Trent University is pleased to welcome Maclean’s magazine’s political editor, Paul Wells, on February 4, 2015 at 1:00 p.m. in Nozhem, First Peoples Performance Space in Peter Gzowski College, for a public discussion about the federal political scene in Ottawa.

“Paul Wells is one of the country’s best journalists,” said Dr. Christopher Dummitt, chair of the Department of Canadian Studies, who has coordinated the visit. “There’s no one in the country with a better sense of how the current federal government thinks and strategizes.”

Mr. Wells is the author of Right Side Up: The Fall of Paul Martin, The Rise of Stephen Harper's New Conservatism, and the e-book The Harper Decade, following Stephen Harper's rise to power. In 2014 he won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his book The Longer I'm Prime Minister: Stephen Harper and Canada, 2006.

The talk at Trent University will be partly based on The Longer I’m Prime Minister, as Mr. Wells will provide insight into how Stephen Harper and the Conservatives have governed. Mr. Wells will also help set the scene for what the political landscape will look like as we head to the next federal election expected in October of this year.

Mr. Wells began his career as a reporter with the Montreal Gazette and then the National Post before moving to Maclean’s in 2003. Aside from his political reporting, Mr. Wells also has a widely popular and influential Twitter account, where he comments on everything from classical music and jazz to politics. Mr. Wells has extensive reporting experience on many of the world’s most important and newsworthy topics and issues, including his highly-touted recent coverage of the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris, France.

The public lecture will be followed by a question and answer period. The lecture is free and open to the community.