Ron Sept is getting desperate.
He can’t afford a car, his prescription medications, eyeglasses or new clothes, he said. He’s stopped eating meat to save on groceries, which he can only buy with the money his son living overseas sometimes sends him. If you visit him in his one-bedroom apartment in Nanaimo, B.C., you’d have to sit on the floor, because he has one chair and no table.
Incumbent governments around the world are in trouble, and some parties are hitting the panic button as a result. Alongside dramatic electoral results in the U.K. and France, in just the last few weeks we’ve seen heated debates emerge around the leadership of both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden. Members of both leaders’ parties have called for each to step aside, hinting at much sharper feedback behind the scenes.
Dear The Right Honourable.
It certainly would aggravate even a normal person to hear, day in and day out, that the large majority of the population wants to see the hind end of you as you exit — and fast.
And even though you are by no means normal, it must gall your supersized ego.
As calls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to step down grow louder, inevitably, talk of “rebranding” the Liberal party of Canada in a post-Trudeau era has begun. But let’s pause and consider the weight of that word: rebranding.
In marketing and politics, “rebranding” is often tossed around as if it were a magic wand, capable of instantly transforming public perception. This notion is not just simplistic; it undermines the complex reality of brand equity and the arduous process of shifting deeply ingrained public perceptions.
Uh-oh. The Prime Minister says he has full confidence in his finance minister. Sounds like Chrystia Freeland is dangling at the end of a thread.
You might recall the moment in August, 2020, when sources said Mr. Trudeau’s previous finance minister, Bill Morneau, might no longer be the person the Prime Minister wanted in the post.
Buried among the many tables in Statistics Canada’s June employment report are data on public sector employment: federal, provincial and local employees hired by departments, agencies, hospitals and schools, including universities and colleges. As of June, 4.412 million workers were public employees, representing 21.5 per cent of Canada’s workforce. That is an astonishing 972,000 more (28.3 per cent) than in 2014, when 3.439 million Canadians were working for governments. And the numbers don’t include contracted services.
“If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain.”
This oft-quoted saying, frequently misattributed to Winston Churchill, actually has a complex history with no definitive source. Its essence, however, has been expressed by various thinkers over the centuries, reflecting a common perception about political leanings across age groups.
Canada’s plan to buy 12 new submarines, announced during the recent North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Washington, may have eased the pressure on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau amid criticism from Canada’s closest allies that it has become a freeloader in the alliance.
Going into the summit, Canada was the only NATO member without a clear plan to meet its commitment to spend 2 per cent of its economic output on defence. While the Trudeau government has taken important, if belated, steps toward this goal, Canada is still years away from reaching the target – the goal is by 2032, Mr. Trudeau said on Thursday – unlike the 23 NATO members that will do so in 2024.
They had best postpone hostilities. Few will volunteer to fight under Trudeau.
Justin Trudeau is so schooled in the art of denial that he now tries to deflect inescapable truths.
In Washington Thursday, at the conclusion of the NATO summit there, the prime minister unveiled what his defence minister, Bill Blair, called a “credible, verifiable path to two per cent” spending of gross domestic product on defence by 2032.
Let’s leave aside the fact that the plan is neither credible nor verifiable. Trudeau was asked if he was worried that the political problems that have dogged him this week will now hang over this country for the next eight years.
Despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise to rid the Senate of partisanship and patronage, most of the senators appointed to the upper house over the past year have ties to the Liberals.
Since July 2023, Trudeau has nominated 12 senators, eight of whom — 66 per cent of the total — have donated money to the federal Liberals or have worked with the federal party or a provincial Liberal party.
That’s a significant jump in the number of Senate appointees with partisan Liberal ties — up from about 30 per cent of all senators appointed between January 2019 and July 2023.
Pierre Poilievre says NATO allies treated Prime Minister Justin Trudeau like a human piñata at the leaders’ summit this week — but he still won’t commit to the alliance’s spending goal.
The Conservative leader says Canada has lost its place on the international stage under the Liberal government, and Trudeau lectures the world without doing his part.
OTTAWA — For political staffers who worked for former finance minister Bill Morneau when he resigned in 2020, Thursday morning must have felt like Groundhog Day.
“Tension rises between Freeland, PMO over economic messaging, low approval ratings,” read a Globe and Mail headline splashed over the newspaper’s website Thursday.
Sure Justin … Mark Carney would be ‘outstanding’ addition to federal politics, Trudeau says
Justin Trudeau wants you to know that it’s Stephen Harper’s fault Canada isn’t meeting it’s NATO commitment to spend 2% of GDP on defence.
Sure, Trudeau has been prime minister for almost nine years and in that time government spending has grown from $289 billion to $535 billion over that time – an 85% increase
For Americans, the good news from the NATO summit in Washington, D.C. is that President Joe Biden managed to read a stirring speech from a teleprompter without too much stammering or gargling noises. While the threat of Donald Trump’s return to the White House looms darkly over the 75-year-old transatlantic alliance — Trump isn’t NATO’s biggest fan — for the moment, at least, the United States is NATO’s bedrock power. That’s all to the good.
A total of 54% of Canadians want the federal government to cut spending instead of hiking capital gains taxes to reduce the deficit, according to a poll conducted by Leger on behalf of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF).
CTF Federal Director Franco Terrazzano said the poll results are clear that the majority of Canadians want the federal government to cut spending instead of hiking capital gains taxes.
