National
By-election Bombshell! Justin Trudeau’s Liberals lose safe Toronto riding
Benefit of hindsight
Feel free to start coming back any time, big guy
Well, of course I saw it coming all along. What kind of fool could have imagined the Liberal in Toronto — St. Paul’s had any chance?
Hang on. I’m just getting word that I didn’t see it coming. In fact, as recently as Monday night I wrote a post I’ll be hearing about until the cows come home. Sorry about that!
Here are the actual final results, barring any recounts, which may not happen because Conservative Don Stewart’s margin of victory, while slim, is too large to trigger an automatic recount.
Congratulations, Don Stewart! I never doubted you’d win. Hang on. I’m just getting word that I doubted you’d win as recently as last night.
Things will now start to happen quickly. Expect Liberals to work their way through four of the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief before lunch. Denial will come easily, benefiting as it does from long practice. Acceptance may take longer.
The Paul Wells newsletter is fun reading even when I’m calling the results of a by-election wrong! Imagine how much you’ll enjoy it when I’m right about something!
In part this is because on paper there isn’t that much to accept. The day’s news is not earth-shaking and, in isolation, should not be taken as definitive. It’s true that by-elections are strange events, though if you add them together they do have some predictive power. It’s true that Leslie Church’s long service as Chrystia Freeland’s chief of staff turned out to be more of a hindrance than a help, a data point whose implications the Deputy Prime Minister won’t want to think much about today. It’s true the Liberals didn’t even try all that hard, if by “didn’t try all that hard” you mean “they tried as hard as they possibly could, my God they tried so hard, my God.”
But a single off-season defeat in a riding the Liberals have, in fact, previously lost during the Paleozoic era is not a larger thing to accept than, say, a punishing loss to Ireland and Norway in a Security Council vote at the UN. Or the loss of two senior cabinet ministers in a controversy in which the ministers who quit were radiantly, obviously in the right. Don’t take my word on that, incidentally: ask David Lametti, who agreed with Jody Wilson-Raybould but managed to keep his job anyway. For a while.
A single by-election defeat is not a larger thing to accept than the prime minister’s documented history of slapping on dark makeup for social occasions, a habit that stretched from junior college to young adulthood. It’s not a bigger deal than firing your finance minister during a global fiscal calamity so you can replace him with somebody who knows less about money. It’s not evidence of poorer strategic thinking than the choice of Parliament as the venue for dismantling a new Conservative leader, given that Parliament has long been where Justin Trudeau and most of his government perform worst.
It’s not a bigger deal than mocking monetary policy during an election campaign. It’s not a big new development, compared to the Prime Minister’s reluctance to meet his own cabinet ministers to discuss business, an oddity of his management style that’s been documented in a growing number of books (look out for Marc Garneau’s this fall!).
The prime minister has been on the ropes before, so to speak, and all those trials have made him the man he is today. Or rather, I suppose, his response to them has. I have no particular advice for Justin Trudeau today, or to the party he leads with the unstinting consent of its members. I screwed up last night by sending a column before the facts were in, so I’m feeling a little sheepish this morning. I’ll let Liberals decide what to do next.
As recently as two summers ago, I used to give them advice. It amounted to this: Notice when something you’re doing isn’t working. Change it. Make sure people see you changing it, so you don’t look quite so full of yourself. Rinse and repeat.
That post from 2022 ends:
“Don’t worry. He won’t take this advice either. Whatever the Liberal leader does on his return from the sunless south, it probably won’t resemble anything we’ve mentioned today. He’ll probably keep doing what he’s been doing. With the same results.”
Let me read to you
My excellent short bestselling book, Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: Governing in Troubled Times, is now an audiobook, narrated by the author, who is me. Here it is on Audible. Other platforms soon.
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Here’s the story of the book, if you’re just catching up. Here’s an episode of my podcast with guest host Vassy Kapelos interviewing me about the book. Paper and ebook editions remain easy to find and buy, for yourself or friends.
We decided to make the audiobook some time after we published the, uh, more booky formats. It’s a response to surprising and gratifying demand. It’s also a promissory note: If this belated audiobook edition finds an audience, it won’t be my last.
There’s a school of thought that says there’s not much demand for nonfiction Canadian audiobooks. Here’s your chance to confound the skeptics. Thanks as always for your support.
International
Trump says Carney would be ‘easier’ to deal with than Poilievre as Canada’s prime minister
From LifeSiteNews
‘I think it’s easier to deal actually with a Liberal,’ Trump said in an interview on Tuesday, adding that Poilievre seems to have a ‘negative’ view of him.
U.S. President Donald Trump suggested he would prefer Mark Carney to continue as Canada’s prime minister instead of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who Trump said was “no friend” of his.
In an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham that aired Tuesday night, Trump said that Carney would be “easier” to deal with than Poilievre and said virtually nothing negative about Carney.
“I think it’s easier to deal actually with a Liberal, and maybe they’re going to win, but I don’t really care. It doesn’t matter to me at all,” Trump said, adding that, in his view, Poilievre seems to have a “negative” view of him.
Trump said that the “Conservative that’s running is stupidly no friend of mine.”
“I don’t know him, but he said negative things,” Trump observed, adding, “So, when he says negative things, I couldn’t care less.”
Today, Poilievre hit back at Trump, saying that the reason Trump endorsed Carney was that he “knows” he will be a “tough negotiator.”
“Last night, President Donald Trump endorsed Mark Carney. Why? Because, as Trump said, he’s ‘easier’ to deal with, and knows that I will be a tough negotiator and always put Canada First,” noted the Conservative leader.
“Carney is weak and would cave to Trump’s demands, just like he did when he moved his company headquarters from Canada to New York City. Canadians don’t want a weak and conflicted leader. They want a strong Prime Minister who will put Canada First.”
Carney, who was installed as Canada’s 24th prime minister last Friday, now serves as the leader of the nation despite never having been elected as a member of Parliament.
He has admitted he is an “elitist” and a “globalist” and has been criticized by Conservatives as well as others for his extensive ties to globalist groups like the World Economic Forum and his apparent similarities to Justin Trudeau.
Poilievre has blasted Carney as an “establishment” Liberal politician who was “installed” by “Justin Trudeau’s insiders.”
In recent weeks, Trump has stated many times that he thinks Canada should be the “51st” state, a comment that was rebuked by former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Carney, and Poilievre.
A little over a week ago, Trump announced he was giving Mexico and Canada a 30-day reprieve on 25 percent export tariffs for goods covered by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on free trade.
From LifeSiteNews
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has a daughter who identifies as “non-binary” and uses “they/them” pronouns.
The Daily Mail first reported these details on March 10:
Carney’s other daughter Sasha, 24, who graduated cum laude from Yale University with a degree in English and Gender Studies, uses they/them pronouns, according to their social media profiles. They previously went by the name Sophia. Sasha Carney, who currently works as a freelance writer and reviewer in Brooklyn, New York, has previously posted about their mental health struggles online.
Sasha’s Facebook profile, which was publicly accessible at time of publication, shows that she self-identified as “non-binary” in 2018:
Many of Carney’s publicly stated views are avowedly leftist; one of her profile pictures identifies her as a supporter of socialist Bernie Sanders. In 2019, she made a Facebook post stating that “Yale is an institution which has promoted and legitimized eugenics, global warfare, genocidal policies, the racialized carceral state, and the hyper-privileging of white voices in academia. In the face of this, it is crucial that we invest time, energy, thought, resources, and love into ethnicity, race, and migration studies, which looks at the world, and Yale itself, through a critical anti-racist and anticolonial lens.”
Juno News, formerly known as True North, broke additional details earlier today, publishing excerpts of an essay written by Sasha Carney in an alternative magazine called Authenticity in April 2020 titled Mumsnet, and Transmasculine Childhood. As reporters Cosmin Dzurdzsa and Alex Zoltan noted, the essay reveals that “Mark Carney sent [his] daughter to [the] discredited U.K. Tavistock Transgender Clinic.” The published excerpt reads:
In 2013, shortly after I chopped off all my hair into a deeply regrettable floppy Justin Bieber cut, I moved to London, the land of Enid Blyton murder mysteries. A block from my new house was the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust, an imposing grey building which contained the country’s only child and adolescent ‘gender identity clinic.’
I watched as my friend, after a year of weekly appointments trying desperately to get an official diagnosis of gender dysphoria, was denied the diagnosis, and with it any hope of top surgery because they sometimes wore skirts. I watched organisations with names like ‘Transgender Trend’ refer to trans Tavistock patients as ‘experimental subjects’ who didn’t know what was best for them. I watched as my school’s former principal told a national news outlet that trans students like me and many of my close friends were cis women who were only coming out to ’cause turbulence’ and ‘adhere to anything a bit radical.’ I watched all this happen, and I quietly stopped wearing underwire bras, and wore baggier clothes, and I felt a fierce surge of jealousy every time I walked into the Tavistock for therapy and saw patients turn left, towards the medical spaces I didn’t feel ‘trans enough’ to enter.
The essay has since been scrubbed from the internet.
In 2022, it was announced that Tavistock was being shut down, with over 1,000 families expected to join a massive lawsuit over the damage done to their children due to the “treatment” they received at the gender clinic. Last year, the U.K. National Health Service announced that it would stop prescribing puberty blockers to minors entirely. Juno News also reported that Sasha has expressed her support, in writing, for “puberty blockers” for children.
It is difficult to overstate the potential political impact of this story. Last year, Danielle Smith’s government in Alberta banned sex change surgeries and puberty blockers for minors; in a press conference in February 2024, Smith specifically cited the Tavistock clinic as a motivation behind her legislation.
“We have been tracking what’s been happening internationally – in Great Britain with the Tavistock Clinic, in Finland, in Norway, in Sweden – and we’ve seen that there has been a substantial change in the approach to dealing with these issues,” Smith observed.
The fact that the prime minister’s daughter went to Tavistock clinic is certainly an indication of his views on such legislation, and an indication that his commitment to the transgender agenda will likely be every bit as fervent as his predecessor’s.
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