Blog

Prime Minister Mark Carney will be watched closely by Canadians infuriated by Donald Trump — and by an anxious business community looking for tariff relief — when he meets with the U.S. president Tuesday in Washington. After months of Trump’s annexation threats, the newly elected prime minister will be tasked with a delicate balancing act — showing strength while maintaining Canada’s place in a critical North American trade pact the president’s tariffs have sought to upend.“My government will fight to get the best deal for Canada,” Carney said Friday in his first news conference since the election.The Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement on trade, called CUSMA, was negotiated during the first Trump administration. Trump at the time called it the best deal ever and Canadian officials declared it a ...

U.S. President Donald Trump “seemed positively delighted” about the impact he had on Canada’s federal election, a U.S. journalist said while recounting a recent interview with the president. Ashley Parker was one of three writers at The Atlantic who interviewed Trump in the Oval Office for an article published late last month, before Canadians elected a Liberal minority government in last week’s election.The interview transcript includes a brief section on Canada, where Trump again said he is serious about making Canada an American state, and mused about the “close” election race between the Liberals and the Conservatives.“Trump sort of gleefully said, ‘Once I became a presence in the Canadian elections, I really turned it into a close call; I kind of threw it from the Conservatives to the...

Former Conservative cabinet minister Peter MacKay isn’t pointing the finger at Pierre Poilievre for the party’s loss in last week’s federal election, but he does think members of his team need to go and that the party itself needs “fine-tuning.” MacKay, who served multiple roles under former prime minister Stephen Harper and ran against Poilievre for the party leadership in 2022, says “difficult” and sometimes “painful” conversations will be had on what went wrong for the Conservatives.While he says tensions exist within the party and with some provinces, MacKay doesn’t believe that’s what led to a fourth Liberal mandate.“I don’t think it’s indicative of a party in crisis — it’s indicative of a party that’s in need of some fine-tuning, perhaps some policy and communications adjustments,” h...

Prime Minister Mark Carney has many foreign policy issues on his plate — and they’re not all about U.S. President Donald Trump. Here are six of the key challenges Ottawa will be navigating in the coming months during a turbulent time in world politics.In just six weeks, Carney will welcome his leading counterparts to Kananaskis, Alta., for the Group of Seven leaders’ summit. Story continues below advertisement Trump is invited to attend, as are the leaders of France, Germany, Japan, the U.K. and Italy, as well as the European Union. The summit sees G7 leaders take stock of the world’s challenges and sign a communiqué that sets the tone for other industrialized democracies.When Canada last hosted a G7 summit in 2018, Trump refused to sign the closing communiqué...

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has repeatedly accused the Liberal government of entrenching Canada’s economic dependence on the United States. But political scientists say the reality is more complex, noting a broad trend toward continental integration of national economies that began almost 40 years ago.On the federal election trail, Poilievre decried a “lost Liberal decade” of economic stagnation. He blamed former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government for failing to advance resource projects, allowing Canadian energy to head to the United States at a discount and losing billions of investment dollars to American companies.It is “kind of silly” to blame Trudeau for Canada’s economic reliance on the United States because it has been a “bipartisan project” since the late 1980s, s...