The year is only a few days old, yet it feels like we’re stuck in 2023. Russia remains at war with Ukraine. Hamas is still at war with Israel. China is meddling in Taiwan’s election. Artificial intelligence is eating our jobs. Social media is filled with rage about inflation, Palestine, trans rights and Donald Trump. It’s enough to make you hide under the covers, shut off your news feeds and watch cat videos until you fall into a fretful sleep.
Perrin Beatty said in an open letter to the PM that the country needs to boost defence spending to deal with an increasingly dangerous world
OTTAWA — The head of Canada’s largest business organization wants the government to step up internationally, warning the country is seen as increasingly irrelevant on the world stage.
Perrin Beatty, CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, released an open letter to the prime minister this weekend, arguing that the country has to do more and develop a foreign policy and defence policy designed to meet today’s challenges.
I don’t trust the Chamber of Crony Capitalists to speak in anyone’s favour but their own.
His policies, rooted in increasingly discredited and dated dogma, would turn Canadians into a flock of sheep
Who uttered the scariest, most threatening words, anywhere in the world, in all of 2023?
Not Putin, not Kim Jong Un of North Korea, or some other unscrupulous dictator — it was Canada’s own Justin Trudeau.
We are lead by a very stupid high school student who believes communism will work … this time.
OTTAWA – After a messy end to 2023, our federal politicians are bracing for another year that will likely be dominated by an array of domestic issues and international conflicts.
The memo sent to staff in the Prime Minister’s Office to announce the hiring of Max Valiquette as the government’s new executive director of communications said the former marketing executive would be focused on, among other things, “aligning the entire team under a clear narrative.”
In politics, a clear narrative isn’t everything, but it’s a lot. And at least one of the reasons for the Liberal government’s struggles in 2023 might be that Justin Trudeau’s side lacked a compelling narrative — a tidy story to tell about itself and the country — or didn’t do enough to be heard.
Nearly half the international students who have been accepted by Canadian schools are being rejected by visa officers, and some public colleges in Ontario are seeing thousands of the would-be students they’ve admitted turned away.
New numbers analyzed by the Star offer a snapshot of the behind-the-scenes workings of this country’s international student system — a system that has become a major revenue source for post-secondary schools, but which critics, including the federal immigration minister, say has “lost its integrity.”
In American news, the name Donald Trump is everywhere these days as his opponents seek to have him removed from the ballot. Two states — Colorado and Maine — have already ruled Trump ineligible for election, and there are decisions pending in 15 other states on Trump’s ballot eligibility.
REGINA – The Saskatchewan government says its natural gas utility is to stop collecting the carbon levy as of Monday from residential customers.
The move comes after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau exempted those who use home heating oil from paying the levy, mostly benefiting residents in Atlantic Canada.
Saskatchewan asked for the exemption to cover all other forms of heating, but Ottawa denied the request. In response, the province said it would stop collecting the charge at the start of 2024.
Remember during the 2015 federal election when Justin Trudeau positioned himself as the champion of the middle class? He was going to make the “rich” pay a little more tax so the middle class could get some relief.
In eight years, Justin Trudeau has managed to destroy Canadian unity to the point where confederation is fraying on all sides.
While all prime ministers have issues with national unity, most try to heal the wounds, but Trudeau picks at them and makes things worse.
If he had even half a brain I’d suspect it was deliberate.
You can’t help but admire the audacity of his hopes as Justin Trudeau’s horrible year ends.
The prime minister faced marital separation on the home front, endured political challenges across Canada and stoked global controversies in 2023.
Yet he still defiantly declares, without giving himself even a millimetre of wiggle-away room, that he will stick around to lead another campaign to victory, an optimistic expectation without much supportive evidence.
It became the number-one question in Canadian politics in 2023: will Justin Trudeau stay or go?
The prime minister has an easy answer for this: He’s staying. Next question.
Yet the speculation will carry over into 2024, no matter how many times Trudeau insists he’s leading the Liberals into the next election, whether that happens in 2024 or 2025.
I predict immigration is going to be one of the biggest issues of 2024 because so many other issues – housing, employment, per capita GDP, health care and school crowding – are affected by it.
That means we will have to have an intelligent public debate about just how much immigration is the right amount. And that won’t be easy, because anyone who dares say there is too much immigration can count on being labelled a racist or a xenophobe. You neither have to be a bigot nor fearful of foreigners to understand the math, though.
Three gigantic waves will roll over Alberta in 2024, political tsunamis that will disrupt our politics and help wash away the momentum for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s agenda of aggressive social change.
The first wave? For the first time in many years, fears about immigration will become a major issue even in welcoming Alberta.
The mass of new immigrants allowed in by the Trudeau Liberals is already a fierce preoccupation in Toronto, Trudeau’s former electoral stronghold. Folks there shudder and fret about the unprecedented number of newcomers competing for already scarce resources, such as apartments, homes and jobs.
Brace for impact, taxpayers.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be reaching deeper into your pockets in the new year with payroll tax hikes, a carbon tax hike and alcohol tax hikes.
