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 Don Martin.
The goal of Budget 2024(opens in a new tab) was simple enough: Put out the raging fire in the dumpster this government has become. Will it work before the election? Probably not. A Hail Mary rehash of the greatest hits from the government’s three-week travelling pony-show, the budget takes aim at reversing the party’s popularity plunge in the under-40 set...
She has the right to hold a grudge, but declines to take any cheap shots. Dr. Jane Philpott(opens in a new tab) is over having Prime Minister Justin Trudeau toss her out of the Liberal caucus along with cabinet colleague Jody Wilson-Raybould for taking a principled stand against the PMO in the SNC Lavalin(opens in a new tab) scandal five...
For the fourth day in a row, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a cabinet contingent of potted palms in tow to backdrop another housing announcement(opens in a new tab), this time delivered Friday in that bastion of Liberal loathing called Calgary.
The political math never added up to an election this spring. When one party is salivating for it, one is leery and the two parties in majority control of the House are scared to death of the voters’ wrath, there was zero chance of toppling Justin Trudeau’s minority government.
The countdown is on. It’s 17 days until the next potential capitulation by a government trying to plug the drain that’s sucking its re-election into a death spiral. Expect the carbon tax boost set for April Fool’s Day to be axed. And you can credit beer for the move. When Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland chopped a planned beer excise tax...
He may be peaking too soon. Pierre Poilievre and his Conservatives appear to be on cruise control to a rendezvous with the leader’s prime ministerial ambition. This week’s byelection(opens in a new tab) in a riding just east of Toronto featured a Liberal show of force, including campaign visits by the prime minister and a parade of cabinet ministers, to...
Justin Trudeau should pay very close attention to the legacy treatment afforded former prime minister Brian Mulroney, who died on Thursday at age 84. There’s the roadmap to a happy future for the ailing Liberal leader in the outpouring of all-party respect and affection for Mulroney, a politician so despised in 1993 that the annihilated Progressive Conservative caucus could’ve fit...
It’s been 22 years since a former auditor general blasted the Chrétien government after it “broke just about every rule in the book” in handing out private sector contracts in the sponsorship scandal(opens in a new tab). The book has been broken anew. In a rule-shredding repeat orbiting the dreaded ArriveCan(opens in a new tab) app, Auditor-General Karen Hogan(opens in...
You can’t help but admire the audacity of his hopes as Justin Trudeau’s horrible year ends. The prime minister faced marital separation on the home front, endured political challenges across Canada and stoked global controversies in 2023. Yet he still defiantly declares, without giving himself even a millimetre of wiggle-away room, that he will stick around to lead another campaign...
Her mouth runs habitually rogue, her policies are often renegade and her connection to Ottawa is all resistance all the time. For those reasons and a few more, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is my newsmaker politician of the year. This is not to say Smith’s basking in a glowing political honeymoon following her United Conservative Party election win(opens in a...
It takes considerable effort to botch the job of Speaker in the House of Commons. For an hour a day they preside over question period to scold MPs when they can’t hear answers over the heckling. If that fails, they simply stand at their chair to silence the microphones until the hubbub subsides. And it almost goes without saying that...
With speculation on the rise that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will follow his father’s footsteps in the snow to a pre-election resignation, there was an interesting subplot to a bland news conference Tuesday. It took four cabinet ministers to deliver a rehashed how-great-they-art list of government accomplishments they insist are responsible for creating a low-debt, affordable, nanny-state, investor-friendly, supercharged economy...
It was the best of times during the worst of times for this besieged-from-every-direction Liberal government. Its bi-annual work of fiscal fiction rolled out Tuesday as the fall update staged a desperate bid to reverse the Liberals' downward spiral in the polls while trying to soften its drunken-sailor-spending image.
It’s been 100+ hours of brutal aftermath since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau turned carbon pricing from a national principle into regional graft by lifting the tax on home heating oil and using free heat pumps(opens in a new tab) to buy back the Liberal loyalty of Atlantic Canada voters. On Tuesday, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre had seen enough and challenged...
Panic has set in. With this week’s flip-flop lifting carbon pricing for heating oil until 2027 (pushing increases beyond the next election) and a doubling of the rural tax rebate, the severely rattled Liberals are chipping away at the load-bearing wall beneath their environmental platform.
There’s a parallel Canadian universe that exists only on Justin Trudeau’s social media feed. It’s a place somewhere over the rainbow where unicorns graze on emerald green fields and a carefree population of politically correct citizens begin each day with a rousing hand-over-their-heart chorus of Kumbaya.
If there’s any fun to be had in contemplating a future with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, it’s what will change should he win a majority government. A major rewind in federal policies is already taking shape. This was foreshadowed ahead of last week’s surprising Supreme Court decision to declare big chunks of the federal Impact Assessment Act to be an...