Lawrence Martin
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 Lawrence Martin.
Team Canada is giving Trump a beating in the tariff war
So far, David is bashing Goliath. In round one of his gratuitous, greed-driven tariff war, the intrinsically mendacious Donald Trump has been changing his mind on levies by the minute, governing by capricious, vindictive whim. He’s left the stock markets reeling, had his work called the “dumbest ever” by the leading financial journal in the U.S., and violated his own...
No one rained on Carney’s parade, and now, he’s set to be our next prime minister
Mark Carney had such a large margin in the Liberal leadership race that it would have required a debacle in the debate Tuesday for him to lose that advantage – something approaching Joe Biden’s disintegration last year in the presidential debate against Donald Trump. That didn’t happen. Mr. Carney was calm and competent, solid if not particularly engaging. It was...
Justin Trudeau’s next dinner date should be with Elon Musk
What we’re going to do, said Vivek Ramaswamy, is “strike the leviathan at its core.” The former Republican presidential candidate was speaking of the plans of his eager self and wunderkind Elon Musk to blowtorch the bloated deep state. Under the guise of the newly concocted Department of Government Efficiency, they want to save hundreds of billions in spending by...
Canada must not cower before Donald Trump’s bullying
When it comes to punishment that’s in excess of the crime, are we witnessing a new bilateral-relations record? The immigration and drug flow from Canada to the United States, while increasing, is trifling in quantity compared to that from Mexico. Yet president-elect Donald Trump, with his sky-high 25-per-cent tariff threat, lumps us in the same to-be-bullied basket as that country...
Foreign crises are getting in the way of the inevitable: Trudeau’s departure
The Justin Trudeau loyalists are digging in. There’s a “considerable cadre who want him to move on,” long-time Liberal MP John McKay told me. “But he’s stared them down before and he’s staring them down now.” Some of the voices of dissent are not getting through to Mr. Trudeau, Senator Percy Downe, one of the first to call for his...
The Liberals would do better if they replace their dead man walking
The past isn’t always prologue. There’s a widespread view that it wouldn’t be beneficial for the Liberals to change leaders at this time; that a new leader would do just as badly, if not worse, in an election than Justin Trudeau; that Liberal Party members are therefore not acting like cowards in not forcing him out.
For progressives, the Trudeau by-election and Biden debate disaster were blessings in disguise
The siren sounds. For progressives in Canada and the United States, it’s an emergency moment. They face the same dire circumstances. They are in the same sinking boats. Their leaders, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden, are flailing and failing. Their respective populations, as is evident in polls, want them to go away. They’re not listening. It’s now...
What’s there to fear about Pierre Poilievre?
Canada has never had a federal Conservative or Liberal leader who fit the term “career politician” more precisely than Pierre Poilievre. He was consumed by politics as a kid and has done nothing except politics ever since. A well-rounded man, he is not. In his book, Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life, right-side journalist Andrew Lawton traces the Leader’s first political...
It’s time for the Liberal Party to force Justin Trudeau’s hand
“One important thing I learned in politics,” said Herb Dhaliwal, the British Columbia Liberal who served in the cabinets of Jean Chrétien, “is that once people have made up their minds, they’re not about to change.” He was talking about Justin Trudeau’s situation. For a year now, Mr. Trudeau and his Liberals have been light years behind the Conservatives. They...
We’re trapped in a system where naysayers are in command
That was an attention grabber: The Angus Reid Institute put out an analysis last week saying the leaders of Canada’s major federal political parties have never been held in such dismal regard. It was based on an analysis of 50 years of public-opinion data. It’s the first time that all three major federal party leaders, the survey said, have garnered...
A score-settling book by Brian Mulroney is being kept under wraps
In 2007, former prime minister Brian Mulroney published a mammoth memoir. At 1,121 pages, you could barely fit it in an airplane carry-on bin. But there was an extraordinary omission in the volume. Not a single word about the controversy that had dogged him for years and did more to damage his reputation than anything else – namely, the Airbus...
Justin Trudeau’s close friend Dominic LeBlanc wants his job
Behind the scenes, the plot thickens in regards to the future leadership of the Liberal Party. We need only to consider what Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, a very close friend of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is up to. A former Liberal cabinet minister met with Mr. LeBlanc recently and they discussed plans, I’m told, for Mr. LeBlanc to run...
Trudeau shouldn’t reject Chrétien and Harper’s offer on 24 Sussex
The residence at 24 Sussex Drive is where more of this country’s history has been plotted than any other, where decisions ruinous and wonderful took shape, where the world’s high and mighty have hobnobbed. But that it is one of Canada’s most famous landmarks doesn’t seem to matter. It’s been vacant for eight years now, just sort of left to...
Forty years later, Pierre Trudeau’s walk in the snow still resonates
Parliament wasn’t sitting and it was quiet at the start of the last week of February in 1984. Pierre Trudeau, who was 65, had been in power for 16 years. Less than a year remained in his government’s mandate and everyone awaited his decision on his future. The country was wracked by a recession worse than in the other G...
Canada’s Liberals and America’s Democrats need to find the courage to stand up to their leaders
If they had their druthers, Democrats in the United States and Liberals in Canada would prefer candidates other than incumbents Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau to lead them in their coming elections. But they’re afraid to speak out. They’re hushed. They’re giving the leaders a pass, no matter that the consequences may well be a progressive’s nightmare: Donald Trump as...
Is a Liberal resurgence possible under Trudeau?
We’ve reached a “new nadir,” says pollster Frank Graves, reflecting on his latest findings. “Canada’s outlook is the darkest and most divided in our lifetime.” Is it that terrible? Mr. Graves has been taking the pulse of Canadian public opinion for 30 years. “Scores we are seeing on the country’s direction are the worst we have ever encountered,” he told...
The Chrétien-Harper connection is a rare thing in our polarized times
The image leaped off the screen a couple of days ago. A photo of Stephen Harper and Jean Chrétien grinning like lifelong buddies in each other’s presence. “Always wonderful to catch up with a true gentleman and friend,” wrote former prime minister Harper, who posted the pals pic on X. The Conservative warrior obviously wanted his close ties to the...
