The Carney government’s proposed labour law reforms target a serious problem: the increase in disruptions to critical industries such as airlines, ports and railways. Ottawa is taking heat from labour advocates, but the changes are a sensible measure to rebalance the interests of federally regulated employers, employees, and the public. In recent years, Canada has seen an upsurge in labour...
As a former prime minister of Canada, staying silent on the upcoming referendum on Alberta secession is not an option. But I wish it were. I love my country, and I love my province. I do not wish to pit one against the other. I believe that is how most Albertans feel. Despite the efforts of a few on each...
Like many people, you may be under the impression that the Conservatives lost the 2025 election. Lately, however, that interpretation has come under challenge. According to this new interpretation, the Conservatives actually won. The country has a Conservative Prime Minister, and his name is Mark Carney. According to political scientist Stewart Prest, Mr. Carney heads “the most conservative Liberal government...
The first day of October was a big one for Alberta. At the same time an Alberta-born astronaut was getting launched into space, Mark Carney and Danielle Smith were unveiling plans for a new pipeline here on Earth. An even bigger day looms later this month, when the province votes on whether to hold an independence referendum, and that pipeline...
More than merely the loss of an able, fair-minded MP, it looks like the Conservative party's reach is ebbing
The news that Conservative MP Scott Aitchison will resign at the end of this year, which will make him the eighth MP to exit the Conservative caucus in one year, has roused the recurring question of just how much more Pierre Poilievre’s hold on his party’s leadership can endure. It’s like watching a frayed rope bridge swinging over a river...
It could have been worse for Pierre Poilievre — at least Scott Aitchison is not leaving the Conservative caucus to join Mark Carney’s Liberals. But Aitchison, a one-time leadership opponent of Poilievre’s who has represented Parry Sound—Muskoka for nearly seven years, is the kind of Conservative that Carney has been attracting. He’s a man over 50 in Ontario and polls...
It’s bad form, in writing, to mix your metaphors. But this summer, speaking to an array of people in and around the Carney government, there were two I kept hearing used to describe how things work in Ottawa these days, both of them apt. One is the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant. Each man touches a...
Until Mark Carney came along, the Liberals never had a prime minister from the province of Alberta. Mr. Carney was born in 1965 in the Northwest Territories and spent his first six years there. But his formative years – the next 12 – were lived in Edmonton. Young Mark delivered the Edmonton Journal newspaper. His father Bob was a deputy...
Less than a week before the October 5th Quebec general election, the Parti Québécois (PQ) remains clearly ahead in the polls and, according to recent seat projections, has a shot at winning a majority of the National Assembly’s 127 seats with only around 30% of popular support. This outcome is likely despite the fact that a large majority of Quebecers...
These are unusual times. There’s a trade war on, given special intensity by Donald Trump’s threats to use “economic force” to bend Canada to his will. To counter the U.S. administration’s crude attempts to divert capital south of the border, governments across the country are mobilizing resources in ways they might not otherwise contemplate. A sort-of wartime economy, fit for...
Mark Carney has managed to fashion a surprisingly workable peace with provincial premiers. But it’s hard to imagine that peace will reign across the land after next week’s Quebec election. The Parti Québécois is about to take power again, for the first time in more than a dozen years, and it’s not just the possibility of an eventual referendum on...
For Prime Minister Mark Carney, yesterday was the sort of day he might look back on fondly from the other side of his political honeymoon. As he stood in Vancouver and announced that LNG Canada is moving forward with its $33 billion Phase 2 expansion project in Kitimat, B.C., Carney’s approval rating had just hit a new high of 6...
There is no shortage of commentary across multiple media platforms on the subject of U.S. President Donald Trump as a bully. Indeed, reading the stream of entries, it is fair to say there is a strong consensus that this is what and who the man is. Whatever his origin story, whatever he endured as a child (and there is plenty...
B.C. NDP Leader David Eby is a shrewd, confident competitor. He will challenge anyone currently suffering from a stomach virus to a hot-dog-eating contest. He will dare any chess champion to a tournament when they are sleeping. Mr. Eby will tackle a bear in a cage (from the outside, without actually touching the bear), or wrestle any and all comatose...
To the group of masked white-nationalist cowards who trespassed on the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation to strike fear into the hearts of people living there: we can only hope the full force of the law catches up to you in short order. It should happen quickly. The group of flag-waving thugs with their white face masks and black uniforms...
The north remembers. Right now, that’s not just a catchphrase from the hit American television show about dragons and thrones. It’s also a fact for millions of Canadians stuck dealing with a second Trump administration that routinely threatens our cultural sovereignty and political independence with economic warfare. No matter what happens in the upcoming midterm elections or even the 202...
Quebec and Alberta may have more in common than anyone suspected — at least when it comes to seceding from Canada. In both provinces, over 70 per cent of voters oppose separation, a question that is animating both the Quebec election and the Alberta referendum campaign. The two votes come to a head Oct. 5 and 19, respectively, and their...
Had to do it. Had to toss the political puzzler Premier Danielle Smith's way Monday. After all, the latest poll from late last week shows support for Smith and the UCP dropping in Calgary, now trailing Naheed Nenshi in the city by several points. Yes, trailing Nenshi in Calgary. The UCP and NDP are tied in the province.
The return of Parliament and, especially, of Question Period last week underscores an urgent national problem: this country desperately needs a good opposition. Even one. Instead, we get sustained bile, messages hollered from the balcony, smear tactics, and scripted questions delivered with all the genuine passion of a hostage video. This is not just a token nod to the vital...
PARTI QUÉBÉCOIS LEADER Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has a dim view of the province he wishes to make a country. Quebec, he says, is at once threatened by creeping Islamism and a radical leftist cabal bent on prosecuting the nation-to-be for an array of purported crimes, racism chief among them. Aping internet trolls and MAGA Republicans, he has taken to labelling...
It’s easy to miss the holes in Canada’s social support systems until you really need that safety net. While many Canadians take pride in programs such as public health insurance or Employment Insurance (EI) benefits, the current reality often falls far short of their legacy reputations. EI benefits have been outdated for a long time. But now, as the U.S...
“Even when Trump moves on, another Trump will eventually come along. That is why it is better to truly break free and become independent, even if it means suffering for a while.” It’s a sentiment that has become ubiquitous among Canadians over the past year. It has bubbled up in coffeeshop chatter, in flags springing up on front lawns and...
Parliament is back with a substantive legislative agenda that reminds us: Democracy is nothing without accountability. For shame, then, that His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is distracted by internal schisms and online echo chambers. This fall, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives must gain a foothold. The party’s own MPs know it. Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman told reporters, “This is not the position...
When Kerry-Lynne Findlay abruptly resigned as leader of the Conservative Party of British Columbia last Sunday, B.C. Premier David Eby’s New Democrats were almost certainly popping champagne corks. After less than four months of Findlay’s tenure — marked by bizarre backroom machinations, hard-right staff hirings and a catastrophic exodus of 14 MLAs — the official opposition looked broken. With a...
There’s a certain water-is-wet quality to noting the furious pace of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government. The busyness feels less like a byproduct than a self-conscious mission statement, even a dare: this is how we roll, so keep up or get left behind. Even by those standards, the past two weeks have been frenetic. There was the investment summit in...
After a year of threatening to seize Greenland by force, Donald Trump has inked a deal to extend indefinite American influence over the autonomous Danish territory. It’s “a dream come true for the United States of America,” the president posted on social media this week. A day earlier, Prime Minister Mark Carney made his own announcement: Canada would be joining...
We’ve known for months that Canada’s Armed Forces have done some thinking about the admittedly remote possibility that Donald Trump’s United States might launch some kind of military action against this country. Anonymous government officials told the Globe and Mail back in January that the military had modelled a “hypothetical” U.S. invasion, apparently for the first time in a century...
Prime Minister Mark Carney says he has a “very clear mandate” from the April 2025 election. Reinforced by floor crossings and byelection victories, Carney’s majority gives his government the right to pass the Building Canada Strong Act, a sweeping 246-page bill dealing with major projects, environmental assessments and federal labour law. It’s true that we need new ports, rail corridors...
Thanks to the New York Times, Canada now knows that Mark Carney was preparing for the risk of military action arising out of Donald Trump’s 51st-state threats. That’s a major acknowledgment for the prime minister to make — perhaps one that he might have shared first with Canadians?
The province of British Columbia is having an election, barely two years after the last. There is, it is commonly acknowledged, no pressing matter in the public interest that obliged Premier David Eby to call it. He has called the election now, two years before its scheduled date under the province’s fixed-election-date law, for one reason only: to take advantage...
“Our people hate trade deals. Like, they f—king hate them. Do you understand?” The morning meetings between the prime minister’s top advisers were sometimes punchy affairs. But it was also where the government was connected to the political party guiding said government. The verbatim(ish) quote above was the kind of thing said by the person tasked with reporting what the...
It’s hard to imagine a country as large and as resource-rich and as intelligently populated as Canada having made such a small footprint on the world stage for so long. But until now, until these transformational times for our country, that’s been generally the case all the way since 1867. Dwarfed by the powers of Great Britain, which controlled Canada’s...
I would like to play poker for money against the people who still believe what Donald Trump and Pierre Poilievre say, because I doubt they can tell a spade from a diamond, a deuce from a Queen. As support for both Trump and Poilievre has diminished — they both have approval ratings of 32 per cent — I am starting...
The Conservative Party of Canada lost the last federal election because they couldn’t put enough distance between themselves and US President Donald Trump, and they seem very determined to lose the next one for the very same reason. Time and time again, they’ve been given opportunities to show their solidarity with Canada and their disdain for Trump and his movement...
Every September, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) high-level week converges on New York City. The week was once largely confined to the General Assembly. While the general debate remains its centrepiece, high-level week now also involves tens of thousands of delegates, observers, lobbyists, advocates, critics, enthusiasts, and hangers-on meeting in countless venues. There is “pre-HLW”, “post-HLW”, main meetings, side...
Are there lessons for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre in this past weekend’s implosion of the short-lived leadership of the British Columbia Conservative Party’s Kerry-Lynne Findlay? Findlay, a former caucus colleague of the federal leader, lasted four months in her role before her Sept. 20 self-sendoff. From the outside, her approach seemed to be one fuelled by constant conflict, rage farming...
Mark Carney was in the room when two starkly different visions of the world order were laid before the United Nations General Assembly. One came from the secretary-general of the UN, António Guterres. The other came from Donald Trump.
B.C. Premier David Eby’s snap election call Tuesday may go down as a cynical but savvy decision that kept his government in power for another four years. Or it will be judged as a too-cute-by-half move that disastrously misjudged the mood of the electorate, leading to one of the most epic political blunders in the province’s history. Almost at the...
