The Buzz Jan 10th 2026: Analyzing Venezuela's impact on Canada

Welcome to the weekend and welcome to The Buzz.

The Venezuela story got me thinking about what we’ve all been worrying about this week. That our world is dangerous, and that world includes Canada, and how vulnerable we may be. Vulnerable to a country we’ve called an ally for decades, but now fear its current leader sees us as a target, just like he saw Venezuela as one. How ready are we for that, and how united are we because of that? Some of the week’s best stories are along those lines, and we’ll get to them in a moment.

But first, one of those stories I like to tell about the challenges journalism often delivers in trying to get to a story. It’s about the only time I’ve ever been in Venezuela. Producer Carmen Merrifield and I, along with our camera crew, flew to Caracas in the early summer of 2007. The country’s President back then was Hugo Chavez, and his people had indicated he’d be willing to do a sit-down interview with us. That was a big deal; Chavez, despite being a major player in the news cycle, didn’t do Western interviews very often. There was a lot of talk ranging from oil (Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves) to his inflammatory rhetoric about the United States, and theirs about his left-wing Cuba-friendly leadership. Grabbing real time with him would be a news coup.

But we knew Chavez was unpredictable. We flew to Caracas with no guarantee in our pocket that he would actually follow through on what his people suggested was likely. We, and our CBC bosses, decided the possibility was worth the significant cost the trip would involve.

Caracas is a beautiful city, but a troubled one. The streets were then, as they are today, roamed by armed gangs, and being a westerner walking the city was not a great idea, especially so in the evening.

As it turned out, we were there for a few days. Constantly on standby. Chavez aides said we had to be ready to get to the Presidential Palace on a moment’s notice. Even at two in the morning. He apparently liked all-nighters. And ready we were. For days. But the call never came, although we were repeatedly given lines like, “tonight looks good”. We finally gave up and headed to the airport. But until the plane actually lifted off from the runway, we didn’t give up hope that the often-mercurial Venezuelan leader would suddenly give the thumbs up to the interview. To be honest, to this day, I don’t know, or will ever know, whether Chavez, now dead, even knew we were in town, let alone that he’d agreed to the possibility of doing an interview.

Which brings us to Chavez’s successor, Victor Maduro, who, last Friday night, was huddled in that same Presidential Palace. He probably now wishes it were a Canadian television crew and not US commandos who were banging down the door last Friday night.

Welcome to the weekend and welcome to The Buzz.

Okay, let’s get to some real analysis of all this.

Some sober second thought (translation: analysis) on all this coming out of the Canadian Senate, too.

Okay, now to the raw politics of all this and the nagging question we have been asking for years.

And then there’s Pierre Poilievre.

With all the talk of floor crossings (and that talk continues with new rumours every day), it’s nice to hear an MP openly discuss the choices facing her.

While the Liberals are on the edge of a majority, they aren’t there yet, and they may never get there.

Time for our latest AI feature, and this one comes from Barron’s.

The US invasion of Venezuela may be popular with some of Donald Trump’s inner circle, but not so much with his Washington outer circle.

Max Fawcett is always worth reading in the National Observer, and his piece this week post-Venezuela spins an interesting dilemma for Alberta:

I found this interesting because I’ve been thinking a lot about this possibility in the last year.

When my family arrived in Canada from Malaya in the mid-fifties, I was only five or six years old, and I wanted to start playing North American sports.

That’s going to do it for The Buzz this week... We’ll be back again in seven days.

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