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.
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...
This is not cancel culture, the right insists, as it scours the internet, searching for heretics. Iconoclasts will be identified – shamed, reported, and maybe even investigated – to ensure they are punished for their unacceptable opinions. This hunt is not limited to those who celebrated the assassination of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, which is arguably legitimate grounds for termination...
The right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk has become a casualty of a version of America he believed could be resisted, simply, with words. Mr. Kirk built a political empire based on the premise that ideas could lead to great victories; that a high school kid could write an op-ed for Breitbart and, just four years later, speak on stage at the...
Maybe the NDP will get its act together. Maybe it will become a real political party, a viable third option, a progressive voice in a political ecosystem where Prime Minister Mark Carney has so graciously yielded the floor. Mr. Carney uttered the word “austerity” last week in describing what to expect from his upcoming budget. That term was verboten under...
Every week, for the last several months, Islamic afternoon prayers have been held outside Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica. The prayers are hosted by the group Montreal4Palestine, which has used the space outside the church to protest Israel’s continuing war in Gaza. It’s either a beautiful or egregiously provocative scene, depending on how you look at it. Beautiful for what it illustrates...
“Elbows up” was always a campaign-winning but policy-losing strategy. We have all unfortunately become students of the mercurial menace that is Donald Trump, and we know that the U.S. President is less a serious negotiating partner than an obstinate toddler – and you don’t go “elbows up” against toddlers for the simple reason that they are, in a word, insane...
Months ago, Canadians were told we were in an emergency. U.S. President Donald Trump “wants to break us, so America can own us,” said then-candidate Mark Carney, who would successfully sell Canadians on his readiness for real change. “We will not let that happen.” Mr. Carney made the case that the tariffs being threatened by Mr. Trump constituted “the most...
It would be tolerable – though just barely – if Gary Anandasangaree was, say, minister of Fisheries, or minister of Artificial Intelligence. One does not need to know about gun licensing, for example, to work on a transition plan away from open net-pen salmon farming on the West coast; a firewall preventing a minister from weighing in on matters involving...
The continuing controversy involving Sean Feucht, the American Christian rocker and MAGA darling who has been denied permits for his concerts all across Eastern Canada, has become just dreadfully irritating. It is irritating to watch Mr. Feucht’s critics conflate his opinions – on abortion (he’s against it), on homosexuality (he believes it is a perversion of God’s will), on the...
The whole world changed in the near-decade between two of the most high-profile sexual assault trials in recent Canadian history. But inside the courtroom, it was as if no time had passed at all. Outside, the world had been fundamentally reordered by a pandemic, by a reality TV star twice elected U.S. President, by the murder of a Black man...
Prime Minister Mark Carney wasted no time in axing a signature Justin Trudeau policy the moment he took on the job. It wasn’t that the carbon tax was bad policy, per se, or focused on the wrong target or poorly administered or needlessly bureaucratic. Indeed, Mr. Carney was broadly supportive of carbon pricing as a mechanism to curb greenhouse gas...
Maybe Prime Minister Mark Carney’s elbows were getting tired. He kept them up the entire campaign, and well, that was enough to get the job done (the job, notably, being winning the election – not standing up to U.S. President Donald Trump). And now that the election is over, Mr. Carney has allowed himself some moments of rest.
An Ontario court justice has sent a strong message to criminal thugs all across the province who might find themselves in a scenario where they could help a friend evade justice: Go ahead. You won’t necessarily go to jail. In fact, you might be able to keep your gym membership. In July, 2023, in the Leslieville area of Toronto, Khalila...
Ever since the election, the Conservative Party has been giving off strong “loser energy” vibes. It’s not simply that the party failed to form government, or even that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre lost his own seat (though it certainly doesn’t help that he’s forced to press his nose up against the House’s stained glass windows). It’s more so the air...
In a less partisan, more conciliatory political environment, there would be cross-partisan consensus about the need for a by-election in the Quebec riding of Terrebonne. It’s not simply that the margin of victory was razor-thin, with the Liberals’ Tatiana Auguste winning the riding by a single vote. Nor is it about the flip-flopping of the result: Terrebonne was first won...
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith absolutely, unequivocally does not want to see a cockfight. She’s merely provoking these specially bred roosters and will soon release them together in a pen. Whatever happens, happens. She has been adamant in her opposition to forest fires. “They’re dangerous,” she says, as she gingerly places a pack of matches on a pile of dry leaves...
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...
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...