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 Andrew Coyne.
So, farewell then, federal budget. Not only a mainstay of economic policy-making, you were a critical element of democratic accountability for many decades, the day each year when the federal government levelled with Canadians about how much it intended to spend, how much to tax, and how much to borrow on their behalf.
By the standards of American elections, this was an earthquake. The two-party system is so entrenched, and American voters’ political identities so immovable, that shifts in the balance of power in any given election tend to be muted. So the Democrats’ gains last night are, in this context, historic. When all the votes are counted, they will probably emerge with...
“Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declined to let Quebec’s newly-elected separatist premier deliver a speech at the Canada-European Union Summit in Montreal this week, sparking a wave of backlash in the French-speaking province
Some days it feels as if Canadian democracy is a complete farce. Provincial governments elected with near majorities on the strength of 28 per cent of the vote – the same 28 per cent that in another province is worth just two seats. Referendum ballots with 10 loaded questions, none of them binding. Party leaders elected by children, non-citizens, and...
It wasn’t all bad for Danielle Smith Monday night. True, Albertans voted massively to “remain” a province of Canada, thus depriving her of the bad cop for whatever good-cop, bad-cop routine she might have hoped to play with the rest of the country. And yes, Albertans voted to reject all four of the constitutional proposals the Premier had also put...
I believe the correct word is debacle. As in, “comprehensive failure, humiliating defeat, fiasco.” The secessionist campaign that Albertans have, in their wisdom and their mercy, dispatched to the hereafter is far from the only victim of the grotesque pantomime of democracy – 10 questions, none of them of any legal or practical effect – the province’s Premier saw fit...
Tax reform is one of those issues that confounds conventional political wisdom. The conventional wisdom, to which most politicians subscribe, is to move cautiously, incrementally, ploddingly – to do “nothing by halves/ Which can be done by quarters.”
Canada is often described as a divided country, and of course it is. No country as large and diverse as ours, built on two official languages, 10 provinces, several dozen Crown-indigenous treaties and countless ethnicities, could fail to be. But lots of other countries have similar divisions, without arriving at the fix we are now in, with not one but...
This is not the first time Albertans have been asked to vote on matters outside their jurisdiction. Five years ago, under United Conservative Party premier Jason Kenney, the province asked its citizens whether Section 36(2) of the Constitution Act, 1982 – the one committing the government of Canada to the “principle” of equalization payments – should be removed from the...
It is hard to convey how thin a mandate the Parti Québécois has just won in Quebec, but I will try. With 28 per cent of the vote, the PQ’s popular vote share is the smallest for any winning party in any election, not just in the modern history of Canada but, as far as I can tell, in any...
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...
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...
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...
There are, as Lenin apparently did not say, decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen. This was one of those weeks: a remarkable series of policy and diplomatic moves that give unmistakable form to what until lately had been mostly rhetorical flourish. The Carney doctrine remains only partly visible, and may only be partly developed, but there’s no...
I confess to a certain skepticism about the Canada Investment Summit, the two-day confab of company executives, institutional investors and politicians which has just wrapped up in Toronto. Why such a conference was needed, or what it would accomplish, has never been entirely clear, despite all the hype about “catalyzing” a trillion dollars in investment. To imagine a mere conference...
All over the democratic world, the hard right – nationalist, populist, anti-immigration, contemptuous of democratic norms and cozy with authoritarian regimes – is on the march. The United States, of course, is the most prominent example: Under Donald Trump it has become a shining city on a hill for right-wing nutters the world over. But look around. In Germany, the...
So we are at war – a trade war, to be sure, but with some of the qualities of a shooting war. It is not a war for our physical survival, but it is very much about our survival as an independent country, against an aggressor that shows every sign of wishing to make an example of us: a warning...
If Davos was the theory, last week’s walkout was the practice: the moment Canada formally abandoned the strategy of trying to appease Donald Trump, as a means of fending off his lunatic designs on this country, and opted for defiance instead. The reaction, at home and around the world, was enthusiastic. Now comes the hard part: What do we do...
I’m not sure anyone has quite wrapped their mind around the significance of what just happened. Or at least, not in Canada we haven’t. But the rest of the world has taken note. A sampling of the headlines: Canada walked away from Trump: Could the EU ever do the same? Europeans should learn from Canadian courage.
The question is not whether the government of Canada should have walked away from the negotiating table with the United States. The question is why it was ever at the table in the first place. The talks were aimed at averting the imposition of 50-per-cent U.S. tariffs on a range of Canadian goods; in addition, the Canadian side hoped to...
When an Ontario judge last year ruled a provincial law ordering the removal of bicycle lanes from three Toronto streets was a violation of the Charter of Rights, conservatives threw a tantrum on a scale rare even for them. A constitutional right to bike lanes? Surely this was proof that the courts in this country had gone crazy. Only the...
The campaign for Quebec’s Oct. 5 provincial election has not yet formally begun – technically, it has not yet been called – but it is already under a shadow. At some point after the election – after all the members of the provincial legislature have taken their seats, after they have passed any number of bills – the whole thing...
In the time it takes you to read this column, the United States will add another US$20-million to its national debt. By the end of the day, it will be nearly US$9-billion more than it was yesterday; in a week, US$60-billion, more than the government of Canada borrows in a year. The annual U.S. federal budget deficit is now running...
Now is the summer of our discontent. It has been a dismal few weeks for the federal Conservatives. Party members have seemed more concerned with settling internal scores, their leader foremost among them, rather than fighting the Liberals. Even as Donald Trump has been hitting Canadian industries with tariffs and threatening to annex the country, conservative MPs and “influencers” have...
The premiers, as is their wont, were free with advice for the federal government at their most recent summer whingefest, notably with regard to health care transfers. You will not be surprised to learn they want them increased, though you may be surprised by how much. In a nutshell, the premiers want them doubled, or perhaps quadrupled. Currently the federal...
Tobi Lütke is a Canadian business legend, the CEO and co-founder of Shopify, an e-commerce outfit that in two decades has grown to be Canada’s largest non-bank company, with a market capitalization in excess of $200-billion, 6 million business users worldwide and revenues of more than $16-billion annually. Mr. Lütke himself is among Canada’s richest people, with a net worth...
The similarity is often noted between the Ukraine and Iran wars: Mad billionaire autocrat with dreams of empire attempts to subjugate another country by force of arms; though seemingly in possession of overwhelming military advantage, is repelled by defenders armed with desperation, cunning and modern technology; now finds himself caught in a trap of his own making, unable either to...
Does Canadian conservatism have a problem with patriotism? Do some conservatives feel a greater loyalty to their ideology than their country? Does this lead them to side with Donald Trump and the United States against Canada, in a dispute that turns in part on whether Canada should exist as a country, separate from the United States? Does it also lead...
Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 – yes, that tariff act, aka the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, the law that famously turned a stock market crash into a worldwide depression – authorizes the President of the United States to impose tariffs on imports from foreign countries that impose “any unreasonable charge, exaction, regulation, or limitation which is not equally...
The Conservative activist Ben Woodfinden was in despair. “I’m more depressed about the state of conservative politics in Canada right now than I think I’ve ever been,” he lamented in a widely read post online. “I look at all sorts of conservative camps and factions right now and I see intellectual poverty everywhere.” The comment was occasioned, in particular, by...
There are, it is sometimes said, only six people in Canada who understand the equalization formula, and five of them are dead. This is not entirely a joke. Equalization – the system of federal transfers to provinces whose “fiscal capacity” is judged to be below the national average – has become so overloaded with political fixes over the years, in...
Annual gatherings of the great democracies in the age of Donald Trump have acquired a certain … rhythm. There is the meeting that takes place before the President arrives, when all is as it usually is between world leaders of the same broad ideological hue: convivial open sessions, chummy photo-ops, urgent side-conferences. Then there is what happens after he gets...
Suddenly, pipelines are all the rage. Time was when you couldn’t get a pipeline built in this country, for love or money. Three pipeline proposals – Northern Gateway, Energy East and Keystone XL – came and went, dead of political hostility, regulatory obstacles or both. Governments, some of them anyway, seemed positively eager to discourage them. Federal legislation, Bill C-69...
Canada’s national holiday and America’s fall within a few days of each other, yet celebrate two very different things. Each celebrates their respective country’s birth, of course, but they define this in different ways. The American commemorates a breach, an abrupt and indeed violent rupture with the imperial power; the Canadian, the date scheduled for its inception as a federal...
Shuffles of the opposition front bench – the roster of critics, or as the Conservatives prefer, shadow ministers, assigned to dog the government ministers for their respective portfolios – rarely excite much notice. That has been especially true of the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre: partly because there are so many critics (83, in the current incarnation, including shadow associate ministers...
To govern is to choose, the old adage runs. The old adage is wrong. More often, to govern is to straddle. Politicians are disinclined to choose by nature, of course: left unsupervised, they will nearly always prefer guns and butter to guns or butter. But many of the most important issues do not lend themselves to binary, either-or choices. The...
I imagine Mark Carney was something of an autocrat even in the cradle, issuing directives and insulting subordinates from the earliest age. “Yeah, I’m not feeling this WubbaNub. Got any others?” “This is not a helpful suggestion. Go back and rework it to a different nap time.”
The reviews have not been kind. “A disaster.” A “catastrophe.” The “worst strategic blunder the U.S. has made post-World War II.” Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion and trenchant geopolitical observer, perhaps said it best: “Trump said he demanded unconditional surrender, we just didn’t know he meant America’s.” What they are describing, of course, is the Trump-Iran “deal,” or...
This fall’s referendum on secession in Alberta – well, not on secession, but on whether to have a referendum on secession – promises another chance to observe a familiar phenomenon: federalists “fighting for Canada” on separatist terms. There has been no shortage of volunteers to play Captain Canada in the campaign to come, notably Danielle Smith, the Premier, and Pierre...
Fears of artificial intelligence tend to fall into two camps. On one hand, there is widespread anxiety that we are allowing AI to develop too fast, too far, beyond our ability to prevent or mitigate its potential harms. These range from the threat to privacy, to the problems of telling what is real or human from AI-generated fakery, to the...
This time they didn’t just bury it: they omitted it altogether. Over the years the annual reports of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board have become longer and longer, and more and more opaque. This year’s is no exception, weighing in at a prodigious 84,000 words, most of it unintelligible – deliberately so, one is forced to conclude. Nevertheless, there...
It is possible you have never heard of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence. It meets just once or twice a year – these days not even that – to provide Canadian and American military leaders with the opportunity for a full and frank exchange of views on bilateral defence issues. But it is far from the only instrument of...
The recorded history of Canada stretches back more than 500 years; the unrecorded history, many thousands. It is one of the world’s oldest continuously existing democracies, with a Constitution whose principal features – monarchical, federal, parliamentary, with an independent judiciary and (ahem) an unelected Senate – have remained unchanged since 1867.
The controversy over Louise Arbour’s appointment as Governor-General is unusual in that both sides cite the same set of facts. She’s a former Supreme Court justice, say her supporters, a former international war-crimes prosecutor, and a former UN high commissioner for human rights, among a long list of other offices and laurels. Exactly, say her opponents: a bona fide member...
I feel perhaps I have been unfair to Donald Trump. Regular readers will know that he has been the subject of the occasional reproof in these corners. Among other things, it has been suggested that he is insane, incompetent, corrupt, treasonous, bottomlessly ignorant, easily manipulated, a Batman villain, and a modern-day Nero: possessed of every vice, devoid of every virtue...
The scandal isn’t what’s illegal. The scandal is what’s legal. – Michael Kinsley What is so scandalous about a separatist group getting its hands on the Alberta voter list, including the names, addresses and phone numbers of nearly three million of the province’s citizens? Is it that the list appears to have been illegally obtained, and passed on to the...
It’s been nearly a week, and we are still no closer to knowing what the Carney government means when it talks about setting up “Canada’s first sovereign wealth fund.” I don’t just mean what it would do, or how it would work, or what problem it’s intended to solve. I mean, quite literally, what is it? I suspect the government...
If you have been wondering what meaning to attach to that irritating phrase the Carney Liberals use to describe themselves, “Canada’s New Government” – which was irritating enough when it was first employed, under Stephen Harper, when it was actually a new government – wonder no longer. As this Spring Economic Update makes abundantly clear, it means nothing whatever. Or...
Was John Turner right? Is Donald Trump’s weaponization of Canada’s dependence on trade with the United States vindication of the Liberal leader’s dire prophecies during the 1988 election campaign? Is this the bitter fruit of the Mulroney government’s decision, all those years ago, to sign a free-trade agreement with the United States?
Opinion on Canada’s New! Liberal! Majority! Government! has tended to divide into two camps. On one hand are those, mostly to be found on the Conservative end of things, who denounce the process by which the Liberals attained their majority – five opposition MPs, crossing the floor one after the other, like baby ducks – as illegitimate, even undemocratic. Canadians...
Where did this idea come from, of Canada joining the European Union? I know the Prime Minister likes to say that Canada is “the most European of the non-European countries,” whatever that means. (More European than, say, Argentina? Uruguay? New Zealand?) And sure, we’ve all joked about it, at least once, in the heat of Donald Trump’s latest outrage (“that’s...
Seeking to explain just where the Liberals draw the line on accepting members of other parties into their midst, House Leader Steven MacKinnon said the party would “keep a light on and a door open for all of those who want to support Liberal Party principles,” which he described as “immutable.” And of course, he’s right. Liberal policies may come...
Almost since its inception, the Senate of Canada has been the subject of proposals for reform. Now there are the first faint stirrings of a new movement: Senate unreform. Ten years after Justin Trudeau introduced his “merit-based, non-partisan” process for appointing senators there are whispers that the whole thing might be about to be called off. The Globe and Mail...
By the time you read this, U.S. armed forces may well have launched a ground war in Iran. Or they may have begun to withdraw from the region and go home. There could be a ceasefire, in exchange for Iran’s agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz. Or the war could have escalated further, with stepped-up U.S. attacks on Iranian...
Somewhere, James Laxer is shedding a wistful tear. Along with Mel Watkins, Cy Gonick and others, Mr. Laxer led the radical Waffle faction within the federal NDP in the late 1960s and early 1970s, whose mission was to pull the party sharply to the left. They advocated for nationalization of major industries, strict limits on foreign ownership, sharply higher taxes...
No one knows where Donald Trump got the notion of annexing Canada. It hasn’t been seriously suggested by any significant figure in American politics for at least a century. There has been next to no take-up of the proposal, even among his MAGA followers. But the underlying premises – the idea that America must have complete dominion over the Western...
The Supreme Court spent most of this week hearing oral arguments in what is widely known as the Bill 21 case, after the infamous Quebec law banning the wearing of religious symbols in much of the public sector – effectively a hiring bar on observant members of certain religious minorities. Only it isn’t really Bill 21 that is at issue...
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...
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...