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 Shannon Proudfoot.
This is the election campaign that wasn’t. Everyone knew what this thing was going to be; it had been building forever. It was going to be a reckoning on 10 years of Liberal government, a volcanic vent for the public’s exhausted fury with the party and Justin Trudeau, who, to some, had become a walking expletive. We were going to...
If Mark Carney – the charming, meticulous, and sometimes prickly economist – lands the job of steering through a crisis, it wouldn't be the first time
Has anyone considered just getting him another game show? Think about it: guaranteed audience; breathless anticipation of the next plot twist; a stage on which he can play the smiting hand of God or magnanimous benefactor, depending on his whim; a teaser campaign in the week before the big reveal; even a team in charge of set dressing and extras...
Nobody got any hugs this time. Perhaps you, like me, thought you remembered the sunny-ways stroll up the Rideau Hall driveway in 2015, when Justin Trudeau and his first cabinet arrived to be sworn in after their surging majority win. But even if you think you remember how joyful and giddy and self-congratulatory and stage-managed that day was, I promise...
The Liberal leadership debates next week will feature something that has been notably absent from the contest so far: Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland taking direct swings at each other. The two leading contenders to replace Justin Trudeau and become Canada’s next prime minister have, until now, avoided going toe to toe, or talking much about each other at all...
It’s hard to know how to identify Jordan Peterson based on the attention he commands. An academic? A culture warrior? A self-help guru? In any case, he sat down for a long interview with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre that was released a few days ago, and the conversation unearthed some enlightening things about the man who is likely to become...
The holidays are often a time of reflection. And even as everyone is still shaking off their cheese-induced torpor, the internal calls for Justin Trudeau to resign as Liberal Leader are accumulating. It emerged this week that a majority of the Liberal Quebec caucus wants Mr. Trudeau to step down, though no one involved seems willing to sign their name...
On 30 Rock, there’s a moment in which Tina Fey’s character, Liz Lemon, says, “What a week, huh?” to Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy in exhausted sympathy. He shoots back: “Lemon, it’s Wednesday.” This week, the Ottawa bubble was Liz Lemon – except that it was only Tuesday by the time the Liberal Party of Canada and assorted hangers-on gathered for...
As Canadians have been feeling squeezed by everyday life, Pierre Poilievre has enthusiastically blamed Justin Trudeau for every single thing that’s gone wrong in Canada and the world at large. Housing and grocery costs, drug problems, urban decay, too few houses, too many newcomers – problems that fairly land at the Prime Minister’s feet and others that don’t, the Conservative...
Politics includes a lot of pretending. People say one thing when they clearly mean another. They swear up and down that they’re not doing the thing they’re doing right in front of your face. Or they insist they’re doing it for some reason other than their obvious intent. But this week, in glorious defiance of all of that shameless artifice...
This week in Ottawa, Justin Trudeau faced off against a small herd of rebellious Liberals who, as it turned out, all showed up for the staring contest with a raging case of pink eye. Basically, two dozen of his MPs whispered, “Please go away,” and the Prime Minister said, “No,” and smiled his Cheshire Cat smile, and then everyone went...
It’s very Ottawa to prebook an attempted political knifing for a Wednesday morning, but also to keep enough of the messiness under wraps so that if the agitators blinked, you could go back to being one big happy family, with bolted-on grins, in the afternoon. The last week has been filled with reports about a growing swell of frustration among...
The big message of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s testimony this week before the foreign-interference commission was – as it so often is – an elaborate political version of, “It’s not me, it’s you.” In his telling, information flowed in and out of the Prime Minister’s Office as it was supposed to, and anything that didn’t float up to his eye...
The broad understanding of J.D. Vance’s personal road map to the vice-presidential debate stage – where he’ll face off against Tim Walz on Tuesday night – is that he is a shameless turncoat who swallowed whole his deeply felt criticisms of Donald Trump when he sensed the winds shift.
During Pride in Toronto early this summer, Kathleen Wynne, the former premier of Ontario, was wandering the crowds with her family when she spotted the tall, familiar figure of Justin Trudeau nearby. One of the Prime Minister’s entourage noticed Ms. Wynne – there is much shared political DNA between her era at Queen’s Park and Mr. Trudeau’s generation of federal...
It’s fun to imagine the planning that went into the campaign launched this week by the Ottawa chapter of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the largest union representing federal government workers. “Okay, team, what’s the best way to make the case that we shouldn’t go back to the office, two years after everyone else did?” “Ooh! Why don’t we...
If you wanted to see a blue-collar guy conversationally cold-cock a prime minister during shift change at the plant, the internet had you covered this week. A CTV camera was rolling when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. recently. One of the workers he greeted at the gates refused to shake his hand, then...
There’s an episode of The Simpsons in which Marge and a few other women create an investment club, but when Marge’s risk aversion annoys the others, they kick her out. The remaining club members buy a slick pita franchise, while Marge invests in a sad-sack “Pretzel Wagon.” When she pulls up outside the power plant, Homer dutifully hollers to his...
Less than 24 hours earlier, their man on the presidential ticket had clutched his suddenly bleeding ear and hit the deck, then rose again to punch the sky while the Secret Service bundled him off the Pennsylvania stage. Now, on Sunday afternoon, Republicans were pouring into Milwaukee, where they’d always planned to be this week for the Republican National Convention...
Partway through the RCMP training program, there’s a class that covers two-person handcuffing – as in, restraining someone who really doesn’t want to help. It takes place in a gym where the floors and lower walls are swathed in dense blue crash mats, for good reason. The lesson typically makes cadets nervous in anticipation, but it often ends up being...
The day after the disastrous presidential debate, CNN convened a panel that included Katie Rogers, a New York Times reporter who covers the White House. When the host asked her what those closest to President Joe Biden, including First Lady Jill Biden, were telling him, she paused to set the table first. “I think it’s important to understand how this...
In his indispensable book of children’s poetry Alligator Pie, Dennis Lee has a verse about the Ookpik, a big-eyed, all-fluff snowy owl figure popularized in the 1960s as an Inuit handicraft toy. Ookpik is sublimely Lee, in that the poem is so bouncy and mischievous that its profound brilliance tiptoes right up behind you. It starts like this: “An Ookpik...
The podcast interview that earned Conservative MP Arnold Viersen a newspaper across the nose this week was fascinating and confounding just like Cirque du Soleil: There’s so much interesting stuff here, but what is this? To recap: Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith has a podcast called Uncommons on which he chats with various experts, people in the news, partisan teammates and...
Justin Trudeau gave a press conference this week about electric vehicles, but reporters took the opportunity after his remarks to ask the Prime Minister whatever they wanted. My colleague Laura Stone stepped to the microphone. “I want to ask you about leadership. Polls have you 20 points behind the Conservatives and it doesn’t seem to be getting better, despite your...
When you’re new to the job of governing, a budget is a manifesto written in the air. All things are possible and all problems are solvable for the simple reason that the people who will do the fixing – you – are not the ones who created the problems in the first place. But with each year that goes by...
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was on the first sentence of his first answer at the public inquiry into foreign interference when it became clear that uh oh, he’d summoned That Guy. You know the guy: Ask him a factual question and the response is a purring, generic values statement so distantly related to the original question they could legally get...
Everyone has been on the receiving end of a social cold shoulder when you start out wondering if you’re imagining things, realize you aren’t, then re-examine all kinds of interactions from the past, wondering what was going on under the surface. This week, the public inquiry into foreign interference heard from a pair of MPs who are among China’s primary...
The Conservatives screeched triumphantly through the finish line of 2023, while the Liberals seemed to be dragging their own inert carcasses to the end. This week, everyone returned to the House of Commons after regrouping over a languorous holiday break, and the government tried to regain its footing with a new line of attack for a new year.
There’s a weekend now ensconced in Liberal lore that happened in 2012, when Justin Trudeau was a second-term MP contemplating a run for the Liberal leadership. He had gotten beyond whispering about the idea with his closest advisers, Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, and gathered a broader group of friends and helpers – together with their families and his own...
Let’s give the Rebel News arrest and subsequent howling the Zapruder film treatment, shall we? The main characters are Rebel on-air personality David Menzies, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and an RCMP officer. We see Ms. Freeland walking toward the camera along a strip-mall sidewalk in the Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill. She’s accompanied by a young woman, presumably a...
If you don’t live in or come from Winnipeg, what you know about the place is probably some version of the following. It is home to broad swathes of grinding poverty. Crime, especially of the violent sort, is distressingly common. The city has a large urban Indigenous population that bears the brunt of those issues. Less weighty, but still painted...
So there sat Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and National Post columnist Rex Murphy in a cinderblock hallway that looked like one of the nation’s better prisons or lesser university dorms, a blue tinsel Christmas tree beside them. You knew you were in for a treat when Mr. Murphy started out with this: “You’ve had in this particular year, the greatest...
The human backdrop at a political event means taking real people and reducing them to scenery, curated and arranged like a person bouquet. If you’re a supporter who gets plucked out of the crowd to stand onstage, it must feel like going out to run errands and ending up as an extra in a movie.
This week, a video that was plainly designed to go viral achieved its purpose, when a clip of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre sparring with a reporter in an apple orchard blew through international conservative circles like catnip. In the video, a journalist asks Mr. Poilievre about his populist approach, but each time he tries to...
Even as Jagmeet Singh set out to make the case that his is the only party that will fight for ordinary people and is ready for serious clout, the NDP policy convention took on a chaotic edge because of tensions over the Mideast war. The NDP sees a political opportunity in how unpopular the governing Liberals have become. The party...
Some basic political math is fuelling a certain giddiness at the federal NDP’s policy convention in Hamilton this weekend. It goes like this, New Democrats figure: Canadians are done with the Liberals, and the Liberals appear to be done with new ideas or any ability to react to the reality surrounding them. That means that either Prime Minister Justin Trudeau...