Canada

When pot goes legal nationwide, what will become of the drug-sniffing K9s?

Poised to miss a key deadline for a renegotiated NAFTA, the White House threatens to leave Canada in the cold.

Plus, Cleveland's greatest bar chain turns 35.

Ways and Means members suggest a trade deal with Mexico might not be legal under fast-track authority.

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

The president threatened to leave Canada behind in renegotiating NAFTA. But lawmakers doubt he’s allowed to do that.

Plus, the phone booth baby finds his mom.

Plus, when you should leave the ballpark.

Michael Taube on the death of Gord Downie and the end of the Tragically Hip, "Canada's house band."

Jews worry too much. That seems to be the point of a recent article in the otherwise sensible Economist. Sure, two German rappers won that country’s highest music award by bragging their torsos are “better defined than an Auschwitz inmate’s” and vowing to “make another Holocaust.” But, says the…

An eyewitness account from an unmanned border crossing.

“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” wrote Shakespeare. Although the odds that President Trump was reminded of that observation when re-reading The Tempest must be regarded as low, they are somewhat higher that he might at one time have stumbled across the modern variant, about…

Being a writer-editor-pundit in Donald Trump’s Washington is a 24/7 job. In the last year, I’ve had countless nights of missed dinners and lost sleep, along with a few canceled concerts and ruined respites. But there was one mission from which not even a Trump tweet starting a nuclear war could…

President Trump signed a controversial order implementing heavy tariffs on imported steel and aluminum Thursday, calling the action “a matter of necessity for our security” and saying it would help to revitalize fading American industry.

A court in Ontario, Canada, has ruled that a patient’s desire to be euthanized trumps a doctor’s conscientious objection. Doctors there now face the cruel choice between complicity in what they consider a grievous wrong—killing a sick or disabled patient—and the very real prospect of legal or…

For recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a sigh of relief: The Supreme Court on Monday effectively upheld a lower court’s ruling that the White House cannot end DACA, which provides legal status to people brought to America illegally as children, until challenges to the…

Wawa Shabbawa? Yep, that's what it sounds like: Shabbat at a Wawa. A local performance artist, Brian Feldman, came up with the concept. Turns out nobody really went because they're obsessed with Wawa, like Feldman is. Now, a Shabbat at a Sheetz? That's another matter entirely. They'd probably have…

Forget Detroit, let's all move to Italy. During the economic crisis, there were hundreds of stories written about distressed properties in Michigan. Now, in Sardinia, you can buy homes for $2. Of course, there are strings attached. As Thrillist reports:

Diplomatic “talks” are often little more than that—gabfests—but Tuesday’s meeting in Vancouver signals a hard-headed determination to deal with the problem of North Korea. The talks, hosted by the U.S. and Canada, brought together 20 nations, primarily those that aided South Korea in the Korean War…

Trade experts, lawmakers, and investors panicked across the board Wednesday night after Reuters reported Canadian officials were increasingly convinced President Donald Trump is planning to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Mmmmm. Delicious Laundry Pods. As we know from science™, laundry pods are unlikely to kill you. But that hasn't stopped folks from wanting to regulate the innovative little cleaning pods. Canada, as behind as it often is, has a tweet asking Canadians if they know the health risks of consuming…

At long last, The Scrapbook has developed proof of foreign meddling in our democracy. Justice Department documents lay the plot bare: a secret deal between a foreign power and two former administration officials at the highest echelons of the U.S. government.

Canada’s NAFTA negotiator has now demanded that new chapters be inserted to the agreement which reflect the Trudeau government’s “commitment to gender equality and . . . improving our relationship with indigenous peoples.”

In 2012, Fareed Zakaria dedicated an episode of his CNN show GPS to exploring Canada’s skills-based immigration system, discussing why such a program accords with the modern economy. On Twitter, Zakaria proclaimed that “Canada has the most successful set of immigration policies in the world.” His…

The representatives from Canada and Mexico who came to Washington on Wednesday to discuss the North American Free Trade Agreement were greeted by U.S. officials taking a hard line on negotiations.

Maybe those ever-so-secretive Russian hackers aren’t nearly as clever as we, or they, thought.

When former president Barack Obama initiated efforts to implement his pledge to close Guantánamo Bay and transfer its detainees to U.S. and foreign prisons, he started a cascade effect that has boosted the global jihadist insurgency. The most recent example of the impact of Obama’s foreign policy…

Bill C-16, which recently received Royal Assent and will soon become law, is the most recent bill to threaten free speech and to mandate that individuals adopt a social constructionist philosophy of gender. Those who refuse to use gender neutral pronouns such as “they” or “zi” and “zir,” or who…

Ever since the Washington Post reported last week that President Donald Trump disclosed classified information in his meeting with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador, commentators have been debating how the revelation might affect intelligence gathering and sharing among America and its…

Ottawa

Ottawa

For a symbolic issue, the Keystone pipeline has sure caused a lot of damage—to Canadian-American relations, to Democrats, to President Obama. And it feeds, underscores, or reflects a variety of political divisions, some of them quite bitter.

The current issue of the New Yorker has an article by staff writer Adam Gopnik, who spent part of his childhood up north, titled, "We Could Have Been Canada: Was the American Revolution such a good idea?" The notion that liberals hate America is an intellectually lazy ad hominem attack indulged by…

After the Trump administration announced on Monday it will impose tariffs of up to 24 percent on Canadian lumber, the National Association of Home Builders said it was "deeply disappointed in this short-sighted action." A previous NAHB study suggested such tariffs would raise the price of new homes…

This was not your typical film premiere. The Bleeding Edge depicts the live-organ harvesting of religious dissidents by agents of the Chinese government and its reigning Communist Party—and the film's starring actress, human-rights activist and religious dissident Anastasia Lin was allegedly almost…

As a young boy in Canada in the 1970s I often accompanied my grandmother to her neighborhood United Church for Sunday service. The United Church is a Canadian invention. In the 1920s some of the largest and oldest Protestant churches in the country, including all the Methodists and the…

Montreal

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

A Canadian who went abroad for terrorist training maintained contact with terrorists in Iran while planning an attack at home, according to a recently released report from the Canadian government.

A nonpartisan department inside Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau's government successfully petitioned Google to remove webpages associated with former conservative leader Stephen Harper from its search results, Canada's iPolitics reports.

This morning, as the White House welcomed Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, the White House passed out American and Canadian flags to guests on the South Lawn.

CNN's Dana Bash asked Marco Rubio whether Ted Cruz is eligible to be president of the United States. Cruz, of course, was born in Canada to an American mother.

Richard Nixon visited Canada just once during his presidency. He’s also been dead 20 years. But he was about the only person to correctly call last week’s Canadian election.

After Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party defeated Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, a giddy New York Times assured Canadians, “Your long national nightmare is over.”  The Times scribe felt “like a broken human after almost 10 years of Harper rule.” Oh, the suffering!  Mr. Trudeau is different, she…

Team Hillary Clinton is happy with the election in Canada. Liberals won big there, as the National Post reports:

After the United States shut down its airspace after the September 11th attack, a unique problem emerged: international flights. 

President Obama claims, as Bill Kristol noted in his editorial in the latest issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, that no country in the world has expressed opposition to his deal with Iran, with the exception of Israel. But that's not accurate. Canada, the United States' biggest trading partner—and,…

The man leading the GOP primary polls made it clear on Thursday night that he still has a high opinion of health care systems that are to the left of Obamacare. 

This month, the Canadian Supreme Court trampled democratic deliberation by unanimously conjuring a constitutional right to “termination of life” for anyone who has an “irremediable medical condition” and wants to die. Note the scope of the judicial fiat is not limited to the terminally ill: The…

Sergeant at Arms Kevin Vickers was given a standing ovation in Canada's Parliament yesterday for allegedly killing the invading terrorist the day before. Watch the moving ovation here:

Here's video that captured the sound of gunfire inside the Canadian Parliament:

A strong statement of support for Israel by the prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper:

This ought to be an easy one for the White House which has been petitioned to take action in a matter of national importance that ought to be a political slam dunk. The people on one side are all too young to vote and those on the other are full of passionate intensity (to borrow a phrase) in…

The news that the administration would like kept quiet, and which it therefore announced in the afternoon, on Good Friday is that it has:

Vice President Joe Biden tried to convince a young Canadian woman to sign up for Obamacare:

In a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Canada's foreign minister, John Baird put things plainly:

It's not often officials from the nation’s largest business lobby and an AFL-CIO-affiliated union speak to one another, let alone work together. But last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and North America’s Building Trades Unions held a joint press conference on Capitol Hill in support of the…

In accepting the best movie award last night at the Oscars, Ben Affleck thanked Canada. 

A cerebral law professor takes his progressive ideas into politics and inspires a personality cult that catapults him to the highest office in the land. Encouraged by the heady mixture of popularity and power, he makes an unprecedented move to abuse his authority. It guts the federalism on which…

If I ever doubted that reporters crave a good story more than almost anything else, my own reaction to the Alberta election last night would have reminded me of its veracity. Before the polls in the province were even closed, I had begun thinking about how I’d pitch a short piece about it to the…

Americans tend to think of Canada as a friendly, clean bastion of European-style socialism, replete with cradle to grave entitlements and a perpetually tepid economy. However, over the last few years Canada has set a pace for economic growth that clearly demonstrates that our current economic…

President Obama’s rejection of a pipeline to bring more Canadian oil to the United States is enormously revealing. He sided with the environmental lobby, a major Democratic interest group, over the majority of Americans who favor the job-creating pipeline. And that’s not all.

Speaker John Boehner and Alberta premier Alison Redford met yesterday to discuss the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project--and how President Obama has delayed his decision on the pipeline until after next year's election. As the speaker's office explains:

Fred Barnes, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Against Reform by John Pepall Toronto, 176 pp., $19.95

Who’s the most powerful conservative leader in the Americas, north and south? That may sound like a trick question, but it’s not. The answer is Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister who triumphed last week in an election that all but destroyed two opposition parties, the Liberals and the Bloc…

"In Bin Laden’s Compound, Seals’ All-Star Team"

Globe and Mail television critic John Doyle notes that Laurence C. Smith's book, The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Northern Future, posits that northern countries will soon rule the world as a result of global warming, water shortages, and the need for oil. This spells great…

Across the Great White North, "Human Rights Comissions" are running amok and making a mockery of the Canadian Charter of Rights, which guarantees "freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication."

Here in the United States, there is never any doubt about the date of the next election: The Constitution provides the schedule. But our northern neighbors don’t have it so easy. Right up until the parliamentary vote that toppled the government of Canada last Friday, pundits debated whether…

Some people only dream of a white Christmas. I’m guaranteed one. It’s right there in the name of the place where I’m headed—the Great White North.

“[H]ealth care system is coming apart at the seams….On the ground, there is too often a glaring lack of execution: long waits, bed shortages, unequal access to medication. Those failures are compounded by the fact that the ever-rising medicare bill is squeezing out education and other social…

The news out of Canada is that authorities have broken up a terrorist cell that had more than 50 electronic circuit boards that could be used in improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The details of the plot are still a bit cloudy, but Canadian authorities were quick to point out that the plotters…