Justin Ling

Justin Ling

The international community has been silent on this growing threat. Worse, Mark Carney’s Liberals mostly have been too

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...

Justin Ling

Let’s not sleep on Justin Trudeau’s last good idea

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...

Justin Ling

We can no longer rely on America. This is how we forge a new place in the world

“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.

Justin Ling

Elon Musk isn’t the Trump adviser Canadians should fear the most. This man is

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...

Justin Ling

Carney and Freeland are right about the Trump threat. But I’m getting worried our next PM has no real plan

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.

Justin Ling

Please: Anyone but Doug Ford

“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.

Justin Ling

Foreign countries aren’t undermining trust in Canada. Our own politicians are

“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...

Justin Ling

A distracted Canadian government shouldn’t forget about this giant foe

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...

Justin Ling

Canada doesn’t just need a new government. It needs new political parties

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...

Justin Ling

Trudeau’s Long Premiership Was Hollow at the Core

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.

Justin Ling

In one of his final acts, Justin Trudeau showed Canadians he’s become what he once fought against

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...

Justin Ling

The joke is over for the leader of the Rhinoceros Party of Canada

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.

Justin Ling

This new Liberal minister has a tiny window of time to ease the housing crisis. He just might do it

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...

Justin Ling

How Trudeau turned Canadian Diplomacy into a Spectator Sport

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,”...

Justin Ling

It’s time for the cowardly lions in the Liberal caucus to stand up and be heard

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...

Justin Ling

Chrystia Freeland’s exit seals it: Justin Trudeau’s government is falling apart

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...

Justin Ling

Canada is dangerously polarized. We can’t solve the problem in court

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...

Justin Ling

For Mélanie Joly’s sake and ours, Canada needs a new foreign minister

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.”

Justin Ling

No, Pierre Poilievre, Justin Trudeau isn’t forcing us to eat bugs

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...

Justin Ling

There’s one lesson the Trudeau Liberals must learn from Trump’s victory

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.

Justin Ling

Trump can do no wrong. Anger is a virtue. This is the version of reality American voters accepted

“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...

Justin Ling

This mega-project could be Canada’s next great nation-building exercise

“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...

Justin Ling

This man knows how to solve Canada’s extremism problem. Why aren’t we guaranteeing him the resources he needs?

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-...

Justin Ling

‘We got outgunned:’ The inside story of how Justin Trudeau lost the battle over his most important climate plan

“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...

Justin Ling

Liberal MPs, it’s time to stage an intervention

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...

Justin Ling

Canada’s conservative philosopher king is painfully verbose and deceptively shallow. He could teach the ‘scoldy left’ a thing or two

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.

Justin Ling

Justin Trudeau’s ‘relentless and insufferable’ optimism no longer matches the national mood. Could another byelection loss be enough to push him out for good?

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...

Justin Ling

We’re terrible at talking about the Israel-Hamas conflict. I tried to figure out why.

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.

Justin Ling

The brain-wormed fantasies of Elon Musk’s Twitter graveyard keep seeping into real life. It’s clear who wears the blame

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...

Justin Ling

Shadow Government: The Consulting Firms Telling Ottawa What to Do

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...

Justin Ling

Justin Trudeau tried to save journalism. This is why he failed

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...

Justin Ling

Thank goodness Donald Trump survived. Now let’s get back to defending democracy

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...

Justin Ling

Queer rights are in danger in Canada. Pierre Poilievre owns some of the blame

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...

Justin Ling

I know the inside story of the Liberal revolt against Justin Trudeau. How? I overheard it in a train station

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...

Justin Ling

Justin Trudeau is getting crushed by a mess of his own making

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...

Justin Ling

“It’s bull——:” How Ottawa insiders really feel about Justin Trudeau’s handling of the foreign interference probe

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...

Justin Ling

We were too quick to reject the ‘lab leaks’ theory. But we shouldn’t be quick to embrace it, either

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...

Justin Ling

I asked Justin Trudeau’s Liberals why they broke a promise to ban three controversial police practices. Their answer says a lot

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...

Justin Ling

Here’s what I learned from my conversation with Justin Trudeau: There’s only one way to fix Canada and everyone is going to hate it

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.

Justin Ling

Justin Trudeau’s Last Stand

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...