• Don Newman

The Carney government’s promise to speedily build infrastructure and other projects in the “national interest” per the provisions of the One Canadian Economy Act is running into the predictable opposition and potential delays. The government’s fast-track infrastructure program combines the nationalist appeal of bolstering Canada’s economic and trade infrastructure — ports, transportation, pipelines, hydro, clean energy, critical minerals among others...

• 2025-08-09
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

Two-and-a-half months after a federal election that made him the third consecutive Tory leader in a decade to lose to the Liberals, Pierre Poilievre’s leadership of the Conservative Party is now a numbers game: His vote percentage in a byelection, his support in a 2026 leadership review and his polling numbers at the beginning of next year, ahead of that...

• 2025-07-16
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

The backlash to the news that Canada is in talks with Washington to participate in a space-based missile defence system designed to protect North America is an early warning to the Carney government on how difficult it will be to make substantive changes in a large number of areas promised in the recent election campaign. Prime Minister Mark Carney and...

• 2025-05-23
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

Pierre Poilievre has moved quickly to consolidate his leadership of the Conservative Party in the wake of its disappointing loss in the April 28th general election and his own stunning personal loss of the suburban Ottawa riding of Carleton, which he had held for 20 years. But Poilievre’s placement of faithful lieutenant and former leader Andrew Scheer to lead the...

• 2025-05-08
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

He materializes on the screen like the ghost of elections past. With the federal election days away, the Conservatives consistently trailing the Liberals in the polls, and leader Pierre Poilievre in danger of losing his own Ottawa riding, Stephen Harper has been enlisted to rally the troops. The first appearance by the former prime minister was at a large rally...

• 2025-04-24
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

As the campaign for the April 28th federal election passes the halfway mark, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is surely getting frustrated, and worried. The evidence of that concern came this week when he brought former Prime Minister Stephen Harper to his mammoth Edmonton rally. Usually, big-name party patriarchs are brought out near the end of a campaign to either give...

• 2025-04-10
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

He had most of the money and most of the endorsements and when the votes were tabulated, it turned out he had most of them as well. On March 9th, Mark Carney won the leadership of the federal Liberal Party with 85.9 per cent of the votes cast in a contest with three other candidates to succeed Justin Trudeau. It...

• 2025-03-10
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

After visiting Washington in an unusual detour from a provincial election campaign, Ontario Premier Doug Ford returned to earth at the end of this week, taking a grilling over his record on housing during a leaders’ debate in North Bay, the first of two ahead of the province’s February 27th general election.

• 2025-02-14
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

“We don’t negotiate with bullies.” That was the mantra repeated over the weekend by many Canadian politicians as they unveiled countervailing tariffs on American exports to this country after President Donald Trump announced Saturday that he would impose 25% American tariffs on Canadian and Mexican exports. While the no-negotiation pledge hasn’t been entirely true, the bully blinked, and Trump’s tariffs...

• 2025-02-04
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

Doug Ford has found an excuse for an election. And he has Donald Trump to thank for it. On Friday, Ford announced that he’ll call an election, expected to be held February 27, more than a year and a half before the mandated fixed election date in the fall of 2026. “I’ll be seeing the lieutenant governor on Tuesday. We...

• 2025-01-25
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

The conventional wisdom in Ottawa these days is that Justin Trudeau’s imminent departure as prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party has left Canada in a difficult position as Donald Trump gets ready for his second term as President of the United States. In fact, the opposite may be true. Trudeau’s departure is an opportunity for Canada to both...

• 2025-01-15
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

I first met Jimmy Carter in December 1974, almost 50 years to the day of his death, at 100 years of age, on December 29th. We met in Kansas City, Missouri at a special convention of the Democratic Party. I had just completed my second year in Washington as the first correspondent posted there by CTV. Two years earlier, the...

• 2025-01-03
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

On the day she was supposed to deliver the Fall Economic Statement the Liberals hoped would ignite their comeback leading into an election next year, Chrystia Freeland instead resigned as finance minister and fired a political broadside at the waterline into the already listing ship that is the Trudeau government. In doing so, Freeland ripped the Band-Aid off a festering...

• 2024-12-16
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

The recent results in the Montreal byelection in La Salle-Emard-Verdun where the Liberals lost by fewer than 300 votes to the Bloc Québécois undeniably mean that the government of Justin Trudeau is finished. It was probably finished in June. That’s when the Liberals narrowly lost another byelection. This one in the Toronto riding of St. Paul’s. The ridings are among...

• 2024-09-21
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

One day fourteen years ago, after speaking to what was then called Ryerson University in Toronto, I was walking down a hall packed with students going to their next assignment as classes changed. Everyone, it seemed, was twenty years old except me. Suddenly, a middle-aged woman smiled and waved at me from a classroom doorway. She was a professor, and...

• 2024-04-19
• — Policy Magazine

• Don Newman

There could be an election in Canada in 2024; the possibility is there but it is not likely to happen. Neither the minority Liberal government of Justin Trudeau nor the twenty-six New Democrat MPs who support it on confidence votes in the House of Commons have anything to gain from an early trip to the polls before the mandated election...

• 2024-02-15
• — Policy Magazine