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.
Everyone seemed to have the same take on the federal budget unveiled this week. That is, no one could figure out quite what it was. It certainly wasn’t a belt-tightening exercise, but the $151.5-billion in new spending over five years didn’t suggest a clear policy narrative about what it was trying to accomplish, either. On top of that, many of...
Mark Carney’s government was perhaps an hour old when he first laid out an intimate shared narrative of Canada and Europe that he has returned to and refined, again and again. “The ceremony we just witnessed reflects the wonder of a country built on the bedrock of three peoples: Indigenous, French and British,” he said as he began his first...
A few months ago, I was talking to Michael Wernick, the former clerk of the Privy Council, and we wandered onto the subject of Alberta’s secession vote. Mr. Wernick – now the Jarislowsky Chair in public management at the University of Ottawa – said something that’s been stuck in my brain ever since. Say the referendum delivers a stout margin...
Pierre Poilievre has to feel robbed by the universe – and also like some cosmic gang of thugs keeps returning to make sure his pockets truly contain nothing but lint. He was supposed to be the next Prime Minister, with the 20-point lead and command on the public mood to prove it. Then everything exploded, the banker stepped neatly into...
There’s a certain water-is-wet quality to noting the furious pace of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government. The busyness feels less like a byproduct than a self-conscious mission statement, even a dare: this is how we roll, so keep up or get left behind. Even by those standards, the past two weeks have been frenetic. There was the investment summit in...
In the early days of the world’s stupidest trade war, outsiders seemed impressed, amused and somehow surprised when Canada pushed back by yanking American booze from our stores, booing The Star-Spangled Banner and dishing out retaliatory tariffs. The same punchline kept surfacing online and among late-night TV hosts: “Do you know how obnoxious you have to be to tick off...
Welcome to the map resistance. On the same day that U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America, MapQuest – yes, that MapQuest, whose sheafs of printed directions guided so many early-2000s road trips – posted a simple, blunt message: “We’re not changing it.”
The 1995 movie Billy Madison stars Adam Sandler as the feckless son of a rich businessman who finally gets fed up with his son’s dirtbag ways and decides to hand his company over to someone else. Then, they cook up a ludicrous bargain: If Billy can successfully redo elementary and high school, he can run the family firm after all...
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s way of communicating and branding things is so distinct that some choice Carneyisms have crept into everyday Canadian speech over the year and a half he’s been a daily national presence. We don’t have plans or policies in this country right now – everything is a strategy. Public money purportedly luring private investment is, of course...
One of the perverse joys of politics is when an elected official looks you in the eye and tells you that the thing going on directly in front of your face is not happening. This happened twice during Mark Carney’s Oprah giveaway day on Thursday: You get a port! And you get a tunnel! And everybody gets a pipeline, whether...
The Prime Minister has been telling a gleaming story about Canada, but is avoiding the dark clouds gathering ahead
In an event with as much prescribed formality as the installation of Louise Arbour as Governor-General, it was the tiny moments of humanity and individual expression that spoke most loudly of how she sees her role and the country she’s now serving in a new way. Guests at the ceremony in the Senate on Monday morning included two former prime...
One word kept coming up this week, as Steven Guilbeault tendered his resignation from a government in which he no longer thought he could do his most important work. The word was “room.” As in: Is there still room on the Liberal benches for an ardent environmentalist? Can the party offer room for pipeline and resource proponents, alongside people animated...
There’s an expression I heard years ago that I try to keep in mind for perspective on days when it feels like everyone in the world has been sent specifically to annoy and oppose me. The original version used naughty language, but I’ll clean it up for the sake of this venerable newspaper. It goes like this: If you wake...
There were several rounds of chatter over the summer and into the fall about whether the honeymoon was over for Prime Minister Mark Carney – and if not yet, when that moment would come. Elbows sagged; President Donald Trump went on blowing up like a puffer fish; tariffs were carving up certain sectors of the economy and regions of the...
This was supposed to be a column about the trio of by-elections in a few days that would have delivered the Liberals to the balmy climes of MajorityLand – if everything went exactly right for them, that is. But then, Marilyn Gladu decided to make Wednesday the most exciting day of the week. The Sarnia, Ont. MP was elected four...
The thing about Mark Carney’s government is that he’s not subtle about what he’s interested in – and what he’s not. When his cabinet was sworn in, the Prime Minister issued a single mandate letter for all his ministers containing just seven priorities wrapped relentlessly around economic development and sovereignty. And the way Mr. Carney has gone about tackling that...
Pierre Poilievre arrived for his long-rumoured-and-finally-realized appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience bearing hefty baggage. The Conservative Leader presented Mr. Rogan with a 70-lb kettlebell created by a Calgary company that specializes in bespoke alterations to guns and knives. Before the episode even aired on Thursday, Mr. Poilievre’s office sent out a statement containing what I can only describe as...
It’s always weird to be reminded that the world as it is – to borrow a phrase, if I may – was a very different place not so long ago, and that what now seems constant and obvious was once strange or unknown. The phone you unthinkingly grab from your pocket to do, well, everything, used to be a crazy...
The fun thing about Ottawa is that it’s a town where people will swear with a straight face that they’re not thinking about a thing they are definitely thinking about, which is also the thing everyone is talking about. This week, that thing is snap-election speculation. It’s easy to picture the polls batting their eyelashes and waving seductively at the...
Just before the ceremony in downtown Ottawa in which Stephen Harper’s official portrait as Prime Minister would be unveiled on Tuesday afternoon, huge screens all around the room displayed a more ephemeral photo record of his time in office. The images highlighted what must have been most meaningful to him about that 2006-2015 chapter: the far north, the Canadian military...
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s press conference on Friday after his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping was chock-full of news, a strange surprise given that the PMO had been spinning everyone toward low expectations before the trip began. The two countries had struck a deal in which Canada would dramatically lower its tariff rate on Chinese-made electric vehicles and China...
Somehow, Mark Carney’s first budget – his grand game plan for the country, written in his economist mother tongue – was maybe the least exciting thing this week in Canadian politics. That could have been a serious problem for the Prime Minister, given how much was riding on his budget delivering in both economic and political credibility terms. But the...
Let’s recap. Everything at the border is Canada’s fault. We’re not a real country and should just become the 51st state. Our economy will exist only to the extent that Donald Trump sweeps unwanted crumbs off his royal banquet table. If we find any of that obnoxious or insulting or just absurd given that the U.S. looks like it’s about...
In 2002, Kenneth and Gabrielle Adelman created the California Coastal Records Project to document erosion of the Pacific coast. The couple worked as a team: She piloted the helicopter while he shot a photo every 150 metres as they flew along the shoreline, and they posted everything on the project’s no-frills website. In 2003, the Adelmans shot a fresh instalment...
You know, in retrospect, Keir Starmer figured out the game long before everyone else, even though he looked like a ridiculous brown-noser at the time. Back in February, the British Prime Minister visited the Oval Office, brandishing a letter from King Charles inviting Donald Trump to a second state visit. “This is really special,” Mr. Starmer said to the President...
How much it will cost your family to have a place to live, and what that burden does to the rest of your life and finances is, obviously, a dollars-and-cents thing. But everyone knows that’s not really what housing means. Home is safety and privacy; it’s comfort and warmth; it’s aspiration and class. It’s also a powerful proxy for how...
Here lies Canada’s carbon price, which exited our earthly realm on March 31, 2025. Mark Carney, mere hours after becoming Prime Minister, signed the death certificate in front of TV cameras he had summoned to witness the act. In that final moment, the carbon price was surrounded by many ministers who had spent years defending it in increasingly half-hearted tones...
Fall has always felt like much more of a time to take stock and start over to me than January. Structure returns to life, new routines settle in and everything green turns more gilded and rustling with each passing day, a constant reminder that time ticks by and things change, whether you like it or not. All of which is...
When Jenni Byrne appeared on the Beyond a Ballot podcast recently, reporters handily strip-mined the hour-long interview for key news tidbits from the first public remarks that Pierre Poilievre’s campaign manager has made since her party lost the April election. But hidden between those crunchy bits of intel, there’s something even more intriguing: the story Ms. Byrne wants to tell...
Donald Trump is a great unifier, forging new friendships and bonds of co-operation near and far. These new relationships are not with him, mind you, but among people who are similarly threatened by him and trying to figure out how to limit the blast radius. But you have to hand it to the guy: He’s really bringing people together. On...
If you talk to people who know Mark Carney well, one of the personality traits that comes up over and over is that he is not someone who suffers fools. People he thought were unprepared in meetings; reporters who asked questions he considered unfair or lazy; anyone he thought was wasting his time and ought to know better – they...
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...