My new book, "Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre," will be published in late March by Biblioasis. The publishing house and I have worked hard to get a 135,000 book ready for press in a very short time , with constant changes and updates as the political ground shifts. I don't just describe Poilievre's life, I look at the political and media landscape that got him where he is. Poilievre has been a "dial a quote" since he was a teenager. He's got a talent for giving short, nasty comments that reporters love.

Buried in this mess is the real tariff plan: ruin our dairy farmers and, even more damaging, force car and parts manufacturers to move to the States. cbc.ca/news/world/tru… Trump’s narrative, echoed by our low-information media, is that Canada’s auto sector is here because of charity or Canadian government payoffs. The reality: we had a domestic car industry before the Auto Pact. Our government let the Americans buy it out and integrate it.

After reading a thread by smart people, I’m going to do another myth-busting post. This one is about the Charter of Rights, which too many people believe “gave” Canadians our rights. The Charter does not give new rights. It codifies and firms up ancient common law and stature rights. Canadians had political rights entrenched in statute - the Bill of Rights (1689) and Canada’s Bill of Rights as well as human rights legislation, common law, and convention

Ontario's universities need to be smaller, better-funded, more selective, and geared for teaching people how to do research in basic science and arts. They are so bloated and stretched that academic standards have collapsed. Universities have severely curtailed the hiring of professors, turning teaching into gig work by hiring sessional lecturers to teach one course at a time. While universities expand with undergrads, many faculties can't supervise many grad students because real profs to that.

During or soon after a solar eclipse, the original five nations of the Haudenosaunee agreed to be part of a federation. There were total eclipses in the region in 1349 and 1478. The Bear and Cord nations formed the core of the Huron Confederacy in about 1420. So it's hard to say who responded to whom. We may never understand the pre-contact history of the Huron and Iroquois, and important groups like the Neutrals and Petuns. The archaeology that's done these days is mainly rush jobs to salvage information and artifacts from construction sites.

Almost every fact in "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is wrong, yet no one ever did as great a job of capturing the steely cold and the isolation of Lake Superior in a song. I assigned it to my journalism students in 2008 for a fact-checking exercise. None of the students (at Concordia in Montreal) had heard of it. By then, urban pop culture had become uncoupled from the Canadia nationalism and Canadian artists of the 1960s and 1970s.

My take on Chinese interference (from someone who was actually asked to spy for China, blew the whistle and watched the Press Gallery protect the spies to save CBC's Beijing bureau): None of the parties, especially the Libs and Tories, will look good. Fintrac also will come out of this looking terrible. So will every trade organization and many companies who, like me, bought the idea that more engagement = more democracy for China.