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 Mike Blanchfield.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ambitious spending promises earned standing ovations from Canada’s defense industry this week. Now he faces his next challenge: turning those promises into contracts. “My business depends on it being faster, and jobs and investment depend on it being faster,” Eliot Pence, the founder of Ottawa-based startup Dominion Dynamics, told POLITICO of the procurement process.
The video playing was clearly Pete Hoekstra, the frequently combative U.S. ambassador to Canada. But something was off. He kept referring to Canada as a partner?
One year after rescuing Canada’s Liberal Party from electoral disaster, Mark Carney has strengthened his hold on power. The rookie prime minister clinched a razor-thin majority in special elections on Monday night, bolstered by five defections during the past five months from progressive and conservative parties to the Liberals. Results are still being counted, but Liberal candidate Danielle Martin claimed...
Canada will open a new consulate in Greenland on Friday, a show of diplomatic support as rattled Nordic islanders there react to President Donald Trump’s aggressive rhetoric about acquiring their homeland. In Nuuk, many say Trump’s attention is leaving them feeling ground down — and yearning to be left alone — in spite of allies in Canada and Europe rallying...
President DONALD TRUMP is flirting with Canada’s worst-case scenario — setting the wheels in motion for the U.S. to pull out of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
One day after a pipeline plan for Alberta sparked backlash and a Cabinet defection, Canada’s energy minister emphasized the project is far from a done deal. “We’re baking the cake,” Tim Hodgson told POLITICO on Friday from British Columbia. “We’re just buying the ingredients right now. Let’s not opine on how the cake tastes till it’s a little bit further...
Republican lawmaker Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina says it’s all good and well that Canada is finally meeting its NATO defense spending commitments, but Canada should make up for two decades of back dues — to the tune of $300 billion. “Can we do a makeup payment for the 20 years of shortfalls as well?” Tillis told a Saturday...
BEHIND THE SCENES — They scrambled to get there on time, after the last-minute invite to DONALD TRUMP’s Gaza peace summit in Egypt over the weekend. But the president kept them waiting.
In the five years that Bob Rae has served as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, he’s seen the global order face immense disruption. Yet he’s found himself drawn back repeatedly to a book written decades ago: George Orwell’s 1984.
Prime Minister MARK CARNEY is headed to Germany next week. Our colleagues in Berlin learned today in a government briefing that Chancellor FRIEDRICH MERZ will welcome Carney on Tuesday morning. The pair will talk about a variety of bilateral foreign and economic issues, including tariffs and the war in Ukraine.
Fresh off his election victory, Prime Minister Mark Carney promised to immediately take on U.S. President Donald Trump on trade. But the White House likely won’t turn its attention to North American trade talks until later this summer — a timeline that might actually work out better for Canada.
An architect of President Donald Trump’s aggressive trade policy told a closed-door Canadian audience Friday that the two neighbors can recover from this period of unprecedented tensions. Robert Lighthizer, the pro-tariff former U.S. trade representative during Trump’s first term, told a conference of Canadian conservatives in Ottawa that their country can help mend the tattered relationship by spending more on...
Pete Hoekstra proved an able firefighter for Donald Trump last summer, extinguishing a Republican Party civil war in his home state of Michigan and ultimately helping ensure the crucial state voted red on Nov. 5. For his efforts, Hoekstra has reaped an unlikely reward: He is set to become the U.S. president’s ambassador to Canada.
With less than two months left as prime minister, his party sagging in the polls, and former colleagues vying to replace him as Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau has turned to a loyal childhood friend to handle Ottawa’s most urgent problem: a threatened trade war with Donald Trump that could sink the economy.
A document imbued with incrementalism offered at least one big energy policy advance with the long-awaited Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program The federal government’s new approach to communicating the details of its 2024 federal budget — telling us about it in advance – has become the attention grabber that it was intended to be. In a staged media rollout in recent...