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 Wells.
A FEW WEEKS AGO, I ran into somebody involved with the Canada–US trade talks. Can’t get more specific than that. When I asked how it was going, this person bugged their eyes out, since miming was probably safer than using words. “Must be like negotiating with a roulette wheel,” I offered. This person didn’t disagree.
IT’S 183 DAYS since Mark Carney told Jon Stewart he was an “outsider” who’d “just started thinking” about running for a leadership role in Canadian politics. He thought fast—and announced his candidacy three days later. Now he’s been prime minister for longer than Charles Tupper and John Turner were. How’s he doing?
I want to begin by emphasizing that my headline is satirical. There is no particular reason to expect a second US civil war, even though this Canadian government report from Prime Minister Carney’s own department says, “U.S. ideological divisions, democratic erosion, and domestic unrest escalate, plunging the country into civil war.” The report received coverage in international media, including this...
The man who plans to become prime minister by making enemies. ’VE KNOWN Pierre Poilievre for twenty years. Or, rather, for most of the past twenty years, I thought I knew Pierre Poilievre. In 2003, I was working at the National Post. One day in my column, I briefly made fun of Stockwell Day, the former Canadian Alliance leader who...
Maybe the Americans assume we’re already part of their country because our leaders won’t get off their TV shows. Politico reports that Justin Trudeau’s office called Jen Psaki on Thursday morning and asked whether she’d interview Canada’s prime minister pro tem for her Sunday MSNBC political show. The PMO’s timing was excellent: Psaki was dropping a kid off at school...
He was late as usual. He sounded sad. The wind blew his script away. He said more or less what you expected. When his time in office ends at the end of March, he’ll have been prime minister for a few months less than Stephen Harper was. His party has very little chance of recovering, but more than it had...
Justin Trudeau wants an election about his values. I’m going to devote two posts to Justin Trudeau’s appearance this week on Uncommons, Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith’s podcast. This is a bit over the top. The podcast, which I link below, isn’t much more than the PM shooting the breeze for an hour with a lightly unorthodox member of his own...
I continue to be amused by the widespread belief that Pierre Poilievre has said almost nothing about how he would govern. Nothing but slogans, people say. In fact, for months the Conservative leader has been all but shovelling detailed policy proposals off the back of a truck. On Friday morning, for instance, he called for a 100% tariff on made-in-China...
Here’s Justin Trudeau at the Saldenah Mas Camp in Toronto on July 18. Volunteers spend months making costumes every year for the Toronto Caribbean Festival. It’s a fantastic tradition. My father, who lived in Barbados for a while, used to drive us up from Sarnia every year for the parade. The prime minister’s public itinerary, which is emailed daily to...
I think a sleeper issue, in our age of political turmoil, is the question of how much latitude new governments have to act upon their arrival in power. In France, as he prepares for a crushing defeat in Sunday’s legislative elections, Emmanuel Macron has been speeding up his appointments, to reduce the influence of a new National Rally government. In...
Well, of course I saw it coming all along. What kind of fool could have imagined the Liberal in Toronto — St. Paul’s had any chance? Hang on. I’m just getting word that I didn’t see it coming. In fact, as recently as Monday night I wrote a post I’ll be hearing about until the cows come home. Sorry about...
Somebody should write a book about Justin Trudeau and boxing metaphors. One reason Trudeau won that fight in 2012, he likes to say, is that he trained hard while his opponent’s friends were prematurely celebrating victory. A clear-eyed reading of this story would teach us that, in any confrontation, it’s best if you don’t give your opponent time to prepare...
Street family My tour guide for much of my visit to Edmonton was Dr. Monty Ghosh, a clinician who’s on faculty at the University of Calgary and the University of Edmonton [Update: Alberta! University of Alberta! Now that’s a great way to let everyone know I’m from Ontario — pw]. He seems to talk to everybody who works with substance...
The Alberta model, made in BC “I, as you know, have been everywhere in this field, from eating out of garbage cans to this office,” Marshall Smith said. “So I have a deep respect for everybody who works along that continuum.” We were sitting in the office at the Alberta Legislature reserved for chiefs of staff to Alberta premiers. That’s...
What’s ahead for Canada’s long-serving prime minister and the government he dominates? Veteran journalist Paul Wells, an observer of national politics for decades while writing for Maclean’s, National Post, the Toronto Star and now Substack, shares his thoughts in his new book “Trudeau on the Ropes.”
Justin Trudeau led the federal Liberals into the 2015 election on a promise to give the middle ground back to Canadians. Before long, there was less middle ground. It had already been shrinking for years when Mr. Trudeau became the Liberal Leader in 2013. He didn’t cause the polarization of Canadian politics, but he noticed it, acted on it, nudged...
One tries to guard against cheap cynicism. On Monday the Prime Minister of Canada continued his long pre-budget tour by announcing a national school food program. Reading the federal news release, one discovers that it takes a truly bewildering amount of time to get to the point. Once we hack our way through the top 200 words of rote self-congratulation...
As victories go, I’ve seen bigger. Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley spends a lot of time trimming the challenge to the Trudeau government’s 2022 invocation of the Emergencies Act before he grants part marks to a minority of the applicants. Four of the six applicants didn’t suffer personally from the Emergencies Act’s enforcement, Mosley writes. But two, a retired OPP...
You can tell whether a politician thinks he’s made a gaffe by what he does next. Last night on the social medium Pierre Poilievre was calling everything that moves incompetent — “incompetent Toronto city politicians” and “incompetent [Vancouver] NDP mayor Kennedy Stewart” (it was a greatest-hits retweet, Stewart lost the last election). Of course that’s because he spent yesterday afternoon...
A top officer in the Canadian Armed Forces says work at home makes work abroad harder. You know how they say, when you want something done, give it to a busy person? Bob Auchterlonie is here to say there are limits to how well that works. Vice-Admiral J. Robert Auchterlonie is the Commander of Canadian Joint Operations Command, which coordinates...
That was a hell of a video that Vice Admiral Angus Topshee, the Commander of the Royal Canadian Navy, put on Youtube this week. Topshee depicts a Navy in a “critical state,” facing “very serious challenges right now that could mean we fail to meet our force posture and readiness commitments in 2024 and beyond.”
Did you know Skype was Estonian? At least that’s the story I heard on my first trip to Estonia in 2004. It’s closer to the truth to say Estonians did the coding work while executives from Sweden and Denmark set up the company. But there were Estonians who were able to do the coding work in 1999 because, in the...
1. The dumb scrum One reason I don’t like to play along with subscribers who assume this newsletter is a running critique of “the mainstream media” is that I know too many journalists. The best ones are wonderful and most are fine. Most are better at some part of the craft than I am. They don’t hesitate to make that...
1. The dumb scrum. One reason I don’t like to play along with subscribers who assume this newsletter is a running critique of “the mainstream media” is that I know too many journalists. The best ones are wonderful and most are fine. Most are better at some part of the craft than I am. They don’t hesitate to make that...
Readers should be warned that today’s post will take the form of a “shaggy dog story,” the term of art for a very long joke whose punchline is underwhelming. The point of such a joke is that you stick with it for what seems like forever, following all the complications, relishing the mountain of detail, only to get to a...
I think the best way I can make sense of Justin Trudeau’s surprising tactical retreat on carbon taxes is to look at his entire history with carbon taxes. On this file, he learned early that his preferred policies could be hard to sell. When you look at Trudeau’s entire history as a Liberal MP, last week’s move starts to look...
I managed to get on the phone with Graham Carr earlier this week. He’s the president of Concordia University, so he’s been busy. “We've been spending a lot of time trying to run numbers, develop scenarios, assess what the likely impact of this could be for us,” he said. “This,” in the above sentence, was a new change to Quebec...