Dec 7 2019 — Murray Brewster — CBC — It was perhaps the most jaw-dropping moment in Donald Trump’s impromptu, marathon news conference — an event which, along with the NATO leaders summit that provided the occasion, was already crowded with jaw-dropping moments. “Right now, the only soldiers we have in that area are essentially the soldiers that are keeping the oil,” the U.S. […]
Dec 3 2019 — Murray Brewster — CBC — Canada is “slightly delinquent” when it comes to meeting NATO’s target for spending on defence, U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday on the eve of the military alliance’s 70th anniversary celebrations. He seemed ready to go easy on Ottawa, however — telling journalists in a wide-ranging news conference with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau this morning […]
Dec 3 2019 — Murray Brewster — CBC — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hit the ground running on Tuesday with a series of courtesy calls in London ahead of the NATO summit with other world leaders. Trudeau met with Prince Charles at Clarence House, the royal residence that had been home to Queen Mother. There have been reports in Britain that the prince […]
Dec 3 2019 — Murray Brewster — CBC — It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of searching behind the couch cushions for loose change: the semi-regular exercise of finding federal expenses to include in Canada’s annual calculation of defence spending. And it appears federal officials have gotten quite good at it. Documents and briefing notes released to CBC News under access to information legislation follow the […]
Dec 2 2019 — Murray Brewster — CBC — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be hitching rides on a variety of air force planes for the foreseeable future. The CF-150 Polaris Airbus that usually shuttles the prime minister to world events is out of commission following a hangar accident last month. The nearly 30-year-old passenger aircraft, which is specially outfitted with a private cabin, […]
Dec 2 2019 — Murray Brewster — CBC — It may be a world away from NATO, but the Chinese telecom titan Huawei — and the United States’ desire to keep it out of the security grid of western democracies — will be a major topic of conversation among allied leaders this week. Senior Trump administration officials telegraphed last week that it “is not […]
Nov 22 2019 — Murray Brewster — CBC — How Western democracies deal with the conundrum that is China is expected to be a major focus of the annual Halifax International Security Forum, which convenes for the eleventh time this weekend in the Nova Scotia capital. Several on the record — as well as off the record — sessions involving some of the world’s […]
Nov 14 2019 — Murray Brewster — CBC — “Success,” Winston Churchill supposedly said, “is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” That could be the motto of foreign ministers in the anti-Islamic State coalition as they gather Thursday in Washington. Representatives of 30 nations, including Canada, are meeting at the insistence of the French. The gathering […]
Nov 10 2019 — Murray Brewster — CBC — Flight Sergeant Arnold Graham and his cousin’s husband, Mark Bredin, flipped a coin. The Royal Canadian Air Force had ordered the two men to split up, saying relatives could not serve on the same Lancaster bomber. Bredin lost the toss and went to join another crew. The day after — March 16, 1945 — Bredin’s […]
Nov 9 2019 — Murray Brewster — CBC — Sapper Abraham Sowers was wounded at Vimy Ridge, the site of the iconic First World War battle. He caught shrapnel in the face from an exploding shell and was evacuated to England, but later returned to France to serve with a combat engineering company digging tunnels underneath the front. It was there Sowers developed a […]
Oct 29 2019 — Murray Brewster — CBC — Conservative senators will push for a closer look at the financial settlement paid to Vice-Admiral Mark Norman when they return to Parliament later this fall, said Sen. Jean-Guy Dagenais. The Conservative senator from Quebec was at the forefront last spring of an attempt to get the Upper Chamber to investigate the failed prosecution of the […]
Oct 23 2019 — Murray Brewster — CBC — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is being told to not even think about appointing an independent senator to fill the regional hole at the cabinet table created by Monday’s election. The time-honoured tradition, dating back decades, has been for prime ministers to pluck potential ministers from the Senate when the need arises — usually to give […]
Oct 17 2019 — Murray Brewster — CBC — The Conservatives have pledged to “protect” the budget of the Department of National Defence even as they work to eliminate the federal deficit. In their election platform, the Tories said they would find $5 billion in savings by cutting operational expenses, but were not clear on precisely what that meant, other than to say it […]
Oct 16 2019 — Murray Brewster — CBC — Many foreign diplomats stationed in Ottawa are putting pen to paper — or fingers to keyboards — this week to give their home governments a sense of where they believe Canada’s federal election is headed. Foreign policy and the extraordinary events unfolding overseas seem to have attracted little political notice in Canada during the campaign, […]
Oct 11 2019 — Murray Brewster — CNN — Turkish artillery reportedly struck the northern Syrian prison holding the British-Canadian Jack Letts — who is accused of being a supporter of the Islamic State — on Thursday, as Turkish forces pushed their military offensive deeper into the contested town of Qamishli. The CBC has not been able to verify independently whether Letts was in […]