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.
Few decisions are more important for a Canadian prime minister than whether to support the United States on matters of war and peace. With such decisions, legacies can be made and unmade. Jean Chrétien offers a prime example. He’s been dining out on his refusal to join George W. Bush’s coalition of the willing in the Iraq war for decades...
To begin his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Donald Trump looked subdued. Maybe he’d seen the NPR report earlier in the day saying his Justice Department was hiding files in the Jeffrey Epstein case that potentially incriminated him. If true, it would be a cover-up story of Watergate magnitude. But soon, Mr. Trump’s bravado was back, and it...
Our trailblazing Prime Minister was at the podium in Montreal. “Over the last few decades,” Mark Carney said, “Canada has neither spent enough on our defence nor invested enough in our defence industries.” That has to change, he added, setting out plans for far more domestic spending on military hardware because “the assumptions that defined decades of Canadian defence and...
After Donald Trump came out this week with his latest instalment in his Browbeat Thy Neighbour series – his dip into Loo Loo Land with his Truth Social threat to block the opening of the Gordie Howe Bridge – I was keen to check in on the American reaction, from readers in both conservative and liberal media. Out of about...
As Conservatives celebrate the 20th anniversary of Stephen Harper’s first election victory this week, there’s a lot of chatter about what Pierre Poilievre can learn from his success. In 2006, Mr. Harper captured 36 per cent of the popular vote, and won. In 2025, Mr. Poilievre was a far better vote-getter, earning 41 per cent of the popular vote –...
As an illustration of Canada’s relative irrelevance on the world stage, I always liked the story about external affairs minister Lester Pearson’s visit to president Dwight Eisenhower, an avid golfer. Pearson emerged from a meeting in disbelief that Ike hadn’t even heard of a pressing Canadian issue. “You’d think,” he muttered to an aide, “his caddie would have mentioned it...
Jamil Jivani, the Conservative MP, and American Vice-President JD Vance are close friends. A Black guy from Toronto and a white guy from Appalachia, they bonded at Yale Law School where, as Mr. Jivani recalls, they felt like “fish out of water” at elitist wine-and-cheese liberal gatherings. At Mr. Vance’s 2014 wedding, Mr. Jivani read a Bible passage. He helped...
Not too subtle: On the eve of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit, China’s state media warned that if Ottawa wanted progress in relations, it had to adopt a foreign policy separate from the United States. “If Ottawa still chooses to subject its China policy to the will of Washington,” the China Daily said in an editorial, efforts to mend ties...
The monster of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, is gone. Good. Most can agree on that, despite the trashing of international law employed by the Donald Trump administration to get him. But as the predator President of the United States warns of toppling other nations – which, for one thing, distracts from afflictions in his own broken country – the task will...
The dire warnings about AI keep coming. Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google, says that within a few years, millions of independent AI agents working together “will develop their own language.” And “we won’t understand what they’re doing.” They will have escaped human control. The University of Montreal computer scientist and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio told The Guardian this...
Over lunch the other day, the talk was about how 2025 had triggered a surge of patriotism in this country on account of the back-of-the-hand treatment from the United States. “It’s extraordinary,” said Duncan Ault, a lawyer friend. “As a Canadian I feel a foot taller.” For much of our history we’ve been in the thrall of the U.S., so...
Mark Wiseman, who is expected to become Canada’s new ambassador to Washington, is a rarity. The financier and corporate executive would be the first in the 100-year history of the position to be appointed without any experience as a diplomat or high-powered politician. In this respect, he’s uniquely unqualified. For Prime Minister Mark Carney to put a rookie in the...
The leadership of two of our three major parties is in the course of being determined. It’s a big moment in the political trajectory of the country. The NDP leadership race could well decide the fate of that party – whether it revives itself or is reduced to a relic. The latter would see Canada devolving into a hollowed-middle, two-party...
Seldom have we seen such a flurry of activity overseas from a prime minister like we have from Mark Carney over the past few months. His decrease-the-dependence-on-America campaign sees him trying to open trade channels everywhere in a bid to make up for the exports shortfall brought on by Donald Trump’s beggar-thy-neighbour tariff assault.
‘Twas much ado about very little. There was a next-to-zero chance of the Carney government falling on the vote on the budget. None of the parties wanted an election. Nor did the population. So, there was lots of posturing by the parties to vote down the budget but make sure the government was kept afloat. The media had to play...
Watching that circus with Donald Trump and Mark Carney in the Oval Office, didn’t you feel a pit in your stomach? Peter Donolo, the former adviser to Jean Chrétien, did. How humiliating, the longtime Liberal told the CBC, to see our Prime Minister “buttering him up” to try and get relief on tariffs. And then sitting there “like a potted...
When Prime Minister Mark Carney walked into the Ottawa book launch for Catherine McKenna’s memoir Run Like a Girl last week, it raised a few eyebrows. The big achievement of Ms. McKenna as environment minister in Justin Trudeau’s government, after all, was the carbon tax. But Mr. Carney, formerly a tree-hugger in good standing, changed the Liberal course and killed...
What arbitrary trade measure against allies who have acted in good faith will the bull-headed authoritarian in the Oval Office take next? In his sledgehammer assault on the world trading system, how much tribute will Donald Trump try and exact from allies, like C
Political power, it goes without saying, has become overly concentrated in the Prime Minister’s Office in recent decades. It’s the unelected appointees, the Katie Telfords, those who have the prime minister’s ear daily, who wield the power. They’re the inner circle – cabinet, the outer circle. We shouldn’t expect it to be much different under Prime Minister Mark Carney. Under...
Among the foreign leaders kowtowing to Donald Trump, Britain’s Keir Starmer leads the pack. The image of him at the G7 summit, bending over and scrambling to pick up papers dropped by the U.S. President, was splendid symbolism. Remember when Tony Blair was labelled as George W. Bush’s poodle? Now Mr. Starmer is the pooch.
How have Conservatives fared since making the big swerve rightward in the early 1990s? We recall that under Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative banner they won majority governments in 1984 and 1988. Then along came the dividers, the ideologues of the Reform Party, who grabbed 52 seats in the 1993 election and then proceeded to swallow the old Tories whole.
Speeches from the Throne are often tedious affairs. They track the government’s agenda but in a boring, laundry-list kind of way. There’s not the raucous atmosphere seen at State of the Union addresses, with the president’s partisans cheering like banshees at their every word. But our upcoming Throne Speech will be highly significant. After 10 years of Liberal rule, the...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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.
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...
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...
“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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
