Canada has never fought a direct war against the United States. However, before confederation (1867) when Canada became a self-governing dominion, the territories that would later form that dominion, which had been under the control of the British, engaged in a small number of military conflicts with the United States (or as they were known previously, the Thirteen American Colonies). The total is four, if we only count significant engagements which involved organized forces. Economic wars, or trade disputes, are another story. We’ll get there.
The Aroostook War (1838–1839) drew no blood. The conflict concerned the Maine-New Brunswick border and was resolved amicably by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. A quarter of a century later the Fenian Raids (1866–1871) saw the Irish-American Fenian Brotherhood make multiple non-state sanctioned attacks in British North America in an effort to sway Britain to withdraw forces from Ireland.
The other far more consequential military struggles between the two North American friends and neighbours occurred first in the late eighteenth century, and second in the early nineteenth century. During the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), which saw limited involvement of areas north of the 49th parallel, British North America thwarted a particularly serious invasion by the Americans in 1775 known as The Battle of Quebec.
It was fought during a snowstorm on December 31, 1775 (one of few battles fought in such miserable conditions during the revolutionary war). The American intention was to conscript the British colony, which today forms the province of Quebec (and also included parts of Ontario) into their struggle against the British. The Patriots of the Thirteen Colonies had earlier that year begun rebelling against British taxation and governance. They surmised that the French-speaking Quebec settlers, disaffected with the imposition of British rule as it was laid out in the 1763 Treaty of Paris (which ended the Seven Years War), would join the American cause. A significant miscalculation, to say the least.
The battle was fought on two fronts against a British garrison of 1800 soldiers led by British commander, Governor Guy Carleton. The combined total of American troops was only 1200. The first front was commanded by Brigadier General Richard Montgomery, who led his troops in an attack of the Lower Town from the south. The second assault occurred from the north and was led by Colonel Benedict Arnold (who would later become an infamous American traitor).
Montgomery and several officers were killed instantly on their initial advance. This sparked a retreat amongst his remaining soldiers. Arnold had slightly more luck. His army penetrated northern defences but were stymied in the narrow streets of Quebec. During fighting Arnold was wounded, after which he handed the command to Daniel Morgan. After hours of fighting, Morgan and his men were forced to surrender. The Americans lost the battle decisively ensuring Quebec would remain a loyalist stronghold.
The second of the two significant conflicts involving British North America and the Thirteen American Colonies was the infamous War of 1812 – a more well-known period of antagonism between proto-Canada and her American neighbours.
Here is a topline summary with some extra history concerning the U.S.-Canada border (the world’s longest undefended border), from Terry Glavin:
The War of 1812 — which the Americans still pretend they won — was officially concluded with the Treaty of Ghent in 1814. Then came the Rush-Bagot Pact of 1817 and the Convention of 1818, which set the border at the 49th parallel.1
The War of 1812 took place during Britain’s struggle against Napoleonic France. The two most famous Canadian battles from this tragic conflict were the Battle of Queenston Heights and the burning of York (now Toronto) – British troops would even the score of the latter by burning Washington D.C.
The war was unpopular. Like today, there were too many bonds between the Americans and proto-Canadians. But also like today, with Canada and the United States once again bickering over trade and various political interests, the disagreements were accompanied by a reluctance to engage in hostilities.
From Pierre Burton’s War of 1812:
At the outset, it was a gentleman’s war. Officers on opposing sides met for parlays under flags of truce, offered hospitality, exchanged cordialities, murmured the hopes that hostilities would quickly end.2
No matter what time period we are examining, we can never forget that Britons, Canadians and Americans are all first cousins. Yes we disagree from time to time, sometimes we even fight. But always over some unfortunate political dispute, and never for each other’s annihilation.
In 1812, for a variety of reasons, the Americans, especially a minority of hawkish elites in Washington, felt they had no other choice but to invade the north. Some of them felt it would be easy. An aggravating factor concerned Britain’s support of Indian tribes in the north west, at a time when the Americans were aggressively expanding into that region. But also, during their imperial contest with France, the British were impressing sailors in the American navy (forcing them to join British forces), because they considered them traitors of the British crown. Further, they blocked key trade ports under Napoleon’s control, disrupting trade between America and France.
Isn’t it curious how trade so often appears as the rift in Canadian-American relations? Further examples include: the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 which allowed for free trade of natural resources between the American and British colonies. However, the Americans abrogated that treaty in 1866 partly out of frustration at perceived British support of the confederacy after the Civil War. A post-confederation trade war with the Americans ensued after Canada’s first Prime Minister John A. MacDonald adopted the National Policy in 1879, which imposed high tariffs to protect Canadian industry. Triggering the Americans to respond with tariffs of their own.
James Pew, “Canadians and our ties to Americans”, Woke Watch Canada, 2025-03-30.
1. Because of the day that’s in it – by Terry Glavin
2. Pierre Berton’s War of 1812.
July 4, 2025
QotD: US-Canadian conflict before Confederation
July 3, 2025
Bill Slim, the most forward-looking British commander of WW2
At The War Room, Dr. Robert Lyman explains how and why General (later Field Marshal) William Slim was able to turn around British and allied military fortunes in Burma and drive the Japanese out of India to their eventual defeat:
Field Marshal Sir William Slim (1891-1970), during his time as GOC XIVth Army.
Portrait by No. 9 Army Film & Photographic Unit via Wikimedia Commons.
“Burma and the Birth of Modern Warfare” is the subtitle to my 2004 book and PhD about General Slim’s command of the 14th Army in Burma during the last war, titled Slim, Master of War, a use of Sun Tzu’s description of a “heaven-born” commander. It may appear a rather grand claim, and perhaps it is, but the purpose of the subtitle reflects that fact that Slim’s conduct of operations in India and Burma in 1944 and 1945 represented an entirely new style of warfighting to that experienced by the British Army during the war. Instead of looking back to the lessons of World War One, Slim’s conduct of operations looked forward to reflect a style of warfare that would only be adopted as formal doctrine by the British Army in the 1980s. In the mid-1940s it remained alien to the vast bulk of similar British military experience and understanding.
My argument wasn’t that Slim was the best general who had ever commanded men in the history of warfare. That may or may not be true, but for the sake of my argument is irrelevant. My proposition, rather, is that:
Slim was the foremost British exponent in the Second World War of the “indirect approach” and that in his conduct of operations in 1944 and 1945 he provided a clear foreshadowing of “manoeuvre warfare”.
My idea, which first saw expression in my 2004 book, has been developed since then in my subsequent writings, including that of Japan’s Last Bid for Victory, which deals with the great events in the Assam and Manipur in 1944 (2011) and A War of Empires (2021). A major reason for the continuing amnesia in British military thinking about the warfighting characteristics of the Burma Campaign – apart from the fact that it is a long way to go for a staff ride – seems to be the fact that Slim’s style of warfighting remained largely alien to the British Army’s doctrinal precepts until the late 1980s. Until then, Slim’s strategic conceptions had been considered an aberration, and Slim himself regarded merely as the epitome of a fine military leader, and nothing more. Then, in a doctrinal revolution which began in the 1980s, the old firepower-based foundations – which themselves were largely a product of Montgomery’s approach to war in 1944 and 1945 – in which the supreme military virtue was the effective and coordinated application of force, were replaced. This revolution in doctrine and thinking about warfighting exchanged the old foundations with new ones based on an entirely different conception, that of manoeuvre at the operational level of war, in which notions of subtlety, guile and psychological dislocation came to be emphasised in an entirely new and refreshing way. My belief is that it was the effective and pragmatic employment of manoeuvre at the operational level of war by Slim in Burma that was the direct cause of the extraordinary victories the 14th Army achieved in 1944 and 1945 and which led to the two greatest defeats the Japanese Army suffered in the field in the Second World War, the first at Imphal-Kohima in India in 1944 and the second at Mandalay-Meiktila in Burma in 1945. My argument I suppose is that Slim’s exercise of command in Burma makes him not merely a fine example of a “manoeuvrist” commander but in actuality the template for modern manoeuvrist command.
[…]
First, the 14th Army was the only truly joint formation in the British armed forces during WW2. Nothing else, in North Africa, Italy or North-West Europe came close to it. Slim insisted on nothing less than full integration. Not only were headquarters joint, but operational and tactic delivery was also joint. At every level of command air and land headquarters were completely interlinked. I became convinced of this fact when I discovered that the RAF and the Army even shared messes! Strategic air transport, winning the air war, the operational reach and flexibility provided by air power underwrote Slim’s conception of battle, to the extent that the senior RAF officer in the theatre ruefully concluded in 1945, and I quote, that:
Slim was quicker to grasp the potentialities and value of air support in the jungles of Burma than most Air Force officers.
There was no snobbery and no shibboleths with Slim: if it worked, it was pressed into action.
[…]
Professor Dixon argues [in On the Psychology of Military Incompetence] that, unusually for a senior commander of his ilk in WW2, Slim was non-ethnocentric. He had no intrinsic prejudices about the virtues of one race over another. Slim, after all, was an officer of the Indian Army, and I have yet to come across any evidence that British regimental officers of the Indian Army regarded their soldiers in any way inferior to themselves. He was commonly known to those who served under him as “Uncle Bill” from the special affinity British troops had to him: the remarkable fact, however, was that at least 87% of his Army of several hundred thousand men recalled him as “Cha Cha Slim Sahib”: 14th Army was, after all, very largely Indian, Gurkha and West and East African. I certainly cannot think of any other Indian Army general who had such an impact on British troops. He became, of course, Chief of the Imperial General Staff following Field Marshal Montgomery, in 1948, which securely establishes this feat. On that note, I cannot conceive of “Uncle Bernard” when referring to Field Marshal Montgomery!
The Burma campaign was as much a struggle for mastery of logistics as it was a struggle for mastery on the battlefield, and it was about risk as much as it was about adherence to logistical principles. Slim had an implicit understanding of the constraints placed on warfare by the demands of logistics. Great efforts were made to increase the quantity of supplies to Burma. Railways were extended, roads built and surfaced, sunken ferries refloated and repaired, barges and rafts built for use on the numerous waterways. In this regard Archibald Nye, the VCIGS under Alan Brooke, regarded Slim’s mastery of logistics to be the most significant measure of his greatness as commander of 14 Army in Burma:
He never had enough to do what he had to do and this … is the measure of his greatness.
The practice of war in Burma by Slim was so startling in its modernity, and unlike any other pattern of warfighting by operational level British commanders in the war. My view of Slim as a commander can be interpreted at two levels. He was, first of all, a great commander and leader. Being a master of strategy, of logistics, of technical proficiency and so on are important in themselves when considering the nature of leadership in war, but by themselves they remain insufficient. Successful military command requires someone who can, through dint of personality and inspirational leadership, wield all of the components of fighting power together so that an extraordinary result transpires. What marks Slim out from the crowd was much more than just his winning of a succession of extraordinary battles. His strength lay in his ability to produce a decisive effect from scratch; to mould thousands of disparate individuals together into a single team with a single goal; to persuade a defeated army that it had the potential to turn the tables on their enemies; to master the complexities of terrain, climate and administrative deficiency so that self-help, resourcefulness and ingenuity could become as much prized as fighting skill. In these individual areas, and more, Slim proved the master. His genius for war was the consequence of his ability to bring together all of these elements to create an extraordinary result, the visible sign of which was the greatest defeat suffered by the Japanese on land during the Second World War.
“[T]he old Fleet Street … would not have foregone the pleasures of a story involving the words ‘prime minister’, ‘firebombings’ and ‘quartet of male models'”
Mark Steyn notes the amazing disinterest the British press has been showing for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s recent firebombing “male model” troubles:
Sir Keir Starmer speaking to the media outside Number 10 Downing Street upon his appointment.
Picture by Kirsty O’Connor/ No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons.
Meanwhile, “Two-Teir Keir” gave an extraordinary interview to a friend from The Observer, in which he reveals that, other than his war on the remnants of UK free speech, he’s spent the last year getting everything wrong. It’s a weird and psychologically unhealthy confessional that one could not imagine from any of his predecessors, whether the wretched David Cameron or the Marquess of Salisbury. If you want the scoop, skip the lame-arse coverage from the decaying Spectator and go to my old chum Dan Wootton. The Speccie’s snoozeroo “gossip columnist” headlines his piece “Four lowlights from Starmer’s Observer interview“, yet fails to note the most intriguing lowlight of all.
Six weeks ago, Sir Keir gave a speech on immigration which, while being a statement of the bloody obvious two decades too late, nevertheless went further than anyone else of any consequence in British life has been prepared to go. Somewhat curiously, this speech came just a few hours after his car exploded and two houses of his were firebombed — for which three (at the time of writing) Ukrainian “male models” have been arrested. I would not wish to suggest the PM has a unique fascination with Ukrainian “male models”. A fourth man has since been arrested — a “male model” from Romania. Diversity is our happy ending! The words “male model” do not appear in The Observer‘s account:
In the small hours of 12 May this year, there was a firebomb attack on the Starmer family home in Kentish Town. His sister-in-law, who had been renting the house since he became prime minister, was upstairs with her partner when the front door was set alight. “She happened to still be awake,” Starmer says, “so she heard the noise and got the fire brigade. But it could have been a different story …”
The prime minister, who had arrived back from a three-day trip to Ukraine the night before, was due to unveil the government’s new immigration policy that morning. “It’s fair to say I wasn’t in the best state to make a big speech,” he says. “I was really, really worried. I almost said: ‘I won’t do the bloody press conference.’ Vic [Lady Starmer] was really shaken up as, in truth, was I. It was just a case of reading the words out and getting through it somehow …” – his voice trails off …
So Sir Keir has now disavowed the only non-bollocks thing he has ever said. He “deeply regrets” saying Britain risked becoming “an island of strangers”, but he only did so, he offers in mitigation, because he was stressed out by all the firebombing from the massed ranks of fetching Slav twinks congregated on his various doorsteps. Unlike the Speccie, my chum Dan Wootton has a nose for a story:
Lucy Connolly was fast-tracked into her gaol cell in nothing flat – because that was the priority of the British state. By comparison, the men who firebombed the Prime Minister’s car and houses will not appear in court until next April, because determining how a remarkable number of East European “models” with no English-language facility were sufficiently familiar with Sir Keir’s homes and car to firebomb them is not a priority. Presumably, by the time April rolls around, the boyish charmers will have been persuaded to do an Axel Rudakubana and cop a plea, so that no trial need be held at all.
Say what you like about the old Fleet Street, but they would not have foregone the pleasures of a story involving the words “prime minister”, “firebombings” and “quartet of male models”. The silence of The Spectator is very typical. If you subscribe to James Delingpole’s view that the increasingly bizarre individuals who make it to the top of the greasy pole — Starmer, Macron, Trudeau — are there because the people who really run the world have got kompromat on them (which is your basic Occam’s Razor), then terror cells of Donbass rent boys blowing up the PM’s motor is an obvious false-flag operation designed to discredit the general thesis …
Here’s the gist of it all, courtesy of another Bob Vylan crowdpleaser:
Heard you want your country back Ha! Shut the f*** up! Heard you want your country back
You can’t have that!
I’m Keir Starmer and I endorse this message. As I wrote
twenty years ago— whoops, no, thirty sodding years ago, a counter-culture has to have a culture to counter. And in Britain and elsewhere an old establishment has merely been supplanted by a new one with lousier tunes. It’s not “edgy” or “transgressive” if you’re live on the BBC’s biggest outlet at an event run by a bloke with a knighthood. The only true counter-culture is that identified by the pseudo-edgy ersatz-transgressive Sir Bob Vylan — the ones who want their country back. Ask Peter Lynch.Oh, wait, you can’t: He’s dead. Sir Keir Starmer and Jeremy Richardson KC killed him — because, in order to prevent you “harming” them, it is necessary for them to harm you.
Nicolas Romero, the inventor who introduced “Spag Bol” to England
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes describes the career of a most inventive man, Signior Nicolas Romero originally of Naples … maybe:
The British interpretation of Spaghetti Bolognese — widely known as “spag bol” — is a pasta dish with a meat and tomato sauce.
The person who tried to bring these coal balls or briquettes to London was one Nicolas Romero — a name that has been almost entirely and undeservedly forgotten. Indeed, the one other historian to have ever noticed a handful of his achievements was unable to find his first name. And so I get the pleasure of being able to give a few glimpses of his remarkable story for the first time in over four hundred years.
Nicolas Romero seems to have originally hailed from the Spanish Habsburg possessions in Italy, most probably Naples. He was personally acquainted with Cardinal Granvelle, who was the regent in Naples from 1570 to 1575, and may have been involved in the Spanish attack on Tunis in 1573-4, where he picked up some siege techniques used by the Ottoman Turks. Romero then moved to Spanish-ruled Milan, where he was apparently the close confidant of one “Dr Sirnige” or “Dr Siring” (as it sounded to an English ear), who received a hefty reward for discovering a “defensative” or preventative treatment against a plague that killed some 15% of the city’s population in 1576-8. Then, Romero appears to have gone to the Low Countries, much of which was in outright revolt against Spain, where he picked up the details of how coal balls were made at Liège.
Then, astonishingly, he suddenly switched sides. Perhaps having fallen afoul of the Inquisition, or perhaps having converted to Protestantism, from some point in the 1580s he was only ever involved with the manifold enemies of Spain. He moved to England, even partaking — and I suspect investing — in its unsuccessful invasion of Spanish-ruled Portugal in 1589, where he was captured and held in “a very cruel prison” for ten months until managing to escape.
Somehow making his way back to London, Romero there befriended the barrister, alchemy enthusiast, and wannabe inventor Hugh Plat. It was via Plat, who plied all of his acquaintances for their technological know-how, and recorded his sources in his manuscripts, that Romero introduced various innovations to England.
Romero told him of how mere bags of linen or canvas, when filled with whatever dirt or sand was to hand, could be used to instantly create a “musket-proof” trench — in essence, the modern sandbag — which had been used by the Turkish army in their successful siege of La Goleta near Tunis. Plat saw a wider potential too, hoping to use these sandbags in reclaiming land from both marsh and sea.
In 1593, when a deadly plague gripped London, Romero gave Plat the recipe of Dr Sirnige’s defensative pills, as used in Milan, and together with the apothecary John Clarke they produced and distributed hundreds of them, including to Queen Elizabeth I and her entire Privy Council, apparently with great success. Clarke published their case notes under the boastful title The Trumpet of Apollo Sounding out the Sweet Blast of Recovery in 1602, though it was a little premature. Just a year later plague returned to London with a vengeance.
Most enduringly of all, Romero told Plat the details of making pasta, which Plat then made and marketed as a cheap and long-lasting food for the English armed forces. What Plat called his “macaroni” even won plaudits from Sir Francis Drake, and in 1594 he published the first known depiction of a pasta extruder. To Nicolas Romero, then — a name never mentioned by even specialist historians — belongs the considerable distinction of introducing the English to pasta. He is the patron saint of “Spag Bol” (if you are Italian, and do not wish to suffer a heart-attack, under no circumstances should you look up this term).
Romero was full of other ideas too. Romero gave Plat his methods for preserving wine, chestnuts, butter, turnips, and quince. He revealed to him the principle behind the diving bell; how to make a metal rotisserie oven; how to catch crayfish; how to engrave glass; how to make vellum paper translucent; how to keep snow from melting over the course of a year by storing it underground; and how few drops of sulphuric acid might be added to a ship’s water supply to keep it fresh for longer. Along with various recipes for Italian salads, and how to make smoke grenades, he even told him how to raise water using atmospheric pressure — perhaps the earliest record in England of what would eventually be developed into the steam engine. In papers seized by the government from the soldier Sir Thomas Arundel, who was arrested for being a Catholic in 1597, are mentions of not just of Romero’s sandbag “trench”, but “also his bridge, his boat to go without wind or sail, and his device against horsemen” — which according to Plat’s manuscripts was a kind of rest for muskets that could also serve as a pike.
Throughout the 1590s, Plat tried to commercialise some of Romero’s inventions, including a method to replace the expensive copper vessels for boiling water for home-brewing with a supposedly more efficient tub made of treated wood; some kind of light, portable water pump; and the Liège-style coal balls or briquettes. But with little success. By 1594 Romero was running low on money and had given up on trying to make it in England, having apparently passed up various opportunities to serve some German princes. So he left Plat in London to keep trying to sell his inventions, while he himself went to Holland to become an engineer in the service of Count Maurice of Nassau, who was fighting to free the Netherlands from Spanish rule.
While in the Netherlands Romero patented his water pump and the wooden boiling tub — an invention apparently “very much needed in the present time of cities under siege”, for whom fuel supplies were scarce. And having gained Count Maurice’s trust and backing, he wrote to one of Elizabeth I’s favourites, the Earl of Essex, in a fresh bid to get the two inventions, along with the coal balls, patented in England. Naturally, Hugh Plat served as his go-between.
Despite such allies, however, they once again failed. Romero would patent more inventions in the Netherlands in 1598 — a means of reducing the friction on the axles of carts and carriages, and a winch for more easily lifting heavy items like anchors and cannon — but he wasn’t to get a patent in England until ten years later in 1608. Just months before Plat’s death, Romero, with one James Jackson, presumably an investor, was finally granted an English patent for some kind of universally-applicable method of saving fuel. Unfortunately, the wording of the patent gives no indication whatsoever of what it involved.
I’ve traced no further record of Romero — if anyone is familiar with German, Dutch, Italian or Spanish sources and has ever come across the name, please do get in touch
Latvia’s Unique Charger-Loading Lee Enfield (CLLE) Cavalry Carbine
Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Feb 2025During the Latvian War of Independence, the nationalist forces receiver a fair bit of support from the British, including some 20,000 P14 Enfield rifles. These were great for the Latvian infantry, but the Latvian cavalry wanted something shorter. So in the early 1920s, they ordered 2200-2350 (the numbers are unclear) carbines from BSA. These were assembled using old Lee Metford and Long Lee parts, 21 inch barrels, and modified with charger clip bridges per the British CLLE pattern.
These carbines remained in service until World War Two, as we know that replacement barrels were purchased from Tikkakoski in Finland in the late 1930s — and this example has one of those Tikka barrels installed. During the Soviet occupation of Latvia, the Latvian Army did not fight, and many of these carbines appear to have been put into reserve service with the Red Army (some appearing to have been retrofitted with Mosin-style sling slots). Others disappeared into the forest with anti-Soviet partisans, and very few survived after the war.
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QotD: Why Marxists turned away from space exploration and colonization
What caused this turnaround?
To understand this, it’s helpful that to notice that spaceflight is not the only technology about which Marxist attitudes have done a 180. Nuclear power is another. More generally, where Marxists used to be pro-growth and celebrate industrialization and material progress, they’re now loudly for degrowth and renunciation.
But the history of western Marxism is more interesting than that. Western Marxists flipped to strident anti-futurism in the late 1960s and early 1970s while futurist propaganda in the Communist bloc did not end until its post-1989 collapse.
That 20-year-long disjunct was particularly strong about nuclear power, with the Soviets providing ideological support and funding to the foundation of European Green parties and the US’s anti-nuclear-power movement at the same time as they were pouring resources into nuclearizing their own power grid.
And that’s your clue. Domestic Marxism favored making power cheap and abundant, while their Western proxies pushed to keep it expensive and scarce and preached degrowth rather than expansion. Futurism vs. anti-futurism: why?
We don’t need to theorize about this. Yuri Bezmenov, a former gear in the Soviet propaganda machine, told us the answer starting in the early 1980s. Fewer people listened than should have.
Bezmenov explained that unlike Marxism in the Sino-Soviet bloc, Western Marxism was a mind virus, a memetic weapon designed to weaken and degrade its host societies from within, softening them up for totalitarianism and an eventual Soviet takeover. The West was to be denied power, both in a literal and figurative sense.
Ever wonder why today’s Marxists are so quick to make alliances with radical religious Islamists? This shouldn’t happen. According to Marxist theory, Islamism is a regression to an earlier stage of the dialectic than capitalism, and today’s Marxists ought to fear and hate it as a counter-ideology more than capitalism. But they don’t, because to them Islam is a tool to be used for nihilistic ends.
That nihilism is the actual purpose of Western Marxism and all its offshoots, including “woke”. One sign of this is how fervently it embraces the sexual mutilation of children.
The Soviets are gone but their program is still running autonomously in the brains of people who were infected by their Cold-War-era proxies and the successors of those proxies. And that program is nihilism all the way down.
Yuri Bezmenov should have been heeded. There is no simpler theory that fits the observed facts.
Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-14.
July 2, 2025
The Korean War Week 54 – The War is One Year Old – July 1, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 1 Jul 2025Over a year has passed since North Korean forces crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded South Korea, and while the war has seen the advantage switch hands time and again, one thing it has not seen is any sort of cease fire or peace negotiations. However, that might change soon, as this week both the Chinese and the Americans indicate their willingness to sit down and talk. South Korean President Syngman Rhee, however, is against any cease fire talks that do not set out to meet a big variety of his demands, demands which which the other warring parties do not see as being in their own best interests.
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“In short order, Trudeau was describing his own country with the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric one typically associates with, say, the Holocaust, Holodomor, or Rwandan Genocide”
In Quillette, Tristin Hopper provides some excerpts from his book Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once, published earlier this year:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holding a teddy bear in the proximity of a soil disturbance in a field at the site of a former residential school in Cowessess First Nation, Saskatchewan.
July 6, 2021.
This is the story of how, in 2019, Canada became the first (and, to this day, only) country to declare itself guilty of committing an ongoing genocide against its own citizens.
To outsiders, who (correctly) view Canada as a humane democracy, the tale will seem bizarre. But to Canadians, there was a certain twisted political logic to it — at the time, at least.
In the late 2010s and early 2020s, back when my country was still ruled by Justin Trudeau, Canada’s progressive elites bought into then-ascendant social-justice manias with a born-again fervour that was arguably unmatched in any other nation. This was a time, readers will recall, when college students were busily confessing their internalised white supremacy and racist thought crimes to one another on social media. Seeking to ingratiate his Liberal Party with this young demographic, Trudeau extrapolated their cultish movement on a national scale.
His rhetorical style became increasingly manic, as one social-justice slogan led to another; with each being rapturously liked and retweeted on social media. In short order, Trudeau was describing his own country with the kind of apocalyptic rhetoric one typically associates with, say, the Holocaust, Holodomor, or Rwandan Genocide.
In this regard, Trudeau’s first truly epic act of national self-incrimination took place at a 2019 women’s conference in Vancouver. The PM had just been handed the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), a probe he’d authorised as a means to investigate the high rates of homicide committed against Canada’s female Indigenous population.
As it turned out, however, the MMIWG report authors’ most prominent demand had nothing to do with the technical details of criminal investigation. Instead, they were focused on language: They wanted homicides targeting Indigenous women and girls to be described as an ongoing “race-based genocide” perpetrated by Canadian society at large.
Murder wasn’t the government’s only instrument of genocide, the authors claimed. Higher rates of Indigenous heart disease and suicide attempts were also described as foreseeable results of Canadian policies that are “explicitly genocidal”.
Canadians tend to feel guilty about the genuinely shameful way their country treated Indigenous peoples at many historical junctures (more on this below). Because of this high baseline guilt level, it is often seen as taboo (especially among journalists) to push back against even the most obviously counterfactual claims made on behalf of Indigenous peoples. And the MMIWG report was a case in point: the inquiry’s insistence that Canada was in the midst of an active genocide was reported uncritically by most media outlets.
Some public figures did speak out against this hyperbolic use of language — such as Roméo Dallaire, the retired general who’d been in Rwanda during that country’s (actual) genocide in 1994. Yet Canada’s most important public figure — Trudeau himself — accepted the inquiry’s conclusions without reservation; even if this meant that he was now signalling his status as leader of a nation that, day in, day out, under his own watch, was committing a genocide against its own population.
“Earlier this morning, the national inquiry formally presented their final report, in which they found that the tragic violence that Indigenous women and girls experienced amounts to genocide,” he told his Vancouver audience. Trudeau then paused for nine seconds to accommodate his desired reaction — which consisted of cheers and applause.
History of Britain IV: Caesar in Britain, Reconnaissance in Force, 55-54 BCE
Thersites the Historian
Published 29 Jan 2025Caesar’s landings in Britain illustrate his willingness to take risks, even unnecessary ones. The questionable decision-making, however, also led to the first surviving detailed description of people and events in Britain.
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QotD: The bane of socialism — boredom
Most “bad” dogs aren’t actually bad. They’re not misbehaving because they’re willful, or mean, or whatever. They’re just bored out of their fucking skulls, because the kind of bugman who gets a dog these days has no idea that you actually have to play with it, and pet it, and interact with it, in much the same way you have to interact with a young human. Given a dog’s limited intellect, the only thing it can think of to do to alleviate its boredom is chew on things, or dig in the yard, or piss on the rug, or, if all else fails, chew its own fur off.
Being slightly more complex critters, humans have more options, but bore a human enough — overfill his material needs, so that he’s stuffed to somnolence, but take his sense of purpose away — and you’ll see the exact same dog behaviors. Why do you think they shove all that metal shit in their faces? And no, I am absolutely not joking. Why all the huge, gaudy, gross tattoos? The constant changes of hair color and style?
Have you ever asked them?
Again, I’m 100% not joking. I know most of y’all avoid SJWs like the plague, and that’s a smart move, can’t blame you for it, but if you do, you’ll just have to trust me: I was in academia for a long time, so I was around not just SJWs, but bleeding-edge lunatic SJWs, and I asked them about it. One must be discreet about this, of course — hey, I’m thinking of getting a roll of toilet paper tattooed on my bicep, to remind me that We’re In This Together, what do you think? — but it’s fairly easy to do. And every time, they’d spin me some elaborate tale of how deep and meaningful it all is.
No, really. By some mental process I can’t begin to reproduce, getting Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s face tattooed on your calf is, to them, striking a blow at ambient civilization. That is the literal truth of their motivation. It’s the same reason the dog digs in the backyard, or pisses on the rug, or chews its own fur off: That’s the only agency it has, the only purpose it can find.
Severian, “Purpose”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-06.
July 1, 2025
Like a cheap suit, Canada folds under Trumpian pressure on the Digital Services Tax grab
A couple of days back, I characterized Prime Minister Mark Carney’s determination to push ahead with the Digital Services Tax “insane”, as it was overwhelmingly likely to trigger a strong reaction from the Trump administration. As it did. So, finally recognizing they were in a no-win situation, the federal government announced at the last minute that they wouldn’t be demanding the literally billions of dollars from the US “tech giants” after all. Michael Geist can legitimately say “I told you so” on this issue:
President Trump Attends G7 Summit in Canada by White House https://www.whitehouse.gov/gallery/president-trump-attends-g7-summit-in-canada/ CC BY 3.0 US
After years of dismissing the warnings of likely retaliation, the Canadian government caved last night on the digital services tax. Faced with the prospect of the U.S. suspending trade negotiations, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced that the government would drop the DST altogether, payments scheduled for Monday would be cancelled, and legislation will be forthcoming to rescind the legislation that created it in the first place. Over the weekend, I wrote about the repeated warnings that the DST was a serious trade irritant with the U.S. that cut across party and presidential lines. While ignoring the risks was bad enough, I argued that Canada played its DST card too early. Rather than delaying implementation in the hopes of incorporating it into a broader trade deal with U.S., it marched ahead, leading to an entirely predictable response from U.S. President Donald Trump. That left Canada in a no-win situation: stick with the DST but face the prospect of higher tariffs or embarrassingly drop the DST (and $7.2 billion in revenue over five years) with only restarting negotiations that were on until government overplayed its hand to show for it.
It is hard to overstate how badly the government managed the DST issue over the past five years. It alienated allies by pushing ahead with the DST despite efforts at an international deal at the OECD, stood alone in rejecting an extension of a moratorium on new DSTs, made the DST retroactive which solidified opposition, and continually downplayed the concerns of successive U.S. Presidents and Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle. Meanwhile, when companies began passing along the costs of the DST to Canadian businesses, it did nothing. And when they urged the government to delay implementation to at least allow for the issue to be incorporated into a broader trade pact, it ignored the advice.
At every step, there were better options. This year, the likelihood that the DST would come to a boil was obvious to anyone who was paying attention. But rather than following the UK strategy, which managed to salvage a smaller DST (2% rather than 3%) as part of a bigger agreement that includes a commitment to support UK digital access to the U.S. market and to negotiate a larger digital trade deal, Canadian officials seemingly assumed that the U.S. was bluffing and would not retaliate.
If this sounds familiar, it is because the Canadian government misreading the tech sector has become a hallmark of its policy. Talk tough, practically dare companies and foreign governments to respond, and then frantically seek an exit strategy when they do. This was the case with the Online News Act and Meta’s blocking of news links, with the government’s AI regulation which new Minister of AI Evan Solomon says will not be re-introduced, with the Online Harms bill, and now with the DST.
Tibet’s Last Stand: The Snow Lion vs. The Dragon – W2W 34
TimeGhost History
Published 29 Jun 2025The fate of Tibet is decided on the roof of the world as Mao’s China sets its sights on Lhasa. This episode traces the dramatic showdown between the snow lion and the dragon — from imperial legacies and British invasions to the last years of de facto Tibetan independence. Discover how realpolitik, Cold War indifference, and the carrot-and-stick tactics of Mao’s regime sealed Tibet’s fate. Watch as the Dalai Lama faces impossible choices, world powers look away, and the dream of independence is crushed beneath the weight of history.
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The Food Professor explains what Trump got right in his Trade War
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, aka @FoodProfessor explains how Trump’s Trade War strategy is working out for US interests, in contrast to the Trudeau/Carney governments’ approach:
The Globalism Hangover: What Trump’s Trade War Got Right
“Trump’s bombastic style aside, his nationalist approach to trade and food policy is forcing global institutions to justify their existence — and that’s a conversation Canada can no longer afford to ignore.”
For the past six months, President Donald Trump’s trade policies have been widely mocked, criticized, and condemned. Some of it is certainly warranted. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, recently likened his tariff-heavy approach to global trade as a direct path toward another Great Depression. But data out of the United States tells a more nuanced story — one that challenges conventional wisdom.
Despite persistent headwinds, the U.S. economy continues to outperform expectations. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta projects second-quarter GDP growth at 3.8%. In May, the U.S. economy added 139,000 jobs, outpacing forecasts, while inflation remained subdued at 0.1% month-over-month and 2.4% annually. The U.S. trade deficit has been cut nearly in half, pointing to stronger export performance and a rebalancing of trade relationships.
Canada, by contrast, is showing signs of economic strain. The national economy is shrinking, manufacturing is struggling under U.S. trade pressure, and food inflation is outpacing general inflation. In short, our economy is not keeping pace—despite our public criticism of the Trump administration.
To make matters worse, the Trump administration has now halted all trade negotiations with Canada, signaling that our bilateral economic relationship holds little strategic value for Washington. For the U.S., Canada is no longer a priority — especially under a Carney-led government that has visibly pivoted toward Europe, a market still heavily invested in maintaining close ties with the United States. From an agri-food standpoint, this shift is consequential: access to our largest trading partner is narrowing, while Ottawa appears more focused on diplomatic optics than on securing stable, competitive trade channels for the Canadian agrifood economy.
This is the one thing the ‘Elbows Up’ crowd never understood — and still doesn’t. We’re not in a trade war with the U.S. There’s no war to be won. For Trump, this is about a realignment of the global order, plain and simple — one centered entirely on American supremacy.
Love him or loathe him, Trump is not destroying the U.S. economy — not yet, anyway. His unapologetically nationalist agenda extends far beyond tariffs. He has withdrawn U.S. support from key global institutions such as the WHO and is threatening to sever ties with others, including NATO and several UN-affiliated agencies. Among them is the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN’s most authoritative body on food security.
At a recent event in Brazil, a senior FAO official acknowledged that fundraising dynamics have shifted. In the Trump era, governments are asking harder questions: Why should we fund the FAO? What domestic benefit does it provide? What used to be assumed support is now conditional — and arguably, more accountable.
This shift isn’t unique to Washington. Many countries are quietly aligning with the U.S. position, scrutinizing globalist institutions with renewed skepticism. Transparency and accountability are byproducts of this anti-globalist sentiment — something not inherently negative.
For decades, globalism pushed the world to believe that trade liberalization was the only viable path to growth and prosperity. It became conventional wisdom. But globalism has made some nations — and some people — richer, while leaving others behind. In the process, domestic sectors, including agriculture, were often sidelined or sacrificed in the name of global efficiency.
The problem with globalism, particularly in agri-food policy, is its tendency to pursue uniformity over relevance. Canada, for example, adopted the carbon tax under a globalist climate agenda that often overlooks the vital role food producers play in feeding people. Instead of being supported, the sector is too often vilified as a problem. But agriculture is not a liability — it is a necessity.
Trump’s message — wrapped, of course, in provocative and often abrasive language — is that one-size-fits-all global policies rarely work. Nations have different socio-economic realities, and those should come first. While cooperation is essential, so is recognizing local and regional priorities. In this sense, his “America First” approach is not without logic — especially when it seems to be yielding short-term economic gains.
For Canada’s agri-food sector, the lesson is clear: striking a better balance between global commitments and national imperatives is overdue. We should not abandon multilateral cooperation, but we must stop anchoring policy to global agendas we have little influence over. Instead, let’s define what works for Canadians — what supports our farmers, protects our food security, and reflects our unique landscape — while keeping the broader global context in view.
We are not there yet. But if this moment of disruption sparks a more realistic and regionally attuned approach to food policy, we’ll be better for it.
The Maple Leaf Forever
Columbia Yore
Published 13 Jun 2018The Maple Leaf Forever was written by Alexander Muir in 1867 and served as the unofficial anthem of Canada from 1867-1980.
QotD: Canadian measuring “systems”
We measure weather and room temperature in Celsius, but we still bake in Fahrenheit. Your weight is in pounds, but your car’s weight is in kilograms. You drink alcohol by the ounce, but soda by the millilitre. The phenomenon was summed up in an imaginary dialogue by Canadian comedian Janel Comeau. Scene: An American, a European and a Canadian. The American says “I use miles and pounds”. The European says “I use kilometres and kilograms”. The Canadian takes an assortment of global measuring systems, crushes them into a powder, and snorts them like cocaine before declaring, “I’m 5’3, I weigh 150lbs, horses weigh 1000kgs, I need a cup of flour and 1L of milk”.
And none of this is an accident. Canada’s bizarre system of half-imperial, half-metric represents the truce lines of a culture war battle whose scale and ferocity is all but forgotten today. There were people in the 1970s who wanted to purge this country of any memory of the imperial system. Feet, inches and gallons were a relic of a backwards, colonial age, and the future belonged to rationalist, scientific metrication. A small army of bureaucrats armed with meter sticks and one-litre jugs were dispatched to spread the metrication gospel. And if you didn’t comply with the new metric zeitgeist, you could face severe consequences. For example, if you were a gas station continuing to sell gas by the gallon instead of by the litre, you could be fined.
But this grand plan to reprogram the Canadian psyche was thwarted, and thwarted forever. And when you buy beef by the pound or do your carpentry with inches and feet, you are the unwitting legacy of a populist, anti-government protest movement that hated the metric system and went all-out to stop it. We’re talking protests. Lawsuits. Civil disobedience. This story will literally feature a group of pissed-off Conservative MPs opening a “freedom” gas station to defy federal mandates to sell gasoline by the litre.
Tristin Hopper The metric schism | Canada Did What?”, National Post, 2025-03-11.
