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From the archives

Boundary Issues

Have Canadians and Americans become the same people?

Who Controls North America?

Today, even the U.S. government is just one of many players

The Superpower Next Door

Bully for you — but at what cost?

Jeffrey Simpson

Jeffrey Simpson was the Globe and Mail’s national affairs columnist for thirty-two years.

Articles by
Jeffrey Simpson

Chartered Fight

When provinces and the bench butt heads November 2024
Mayors in Canada’s largest cities, as well as some who run smaller ones, complain about the financial burdens of asylum seekers and refugees on their budgets and physical facilities. Provinces correctly blame Ottawa for increased numbers of new arrivals and demand money for their care. A surge of migration has produced predictable results: ad hoc sheltering…

Skippy

A prime minister in the making September 2024
The October 1993 federal election shattered the structure of Canadian politics. The Bloc Québécois won fifty-four seats to form the official opposition. The BQ remains a force in Quebec to this day; its presence in the Commons makes it harder for national parties to form majority governments. The Reform Party won fifty-two seats and, via a reverse takeover of the historic Progressive Conservative…

The Churn

Media turmoil through the eyes of Bill Fox December 2022
Tumult is washing over the news media business, with staff being cast overboard as newsrooms shrink or disappear. Postmedia and some newspapers in Atlantic Canada are now publishing digital-only Monday editions. The two owners of the Toronto Star wound up in court, and then mediation, over a disagreement about the business and editorial models for a once money-spinning organization they purchased for…

A Sort of Equilibrium

Revisiting the debates of old July | August 2022
Here’s an old chestnut that’s appeared in these pages before. Several people of different nationalities are asked to propose the title of a book about an elephant. The Brit replies with The Elephant’s Role in the British Empire. The French person suggests La vie amoureuse de l’éléphant. The American proposes The Elephant: An American Invention

That Ever Governed Frenzy

Through the eyes of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Michael Wernick January | February 2022
More than a year before the 2015 election, which delivered a Liberal majority government, I had dinner in Ottawa with Gerald Butts, a confidant of Justin Trudeau. I did not know Butts well, our previous contact having been several lunches in Toronto when he had worked for Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty. Until he left the Prime Minister’s…

Period Piece

Forty-five years of change May 2021
John Lawrence Manion joined the federal public service in 1953 and held numerous roles until his retirement as principal of the Canadian Centre for Management Development, in 1991. Since then, the annual Manion Lecture has addressed “pressing public policy and public management issues that affect the professional roles and responsibilities of public servants in a way that challenges