Max Valiquette didn’t take much time off after his job with Justin Trudeau’s government ended in the spring.
While side-stepping a question about if he’ll return to advertising, Valiquette said he wants to get back into doing more media: on-air appearances, writing, and public speaking, updating some older presentations and speeches, and working on a few new ones. He’s started publishing what he calls a “serialized memoir of working at PMO” on Substack, and he’s working on the first of what he hopes will be a series of books.
Called “Wrong,” the book is about how people are hardwired to be afraid of doing wrong, the growing aversion to even being perceived as being wrong, and unwillingness to admit wrongness. “And the way that that's the enemy of growth and creativity,” he said. “We're kind of in a time of peak wrong… It's never been this easy to be wrong. It's never been this easy to find corroboration or community for one's own wrongness, but we are less willing to walk back being wrong than ever before.”
He attributes a large part of the problem to social media and algorithms that reinforce beliefs—no matter how flawed—rather than challenge them.
The power and importance of social media was a big part of his conversation with Campaign about his time as executive communications director for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from late 2023 until Trudeau’s replacement by Mark Carney in March. In the second part of our Q&A, Campaign addressed the power of social media, the ability (and inability) of government to mitigate its harms, as well as what he learned from his 16 months at the PMO.
For a lot of what we’ve talked about here, the subtext is about the power of social media. The power of the platforms was an important issue for the government while you were there, and one that very much intersects with the core of our audience. Can you describe the attitude or general posture of the government towards the social platforms while you were there?
It's really interesting, because the challenge for the sitting government is that any attempt to regulate any of these platforms will be spun by the opposition as infringing on free speech, on Canadians’ fundamental rights to this, or that, or the other thing, which is a crazy thing to think about, because these things didn't exist 20 or 25 years ago.
I feel, to some extent, it’s like everybody owns a car right now, but the government hasn't said you have to have seat belts… the government hasn't said you had to have brakes, right?
And, of course, the interested parties are going to be saying that there's nothing negative with any of these, that we should just let them run as much as they possibly can.
It's a very difficult situation to deal with, where there was an Online Harms Act [Bill C-63] that unfortunately never got the traction it needed because of the proroguing of Parliament, but recognized that it’s impossible to play Whack-a-Mole with the bad actors in those social spaces—there are just too many of them. And so it should be up to the platforms to regulate that, and of course they can if they want to. But they don't want to.
So the challenge marketers face in social is that the algos know that you feeling rage and anger is going to have the biggest impact on how much time you spend there. And so the kind of content that gets sent to all of us is content that does that.
I actually think that in some ways it's great for marketers, obviously, to have a channel that they can micro-target and create one-to-one at scale. I think both of those things are the big dream for a lot of marketers. The flipside is that the environment isn't necessarily conducive for people to receive great brand messages. So I think that part can obviously be a challenge.
It’s not only that Max. It feels like it’s not conducive to a healthy, functioning society.
Well, no disrespect to anyone in the industry, but I can't say that most people working in marketing get up in the morning and have as the fundamental reason they do their job is to create a healthy, better functioning society. Your performance review isn't based on that.
And this is not a knock on marketers. It's not a knock on government. This is probably a knock on late-stage capitalism, to be honest. It is a complicated system that gets more and more complicated, in which power and money are increasingly consolidated amongst a very powerful group of a few, taken away from the many, and it's not interested in making sure that everybody is doing great. If anything, it's interested in minimizing what may be the negative effects of something, because there's money to be made.
And again, it's not putting anything on any one person in particular, which is really critical here. It's this system that we were all born into. But if overall quality of life is worse for us than it was 20 or 25 years ago—and I think the numbers are suggesting that it is—then my question is, what are the big changes between now and then that may have led to this? Well, I think I know.
But isn’t it important for advertisers and advertising to be talking about this? There were a lot of people who wanted to talk about Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle, and my first thought was, ‘but your ad budgets are funding this system that is actually creating real damage.’
I would agree with you. We're not amazing at having some kind of a legitimate reckoning over what the system is, and how it works. Unfortunately, we have to get up and put on our pants, or skirts, or whatever it is we’re wearing that day, and get into work because we've got a family to feed. You've got a life to live… people naturally would like to do well for their boss, all of these things matter. And that's how the system is not set up to encourage a greater sense of responsibility.
Which is why I want the government to do it for me.
Agreed, and squaring the circle [about the challenges of governing in Part I], I would love Canadians to understand the difficulty of governing at a time when everything is politicized, and it is less about [parties acting] as if the others have the best interests of Canadians in mind. And understand that right now, the difficult part is you are trying to get elected, you are trying to stay elected, you are also trying to conceivably do some things that fundamentally change for the better how the world may be moving, and the extreme difficulty of making that happen because of that political environment.
Have you given much thought to how your time at the PMO changed you personally, and also as a communication professional?
I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about communications. Frankly, I learned a lot about Canadians. So as a marketer who's steeped in research and understanding—and very much that's where I started, and what I really believe in is talking to people—never have I learned so much about the country that we live in and the people that inhabit it. Canadians at large, family, friends, especially acquaintances, people who would otherwise describe themselves as being good and nice people, engaging with me for the first time in literally decades to say the kind of things that I don't think people would want to say to my face. And then others saying really wonderful things, and friends of mine with whom I don't agree politically, sitting down with me and saying, ‘Look, I'm not a fan of your boss, but I've got to say it's great to see someone giving it all to public service.’
So, yeah, the learnings were massive, and fun, and absolutely far-reaching.
If there's one thing I can share, it’s that government at its worst, from a communications perspective, commits the number one cardinal sin, which is that it expects you to listen to its talking, rather than speaking to your hearing.
The Canada Carbon Rebate is a great example of that, something that was initially called the Climate Action Incentive Payment, and Canadians didn't know it, didn't like it, didn't understand, right?
Actual policies or pieces of legislation fundamentally have language around them that are the enemy of anybody understanding it. It's terrible. And there is a bubble, and like any other bubble, it speaks its own language. It talks to itself.
So it’s where the Conservatives did a great job with “Ax the Tax,” it ended up being their undoing, because the tax got axed and it was like, congratulations, the tax got axed. So what else have you got?
That being said, government can do a much better job of [simple clear communications], rather than communicating by committee and thinking about how all the nooks and crannies on the English muffin have to be buttered, everybody has to be serviced all the time, which means the language gets so overwhelming that it actually means nothing to anyone.
We're either speaking in an internal language that only makes sense to public servants, or we're speaking in a language that people think will be understood by everyone, which means words keep getting added and added, until people think that every single constituent is covered.
The number-one rule is, come to where I am and speak to me in my language. And that's difficult for government, because it's just fundamentally not built to naturally do that.
You said you learned a lot about Canadians. There's a lot of pessimism around these days. Are you feeling more pessimistic or optimistic from what you learned?
I don't have pessimism in me. I never have, and I never will. And I'm not a Pollyanna by any sense, but we're here on this planet with resources and skills and an orientation and all of which should keep one realistically optimistic. So I'm never pessimistic.
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