The Canadian media is constantly, desperately trying to prop Poilievre up at this serious policy thinker but fortunately he regularly intervenes to make clear that he’ll never surpass his true Facebook comment section self
— Martin Concagh (@mconcagh.bsky.social) July 7, 2026 at 6:40 AM
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Cosplay Cowboy: Pierre Poilievre Gets Roasted Over Satin “Warrior Not Woke” Outfit & Speech Combo youtu.be/RLAZrVsBy7U?...
— David Doel (@daviddoel.bsky.social) July 7, 2026 at 12:11 PM
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The only good thing about Pierre Poilievre is that he will keep the federal government Liberal.
— geezer34.bsky.social (@geezer34.bsky.social) July 8, 2026 at 12:12 AM
Canadian Bluesky remains undefeated in our ability to pan Pierre Poilievre. Good work, everyone. 🇨🇦
— Holly Hoye 🇨🇦 (@hollyhoye.bsky.social) July 7, 2026 at 9:08 AM
And now Poilievre has lost another MP:
I don't know why but I find the appointment of a Conversative MP to the Senate to be a HILARIOUS political move. I can only imagine the conniptions Poilievre is having. "Carney is trying to get a Fake Majority by appointing a Conversative to a lifetime(age 75) Senate position!"
— Devan Marr (@devanmarr.bsky.social) July 7, 2026 at 9:40 AM
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(On a side note, I'm seeing predictable tut-tutting online today about Carney changing Trudeau's non-partisan Senate appointments policy. But whenever Trudeau appointed a Senator, the media combed through every donation or public statement that person ever made to try to "prove" they weren't "really" non-partisan at all, they were secret Liberals. So in the end, nobody believed Trudeau so what was the point.)View on Threads
Anyway, getting back to PP, Linda T writes on her substack
Are the Liberal Lobbyists from Out East in the Room with Us Now?
Pierre Poilievre flew west to denounce eastern insiders - and somehow became the clearest example of one.
NATO is meeting and guess who just got there?
Video you will never see on Fox News:
Carney is there too, making deals for Canada:
... Poilievre is angry. He’s angry at how everything has played out. He’s angry that Mark Carney turned out to be a much more ruthless and effective political operator than many expected. Carney entered an arena that was new to him and then proceeded to compete with a level of strategy and cold discipline that most Canadian political observers have not seen in years.
He’s constantly thinking, moving, and checkmating. That must be torturous for Poilievre.
A mere eighteen months ago, Poilievre looked like he had a thumping majority in his back pocket. The Liberals were exhausted. Trudeau was done. The country was angry. The polls were enormous. The whole thing looked inevitable.
And then it wasn’t.
Carney’s arrival changed the board. From day one, he sent a message about how he intended to play by taking the fight directly to Poilievre’s own seat. Of course, it was Poilievre and Jenni Byrne’s job to protect that seat. But leaders usually hold their own ridings by default, and parties usually don’t go that aggressively after another leader’s home base. But Carney is made of different stuff. He green-lit a political curb-stomping in Poilievre’s own riding.
That should have been the warning.
Since then, it has been one humiliation after another. Slow drips of floor-crossers. Political moves timed to irritate and destabilize. The latest example was the Senate appointment. Poilievre said that if Carney was such a fair guy, he should appoint more Conservative senators. So Carney did it in the most politically painful way possible: by plucking one from Poilievre’s caucus and opening up a by-election opportunity in a riding the Liberals clearly believe they can take.
It’s not accidental. It is chess and Poilievre is losing.
Stating this does not mean I am suddenly a fan of Carney as Prime Minister. I’m not sure what I think of Carney yet, and I’m still not sure what he is getting done beyond beating all of his opponents at political combat. But Conservatives need to be honest with themselves about one thing: Carney is very good at this. He has badly beaten Poilievre at the political chessboard....
NATO is meeting and guess who just got there?
View on Threads
Video you will never see on Fox News:
View on Threads
Carney is there too, making deals for Canada:
Just in time for the NATO meetings, the Wall Street Journal published two major articles:PM Carney to Norwegian PM: "Interoperability also means sharing crews. And in the next World Cup, if you could share Erling Haaland with us, that would be greatly, greatly appreciated."
— Scott Robertson (@sarobertson.bsky.social) July 7, 2026 at 11:38 AM
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The Canadian Who Steered Europe Away From the U.S. [gift links]
An excerpt from the second article:
Here are a couple of good pieces about the US-Canada relationship.
An excerpt from the second article:
Mark Carney swept to power on a backlash to President Trump’s talk of making Canada the 51st state, which many Americans took for mere shtick. But for the new prime minister, reading intelligence reports detailing the gravity of the crisis, it was a breaking point.
In private phone conversations with Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, Trump had threatened to scrap the 1908 agreement delineating their shared border. “I tear that up and your whole country unravels,” Trump told Trudeau in one call, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Trudeau’s envoys tried to dissuade Trump from absorbing their country. When one Trump aide pointed out Canada’s 41 million people would lean Democrat, the president came up with a neat solution: just split the northern neighbor into two states, one red, the other blue.
Now, as Carney took charge in early 2025, he commissioned a sensitive review that he would discuss one-on-one with his closest aides, in his office or aboard the jet officially callsigned CanForce 1: How dependent was Canada on one particular country for its data storage, military hardware, payments processing and even food?
It was Carney’s first crack at a riddle that would come to bedevil governments on both sides of the Atlantic. What to do when your closest ally turns into a threat?
His prescription in large part would lay in Europe, where Carney, a former Bank of England governor, had made his past and now saw Canada’s future. The Canadian banker who never before held elected office would emerge as an unexpected central figure in a high-stakes project to reshape the economic and military community known as the West.
Since World War II the alliance had worked like a wheel: The U.S. as the indispensable hub and the rest as spokes. Carney argued that Canada and Europe would have to build an alternative model, a “dense web of connections” that wouldn’t overly depend on any single country. His approach contrasted to that of another influential leader, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who was encouraging Europe to double down on its relationship with Trump—whatever it took to keep America from abandoning the alliance.
They represented opposing poles of a years-old debate coming to a boil in Europe, with the U.K., like Rutte, betting heavily on its special relationship with Washington. France, conversely, was eager to build up Europe’s own sovereign defense base and technology, from quantum computing to AI systems held outside America. Carney would try to sway the outcome, without provoking the superpower that imports three-quarters of Canada’s goods.
In effect, a push to make Canada America’s 51st state had lighted a fuse of unintended consequences that would play out far beyond North America, as overseas allies asked themselves whether the U.S.-led alliance could truly last....
Here are a couple of good pieces about the US-Canada relationship.
On his substack, Paul Krugman discusses
The End of North America
Neighbors? Who needs them?
On her substack, Elle Campbell writes
In what would be major news except for all the other disasters happening, Donald Trump has declined to renew the USMCA — the successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement — which he himself negotiated. This puts businesses on notice that tariff-free shipments within North America, which NAFTA supposedly made permanent, may go away.At the end off the article, Krugman concludes:
Some commentators have dismissed this as no big deal, because Trump’s successor will probably reverse his decision and make the USMCA permanent after all. However, this misses the point of such agreements. Before NAFTA went into effect, North American tariffs were already low. The average tariff imposed by the US on imports from Mexico was only 2 percent. But NAFTA gave more than tariff relief. It gave, or seemed to give, certainty: businesses could invest in border-spanning supply chains confident that they would be able to use these chains for many years to come.
Or, as it turns out, not, if we have a U.S. president who doesn’t care about breaking promises....
We have a real problem with China. The problem with Mexico and Canada is just a figment of the president’s imagination.
On her substack, Elle Campbell writes
Dispatch 022: You Fucked Up, Bud
America still thinks the right apology, president, signature, or deal can restore the relationship it broke. This is real life, not a rom-com. Canada is done being “nice.”
Finally, on a lighter note, two articles about finding your own best self.
In his Beauty is Truth substack, James Lucas writes
....For a very long time, America got used to being the main character in everyone else’s strategic imagination. Your market. Your military. Your currency. Your culture. Your elections. Your drama. Your instability. Your moods. Your presidents. Your courts. Your cable news.
Your internal arguments that somehow became everyone else’s weather system.
Living next to that meant paying attention.
Canada did.
Far more than Americans could ever understand.
We watched the story America told about itself, and we watched the reality beside it.
We watched the Tea Party. We watched the birther years. We watched the backlash to Obama.
We watched January 6th.
We watched the normalization of threats, cruelty, conspiracy, spectacle, and institutional rot.
We watched your politics become performance, then grievance, then revenge.
So when the swing finally came for us, we were not shocked by the character of it.
We had been waiting for it.
It’s not us…it’s you.
They assumed Canada would experience the tariffs, the insults, the 51st-state routine, the CUSMA threats, and the open contempt as a sudden rupture.
But for many Canadians, it felt more like confirmation.
The first swing did not reveal something new. It removed the last excuse to pretend we had not already seen it.
That is why the pressure strategy has backfired so consistently.
And why Hoekstra keeps having such bad days. (Love to see it.)
The assumption was that Canada would fear losing access more than we would resent being threatened. The assumption was that the pain of transition would frighten us back into the old arrangement.
The assumption was that businesses, consumers, provinces, and political leaders would eventually pressure our own government to take whatever deal was offered and call it stability.
That was the mistake.
Because what America understood as leverage, Canada understood as evidence of who thinks like this.
A deal is not just a signature
A deal is a route, a habit, a planning assumption, a supply chain, a customer relationship, a risk model, and the story businesses tell themselves about what can be counted on.
Once the route becomes unreliable, the question is no longer whether the door technically remains open.
That is where the uncertainty threat falls apart.
The United States seems to think refusing to extend CUSMA creates uncertainty for Canada.
Of course it does. But not the kind they think.
It does not create uncertainty about whether Canada should hesitate before reducing dependence. It creates urgency around doing more of it.
It accelerates diversification, new routes, new partners, infrastructure, industrial capacity, and new habits
It tells every boardroom, producer, exporter, province, port, farmer, manufacturer, investor, and shopper what Canada has been learning all year:
Do not wait for certainty from a partner who uses uncertainty as a weapon.
Build around it....
Finally, on a lighter note, two articles about finding your own best self.
In his Beauty is Truth substack, James Lucas writes
If You Think It's Too Late for You, Read This
8 people who began long after the world had counted them out...
...We tell ourselves that the door has closed, that the best years are spent, that the people ahead of us got there first and there is no point starting now. But the years behind you were never the ones that mattered. The only years you can do anything with are the ones still in front of you, and those are entirely yours.An inspiring piece, well worth reading.
So begin. Write the first page. Sign up for the class. Make the call. Start the business, the painting, the life you have been carrying around inside you for years, half-afraid to say out loud that you still want it. You will not feel ready. No one ever does. The fear you feel standing at the edge of it is not a sign to turn back; it is only the proof that this is something you love, and that your time is finally here.
And here's another worthwhile read:
World Cup Stories
Now that the US team is out, I expect Fox viewership will plummet. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.
I certainly didn't see very many cheerful World Cup stories today - I guess the reality of "knockout" is harshing our mellow.
But this one was funny:
This is the Somalia referee who was inexplicably stopped at the US border.
Terrific article - here's the linki fell down a deep and winding rabbit hole on the General Hospital wiki to bring you this... ... and it was all so, so worth it type-click-type.ghost.io/john-oliver-...
— Brian Grubb (@briancgrubb.bsky.social) July 7, 2026 at 11:14 AM
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World Cup Stories
An updated look at the bracket heading into the #FIFAWorldCup quarterfinals! Any surprises? 🤔⚽
— TSN (@tsnofficial.bsky.social) July 7, 2026 at 4:58 PM
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Now that the US team is out, I expect Fox viewership will plummet. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing.bsky.social) July 7, 2026 at 6:35 PM
I certainly didn't see very many cheerful World Cup stories today - I guess the reality of "knockout" is harshing our mellow.
But this one was funny:
View on Threads
This is the Somalia referee who was inexplicably stopped at the US border.
View on Threads
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