Robyn Urback
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.
Mass murderers spending life in prison is good, actually. But we don’t need the notwithstanding clause to make it happen
Over the years, reams of analysis have skewered the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision in R v. Bissonnette, which declared it unconstitutional to sentence offenders to consecutive periods of parole ineligibility on the grounds that it constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment.” But the decision is so myopic, so deleterious to the public’s perception of the fairness of our justice system, that...
Pierre Poilievre has a women problem
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre caused a bit of a stir online this week when he gave a shoutout to the enfeebled ovaries (and low-motile sperm) of this great nation when addressing millennials’ struggle to enter the housing market. “We will not forget,” he said, during a campaign stop in New Brunswick, “that young 36-year-old couple whose biological clock is running...
Mark Carney is offering voters the other guy’s ideas, without the other guy
If the last near-decade has proven any adage true, it’s that the Liberals are terrible at governing, but exceptional at campaigning. Campaigns are when you get to announce things; governance is when you’re supposed to follow through. Unfortunately for Canada, the Trudeau Liberals conflated the former with the latter, behaving as if announcing a plan – a framework for a...
Pierre Poilievre’s strength is as an attack dog. But he’s growling against the wrong target
A moment of silence, please, for the devastating loss that the Conservative Party of Canada still hasn’t fully recognized – or come to terms with. The Tories surely thought they had the coming election in the bag: it would be a carbon-tax election against a deeply unpopular prime minister, after which Pierre Poilievre would form government with a commanding majority...
Infection point: How vaccine mandates killed the Justin Trudeau brand
Two different Justin Trudeaus stood outside Rideau Cottage nearly five years apart, each version of the Prime Minister delivering an address that, together, defined the arc of his time in leadership. The first Trudeau stood alone, but he had the support of his caucus, and his country, behind him. He had a beard and a slight wave to his hair...
Society’s brainworms have gotten so bad, we can’t even recognize a swastika as a hate symbol
Shopify, the Ottawa-based multinational e-commerce company, was faced with a dilemma this week: One of its customers was selling T-shirts with swastikas on them using its platform, and the company was facing pressure to take down the store. But oh, free speech! What to do, what to do?! That customer was rap superstar Kanye West, who now goes by Ye...
Chrystia Freeland pitches Trump’s animosity for her as her strength. It’s her incorrigible weakness
“I want to let you in on a little secret,” says Chrystia Freeland in her video pitch to become the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. “Donald Trump doesn’t like me very much.” This is, according to the person hoping to steer the country through the next fours years of Mr. Trump’s recalcitrant tumult, to her advantage. “I’m...
How we went from Trudeaumania 2.0 to a resignation at Rideau Cottage
It’s difficult to recall, watching a defeated man finally yield to his fate outside Rideau Cottage this week, just how fervently Canadians fell for Justin Trudeau more than a decade ago. It was like Trudeaumania redux: he’d get stopped for selfies on the street, make headline news for appearing shirtless in public, and would absolutely electrify crowds of thousands of...
Conservatives give into their worst impulses with their ‘Wacko’ movie on Trudeau
Credit to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who has, in a small way, taken action against youth unemployment even before he becomes prime minister. With the creation of his latest movie, which his party named “WACKOS: the weird, wild, woke & wonderful world of the people running our country,” Mr. Poilievre must have employed at least a half-dozen members of middle-school...
Good news, Canada! The economy is great, it’s just your ‘vibes’ that are bad
It seemed like the Liberals had tried just about everything to resuscitate their dwindling support among Canadians, but Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, bless her heart, still managed to find something new: sneering contempt. Speaking to reporters on Monday, Ms. Freeland suggested that there is a disconnect between Canada’s positive economic numbers and how Canadians are actually feeling about their economy...
The Randy Boissonnault scandal has become a clown show
Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault is the current Most Problematic Minister in the Liberal cabinet. It’s a floating title – sort of like employee of the month, except for people who embarrass the government and undermine the importance of the office they serve – and one that several of the Prime Minister’s picks have worn over the years. Previous title-holders include...
In preparation for Trump 2.0, Ottawa must broadcast that our border is closed
U.S. President Joe Biden did Canada a solid back in 2023, when his government agreed to new terms on the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) with Canada. A loophole in the previous agreement meant that migrants who crossed into Canada at irregular crossings, such as Roxham Road in Quebec, could still claim asylum in Canada. The U.S. could thus wash...
Donald Trump, Mr. Invincible, has triumphed once again
Donald Trump has lived his life with a horseshoe in his sphincter and a different set of rules. He was on third base by the time his umbilical cord was cut, living an early life of wealth and opulence, the type of lifestyle of which most Americans could only dream. When young men his age were being sent to fight...
Justin Trudeau is spoiling for a fight, even if it means taking his party down with him
Pity Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who can’t so much as order a coffee in Ottawa Centre without being asked, “Cream or sugar, sir? And also: why won’t you step down?” The question has dogged the Prime Minister for months, ever since it became clear, after the Liberals’ by-election defeat in its former stronghold of Toronto-St. Paul’s in June, that the...
Pierre Poilievre, champion of the little guy, just voted to hurt young workers
Back in 2012, a young Pierre Poilievre, who was parliamentary secretary to the minister of transport in Stephen Harper’s government, gave a compelling address in the House of Commons defending his government’s decision to raise the age of Old Age Security (OAS) eligibility from 65 to 67. He explained that people are living longer than when the program was first...
Jagmeet Singh to NDP caucus: We’ve accomplished basically nothing, so our work here is done
Friends, brothers, sisters and donors (yes, both of you): We did it. It has been a long 2½ years: 2½ years of subtle debasement, of quiet humiliation, of trying to explain what, exactly, we’re thinking by propping up a government that we’ve also called “out of touch” and ineffective. Well, the results are finally in. No, I’m not talking about...
Misuse of the temporary foreign worker program is a business racket
Standing by a lectern with a sign that read “Bring Home Our Jobs,” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre had words for both the government and for businesses that he implied were abusing Canada’s temporary foreign workers program. “Trudeau has destroyed our entire immigration system,” he said, referring to the massive expansion of workers applying under the low-wage labour market impact assessment...
The appalling homophobic attack in Canada you didn’t hear about
It’s been six weeks since a brazen, allegedly bigoted attack took place on the street in a major Canadian city. It should have been national news. Perhaps under different circumstances, it would have been. In the early hours of June 23, Emma MacLean and her girlfriend were walking in downtown Halifax. By Ms. MacLean’s telling, one man made a “sexually...
Is it fair that some female athletes are born with male traits? No. But it wouldn’t be fair to disqualify them either
Eero Mäntyranta was a seven-time Finnish Olympic medalist with a genetic advantage. That wasn’t known in the 1960s, when he took home three Olympic golds for cross-country skiing, but his body was producing extraordinarily high levels of hemoglobin, which gave him enhanced oxygen-carrying capacity: a clear advantage in endurance sports. It wasn’t until 97 members of his family were assessed...
Why ‘weird’ is the perfect, pernicious political attack against Republicans
Hillary Clinton tried all sorts of acrimonious attacks against Donald Trump when the two were vying for the White House back in 2016. Mr. Trump was a bad role model for children, she implied in one ad. He raised the spectre of nuclear war, she warned in another. He said disgusting things about women. Insulting things about veterans. Racist things...
Trump’s first term was a warning for Canada. We didn’t heed it
The U.S. presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden last month was a genuinely frightening spectacle. At one lectern was a known lunatic: a guy who trades in conspiracies and lies, whose prospective second term promises to be even more volatile than the first. At the other lectern was an unknown figure: Joe Biden in body, but someone else...
Striking LCBO workers are making Doug Ford’s case for him
The very first government-run liquor stores opened in Ontario nearly 100 years ago, garnering huge fanfare, hours-long lines and a healthy degree of puritanical skepticism. Reporters chronicled the scenes in a massive spread published in The Globe and Mail on June 2, 1927, where they noted that people were mostly civilized as they waited to acquire their permits to buy...
Harjit Sajjan will remain in cabinet, and shame on you for asking about it
One thing that Canadians have learned over the course of the past nine years is that, in this government, there is no such thing as a lethal scandal. Ministers don’t resign in disgrace. Public displays of contrition are verboten. No accusation is ever so egregious as to demand an actual response; no charge so serious as to merit sombre reflection...
Anthony Housefather can best represent Canadian Jews by walking away from the Liberals
For the past six or so months, Liberal MP Anthony Housefather has been an accidental maverick in his own party. It’s an unenviable position – lonely, polarizing, controversial – and one that, by his own telling, he didn’t seek to occupy. Indeed, Mr. Housefather didn’t have much of a reputation for dissidence before, with the exception of matters of English...
Pierre Poilievre can prove he’s a grown-up and read the NSICOP report. But what would be the point?
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has every partisan political reason to resist calls to read the classified version of the watchdog report into foreign meddling and alleged collaboration from Canadian parliamentarians. His party’s support in the polls is sky-high. The Liberals’ support is the worst it’s been since 2015. He has a clear, solid line of attack in demanding Prime Minister...
Canada should give doctors every incentive to stay. By hiking capital gains, it’s doing the opposite
There is one very good reason why the Liberals could not entertain the request from Canadian doctors for a carveout on the looming capital-gains tax increase, and it comes down, as most things do with this government, to politics and perceptions. For months now, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has insisted that the change to the capital-gains inclusion rate, which is...
If the Conservatives have a ‘hidden agenda’ on abortion, it’s a mess
Canadians who are staunchly pro-choice should listen to Conservative MP Arnold Viersen’s appearance on Uncommons, a podcast run and hosted by Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith. They will – or should – walk away reassured.
Blaine Higgs is livid about teens learning about sex. Does he know they listen to rock, too?
A moment, please, for the pure souls in New Brunswick high schools whose innocence has been siphoned away by the apparent smut-peddlers operating under the guise of sexual-education instructors. Those delicate flowers, you must understand, were probably still playing with Barbies and Pokémon cards (despite what their parents were probably doing when they were in high school) until they were...
Beverley McLachlin’s continued tenure on Hong Kong’s court is an ongoing disgrace
Beverley McLachlin has spent the past six years servicing the reputation of Hong Kong’s top court, while destroying the one she spent a lifetime building in Canada. Had she decided, upon her retirement from the Supreme Court of Canada in 2017, to invest in a nice condo in Boca Raton and take up watercolour portraits or something, her legacy would...
‘Useless and overpaid’ lobbyists sure are keeping Pierre Poilievre’s calendar busy
I’m not sure why Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre wrote an entire op-ed in the National Post urging Canadian businesses to fire their “useless and overpaid lobbyists.” “Often,” he wrote, “the lobbyist doesn’t share the interests of the company, its workers, consumers or shareholders. A good solution would be to fire these lobbyists, stop talking with politicians and start trying to...
Of course the keffiyeh is political. But it still shouldn’t be banned from Ontario’s legislature
Unless I misread their biographies, I don’t believe NDP MPPs Kristyn Wong-Tam and Joel Harden trace their lineage to the Levant. Was Mr. Harden’s activism born from his experience as a young Palestinian trying to survive in Gaza? Or was it from his position as a student activist railing against capitalism within the comfy confines of Canadian universities? I suppose...
Jews have eyes. And they see that the antisemitism in the protests over Gaza is no aberration
There is a point at which the gaslighting becomes genuinely insulting. When meek attempts to blame a rogue few for hateful or antisemitic speech, or the repeated insistence that such displays of bigotry have “no place in Canada,” are so disconnected from reality that they become offensive and belittling.
The failure of Canada’s health care system is a disgrace – and a deadly one
What can be said about Canada’s health care system that hasn’t been said countless times over, as we watch more and more people suffer and die as they wait for baseline standards of care? Despite our delusions, we don’t have “world-class” health care, as our Prime Minister has said; we don’t even have universal health care. What we have is...
According to Justin Trudeau, Justin Trudeau is fear-mongering on immigration
Someone, somewhere, appears to have taken a blowtorch to Canada’s immigration system. It’s a mess. We have too many people, and not enough homes, not enough transit, not enough health care infrastructure. International students are lining up at food banks and homeless shelters. Canadians’ attitudes on immigration are becoming more negative.
Pierre Poilievre wants big government to protect kids from porn
Mr. Freedom’s war against the gatekeepers apparently comes with a few stipulations. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who is currently railing against this government’s efforts to regulate and police the internet with its new online harms legislation, seems to believe the government should regulate and police the internet – just as long as it’s over an issue that appeals to his...
Jagmeet Singh is super serious this time
Pity Jagmeet Singh’s communications staff, constantly tasked with finding new language for the same empty threat the NDP Leader has been making for years. Mr. Singh has to sound serious but not be serious; he needs to project resoluteness even though he’s the political equivalent of an accordion, bending in every direction and emitting sounds that appeal only to a...
No, for sure, I believe Justin Trudeau is the right leader for the Liberals
No one should listen to Newfoundland MP Ken McDonald, who said in an interview with Radio-Canada last month that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should face some sort of leadership review. “Every leader, every party has a best-before date. Our best-before date is here,” he said. “So you think at least there should be a leadership review in the Liberal Party?”...