From the new NAFTA to winning a seat on the UN Security Council: the key foreign policy priorities in the next Parliament
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s minority government will face both lingering and new foreign policy puzzles when the new cabinet is sworn in on Nov. 20. The Canada-U.S. relationship could come under the spotlight once again as Americans head to the ballot box in just under a year. Implementing the new NAFTA, addressing the rocky relationship […]
Time for a reset on social assistance reform
Social assistance in Ontario is a waste of time and money. The goals of social assistance—providing financial assistance to people in great need and helping them find work—are among the most important things government can do. But the current system wastes countless hours on paperwork and red tape. And the government wastes precious resources on […]
Ottawa at risk of losing its first-mover advantage in cannabis sector
As the first G7 nation to legalize cannabis, Canadians have embraced this opportunity to innovate and create jobs throughout the cannabis sector, and one year after legalization, academic and industry leaders remain eager to lead in this space. Legalization sparked new research projects, novel production and processing systems, inventive product development, and growth in our […]
Focus on restricting access to weed has hampered crackdown on black market
Any assessment of the federal government’s efforts to create a legal framework for adult-use cannabis—or any public policy—must first be viewed through the lens of said policy’s objectives. In the case of cannabis, the government’s stated objectives were to, above all: protect young Canadians by keeping cannabis out of the hands of children and youth, […]
Trudeau’s real job now: sparking national action on a post-carbon future
OTTAWA—Apparently Doug Ford didn’t really mean it when he said in the summer that he would let voters in the federal election decide whether he would continue with Ontario’s costly, and likely futile, legal offensive against Ottawa’s carbon levy. Ford, who was shut out of the less-than-stellar federal Conservative campaign, sounded a bit more co-operative […]
Should Canada advocate a new concept of responsibility to protect if elected to the UN Security Council in 2020?
The worrying violence in many parts of the world is fuelling international news. Humanitarian disasters in Syria and elsewhere are causes for concern. Violent protests in Hong Kong, Spain, Lebanon, Haiti, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela—to name but a few—are signs of increasingly violent confrontations, suggesting that the peaceful resolution of conflicts is increasingly out […]
‘You don’t want any early bumps in the road’: first 100 days to chart Liberals’ path
A former top federal bureaucrat says the prime minister’s top priority in his first 100 days should be to “figure out how to manage the House” in a minority scenario, while another former bureaucrat-turned-politician says “you don’t want any early screw ups” following the return of politicians to Ottawa from the campaign trail. “When I […]
Hijacking history: twisted narratives of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
OTTAWA—This year marks 80 years since a pivotal event that dramatically changed European history: the signing of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (MRP) or “Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” on Aug. 23 1939. This development stunned the world since an alliance between Communism and Nazism had been inconceivable. At […]
The election interference call is coming from inside the house
OTTAWA—On Oct. 23, with the dust still settling in the wake of the federal election results, it was quietly announced by the Privy Council Office that there had been no attempted foreign inference in Canada’s democratic process. While it was reported by several national media outlets, if you blinked you likely missed this particular news […]
Congratulations, we played ourselves
OTTAWA—We got played. The Liberals talked a big game this past election, insisting that “[if] you want progressive action, you need a progressive government, not a progressive opposition.” They reminded us at every turn that cuts to social services, like we saw in Ontario, would surely follow if the electorate foolishly supported a Conservative government […]
