Quotulatiousness

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…)

August 10, 2026

Was Canada’s Victoria-class submarine deal a massive procurement failure?

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Dominion Defence Review
Published 8 Aug 2026

Plagued by chronic low availability while also being expensive to maintain, the purchase of used British submarines seems to be a good reminder that a low sticker price isn’t everything …

August 9, 2026

The drift toward socialism in the west

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Europe, Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m reminded of that line from Kipling: “And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire”, as most western countries have had plenty of opportunities to observe socialism in the wild, yet there’s always the chorus that it “wasn’t real socialism” and this time it’ll be great:

Socialism survives because it flatters the most powerful human instinct you have: the desire to believe that good intentions produce good outcomes.

The engine is pure motivated reasoning: not ignorance, not stupidity.

Venezuela collapsed from one of Latin America’s wealthiest economies into a country where citizens lost an average of 11 kilograms of body weight in 2017 because food disappeared. The Soviet Union murdered tens of millions in gulags and deliberately starved Ukraine in 1932-33. Cuba turned a middle-income Caribbean nation into a prison island. West and East Germany, North and South Korea. The pattern repeats, and yet the ideology never takes the blame.

Here’s why. Socialism’s defenders always move the goalposts. When the USSR fell, they said it wasn’t “real” socialism. When Venezuela imploded under Chavez and Maduro’s nationalizations, they blamed American sanctions. There is always an excuse, and that excuse always points away from the central planning mechanism itself.

Ludwig von Mises nailed this in 1920 in his essay on economic calculation. Without prices set by voluntary exchange, planners cannot allocate resources rationally. You get shortages and surpluses simultaneously, not because bureaucrats are evil, but because they are operating blind. The information simply does not exist in a form they can use.

Mises’s argument is uncomfortable in a specific way: it says the system cannot work regardless of who runs it. You cannot fix central planning by finding better central planners.

The real villain is the intellectual class, professors and politicians who build careers selling the promise of top-down coordination. They capture universities, media institutions, and government agencies, and they teach each new generation that the solution to failed socialism is more socialism.

Socialism survives because the people promoting it face zero personal cost when it fails. The Venezuelan peasant starves. The tenured professor in Boston gets a book deal.

That gap between who sells the idea and who pays for it is what keeps the whole rotten project alive.

Celina notes that a recent Cato Instutute report shows uncomfortably strong support for both socialism and communism in the youngest groups:

This summer, America celebrated the 250th anniversary of its founding. At the same time, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank whose entire institutional purpose is the defence of free markets, commissioned a survey with Morning Consult of 2,253 American adults. The survey included the usual questions: pride in country, knowledge of what the anniversary commemorated, and belief in the American Dream.

Besides the typical civic questions, the Cato questionnaire also asked Americans their feelings on communism, socialism and capitalism. The responses were quite explosive; the survey’s authors reported that: 21 percent of Americans said they held a favourable view of communism.1

Not socialism but communism. The word itself, which to the older Western mind is attached to the gulag and the Stasi and the Cultural Revolution, the one that American politics spent literally seven decades treating as roughly synonymous with treason.

Among Americans aged 18 to 29, the figure was 38 percent. In that cohort, favourable views of communism (38 percent) ran only seven points behind favourable views of capitalism (45 percent), and the generation was the only age group in which favourable views of communism actually edged out unfavourable ones, 38 to 36. Socialism, meanwhile, outpolled capitalism among the young outright: 53 percent favourable against capitalism’s 45. Also, the generational gradient was almost perfectly linear. Favourability toward communism fell from 38 percent among Gen Z to 29 percent among younger millennials, 19 percent among the middle-aged, 13 percent among those approaching retirement, and just 5 percent among seniors, the Americans old enough to remember duck-and-cover drills, Brezhnev, and the Berlin Wall as a piece of functioning infrastructure.

The 2026 Cato survey was not a fluke, which would be plainly obvious to people with even a slight interest in American politics. We also know this was not a fluke because the year before, in March of 2025, a Cato/YouGov survey of 2,000 adults found 34 percent of under-30s favourable toward communism and 62 percent favourable toward socialism. Cato’s senior editor Michael Chapman recorded roughly 52 million Americans aged 18 to 29, reporting a 34 percent favourability figure implying something on the order of eighteen million young people willing to say a kind word about an ideology that the Black Book of Communism credits with approximately 100 million deaths.

If you know a bit about the history of communism in America, you can understand why these numbers landed the way they did. American attitudes toward communism for most of the twentieth century were not just slightly negative; they were extremely so. Anti-communism was one of the few genuinely bipartisan commitments in American life, embraced by Cold War liberals and conservatives alike. Congress quite literally passed the Communist Control Act of 1954, effectively outlawing the Communist Party. Having any public sympathy for communism was politically and professionally fatal, as evidenced by the loyalty oaths, blacklists, and the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). When Gallup asked Americans in 1949 what “socialism” meant to them, the largest share answered on the lines of “government ownership of the means of production”, and they wanted no part of it. Communism, the harder and more explicit term, was too unthinkable during that time to even be asked in the poll.2

    https://www.cato.org/blog/new-poll-nearly-half-americans-dont-know-what-americas-250th-celebrating
    https://news.gallup.com/vault/240749/gallup-vault-americans-views-socialism-1949-1965.aspx

August 5, 2026

Canada decides to treat online opinions as matters for police enforcement

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

It’s never a good sign when my region features in a news story, like this post from Exiled Mountie, discussing Canada’s Bill C-9 and the way it encourages local police forces to treat lawful online speech as a matter for police involvement:

As I watch the reaction to Bill C-9 unfold in real time on social media, I cannot help but think that another important line has been crossed in Canada.

Most of us saw the writing on the wall months ago and tried to warn others by screaming it from the rooftops. But as with Covid, nobody listened, and we were probably called racists for doing so. So here we are, another important battle lost.

From a legal point of view, we are now becoming almost indistinguishable from the system in the UK, and that’s a frightening thought.

In the UK, police have recorded non-crime “hate” incidents against schoolchildren for classroom insults, despite no criminal offence having taken place. The system finally became so absurd that the British government recently announced that it would scrap the practice in order to stop police wasting their time on petty arguments. Just imagine the absurdity of this: police resources being tied up over petty squabbles in the schoolyard!

We have now entered a time where the government has extreme control of our speech.

So much so, that we’re even being warned that criticizing or boycotting a company based on moral or ethical reasons can be treated as a hate incident, even when police openly acknowledge that no criminal offence has occurred. From there, the matter can still be reported and subjected to further police investigation to determine if the elements of a hate crime are met.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the twilight zone. We have arrived in the progressive future the Left has been pushing for so long, and it sucks.

The danger here is not only what will eventually result in charges. It is that police are inviting complaints and opening the door to police attention over expression that is not criminal at all.

Durham Police openly acknowledges that these so-called hate or bias incidents are not criminal offences. Yet it still encourages people to report them and even uses the lawful boycott of companies supporting the 2SLGBTQI+ community as an example.

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