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 Phillips.
There are some things you just have to get done quickly, and there are others where you should take the time you need to get it right. The key is knowing which is which. But when it comes to the thorny issues involved in medical assistance in dying, or MAID, the federal government is showing it doesn’t know, or care...
Pete Hoekstra, U.S. President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Canada, is apparently ticked off that no one took his warning about alleged Canadian meddling in the U.S. midterm elections seriously. So he had his embassy issue a profoundly unserious “fact sheet” this week backing up his claim. It’s tempting to brush off the document — a list of nine “FACTS” in...
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s investment envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, posted one of those AI-generated memes on social media over the weekend and it speaks volumes about the new world order taking shape before our eyes. It shows a Russian bear and an American eagle, side by side, facing off against a British lion and a European flag. It included this caption...
There’s a term in psychology for people who accuse others of doing what they themselves are guilty of: projection. A chronic liar thinks everyone else lies too. A cheater assumes others must cheat. So pointing a finger comes naturally. Plus it’s a great way to turn the tables and deflect attention from your own sins.
First of all, that title. Chrystia Freeland chose to call her new book “Unreliable Boyfriend” — the boyfriend in question being the United States — which puts the focus firmly on her role in managing Canada’s fraught relationship with Donald Trump’s America.
Alberta separatists are fond of pointing to Quebec’s sovereignty movement as a model. If those guys can get so much by holding a knife to the throat of the rest of the country, goes their thinking, then why shouldn’t we do the same? It’s a lousy comparison overall, given the fundamental differences between Alberta and Quebec (such as, for e.g....
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...
We’re in a war of sorts with Donald Trump’s United States, or so the prime minister tells us. So to understand where we are right now I turned to my well-thumbed copy of Carl von Clausewitz’s “Vom Kriege” (On War), the Urtext for people who think about such things. Clausewitz, a Prussian general, was writing with the Napoleonic campaigns very...
Trust U.S. President Donald Trump to prove Mark Carney’s point even before Carney made it. The prime minister hadn’t yet laid out his vision of greater co-operation with Europe to the European Parliament and Trump was already out trashing the idea as “laughable” and threatening yet more tariffs if he didn’t like the outcome. A year ago I expect that...
Donald Trump’s assault on Canada has opened a great wound between this country and the United States, and the most tender spot must certainly be found in Gander, Newfoundland. Especially on Friday, the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks when the people of Gander famously opened their homes and hearts to thousands of stranded air travellers, most of them American.
We’re all “elbows up” these days, aren’t we? As the United States leans hard on Canada, the last thing you’d think we’d want to do is adopt policies that make us just a bit more “American” — and not in a good way. But that’s the effect of what the Ford government is doing — or trying to do —...
For the past year and a half Canadians’ attitude toward Mark Carney might best be described as one of deference. Where he leads, they more or less said, we will go. We aren’t sure how to handle Donald Trump but we have confidence that Carney will make the right calls. Poll after poll confirmed it: in Mark we trust.
Canada is staring down the barrel of yet another tariff threat from U.S. President Donald Trump, and pretty much everyone is telling Prime Minister Mark Carney to be super careful about making any more “concessions” to the United States. In this case, pretty much everyone is right. The government has tried making nice with the Trump administration on a string...
Mark Carney says there’s “no big drama” in the fact that the Trump administration has taken a $6.4-billion bridge hostage as part of its campaign to have its way with Canada. In this, at least, the prime minister is wrong. The troubled saga of the Gordie Howe International Bridge is a real-life drama. The question is: what type?
When I wrote about Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” two years ago, I was struck by the thought experiment he uses as an opening. Imagine, he wrote, if a tech lord proposed sending your teenage daughter to join the first human settlement on Mars. She’s eager to go — all my friends will be there! — but it turns...
Donald Trump’s man in Ottawa, Pete Hoekstra, managed to achieve the trifecta of Canadian journalism this week: he had pundits from three leading papers across the political spectrum calling for his head. On the left, more or less, John Lorinc argued in the Star that the Carney government “should kick Hoekstra out” for retweeting a Trump jibe about Canada being...
I have a pretty good idea what a lot of people think I should say about Alberta’s sovereignty referendum, and I have a good idea of what I actually think. The problem is the two don’t line up very well. What a lot of people think that I (and others like me) should say is, mostly, nothing. As an opinionator...
Good news from the West: the prospect of a referendum on independence for Alberta this fall continues to collapse under the weight of its own absurdities and contradictions.
If you haven’t seen Richard Warnica’s reports over the weekend in the Star on the leadership of the Alberta separatist movement, do yourself a favour: read them. Warnica spent time among people pushing the cause of Alberta independence and specifically with Mitch Sylvestre, the man he describes as the “architect” of the movement.
The thing about the new Canadian “sovereign wealth fund” (SWF) announced on Monday by Prime Minister Mark Carney is that, judging by what we know so far, it’ll be pretty much the opposite of what he’s comparing it to. The prime minister cited Norway as a leading example of a country with a successful SWF — and so it is...
We’ve been warned for months that Canada faces exceedingly tough talks on renewing the CUSMA/USMCA trade deal. With Donald Trump blowing off the importance of Canada (“we don’t need anything they have”), it was shaping up as a cage match at the negotiating table. As of this week, though, we face the very real possibility of an even more ominous...
It seems there’s a cross-party freakout over the fact that Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu has crossed the floor of the Commons to join the Carney caucus. Conservatives are outraged that Gladu would turn her back on the party under whose banner she was elected no fewer than four times.
I’ve covered a few wars, in the Balkans and the Middle East, and I’ve seen plenty of military officers (including senior Americans) explain how things are unfolding on the battlefield. In my experience they’re invariably professional, cool and calm. What they’re not is what the U.S. “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth, displayed this week in a couple of briefings on...
In politics it’s usually best to be as clear as you can. But there are times when clarity will get you in trouble for no particularly good reason. That’s when it’s smarter to fuzz things up a bit. On India and Iran, Mark Carney has been both clear and fuzzy over the past few days. The problem is he’s been...
Expect to hear a lot over the next few days about the delicate dance Mark Carney is supposedly attempting as he travels to India to promote trade amid lingering suspicion that India’s government is linked to violent crime in this country. It’ll be a bit like the delicate dance Carney was said to be engaging in last month when he...
The headline that caught my eye late last week was this one: “Look how much Canadians hate the United States now.” It was on Politico and it was propped up by the results of a major new poll that suggests a “lasting chill” has settled over relations between our two countries.
It’s not hard to imagine what would have happened if a year ago, or even a few months ago, Donald Trump had threatened to block the new Gordie Howe International Bridge linking Windsor, Ont., and Detroit. Shock and horror on the Canadian side. Front-page coverage in the Canadian media. Opposition calls for the government to do something.
We’re becoming familiar with the Alberta government’s give-me-this-or-else demands. The latest one is flimsier than most: it’s based on a falsehood and it amounts to threatening to punch yourself in the face if you don’t get your way. Still, it bears attention because it points to a fundamental flaw in the Alberta separation project, which can no longer be dismissed...
What an awfully nice, careful people we are. So reluctant to cause offence, even when someone spits in our collective eye. The tiny group of Alberta separatists, who are openly seeking support from a hostile Trump administration to break up the country are, at least in a political sense, spitting in our eye. They boast about meeting with U.S. officials...
My goodness, how the world — or at least the anti-Trump part of it — has fallen in love with Mark Carney’s Davos speech. A fairly typical example: in the New York Times, columnist David French hails what he calls the “Carney Doctrine” and says his speech “might be the most important address of Trump’s second term so far.”
Memo to Canada’s Official Opposition: it’s not 2024 anymore. It’s understandable why the Conservatives can’t drag themselves away from the world of 13 months ago. It was a great time for them as they counted down the days until they’d stride back into power over the bloody corpse of the Liberal party. Or so it seemed at the time...
There’s an old clip going around on social media this week showing Stephen Harper on his feet in the Commons batting away a question about the supposed impropriety of a Liberal MP crossing over to join his Conservatives. It was 2006 and Harper was being accused of “seducing” Liberal David Emerson over to his side. The then-PM first shrugged it...
The Carney Liberals are in grave danger of repeating a mistake the Conservatives made a year ago. They’re running the risk of eliminating the person they see as their principal opponent — but who is also one of their biggest assets, maybe the biggest of all.
Coming from another president, there are parts of the United States’ new “National Security Strategy” that would be welcome. It’s well past time, for example, that the U.S. acknowledged it cannot and should not try to lead the “free world” and impose its system on other countries. Barack Obama, no less, took steps down that road more than a decade...
If you listen to the noise coming out of British Columbia, rather than pay attention to what’s actually going on, you might conclude the province’s NDP government simply hates pipelines. A new line to the B.C. coast, they keep saying, is a terrible idea. It’s just a pipe dream, a “fantasy” in the words of Premier David Eby. Worse, the...
The verdict in Ottawa this week seems to be that the Carney government was darn lucky to get its budget passed in this minority Parliament. Judging by the political panel shows and the judgment of pundits, including some in the Star, the fact that a Christmas election was avoided by a mere two-vote margin in the Commons and the government...
So it turns out we really are those people, the ones who say “sorry” when someone steps on our foot, the ones who can’t stop apologizing when we’ve done something wrong or even — especially, really — when we haven’t. Prime Minister Mark Carney said over the weekend that he apologized to Donald Trump for those Ontario TV ads that...
When Mark Carney became PM, the book on him was we were getting a cerebral policy wonk. What a change that would be from the politics-first, poll-worshipping Liberals of the late Trudeau years! If that was ever true, it sure isn’t now. It hasn’t taken Carney long to become a cynical pol when the circumstances call for that, to tailor...
When it comes to Mark Carney, Donald Trump and the White House meeting that swallowed much of this week, I’m with John Cleese — or at least the character he played in the movie “Clockwise.” “I can take the despair,” he famously said. “It’s the hope I can’t stand.”
When people talk about being “diplomatic” they usually mean something along the lines of being tactful, sensitive, of smoothing over difficult issues. In that sense Donald Trump’s top diplomat in this country, U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, must be the least diplomatic guy around.
When it comes to politicians, especially newcomers to public life, journalists have a well-worn modus operandi. We build ’em up, then we tear ’em down. For Mark Carney, the teardown phase seems to be well underway. The man hailed as a political miracle-worker a scant few months ago now apparently can’t get anything quite right.
Suddenly it seems there’s a new narrative out of Ottawa and it goes roughly like this: Canadians aren’t so concerned about Trump and tariffs and all that anymore. They’re back to worrying about those old favourites that dominated our politics back in the old days (i.e. about 10 months ago) — inflation, the cost of living, and unaffordable housing...
Today’s theme: provinces — or more to the point, provincial governments — acting stupidly. This is always a rich vein, but never more so than this week. We begin in Alberta, where the government of Premier Danielle Smith has tied itself in knots and managed to make the province an international laughing stock over a policy that might well amount...
I hadn’t heard of Joseph Martin until five minutes ago, and I bet you hadn’t either. Martin is a Republican state senator from a rural corner of Maine, not exactly a power position. Even most Mainers, as they call themselves, would probably have a hard time picking him out of a lineup. But Sen. Martin is suddenly famous, or more...
What on earth has gotten into those Canadians? The United States, specifically Donald Trump, has “done nothing but treat them with the utmost respect.” The Trump administration has “protected the integrity” of its trade deal with Canada, but the Canadians have tossed that aside and decided that “the guardrails are off.” Frankly, it’s hurtful. The U.S. sees Canada as a...
No matter how bad things are, it seems they can always get worse. I wrote about the situation in Gaza earlier this week, focusing on the repeated reports of hungry, desperate people being shot and killed as they scrambled for food at distribution hubs. That’s bad enough, but even in the past few days the horror there has become even...
You want to say something that isn’t blindingly obvious. You want to talk about something people care about. If possible you want to spin a clever line or two. What you don’t want to do, generally speaking, is rub people’s faces in things they’d rather not look at. So for people like me in the opinionating line, the temptation always...
Hell froze over. The lion lay down with the lamb. Quebec nationalists agreed English-speaking Quebecers aren’t actually a big threat to French in that province. On the list of unlikely events, that last one might not seem earth-shaking outside Quebec. But after years of treating the province’s million-strong Anglo community as a convenient punching bag, it’s a very hopeful sign...
Of all the turnarounds engineered by Prime Minister Mark Carney over the past few months, none is bigger than the enormous commitment to new defence spending he announced on Monday. For in this case Carney isn’t just reversing Justin Trudeau’s policies (we’re all used to that by now). He’s pulling a U-turn on himself. As recently as April, Carney was...
It’s still early days, but so far I’m pretty impressed with what I see from Canada’s new conservative government. Voters clearly wanted a big change after a decade of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal approach, and boy are they getting it.
It didn’t take long for Donald Trump to make a liar — or at least a fool — out of his own ambassador to Canada. Pete Hoekstra did a round of introductory interviews last week as he made his debut as Trump’s representative to this country. One of his key messages was that all the talk about annexation is “over.”...
Could there be a more Canadian headline than the one on the front page of Monday’s Star? “Liberals reject power to oust leader,” it proclaimed. Given the opportunity to assert some control over their leader if things go sideways, with the memory of the impasse over Justin Trudeau’s leadership fresh in their minds, the party’s members of Parliament meekly said...
What a genius move by Mark Carney to get King Charles to deliver his government’s Speech from the Throne later this month. Given all Carney’s up to in his first week after the election, arranging for Charles to preside over the re-opening of Parliament might not seem like a big deal. There is, after all, that little matter of the...
Mark Carney didn’t quite get the majority mandate he was looking for and there’s a lot of punditry out there about the problems he and the Liberals will have in managing that. It’s being called an “uncertain mandate,” a “less than strong mandate,” and the outcome has been labelled (on page one of the Star no less) an “uneasy victory.”...
Donald Trump, it seems, just can’t help himself. He can’t stop trash-talking Canada, even when he knows he shouldn’t. Trump was remarkably silent about this country for weeks, ever since Mark Carney took over as prime minister in fact. He seemed to be restraining himself, or at least turning his malevolent gaze on other countries as he announced punitive tariffs...
Before the current campaign, Canada held eight federal elections in this century. Five — including the last two — resulted in a minority government. Minorities have become the norm in our multi-party system. But now is not the time for another minority. It’s not the time for another government that has to cut deals to stay in office, that’s always...
I went to Pierre Poilievre’s “Stop the Crime” night in Brampton on Wednesday. I wanted to figure out how the Conservative leader could be taking luxuriant crowd baths across the country while languishing in the polls. More to the point, I wanted to find out how the people who turn out for him are dealing with that. I learned, no...
One of the biggest knocks against Justin Trudeau’s government is that it failed to get big things done. It was great at announcing ambitious plans with multibillion-dollar price tags. But when it came to actually building stuff, not so much. The list is familiar: military jets that were studied for years but never arrived; housing plans that promised a lot...
The most sobering thing I’ve read in the past couple of weeks comes from Timothy Snyder, the renowned historian of Ukraine. Snyder, who’s been studying modern-day authoritarianism for years, draws a strong parallel between how Vladimir Putin sees Ukraine and how Donald Trump views Canada. Most jarringly, Snyder argues that Trump is preparing the ground not just for an economic...
Who is that smiling man? Who is that affable fellow with the big grin and the adorable family, the one who seems delighted to field queries from journalists? “Thanks for the question, Bill!” Why it’s Pierre Poilievre, formerly the Dark Prince of Canadian politics, the scowler, growler and angry apple-muncher, who couldn’t be bothered to mask his contempt for the...