Mid-Week Break: Good cartoons, good videos, good news

And Star cartoonist Theo Moudakis predicted Lake America a year ago 

Next, a few good videos to enjoy:

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A new "Elbows Up" video from Iran Lego 

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A new Heritage Minute

Some Canada good news

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Carney's Canada Investment Summit is coming up in two weeks. Today The Globe and Mail reports:

Prime Minister Mark Carney and top Canadian CEOs plan to showcase energy, critical minerals, defence and advanced technologies as sectors where Canada has untapped potential at a global investment summit in Toronto later this month.
The Canada Investment Summit, on Sept. 14 and 15, is drawing a group of about 250 heavyweight financial-sector executives who lead global companies that collectively oversee nearly $120-trillion in assets.
Mr. Carney will open the summit’s main program on Sept. 15 with a keynote speech and a fireside chat with Deborah Orida, chief executive officer of the $321-billion Public Sector Pension Investment Board, according to an agenda circulated to attendees and reviewed by The Globe and Mail.
...The event gives Ottawa and Canada’s companies a brief, high-stakes chance to pitch the country as an increasingly attractive destination for investment capital. They plan to emphasize the country’s stability – even in the midst of a trade war – and frame it as an option to reduce risk in portfolios that are heavily tilted toward the U.S., Europe and Asia...

And I hope Canada grasps the magnitude of the risk Carney is taking in holding this summit at all -- I suspect Bessent and Nutlick and Greer and Navarro, even Trump himself, will be moving heaven and earth to dissuade business leaders and big investors from attending. 

But I don't think they will be able to stop it, no matter how hard they try.

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In other good news, Canada’s economy is showing to have the fastest growth in the G7, more than doubling the pace of the United States under the current fascist MAGA regime. I absolutely love that. 💙👊🇨🇦

— Ricky Davila (@therickydavila.bsky.social) August 29, 2026 at 1:44 PM

In his substack, broker Kevin Boucher writes:

...The Chinese symbol for crisis contains two elements: danger and opportunity. When the person in charge sees and focuses on the opportunity, great things become possible. What looked like a threat to Canada’s economic survival became the forcing function for a transformation that should have happened a decade ago.
The malaise broke. The complacency cracked. And Canada got to work.
This is what getting to work actually looks like.
On August 31st — yesterday — 30,000 tonnes of Canadian durum wheat was loaded at the Port of Churchill in northern Manitoba, bound for Europe. The first grain shipment through that port in six years. The first of three expected this season, representing more than 100,000 tonnes of Prairie grain headed to European markets — bypassing the United States entirely. The port is owned by Arctic Gateway Group, a consortium of northern and First Nations communities who took it back from American ownership and rebuilt it. Also loading this week: zinc concentrate and Churchill’s first-ever potash shipment, headed for the Port of Antwerp-Bruges.
The CEO of Arctic Gateway said it plainly: this was an asset neglected for decades by American ownership. Now it is Canadian, it is Indigenous-partnered, and it is open for business.
That’s what diversification looks like. Not a policy paper. A ship.
On LNG: Canada has now signed two separate 20-year deals to supply German companies from the Ksi Lisims terminal in northern British Columbia — a project co-developed with the Nisga’a Nation, powered by hydroelectricity, on Indigenous land. The first deal, with SEFE, is for one million tonnes per year. The second, signed in July with Uniper, is for two million tonnes per year. Three million tonnes of Canadian LNG flowing to Germany annually for two decades. The Enbridge Sunrise Expansion Project received federal approval and broke ground in July, backed by a landmark agreement giving 36 B.C. First Nations a 12.5% ownership stake in the Westcoast pipeline system — a $715 million investment supported by the Canada Indigenous Loan Guarantee Corporation.
Five years ago not one of these things was politically possible. Today they are signed, funded, and under construction.
The India story is equally significant. In February, ahead of Carney’s five-day visit to New Delhi, India’s High Commissioner to Canada, Dinesh Patnaik, made a statement that deserves to be read slowly. “On energy,” he told CBC News, “there is an appetite which even Canada cannot fulfill and we are willing to buy whatever Canada is offering.” In May, India sent the largest trade delegation it has ever dispatched anywhere in the world to Canada — over 120 companies. The target: double bilateral trade to $70 billion by 2030. Last week, the two countries held their inaugural Finance Ministers’ Economic and Financial Dialogue. A Bilateral Investment Treaty is now on the table. This relationship, frozen solid eighteen months ago over a diplomatic crisis, is now one of Canada’s most consequential economic partnerships in the making.
At the CAMI plant in Ingersoll, Ontario, GM and Unifor ratified a new three-year agreement this week. The plant stays open. GM has committed to seek Canadian Armed Forces defence production work if that contract is awarded to them. In a sector that was idled and facing an uncertain future, that is not nothing.
Non-U.S. exports totalled $333 billion in 2025, up from $299 billion in 2024, and the rate of increase is accelerating. Foreign direct investment hit $96.8 billion in 2025 — the highest level since 2007. Carney himself has stated that FDI is now running at twice the rate of Canada’s nearest G7 peer.
And the market has rendered its own verdict. Matthew Winkler, co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Bloomberg News, wrote last month that Canada’s publicly traded companies have surged 41% to $4.5 trillion in value since Carney became Prime Minister — outperforming the United States and the eight other largest stock markets in the world. His conclusion: “One of the greatest investment periods in Canada that we’ve seen. Money is pouring into Canada like we have not seen in a century.” That’s not a Liberal talking point. That’s Bloomberg data, from the man who built Bloomberg News.
In two weeks — September 14th and 15th in Toronto — Carney convenes the first-ever Canada Investment Summit. Nearly 100 investment firms from 28 countries. The combined assets under management of the people in that room: approximately $120 trillion. Larry Fink of BlackRock. Jonathan Gray of Blackstone. Berkshire Hathaway. JPMorgan. The Globe and Mail called it “the 24 hours that could change Canada’s economic trajectory.”
The goal: catalyse $1 trillion in new investment in Canada over five years, in energy, transportation, data, and defence.
The world has noticed.
Since Davos, where Carney received a rare standing ovation from assembled world leaders for his speech on the rupture of the old order, a phrase has begun appearing with increasing frequency in international commentary. American conservatives at The Bulwark used it seriously. Commentators across Europe have reached for it. Social media on both sides of the border has amplified it.
The phrase is: leader of the free world.
It is not a title Canada sought. It is a title the world has begun to assign, because someone has to occupy the space that the United States vacated when it decided that tariffs, threats, and bullying were a foreign policy. Carney himself put it plainly: “It is my strong personal view that the international order will be rebuilt, but it will be rebuilt out of Europe.” He said that standing in Europe, on his way to address the European Parliament — the first Canadian Prime Minister ever to do so.
Is it hyperbole? Perhaps. But it is the kind of hyperbole that emerges when reality outpaces the language available to describe it. And the Canadian public, judging by last night’s by-election results, appears to agree with the sentiment if not necessarily the title
He belongs to us. Sorry. Not sorry....

And so does he:

…and welcome with open arms scientists fleeing MAGA tyranny.

- James L Bruno

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A couple of interesting comments from PastPresentFuture analyst and author Dan Gardner

A little background on the Canadian aluminum industry Trump is determined to kill: Canada has vast amounts of hydroelectricity and because electricity is critical for aluminum production it was only natural Canada would develop one of the earliest and biggest aluminum industries. And a good thing we did: During the Second World War, when aluminum was critical to airplane manufacturing, Canada supplied 40% of all Allied aluminum — and almost 90% of the aluminum for Great Britain and the Commonwealth. And you know who should be grateful for that? The United States. By WWII, the US aircraft industry had abandoned wooden planes and switched entirely to aluminum. When the US entered the war, it faced severe aluminum shortages — which were averted in part by importing massive quantities of Canadian aluminum. As for today, the high cost of electricity in the US led most American aluminum producers to shut down, so the US imports primary (not recycled) aluminum from the UAE, Bahrain, and … Canada. To sum up: The US got much of the aluminum it needed to win WWII from Canada. Today it is even more reliant on Canada for the aluminum that is a core ingredient of countless products. That arrangement makes perfect economic sense because Canada has all the hydropower needed to make aluminum cheaply. So naturally… Donald Trump walloped Canadian aluminum with a giant tariff that will hurt countless American industries and force American consumers to pay more for everything from pop to refrigerators. Trump may not be on Putin’s payroll but, if he’s not, he should submit an invoice for services rendered.

- Dan Gardner

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Gridlock also suggests the same outcome: The US federal government is piling up debt at a terrifying rate thanks to decades of tax cuts for the rich and (unlike the 1990s) an inability of the parties to agree on the package of spending cuts and tax increases needed to restore fiscal sanity. That means every existing source of revenue will be essential — and Trump’s tariffs, unless knocked down by the Supreme Court, will be one of those existing sources. My bet: Most Americans will agree that Trump’s tariffs on Canada are outrageous and destructive. And most Americans will agree they should not be removed. If I’m right, there will be no going back. In future, Canada can either surrender some or all of this country’s sovereignty to have free trade with the United States. Or we can stand up, develop new economic and security relationships in the world, and build big things all on our own. We have always been capable of that second option but we didn’t choose it because integration with America was easier. It’s not easier anymore. So, now, which will it be? I know what I support. 🇨🇦

- Dan Gardner

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So, to wrap it all up today

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