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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...

Jews get arrested in Toronto for standing up to Hamas cheerleaders; Judaic students hide their identity while public school teachers extol Islam; progressives, along with media and politicians, compare Israel to Nazis and cast Palestinians as blameless martyrs. These are among the reasons Brendan O’Neill, author of After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, tells Brian why...

He won last month’s election for the Liberals promising he had a plan to protect Canada’s economy from the predations of the American president. But since returning to Ottawa, Prime Minister Mark Carney has sent alarming signals to business and scaring off badly needed capital investment, as economist and professor Ian Lee tells Brian this week. The Liberal government’s decision to avoid tabling a...

Torn at for nine years by the divisive Trudeau Liberals, Canadian unity is seriously frayed, with Alberta now preparing for a possible secession referendum. In this episode, Brian talks with Reform Party founder Preston Manning, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, and longtime Liberal pollster Dan Arnold to get a sense of how dire the situation has become. Manning explains that the separatist sentimen...

The big election surprise was that Conservatives can do so well and still lose. Leader Pierre Poilievre created a new Tory coalition, sweeping up working-class NDPers and anti-establishment People’s Party voters, as Brian discusses with Tasha Kheiriddin and Stuart Thomson from Postmedia’s Political Hack newsletter. But Poilievre now needs even more to beat the Liberals — which means building bridg...

Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative party, with the campaign’s momentum and tightening polls, could yet declare victory in the federal election. But the party infighting that started early in the campaign already has some sniffing around a potential leadership change, as the Political Hack newsletter’s Tasha Kheiriddin and Stuart Thomson discuss with Brian this week. Our 2025 election panel also gets...

If there’s anyone other than U.S. President Donald Trump who can take credit for helping the Liberals try to hang onto power, it’s NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh. After years protecting the Liberal government from falling in the House, Singh spent last week’s debates inexplicably assisting Liberal Leader Mark Carney, as Brian discusses with Tasha Kheiriddin and Stuart Thomson from the Political Hack new...

In a rare, casual interview Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre talks to Brian about what it’s been like campaigning for an election with his wife and kids, what he thinks about people saying he’s too “angry,” and what he does to stay in shape during the race. He also discusses what he makes of provincial conservatives in Ontario publicly criticizing his campaign, and fear tactics being used agai...

The latest questions about his support from China and his corporate tax dodging have had Mark Carney stumbling and snapping at reporters, even suspending his campaign to seek refuge in the image-friendly prime minister’s office. But the bigger question is whether he can avoid fumbling his front-runner status in the last two weeks of the campaign, as Brian discusses in our weekly election panel wit...

Things are happening in the election campaigns behind the headlines that may reveal a different version of what’s showing up in the polls. Stuart Thomson and Tasha Kheiriddin, the team behind Political Hack, Postmedia’s politics insider newsletter, join Brian to talk about some of the challenges inside Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s campaign, which Stuart travelled with this week. Brian and Stuart d...

In any other election the kind of poll numbers Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are putting up would be cause for celebration. And their campaign so far has been perfectly executed, as Stuart Thomson and Tasha Kheiriddin from Postmedia’s Political Hack newsletter discuss with Brian this week. Meanwhile Liberal Leader Mark Carney has stumbled and underwhelmed. But the dynamics of this race in the f...

It’s finally dead… or is it? New Liberal Leader Mark Carney reduced the carbon-tax rate to zero before calling an election, but as Franco Terrazzano tells Brian, there are still questions about what Canadians will pay. Terrazzano, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, is author of the new book Axing the Tax. He discusses how the federal Liberal government snuck in the carbon tax...

Canada’s crucial relationship with the U.S. is in its worst crisis ever. And Mark Carney’s first urgent trip as prime minister is … to Europe. Brian talks with John Ivison and Lorne Gunter this week to assess Carney’s first curious moves as the newly selected Liberal leader. But while Carney’s already saddled with loads of negative baggage — and just added more with some cabinet picks — none of it...

Shock and awe followed by erratic moves is how Donald Trump is used to negotiating, as historian, businessman and Postmedia columnist Conrad Black (who occasionally speaks with the president) tells Brian this week. Trump is determined to end the era of other countries picking America’s pocket in myriad ways and is using tariffs to do it. Black says he gets the impression the Trump administration w...

If you want a thriving fentanyl trade in your country, attracting heavily armed cartels, super labs, and a large and growing market of users subsidized by the government and unimpeded by law enforcement, just do everything Canada’s been doing. So says Marshall Smith, former chief of staff to the Alberta premier, a former addict, and a prominent dissenter from the entrenched harm-reduction dogma of...

They said his calling an early provincial election was hubris, and yet Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford may win an even bigger majority on Feb. 27. They scoffed when he claimed a vote was needed to fight U.S. tariffs, but that turned out to be all Ontarians were thinking about. And, as Brian discusses this week with Postmedia’s Ontario columnists Chris Selley and Lorrie Goldstein, Ford’s...

The premiers blitzing the U.S. capital wasn’t the pointless fiasco reports made it out to be, and President Trump’s plan for Canada may not really about tariffs or fentanyl. In this special episode, Brian reports from the ground in Washington, D.C. where he interviews Canadian provincial and business leaders who were there and hears about their actual progress in trying to dissuade the Trump admin...

It might seem unbelievable, but some Americans, including President Donald Trump, really think it’s possible that Canada, or parts of it, might join the U.S.A. Joel Pollak, California-based editor for Breitbart News and author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, tells Brian that the president’s unexpected, confrontational tariff pressure on Canada isn’t just another of his m...