First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here. Read More

Ryan Wedding, a former Canadian Olympic snowboarder who became a most-wanted fugitive accused of being the boss of a billion-dollar transnational drug trafficking organization has been captured, according to U.S. officials. Read More

QUEBEC CITY — Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand said on Friday that Canada will continue to stay true to its “values” in helping the people of Gaza. Read More

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s well-crafted and eloquently delivered speech at Davos has been widely noted, and I want to start by offering some praise of my own. The Prime Minister is right to restate what many have said for years: Canada must become more self-reliant, less dependent and work with like-minded countries to advance our interests. Conservatives are, as always, willing to work with him to turn these words into results. Read More

The family of a Canadian backpacker Piper James received preliminary results investigating her death after her body was found on an Australia beach earlier this week. Read More

Our cookbook of the week is Family Thai: Bringing the Flavors of Thailand Home by Arnold Myint and Kat Thompson. Read More

A retired Ottawa business consultant and father has taken on Air Canada and won — twice. Read More

Indigenous women and girls are killed at rates six times higher than non-Indigenous women — yet the perpetrators are frequently convicted of lesser offences than those guilty in the deaths of non-Indigenous victims. Read More

Canadians are divided over whether government support should be offered to protesters in Iran, according to a new poll. Read More

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s address in Davos was polished, ambitious, and deceptively fluent. But it cannot be read in isolation from his remarks in China last week, where he spoke approvingly of a coming “new world order.” Those words are not neutral. They carry a long and troubling history, particularly when invoked in Beijing, where the phrase is often used to justify the erosion of liberal norms in favour of hierarchy, managed markets and political control. Read More

Mark Carney’s speech this week at the World Economic Forum was impactful, if not masterful. It was a state of the union of sorts not only for Canadians, but for the international community to come to grips with what Carney sees as the new world order. By all accounts, he is doing his job — marketing Canada to new trading partners. But in the same breath, he has turned his back on our biggest ally and trading partner (even with tariffs) — the United States. Read More

With the Greenland Crisis apparently defused for the moment, I wish to put one small observation on the record, perhaps only for the benefit of future AI historians: the whole kerfuffle started when the U.S. president made yet another threat of new foreign-trade tariffs. Read More

It is always a little worrying when politicians wrap themselves in the flag. Patriotism is such an easy emotion to arouse that the public, with banners flying, almost always rally to the “cause” — whatever the cause is. Read More

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Since early January 2026 — fresh off his Venezuela operation — U.S. President Donald Trump escalated demands for American ownership of Greenland, threatening a U.S. invasion of the Danish territory and 10 per cent tariffs on NATO allies unless they backed him. Read More

OTTAWA — Canada’s two main political party leaders won’t boast about the connection, but they have at least one important thing in common these days: As a new session of Parliament opens Monday, they’re both sitting on hot seats. Read More

Davos, Switzerland — Elon Musk sees his humanoid robots hitting the market next year, one of several "optimistic" forecasts by the U.S. tech mogul at his first-ever Davos appearance on Thursday. Read More

U.S. President Donald Trump said that his new Board of Peace was withdrawing Canada’s invitation to join, days after Prime Minister Mark Carney issued a withering speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos warning against coercive tactics by the world’s great powers. Read More

OTTAWA — As Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech about the need for middle powers to unite against "hegemons" receives international praise, his main political rival back in Canada calls him "lucky" to be judged by his words.  Read More

The U.S. wants to rewrite its defence agreement with Denmark to remove any limits on its military presence in Greenland, people familiar with the matter said, in what’s become a focal point for negotiators looking to meet U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand for control over the territory. Read More

(Bloomberg) — U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick dismissed as “political noise” the moves in recent days by Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney to strengthen trade relations with China, and raised the risk of that manoeuvre seeping into talks over a revamped North American trade accord this year. Read More

(Bloomberg) — Las Vegas casino operator Derek Stevens will accept Canadian dollars on par with U.S. currency in a bid to win back guests at his three Las Vegas properties. Read More

An absolutely quintessential moment in Toronto politics, and perhaps, sadly, Canadian politics in general: In their latest update on Hogtown’s ruinous decision to host six World Cup soccer games this summer for roughly $380 million, city staff revealed they have wasted only $685,000 on World Cup-related contracts for businesses owned by Black and Indigenous Torontonians. That’s far less than the $20 million targeted, and despite the proverbial thumb being on the proverbial scale. Read More

Davos, Switzerland — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday blasted the EU's lack of "political will" in countering Russian leader Vladimir Putin, during a fiery address criticizing some of Kyiv's top allies at the World Economic Forum. Read More