This actually is true:Carney eyes Bloc MP to complete his collection
— The Beaverton (@thebeaverton.com) March 12, 2026 at 3:56 PM
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What a paragraph. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
— Duncan Weldon (@duncanweldon.bsky.social) March 16, 2026 at 4:11 AM
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Europeans when being asked to unblock the Strait of Hormuz
— Witty Librarian Resistance (@paulwartenberg.bsky.social) March 16, 2026 at 1:38 PM
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...I dream of the cabinet meeting when Trump is finally pelted with Florsheims, like that glorious moment in 2008 when the Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi hurled his shoes at President Bush during a joint press conference with Iraqi puppet PM al-Maliki in Baghdad. “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, dog!” shouted Muntadhar, before he was wrestled to the ground and thrown into jail. (“I don’t know what his beef is,” commented Bush, who lacked imagination at the best of times.)
The unsettling thing is, we are all wearing Florsheims now. Not because we lack raucous expressions of dissent at the manner in which America lurched into a war of choice with Iran, but because we all keep pretending there is a functioning alternative reality in which norms, policy, think tanks, and geopolitical game plans still play their traditional roles. Pundits speak sonorously about “regime modification” (shorthand for a next-gen, turban-charged Islamic republic) and the “extension of presidential power,” as if this were the long-ago world of institutional gravitas and coequal branches of government, instead of an inescapable escape room, in which we are trapped with a berserk brontosaurus peddling vehement ignorance.
We nod away as former military brass with their flat procedural voices outline the latest wheeze from the White House about special ops forces extracting canisters of enriched uranium from the rubble of Iran’s nuclear facilities without getting blown up. The sudden notion of resurgent Kurds has already come and gone from the news cycle. Trump, who hasn’t even flown commercial since circa 1988, is contemptuous of mariners and shipping companies who are hesitant to set sail on the perilous Strait of Hormuz, now seething with mines and drones. “These ships should go through…and show some guts. There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Trump bloviated to Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade on the phone, not long before three international cargo ships were hit by fiery Iranian projectiles. The truth is Trump’s Iran high is already wearing off. He all but yawned to reporters on Monday, “We want a system that can lead to many years of peace, and if we can’t have that, we might as well get it over with right now.” On to Cuba...
This post reminded me of my favorite Threads post of all time:The only solace I take some days is that he's as miserable about how this presidency is going as the rest of us are 🇺🇸
— Paul Meek (@paulmeekperth.bsky.social) March 14, 2026 at 6:56 AM
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...the truth that is self-evident to me watching Carney - even at his most angering - is that it is so much better having an imperfect Liberal government than any flavour of a Conservative one. We want a perfect government, and we want to defend the one we support to make it seem like it’s perfect, but it’s not. But at the end of the day this government is far far better than the alternatives, because it is a government that will at least listen to the left and respond to criticism. And that, even more than a government that is closer to my ideological project, is what we need to be grateful for.
Carney’s government has fixed a lot of Canada’s problems - we’re moving away from a bail system that’s not working, we’ve stabilized an economy that was expected to be in recession, we’ve achieved real progress in expanding our export markets, and we’re doing it all in a set of circumstances that are far harder than anything Trudeau dealt with outside of COVID. It’s also happened while making the Liberals the strongest they’ve been in any of our lives in the trio of Prairie provinces and defusing the looming national unity crisis of a recalcitrant Alberta with another Liberal PM.
Carney’s done all of this without a Parliamentary majority and a crazy person leading the US, two facts that need to be understood as constraints on his position. And despite those constraints, he’s been remarkably effective. Carney has to be judged through the strain that he was and is under, and by that test he’s been about as good a PM as he could have been....
Carney is expected to forward four projects — Mackenzie Valley Highway, which will connect Yellowknife and Inuvik, the Grays Bay Road, the Arctic Economic and Security Corridor and the Taltson Hydro Expansion Project — to the major projects office.
— Canada's National Observer (@nationalobserver.com) March 12, 2026 at 4:37 PM
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I love that Trump's toadies are wearing comically large shoes because the boss bought them and they're too chickenshit to mention that he guessed the wrong size.
— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) March 11, 2026 at 6:43 AM
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Lori Idlout will cross the floor from the New Democratic Party to the Liberal Party of Canada, according to confirmation from the Liberal Party.Idlout's statement is focused on Canadian political involvement and respect in the North:
Idlout has represented Nunavut since being elected in 2021.
Her move adds to a growing list of MPs who have recently left their parties to join the Liberals. In total, three Conservative MPs and one NDP MP have now crossed the floor to the Liberals.
With three upcoming byelections scheduled for April, the floor crossing makes it increasingly likely that Mark Carney and the Liberals will secure a majority government in the House of Commons.
Statement from new Liberal MP Lori Idlout, which was just released moments ago:
— Luke LeBrun (@lukelebrun.ca) March 10, 2026 at 11:16 PM
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Speaking in Australia, Carney said he would “never categorically rule out” Canadian military involvement in defending allies from Iran, but added it’s distinct from offensive actions being taken by the US/Israel. “We will always stand by and defend our allies when called upon”
— Brian Platt (@brianplatt.bsky.social) March 4, 2026 at 7:35 PM
“There’s a distinction between the offensive actions that were taken, and are being taken, by the United States and Israel…We’re not party to those actions. But we will always defend Canadians. We will always stand by and defend our allies when called upon.” www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
— Brian Platt (@brianplatt.bsky.social) March 4, 2026 at 9:28 PM
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...Prime Minister Mark Carney, very quickly out of the gate, endorsed this military action. Should he have?Now Carney is in Australia - here are some of the best interviews and speeches.
This is a complicated question. I don’t say this as a value judgment, just as an empirical matter, but with the radicalism of the change in foreign policy that Carney has brought, Carney is the least Pearsonian prime minister in Canadian history.
The Carney view is, while Canada spent much of its existence as a nation under the protection of the superpower of the day — first Great Britain, then the United States — under that protection, Canadians never had to worry much about their own security. That was somebody else’s job. So Canadian foreign policy could focus on values.
Carney is now saying, Canada has lost its superpower protector, for the first time since 1867. And in that world, Canada must act in a much more cold-blooded and amoral way. And that’s why it must forgive India for committing assassinations on Canadian soil. It must forgive China for interfering in Canadian elections and brutalizing Chinese Canadians on Canadian soil. And it must accept the American intervention in Iran, because those are all things that are important to those much greater powers, and Canada needs to navigate between India, China, and the United States in a world in which Canadian security is much less secure than it ever has been before, and there’s no room in this complicated equation for Pearsonian talk. Canada is out of that business forever.
That seems to be what he’s saying, and it’s very radical.
Let’s pivot to what you see happening on Canadian-American relations. A lot of our politicians are trying very hard to influence this administration, everything from Premier Doug Ford’s commercials featuring former president Ronald Reagan, to Conservative MP Jamil Jivani visiting his old friend the vice-president JD Vance. Is there any evidence that any of that is working?
Well, the fact that it doesn’t work doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.
Canadians are not wrong to use the tried-and-true methods first. Politics is extremely hard, and the fact that things don’t work doesn’t mean you are foolish to try them. It’s worth the effort.
And it was also worth taking the measure of how much of Trump’s hostility to Canada was just bluster, and how much of it was settled implacable malice. I think it’s the latter.
And it has taken time for Canadians to accept that that could be true, because it’s so different. It’s so shocking. Canada has a whole history that goes back to the meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and Mackenzie King at Ogdensburg (New York) in the ‘30s, where Roosevelt said an attack on Canadian territory will be (considered) an attack on the United States. It’s America’s first permanent security guarantee to any country. And now that logic has changed, and it’s hard to adjust.
Many people up here wonder whether we should be expending so much effort on a renewed trade agreement with the U.S., because they fear even if he signs it, Trump won’t adhere to it anyway. What’s your view?
As scary and threatening as Trump is, he has one thing in common with every other previous president, which is, he starts with a bucket of minutes, and every day he spends the minutes, and they never return. And as you spend the minutes, the president almost always gets weaker.
So, the longer Canada postpones agreements with Trump, the better Canada will do.
In which Mark Carney drops the F bomb while talking about having drank too much wine 😅 (they muted it out for youtube of course *eye roll* it was more of that whispered fuck as opposed to loud dropping it) www.youtube.com/shorts/Z6vWP...
— Krista D. Ball: Canada's Mean Potato (@kristadb1.bsky.social) March 4, 2026 at 2:07 PM
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So far we’ve heard 12 different primary reasons for the war, 7 different main objectives, and 5 different exit strategies.
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) March 2, 2026 at 3:12 PM
— George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 (@gtconway.bsky.social) March 2, 2026 at 7:37 AM
The glibness. The indifference. The carelessness. The utter lack of planning for a war against a country of 90M. The sickness of a man who acts on whim that will kill thousands not hundreds. The horror of a regime that enables this sickness. The broken body politic that votes in such malignancy.
— Steven Beschloss (@stevenbeschloss.bsky.social) March 2, 2026 at 7:39 PM
