From the Editor / L. Ian MacDonald

Welcome to our issue on Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, as well as Budget 2022 and the Liberal-NDP peace pact assuring a majority on confidence and supply votes for three years until the 2025 election.

From a Canadian perspective, there’s one player who brings these three political events together—Chrystia Freeland, the deputy prime minister and finance minister. Hence, she graces our cover in a remarkable photo by Adam Scotti, who captured her pointing to a yellow button sewn on her blue suit jacket for a Ukrainian solidarity signal as she delivered the budget speech on April 7.

Blue and yellow, the national colours of Ukraine, and she is a daughter of the Ukrainian diaspora of 1.4 million Canadians. And it was very much in her own words that this writer and journalist-turned-politician who had served as Moscow bureau chief of the Financial Times and covered Ukrainians in their own language for years, spoke of the February 24 invasion as “a day of infamy”, echoing the famous words of Franklin Roosevelt after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Freeland declared: “Putin and his henchmen are war criminals. The world’s democracies — including our own — can be safe only when the Russian tyrant and his armies are entirely vanquished.”

You can be sure that wasn’t written by the bean counters at Finance, but in her own hand, the sort of moral authority statement normally made by the prime minister. And in the budget, she delivered on increased defence spending as well as the numbers for the social policy deals negotiated by Justin Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh in the “Lib-Dipper” non-aggression pact. It is the first moment since Freeland left international financial journalism for politics nearly a decade ago in which her grounding in both economics and geopolitics has proven so crucial, and so influential.

From the United Nations, Ambassador Bob Rae pulls no diplomatic punches and writes that “this has all the makings of a turning point, and forces us to assess the full impact of Putin’s war.” 

Jeremy Kinsman, our lead foreign affairs writer, knows Russia from his years serving as our ambassador in the 1990s after the end of the Soviet empire. Of the current situation with Putin, he writes: “Whatever the outcome, we have entered changed times.”

Robin Sears looks at the world of realpolitik, and wonders how NATO, Europe and Russia will reposition in the event of Putin’s defeat and downfall over his misbegotten invasion of Ukraine.

In a searching and searing summary of the Russian invasion and crimes, Yaroslav Baran asks: “Why do the Ukrainian armed forces continue to fight alone against Russian waves of inhuman brutality in a struggle for survival as a people?” And Policy Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen writes of the Putin-Xi alliance of dominance by Russia and China as the “Tag Team of Turmoil”. 

On Budget 2022, Kevin Page notes that “negative supply shocks” such as COVID and the Ukraine crisis are more complicated for policy makers “than shocks to demand” such as the 2008 financial crisis. 

Kevin Lynch and Paul Deegan write that as a trading economy Canada should be concerned about the comparative data such as ranking 14th on the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index. “Ottawa,” they warn, “we have a problem.” 

From the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Perrin Beatty and Mark Agnew conclude that given two years of successive COVID waves, war in eastern Europe, and the resulting supply management crisis, not to mention inflation, “Budget 2022 took crucial steps” to enhancing investment, innovation and job creation.

Green MP Elizabeth May writes that Ottawa is afflicted with “a new form of climate denialism. It presents as climate leadership, but denialism it is” in terms of achieving net zero on climate change by 2050, when the point of no return in reducing emissions is actually 2030. And columnist Don Newman looks at the numbers on defence spending and concludes that Freeland “didn’t put her money where her mouth is.”

As to the Liberal-NDP deal, Tom Axworthy looks at it as the first written peace agreement between a centrist government and a leftist third party in a minority House, and compares it with tacit understandings of earlier eras. 

Lori Turnbull writes that while the Liberals will benefit from the deal for three years, they could end up losing the election, especially if Pierre Poilievre wins the Conservative leadership, and fills halls in a general election as he’s doing on tour this spring. John Delacourt and Daniel Komesch see it as “a compact forged in crisis and uncertainty”. And Brian Topp thinks that most New Dems were pleased that “Singh found a way to achieve more progress.”

Finally, in Book Reviews, Anthony Wilson-Smith highly recommends Thomas Mackay: The Laird of Rideau Hall and the Founding of Ottawa, from writer-historian Alastair Sweeny on the designer and developer who played a seminal role in building many landmarks in the nation’s capital.

And Senator Peter Boehm enjoyed Martin Indyk’s “thoroughly researched” Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy.

Enjoy.