I'm noticing how many cartoonists are now riffing on various transportation memes - sailing off a waterfall or taking a wrong turn on the road or driving into a wall. It seems like an apt metaphor, doesn't it
Next, here are some thoughtful comments about issues of the day
Today's Alberta Referendum update
This is something Canada is going to have to deal with‘Unintended consequences’: Poll shows UCP independence referendum boosting Alberta NDP. Opposition party says campaign-tested party volunteers ready to knock on doors. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
— JeffTrnka (@jefftrnka.bsky.social) October 5, 2026 at 7:26 AM
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"Invasion." "Remigration." They're terms you'd more commonly associate with America's toxic debate around immigration policy than Canada's. But they're starting to pop up here. You can thank Danielle Smith and the UCP for that. #cdnpoli #abpoli www.nationalobserver.com/2026/10/06/o...
— Max Fawcett (@maxfawcett.bsky.social) October 6, 2026 at 8:40 AM
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In The Walrus, Claire Porter Robbins writes about Poilievre's Alberta problem. It sounds like Poilievre is MIA in the Alberta referendum discussion:#ableg #abpoli Every word of this 👇🏼
— Canadian In Alberta (@canadianinalberta.bsky.social) October 6, 2026 at 5:43 PM
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... thirty-three out of thirty-seven of Alberta’s federal ridings are Conservative, giving the party considerable sway in the province. And yet, “there’s a lot of silence from a lot of Conservative MPs,” says Duane Bratt, a Mount Royal University political science professor who’s vocally opposed to separation. Most of the silent members of Parliament, he points out, are those with higher concentrations of potentially separatist voters, like those in rural Alberta, and may be separatists themselves...
“I think it was important that Poilievre speak out, and he did,” says Bratt, referring to Poilievre’s June speech. Bratt also noted the involvement in pro-Canada activism from former federal cabinet minister and Alberta premier Jason Kenney, the province’s former minister of finance Travis Toews, and former Progressive Conservative MP Monte Solberg. But, he asks, “where are the sitting Conservative MPs?”
Kory Teneycke, a prominent conservative strategist who has publicly criticized Poilievre’s leadership, says MPs are taking cues from him—and so far, he’s done little. Poilievre, he says, “feels constrained in what he can do because I think a lot of the people who constitute the hardcore support of him and his leadership are sympathetic to the separatist cause.”...
"Never, ever"
On his substack, Ross Boulton discusses Trump's "they're learning a little lesson" smear about Canada.
Its good but lengthy, here's a quote:
... My comments are full of Canadians. More of them than I can count tell me the same thing, in nearly the same words. They aren’t coming back. Not for the beach, not for the outlet mall, not for the cousin’s wedding in Maine. They will never come to America again. They will never trust America again. More than one of them has written it to me in the same two words, the way a child would. “Never ever.”
Never. That’s the word they use. These are people who will tell you a winter that froze the pipes was “not too bad.” Never is not a word they reach for.
...Back at the White House, the President also said this: “I love the Canadian people. So many friends. Wayne Gretzky, I love the Great One.”
It’s the way you talk about a family you’ve decided to stop visiting.
He loves the people. He is teaching them a lesson. And the ones sitting in the classroom, it turns out, are us...
...They didn’t wake up one morning and decide we were the enemy. They didn’t threaten to annex us, or rename anything of ours, or call our president a governor. They answered what we did. When we taxed their steel, they stopped buying our bourbon. When we called them a state, they stopped coming to Myrtle Beach. That’s the whole file. Thirty-six points of American friendship, gone in three years. Every move they made came after one of ours, the way a reply comes after a letter.
Washington has its side, and it deserves a hearing. Our trade representative says Canadian provinces pulled our liquor off their shelves, and that, in his words, “at a certain point we said, ‘That’s enough.’” Canada says it was answering tariffs that came first. Both stories are about the same empty shelves. Only one of them has the order right, and it isn’t ours....
At Concis Canada, Shankar Narayan tells Canadian universities to Poach, Canada. Poach. Not a Year to Waste.
...I am a product of the American higher education system. The kind of professors I had—I will never, ever find their like again. They are teachers in the truest sense of the word. I can still see them in my head. Every now and then, I hear them too.
And yet, when my nephew called to ask what he should do about his U.S. university admissions, I told him not to even bother. Let it go. It was an excruciatingly painful moment for me. But I had to do what was good for him, not what made me feel good. And I felt completely vindicated when the Trump Oligarch Administration went after Harvard, using foreign students to score a political point.
...[US] universities ... pull in talent from around the world. It is not just American money funding American talent. It is the world’s money and the world’s talent, brought together in America.
...That is the pillar the MAGA oligarchs are now taking a bludgeon to. They don’t care. This group did not care about the U.S. defence industrial complex. They did not care about the massive U.S. automotive industry. So why would they care about America’s ability to attract and retain talent?
We can pay. We can get the talent. That seems to be the thinking. It might work for their own companies. It will not work for the United States in the long run. Being able to buy talent for yourself is not the same as keeping your country a place where talent wants to go.
The good news for Canada is that the Carney government has recognised this opening. ...
...This is not just about filling classrooms or collecting tuition fees. It is about attracting the people who will lead laboratories, build companies, teach the next generation and create new industries. Getting them through the university gates is the beginning. Giving them the conditions to do their best work—and reasons to stay—is how that investment compounds.
Do not simply watch America dismantle its advantage. Build your own. Go after the talent.
The time is here.
Watergate revisionism? Really?
I saw something about this when scrolling past MSNOW the other day but I just couldn't believe it
For anyone who wasn't actually alive during Watergate - which I was but most of you weren't - Jill Wine-Banks was a prosecutor against Nixon.Yesterday Jack Smith was the target. Today the #wsj reports it’s me and my #Watergate colleagues from 50 years ago. Hope I behave as admirably as Smith if I’m subpoenaed.
— Jill Wine-Banks (@jillwine-banks.bsky.social) October 1, 2026 at 7:56 PM
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On Doomsday Scenario, Garrett Graff updates us on recent moves with the Department of Justice to re-open files about Watergate - I suspect because Trump is terrified about how Nixon could have been impeached for his criminality in office.
...as if Todd Blanche’s modern Justice Department wasn’t doing enough to undermine law and order in our time, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday that it was now entertaining the idea that somehow Richard Nixon was unfairly targeted and maligned as president amid his umbrella of the Watergate scandal.I hope that at some point the world will find out about all the criminal actions now going on in the Trump White House and with his Cabinet secretaries, but investigating and prosecuting all of it will be a absolutely massive job.
... Much of the recent revisionism around Watergate equates the “persecution” of Trump, and his many many many crimes, with the idea that somehow Nixon was also targeted by a “Deep State plot.” It’s clearly based on (a) a wildly simplistic and misguided understanding of what Watergate “was”; (b) a desire to hand-wave away both Donald Trump’s egregious corruption, abuse of office, and conspiracies to hold onto power and persecute his enemies; as well as (c) to promote the idea that presidents deserve to be above the law....
As the author of what I’d like to believe is the definitive “mainstream” account of the scandal, I think it’s worth remembering the full arc of Watergate and how it was much more than a burglary. I think most Americans still misremember, wrongly, that the whole prosecution was the burglary itself — if you ask the average American they’d probably tell you that the only people prosecuted were the burglars.
In reality, 69 people were indicted or charged with crimes stemming from the Watergate prosecutions — and 48 of those in the end pleaded guilty or were found guilty at trial. As I summarized the full scope in my book:
Ultimately, multiple Cabinet officials would face criminal charges, an FBI director would resign and face prosecution, a congressman would commit suicide, and a CIA director would plead guilty to misleading Congress. There were secret hush money payoffs, threats of blackmail, layers upon layers of betrayals, an alleged kidnapping, and even a suspicious plane crash. There were rumors of high-priced call girls, allegations of the CIA and the Pentagon spying on the Nixon White House itself, and accusations of illegal donations from the Greek military junta. All told, 69 people would be indicted on charges stemming from the related investigations—including George Steinbrenner—and companies from Goodyear Tires and Gulf Oil to American Airlines and 3M found themselves pleading guilty to illegally financing Nixon’s reelection. Nixon’s attorney general and commerce secretary were put on trial together, a case then dubbed the “trial of the century,” despite being all-but forgotten today. The careers of three consecutive attorneys general would be upended.It was the largest, most egregious and far-reaching scandal in American presidential history — until the current era we’re all living through.
To me, the scandal worth focusing on now isn’t the events of Watergate or the reaction and reforms thereafter. The scandal we need to focus on as a country is that we didn’t engage in a similar post-Watergate era of robust reforms and oversight mechanisms after the first Trump administration. Had we been more aggressive in those post-Trump prosecutions, congressional and democracy reforms, we might have been able to prevent this second, increasingly unrepairable debacle....
Why Greer hates Canada's trade "surplus"
In his substack, Kevin Boucher writes The Reasonable Man in the Room Carney says nostalgia is not a strategy. America's trade chief has made it one.
It's a lengthy article about US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, the meaning of the speeches that Greer and Carney gave at Davos, and why Canada is unlikely to be able to sign a deal with the US.
...Greer is looking in the rear-view mirror. He said so himself at the National Conservatism Conference last year: “Let us give our country the economy we once had.”
To be fair, he isn’t against new technology. He talks about semiconductors, and he praised a 1980s chip research program. But look at what he measures: factory jobs, tariff revenue, the goods trade deficit. That’s a 20th-century scoreboard.
If Hamilton were alive today, the Hamiltonian question wouldn’t be how to bring back every factory America once had. It would be: what will make America indispensable 50 years from now? Greer has studied Hamilton’s policies more carefully than almost anyone in Washington. He may have missed Hamilton’s point.
And that’s exactly what Carney meant in Davos. Nostalgia is not a strategy.
Greer has made it one.
Why our surplus is the crime
This is the part Canadians most need to understand. In the Davos speech, Greer leans on John Maynard Keynes. His version of the argument goes like this: a country that runs a persistent trade surplus is very likely growing at its partners’ expense. In Greer’s words, “a country should export in order to import, and if that is not happening then it is a clear sign that something is wrong.”
Think about what that means for us. Canada sells the United States more than it buys, and a big part of that is energy: oil, gas and electricity that American refineries, factories and homes run on. Most economists would say the Americans got something valuable for their money.
Greer doesn’t start there. In his framework, our surplus is itself the evidence that we’re doing something to them... ... If the dispute were about dairy quotas or a digital tax, Canada could trade concessions and get a deal. Those are negotiable. But if the problem is the surplus itself, then nothing on that list solves it. The only thing that closes the gap the way Greer wants is less Canadian production selling into the American market. More of it happening in the United States instead.
That’s not a negotiating position. It’s a destination.
...So what would a deal that satisfies Greer’s theory actually look like? It would look like production moving south. Auto plants in Ontario becoming auto plants in Michigan. Steel made in Hamilton, Ontario, becoming steel made in Ohio. Fewer jobs here, and fewer of the paycheques that cover mortgages in Oshawa, Windsor and Sault Ste. Marie.
That isn’t a deal Canada can accept. And it may be the only kind of deal he’s looking for.
...So I’m not optimistic about a fair deal any time soon. Not because Canada is negotiating badly. Because the man across the table has told us, in his own words, that he thinks our whole model is the problem.
But there’s a difference between hopeless and clear-eyed. If this is who we’re dealing with, then waiting for the reasonable man to deliver a reasonable deal isn’t a strategy either. It’s just another kind of nostalgia: the hope that the old relationship comes back if we’re patient and polite enough.
It won’t.
Which means building more customers, more trade routes and more production we control isn’t anti-American spite. It’s the only rational response to understanding the man across the table.
On January 20, two men in Davos gave the world opposite answers. One said nostalgia is not a strategy. The other is absolutely convinced the road forward runs through the past.
Canada can’t follow him there.
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