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 Lisa Van Dusen.
As a veteran columnist and editor, I can attest to the predominance of a handful of opening gambits that have stood the tests of both time and competition from political-aphorism upstarts. Harold Macmillan’s irresistible “Events, dear boy, events” and Yogi Berra’s (and Lenny Kravitz’s) “It ain’t over ’til it’s over” come to mind. In the Canadian canon, there’s Robert Bourassa’s...
As classic by-election stories go, Mark Carney’s Liberal Party sweep on Monday night in Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia was the democratic antithesis of the recent performative-populist Nigel Farage by-election farce in the UK riding of Clacton (with apologies to Count Binface). The Canadian by-elections were not just a clean sweep, they were a veritable stampede toward the one leader...
When asked on Thursday morning to name her main opponent in the campaign she had just launched for the scheduled October 5th Quebec election, premier and Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) leader Christine Fréchette did not say, “The leaders of the other parties,” “The prospect of a Quebec independence referendum”, or “21st-century malaise”.
“Let the games begin” is both belated and understated under circumstances in which the games have been underway for quite some time, but let’s say for argument’s sake that the Canada-US trade war of 2026 truly began this morning, with Donald Trump’s egregious assault on our toponymical sovereignty via the arbitrary renaming of Lake Ontario “Lake America”. As ever, Trump’s...
At the end of his news conference on Saturday following Canada’s 11th-hour withdrawal from bilateral trade talks with the Trump administration on Friday night, Prime Minister Mark Carney was asked the following question: “Why does it feel like today, Mark Carney is going to war?” “Because we were attacked,” Carney replied. At the same time, Carney was careful to characterize...
In case there was any residual doubt as to just how far human events have veered into the patently absurd, we submit to the Rip-Van-Winkle test a recent Sunday Guardian headline: “Andy Burnham says he will disagree with Trump in public if necessary.” Who could possibly have predicted 20 years ago that publicly challenging the host of The Apprentice would...
If you’re Pierre Poilievre, you must be wondering, on some level, where everyone has been. Why are so many Tories suddenly complaining about the same personality you’ve had all along, and which they seemed to find so beguiling — or at least useful — when its most caustic bits were mobilized and sent into battle against Justin Trudeau’s prime ministership...
As many Canadians brace for a Canada Day heat wave, we have good news and bad news for you to ponder while you’re raiding the icepack, AC, and oscillating-fan sections at Canadian Tire. The good news is that Canada’s “technical recession” of a month ago is now, per BMO Chef Economist and Policy Contributing Writer Doug Porter, a technical recovery...
The Irish political pilgrimage — or world-leader “roots tour” as an adaptation of the ancestral tourism that fuels so much Blarney-Stone kissing — is a classic of personal diplomacy pioneered by President John F. Kennedy. “If this nation had achieved its present political and economic stature a century or so ago,” Kennedy said in his speech to the Oireachtas Éireann...
Yes, Donald Trump and Pete Hoekstra’s tag-team 51st-state trolling this week was symptomatic of just how insane our bilateral relations with the United States have become. But what’s truly worth noting is what started out Monday as the subtext of Trump’s revived annexation threat — pegged to Canada’s now-notorious “technical recession” as all the more reason to capture the country...
The speech Mark Carney delivered to the Economic Club of New York on Thursday was many things. In the room, it was a stability balm amid a global drama: Canada is the reasonable, rational source of solutions, not problems. “A country that’s predictable, reliable and principled in a world that’s anything but,” Carney said in his summation. As a narrative...
Breaking my rule of never quoting myself, but those lines are from a column of mine from February 2017, one month after Donald Trump’s first inauguration. Since then, American democracy has experienced the respite of four years of Joe Biden, which not so much reinstated normal working conditions in journalism and comedy as slowed the slide of both towards the...
For someone relatively new to elected politics, Mark Carney has developed a habit of leaning into his pre-political past. When Carney unfurled his middle-power response to the geopolitical upheaval fronted by Donald Trump’s weaponized presidency, he didn’t do it at the Canadian Club, the United Nations, or Chatham House. He delivered his code-cracking economic GPS from the annual gathering of...
As Mark Carney celebrates a belated majority victory nearly a year after his election as prime minister, he can once again thank Donald J. Trump, along with the voters of University-Rosedale, Scarborough Southwest, and Terrebonne. Of all the improbable outcomes Trump’s presidency has rationalized, Canada’s pro-technocrat groundswell of floor-crossers and byelection voters is among the most interesting, and least dystopian...
As the world absorbed this morning the good news that Persian civilization has not been obliterated per an apparent nuclear threat issued by an American president to end an avoidable war he started, the question remains of “What just happened?”. In superficial terms, what just happened was an unjustified war in the Middle East launched by an American president acting...
I once predicted semi-seriously in a long-ago column that climate change and calm — or a combination of temperature and temperament — would make Canada a 21st-century superpower. Donald Trump may have achieved it in half the time. The term “New World Order” went viral not long after the dawn of 2026, when Prime Minister Mark Carney used it to...
One of the many things that could be said of the rules-based world order is that it was designed so that countries — including middle powers — would not have to rely on their wits, in the manner of a Hobbesian geopolitical Hunger Games, to survive in the face of hegemonic aggression. “The world will always be driven by great...
Embedded in the marquee numbers of the Defence Industrial Strategy Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled on Tuesday was a long-unfathomable message: the United States is no longer a reliable ally, but a potential kinetic enemy. “The assumptions that defined decades of Canadian defence and foreign policy have been turned upside down,” Mr. Carney said at the DIS unveiling in Montreal...
The consensus on Pierre Poilievre’s fate as leader of Canada’s federal Conservative Party is that he will sail through this weekend’s leadership review in Calgary. That a leader who lost the last election, lost his own seat in that election, and is unpopular beyond his own party can anticipate no trouble in a leadership review has effectively made the magic...
In Davos on Tuesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney made a triumphant return to the Glastonbury of his people. After two decades of belonging to the global financial élite that gathers to solve the problems of the world (and sometimes has) in the Swiss Alps once a year, Carney returned to the World Economic Forum as a member of that most...
As Donald Trump prepares to invade Davos as a possible prelude to invading Greenland, the world is reeling from a 2026 already fraught with previously unimaginable headlines. This escalated Trumpian assault on reality — complete with a tariff-coercion twist — has produced a range of responses, including from Canada. In his meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang on January 15th...
At the risk of ushering in the new year to the soundtrack of collapsing illusions, Donald Trump is not a stable genius. He is also not a peace negotiator. As McGill University Russia expert Maria Popova pointed out in her Policy column this week, Trump’s role in what she has previously dubbed the “Groundhog Day diplomacy” of the Russia-Ukraine negotiations...
Lisa Van Dusen: Senator Boehm, that was quite a year. Between the trade war, Donald Trump’s renewed undermining of multilateralism, and the geopolitical implications of American degradation — I think Trump’s recent National Security Strategy may have summed it up best as a capstone to 2025. How do you see Trump II, Year One? Sen. Peter Boehm: In foreign policy...
Given the economic and geopolitical events of the past year, it’s tempting to say that Mark Carney’s introduction to elected politics has been a baptism by fire. On closer inspection, it has really been defined by the kind of cosmic luck that most politicians can only dream of. There’s no disputing that 2025 was an unprecedentedly disruptive year in the...
The official agenda for this week’s bilateral between Mark Carney and Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Korea may already be the least important itemized diplomatic checklist ever assembled. While the substance of the meeting will cover “a broader set of issues than trade”, per Carney’s comments to reporters at the Association of...
Sometimes, a budget is more than just a budget. In the case of the Carney government’s first federal budget being tabled on November 4th, the latest clue to its oversized, melodramatic quality was the speech that Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered as a prime-time address to the nation Wednesday night from the University of Ottawa (above). Not the substance of...
There are two reasons why Mark Carney’s first budget as Prime Minister of Canada is already burdened with the weight of unprecedented if not unreasonable expectations. The first is that this budget, scheduled to be tabled November 4th, is indeed Mark Carney’s and the second is that this budget is also Donald Trump’s. The reason this is Mark Carney’s budget...
As federal politicians prepare for the return of the House of Commons on September 15th, Canadians can expect a number of key themes in the mix of drama unfolding in Ottawa. But first, a recap. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s minority government was elected on April 28th, with the 45th Canadian Parliament now reflecting a 343-seat House comprised of: the governing...
With America engaged in retaliatory strikes with Iran in the Middle East, this year’s NATO Summit, which begins Tuesday in The Hague, has acquired a fresh layer of context. Back in 2019, two weeks before the NATO 70th anniversary summit in Watford, UK, French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a shot across the existential bow of the transatlantic military alliance. No...
If diplomacy, as influence impresario Henry Kissinger once said, is “the art of restraining power”, then Mark Carney’s first G7 was a success. As host of the most bizarre gathering of the group in its half-century history based on the attendance of Donald Trump as an American president whose entire second term has been an homage to unrestrained power, Carney...
The upcoming Kananaskis G7 has been pre-emptively framed as many things — the most important G7, the most impactful G7, the most Canadian G7. What is certain is that it is already the most unpredictable G7 based on the source of — and unprecedented factors feeding the anticipatory anxiety around — that unpredictability. For instance, there has never been a...
“The world is a more dangerous and uncertain place than at any point since the Second World War,” King Charles noted in the Speech from the Throne on Tuesday. “Canada is facing challenges that are unprecedented in our lifetimes.” In keeping with the divine right of kings to bury the lede, that section didn’t come until 660 words in. But...
In the realm of American political rituals, the Oval Office “pool spray” doesn’t quite top the list of presidential traditions that have been upended by Donald Trump — the peaceful transition of power, the inaugural address, and a glancing acquaintanceship with the US Constitution all rate higher on the litany of obliterated norms than the classic, seated, fireplace-flanking bilateral handshake...
Back in mid-February, more than a month before the federal election was called and just as Mark Carney was beginning to close the longstanding polling gap between Liberals and Conservatives, I filed a column on how elections are defined by two things: are context and contrast. It’s a theme worth revisiting one week from Election Day. In the case of...
In the 1975 Spielberg summer blockbuster Jaws, a line that had become a running on-set joke about the stinginess of producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown in failing to supply a boat big enough to assist the film’s shooting barge made its way into the final cut, becoming one of the most quoted, and misquoted, lines in movie history. “You’re...
The campaign launched Sunday by Governor General Mary Simon’s proclamation — signed at the request of Prime Minister Mark Carney — of a federal election on April 28th isn’t just about Carney vs. Pierre Poilievre or Liberals vs. Conservatives. The last time Canadians went to the polls in an existential election, it was 1988, Brian Mulroney was staking his second...
First off, full disclosure: I love America. I’ve loved America since I was a scruffy kid watching old Jimmy Cagney movies in the bilingual, bicultural town of Aylmer, Quebec. I loved its Big Bird, its palm trees, its dramatic breakfast cereals and its epic, Manichean conflicts: Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote, Tweety vs. Sylvester, Jan vs. Marcia. My earliest...
Mark Carney has now stepped into his new role as Liberal leader — and, at a moment to be determined, prime minister — with an overwhelming 86% of the vote from party members. In the end, Carney not only defied the expectations telegraphed by polling, fundraising and other anecdotal evidence, his victory delivered a message from Ottawa’s Rogers Centre to...
With a pre-emptive disclaimer covering all the inbound exceptions that make the rule, most election campaigns are about two things: contrast and context. And, while those defining elements sometimes exist relatively independently of each other, there are some campaigns, usually at key moments in history, in which they are impossible to unweave: The Mulroney-Turner election of 1988, in which the...
In a recent Policy Q & A, Peter Boehm, the independent Canadian senator, six-time G7 Sherpa and former career diplomat, made a number of recommendations as to how to Trump-proof (not in so many words) the upcoming Kananaskis G7. He also raised a possibility.
As much as America’s political pendulum swing from Donald Trump to Joe Biden and back again may prove to be discombobulating for all “legacy” US allies, Canada holds a disproportional interest in its consequences, occupying as we do the front-row-middle seat in the political poncho zone of America’s global audience. While that prime location has proven overwhelmingly beneficial for most...
Of all the things that Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney have in common, their crucial shared quality for both the Liberal Party and the country may be their status as embodiments of the most overused political quote of the past three decades, the famous James Carville ’92 campaign exhortation, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The latest, most vivid example of this...
Of all the anticipatory-anxiety activating appointments Donald Trump made in the waning days of the year when — per instant conventional wisdom — the music died all over again, the most eloquent was the naming of reality-show mastermind Mark Burnett as special envoy to the United Kingdom. More of a statement even than Trump’s appointment of vaccine-denying roadkill aficionado RFK...
As the world processes the end of the Assad regime and the departure of its brutal dynastic scion, Bashar al-Assad, for Moscow, Syrians in Syria and elsewhere, including Canada, are euphoric. Or, as Syrian exile and Oxford research fellow Ammar Azzouz writes in the Financial Times, capturing the theme of the day, Now Syria can Dream of a Future Again...
On December 1st, 2019, the first laboratory-confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 was diagnosed in Wuhan, China. By December 8th, 41 people had been diagnosed. The first case in Canada was confirmed in British Columbia on January 25, 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) named the acute respiratory disease “COVID-19” on February 11, 2020. By mid-March, Canada’s lockdown had begun. These facts...
You know that a story has all the makings of an economic-crisis catalyst when the Globe and Mail runs 13 news and opinion pieces plus an editorial about it on the same day. It may say more about the state of the world that, in the case of Donald Trump’s first post-2024 election outing as “Tariff Man”, the event in...
To anyone who has ever covered a U.S. presidential election, one of the most serious indications that the one that just produced a second victory for the most empirically unelectable candidate in history was indeed not a normal race came in the days following the September 10 debate. Kamala Harris won that debate in such an overwhelmingly obvious, floor-sweeping, hands-down...
While it may not necessarily seem like it now, with all the usual stylings of narrative warfare and performative propaganda predictably besieging the homestretch of this US presidential campaign and leaving us hankering for the days when politics made sense, the current (ironic hyperlink alert) war on democracy does have its advantages over previous wars on democracy. For starters, a...
In the Before Times, when American politics had not yet been repurposed as aversion therapy for troublesome democracy romantics in incipient autocracies, the presidential debate was just another cyclical feature of campaign culture — like the Styrofoam boater, the oppo-research honeytrap and the Iowa State Fair butter cow. That pre-chaos debate montage, quaintly sprocketed by sweaty Lazy-Shave meltdowns and “There...
On August 1st, as Vladimir Kara-Murza’s plane was lifting off from Moscow following a sequence of events he’d been sure would culminate in his execution, the FSB/KGB minder escorting the journalist and longtime state harassment target told him to look out the window. “This is the last time you will see the Motherland.” Kara-Murza laughed and replied that he would...
Contrast is a key ingredient of any election campaign, and in US presidential campaigns is always especially pronounced. In a country where political polarization is leveraged as a tactical asset and propaganda fuels that polarization, drawing distinctions with one’s opponent isn’t just a thing, it’s a political necessity. After stepping aside July 21st for the sake of his country, President...
In an American presidential campaign that has already been unprecedented as a race in which the Republican candidate is a twice-impeached convicted felon and failed coup plotter and the Democratic candidate and failed-coup target, the incumbent president, was replaced at the 9th hour, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is a breath of ordinary air. When Vice President Kamala Harris’s own vice-presidential...
As a notorious fan of Venn diagrams, Kamala Harris has surely contemplated the Venn overlap that has framed her friendship with Joe Biden. An 81-year-old white man born into the small-town dream incubator of postwar America and a 59-year-old Black-South Asian woman born into the immigrant dream incubator of American academia, Biden and Harris share a family background of aspirations...
The momentousness of Joe Biden’s decision Sunday to withdraw from the 2024 presidential election was not lost on anyone. For once in the recent, relentless spree of norm-breaking related to what is still the world’s most powerful office, this unprecedented act was generated by America’s pro-democracy president rather than his unpredictable, anti-democracy predecessor and now-erstwhile rival. But, with all respect...
With Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts by a Manhattan jury on Thursday, the election campaign in which Mr. Trump’s improbable candidacy provided a relentless source of previously unthinkable headlines, norm-blastings and legal melodrama now has a chance to correct to something resembling baseline reality, as opposed to debasing reality show. Will this moment of breakthrough in America’s post-Obama...
As voting got underway for the 2024 Republican US presidential nomination amid the Iowan pathetic fallacy of suitably, brutally bitter weather, it seemed like an opportune moment to revisit the recent evolution of narrative in American politics. That far less literary, more literal pathetic fallacy, the guy who won on Monday, is the unlikely leading man in democracy’s recent global...