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.
In 1993, Liberal party leader Jean Chrétien had dinner with four top Canadian academics. Over dessert, one asked a blunt question: If you win, what do you actually want to do? “I have three priorities,” replied Chrétien. They were to keep Canada independent from the United States, keep the country together and keep the International Monetary Fund out.
A half century ago, a pair of design theorists coined a new term for tough times: “Wicked problems.” It’s a type of problem, neither inherently good nor bad, that is hard to define. It calls for many possible solutions but makes it impossible to adequately test them out. Worst of all, it’s impossible to tell when you’ve actually solved it...
With Canadians across the country avoiding the United States like plague, many are looking to other ends of the country for their summer vacations. And they are, most likely, coming to a realization: Travelling across this country is really damn expensive. Base airfares from Canada’s two main air carriers on major routes have tripled in just five years, leaving Canadians...
Donald Trump is a tariff man. He said so himself, this Monday at the G7 summit in Kananaskis. Nevertheless, the protectionist American president says, there’s no reason why Canada and the United States can’t hammer out their trade differences. “It’s achievable,” he nodded. Standing next to him, Prime Minister and host of the summit Mark Carney kept his poker face...
As the United States expanded westward through the vast expanse of plains, mountains and desert in the middle of the 19th century, it had a problem: mules, the U.S. Army’s preferred pack animal, were dying and piling up. An enterprising major pitched an unusual idea: Why not try out some camels? It took two years of study and debate, but...
Delivering his maiden speech in the House of Commons on Monday, Prime Minister Mark Carney wisely tacked towards humility. “I have much to learn from the members of this great House. I will make mistakes,” he said. “I have no doubt that you will call them out, and for good reason.” Carney acknowledged that our parliamentary system may seem arcane...
Here’s a puzzle: How do you make homes more affordable without making them cost less? It’s a riddle that ex-Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson is promising to solve in his new role as federal housing minister. But I’m here to tell you it’s no ordinary brainteaser, but a paradox.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has unveiled his new cabinet, and he has tasked his team with changing government. Not “small change,” he insisted, but “big change.” Applying the measuring tape to his new government, however, we can conclude that the freshly-elected prime minister is exaggerating just how radically different his new team really is. And in his medium-sized change cabinet...
I discovered my favourite bit of wartime propaganda recently. In chunky pale blue and red font, the poster reads: “THE SLACKER MUST NOT RULE CANADA. VOTE UNION GOVERNMENT.”
When President John F. Kennedy asked Congress to fund the establishment of a dedicated foreign development agency in 1961, he did so by letting them know that the world was watching. “The eyes of other industrialized nations, awaiting our leadership for a stronger united effort,” Kennedy said. “The eyes of our adversaries, awaiting the weakening of our resolve in this...
A curious fundraising website reveals an abandoned GOP-Conservative collab. “Donate today,” the website proclaims, next to the grinning face of the Conservative Leader, “to help Pierre Poilievre and our common sense Conservative team axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.” If you stumbled across this donation site — which asks for up to $1,72...
For every American worker, American businesses invest $24 (U.S.) into the domestic economy. For every Canadian worker, Canadian businesses invest just $11 (U.S.) back into Canada. That gap, mentioned frequently by Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, is a bright red warning light that something has gone wrong in the Canadian economy. Up until 2014, America and Canada’s per-worker investment rates were...
In unveiling his party’s full platform Saturday morning, Mark Carney released a strange plan for strange times: A protectionist plan to return Canada to the world stage. The costed platform document, released after Canadians have already begun voting, sets the stakes in its second sentence: “Our sovereignty is under threat.” In response, Carney wants to open markets, integrate with our...
In an election campaign that has been obnoxiously micromanaged, where the aspirants to lead our country have treated journalists — and, by extension, the public — with varying levels of disdain, last night’s debates should have been a breath of fresh air. Instead, the whole affair was hijacked by right wing conspiracy-minded outlet Rebel News and another right-wing network. We...
“In its letter, that we received this morning at 7:20am,” Jonathan Pedneault said, the Leaders’ Debate Commission announced that it would “exclude the Green Party of Canada from the leaders’ debates.” This decision is “unjust and baseless,” Pedneault told a gaggle of reporters at a hastily assembled press conference at his campaign office. "Their decisio…
It’s debate week on the Chaos Campaign, but arguably the most important conversation of the campaign transpired last night. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and Liberal leader Mark Carney visited Radio-Canada’s nouvelle maison to participate in Tout le monde en parle, the wide-ranging panel show hosted by comedian Guy A. Lepage, and watched live by at least one million Quebecers every...
“In many ways,” Jonathan Pedneault says, “the Greens have been at the forefront of identifying threats.” Risk-detection may not be the first attribute that comes to mind when thinking about the Green Party. But Pedneault, the party’s co-leader along with stalwart Elizabeth May, is hoping to convince Canadians that, in dark, weird, and uncertain times, the Greens are up to...
If you have paid attention to Pierre Poilievre in recent months, you could be forgiven for thinking he is afraid of journalists. From the outset of the campaign, the Conservatives have aggressively tried to limit journalists’ access to their leader and undermine their ability to ask him tough questions about how he hopes to govern the country.
“We will cut back on foreign aid to dictators, terrorists, and global bureaucracy,” Poilievre told some 4,000-odd supporters in Kingston last week, “to bring our money home.” He repeated that notion again in Trois-Rivières on Friday: “I will be cutting waste, bureaucracy, consultants, foreign aid and other unnecessary expenses,” he declared. Poilievre appeared on Radio-Canada this week for a lengthy...
I hope everyone had a pleasant Liberation Day. I’m coming to you from overcast Kingston, Ontario, where Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is campaigning. All party leaders have spent the past 24 hours scrambling to respond to Donald Trump’s quixotic tariff announcement — which, conspicuously, left out Canada and Mexico. While we still face a litany of sector-specific tariffs, everyone is...
Thanks to tactful diplomacy, Canada and Greenland share a border. Thanks to increasingly an increasingly aggressive foreign policy coming out of Washington, the two countries now share an existential threat, as well. While all of Canada’s political leaders now, finally, recognize the need to take Arctic sovereignty seriously, Canada needs to immediately stand up for Greenland as it faces intimidation...
In one of his last acts as prime minister, Justin Trudeau put forward a genuinely great idea: Get the RCMP out of local policing. It may not have been a terribly sexy note to end on, or one that even garnered much press. But after ten years of presiding over a police department mired in internal dysfunction, it is a...
“We strongly support your right to determine your own future,” President Donald Trump declared Tuesday night. In the next breath, he declared that “one way or the other” America would seize control. Trump was talking about Greenland, but Canadians should see themselves in that bizarre threat from a power-mad president.
A month of escalating threats emanating from the White House has left Canada shocked. From President Donald Trump’s initial vow to impose stiff across-the-board tariffs to the menacing invitations that Canada surrender its sovereignty altogether, Canadians have been caught off guard. But if you’re familiar with the work of Peter Navarro, none of this should have been a surprise...
The international order is crumbling. Canada is facing an existential threat. Our closest ally says it wants to conquer us. And to meet this enormous challenge, we need the status quo. That is the consensus message coming out of two nights of debates between the four men and women vying to become the next prime minister, anyway.
“Doug Ford here,” the Progressive Conservative leader texted me recently. “I will stand up and fight US tariffs to save Ontario jobs.” He informed me that I have two options: “REPLY > YES if you’re with me and the PC team.” Or, I could reply “stop to stop.” This column is my reply: stop.
“Trust in Canada’s democratic institutions has been shaken, and it is imperative to restore it,” Justice Marie-Josée Hogue writes. “This can only be achieved through greater transparency.” That sage advice, tucked in the preface of Hogue’s voluminous report on the threat of foreign interference— and Ottawa’s response to it — is perhaps the most important thing our leaders should take...
You can tell a lot about the value of a democratic movement based on how hard the despots work to undermine it. By that metric, there’s a lot of value in the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum. The Kyiv, Ukraine-based organization is an umbrella group for the various dissident groups and sovereigntist movements which are struggling to free themselves from...
When members of the Reform Party met in Ottawa in 1999, they didn’t agree on much. But when the party’s 1,200 odd delegates were asked to vote on the party’s priorities, only one idea proved very popular: Create a new political party. Reform itself was barely a decade old. But by the next year’s election, it would be reborn as...
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, dean of the G-7, has outlived a lot. His tenure has coincided with the terms of two French presidents; four U.S. administrations; and a list of prime ministers—four in Japan, five in Italy, and a whopping six in the United Kingdom.
Canadians do not want “a government that suspended work when the going got tough,” Justin Trudeau once proclaimed. On Monday, amid some pretty tough going, the outgoing prime minister suspended work. Facing a loss of support from voters, his own caucus, and the House of Commons, Trudeau, finally, announced his resignation. Just before he did, he visited the Governor General...
Canada’s most ambitious and principled progressive politician has announced his resignation. His departure was not prompted by a confidence vote by the party members or internal discord, but rather by the realization that “the time has come to end my term and pass the torch,” as he announced in a video statement posted last week.
For years, a metaphysical question has hung over Ottawa: Who, exactly, is Nathaniel Erskine-Smith? He’s the 40-year-old three-term backbench Member of Parliament for Beaches—East York, yes. But he doesn’t look or act like any of the other 150-odd Liberal MPs in his caucus. He is one of Canadian politics’ most popular podcasters. He’s arguably the only elected Liberal, apart from...
IN NOVEMBER OF last year, I reached out to foreign affairs minister Mélanie Joly’s office with a question. The prime minister of Lebanon had, just days earlier, put forward a peace plan to halt Israel’s war in Gaza; to release the hostages held by Hamas; and to put the region back onto the path to peace. “Can you tell me,”...
Another by-election, another massive defeat for the governing Liberals. On Monday night, it was citizens in Cloverdale—Langley City, in Metro Vancouver, who delivered the blow. Two-thirds of voters opted for the Conservative, former MP Tamara Jansen, just 16 per cent voted Liberal Madison Fleischer, a 2021 university graduate who spent much of her campaign avoiding questions about her shaky claims...
With the exit of its most senior minister and most prominent rising star, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has finally completely, entirely, and functionally broken down. The abrupt resignation of Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, which came the morning she was slated to deliver the fall economic statement, days before her expected demotion, and hours after her...
Not long before he died, Gilbert Baker had a disquieting realization. “China produces more rainbow flags than anyone,” he told the San Francisco Bay Times. He was struck by the “nightmare” that underpaid and overworked labourers and in some cases even slaves could be churning out “rainbow tchotchkes.” Baker, affectionately known as the Betsy Ross of the gay movement, sewed...
It was in a high school gymnasium in Missouri that Winston Churchill first warned of an “iron curtain” descending across Europe. If peace were to prevail, he said, the Western alliance must be strong and the newly-founded United Nations must be “a force for action and not merely a frothing of words.”
Even after trying the delicious cricket Bolognese, I was skeptical of the cricket hot dog. Rightly so: It sure tasted like whatever a hot dog is supposed to taste like, but it had the consistency of ground bugs. I was sampling the insect fare while visiting the test kitchen of One Hop Kitchen, a Toronto-based start-up trying to figure out...
Standing on the lawn of Howard University in Washington, D.C on Wednesday, listening to Vice President Kamala Harris deliver her concession speech, I tuned my ears for a note of introspection or contrition.
“I’m mad as hell,” proclaims Howard Beale, protagonist of the 1976 film “Network,” “and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Those twelve words have become a call of disgruntled people ever since, even becoming a rallying cry for American voters as they lined up to re-elect Donald Trump as president this week. Their anger, directionless and general, hasn’t just...
“For many people these days, it’s unclear from which tributary of history we have sprung, in which world we now live,” Stephen R Brown wrote last year. “It shouldn’t be unclear to which world we should aspire.” I was thinking about that line when I walked into the shiny new offices of VIA HFR last week. Brown wrote it in...
David O’Brien is used to dealing with neo-Nazis. He’s grown accustomed to handling those recruited by the Islamic State. His clinic in midtown Toronto deals with white supremacists, incels, religious fundamentalists, gang members, and all manner of other violent ideologues But over the past year, O’Brien has seen a disquieting shift. He told me recently he has been seeing 12-...
“When it starts to fall apart,” Gord Downie once sang. “Man, it really falls apart.” Canada’s once-lauded carbon pricing program began falling apart soon after it was set up in 2019. Today, thanks to government incompetence and a relentless, bad-faith campaign to destroy it, it is really falling apart. I’ve followed the promise of and backlash to the Liberals’ deeply...
A disquieting reality is sinking in for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s caucus: It’s just not working anymore. It’s a case those Members of Parliament have been making more and more pointedly behind closed doors. It’s a case voters have now made in Toronto and Montreal. And yet the prime minister and his advisers seem convinced that they don’t need to...
Bring me a “dispassionate” climate scientist, Jordan B. Peterson said, one not possessed by “the hangover of the antihuman, Malthusian agenda from the 1960s” and they would conclude that there is no climate crisis at all. So then, he continued, the environmentalist left must have a bigger agenda: Deindustrialization and depopulation.
There is certainly a vibe on the campaign trail in Montreal, Craig Sauvé told me this week: Rage. When I sat down with the NDP candidate in this month’s federal byelection, he had just come back from knocking on doors. At one home, he met a guy still seething from downpour that flooded his basement. It was just another problem...
Earlier this month, Ottawa’s Pride festival put out a statement that denounced, in “solidarity with Palestine,” the “ongoing genocide” in Gaza and called for an immediate and permanent ceasefire.
Three years ago, a user named IlluminatiPirate posted an all-encompassing, utterly deranged theory of the internet on an obscure, retro-looking message board. The poster, a self-described 30-something veteran of the wide open spaces that used to flourish online, claimed the World Wide Web had actually died in 2017. It had been replaced, they wrote, by a U.S. government conspiracy that...
AT SOME POINT over the past decade in Canada, McKinsey & Company became the North Star for how to fix things in Ottawa. The management consulting company has been called in to help digitize the Canadian navy, create a ten-year plan for a government-owned bank, modernize leadership at our border services agency, provide an international view on transforming our immigration...
Over the past nine years, the Trudeau government has papered over the cracks in our ailing news industry. It has subsidized journalists’ salaries, bailed out struggling newspapers, upped their subsidy to the CBC; they even shook down Google for $100 million per year. And yet, as I put it to Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge when we sat down last week...
Last year, far-right broadcaster Tucker Carlson asked Donald Trump an unnerving question: “Do you think we’re moving toward civil war?” The former president was unusually philosophical: “There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen. There’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen. And that’s probably a bad combination.” Carlson pressed the question. “The left,” he said, had protested...
For years, Ipsos has been asking individuals around the world for their opinions on Queer people. And for years, the pollster has found, those opinions have steadily improved. People had been growing more and more supportive of the LGBTQ community with each passing year, especially in Canada. In 2011, more than six-in-ten Canadians said people should be open about their...
Steven Guilbeault has been taking the temperature of the Liberal Party caucus as calls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation mount. The environment minister was in Toronto this week to meet with Members of Parliament who were awestruck by Monday’s upset defeat in the Toronto–St Paul’s byelection. He spent Thursday working the phones with Liberals across the country trying to...
When voters stepped into polling booths across midtown Toronto Monday, they were confronted with a scroll of a ballot: 84 candidates’ names on a meter-long piece of paper. There was Julie St. Amand, whose fuzzy alt-rock campaign jingle proclaimed she is “feisty, opinionated, ready to hold a grudge.” And Donovan Eckstrom, who campaigned from Alberta with an appeal to “stop...
Eighty years ago, cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko walked out of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa with a briefcase full of documents and a plan to defect. When he finally got an audience with the RCMP, he revealed the most extensive espionage and influence campaign Canada had ever seen. Gouzenko’s defection spurred a series of investigations, a public inquiry, and a...
Scientists didn’t crack the whodunnit quickly. For years they didn’t know where the virus came from, how it leapt to humans and why it was so well suited to making us sick. It took more than a decade to solve. But eventually they did come up with a thorough and compelling theory for what happened: The virus first percolated in...
In 2021, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, desperately clinging to a minority government in an election they didn’t have to call, made a bold promise on policing. Re-elect the Liberals, the party’s platform said, and the new government would prohibit the RCMP from employing neck restraints—like the ones used to kill George Floyd and Eric Garner—or deploying tear gas or bullets...
I was not a big believer in re-opening the constitution, until Prime Minister Justin Trudeau convinced me otherwise. It’s not that Trudeau thinks this is a good idea. He doesn’t. He believes his own steering of the machinery of government is going very well, thank you, even if few in the country seem to agree with him.
In an exclusive interview, a confident prime minister addresses his doubters. INSIDE THE Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is hunkered down with his cabinet for three days of meetings. Built in the postwar boom by the Canadian National Railway as the capstone of the city’s rail station, the hotel has hosted heads of state and world...