Fighting for Lake Ontario? We don't get to choose the battle; we only get to choose our side

So now we're in a fight for the honour of Lake Ontario. 

Really? 

Once again, this proves what I first wrote 20 years ago and have repeated it several times since - we don't get to choose the battle, we only get to choose our side.

Whether its tyranny or fascism or racism or the patriarchy or corporate greed or environmental degradation (or pick your own adventure), we usually don't have the luxury of waiting for exactly the "right" issue to be upset about. The battle lines are usually drawn long before we get there, over some event or situation or outrage or tragedy.
Usually its something pretty serious - like deciding who can be married, or watching a black man crushed by police, or stopping ICE Gestapo rounding up innocents. But other times the event is sorta trivial, really - like Trump trolling Canada by changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America.
Really, Trump? That's all you've got? Its just so silly stupid dumb.
But we can't just turn away, and think its OK to ignore it, to wait until something more important happens.
While Americans have to shame themselves by bending the knee to Trump's stupidity, we don't. Canada can stand up. We can choose our side. And all across the country, we're doing it.

Dear Mr Rapist, Lake Ontario is named as such in the Treaty of Canandaigua, signed by President George Washington and ratified by Congress in 1795. An executive order can’t override it, you stupid, uneducated arsehole.

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— Jeff Rudd 🇮🇪 🇨🇦 🇵🇸 (@jeffrudd.bsky.social) August 31, 2026 at 11:39 PM

Premier Doug Ford unveiled a Lake Ontario sign at a park on the shores of the Great Lake on Saturday, two days after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to change its name to Lake America. 🔗 www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

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— The Globe and Mail (@theglobeandmail.com) August 29, 2026 at 12:57 PM

Sunday Funday: Cartoons, Interesting Posts, Funny Posts, Getting Old(er), Carney Hat Trick, TrumpWatch, Animal Crackers plus the Jays

So much depressing news this week about war and Nepal so I didn't find as much funny stuff. But enough, I think! Enjoy...

About the CAN-US Trade & Tariff War

Closing out the week: "Buy Canadian, Bye USA", plus some updates on wildfires, Nepal and the Jays

Buy Canadian

It's sweeping the country now.

More Canadian small businesses hit by American tariffs that YOU can support! #BuyCanadian

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— Tod Maffin 🇨🇦 (@todmaffin.com) August 28, 2026 at 12:30 PM

Hee are some good websites:
Reddit Buy Canadian page
Canada Shops, by Canada Post
Made in Canada
Globe and Mail The Big Guide to Canadian Shopping
Canoe News The Ultimate Guide to Buying Canadian: Home, Fashion, Beauty and more local brands. Canoe also has a Buy Canadian page on their website.

And I saw this on Facebook:

A Manitoba commenter noticed they had missed Old Dutch potato chips.

National Dog Day post now updated

Hi all
For some reason, my Thursday post about National Dog Day wasn't visible on tablets or phones.
I changed a couple of settings, and it now works on my tablet, so I hope it works on yours too.
Link here:
Mid-Week Break for National Dog Day!

Today in "Christ, what an asshole!"

And everyone in Canada knows exactly who I'm talking about first.

View on Threads

Mid-week Break for National Dog Day!

Time for a mid-week break, to celebrate National Dog Day! 
Some good photos, videos, and posts I found:

First, some good cartoons

Today's News: Canada leaps over the boards

Tonight, I'm seeing Canadians across the country with their elbows up, their gloves off, and leaping over the boards.

In The Globe and Mail, Andrew Coyne writes

...When your back is against the wall, it tends to stiffen the spine. Perhaps Mr. Trump expected Canada to fold like the others, but the extravagance of the U.S. demands made that impossible. It is difficult to see how any government, of whatever party, could have accepted the terms presented to us, not least because there was no guarantee we would receive anything in return: as it has since been reported, the U.S. reserved the right to raise tariffs in future to whatever level they please, notwithstanding anything in the deal. So we are headed for heavy weather. It is highly unlikely that Canada will give in, no matter what punishment is meted out to us. And yet it is hard to see how the Trump administration could yield, either, precisely because of the admiring notice we have been getting elsewhere. It is true what they say: In defying Mr. Trump, we are setting an example for the rest of the world. Therefore it is likely he will try to make an example out of us. This is about much more than trade, in other words, more even than our existence as a sovereign state. Fate has assigned us the role, as it has other nations from time to time, of a kind of Horatius at the Gate, the one who “keeps the bridge” when all the rest have fled. Our fight, it is no exaggeration to say, is the civilized world’s fight. It is a fight for reason and comity in the affairs of nations, against an administration whose worldview, and behaviour, is increasingly that of an aggressive dictatorship, in all its crudeness and its thuggery...

Canada says No to Trump's Naked Man Doctrine

What happened on Friday night demonstrates that Canada is saying "NO!" to Trump's Naked Man Doctrine. 

This doctrine is described by The Grim Historian Carlyn Beccia  - I first talked about it two weeks ago - here's the summary:

...The “Naked Man” was first formally introduced on November 24, 2008, in Season Four, Episode Nine of How I Met Your Mother. But like many important developments in American foreign policy, nobody understood its significance at the time...
...if a date is going badly and [Mitch] suspects there is very little chance of sex, he waits until the woman leaves the room. Then he removes all his clothes.
Naturally, Ted asks the only reasonable question: Does that actually work?
According to Mitch, “two out of three times.”
To be clear, the Naked Man is not a pickup line. There is no seduction involved. Mitch simply eliminates several intermediate stages of human courtship and confronts his date with a radically altered set of facts. And nudity....
Mitch’s war/love strategy depends entirely upon scrambling the normal sequences of human interaction. Five minutes earlier, Robin was trying to decide whether she even liked Mitch. Now Robin must decide what to do about the naked man on her couch. Thus, Mitch’s brazenness collapses the normal sequence of female decision-making. Or so his theory goes.
And, stripped of the testicles, there is an actual theory of power buried in there. Mitch has created a new reality and left everyone else to respond to it...
Political scientists have a more respectable term for this: a fait accompli.
I prefer Naked Man.
Because once you recognize the maneuver, Donald Trump starts looking less like a deal maker and more like a man who has spent eighteen years taking foreign-policy advice from CBS reruns....
Action first.
Authority later.
Never ask permission.
This is an old philosophy wearing a very long red tie.
....But Naked Man Doctrine is not only a joke about impulsivity. It is power exercised through presumption.
The ballroom: I have already demolished it.
Venezuela: We have already bombed them.
Greenland: The equipment is already here.
The boundary has not technically disappeared. It has simply become everyone else’s responsibility to enforce it. And enforcement is tiring. It requires lawsuits, coalitions, votes, sanctions, diplomatic confrontations, and sometimes throwing a drink in a creepy naked man’s face...

Thus, in mid-July Trump suddenly threatens Canada with 50 per cent tariffs, and for the rest of the summer that's the only thing Canada is talking about. Other CUSMA issues fade into the background as Canada sends a team to Washington for negotiations and the media breathlessly report on every scrum.
In addition, I also believe that America's other last minute demands in the trade negotiations were aimed squarely at Carney, personally.
We all know Trump is a petty and vindictive man, and so are the people around him. 

I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out someday soon that Nutlick's last-minute addendums to draft agreement were actually personal attacks on Carney, intended to jeopardize Carney's leadership - shutting down Carney's ability to make worldwide trade deals, undermining Carney's Buy Canadian policies, infuriating Quebec if Carney had bargained away dairy and language protections.
But Carney didn't take the bait. And now that Carney has taken his ball and gone home, the Naked Man isn't going to work for Trump anymore either.

Sunday Funday: Canada Strong, plus some cartoons, some good posts, TrumpWatch, Animal Crackers and Wildfire Update

Canada Strong

Carney's speech and press conference Saturday morning:

I saw no criticism anywhere about what Carney said or how he said it - clear, informative, straightforward, understandable.

View on Threads

For Canada, the best deal is no deal. Because we're not going to be America's Guam North

Canada reached its gag limit with these jerks. 

I know it might be terrible news for our industrial workers and manufacturers, but Canada now understands that Free Trade is dead, at least until Trump is.

Actually, I think what we just turned down wasn't a Free Trade deal at all - what the United States actually wanted is for Canada to turn itself into Guam North. That's where all their last-minute insertions about alliances and alignments and cooperation and partnerships would have pushed us. 

That deal would have crushed us. We might end up crushed anyway, but at least its on our own terms. Maître Chez Nous.

And considering everything happening in the US right now - they seem to be sliding into a pit of despair, chaos, fascism, and bankruptcy - this may actually turn out to be one of the bravest and best decisions Canada ever made.

View on Threads

Today's News: Negotiating Tariff Deal Straight and Tariff Deal Crazy

From what I am reading tonight, I suspect there are actually two Tariff Deals being negotiated now between Canada and the Trump administration.

TDStraight is the straightforward normal Tariff Deal where each side gets something. Tonight the Globe and Mail has an article with some details about the TDStraight deal, with some provisions that Canada won't like and a few it will, and generally, at least, it does reduce Trump's threatened steel and aluminum tariffs. 

TDCrazy is the nutty Tariff Deal that Trump wants. It will be the nonsensical deal that panders to Trump's ignorant prejudices, his mid-1970s world view and his knee-jerk complaints, plus a few goodies for Trump's oligarch friends so they will call him up to praise it as a big "win".

In TDCrazy, I'm thinking we will see things like allowing American booze back on our shelves, or letting American dairy producers sell us a little more cheese, or pandering to Zuckerberg by cancelling the Online News Act. 

Some of this stuff actually doesn't really matter much - who cares whether American bourbon is on our shelves again if nobody is buying it anyway?

But giving up the Online News Act would be a serious loss for Canada. 

Just waiting for the other shoe to drop

While everyone waiting and wondering what kind of deal Canada will be making with Trump, here's some speculation, some cartoons, and some other news.

Waiting for The Deal
Here are some comments about the deal when we don't know what it is yet

Dear PM Carney and M. Leblanc: Make whatever short-term concessions Canada requires to protect our workers and industries while we look to move to non-U.S. markets and solutions. We know any deal Trump makes with Canada this weekend isn’t worth the price of the Sharpie he signs it with. Sincerely, -Maritimer

- A Letter from a Maritimer

Read on Substack

Today in "Christ What an Asshole!"

Trump, of course

Yeah...it was Taco Tuesday

View on Threads

The war with Iran ended six months ago. Iran surrendered like a dog. The victory parade in Washington was the biggest ever, people are saying.

- Dan Gardner

Read on Substack

Sounds like the tariff negotiators will pretend to give Trump a "win" by boasting about how he will revive the Keystone XL Pipeline -a project that Harper and Trudeau both promoted and that many Canadians had supported before anyway.

Catching up with the news: "Maîtres Chez Nous", wildfire update, and some good news stories

I think we have a new slogan to add to "Elbows Up".

And this one comes with a fist - Maîtres Chez Nous.
It happened on Monday, during Prime Minister Carney's press conference at the Churchill Falls announcement

View on Threads

The Churchill Falls project is very very big news for Canada, and it came together at the right time.

Sunday Funday: Cartoon Cavalcade, Interesting posts, Funny posts, Getting Old(er), Carney Hat-Trick, TrumpWatch, Animal Crackers

This week's Cartoon Cavalcade

About the Canada-US tariff negotiations: