Aug 11 2019 — Campbell Clark — CBC — The Foreign Affairs Minister is doing a lot of travel within Canada. When Chrystia Freeland goes to a steel-pipe manufacturer to talk about the new North American free-trade deal, as she did Friday, it is a way to send a message that the Liberals are concerned with lunch-box issues, industry and jobs. It also says […]
Aug 6 2019 — Campbell Clark — Globe and Mail — New British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab came to tell us Canadians we’ll be even closer partners after Brexit. But no, Mr. Raab, you’ll be too busy staring at your navel for the next few years, and sorting out the mess with your biggest partners after Brexit, for us to focus on each other. We Canadians […]
Jun 29 2019 — Campbell Clark — Globe and Mail — The provincial premiers who took Ottawa to court over the carbon tax have seen it blow up in their faces. Just look at what Ontario’s Court of Appeal said on Friday, in crisp legal prose, and in black and white. First, the federal government’s carbon-levy “backstop” is perfectly within Ottawa’s jurisdiction. And second, it’s not […]
Jun 26 2019 — Campbell Clark — Globe and Mail — Once he was the touchy-feely king of co-operation and co-operative federalism, but now Justin Trudeau is being sold as a tough guy. Particularly when it comes to dealing with premiers. The Liberal Party’s new French-language ads feature the Prime Minister looking straight into a camera saying “We stand up – for you” – in NAFTA […]
Jun 3 2019 — Campbell Clark — Globe and Mail — NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has had several different climate-change policies, but none of them were in the climate platform he released last week. Only last month, he was telling the country the NDP was moving in a bold new direction on environmental issues, opposing all new oil-and-gas infrastructure. That meant no new pipelines or major […]
May 30 2019 — Campbell Clark — Globe and Mail — What’s the opposite of a dog whistle? An air horn? Whatever it is, it is what Justin Trudeau was using to send a political signal when he complained about U.S. “backsliding” on abortion rights to Vice-President Mike Pence. This was no sly message designed to perk up the ears of a particular target audience without […]
May 28 2019 — Campbell Clark — Globe and Mail — Andrew Scheer’s big immigration-policy speech was not about immigration policy, but about telling the country that he’s not a bigot. That section of the speech, laying out the Conservative Leader’s personal commitment to diversity and equality, and telling racists they have no place in his party, was personal, and it was important. Good thing, too. […]
May 13 2019 — Campbell Clark — Globe and Mail — It’s a good thing for the NDP that they didn’t win their campaign to change the electoral system to proportional representation or they’d be in danger of splitting into pieces now. The Green Party has wind in its sails, most recently from winning a second seat in the British Columbia riding of Nanaimo-Ladysmith, and some […]
May 7 2019 — Campbell Clark — Globe and Mail — Forget China, and look for new trade elsewhere. Forge a closer alliance with the United States, because Donald Trump is just a blip. Build the military, and a bigger alliance with like-minded democracies. Andrew Scheer’s “vision” speech for Canadian foreign policy was mostly Conservative Classic, not some new flavour. But it did include one big […]
May 3 2019 — Campbell Clark — Globe and Mail — There was a palpable sigh of relief felt in Liberal Ottawa when a Saskatchewan court endorsed the legality of the federal carbon tax, even if Environment Minister Catherine McKenna gloated like it was a slam dunk. This is one court’s opinion with many to come in a particularly litigious time for Confederation, and not resounding. […]
Apr 25 2019 — Campbell Clark — Globe and Mail — Maybe the federal Conservatives were getting so excited about Jason Kenney’s impending victory in Alberta’s provincial election that they were blinded to the stupid thing they were doing. In Alberta, there was, and is, so much anger about the economy, unemployment, the glut of oil and the lack of pipelines to ship it, that Mr. […]
Mar 29 2019 — Campbell Clark — Globe and Mail — This wasn’t the Clerk of the Privy Council making a threat. Michael Wernick was, almost sheepishly, warning Jody Wilson-Raybould about someone else. It was Justin Trudeau who wanted to get his way. Now that we have seen everything that was said in a Dec. 19 phone call between the head of the civil service and […]
Mar 27 2019 — Campbell Clark — Globe and Mail — It was hard not to feel sympathy for Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, a politician visibly struggling to maintain principles despite being a Liberal MP on the Commons ethics committee during a vote on the SNC-Lavalin affair. He was the one, among the six Liberal MPs on the committee, who had voted a month ago for a public […]
Mar 7 2019 — Campbell Clark — Globe and Mail — Not an apology. Not really an act of contrition. Not a full-throated defence. Not a detailed accounting of events. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s press conference on the SNC-Lavalin affair included an assertion that there were lessons learned although he wasn’t terribly specific about which ones. So what was that? The Prime Minister said that he […]