For 2025, I got some things right: Justin Trudeau would leave (Adrienne Batra and Brian Lilley still owe me lunch for that bet). The Liberals would have a leadership race and their numbers would improve (dramatically, as it turned out). The new Liberal leader would be an outsider (Mark Carney, take a bow). Doug Ford would win, big (and he remains a formidable political force).

But I got one thing very wrong: notwithstanding all the above, I thought Pierre Poilievre could still win. His polling lead was too big, I said.

Well, so much for that prediction.

My fallibility thus established, I herewith offer my predictions for 2026. I’ll try to do better this time.

1. Donald Trump will have a major health crisis. This one isn’t hard: the U.S. president is already clearly unwell. He can’t stand for extended periods, he has mysterious bruising and swelling in his extremities, he’s getting more MRIs than you get hot meals, and – whenever he opens his mouth – Trump genuinely sounds like he is experiencing actual dementia. There’s lots of Kremlinology going on, so no one knows for sure. But something’s up.

The consequence of it could be a silent palace coup, and there already signs that is happening. Or, there could be serious moves made on the 25th Amendment, to formally remove him. Either way, it isn’t just MAGA that is looking sickly. Trump is, too.

2. The Democrats will win. Full disclosure: I’ve actively campaigned for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. So, you know I’m being truthful when I say I’ve been completely disgusted by how cowardly the Democrats have been since Trump’s return. With the exception of my preferred presidential contender Gavin Newsom, the Dems have been directionless, clueless and gutless.

Despite all that, and despite themselves, the Dems have been winning. In November’s races and in special elections, the Democrats have been crushing their Republican MAGA opponents in places where they haven’t been competitive in decades. Trump has become a major liability to his party, and he is going to get beaten like a human piñata in November’s midterms.

3. Carney isn’t going to get a trade deal. Not one worthy of the name, that is.

The issue isn’t the Prime Minister or any of the rotating cast of characters he picks to lead talks in Washington. The issue is Trump himself, for the reasons outlined above: the president seems to be losing his marbles. He’s not compos mentos, as lawyers like to say.

Carney and Trump could sign a deal on a Tuesday and – after, say, Trump sees a completely-factual commercial about tariffs on Wednesday – lose his mind and tear up the deal. He’s invoked bogus “national emergencies” against us before, and he will do so again.

My advice to Carney: keep doing trade deals with the rest of the world. Stay calm. And wait until Trump loses power, or is a resident of the funny farm, whichever comes first.

4. The AI bubble will burst. And, possibly, take us with it.

Ominously, artificial intelligence is already showing signs of self-preservation. As Canadian tech genius Yoshua Bengio has noted, chatbots are becoming independent and starting to “drive bad decisions.” Stories litter the Internet (for now!) of people being nudged toward violence by AI-generated “companions.”

But for most of us – writers, musicians and artists in particular – AI remains an elaborate plagiarism platform, one that doesn’t generate intelligence so much as steal intelligence and offer it up as its own. And, with so much capital invested in a concept that has so far been all lunchbag-letdown, a burst bubble seems highly likely. It’s happened before.

5. Things will get worse. Sorry, but they will.

And not just the weather or the cost of beef, either. Us. The enemy is us, as comic strip Pogo once memorably said. We are becoming less intelligent. We are becoming more violent. We are becoming less and less preoccupied with the common good.

The cause is what you almost certainly are using to read my prognostications: the Internet. The device you hold in your hands has been the biggest political, cultural, personal and economic revolution in our lifetimes. Since it became ubiquitous in the Nineties, the Internet has made all of human knowledge available to us, for free.

Instead of embracing that, humans have moved in the opposite direction, and become suckers for misinformation, disinformation, hate and conspiracy theories. We read less, and we yell more. It’s not good. Way to go, Al Gore.

Final prediction, then, gratis: I’ve now depressed you enough to drive you to an early drink.

Save one for me. I’m depressed, too, and I’m coming over.

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In Canadian politics, Pierre Poilievre should be – but actually isn’t – the biggest loser of the year.

And, yes, 2025 saw the Conservative leader blow a massive lead in the polls, lose an election that had been in the bag, and fritter away his own Ottawa-area seat. By any objective standard, that should qualify Poilievre as the political loser of the year.

But the biggest losers – the ones who will continue to be losers after Poilievre is gone, which is a foregone conclusion – are those who make up the Conservative Party of Canada. They are the real losers.

The Conservatives’ 2025 election loss – to a man who had never held elected office before, to a party that had been mired in misconduct and misfires – was not entirely Pierre Poilievre’s fault. Because Poilievre is the current Conservative Party of Canada in human form: too angry, a bit paranoid, often Trumpian. They are him, and he is them.

Consider the available evidence. For months – and long before Justin Trudeau’s departure, and Mark Carney’s debut – polls had been consistently showing that voters were decidedly unenthusiastic about Poilievre. His petulance, his arrogance, his bumper-sticker policy-making was hurting him with key constituencies – women, seniors, Quebeckers.

A year ago, as 2024 was coming to a close, multiple polls showed the Conservative Party had a huge lead over Trudeau’s Liberals. But, in every one of those polls, Poilievre was lagging behind his party. In December 2024, the Reid Institute found that every party leader was more unpopular than popular – with Poilievre being seen favourably by 37 per cent of respondents, and unfavourably by 55 per cent. That is a huge gap in an era where people vote for leaders as much as parties.

Leger, one of the most reliable federal pollsters, found the same sort of trend. In December 2024, only 22 per cent of Québec respondents thought Poilievre would make the best Prime Minister. Likewise for women and urban voters – only 24 and 27 per cent, respectively, saw the Tory leader as the best choice. Those are constituencies, as everyone knows, make up the vast majority of voters. Ignore them at your peril.

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Figuring out the Canadian political winners of 2025 is pretty easy.

Mark Carney, Ontario’s Doug Ford, Newfoundland and Labrador’s Tony Wakeham: they all won elections in 2025.

But Carney, Ford and Wakeham aren’t winners simply because of that. They’re winners because they all made a little history, as Nick Cave sang.

For his part, Ford increased his share of the popular vote with a third majority win, and he kept his political opponents marginalized. Wakeham’s achievement was also winning a majority government, and ending a decade of Liberal rule – stunning many in the province.

And Mark Carney? In 2025, Carney is the biggest winner of all. Because his Liberal Party wasn’t supposed to win anything.

Just one year ago this week, Ipsos was reporting that Pierre Poilievre’s Tories had a 25-point lead over Trudeau’s beleaguered Grits. The CBC poll tracker, an aggregator of all polls, showed the same thing. Other polls actually showed the Conservative lead to be closer to 30 percentage points – a massive Parliamentary majority.

Then came January, and seismic political shifts. Justin Trudeau left, Donald Trump returned, tariffs hit, and Mark Carney made his debut.

2025 has been a political roller coaster, with plenty of twists and turns. But Carney’s April victory was truly extraordinary. Never in recent Canadian political history had a party overcome a nearly-30-point-deficit to win a near-majority – within just a matter of weeks.

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Aziza Mohammed, who stole documents from Daisy Group and was let go for antisemitism – and was treated as a credible “source” by CBC News, CANADALAND and the Globe – has had another court date for criminal harassment charges. She’s back in court in January.

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The sticker affixed to the London Calling album shrink-wrap, so many years ago, boldly declared that the Clash were “the only band that matters.” If that is true – if it was more than record company hyperbole – then Joe Strummer’s death on today’s date in 2002, of a heart attack at age 50, was a very big deal indeed.

It wasn’t as big as John Lennon’s murder, of course, which came one year after London Calling was released, and shook an entire generation. Nor as newsworthy, likely, as the suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in 1994. No, the impact of the sudden death of Joe Strummer – the front man for the Clash, the spokesman for what the Voidoid’s Richard Hell called, at the time, “the blank generation” – will be seen in more subtle ways.

For starters, you weren’t going to see any maudlin Joe Strummer retrospectives on CNN, or hordes of hysterical fans wailing in a park somewhere, clutching candles whilst someone plays ‘White Riot’ on acoustic guitar. Nor would there be a rush by his estate to cash in with grubby compilation and tribute discs. Punk rock, you see, wasn’t merely apart from all that – it was against of all that.

Punk rock was a specific rejection of everything rock’n’roll had become in the 1970s – namely, a business: an arena-sized, coke-addicted, utterly-disconnected-from-reality corporate game played by millionaires at Studio 54. Punk rock, and Joe Strummer, changed all of that. They were loud, loutish, pissed off. They were of the streets, and for the streets. They wanted rock’n’roll to matter again.

I met Joe Strummer for the first time on the night of October 16, 1979, in East Vancouver. Two of my Calgary punk rock buddies, plus my girlfriend and I, were loitering on the main floor at the Pacific National Exhibition (PNE). We were exhilarated and exhausted. We had pooled our meager resources to buy four train tickets to Vancouver, to see Joe Strummer and the Clash in concert. Their performance had been extraordinary (and even featured a mini-riot, midway through). But after the show, we had no money left, and nowhere to stay.

The four of us were discussing this state of affairs when a little boy appeared out of nowhere. It was near midnight, and the Clash, DOA and Ray Campi’s Rockabilly Rebels had long since finished their respective performances. Roadies were up on stage, packing up the Clash’s gear. The little boy looked to be about seven or eight. He was picking up flashcubes left behind by the departed fans.

We started talking to the boy. It turned out he was the son of Mickey Gallagher, the keyboardist the Clash had signed on for the band’s London Calling tour of North America. His father appeared, looking for him. And then, within a matter of minutes, Topper Headon appeared, looking for the Gallaghers.

Topper Headon was admittedly not much to look at: he was stooped, slight and pale, with spiky hair and a quiet manner. But he was The Drummer For The Clash, and had supplied beats for them going back almost to their raw eponymous first album, the one that had changed our lives forever. We were in awe.

Topper asked us where we were from and what we thought of the show. When he heard that we had no place to stay, he said: “Well, you’d better come backstage with me, then.”

Sprawled out in a spartan PNE locker room, Strummer was chatting with lead guitarist Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon, along with some Rastafarians and a few of the Rockabilly Rebels. They were all stoned, and grousing about an unnamed promoter of the Vancouver show, who had refused to let them play until he was paid his costs. The Clash, like us, had no money. That made us love them even more.

Joe Strummer, with his squared jaw and Elvis-style hairdo, didn’t seem to care about the band’s money woes. While Mick Jones flirted with my girlfriend, Strummer started questioning me about my Clash T-shirt. It was homemade, and Strummer was seemingly impressed by it. I could barely speak. There I was, speaking with one of the most important rock’n’rollers ever to walk the Earth – and he was acting just like a regular guy. Like he wasn’t anything special.

But he was, he was. From their first incendiary album in 1977 (wherein they raged against racism, and youth unemployment, and hippies), to their final waxing as the real Clash in 1982 (the cartoonish Combat Rock, which signaled the end was near, and appropriately so), Strummer was the actual personification of everything that was the Clash. They were avowedly political and idealistic; they were unrelentingly angry and loud; most of all, they were smarter and more hopeful than the other punk groups, the cynical, nihilistic ones like the Sex Pistols. They believed that the future was worth fighting for.

The Clash were the ones who actually read books – and encouraged their fans to read them, too. They wrote songs that emphasized that politics were important (and, in my own case, taught me that fighting intolerance, and maintaining a capacity for outrage, was always worthwhile). They were the first punk band to attempt to unify disparate cultures – for example, introducing choppy reggae and Blue Beat rhythms to their music.

They weren’t perfect, naturally. Their dalliances with rebel movements like the Sandinistas, circa 1980, smacked of showy dilettante politics. But they weren’t afraid to take risks, and make mistakes.

Born John Graham Mellor in 1952 in Turkey to the son of a diplomat, Strummer started off as a busker in London, and then formed the 101ers, a pub rock outfit, in 1974. Two years later, he saw the Pistols play one of their first gigs. Strummer, Jones and Simonon immediately formed the Clash, and set about rewriting the rules.

While political, they also knew how to put together good old rock’n’roll. Strummer and Jones effectively became the punk world’s Lennon and McCartney, churning out big hits in Britain, and attracting a lot of favourable critical acclaim in North America. Some of their singles, ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’ and ‘Complete Control,’ are among the best rock’n’roll 45s – ever. Their double London Calling LP is regularly cited as one of history’s best rock albums.

After the Clash broke up, Strummer played with the Pogues, wrote soundtrack music and formed a new group, the world beat-sounding Mescaleros. He married, and became a father. But he never again achieved the adulation that greeted the Clash wherever they went.

Strummer didn’t seem to care. When I saw him for the last time – at a show in one of HMV’s stores on Yonge Street in July 2001, which (typically) he agreed to give at no cost – Strummer and his Mescaleros stomped around on the tiny stage, having the time of their lives. They didn’t play any Clash songs, but that was okay by us. Joe Strummer’s joy was infectious, that night.

As the gig ended, Strummer squatted at the edge of the stage – sweaty, resplendent, grinning – to speak with the fans gathered there. They looked about as old as I was, when I first met him back in October 1979. As corny as it sounds, it was a magical moment, for me: I just watched him for a while, the voice of my generation, speaking to the next one.

I hope they heard what he had to say.

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