The pollsters are trying to tell us something. For much of the past year, the dominant strain of Canadian political coverage has focused on the struggles of Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre, especially as contrasted with the brilliant successes of his opponent, Mark Carney. How could it not? Mr. Poilievre saw a 25-point lead evaporate in the space of two...
Canada's next election will turn on how much people want to escape the chaos and division Trump brings to their lives. Conservatives have a horse bred for a different race. Trump was sworn into office again a little more than 300 days ago. In 300 days, Americans can hit the reset button. Most Canadians are really hoping that they do...
As the world reels from another chaotic year, humanity hopes for a less frenetic, less dangerous 2026 while, as ever, bracing for God’s laughter. The negative change agent responsible for our insecurity is Donald Trump. Our hope lies in the fact that Americans now seem tired of the roller-coaster of shock driven by Trump, his tone of derision and vindictiveness...
The year-in-review phase is over. It’s time to look ahead. In Canadian politics, 2025 will be remembered as the year of Trump. In 2026, I regret to predict, very little will change. In my last column, I argued that the U.S. midterms — and President Donald Trump’s rhetoric in the lead-up — will turn Canada into an increasingly convenient political...
We now have a written copy of the Donroe Doctrine, and it makes for some unnerving reading. The National Security Strategy serves as America’s written foreign policy, laying out priorities and concerns and revealing how the United States intends to both co-operate with its allies and compete with its adversaries. The first such document of Donald Trump’s second presidency dropped...
At the stroke of midnight, in a decommissioned subway station beneath the streets of Manhattan, the old world finally flickered out. Standing under the vaulted Guastavino arches of the abandoned City Hall stop, Zohran Mamdani took his oath of office on a Quran. Mr. Mamdani’s election victory was a cinematic heist of the political status quo. A 34-year-old, South Asian...
The dire warnings about AI keep coming. Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google, says that within a few years, millions of independent AI agents working together “will develop their own language.” And “we won’t understand what they’re doing.” They will have escaped human control. The University of Montreal computer scientist and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio told The Guardian this...
Everything can change in an instant. A life-altering – even, heaven forbid, life-ending – moment. Too many of you know this in a way that transcends vocabulary. This time of year can be particularly excruciating for anyone whose life has been changed irrevocably by a diagnosis, by a red-light runner, by the worst kind of phone call. Life can turn...
Heading into 2026, Canada is grappling with talk of separatism referendums in two provinces, Alberta and Quebec. It is slated to participate in a formal review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) at a time when the U.S. has pledged to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Public trust in our institutions...
It has been curious to watch Prime Minister Mark Carney’s parade of year-end interviews while reading Paul Litt’s excellent 2011 biography of former prime minister John Turner: Elusive Destiny. Many of Turner’s qualities, as noted by journalist Ron Graham in a Saturday Night magazine profile ahead of the 1984 Liberal leadership election, could equally be said of Carney.
The week that Donald Trump was elected I offered Justin Trudeau some free advice in this newspaper. At that time, Trudeau was trailing Pierre Poilievre in the polls by 25 points and had been for two years, hanging onto power despite being so personally unpopular that he could not win support for anything.
I was 13 years old when Quebec voted on independence in 1995. I vaguely remember coming home the night the votes were being counted and seeing my parents glued to the television. I did not fully understand the stakes, but I could feel them. The tension in the room was unmistakable. Adults spoke in lowered voices. The country felt like...
Premier Doug Ford is tearing down everything we’ve ever loved about Ontario—starting with the things poor people need most to live.
As we close the book on 2025, the Canadian political landscape is not just altered, it is unrecognizable. For those of us within the “bubble,” this year served as a reminder that the old playbooks are obsolete. In 12 months, we witnessed the fall of a populist juggernaut, the erasure of a major party’s official status, and a pivot toward...
In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s Sunday meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the U.S. president said he spoke with the leaders of France, Finland, Poland, Norway, Italy, the U.K. and Germany, as well as the presidents of NATO and the European Commission. Canada was notable by its absence, despite committing an additional $2.5 billion in financing and loan...
Politics has always been a degrading popularity contest. To remain in power, politicians require public support and so find themselves in a constant battle to win affection or, at the very least, respect. The paradox is that the harder they try, the less likeable they often become. Over time, many leaders begin to chafe at this dependency. The need to...
In these dark days, look to Irwin Cotler. No wonder hope seems so much harder to conjure up than despair when one reads the daily news. In particular, the counter-revolution against the post-war liberal consensus being led by Donald Trump inspires dread and fear.
I remember clearly a conversation in Luleå — known as the gateway to Swedish Lapland — with then U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, as we negotiated the founding bargain of the Arctic Council. It was the mid-1990s, and Canada was shepherding the Council into being via the 1996 Ottawa Declaration. The critical issue was whether to include national...
As Canada closes out 2025, the Conservatives are suddenly polling higher than at any point since the swearing-in of Mark Carney as prime minister. In the last days of December, several pollsters posted year-end results finding that the Conservatives and Liberals would be neck and neck in a federal election. A Dec. 19 poll by Innovative Research had the Liberals...
We are about to embark on 2026. Should we look ahead with optimism, pessimism or trepidation? Essentially, it is unknown as the crazy man in the White House continues his rampage, destroying what were warm relations between Canada and the United States and turning them to ice. Most Canadians know how to deal with ice so we should have the...
Negotiations on the future of our trade framework with the Trump administration resume in mid-January. Canadian negotiators will continue to work to renew the continental CUSMA agreement that is the successor to NAFTA. This is the preferred result. But we must also acknowledge that non-renewal is a possible outcome. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has already served notice that the...
Remember how deeply divided Canada was over building new oil pipelines last year? Not any more. Two years ago, politicians of all stripes felt the public would never support substantially increased military spending? Now, most do. Free trade is almost a wistful notion from a happier past; economic nationalism is in. The pro-immigration consensus, part of this country’s social fabric...
It might not feel like it, but 2025 was not end-to-end doom-and-gloom – even if it doled out its fair share of the dark stuff. To wrap up this often challenging (understatement of the, yes) year, here’s a look back at some of the happier highlights of the annum Donald Trump returned to office, wars continued to rage, and natural...
Someone needs to tell Donald Trump that yelling a lie won’t make doubters believe it. In his defensive, Scrooge-like message from the White House last week, Shouty Claus railed about the awful economy he’d inherited and how hard it’s proving to mend. Nonetheless, he boomed in staccato until he grew breathless, the economy was doing great, it was on the...
As 1993 drew to a close, Canada was on the edge. Two failed attempts at getting Quebec to sign the 1982 Constitution had put the Parti Québécois on the trail to a comeback. After floundering for eight years, the PQ led in the polls only months ahead of a provincial election. And under its hardline sovereigntist leader, Jacques Parizeau, it...
If you want to know why Canadians judge a leader as an effective prime minister, you can ask them directly. Or you can look at what sits behind those judgments. That is what I set out to do. I ran the same statistical test for Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre and asked a straightforward question:
Here’s my New Year’s list — not for the best or the worst of 2025 — but for the issue most consistently ignored, despite the fact that people care about it.
If there was ever a year that proved that politics can still surprise, it was 2025. U.S. President Donald Trump started it by declaring Canada the 51st state and ended it by adding his name to the Kennedy Center. Our spring federal election morphed from Conservative cakewalk to Liberal renaissance, and the winter saw a flurry of floor crossing. Alberta...
Osman Azizov, who allegedly hunted Jewish women, has been released on bail. How warped are our values in the name of accommodation and diversity
Doug Ford for Prime Minister? It’s the question everyone asks me, in both official languages — even though Ontario’s premier can only speak one of them.
Put the playlist on, and I’ll listen to everything from “Adeste Fideles” to “Petit Papa Noël.” I love Christmas music. But dancing among the carols and Christmas songs in my seasonal memory are a couple of other festive numbers, too.
The chickens are coming home to roost for Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. And as we prepare for 2026 to dawn, so many chickens are coming home she’s pretty much running a political poultry farm.
The world of politics often embraces contradictions. Canada faces a stark contradiction today. On the one hand, our country is dangerously divided, regionally and generationally. Both Quebec and Alberta may soon be holding referendums on sovereignty. Many younger Canadians living economically precarious lives resent the Boomers and Gen Xers, with their pensions, health care and other entitlements that millennials and...
MPs defect, unity frays and a leadership review looms for the Conservative Leader
He will have to face the fact that his opponent has been selling Tory policies better than he did — and do something about it. A year ago, Justin Trudeau was still determined to hang on as prime minister, still professing to believe he could win the next election against all odds and public evidence. If he’d held on, he’d...
I was standing in the back of a half-built warehouse in Kingston in April, watching Pierre Poilievre try to rouse his supporters. “We will reject,” the Conservative leader declared ominously, “the Century Initiative.” There were a few angry shouts from audience members who knew what he was talking about. Everyone else was silent. This radical scheme, designed by “multinational corporations”...
If the theme of 2025 in Canadian politics was to expect the unexpected, the ways in which the political world turned upside down will reverberate into 2026. Everyone will have their own surprise developments of this truly tumultuous year, but here are my top five picks for the big country-shaking shifts of 2025.
There is a great deal to love about Canada, but one of the greatest things is that this country will never have a Donald Trump. That thought crossed my mind as this narcissistic egomaniac addressed his countrymen last week in what could only be called an orgy of ego-liberation and industrial scale mendacity. One American commentator said it was as...
On Dec. 15, 2015, I stood in a hotel in downtown Ottawa as the commissioners of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission shared the 94 Calls to Action. I remember the room with auras of super-bright colour as if the children who were lost had travelled from the stars to share in the moment. We stood in awe of these leaders...
Sergio Marchi got himself elected to North York city council at the tender age of 26, and just two years later, became a Liberal MP, just in time to see his party thrashed by Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives in 1984. But he stuck around, eventually earning three different jobs in Jean Chretien’s cabinets between 1993 and 2000. He chronicles it...
Last week I carefully read the statement of strategic purpose of the Trump administration, a document published by every recent incoming administration within a year of its inauguration. The strategic statement has been received with misgivings by members of the Fortress America school that holds that the United States should be ready at all times to repulse any initiative from...
There’s an old clip going around on social media this week showing Stephen Harper on his feet in the Commons batting away a question about the supposed impropriety of a Liberal MP crossing over to join his Conservatives. It was 2006 and Harper was being accused of “seducing” Liberal David Emerson over to his side. The then-PM first shrugged it...
