'PEOPLE ARE GRUMPY' — Playbook caught up with Labor and Seniors Minister SEAMUS O'REGAN on a mid-June afternoon in Canada's biggest city. Soon after, O'Regan stopped by a seniors' home for a cup of tea. He was there to support LESLIE CHURCH's run for office. The by-election stunner has upended a summer of low-key BBQs and invited endless speculation about how Liberals can possibly hope to maintain power after the next election. Playbook spoke with O'Regan following his keynote on the care economy at Canadian Club Toronto. We talked about the long hangover of Covid-19 anxiety in Canada, a pain point for the Liberals that smarts even more now that a Conservative will represent Toronto-St. Paul's. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. People really just want to move on from the pandemic. How difficult is it to keep the country's attention on fixing long-term problems in long-term care and elsewhere? I want to move on, but we're not moving on. We think we're moving on, but man, people are grumpy. Like I said in the speech, people's nerves are rubbed raw. Our politics, just our day to day. It affects our economy in certain ways, and it affects our politics in a huge way. People are angry. You come out of it. You think you're carrying on. And then inflation, interest rates, people are stretched. It's irritating. It's more than that. There's a deep anxiety. I think it's important that you at least step back and go, “Why is that?” A lot of it just accumulated over two and a half years spent being afraid of one another. We're not built that way. And then everything that happened during it. I lost my dad. My mom was looking after my dad. Suddenly I'm looking after both of them. Then my dad asked if I could look after my mom. We're all strung. It's an emotional issue. I tap into that. I keep saying that to my Cabinet colleagues, too. Tap into it. We're not like automatons, living in this economy. Amongst ourselves, it is important that we talk about what we've all gone through, because it will allow us to be better leaders. It'll allow us to be more empathetic to what everybody out there is feeling. Is there not enough of that happening in Cabinet? Yeah, we all just keep calm and carry on. All of us do. We're no different. But now and then, it is worth our time to say, "Okay. Why is this happening?" Because we can't allow all this angst and irritation and very real pain to get in the way of some incredible things that did happen during the pandemic. We came together as a country like we rarely have before, and we did look after one another, and we came out of it better than just about any other country I'm aware of. I'm not saying jubilation, but when we say there's no way we can square an energy economy, oil and gas, and climate change — when we really focused our minds, we did do something incredible back there, even though it's difficult to talk about it, because it was so goddamn painful. — More Cabinet candor: Immigration Minister MARC MILLER acknowledged the Liberals' woes at a Wednesday announcement. “We got a message that was loud and clear from Toronto-St. Paul’s that was considered a quote-unquote safe riding,” Miller said. “We should absolutely never take anything for granted as a government. And we need to listen to people who voted and the way they voted, screw our heads on better and then move on.” | 
