Playbook Canada

The recession debate has taken over Parliament Hill, and Pierre Poilievre wants Mark Carney to wear it. Nick Taylor-Vaisey and Mickey Djuric dissect the fight over the exact meaning of two quarters of negative growth. The Liberals move to reverse a rule forcing US streaming giants to fund Canadian content, one day after Dominic LeBlanc met Trump's trade rep in Washington. Plus a look inside the Senate before a tsunami of June bills rolls in. And a 200-second interview with Liberal operative and legendary Hill tour guide Kevin Bosch.

A special edition of Playbook Canada: Google chief economist Fabien Curto Millet was in Toronto for Tech Week, and he sat down for a conversation that ran well past our usual 200 seconds. He makes the economic case for AI as the one force that could pull Canada out of two decades of sluggish productivity and offset the drag of an aging population. But he warns that Canada and the U.S. sit at the back of the global queue on the ratio of anxiety to enthusiasm. He argues AI is barely a factor in youth unemployment when the real driver is a soft labour market, why encouragement from employers is what moves hesitant workers to start using AI, and reveals that for all the overlap in their training, he has never met fellow economist Mark Carney. And finally, the chess game he wants with Mark Carney.

Steven Guilbeault resigns from the Liberal caucus over the government's diluted climate plans — and he's not alone, with 14 Liberal MPs signing an anonymous letter criticizing the Alberta pipeline deal. Mark Carney lands in New York City to pitch Wall Street investors on Canada, and CANSEC is back in Ottawa, bigger and thirstier than ever, as the defense industry descends on the capital.

Little irritants are piling up ahead of the July 1 USMCA deadline: a suspended defense board, revived potato tensions, mushrooms duties and renewed attacks on the Online Streaming Act. Nick Taylor-Vaisey and Mickey Djuric unpack the friction. POLITICO’s Anne McElvoy joins to discuss her interview with Chrystia Freeland in Europe, including a Mark Carney nickname and a “lubricious” dinner from their Kyiv days. Plus, Steve Outhouse replaces Ian Todd as Pierre Poilievre’s chief of staff, and former Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole sits down for a 200-second interview.

A grand bargain between Ottawa and Edmonton appears to be taking shape, and details leaking out of Alberta connect carbon, pipelines and national unity. As Carney's Cabinet turns one, insiders are whispering about who should go. And finally, the first time Ottawa faced a separatist threat, they wrote it all down. What 50-year-old Cabinet minutes tell us about today's national unity battles.