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The federal Conservatives were still licking their wounds from the Liberals’ recent minority election victory when they were rocked by a stunning and dispiriting floor-crossing. And they failed to stop the government from passing its budget by a razor-thin margin. That was 20 years ago, as Ian Brodie, former chief of staff to prime minister Stephen Harper, reflects on with Brian. And it looked a l...

He promised a historic budget. He warned of big sacrifices. He said he had a vision. But what Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered was not much more than a big-spending, big-government Trudeau-style plan, with a bit less hostility to business and some long-overdue military funding, as Tasha Kheiriddin and Stuart Thomson, curators of Postmedia’s Political Hack politics newsletter, discuss with Bria...

From Elizabeth May’s permanent iron grip on the Green party; to Jagmeet Singh’s self-destructive Liberal alliance; and the sabotaging of NDP campaigns by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s “leap manifesto”: Mark Leiren-Young, a committed environmentalist, saw all of it from a front-row seat. He had worked to help elect the politicians he thought were committed to fighting for his cause. But, as he tells...

Did Republican icon Ronald Reagan detest tariffs or love them? For President Donald Trump and his fiercely loyal army of acolytes, the answer is whatever the president says. As Brian discusses with Postmedia political columnists Lorne Gunter and Chris Selley, there’s no reason to be surprised that Trump blew up trade talks over an ad being run by Ontario that quotes Reagan denouncing tariffs, sayi...

The elbows are down, the prime minister is backslapping President Donald Trump, but America’s tariffs just keep coming, and hurting Canada more. The ugly truth is that Ottawa’s been foundering in trade talks with the White House, as former diplomat to the U.S., Louise Blaise, and former trade minister Ed Fast discuss with Brian this week from the Banff Forum in Quebec City. They explain how Mark C...

It’s a major backer of Hamas. It’s an ally of the United States. It has alienated Arab neighbours and spreads toxic propaganda through Al Jazeera but maintains relations with Israel. Since Oct. 7, 2023, the enigmatic Qatar has been a linchpin in negotiations over the war in Gaza. Brian talks to two guests about how this tiny, gas-rich emirate has taken an outsized role in the Middle East. Alon Ben...

The public safety minister admitted his government’s sweeping plan to confiscate thousands of previously legal gun models with a “buyback” is badly flawed. But as Ian Runkle, a lawyer specializing in firearms law, tells Brian, it’s far more troubling than that. Ottawa plans to recreate a form of the hated gun registry that it abandoned long ago. And gun owners won’t necessarily be compensated for...

No military in history has been as careful as Israel to minimize civilian casualties in war. And no country has been criticized for it like Israel has — including by Canada. That’s the assessment of guests Richard Kemp and John Spencer, former military men and two of the highest authorities on urban warfare. They explain to Brian the groundbreaking lengths the IDF goes to in Gaza to mitigate harm,...

When he was elected, Prime Minister Mark Carney promised a trade deal with President Donald Trump, a blaze of new major infrastructure projects and a return to affordable middle-class home ownership. Today, Canadian and American trade negotiating teams are barely speaking, the only prioritized projects recently announced were already in the works, and the housing plan looks like a monumental boond...

The Liberals claim they’ve stopped the flood of temporary workers, foreign students and other immigrants that blew up our housing crisis and devastated the youth job market. Michelle Rempel Garner, the Conservatives’ immigration critic, tells Brian that the reality is nothing close to what they say. Five-million people remain here on temporary visas. Hundreds of thousands of more people are still...

What can you do when someone attacks you or your family? After recent high-profile, violent home invasions, police have made it seem like you need to give up and not fight back. That’s wrong, as criminal lawyer Solomon Friedman tells Brian. Friedman explains how the power to defend yourself, your home and others, including killing an assailant if it’s justified, is consistently endorsed by court r...

The U.S. Republican party today isn’t what it used to be. But the evolution toward President Donald Trump’s MAGA-ism began decades ago when William F. Buckley launched a revolution on the American right. As Buckley’s official biographer Sam Tanenhaus tells Brian, the late conservative icon was a lot like Trump: a media-savvy wealthy elite who rebelled against the very establishment he came from. I...

We all know governments used the pandemic as rationale for stripping away basic Charter rights, even if some think it was justified. John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, remains at the forefront in fighting to get them back. He has a new book out, Corrupted by Fear: How the Charter was betrayed and what Canadians can do about it. And he discusses with Brian why...

Before Pierre Poilievre, before Brian Mulroney, there was one leader who made federal conservatives an electoral force to be reckoned with. Before John Diefenbaker, Canada had begun to resemble a Liberal one-party state. Bob Plamondon, author of the new book Freedom Fighter: John Diefenbaker's Battle for Canadian Liberties and Independence, talks with Brian about how Dief became a political sensat...

A lot of people in the West misunderstand the motives of Russian president Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine. As Andrew Natsios, editor of the new book Russia Under Putin, tells Brian, we won’t understand the war unless we understand demographics. Russia’s population is cratering; the largest country by land mass is rapidly depopulating and becoming vulnerable, particularly to China. While...

For two years, Hamas has used the suffering of Palestinians to manipulate global opinion. As Brian discusses with this week’s guests, it worked: The Hamas-engineered hunger crisis in Gaza has prompted Canada, with France and the U.K., to recognize a Palestinian state based on unenforceable conditions like democratic elections and Hamas relinquishing power — which it says it will never do. Iddo Moe...

One-day sentences for aiding and abetting the Islamic State terror group, a few short years for murder, but possibly more if you’re an anti-vaccine trucker: these stories and loads of others from recent Canadian court cases seem to be undermining the public’s faith in our justice system. Brian chats with Postmedia columnists Jamie Sarkonak and Chris Selley about how things went so wrong and what t...

Between President Donald Trump claiming there’s a flood of fentanyl from Canada to the U.S., and people here insisting there’s almost none, the truth is elusive. A new American report gets to the bottom of what’s really going on, and its author, Jonathan Caulkins, talks to Brian about what he found. Specializing in crime systems, the professor from Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College breaks...

We’ve lost sight of where Prime Minister Mark Carney is pointing his elbows as U.S. President Donald Trump keeps smacking Canada with more economic threats. Brian talks this week about Carney’s erratic political shapeshifting with Conservative adviser Ginny Roth and veteran Liberal adviser Warren Kinsella, and asks: Is our new prime minister emerging as a progressive, a conservative, or someone wh...

For a moment it seemed all Canadians understood that, facing President Donald Trump’s tariff war, we had to make our economy as resilient and competitive as possible. As Martha Hall Findlay discusses with Brian, there was finally talk of ending Ottawa’s war on oil and gas, building infrastructure and boosting productivity. The government even yanked the aggravating digital services tax. But, expla...

Make no mistake: the blows that Israel and America delivered to the Islamic tyrants in Tehran were in many ways crippling. As Kaveh Shahrooz, an Iranian-born Mideast analyst and human rights activist, tells Brian this week, the devastating targeted assassinations of nuclear scientists and military leaders indicate Israel has infiltrated the regime at its highest level. Its nuclear program is shatt...

As the Islamic Republic’s missiles rain down on the Jewish state, and with massive U.S. attacks against Iran’s nuclear sites ratcheting up the war, Brian talks to two Canadians living under fire as they frantically duck in and out of bomb shelters. Postmedia columnist Adam Zivo has been stuck in Israel, unable to get out, while former Canadian ambassador to Israel Vivian Bercovici (also a Postmedi...

There are many lingering questions about the two-day killing spree by Gabriel Wortman that killed 22 people in 2020 in Nova Scotia, even after a joint federal/provincial commission wrapped up its inquiry. Investigative journalist Paul Palango joins Brian to discuss why he thinks all signs point to RCMP covering up that Wortman was working undercover for them before his rampage, as he exposes in hi...

Don’t call it a done deal until it’s done, but America’s ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, tells Brian this week that negotiations between Ottawa and President Donald Trump’s administration are making progress. He explains why he believes things are moving quickly in the right direction to settle the trade war between our two countries. Hoekstra also talks about why he’s looking forward to the...

With the King opening Parliament, and a disciplined agenda, the prime minister modelled a poised and assured break from his unserious predecessor while sending a message to the world about Canadian sovereignty. That’s the verdict of Postmedia’s politics columnist John Ivison and parliamentary bureau chief Stuart Thomson, who join Brian to discuss the first week of Mark Carney’s re-elected governme...