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 Lisa Van Dusen.
In the realm of American political rituals, the Oval Office “pool spray” doesn’t quite top the list of presidential traditions that have been upended by Donald Trump — the peaceful transition of power, the inaugural address, and a glancing acquaintanceship with the US Constitution all rate higher on the litany of obliterated norms than the classic, seated, fireplace-flanking bilateral handshake...
Back in mid-February, more than a month before the federal election was called and just as Mark Carney was beginning to close the longstanding polling gap between Liberals and Conservatives, I filed a column on how elections are defined by two things: are context and contrast. It’s a theme worth revisiting one week from Election Day. In the case of...
In the 1975 Spielberg summer blockbuster Jaws, a line that had become a running on-set joke about the stinginess of producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown in failing to supply a boat big enough to assist the film’s shooting barge made its way into the final cut, becoming one of the most quoted, and misquoted, lines in movie history. “You’re...
The campaign launched Sunday by Governor General Mary Simon’s proclamation — signed at the request of Prime Minister Mark Carney — of a federal election on April 28th isn’t just about Carney vs. Pierre Poilievre or Liberals vs. Conservatives. The last time Canadians went to the polls in an existential election, it was 1988, Brian Mulroney was staking his second...
First off, full disclosure: I love America. I’ve loved America since I was a scruffy kid watching old Jimmy Cagney movies in the bilingual, bicultural town of Aylmer, Quebec. I loved its Big Bird, its palm trees, its dramatic breakfast cereals and its epic, Manichean conflicts: Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote, Tweety vs. Sylvester, Jan vs. Marcia. My earliest...
Mark Carney has now stepped into his new role as Liberal leader — and, at a moment to be determined, prime minister — with an overwhelming 86% of the vote from party members. In the end, Carney not only defied the expectations telegraphed by polling, fundraising and other anecdotal evidence, his victory delivered a message from Ottawa’s Rogers Centre to...
With a pre-emptive disclaimer covering all the inbound exceptions that make the rule, most election campaigns are about two things: contrast and context. And, while those defining elements sometimes exist relatively independently of each other, there are some campaigns, usually at key moments in history, in which they are impossible to unweave: The Mulroney-Turner election of 1988, in which the...
In a recent Policy Q & A, Peter Boehm, the independent Canadian senator, six-time G7 Sherpa and former career diplomat, made a number of recommendations as to how to Trump-proof (not in so many words) the upcoming Kananaskis G7. He also raised a possibility.
As much as America’s political pendulum swing from Donald Trump to Joe Biden and back again may prove to be discombobulating for all “legacy” US allies, Canada holds a disproportional interest in its consequences, occupying as we do the front-row-middle seat in the political poncho zone of America’s global audience. While that prime location has proven overwhelmingly beneficial for most...
Of all the things that Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney have in common, their crucial shared quality for both the Liberal Party and the country may be their status as embodiments of the most overused political quote of the past three decades, the famous James Carville ’92 campaign exhortation, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The latest, most vivid example of this...
Of all the anticipatory-anxiety activating appointments Donald Trump made in the waning days of the year when — per instant conventional wisdom — the music died all over again, the most eloquent was the naming of reality-show mastermind Mark Burnett as special envoy to the United Kingdom. More of a statement even than Trump’s appointment of vaccine-denying roadkill aficionado RFK...
As the world processes the end of the Assad regime and the departure of its brutal dynastic scion, Bashar al-Assad, for Moscow, Syrians in Syria and elsewhere, including Canada, are euphoric. Or, as Syrian exile and Oxford research fellow Ammar Azzouz writes in the Financial Times, capturing the theme of the day, Now Syria can Dream of a Future Again...
On December 1st, 2019, the first laboratory-confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 was diagnosed in Wuhan, China. By December 8th, 41 people had been diagnosed. The first case in Canada was confirmed in British Columbia on January 25, 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) named the acute respiratory disease “COVID-19” on February 11, 2020. By mid-March, Canada’s lockdown had begun. These facts...
You know that a story has all the makings of an economic-crisis catalyst when the Globe and Mail runs 13 news and opinion pieces plus an editorial about it on the same day. It may say more about the state of the world that, in the case of Donald Trump’s first post-2024 election outing as “Tariff Man”, the event in...
To anyone who has ever covered a U.S. presidential election, one of the most serious indications that the one that just produced a second victory for the most empirically unelectable candidate in history was indeed not a normal race came in the days following the September 10 debate. Kamala Harris won that debate in such an overwhelmingly obvious, floor-sweeping, hands-down...
While it may not necessarily seem like it now, with all the usual stylings of narrative warfare and performative propaganda predictably besieging the homestretch of this US presidential campaign and leaving us hankering for the days when politics made sense, the current (ironic hyperlink alert) war on democracy does have its advantages over previous wars on democracy. For starters, a...
In the Before Times, when American politics had not yet been repurposed as aversion therapy for troublesome democracy romantics in incipient autocracies, the presidential debate was just another cyclical feature of campaign culture — like the Styrofoam boater, the oppo-research honeytrap and the Iowa State Fair butter cow. That pre-chaos debate montage, quaintly sprocketed by sweaty Lazy-Shave meltdowns and “There...
On August 1st, as Vladimir Kara-Murza’s plane was lifting off from Moscow following a sequence of events he’d been sure would culminate in his execution, the FSB/KGB minder escorting the journalist and longtime state harassment target told him to look out the window. “This is the last time you will see the Motherland.” Kara-Murza laughed and replied that he would...
Contrast is a key ingredient of any election campaign, and in US presidential campaigns is always especially pronounced. In a country where political polarization is leveraged as a tactical asset and propaganda fuels that polarization, drawing distinctions with one’s opponent isn’t just a thing, it’s a political necessity. After stepping aside July 21st for the sake of his country, President...
In an American presidential campaign that has already been unprecedented as a race in which the Republican candidate is a twice-impeached convicted felon and failed coup plotter and the Democratic candidate and failed-coup target, the incumbent president, was replaced at the 9th hour, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is a breath of ordinary air. When Vice President Kamala Harris’s own vice-presidential...
As a notorious fan of Venn diagrams, Kamala Harris has surely contemplated the Venn overlap that has framed her friendship with Joe Biden. An 81-year-old white man born into the small-town dream incubator of postwar America and a 59-year-old Black-South Asian woman born into the immigrant dream incubator of American academia, Biden and Harris share a family background of aspirations...
The momentousness of Joe Biden’s decision Sunday to withdraw from the 2024 presidential election was not lost on anyone. For once in the recent, relentless spree of norm-breaking related to what is still the world’s most powerful office, this unprecedented act was generated by America’s pro-democracy president rather than his unpredictable, anti-democracy predecessor and now-erstwhile rival. But, with all respect...
With Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts by a Manhattan jury on Thursday, the election campaign in which Mr. Trump’s improbable candidacy provided a relentless source of previously unthinkable headlines, norm-blastings and legal melodrama now has a chance to correct to something resembling baseline reality, as opposed to debasing reality show. Will this moment of breakthrough in America’s post-Obama...
As voting got underway for the 2024 Republican US presidential nomination amid the Iowan pathetic fallacy of suitably, brutally bitter weather, it seemed like an opportune moment to revisit the recent evolution of narrative in American politics. That far less literary, more literal pathetic fallacy, the guy who won on Monday, is the unlikely leading man in democracy’s recent global...