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.
Mark Carney told the premiers in Huntsville, Ont., on Tuesday that the federal government’s new major projects office will be open by Labour Day, representing a shift in attitude towards building big things, the prime minister said, “from ‘why?’ to ‘how?’” The statement expressed a confidence that, as with deceased baseball players in the movie Field of Dreams, “if you...
The prime minister risks becoming the man who fell to earth if the spending reductions are miscalculated
The auditor general’s report is a reminder that they're part of the solution to air security, but Canada also needs a more practical option
Justin Trudeau went to Washington for last year’s NATO summit and unveiled what he called a “credible, verifiable path” to spending two per cent of Canada’s GDP on defence … by 2032. Article content The lack of urgency and ambition was reflected in the then prime minister’s belief that two per cent is a “nominal target” that makes for easy...
Wooing Sikh voters while turning a blind eye to Khalistani sympathizers worked well for Poilievre's party during the election. Conservative party deputy leader Tim Uppal posted on social media on Wednesday morning, urging Sikhs to remember 1984. “Forty one years ago, a pre-planned attack by the Indian army named Operation Blue Star was executed against one of the Sikh’s holiest...
The Main Estimates suggest that the prime minister's message of restraint has fallen on deaf ears in Ottawa
Information manipulation poses the single biggest threat to Canadian democracy, concluded commissioner Marie Josée Hogue, in her final report on foreign interference in federal elections, earlier this year.
There have been concerns about the “presidentialization” of the Canadian prime ministership for years — worries that have been exacerbated by Mark Carney’s tendency to sign Trump-style legislative orders to grant tax cuts.
As the new prime minister reflects with pride on his unsullied cabinet, he should remember the words of P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster: “It’s always when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping.”
A failure to accommodate shifting circumstances is prompting questions inside the party about whether a 45-year-old man can truly change
The prime minister exited the Oval Office, and the most intense experience of his brief political career, with his dignity intact
They could grind down opponents with enough time. But the Liberals moved too quickly to dump Trudeau and install Carney for the plan to work
The Liberals will be disappointed that they fell short of a majority. But everything is relative. Three months ago, they were nearly dead.
'It would be an extremely rash politician who links events in Vancouver to federal government policy'
With two days to go until polling day, Mark Carney was careful not to break into a victory lap. At a campaign event at Seneca College in this commuter community 40 km north of Toronto, Carney was asked to grade his own campaign performance.
Even the latest mini-scandal that broke on Thursday works in his favour, given it concerns a subject he is desperate to talk about. Article content Radio-Canada reported that in Carney’s call with Donald Trump on March 28, the president brought up the issue of Canada becoming the 51st state of the United States. At the time, Carney said Trump had...
Any hopes they had of profiting from the prodigal nature of the Liberal platform disappeared when they released their own costing document
There has been a weightlessness to the Liberal campaign in the past two days, as if their internal polling shows the election is in the bag
Switch voters will likely find the prospect of adding a quarter-trillion dollars to the national debt a haunting prospect
There are probably few areas of Canada where Liberal fortunes have turned as dramatically as they have in Niagara Falls
The impact on the broader election race was a nothingburger: there simply were no flashpoints that would justify anyone shifting their vote
Singh thinks the polls have stabilized enough to make it safe for progressives worried about a Conservative win to 'come home' to the NDP
I’m reading my six-year-old son Lewis Carroll’s classic Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, with all its delightful nonsense talk about shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings.
The broad-based 'Liberation Day' exemption for Canada is good news but the crisis facing our economy remains dire
It takes some gall for an assailant to want gratitude after he stops punching you in the face but anything goes in a general election
Paul Chiang's comments, and Carney's defence of the candidate, are a sign that the Liberal party’s inexplicable attachment to Beijing remains intact
The Conservatives have a month before election day and the benefit of all opposition parties now having Carney squarely in their sights
Instead of a smooth launch to get the campaign rolling, Conservatives found themselves hurtling backwards at pace
It seems unlikely Mark Carney will be able to resist opposing Poilievre's promise to cancel industrial carbon tax mandates
B.C. First Nations claim betrayal, bad-faith bargaining and a propane monopoly that lets a foreign company cap Canada's export potential
His party and most of its senior members will remain the same people who have dragged the country to such a low ebb
This week, John Ivison is joined by veteran pollster, Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, to talk about the unprecedented shift in public opinion in Canada since Justin Trudeau’s resignation announcement in January.
A tightening of the polls is no surprise and might even benefit Conservatives who have become too complacent
Carney will not go on to win an election unless he moves the hearts of men and women
Canada’s commitment to NATO is irrelevant to Trump. Europe doesn't matter to him anymore
The sense that the Liberals need to be consigned to the penalty box remains strong and may be a decisive factor in the coming election
On regulation, taxes, China and so much more, Ford is speaking Republican
Canada’s hold on the Arctic is, in the words of former defence chief Wayne Eyre, 'tenuous' — and it is likely to become more so with Trump in office
We may not have been traditionally considered an adversary, but we are now — and we should reciprocate that sentiment
'The only way out of a mess that is not of our choosing is not only to inflict pain on American consumers and producers, but to let them know who is to blame'
This government’s instinctive reactions have helped to get us into this mess — and are unlikely to get us out of it
As Justin Trudeau gets ready to step out of the spotlight, his oldest son is poised to step into it, albeit not on the political stage. Xavier James Trudeau is releasing a debut original R&B song on Feb. 21, and the 17-year-old teased a snippet of what listeners can expect from his musical stylings in an Instagram post over the...
There are legitimate concerns about Guilbeault’s influence on Carney’s policies on energy and growth
Mark Carney will oppose the carbon tax and oil and gas emissions cap, while hoping to turn his elitist experience from a negative to a positive
Everyone knows the 'business as usual' directive is an illusion: the Liberals know it, the opposition knows it and, most importantly in this case, so does the public service
Critics have often accused me of having my head in the clouds, if not somewhere darker and more malodorous. But I was literally in a cloud forest, sitting in a volcanic hot spring, when Justin Trudeau announced his resignation last Monday.
Western democracy has weathered severe tests in the past, from fascism to Bolshevism. The United States, though often late to the game, was generally on the side of open markets, self-determination and the rule of law. But Donald Trump’s extraordinary statement on January 7th — that he could not rule out the use of force to annex Greenland and the...
The week in politics has been defined by a series of momentous events but Friday’s lame duck cabinet appointment process was not one of them.
Who saw Chrystia Freeland pulling a gun, after Justin Trudeau unsheathed a knife? The finance minister is an unlikely champion of the Chicago Way, but she has just pulled off a coup that may end up toppling this government. Just hours before she was due to give her fall economic statement, she quit.
Cancelling the PMO's questionable giveaway may be a victory of sorts for Freeland. If you are one of the nearly 19 million working Canadians expecting to receive a $250 cheque from the Liberal government in the new year, don’t spend the money just yet.
Trudeau has undermined the idea of citizenship that held us together, with its sense of obligation, sacrifice and collective mission
On the day that Vladimir Putin said NATO members are now directly involved in the war in Ukraine because they have supplied missiles being used to bomb Russia, Justin Trudeau was announcing a yuletide $6.3-billion GST holiday on Christmas trees, beer and popcorn. Canada, remember, is the country that can’t afford to hit its NATO spending target of two per...
Western democracies are not pushing back on violent Muslims who seek to dismantle our way of life, says author Yasmine Mohammed, who broke away from the religion
Trudeau doesn’t have many options left. He might be tempted to use Trump as an insult against Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre
I don’t know what it’s like to be part of a political team — as former Maclean’s columnist Allan Fotheringham once said, any journalist who wants to become a politician is like a jockey who wants to become a horse.
Canada must convince India that it is prepared to counter Khalistani extremism on its soil