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Canada’s governing Liberals were one seat short of a simple majority in Parliament after a Conservative lawmaker defected and joined Prime Minister Mark Carney’s party Thursday. Michael Ma was the second Canadian Conservative opposition lawmaker to join the Liberals in just over a month. Ma, who represents Markham–Unionville, said he entered politics “to focus on solutions, not division.” “I have concluded that Prime Minister Mark Carney is offering the steady, practical approach we need to deliver on the priorities I hear every day while door knocking in Markham–Unionville,” Ma said in his statement. His move puts the Liberals one seat...

@KemiBadenoch We have listened, we have learned and we have changed.

Sir Keir Starmer is expected to announce the UK's recognition of a Palestinian state in a statement on Sunday afternoon. The move comes after the prime minister said in July the UK would shift its position in September unless Israel met conditions including agreeing to a ceasefire in Gaza and committing to a long-term sustainable peace deal that delivers a two-state solution. It represents a major change in British foreign policy after successive governments said recognition should come as part of a peace process and at a time of maximum impact. The move has drawn fierce criticism from the Israeli...

Seat-less Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre will try his luck in Alberta. After losing on election night in his now-former Ottawa-area riding of Carleton, the Tory leader will get the chance to snag a seat in the House of Commons thanks to Battle River-Crowfoot MP Damien Kurek, who has agreed to step aside. “It has been a tremendous honour to serve the good people of Battle River-Crowfoot as their Member of Parliament since 2019,” Kurek said in a statement. “Their support and commitment to the Conservative movement and our mission to bring back hope and prosperity to this country has been...

Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre lost his own seat in Parliament in Monday’s election, but he has not resigned as leader of the party and some prominent Conservatives have spoken up to defend his position. “There is no doubt that Pierre Poilievre and his team ran an incredible campaign,” former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer said in a post on social media platform X on Tuesday. Scheer noted that while the Conservatives came up short of forming a government, they won “the highest vote percentage in modern Conservative history” and “the most amount of total votes for our party,...

The Latest Millions of Canadians are at the polls today, choosing the nation's next leader at a time of diplomatic and economic turmoil — especially with the United States. Voting places close first in Newfoundland and Labrador, then across the Atlantic region. All of the major party leaders have cast their own ballots. CBC News is live with special coverage

Our neighbor to the north has a lot going for it. Beautiful scenery, some decent food (if you like poutine), a few decent beers, and great hunting and fishing. But their voting patterns? Hoo boy. Now, after some months where we were hoping the Conservatives might win the next Canucki-lection and put Pierre Poilievre in the Prime Minister's chair, now the Canadian Liberals - the party of Justin Trudeau - seem to be resurging. On Monday, could Canada be about to make the wrong choice, again?At a rally in London, Ontario, on Friday, the crowd booed as Mark Carney delivered...

Pierre Poilievre, leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, seemed set to become Canada’s next prime minister at the start of 2025. For more than a year, his party had a 20-point lead in opinion polls over then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party and momentum toward a landslide victory. Then came President Trump. Trump’s trade war and threats to annex Canada have upended Canadian politics. In less than three months, the Conservatives have gone from heavy favorites to underdogs in an election set for April 28. Poilievre’s problem is bad timing. His preferred foil, the unpopular Trudeau, resigned in March, when Trump’s...

‘Negativity won’t win a trade war,’ Carney says in shot at Poilievre CBC News Special | Carney kicks off Liberal campaign, Canadians set to vote April 28 ..... The Latest Voters will go to the polls on April 28. Carney says he will cut taxes for middle-class Canadians. Speaking earlier in Quebec, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said he will stand up to U.S. President Donald Trump and his threats of annexation. We’re expecting to hear from all the other major national party leaders today as well. Polling suggests a tight race between the Liberals and Tories as the campaign gets...

How seriously are Canadians taking Trump? Some are apparently taking him a little too seriously. Most of us on the right are familiar with Trump's swagger, his Queens-style approach to negotiation, and his tendency toward acidic one-liners, nicknames, and insults. We know that he means business, but we don't take him literally. To be honest, most people on the Left know this, too, but it is to their advantage to pretend otherwise. Some Canucks are taking Trump at his word that he will annex the Great White North. Some are even thinking about possibly taking up arms to repel an...

The term ‘special relationship’ has been carved out by a long and relatively well-trodden history. The term was originally coined by former Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the wake of the Second World War. In a world where a victorious Britain had defeated Nazi Germany principally due to their alliance with the US, it was easy to see the need to promote a special relationship between the two nations. The relationship continued to simmer throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, reaching a particularly warm point in the 1980s under the dynamism and chemistry of the relationship between Prime...

Victims of grooming gangs have been ignored because of political correctness, Rishi Sunak said as he set out plans for a police taskforce. Specialist officers supported by the National Crime Agency will be sent to help forces with their investigations, the government said. And better ethnicity data will help ensure abusers do not evade justice due to "cultural sensitivities", it added. Labour said the proposals were "far too inadequate". Under the new plans, more data on the make-up of grooming gangs, including ethnicity, would help ensure suspects "cannot hide behind cultural sensitivities as a way to evade justice", the government...

Elon Musk's attack on the government's handling of grooming gangs is "misjudged and certainly misinformed", Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said. Tech multi-billionaire Musk has posted a series of messages on his social media site X, accusing Sir Keir Starmer of failing to prosecute gangs that systematically groomed and raped young girls, and calling for safeguarding minister Jess Phillips to be jailed. Asked about his comments, Streeting said "this government takes the issue of child sexual exploitation incredibly seriously". He invited Musk to "roll up his sleeves and work with us" against rape gangs. The Tories have also criticised Musk...

Who says British punk rockers can't be prophetic?In the U.K., the Brits are "making plans for Nigel," albeit not quite in the way the punk band XTC had envisioned.According to Breitbart News:Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party has now overtaken the UK’s traditional party of government, the Conservatives, in membership, crossing the historic threshold weeks sooner than expected.The most recent public figures for paid-up full members of the Conservative Party, certainly the oldest political party in the United Kingdom and possibly the oldest political party in the world, put it at 131,680 in November. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK — which he...

“A failure on this scale isn’t just bad luck, it isn’t a global trend or taking your eye off the ball – no, this is a different order of failure,” the prime minister continued. “This happened by design, not accident. Policies were reformed deliberately to liberalize immigration. Brexit was used for that purpose, to turn Britain into a one-nation experiment in open borders.” Following Brexit, net migration reached a previous peak of 764,000 in 2022. In 2015, before the referendum passed, net migration totaled to no more than 333,000. The latest immigration numbers are higher than previously thought.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has ruled out calling another general election, but said he is “not surprised” some people who did not support Labour might want a second poll. A petition on Parliament’s website calling for another election had by Monday night been signed by more than 2.4 million people. “I believe the current Labour Government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead-up to the last election.” Asked about the petition on ITV’s This Morning programme on Monday, Sir Keir said: “Look, I remind myself that very many people didn’t vote Labour at the...

Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham won elections in areas with large Muslim populations. Both engaged with us as citizens The local and mayoral elections sawmany traditional Labour-voting Muslim voters abandon the party they’ve loyally supported for decades. One incident from one interview, and one sentiment in particular that I heard in my local area, sits front and centre: “I was disgusted when Keir Starmer supported Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza – how can I vote for someone who won’t even apologise for this?” said one man, referring to Starmer’s performance in an interview on LBC last October and...

Guido understands that the conversion therapy ban has finally been killed off. The government committed to a draft bill for pre-legislative scrutiny last January, though now it will not be put forward a Joint Committee, cutting it off at the first stage. Banning conversion therapy for gay and trans people has been kicked down the road since 2018, and now Rishi has let it die… Like most things, it’s an issue that polarises the Tories, and it seems that Sunak doesn’t want the backlash from the Tory right if he were to go ahead with the ban. MPs raised their...

The Conservative party’s biggest donor told colleagues that looking at Diane Abbott makes you “want to hate all black women” and said the MP “should be shot”, the Guardian can reveal. Frank Hester, who has given £10m to the Tories in the past year, said in the meeting that he did not hate all black women. But he said that seeing Abbott, who is Britain’s longest-serving black MP, on TV meant “you just want to hate all black women because she’s there”. He also called all his “foreign” workers together to defend himself against online claims that he had made...

To the authentically British backdrop of drizzle, a distant heckler and the piccolo patter of a Downing Street tree sparrow, Rishi Sunak confronted the 'poison' of Islamist and far-Right extremism. It needed saying and it needed saying well. Our Prime Minister did that. Arc-lit by TV cameras as Friday afternoon slipped into evening, a deadly serious Sunak said: 'This situation has gone on long enough. Our great achievement in building the world's most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy is being deliberately undermined. There are forces here at home trying to tear us apart. We must not allow that to happen.' 'Forces...