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 Daniel Béland.
On Tuesday in the Senate Chamber, King Charles III will deliver the Speech from the Thone. The last time a monarch did so was in 1977, when his mother Elizabeth II read it during her Silver Jubilee tour. Two decades earlier, she had pronounced her first Speech from the Throne in Ottawa, an occasion that marked the young Queen’s first...
Barely two months after he and his cabinet were first sworn in and two weeks after his election, Prime Minister Mark Carney attended the swearing-in ceremony at Rideau Hall Tuesday during which two dozen new people joined his shuffled, culled and expanded ministry. More than half of them are newly elected MPs, which brings many new faces to the fore...
In his first post-election news conference, Prime Minister Mark Carney said that he’s in politics “to do big things, not to be something.” He also stated that, “Now is the time for ambition, to be bold, to meet this crisis with the overwhelming, positive force of a united Canada.” Based on some of the pledges he mentioned in his speech...
After a short yet intense campaign focused on how to strengthen our economy and protect our sovereignty in a more uncertain and threatening continental and global context, Canadians have voted and the results are in. The Liberals have done what many thought impossible barely a few months ago: they won the most seats and found a way to remain in...
The term “the Trump effect” has been used over the past eight years to describe a range of political phenomena, from certain trends in tactical disruption to the dominance of propaganda in the news cycle. As we approach the 100-day mark (on April 30th) of the unlikely American president’s second term, the Trump effect has taken on a whole new...
There was no clear “winner” of the French-language leaders’ debate on Wednesday night in Montreal, but the lack of a clear loser, and the takeaways based on expectations, produced a number of results. First, it is quite clear that this debate is unlikely to be particularly consequential in terms of shifting party standings in this campaign, partly because no party...
During a speech in Victoria on Sunday, Mark Carney quipped: “We’re sending Doug Ford onto FOX News to show them that we’re not messing around up here,” which made Liberal supporters in the room laugh. Then, he added: “And we’re going to send Danielle next. Well, maybe we won’t. We won’t send Danielle. That’s a bad idea. Strike that.” The...
The headline in Tuesday’s Journal de Montréal said it all: “Sondage Léger: les Québécois passent l’éponge sur la mauvaise semaine de Carney, toujours solidement en tête”. En anglais: a Léger poll was showing that Quebec voters had “wiped the slate clean” on Mark Carney’s bumpy launch in the province, where he’s now surfing a 20-point lead. Even in an age...
After months of prime ministerial departure and succession drama, of bilateral chaos, avoidable economic uncertainty, and a spit-take reversal in the pre-campaign polling snapshot, the 2025 federal election is finally underway. The campaign begins as support for the Liberals, who had trailed the Conservatives in the polls for more than a year, has surged, partly because of the departure of...
Now that Mark Carney is Prime Minister, federal elections could be triggered very soon. Since Justin Trudeau announced his resignation on January 6 amid both a bilateral trade war and a deeply troubling questioning of Canada’s sovereignty from a rogue president of the United States, the Liberals have dramatically improved their standing in opinion polls. This is so much the...
Sunday evening, as expected, Mark Carney easily won the Liberal leadership race. More than easily; resoundingly, with more than 86% of support from party voters. Even as he steps into daily political life with the full-throated endorsement of his own party, the scope of Carney’s victory does not erase his most obvious Achilles’ heel: a lack of prior political experience...
On the evening of March 4th, the same day the United States imposed 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, President Donald Trump gave the first major speech of his second term, the conventional first-year, post-inaugural adaptation of the State of the Union address, the presidential speech to a joint session of Congress. In the House chamber Tuesday night, he delivered...
On Monday and Tuesday evening, the remaining four Liberal leadership hopefuls participated in the only two official debates of this unusually short race: one in French and one in English. Because Mark Carney seems way ahead in the race and likely heading toward a crowning, these two debates provided an opportunity to test his debating skills and imagine how he...
Canada’s Conservatives are becoming increasingly nervous as recent polls suggest that the Liberals, due to a cascade of game-changing events, have significantly closed the polling gap between the two parties. Some data also shows that, under the hypothetical leadership of Mark Carney, the Liberals would tie the Conservatives in terms of popular vote. Under normal conditions, considering that the Liberals...
The most striking irony in U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first appearance at NATO in Brussels on Wednesday was his reiteration of Donald Trump’s insistence on an increase to 5% of GDP in defence spending for Alliance members at a time when Trump himself represents the greatest security threat to Canada.
Earlier this week, the Liberal Party of Canada allowed six candidates seeking to replace Justin Trudeau to formally enter its leadership race. This means that the party only excluded one leadership hopeful: Liberal MP Chandra Arya, who was the first to announce he would like to run for the leadership after Prime Minister Trudeau announced he would step down.
On the first day of his second presidency, Canadians feared that Donald Trump would impose 25% tariffs on their country. This is why many of them were relieved when they noticed he did not mention Canada at all in his inauguration speech. Canadians typically like it when U.S. presidents pay attention to them, but with President Trump, it is the...
When Steve MacKinnon, Justin Trudeau’s minister of employment, was asked two days after Trudeau announced his intention to resign whether he’d be entering the race to replace him as Liberal leader, it wasn’t so much what MacKinnon — the MP for Gatineau — said but the way he said it that telegraphed his thinking. MacKinnon was asked the question in...