Marjorie Harris and Michael Hughes are deadlocked, with net favourability scores of +1. The thing is, they are made up names for an experiment. Ever since I started working in public opinion research (back in the early 1980’s) I was keen to know about the sources of bias that can creep into research unless care is taken in survey design.
From the moment that Donald Trump first started talking about Canada as the 51st state, all sorts of people have debated whether the president was joking or serious. The answer, it seems, is both, and we learned that this week when Pierre Poilievre sat down for an epically long conversation with the right-wing American podcaster Joe Rogan.
What in heaven’s name is going on in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government with regard to the threat posed to Canada’s national security by India?
If Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre had asked me whether he should go on Joe Rogan’s podcast in the United States this week, I would have told him, “No.” I would have been wrong. Poilievre’s appearance on the world’s No. 1 podcast may well mark the moment when he began turning around Canadian voters’ impression of him.
Sometime during the evening of April 13th, Mark Carney will quite likely find out that his majority in the House of Commons is secure. The results of the upcoming federal by-elections in University-Rosedale and Scarborough West in Toronto will confirm that. If, a few hours later, a Liberal victory in the Montreal-adjacent riding of Terrebonne is also confirmed, that will...
In his first year as prime minister, Mark Carney was restless. Two days after being sworn in at Rideau Hall, he made official visits to France and the United Kingdom. Shortly thereafter he went into a five-week election campaign, and a week after last spring's vote he travelled to Washington. In the months since, Carney has been to Belgium, the...
Pierre Poilievre arrived for his long-rumoured-and-finally-realized appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience bearing hefty baggage. The Conservative Leader presented Mr. Rogan with a 70-lb kettlebell created by a Calgary company that specializes in bespoke alterations to guns and knives. Before the episode even aired on Thursday, Mr. Poilievre’s office sent out a statement containing what I can only describe as...
It’s not true to say that the end justifies the means. Neither is it true that it never does. The true statement is: some ends justify some means. A lot of people who ought to know better seem to have persuaded themselves that the U.S.-Israel war on Iran (in? against? with?) is a case of the end justifying the means...
Members of Parliament are allowed to switch parties, and pretending otherwise just makes you sound weak. There is a thing that happens in sports sometimes when a coach or a player, after a tough defeat, refuses to accept that they might be at fault. They blame the officials, or a busy schedule, or a brutal stretch of injuries. Or maybe...
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...
Let’s talk for a moment about the scale of Canada’s ambition and how it compares to the scale of what we can plausibly achieve. Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced major plans for Arctic infrastructure. Much of the $35 billion budgeted for them will be used to expand and upgrade existing military facilities; these, in theory, will increase the...
Canada is shrinking. For far back as records have been kept, and probably much farther, this country’s population grew year after year, seemingly inexorably. Until 2025. On Wednesday, Statistics Canada released figures for the fourth quarter, which estimated that Canada’s population declined by 102,436 people over the course of last year.
Manitoba has just become the first jurisdiction in Canada to introduce legislation that would make it an unfair practice for suppliers to charge higher prices based on algorithmic pricing. Bill 49 is aimed at preventing retailers from using personal data, such as purchasing history, to set higher individualized prices. Vass Bednar, managing director of the Canadian Shield Institute, which promotes...
When I was in the first grade, my hometown junior hockey team, the Granby Bisons, played the team from Trois-Rivières. After trailing Trois-Rivières for a while, Granby had finally managed to tie the game. Trois-Rivières decided to change up their goalie and put Mannon Rhéaume in net. My little, six-year-old mind was blown. A girl! Playing hockey! With boys...
Two recent tweets by Donald Trump on Truth Social reflect a dangerous unravelling of his Middle East war strategy, to the extent that there was one. The first is about the refusal of many countries to send military personnel or equipment as part of operation “Epic Fury”: “The United States has been informed by most of our NATO “Allies” that...
In a competition for the prize of most wonderful irony ever, there is a strong candidate. How about the turn of events that has seen the most lethal, destructive force mankind ever created, nuclear weapons, becoming the greatest preserver of peace? Prior to 1945, major wars between great powers occurred about every 20 or 30 years. This era ended when...
A Liberal majority looks all but inevitable. Three Conservative MPs and one New Democrat having crossed the floor, the Liberals now have 170 seats out of 343 in the House. A probable sweep of the three by-elections scheduled for April 13 would leave them with 173, enough to outvote the combined opposition even without the help of the Speaker. That’s...
The Conservatives knew what they were doing – well, sort of – when they announced a petition to nominate former hockey commentator Don Cherry to the Order of Canada. It’s a great cultural wedge issue: one that pits the millions of Canadians with fond memories of Coach’s Corner against the ostensibly smaller cohort of Canadians who still begrudge Mr. Cherry...
If you’re a political nerd like me (and if you’re reading this, you clearly are), you enjoy a good by-election night. They’re a fun little pitstop between general elections - a chance to get a sense of where the parties actually stand. Sometimes they tell you a lot, sometimes they tell you nothing at all, but they tell you SOMETHING...
It may have taken him more than a year, but Pierre Poilievre has finally come up with an answer to US President Donald Trump. In his ongoing attempt to pivot away from the pompous petulance that had defined his brand of politics, the Conservative leader tried something other than attacking the government. Instead, he proposed a solution to the trade...
A significant corner was turned this week when many nations, including Canada, said no to Donald Trump. It’s a word that hasn’t been said often enough as this president runs his second term, defying all challengers and asserting that he wins all battles he wages.
President Donald Trump’s late-night musing about Venezuela potentially becoming the 51st state was likely well received in the Prime Minister’s Office. It suggests that Mark Carney’s speech in Davos — widely viewed as standing up to the bully president — has persuaded Trump to move on and find an easier target than Canada or Greenland. That may be temporary, of...
WEEKS AFTER IT was delivered, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech is still generating ripples—quoted in think tanks, parsed in Ottawa, and invoked as shorthand for a world tilting away from frictionless globalization.
Channeling his inner DJ Khaled, Prime Minister Mark Carney has gotten “another one.” A floor-crosser, that is. Lori Idlout is the latest MP to cross over to the government benches, this time from the NDP, making her the fourth floor-crosser and edging the Liberals ever closer to that coveted 172 seat majority. The Liberals now have 170 seats in the...
Trouble from the progressive wing of the Liberal party as dozens of Liberal MPs have just broken with the government over arms sales
There is a nostalgic, almost wistful thread that runs through Pierre Poilievre’s approach to trade with the United States, as if he still can’t believe the happy days of the past are gone and therefore thinks it’s easy to put forward a simple idea that will bring them back. On Sunday, when the Conservative Leader presented his plan to save...
Whatever you may think about Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s chances of becoming prime minister—the proverbial snowball in hell comes to mind—he keeps trying to find a way to stay in the game against Mark Carney. It is no easy task. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s lead over Poilievre in the polls keeps growing, recently hitting 13 points. If that spread were...
Donald Trump famously said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s like incredible.” All the evidence so far has suggested that he was right. But few things shift the winds of US politics like wars.
There are political miscalculations, and then there are gifts to your opponents so perfectly timed they seem almost deliberate. Pierre Poilievre’s campaign to nominate Don Cherry for the Order of Canada belongs firmly in the second category. The Conservative leader declared last week that Cherry “embodies what it means to be a proud Canadian,” throwing his personal support behind a...
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith speaks out on this day. Article content But the premier is not on about budgets or pipelines or the place of Alberta in Canada. Smith is talking about Don Cherry, the man also known by his nickname, Grapes. For years, for far too many years, Don Cherry has been snubbed by the establishment types in this...
It’s always weird to be reminded that the world as it is – to borrow a phrase, if I may – was a very different place not so long ago, and that what now seems constant and obvious was once strange or unknown. The phone you unthinkingly grab from your pocket to do, well, everything, used to be a crazy...
For a career banker, Mark Carney plays the role of Machiavellian politician very well. The prime minister has now plucked a third MP from the opposition benches and is just two by-election wins in safe Liberal seats away from a majority government. This time Carney’s fruit was harvested from the NDP, not the Conservatives, and came in the form of...
The balance of power is shifting in favour of the western democracies. With all the controversy over the fast-moving war in Iran, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the world balance of power and international correlation of forces are shifting in favour of the western democracies. Since the reinstallation of the present U.S. administration less than...
Much is being made of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s successful efforts to poach MPs from both the Conservative and New Democratic parties in an effort to convert his minority Liberal government into a majority. But these MPs’ parliamentary perambulations are small potatoes compared to events in the early 2000s. Floor-crossings in those years helped determine the future of the conservative...
“Let the party begin.” That’s how Mark Carney started his first press conference after being sworn in as Canada’s 24th prime minister, on March 14, 2025, after a whirlwind leadership contest.
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...
The three federal by-elections that will happen in April are going to be consequential. They’ll determine whether the federal Liberal caucus will have enough members to carry votes in the House of Commons without relying on support from other parties.
A LITTLE LESS THAN a year after the April 2025 federal election, public opinion data continues to break strongly in favour of Mark Carney’s Liberal government. The latest federal poll by Leger suggests the Liberal Party now holds a substantial lead in voting intentions. The survey, conducted from February 27 to March 2 among 1,627 respondents, puts the Liberals at...
UNITED STATES PRESIDENT Donald Trump is not primarily waging war on Iran. In waging war on Iran, Trump is waging war on human reason. I do not say that war with Iran is inherently unreasonable. Nor do I mean that Trump has offered poor justifications, or justifications that most people would recognize as inadequate, in defence of his war in...
