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 Campbell Clark.
Everybody knows what’s happening with Donald Trump’s threat to block the opening of a Detroit-Windsor bridge. At least, everybody in the political system in Washington and Ottawa. It’s a shakedown, with a choke point in Canada-U.S. relations as leverage. Detroit border crossings have been used that way for years. Now it’s a pretty good analogy for all of U.S. foreign...
The whole co-operation initiative was obviously a distasteful task to Pierre Poilievre, one that circumstances and strategists have foisted upon him. When he went to meet Prime Minister Mark Carney on Wednesday to talk about it, his opposite number appeared equally sincere. This was a week when talk of co-operation seemed to be breaking out all over Ottawa. But the...
Pierre Poilievre garnered rousing applause Friday night when he told delegates to the Conservative convention in Calgary the party won’t change its principles. “We won the debate in the last election on every single one of the big issues, on carbon taxes, inflation, housing, resources, crime, drugs, and soon we will be proven right once again on the wasteful and...
The phrase that was repeated like a mantra on the opening night of the Conservative convention was that Pierre Poilievre carried a “message of hope.” MPs and party officials who spoke Thursday night used the word “hope” 16 times in an hour.
There’s always the chance that there will be a quick rerun of last year’s federal election, even within a matter of months. That’s a prospect that will be helpful to Pierre Poilievre over the next day or two. After that, it will make things a little tricky. For all the rough knocks that Mr. Poilievre has suffered over the past...
It’s always dangerous when a party leader has to reach three different audiences, each grading a different test. That’s what Pierre Poilievre faces Friday night. At the Conservative convention in Calgary, Mr. Poilievre’s speech will come just before delegates vote on his leadership. That’s normally when a leader plays to the room, hitting the notes the base wants to hear...
Before Mark Carney spoke in Davos, French President Emmanuel Macron was on the same stage lamenting that the world is shifting to a place without rules, where the strongest dominate, pleading for a return to global co-operation. After Mr. Carney’s speech, U.S. President Donald Trump talked about dominating other countries, claiming he forced Mr. Macron to double French drug prices...
Mark Carney’s stark warnings are by now central to his politics. In April, he told Canadians the old relationship was over. For many months, he has been saying that the world is in a period of “rupture, not transition.” On Tuesday, he pointed to the danger of a new world of rapacious great powers and called for middle powers to...
Whatever you think of the wisdom of Mark Carney’s trade deal with China, it’s not a big vote of confidence for the future of Canada’s auto industry. At least, not the auto industry we have known. It was a move to jump-start trade with the world’s second-largest economy, opening the big Chinese market to Canadian canola, peas and seafood. Yet...
Prime Minister Mark Carney said he is “concerned” about the escalation. It was a calm word for this particular bout of Donald Trump’s insanity. The President of the United States insists he will take Greenland from Denmark – and the European Union – and now says that he will use heavy tariffs to try to coerce allies into handing over...
François Legault’s days as Quebec premier have been numbered for a long time but his resignation, inevitable as it seemed, has nonetheless shuffled the cards of Quebec politics. Mr. Legault had been visibly suffering from the wear and tear of seven years in power and the Coalition Avenir Québec, the party he founded as a kind of third way to...
On his way to Beijing, Prime Minister Mark Carney will have to fly past Japan, a country being bullied by its largest trade partner, China. It’s something Canadians might want to consider as their Prime Minister heads to Beijing to reset relations. Canada wants to get back on track. But there is always a country on the outs with Beijing...
If it came in isolation, one might look at the toothless debates over the legality of the U.S. abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and chalk it up as another American intervention in Latin America. But the context is not the same. It’s not just that U.S. President Donald Trump warned Colombian President Gustavo Petro that he could be next...
Remember how deeply divided Canada was over building new oil pipelines last year? Not any more. Two years ago, politicians of all stripes felt the public would never support substantially increased military spending? Now, most do. Free trade is almost a wistful notion from a happier past; economic nationalism is in. The pro-immigration consensus, part of this country’s social fabric...
Losing one MP to the Liberals may be regarded as a misfortune. Losing two smacks of carelessness. Now Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative leadership is really in danger. Even a victory in the upcoming leadership review in January won’t necessarily make it safe. Now, Mr. Poilievre will be looking over his shoulder and into the shadows. Maybe one more of his MPs...
More than eight months have passed and it’s now safe to bring friends of Justin Trudeau back into the cabinet. Marc Miller was one of the Trudeau-era ministers tossed over the side of the ship of state when Mark Carney became prime minister, when the political imperative was making Canadians see his government as something new and different.
There is a negotiation maxim widely heard in trade talks that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. By that measure nothing has been agreed between Ottawa and Alberta. Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith wanted to make a show of signing a memorandum of understanding on energy and the environment, even though all the actual commitments...
Green Party Leader Elizabeth May is pretty sure that backbench Liberal MPs from British Columbia are really worried. Why? “They’ll lose their seats,” she told reporters. “And they like their seats.” The Ottawa-Alberta memorandum of understanding that has not yet been released − to be signed Thursday by Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith − is that...
At a steakhouse on Avenue Road in Toronto earlier this month, a number of conservatives turned up for a Liberal MP’s fundraiser. One was John Tory, the former Toronto mayor and onetime leader of Ontario Progressive Conservatives. It was perhaps not surprising that Mr. Tory was at this fundraiser, given that the Liberal MP in the Eglinton-Lawrence riding, Vince Gasparro...
It’s a stunning allegation to make. The Leader of the Opposition stated that Canada’s national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, covered up a crime by the then-prime-minister, Justin Trudeau. What Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said was full of import: The cops are crooked, so deeply corrupt they rigged an investigation to let Mr. Trudeau off the hook for...
Reviving Keystone XL is, in the eyes of former Alberta premier Jason Kenney, a brilliant “judo” move. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s suggestion that the Keystone XL pipeline project could be revived could end up tying Canada more closely to the United States, rather than diversifying trade. But the idea turns U.S. President Donald Trump’s own talk about Canada on its...
When France’s President Emmanuel Macron announced he’d recognize a Palestinian state, Donald Trump dismissed it as irrelevant. When British Prime Minister Keir Starmer threatened to do so, Mr. Trump mostly shrugged. His response to Mark Carney’s announcement was to suggest it could imperil a Canada-U.S. trade deal. Perhaps Mr. Carney had taken Mr. Trump’s ambivalence to the European moves as...
Too soon. Way too soon. Inviting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to come to Canada now amounts to a signal that foreign powers can interfere in Canada with impunity. Less than two years ago, the Prime Minister of Canada – then Justin Trudeau – accused the Indian government of involvement in the murder of a Canadian. Last October, the RCMP...
Now we wait. There is a sweat-it-out period on Canada-U.S. trade now. There aren’t real negotiations going on, not in the nitty-gritty sense, not yet. There’s a kind of pause to regroup. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump sat next to Prime Minister Mark Carney in the Oval Office and said there’s nothing the United States wants from Canada. He told...
There were all the parts of Pierre Poilievre in Monday’s election result. There were the revved-up and frustrated young and middle-aged men responding to his call for change. There were also people who changed their political habits to stop him from becoming prime minister. All those positives. All those negatives. Sometim
Pierre Poilievre is counting on the budget balancing itself. Almost. There are some mostly vague plans for spending cuts in the Conservative election platform Mr. Poilievre released Tuesday, but it’s not enough to pay for all the party’s promises. So instead, the Conservative platform relies on the hope that their policies would cause a big economic boom, mostly in the...
There are two big questions about who will show up for the first leaders’ debate this week: Which Pierre Poilievre will we see? And how forgiving will the audience be? The Pierre Poilievre who appeared on the Radio-Canada talk show, Tout le monde en parle, was a creature that had rarely been spotted in front of TV cameras. The Conservative...
On to Plan C. Pierre Poilievre made a belated campaign pivot last Wednesday to focus more heavily on U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war. Now the Conservative Leader has pivoted again. He’s taking big swings to try to knock down Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s reputation as an economic manager. Before it’s too late.
It was the end of a long day, but Pierre Poilievre had more energy in the evening than in the morning. “Wow, what a wonderful crowd,” the Conservative Leader said in Oshawa, Ont., as he quickly stepped onto a two-foot-high platform in an airplane hangar and went into his slogans. “Who’s ready to axe some taxes?” he said at the...
It’s the last trip that Justin Trudeau never took. In his last weeks in power, amid the turmoil of Donald Trump’s tariff threats and jibes about making Canada the 51st state, Mr. Trudeau was quietly planning a symbolic and potentially controversial trip to Syria. The advance teams had been there. Canadian Armed Forces troops were on the ground in Syria...
There was a familiar echo when Pierre Poilievre dismissed the news that India had sought to interfere in the 2022 Conservative leadership race to help him win. It sounded a lot like Justin Trudeau when the former prime minister was first confronted with reports of serious foreign-interference activities. Both were brush-offs, an assertion that it didn’t matter, because the foreign...
The signs still work. Phew. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre put a lot of work into that “axe the tax” slogan, and there was no way he wanted to waste a rhyme. Prime Minister Mark Carney announced after he was sworn in on Friday that he would kill the federal fuel charge – the consumer carbon levy that has raised so...
Mark Carney was anointed as much as elected. Canadian politics had gathered currents that pushed Liberals to want a different kind of leader: a technocrat to steer away from Justin Trudeau and through troubled times. The result was overwhelming. Mr. Trudeau’s former deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, was brushed aside brutally, into a second-place finish that amounted to 8 per...
Retaliation is one thing. Most Canadian politicians agree it’s a necessary weapon to fight a trade war against Donald Trump. But how will Canada deal will the economic casualties? There are already stark differences on that. Ontario Premier Doug Ford just won a landslide provincial election promising he’d go big to support affected workers. Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is...
Charlie Angus was driving down Northern Ontario’s Highway 11 and his signal kept dropping. But he was still on a roll. The New Democratic MP was on CNN the night before comparing U.S. President Donald Trump to “Al Capone in his syphilitic period.” He’d been on social media urging Canadians to boycott U.S. products. The response was emphatic...
She knew. Chrystia Freeland knew. That’s what she told Canadians last year about increasing capital-gains taxes. It meant tax fairness for every generation, she said. “And we know that right now, Canada needs to make investments,” Ms. Freeland, then the finance minister, told a CTV News interviewer in June.
There were going to be hockey clichés. Mark Carney launched his campaign for the Liberal leadership in an Edmonton hockey arena. He talked about leading Liberals to a third-period comeback. But somebody should have given the starting centre a shake. Mr. Carney had a slow start. There were the usual trappings for a rah-rah event – a giant big flag...
Eight months ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s strategists set an internal goal: gain five percentage points in opinion polls come July, 2024. Instead, they went nowhere. The plan back then was to take Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s April budget, purportedly focused on Canadians under 40, and flog it aggressively to move the Liberals back into a competitive race with the...
You could see how things got awkward. The Prime Minister’s Office insisted on a GST holiday to buy votes and all it did was blow billions without winning the Liberals any support. That’s uncomfortable for the Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland, who made specific promises about the size of the deficit that she was very, very unwilling to repeat on Tuesday...
The election of Donald Trump has Pierre Poilievre talking about a crackdown, but it’s not just about security at the U.S. border. Lots of people, notably provincial premiers, have called for beefing up policing of the border. Mr. Poilievre did too: Two days after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the Conservative Leader was arguing Canada’s lax...
It’s surprising that Justin Trudeau was able to mount a second charm offensive with Donald Trump, eight years after the first go-round and six years after Mr. Trump angrily labelled the PM “dishonest and weak.” It’s a coup. There shouldn’t be any doubt, despite the political spin, that it is better to talk to the president-elect face-to-face than be forced...
Justin Trudeau is talking about Team Canada again. Premiers met with the Prime Minister, virtually, to talk about Donald Trump’s tariff threat, and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland came out emphasizing the importance of working together. But this isn’t 2017. There isn’t going to be a united front to meet Mr. Trump’s trade threat. Mr. Trudeau isn’t going to get...
It took just two weeks after Donald Trump was elected U.S. president again before some of Canada’s political leaders figured they’d found a plan to spare this country from a trade war: cut Mexico loose. Ontario Premier Doug Ford was first off the mark, arguing Canada shouldn’t even wait till Mr. Trump can trigger the re-negotiation of the Canada-United States-Mexico...
There’s a reason why Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign puts out social-media ads with middle-aged men saying they will vote for her. And why Justin Trudeau keeps appearing on hour-long podcasts. It has to do with getting permission to change your mind. It seems to be working a little for the U.S. Vice President. For Canada’s Prime Minister, not so much...
Nine months ago, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre told a television interviewer that if he were prime minister, he would not cut Liberal child care and dental care programs. Or so it seemed. Mr. Poilievre was pressed in an interview with Quebec’s TVA network on how he’d balance the budget without cutting social programs. Journalist Emmanuelle Latraverse asked whether a Conservative...