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.
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...
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...