Quotulatiousness

April 8, 2025

Mark Carney explained how he viewed the world in his book Values

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

It’s worth considering what Mark Carney wrote about his beliefs before becoming prime minister and how he’s campaigning right now:

For those who haven’t had the misfortune of parsing through Mark Carney’s Values, it reads like a sermon from a high priest of globalism — polished, preachy, and packed with ideas that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares about Canada’s economy, especially Western energy producers.

Writing as the former Bank of Canada governor and a darling of the Liberal elite, Carney pitches a vision of “sustainable finance”, net-zero absolutism, and heavy-handed regulation. To the National Citizens Coalition, it’s clear: this isn’t a roadmap to prosperity, it’s a wrecking ball aimed at the heart of Canada’s resource sector and the West’s economic lifeline.

Start with Carney’s obsession with “revaluing value”. In Values, he argues markets should prioritize climate goals over profit, pushing financial institutions to choke funding for oil and gas.

For Alberta and Saskatchewan, where energy employs tens of thousands and pumps billions into the economy, this is a death knell dressed up as virtue.

Western producers aren’t just businesses; they’re the backbone of communities, powering schools, hospitals, and homes. Carney’s disdain for fossil fuels ignores their role in keeping Canada competitive while our allies and adversaries keep drilling. His plan? Starve the sector, stranding assets and jobs, all to appease international green lobbyists in European nations with nationalized economies on the road to being as disastrous as Canada’s.

Then there’s his love affair with regulation. Values champions policies just like Bill C-69 — the “No More Pipelines Bill” — which Carney has refused to repeal. He sees it as a tool to enforce his net-zero utopia, but for the West, it’s a padlock on progress. Pipelines that could carry Canadian oil to global markets sit stalled, leaving producers at the mercy of low prices, foreign competitors, and now, tariff threats.

Carney’s mental framework both then and now doesn’t just stop projects, it signals to investors that Canada’s energy sector is a no-go zone. The result? Capital flees, jobs vanish, and the West pays the price for the lofty ideals of a London and Manhattan banker, who spends only part of his time in Canada — specifically, Ontario and Quebec.

Dan Knight on Carney’s swing through some British Columbia ridings this week:

A mock campaign sign for the Liberals spotted on social media.

Mark Carney rolled into Victoria this week with the swagger of a man who’s never missed a wine-and-cheese reception in his life and delivered what the Liberal brain trust likely considers a “bold vision” for Canada. But peel back the banker buzzwords and Churchill cosplay, and what you really got was a cringeworthy display of delusion, detachment, and recycled globalist dogma.

He opened his mouth and immediately signaled his marching orders: “clean energy”. Not once. Not twice. It was practically every other sentence. Because when you’re out of ideas, just say “green transition” on repeat and hope nobody checks the receipts.

He’s not just pushing the same failed Liberal climate ideology — he’s doubling down on it.

Carney promised to turn Canada into a “clean energy superpower” — without explaining how, exactly, we get there when his party has spent years shutting down oil and gas, blocking pipelines, and handing our resource wealth to the Americans.

This wasn’t new policy. It was the same Liberal fantasy that has already gutted Alberta, choked investment, and driven electricity prices through the roof — just ask Europe how that’s going. And when it comes to reopening auto plants or restoring manufacturing jobs? Nothing. Not a plan, not a word, not a clue.

And don’t worry — when Trump’s tariffs hit our industries, Carney says we’ll respond with “retaliatory tariffs”. Sounds tough, until you remember who actually pays those. Working Canadians. Line workers. Parts manufacturers. People trying to keep the lights on while Ottawa plays global economic chicken.

Carney’s big idea for recovery? Just keep handing money to the Liberal-connected elite.

He promised to “give back” — and by that, he means pouring another $180 million into the CBC, the same taxpayer-funded mouthpiece that’s been running interference for the Liberals for nearly a decade. This comes after ArriveCAN, the $60 million QR code boondoggle funneled through Liberal contractors, and countless other slush funds masquerading as “public service”.

While the working class is bracing for a made-in-Ottawa recession, Carney’s pledging more green slogans, more centralized control, and more taxpayer money to keep the illusion alive.

April 5, 2025

Liberals spike the football after eliminating the consumer portion of the carbon tax

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

Among the items in this week’s “Bullshit Bulletin” from The Line is a thoroughly earned drubbing for the federal Liberals who took full credit for eliminating a particularly unpopular tax … that they spent the last several years justifying for “putting more money in Canadians’ pockets”:

Your Line editors are fans of loopholes. And we’re glad that when we laid out the ground rules for the Bullshit Bulletin last week, we made room for things that would technically pass a lie detector test, but are still too egregiously bullshitty to not be called out.

Mona Fortier, Liberal party whip, former cabinet minister and current candidate in Ottawa-Vanier-Gloucester, step up and collect your prize. You’re the first stop in our second bullshit bullet of this campaign. To be clear, Fortier is accepting this award on behalf of the entire Liberal party. The absolutely breathtaking hypocrisy of watching these guys campaign on the dismantling of the carbon tax is something to behold.

If you missed it, the zeroing out of the “consumer-facing” carbon tax took effect this week, at midnight on April 1. This resulted in an immediate drop in the price of gas at many stations across the country. This genuinely did make the news. Your Line editors heard local radio stories about it as they were out and about on their various errands this week. Many of those stories, but not all, made a point of noting that the price drop was directly related to the carbon tax coming off the price of a litre of gas.

And that’s where Fortier steps in. She was quick to take to social media with a video of herself at a gas pump, celebrating how her government had made the lives of Canadians more affordable.

Couple of things.

First, your Line editors have some history of noting the absurdity of politicians posing at gas pumps. Our favourite is still the Conservative who clearly did not have a car and simply posed awkwardly by a pump. But in general, these photo ops are really stupid. And we’re sure they’re demeaning and embarrassing for the people involved. Add this to the long and growing list of why we would never, ever agree to subject ourselves to the humiliation of a life in politics.

But we can’t help but note the chutzpah — or the bullshit, more plainly — of the Liberals touting lowering the price of gas, when that drop is explained by them removing the tax they chose to put on gas, and then spent years insisting was necessary to prevent, literally, the destruction of the planet. We guess we can take our kids on vacation without “letting the planet burn” now. Thanks, Carney!

And we just don’t mean that this is hypocritical in the abstract. Fortier herself, not all that long ago, was loud and proud about how the carbon tax was helping low-income Canadians by giving them more in rebates than they were paying in tax.

Keen-eyed observers might note that there is less than a year between those tweets.

What else can we call this bullshit? We can gussy it up a bit. We can call it hypocritical bullshit or shameless bullshit — but fundamentally, it’s bullshit. The Liberals taking credit for removing the carbon tax makes about as much sense as them taking credit for rescuing a man from drowning whom they beat senseless and threw over the side of a yacht. The entire thing reminds us of the Hot Dog Man sketch — an obviously guilty party insisting, despite the evident disbelief of everyone else, that they aren’t responsible for the problem. Except this is actually worse — they’re claiming they fixed the problem, while studiously ignoring any question of where it came from.

Only in politics would someone actually seek to claim any credit for reversing a cost that they had willingly inflicted on people, despite howls of protest, for years, all while insisting the pain was necessary, and even worth it, because of the rebate. And only in Canada would we have very little expectation that the voters would actually hold those people accountable for their, wait for it, bullshit.

April 3, 2025

Election 2025 – Candidates overboard, biological clocks ticking, and Trump tariff letdown

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

One of the recent events in the federal election campaign — the Liberals finally getting rid of their toxic candidate in Markham-Unionville — has been reciprocated by the Conservatives dumping their candidate in a southwestern Ontario riding and another in the Montreal area. While the Liberals dragged their feet for several days, the Conservatives have been much faster to pull the ejection handle for their bozo eruptions (some might say too fast), but Poilievre absolutely did not want the kind of media circus that Carney enabled over the Chiang scandal.

The Liberals have been doing what they can to gin up angst and outrage over a recent Pierre Poilievre comment that they’re trying to portray as being somehow misogynistic and insensitive. In The Line, Melanie Paradis says that it’s nothing of the sort and instead it highlights a genuine concern for young Canadian women and their partners:

I just turned 40. I have two beautiful children — three-and-a-half years old and eight months — and I want a third.

That statement raises eyebrows. After all, I run a successful business. I work more than full-time. I live in the same economy as you. And yet — I want another baby. Not because I’m reckless. Because I love being a mom. Because I believe in investing in the future. Because I want to.

And in today’s Canada, that feels like a radical act.

This election, the conversation is dominated by Trump’s tariffs, and understandably so. But as we analyze different sectors that will be impacted by tariffs, and develop policy prescriptions for the hundreds of thousands of jobs that could be lost, where are the policies for the millions of young Canadians pausing their hopes and plans for children because of so much uncertainty? The untold story of Trump’s tariffs and threats is that the quiet collapse of Canada’s birth rate will only worsen. Nothing kills the mood or your hormonal balance quite like Trump.

Of course, the second Pierre Poilievre mentioned this, the Liberals couldn’t resist twisting it into a tired attack line about reproductive rights.

On Monday, Poilievre said, “We will not forget that 36-year-old couple whose biological clock is running out faster than they can afford to buy a home.” This is a statement rooted in the biological and economic realities of being 30-something and trying to conceive. Yet the Liberals are tripping over themselves to condemn Poilievre for somehow insulting women.

What a total misread. Poilievre is the only politician in this campaign who is speaking openly and clearly about a real issue that is radicalizing young Canadians: it has become far, far too hard to start and support a family in this country, and that is obviously a burden that lands entirely on the young. Given the demographics of the average Liberal voter, I can get why this would be below the radar for the party, but I’m begging them, and setting politics aside when I do, to stop viewing this as a moment to launch a political attack on your rival and instead ask if this is actually a national issue that we should be talking about more, not less. Even if the politician happens to be a man.

To my Liberal friends: You are punching down on hurting people when you dismiss this issue, and since this might matter to you more, you’re hurting your electoral chances, too. Your party has a blindspot here, and the issue is too important to become a partisan football. Like, my dudes, for all your stupid rhetoric about The Handmaid’s Tale, have you read the damn book? It starts with a fertility crisis and birth rate collapse. If you don’t want the red capes, maybe we should get out in front of the issue?

The latest round of Trumpian tariffs let Canada off easier than other American allies and trading partners in President Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement:

While the rest of the world was trying to determine the length and breadth of the shaft, Trump waved around a cardboard chart that named their country and the percentage tariff hike they could expect to be hit with.

Top of the list was China, which will see a 34 per cent increase in the tariffs on its exports to the U.S. (on top of the previous 20 per cent). Japan will be hit with a 24 per cent increase and the European Union with 20 per cent.

But half of the chart was hidden behind Trump’s podium, so it took a while to figure that Canada was not on the list.

It was only after the Rose Garden press conference concluded that it became apparent that Canada is exempt, or at least the exports to the U.S. covered by the Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade agreement are not impacted (and they account for more than 90 per cent, according to RBC Economics).

However, the previously announced 25 per cent tariffs on autos, and on steel and aluminum from Canada remain in place.

The broad-based exemption is good news but the crisis facing the Canadian economy remains dire. As has been pointed out by many industry insiders, no auto plant in Canada can survive 25 per cent tariffs for an extended period at a time when their profit margins are less than 10 per cent.

April 1, 2025

Carney chooses not to dump Paul Chiang as Liberal candidate in Markham-Unionville

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

Update: The National Post is reporting that Chiang has dropped out of the campaign.

Liberal leader Mark Carney may believe he’s showing something something strength and something something compassion by allowing Paul Chiang to stay on the ballot as the official Liberal candidate despite the awful optics of the situation:

In the National Post, Anthony Furey says that the decision indicates that Carney values China’s values ahead of Canadian values:

Liberal MP Paul Chiang, left, and Liberal leader Mark Carney, right.

Mark Carney’s mishandling of the Paul Chiang scandal has got to be one of the worst cases of poor judgment in recent Canadian political history. From the moment the story broke, it was a no-brainer that Chiang could not remain as a Liberal MP and as the Liberal candidate in Markham-Unionville.

The fact Carney didn’t immediately do the right thing was a problem. And that he’s now defiant in keeping Chiang on despite several days of significant pushback seriously calls his judgment into question.

On Friday, the civil rights group Toronto Association for Democracy in China broke the scandal on remarks Chiang made about Conservative candidate Joe Tay that appeared in Chinese-language newspaper Ming Pao Toronto.

“To everyone here, you can claim the $1 million bounty (on Joe Tay) if you bring him to Toronto’s Chinese consulate,” Chiang said during an ethnic media conference in January.

Jaws dropped when the news spread. Dozens of human rights groups have already condemned the remarks.

Hong Kong Watch, a human rights advocacy group, wrote in a statement: “It is clear that this is a Parliamentarian suggesting to a broad community that a political opponent be taken against their will and handed over to the custody of a foreign government that has a well-documented history of wrongfully detaining Canadian citizens and using coercion to get Canadian citizens to return to (China).”

[…]

Yet Liberal leader Mark Carney is downplaying it and standing by Chiang.

“The comments were deeply offensive,” Carney said on Monday. “This is a terrible lapse of judgment by Mr. Chiang. He has apologized for those comments.”

If they are that offensive and if Chiang’s judgment is that poor, why keep him on as a member of the team?

Carney was hammered with repeated questions to that effect from the news media but was firm that Chiang would remain as a candidate. He also seems to think that Chiang being a police officer makes the remarks less of an issue, when it clearly makes it a much bigger problem.

“Mr. Chiang is a veteran policeman with more than a quarter century of service to his community,” Carney told the press. “And he will continue his candidacy going forward, having made those apologies very clearly to the individual, to the community and moving forward to serve.”

From the outside, it looks less like Carney is trying to stand up for a member of his party and more as though he’s desperate to hang on to that seat (perhaps Liberal internal polls aren’t quite as rosy in the GTA as the public polls are showing at the moment).

Also on the social media site formerly known as “Twitter”, Dan Knight posts a long note on the situation:

This is no longer just a political scandal — this is a national disgrace. Joe Tay, the Conservative candidate targeted by Paul Chiang’s shocking comments, has now broken his silence — and it’s nothing short of damning.

In his official statement, Tay pulls no punches. He calls Chiang’s words what they are: “threatening public comments … intended to intimidate me”. Not debate. Not disagreement. Intimidation. And Tay makes it crystal clear: “no apology is sufficient”. Why? Because this isn’t some offhand gaffe — this is the exact playbook of the Chinese Communist Party, imported straight into Canadian politics.

Let that sink in. A Canadian MP, standing on Canadian soil, echoed a bounty issued by a hostile foreign regime. And the man targeted — Joe Tay — says it plainly: “Suggesting that people collect a bounty from the Chinese Communist Party to deliver a political opponent to the Chinese Consulate is disgusting and must never be condoned.”

Disgusting — and yet, here we are. Paul Chiang is still in the Liberal fold. Mark Carney, the man who wants to run the country, says nothing. Meanwhile, Tay is left fearing for his safety — already in touch with the RCMP before the public even knew what Chiang had said.

This is the state of Canadian politics under the Liberal machine: where the only people paying a price are the ones speaking out. Where the candidate who exposes foreign interference is the one who needs police protection. And the one who parrots CCP propaganda? He gets to keep his seat.

Even Michael Chong — a guy who knows firsthand what CCP intimidation looks like — is stepping in and asking the obvious question: Why is Paul Chiang still a Liberal candidate?

Chong just posted on X (formerly Twitter) that at least three Canadians have already been coerced into returning to the People’s Republic of China against their will. Against their will. Think about that. Beijing is actively running transnational repression ops on Canadian soil — and now, one of Carney’s own candidates is joking about turning a political opponent over to the CCP for a cash reward. And we’re supposed to believe the Liberals take foreign interference seriously?

Chong’s post includes actual evidence — parliamentary testimony, U.S. indictments, and RCMP-relevant keywords like “United Front”, “overseas station”, and “minutes or less”. In other words, this isn’t conspiracy talk. This is real. It’s happening. And it’s been happening under the Liberals’ watch.

And still, Paul Chiang stays in the race. No suspension. No investigation. Nothing from Carney, the security-cleared savior of the Liberal establishment.

And here’s where the hypocrisy hits terminal velocity.

Remember, Mark Carney has a security clearance. That’s been his whole pitch. That somehow he is more qualified to lead Canada because he has access to classified intelligence. Because he is in the know. He’s the grown-up in the room. The steady technocrat with one foot in the Privy Council and the other in Davos.

Well, here’s a question: What good is a security clearance if your own MPs are acting like a propaganda arm for Beijing?

Because while Mark “Bank of China” Carney sits on his classified briefings, his Liberal MP Paul Chiang is out there, on camera, floating the idea that a Conservative candidate should be delivered to a Chinese consulate to “claim the bounty” placed on his head by the Chinese Communist Party.

Let’s repeat that: A Canadian MP is echoing a CCP-issued bounty, and Carney — the man with all the intelligence, all the briefings, all the supposed national security credentials — says nothing. Not a peep. Not even a token tweet.

So what exactly is that security clearance buying us, Mark? If you’re such an expert on foreign threats, why can’t you recognize one when it’s sitting in your own caucus?

It’s a joke. The entire premise of Carney’s leadership bid is unraveling in real time. He promised Canadians he could stand up to foreign interference — meanwhile, his own candidate in Markham–Unionville is out there sounding like a CCP press secretary. And instead of showing leadership, Carney hides behind talking points, closed-door fundraisers, and his carefully curated media handlers.

Joe Tay is right. This isn’t just about intimidation — it’s about sending a “chilling signal to the entire community”. And the message from Carney is loud and clear: if you’re a threat to the Liberal regime, they’re not just coming for your policies. They’re coming for you.

Security clearance? Please. It’s not leadership if you only speak up when it’s politically convenient. And if Carney won’t condemn this, then he’s not qualified to lead a PTA meeting, let alone a country.

March 31, 2025

The infighting among the Conservatives is becoming a story in this election

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

Listening to Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney on The Line podcast a few days ago, I was surprised to hear that the Ontario Progressive Conservatives seem to be trying to actively torpedo the federal Conservative election campaign. While internecine combat among conservative factions is pretty normal, it isn’t quite as normal for it to be happening in the middle of a federal election campaign. It’s almost as if Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s team would rather throw the election to the Liberals than to let Pierre Poilievre’s team score a win. Some friction, sure, but this level of conflict is almost unheard of.

At Acceptable Views, Alexander Brown mulls the chatter he’s been hearing from the campaign trail:

“Something’s really going on here,” says word from on the ground in once-Liberal-safe Toronto.

“The polls say one thing, but we’ve never given out so many signs. We’ve had to print thousands more than usual.”

“We’re actually doing just fine,” says another source high up on the federal campaign trail.

“Don’t believe the chatter from disgruntled so-called conservatives … Nobody here is hanging up their skates. We’ve had a very good week — long days notwithstanding! — and are beginning to inflict solid brand damage on Carney.”

“The best is yet to come. We are running the campaign we should be running. One that’s true to conservative values and principles.”

On that “chatter”, this non-profit campaigner and writer has no qualms about going weapons-hot.

For those unaware, Ford-“conservative” insiders in Ontario have been taking to the media circuit, issuing complaint after complaint, as both anonymous and named sources, in an effort to pull the Conservatives off of major pocketbook issues such as immigration, housing, affordability, and crime, and on to, all but exclusively, Trump, Trump, Trump.

It matters to them not, apparently, that the Liberals have lucked into booby-trapping both sides of the Trump issue, and that it forces the Conservatives onto uneven terrain.

Drag this out and make it worse, as Carney has largely chosen to do? His elbows are up!

Get shoved around by the administration to the south? See, this is why he’s the one to deal with it. He’s Trump’s enemy!

(Apparently, it also matters not that Carney has received repeated pats on the head and quasi-endorsements from #45, and now, #47.)

The real story here? Allegedly embittered that they were left out of the war-room for reasons of not being all that conservative and being untrustworthy (a point they are now proving over and over again), and wanting to neglect a youth vote they were incapable of turning out, a select few in an Ontario crew think they know best, and would rather engage in public displays of industrial sabotage than keep it private and above the belt.

It’s a ridiculous little consultant slap-fight, at a time when 5000 people are standing out in the rain, to tell a man they don’t know that their Canadian Dream is now a nightmare, that they’re now drowning in debt and don’t feel hope for the future.

“These guys have no idea what they’re talking about. When this is all over, I hope they regret ever weighing in like this.”

For Doug Ford’s campaign manager Kory Teneycke, who has been working the Liberal podcast and media circuit the hardest, it might be worth noting that not every campaign has the advantage — nor indulgence — of being able to run on Liberal-lite and solely Trump.

The Ontario PCs were granted the easy road of being able to cut the corner to the polls in February, in an election no one asked for, while running Carney-adjacent messaging, and they still couldn’t pick up a seat against the worst Ontario Liberal leader of a generation.

The Line‘s Gerson and Gurney both seem quite taken with the attacks on Poilievre by Ford’s right-hand spokes-hatchetman, but others are reporting lots of enthusiasm on the campaign trail and contrasting it with Carney’s handlers deliberately keeping the PM away from the press as much as they can.

The numbers of people who show up to political events isn’t a dependable metric, but if the disproportion gets to the point that you’re able to hand-count the number of supporters at a given venue, it might be a useful bit of anecdata:

The first genuine “bozo moment” of the federal election campaign

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

I saw a mention on social media that an Ontario candidate had publicly suggested that his primary opponent be dragged off to the Chinese embassy for some kind of reward, and I assumed it was another example of something being taken wildly out of context … but no:

Liberal MP Paul Chiang, left, and Liberal leader Mark Carney, right.

So let’s just recap, because this is almost too surreal to believe.

A sitting Liberal Member of Parliament — Paul Chiang — stood in front of a Chinese-language media outlet in January 2025 and said that if someone were to kidnap Joe Tay, a Conservative candidate and Canadian citizen, and deliver him to the Chinese Consulate in Toronto, they could “claim the one-million-dollar bounty”. That wasn’t some fringe YouTuber or anonymous social media post. That was a sitting MP, elected to represent Markham—Unionville, who also happens to serve as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Diversity and Inclusion.

Let me be crystal clear here: that’s not just inappropriate. That’s not just “deplorable”. That’s language lifted directly from the Chinese Communist Party’s playbook. Joe Tay is on a real bounty list. Not fantasy. Not fiction. A real HK$1 million bounty placed on his head by the Hong Kong police for supporting democracy and speaking out against tyranny.

And what happens when a Canadian MP echoes that threat — on Canadian soil?

Nothing.

As of right now—this minute — Paul Chiang is still an MP in good standing in with the Liberals. Not suspended. Not removed from caucus. No RCMP probe. No parliamentary discipline. Nothing.

And the Carney campaign? The Liberal Party’s new face? Crickets. Absolute silence. Carbon Tax Carney, Trudeau’s old money-man turned globalist messiah, who’s spent the last month talking about “foreign interference” and demanding Pierre Poilievre get a security clearance? Not a word. Apparently, if a Conservative doesn’t submit to Ottawa’s surveillance state, it’s a national crisis. But if a Liberal MP plays mouthpiece for Beijing and jokes about abducting a political opponent? It’s just … Tuesday.

Imagine for a second that a Conservative MP had said anything remotely close to this — maybe even joked about placing a bounty on a Liberal politician funded by a foreign regime. Every major newsroom in the country would have declared martial law. CBC would be live for 72 hours straight. The RCMP would have launched a task force. But because it’s a Liberal, they issue a press release. A shrug. A “deplorable” comment, followed by a half-hearted apology and — get this — no consequences.

As former prime minister Justin Trudeau amply demonstrated, consequences are for other people, not members of the Liberal caucus.

March 30, 2025

Recycling an old slogan – [Mark Carney] “didn’t come back for you”

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

I guess you could say that Elizabeth Nickson isn’t a Carney fan:

Doesn’t he look half-dead? Like a shroud covers his saggy emaciated face and spindly body. Indicative of lifelessness of his ideas. NOT his actual ideas because what he is currently selling are the ideas he stole from Canada’s Conservative Party. Those ideas are grass roots, labored over for decades in underfunded think tanks, all roundly mocked and slandered in our repellent media which never tells the truth when an easy lie is within reach. But now, in the hands of a “leader” who will not stop the Liberal Party and its Laurentian elite clients looting of the Canadian people, well now they are AOK. And genius. And a lie, because he will only perform the minimum to gratify the stupid, “educated” women who will elect him.

Because above everything Liberal Party looting must continue. And with Net Zero and all that elite clap trap there will be another three generations of Canadians to ruin, to steal from, to harvest their life’s energy to feed the Party’s enormous ego and the plush lifestyles in the posh suburbs of Canada. Scratch such a resident and whatever he does, his salary is boosted by government, in some form or other, via contracts which do not perform, ghost contracts, just money to play with for supporting the Liberal Party.

If Carney is elected, the country will break up.

First Alberta will go. Danielle Smith emerged grim from her last meeting with Carnage. Have you heard of stranded assets? That’s his goal for Alberta’s oil and gas. Albertas energy is responsible for one third of Canadas private sector economy and no matter what he says, he has worked for two decades for Climate Change sequestration nonsense. For solar and wind, for de-development, sliming his way around the world twisting arms. He was the grim reaper behind Justin’s authoritarianism. As a result our current economy is built on government and debt and refinancing loans and housing.

Oh he will lie and lie and lie and promise new industrial infrastructure. Sure he will. You know who will own that infrastructure? BIS, the Bank of International Settlements or some international banking outfit. They will own it because carbon credits and future use. They will retire some of our debt, not enough for us to actually grow, just to keep body and soul together. And we will grind forward another twenty years, piling up yet more debt, at which time the Liberal Party will broker off another hunk of our heritage.

Then Saskatchewan. BC and Manitoba will look at the powerhouse economy that the U.S. is building, and petition to strand the Eloi, with their banal life of ease on B.C. Coast, all as equally dumb and destructive as California’s ruinous elites. And join the U.S.

Canada has so much banked energy, so much thwarted ambition, so many lives wasted. So much potential lost. We are like a screaming adolescent banging ourselves against the wall, wanting nothing more than to get a job and get on with it. (Oh, wait, that was me)

Kaizen’s video is linked [here]. I STRONGLY recommend you listen to his powerful brief encapsulation of how fast the American economy is going to grow.

We tariff because we are broke. We are broke because we have regulated ourselves into stasis. This below represents what it is to do business in Canada. I have heard this from thousands of entrepreneurs.

March 29, 2025

Carney, our unelected PM, announces the end of our generations-long bilateral relationship with the US

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

As many folks on Twit-, er, I mean X have pointed out, Mark Carney is just a caretaker PM, not having ever been elected to the position, so it’s more than a bit breathtaking that he’s making announcements like this without any mandate from the voters:

Later, we get to vote on whether he made it to the podium

The last Liberal leader promised real change too. Apparently this one uses a different definition.

“It is clear that the United States is no longer a reliable partner,” Mark Carney said after a cabinet meeting on Thursday. “It is possible that with comprehensive negotiations we will be able to restore some trust. But there will be no turning back.”

Uh, sir, you’re sounding kind of categorical —

“The next government — and all that follow — will have a fundamentally different relationship with the United States,” Carney said.

So if I understand correctly, what you’re saying is —

“Coming to terms with this sobering reality is the first step in taking necessary actions to defend our nation,” Carney said. “But it’s only the first step.”

In a career that now stretches back to before many of my readers were born, I’ve covered speeches like this before, of course. Maybe five. Well, two. No, strike that, this was new.

“Over the coming weeks, months, and years we must fundamentally reimagine our economy,” the rookie leader of the Liberal Party of Canada said.

Well, you know, “fundamentally” can mean a lot of things —

“The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.”

Oh, so you mean fundamentally.

In French, a language that fits this Savile Row man like a hand-carved barrel — it covers the essentials while leaving the odd splinter — Carney did a version of the Doug Ford thing where he asked for a strong mandate to undertake negotiations. Unlike Ford he put no real effort into selling it. Was he being overconfident? Not at all, he said, as every man ever has in response to that question. He still needs to “win every vote,” he insisted.

But it “would be better” to have a large mandate “to have a large, comprehensive negotiation, the most important in our life.” Here he didn’t pause, really, so much as consider the ramifications of what he was saying while the words were still coming out.

“Especially in my life. When I was born the Auto Pact was created.” Which sounds grandiose, sure, but to be fair I believe Carney, who was born in Fort Smith in 1965, was merely asserting correlation, not causality. “And now it’s over.”

Wait, what? The AUTO PACT is over? That’s like saying it’s time to shut the ski operation at Whistler down, if Whistler contributed 11.5% to Canada’s manufacturing GDP. “It’s very serious, this situation,” he concluded, mildly.

Later, some of the early reaction to Carney’s remarks seemed to me to skip too lightly over the plain meaning of the Prime Minister’s words. And yes, it feels odd to call him the Prime Minister. We haven’t yet had a vote on the matter, although I’m told one will be held shortly. But the people in the cabinet room were people Carney had appointed, and the Parliamentary Protective Service let them in, so I guess in a rough-and-ready way, he really is — Anyway. It’s possible Carney’s words meant nothing. Or that he’ll be forced to eat them later. Or that, it being election season, he’ll never get a chance to implement them. In the latter case, the Carney Tariff Scrum of March 2025 would become an item of wonk trivia, like Kim Campbell’s genuinely impressive government reorganization of 1993.

March 18, 2025

“[T]he Liberals have no principles because it works“

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

The first act of our unelected prime minister was to performatively sign a piece of paper that supposedly eliminated the hated carbon tax. Well, part of the carbon tax. And not really eliminated eliminated, it just set the rate to zero percent. The carbon tax that the Liberals had proclaimed was essential to saving the entire planet from global warming. If this seems odd, buckle up, because this is just how the Liberal Party operates:

Obviously, I don’t believe Mark Carney nor the Liberal Party of Canada want to destroy the world.

Nor do I believe they could destroy the world, even if a supervillain gave them an unlimited budget in which to do so. After ten years when the supervillain checked up on the Liberals to see how the world-destruction plan was coming along, he’d find out that the world destruction equity subcommittee was waiting for a report from a sub-subcommittee responsible for convening a task force to authorize a panel to determine how to destroy the world in way which minimally impacted disadvantaged communities, but they’re having trouble finding francophone Saskatchewanians for the breakout sessions.

But I am somewhat startled to see how quickly Carney’s Liberal Party abandoned a signature policy it assured us was necessary to fight the existential threat posed by climate change:

This is like the National Socialist German Workers Party tweeting a meme cheering on Adolf Hitler for killing Hitler. (Given the state of Twitter these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if there actually is an official NSDAP account, but never mind.)

We’re left with two possibilities regarding the carbon tax policy promoted by the last Liberal Prime Minister and now abolished (or is it?!?) by the new Liberal Prime Minister:

  • it never would have made much difference in the fight against climate change anyway, in which case it was always a waste of time and effort; or,
  • it would have made a big difference in the fight against climate change, in which case Carney has decided it’s more important to win the impending federal election and take away his opponents’ talking points than to actually do something about a potential ecological crisis.

I’m not naive about politicians, even those I support, being hypocrites and flip-floppers. There may be some truly principled, ideologically consistent political parties out there, but they can hold their annual conventions in a Ford Club Wagon.

March 11, 2025

“In many ways, Carney is the technocrat’s technocrat. A bona fide citizen of nowhere”

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In spiked, Fraser Myers expresses incredulity that Canadians have “chosen” yet another technocratic globalist as our next Prime Minister to succeed Justin Trudeau:

Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Canadians have a new prime minister. After a leadership election in the ruling Liberal Party, it’s out with the woke globalist, Justin Trudeau, and in with the woke globalist, Mark Carney.

Extraordinarily, in an age where justified populist rage against an out-of-touch establishment is spreading across the globe, Canadians have ended up with a leader who embodies that very establishment. In many ways, Carney is the technocrat’s technocrat. A bona fide citizen of nowhere.

The new Canadian PM’s CV reads like a parody of an archetypal Davos man. He has been governor of the Bank of Canada, governor of the Bank of England and a United Nations special envoy on climate action and finance. Before he entered the public eye, he worked for Goldman Sachs – in London, Tokyo, New York and Toronto. He has degrees from Harvard and Oxford. Yet he has never once held any form of elected political office. He does not even currently hold a seat in Canada’s House of Commons.

Carney is living, breathing proof that expert credentials are no substitute for sound judgement or political acumen. He has embraced just about every naff and dangerous political trend of our times, never deviating from the Davos script.

Most notoriously, as governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, Carney became the high priest of Project Fear ahead of the 2016 Brexit vote. He warned before the referendum that a Leave vote would spark an instant recession. It didn’t. He claimed Brexit would make investment in British assets so risky that it could ‘test the kindness of strangers’ should the UK take the leap. Needless to say, this was politically motivated hysteria, not a sober assessment of Britain’s economic prospects outside the EU.

More recently, his endorsement of Labour’s Rachel Reeves as chancellor ahead of the UK General Election also smacked of both dubious judgement and needless political interference. Carney said in autumn 2023 that it was ‘beyond time’ her plans were put into action. Yet since Reeves’s plans were actually put into action, in her first budget in October last year, the UK economy has teetered on the brink of recession, unemployment has risen and government borrowing costs have shot up. Call it the Carney kiss of death.

March 10, 2025

“I, for one, welcome our new unelected globalist technocratic overlord”

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

With a resounding 99% 85.9% of the voters whose votes were allowed, Maximum Leader Mark Carney has finally been elected to a position for the first time in his adult life:

With the support of most of Justin Trudeau’s team, Carney has been ushered in to continue on with more of Trudeau’s signature economic policies, the ones Carney has been advising Trudeau on since 2020.

Yes, Carney said that he will scrap the capital gains tax changes that have hurt so many small business owners, but that had to go. He also promised to drop the consumer carbon tax but would also increase the industrial carbon tax, a move that will have the same impact on manufacturing industries like steel as Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Few Canadians will know about the discrepancy in Carney’s plan or any others because there has never been a leader in this country elected to such high office with so little vetting. Carney preferred speeches and rallies over news conferences and interviews with U.S. media outlets over Canadian ones because the interviewer would know little about Canadian politics.

When he wasn’t appearing on The Daily Show or the podcast of Trump’s short-lived spokesman Anthony Scaramucci, Carney preferred to speak to friendly liberal media outlets like CBC. While the media narrative is that Carney has reinvigorated the Liberal party and closed the polling gap with Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, neither claim is demonstrably true.

While more than 400,000 people signed up as “registered Liberals” to vote in this nomination process, just over 151,000 actually took the time to vote. This is a chance to pick the next prime minister of our country at a time when we are facing a threat to our sovereignty and a threat to our economic future, yet our next PM was chosen by so few people.

By comparison, the last Conservative leadership race saw more than 400,000 people vote with 295,285 ballots cast for Poilievre alone. Sure, it might have been a longer timeline, but the stakes – becoming leader of the official Opposition with no election in sight – were much smaller.

In the National Post Chris Selley doesn’t seem to be a fan of the new unelected leader of the federal government (assuming that Justin Trudeau will actually step down, of course):

Every speaker of note [at the Liberal leadership hootnanny], from the four leadership candidates to outgoing leader Justin Trudeau to former prime minister Jean Chrétien, who held the room in the palm of his hand for what felt like a day and a half, mentioned the need for Canadians to stand together, united and altogether resolute against the threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs.

At the same time, of course, Liberals were insisting that the Conservatives — who have as much or more support nationwide, and until recently had a lot more — are bent on destroying all that’s good and holy about this country. That isn’t really a unifying message.

“Pierre Poilievre just doesn’t get it,” Carney averred in his victory speech. “He is the type of life-long politician … who worships at the altar of the free market without having made a payroll himself. And now … at a time of immense economic insecurity, he would undermine the Bank of Canada. Poilievre has called for the shutting down of CBC at a time when disinformation and foreign interference are on the march. He insults our mayors and ignores our First Nations.”

“A person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him,” Carney said of Poilievre, who has been raining invective on Trump just as fast as he can in recent days — and indeed someone whom Trump himself denigrated in recent days as “not a MAGA guy”.

Oh, and Carney said “Pierre Poilievre would let our planet burn” — on the same night he promised to axe the consumer carbon tax as a first order of business.

Other than all that, though, we’re in it together. Okey-dokey.

Dan Knight is even less impressed:

And here’s where it gets even better. The polling — oh, the polling. For months, the Liberals have been sinking. Before Trudeau resigned, they were floundering at 24% support. Then, magically, within days of picking a new leader, they skyrocket to 33%? A 9-point jump in the blink of an eye? Wow, what a coincidence! You mean to tell me that the same Canadians who couldn’t be bothered to sign up for a free membership, the same Canadians who have overwhelmingly turned against this party, suddenly decided they’re on board again — just because the party swapped one out-of-touch elitist for another?

No. That’s not how this works. That’s not how enthusiasm works.

This isn’t some grand Liberal resurgence. This is the Liberal-friendly media manufacturing a comeback narrative because their government subsidies depend on it. The same journalists who screamed for years about the Conservative “far-right” threat are now bending over backwards to convince you that Mark Carney is a fresh outside

And you know what? Maybe if they had actually let Ruby Dhalla into this race, they would’ve stood a chance. Seriously. I had to do a double-take when I looked at her policies — supporting small business, tough on crime, actual immigration regulation — I mean, that’s how you win the center. That’s how you stop a Conservative majority and turn it into a minority government. If they had let her run, we’d be having a very different conversation right now.

But what did the Liberals do? Oh, they disqualified her over — get this — campaign finance irregularities. But guess what? They kept the money. That’s right. The party flagged “violations”, kicked her out, and then conveniently pocketed the cash. If that’s not the most Liberal Party thing I’ve ever heard, I don’t know what is.

Can you feel the Carneymentum? It’s supposed to sweep the land from sea to sea to sea … any minute now.

March 9, 2025

Mark “the human snooze button” Carney

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

In the National Post, Chris Selley explains the attraction of a Mark Carney-led Liberal Party to mainstream Canadians:

Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Ironically I suspect what Poilievre is up against is one of the most basic and powerful forces in Canadian politics: conservatism, but in one of its purest forms, namely suspicion of change — especially in a crisis. Recall that Canada saw 10 elections during the pandemic — one federal and nine provincial. The incumbent parties won eight of them, in some cases even as their health-care and long-term care systems collapsed on their heads and their “pandemic preparedness” folders turned out to contain nothing but some old Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.

No question, there are problems here specific to Poilievre and the Conservatives. The Royal Order of Laurentian Elites nearly fainted when Poilievre started saying “Canada is broken”, but people seemed to calm down about it and engage with it once it became clear most Canadians agreed: 70 per cent, according to a Postmedia-Leger poll last year.

Saying “Canada is broken” nowadays is likely to get you branded a traitor by a mob of people who think Beaver Tails, Tim Horton’s, Molson advertisements and a Tragically Hip playlist comprise a national identity. Canada can be broken and Trump can be a lunatic at the same time, but nationalist outbursts have little time for such nuance.

[…]

Change is unavoidable in the forthcoming election, of course. And by rights, Canadians should want it: Like COVID, Trump’s demands on border security and military spending, and his obviously sincere belief in the power of tariffs — as untethered from reality and sense as these demands are — have exposed massive weaknesses on our part that we should want to fix for our own sake. Poilievre should speak more to us about those fixes.

Mark Carney never made any sense to me as a potential saviour for the Liberals. The most obvious recent event they needed to replicate was Kathleen Wynne’s jaw-dropping majority win in 2014 for the Ontario Liberals, after Dalton McGuinty had driven the party into a pond and left it there to drown. Wynne was a proven, veteran campaigner. Carney is … well, certainly not an “outsider”, but this is his first go at politics, and it certainly hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

But Carney seems set to win the party’s leadership race on Sunday, anyway. He’s boring, and he’s a technocrat, and Trudeau is neither. And neither is Poilievre. A boring technocrat might well look like a safe harbour for a lot of Canadians. Poilievre needs to put a more positive spin on the changes we so desperately need.

February 2, 2025

Captain Trumpmerica versus the Post-national Maple Protectionists

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

Donald Trump has made picking fights with the corrupt oligarchs of Mexico and Canada a key part of his appeal to American voters. Canada used to be a proud nation, but after years of deliberate mismanagement and stubborn opposition to innovation and growth, we’ve become — as Justin Trudeau so smugly put it — the first “post-national state” that has “no core identity [and] no mainstream”, because we’re a plaything for the WEF and other transnational organizations. Elizabeth Nickson calls us a “failed state” and that swapping in globalist WEF’er Mark Carney for globalist WEF’er Justin Trudeau will make no positive difference:

25% tariffs will ruin us. The tariffs mean one million small businesses — all which sell to the U.S. — will contract and many will close their doors. And then Trump, as he promised the unions, will pull “our” auto industry. Then we’re done.

Who is to blame for this?

The following is going to be crude because Canada is so boring (that’s deliberate) that no one cares. There are a thousand ultra-complex rationales on why Canada is failing and all they do is obfuscate. I’m not pulling punches, softening rhetoric — it is bad. It is urgent. This is the death of something that 75 years ago was shining, sunlit, exciting. That country? That country was killed by the Laurentian elite, weak, cosplaying Marxism to stay in power, themselves outwitted by investment bankers who plan to steal everything not nailed down. In so doing new elements were forcibly injected into the population: envy, resentment of the successful, sloth, the refusal to grow up, be strong and independent. We effectively sit on top of the U.S., seething with envy, in wet diapers.

We are a broken country. Everyone who understands the world knows this. The only people who don’t are deluded Canadian socialists, which is to say our entire elite and all our “knowledge class”. Dissent is ignored. Or jailed.

Central banker Mark Carney, WEFer paramount, is being parachuted into the Liberal party in order to sell us off to the investment banks who will harvest us for our resources. Our people? Future serfs in Special Enterprise Zones. We already have the regulation in place. No taxes, no worker rights, no enviro controls, no self-determination, no agency, no freedom. Time frame? Ten years, twenty at the outside. The inevitable end of hard-core socialism.

That is what Carney did to Canada in the ‘08 crisis, a crisis entirely created by larcenous government and investment bankers: he loaded us up with so much debt that the moment the economy turned, the working class — and Canada is now 75% working class — paid for it through interest rates so high they crippled and broke every middle class family with a mortgage. Then, he moved to England and did it to the English. His name there? Mark Carnage. During the ’08 crisis, he in Canada and the UK and Obama in the US transferred trillions in public wealth to the investment banks to keep them going after the worst crisis since ’29. A crisis they caused. That was the people’s money, not theirs.

However, as Peter Menzies points out, our Laurentian Elite are still 100% protecting us from the baleful influence of American culture … well, the commercial bits anyway:

Next Sunday, the federal agency responsible for the flourishing of national culture and identity will be swamped with complaints. The grumbling will emanate from Canadians enraged they can’t get more American culture. Yes, America may be in the process of humiliating Canada as its lamest of lame duck leaders, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, waddles into the sunset. And, for sure, most of us are mortified that U.S. President Donald Trump has chosen to make an example of us as he launches his mission to bring the globe to heel and Make America Great Again.

But the bitching directed in the days to come at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications (CRTC) headquarters in Gatineau will originate from Canadians angry they can’t watch American Super Bowl TV ads along with the game. A perennial contender to be the most watched TV event in Canada, the Super Bowl also has traditionally been the most controversial event on the CRTC’s calendar.

The USA can slap us silly with tariffs. It can send hundreds of thousands of us into unemployment and despair. It can mock our disinterest in maintaining the essentials of nationhood and drive us into unsustainable debt. Trump can brutalize our national esteem and taunt us for our cavalier attitudes towards the defence of our sovereignty. And he can lick his big beautiful lips while pondering our potential as the 51st state.

But what will really light us up Feb. 9 will be being unable to watch Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal reinvent their famous restaurant scene from When Harry Met Sally or Michelob Ultra’s production starring Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara as a couple of pickleball hustlers. Or Matthew McConaughey channeling legendary Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka for Uber Eats. And the Clydesdales. Everyone loves those Budweiser Clydesdales, particularly the cute little foal making a debut.

It doesn’t matter that the ads cost $7 million U.S. (which will convert into heaven only knows how many bazillion loonies in the months ahead) for a 30-second spot. Or that for more than a decade many of the commercials have been available on YouTube. Canadians don’t want to watch a Super Bowl adorned with Government of Ontario and Maple Leaf Foods ads. They want to watch the game like real Americans and relish the full, unfettered American experience.

At the National Post, a sad recounting of just how badly we’ve been let down by our politicians — and not just recently … this is a decades-long list of conscious self-harm for short-term domestic political advantage:

Bold counter-attacks against the U.S. can’t work, because all the ideas Canada could have put into action to make such a response viable are collecting dust on the cellar shelf. Drop interprovincial trade barriers that amount to a $200-billion penalty on the national economy every year? That only became a serious conversation in the last month. It should have been a serious conversation 10 years ago, if not more.

End supply management? Out of the question — think of the Quebec votes such a move would cost. The Big Milk lobby is a strong one.

How about resource development? Because Canada is ultimately a resource-exporting economy? No; we’ve been cancelling energy projects at the slightest objection and building more legislation to stand in their way. Industries like mining and fishing, already mired in growth-choking regulations, are increasingly refashioned by governments into welfare and “reconciliation” initiatives, repelling private investment that would have brought prosperity to the country as a whole.

Diversify away from the Americans? We’ve only done the opposite: since 2017, Canadian trade has become more focused on the U.S.

Canada should be a prosperous, growth-oriented economy, but instead, its government — and the people who continuously vote for economy-stagnating policy — settle for subsistence and redistribution of a shrinking pie of wealth. Their choices for the past decade have left us without enough fat to get through a cold trade winter.

Prompt retaliatory counter-tariffs are hence unwise. Such a move would put Canadians in the path of two separate blows, one from the front, the other from the back. And while immediate counter-tariffs could affect Americans whose support the president depends on — as was the case in the 1930s, when Canadian counter-tariffs prolonged the American Great Depression (while inflicting domestic pain) — those Americans have much bigger economic fat stores. In a trade war of attrition, expect Canada to lose.

That leaves us, unfortunately, with the less-glamourous immediate option: play this by the book. The United States-Canada-Mexico free trade agreement, which will be violated by any across-the-board tariff Trump applies, needs to be challenged with the mechanisms agreed upon by party states. During the process, Canada must remind Trump that it’s just following the agreement that he made.

January 19, 2025

Mark Carney is a serious man … that doesn’t mean he’d be a good political leader

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

The Line‘s Jen Gerson likes Mark Carney, but she hastens to add that this isn’t necessarily good news for Mr. Carney as she felt the same way about Jim Prentice who was very briefly Premier of Alberta but “demonstrated the political nous of a chicken nugget” and quickly was out of power:

Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.

I learned the most valuable lesson from that period of political reporting, one I try to carry with me unto this very day: Never, never let one’s personal feelings about an individual candidate corrupt one’s political analysis. And if you think about it, this is a very important lesson to learn.

I am not a normal person. That which appeals to me is very unlikely to find purchase with sane, feeling voters who hold ordinary jobs and live lives filled with meaningful human connections and real, not-political conversations.

I was thinking about this as I watched Mark Carney announce his intention to run as Liberal leader in Edmonton on Thursday. Carney is a serious man. He has a real CV and a long list of meaningful accomplishments. He’s a man who seems to understand that the “good old times are over”. He’s a man who has navigated several international crises — as he was keen to point out. He’s a man who despises the excesses of both the right and the left. He’s a man who is is focused on building Canada’s economy.

He’s a man who has correctly identified one of the Conservatives’ core weaknesses, their tendency to channel legitimate anger and grievance into thin slogans that offer few substantive plans toward the kinds of significant changes that this country will be required to make. The fact that Carney is making this critique while coming to the fore without offering any substantive plans of his own is only to be expected considering the timeline’s he’s working with, I suppose.

Regardless, Carney is giving Jim Prentice Energy. Jean Charest Energy. Jeb! Energy.

I like him.

[…]

For that matter, if Carney wants to present himself as a strong supporter of Canada, a defender of our sovereignty in the face of America’s re-articulated expansionist ambitions, why did he preempt his leadership launch with an appearance on The Daily Show? What message are we to take from this: that Carney is well liked and respected by the American political milieu that was roundly trounced by Donald Trump?

It doesn’t signal a lot of faith in Canada as a cohesive cultural concept to soft launch your political leadership campaign through a marshmallow chat with an American comedy host. (As an aside, I realize that foreigners aren’t real to Americans, but I’m begging literally any television journalist on a mainstream U.S. network to stop treating our politicians like kawaii pets [Wiki] on loan from a northern Democrat utopia that exists only in their minds. These people can handle hard questions — even about matters that are important to an American audience; like, for example, Canada’s delinquent NATO spending.)

Did Mark Carney not believe that the CBC that I presume he will be campaigning to preserve was up to the challenge of doing the first interview with him? Look, I wouldn’t turn down a chat at Jon Stewart’s table if I got the call, but if the best possible way to reach potential Liberal leadership voters in 2025 is to pop onto American TV, we might as well pack it in, call ourselves 51 and be done with it.

By the way, in case anyone hasn’t yet pointed it out; the average age of a Daily Show audience member is 63. The audience is in steep decline, and it doesn’t even air on any Canadian TV channels anymore. To watch the Carney clip, Canadians have to seek it out on Apple TV or YouTube. Usually the day after because the target demo is usually in bed by 9 p.m. MST now.

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