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 Stephen Maher.
After Nunavut MP Lori Idlout announced Tuesday night that she would join the Liberals, a grim-looking Don Davies — interim leader of the NDP — had the dreary task of responding. “The position of the New Democratic Party is long-standing and clear,” he said, accurately. “To us, the decision of the voters at the ballot box is a sacred trust...
Mark Carney’s majority dreams are in the hands of the normally separatist voters of Terrebonne, a suburban community north of Montreal. Carney won 169 of 343 seats in the House of Commons on election night last April, just three short of the 171 he needs to govern with full control of the chamber. Since then, he has lured three Conservative...
I paid for my Sunday morning beers one at a time during the men’s gold medal Olympic game. I wanted to be able to walk out of the bar immediately if the Americans won the game, which is what I did as soon as Jack Hughes put the puck past Jordan Binnington. I was in a little bar in the...
When Mark Carney announced Wednesday that Edmonton Conservative MP Matt Jeneroux would cross the floor to join his government, I thought of two recent rumours from the backrooms of Ottawa. The first rumour spread in November, when Nova Scotia MP Chris d’Entremont let slip that he was thinking about crossing the floor to the Liberals. When Conservative Deputy Leader Andrew...
When Stephen Harper was Prime Minister I wrote many columns warning about the influence that right wing Americans had on his political operation, and I spent many dreary hours trying to trace his connections south of the border. I now wonder if that was time well spent because, since the second election of Donald Trump, it has become clear that...
I regret to inform you that it is necessary to pay attention to Steve Bannon because he has plans for Canada and, unfortunately, he has repeatedly shown that he can make bad things happen. Bannon will go down in history as the man who discovered the power of the “sh*tpost,” and who showed that an online army of incels and...
The good news about the U.S. abduction of Nicolás Maduro is that Venezuela is finally rid of a corrupt, violent and buffoonish leader. The bad news is that the country may soon be under the power of another corrupt, violent and buffoonish leader — Donald Trump — who is itching to use his military might on other countries in the...
The week that Donald Trump was elected I offered Justin Trudeau some free advice in this newspaper. At that time, Trudeau was trailing Pierre Poilievre in the polls by 25 points and had been for two years, hanging onto power despite being so personally unpopular that he could not win support for anything.
Markham—Unionville MP Michael Ma goes to all the best parties. On Wednesday, he attended the Conservative party’s holiday gathering in Ottawa, even lining up for a photo with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and his wife, Anaida.
I am starting to wonder if Mark Carney knows what he is doing. On Thursday, he met with Premier Danielle Smith in Calgary to sign a new agreement with Alberta, which includes federal support for a bitumen pipeline to northern British Columbia. On the surface, this is splendid news. It was good to see Smith and Carney working together on...
The first thing to know about last week’s floor crossing is that everybody likes Chris d’Entremont, an easy-going Acadian from Yarmouth, a fishing town on the southwestern end of Nova Scotia, across the Bay of Fundy from Maine. He’s a natural politician — calm, low key and pleasant — a good MP for Acadie-Annapolis, which he has represented since he...
At the closing news conference after meeting Asian leaders in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Monday, Mark Carney said something curious. When asked whether Donald Trump really called off trade talks with Canada because Doug Ford broadcast an antitariff ad quoting former president Ronald Reagan, the prime minister said: “I would suggest you take the president at his word for his...
His elbows-up enthusiasm won him the election. Now he’s governing like a Bay Street exec. Mark Carney talks a lot about staying humble. In his 2021 book, Values, he wrote that humility is one of the “five essential and universal attributes of leadership.” In March of this year, after he became leader of the Liberal Party, he stood on stage...
Since Charlie Kirk was shot, I keep thinking about the months I spent in London, Ont., investigating another politically motivated murder. One Sunday morning in June 2021, a 20-year-old named Nathaniel Veltman ran his Dodge Ram over the curb, killing Madiha and Salman Afzaal, their daughter, Yumnah, and her grandmother, Talat Afzaal. Yumnah’s nine-year-old brother survived the attack with serious...
Donald Trump’s trade war cost Ontario 38,000 jobs from April to June, including 29,400 manufacturing jobs, according to a report Thursday from the Financial Accountability Officer of Ontario. The situation is bad and could get much worse. Trump has thoroughly disrupted global trade, and nobody, except maybe Mexico, is more dependent on the U.S. market. Much of our trade is...
I realized how dry the woods are in Nova Scotia when I stopped my car by the side of the road the other day and briefly stood on the gravel shoulder. The woods smelled dry, almost smoky, like they wanted to be on fire. It’s not how this typically soggy peninsula normally smells. But we have had less than half...
On January 7, Donald Trump said publicly for the first time that he wanted to force Canada to become the 51st state. The president-elect had spent two months waiting to be inaugurated. He seemed to be yearning for action, to be on TV, to signal how he would lead. So he invited journalists to a gilded room in his Mar-a-Lago...
King Charles III’s speech on Tuesday from the throne in Ottawa was like a family reunion for Canadian politicians. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was there, joking around with his old opponent Justin Trudeau, who, playing to type, wore an inappropriate pair of running shoes. Justin’s mother, Margaret Trudeau, who has known the king for 50 years, embraced the monarch...
Nobody even thinks about booing when Miss Rodeo Taber, Shaylynn Amen, rides out on horseback, holding the Stars and Stripes aloft as she gallops around the arena while Bill Lawson sings the American anthem, a capella, in a gravelly but tuneful cowboy baritone. This is not a hockey game in eastern Canada, where the Star-Spangled Banner has regularly been booed...
Léa Stréliski was just 13 in 1995 when the Oui side in the independence referendum fell 54,288 votes short of a mandate to make Québec a country, and ever since she has been hoping to one day play a role in the creation of a new nation. “My first position is, I’m an artist,” she said in a recent interview...
When the truckers’ convoy rolled into Ottawa in a cacophonous cloud of diesel smoke in January 2022, Canada’s Conservative Party was led by Erin O’Toole, a mild-mannered centrist who had been trying to keep his party moderate enough to appeal to voters in Ontario suburbs. The arrival of thousands of horn-honking anti-vaccine protesters scrambled the opinion environment in the Conservative...
At a rally Tuesday in Hamilton, Pierre Poilievre joked about the great day when a U-Haul rolls up Front Street “with a wonderful family in it to move into their wonderful new home in the headquarters of the CBC.” The next day in Montmagny, down the Saint Lawrence from Quebec City, he promised that he would “préserver les services de”...
The following is a conversation between two journalists who have been covering Canadian federal politics up close for decades. Stephen Maher — author of The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau — spoke to Mark Bourrie on March 22 about his latest book, Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, a thoughtful and unsparing examination of the life and career...
An election that will be fought about the sovereignty of Canada is beginning with news that one of Canada’s most prominent conservative leaders asked Donald Trump’s government to interfere. In an interview with U.S. conservative outlet Breitbart earlier this month, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said that she told Trump officials that Pierre Poilievre would be a better PM for Trump...
Mark Carney had quite a first week as prime minister of Canada. He was sworn on Friday, unveiled a smaller new cabinet, killed the consumer carbon tax and ordered a review of the purchase of American fighter jets; spoke to allies on Saturday; flew to Paris on Sunday to meet with Emmanuel Macron, and made progress behind the scenes on...
Mark Carney set a dramatically different tone as he took over from Justin Trudeau on Friday, swearing in the smallest cabinet in decades, telling reporters that he is ready “to get straight to work.” Carney has no choice but to do a lot of things in a hurry. The government has been paralyzed for months, with a lame duck prime...
During the Liberal leadership debate on Tuesday night Mark Carney looked ready to be prime minister. Then he made a rookie mistake. He was asked — as he knew he would be — to explain his role in the decision in October to move the head office of Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., the board of which he was chair at...
In the two elections to come — the Liberal leadership race, which ends March 9, and the federal election that will closely follow it — Canadians should be thinking hard about whether we want to give up our sovereignty. It is far from certain that Donald Trump really wants to annex Canada, but we can’t afford to assume he doesn’t...
This time last year, when I was doing final edits on my book about Justin Trudeau, I asked my editors at Simon & Schuster if they thought that any passages in the book stuck out as unfair. After two years of researching and writing about Trudeau, I had started to find myself becoming irritated by him, and I was afraid...
In a speech to a feminist political charity in Ottawa Tuesday night, Justin Trudeau lamented the election of Donald Trump as a setback for women’s progress. “I want you to know that I am, and always will be, a proud feminist,” he said. “You will always have an ally in me and in my government.” On Friday, the proud feminist...
It’s all but certain that, by the end of 2025, Pierre Poilievre will become our new prime minister. We don’t know when the election will be, or even who will lead the Liberals. What we do know is that the Conservatives have been ahead in the polls by double digits since September of 2022, when Poilievre became leader. He’ll probably...
In January 2017, the day after Donald Trump signed what he called a “Muslim ban,” limiting travel from some Middle Eastern countries to the United States, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent a signal, without mentioning Trump, that Canada was different. “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” he tweeted. “Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada”
When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s plane touched down in Honolulu on his way back from a summit in Laos last Friday, reporters on the plane learned that a caucus revolt was underway in Canada. While they were in the air, the Toronto Star had reported that dozens of backbench Liberal MPs were trying to figure out how to make the...
This year’s Atlantic Canada Momentum Index offers evidence of a region at a critical juncture. The strong momentum outlined in last year’s index1 has slowed as the region struggles to adapt to the challenges that come with boom times and unprecedented population growth. Momentum remains positive, but it is more tentative now. Of the 25 indicators chosen for this study...
The facts in the brief and dispiriting feud between CTV and the Conservative Party of Canada over a mangled clip of Pierre Poilievre will eventually be litigated, and I would not like to write anything here that prevents diligent workers from winning their rightful severance, but it is, I think, necessary to lay out some facts so that Canadians will...
Somehow during the production of a two-minute news item for CTV National News last Sunday, the weekend crew mangled a quote from Pierre Poilievre. The story was about the Liberal government’s dental care program, which could have been jeopardized if the Conservatives had succeeded in bringing down the government with a non-confidence motion. I was told by two sources, independently...
When about 200 foreign students arrived by bus at the Liberal nomination meeting in the leafy suburban Toronto community of Don Valley North in 2019, Han Dong thought nothing of it. “I didn’t pay attention to busing international students because … I didn’t understand it as an irregularity,” he testified later. Dong, who was born in Shanghai but has lived...
While Trudeau was enjoying a New York broadcast, his opponent, Pierre Poilievre, was getting deeper into a fight with a Canadian broadcaster. Poilievre’s Conservative Party announced Tuesday that it will no longer give interviews to reporters at CTV, the country’s top-rated private news channel. The Conservatives are furious about a Sunday report in which the network put together several clips...
Back in 2012, when Justin Trudeau was training for a charity boxing match that few people thought he was going to win, he ran into his stepfather, Fred Kemper, who asked Trudeau if he should bet on him. ‘You sure about this?’ Kemper asked. ‘Yeah,’ Trudeau said. ‘I got this.’
Canada is likely on track for a significant milestone. If there were a federal election tomorrow, and Canadians vote as they say they would, there would be more elected NDP politicians at both the federal and provincial levels than Liberals. According to the latest projection from poll aggregator 338Canada.com, the Conservatives would win 212 seats in a federal election, up...
On Tuesday, when Doris Grinspun, the CEO of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, told CBC that Ontario’s decision to close 10 supervised drug consumption sites is “a death sentence for people that use substances,” the federal Conservatives were quick to attack her. Sebastian Skamski, a spokesman for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, slammed her on X: “CBC’s so called ‘expert’...
Speaking of good news for Kamala Harris, a Cook Political Report swing state poll released Wednesday shows her leading Donald Trump in five of the seven swing states that could decide the election. Cook, a highly rated pollster, finds Harris up in Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, tied in Georgia, and slightly behind in Nevada. If that holds...
On Feb. 21, 2021, 800 days after the Chinese government locked up Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, Don Valley North MP Han Dong, a Liberal, called China’s Toronto Consul General, Han Tao, to discuss the case, which he shouldn’t have done. Dong testified later that he could not remember the details of the conversation, but a CSIS transcript of the...
A pipeline that gave Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a huge headache is finally delivering benefits — to oil companies, at least — although Trudeau should not expect to get political rewards for his troubles. Refineries in Washington state and Oregon are displacing Iraqi crude with cheaper oil from Alberta that is now available thanks to the expansion of the Trans...
One of the bitter ironies in the dismal, long-running foreign interference saga is that Justin Trudeau – whose lack of leadership on this issue has been so disturbing – did one smart thing six years ago that is helping us get to the bottom of the mess. In 2018, Ralph Goodale, then Mr. Trudeau’s public safety minister, established the National...
THE STORY OF how Ottawa failed to deal effectively with the three-week “Freedom Convoy” protest in January 2022 is a particularly Canadian story. As with so many problems we can’t fix, it involves jurisdictional overlap that allowed officials to do nothing because they would not be blamed for doing nothing.
Book excerpt: How the Liberal campaign team helped Justin Trudeau survive arguably his worst scandal of his political career
IERRE POILIEVRE first came to my attention in 2004, when we were both new to Ottawa and I used to sit in the gallery of the House to watch Question Period. Poilievre, then a freshly elected twenty-five-year-old, stood out as unusually combative. He sought every opportunity to take cheap shots at his opponents, like a trash-talking hockey player, always slashing...
In October of 2022, when I started working on my book about Justin Trudeau’s government, I told my interview subjects that I thought history would judge him favourably. It seemed to me then that Mr. Trudeau had changed the country more than Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin or Stephen Harper, and that his record could be measured against Brian Mulroney’s. Justin’s...
Canadian Finance Minister Chystia Freelandsaid this week that she will put forward legislation to increase capital gains taxes before Parliament stops sitting for the summer, and she urged Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre to take a stand on the issue, which he has so far declined to do. Liberals hope the measure — which will hit a small number of high-income...
Mark Carney set the cat among the pigeons last week with a speech that gently criticized the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and tore a strip off of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
Last Thursday, after Joe Biden promised during his State of the Union to build a pier to deliver aid to Gaza, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet shook the president’s hand, congratulated him on the speech, and urged him to push Israel to do more on “humanitarian stuff.” Biden, caught on a hot mic, nodded in agreement and said he was pressing...
If the race to succeed Trudeau takes place while Israel is bombing Gaza, would-be leaders would be under intense pressure to appeal to voters who want Canada to push for a ceasefire. A leadership race dominated by an emotional conflict over the Middle East policy could leave the Liberals in a worse situation than they are now.
Many voters may be glad to see him treat journalists with disdain — that is for them to decide — but our job is to test him and study his character before he takes over the country, and we should not shrink from the task even if it means taking some browbeatings.