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 Justin Ling.
Mark Carney’s latest Euro trip is something of a love-in — a cheery celebration among pals looking for new ways to strengthen their friendship. But the prime minister’s charm offensive at the European Parliament in Strasbourg should be merely the opening move in a larger mission. Carney needs to be a bringer of bad tidings to the Continent: We were...
Five years ago, Meta banned U.S. President Donald Trump from both Facebook and Instagram. Trump had led a violent coup attempt in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, and Big Tech tried to show some moxie by deplatforming him. How times have changed: last year, Meta settled a lawsuit filed by the president, agreeing to pay him $25 million. Now the...
President Donald Trump has returned to his favourite talking point, in another all-caps message on social media: “WE DON’T NEED CANADA.” On Monday, Prime Minister Mark Carney snorted as he took aim at that line. “It’s not true,” he said. “We’re the energy producers. We provide the critical minerals. We provide the key elements of our automobile supply chain.”...
When U.S. Brigadier-General Winfield Scott stepped off his rowboat, brandishing his sword, he hoped to set foot on land that would soon become American. Instead, he misjudged the depth of the Niagara River and promptly sank into the mud and silt. His men pulled the hapless general out of the river, but the invasion would only go south from there...
Mark Carney just flipped the ”ON” switch for a new kind of electric federalism. On Monday, the prime minister jetted out to St. John’s, N.L., to join in the signing of a long-awaited energy agreement between Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec. More than merely settle a protracted jurisdictional dispute, Carney and the two premiers unveiled plans for a major new...
In the name of placating President Donald Trump and his band of oligarchs, the Canadian government may be getting set to kill its last-remaining bit of Big Tech regulation. I’m told, by sources not authorized to speak on the record, that Ottawa has briefed publishers to be ready for the death of the Online News Act. It would be just...
There is no end to Canada’s betrayal of America, according to Peter Navarro. U.S. President Donald Trump’s longtime trade guru has been cheering on America’s economic war against the world. And he has a special obsession with Canada.
The going rate to organize a string of attacks on synagogues and Jewish community centres is a measly US$10,000: a third up front, the rest after the terror has been inflicted. We have evidence not only that such a cash-for-terror campaign has hit Canada, but also that it’s being financed by Iran.
FoodNet is one of those programs you never hear about until something goes terribly wrong. Things in the United States have, in more ways than one, gone terribly wrong. This time, it’s an outbreak of Cyclospora, a parasite that causes bouts of explosive diarrhea — the kind of parasite FoodNet was set up to surveil and prevent.
In 1982, a scrappy little comedy festival began in Montreal. In a matter of years, it would become a cultural juggernaut: the world’s largest comedy festival and a series of TV shows seen around the globe. Just For Laughs was a Canadian success story. Then everything went wrong: Its founder was charged with sexual assault, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, then...
There is a war against Western civilization, the White House says. And it is being waged from the Caribbean, on a tiny island the United States has tried to conquer for more than a half-century. Cuba, bastion of communism, has established a global network of revolutionaries, terrorists and political agents meant to overthrow capitalism, says the U.S. And you can...
A century ago on New Year’s Day, a massive billboard went up over a central London Underground station. It displayed a map flipped on its side, with Britain at the centre of world. Lines radiated from the island, connecting it with the far-reaching British Empire. “Buy Empire goods from home and overseas,” the advertisement read.
A global coalition of middle powers, led by Canada, is little more than “hubbub,” says a senior Trump administration official. The United States, he says, has never been more necessary or relevant. “We are not concerned,” wrote Under Secretary of Defense Eldridge Colby on social media this week, that a middle-power alliance capable of rivalling America “is a serious possibility.”...
Everybody knows Pierre Poilievre has a favourite adviser, whose counsel and wisdom he values above all. That adviser’s name: Pierre Poilievre. Where once it was the Conservatives’ greatest asset, however, Poilievre’s love affair with Poilievre has become a liability according to some Tories, and morale within the party has sagged to new depths.
There are plenty of ways to celebrate America’s ongoing semiquincentennial: see a fight on the White House lawn, watch the World Cup in the shadow of the Capitol, visit a Great American State Fair on the National Mall. However they celebrate, Americans will likely see banners advertising Freedom250, a private vehicle for outright corruption cooked up by President Donald Trump...
Israel’s right to defend itself “does not grant us the right to oppress others,” the Israeli newspaper Haaretz once warned in an editorial. Seizing new land requires ruling that land, and rule without representation brings resistance. In turn, it continued, “resistance brings in its wake oppression. Oppression brings in its wake terrorism and counterterrorism.”
It’s been nearly 160 years, and we’ve yet to fully figure out what it means to be Canadian. Just flip back through the archives of this paper and you’ll find a history of hand-wringing about that fact. The constant pull from south of the border, a Star editorial argued in 1976, “requires an answer to reinforce Canada’s will for cultural...
Six years ago, Mark Carney set out to discover his own grand unified theory of everything — or, at least, of why houses became so expensive. Then the governor of the Bank of England, Carney thought there could be a way to align government and bank policy which, borrowing a phrase from Sir Isaac Newton, would “protect the economy from...
Mark Carney says Donald Trump’s peace deal with Iran is a “game changer.” If that game is Risk, then the U.S. president just rolled snake eyes, announced he didn’t want to play anymore and began eating some of the plastic soldiers. I remain perplexed as to why our prime minister continues to commend a war that has always been an...
The Conservative party wants you to picture lineups around the block for Canada’s overwhelmed food banks. To help, they’ve used AI to generate a false scene. Rather than appreciate the helpful visuals, we should make clear: This sucks.
“Do you thank your AI?” It’s a question I’ve heard asked more than once in recent weeks. It’s not just Canadian politeness: The trend of users trading niceties with their chatbot has become so prevalent that OpenAI oligarch Sam Altman has asked users to stop, as it’s wasting compute power.
As Alberta careens toward a bedevilling referendum this fall, Team Canada finds itself in desperate need of a captain. Premier Danielle Smith got us into this mess, so it shouldn’t be her. Provincial NDP leader Naheed Nenshi, an unimpressive adversary of the premier’s thus far, would be an uninspired choice.
Imagine, if you will, an Alberta of endless opportunities. The landscape glistens with a thousand shiny new data centres, each of them furiously mining bitcoin. The Alberta Provincial Police patrol the highways. Go 300km in either direction, and the poor citizens of Canada are living in globalist tyranny. This is Danielle Smith’s Alberta.
Ottawa’s second crack at passing its big lawful access bill is going much worse than its first one did. Assailed by privacy advocates, Big Tech and bigwig Republicans in the United States, the Carney government faces a tough slog in trying to modernize the legal tools cops and spies use to do their jobs in the digital era. This is...
The time is coming for Prime Minister Mark Carney to overhaul his cabinet, and everyone in Ottawa has some idea how he might do it. Picking a cabinet is an increasingly difficult task. Prime ministers must ensure various regions, languages, identities, genders, loyalties and competencies are represented fairly. You need politicos, communicators and managers, and you need to instil the...
You wouldn’t know it, from their usual delusional bluster, but Donald Trump’s team is starting to panic. And perhaps they should. The president’s popularity is plummeting. One clear reason: the economic revolution he promised has turned into a catastrophe.
When Mark Carney skated over to the TV cameras at an ice rink in Ottawa this month, he introduced his hockey buddy Alexander Stubb to Canadians as “the man, the myth, the legend” and the prime minister’s “No. 1 draft choice.” Carney isn’t putting together a beer league, nor is he trying out for the Ottawa Charge, whose practice he...
“Unity,” said Mark Carney last weekend, “does not require uniformity.” Accommodation beats assimilation, the prime minister told the Liberal faithful at the party’s convention in Montreal — and partnership is better than domination.
The whiff of corruption hangs over Queen’s Park. We can smell it thanks to Ontario’s freedom-of-information system. It’s this system that has exposed the Ford government to the harsh light of scrutiny and revealed all manner of meddling and shady dealings. Perhaps annoyed at having been caught in flagrante delicto so many times, Premier Doug Ford now wants to dismantle...
If you want to know what Alberta Premier Danielle Smith really believes, you have to listen to her when she’s amongst her fellow travellers. We were afforded that opportunity last weekend, when Smith graced the Cornerstone Forum, a confab of conspiratorial alternative media personalities, with her presence. There, she echoed suspicions that Ottawa is preparing to round up pastors for...
Imagine a Canada ruled by a “mini-Trump.” It’s not so implausible, lawyer Frédéric Bérard told the Supreme Court last week. Western nations are teeming with clones of the American president these days. If such an illiberal leader were to come here, Bérard argued, we would simply have to hope that our politicians do the right thing...
Pierre Poilievre’s interview with podcast giant Joe Rogan began on-theme, with the Conservative party leader gifting the skeptical-yet-gullible interviewer with a red maple leaf emblazoned 70-pound kettlebell, and stayed in the zone for the next two-and-a-half hours. The marathon chat managed to broach policy, personality, and puffery, sometimes simultaneously. And it was, if not particularly enlightening, fairly endearing. And equally...
We live in a world of chatbots. The economic and social promise of large language models has driven the Western world into an AI mania that’s driving our stock markets and leading to massive investments in data centres and energy infrastructure. Yet we still don’t really know how AI works — nor the very real impacts it can have on...
More than two decades ago, the United States invited Canada to join in a new Middle Eastern misadventure. The invitation was premised on a big lie about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien declined to participate. It’s not that he foresaw the disaster to come — but he had a team of good advisers, as...
In Iran, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have opted to play regime change roulette. They are wagering with the lives of civilians in Iran, Israel, and the Gulf countries. They risk embroiling American and Israeli forces into yet another forever war, a military operation with no clear objectives and no way to truly win. And they do so with no...
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday issued a rare rebuke against a White House that has otherwise seemed unbound by law, nixing Donald Trump’s tariffs via statement of fact: “The President enjoys no inherent authority to impose tariffs during peacetime.” Revel in this rare bit of good news, Canada — but not for too long. This, for Trump, is a...
As he looks to rebuild Canada’s military, Prime Minister Mark Carney has surely been thinking of C.D. Howe. Howe became William Lyon Mackenzie King’s “minister of everything” at the outset of the Second World War, when “few thought of Canada as an industrial power,” as he later wrote. He believed not only that Canada could industrialize but also that the...
Canada has a big, beautiful piece of infrastructure we think you might be interested in. It’s a tremendous, wonderful bridge, and it’s already been paid for — you only have to take the credit. And just because it’s you, because you’re such a clever and strong president, we named it for the best right-winger the Detroit Red Wings ever had...
The mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge is the kind of tragedy that Canada, unfortunately, has seen too often in recent decades. It will take some time to fully understand how this horror occurred. But we know the results. Nine people are dead: A mother, an educator, six children, and the shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar.
A rogue ambassador to the United States, a new office in Washington for the “Commonwealth of Alberta,” another Mark Carney world tour: we’re just over a month into 2026, and already Canadian diplomacy is headed madly off in all directions. Let’s start with Conservative MP Jamil Jivani, who last week heeded a call that apparently he alone could hear and...
For decades, Canada has been using a secret, expansive, junk-ridden database of suspected terrorists, operated by the United States government. Known as Tipoff U.S./Canada — or TUSCAN — it serves as a form of no-fly list. Only this one is easier to be added to and harder to get removed from.
Melos was, stuck firmly between two empires, an island of quiet stability. The Persian empire had been booted out of the territory around the Aegean Sea, which left just the Athenian Empire and Sparta cohabitating along the archipelago and island chains. While both powers were rivals, each commanding loyalty from a network of city-states, they maintained a parity and cooperation...
For a time, it was Kimberly Prost’s job to make sure only real terrorists appeared on the international sanctions list. Being on this list means being cut off from much of the global financial system and barred from much of the Western world. If you found yourself on such a list in error two decades ago — improperly accused of...
It was a tale of two speeches. Prime Minister Mark Carney quoted Greek historian Thucydides, cited Czech democratic hero Václav Havel and outlined how the old systems of the liberal order were over.
Quebec Premier François Legault resigned on Wednesday, leaving an unholy mess in his wake. Now, with the province’s largest parties leaderless, it looks like a fait accompli that the Parti Québécois will win the 2026 election — steering Canada toward a third referendum on Quebec independence.
In December 2022, a parliamentary committee launched an investigation into “tech giants’ current and ongoing use of intimidation and subversion tactics to evade regulation in Canada and around the world.” Meta, the tech giant, took that personally.
The Donroe Doctrine has been put into action and the United States has re-entered the business of regime change in the Americas. Canada can’t keep sitting on our hands and hoping it will all work out. Late Friday night, American might pounded military installations across Venezuela while helicopters full of special forces descended on Caracas to snatch dictator Nicolas Maduro...
We now have a written copy of the Donroe Doctrine, and it makes for some unnerving reading. The National Security Strategy serves as America’s written foreign policy, laying out priorities and concerns and revealing how the United States intends to both co-operate with its allies and compete with its adversaries. The first such document of Donald Trump’s second presidency dropped...
I was standing in the back of a half-built warehouse in Kingston in April, watching Pierre Poilievre try to rouse his supporters. “We will reject,” the Conservative leader declared ominously, “the Century Initiative.” There were a few angry shouts from audience members who knew what he was talking about. Everyone else was silent. This radical scheme, designed by “multinational corporations”...
History is not made by great men and women acting alone, writes Mark Carney in his book “Value(s).” Leaders who accomplish big things know how to “engage, explain and emote.” Government has become too short-sighted and transactional, Carney argues. Writing in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, he calls on leaders to leverage crises to make big changes.
Canada has spent 28 years trying to buy a new fighter jet: the federal government made a decision, then unmade it, then made it again. We’ve already spent more than a billion dollars on this thing, and 1,500 Canadian jobs have been created to build it. It’s the tent pole of our plans to defend ourselves and co-operate with our...
I’m calling it the Halifax screwjob. Over 48 hours this weekend, the Trump administration sold out its most deserving ally, sided with an enemy, reversed itself, and reversed itself again. The saga is further evidence for an untrustworthy America, where bad actors are winning the power struggle.
Touting his One Big Beautiful Bill Act in June, President Donald Trump declared America “the hottest country in the world.” With its smörgåsbord of tax cuts and tax incentives to go with America’s sky-high trade barriers, at its core were the White House’s dreams of a manufacturing renaissance.
In early October, Premier Doug Ford sat and stared at the giant floating head of Howard Lutnick as the U.S. commerce secretary explained that Canada won’t be allowed to keep its automotive manufacturing industry. Lutnick was addressing the crowd virtually, and Doug Ford was sitting in the front row. “America is first, and Canada can be second,” Lutnick declared...
I can’t believe that this needs to be said, but: It is wrong to call for the jailing of your political opponents. Perhaps somebody should tell Pierre Poilievre.
Recent decades in politics have made us cynical. We rarely trust our politicians to wield power effectively or honestly. Our politicians have responded by making their promises smaller and more boutique, or else giving up their power altogether. Our cynicism has made us lazy and unimaginative. And so the tools of public policy have, increasingly, become targeted tax cuts and...
“We can no longer allow,” Charlie Kirk said, “a tech oligarchy, a tech dictatorship, absent the traditional constitutional checks and balances to continue to rain terror over our speech.” This was 2022 and Kirk, one of the most important conservative influencers and organizers in America, was telling his supporters that social media couldn’t be trusted. Twitter, Facebook, Google, and the...
BY THE CLOSE of the first week of the forty-fifth federal election, Pierre Poilievre’s rhetorical shimmy shake was well practised. The quips, carefully written, had been frequently used. The lost Liberal decade. A new Conservative government that will put Canada first for a change. A big bring-it-home tax cut.
There are some people who are quite displeased with the title of my new book: “The 51st State Votes.”They are even more upset at the art on the cover: A mountie flying an American flag. And to them I say: Good, be mad. I wrote this book to be a succinct recounting of this current moment in Canada’s democracy: The...
In April, just days before he was elected prime minister, I asked Mark Carney whether Canadians ought to start worrying about the state of things down south. “The U.S. system is one of checks and balances, famously,” Carney began. At the core of the American system of democracy, he went on, “is the rule of law.” He gave a small...