In 2021, No. 1 is no contest Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered weekday mornings. The last time Maclean's published a list of the most powerful people in Canada, the year was 2014. Stephen Harper was prime minister, and he topped the list. Justin Trudeau was the leader of the third party and, even though he led in the polls at the time, he ranked No. 13. Back then, Paul Wells wrote: "Trudeau’s like the old urban myth of the bumblebee: theoretically he can’t fly, and yet there he is." Things have changed. Now, as the Power List returns, Trudeau finds himself at the top . Wells explains that in an extraordinary year, the PM simply exerted power "on a scale nobody in the country could match." There are a bunch of reasons for this. First, Trudeau works in Ottawa. No provincial or municipal government, and no organization outside government, had anything close to the clout the federal government enjoyed in 2020. Second, Trudeau leads a minority government, which should have made him more unsure and tentative—as it seemed, in the first weeks after the 2019 election, that it would. But in Parliament, Trudeau has kept his opponents consistently on the back foot. Finally, he leads a party that has historically been divided into factions. But no Liberal leader in Trudeau’s lifetime has led a Liberal party as unified as today’s. Check out the full Power List. As the opening editorial explains, this ranking is about more than just raw power. "We canvassed the landscape for Canadians with qualities we think represent power in a time of transformative change," write the editors. "By dint of their actions, words or character, they force us to watch, listen and learn." The ranking's runner-up runs a Canadian e-commerce giant. Clocking in at No. 16 a man who "launched the BlackNorth Initiative to nudge social change, starting in Canada’s boardrooms." At No. 33, "the billionaire venture capitalist investing in a better world." Tory leader Erin O'Toole finds himself at No. 18 , a couple of hairs lower than Trudeau's rank in 2014. A fun hypothetical: Where will O'Toole be in seven years? Just a day after pledging that "there is no place for the far-right in our party," O'Toole found himself once again on defence. PressProgress unearthed electoral records that show a neo-Nazi by the name of Paul Fromm donated to the failed leadership campaign of Derek Sloan. The Tory leader released an evening statement that took decisive action. "I have initiated the process to remove Mr. Sloan from the Conservative Party of Canada caucus," he said. "I expect this to be done as quickly as possible." O'Toole called racism "a disease of the soul, repugnant to our core values." Trudeau spoke to German Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday. A "readout" of the talk mentioned a laundry list of current affairs: limiting the spread of COVID-19, coordinating the international distribution of vaccines, climate change, democracy and human rights, international trade, peace, security, China and Russia. They even committed to working together on green energy. Not mentioned: The American-shaped elephant in the room. Transport Canada has given Boeing a list of necessary fixes to systems, sensors, wiring and procedures on the aerospace giant's grounded 737 MAX fleet. A new airworthiness directive identified seven "corrective actions" required for the aircraft to fly in Canadian airspace. The department boasted about its "significant leadership role" in a reevaluation of the 737 MAX, which gobbled up 15,000 hours and helped "shape many decisions taken" by the Federal Aviation Authority south of the border. Canada Post distributed some post-holiday chest-thumping yesterday. The mail carrier beat its all-time record for parcel deliveries in a single day, hitting 2.4 million on Dec. 21. The crown corp admitted its performance "still wasn't enough to keep up with a demand," which might sound familiar to gift-givers who faced delays. On the procurement beat: The Department of National Defence is on the hunt for a "large-scale, low carbon energy generation and transfer system" for its buildings. DND wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. But 90 per cent of the heating systems of the department's 10,000 buildings require the burning of fossil fuels. Five million bucks are on the table for whoever can design and install a new system for a test building in Kingston, Ont. DND also paid the U.S. Navy $13.8 million for 20 unmanned aircraft. A little bit of chaos: Elections Canada made international headlines last November when the agency tweeted that federal elections don't make use of the Dominion Voting Systems equipment at the centre of debunked conspiracy theories in the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election. When Donald Trump himself hit retweet, implying Canadians were backing up his claims, the aftermath of that tweet, described in documents obtained by Maclean's via access-to-information, was instructive for the public servants who never expected to go viral. "Lots of very positive interactions," wrote one comms official, minutes after Trump's megaphone stole the show. "Lots of new followers, too." By the next day, the chief electoral officers in three provinces had reached out to their federal counterpart. Elections Canada saw half of its social media mentions for 2020 in just a 48-hour span. A summary of the social media "anomaly" referred to the president as a "prominent influencer" (hopeless naïveté or brilliant deadpan?). The analyst ran down the general tone of the response across various platforms. Facebook was "mainly hostile." Twitter offered a "balanced conversation." Reddit was "mostly irrelevant" and "very U.S.-centric." Parler and Gab "misinterpreted" the post as friendly to their voter-fraud crusade. Some of those new followers might have been earnestly interested in the agency's work. But the summary credits at least some of the attention to a much more voyeuristic motive: schadenfreude. —Nick Taylor-Vaisey | 
