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 Susan Delacourt.
Mark Carney’s bold new plan to increase Canada’s defence spending comes with two price tags. The prime minister’s announcement was clear on one of them: more than $9 billion will be injected into military spending this year alone, and increases in the years after. The other price — “sacrifice” — got a mention from Carney, but little more by way...
Susan Delacourt: Thanks to Doug Ford, I have had a song stuck in my head for days this week. “Love is in the Air,” a one-hit wonder from the 1970s, turned into the soundtrack of the first ministers’ meeting after the Ontario premier walked in singing it.
Mark Carney wants to you know that he is the leader of “Canada’s new government.” The prime minister slipped that into a few of his very first appearances in the Commons. This Liberal government is not entirely new, of course, but neither is the phrase. It’s how Stephen Harper branded his government when it came to power two decades ago...
“Humility” is a word that is being thrown around a lot as the new House of Commons gets to work this week. Mark Carney kicked off his formal address to the throne speech on Thursday with avowed “great humility” at the task before him. Other MPs, new and old, have told the House too that they return after the last...
King Charles no doubt had many reasons for his whirlwind trip to Canada this week, but really, it all goes back to one moment in the dead of winter earlier this year. It happened at the White House in February, when British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with a flattering flourish, issued a royal invitation to Donald Trump for a second...
Matt Gurney: Over the last few weeks, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s postelection government has been shaping up. A cabinet has been announced. Parliamentarians are being sworn in — including the PM, for the first time. Some key staff positions remain unfilled. With the House returning next week and the King coming to town, what’s your sense of where things stand...
Mark Carney isn’t getting much of a honeymoon as a new prime minister. It’s been a bit of a bumpy ride since Carney swore in his new cabinet just a week ago, which featured some surprising new ministers, as well as some conspicuous absences, such as Nate Erskine-Smith, who pronounced himself disrespected.
Most cabinet shuffles unfold with a flurry of attention on all the new faces, and Mark Carney’s first ministry after the election has plenty of them. But this was a shuffle with an unusual amount of attention on who and what wasn’t there — big names from Justin Trudeau’s time in office and of course, Trudeau himself.
Susan Delacourt: One word leapt out at me in a piece you wrote for this paper last week, Matt, and it was this one: “killed.” As in, the Conservatives got killed in the election. I agree that their hopes got killed — especially the hopes they had when they were 20 points ahead of the Liberals. But here’s the thing...
It’s called “the weave” — Donald Trump’s rambling, random rants when he has anyone’s attention — and Prime Minister Mark Carney can now say he experienced one at the president’s right hand. For more than 30 minutes in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump was weaving all over the place, but not dodging. Yes, he wants Canada to become part...
Mark Carney is new to politics, but in a matter of months, he is learning that each fight gets tougher. He handily won the Liberal leadership in March. His election victory a week ago was tighter. This week, he’s up against Donald Trump, and the newly elected prime minister has to be aware that the stakes in this contest are...
Whenever the House of Commons does get together again, it will be bigger, but will it be any less nasty than the last one? A lot of people are saying it should be, including newly elected Conservative MPs such as Chris d’Entremont and Scott Aitchison, talking optimistically in postelection media interviews about their expectations of a tone shift.
Donald Trump went on social media on Canada’s election day to endorse himself as the best leader for this country. Canadians politely disagreed, handing victory to Mark Carney and the Liberals — a vote for stability amid the chaos Trump keeps wanting to wreak on Canada.
Jagmeet Singh, in a tough election fight, is opening up about another tense period in his life as New Democratic Party leader — the winter of 2023-24, when real and credible death threats put him and his family under heavy RCMP protection for weeks on end.
Matt Gurney: A few weeks ago, I expressed some irritation with the candidates. I still feel that way. This has been an uninspiring campaign. We are, we’re told, facing major, existential threats to our way of life and maybe even our national survival. And I honestly can’t recall a single policy proposal from any of the parties off the top...
Years ago, someone put a Canadian spin on the old joke about the chicken crossing the road. Question: Why does a chicken cross the street in Canada? Answer: To get to the middle of the road. As the 2025 election winds down to its last hours, let it be noted that this was a campaign about forcing all the political...
Susan Delacourt: Well, the debates are now behind us, advance voting is under way, and I am thinking a lot this weekend about the whole idea of change. I wonder whether the debates changed anything. I’m curious to see if poll trends change in the last week of this election. And I’m also reflecting on Pierre Poilievre and whether we’ve...
Three leaders walked on to a stage in Montreal on Thursday night with one mission — to take the front-runner shine off Liberal Leader Mark Carney. If there was any doubt about Carney’s lead in this election, it was dispelled within minutes after the opening of the English-language leaders’ debate.
Doug Ford and Pierre Poilievre agreed on one subject this week: change is needed. The federal Conservative leader is saying that Canada needs change. The Ontario premier is saying that Poilievre needs to change his campaign team.
One of the more searing images of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign came during the debate when Donald Trump kept lurking behind Hillary Clinton on stage. Clinton, who lost that election, would recall later in her book that she found it “incredibly uncomfortable,” and considered telling Trump: “Back up, you creep.”
Matt Gurney: Something the small but mighty team at The Line is doing during the campaign is a fun little feature with a profane name we publish on Fridays. It’s an accountability/fact-check feature. Last week, we noted in it that the parties were more or less behaving and keeping relatively honest. As late as the middle of this week, that...
Canadians didn’t get an “axe the tax” election in 2025, as Pierre Poilievre hoped, but that may be just as well for the Conservatives. New polling from Abacus Data shows that Liberal Leader Mark Carney, not Poilievre, is getting credit for axing the carbon levy — by a margin of nearly two to one.
Mark Carney calls it “dramatic.” Former Reform party leader Preston Manning says it’s just the plain truth. Whatever way you look at this flurry of talk about Western secession if the Liberals win the federal election on April 28, it has injected another dose of existential rhetoric into a campaign already laden with do-or-die propositions.
Matt Gurney: I want to ask you a specific question about the campaign — a few different parts of it, really. But I want to lead with a broader question, just as a vibe check. Does this feel like an election yet? I have to say, it doesn’t to me. It’s my job to follow this stuff. I do! But...
In a normal election campaign, the ballot-box question would revolve around what voters want. But Canada is not in a normal campaign, and a lot of time is being spent in this one focused on what Donald Trump might want.
Canada didn’t emerge totally unscathed from Donald Trump’s shock-and-awe day of sweeping tariffs this week, but the general agreement in this country is that it could have been a lot worse.
Pierre Poilievre went into this election campaign with plenty of political skills, but lacking one he needs right now — the ability to turn enemies into friends. That could be a tall order for this take-no-prisoners Conservative leader.
Welcome to Election 2025 and the weekly campaign edition of On The Contrary, in which Susan Delacourt and Matt Gurney will be tracking the race by focusing on the five people who have made things interesting or game-changing.
Canada is just days into its own federal election campaign and Donald Trump has already pulled the fire alarm. More disturbing, this will probably not be the last Trump disruption before voting day on April 28. He may not have annexed this country, but Trump is annexing himself and his whims into a sovereign country’s election.
In a little more than five weeks, either Mark Carney or Pierre Poilievre will be the prime minister of Canada. But it is abundantly clear that this election campaign is more than a faceoff between the Liberal and Conservative leaders.
Matt Gurney: Well, here we are. Yay, I guess. There goes our April. For the one or two readers who haven’t heard, Susan and I are writing this when an election call is believed to be imminent. This will probably hit the presses as one is called. There’s so many angles to get started with, but here’s one I’m not...
The two leading contenders to be Canada’s next prime minister are not vying to get that job on the basis of their media friendliness. One, new Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney, has shown again this week that he can be testy with tough media questions, especially when it comes to his personal finances.
New prime minister Mark Carney didn’t go out of his way to be a champion for women with his cabinet choices unveiled at Rideau Hall on Friday — and that could be a deliberate effort to walk back what critics called the “woke” feminist brand of Justin Trudeau. It might also be a reflection of how Carney has been leaning...
Mark Carney, who will officially become prime minister on Friday, is walking into the job as a serious threat to Pierre Poilievre, according to the latest polling from Abacus Data that shows Carney ranked higher than the Conservative leader across a wide range of skills. It means that the federal election campaign expected within days is going to be intense...
Every decade or so, the federal Liberal party has had to reinvent itself or risk extinction. That job now falls to Mark Carney, the former bank governor who won a massive victory Sunday in the race to succeed Justin Trudeau. It was as close to a unanimous vote of confidence as Carney could have hoped for — 85.9 per cent...
Justin Trudeau spent the last days of his time as prime minister with his political life flashing before his eyes. All the big, disruptive events of Trudeau’s nearly decade in power have been churning around him. Donald Trump’s existential threats were chief among them, but there were shades of other crises, too — the resumption of weekly meetings with the...
If there was any doubt that Canada-U.S. relations have reached a breaking point this week, Justin Trudeau dispelled it in a remarkable address on Tuesday that tackled Donald Trump head on and personally. It can be argued that no Canadian prime minister, at least in living memory, has called out an American president in such a public, withering way. “We’re...
How many countries will Donald Trump and his enablers try to put in their place in the space of a few days? The answer seems to be: as many as they want.
Doug Ford now has everything that federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has wanted for quite a while: an election out of the way early this year and a comfortable majority, with Liberals and New Democrats consigned to the sidelines for the next four years. All those goals are still within the sights of the federal Conservatives, but the route there...
Susan Delacourt: I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Matt, but we are days away from an Ontario election. While it’s dangerous to make predictions in politics these days, you want to take a guess at what we might see when all the votes are tallied Thursday night?
If Mark Carney is the next prime minister who has to deal with Donald Trump, the U.S. president may need to change up his game on the insults he’s been tossing in Canada’s direction. Calling Carney “governor” won’t exactly have the same sting, given that the man increasingly seen as the front-running Liberal leadership contender has actually been a governor...
Three years ago this week, Canada’s capital was in the midst of an occupation by the so-called “Freedom Convoy,” prompting Justin Trudeau to declare a state of emergency on Valentine’s Day, 2022. February has never been one of Trudeau’s greatest months — the prime minister may even be secretly grateful this is his last one in power.
No one in the Liberal party, perhaps understandably, wants to make too much of the parallels between Chrystia Freeland’s bid to be prime minister and Kamala Harris’s unsuccessful bid last year to keep Donald Trump from being re-elected. But the similarities are there.
Susan Delacourt: Donald Trump is no friend to progressives in Canada, to state the obvious. But I’m sure I’m not the only person wondering these days how much of a pal he is to Canadian conservatives, both provincially and federally.
It’s starting to become clear why Pierre Poilievre was so keen to have an election last fall. Not only is Donald Trump raining on the Conservative leader’s parade, but now Premier Doug Ford will be beating Poilievre to the campaign trail with the Feb. 27 Ontario election to be called within days.
In a recurring feature, Susan Delacourt, a small-l liberal, and Matt Gurney, a small-c conservative, bring their different perspectives — and shared commitment to civil disagreement — to the political debates of the moment.
Justin Trudeau is facing down one of the most powerful threats to Canada at a moment when his own power is waning. It may turn out to be one of the defining chapters for Trudeau himself and Canada as a whole. Critics have been saying since he resigned a few weeks ago: is this any time for a lame-duck prime...
The race to become Canada’s next Liberal leader is shaping up into the battle that Justin Trudeau keenly wanted to fight himself — one in which U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump, and the forces behind his resurgence, are top of mind for Canadians. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre isn’t forgotten, but Trump has found a way to make himself a much bigger...
Susan Delacourt: Any other week, Matt, we probably would have been talking about Justin Trudeau’s resignation last Monday. But Donald Trump has walked all over that conversation with his threats to force Canada into a merger with the United States. I actually can’t believe I just wrote that last sentence. So let’s talk about what he has done to throw...
Justin Trudeau spent the past year saying he wasn’t a guy who could walk away from a fight. Today, he is that guy. Critics of Trudeau, and there are many of them, will be keen to cast this decision as an inglorious retreat — the man who fell to earth after hanging on too long. But that brand of criticism...
One of the most momentous weeks of Justin Trudeau’s political career came to a close on Friday with arguably his least momentous cabinet shuffle. This is not to take away from the personal significance of the moment for any of the new cabinet members, such as Public Safety Minister David McGuinty or Housing Minister Nate Erskine-Smith, who probably expected to...
Justin Trudeau has had many bad days as prime minister. But Monday, Dec. 16, 2024 will likely come to be seen as his worst. Recovery, to be blunt, seems impossible. It is not only the surprise resignation of his deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, but the blazing way in which she departed, with a damning letter and a not-so-veiled warning...
In a recurring feature, Susan Delacourt, a small-l liberal, and Matt Gurney, a small-c conservative, bring their different perspectives — and shared commitment to civil disagreement — to the political debates of the moment.
Donald Trump was not only the host for Friday’s dinner with Justin Trudeau and his team — he was also the disc jockey. Controlling the music from his iPad at the dining table in Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect entertained musical requests. Trudeau, sitting beside him, reportedly brought Trump up to speed on the various versions of Leonard Cohen’s legendary “Hallelujah,” though...
Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Pierre Poilievre are very different kinds of conservative leaders. Their response to Donald Trump’s tariffs threat to Canada this week is laying bare those differences in a stark way. Ford is doing a lot of things right; Poilievre, perhaps not so much.
Susan Delacourt: Liberals, at least the ones with some optimism left in them, are pretty sure that good news for Donald Trump will be good news for Justin Trudeau. The idea is that the more crazy things look in the U.S., the more Canadians will want some stable leadership here.
Canadians have had more than two weeks to let Donald Trump’s reelection sink in here, and a new poll from Abacus Data shows that most of us think having him back in the White House is overall bad news for this country. But there are interesting divisions between Conservatives and supporters of other parties over just how bad Trump will...
Donald Trump’s victory has produced two types of Canadians — those who hope nothing like that happens here, and those who believe this country could use a bit more of the politics that vaulted Trump back into power. I am, no surprise, firmly of the first view, among the majority of Canadians who would rather Americans keep their Trump-style politics...
Progressive-leaning voters are going to be looking for some kind of silver lining in Donald Trump’s return to power in the United States. Here is one: all those people whose faith in democracy was shaken by Trump’s loss four years ago, braced to declare this 2024 election corrupt too, can no longer complain that the system is rigged against them...
The tag line on one of the new Liberal ads — “We won’t go back” — is a very unsubtle hint on just how closely Justin Trudeau’s team is watching the U.S. election, and which side it is on. The line is, of course, a direct borrow from Democrat Kamala Harris’s campaign chant: “We’re not going back.”