Canadian Forces exchange officers working with the U.S. military were “very likely” involved at some level in planning the weekend strikes on Iran, a former Canada major-general has warned. If true, this should raise alarm bells for Canadians because it means Ottawa’s insistence that Canada is “not involved” in this operation is not just implausible, it’s misleading.
RIP Canada’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, we hardly knew you. As Prime Minister Mark Carney alights in Australia this week, fresh from a trade mission to India, the basic premise of the strategy — “to seize opportunities in the national interest of Canadians, while defending the values they hold dear” — has been junked in favour of realpolitik: doing business with countries...
Mark Carney may have thought he dodged a bullet when he wordsmithed Canada’s position on the latest U.S.‑Israeli assault on Iran, Operation Epic Fury. “Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security,” Carney said in a written statement released jointly with Foreign...
Mark Carney left on a trip to India last Thursday but there has simply been no time to field reporters’ queries. The Prime Minister cancelled the press conference scheduled for Monday, when embarrassing questions were to be posed, because his meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ran long and his flight to Australia couldn’t be delayed and well, there...
In politics it’s usually best to be as clear as you can. But there are times when clarity will get you in trouble for no particularly good reason. That’s when it’s smarter to fuzz things up a bit. On India and Iran, Mark Carney has been both clear and fuzzy over the past few days. The problem is he’s been...
Every prime minister is called upon, at one point or another, to comment on the actions of an American president. For Mark Carney, still less than a year on the job, there have already been several such moments. The latest moment of necessity arrived this past weekend, when the United States and Israel launched new attacks on Iran. The response...
In his Davos speech in January, Prime Minister Mark Carney said his government’s aim in foreign affairs is to be “principled and pragmatic.” He defined “principled” as being committed to the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the United Nations Charter; and “pragmatism” as taking the world as it is, not as Canada wishes it to...
Mark Carney wasted no time in backing U.S. military action to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. It was a quick decision to pick a side but also to pick from a menu. It is hard to claim that preventing Iran from getting the bomb is the cause for this war.
Pierre Poilievre says he would rather work with Prime Minister Mark Carney to fight Donald Trump than plunge the country into another election to choose which man is the better negotiator. The Conservative leader declared that choice in a 40-minute podcast interview with former CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge, featuring some fascinating glimpses into how Poilievre intends to shift his tone...
If the PM were to call an election now, he would almost certainly be punished. Despite some stellar polling, what certainly feels like a collapsing opposition leader and the foundations of some policy wins, Mark Carney must not give in to those advising him to go the polls to secure his majority.
I’ve recently spent a week working in Ottawa. Keeping in mind that I work in public policy and am surrounded by political junkies, on one of those days not one but five separate people raised Quebec sovereignty with me unprompted. Clients. Colleagues. Even housemates. The anxiety is real.
Back in 2011, the popularity in Quebec of then New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton helped trigger an unprecedented Orange Wave that saw the NDP win 59 seats (out of 75) in a province that had never been fertile electoral ground for the NDP. Tragically, Layton passed away from cancer less than four months later. In the 2015 federal election...
Canada’s response to the U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran exposes a fault line at the heart of our foreign policy. We invoke international law and the “rules based international order” when adversaries engage in unlawful actions, but abandon those same rules entirely when it’s the Americans — whose current government 60 per cent of Canadians now see as a threat —...
In Iran, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have opted to play regime change roulette. They are wagering with the lives of civilians in Iran, Israel, and the Gulf countries. They risk embroiling American and Israeli forces into yet another forever war, a military operation with no clear objectives and no way to truly win. And they do so with no...
Prime Minister Mark Carney was forced to admit an unpalatable truth Saturday, that despite his declaration that the old order had been irreparably ruptured it was still very much intact.
As I write this late Saturday morning, news is still coming in about the joint U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. The targets reportedly included senior regime figures and missile infrastructure. Iran has responded. World leaders are trading statements. The situation feels fluid and dangerous. Prime Minister Mark Carney has reacted in a way that is far different than how...
Is it too late for Pierre Poilievre? The Conservative leader gave an impressive speech this past week to the Economic Club of Canada in Toronto in which he laid out a Conservative strategy for dealing with the erratic and very anti-Canadian U.S President Donald Trump. “Canada cannot control the decisions of foreign presidents,” Poilievre said. “But we can control the...
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre tried to get back in the game this past week. Poilievre did that with a speech in Toronto on Thursday that actually mentioned President Donald Trump by name. More notably, he mentioned Trump in a critical way. Poilievre has been under increasing criticism for his reluctance to go after Trump and his administration for both the...
I paid for my Sunday morning beers one at a time during the men’s gold medal Olympic game. I wanted to be able to walk out of the bar immediately if the Americans won the game, which is what I did as soon as Jack Hughes put the puck past Jordan Binnington. I was in a little bar in the...
Alberta might be landlocked but the province is sinking in a sea of red ink — and red faces. An embarrassed United Conservative government admits its new deficit-riddled budget unveiled Thursday breaks the province’s own law against running deficits — a law the UCP introduced in 2023 when the government was flooded with oil-generated revenue and buoyed by an $11.6 billion surplus.
The premier defector from, and debunker of, the “Green Terror,” which holds that climate change is an existential challenge to the continuation of life on earth, is probably Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and former director of the Danish government’s Environmental Assessment Institute. He has been a prominent climate change skeptic for years, and has roiled the...
There will be no Ceausescu moment, no “at long last sir have you no decency” turning point, no dramatic climax in which the tyrant’s power suddenly evaporates: That instantaneous, simultaneous crystallizing of long-inchoate doubts, wherein those who feared him lose their fear, and those who believed in him lose their faith. Life rarely supplies the needs of narrative, and if...
What happens when Canada needs bold action but the global figure most closely associated with political radicalism is the man Canadians hate the most in the entire world? Welcome to the conundrum facing Pierre Poilievre and Canada’s Conservatives. Lots of lights on Canada’s national dashboard are blinking red, but the country is fearful of the kind of radical disruption represented...
Donald Trump spent nearly two hours this week proclaiming that everything is going great for the United States under his watch. In this same week, the president is getting a united rebuttal from Canada — no, things are not that great on this front. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is the latest to lay down that marker, and a strong one...
There were two speeches inside the speech on Canada-U.S. relations that Pierre Poilievre gave Thursday. One was intended to make him sound like a grown-up. The other was to make him sound different than Mark Carney. The first part was the kind of political repositioning that Mr. Poilievre has long needed.
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney often remarked that the two principal challenges facing any Canadian Prime Minister were national unity and managing relations with the United States. Mulroney excelled at both, which contributed significantly to his back-to-back majority election victories. Today, Prime Minister Mark Carney faces daunting challenges on both of these files and, so far, his prescriptions for success are...
Expect to hear a lot over the next few days about the delicate dance Mark Carney is supposedly attempting as he travels to India to promote trade amid lingering suspicion that India’s government is linked to violent crime in this country. It’ll be a bit like the delicate dance Carney was said to be engaging in last month when he...
Danielle Smith has a problem. Her government is heading toward a deficit projected, before Thursday’s budget, at $10-billion. This is only partly because it overestimated oil revenues, with oil prices now projected at roughly $5 to $10 a barrel lower than forecast in last year’s budget. It is because the government set spending at levels that could only be sustained...
I have a pretty high tolerance for political spin. You kind of have to when you’ve spent years in the House of Commons and on the ground here in Alberta. But a recent opinion column published right here on this platform claiming “moderates are fleeing” the Conservative Party crossed the line from standard spin straight into fiction. It’s a perfect...
For the past two years, much of his rhetoric has revolved around the idea that Canada is broken. That elites have failed. That gatekeepers have blocked growth and made life unaffordable. It has been sharp and oppositional, sometimes deliberately so. This speech was different. It felt calmer and more reflective. He reached back to Marcus Aurelius and the founding of...
The NDP should have a singular focus for the short- and medium-term: finding a way back to official party status. Everything else can come later. In fact, everything else will only come later if the NDP is once again a party with at least 12 seats in the House of Commons. That official party status will unlock desperately needed funds...
You might not remember the days when then-prime minister Justin Trudeau went to India to reset relations, but if you close your eyes, you might just be able to conjure an image of Mr. Trudeau in Bollywood outfits. That was in 2018. Mr. Trudeau’s predecessor, Stephen Harper, announced free-trade talks with India’s prime minister in 2010. They never came close...
Prime Minister Carney is headed to India, Australia, and Japan as part of Canada’s ongoing efforts to shore up trade. While Australia and Japan are uncontroversial trading partners, Canada’s relationship to India is more problematic. Carney’s entire trip occurs against an alarming backdrop: rampant extortion in Canada; a guilty plea in a murder-for-hire plot in the US that once again...
To begin his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Donald Trump looked subdued. Maybe he’d seen the NPR report earlier in the day saying his Justice Department was hiding files in the Jeffrey Epstein case that potentially incriminated him. If true, it would be a cover-up story of Watergate magnitude. But soon, Mr. Trump’s bravado was back, and it...
In a performance that clocked in at just under two hours on Tuesday night, Donald Trump turned the State of the Union address into an awards show — “You get a medal!”, “You get a medal!”…he even bemoaned not being able to award himself the Medal of Honor. Those who only read the transcript may miss the point that this...
If the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it, Prime Minister Mark Carney might consider visiting the Governor General in the coming weeks and asking her to dissolve Parliament. The latest polls are starting to show a seductive spread in his favour — both in the horse race, and as far as whom Canadians consider...
The only person who could realistically benefit from Doug Ford’s appearance on CNN on Monday is Doug Ford himself. Ontario’s Premier decided to insert himself once again in the middle of international trade negotiations, an area he has no jurisdiction over, by appearing on American television.
There was a trigger warning included in the written decision handed down by B.C.’s Human Rights Tribunal last week. A caution – just in case someone was browsing the web, looking for tiramisu recipes or articles on the Northern Cricket Frog or something, and accidentally stumbled on the case of former Chilliwack, B.C., school board trustee, Barry Neufeld, who was...
A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Tumbler Ridge shooter sent messages about gun violence to OpenAI’s ChatGPT over the course of several days last June. The posts were flagged by OpenAI’s automated review system and roughly a dozen employees debated whether the posts indicated the possibility of real world violence. Ultimately, however, OpenAI leadership decided...
Canada’s new Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS) sends a clear signal that defence capability, economic security, and industrial capacity are inseparable. Investment will deliver tangible outcomes: a stronger domestic industry, sovereign capability, and cooperation with allies. Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the first Canadian Defence Industrial Strategy at our CAE headquarters in Montreal. This marks an important first step...
Light is being cast on two measures the Liberal government hoped to pass with little scrutiny this week but public outcry many not be loud enough for Prime Minister Mark Carney to change course. The first is on the extraordinary powers the Star first raised concerns about back in December. Hidden in the government’s 600-page budget bill is a measure...
Had Pierre Poilievre had won the last election, he would not have gone to Davos to address the World Economic Forum, as Mark Carney now famously did — to Donald Trump’s scorn and world acclaim. The Conservative leader has promised for years to steer well clear of the annual gathering in Switzerland, and committed once again in the 2025 campaign...
This week, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre released a video about the preferential treatment of asylum seekers in Canada. In it, he states that six million Canadians can’t get access to a family doctor and specialist wait times average 30 weeks. Then, he drops the kicker: rejected asylum claimants, who have never paid taxes, get free “deluxe supplementary heath care” such...