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 John Ivison.
Watching the governor of the Bank of Canada field questions from MPs at the House of Commons finance committee was like viewing an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation, in which Jean-Luc Picard grapples with the Prime Directive. This general order prohibits Starfleet personnel from interfering with the natural development of primitive alien civilizations.
Winston Churchill once said that history would be kind to him because he intended to write it. And he did, producing 13 volumes of memoirs over the course of his long life. More than a decade after leaving the Prime Minister’s Office, Stephen Harper’s memoirs have finally landed with a thump — all 656 pages of them.
I am not, it should be acknowledged, an expert on the merits of frontier AI models. I am, however, a reasonably seasoned observer of government ministers proclaiming solemnly that they have just made a very prudent investment of taxpayers’ money, on the most favourable of terms, as AI minister Evan Solomon did this past weekend. Sometimes it works out: the...
Similar levels of support launched secessionist parties in Quebec and Scotland decades ago, and both are in power today
Intelligence agencies have reportedly warned that Moscow is upping preparations to assassinate leaders of companies supplying drones to Ukraine
The Supreme Court’s coming ruling has the potential to reignite separatism and quake the teetering balance between courts and government
More than merely the loss of an able, fair-minded MP, it looks like the Conservative party's reach is ebbing
This is probably as good as it gets for Mark Carney, if the curse of Rolling Stone holds true. The prime minister was lauded for his “genius-level instincts” in a recent profile in the magazine, under the headline: “How Mark Carney Became Leader of the Free World by Standing Up to Trump.”
The Conservative party is a “fractured mess,” according to one caucus member who volunteered the opinion to a CTV reporter Wednesday. Article content Few people (with the possible exception of leader Pierre Poilievre) will have been more distressed by the sense of incipient rebellion than Mark Carney’s political advisers.
Mark Carney’s pitch to over 100 institutional investors from 11 countries, responsible for over $70 trillion, in Toronto this week is that Canada is open for business. Article content The early signs from the Canada Investment Summit are that the Prime Minister is on track to raise $1 trillion in new spending commitments over the next five years. Eight Canadian...
There’s no doubt that Prime Minister Mark Carney is a man in a hurry. During Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit this week, the Ukrainian president revealed that his drone team said a partnership deal could be concluded with Canada within 90 days.
The AfD victory in Germany is no isolated case. Canada should dedicate resources to coming up with off-ramps and make a deal with the U.S. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “forward guidance” videos have proven adept at fostering populist tactics in the services of mainstream politics. Voters across the western world have been drawn to conspiracy theories and demagogues because they...
In the 2025 general election, the Conservatives won 41.31 per cent of the vote. In the seven byelections since then, the party has averaged just 24.6 per cent support — and that includes leader Pierre Poilievre’s whopping 80.86 per cent win in Battle River—Crowfoot. Article content Politicians can dismiss polls as being a snapshot in time. The Conservative leader may...
It’ll be over by Christmas. Article content It wasn’t true in 1914, but the trade war with the United States had better be resolved by the end of this year.
Ottawa backtracked on U.S. fish counter-tariffs this week after the Canadian seafood industry privately raised stink
The main business of Canadian foreign policy for nearly 160 years has been to remain friendly with the United States, while maintaining a measure of self-respect. According to Prime Minister Mark Carney, last minute changes to the prospective Canada-U.S. deal meant that his government couldn’t sign on and still retain its conception of itself as a proud, independent country.
Thus ends, it seems, the most pointless standoff since the great Pig War of 1839, when an American farmer on San Juan island shot a British-owned black boar rooting in his potato patch (tensions escalated but the only casualty remained the pig).
The most important thing happening in Canada this week is not the threat of 50 per cent tariffs on US$20 billion of this country's products by President Donald Trump. Rather, according to Prime Minister Mark Carney, the most consequential event was Monday's announcement in St. John's, N.L., of a multi-billion-dollar clean energy deal with Quebec that will see a tripling...
Canada-U.S. trade minister Dominic LeBlanc was due to brief his provincial counterparts on Friday about progress on trade negotiations with Washington, ahead of the imposition of new tariffs next week. It probably won’t take him long.
Canada’s defence minister was asked on Monday whether the United States would be given preferential treatment in the purchase of military equipment, as part of any comprehensive trade agreement with the Trump administration. Article content David McGuinty is too grey in the temple to answer such a hypothetical question, and responded that because he is not at the negotiating table...
For many years, Elbridge Colby has been one of the loudest voices in Washington calling for America’s NATO allies to pay their “fair share” on defence, in order to allow the United States to pivot toward the growing challenge of China.
One observer said on CUSMA, Canada has to propose something that allows Trump to take the credit ‘without doing something that’s bad’
Real life does not follow the binary framework of the movies, where a Bond-like hero vanquishes a grandiose, arrogant, greedy villain
The Prime Minister's grand bargain is just intentions for now. But it's harder for Alberta’s separatists to say he's trying to hobble their industry.
Just over two years ago, the Liberal government released its defence policy review, Our North, Strong and Free, which purported to focus on Arctic sovereignty by defending Canada’s coastline from maritime and airborne threats.
In the 2015 British election, the Labour party campaign team underlined their commitment to keeping their promises by literally carving them in stone. Article content When the leader, the hapless Ed Miliband, showed up to unveil the eight-foot-tall limestone slab, he turned to his spin doctor and said: “Bob, doesn’t it look a bit like a gravestone?”
Nobody could accuse Mark Carney of lacking intellectual suppleness. A week after enthusiastically endorsing the federal government’s involvement in moves to buy and convert up to 2,500 Vancouver condos that developers can’t unload, on Thursday the prime minister downplayed Ottawa’s role in the scheme. Article content At a press conference to mark the end of the parliamentary session, Carney said...
In economics, the concept of “moral hazard” describes a situation where an individual or institution is more likely to take reckless risks because they do not bear the negative consequences of those risks. It is an idea with which Prime Minister Mark Carney is very familiar, having been a vocal critic of the claim that banks were “too big to...
British prime ministers have for the past 65 years had their public image satirized in Private Eye magazine, an often-unflattering pastiche that generally finds its way into the mainstream culture. From the outset of his time in No. 10 Downing Street, Keir Starmer — who on Monday announced plans to resign — was portrayed as a dull, indecisive, overly cautious...
The Cannabis Council of Canada has announced it is suspending its advocacy operation, apparently because its member companies have given up hope that the federal government is prepared to listen to them. In a letter to Finance Minister François Philippe Champagne that foreshadowed this week's announcement, outgoing council president Paul McCarthy said the country's licensed cannabis producers have lost confidence...
The lesson is the welfare-vs-warfare debate is an irrelevancy and western societies need to be more resilient in an age of rising threats
Pete Hoekstra is not quite in the super league of undiplomatic diplomats. Before he was British foreign minister, Boris Johnson once offended the entire nation of Papua New Guinea by linking it to cannibalism. But the current U.S. ambassador can claim the rare accomplishment of uniting Canadians coast to coast in their animosity toward him.
The daily question period in the House of Commons generally subtracts from the sum of human knowledge, and Tuesday’s episode was an absolute belter in terms of confusing anyone watching. It kicked off with Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre calling the “phantom” high-speed railway between Quebec City and Toronto “a boondoggle.” This from the Conservative party that has called on the...
When Avi Lewis was elected leader of the New Democratic Party just over two months ago, he issued a boast that was almost Trumpian in its braggadocio. "Canada, mark your calendar. The NDP comeback starts now," he said. But it turns out, he was right. A Liaison Strategies poll released on Monday had NDP support at 15 per cent, with...
Jim Dinning tells the Post’s John Ivison why he is sympathetic to Premier Danielle Smith’s push to give separatists the chance to express their strongly held sentiments in a referendum
In the course of researching my biography on Irwin Cotler, I spoke with his old McGill debating partner, Moses Znaimer, the CityTV and MuchMusic founder. In typically unfiltered Znaimer fashion he wondered aloud what the former Liberal party justice minister thought about his old party, “which betrayed the Jewish community, in favour of the huge Muslim influx, of which they...
The first promise made by the federal Liberals in their last election platform — literally — was to unite the country by building one economy, so that Canadians can work wherever they want and goods can move freely from coast to coast. “Unleashing free trade” would “give ourselves much more than any foreign government, including the U.S., can ever take...
As the Western premiers pulled on Team Canada soccer jerseys at the close of their meeting in Kananaskis on Tuesday, some kind of barbed comment was inevitable. Wab Kinew obliged. “I just want to tell Premier (Danielle) Smith, that she looks great in a Team Canada jersey,” the Manitoba premier said, pointedly. As host of the conference, Smith may have...
If our troops are fighting in Latvia, or if Ottawa fails to renew CUSMA, a more North American policy could gain favour with voters
Mark Carney was asked Monday about his role in the forthcoming Alberta referendum campaign and the response was reassuring. The prime minister wasn’t exactly Henry V at Agincourt on St. Crispin’s Day, rallying his outnumbered troops in a call to arms. But he is a veteran of these campaigns from his time in the United Kingdom during the Brexit and...
An extraordinary exchange with potentially dramatic consequences for Canada took place at the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday. Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s potato-faced permanent representative at the UN, told the council that his country’s intelligence agency believes Latvia is deploying Ukrainian drones on its territory, with the intention of attacking Moscow. “Membership of NATO will not protect you from just...
The moment when Canada moved from Britain’s orbit into America’s can be dated precisely to Aug. 17, 1940. That was the day when Canadian prime minister William Mackenzie King and U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Ogdensburg Agreement that defined the principle of the joint defence of North America
Building at speeds not seen in generations, as per Mark Carney’s oft-repeated election pledge, has been less hypersonic than the prime minister might have wished. As the new parliamentary budget officer pointed out last week in an analysis of the spring fiscal update, only two of 15 projects being overseen by Carney’s Major Projects Office are actually under construction, and...
Pierre Poilievre’s speech to the conservative Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Ottawa on Thursday was a perfectly acceptable Opposition leader’s address. Modestly delivered and modestly received, it had much to be modest about. The problem was, it sounded like a reheated version of one of his speeches from last year’s election, a campaign in which he was rejected...
It must have been tempting for Prime Minister Mark Carney to appoint an absolute blockhead as the new parliamentary budget officer. Instead, in Annette Ryan, he has installed a 30-year public service veteran with Finance Department experience who has probably seen it all when it comes to juggling the numbers and concealing errors.
Like hungry wolves, opposition MPs look to isolate and target the weakest, the most awkward or the most bumbling in the ministerial herd. The Conservatives are currently launching coordinated attacks on Lena Diab, the immigration minister. In an unsentimental social media post, the party’s immigration critic, Michelle Rempel Garner, called for the minister to be fired , after her department...
A pessimist could construe Donald Trump’s warning about American troop reductions in Germany as a less brazen modern equivalent to the non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. The U.S. president is involved in a spat with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over his conduct in the war with Iran and has said the Pentagon is...
It is a time-honoured parliamentary tradition for finance ministers to congratulate themselves on making more progress than can possibly be justified by the facts. François-Philippe Champagne was no exception, as he presented his government’s spring fiscal update in the House of Commons on Tuesday. He said his government is spending less, so that it can invest more, and added that...
Nothing is likely to shore up Conservative esprit de corps like the sight of Patty Hajdu rising in the House of Commons and accusing the Official Opposition of being “against Canada.”
Sovereign wealth funds are typically established by countries to manage their surplus wealth. Canada has just established the Canada Strong Fund — this country’s first national sovereign wealth fund — despite being deeply in the red. In short, there is no surplus wealth to manage.
Jim Balsillie said Canada was ‘hijacked’ last time around and is likely to be further disadvantaged in the pending negotiations
Former prime minister Brian Mulroney once levelled the bizarre charge that the first thing then NDP leader Ed Broadbent would do if elected to replace him would be to nationalize high-end menswear retailer Harry Rosen. It was a personal shot at Broadbent, who was renowned for his ill-fitting brown tweed jackets, but also a reminder to voters that elements within...
Was the timing of Mark Carney’s feel-good “fireside chat” video released Sunday mere coincidence, landing as it did the day before concerning inflation numbers? Or was it a deliberate calculation to point out that Canadian fur traders were all over the northern plains before the Americans had left St. Louis, a day ahead of confirmation that consumers are now paying...
The global expansion of the illiberal right has been so seemingly inexorable that the victory of a democratic centre-right leader in Hungary, after 16 years of “electoral autocracy,” still seems implausible.
The news that Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu is crossing the floor to join the Liberal caucus, effectively guaranteeing Prime Minister Mark Carney a parliamentary majority, has not been hailed universally by her constituents. “She thinks she knows better than her voters?” said one resident of Sarnia–Lambton–Bkejwanong on social media. “What is the flipping point? You wonder why people get radicalized...
Jamieson Greer stands like Mount Olympus above the intellectual molehills of his cabinet-level colleagues, to such an extent that one worries for his welfare in the Trump administration. The U.S. Trade Representative spoke at the Hudson Institute think tank on Tuesday, and such was his coherence it was almost possible to set aside that his boss had just threatened to...
Canada’s finance minister was in Beijing late last week looking to deepen financial sector ties with China. Francois-Philippe Champagne said he was building on the strategic partnership deal signed between Prime Minister Mark Carney and Chinese President Xi Jinping “with eyes wide open.”
Just as turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, it would be unreasonable to expect Canada’s chicken farmers to elect for more open trade with the world’s major poultry exporter. The chicken sector is, after all, one of this country’s supply-managed industries. It’s protected from most foreign competition, ostensibly in the name of domestic food security but also, whisper it, to ensure...
Manitoba has just become the first jurisdiction in Canada to introduce legislation that would make it an unfair practice for suppliers to charge higher prices based on algorithmic pricing. Bill 49 is aimed at preventing retailers from using personal data, such as purchasing history, to set higher individualized prices. Vass Bednar, managing director of the Canadian Shield Institute, which promotes...
President Donald Trump’s late-night musing about Venezuela potentially becoming the 51st state was likely well received in the Prime Minister’s Office. It suggests that Mark Carney’s speech in Davos — widely viewed as standing up to the bully president — has persuaded Trump to move on and find an easier target than Canada or Greenland. That may be temporary, of...