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 Robyn Urback.
Former Alberta premier Ralph Klein would occasionally remark on the prosaic, conventional nature of the work he did as leader of his province. In 1998, Edmonton Sun journalist Neil Waugh wrote about Mr. Klein’s “good news” tour, during which the premier travelled across the province to spread the word about how “Albertans have turned their province into the envy of...
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith fed a stray cat, in hopes that it would go away. But stray cats don’t do that. They eat until their bellies swell, then saunter away to go sleep it off. The next morning, however, they’ll come back for another meal, screeching by the side door until someone appears with a plate. And then, the next...
The news that Conservative MP Scott Aitchison will resign at the end of this year, which will make him the eighth MP to exit the Conservative caucus in one year, has roused the recurring question of just how much more Pierre Poilievre’s hold on his party’s leadership can endure. It’s like watching a frayed rope bridge swinging over a river...
B.C. NDP Leader David Eby is a shrewd, confident competitor. He will challenge anyone currently suffering from a stomach virus to a hot-dog-eating contest. He will dare any chess champion to a tournament when they are sleeping. Mr. Eby will tackle a bear in a cage (from the outside, without actually touching the bear), or wrestle any and all comatose...
The statement that NDP Leader Avi Lewis posted on X on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur deserves to be reproduced in its entirety, in order to fully appreciate its malignancy and reckless stupidity. “Tonight Yom Kippur begins, the most sombre moment of the Jewish calendar,” Mr. Lewis wrote. “It’s a time of atonement – a time to grieve those...
On Monday afternoon, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced what has been billed the single largest private capital investment in Canadian history: $52-billion to expand Bell’s AI Data Centre project in Saskatchewan. If completed, the project will mean hundreds of good, permanent data-operations jobs, plus thousands more in associated opportunities. It promises to attract further investment in the province and to...
At a border crossing in B.C. on Tuesday, Premier David Eby showcased one of the more embarrassing side effects of the ongoing trade war with the United States. After a performance by a rapper named OGR-Scintilla, who performs parodies of pop songs using Canadian-themed lyrics, the B.C. Premier took to the podium wearing a red-and-black plaid jacket, which he dubbed...
If Canada is indeed at war – and one could reasonably make that case based on our neighbour’s apparent efforts to turn this country into a vassal state – then all of its institutions should be operational, and on alert. Tens of billions of dollars worth of goods have been affected by tariffs levied by Washington, and now Ottawa. Nearly...
Most Americans are dozing through the unveiling of the newest, dumbest front in the trade war launched by U.S. President Donald Trump. The majority, in fact, don’t even know they are at war, much less what Mr. Trump and his convoy of obsequious votaries are fighting for. According to a recent report prepared for the New North American Initiative at...
The proposed expansion of the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport was a test case for Prime Minister Mark Carney – and a fairly straightforward one, too. Here was an infrastructure project that did not involve multiple jurisdictions, competing provincial interests, or Indigenous land claims (though in late May, the Haudenosaunee Development Institute asked to be formally consulted on the plans)...
There’s an air of Justin-Trudeau-circa-2018 to the new Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) directive that now prohibits mention of God and other specific religious language during public events. It seems like a solution in search of a problem: not unlike the Trudeau government’s move to replace “in all thy sons command” in our national anthem to “in all of us command”...
Canada has been caving to U.S. President Donald Trump. That’s not what Ottawa is saying, of course. Canadians are being told that our negotiators are playing hardball – that everything’s on the table. But then we see the results: capitulation on the digital services tax (though it was a silly regulation in the first place, to be sure), the dropping...
Here’s the thing about awful, soul-destroying relationships: sometimes, you come out on the other end a stronger, better person. It’s hard to see the benefits when you’re constantly being lied to, cheated on and disparaged. It’s emotionally exhausting and you know you need to get out, but you signed a lease together and you need his income to make the...
Can we just try to empathize with poor Tourism Minister Stan Cho, who is currently enjoying his five-month summer break from the provincial legislature, while earning $232,340 annually thanks to a pay bump legislators gave themselves last year? He had to spend 30 whole days at Queen’s Park during the spring session, and 28 days during the fall session, which...
It’s not often that a prime minister is lauded for something that he doesn’t do, but Prime Minister Mark Carney is currently being celebrated by six policy organizations for his inaction on an important Canadian regulatory matter. In an open letter published late last month, the CEO of the Canadian Health Policy Institute, the deputy director of domestic policy for...
I’m starting to believe that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is the subject of an elaborate, prolonged hazing ritual. The frat house in this scenario might have better decorum and nicer furniture than those found on college campuses, but the initiation process is the same: subject the pledge to a succession of humiliating rituals to see if and how long he...
Prime Minister Mark Carney deserves credit for doing the thing that prime ministers before him have been too pusillanimous to do for decades. While it shouldn’t be politically risky, really, to spend some money to refurbish the official residence of the Prime Minister ‐ which has been inhabited only by mice and insects for the last 10 years – this...
It is patently unfair that the Carney government has announced plans to bail out condo developers in British Columbia, without even a mention of the struggling venture capitalists in Ontario, the hedge fund managers in Quebec, and the corporate CEOs in Alberta.
Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty was just one seat shy of securing a third majority mandate when he led his party to win the 2011 Ontario election. It wasn’t a great result – the Liberals won 18 fewer seats than they had the previous election – but it was still a win, and Mr. McGuinty’s approval rating was a respectable (for...
There’s a lineup of imperfect candidates who could make the case for Canada ahead of Alberta’s referendum-to-have-a-referendum on sovereignty in the fall. There’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, of course, the most prominent federalist in the country and one who happened to spend the majority of his childhood and adolescence in Alberta. But Mr. Carney is Albertan in the same way...
I take Alberta Premier Danielle Smith at her word that she supports a “sovereign Alberta within a united Canada,” which is the refrain she hauls out every time she is asked for her personal opinion on Alberta independence. While Alberta’s NDP is busy charging that the Premier and her entire caucus “are separatists. Period,” Ms. Smith’s long tenure as a...
Various experts have been assuring the public over the past several weeks that the risk of a major hantavirus outbreak is low. This is a known virus, they say, unlike the novel coronavirus first observed in 2019. It doesn’t pose pandemic potential, they say, because this Andes variant requires prolonged close contact to be transmitted from human to human.
“In a crisis, fortune favours the bold,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a fireside chat video, posted online earlier this month. The Prime Minister laid out the foundation for his Canada Strong plan, which he promised would be transformative, comprehensive and ambitious. But if fortune indeed favours the bold, as Mr. Carney said, the forces of the universe will...
The instant Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles blasted out the words “gravy plane,” it became obvious that the private jet purchased by Ontario Premier Doug Ford was not long for this province. It wasn’t simply that the act of spending $28.9-million of taxpayers’ money on a private aircraft for the Premier’s office was hideously off-brand, though that was a major...
George W. Bush took up painting when he left the Oval Office in 2009. In 2014, he unveiled his first public exhibit, entitled “The Art of Leadership: A President’s Personal Diplomacy,” which featured portraits of world leaders he met during his time in office. The whole thing was sort of … odd. It wasn’t just that Mr. Bush’s portraits were...
Officially, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is outraged. “The Carney Liberals did not win a majority government through a general election or today’s by-elections,” Mr. Poilievre posted on X Monday night, as the results erasing his leverage in the House of Commons rolled in. The Liberals swept all three by-elections, less than a week after they seduced the unlikeliest of floor-crossers...
“The whole point of being an MP is to represent your constituents,” a Conservative MP told a local Ontario newspaper back in January, when she backed a call for automatic by-elections following an MP’s defection. “So if they’re voting you in under one platform,” she continued, “for you to switch for whatever reasons, just seems to me to not be...
Last summer, Canada’s Supreme Court sent an inadvertent message to all young offenders in Canada: you will almost certainly never be sentenced as an adult. Even before the Court released its judgement in R v. I.M., which changed the standard for which youth can be sentenced as adults, it was already true that young offenders would be treated more leniently...
Alberta’s new legislation limiting “ideology” in classrooms is its own type of ideological flag – which is ironic, since one of the changes proposed by Bill 25 is to prohibit, with limited exceptions, the display of all flags other than Canada’s and Alberta’s. This Bill 25 flag, also known as the “Act to Remove Politics and Ideology from Classrooms and...
Prime Minister Mark Carney is not oblivious. He knows, as any reasonable person would, that it looks terrible for one of his MPs to try to undermine an expert witness on forced labour in China during a parliamentary committee meeting. Last week, Liberal MP Michael Ma grilled Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa, about whether she...
Those who aspire to lead democratic nations are tested from the moment they declare their candidacy. Does he speak well? Is she good on her feet? How will he handle the economy? Will she be trusted in a crisis? Each candidate is sliced and smeared and pressed onto a slide, so that the electorate can inspect every personal and professional...
The scale of growth of Canada’s assisted-dying industry has become an easy talking point for skeptics both in Canada and abroad. The New York Post, in typical tabloid fashion, announced that Canada will “soon cross the sickly six-figure threshold” of 100,000 deaths by medical assistance in dying (MAID), noting the figure will surpass the number of Canadian deaths during the...
The Conservatives knew what they were doing – well, sort of – when they announced a petition to nominate former hockey commentator Don Cherry to the Order of Canada. It’s a great cultural wedge issue: one that pits the millions of Canadians with fond memories of Coach’s Corner against the ostensibly smaller cohort of Canadians who still begrudge Mr. Cherry...
Three Toronto-area synagogues were hit by gunfire in the span of one week last week. No one was obtuse enough to express “shock.” These acts are not shocking when one Toronto synagogue has been vandalized 10 times in 18 months. When swastikas were spray-painted on three Jewish-owned businesses in Montreal – and on a synagogue in Winnipeg, and two in...
The NDP should have a singular focus for the short- and medium-term: finding a way back to official party status. Everything else can come later. In fact, everything else will only come later if the NDP is once again a party with at least 12 seats in the House of Commons. That official party status will unlock desperately needed funds...
There was a trigger warning included in the written decision handed down by B.C.’s Human Rights Tribunal last week. A caution – just in case someone was browsing the web, looking for tiramisu recipes or articles on the Northern Cricket Frog or something, and accidentally stumbled on the case of former Chilliwack, B.C., school board trustee, Barry Neufeld, who was...
“Some of you – and I salute you – have been Liberals your whole life,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said to the crowd at the Liberals’ holiday party in December. “Others, like me, are new to politics. I’m not a politician.” And then, responding to someone on his right he said: “I am now, yes, you’re right.” “Some may have...
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was like Oprah handing out free cars when he named his shadow cabinet last May. More than half of the Conservative caucus got a role; it’s possible that the guy who vacuums the rugs in MPs’ offices was accidentally named shadow minister for small business for a brief moment during the flurry of appointments. But notably...
On June 18, 2012, doctors and other health care workers all across the country staged a walkout to protest the government’s changes to refugee health care benefits in Canada. Roughly two months earlier, the Stephen Harper government had announced that cuts were coming to the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP), which provides temporary health care coverage for refugees in Canada.
In 1935, American author Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, a dystopian novel about the rise of a populist demagogue named Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, who becomes the U.S. president after cultivating a cult following for his nationalism, anti-elitism, and quixotic promises. Windrip was fixated on restoring domestic production of material goods and hated the press.
The cognitive decline of former U.S. president Joe Biden was undeniable, minutes into his 2024 debate with Donald Trump. He looked confused, bewildered, and couldn’t complete a thought. The people around Mr. Biden had clearly been aware that he was losing his faculties, which is why, for months prior, he had largely been hidden from public view. But that decision...
While you were sleeping – and when he should have been – the President of the United States posted an image of a doctored map of the U.S. that included Greenland, Venezuela and Canada. It was the type of thing that your great uncle, having just discovered AI, posts while sitting in his underwear at 1 a.m., after his wife...
When an individual falls victim to the sunk cost fallacy, the consequences that follow are generally even worse. Maybe it’s an extra few thousand wasted on a rust bucket of a car just to feel like the money invested in it wasn’t for nothing. Maybe it means staying in a bad relationship that ought to have ended years ago. Maybe...
Heading into 2026, Canada is grappling with talk of separatism referendums in two provinces, Alberta and Quebec. It is slated to participate in a formal review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) at a time when the U.S. has pledged to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Public trust in our institutions...
In the late 1990s, a Toronto man named Mark Harding was busily spreading his “gospel” around the city. His proselytizing took the form of printed pamphlets and telephone messages, which warned that Muslims in Canada are “like raging wolves in sheep’s clothing,” and “full of hate, violence, and murder.” Mr. Harding’s materials suggested that all Canadian Muslims are actually terrorists...
In another life, Pierre Poilievre would have been a lawyer. The Conservative Leader is very good at creating a narrative, at prosecuting his case, and at setting traps for wayward leaders of other parties. He did that roughly one year ago, when he used the exact words articulated by then-NDP leader Jagmeet Singh when he walked away from the supply-and-confidence...
Can you mourn something that never existed? Like the idea of a happy marriage when you knew all along you settled for the first person who accepted your advances? Or the daydream of a life of luxury and indulgence, which feels possible while you’re holding a lottery ticket, but vanishes as soon as the numbers are called? What about the...
Back in October, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith wiped her hands clean of any scandal involving Alberta Health Services (AHS). Seven months earlier, the Premier had tapped retired Manitoba judge Raymond Wyant to probe alleged political interference involving the procurement of children’s medicine from abroad, and contracts for private surgical facilities in the province, both of which had ties to a...
Every so often a Canadian politician comes along and decides he or she is ready to challenge the orthodoxy. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas, who insisted that universal, publicly funded medical care was possible in Canada, despite strong opposition from health care providers, which culminated in a doctors’ strike.
Canadian health care as an idea, and Canadian health care as an institution, exist in two different universes. Notionally, health care in Canada is single-payer, universal and egalitarian. No one can jump the line. No one can buy better or faster care. Everyone has reasonably timely access to primary and specialist care, and critical issues are treated as true medical...
The members of Canada’s Supreme Court have such wonderful imaginations. They are able to look at the facts of a case – or a couple, as recently brought before them regarding prison sentences for accessing and possessing child pornography – and invent an entirely unrelated and far-fetched scenario in order to strike down a mandatory minimum sentence as unconstitutional. It’s...
Forty years ago, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney touched a hot stove. He announced that his government would partially de-index Old Age Security benefits from inflation, and very quickly, the smell of burning flesh began wafting through Ottawa. NDP MP Simon de Jong charged that Mr. Mulroney was breaking a “sacred trust” with Canadian seniors. “Two and a half million elderly...