Today's News: Carney's anniversary, Canada Strong Fund, Iran War update, Funny responses to the WHCA dinner, and some Canada Good News. Plus a quip

Carney's anniversary
Its been a year since Carney was elected, so he is doing interviews and here's a good one:


TL,DW (too long, didn't watch): Its a good interview covering a wide range of topics - the Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Iran War, the need to strengthen our military and alliances with other northern countries, and to broaden our relationships with countries around the world. Regarding CUSMA, we need a good deal in the right time, but we don't need to chase a smaller deal that would hamper our larger interests, and remembering that unless the deal is aligned with the interests of the United States, its not clear that they would respect it. Canada needs to be clear about what it stands for, and where there are opportunities; President Trump can see through obsequiousness. A lot of countries rushed into deals and aren't pleased now with their deals.
I thought this was the most interesting part:

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And this was said right at the end:

CARNEY: A lot of countries rushed into deals with the US -- they weren't really worth the paper they were written on ARSENAULT: You don't think there are any [countries pleased with their deal]? CARNEY: Certainly not in private

- Scott Robertson

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In her substack, Caroline Boudakian describes Carney's strategy with Trump, and compares it to what Poilievre is suggesting:

....Mark Carney wasn’t surprised by any of this. He’s been reading Washington like a children’s book for months. While Trump’s people were still figuring out their own strategy, Carney was already on planes. Building relationships. Signing agreements. Diversifying.
He knew Washington was going to pull this shit. So he spent the year quietly building the door that doesn’t require their permission to open.
Meanwhile PP’s big plan? Give Washington preferential access to our critical minerals. Sell them more oil and gas. Hope they like us enough to cut a deal.
That’s not a plan. That’s a yard sale...

Canada Strong Fund
Carney's big announcement today was the new Sovereign Wealth Fund. These two pieces are long, but I thought they were worth repeating because they explain what is being done:

Collective Ownership of Public Assets? That Smells Like Socialism! Or: Why A Canadian Sovereign Wealth Fund is an Intergenerational Wealth Transfer Natural resources and other finite national assets are depleted in one generation but their value belongs to all future generations equally. When you extract oil, cut timber, or mine minerals, you are converting a one-time asset into cash. If you spend that cash on current government services, the generation doing the extracting gets the full benefit and future generations get nothing, even though the resource belonged to them too. A sovereign wealth fund interrupts that pattern by converting the depleted asset into a financial asset that persists and compounds over time. The mechanism is compounding returns. When you invest money and reinvest the earnings rather than spending them, the fund grows exponentially over decades. Norway deposited oil revenues starting in 1990 and now has a fund worth over a trillion dollars generating tens of billions in annual returns. Those returns will still be flowing to Norwegian citizens long after the last barrel of North Sea oil is gone. The oil was finite. The financial asset it created is not. Each generation in Canada inherits infrastructure, institutions, and public assets built by previous generations. A sovereign wealth fund formalizes the obligation to pass something of equivalent value forward. You received something from the people who came before you. You owe something to the people who come after. The political challenge is that compounding only works if you leave the money alone. The temptation for any government facing a budget shortfall is to treat the fund as a piggy bank. Alberta demonstrated exactly how that kills the intergenerational benefit. The generation that raids the fund gets a short-term benefit. Every generation after loses. Norway succeeded because it built legal and institutional barriers around the fund that made political interference difficult. The returns flow to the government budget but within strict limits, and the principal is protected. That discipline, sustained across multiple governments of different political orientations, is what turned oil into a trillion-dollar inheritance. That is the promise of the Canada Strong Fund if it is designed and protected well. The projects being built today could generate returns that fund public priorities fifty years from now, long after the people making the decisions today are gone. That is what intergenerational wealth transfer actually means in practice.

- A Letter from a Maritimer

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🟢Canada Launches Its First Sovereign Wealth Fund: The Canada Strong Fund🟢 By Annie Koshy Prime Minister Mark Carney announced today the creation of the Canada Strong Fund, Canada’s first national sovereign wealth fund, backed by an initial federal contribution of $25 billion. The Fund will invest alongside the private sector in Canadian projects and companies driving the country’s economic transformation, with a focus on clean and conventional energy, critical minerals, agriculture, and infrastructure. The announcement arrives one day before the government’s Spring Economic Update, which will be tabled in the House of Commons by Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne on April 28 and will provide additional details on the Fund’s mandate, structure, and implementation plan. The logic behind the Fund is straightforward. Canada is in the midst of a wave of nation-building investment across energy corridors, critical minerals, ports, and trade infrastructure. As private sector and international capital flows into those projects, the government has concluded that Canadians themselves should hold a direct stake in the returns those projects generate. The Canada Strong Fund is the mechanism through which that stake will be structured and managed. Returns generated by the Fund will be reinvested to grow its capital base over time, with the objective of directing an increasing pool of capital toward investments with the highest potential return for Canada and Canadians. The Fund will operate as an arm’s length entity reporting through the Minister of Finance and National Revenue, insulating its investment decisions from direct political interference while maintaining government accountability for its overall mandate. The most distinctive element of the announcement is the commitment to launch a retail investment product that will allow individual Canadians to participate directly in the Fund and share in its financial returns. The specific design of that instrument will be determined through public consultation over the coming months. The concept draws on models used in other resource-rich economies where sovereign wealth vehicles have been structured to distribute returns broadly across the population rather than concentrating them in government revenue alone. The Fund does not operate in isolation. It sits alongside an existing suite of federal financing institutions including the Canada Infrastructure Bank, Export Development Canada, the Canada Growth Fund, the Business Development Bank of Canada, the Canada Indigenous Loan Guarantee Corporation, and Farm Credit Canada. What distinguishes the Canada Strong Fund from those existing entities is its sovereign wealth mandate, its retail investment dimension, and its explicit orientation toward the nation-building project pipeline that the Major Projects Office is currently managing. That pipeline already represents more than $126 billion in projected economic investment across nuclear, LNG, critical minerals, and transportation infrastructure. The announcement today is a statement of intent backed by a specific capital commitment. The details that will determine its ultimate impact, governance structure, investment criteria, the design of the retail product, and the pace at which the Fund scales, will emerge over the coming months. What is clear from today’s announcement is that the Carney government is moving to ensure that the returns from Canada’s economic transformation flow back to Canadians rather than exclusively to the institutional and international investors who are being invited to help build it. https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/04/27/prime-minister-carney-announces-canada-strong-fund-canadas-first

- Annie Koshy

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At the Globe and Mail, Cambell Clark writes:

[gift link]....It’s certainly no coincidence that Mr. Carney’s new fund is named for his Liberal political slogan, Canada Strong. It’s probably also no coincidence that this vehicle was embraced by a Prime Minister with experience setting up investment funds, as he did in his last private-sector job at Brookfield Asset Management.
Its creation also highlights the gulf in fiscal philosophy between his Liberals and Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, at least when it comes to coping with the economic threats of a trade war.
Mr. Carney is deploying public money to replace and hopefully leverage private investment. Mr. Poilievre’s prescription to spur investment is to cut taxes and loosen regulation, especially environmental regulation.
On Monday, speaking to reporters, Mr. Poilievre argued there is no reason to deploy public funds to invest in business projects.
“If a project has a business case, why would the government need to fund it?” Mr. Poilievre said. “If it doesn’t have a business case, why would the government want to fund it?”
Those are both reasonable questions for such actions, in normal times. But Mr. Poilievre found in last year’s election campaign that many Canadians think these aren’t normal times. In a trade war, his free-markets-only ideas lost out to Mr. Carney’s call for national economic strategy...
For now, however, it is a vehicle to push money into Canadian projects at a time when investors might be scared off by trade-war uncertainty. Mr. Carney approached it with a former investment banker’s confidence in results. It’s his kind of Liberal interventionism.

And Brittlestar checks in too:

Iran War update 

I guess this would be OK....

“Trump and his national security team are skeptical of Iran’s latest proposal, which would reopen the Strait while delaying nuclear negotiations.” Translation: Trump lost, Iran won. Iran will open the Strait but not meet any other US conditions. Pressure from the ROTW should see Trump capitulate.

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— Heath Ryan (@heathryan16.bsky.social) April 27, 2026 at 8:07 PM

[by the way, ROTW is "Rest Of The World"]

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In Monday night's Rest of the World Report, Rudy Martinez provides much more detail about what has been proposed by Iran, and who they are discussing it with:

Iran's foreign minister spent 72 hours crossing the Middle East and Eastern Europe this weekend — Islamabad twice, Muscat, then St. Petersburg — and by Monday morning had assembled the most coherent diplomatic architecture Tehran has produced since the war began. The question is whether Washington is positioned to read it that way.
The centerpiece is a formal three-phase written proposal transmitted to the United States via Pakistani mediators over April 25-27. As reported first by Axios and confirmed by AP, Bloomberg, and the Washington Post, the structure is sequential and deliberately so: Phase 1 — a full ceasefire plus binding guarantees against renewed US and Israeli attacks on Iran and Lebanon. Phase 2 — the Strait of Hormuz reopens, its “management and security” resolved between Iran and Oman, the strait’s two coastal states. Phase 3 — the nuclear file, addressed at a later stage. Tehran’s position is explicit: it will not engage nuclear negotiations until progress is made in the earlier phases. The nuclear program — which the administration, after weeks of shifting justifications, has placed at the center of any deal — is moved to the back of a queue Iran controls.
...American coverage of the proposal has largely framed it as Iran’s attempt to escape accountability on the nuclear question. The international press — and the regional analysts who spoke to it — read the same document and arrived at a more complex picture.
Al Jazeera, reporting from Islamabad with Iranian and Gulf analysts, published a detailed account of what the proposal reflects internally as much as strategically. One of the most significant details in its reporting: the Iranian leadership is genuinely divided on nuclear concessions. Araghchi made clear to Pakistani, Egyptian, Turkish, and Qatari mediators over the weekend that there is no internal consensus in Tehran on how to address US nuclear demands. The phased structure is not only a negotiating tactic — it is a mechanism for buying time while that internal division is resolved. ...

Martinez goes on to describe Iran consultations with Putin as well as other Middle East states. He concludes:

The proposal on the table does not give the US what it went to war for — permanent nuclear renunciation. Iran knows that. What it offers is an end to $108 oil, a reopening of the world’s most critical shipping lane, and a ceasefire that stops American service members from dying in a war Congress never authorized. The nuclear question is deferred, not resolved. Whether that is an unacceptable outcome or the only realistic one available is the central argument in Washington right now. The Situation Room met today. No decision has been announced. The May 1 War Powers deadline is Thursday....
[Regarding Lebanon] Iran has said it will not negotiate on nuclear terms while Lebanon burns. The connection between what is happening in the Bekaa Valley and whether this war ends is direct, and it runs in one direction: every Israeli strike that expands the operational footprint in Lebanon makes the diplomatic process in Islamabad and Muscat harder to advance...

Some funny responses to the WHCA dinner debacle

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Never mind! an excellent Emily Litella parody!

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Canada Good News
A roundup of good Canadian news stories

Good news! A tangible shift in approach from selling raw materials to building value chains in Canada. From the post … “Mangrove Lithium is an example of Canada’s industrial policy in action, with Ottawa anchoring the project through a Canada Growth Fund–led US$85 million financing round and a $21.88 million non-repayable contribution from Natural Resources Canada. The structure matters: public capital is not replacing private investment, but de-risking a technology and business model that would otherwise struggle to attract financing at this stage. That approach reflects a broader shift in Canadian policy. For decades, governments focused on enabling extraction while leaving processing and manufacturing to global markets; now the emphasis is on building complete value chains at home, particularly in sectors tied to energy transition and economic security. Projects like Mangrove’s sit squarely in that shift, where the goal is not just production of the commodity, but value-added capacity downstream of extraction. The timing is not accidental. The launch Monday morning of the Canada Strong Fund—Canada’s first sovereign wealth fund—signals a deeper institutional commitment to deploying public capital strategically, not just to support individual projects, but to shape entire industries.”

- Anne Ward

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I love Wab Kinew

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I thought this was  funny too -

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Here's the quip

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