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 Joe Oliver.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has confronted two critical but unrelated challenges with performative techniques that have been greeted with understandable skepticism by the two target audiences. In both cases — the need to build infrastructure to transport oil to tidewater and on to overseas markets and the failure to counter the worst antisemitism since the Second World War — Carney...
The Liberals' $25-billion 'sovereign wealth fund' proves Mark Carney thinks governments should allocate Canada's capital
President Donald Trump's spectacular extraction of narco-dictator Nicolás Maduro doubtless terrified other American foes, including the mad mullahs of Tehran. It will have dramatic geopolitical consequences if it hastens the departure of the Iranian theocrats who have supported international terrorism and brutalized their long-suffering people...
Though superficially promising, last month’s “memorandum of understanding” between Alberta and Ottawa is in fact restrictive and self-contradictory, leaving the over-arching economic and strategic question of Canada’s future energy development mired in uncertainty. Questionable support for pipelines from the prime minister and his energy minister, obstructive laws and regulations, and at least implied vetoes for the provinces and Indigenous communities...
As summer winds down, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s approval rating is running around 60 per cent, still in honeymoon territory. If an election were held today, Canada338 estimates his Liberals would win a comfortable majority of 191 seats — 22 more than they won in April’s federal election. But it is hard to see how public confidence in him and...
Prime Minister Mark Carney feebly capitulated to President Donald Trump on Sunday night by rescinding Monday’s scheduled imposition of a retroactive digital services tax (DST) just two days after Trump suspended trade talks with Canada over the DST and promised to hit us with more tariffs in response. This humiliating public surrender would not have happened if the government had...
What a Trudeauesque beginning to the Liberals’ fourth consecutive term — theatre, false starts, evasion and unaccountability, but absent the sunny ways! The technocrat’s prologue risks rivalling the drama teacher’s denouement.
This election produced a startling result. After a decade of failure by a government that historians will likely give low marks to on virtually every relevant measure, the electorate decided it deserved a fourth term. There were two main reasons, both dubious: first, its terminally unpopular leader and prime minister was replaced by a charisma-free technocrat, who promised to somehow...
Canada cannot afford four more years of Trudeau-style progressivism that pursues net zero and produces zero growth
In Mark Carney’s first month as Liberal leader and prime minister, a picture has emerged of who he is: a technocratic version of Justin Trudeau, without the charisma, great hair or ability to communicate comfortably in French, but with many of his banished predecessor’s other personality characteristics and policy propensities.
All elections are consequential. But the one just called will be more consequential than most. At a time of self-inflicted economic decline and social weakness, we find ourselves in a trade war with the Americans, who until now have bought 80 per cent of our exports.
No good deed goes unpunished, but the Liberals are hoping bad deeds will be forgotten. Thus their leadership candidates are running against their own party’s record. For that to work, they’ll have to convince Canadians not to believe their lying eyes.
Let's have an election then clear away trade irritants, the border, defence, supply management, that are own-goals
In his inaugural address, U.S. President Donald Trump declared that he would overhaul the American trade system and establish an External Revenue Service to collect “massive” tariffs, duties and other revenue. Later that day, he said he was considering imposing tariffs on Canada and Mexico on Feb. 1. Canada is targeted for political, economic and ideological reasons, some defensible, others...
When Pierre Poilievre becomes prime minister, as still seems all but certain even after Justin Trudeau’s exit, he will face acute economic problems: out-of-control spending, massive deficits, ballooning debt and crushing interest obligations, as well as insipid productivity and lagging growth in real GDP per capita. He will need — we will need — faster income growth but without raising...
Escape from Justin Trudeau's record will be hard. Beyond that the Liberals need to move to the centre, where most Canadians are
For someone used to getting his own way for most of his life, public hostility, repeated failure and relentless bad news must be terribly trying for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. His government began in 2015 with high hopes and widespread good wishes. Now that it is all coming crashing down, he refuses to accept blame and either change course or...
In an egregious instance of malign virtue signalling, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated that because of “who we are as Canadians” he would “abide by” a blatantly political decision of the discredited International Criminal Court (ICC) to enforce arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, as well Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif, who...
Among the myriad problems Justin Trudeau is confronting, two have an immediacy that must be especially troubling. One is political, the other economic.
Last week, columnist Kimberley Strassel wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Democratic Party’s central problem is, not Joe Biden’s deteriorating cognition, but its policies. The very same day, our own Prime Minister’s Office criticized Deputy PM and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland for poor economic messaging, a stunning public rebuke of the second most important person in the...
President Joe Biden’s debate debacle laid bare a disgraceful willingness to deliberately mislead the public about a subject of geopolitical significance — the failing mental capacity of the world’s most powerful person. Perpetrators of this reckless disinformation campaign include the Biden family, White House staff, Democratic members of Congress, senior Democratic Party spokespeople and the progressive mainstream media.
Antisemitism has imposed a pervasive and pernicious double standard on the Jewish people for thousands of years, rampant during periods of extreme persecution but less overt during in periods of enlightenment, but always lurking in the swamp of human malevolence. Since 1948, that double standard extended to Israel with varying intensity. After the October 7 massacre by Hamas, it exploded...
In a much-remarked-on recent column — “The case for Trump — by someone who wants him to lose” — Bret Stephens of The New York Times gave U.S. Democrats a wake-up call: “You can’t defeat an opponent if you refuse to understand what makes him formidable.” Let me provide the same wake-up call to Canadian Liberals about Pierre Poilievre —...
The year just beginning could be a watershed, with turning points in politics, economics and culture, provided common sense and moral clarity prevail both here and abroad.
The appalling Congressional testimony from the presidents of three elite U.S. universities offered an alarming revelation of institutional rot in higher education. The putrefaction is far ranging, extending to an eruption of antisemitism on campus and beyond and the weakening of core societal values, which are sapping the moral strength of western democracies.