Stephen Thorne has died. The bitter, unexpected death of a tough journalist who wrote about death but couldn’t report on his own. He’d have written a damn fine story about it. I was his boss for years, in Halifax and Ottawa, though Stephen had no time for bosses. He followed his nose for stories whether or not anybody asked for...
The Canadian government has avoided commenting on the United States’ controversial targeting of alleged drug-trafficking vessels in Caribbean waters.
I went back to Ottawa this week. It’s been a while since I’ve been in the nation’s capital to talk about peace issues, so when the Senate of Canada contacted me, I had to go. Prime Minister Carney’s Budget 2025 is making its way through Parliament, and the Senate’s Committee on National Security, Defence and Veterans Affairs asked me and...
Pierre Poilievre’s recent video attacking Mark Carney could have been a strong argument. If not for the air quotes. When he says Carney promised he could “handle Trump” and “negotiate a win,” his fingers twitch into the familiar inverted-comma gesture. It’s a tiny move, but it says everything. Air quotes don’t persuade; they perform. They turn conviction into commentary and...
As Prime Minister Mark Carney said, “Donald Trump wants to break us so America can own us.” But what if Trump decides to use military power along with economic tariffs? An Arctic expert writing in The Globe and Mail says we shouldn’t think of tanks or helicopters streaming over the border. Instead, an American show-of-force could begin with a single...
I am very worried that Canada is sleepwalking into potentially the most dangerous military project since the atom bomb. Trump’s Golden Dome will put thousands of weapons in space – one of the few places where there are no weapons today – and lock us into a new Cold War with Russia and China that will rob our children and...
Basil Borutski brutally murdered three women one morning in 2015, in Renfrew County, Ontario. He was convicted and sent to prison, where he died. I wrote a book about the case.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s own department is struggling to comply with a flurry of legal orders requiring it to release information to requesters who’ve been denied their rights under the Access to Information Act. In the last two years, Caroline Maynard, Canada’s information commissioner, has hit the Privy Council Office (PCO) with at least 87 such orders after her investigators...
Canada’s Defence Minister was at the Pentagon this week working out untold arrangements with his mercurial American counterpart, Trump’s Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth (yes, “war” is part of his new job title). Canada’s media seems to have little interest in what Minister David McGuinty was discussing, whether it was
You may have heard the news this week that in a bizarre, high-risk move, Russia sent drones into the airspace of NATO members Poland and Romania (Russia has denied attacking NATO). The scale of the incursion – 19 drones into Poland’s airspace and another drone over Romania – is too many to be just an accident. On September 9 and...
The RCMP has a venerable history of flouting the Access to Information Act, invoking excessive redactions and imposing delays that too often violate the letter of the law. Canada’s information commission raps the RCMP’s knuckles every few years and they always promise to do better. But like clockwork, they soon fall back into bad habits. Requestors who deal regularly with...
It’s difficult for us to imagine a future that’s different than today, because so much of our understanding of today is based upon our past.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has removed any restrictions on Canada’s military to join President Trump’s Golden Dome, an unproven, half-trillion dollar program to try to shoot down nuclear-armed missiles launched against the United States by Russia or China. According to Ottawa Citizen reporter David Pugliese, Defence Minister David McGuinty visited the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) headquarters in Colorado...
More than half of the 3,534 Canadians polled by the federal government earlier this year said they had heard of Canada’s National Medal of Service, and most of those had some idea of why it’s awarded.
Canada’s military budget is set to grow so much, the question everyone is asking is: How will Prime Minister Carney pay for it?
For readers of a certain generation, Lloyd Axworthy represents a Golden Era for Canada on the international stage during the 1990s after the Cold War. Serving as Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Lloyd Axworthy helped to shift power away from the nuclear-armed superpowers toward increased multilateralism, international institutions, and disarmament. Chief among his accomplishments is the global treaty...
RCMP officers continue to break rules around investigative note-taking, despite a decade-old commitment to fix the problems.
A pioneering effort to make the federal government more transparent has been shut down. The National Capital Commission (NCC) removed hundreds of original documents from its website after an adverse ruling from the official languages commissioner.
Employees at Canada’s secretive spy agency say their open-office workspace is too noisy and visually distracting to focus on their jobs. “Auditory and visual distractions … from an open-office environment were a concern expressed by most survey respondents,” says an evaluation report from the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE.
American President Donald Trump left the G-7 meeting in Kananaskis one day early this week, but not before firing a parting shot at Prime Minister Carney over Canada’s role in the Golden Dome missile defence system, which will put weapons in space for the first time.
Canada is moving closer to joining Trump’s Golden Dome scheme, despite widespread opposition expressed by the public in a new poll.
Looking over media releases from the Prime Minister’s office, you will find in recent days Mark Carney has spoken to the Premier of China Li Qiang, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, and President of Indonesia Prabowo Subianto. But one world leader’s name is conspicuously absent from the list: U.S. President Donald Trump.
Elon Musk has always taken a curious pride in not spending big on advertising. Tesla’s meteoric rise was, in his telling, proof that a superior product—and a CEO with 220 million followers—renders paid media optional.
Canada’s information commissioner, Caroline Maynard, wields legal authority to order federal departments to release information they’ve withheld from requesters who are seeking it under the Access to Information Act. Well, sort of.
It takes this National Defence expert only five minutes to utterly take apart Trump’s Golden Dome missile defence scheme. This interview features an analysis by Prof. Walter Dorn, a Defence Studies professor at the Royal Military College, discussing President Donald Trump’s ambitious “Golden Dome” missile defence initiative. Watch it here:
RCMP communications centres that receive 911 calls are so short of staff that wait times have doubled – prompting increasing numbers of frustrated callers to hang up. That’s one of the main findings from an internal evaluation that was triggered in part by the fumbles of the Mountie call centre in Truro, N.S., during the 2020 mass murder, which left...
Former Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy accused Prime Minister Mark Carney of betraying Canadians in a strongly worded opinion article published by The Globe and Mail. Axworthy was responding to the announcements this week, first by Donald Trump and then by Carney a day later, that Canada wants to join and help pay for Trump’s “Golden Dome” scheme that...
There are plenty of problems confronting progressives in the United States right now. So lots of our American cousins may not even be aware of the angst and hardship that Trump is inflicting upon Canada.
Parliament will look very different when newly-elected MPs return to Ottawa this month. There will be far less diversity of voices in the House of Commons with the demise of the NDP, and this is not good for our democracy.
Canada’s premier agency for cyber-security, which helps governments and businesses defend against bad actors, itself got scammed as part of a wide-ranging IT overbilling fraud worth several million dollars.
Some dismissed it as the “erectile dysfunction” ad. Others laughed it off as a desperate Hail Mary to salvage a faltering campaign in Southern Ontario—specifically in the all-important 905 region. Well, they can stop laughing. Call it the blue belt now. The Conservatives not only held their ground in the 905—they flipped several Liberal ridings.
The world is chaotic. Sovereignty, diplomacy, trade, free speech, science are all under assault. Daily life seems suddenly dangerous. Even the weather report is scary. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” as William Butler Yeats put it in The Second Coming (1919). We’ve entered an era of might makes right. Familiar rules are changing. Among the changes is the...
This will be a very short post on the access-to-information election promises of the five main political parties. That’s because there’s nothing to write about. With the release of the last platform today (Conservative), no party is committing to reforming the dysfunctional Access to Information Act, other than reciting cheap bromides. Some aren’t even offering bromides.
Is it time I admit defeat, pull up my tent and go home? For 30 years I have advocated for reductions to Canada’s military spending, and it keeps rising and rising. Now it’s reached the point where Canada is the 6th highest in actual dollars within NATO (after USA, Germany, UK, France, Poland). Responding to expensive plans to increase military...
Last fall, before the Trump shitstorm, advisers to the prime minister saw the black clouds gathering to the south. The new president had not yet been sworn into office, but it was clear Canada was in the crosshairs.
The 10 men who have governed the Bank of Canada since its inception in 1934 have been taciturn types, studiously avoiding the mud-holes of public controversy. Central banks trade in trust, and must project immutability and stability. That’s why it was so unusual in 2012 to hear Mark Carney, then governor of the Bank, apologize to Canadians for screwing up.
Peter Larkin launched King’s fund with $25,000 of his own cash, deposited Sept. 22, 1925 at the Old Colony Trust Co.’s main branch in Boston, the same firm used by Salada Tea for its U.S. operations. Likely he reasoned that a foreign account would reduce the risk of discovery.
Now that the election is called, time to riff from that part of my bio that says “campaign manager” and offer up regular assessments and analysis on what I think is going on. Check this space regularly for my campaign updates. You can judge my content for its value and biases on its own. But for the record, let me...
Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin and Donald Trump’s White House have shown how political leaders who bond with billionaires can be toxic to the public good. Canada so far has avoided devolving into a plutocracy, but some of our past leaders have nevertheless been compromised by powerful men bearing suitcases stuffed with money. Several prime ministers have accepted generous handouts from business...
Canada’s 45th general election is upon us, and it’s shaping up to be the nastiest we have ever seen. Already, the personal attack ads are flying. The Liberals are painting Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre as a MAGA Mini-me who will sell out Canada. The Conservatives claim Liberal leader Mark Carney is a clone of PM Justin Trudeau: elitist, globalist, and...
Canada Proud, the right-wing provocateurs and third-party advertising group closely aligned with Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, are not exactly renowned for their subtlety. Their social media ads frequently veer into crass territory, yet clearly resonate—evidenced by their hefty investments in Meta's Facebook and their savvy optimization of messaging and targeting.
A recent analysis highlighted in La Presse reveals a startling aspect of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's oratory style. When assessed through a linguistic lens, Trudeau's vocabulary richness—or lack thereof—stands out, particularly when his word variety is measured against the total number of words he has spoken. This metric, known as a lexical richness index, positions Trudeau's vocabulary as one of...
If that's the overarching theme of the campaign, 'Canada Strong' could be a slogan-sized blind spot for the Liberal campaign.