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.
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...
Interest rates are falling. Inflation is back down to the target level. Wages have finally caught up, on average, to the price increases of recent years. In some cities, landlords are asking new tenants for lower rents. Affordability concerns have been clobbering Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government for two and a half years. Now, many of the economic indicators...
New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs’s approval ratings are the lowest of any premier in Confederation, according to the Angus Reid Institute. When he launched his re-election campaign Thursday, Mr. Higgs needed to pick on someone even more unpopular. Luckily for him, there’s Justin Trudeau. Every politician in Canada is running against Mr. Trudeau, except Liberals, who are running away from...
The campaign director quit. Five chiefs of staff to cabinet ministers are leaving. A Liberal fundraiser was appointed to the Senate. A senior minister quit and another is thinking about it. Justin Trudeau insists he’s not going anywhere but his Liberal government keeps acting as if it’s nearing the end. There are just a lot of things happening in Liberal...
Canadians can see why drug policy has become a big political issue. The opioids epidemic is tragic and visible. People suffering from life-altering addiction can be seen in numbers on the streets. In 2023, 8,049 people died from opioid overdoses in Canada. British Columbia retreated from its experiment with broad decriminalization. So has Oregon. But the tough criminal penalties of...
Uh-oh. The Prime Minister says he has full confidence in his finance minister. Sounds like Chrystia Freeland is dangling at the end of a thread. You might recall the moment in August, 2020, when sources said Mr. Trudeau’s previous finance minister, Bill Morneau, might no longer be the person the Prime Minister wanted in the post. That’s when the Prime...
A year ago, the Liberal plan to fight the 2025 election was based on making Canadians fear Pierre Poilievre. Now, they can’t even get a large portion of the population to think about the Conservative Leader – because their feelings about Justin Trudeau get in the way. The Liberals want to tell people that Mr. Poilievre is too right-wing, or...
This is a period of Liberal reflection, we are now told by Justin Trudeau himself. That is naturally needed to digest his party’s gut-punch by-election loss in Toronto-St. Paul’s. And there’s another thing he didn’t mention: The drumbeat of Liberals calling for the Prime Minister to go. On Friday, nine MPs signed onto a letter demanding an in-person caucus meeting...
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office declined to comment Sunday on a letter signed by several MPs calling for an immediate in-person national caucus meeting to discuss the party’s surprising by-election loss in Toronto-St. Paul’s. A small group of MPs sent the letter to Liberal caucus chair Brenda Shanahan on Friday requesting the immediate meeting to discuss what they call the...
Witting. That’s the word in the latest report on foreign interference that changes things. In the latest review, we don’t just see cases of messing with political messages in a local election or allegations of interference in a nomination race, such as that of then-Liberal, now-independent MP Han Dong. Now, a committee of MPs has reported that some of their...
For a textbook example of political debate unglued from real-world concerns, it’s hard to do better than Tuesday’s Question Period.Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland crowed that the annual inflation rate had just cooled to 2.7 per cent. Then Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre countered by wrongly claiming the inflation rate is 35 per cent above target.
It seems a little early for the kitchen sink. But Justin Trudeau and his Liberals saw an opportunity, however slim, to attack Conservatives on abortion – and they grasped at it. Abortion is one of the holy trinity of explosive issues that the Liberals lob at the Tories in every election campaign, along with guns and privatization of health care...
When former columnist Sabrina Maddeaux announced last week that she was suspending her campaign for a Conservative Party nomination in the riding of Aurora-Oak Ridges-Richmond Hill because of a “corrupted” process, a number of Conservatives posted calls for party brass to investigate. Isn’t that cute?
It’s 2024, and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has tabled the foreign-interference bill that would have been so useful in 2019. A new offence for foreign interference, with serious jail time as the penalty, would have been in effect before the last election. A foreign registry would not just be on the drawing board, but in place and working years before...
Mark Carney might be setting the stage to run for the Liberal leadership after the next election. Or he might be auditioning for a role as the new blood in Justin Trudeau’s embattled government. Certainly, the former governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England is making it clear that he wants to be the next leader of...
For a year, the Liberal government stood around flat-footed while revelations about the ArriveCan app spread into an indictment of federal procurement. Now they are running to catch up. They finally caught a piece of the tiger’s tail on Wednesday, when they announced they had found that three contractors fraudulently overbilled government departments to the tune of $5-million.
Pierre Poilievre held a press event in a shopping-mall parking lot in Montréal’s West Island railing about big-city bureaucrats blocking the development of housing. The mall is near a soon-to-be-built station on a new REM train line partially funded by the federal government, and the Conservative leader showed up last Thursday morning to complain that bureaucracy is blocking plans to...
In the long, strange series of hearings into the ArriveCan app, one of the most peculiar twists is that Conservative MPs have switched sides from prosecution to defence. In November, when senior civil servant Cameron MacDonald appeared at hearings, Conservative MPs pounced. Now they are his defenders – and attacking investigators for treating him unfairly. Mr. MacDonald had been a...
Pierre Poilievre stood in front of his cheering Conservative MPs on Sunday, rhetorically pummelling Justin Trudeau and revelling in his status as the front-runner to be the next prime minister. The speech was all about the faults of the Canada that Mr. Trudeau leads, from housing costs to car thefts – a Canada that Mr. Poilievre said looks a long...
It didn’t take long for Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland to troop out to say the federal government will appeal. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals know what Tuesday’s court decision is: A millstone around their necks. Invoking the Emergencies Act to shut down convoy protests in February, 2022, had been a popular decision at the time, and one of the biggest calls...
While Pierre Poilievre claims that the new, updated Canada-Ukraine free-trade agreement would force Ukraine to adopt a carbon tax, there is a pretty good source that says that is not so: Ukraine. For some bizarre reason, Mr. Poilievre – a Conservative leader with a 14-point lead in polls who is heading what is supposed to be a government-in-waiting – insists...
It’s true, as Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson told the Commons last week, that heating oil is different. It is particularly dirty, he noted, and far more expensive than natural gas. But it is hard for lower-income families with oil furnaces to switch to another type of heating – say a heat pump.