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 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...
For an action-oriented new government about to reinvent the Canadian economy, find new trade and defence partners and withstand the onslaught of President Donald Trump and his tariffs and territorial ambitions, this week was not an auspicious beginning. Instead of appearing as a crack, recently elected team of men and women ready to redefine Canada, the first meeting of Prime...
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...
Mark Carney told Canadians that his career as a central banker dealing with international financial crises had made him into a skilled negotiator. It was the argument he used to convince as many Canadians as possible that he was and is the man to deal with an unpredictable, unreliable, aggressive, and often uncontrollable President Donald Trump. Trump has slapped tariffs...
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...
As we enter the 10-day homestretch of Canada’s most important election campaign in generations, many voters will be spending this long Easter weekend either casting their ballots in advance polls across the country or taking a last look at the very different candidates. This week provided a crucial window on those candidates, especially the two top rivals, Prime Minister Mark...
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...
With an election call expected this Sunday, the Conservatives have devised a way they hope will increase Pierre Poilievre’s chances against Mark Carney. It is a strategy Conservatives have tried before, and now they are trying it again. Two months ago, Poilievre had every reason to be brashly confident that he would easily win the next election. But now, there...
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...
While Donald Trump’s disruption act has sown undeniable geopolitical discord, economic upheaval and political chaos, it has had had different impacts on Canadian premiers, depending on a range of factors from geography to ideology to temperament. In Doug Ford’s case, it possessed him to call a $190 million snap election that dropped him back in pretty much the same spot...
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.
“Never let a good crisis go to waste,” Winston Churchill quipped during the Second World War. Now, it is time for Canadians to remember and repeat it. We are almost one week into the 30-day pause President Donald Trump agreed to on the 25% tariffs he has threatened on all Canadian exports to the United States except energy, to be...
“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...
Pierre Poilievre wants to remain in the dark. At least that’s what he’s doing by continuing to refuse the top-secret security clearance required to read classified government documents. His latest refusal came this week after the tabling of the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions by Commissioner Justice Marie-Josee Hogue. In realtive terms, Justice...
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...
The race for the Liberal leadership and contest to be the next prime Minister of Canada is down to two serious candidates with a chance of winning and the defining issue that will determine the outcome is clear. It is no big surprise that despite other entrants the only people with a chance of emerging victorious when the votes are...
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...
Justin Trudeau has now announced that he will step down as leader of the federal Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Canada once the party picks his successor. As readers of this column may recall, the scenario we now face was forecast in my December column, Bracing for a Foggy Political Holiday Season. That fog, for the moment, has lifted...
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...
Pierre Poilievre says he wants something he knows will not be granted. Jagmeet Singh says he will do something but doesn’t say when. And Justin Trudeau says nothing, but has no plans to step down over Christmas. In other words, it’s going to be a foggy political holiday season. That is what Canadians — including an update-starved media — are...
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...
While Santa is busy making his naughty and nice list, Justin Trudeau should be compiling one of his own – the list of US exports headed for Canada that will be hit with retaliatory tariffs if Donald Trump delivers on the first tariff threat of his second administration. That is what the Canadian Government should be doing as we prepare...
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...
For his sake, I hope federal New Democratic Leader Jagmeet Singh doesn’t receive a letter from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre telling him he should jump off the Peace Tower to see if he can fly. Because based on the evidence, he might just try and do it. Singh announced Wednesday that he is terminating the Supply and Confidence Agreement between...
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...
The death of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on February 29th marked the passing of an era. It also marked the passing of a dream. In Mulroney’s era in domestic and international leadership, politics was a more civil affair, when hard fought election campaigns, bitter debates and cantankerous Question Periods were conducted with at least a modicum of civility between...
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...