Quotulatiousness

August 29, 2026

On the scenic shores of “Lake America”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

One thing Trump does better than any other politician is finding ways to send his opponents crazy. It’s not a skill I’d want to have myself, but it’s amazing how Trump can do or say something outrageous … and pretty much every time his opponents take the bait and make themselves even more ridiculous in trying to react to his provocations. Like randomly renaming Lake Ontario by executive order:

I don’t think Carney has Trump Derangement Syndrome, the citizens who vote for him do. Carney knows this, he counted on it to win the election. Elbows up was about preparing Canadians for a breakdown in relations with the U.S. – A breakdown that Carney and the other Laurentian elites who run things in Canada saw as inevitable. To anyone paying close enough attention, Carney is the de facto new leader of the globalists (the WEF mob). He ascended to that position at the moment he became the Canadian prime minister. Trump and the MAGA movement, on the other hand, are the singular force in the world effectively opposing globalism as it has emerged in the post-WWII “rules based order”.

This effectively places Canada at the center of an existential global struggle. However, we are not only at the center, but oppositionally set against the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, locked in a “trade war” with the largest economy in the history of humanity. Pardon my use of acronymic French as I blurt out an unruly “WTF!”

I am sure Carney has read The Art Of The Deal and knows how to win diplomatically with Trump – which is all one needs to read to gain the key insights prerequisite to mutually successful negotiations with the orange one. But Carney is not interested in mutually beneficial trade relations with the U.S. because that would mean tacit support for the American led reset of global political economy (which of course follows from America’s new economic policy, because yes absolutely America is that powerful), or put another way, it would mean Carney supporting the thing which is opposing the thing that he actually supports.

Elbows up Canadians have been manipulated by the most cynical government in the history of Canada. Carney is a smooth operator but a cunning wirepuller. He has essentially pulled the wool over the eyes of a malinformed citizenry who have been fed an endless diet of state-sponsored anti-American, Anti-Trump, and Anti-Poilievre propaganda since at least the final scenes of the Trudeau premiership set the stage for Carney the globalist show closer.

[…]

And at last we come unceremoniously to the supreme troller who has cast his line in the newly anointed Lake America. He is fishing for a major catch of Canadian TDS, and he is bound to fill his nets. Indeed, Trump has signed an executive order officially changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. Canadians are of course triggered and are whining insufferably. I think it is funny, and I like that for once an Indian name is being changed to a European one. Trump is the greatest troller in the history of trolling. However, the move is a serious one, in twenty years the world will be flooded with maps and globes that label the former Lake Ontario as Lake America, in spite of the impotent protestations of butt hurt Canadians. America has vastly more power in this world, if they want our lake known as Lake America it will be so. Canadians who have a hard time accepting this simply have no clue about the dynamics of power.

Carney’s response to Trump’s redesignation of the lake was replete with a self-own only one as invested in a globalist “new world order”, and oblivious to actual domestic concerns could muster. He posted the following to X:

    The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”.

    The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.

    We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.

    Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.

A hilarious response to this which appeared on X was posted by Miranda Veracruz de la Jolla Cardinal, which I am assuming is a parody account since Miranda was a recurring character in the 1980s sitcom Married With Children. MVdlJC wrote:

    “How dare Trump rename Lake Ontario!”

    “Anyways, here I am at Sankofa Square …”

If that is not the cat’s pajamas then I have no idea what type of a response to Carney’s boundless smugness would adequately compliment a feline’s slumber. Carney says that Canadians know about “naming reality”, yet how many unpronounceable aboriginal terms have been grafted over the real names of Canadian places in the past decade or so.

August 28, 2026

“The Maple Mujaheddin Insurgency is not going to happen”

Filed under: Cancon, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Of all the potential military conflicts facing the west, a US invasion of Canada has to be among the least likely — not just because it’s been attempted more than once in the past. For one thing, I don’t think even the best social media posting is going to bring ordinary Americans around to getting boots on the ground across the 49th parallel … there’s remarkably little passion about seizing our maple syrup and confiscating our strategic reserves of poutine among voters. Unlike places that Americans have strong feelings about, Canada just doesn’t move the needle.

The Operational Art of War has the first of a promised three-part series on Operation Maple Stomp, the biggest and best invasion of Canada — everyone says so:

In the latest round of “let’s do everything the dumbest way possible” the two nations in the world sharing the most in common keep taking to social media to fantasize going to war with each other.

It is deeply annoying, brings out the worst tendencies on both sides, and (to my mind worst of all) illustrates no one understands the Operational Art of War!

Americans take to social media and claim Canada doesn’t have a military, the military wouldn’t fight and be so outnumbered that resistance would collapse within hours.

Canadians usually agree the conventional war would be over in an afternoon, but then America would face a long and bloody insurgency (just wait till Uncle Sam meets the Maple Mujahedeen!).

Google AI’s idea of what a Canadian Insurgent looks like.

You can definitely count me as a member of Team Mere-matter-of-marching, at least as far as the tactical operations necessary to occupy the most populous parts of Soviet Canuckistan. Here’s a sketch map that Big Serge updated for the 2020s, based on the mid-1930s details for an attack on southern Ontario from War Plan Red:

Manifest Destiny, 2025? Big Serge’s updated map for the old US War Plan Red for a military invasion of Canada.

The distances are short enough and the chances of significant military resistance low enough, that US Army vehicles would probably not need to refuel before reaching the initial stop-lines for their advance. Canadian infrastructure is not pre-wired for destruction, so unless local hotheads manage to temporarily block road bridges, volume of traffic will be a bigger friction factor than actual defensive fire.

Trump’s legions would reap the benefit of more than a century of demilitarized populations and the (small, but real) Canadian military being oriented to expeditionary operations rather than home defence. But taking the territory is only the first step. There are Canadians scattered throughout the continental United States, looking and sounding pretty much like any other American, and it wouldn’t take too many of them to decide that Trump’s fight was also their fight. Canada isn’t the only one enjoying the benefits of decades of lack-of-worry about homeland defence. Look how exposed the US has been to Islamic terrorists who, for the most part, don’t look or sound like Americans and still managed to pull off one of the greatest terror attacks of the modern age.

I mean, don’t misread what I’m saying here: the US would win. That’s not even remotely in doubt. There are at least ten of you for every one of us, and more of you have military training and access to personal weapons. (One wonders if the Canadian government’s fanatic devotion to civil disarmament is a kind of pre-surrender to this imagined US invasion we’re discussing …)

But the cost of winning might be more than even the most government-worshipping progressive might be willing to pay. We look like you. With a few exceptions (French-speaking Quebecers and Newfoundland-speaking Newfoundlanders, mostly), we fit in very well with you. We come from very, very similar cultures (some like Vancouver vlogger J.J. McCulloch argue it’s the same culture). Rather than a war of conquest, this would be much more like that “Second Civil War” that’s been so much a topic of conversation on far left and far right social media. The kind of civil war that takes far too long to settle back into peaceful co-existence.

You don’t like government surveillance? Too bad, bucky, because every level of government is going to be eager to ensure that you’re a good, loyal American … at all hours of the day and in everything you do. Cut down a Flock camera? That’s not going to be a mere vandalism issue … that’s tantamount to treason. What if that Flock camera was watching one of those undercover Canucki guerilla fighters?

Don’t like the feds watching every financial transaction? Too bad, bucky, ’cause you giving $5 to that sketchy Canuck for some bootleg maple syrup might be funding a terror attack on your nearest USAF base.

To fight the threat of Canuck infiltration, your every car trip will need to be logged, and your patterns of travel will need to be recorded and analyzed. Who you talk to will also need to be observed, in case one of your buddies is a covert maple-slurping spy!

Oh, wait, there’s more from the Operational Art of War:

There Won’t Be a Maple Mujahadeen

If the United States annexes Canada, there will not be a long-standing violent insurrection by a nation of hunters. The Maple Mujahadeen isn’t going to happen.

A successful insurgency has several requirements:

  1. A pre-existing structure to organize around;
  2. The structure having access to weapons;
  3. The insurgent group not having a future in the new regime; and
  4. The broader population being willing to shelter the insurgency.

Canada does have factions that meet all four of these factors, but spread across different factions. Like any complex modern society, Canada does have pre-existing structures of voluntary organizations. Virtually none of them are organized around any kind of collective defense or skills that easily translate to an insurgency.

For #2 (access to weapons) you either need armed citizens, government weapons cashes or weapons brought in by a rival power supporting the insurgency. In Canada’s case, the only viable supply of weapons for an insurgency is its armed citizens. As with most statistics, Canada only looks like a gun free country because it’s beside America.

The graph below shows the top 10 countries for estimated firearms per 100 people, plus the EU and global average for comparison (excluding countries with a population under one million). Countries that were recently warzones are in orange, as their rate of firearm ownership is something of a special case.

The number for Canada is likely too low. This is based on a 2017 data set, and firearm ownership is growing faster than the population. It also assumes there are five unregistered firearms to every registered firearm in Canada. The last time Canada had hard data on unregistered firearms (2003 to 2012) the ratio was 10:1. Assuming a similar ratio today, firearms per 100 jumps to 1/2 that of America and nearly 4x the European average.

August 27, 2026

Memoranda of understanding: the illusion of action

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

One of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s signature differences from the Trudeau era is his passion for negotiating and signing memoranda of understanding with foreign governments, corporations, organizations, and NGOs. Most Canadians had probably never encountered the term before 2025 brought a regular stream of media reports of yet another MoU signed in a nice little performance for the cameras. Carney loves MoUs because they allow him to travel around the world, meet foreign dignitaries, bankers, and business leaders in luxurious settings, and produce mediagenic signing ceremonies on the regular. Most MoUs are about as valuable as the paper they’re signed on in real-world terms, but they allow Carney and his ministers to present a façade of purposeful motion, action, and success for minimal effort. Perfect for a government that lives and breathes to the media cycle.

L. Wayne Mathison points out that previous flurries of MoU negotiations have resulted in almost no change, regardless of the media fuss at the time of signing:

This is why I am skeptical when politicians announce billions of dollars in MOUs as if the money is already in the bank.

We have seen this movie before. Jean Chrétien’s Team Canada missions produced hundreds of signed agreements and plenty of impressive headlines.

Yet research by UBC economists Keith Head and John Ries found no statistically significant increase in bilateral trade attributable to those missions.

That does not mean trade missions are useless. Relationships matter. Opening doors matters. Some individual companies may land real business.

But an MOU is not a completed investment, a new factory, an export shipment or a permanent job.

Judge governments by what actually gets built, invested and sold after the cameras leave.

Announcements are easy. Results are the hard part.

August 24, 2026

Trade negotiations degrade into full-on trade war

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I mentioned the other day, I don’t believe Prime Minister Mark Carney ever intended to reach a trade agreement with the United States, because it was far better for his domestic political situation to have the US — and especially Donald Trump — as a focal point for retired Canadian boomers to trigger a two-minute hate. Every time the name Trump appeared in a state-sponsored newspaper or TV story, Carney’s popularity went up. After a decade of economic stasis and relative decline under Justin Trudeau, Carney’s more staid persona told the boomers that “the adults were back in charge”, yet Carney’s policies have been largely the same as Trudeau’s with a bit less hamming it up for the cameras.

On his Substack, Brian Lilley considers the potential economic damage of the increased tariffs:

“You’re at war when you get attacked, we got attacked.”

That’s what Prime Minister Mark Carney said when he was asked why it sounded like was going to war after his Saturday morning speech.

Carney used references to war multiple times in his speech and during his Q & A with reporters.

“We’re stronger now than when the United States started this trade war. More unified, more determined, more ambitious,” he said in his speech.

Not sure that I believe that to be the case, though we could be if we take the right steps, something I was writing about in my latest column for the Sun.

Previously, I have questioned whether we should consider this a trade war between Canada and the United States. The Americans say they don’t see it that way, they see it a change in trade policy, an attempt to rebalance trade.

My thinking that perhaps the Americans were right was that calling it a trade war put us in the wrong mindset. Canadians were looking for a fight with the Americans, many still are and are happy that Carney walked away from this deal.

Of course, for the devoted “Elbows Up” crowd, no deal was always the best deal. They foolishly believe we can and should walk away from the United States.

After this latest round of tariffs though, I’m fine calling it a trade war.

Melanie in Saskatchewan calls it “the most convenient failed trade deal in Canada”:

AI-generated image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

Imagine, if you will, a prime minister first installed and then elected, because Canadians believed he was uniquely equipped to deal with Donald Trump. Our hypothetical prime minister has impeccable credentials, international connections, central banking experience, serious suits, and the reassuring manner of a man who appears to know exactly which fork to use while the dining room burns down around him.

Most importantly, his political identity rests on one enormously useful proposition: Only he can handle Trump.

Now imagine the negotiations aren’t going particularly well. Not outright disastrous, at least not yet. Just difficult. Canada makes concessions. Ottawa drops the Digital Services Tax, removes most retaliatory tariffs, and American alcohol and supply management are on the table.

Still, negotiations continue, but then something changes.

On August 18, Trump postpones the new 50 per cent tariffs for three days after the two sides report “substantial progress”. By August 20, Canada’s trade minister says they’re “very close” to a deal. Reporting suggests the agreement under discussion could halve steel and aluminum tariffs and reduce tariffs on Canadian-built vehicles from 25 to 15 per cent.

And then … poof!

No deal. Do not pass go, consider this farce terminated.

The 50 per cent tariffs take effect. Carney suspends negotiations, the Canadian negotiators come home, and Ottawa announces retaliation. Washington says Canada backed away from commitments while Ottawa resolutely asserts Washington changed the terms at the last minute.

Well, that’s pretty fricking interesting, isn’t it?

So naturally our hypothetical prime minister takes to the airwaves and explains exactly what happened. Except he doesn’t, not with any actual clarity.

He speaks for more than twenty minutes, probably moistly, wandering from storms and changing climates to sovereignty and resilience, then through infrastructure, LNG, nuclear power, housing, defence, diversification and investment. By the time he finishes, we’ve practically navigated the entire federal government, several industries and the weather forecast.

Canada, we learn, is “master in our own home”. Well, isn’t that just terrific! What happened to the bloody trade deal?! Carney says the Americans introduced new terms that were “uneconomic” and “unfair”. They “asked too much and offered too little”. Who is going to draw the short straw and tell Carney those are adjectives and conclusions, and not terms?

Then comes a particularly curious bit. Carney says Washington also sought restrictions affecting Canada’s future trade relationships with other countries.

Other … countries.

But he never actually tells us which countries Washington was talking about, exactly what restrictions were being demanded, or which “certain sectors” he meant when he admitted the Americans wanted Canada to coordinate tariffs against other countries. Stranger still, Carney conceded that Canada could actually see merit in some of it as part of the right deal.

So which countries? Which sectors? And which parts of this supposedly unacceptable assault on Canadian sovereignty did you actually find reasonable? Suddenly the man who just spent twenty minutes talking develops an acute shortage of proper nouns.

August 23, 2026

Trade deal? What trade deal? Best we can do is more tariffs

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

My sense has always been that the Carney government didn’t really want to get a deal done with Trump, because it was far more politically useful to keep the eLbOzOs all angry and posturing than to negotiate in good faith. Canada’s premiers, taken as a group, have been a never-ending stream of clown car antics, political gamesmanship, and schoolyard baiting. Yes, Trump is infuriating, inconsistent, obnoxious, and even more performative than Justin Trudeau but he’s the current American president and we needed to send sensible politicians and diplomats to work with him.

The presstitutes in the Canadian relic media have been eagerly fanning the flames of Trump Derangement Syndrome across the country, so when the latest episode of The Line podcast popped up yesterday, I had to provide a helpful edit to their episode title:

They’re going to do everything they can to deflect blame from their beloved paymaster, Dear Leader, and point accusingly at Pierre Emmanuel Goldstein and his band of anti-Canadian wreckers and looters in the Conservative party.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @jaycurrie discussed this when the news broke of the breakdown in talks:

The last minute collapse of trade negotiations between Canada and the US demonstrates a fecklessness on the Canadian side which is astonishing. The walking resume — in the very good suits — could not get’er done.

Apparently those damn Yankees had unacceptable last minute changes. No shit. You are dealing with serious negotiators who will squeeze hard. It is said of Trump that he regarded signed contracts as the beginning of the negotiation.

Brutal, unscrupulous, nasty. Orange man very, very, bad. But you play the hand you’re dealt. Had Canada sent serious negotiators a year ago rather than posturing and dumbly sticking the official elbows in the air, we’d have a deal.

Or, had we had negotiators who did not take Dudley Doright as a model, we would have signed a “bad deal” and gone right back to the table to get a better deal. I’d love to know what the show stopper American last minute “demands” were.

Trade is a constant series of negotiations. A deal in place would have avoided the BS 50% tariffs and set the stage for the next deal. This collapse just puts us in a deep hole smarter people will have to climb out of.

“That’s my final offer” is a tactic. Is it an offer you like? No. Is it an offer you can live with? Probably. Again, the devil is in the details. But unless the offer required Canada to cede territory (which Eby is already more than willing to do) it was workable.

“A bad deal is worse than no deal at all” when there are 50% tariffs looming as a consequence of “no deal” is a very dumb position to take. Brace for “defense of Canadian Sovereignty” in a matter of minutes.

These trade talks have been bungled from the beginning simply because a combination of the political advantages of TDS and an inflated view of Canada’s relative bargaining strength created a reality free bubble.

The sheer arrogance and vile political opportunism of the Carney Liberals has been on full display for a year. Trump and his people called BS. Carney was euchred. Canada is, frankly, boned.

Maxime Bernier:

New 50-per-cent levies will hit around $28-billion worth of Canadian goods, which is roughly 5 per cent of Canada’s exports to the United States.

Carney has said it will respond with retaliatory tariffs on $28-billion worth of U.S. products.

Escalation is a very bad idea! Tariff retaliation has just triggered an escalatory trade war we cannot win. The U.S. economy is 10 times larger than ours.

A study released last week by the Canadian American Business Council concluded that the end of USMCA would have a surprisingly small impact on the Canadian economy.

It estimates that, even with high and long-lasting tariffs, Canada’s economy would only be about 1.6 per cent smaller in 2035 than if the USMCA were renewed and respected, and tariffs fell to near zero.

We are further damaging our economy with these “dollar-for-dollar” counter-tariffs.

Retaliatory tariffs are NOT a weapon. They are a tax on Canadians.

Who do you think absorbs that cost?
Canadian consumers, businesses, and workers.

Let’s be brutally honest: the Canadian government is worsening the situation. Canadian families will pay the price at the checkout counter.

The National Roast gets it:

Why This “Foreign” Commonwealth Truck Was Built In 800,000 Units And Supplied Every Front

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BritishWarLegends and BritishWarArmory
Published 31 Mar 2026

The Canadian Military Pattern truck was built by two rival factories in Ontario for a nation of eleven million people. It ended up supplying the British Eighth Army across North Africa, Italy, Normandy, and Burma — and Canada built more of them than Germany, Italy, and Japan built trucks combined.

Almost nobody knows it existed.

When Rommel captured two thousand of them at Tobruk in 1942, he didn’t scrap them. The Afrika Korps pressed them straight into active German service. An enemy with his own purpose-built military trucks chose to keep using captured Canadian vehicles instead.

The full forgotten story.

Update: I generally try to avoid watching or re-posting clearly AI-generated slop, but this was the first video I’d encountered discussing the hundreds of thousands of CMP trucks that Canada built during WW2. At some point between me scheduling the video and today, the channel has been banned. You’ve undoubtedly seen CMP vehicles in WW2 stills or movie footage, as they’re pretty distinctive – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Military_Pattern_truck

From The British Army in North-west Europe 1944-45,
CMP lorries passing through Uedem, 2 March 1945.
Photo by Carpenter (Sgt), No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Photograph B 14966 from the Imperial War Museums via Wikimedia Commons.

August 16, 2026

In Ontario, bike lanes are not a “human right”, thank goodness

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Brian Lilley celebrates two recent developments in Ontario that — unlike so many others in the last several years — align with common sense:

Last year I wrote about the horrible court decision put out by “Justice” Paul Schabas on bike lanes being a Charter right. I put “Justice” in quotations because as I described at the time, the decision was so horrible and so political that it wasn’t worthy of an Ontario court.

Today, the Court of Appeal of Ontario agreed with me. As I wrote in my Toronto Sun column, they didn’t just overturn the ridiculous decision by Schabas, they excoriated him and his ruling.

AI-generated image from Brian Lilley

I quoted different sections of the appeals court ruling in my column, and trust me it was tough to choose which parts to quote in such a brilliant decisions. Here, I want to quote from early in the ruling, paragraphs 3-5.

    [3] The application judge’s decision presents as a straightforward application of orthodox s. 7 principles. But the application of those principles, divorced from a broader understanding of the constitution of which they are a part, has led to a surprising outcome: the conclusion that routine legislation regulating road usage is unconstitutional.

    [4] Something has gone wrong.

    [5] The application judge erred in law in interpreting and applying s. 7. But his decision is wrong in a more profound sense, for it subverts a fundamental principle of our democratic constitutional order: a legislature cannot bind its successors. Legislatures in the Westminster tradition are free to undo legislation by amending or repealing it as they see fit. That is the nature of democratic lawmaking in our constitutional order. Of course, all laws are subject to the Charter, but this does not preclude the amendment or repeal of legislation the legislature was under no constitutional obligation to have passed in the first place. Amendment or repeal of legislation may breach the Charter only if the breach can be established independent of the prior state of the law.

There is so much to digest here, but I am glad to see judges — who come from different backgrounds and were appointed by both the Harper and Trudeau governments — agree on fundamental principles. That should be a given, we shouldn’t think about such things, but today, we can’t those fundamentals for granted.

The idea that one Parliament, or legislature, cannot bind the hands of another is fundamental to our system. If I pass a law saying that wearing blue on Tuesdays is illegal and the next Parliament passes a law saying that it isn’t, the more recent law takes precedent.

Yes, I used a ridiculous example on purpose, but just to prove a point. It’s sad that so many people, including those who report and comment on politics, aren’t familiar with this basic concept on the role of Parliament.

And the other reversal of an absurd policy:

Last month there was a tribunal ruling in Ontario that said people in the country illegally were still entitled to welfare. I wrote about it at the time and said it was a crazy ruling that the Ford government needed to deal with.

They promised to do so at the time and on Thursday announced that they had.

Friday morning I was forced to write about the ridiculous take by the Toronto Star‘s “senior immigration reporter” Nicholas Keung. It seems, based on his stories, that Keung has never met someone he doesn’t think should be in Canada.

I’ll say as the son of immigrants, who grew up in an area where kids with parents who had Canadian accents were the strange ones, most immigrants don’t back illegals getting welfare.

Still, this was the Star‘s headline on the story.

As I point out in my Sun column, Parsa is himself an immigrant having come from Iran with his family as a child.

But sure, the Star‘s “senior immigration reporter” smears him as racist.

Let me explain something to you. When a reporter says “experts” say and they only find experts from one side, that is them finding the people they agree with to say what they want said.

Understanding Canadian politics

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

To an outsider, the ins and outs of Canadian politics must seem quite illogical — and for lots of good reasons — but L. Wayne Mathison offers an explanation that may help:

I think the “constraints” framework explains a surprising amount of Canadian politics.

Canada increasingly governs as though good intentions can overrule physical and economic limits.

We want more housing, but often ignore land-use rules, permitting delays, skilled-trade shortages, infrastructure capacity and construction costs.

We want better health care, but governments can promise “universal access” far more easily than they can produce doctors, nurses, operating rooms, diagnostic machines and hours in the day.

We want rapid population growth, while pretending housing, roads, schools and hospitals will expand at the same speed.

We want reliable electricity while making major generation and transmission projects harder to build.

We want higher wages and stronger public services while giving far less attention to productivity, capital investment and the businesses that ultimately generate the income being taxed.

This is where I think the constrained versus unconstrained distinction is useful.

Politics often treats shortages as failures of compassion or policy design. But sometimes the problem is much simpler: you cannot legislate resources into existence.

I learned that farming. You could have the best plan in the world, but weather, machinery, labour, soil, interest rates and time still had the final vote. Reality didn’t care how sincere you were.

Government faces the same rule.

This doesn’t mean government is useless, and it doesn’t mean every left-wing idea ignores constraints or every conservative understands them. Plenty don’t. But Canadian policy would improve dramatically if every proposal had to answer one basic question:

What are the real-world bottlenecks, and what happens when we hit them?

You can redistribute money. You can rewrite regulations. You can announce targets.

You cannot redistribute houses that haven’t been built, doctors who don’t exist, electricity that hasn’t been generated or productivity that hasn’t been created.

Eventually the physical world collects its bill.

August 15, 2026

Debunking common Supply Management beliefs

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Dr. Sylvain Charlebois debunks ten myths about Canada’s supply management cartel that interfere with Canadians’ ability to engage with the idea of dismantling the government’s favourite oligopoly:

Suddenly, everyone — and their grandmother — seems to be an expert on supply management.

That newfound interest is healthy. Canadians are finally examining the benefits, costs and contradictions of a complicated system affecting roughly one-quarter of the country’s agricultural economy.

A generation ago, few economists openly criticized supply management. Those who did faced fierce attacks, while the dairy lobby deployed a nationwide marketing budget approaching $200 million annually. Remember the Doug Gilmour milk advertisements? Today, the “Milk” logo appears on Toronto Maple Leafs jerseys through a multimillion-dollar sponsorship.

For years, criticizing supply management was almost politically taboo. Social media has changed that. Consumers can now see milk being dumped, compare Canadian prices with those abroad and question why Ottawa repeatedly compensates a protected industry.

Dairy farmers are not the problem. They operate rationally within rules created by governments and administered by marketing boards. But those rules should not be immune from scrutiny.

Here are 10 myths Canadians should stop believing.

1. Dairy farmers are poor […]

2. Supply management is saving the family farm […]

3. Canadian dairy farmers receive no subsidies […]

4. Trade agreements make every dairy farmer lose money […]

5. Ending supply management would automatically lower prices […]

6. Farmers alone pay for dumped milk […]

7. Milk dumping is unavoidable […]

8. Canada has fully respected CUSMA […]

9. Supply management guarantees food security […]

10. Reform means abolishing the system overnight […]

QotD: “The progressive is a walking paradox”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Economics, Europe, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In economics, we cut through noise with a concept called “Revealed Preference”.

If I loudly claim to love vanilla ice cream, yet every time I return from the Mr Whippy van I’m holding a choc-ice, my revealed preference is evidently for chocolate — not vanilla.

Thus the truth of a person’s preferences is revealed through their actual choices and behaviour, not by what they claim to prefer.

It’s unfortunate we can’t simply listen to their words, but they are so oriented toward the external, the aesthetic, and the performative (“Theater Kid Progressivism”) that we must instead look at their proximal behaviours — where they actually choose to live and raise their families, for example, to extrapolate backwards their true feelings on mass migration and its consequences.

This is the lens through which we should try to understand our Progressive class.

The bitterest irony, the irony of ironies, is this: progressives, especially those who voted for it, self-evidently do not feel at home in the societies they helped create.

If they were genuine believers, they would live contentedly amidst their new friends.

Instead, they scuttle off into the countryside, the leafy suburbs, or gated enclaves, abandoning the very demographic transformation they imposed on others.

It is often said that if liberals didn’t have double standards they wouldn’t have any at all, but while this is very funny (and true), there’s more to it.

It reveals a profound non-confluence between their stated attitudes and their actual behaviours, indicative of extreme cognitive distortion.

They protest performatively that open borders and rapid demographic change are a universal good, even moral imperatives and (admittedly less often nowadays) sources of strength.

Yet when it comes to their most intimate revealed preference — where they opt to live and raise their families — they consistently prioritise homogeneity, good schools, and cultural familiarity.

They lobby and vote without end for policies that maximise immigration into lower- and middle class neighbourhoods, then abandon those very communities for pastures anew, safely insulated by postcodes and house prices.

Their revealed preference is that do not want to live in the Canada (or Britain, or America, or Europe) they are busily helping to construct.

They enjoy the vibes, the moral status, the Instagram aesthetics, while quietly falling back to the leafy, high-trust environments their grandparents took for granted.

Progressives love to speak of taboos (indeed if there is a pastime more alluring and intoxicating to the progressive than “breaking taboos”, I am yet to come across it, but I digress) yet is the greatest taboo of all right in front of us after all, carrying a basket of organic fruit and veg from Waitrose?

To interrupt the Progressive in the midst of his communal dream state, to turn our collective eye away from the brave new world they are building for us and to instead look inwards, to look the Liberal cuckoo directly in the eye and put words to the disparity between their words and their actions …

The subject of lawful and legal deportations is increasingly mainstream, yet what of urban renewal and rewilding by means of progressive importations?

The Progressive is a walking paradox, he is both the centre of attention and the ghost at the feast all at once.

Æthelstan, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-14.

August 14, 2026

Ontario premier doubles-down on provoking Trump. What could go wrong?

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At some point you have to ask yourself … if Canada was being run by people who wanted to destroy it, what would they have done differently in the trade negotiations with Donald Trump’s government?

Is Doug Ford the dumbest Canadian?

I know, it is a deep bench. But the tubby premier is extraordinary. You have to appreciate talent.

There are, apparently, two schools of Canadian thought on the trade fracas with the US. “Punch the bully in the nose.” and “For God’s sake get a deal already.” As I prefer a Canada with an economy, I pick door number 2.

Our Chief Trade Negotiator Janice Charette, is more combative. If Trump brings in his retaliatory tariffs in a week she’s packing up and going home. That’ll learn him.

The idle threat school of negotiation enjoys wide currency in both Ottawa and Queens Park. Meanwhile, Canadian businesses are looking [longingly] at the low tax, low reg world inside the Trump tariff wall.

I’m having a beer with a buddy who is in “founder’s mode” on a startup and, frankly, he’d be crazy not to be looking at domiciling his business in the States. Sure, have a Canadian sub, but why put your main business in Canada?

And decisions like this are being made all over Canada and, indeed, the world. People might hate Trump and all his works but the business attractions of Red States make Ontario and BC look pathetic.

You would think that after Ford’s Super Bowl ad fiasco he would have the wit to remain silent as his province’s fate is being negotiated. You know, avoid more damage. But no, the tubby premier likes to “talk tough”.

I actually feel a bit sorry for Carney having to deal with the fallout of this idiot’s remarks. Unless, of course, like the Super Bowl ads, Carney actually encouraged these remarks … In which case the competition for dumbest guy in Canada has tightened up.

“Ultra vires“

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eva Chipiuk explains why it’s never a good thing to have your government ever extending the things it is involved in:

Governments going ultra vires should concern every citizen.

Ultra vires means “beyond the powers”. In a democracy, governments and public institutions do not have unlimited authority. They can only exercise the powers the law actually gives them.

Yet increasingly, we see governments, regulators, agencies, and other public bodies stretching their mandates, assuming powers they were never granted, and acting as though their authority is limited only by what they can get away with.

That turns the rule of law on its head.

The question should never be: “Where does the law say government can’t do this?”

The question is: “Where does the law give government the authority to do this?”

That distinction matters.

Government is not above the law. Public institutions are creatures of law, and their power has boundaries. When those boundaries are ignored, courts must enforce them, legislatures must correct them, and citizens must demand accountability.

Because once we accept government exercising powers it was never given, the limits on government become meaningless.

Staying within your legal jurisdiction is not optional. It is the foundation of the rule of law.

August 13, 2026

A minimum 12-year sentence

Filed under: Cancon, Education — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’ll probably be no surprise to anyone who’s met me, but I was a terrible student in school. While I quite enjoyed learning (about some things, anyway), I hated the environment where that learning was supposed to be taking place. I did well enough in primary and middle school, but I dropped out of high school and finished my diploma through correspondence. I have a great deal of sympathy for those kids who don’t fit into the institutional framework, as I certainly didn’t feel I fit in during my sentence. (It’s often worse for boys, as it’s more difficult for boys to sit still and stay quiet, and teachers readily interpret distraction and fidgeting as something needing medical intervention rather than signs of normal human development for half the species.) At Without Diminishment, Sam Dagres considers the plight of the vast majority of children locked in to that minimum 12-year incarceration:

You’re sitting there, one eye on the clock, eagerly waiting for the bell to ring. How you crave the chime of that sweet-sounding bell, a ring marking the start of your allotted outdoor time. You rush outside, feel the sun on your skin, eat a snack reminding you of a world that exists on the other side of the fence. But for most of the day, you are sat, effectively immobile for 8 hours. Stillness is the highest virtue, and any violation leads to punishment and an ADHD diagnosis. Day in and day out, you wait for the last bell.

Most of us will have experienced this kind of imprisonment, befitting what crime, you may wonder? We are punished for the crime of being born into a society where all forms of care are by default institutional, a society whose “child care policy is adult policy, not early childhood policy”, as Katharine B. Stevens noted.

According to Statistics Canada, approximately 5.5 million students are enrolled in K–12 public schools, dwarfing the 67,000 who are home-schooled. Nearly 99 per cent of all school-aged children in Canada are currently institutionalised.

In 2025, 58 per cent of children aged 0 to 5 were in childcare facilities, representing approximately 1.4 million children. One-quarter of those were aged under 1.

As someone who attended public schools all my life, I never thought of it as anything but natural. But as I reach a point in my life where family formation is uppermost in my mind, I wonder whose interests are prioritised whenever I walk by a school and hear, not see, kids playing on the other side of a tall brick wall.

We do not leave it to children to decide very much for themselves, which means their interests are ours to safeguard. Luckily, the research exists: institutional, non-familial care is not what is best for most of our young.

The incomparable Institute for Family Studies recently enumerated the relevant studies, one of which is the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which followed 1,000 children from infancy through adulthood and found that “children who had spent at least 30 hours per week in those settings beginning in infancy had three times the rate of social-emotional difficulties, including lower social competence, higher externalising behavior, and more conflict with teachers and peers. These effects persisted through elementary school, and by adolescence appeared as impulsivity, risk-taking, and substance use.”

Similarly, studies of Quebec’s universal childcare system have shown that the programme “has been associated with increased anxiety, aggression, hyperactivity, worse parent-child relationships, and lower self-reported life satisfaction in adolescence. By young adulthood, the negative effects extended to a 22% increase in criminal conviction rates.”

The foundations of our emotional and cognitive lives are formed early on while we bond with caregivers, and early institutionalisation disrupts that. The emotional downsides resulting from the systematic separation between the young children and their mothers are not broadly grasped, since the opposite is widely believed. When I share my musings about home-schooling with my friends, without fail, I receive the unanimous response: “Aren’t you worried they’ll turn out weird?” To that I respond, “Have you been paying attention?”

We are living through an era of weird, surrounded by friendless, non-eye-contact-making, socially anxious individuals. Nowadays, most schools encourage gender exploration and, through intense anti-bullying campaigns, demand a near-total embrace of any and all quirks. Not to mention that these tiny balls of anxiety, for some reason, require Vietnam-War-vet-levels of pharmacological intervention. I had someone tell me, “In my current role, I feel more like a pharmacist than a teacher”.

We can attribute the explosion of weirdness to a whole host of factors, notably digital devices and their role in mass social atrophy, but the forced dislocation of young children from their families is the foundation for a lifetime of alienation.

August 12, 2026

“It might be Carney’s unconditional surrender to Trump, but it’d be worse under Poilievre”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I exaggerate a tad in my choice of headline, but Canada’s bought-and-paid-for relic media will always choose to present a spectacular Carney faceplant as being somehow better than any theoretical action by Poilievre. If Carney’s going to surrender to the Yanks unconditionally, it would obviously be far worse if the Leader of the Opposition had been PM instead. eLbOwS uP, everyone!:

The new Canadian trade flag – The Line

Well, it looks like our prime minister is losing his nerve, eh?

Reports are now leaking fast and furious that Trump’s surprise August 19 tariffs have worked to break our strategic patience. Canada is working to secure some kind of interim deal, and if the leaks are to be believed, we’re going to give the Americans essentially everything they want while they maintain most tariffs on us. It appears to be a shit deal for us, and one that puts us directly in the glide path toward vassal state.

Worse — and, to be frank, I do think this is the worst part of all of this — it’s the exact opposite of what we elected Mark Carney to do. When facing economic and political aggression from a neighbour and once-ally like the United States, surrender vs. resistance is a valid conversation to have. Given our circumstances, one could make a legitimate case for either choice. However, as a people, we did have that conversation, in the spring of 2025. We did make that choice. We chose resistance. We chose sacrifice. That was the premise of the last election, and that was the value proposition Mark Carney made for himself.

Instead, what we’ve actually done in the past year-and-a-half is a counter-productive middle path: yes, we’ve made moves toward strengthening our economy internally, and this is all to the good. But when it comes to measures that require a willingness to stand up to real power, all we’ve offered has been performative resistance in the form of angry social media sputtering and grandiose global speeches, followed in private by concession after concession. This has left us with the worst of both options. We’ve demonstrated that we lack the collective will to sustain real economic sacrifice. And we’ve just annoyed the Americans, which has clearly only increased their desire to make an example of us.

What we absolutely did not vote for was the prediction offered by Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group, a political risk analysis firm with long ties to Carney and the Liberals. Last year, Bremmer wrote: “Canadian leaders have a political incentive to put up a bigger fight because Trump’s threats toward Canada’s economy and sovereignty have sharply inflamed nationalist sentiment north of the border in the run-up to the April 28 elections. However, I expect Ottawa will quietly fold shortly after the vote to ensure that ongoing relations with the U.S. remain functional.”

Congratulations, Canada. You got punk’d.

In honesty, I can’t think of a worse strategy for achieving a remotely fair trade deal with the United States than the one Carney chose to follow. If he’d been dealing with George W. Bush, this plan might have worked, but I think that Bush was the last US president who would put up with the juvenile performative “strategy” Canada used. Barack Obama would have easily turned the tables, as the relic media loved (and still love) Obama more than they love maple syrup and oxygen. Even Joe Biden’s handlers could have highlighted just how J.V. Canada was acting. But for some reason, the Liberals decided that constantly pissing in Donald Trump’s cornflakes was a winning strategy. And now we’re looking at a maple-flavoured Appomattox Court House meeting … and Trump has no interest — quite the opposite, in fact — in being as generous to a defeated foe as Ulysses S. Grant was to Robert E. Lee.

August 11, 2026

How the Royal Navy’s budget cuts built foreign navies

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Cancon, Europe, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Warships & Warriors
Published 10 Apr 2026

When the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence faces a budget crisis, the rest of the world goes shopping. Welcome to Warships And Warriors! Today, we are exploring the global “Ghost Fleet” of the Royal Navy.

Through decades of cyclic Strategic Defence Reviews, the UK has repeatedly cut its fleet, selling off highly capable surface combatants, submarines, and massive amphibious assault ships decades before the end of their mechanical lifespans. In this video, we track down these decommissioned British warships to see how middle-power navies in South America, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia have transformed them.

From Brazil snapping up the Royal Navy’s amphibious heavyweights like HMS Ocean (now the Atlântico) and HMS Bulwark, to Chile bolting advanced missile systems onto ex-British Type 22 and Type 23 frigates, we uncover how foreign navies are gaining massive frontline capabilities at bargain prices. We also look at the strategic transfers of Upholder-class submarines to Canada, armed patrol vessels in Bangladesh, and the legally complex deployment of Sandown-class minehunters in the Black Sea.

0:00 – The Royal Navy Fire Sale
01:16 – Chapter 1: The Amphibious Heavyweights (Brazil)
04:31 – Chapter 2: The Frigates (Brazil, Chile & Romania)
07:16 – Chapter 3: The Submarines (Canada)
08:36 – Chapter 4: The Offshore Upgrades (Bangladesh & Philippines)
10:27 – Chapter 5: Clearing the Minefields (Lithuania, Greece, Ukraine & Estonia)
13:01 – Chapter 6: Mapping the Deep (Bangladesh)
13:48 – The Wrap-Up & The Tragic Fate of the Type 22 Batch 3
(more…)

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