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 Chris Selley.
What are voters to make of a political party that can’t properly manage a riding nomination? The Ontario Liberals are the latest to pose that question implicitly — and not for the first time — to the electorate. Nate Erskine-Smith, a departing federal Liberal MP and presumed candidate for the provincial party’s leadership, alleges all manner of skulduggery in the...
There are days when Canada just makes me want to crawl under the bed and hide. Days when I wonder if this country really is redeemable, despite its endless natural resources, generally level-headed and tolerant population, geographic insulation from global strife and hundreds of years of good luck. Tuesday was one of those days. Wednesday was another. I’m not expecting...
Canada’s federal ridings range in population from 26,665 in Labrador to 134,415 in Kingston and the Islands
What if Mark Carney doesn't end up as terrible a prime minister as many Conservatives expect he will be? Of the many possible scenarios that could have unfolded on Monday evening, not many people seem to have anticipated the one we got: A very impressive Conservative showing, but only good enough for second place, and with party leader Pierre Poilievre...
The air was sucked out of the bizarrely freezing-cold Canada Room at the Rogers Convention Centre in downtown Ottawa at 10:07 p.m. local time, when CTV News made its call for a Liberal government. A relatively rowdy crowd near the stage, surrounded by photographers and cameras, had been leading chants of “bring it home!” as positive Conservative results trickled in...
Carney, like Michael Ignatieff before him, doesn't even seem to be in charge of his own campaign. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre landed a few pretty solid blows against Liberal leader Mark Carney during the French-language debate in Montreal on Wednesday night. Whether those blows will matter to Quebecers, who will have comprised the vast majority of the audience for the...
'We need to get serious about the hard work of nation-building if we want to compete and win in the next generation'
None say anything like “stay the course, big fella!” “You’ve got to get on the f-cking ballot question or you are going to lose,” Kory Teneycke, the Ontario conservative strategist bluntly said at an Empire Club event last week. (Teneycke is a veteran of the old Reform Party politics, like Poilievre’s campaign manager Jenni Byrne.)
If you want to influence Donald Trump, who else would you talk to but influencers? It’s a fine line between engaging the United States and treason nowadays in the court of public opinion, as Alberta Premier Danielle Smith knows perhaps better than anyone else. She is set to appear on Thursday with right-wing mega-podcaster Ben Shapiro at a fundraiser for...
You can’t have an outburst of nationalism without purity tests coming into play, and two prominent Canadian figures have failed theirs in the court of chattering-class opinion: Wayne Gretzky and King Charles III, of all people. In recent consecutive days, hilariously, The Globe and Mail’s website published the following headlines to its online readers’-letters pages: “Wayne Gretzky’s fall from grace...
In recent days Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have very obviously received marching orders from the leader’s office with respect to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. The new line is, “he has something to hide.” Liberal House leader Karina Gould posted a whole video about it last week, in addition to levelling the accusation in the House of Commons in recent days —...
It’s disturbingly plausible, as Tasha Kheiriddin argued here on Thursday, that Justin Trudeau might have extended his proverbial runway on Wednesday with his jaw-dropping performance before the parliamentary inquiry into foreign interference in Canadian elections. The most unhinged Trudeau and Liberal partisans are now convinced that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is some kind of Manchurian candidate — or the Indian-brainwashed...
CTV News made a seemingly necessary decision Thursday afternoon in the aftermath of one of the craziest Canadian network-journalism fiascos in recent memory: After an internal investigation, it says it discovered two video editors were involved in “altering a video clip” — which is to say doctoring, truncating and taking entirely out of context a quote from federal Conservative Leader...
“The CEO of Elections Canada has indicated his opposition to it, and let me just say I’m at peace with that.” These words, spoken by Pierre Poilievre a decade ago, are part of an absolutely bizarre 46-second video the Liberal Party of Canada released in recent days trying to convince us — a very novel approach — that the Conservative...
The National Post’s Tristin Hopper did a fine job this week explaining the migraine-inducing politics behind whether or not an opposition leader ought to read the un-redacted National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) report that apparently implicates more than zero parliamentarians in wilful collusion with foreign influences. The conundrum, in a nutshell, is that once you’ve read it...
Back when the annual Canada Strong and Free Conference, which wrapped up Friday, bore Preston Manning’s name, the Reform Party founder would usually take an opportunity to counsel the flock away from fiery rhetoric. He was most stern in 2013, when he warned at the Manning Conference that the conservative movement’s “greatest weakness” is “intemperate and ill-considered remarks by those...
The more inevitable Poilievre’s victory seems, the more pointed the questions become about how exactly he intends to fix this broken country
Justin Trudeau’s backroom geniuses want you to see yet another clip of Pierre Poilievre refusing to answer a very insistent reporter’s question in Ottawa. The question, asked during a Thursday press conference was, “Will you dismantle pharmacare?” Poilievre, unable or unwilling to get a word in edgewise, simply walked away rather than answer.
Justin Trudeau’s somewhat revamped office continues to make it abundantly clear that there will be no revamping of the basic strategy heading into the next election: Pierre Poilievre is Donald Trump, so say goodbye to gay rights, say goodbye to abortions, and Pierre Poilievre is Donald Trump.
The federal New Democrats recently announced a bit of a leadership shake-up: Anne McGrath, whose many past roles have included chief of staff to Jack Layton and principal secretary to Rachel Notley, is stepping down as party president to become principal secretary for Jagmeet Singh. The press release said the changes were about “building momentum for the next election,” which...
When it comes to defunding CBC, the Conservative Party of Canada’s official line is that the public broadcaster’s French-language services in Quebec are behind a firewall. Curiously, I’ve never heard leader Pierre Poilievre say this himself; in fact, in the past he has suggested sparing only “a small amount (of funding) for French-language minorities” in the Rest of Canada. But...
After many years of flying totally or partially blind, Canada finally has a pretty decent handle on the data with respect to murdered Indigenous women and girls. A new Statistics Canada report, released this week, confirms the basic, horrifying reality: Between 2009 and 2021, 490 Indigenous women and girls were murdered. That’s a rate of 4.3 per 100,000, which is...
