National
It’s Been One Week

Imagine the relief they’re feeling. Photo from the voluminous PW files
Paul Wells
Hold it now and watch the hoodwink/ As I make you stop, think
Maybe the Americans assume we’re already part of their country because our leaders won’t get off their TV shows. Politico reports that Justin Trudeau’s office called Jen Psaki on Thursday morning and asked whether she’d interview Canada’s prime minister pro tem for her Sunday MSNBC political show. The PMO’s timing was excellent: Psaki was dropping a kid off at school, so she had excess childcare capacity at precisely the moment she was being offered quality time with somebody high-maintenance.
Trudeau had a message to deliver about Canada-US relations, and he was eager to deliver it to the seventh highest-rated show on MSNBC. He also paid his regards to Jake Tapper, who gets fully one-fifth the viewers of his Fox competitors.
Trudeau’s message to his tiny bespoke audiences was straightforward: that Donald Trump wants to talk about annexing Canada because he doesn’t want to talk about the economic costs of his own tariff policy. Trump’s advisors were said to be working this week on ways to limit those costs. Talk of costs isn’t guaranteed to change Trump’s mind, but nothing is. I don’t have a secret smarter policy I’m keeping in my back pocket; the situation is what it is. Danielle Smith went to Mar-a-Lago — a gambit as legitimate as Trudeau’s visit or anybody else’s — but didn’t come away sounding confident that she’d had better results than anyone else.
Even Stephen Harper — also appearing on a U.S. podcast — sounded worried and perplexed by Trump’s thinking. Still, Canada’s last Conservative prime minister delivered a rebuttal of Trump that was orders of magnitude more on-topic and specific than anything we’ve yet heard from the next Conservative prime minister. There’s playing tough, and then there’s being tough.
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Trudeau will do what he does until the Liberals select his successor. His itinerary for Tuesday says “No public events scheduled,” yet again. If he has any particular message for Canadians at T2 Minus Six Days, he is in no hurry to deliver it. I think something in him broke after the Toronto—St. Paul’s by-election defeat at the end of June. Sure, he’s talked to Mark Critch and the hot-sauce guy in Quebec. But the fight was out of him long before he made it official. The impulse in almost any politician to tell you exactly what they’re up to — the yearning François-Philippe Champagne has at triple strength — it’s all but vanished from Trudeau for months now. I don’t think it’s because he’s decided to resign. I think if he had managed to stare down his Liberal critics over the holidays, if he still had one more campaign ahead of him, he’d still basically be waiting. In that alternate universe, waiting for the voters to deliver their verdict.
Instead Trudeau let his party’s late-blooming internal opposition win, and now the Liberals are having a bad time of it. I have to assume that in some corner of his psyche, he enjoys seeing them squirm. All he wanted to do was receive the voters’ judgment. There would have been grim realism in letting him. But the Liberal caucus, docile in October, panicked and bolted in December after Chrystia Freeland quit. So now they get to come up with a better idea.
By 2021 or so, the people who’d left the Trudeau government started to look like a better cabinet than the ones who’d stayed. Similarly, a lot of the talent in the emerging Liberal leadership race is in the people who are sitting it out: Dominic LeBlanc, Anita Anand, Champagne, Mélanie Joly if you like. Steve MacKinnon would have been interesting to watch as an underdog. He speaks both official languages better than most MPs speak either, and after an early defeat in 2011, he reacted in the old-fashioned way: by figuring out how to get better at politics. Oh well.
Does anybody doubt the crew who aren’t running for the leadership will have a more pleasant 2025 than Mark Carney, Chrystia Freeland, Christy Clark, Karina Gould, Chandra Arya and That Other Guy? Frenzied parallel campaigns to raise money and recruit supporters. Gigantic questions they’d rather avoid. Party horse-race polls that have exited the realm of arithmetic and turned into Escher drawings. And waiting just over the horizon, cracking their knuckles: the voters of Canada.
Realistically it’ll come down to Freeland and Carney, if they both run. A study in contrasts: she’s from Alberta but couldn’t save her former chief of staff who ran in the riding next to Freeland’s last June. He’s from Alberta but has been flirting with electoral politics since the Obama presidency. “I’ve just started thinking about it,” Carney told Jon Stewart, whose return has driven The Daily Show to fully 40% of Colbert’s ratings. Just started thinking about it? Where’s he been all his life?
I wasn’t kidding, not one tiny bit, when I wrote last week that the least Carney can do is cough up the task force report on the economy that his party’s current leader commissioned from him four months ago. This should not seem like a clever gotcha from one of our nation’s premier snarky pundits. It should be obvious that serious people finish a job, and that the best measure of Carney’s insight and instincts is the work he was theoretically already doing when things got weird.
An obvious question for Freeland is why the Nanos polling spread between Liberals and Conservatives is seven points wider than it was the day before she left the cabinet. Another is whether the “costly political gimmicks” in the Fall Economic Statement she declined to deliver were the first she’d seen.
They’ve both done great things. Carney was appointed to run two central banks by two Conservative prime ministers, neither of whom ever had a word of criticism for his work. He delivered the smoothest possible Brexit even though he hated the idea. Freeland basically picked the Trudeau government up from the wrong side of relations with Russia and dropped it on the right side. Neither needs my permission to march into the history books. But if you think either is a natural political talent, you’ll find the next couple of months hard to watch.
Maybe one of the Liberal candidates will develop the habit of answering questions when asked. It would have the virtue of novelty. It worked well for Harper on that American podcast. Pierre Poilievre is still pivoting to message. Last week he was asked why Elon Musk seems to like him. “If I ever get a chance to meet Musk, I would say, how do we make this an economy where we bring home hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to Canada?” Smooth. Except Musk makes no secret of his answer: ban union labour. Which fits poorly with some of Poilievre’s pro-union marketing.
Two years ago three of Poilievre’s MPs met with Christine Anderson, a German eurodeputy from the AfD party. Poilievre called her views “vile” and said they “have no place in Canada.” Musk has been campaigning nearly full-time for Anderson’s party in German legislative elections.
I’m not trying to pin AfD’s politics on Poilievre. I’m just pointing out that once he no longer has Trudeau to kick around, the internal contradictions in Poilievre’s positions will become harder to ignore.
This week Jenni Byrne, Poilievre’s lead gatekeeper, came in for criticism when she criticized Erin O’Toole for saying nice things about Anita Anand. “For anyone unsure why Erin is no longer leader of the Conservative Party…. [Anand] supported DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] policies like name, rank and pronouns. Tampons in men’s rooms, etc.” Much of the criticism amounts to dismay that Byrne could be so mean. I could hardly care less. But I do wonder where Byrne expects Canadian soldiers to fight, and alongside whom. Here’s a story on pronoun use in the U.S. Navy and Marines. Here’s one on the UK’s Ministry of Defence offering pronoun guidance while Boris Johnson was prime minister. Here’s NATO’s gender-inclusive language manual. When congratulating oneself on preferring a warrior culture to woke culture, it’s handy to have the first clue what’s going on in other warrior cultures.
Mostly I wonder how anyone could look at a Navy [UPDATE: That should read “Air Force” — pw] veteran congratulating a former Minister of Defence and think, before anything else, “But the tampons!” Poland, and Elon Musk’s friend Donald Trump, want member states in the woke NATO alliance to spend five percent of GDP on national defence. All of the Liberals and all of the Conservatives in all of Canada’s little schoolyard arguments have never come up with a plan to get to two. I know we all get excited about our little feuds, but after an election comes, whoever wins will have to provide real government for a real country in a real world. That’s harder than tweeting.
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Business
Mark Carney’s Fiscal Fantasy Will Bankrupt Canada

By Gwyn Morgan
Mark Carney was supposed to be the adult in the room. After nearly a decade of runaway spending under Justin Trudeau, the former central banker was presented to Canadians as a steady hand – someone who could responsibly manage the economy and restore fiscal discipline.
Instead, Carney has taken Trudeau’s recklessness and dialled it up. His government’s recently released spending plan shows an increase of 8.5 percent this fiscal year to $437.8 billion. Add in “non-budgetary spending” such as EI payouts, plus at least $49 billion just to service the burgeoning national debt and total spending in Carney’s first year in office will hit $554.5 billion.
Even if tax revenues were to remain level with last year – and they almost certainly won’t given the tariff wars ravaging Canadian industry – we are hurtling toward a deficit that could easily exceed 3 percent of GDP, and thus dwarf our meagre annual economic growth. It will only get worse. The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates debt interest alone will consume $70 billion annually by 2029. Fitch Ratings recently warned of Canada’s “rapid and steep fiscal deterioration”, noting that if the Liberal program is implemented total federal, provincial and local debt would rise to 90 percent of GDP.
This was already a fiscal powder keg. But then Carney casually tossed in a lit match. At June’s NATO summit, he pledged to raise defence spending to 2 percent of GDP this fiscal year – to roughly $62 billion. Days later, he stunned even his own caucus by promising to match NATO’s new 5 percent target. If he and his Liberal colleagues follow through, Canada’s defence spending will balloon to the current annual equivalent of $155 billion per year. There is no plan to pay for this. It will all go on the national credit card.
This is not “responsible government.” It is economic madness.
And it’s happening amid broader economic decline. Business investment per worker – a key driver of productivity and living standards – has been shrinking since 2015. The C.D. Howe Institute warns that Canadian workers are increasingly “underequipped compared to their peers abroad,” making us less competitive and less prosperous.
The problem isn’t a lack of money; it’s a lack of discipline and vision. We’ve created a business climate that punishes investment: high taxes, sluggish regulatory processes, and politically motivated uncertainty. Carney has done nothing to reverse this. If anything, he’s making the situation worse.
Recall the 2008 global financial meltdown. Carney loves to highlight his role as Bank of Canada Governor during that time but the true credit for steering the country through the crisis belongs to then-prime minister Stephen Harper and his finance minister, Jim Flaherty. Facing the pressures of a minority Parliament, they made the tough decisions that safeguarded Canada’s fiscal foundation. Their disciplined governance is something Carney would do well to emulate.
Instead, he’s tearing down that legacy. His recent $4.3 billion aid pledge to Ukraine, made without parliamentary approval, exemplifies his careless approach. And his self-proclaimed image as the experienced technocrat who could go eyeball-to-eyeball against Trump is starting to crack. Instead of respecting Carney, Trump is almost toying with him, announcing in June, for example that the U.S. would pull out of the much-ballyhooed bilateral trade talks launched at the G7 Summit less than two weeks earlier.
Ordinary Canadians will foot the bill for Carney’s fiscal mess. The dollar has weakened. Young Canadians – already priced out of the housing market – will inherit a mountain of debt. This is not stewardship. It’s generational theft.
Some still believe Carney will pivot – that he will eventually govern sensibly. But nothing in his actions supports that hope. A leader serious about economic renewal would cancel wasteful Trudeau-era programs, streamline approvals for energy and resource projects, and offer incentives for capital investment. Instead, we’re getting more borrowing and ideological showmanship.
It’s no longer credible to say Carney is better than Trudeau. He’s worse. Trudeau at least pretended deficits were temporary. Carney has made them permanent – and more dangerous.
This is a betrayal of the fiscal stability Canadians were promised. If we care about our credit rating, our standard of living, or the future we are leaving our children, we must change course.
That begins by removing a government unwilling – or unable – to do the job.
Canada once set an economic example for others. Those days are gone. The warning signs – soaring debt, declining productivity, and diminished global standing – are everywhere. Carney’s defenders may still hope he can grow into the job. Canada cannot afford to wait and find out.
The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.
Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.
Business
Carney Liberals quietly award Pfizer, Moderna nearly $400 million for new COVID shot contracts

From LifeSiteNews
Carney’s Liberal government signed nearly $400 million in contracts with Pfizer and Moderna for COVID shots, despite halted booster programs and ongoing delays in compensating Canadians for jab injuries.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has awarded Pfizer and Moderna nearly $400 million in new COVID shot contracts.
On June 30th, the Liberal government quietly signed nearly $400 million contracts with vaccine companies Pfizer and Moderna for COVID jabs, despite thousands of Canadians waiting to receive compensation for COVID shot injuries.
The contracts, published on the Government of Canada website, run from June 30, 2025, until March 31, 2026. Under the contracts, taxpayers must pay $199,907,418.00 to both companies for their COVID shots.
Notably, there have been no press releases regarding the contracts on the Government of Canada website nor from Carney’s official office.
Additionally, the contracts were signed after most Canadians provinces halted their COVID booster shot programs. At the same time, many Canadians are still waiting to receive compensation from COVID shot injuries.
Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) was launched in December 2020 after the Canadian government gave vaccine makers a shield from liability regarding COVID-19 jab-related injuries.
There has been a total of 3,317 claims received, of which only 234 have received payments. In December, the Canadian Department of Health warned that COVID shot injury payouts will exceed the $75 million budget.
The December memo is the last public update that Canadians have received regarding the cost of the program. However, private investigations have revealed that much of the funding is going in the pockets of administrators, not injured Canadians.
A July report by Global News discovered that Oxaro Inc., the consulting company overseeing the VISP, has received $50.6 million. Of that fund, $33.7 million has been spent on administrative costs, compared to only $16.9 million going to vaccine injured Canadians.
Furthermore, the claims do not represent the total number of Canadians injured by the allegedly “safe and effective” COVID shots, as inside memos have revealed that the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) officials neglected to report all adverse effects from COVID jabs and even went as far as telling staff not to report all events.
The PHAC’s downplaying of jab injuries is of little surprise to Canadians, as a 2023 secret memo revealed that the federal government purposefully hid adverse effect so as not to alarm Canadians.
The secret memo from former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Privy Council Office noted that COVID jab injuries and even deaths “have the potential to shake public confidence.”
“Adverse effects following immunization, news reports and the government’s response to them have the potential to shake public confidence in the COVID-19 vaccination rollout,” read a part of the memo titled “Testing Behaviourally Informed Messaging in Response to Severe Adverse Events Following Immunization.”
Instead of alerting the public, the secret memo suggested developing “winning communication strategies” to ensure the public did not lose confidence in the experimental injections.
Since the start of the COVID crisis, official data shows that the virus has been listed as the cause of death for less than 20 children in Canada under age 15. This is out of six million children in the age group.
The COVID jabs approved in Canada have also been associated with severe side effects, such as blood clots, rashes, miscarriages, and even heart attacks in young, healthy men.
Additionally, a recent study done by researchers with Canada-based Correlation Research in the Public Interest showed that 17 countries have found a “definite causal link” between peaks in all-cause mortality and the fast rollouts of the COVID shots, as well as boosters.
Interestingly, while the Department of Health has spent $16 million on injury payouts, the Liberal government spent $54 million COVID propaganda promoting the shot to young Canadians.
The Public Health Agency of Canada especially targeted young Canadians ages 18-24 because they “may play down the seriousness of the situation.”
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