Robyn Urback

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 Robyn Urback.

Robyn Urback

Pierre Poilievre, champion of the little guy, just voted to hurt young workers

Back in 2012, a young Pierre Poilievre, who was parliamentary secretary to the minister of transport in Stephen Harper’s government, gave a compelling address in the House of Commons defending his government’s decision to raise the age of Old Age Security (OAS) eligibility from 65 to 67.He explained that people are living longer than when the program was first introduced; that as Baby Boomers retire, the country would see too many people collecting benefits and too few working-age adults to support them.

Robyn Urback

A spiralling Trump resorts to a tried-and-true tactic: blaming the Jews

Robyn Urback

Jagmeet Singh to NDP caucus: We’ve accomplished basically nothing, so our work here is done

Friends, brothers, sisters and donors (yes, both of you): We did it.It has been a long 2½ years: 2½ years of subtle debasement, of quiet humiliation, of trying to explain what, exactly, we’re thinking by propping up a government that we’ve also called “out of touch” and ineffective.Well, the results are finally in. No, I’m not talking about the polling results – please don’t look at those. I mean the policy results of our hard work trailing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau like a doe-eyed puppy, grateful for the odd morsel thrown our way. When Mr. Trudeau veered out of line, we’d growl with all the ferocity of a freshly groomed shih tzu being carted around in a stroller by a pleasant octogenarian: a warning that our loyalty could not simply be bought, since, for the most part, we gave it away for free.

Robyn Urback

Justin Trudeau’s legacy will be destroying the Canadian consensus on immigration

Robyn Urback

Misuse of the temporary foreign worker program is a business racket

Standing by a lectern with a sign that read “Bring Home Our Jobs,” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre had words for both the government and for businesses that he implied were abusing Canada’s temporary foreign workers program. “Trudeau has destroyed our entire immigration system,” he said, referring to the massive expansion of workers applying under the low-wage labour market impact assessment (LMIA) stream.

Robyn Urback

The appalling homophobic attack in Canada you didn’t hear about

It’s been six weeks since a brazen, allegedly bigoted attack took place on the street in a major Canadian city. It should have been national news. Perhaps under different circumstances, it would have been.In the early hours of June 23, Emma MacLean and her girlfriend were walking in downtown Halifax. By Ms. MacLean’s telling, one man made a “sexually degrading” comment toward her, which catalyzed a verbal confrontation between Ms. MacLean’s girlfriend and the man, who she says “made several disgusting slurs, some being homophobic.” The confrontation then turned physically violent. Ms. MacLean says a group of approximately seven to 10 men started attacking them, “throwing several punches and kicks to our faces, ribs,” which resulted in a broken nose, chipped tooth, and several cuts and bruises.

Robyn Urback

Is it fair that some female athletes are born with male traits? No. But it wouldn’t be fair to disqualify them either

Eero Mäntyranta was a seven-time Finnish Olympic medalist with a genetic advantage. That wasn’t known in the 1960s, when he took home three Olympic golds for cross-country skiing, but his body was producing extraordinarily high levels of hemoglobin, which gave him enhanced oxygen-carrying capacity: a clear advantage in endurance sports. It wasn’t until 97 members of his family were assessed in the 1990s that scientists discovered a familial mutation in the EPOR gene, which resulted in an abnormally high production of red blood cells. The condition was so mild in some family members that they didn’t know they were affected, according to the research paper, but others …well, one in particular, went on to be one of the best cross-country skiers in the world.

Robyn Urback

Why ‘weird’ is the perfect, pernicious political attack against Republicans

Hillary Clinton tried all sorts of acrimonious attacks against Donald Trump when the two were vying for the White House back in 2016. Mr. Trump was a bad role model for children, she implied in one ad. He raised the spectre of nuclear war, she warned in another. He said disgusting things about women. Insulting things about veterans. Racist things about Black people. And he would destroy American democracy.

Robyn Urback

Trump’s first term was a warning for Canada. We didn’t heed it

The U.S. presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden last month was a genuinely frightening spectacle. At one lectern was a known lunatic: a guy who trades in conspiracies and lies, whose prospective second term promises to be even more volatile than the first. At the other lectern was an unknown figure: Joe Biden in body, but someone else in mind. This was an old man unlike the one who ran for president in 2020; he was pale, confused and adrift. With his mouth frequently agape, Mr. Biden could barely put together a coherent thought. That guy was someone you wouldn’t trust with your car keys, never mind the nuclear codes.

Robyn Urback

Striking LCBO workers are making Doug Ford’s case for him

The very first government-run liquor stores opened in Ontario nearly 100 years ago, garnering huge fanfare, hours-long lines and a healthy degree of puritanical skepticism.Reporters chronicled the scenes in a massive spread published in The Globe and Mail on June 2, 1927, where they noted that people were mostly civilized as they waited to acquire their permits to buy alcohol, though there was some line-cutting and “police reported one drunk arrested” at a store in London, Ont. Reporters also observed with some bewilderment that women – women! – were often among those lining up to purchase alcohol, some pushing baby carriages “with the baby at home apparently” to cart their bottles home.

Robyn Urback

Harjit Sajjan will remain in cabinet, and shame on you for asking about it

One thing that Canadians have learned over the course of the past nine years is that, in this government, there is no such thing as a lethal scandal. Ministers don’t resign in disgrace. Public displays of contrition are verboten. No accusation is ever so egregious as to demand an actual response; no charge so serious as to merit sombre reflection. Ministers will deflect, reject, maybe explain a little bit. But they never, ever concede.

Robyn Urback

Anthony Housefather can best represent Canadian Jews by walking away from the Liberals

For the past six or so months, Liberal MP Anthony Housefather has been an accidental maverick in his own party. It’s an unenviable position – lonely, polarizing, controversial – and one that, by his own telling, he didn’t seek to occupy. Indeed, Mr. Housefather didn’t have much of a reputation for dissidence before, with the exception of matters of English language rights in Quebec. But the events of Oct. 7, and more specifically his government’s shifting position on Israel, changed things. Speaking on The Line podcast back in March, he accused his own government of “changing foreign policy on the fly.”

Robyn Urback

Pierre Poilievre can prove he’s a grown-up and read the NSICOP report. But what would be the point?

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has every partisan political reason to resist calls to read the classified version of the watchdog report into foreign meddling and alleged collaboration from Canadian parliamentarians. His party’s support in the polls is sky-high. The Liberals’ support is the worst it’s been since 2015. He has a clear, solid line of attack in demanding Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “release the names” implicated in the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) report, the redacted version of which was released earlier this month.

Robyn Urback

Canada should give doctors every incentive to stay. By hiking capital gains, it’s doing the opposite

There is one very good reason why the Liberals could not entertain the request from Canadian doctors for a carveout on the looming capital-gains tax increase, and it comes down, as most things do with this government, to politics and perceptions.For months now, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has insisted that the change to the capital-gains inclusion rate, which is going from 50 per cent to 66.7 per cent for gains above $250,000 for individuals on June 25, will only affect a minuscule number of people: the richest of the rich. Just 0.13 per cent of Canadians. This change is a way to deliver on the government’s promise of tax fairness, Ms. Freeland has repeated over and over again. And she has been firm in assuring the public that it won’t affect the vast, vast majority of Canadians.

Robyn Urback

If the Conservatives have a ‘hidden agenda’ on abortion, it’s a mess

Canadians who are staunchly pro-choice should listen to Conservative MP Arnold Viersen’s appearance on Uncommons, a podcast run and hosted by Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith. They will – or should – walk away reassured.

Robyn Urback

Blaine Higgs is livid about teens learning about sex. Does he know they listen to rock, too?

A moment, please, for the pure souls in New Brunswick high schools whose innocence has been siphoned away by the apparent smut-peddlers operating under the guise of sexual-education instructors.Those delicate flowers, you must understand, were probably still playing with Barbies and Pokémon cards (despite what their parents were probably doing when they were in high school) until they were poisoned by talk of sex at school. Indeed, under the noses of both parents and Premier Blaine Higgs, an organization that teaches kids about human sexuality and safe sex managed to enter the province’s schools and teach kids about human sexuality and safe sex.

Robyn Urback

Beverley McLachlin’s continued tenure on Hong Kong’s court is an ongoing disgrace

Beverley McLachlin has spent the past six years servicing the reputation of Hong Kong’s top court, while destroying the one she spent a lifetime building in Canada.Had she decided, upon her retirement from the Supreme Court of Canada in 2017, to invest in a nice condo in Boca Raton and take up watercolour portraits or something, her legacy would have been set as one of the most esteemed and accomplished jurists in generations. She was the first woman and longest-serving chief justice of the Supreme Court; she was a professor, an author, and at times, a polarizing figure, but her fidelity to law and order, to democracy and fairness was without question. But Ms. McLachlin has torched that very legacy by renting out her reputation to a sham court operating under the thumb of Beijing’s repressive and authoritarian regime.

Robyn Urback

‘Useless and overpaid’ lobbyists sure are keeping Pierre Poilievre’s calendar busy

I’m not sure why Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre wrote an entire op-ed in the National Post urging Canadian businesses to fire their “useless and overpaid lobbyists.”“Often,” he wrote, “the lobbyist doesn’t share the interests of the company, its workers, consumers or shareholders. A good solution would be to fire these lobbyists, stop talking with politicians and start trying to win the support of the population.”

Robyn Urback

Of course the keffiyeh is political. But it still shouldn’t be banned from Ontario’s legislature

Unless I misread their biographies, I don’t believe NDP MPPs Kristyn Wong-Tam and Joel Harden trace their lineage to the Levant. Was Mr. Harden’s activism born from his experience as a young Palestinian trying to survive in Gaza? Or was it from his position as a student activist railing against capitalism within the comfy confines of Canadian universities? I suppose I will leave it to Mr. Harden, as well as Ms. Wong-Tam, to clarify.

Robyn Urback

Jews have eyes. And they see that the antisemitism in the protests over Gaza is no aberration

There is a point at which the gaslighting becomes genuinely insulting. When meek attempts to blame a rogue few for hateful or antisemitic speech, or the repeated insistence that such displays of bigotry have “no place in Canada,” are so disconnected from reality that they become offensive and belittling.

Robyn Urback

The failure of Canada’s health care system is a disgrace – and a deadly one

What can be said about Canada’s health care system that hasn’t been said countless times over, as we watch more and more people suffer and die as they wait for baseline standards of care? Despite our delusions, we don’t have “world-class” health care, as our Prime Minister has said; we don’t even have universal health care. What we have is health care if you’re lucky, or well connected, or if you happen to have a heart attack on a day when your closest ER is merely overcapacity as usual, and not stuffed to the point of incapacitation.

Robyn Urback

According to Justin Trudeau, Justin Trudeau is fear-mongering on immigration

Someone, somewhere, appears to have taken a blowtorch to Canada’s immigration system. It’s a mess. We have too many people, and not enough homes, not enough transit, not enough health care infrastructure. International students are lining up at food banks and homeless shelters. Canadians’ attitudes on immigration are becoming more negative.

Robyn Urback

Pierre Poilievre wants big government to protect kids from porn

Mr. Freedom’s war against the gatekeepers apparently comes with a few stipulations. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who is currently railing against this government’s efforts to regulate and police the internet with its new online harms legislation, seems to believe the government should regulate and police the internet – just as long as it’s over an issue that appeals to his base. Fire (select) gatekeepers. Down with big government (sometimes). End (some) state overreach.

Robyn Urback

Jagmeet Singh is super serious this time

Pity Jagmeet Singh’s communications staff, constantly tasked with finding new language for the same empty threat the NDP Leader has been making for years. Mr. Singh has to sound serious but not be serious; he needs to project resoluteness even though he’s the political equivalent of an accordion, bending in every direction and emitting sounds that appeal only to a very niche subset of people.

Robyn Urback

No, for sure, I believe Justin Trudeau is the right leader for the Liberals

No one should listen to Newfoundland MP Ken McDonald, who said in an interview with Radio-Canada last month that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should face some sort of leadership review. “Every leader, every party has a best-before date. Our best-before date is here,” he said. “So you think at least there should be a leadership review in the Liberal Party?” Radio-Canada reporter Laurence Martin asked. “Yes,” Mr. McDonald responded.