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.
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.”
It is the question bedevilling progressive-leaning people north and south of the Canada-U.S. border throughout this raucous, election-filled fall — how has the race against the conservative right become so close? You hear it from people voting for Democratic contender Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s presidential vote. How on earth is Donald Trump, a convicted felon, an election denier, the man...
Susan Delacourt: The current Liberal leadership drama has had a lot of people riveted over the past couple of weeks. But it seems that one guy in particular — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre — is glued to every development. He brings it up constantly in the House of Commons. He talks about what he’s seen on CBC, which is a...
This week’s Liberal caucus meeting will prove to be an important milestone in the career of Justin Trudeau. The lingering question is whether this is a crisis avoided or just the beginning of one. Trudeau and his team will be wanting to see this as yet another moment they met. That is, after all, what the prime minister told the...
Ten years ago this week, Justin Trudeau was assembling all the pieces that would make him prime minister within a year. He had turned his landslide 2013 Liberal leadership victory into what his team liked to call a “movement,” fuelled by Trudeau’s popularity and crowd-drawing appeal. To feed Canadians’ curiosity about a man who many already thought they knew, Trudeau...
Susan Delacourt: Earlier this week, for non-column purposes, you and I were chatting about the fire hose of news in what was supposed to be the post-Thanksgiving “break.” Justin Trudeau is facing a caucus mutiny, a diplomatic blow-up with India and, let’s not forget, the all-day testimony before the foreign-interference inquiry. Assuming that nothing else explodes into the headlines next...
New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh is not wrong when he says that dangerous politics are being played with national security in this country. Taking aim at Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre, Singh said on Thursday: “I think it’s clear to me that both of these leaders have at many times chosen to put the party before the country.”
Pierre Poilievre’s popularity has taken a significant hit in the weeks since Parliament returned from the summer break, according to the latest Abacus Data polling. The five percentage-point increase in negative impressions of the Conservative leader leaves him open to serious questions about whether his aggressive, take-no-prisoners style — on constant display in the Commons lately — is really working...
Pierre Poilievre’s popularity has taken a significant hit in the weeks since Parliament returned from the summer break, according to the latest Abacus Data polling. The five percentage-point increase in negative impressions of the Conservative leader leaves him open to serious questions about whether his aggressive, take-no-prisoners style — on constant display in the Commons lately — is really working...
It’s time to put this Parliament out of its misery — or at least on life support. Canadians can be excused for ignoring the dysfunction of this fall, or tuning it out. Even people paid to keep an eye on the antics in Parliament are finding it hard to watch. Between the toxic, insult-laden question period and the procedural jamming...
Matt Gurney: This one feels a bit like déjà vu all over again, but not a ton has changed politically since our last chat. Things are mostly ticking along as they were, at least at home — geopolitically, things are bonkers. That may matter at home, but it hasn’t yet, at least not much.
Justin Trudeau sat down recently for an interview with his fellow Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith, and the hour-long conversation has generated a lot of attention since it was posted.Little wonder — Erskine-Smith is a thoughtful MP who is not afraid to disagree with the prime minister, and Trudeau prefers interviewers who challenge him.
Two of the most recent polls are putting Justin Trudeau’s Liberals back in 2015 — and not the better part of that year for them, when they liked to say that better was always possible. Nik Nanos is reporting that Liberal support has dropped to levels not seen since 2015, while Abacus Data is showing the Liberals behind the New...
Conservatives appear to be trying everything this fall to turn their poll lead into eventual election victory, with the exception of one force in politics — likeability. Nothing in Pierre Poilievre’s repertoire in the Commons the past two weeks has been aimed at making people like him, beyond those who already do. He insults, he taunts, he name-calls, he sneers...