Smith's referendum risks backfiring, handing power to the NDP
The Alberta premier is acutely aware that another split on the right could lead to the UCP's downfall
Carney appeals for a 'decisive' vote to settle the Alberta independence question
Four days before the latest test of this 159-year-old Confederation — a nation that has given the world both insulin and Céline Dion — Mark Carney went to Calgary to make the case for carrying on. "Canada isn't perfect, but we are the best," he said. "And we are getting better." A day before Carney arrived, Naheed Nenshi, the leader...
Alberta’s separation referendum is coming. What happens in the days and weeks and months after?
A few months ago, I was talking to Michael Wernick, the former clerk of the Privy Council, and we wandered onto the subject of Alberta’s secession vote. Mr. Wernick – now the Jarislowsky Chair in public management at the University of Ottawa – said something that’s been stuck in my brain ever since. Say the referendum delivers a stout margin...
Radical tax reform is not just good policy: it’s the only kind likely to succeed
Tax reform is one of those issues that confounds conventional political wisdom. The conventional wisdom, to which most politicians subscribe, is to move cautiously, incrementally, ploddingly – to do “nothing by halves/ Which can be done by quarters.”
Canada is inflicting pain and U.S ambassador Pete Hoekstra is feeling it
There’s a term in psychology for people who accuse others of doing what they themselves are guilty of: projection. A chronic liar thinks everyone else lies too. A cheater assumes others must cheat. So pointing a finger comes naturally. Plus it’s a great way to turn the tables and deflect attention from your own sins.
Take it from the Harper government: Carney’s managerial style is working now, but it won’t work forever
In May 2006, a reporter asked then-finance minister Jim Flaherty about the new Conservative minority government’s poll numbers. That same week, an Ipsos-Reid survey showed the Conservatives were up to 43 per cent support nationally. “I think it’s a credit to Prime Minister Stephen Harper,” said Flaherty, “because Canadians are thirsty for a real leader. They don’t agree with everything...
The United Nations has become irrelevant. Mark Carney’s got a plan to make it matter again
There’s a fatal flaw in Mark Carney’s grand foreign policy designs: the world has only one Mark Carney. That’s bad news for his plan to build out a bulwark against the great powers — “the hegemons,” as he calls them. With liberal internationalist leaders losing power by the day, this work is only getting tougher.
Russia’s deadly crosshairs could be aiming at the heads of Canada’s defence contractors
Intelligence agencies have reportedly warned that Moscow is upping preparations to assassinate leaders of companies supplying drones to Ukraine
Why Mark Carney needs to think small in the upcoming federal budget
The federal budget expected next month would be a good time for Mark Carney to start thinking small. Not in terms of economic ambition. This is not a case to pivot hard into fiscal-restraint mode, when there’s still tons to be done to get this country to compete more aggressively for investment and growth and a reduced reliance on the...
If the Conservative Party wants to win, it should part company with its fringe.
Some conservatives believe they struggle to win elections because of media bias. Some say it’s because they are unfairly maligned by people on the left. These points are debatable, but to me they are a distraction from the real reasons Conservatives are finding it hard to get traction today. Voters prioritize economic policy, keeping taxes down, and promoting trade and...
The Freeland chronicles: She stared down a President and took down a Prime Minister
In her just-released book, Chrystia Freeland writes that she is “profoundly, sometimes embarrassingly, earnest.” True. A bit school-marmish, you might say. She also describes herself as “diminutive.” True also. At barely over five feet, she was rather unimposing. Not the most advantageous qualities for a politician. And yet she became the most powerful woman politician Canada ever produced.
Donald Trump’s original Canadian bad cop has something to say
One year ago this week, Doug Ford unveiled the anti-tariff ad that incurred the wrath of Donald Trump. Former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland was given an early look at that ad, she reveals in her new book, which also makes clear she was a fan of standing up to Trump that way, even if it did make the president...
First past the post sets Canada up for secession threats
Canada is often described as a divided country, and of course it is. No country as large and diverse as ours, built on two official languages, 10 provinces, several dozen Crown-indigenous treaties and countless ethnicities, could fail to be. But lots of other countries have similar divisions, without arriving at the fix we are now in, with not one but...
Don't be duped into flipping yes-to-Canada vote to future referendum
Voters, please don’t be fooled into voting no to Canada in order to “send Ottawa a message.” Article content Convincing you to do that is the strategy of failed separatists who are trying to pull victory out of the voting that concludes next Monday. In this context, sending a message means endorsing a genuine separation referendum at some vague point...
Canada Labour Code changes are not an attack on workers' rights
If Canadians focused solely on recent commentary from union leaders and their lawyers, they’d be forgiven for thinking the current Liberal government has been engaged in a long battle against workers’ rights, culminating in a final charge against the right to strike.
Chrystia Freeland book spills the tea on her ‘Unreliable Boyfriends” and Justin Trudeau does not come off well
First of all, that title. Chrystia Freeland chose to call her new book “Unreliable Boyfriend” — the boyfriend in question being the United States — which puts the focus firmly on her role in managing Canada’s fraught relationship with Donald Trump’s America.
Carney struggles to know if he should back Trump on Russia, or not
Prime Minister Mark Carney has built his political reputation on being the adult in the room — and a man at ease in the corridors of power. He’s a former central banker with friends in high places, a guy who understands how the world works, and, supposedly, a leader who can handle U.S. President Donald Trump. Article content But this...
Don’t buy it when the separatists say the referendum is about leverage
The moment for voting approaches on the Alberta referendum, and the separatists, having seemingly largely failed to convince a critical mass of Albertans to adopt their millenarian view of the province’s place within Confederation, are now putting an awful lot of weight in an alternate way to make their case – namely, that this is all about leverage. Leverage, you...
Mark Carney says he might ramp up immigration again. We need to see his plan first
It’s unlikely Mark Carney was aiming to relaunch a national immigration debate when he popped into the New York Times last month and mentioned in passing that Canada will “resume some controlled increase in the population” once the system is under control. But that, unsurprisingly, has been the result — with opposition MPs warning about Ottawa again letting in “too...
Elon Musk and the New American Meddling
It didn’t take long for Elon Musk, one of President Donald Trump’s attack dogs, to stick his unwelcome nose into Canada’s domestic political drama. Shortly after the Parti Québécois’s election victory on October 5th, he endorsed Quebec independence and, to pour more gasoline on the fire, said Alberta and Saskatchewan should leave Canada too. Musk, who has Canadian roots, studied...
Beyond the Balance Sheet: The True Scale of Ontario’s Indigenous Economy
For decades, public discourse regarding Indigenous economies in Ontario has been framed through a narrow lens of dependency or isolated community-level initiatives. Our firm’s comprehensive report, Indigenous Economic Contribution Analysis of Ontario, changes that narrative entirely. By integrating Statistics Canada’s Indigenous Peoples Economic Account with provincial input-output models, new data show that Indigenous economic activity is a robust, widely distributed...
Not sure if the world can take two more years of Trump
Enough is enough. It is not at all certain that the world can take two more years of United States President Donald Trump. A dangerous and possibly demented man occupies the most powerful office in the world, and he is increasingly using it to lash out at anyone who opposes him.
The moral retreat of Quebec’s political class
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of last week’s provincial election in Quebec was not the threat of constitutional turmoil, or even separation—which does not feel imminent, for various reasons. It was the silence, from nearly all parties, concerning legislation aimed at driving Muslim women who wear a hijab from public life in the province. That isn’t the stated goal of...
Mark Carney faces the return of national unity politics
If it has been said that the first job of a Canadian prime minister is national unity, it was easier in recent years to forget. Before this summer, it had been 30 years since a prime minister had to worry about a provincial referendum to secede. Before this week, it had been more than a decade since a prime minister...
The weakest links in Carney’s cabinet are still there
Most Canadians don’t know much about the Singh decision. But if you’re the country’s Immigration Minister, you must. So it was alarming that Lena Metlege Diab seemed confused when she was asked about the seminal 1985 Supreme Court decision in an interview for a Radio-Canada podcast.
Scott Aitchison’s resignation is a dire warning for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives
Parry Sound—Muskoka MP Scott Aitchison’s upcoming departure from the House of Commons reflects the greater malaise within Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative caucus. Aitchison, Huntsville’s former mayor, sees himself, like many MPs, as a doer. Few politicians want to sit back and watch others make big decisions. They want to be cabinet ministers; some want to lead the party, and dream of...
Liberal democracies must embrace friendshoring – or become the easy prey of the world’s bullies
Globalization’s fans argue that populist movements of the left and the right use global trade as a whipping boy for the other big challenge liberal democracies confront, and one which is a lot harder to address: how to enjoy the economic growth that capitalism delivers while also distributing the fruits of that growth beyond the 1 per cent. How can...
A Bill 21 explosion could engulf Carney, Quebec and Canada
The Supreme Court’s coming ruling has the potential to reignite separatism and quake the teetering balance between courts and government
An important political lesson for Carney: Nothing respects a border
In one of the most famous television commercials in Canadian history, a man puts an eraser to a stylized map of North America and removes the border between Canada and the United States. Aired during the 1988 federal election campaign, it was the Liberals’ way of protesting then-prime minister Brian Mulroney’s negotiation of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. They didn’t...
The Alberta referendum: a pointless, futile stunt, just like the last one
This is not the first time Albertans have been asked to vote on matters outside their jurisdiction. Five years ago, under United Conservative Party premier Jason Kenney, the province asked its citizens whether Section 36(2) of the Constitution Act, 1982 – the one committing the government of Canada to the “principle” of equalization payments – should be removed from the...
A Nobel Prize for Mark Carney? Premature. Person of the Year award? Thumbs-up
The Nobel Peace Prize is being announced Friday and Prime Minister Mark Carney is considered a contender. Can we imagine if it’s the Canadian who takes the award and not the man in the White House who has hardly let a week go by without sounding desperate for the honour? Donald Trump claims he has ended no fewer than eight...
What if ‘Buy Canadian’ just makes us more American?
These days I read product labels as carefully as I used to read liner notes. You’ll not get an “assembled in” or a “distributed in” Canada past me any more than you’d have got a “the band’s third bass player got legal rights to the name and this album’s even less live than any of its founding members” album past...
Tumbler Ridge allegations describe a scary new frontier in crime
The FBI affidavit filed in the Tumbler Ridge investigation is a true punch in the gut — not just for anyone who read it, but for governments forced to recognize the sheer scope of all that apparently went wrong. Worse, it’s hard not to walk away with the sense that government doesn’t have the tools it needs to thwart all...
The weakness of its mandate will not deter the PQ from the chaos and division of its project
It is hard to convey how thin a mandate the Parti Québécois has just won in Quebec, but I will try. With 28 per cent of the vote, the PQ’s popular vote share is the smallest for any winning party in any election, not just in the modern history of Canada but, as far as I can tell, in any...
The PQ will make life difficult for Canada
Last weekend, I was in Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu, Que., a pastoral village 60 kilometres southeast of Montreal, for my son’s wedding. As I had a few moments to explore the town, I crossed the street from the wedding venue to check out a local park flying the tricolour flag of the “Patriotes” of the 1837 rebellion. Beneath the flag was a plaque...
Quebec’s election results mean Mark Carney must finally address the province
Mark Carney can breathe a sigh of relief. Monday’s election results in Quebec delivered a Parti Québécois minority government that will prove thorny to handle, but the prime minister escaped the worst-case scenario: a sovereigntist premier with a strong majority government.
Quebec election was bad news for Carney, good for Poilievre
Quebec Conservative Leader Éric Duhaime was perhaps the night's biggest winner
The PQ is back. The rest of Canada will need to brace for that
Four years ago, as the Coalition Avenir Québec rolled over the competition to win 90 of the National Assembly’s then 125 seats, the Parti Québécois looked like a spent force. The sovereigntist “party of a generation” had its worst election result since its founding in 1968 by René Lévesque – the ruffled, chain-smoking everyman who charmed baby-boomer francophones – taking...
What Alberta separatists get wrong about Quebec as a model for independence
Alberta separatists are fond of pointing to Quebec’s sovereignty movement as a model. If those guys can get so much by holding a knife to the throat of the rest of the country, goes their thinking, then why shouldn’t we do the same? It’s a lousy comparison overall, given the fundamental differences between Alberta and Quebec (such as, for e.g....
America’s anti-immigration politics are coming to Canada — and Alberta invited them in
Alberta’s forthcoming referendum on independence is a clear and meaningful threat to Canada’s safety, integrity, and prosperity. But a few of the other questions on Premier Danielle Smith’s democracy-o-rama — ten ballots, all to be hand-counted, with mayhem all but guaranteed at this point — might be even more dangerous. That’s because they deliberately invite a particular conversation around immigration...
Danielle Smith finds out that playing both sides of the fence is a losing strategy
The Alberta referendum on separation is less than two weeks away and it appears most Albertans have decided they want to remain in Canada; not just by a simple majority but overwhelmingly. That’s a relief. Now those voters just have to turn out to cast a ballot. In a recent poll, 72 per cent of Albertans said they wanted to...