Quotulatiousness

September 10, 2026

The tragedy of the commons at sea

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Europe, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

When a valuable commodity isn’t directly owned by anyone, the incentives are for everyone to grab as much of the commodity as they can. Nobody will preserve it, because they wouldn’t get the benefit from it: it would be shared among all the other users. Fishing grounds outside coastal waters are valuable commodities that nobody owns:

Nobody owns the ocean floor off the Georges Bank, and so between 1960 and 1994 the New England cod population collapsed by roughly 70 percent while every fishing fleet on the Atlantic raced to pull up fish before a competitor did. This race is the entirely predictable consequence of absent ownership.

Garrett Hardin formalized the problem in 1968, but the mechanism is older than economics itself. When no individual owns a resource, no individual bears the full cost of depleting it. The cost gets distributed across everyone; the benefit goes straight to whoever acts first. You extract as much as you physically can before the next boat arrives. So does the next boat. The resource disappears, and everyone stands around pointing fingers at greed. The actual culprit is the property rights regime, or rather the absence of one.

State managers offer themselves as the solution: quotas, licensing boards, regulatory agencies. The Atlantic fisheries commission issued exactly these instruments. The cod is still not back. Bureaucrats lack the price signals, local knowledge, and personal stakes that make stewardship rational. A regulator who mismanages a fishery keeps his salary; an owner who does the same loses his capital.

Private ownership forces the owner to think in time. Iceland extended exclusive fishing rights to its own coastal fishermen in 1975, drove foreign trawlers out, and now holds one of the best-managed cod stocks in the North Atlantic. Property rights did what Brussels-style quota spreadsheets could not: they tied the fisherman’s future income to the health of the stock today.

Common ownership produces a sprint to zero.

September 9, 2026

The day after counter-tariff Tuesday

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

Yesterday, the Canadian counter-tariffs to the latest round of US tariffs kicked in. Maxime Bernier put it this way:

Canadians wake up today to a brand new tax hike; courtesy of PM Carney’s “dollar-for-dollar” countertariffs.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a weapon against Trump. It’s a tax on YOU.

Every time you buy steel, a fridge, manicure products or a laundry machine, etc. … you’re paying more so Ottawa can feel tough.

The Liberals call this “standing up to Trump”. I call it economic sabotage.

They’re taxing Canadians to feel good about “punishing” Washington. And who pays the bill? Families, workers, and businesses right here at home.

Trump started this pointless trade war. But two wrongs don’t make a right; they just make everything more expensive.

You can’t fight tariffs with more tariffs. That’s just stupid.

Happy Tax Day, everyone. Thanks, Carney.

Carney’s plan all along has been to push Trump into saying and doing things that give Carney and the Liberals even more Boomer support. Pretty much controlling the relic media allows the government to massage the stories so that Dear Leader is never in the wrong and “the Bad Orange Man hates you and wants to destroy you”. Canadian boomers are among the last people in the world to realize that they’ve been systematically gaslighted since Justin Trudeau ran for Liberal leader … and the penny still hasn’t dropped. Enough of them are already psychologically prepared to destroy what’s left of the economy, Thelma & Louise style, if Carney invites them to. And he’s going to.

John Carter responds to a Ben Woodfinden article in the National Post, blaming dissident Canadians for not rallying behind Mark Carney to … do exactly the same sort of performative elbozo pantomime that the Boomer Liberals have been doing for over a year?

This misses the mark in a subtle but interesting way. The author invokes the concept of oikophobia against the Canadian online right for joining in (actually initiating) American mockery of Canada, arguing that Canadian rightists are themselves oikophobic for not instead supporting the Carnites.

This is incoherent. The Liberal regime is itself oikophobic, loudly so. Oikophobia is explicit Canadian government policy, as the author himself tacitly acknowledges by noting that we pointed out the hypocrisy of Canadian politicians decrying Trump’s lame Lake America stunt after a decade-long orgy of renaming every school, square, and street in the country in the name of a Woke ideology imported straight from America. That’s to say nothing of replacement migration, and racial preference systems that make white Canadians second class citizens. You can’t be oikophobic against the oikophobes.

There are certainly slopulist 51st staters out there, but their influence in the Canadian right is actually marginal, largely confined to a rump of lolcow Alberta separatists. The energy is all in Canadian Loyalism, and that is a different animal entirely.

The reason we’re happy to pile on to the Canadian political elite when the Americans mock them isn’t because we want to be America. It’s because we’re disgusted by the state of the country.

Trump can excoriate the Canadian military for being fat and woke because it is. That isn’t Trump’s fault. That’s because of decades of sabotage and social engineering by the Liberal Party.

Trump can joke about annexation because the Canadian military is weak. Again, that isn’t Trump’s fault. That’s the fault of the Laurentian elite, the very people now insisting that they can turn things around.

If Canada had a serious government, we’d be taken seriously. We don’t, and haven’t since Pearson at least. As a direct result of the deeply unserious clowns running the country into the ground, Canada is poor, defenseless, sclerotic, and despondent. Every time Trump makes fun of us, the very fact that his insults land is a condemnation of the elites that brought our beautiful country to this shameful condition.

Saving Canada requires circulating the elite.

And that’s why we pile on.

And since I try not to overtax my non-Canadian readers (the vast majority of you) with too many separate maple-flavoured posts, here are some sensible suggestions from Matt Gurney about fixing our own problems — which are legion, and mostly self-inflicted — rather than pretending that Trump is the problem:

… there’s a bigger issue at play here than just managing the relationship with America. What the hell do we do as Canadians?

Don’t think about the States at all. Don’t think about Trump. Just think about Canadians in Canada. What should we be doing for ourselves? Even if the trade war does eventually end, our relationship with the United States is going to require generations to fix. Some very fundamental assumptions about Canadian, well, everything, now need to be reconsidered. I’m the guy who wrote the column about our expectations being a problem, and I’m still having a hard time keeping up with this.

But if there is one thing that I could suggest we should prioritize, it’s simply fixing the problems we have in this country. Really. Just … do the right things. Fix the problems. Just like virtue is its own reward, making good decisions is always a good decision. It’s bizarrely not something we’ve been good at lately, though, and it’s probably actually going to get harder for a while. In fact, a patriotic rallying-around-the-flag effect is very likely to make it even harder than it already is to get Canadians to actually admit there are major problems in this country, and then insist that the politicians get serious about fixing them.

I’ve been thinking about writing this column for a couple of weeks. Last month I was in the United States for some family business. I was actually there the day Carney called our negotiators home, and I returned to Canada the next day; I joked with some friends that, much like our negotiating team, I was packing up and leaving the United States to show them we meant business.

But one of the things I did notice on my visit to the United States, which included stops in two major cities, was that those American cities were much cleaner than my hometown of Toronto, and in much better repair.

And the especially bizarre thing was, one of these cities was Detroit.

Yes, that Detroit. Astute Line readers — the smartest and best-read people in the whole wide world — will recall that Detroit has not often been held up as an exemplar of civic governance and urban success.

But the downtown looked good. It was safe, clean, well-patrolled; I’m not exactly a regular visitor, but I do pop in often enough to have noted real improvement in the state of things there, even compared to my last visit, which was only about a year ago.

The other major city I visited, Chicago, has always struck me as the best apples-to-apples comparison my hometown of Toronto has with a U.S. city. Chicago has a lot of visible problems. I’m not trying to gloss those over; one thing I quickly noted was a roughly Toronto-esque number of people wandering the streets in evident mental-health crisis, shouting at nothing. But overall, Chicago had much less visible homelessness and was in a considerably better state of repair and cleanliness than my hometown. It wasn’t subtle. Cleaner streets, in better condition, with fewer people obviously living on them. Toronto did not compare well.

And just when the hell did that happen?

We can’t blame Trump for our laughably protectionist inter-provincial trade barriers. We can’t blame Trump because we’re functionally incapable of building a pipeline to bring Canadian oil and natural gas to Canadian markets. We can’t blame Trump for our ever-less-functional public healthcare systems. We can’t blame Trump for our ever-less-appealing market conditions for foreign investment. We can’t blame Trump for our deteriorating relationship with First Nations groups. These are all things that need to be fixed by Canadians. In Canada. No matter who might be occupying the Oval Office in Washington, DC.

Update: Added missing URL to John Carter’s post on X.

September 7, 2026

An “exit tax”? What next, internal passports?

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A few months back, there was a brief online reaction to the Liberal Party idea of imposing a ridiculously high “exit tax” on young Canadians taking jobs in other countries — and by “other countries” they really only meant the United States. I dismissed it at the time as just someone letting their Liberal freak flag fly … but:

Jesus Christ. These boomer leaflibs, man.

It doesn’t occur to him to ask why highly trained Canadian engineers would rather work in the US. Actually no, he tacitly admits this: they get paid more. Why is that? Why can’t they get paid well in Canada, putting their skills to work here, developing innovative, world-leading technologies right at home in Canada?

The answer is obvious. Because there is no opportunity in Canada. It’s all but impossible to develop high tech industry here. The regulations are too thick, and all the available investment capital gets sucked up into real estate development.

Maybe Canada should try and fix that, so that Canada is actually an attractive country for talented young Canadians?

But nah fuck those kids, we should just charge them a half million dollar exit tax so if they can’t pay that they can just let their dreams die and get a job at BMO.

Oh and at the same time we should flood Canada with “world leading talent” (from Calcutta), in order to make it that much more impossible for Canadian engineers to find employment in their fields at home.

September 4, 2026

Loyalist Canada to Liberal Canada, a political devolution

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

On Substack Notes, John Carter discusses the old, stable Canada that the Liberals have spent sixty years trying to destroy, with great success, sadly.

For all intents and purposes, post-1965 Liberal Canada is a completely different country from the Loyalist Canada that it erased. Different flag, different basis for moral legitimacy, different constitution even.

Liberal Canada loves to wear poppies on Remembrance Day, but this is stolen valour. Liberal Canada has never won a single war. Loyalist Canada won every war it fought in.

Liberal Canada built no great works. Most of the infrastructure of Canada was constructed before Liberal Canada. The Trans Canada Highway, the Trans Canada Railroad, the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant, the Toronto subway, the Montreal Metro — all were built or initiated by Loyalist Canada. Liberal Canada completed the projects that began under Loyalist Canada, but initiated none of its own, and at best can be said to maintain the infrastructure it inherited … badly. Liberal Canada cannot even build a pipeline to bring its oil to market. Liberal Canada cannot even refine its own oil.

Loyalist Canada built out an organizational infrastructure of Crown Corporations which were once the envy of the world. Liberal Canada dismantled them, giving us toll roads owned by foreigners.

Loyalist Canada built all of this infrastructure, and won all of those wars, without incurring a national debt. The national debt was accrued entirely by Liberal Canada, and is entirely a function of social welfare programs it uses to turn Canadians into domesticated clients of Liberal Party patronage, and indentured servants of the banks.

Then of course there are the demographics. Loyalist Canada was a white Canada, a British and French Canada, and a fecund Canada, with one of the world’s highest birth rates. Liberal Canada is a barren Canada, with one of the world’s lowest birth rates, and it has presided over the systematic replacement of the Canadian people with Indians, Chinese, Africans, and Muslims, to whom it moreover extends preference for social services, university admissions, and employment. Liberal Canada makes Canadians second class citizens in the land their ancestors built.

Liberal Canada is a parasitic entity that is rapidly killing its host. It is an exhausted Brezhnevian sclerocracy that destroys ambition because even the most modest of ambitions are a threat to the soft men, the mild bureaucrats and glassy-eyed ideologues who subsist on the arbitrage of national decline. Liberal Canada is weak, and so it demands that its subjects be even weaker, as this is the only way for weak men to rule.

Liberal Canada is not the real Canada, and Canadians are beginning to wake up from this long nightmare of mismanagement and institutionalized treason, and to remember who they are.

September 3, 2026

John Carter reports on “the largest gathering of Canadian nationalists in generations”

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

Canadian Red Ensign 1921-1957

Having been peripherally involved in party politics in Canada since the mid 1970s, I hope you’ll forgive my occasional bout of cynicism about getting political change in this country through peaceful means … the long comfortable decades under the US nuclear umbrella has allowed Canadian political parties to get ever more unserious and willing to pretend that taking a two-and-a-half generations-long vacation from the world of realpolitik has been somehow our birthright. I love my adopted homeland and it is distressing to see how easily the Liberal propagandists (supported by the state-funded relic media) can get elbow-flapping choruses of Canadian boomers to chant the slogans and blandly accept the grand theft from their children and grandchildren without a blush of shame.

John Carter says there may still be hope that enough Canadians have recognized the awful situation we’re in and are willing to do what’s necessary to change our collective ways and get back onto a path of constructive nationalism rather than the tame opposition of the current Conservative Party:

I don’t want to overstate things, but I think this was an historic moment.

It was also a hell of a ride.

The Dominion Society was founded barely over a year ago, and rapidly exploded to over three thousand members across the country. It is a peaceful and explicitly non-partisan political advocacy group dedicated to advancing the cause of remigration within Canadian civil society. So far its activities have consisted mainly of selling branded merchandise, putting up posters, cleaning up parks, rallies to oppose Canadian towns from tearing down statues of Sir John A MacDonald and Samuel de Champlain, and a whole lot of social media campaigns.

To anyone in possession of some shred of sanity, all of this would seem to be entirely unobjectionable and non-threatening. To the Canadian government, which long ago released its hold on the last tenuous threads of sanity, this is a five-alarm political fire. They are, it seems, terrified of the Dominion Society to the point of hysteria.

Until recently the Canadian media – which by virtue of a generous state funding apparatus is de facto state media – has for the most part done its best to ignore the Dominion Society, treating it as an irrelevant collection of disgruntled kids who aren’t worth reporting on. That isn’t to say that the political class was not aware of DomSoc. Their founder, Daniel Tyrie, showed up at the Conservative Party conference several months ago with a number of supporters, trolling the Conservative Party of Canada with a big “Conserve What?” sign outside the front door of the venue, showing a picture of CPC leader Pierre Poillievre wearing a Sikh temple hat during one of his many ethnic pandering junkets. The CPC very much noticed this, and were not impressed.

Since then Tyrie and his supporters have sparred with various CPC politicians on X, ratioing them on a fairly regular basis. On February 15th, the Flag Day that marks the 1965 transition from the original Canadian flag to the Maple Leaf, the House of Commons account got thoroughly ensignmogged by a swarm of Canadian nationalists declaring that the Red Ensign was their real flag.

Seriously, just look at the replies and quote tweets. An unending sea of red ensigns.

The flag day ensignmogging was a remarkable eruption of nationalist energy, and it’s very difficult to imagine that the Canadian government has not noticed the sudden popularity of the Red Ensign and the Canadian shield as symbols of Canadian nationalism. This use of these discarded symbols makes Canadian politicians palpably anxious. They have spent many decades patiently erasing Canada’s past in order to socially engineer the wild colonials into the universal economic subject, and the revival of ethnically particular medieval heraldry signals something stirring within the deep recesses of the mass psyche. The natives are restless. Old and terrible gods are awakening.

The question of course is what they can do about that. So far the answer has been “not much that matters”. It would be one thing if the Dominion Society was a bad optics skinhead cult called the White Reich Front or something, brandishing sonnenrads on their shield walls as they formed up for street battle with Trantifa. This would be easily dealt with as something obviously frightening and foreign. But the Dominion Society is none of these things. It is named the Dominion Society, as in the Dominion of Canada – Canada’s official, full name, being a Dominion of the British Crown. Its symbolism draws upon Canada’s own traditional symbolism, symbols that are indeed still quietly used by the Canadian government itself, and it is therefore quite impossible for the regime to characterize DomSoc as something frightening and foreign on aesthetic grounds alone. Worse still, DomSoc is very smart about how it operates. They don’t march through the streets shouting and getting in fights: they’re polite and friendly, focusing on media activism and political pressure campaigns. Their messaging stays strictly within legal boundaries. Their over-arching goal is direct and simple: to popularize the concept of remigration, normalizing it as a topic in the national conversation, such that voters will begin spontaneously raising the issue with politicians: “If we can bring people in, why can’t we send them back? Planes fly in any direction.”

Canada’s “softer, gentler, more inclusive, more sensitive” cadet movement

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

I was in the army cadets from 1972-76. We were still wearing British-style battledress uniforms rather than the CF Green delivery driver uniforms, but we weren’t in cadets for the pseudo-scouting experience … we wanted to be army cadets. Not long after I left cadets for the reserves, the leadership vision changed to (I assume) make cadet organizations more “inclusive”, as John Carter describes:

This unfortunately isn’t new. I was in Army Cadets back in the 90s. Even then female fatbodies in the adult officer corps weren’t unknown, and cadets was coed.

I didn’t actually mind the coed aspect at the time, I picked up a lot of my hs gfs through cadets. What I did mind was how ridiculously soft it was. Weapons training, in particular, was essentially impossible to obtain unless you joined the marksmanship team (which I did for that specific reason), and even then they only gave us ancient Lee-Enfields with .22 inserts. We did a lot of camping and rucking, including in winter, which was great, but aside from the exercises being on army bases and conducted in combat fatigues using old surplus kit, there was almost nothing to mark it out as military in character. Nor for that matter was there anything in the way of physical conditioning.

I wasn’t the only one annoyed by that. The kids who joined cadets wanted to be little warriors. They wanted to crawl through mud with a knife clenched between their teeth, they wanted to get emotionally abused as they struggled through obstacle courses, and they wanted to handle firearms. There was a rumor that all of us had signed an agreement that in event of war, if the rest of the military had been wiped out, we could be called up for the last line of defence. I doubt that was true but we thought it was the coolest thing.

Instead, the only cadets who were allowed to handle C7s were the honour guard, who were issued (rubberized) rifles before parades.

Unfortunately it didn’t matter what the cadets themselves wanted. The adults had decided that softer, gentler, more inclusive, more sensitive was the name of the game. I didn’t make the connection with the presence of female cadets at the time, though in retrospect that’s obvious. What was obvious to me at the time however was that this was all downstream of liberal females aghast at the very concept of a militarized youth, and weak men who couldn’t tell the females to shut their fool mouths.

As an epilogue, when I turned 17 I joined the Army Reserve, only to discover that this infernal feminine softening had long since infected the military, as well.

The cadet Lee-Enfields firing .22LR were an important part of our weapons training … although due to a weird bit of timing, the very first rifle I ever fired was a full-size .303 Lee Enfield that seemed to have enough kick to push me right out of the rifle pit when I fired it (I was small for a 12-year-old). We hadn’t yet learned about hearing protectors, so my ears were ringing for about an hour after the range trip.

September 1, 2026

Despite police efforts, the Dominion Society successfully holds their conference

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

The Dominion Society of Canada had planned to hold their conference at a venue in Hamilton, but Hamilton police took it upon themselves to harass the owners of rental facilities to ensure that the conference could not take place. Despite active police intervention, the organizers found an appropriate site in Burlington and the event went ahead after all:

It’s always a good look when the local police are trying to intimidate businesses to prevent a peaceful legal gathering from taking place.

On August 29th, the Dominion Society of Canada (DSC) hosted a sold-out conference bringing together domestic and international speakers.Taking place in Burlington, the event was originally announced for Hamilton and was elevated to the status of international incident by legally dubious political policing, the likely unconstitutional interference of federal agencies, and numerous violations of political neutrality by local municipalities and charitable organizations.

Launched in 2025 and swelling to several thousand members by 2026, the DSC exists to advocate for immigration restriction and Canadian nationalism. Controversially, this includes a ten-year halt to immigration and the deportation of millions of non-citizen residents.

DSC’s first conference, this was a deciding moment for the increasingly notorious organization and was strongly opposed by left-wing and anti-nationalist groups, including local civic and social planning organizations, the Jewish rights and advocacy group B’nai Brith, Hope Not Hate, and the state-backed Canadian Anti Hate Network.

The event nearly passed with little notice. But moderates and liberals across the country were alarmed at a chilling assault on free assembly and expression mobilized against DSC at all levels of power.

Ahead of the event, the Hamilton Police Service urged venues “to consider the impact this event and its messaging may have on the broader community when making decisions about hosting it” and claimed “the messaging associated with DomCon is divisive and exclusionary and can negatively impact the sense of safety and belonging within our community”.

Dominion Society founder Daniel Tyrie condemned the move to use police resources to dissuade venues from hosting the conference: “Today we learn that they are going venue-by-venue to pressure businesses into canceling on us or refuse our booking. Is this an appropriate use of police resources in a city as dysfunctional as Hamilton?”

In a call with Wire Tap Media, Inspector Darren Murphy denied that Hamilton Police Service (HPS) were engaged in political intimidation, and confirmed the steps taken by HPS to keep DSC out of Hamilton.

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.

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