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 Konrad Yakabuski.
Four years ago, as the Coalition Avenir Québec rolled over the competition to win 90 of the National Assembly’s then 125 seats, the Parti Québécois looked like a spent force. The sovereigntist “party of a generation” had its worst election result since its founding in 1968 by René Lévesque – the ruffled, chain-smoking everyman who charmed baby-boomer francophones – taking...
Quebec Liberal Party Leader Charles Milliard hopes that Monday’s federal by-election victory by the Liberal Party of Canada in Chicoutimi-Le Fjord persuades federalists to rally behind the QLP in the Oct. 5 provincial election. In normal times, he might get his wish. But Mr. Milliard’s party has lost its status as the default choice among francophone federalists as Christine Fréchette’s...
On the eve of Canada’s 150th birthday, in 2017, the then-premier of the country’s most reluctant province interrupted the party preparations with an awkward reminder of the federation’s unfinished constitutional business. Philippe Couillard, the Liberal premier of Quebec, chose the moment to call for an end to an unofficial moratorium on federal-provincial talks to recognize his province’s distinct character in...
On Sunday, after his runaway victory in the federal New Democratic Party’s leadership race, Avi Lewis linked his own anti-Zionist views to an ancestor’s opposition to the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East. “My great-grandfather was a leader in the [Russian anti-Zionist] Jewish Labour Bund,” said Mr. Lewis, who noted that it was founded in 1897, five...
That the riding of Terrebonne is at all competitive tells you a lot about Quebec’s shifting political landscape in the Mark Carney era. Until last year, the suburban riding on Montreal’s Rive-Nord had been a Bloc Québécois stronghold for three decades, with the exception of a one-term flirtation with the New Democratic Party in the ephemeral Orange Wave of 2011...
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s pre-Christmas shuffle of top bureaucrats was one of the biggest in recent memory. And it was likely a prelude to more such changes in the senior ranks of the public service as his Liberal government moves to speed up the otherwise glacial pace of decision-making in Ottawa. Unfortunately, it will take a lot more than moving...
As 1993 drew to a close, Canada was on the edge. Two failed attempts at getting Quebec to sign the 1982 Constitution had put the Parti Québécois on the trail to a comeback. After floundering for eight years, the PQ led in the polls only months ahead of a provincial election. And under its hardline sovereigntist leader, Jacques Parizeau, it...
The Montreal riding of Laurier–Sainte-Marie is ground zero for Quebec’s media elites and the beating heart of the province’s cultural industries. Not surprisingly, it skews progressive and has reliably sent left-leaning MPs to Ottawa for more than three decades. Last week’s resignation of local MP Steven Guilbeault from Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet generated a minor earthquake in Laurier—Sainte-Marie whose...
Former New Democratic Party MP Charlie Angus was being charitable when he called the party’s recent federal election campaign “an unmitigated disaster.” Under Jagmeet Singh, the most unpopular of the three main national-party leaders, the NDP lost three-quarters of its seats and failed to secure official party status in the House of Commons. Its share of the popular vote fell...
The costed Conservative election platform released this week largely eschews the hyperpolarizing language that had defined Pierre Poilievre until recently. The word “broken” shows up seven times in the 30-page document, but nowhere does the Tory platform apply that descriptor to Canada as a whole, as Mr. Poilievre had been endlessly doing until the federal election campaign began. Rather, the...
Quebec sovereigntists have always been among the strongest supporters of continental free trade. Under Jacques Parizeau, the Parti Québécois backed the original 1989 Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement as an insurance policy against economic blackmail by the rest of Canada. Ever since, sovereigntists have favoured north-south over east-west trade links. Thanks to free trade with the United States, Mr. Parizeau wrote in...
There is probably no one in Canada today more qualified for the job of prime minister than Mark Carney. At 59, his life up to now has been one of awe-inspiring achievement fuelled by the pursuit of excellence in his field of specialization, central banking. His stellar reputation and real-world experience in the roller coaster global financial sector precede him...
As CBC/Radio-Canada prepares to welcome a new president in January, the fate of the embattled public broadcaster has never been more in doubt, writes Konrad Yakabuski
Barely two years ago, Donald Trump looked like a spent force. After leading the Republican Party to a midterm-election shellacking in 2018, losing the presidency to Joe Biden in 2020 and watching a slew of his personally endorsed candidates go down to defeat in 2022, Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory began looking like it might have been a fluke of history.
Timing is everything in politics, and it has never seemed to be Mark Carney’s friend. In 2012, as the former Bank of Canada governor won international plaudits in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the then-46-year-old was already being touted as the next leader of the federal Liberal Party – the person who would return the flailing Grits to glory.
Jaws dropped in Ottawa when then-Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper named long-time press-gallery gadfly Mike Duffy to the Senate in 2008. In the twilight of his journalistic career, the colourful Mr. Duffy was known for vehiculating conservative talking points. He was a “big name” in small-town Canada and popular among Conservative MPs.
Back when she was foreign affairs minister, Chrystia Freeland rarely missed an opportunity to champion the postwar “rules-based international order” that had come under assault by then-U.S. president Donald Trump. In 2018, when Mr. Trump slapped tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum imports as part of a broad protectionist thrust directed mostly at China, Ms. Freeland used a speech in...
The mainstream U.S. media are generally slow on the uptake when it comes to Canada. So, it took them a while to catch on that it is no longer 2015 in the Great White North and that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is not just unpopular at home but facing political oblivion. This unexpected (by them) state of affairs has got...
It is a safe bet that most Canadians were not champing at the bit to see Prime Minister Justin Trudeau government’s use of the Emergencies Act in 2022 relitigated in the courts after a public inquiry had already concluded that the move met the threshold – albeit barely – that was required under the law.
Colourful Quebec Conservative MP Jacques Gourde came up with a delicious pun to describe the varying explanations given by the Prime Minister’s Office about Justin Trudeau’s Christmas vacation at a friend’s luxury Jamaican villa. During a Wednesday House of Commons ethics committee hearing looking into Mr. Trudeau’s 10-day stay at the exclusive Prospect Estate resort, located on the site of...
The 4.5 million viewers who tuned into Radio-Canada’s Bye Bye sketch-comedy retrospective on New Year’s Eve and the following day were treated to a gut-splitting skit that depicted federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre seeking an optician’s advice on new glasses. The sketch, which parodied an ad for the New Look eyewear chain that ran endlessly on Quebec television in the...
On New Year’s Eve, Canada’s public broadcaster offered stay-at-home television viewers a dog’s breakfast that screamed desperation. The CBC blamed “financial pressures” for its move to cancel its traditional live musical countdown to the new year. Instead, it broadcast a B-rated foreign remake of Death on the Nile, The National and a taped Just for Laughs special, as if Dec...