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.
Most Canadians don’t know much about the Singh decision. But if you’re the country’s Immigration Minister, you must. So it was alarming that Lena Metlege Diab seemed confused when she was asked about the seminal 1985 Supreme Court decision in an interview for a Radio-Canada podcast.
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...
Prime Minister Mark Carney is back from Europe and now Europe is coming closer to him. Over 48 hours on Sunday and Monday, he’ll meet with two European allies, two leaders who, like Mr. Carney, see strategic autonomy as the key goal of their foreign policy. If he wanted allies to help knit together a trans-Atlantic geopolitical alliance, he could...
Prime Minister Mark Carney emphasized that a proposed new alliance with Europe is not an attempt to create a new bloc to rival the great powers. Yet it was a bit of a stretch to assert, as he did in a press conference in Strasbourg, France, on Thursday, that it wasn’t a reaction to others. The speech he had made...
“What incredible timing, huh?” That was John Toomey, CEO of Boston-based private equity firm HarbourVest Partners, speaking at an event hosted by the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association on the eve of the Canada Investment summit as foreign investors touched down in Toronto. It is a unique moment. Mere weeks ago, the Canada-U.S. trade war was bumped up...
There was a mood to get a deal in record time. Canada and the United Arab Emirates agreed in November, 2025, to strike a trade agreement, and as they prepared to open negotiations, the Emirati President, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, mentioned his country had worked out a deal with India in record time. The Canadians told the Emir...
It was striking how much Mark Carney’s crisis press conference on Saturday looked like the crisis press conference of 17 months ago. He wore a different necktie but a similar suit and strode into the same room to stand in front of the same backdrop of wood panelling and Canadian flags to deliver the same message: Canada would stand up...
When The Canadian Press tracked down U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley at the Iowa State Fair last week, he offered some pithy analysis of Donald Trump’s threat to impose whopping new tariffs on a large swath of Canadian goods. “I think the President is probably using them as a lever,” Mr. Grassley said. Gee, thanks for explaining that, Mr. Grassley. Canadians...
In the coldest days of the chill between Canada and China sparked by the 2018 arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, Beijing’s then-ambassador urged Canadians to drop their testy attitude and choose “win-win” co-operation. Chinese authorities had arrested two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. They imposed restrictions on Canadian canola. The proportion of Canadians that viewed China favourably had...
Mark Carney has always faced a conundrum when it comes to making a trade deal with Donald Trump. There’s pressure to get a deal, but it would require concessions that come at a political cost. Now that squeeze is even tighter. At a critical time. Canada and the United States are talking about a deal again, after a long period...
Prime Minister Mark Carney had a message for the Canadian ambassadors who had trooped home to Ottawa from around the world: Be bold and move fast. At a closed-door session in May, he told the heads of Canada’s diplomatic missions that his government has a higher tolerance for risk than their previous political masters.
“Nice bridge you got there,” the thugs said. “It’d be a shame if something happened to it.” That’s not a verbatim transcript of what U.S. President Donald Trump’s operatives told Prime Minister Mark Carney about the Gordie Howe International Bridge, but it might as well have been. The U.S. President just shook down this country, refusing to allow the opening...
The South Korean bidder, Hanwha, backed by its government, promised to put money into a Canadian steel plant and put commercials on TV. Germany’s TKMS proposed later subproduction in Canada and lined up Canadian subcontractors. Somewhere in there, on top of the bidding war for highly exaggerated “economic benefits,” was a choice between two top-notch diesel submarines, a key future...
For more than a decade, a gray limestone-clad house overlooking the Ottawa River has served as a symbol of Canadian indecision and entropy. The prime minister’s official residence at 24 Sussex Drive had been left to the gnawing of rats because politicians didn’t have the guts to do something about it. Anything.
Canada’s worth fighting for. Alberta does better together with the rest of Canada. And the Oct. 19 referendum in the province is a real choice that could bring on years of uncertainty for Alberta’s economy. None of those points, raised by Prime Minister Mark Carney at a press conference on Thursday, are groundbreaking. But together, the three parts are the...
They were the kind of words a parent might say to convince a child scrunching his nose at his birthday present that it’s really what he wanted: “I thought you’d actually like that.” In this case, the Prime Minister of Canada was speaking to the President of the United States. Mark Carney was trying to convince Donald Trump that a...
One day, Steven Guilbeault, Justin Trudeau’s activist environment minister, quit Mark Carney’s Liberal caucus. The next, the Prime Minister was in New York to sell CEOs and fund managers on investing in Canada, touting this country as an energy superpower that could help “make America great again.” Things have changed. The style is a long way from Mr. Trudeau’s era...
David Eby doesn’t perform well when drawing lines in the sand. It’s not in his emotional range. But the Premier of British Columbia wanted everyone to know he is miffed. “There’s no doubt in my mind that the Prime Minister is a friend to British Columbia,” Mr. Eby said as he stood beside Prime Minister Mark Carney at a photo-op...
For all the talk that Prime Minister Mark Carney is a small-c conservative his announcement that Canada will create a sovereign wealth fund was a confirmation of his capital-L Liberal predilections. The form of the fund might be a little surprising, given that the sovereign wealth funds of resource-rich nations are usually seeded with windfall earnings socked away for the...
It’s nice that U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen got a few cheers in Canada for taking U.S. officials to task for their insults. But it’s the injury that is the real problem. Ms. Shaheen snapped back at U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who had recently said his Canadian counterparts “suck” and complained during a Senate subcommittee hearing last week that liquor...
Among the former politicians and CEOs of a mining giant, a paper company, a steel company, a potash producer, a railway, a bank, and lobby groups for small business and the auto and aluminum sectors, there was a glaring omission: experts from the tech sector. The 24 people on the Advisory Committee on Canada-U.S. Economic Relations announced by Prime Minister...
“Thank you for your time,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said at the close of his recent direct-to-you vlog, titled Forward Guidance. “I know it’s precious.” That’s nice. He told Canadians he is going to want to talk with them again, but promised to do so sparingly. “I know you have busy lives and you don’t need busy lives from me,”...
Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet stepped out to meet reporters and take his by-election defeat on the chin. “We have to take it with humility. And we have to take it with patience,” Mr. Blanchet said. There’s a wave, he said – arguing that past Conservative and New Democrat voters moved to the Liberals – that seems even stronger now...
The second phase of Mark Carney’s government now begins. It has a majority in the House of Commons, and that allows it to look further ahead. In the year since winning a general election on the hustings, Mr. Carney’s Liberals have campaigned by other means. They have juggled expectations higher and higher – adding onto Mr. Carney’s narrative about an...
The buzz at the Liberal convention over the weekend was all about floor-crossers. On Friday morning, there was a rumour circulating that Prime Minister Mark Carney would show up unexpectedly to unveil another, freshly recruited Conservative to follow the surprise defection of Marilyn Gladu. Later, there was scuttlebutt that Mr. Carney might show up on Saturday with two or three.
Impressive ambition. A needed boost for Canadian sovereignty. Some hope for industrial transition. But when you get down to the math, there is only half the equation. The figures are big. After touring a Royal Canadian Navy ship on Thursday, and boasting that Canada has finally met the NATO target for defence spending, Prime Minister Mark Carney made a point...
Avi Lewis likes neon-sign politics. That was the point of the Leap Manifesto he co-authored more than a decade ago in a bid to prod the NDP to the left. He didn’t propose steps. He wanted a leap. “We’re challenging decades of political clichés. So we want to spend like drunken sailors,” he said then, in an interview at the...
Canada is shrinking. For far back as records have been kept, and probably much farther, this country’s population grew year after year, seemingly inexorably. Until 2025. On Wednesday, Statistics Canada released figures for the fourth quarter, which estimated that Canada’s population declined by 102,436 people over the course of last year.
There is a nostalgic, almost wistful thread that runs through Pierre Poilievre’s approach to trade with the United States, as if he still can’t believe the happy days of the past are gone and therefore thinks it’s easy to put forward a simple idea that will bring them back. On Sunday, when the Conservative Leader presented his plan to save...
It has felt like a constant stream of floor crossers for months. But this was the big one. Nunavut MP Lori Idlout’s move to defect from the depleted New Democrats to the governing Liberals has put Prime Minister Mark Carney firmly in charge of the political calendar – and weakened two of his opponents with one blow. The most obvious...
In recent days, it’s been as rare to find Prime Minister Mark Carney in Parliament as it is to spot the elusive boreal owl in the woods around Ottawa. A nine-day foreign trip, on top of a prior mission to China, plus breaks in the parliamentary schedule, and important prime ministerial business have all kept him from the House of...
Let’s peek in on Mark Carney’s Iran war foreign-policy update, beamed to us all the way from Australia. Mr. Carney supported U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran in a statement issued Saturday, and he still does, now in a different way, because the U.S and Israel probably did not act in keeping with international law, which is unfortunately part of...
Mark Carney left on a trip to India last Thursday but there has simply been no time to field reporters’ queries. The Prime Minister cancelled the press conference scheduled for Monday, when embarrassing questions were to be posed, because his meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ran long and his flight to Australia couldn’t be delayed and well, there...
Mark Carney wasted no time in backing U.S. military action to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. It was a quick decision to pick a side but also to pick from a menu. It is hard to claim that preventing Iran from getting the bomb is the cause for this war.
There were two speeches inside the speech on Canada-U.S. relations that Pierre Poilievre gave Thursday. One was intended to make him sound like a grown-up. The other was to make him sound different than Mark Carney. The first part was the kind of political repositioning that Mr. Poilievre has long needed.
You might not remember the days when then-prime minister Justin Trudeau went to India to reset relations, but if you close your eyes, you might just be able to conjure an image of Mr. Trudeau in Bollywood outfits. That was in 2018. Mr. Trudeau’s predecessor, Stephen Harper, announced free-trade talks with India’s prime minister in 2010. They never came close...
When one of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative MPs, Jamil Jivani, travelled to Washington to meet with Trump administration officials, he chose to chastise Canadians for having an anti-American “hissy fit” in an interview with MAGA site Breitbart News. It’s hard to imagine a more harmful piece of public relations for the Conservatives. And it is a golden opportunity for Mr. Poilievre...
It’s unanimous: Federal political parties agree that they should be above the law. In this instance, the laws in question are provincial privacy laws that set limits on how your personal information can be used and provide individuals with some rights to know what information has been collected. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government snuck measures into a bill on...
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...