While National Newswatch does not keep an archive of external articles for longer than 6 months, we do keep all articles written by contributors who post directly to our site. Here you will find all of the contributed and linked external articles from Justin Ling.
Ottawa’s second crack at passing its big lawful access bill is going much worse than its first one did. Assailed by privacy advocates, Big Tech and bigwig Republicans in the United States, the Carney government faces a tough slog in trying to modernize the legal tools cops and spies use to do their jobs in the digital era. This is...
The time is coming for Prime Minister Mark Carney to overhaul his cabinet, and everyone in Ottawa has some idea how he might do it. Picking a cabinet is an increasingly difficult task. Prime ministers must ensure various regions, languages, identities, genders, loyalties and competencies are represented fairly. You need politicos, communicators and managers, and you need to instil the...
You wouldn’t know it, from their usual delusional bluster, but Donald Trump’s team is starting to panic. And perhaps they should. The president’s popularity is plummeting. One clear reason: the economic revolution he promised has turned into a catastrophe.
When Mark Carney skated over to the TV cameras at an ice rink in Ottawa this month, he introduced his hockey buddy Alexander Stubb to Canadians as “the man, the myth, the legend” and the prime minister’s “No. 1 draft choice.” Carney isn’t putting together a beer league, nor is he trying out for the Ottawa Charge, whose practice he...
“Unity,” said Mark Carney last weekend, “does not require uniformity.” Accommodation beats assimilation, the prime minister told the Liberal faithful at the party’s convention in Montreal — and partnership is better than domination.
The whiff of corruption hangs over Queen’s Park. We can smell it thanks to Ontario’s freedom-of-information system. It’s this system that has exposed the Ford government to the harsh light of scrutiny and revealed all manner of meddling and shady dealings. Perhaps annoyed at having been caught in flagrante delicto so many times, Premier Doug Ford now wants to dismantle...
If you want to know what Alberta Premier Danielle Smith really believes, you have to listen to her when she’s amongst her fellow travellers. We were afforded that opportunity last weekend, when Smith graced the Cornerstone Forum, a confab of conspiratorial alternative media personalities, with her presence. There, she echoed suspicions that Ottawa is preparing to round up pastors for...
Imagine a Canada ruled by a “mini-Trump.” It’s not so implausible, lawyer Frédéric Bérard told the Supreme Court last week. Western nations are teeming with clones of the American president these days. If such an illiberal leader were to come here, Bérard argued, we would simply have to hope that our politicians do the right thing...
Pierre Poilievre’s interview with podcast giant Joe Rogan began on-theme, with the Conservative party leader gifting the skeptical-yet-gullible interviewer with a red maple leaf emblazoned 70-pound kettlebell, and stayed in the zone for the next two-and-a-half hours. The marathon chat managed to broach policy, personality, and puffery, sometimes simultaneously. And it was, if not particularly enlightening, fairly endearing. And equally...
We live in a world of chatbots. The economic and social promise of large language models has driven the Western world into an AI mania that’s driving our stock markets and leading to massive investments in data centres and energy infrastructure. Yet we still don’t really know how AI works — nor the very real impacts it can have on...
More than two decades ago, the United States invited Canada to join in a new Middle Eastern misadventure. The invitation was premised on a big lie about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien declined to participate. It’s not that he foresaw the disaster to come — but he had a team of good advisers, as...
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...
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday issued a rare rebuke against a White House that has otherwise seemed unbound by law, nixing Donald Trump’s tariffs via statement of fact: “The President enjoys no inherent authority to impose tariffs during peacetime.” Revel in this rare bit of good news, Canada — but not for too long. This, for Trump, is a...
As he looks to rebuild Canada’s military, Prime Minister Mark Carney has surely been thinking of C.D. Howe. Howe became William Lyon Mackenzie King’s “minister of everything” at the outset of the Second World War, when “few thought of Canada as an industrial power,” as he later wrote. He believed not only that Canada could industrialize but also that the...
Canada has a big, beautiful piece of infrastructure we think you might be interested in. It’s a tremendous, wonderful bridge, and it’s already been paid for — you only have to take the credit. And just because it’s you, because you’re such a clever and strong president, we named it for the best right-winger the Detroit Red Wings ever had...
The mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge is the kind of tragedy that Canada, unfortunately, has seen too often in recent decades. It will take some time to fully understand how this horror occurred. But we know the results. Nine people are dead: A mother, an educator, six children, and the shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar.
A rogue ambassador to the United States, a new office in Washington for the “Commonwealth of Alberta,” another Mark Carney world tour: we’re just over a month into 2026, and already Canadian diplomacy is headed madly off in all directions. Let’s start with Conservative MP Jamil Jivani, who last week heeded a call that apparently he alone could hear and...
For decades, Canada has been using a secret, expansive, junk-ridden database of suspected terrorists, operated by the United States government. Known as Tipoff U.S./Canada — or TUSCAN — it serves as a form of no-fly list. Only this one is easier to be added to and harder to get removed from.
Melos was, stuck firmly between two empires, an island of quiet stability. The Persian empire had been booted out of the territory around the Aegean Sea, which left just the Athenian Empire and Sparta cohabitating along the archipelago and island chains. While both powers were rivals, each commanding loyalty from a network of city-states, they maintained a parity and cooperation...
For a time, it was Kimberly Prost’s job to make sure only real terrorists appeared on the international sanctions list. Being on this list means being cut off from much of the global financial system and barred from much of the Western world. If you found yourself on such a list in error two decades ago — improperly accused of...
It was a tale of two speeches. Prime Minister Mark Carney quoted Greek historian Thucydides, cited Czech democratic hero Václav Havel and outlined how the old systems of the liberal order were over.
Quebec Premier François Legault resigned on Wednesday, leaving an unholy mess in his wake. Now, with the province’s largest parties leaderless, it looks like a fait accompli that the Parti Québécois will win the 2026 election — steering Canada toward a third referendum on Quebec independence.
In December 2022, a parliamentary committee launched an investigation into “tech giants’ current and ongoing use of intimidation and subversion tactics to evade regulation in Canada and around the world.” Meta, the tech giant, took that personally.
The Donroe Doctrine has been put into action and the United States has re-entered the business of regime change in the Americas. Canada can’t keep sitting on our hands and hoping it will all work out. Late Friday night, American might pounded military installations across Venezuela while helicopters full of special forces descended on Caracas to snatch dictator Nicolas Maduro...
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...
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”...
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.
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...
I’m calling it the Halifax screwjob. Over 48 hours this weekend, the Trump administration sold out its most deserving ally, sided with an enemy, reversed itself, and reversed itself again. The saga is further evidence for an untrustworthy America, where bad actors are winning the power struggle.
Touting his One Big Beautiful Bill Act in June, President Donald Trump declared America “the hottest country in the world.” With its smörgåsbord of tax cuts and tax incentives to go with America’s sky-high trade barriers, at its core were the White House’s dreams of a manufacturing renaissance.
In early October, Premier Doug Ford sat and stared at the giant floating head of Howard Lutnick as the U.S. commerce secretary explained that Canada won’t be allowed to keep its automotive manufacturing industry. Lutnick was addressing the crowd virtually, and Doug Ford was sitting in the front row. “America is first, and Canada can be second,” Lutnick declared...
I can’t believe that this needs to be said, but: It is wrong to call for the jailing of your political opponents. Perhaps somebody should tell Pierre Poilievre.
Recent decades in politics have made us cynical. We rarely trust our politicians to wield power effectively or honestly. Our politicians have responded by making their promises smaller and more boutique, or else giving up their power altogether. Our cynicism has made us lazy and unimaginative. And so the tools of public policy have, increasingly, become targeted tax cuts and...
“We can no longer allow,” Charlie Kirk said, “a tech oligarchy, a tech dictatorship, absent the traditional constitutional checks and balances to continue to rain terror over our speech.” This was 2022 and Kirk, one of the most important conservative influencers and organizers in America, was telling his supporters that social media couldn’t be trusted. Twitter, Facebook, Google, and the...
BY THE CLOSE of the first week of the forty-fifth federal election, Pierre Poilievre’s rhetorical shimmy shake was well practised. The quips, carefully written, had been frequently used. The lost Liberal decade. A new Conservative government that will put Canada first for a change. A big bring-it-home tax cut.
There are some people who are quite displeased with the title of my new book: “The 51st State Votes.”They are even more upset at the art on the cover: A mountie flying an American flag. And to them I say: Good, be mad. I wrote this book to be a succinct recounting of this current moment in Canada’s democracy: The...
In April, just days before he was elected prime minister, I asked Mark Carney whether Canadians ought to start worrying about the state of things down south. “The U.S. system is one of checks and balances, famously,” Carney began. At the core of the American system of democracy, he went on, “is the rule of law.” He gave a small...
Nova Scotia is, if you listen to a small-but-loud chorus, sliding into “authoritarianism” and “totalitarianism.” It is the testing ground for draconian “climate lockdowns” and a sign of a malignant government “paranoia.” For most Nova Scotians, their government’s decision to ban anyone from entering the woods for any reason, save on their own property — issued with the blunt warning...
“The worst thing you can do in a deal is seem desperate to make it.” Donald Trump may have written that bit of wisdom, in his 1987 book “The Art of the Deal,” but he’s not practising it. Ever since his administration vowed “90 deals in 90 days,” the president has been scrambling to ink trade deals before the full...
“If genocide is an actual possibility of the future,” Hannah Arendt wrote in 1963, “then no people on earth — least of all, of course, the Jewish people, in Israel or elsewhere — can feel reasonably sure of its continued existence without the help and protection of international law.” A historian, Arendt’s life’s work was a diagnostic look at the...
In 1993, Liberal party leader Jean Chrétien had dinner with four top Canadian academics. Over dessert, one asked a blunt question: If you win, what do you actually want to do? “I have three priorities,” replied Chrétien. They were to keep Canada independent from the United States, keep the country together and keep the International Monetary Fund out.
A half century ago, a pair of design theorists coined a new term for tough times: “Wicked problems.” It’s a type of problem, neither inherently good nor bad, that is hard to define. It calls for many possible solutions but makes it impossible to adequately test them out. Worst of all, it’s impossible to tell when you’ve actually solved it...
With Canadians across the country avoiding the United States like plague, many are looking to other ends of the country for their summer vacations. And they are, most likely, coming to a realization: Travelling across this country is really damn expensive. Base airfares from Canada’s two main air carriers on major routes have tripled in just five years, leaving Canadians...
Donald Trump is a tariff man. He said so himself, this Monday at the G7 summit in Kananaskis. Nevertheless, the protectionist American president says, there’s no reason why Canada and the United States can’t hammer out their trade differences. “It’s achievable,” he nodded. Standing next to him, Prime Minister and host of the summit Mark Carney kept his poker face...
As the United States expanded westward through the vast expanse of plains, mountains and desert in the middle of the 19th century, it had a problem: mules, the U.S. Army’s preferred pack animal, were dying and piling up. An enterprising major pitched an unusual idea: Why not try out some camels? It took two years of study and debate, but...
Delivering his maiden speech in the House of Commons on Monday, Prime Minister Mark Carney wisely tacked towards humility. “I have much to learn from the members of this great House. I will make mistakes,” he said. “I have no doubt that you will call them out, and for good reason.” Carney acknowledged that our parliamentary system may seem arcane...
Here’s a puzzle: How do you make homes more affordable without making them cost less? It’s a riddle that ex-Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson is promising to solve in his new role as federal housing minister. But I’m here to tell you it’s no ordinary brainteaser, but a paradox.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has unveiled his new cabinet, and he has tasked his team with changing government. Not “small change,” he insisted, but “big change.” Applying the measuring tape to his new government, however, we can conclude that the freshly-elected prime minister is exaggerating just how radically different his new team really is. And in his medium-sized change cabinet...
I discovered my favourite bit of wartime propaganda recently. In chunky pale blue and red font, the poster reads: “THE SLACKER MUST NOT RULE CANADA. VOTE UNION GOVERNMENT.”
When President John F. Kennedy asked Congress to fund the establishment of a dedicated foreign development agency in 1961, he did so by letting them know that the world was watching. “The eyes of other industrialized nations, awaiting our leadership for a stronger united effort,” Kennedy said. “The eyes of our adversaries, awaiting the weakening of our resolve in this...
A curious fundraising website reveals an abandoned GOP-Conservative collab. “Donate today,” the website proclaims, next to the grinning face of the Conservative Leader, “to help Pierre Poilievre and our common sense Conservative team axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.” If you stumbled across this donation site — which asks for up to $1,72...
For every American worker, American businesses invest $24 (U.S.) into the domestic economy. For every Canadian worker, Canadian businesses invest just $11 (U.S.) back into Canada. That gap, mentioned frequently by Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, is a bright red warning light that something has gone wrong in the Canadian economy. Up until 2014, America and Canada’s per-worker investment rates were...
In unveiling his party’s full platform Saturday morning, Mark Carney released a strange plan for strange times: A protectionist plan to return Canada to the world stage. The costed platform document, released after Canadians have already begun voting, sets the stakes in its second sentence: “Our sovereignty is under threat.” In response, Carney wants to open markets, integrate with our...
In an election campaign that has been obnoxiously micromanaged, where the aspirants to lead our country have treated journalists — and, by extension, the public — with varying levels of disdain, last night’s debates should have been a breath of fresh air. Instead, the whole affair was hijacked by right wing conspiracy-minded outlet Rebel News and another right-wing network. We...
“In its letter, that we received this morning at 7:20am,” Jonathan Pedneault said, the Leaders’ Debate Commission announced that it would “exclude the Green Party of Canada from the leaders’ debates.” This decision is “unjust and baseless,” Pedneault told a gaggle of reporters at a hastily assembled press conference at his campaign office. "Their decisio…
It’s debate week on the Chaos Campaign, but arguably the most important conversation of the campaign transpired last night. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and Liberal leader Mark Carney visited Radio-Canada’s nouvelle maison to participate in Tout le monde en parle, the wide-ranging panel show hosted by comedian Guy A. Lepage, and watched live by at least one million Quebecers every...
“In many ways,” Jonathan Pedneault says, “the Greens have been at the forefront of identifying threats.” Risk-detection may not be the first attribute that comes to mind when thinking about the Green Party. But Pedneault, the party’s co-leader along with stalwart Elizabeth May, is hoping to convince Canadians that, in dark, weird, and uncertain times, the Greens are up to...
If you have paid attention to Pierre Poilievre in recent months, you could be forgiven for thinking he is afraid of journalists. From the outset of the campaign, the Conservatives have aggressively tried to limit journalists’ access to their leader and undermine their ability to ask him tough questions about how he hopes to govern the country.
“We will cut back on foreign aid to dictators, terrorists, and global bureaucracy,” Poilievre told some 4,000-odd supporters in Kingston last week, “to bring our money home.” He repeated that notion again in Trois-Rivières on Friday: “I will be cutting waste, bureaucracy, consultants, foreign aid and other unnecessary expenses,” he declared. Poilievre appeared on Radio-Canada this week for a lengthy...
I hope everyone had a pleasant Liberation Day. I’m coming to you from overcast Kingston, Ontario, where Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is campaigning. All party leaders have spent the past 24 hours scrambling to respond to Donald Trump’s quixotic tariff announcement — which, conspicuously, left out Canada and Mexico. While we still face a litany of sector-specific tariffs, everyone is...