The Buzz June 14th 2025: All Eyes on Kananaskis

The Buzz June 14th 2025: All Eyes on Kananaskis

Welcome to the weekend and welcome to The Buzz.

Has your invitation to attend the G7 Summit in Kananaskis arrived yet? I’d be worried if I were you if it hasn’t. Seems pretty much everyone else has been invited. They are bound to be running out of hotel rooms soon, as the Prime Minister seems to find a new world leader (and their entourage) to invite every day. Someone has told him it’s a G SEVEN summit, right?

I’ve been in Calgary most of this week and there is an excitement, but more importantly, there’s a cautious optimism about things in general. Excitement about how the world will see the spectacular sights associated with the Rockies, and cautious optimism domestically surrounding the possibilities; there really is a new tone in the relationship between Alberta and Ottawa on the energy front. No one is counting unhatched chickens quite yet, but even Premier Danielle Smith says she’s “encouraged”.

During a twenty-minute chat at the Global Energy Forum, she made a number of points, including this one: if the early talk from Mark Carney goes from promising to action, it could very well make the secession and referendum talk in Alberta fade away. On the other hand, she put a date of sorts on how long she is going to give the new PM to deliver. This fall, four to six months at most. Then what happens? Stay tuned.

Back to the G7 – what should we expect that the Carney-hosted leaders of the world’s big economies (plus their guests) will come up with?

Keeping in mind things can get derailed when other world events suddenly happen (like Israel attacking Iran), but former diplomat Colin Robertson wrote this piece for Policy magazine:

Canada Needs More World: Mark Carney’s Summitry Launch

Pollster and analyst Allan Gregg has a take on the G7 and it’s one that places Canada in a very different role, not just a host, but a leader:

🔒 Allan Gregg: At the G7 meeting, look for Canada to do something unusual: Lead

When Mark Carney isn’t thinking about the world stage, he certainly is thinking about how to put a powerhouse team together to guide him on the domestic front.

All things considered, he seems to have done a pretty impressive job. Now it will be for us to watch and see how the team performs. The core, it seems, got filled out this week with the addition of Michael Sabia, to the trio of Carney himself, Marc-Andre Blanchard, his Chief of Staff, and Tim Hodgson, his private sector buddy and now his energy minister. Sabia is no stranger to Ottawa or to corporate boardrooms.

Like Carney, he’s a former deputy minister of finance, and like Carney, he’s a former CEO leaving Hydro Quebec to become the most powerful unelected person in Ottawa as Clerk of the Privy Council. If the top levels of the bureaucracy are in for a shakeup to fit the Carney agenda, little doubt Sabia will make that happen, and quickly. As a wise old political hand told me in Calgary this weekend, if this core group, with the business acumen they collectively have, can’t make something click quickly, who and what can? If there’s one thing to keep in mind, though, they’re all men, all of roughly the same age, and all with roughly the same background.

So, what should you know about Sabia, the last to join and, aside from the PM himself, perhaps the most consequential? There are a lot of nice things being said about Sabia, but Paul Wells isn’t quite there. This from his latest Substack:

New world man

The whispering is getting louder about Pierre Poilievre.

Whispering about the future and whether this is the guy to lead the Conservatives back from yet another election defeat to a new world. Lawrence Martin of the Globe sees the problem as deeper than that …he thinks there’s a serious rebuild needed:

🔒 Post-Mulroney, the Conservatives’ brand is ‘loser.’ It’s time for an overhaul

One of the things I like about post-election periods is the studies that come out weeks, sometimes months, after the votes are counted.

The studies that tell you things you believed at the time were, upon reflection, just myths. Abacus Data’s David Coletto is one of the first out of the gate with his view of what we thought we knew about Election 2025:

David Coletto: Four myths (and one truth) about the 2025 federal election

So, here’s the question. Everywhere you look, the new government is contemplating throwing money at turning things around.

Planting the seeds to turn Canada’s economy into the strongest in the G7. Where’s all that money coming from? Not new taxes because they’re cutting taxes. So, it must be from spending less. The PM says Canadians must be prepared to sacrifice, and that usually translates into cuts. In what? Time for the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt

🔒 Opinion: Mark Carney says sacrifice is necessary to pay for defence spending: so what will Canadians be asked to do?

Lots more on some of this in our two YouTube podcasts this week. You can find this week’s Good Talk with Chantal Hebert and Rob Russo right here.

And Smoke Mirrors and The Truth with Fred DeLorey and Perry Tsergas (sitting in again for Bruce Anderson) right here.

The Born in the USA man was blaring in Berlin this week.

Bruce Springsteen is on a mission, and that mission is all about warning the world about Donald Trump. Trump has tried to trash Springsteen, slow him down, but it hasn’t worked. The Associated Press was watching this week:

Bruce Springsteen’s Berlin concert echoes with history and a stark warning

Rock on, Bruce. That’s the Buzz for this week. See you again in seven days

The Buzz is a weekly publication from National Newswatch that shares insights and commentary on the week’s developments in politics, news and current affairs.