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 Paul Deegan.
Given recent developments in our bilateral relationship with the United States under its current president, it is now clear that our disagreement over the unprecedented use of tariffs to coerce acquiescence to otherwise unacceptable economic change is about much more than trade. It is about sovereignty. Team Trump misread Canadians and overreached. Prime Minister Mark Carney rightly walked away from...
In a world riven with strife, with democracy and dignity under daily assault in the United States by its president, and with global hegemons rejecting the sovereignty of nations, Canadians should take careful stock of what we have and who we are. Canada is blessed with vast geography, abundant natural resources and an educated and diverse population. We have the...
The 2026 edition of Davos that begins Monday will be notable for the 11th-hour exit of its founder, Klaus Schwab, and the subsequent, dominance-marking presence of President Donald Trump and the largest U.S. delegation to ever attend the World Economic Forum. The Swiss must be praying that Trump doesn’t decide that its luxury goods industries, exclusive resorts and prime geographical...
U.S. President Donald Trump has denigrated our sovereignty and threatened our livelihoods through a pernicious and unjustifiable trade war. Against this backdrop, we need to push back and build up the Canadian economy by urgently tackling our weak productivity and excessive reliance on the U.S. market.
With Mark Carney now prime minister, we are, perhaps, days from him heading back to Rideau Hall to trigger the federal election. What the election should boil down to, paraphrasing Democratic strategist James Carville, is: “It’s Trump and the economy, stupid.” In this reality, the candidates must be laser-focused on serious issues with clear policy prescriptions, not campaign slogans and...
With his tariffs now a reality, U.S. President Donald Trump is weaponizing uncertainty to coerce businesses to move their operations to the United States. While we are now subject to 25 per cent across-the-board tariffs (10 per cent on energy), it’s unlikely all his tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports will remain in place. The cost to Americans, both producers...
A group of Canadian tech entrepreneurs recently launched something called Build Canada, which bills itself as “a platform of bold ideas for growth, innovation, and prosperity”. Perhaps because of the supersized influence of Elon Musk on Donald Trump and Big Tech CEOs lined up in an unseemly pay-to-play scheme at Trump’s inauguration, some are skeptical about Canadian tech entrepreneurs wanting...
Canadians don’t get U.S. President Donald Trump and why, though he’s agreed to a temporary reprieve, he’s still threatening to impose tariffs on us. We think he doesn’t understand how important we are to the U.S. We cite statistics like Canada is the largest export market for U.S. goods, the top export market for 34 states and accounts for the...
Canadian political leaders were caught flat-footed by President-elect Donald Trump’s warning that he would impose punitive tariffs on Canada and Mexico on day one of his presidency, citing our porous borders, which, he complains, have facilitated the movement of illegal immigrants and drugs into the United States. With his 25% tariff salvo, Trump has made it clear that he doesn’t...
Federal law says there has to be an election by Oct. 20 of next year. The current level of rancour in the House of Commons suggests it may come sooner rather than later. We believe, echoing Democratic strategist James Carville, that whenever it does happen it needs to be “about the economy, stupid.” Three issues should top the list: sound...
In a recent op ed in The Globe and Mail, University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist wrote about “the disbelief among far too many in Canada that rising antisemitism is real, alongside the disbelief by many within the Jewish community that antisemitism has returned in a manner unseen since the Holocaust.” He asked Canadians to “simply believe us”. In...
The reality today is an uncomfortable mix of geopolitical turmoil, rising nationalism and rampant populism. A useful lens to try and make sense of it is “economic nationalism” – an old problem, recently re-framed on both the left and the right for a 21st-century economic reality. While the economy has influenced political trajectories and electoral outcomes since long before James...
“Without a course correction, we are indeed heading for ‘Tepid Twenties’ – a sluggish and disappointing decade.” While International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva was speaking to the global community in her “curtain raiser” remarks in advance of the IMF/World Bank Spring 2024 meetings, her comments certainly apply to Canada’s diminished prospects, particularly for growth in real GDP per...
When corporations have bad news to deliver, they often put it out late on a Friday. Article content That’s exactly what Royal Bank of Canada, the country’s largest company by market capitalization, did when it announced “changes to its executive team” in a press release that landed this past Friday at 6 p.m. ET.
A year ago, we wrote in these pages that “The ‘new normal’ for Canada is slow economic growth.” We wish we could say what a difference a year makes, but we can’t. Growth seems stubbornly mired well below two per cent, barely half of what we averaged over the last half-century. Our weak productivity is translating into weak GDP growth...
There are fewer than 300 days to the American presidential election, and Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden in almost every major poll. The world needs to start thinking seriously about the implications of a second Trump presidency. Beyond the domestic disruption as he erodes American democratic norms, undermines institutions, and threatens to abuse the rule of law, a man...