Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ad-lib brought down the house at Thursday night’s Forever Canadian rally in Calgary. “They’re a little touchy down there at the moment,” he added, to roars from a crowd of about 5,000.
RCMP officers who responded to the April 2020 mass murders in Nova Scotia will receive bravery medals from Governor General Louise Arbour. An announcement is expected “imminently,” says an Arbour spokesperson. The medals follow 23 awards for excellence quietly distributed last year by RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme to RCMP members and employees who managed the grisly incident, in which 2...
Prime Minister Mark Carney has finally charted a course out of the morass that is 24 Sussex Drive, the official residence of Canada’s prime ministers since 1951. Carney’s June announcement of a private-sector competition to “modernize” the decrepit building, abandoned in 2015 and later put into mothballs, was welcomed by heritage advocates as an end to a political impasse. A...
Artificial intelligence has moved from a promising general-purpose technology to an increasingly consequential layer of economic, social and public infrastructure. It is already raising productivity, expanding access to expertise, accelerating scientific discovery and creating new ways to deliver services. At the same time, AI systems are implicated in fraud, manipulation and cyberattacks and unreliable results and misinformation. The most capable...
The RCMP commissioner has warned the Carney government that proposed reductions in security measures for the modernization of the official residence at 24 Sussex Drive will “result in an increased overall security risk,” says an internal document. The RCMP has been meeting with senior government officials since 2025 to discuss trimming the estimated bill for hardening the property against attacks...
At Carney’s invitation, the world’s biggest institutional investors are arriving in Toronto to look over opportunities to invest in Canada — opportunities that may not yet be ripe for their taste. About 300 chief executives and senior managers gather Monday evening and Tuesday at the Four Seasons in Toronto. Between them they manage $120 trillion in assets, fifty times the...
Courage, his mother told him. And his mother was right. We will need to repeat that to ourselves — a hazy memory of a Bertolt Brecht play — to face President Trump’s aggression. There will be lulls, perhaps a truce. Do not dream of a lasting peace. The American king’s escalating demands would have made Canada his vassal. Mark Carney...
Late on a Friday night, with the clock running out on a new trade deal, Prime Minister Mark Carney did something Canadian prime ministers don’t do very often: he told the Americans no.
There are times in politics and government when leaders are faced with a fundamental, even primordial choice. Either protect your partisan political interests or put them at risk for what can be argued is a greater public good. It’s called a test of leadership. At this moment, with Canada under direct economic assault by the U.S., Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe...
Prime Minister Mark Carney has declared that 24 Sussex Drive will be rehabilitated, modernized, restored and preserved. That scattershot of descriptors contained in the official announcement tells us precisely nothing about what will happen at the forlorn property, once the proud home of Canada’s prime ministers and now a ghost house.
Edward Greenspon: I was thinking yesterday about a 1960s BBC program called That Was the Week That Was. It was a satirical show with David Frost, and it started with the song, ‘That was the week that was, it’s over, let it go.’ But I don’t think Canadians can let last week go easily. It seems to have really sparked...
The following depicts an imagined yet realistic dialogue involving Canadian and American negotiators working to resolve their differences while sticking to their rhetorical guns. I have been in these kinds of trenches. Believe me, this is how negotiators speak to each other and play with one another. There’s generally less rancour than readers might expect, especially those of you who...
Peter Nicholson: Thanks, Chris. Since the events of July 2 we have quite a bit more information on the agreement between Canada and Alberta over the rules that are going to govern both the pipeline and oil sands production developments. I think there is a growing recognition that a pipeline shouldn’t be a “field of dreams” – that it is...
Prime Minister Carney has made clear from the outset of his time in office that without a commitment to implement the Pathways carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, there would be no new bitumen pipeline to the B.C. coast. The expectation was formalized in the Nov. 27 Alberta-Ottawa MOU and the May 15 Implementation Agreement. The oil sands industry has...
An Indigenous couple’s remains, repatriated to Canada six years ago, have yet to find a final resting place because their “spiritual belongings” are being held by museums in the United Kingdom. Six objects associated with Demasduit and Nonosabasut, among the last of the Beothuks of Newfoundland, are being retained by the National Museums Scotland and by the British Museum. Thanks...
Canada’s political and media spheres seem to have developed an unhealthy obsession with the CUSMA. Will it survive the whims and shifting moods of the US president? Will we ever regain the level of access to the American market that we took for granted just a few years ago? What price will we have to pay to preserve what remains...
The great promise of the post-war era was that growth and fairness could advance together. That promise is breaking down – not just because of government failures, but because the nature of growth has changed. The same knowledge economy that is generating extraordinary growth requires fewer people to create it – and concentrates its rewards in fewer hands. Today’s increasingly...
In 1995 the Canadian economy was not exactly humming along – it still hadn’t got its mojo back after the severe 1990-92 recession. The unemployment rate was 9.5%, GDP per capita had only just made it back to the level of 1989, and steep spending cuts in Paul Martin’s February budget signaled more contraction.
The name tags that RCMP officers are required to wear for identification no longer have to display their actual names, a move intended to protect them from digital bad actors. In a significant amendment to the Mounties’ Uniform Dress Manual, regular members now can choose to display only their regimental numbers rather than their names.
Today’s Roundtable discussion began with an email from former Bank of Canada governor and deputy minister of finance David Dodge to fellow Sage contributors. David posed this question and observation: “Can Canada still afford the welfare state we built in the 1960s when domestic productivity, labour force growth and investment were high and the global economic conditions were favourable? In...
I once had a very wealthy colleague who owned an Aston Martin. That’s the four-hundred-thousand-dollar car best known as James Bond’s car. He proudly drove it everywhere. But on weekdays, he drove a Toyota Camry. That more modest vehicle, he explained, was for the office. He didn’t want clients pulling into the visitors’ lot beside an Aston Martin they were...
A project to ensure Order of Canada recipients better reflect Canada’s diversity appears to have hit a cultural barrier that could limit Indigenous participation.
Canada’s ambition to become an energy superpower has revived calls for a new oil pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific coast. The provincial government strongly supports the idea, agreeing to submit a proposal to the federal Major Projects Office by July 1. Alberta argues that inadequate pipeline capacity is the principal obstacle to expanding oil sands production and increasing Canada’s...
The Liberal government in Ottawa is in the middle of a review of the Access to Information Act, required by law every five years. It’s being run by officials at Treasury Board Secretariat, a powerful central agency. So much is happening in Ottawa these days that the exercise is flying below the radar, like a ground-hugging drone.
The Parti Québécois just released its Livre bleu, a 524-page document detailing its arguments in favor of Quebec’s independence. The separatist party is inviting Quebecers to provide suggestions for a second version, I’d have a lot of recommendations, of course - on all topics - but in this short text, I’ll stick to the parts where I’m specifically criticized by...
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s own department, the Privy Council Office (PCO), has become the bad boy of freedom of information in Canada.
Secrecy surrounding cabinet documents is so absolute in Canada that critics look to theology and astrophysics for metaphors to describe it. Federal cabinet records in Canada are treated as “sacred artefacts to be shrouded in mystery for decades, hidden in a black hole beyond the contemplation of judges, commissioners, or citizens.”
In 2007, Roger Martin, then dean of the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto, wrote a book called The Opposable Mind. It argued that the most successful leaders tend to be “integrative thinkers,” by which he meant they tackled problems holistically rather than breaking them down into component parts. Instead of seeking trade-offs, they are at ease with...
“Despite the ongoing conflict between Hezbollah and Israel which has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries…Lebanon moved forward with the ban on antipersonnel landmines,” said the Ottawa-based group Mines Action Canada in a statement, celebrating the new addition.
Canada’s privacy laws are supposed to protect ordinary citizens from unwarranted intrusions into their personal lives. But they can also protect pedophiles. Dead pedophiles. Dead pedophiles from America.
If you want to sound wise these days, just blame the crazy state of the world on polarization. If you want to sound really wise, say that fighting polarization needs to be part of the political agenda and be sure to blame social media and Donald Trump (although not necessarily in that order) for the current chaos. Despite it being...
An F-35 crash in Alaska should give shivers to Canada’s military. The pilot survived thankfully, but the $200 million plane was completely destroyed.
By now, most of you reading this column are aware of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s announcement earlier this week that the government is launching a sovereign wealth fund (entitled the Canada Strong Fund). There is, in theory, nothing wrong with such an idea. Indeed, the logic behind such a fund is quite sound.
Earlier this month, the federal government quietly released its annual inventory of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, now with data up to 2024. The news was not good. Carbon pollution reduction effectively stalled in 2024 (down a measly 0.3 per cent from the previous year and down only 10 per cent from 2005). Canada, simply put, is not on the trajectory...
I nearly drove off the road when I heard Pope Leo’s powerful message on the radio this week.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office wants to bust up a monopoly. I think I’m the target. Let me explain. The Privy Council Office (PCO), home of the prime minister and cabinet, has been flooded with complaints about its failures to comply with the Access to Information Act.
Canadian troops may be only days away from deploying to the Middle East to aid the U.S.’s and Israel’s war on Iran. The latest indication is a joint statement expressing concern about Iran’s restriction of oil tankers through the narrow Strait of Hormuz signed by Prime Minister Mark Carney and NATO allies late in the week.
Canadians who have neglected to pay their taxes to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) have been coming forward in droves to take advantage of new amnesty rules.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s spurious excuses for gutting the province’s freedom-of-information (FOI) law are exactly why we need transparency legislation in the first place: governments are habitual liars. Last week, the Ford government said it plans to weaken its sunshine law by erecting brick walls around every minister’s office, including the premier’s. Freedom-of-information requests will no longer be accepted. The...
For a moment there, it looked like Mark Carney would be the torchbearer for countries opposed to Trump’s big power politics. Now, not so much. In fact, it seems Prime Minister Carney is ready to embrace the “end of the international rules-based order” rather than oppose it – thanks to the confusing and contradictory statements by the Canadian government following...
On Thursday, the Liberal government finally got around to asking ordinary Canadians how to fix the country’s premier transparency law, the Access to Information Act. The Act, dating from 1983, empowers citizens to hold governments to account through requests for internal information.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was a monster. For close to thirty years, he presided over a police state that violated human rights at home and exported terror to the world. Now he is dead, crushed by the American assault on Iran that flattened his compound and sparked a regional war. From Tehran to Toronto, thousands of Iranians are celebrating...
Prime Minister Mark Carney has finally revealed his plan to turn Canada into a weapons-exporting global mega-power. “In total, the Defence Industrial Strategy is an investment of over half a trillion dollars in Canadian security, economic prosperity, and our sovereignty,” he announced this week, promising to create over 125 thousand “high-paying careers” building weapons and otherwise supplying the Canadian military...