Potential disaster looms over Pierre Poilievre’s leadership
Losing one MP to the Liberals may be regarded as a misfortune. Losing two smacks of carelessness. Now Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative leadership is really in danger. Even a victory in the upcoming leadership review in January won’t necessarily make it safe. Now, Mr. Poilievre will be looking over his shoulder and into the shadows. Maybe one more of his MPs...
Mark Carney threw a party and Pierre Poilievre woke up with a hangover
Markham—Unionville MP Michael Ma goes to all the best parties. On Wednesday, he attended the Conservative party’s holiday gathering in Ottawa, even lining up for a photo with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and his wife, Anaida.
It’s been good year for Mark Carney — but he has one weakness critics will try to exploit in 2026
History is not made by great men and women acting alone, writes Mark Carney in his book “Value(s).” Leaders who accomplish big things know how to “engage, explain and emote.” Government has become too short-sighted and transactional, Carney argues. Writing in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, he calls on leaders to leverage crises to make big changes.
The line Mark Carney is walking might not be sustainable
The Liberal government has cribbed from the Conservative playbook as opponents on the left and right have faltered. But in 2026 they may face new challenges – including a renewed opposition
Another floor-crossing bookends a transformational year in Canadian politics
To illustrate the incredible upheaval that federal politics in Canada has experienced over the last 12 months, one could do worse than to simply look at the last two Liberal caucus holiday parties. A year ago, the Liberal caucus — then numbering 152 members — gathered just a day after Chrystia Freeland's stunning resignation from cabinet. Justin Trudeau tried to...
Is Pierre Poilievre's Conservative Party leadership at risk?
As government House leader Steven MacKinnon says there are 'other' disgruntled MPs in the Conservative caucus, the Power & Politics panel of party insiders discusses what Michael Ma's decision to cross the floor to the Liberals could mean for Pierre Poilievre's prospects ahead of a leadership review at the end of January.
America is sending out a grim warning, with Trump as Big Brother. Canada must keep its moral integrity
Just a few short weeks ago, I was sitting in the United Nations listening to statements from the Trump administration emphasizing that the United States would never agree to anything that limited state sovereignty. This assertion — echoing the recent use of sovereignty as a fig leaf by autocratic states to justify a multitude of sins against international law and...
Canada’s hate speech laws don’t need a rewrite. They need to be enforced
In the late 1990s, a Toronto man named Mark Harding was busily spreading his “gospel” around the city. His proselytizing took the form of printed pamphlets and telephone messages, which warned that Muslims in Canada are “like raging wolves in sheep’s clothing,” and “full of hate, violence, and murder.” Mr. Harding’s materials suggested that all Canadian Muslims are actually terrorists...
Can Carney Build a New Majority Around the Promise of Getting Things Done?
The transition Canada is undergoing—including the reshaping of “the rules-based international order and the trading system that powered Canada’s prosperity for decades”—is “a true generational shift,” he said. And it was in this spirit, he told the members of Parliament in the House, that he presented this year’s budget, the first from the Mark Carney Liberal government. Champagne then quoted...
Carney’s Pipeline Play Tests the Coalition That Put Him in Power
STEVEN GUILBEAULT WAS on Tout le monde en parle on November 30, downing a shot at the end for comic relief after catching his throat as he struggled to explain what it feels like to quit a cabinet job over Prime Minister Mark Carney’s energy deal with Alberta. I think he gave a good account of himself. Not for the...
Something is wrong with Canadian democracy
Bill C-15, “An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget,” is 634 pages long. It creates four new Acts, repeals six more, and amends at least 45 others, on matters ranging from stablecoins to broadcasting to the marketing of freshwater fish. It is, in short, an omnibus bill, the sort with which we have grown all too familiar in...
Poilievre Conservatives favour stunts over substance, and it's hurting them
I want the pipeline to the West Coast to succeed. And I want the federal Conservatives to knock off the Liberal government. So why do I agree with the Liberals that Tuesday’s opposition motion in the Commons to get MPs to show support for the pipeline was a “cheap political stunt” and “immature?”
How I changed my mind about the Liberals ending religious exemptions for hate speech
It is a rare thing to have one’s mind changed by a politician. In the words of the late prime minister Pierre Trudeau, MPs are “nobodies…like pawns in a chess game.” And yet, as I prepared to write a column questioning the Conservative opposition to C-9, the legislation designed to combat hate crimes and intimidation, I reconsidered my position after...
The PQ Leader’s Quebec Loyalty Test
Earlier this week, Party Québécois (PQ) leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon told Quebec journalists that they were not doing a good job at covering and exposing what he depicts as the anti-Quebec policies of the federal government, which he dismissively calls “the federal regime,” as if it was some sort of dark foreign entity. This tirade against a key component of...
2025 brought the democratic backslide to Canada
This was a heavy year for liberal democracy, as the second Trump presidency in the United States began actively dismantling democratic institutions in that country. If 2024 was the year of creeping authoritarianism, 2025 saw it in full bloom. Across the border in Canada, there has been a false sense of security with the rise of Mark Carney to the...
The U.S. might think women ‘ruined’ the workplace — don’t let it happen here
There’s an ill wind blowing in from the United States, one that should send a chill down the backs of working women in Canada. It seems that our neighbours are trapped in a time machine of their own invention, which aims to send women back to the kitchen with a baby on either hip. Their tech and political elites muse...
Who won this week's parliamentary pipeline game? Maybe no one
When the Conservatives tabled a motion asking the House of Commons to "take note" of the memorandum of understanding signed between the federal and Alberta governments and express its support for the construction of a pipeline, the Official Opposition presumably hoped, one way or another, to make trouble for the Liberal government. According to the logic of these things, the...
Canada’s likely new U.S. ambassador is unqualified – but that’s what people said about Carney
Mark Wiseman, who is expected to become Canada’s new ambassador to Washington, is a rarity. The financier and corporate executive would be the first in the 100-year history of the position to be appointed without any experience as a diplomat or high-powered politician. In this respect, he’s uniquely unqualified. For Prime Minister Mark Carney to put a rookie in the...
We’re living through a time of crushing tariffs and uncertainty. There’s one thing Canada can do to prepare
Twenty years ago, I released “Ontario: A Leader in Learning,” a report that presented a simple truth: a prosperous province and country invest in knowledge, skills, and innovation. We recognized then — as we must today — that long-term economic success depends on the strength of our colleges and universities. The current mix of policies — tuition freezes, an uncertain...
Conservatives persist with cute legislative tricks, while the government tries to run a country
In another life, Pierre Poilievre would have been a lawyer. The Conservative Leader is very good at creating a narrative, at prosecuting his case, and at setting traps for wayward leaders of other parties. He did that roughly one year ago, when he used the exact words articulated by then-NDP leader Jagmeet Singh when he walked away from the supply-and-confidence...
Mark Carney said he wants empowered cabinet ministers — but does he really?
In all the flurry this week of trying to get bills passed in a near-paralyzed House of Commons, Mark Carney’s office did a rare thing — it rebuked one of its own ministers in public. It came amid a back-and-forth over whether the Liberal government was going to come to an agreement with the Bloc Québécois on hate crime legislation...
Poilievre pushes on the anti-pipeline cracks in Carney’s caucus
A politician’s worst nightmare is to be thought of as yesterday’s breakfast by voters. When prime minister, Mark Carney, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on energy development with the premier of Alberta two weeks ago, federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was made to look as relevant to the big issue of the day as the leader of the NDP...
I quit Mark Carney’s cabinet. This is what I hope happens next
It’s a grand bargain that feels like a fire sale. That at least is how some have characterized the Memorandum of Understanding on energy that was signed late last month by Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
Welcome to the ‘Trade War World Cup’
Mark Carney has apparently wanted to be Canada’s prime minister since he was old enough to seriously entertain such ideas. But you still have to wonder what he must have been thinking about his job as he sat under the global spotlight watching United States President Donald Trump get jiggy with it at the World Cup draw in Washington, D.C...
Judges suing Ottawa for fatter salaries are shameless
Whether the government’s argument will hold water, only a Federal Court judge, who stands to gain $28,000 by saying it doesn’t, can know
Bill C-9 a test of Carney's willingness to stand against hate
The battle over Bill C-9, the federal government’s proposed anti-hate law, has blown up a cultural divide that not only pits Quebec against the rest of Canada, but seriously questions Ottawa’s willingness to tackle hate crimes. If Prime Minister Mark Carney gets the balance wrong, he risks both empowering hatemongers and fanning the flames of Quebec separatism — at a...
Can Carney still put together a credible climate plan? Does it matter?
Ten months before he resigned from Mark Carney's cabinet, Steven Guilbeault vouched for the then Liberal leadership contender. "I've known Mark for many years. We've worked together on issues of green energy, transition, fighting climate change and the role of the financial sector in fighting climate change," Guilbeault told reporters when he endorsed Carney's candidacy to lead the party in...
Conservatives choose rage-bait over real debate on hate speech
The Liberal government has agreed to amend the Criminal Code to remove religious exemptions from the country’s hate speech laws, hoping to secure the Bloc Québécois’ support for its Bill C-9. This has prompted outcries from faith communities as well as the Official Opposition: that the move is an assault on freedom of expression and freedom of religion. Currently, the...
Trump’s NSS: A Warning to the World, a Threat to Canada
Anyone who thought negotiating a productive new Canada-United States trade deal with the Trump administration was in the offing will have been thoroughly disabused of that idea after reading the National Security Strategy (NSS) released late last week in Washington. The NSS — the production of which from the executive branch is mandated by federal law — is also, in...
Trump’s global security vision means problems for Canada
Coming from another president, there are parts of the United States’ new “National Security Strategy” that would be welcome. It’s well past time, for example, that the U.S. acknowledged it cannot and should not try to lead the “free world” and impose its system on other countries. Barack Obama, no less, took steps down that road more than a decade...
Mark Carney’s Liberals are building a new Canadian voter coalition
For all the noise that has accompanied Mark Carney’s first seven months as prime minister, one fact is now impossible to deny: the prime minister is rebuilding the federal Liberal Party into a modern, centrist, pro-growth political coalition — one that Canada has not seen in a generation. Donald Trump’s protectionism and the changing global trading order have no doubt...
Carney’s quandary — political will blocked by bureaucratic won’t
The panel’s discussion focused on the ability of Mark Carney’s government to deliver on its agenda. Article content Lang, a former chief of staff to two Liberal defence ministers and now acting director at the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University, pointed out that Carney faces the frustrations of attempting to move at speeds the bureaucracy was not designed...
Trump’s National Security Strategy is hostile to Canada – and the democratic world
Without much fanfare, the U.S. government has launched what could be a seismic shift in American foreign policy with its new National Security Strategy. And for Canada, the impact of the NSS could be profound. We already know Donald Trump’s approach to relations with Canada has complicated our economic and security environment. But the NSS tries make coherent a foreign...
Mark Carney is quietly giving sweeping new powers to his ministers
Hidden in the federal government’s 634-page omnibus bill C-15, the Budget Implementation Act, is a measure that has so far escaped scrutiny. Under the pretext of regulatory efficiency, Prime Minister Mark Carney plans to grant cabinet ministers the power to exempt any individual or company from any federal law on the books — except for the Criminal Code — for...
Mark Carney's coup de grâce — forcing Guilbeault out of cabinet
The activist former environment minister's departure is great news for this country. Readers will recall that I was censorious of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s histrionic emulation of Winston Churchill during the election campaign, lacking only the siren-suit, the cigar and the eloquence, as he promised to lead Canada with raised elbows “in the fields and in the streets,” as he...
Trump’s ‘National Security Strategy’ is a Dystopian Propaganda Stunt
On December 4th, the Trump Administration released its U.S. National Security Strategy. As with so many institutions, norms, and pillars of American democracy, the first NSS of the second Trump presidency represents a significant departure from all the presidential NSSes that have preceded it. Its foreword by Donald Trump describes the document as a “road map to ensure that America...
Guilbeault playing separatist card to oppose Alberta pipeline
Steven Guilbeault’s claim the federal government’s memorandum of understanding with Alberta to build an oil pipeline to B.C. is fuelling Quebec separatism is nonsense. In interviews with Bloomberg News and the CBC last week after he quit the federal cabinet, Guilbeault attempted to toss a grenade into Canadian unity by arguing that by signing the MOU with Alberta Premier Danielle...
Liberals should get real with Canadians: Pharmacare, for now, is dead
Can you mourn something that never existed? Like the idea of a happy marriage when you knew all along you settled for the first person who accepted your advances? Or the daydream of a life of luxury and indulgence, which feels possible while you’re holding a lottery ticket, but vanishes as soon as the numbers are called? What about the...
Enough is enough, Canada. Just buy the damned jets
Canada has spent 28 years trying to buy a new fighter jet: the federal government made a decision, then unmade it, then made it again. We’ve already spent more than a billion dollars on this thing, and 1,500 Canadian jobs have been created to build it. It’s the tent pole of our plans to defend ourselves and co-operate with our...
Donald Trump – and American democracy – is getting exponentially worse
I wish I could say I told you so. A point I have tried to make over the last year or so is that Donald Trump can only get worse: that however corrupt or incompetent or dictatorial or treasonous or insane he may appear at any given moment, it will inevitably come to be seen as a relative golden age...
BC Conservatives have been given a new lease on life with John Rustad’s resignation
One of the more infamous scenes in the movie sketch comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail involved a sword fight between King Arthur and the Black Knight. Almost immediately, things do not go well for the Black Knight. He quickly loses a limb, then another. Despite his losses he defiantly fights on: “Just a flesh wound … I’m invincible.”...
Mark Carney’s embrace of Liberal enemies could be a good thing for all of us
Progressive-leaning folks are having a hard time watching Mark Carney link arms with the same forces that spent the past decade demonizing the Liberals. Whether it’s making a deal with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith or playing to the “bro” culture with all the sports talk and walking back feminist foreign policy, it seems like the prime minister is determined to...