Quotulatiousness

April 17, 2026

Canada joining the EU is a terrible idea

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Dean Allison explains a few of the reasons Canada should not be attempting to join the European Union, despite Prime Minister Carney’s obvious love for the idea:

One of the dumbest ideas floating around right now: Canada joining the European Union.

This isn’t a trade deal. This is a surrender.

You don’t “partner” with the EU. You hand power to unelected technocrats in Brussels who dictate policy across 27 countries.

Let’s be clear what that means for Canada:

  • You lose control of monetary policy. Goodbye independent Bank of Canada.
  • Your federal budget gets reviewed and constrained by foreign bureaucrats.
  • Regulations get imposed from overseas with zero accountability to Canadians.

And if you think Ottawa is slow now, wait until every decision requires EU-level consensus. Nothing gets done without layers of approvals, committees, and political trade-offs across continents.

Then there’s censorship.

The EU is aggressively regulating online speech, platforms, and content. Handing them influence over Canada means more control over what you see, say, and share.

This isn’t sovereignty. It’s outsourcing it.

As Brian Lilley points out, we’d be giving up more control than in any U.S. trade deal.

Rejecting becoming the 51st state of the U.S. only to become the 28th state of Europe isn’t strategy, it’s pure stupidity!

And Canadians will pay the price.

April 14, 2026

Bureaucrats often prefer regulations to taxes, because the costs are “hidden”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Reason, J.D. Tuccille discusses the hidden impact of “red tape” on the economy — just because the government isn’t getting a cheque doesn’t mean that compliance is free:

President Trump prepares to cut a “red tape” display of regulations representative of 1960 and compared to the current numbers of regulations, Thursday, December 14, 2017, in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, announcing how the administration is keeping its promise to remove regulations burdening job creators and American taxpayers.
White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Anybody who runs a business or engages in regulated activities knows that government red tape imposes a significant burden. Those burdens can be very high, deterring entrepreneurs from launching companies, restraining the growth of those that already exist, and driving some people to operate illegally rather than try to deal with an administrative state that specializes in obstructionism. But just how much do federal regulations cost us? A new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) tries to tally the price tag — and warns that Washington, D.C. needs major reform.

The Out-of-Control Regulatory State

That the regulatory state is out of control isn’t really a debatable point. The Federal Register lists 445 agencies with the legal authority to publish regulations. Forbes noted that “federal departments, agencies, and commissions issued 3,853 rules in 2016, while Congress passed and the president signed 214 bills into law”. In May of last year, the White House acknowledged that “the United States is drastically overregulated” and that “the Code of Federal Regulations contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages … Worse, many carry potential criminal penalties for violations.”

[…]

Compliance Costs Strangle the Economy

“Just as consumers shoulder much of the corporate income tax and tariff burden, regulatory compliance costs and mandates borne by businesses percolate through the economy and materialize as higher prices, lost jobs, and lower output,” writes Crews. “Off-budget regulatory costs can drag down the economy, just as overspending can.”

If you balk at the idea that federal regulations impose costs of over $2 trillion on Americans, you should be aware that CEI is restrained in its assessment. As the report points out, other sources assign even higher price tags to regulatory burdens. Three years ago, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) estimated that “the total cost of federal regulations in 2022 is an estimated $3.079 trillion (in 2023 dollars), an amount equal to 12% of U.S. GDP”. That NAM report added that “the annual cost burden for an average U.S. firm is $277,000, the equivalent of 19% of the average firm’s payroll expenses”. For manufacturers with fewer than 50 employees, the NAM put regulatory compliance costs at $50,100 per employee per year.

Compliance costs aren’t expressed in only monetary terms, they also require time and effort. According to the Office of Management and Budget, for Americans supplying required information to federal agencies “in FY2022, the total paperwork burden … was 10.34 billion hours, compared to 9.97 billion hours in FY2021”.

Of course, not everyone is equally impacted by government regulations. Generally speaking, the smaller the company, the harder it is to comply with all the relevant rules, so big companies often end up supporting demands for more regulation because it handicaps smaller competitors to a much greater degree.

April 6, 2026

Cross-country booze woes

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

On his Substack, Brian Lilley discussed the frustrations of Canadian drinkers thanks to our odd and often illogical regulations around the sale of alcohol:

How Canadian Premiers think they’d have to operate if they let private enterprise into the alcohol trade.
New York City Deputy Police Commissioner John A. Leach, right, watching agents pour liquor into sewer following a raid, 1921.
Wikimedia Commons.

I landed in Saskatoon after a late in the evening flight from Toronto on Thursday. As we headed to a family gathering south of the city, we stopped to pick up some refreshments to add to the festivities.

First off, I’ll say private liquor stores in Sask, like the ones run by Sobey’s or Co-Op are generally quite nice. It’s proof that you can have private liquor stores, the province won’t fall apart and consumers can get their products in a nice, clean, friendly environment.

This is in reference to the silly Canadian abhorrence of private liquor sales … most of our provincial governments are deeply involved in the booze trade, and regularly imply that letting any more of that business go into private hands will instantly create a maple-flavoured version of Al Capone’s empire during Prohibition.

You can also buy booze here that is forbidden in Ontario.

But holy crap is beer expensive here!

[…]

The combined federal and provincial tax rate for Quebec is about 31.5%, Ontario’s is 43% and Sakatchewan’s are the highest in the country at 49.4%.

While beer is more expensive in Sask, Ontario made liquor is cheaper here…
Why is it that in Saskatoon I can buy a bottle of Wiser’s whiskey, made in Windsor, Ontario, for about $10 cheaper than I can at the LCBO, Ontario’s government run liquor stores?

[…]

In Saskatchewan, consumers can choose what to buy…

Ontario has had a ban on the sale of American alcohol products via the LCBO since March 2025. In Saskatchewan, as in Alberta, you can choose whether to buy your Kentucky bourbon or California wine.

That’s a lot of sweet, sweet bourbon for sale at a Sobey’s store in Saskatoon.

If you want to buy some California wine in Saskatoon, you can.
So far, Alberta and Saskatchewan are alone in allowing the regular sale of American alcohol. Consumers who want to boycott here can and I’m sure many do. I hear plenty of anti-Trump/anti-American attittudes here so sales are likely lower than they were pre-tariff.

That said, you are an adult and can buy Yankee hooch if you want to.

That won’t be happening in Ontario anytime soon.

March 25, 2026

Apache Arms Carbine: A Saga of Compliance and Crappy Manufacture

Filed under: History, Law, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Nov 2025

The Apache Arms carbine was a Thompson SMG lookalike that was made in small numbers in the late 1960s. It was the successor to the Spitfire carbine made by the same people, after the Spitfire was deemed a machine gun by the IRS. The Apache used M3 Grease Gun magazines and was chambered for .45 ACP. It uses a square receiver tube and many of the same cast parts as the Spitfire. It is a very interesting look at how the design was adapted to be legally considered semiautomatic.
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March 18, 2026

Virginia sees California’s tax schemes and says “hold my beer”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Freeman, Erik W. Matson pleads with the Virginian government not to “California our Commonwealth”, as the new governor keeps cribbing tax policies from Gavin Newsom’s playbook:

The state seal of Virginia. I am told that the motto Sic semper tyrannis does not actually stand for “Thus always to taxpayers”, all appearances to the contrary.

In 1966, fresh off four busy years of touring, the Beatles returned to the UK to discover they were on the brink of bankruptcy. Their earnings had placed them in the top tax bracket, putting them at the mercy of the Labour government’s 95% supertax. George Harrison, in response to this tyranny, penned the lyrics to what became the first track on their next album Revolver: “Taxman”.

    Let me tell you how it will be
    There’s one for you, nineteen for me
    ‘Cause I’m the taxman

Harrison’s words resonate across the pond today, especially for those living and working in the state of California. Consider the recent case of Sam Darnold, quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks. Darnold earned $178,000 for winning Super Bowl LX in February 2026, which was played in Santa Clara — and promptly found himself owing California $249,000, thanks to the state’s so-called “jock tax“. For almost three decades, the state has had the highest top marginal income tax rate in the US. Capital gains in California are treated — and taxed — as ordinary income, pushing many into higher tax brackets. At the state and local level, California features a garden variety of invasive taxes and surcharges to fund everything from tourism to mental health support initiatives. Add to this the recently proposed 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on the worldwide net worth of California residents worth more than $1 billion. The act would also amend the state constitution to remove the cap on taxes on intangible property (and likely cost the state $25 billion!).

California’s predatory tax regime, sadly, seems increasingly familiar to those of us living in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Thanks to the initiatives of the new governor Abigail Spanberger, Virginia is barreling down a trail of “California-ization.” In some sense, as Adam Johnston has recently discussed, our California-ization has been underway for over a decade, largely due to the influx of legal and illegal immigrants to the deep-blue suburbs in Northern Virginia. But it has entered a new and more aggressive phase under Spanberger, a former member of Congress’s Blue Dog Coalition who, two months in, is governing like anything but. Spanberger and her administration are openly attempting to gerrymander the Commonwealth’s congressional map in an effort to wipe out the state’s Republicans. They have also proposed an expansive set of truly California-esque taxes, subsidies, and regulations antithetical to liberty, prosperity, and “affordability.”

In January, City Journal‘s Judge Glock catalogued some of Spanberger’s initial ideas for governance, including her desire to subsidize housing for state employees and low-income residents and regulate the Commonwealth towards carbon neutrality. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of her ideas would, as Glock says, “drive up expenses for one group of consumers in order to benefit another group deemed more deserving”. If Spanberger’s officially announced agenda from November 2025 is any indication, the “more deserving” include smokers (taking a tactic straight from California’s playbook), solar farms, and scofflaw tenants (compare California’s 2019 Tenant Protection Act!).

Since the convening of the General Assembly, Virginia Democrats’ wildest dreams have metastasized into a concrete body of legislative proposals that promise at once to limit Virginians’ freedoms and nickel-and-dime us into oblivion. House Bill 978, for example, introduces new taxes on:

    recreation, fitness, or sports facilities; nonmedical personal services or counseling; dry cleaning and laundry services; companion animal care; residential home repair or maintenance, landscaping, or cleaning services when paid for directly by a resident or homeowner; vehicle and engine repair; repairs or alterations to tangible personal property; storage of tangible personal property; delivery or shipping services; travel, event, and aesthetic planning services; and digital services.

Building on the architecture of the widely unpopular vehicle tax (which, despite what Spanberger proposed during her campaign, is likely here to stay), House Bill 557 proposes local personal property taxes on electric-powered lawn equipment — including mowers, trimmers, blowers, and chainsaws — used to maintain “commercial, public, or private gardens, lawns, trees, shrubs, or other plants”. These suggested taxes on electric-powered equipment complement a proposal in House Bill 881 encouraging the regulation and even outright banning of gas-powered leaf blowers — again following the lead of California.

SPAS-12: Franchi’s Special Purpose Automatic Shotgun

Filed under: History, Italy, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Nov 2024

Franchi introduced the Special Purpose Automatic Shotgun (SPAS-12) for Italian military and police agencies in 1979 and it quickly became popular worldwide. Based originally on the gas-operated Franchi 500, that SPAS-12 was robust, reliable, and designed as a semiautomatic action with a backup pump action operation for use with underpowered ammunition (like beanbags or other less-lethal loads). In 1982 they began to be imported into the US through FIE, which was replaced by AAI as the importer in 1989. Eventually the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban ended SPAS-12 importation, and Franchi discontinued the model in 2000 in favor of the improved SPAS-15.

The SPAS-12 was almost always sold with a 21.5 inch barrel and 8-round magazine tube. It was available with either a solid sock or a top-folding type, complete with arm brace hook for shooting one-handed from a vehicle. In total, between 45,000 and 50,000 were made between 1979 and 2000, with the largest single purchaser being the Egyptian government (which took 18,000 of them).

Full video on the SPAS 15:
• SPAS-15: Franchi’s Improvement on the SPAS-12
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March 15, 2026

Using US gun statistics to argue against Canadian gun owners

Filed under: Cancon, Law, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Gun Owners of Canada respond to a troll post trying to confuse the legal situation for Canadian gun owners by using statistics from the US, where the laws are significantly different:

Typical. He blocked without further discussion.

But, he’s wrong.

There is a fundamental flaw in using that 1998 [US] DOJ literature review to argue the Stand on Guard Act will lead to more gun deaths. The claim relies on a completely broken comparison between U.S. and Canadian law.

Here is why applying that specific American data to this Canadian bill proposed by the CPC simply does not work.

The DOJ report relies heavily on American statistics where firearms kept for self defense are typically stored loaded and unlocked. That specific environment, meaning immediate and unrestricted access to a loaded weapon, is the primary driver for the increased rates of accidental shootings and suicides highlighted in those U.S. studies.

The Stand on Guard Act does not create that environment in Canada. Saying it does such is just fear-mongering.

This proposed legislation is strictly an amendment to Section 34(2) of the Criminal Code. It establishes a presumption that force used against a violent home invader is reasonable. The goal is to spare Canadians from years of legal limbo for defending their families.

Crucially, this bill does not amend the Firearms Act and it does not repeal Canada’s strict safe storage regulations.

A legally compliant Canadian firearm owner must still store their firearms unloaded and secured with a locking device, or locked inside a sturdy cabinet or safe. Ammunition must also be stored separately or locked up securely in the same safe.

The specific risks identified in the U.S. data, like a child finding a loaded gun or someone in crisis having instant access to a weapon, are mitigated by our existing storage framework.

Debating the merits of self defense thresholds is perfectly fair. However, importing U.S. data based on a completely different regulatory baseline to predict Canadian outcomes is a clear misapplication of the evidence. We need to ground this conversation in actual Canadian law rather than American statistics.

So, as a reminder — welcome to Canada — let’s buy Canadian, support Canadian and recognize Canadian facts.

March 10, 2026

Rolling toward disaster – North America’s trucking industry

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

Donna Laframboise reviews a new memoir by Gord Magill, recounting his career in trucking in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand:

… Gord has written a splendid book that belongs on Economics 101 reading lists everywhere. End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers is chock-a-block with firsthand anecdotes. He tells us, for example, about traveling north into Canada from New York state during the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, and feeling “drunk with patriotism, in love with every person I met, and they were in love with me”. After returning to his wife and daughters south of the border, he says he’d “never seen so many Canadian flags flying in the United States. It was unbelievable.” For a short time, “I was a minor celebrity simply for being from Canada”.

But this book is more than a collection of quirky tales about life behind the wheel. It’s a deep dive into shark-infested waters. For decades, but especially in recent years, experienced truckers have been treated like disposable widgets rather than skilled professionals. An industry upon which much of the North American economy depends has been undermined and hollowed out by perverse economic incentives, widespread fraud, and foolish policy. All of this makes our highways dangerous.

Gord explains that members of the public are three times more likely to be killed in a truck crash in America than down under partly because Australia has a graduated, quasi-apprentice licensing system. After driving smaller trucks for a year, people apply for the next level of trucking license, and then the next level, and then the next.

In North America these days, licenses seem to be given out like breath mints. The driver who blew through a stop sign in rural Saskatchewan in 2018, killing sixteen people associated with the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team and injuring 13 others had less than one month of trucking experience. Yet he was behind the wheel of one of the largest configurations on the road (two interconnected trailers, known in the industry as a Super B-train). In Australia, that same driver would have needed a minimum of four years of experience and would have completed multiple courses and passed multiple tests before being entrusted with such a load.

Gord reminds us about the Ethiopian driver (on a work visa) who plowed into traffic that had slowed to a halt in a Texas construction zone last March. Five people — including a family of two parents and two young children — were killed, eleven others were sent to hospital, and seventeen vehicles were damaged. In that case, the driver reportedly had only four months of trucking experience.

Shortly afterward, in August 2025, three people died in Florida when, as Gord writes, “a tractor trailer attempted to pull an illegal U-turn through a small access point in the median … As the driver of the truck executed the turn, he pulled in front of a minivan, which ran into his trailer at high speed.”

The trucker in that case, an illegal immigrant from India, had somehow acquired commercial driver’s licenses in two US states. But when an English proficiency test was administered a few days after the accident, he answered only 2 of 12 verbal questions correctly and could identify only 1 of 4 traffic signs. It was later reported he’d failed his commercial trucking exam ten times during a two-month period.

Then there’s the trucker who drove an 18-wheeler weighing forty tons across a bridge with a clearly posted weight limit of six tons in rural Arkansas in 2018. The bridge collapsed and the truck sank into the river. It took seven months to extract it, while the bridge remained out-of-service for years.

February 28, 2026

Corruption and red tape rise in lockstep

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

J.D. Tuccille notes that corruption — at least corruption being brought to our attention — is rising at the same rate as bureaucratic red tape. It’s almost as though there’s a correlation between making things harder to do and officials accepting “sweeteners” to make things easier to do …

At the moment, corruption investigations and trials of political figures are taking place in jurisdictions around the U.S. including Hawaii, Mississippi, and Washington, D.C. These aren’t isolated scandals; the latest edition of an international corruption index finds corruption worsening globally, with the United States earning its worst score to date. Given that corruption involves government officials peddling favors for compensation, it shouldn’t be surprising that evidence suggests the solution lies in reducing the power and role of the state.

[…]

Regulation Breeds Corruption

“EU regulation is not only becoming more cumbersome but it is also pilling in”, Oscar Guinea and Oscar du Roy of the European Centre for Political Economy wrote in 2024. “The amount of new regulation accumulated during the last years has been staggering.”

That matters. In its advice for reducing corruption, Transparency International emphasizes, “there is a broad consensus that unnecessary and excessive administrative requirements for complying with regulations create both incentives and opportunities for bribery and corruption”.

The means by which this occurs is logical enough. Government-imposed permitting and licensing requirements, administrative procedures, prolonged decision-making, and contract awards create a temptation to shorten delays and reduce costs by padding officials’ pockets. In many cases, selling exceptions becomes the real reason for red tape. That phenomenon applies to the entire world, including the United States.

In the U.S., the More Regulations, the More Bribery

In a paper published in the European Journal of Political Economy in 2020, Oguzhan Dincer of the Department of Economics at Illinois State University and Burak Gunalp of the Department of Economics at Turkey’s Cankaya University looked at the relative effects of federal regulations on the corruption levels in U.S. states.

“Power to enforce the regulations gives government officials power to extort bribes”, they wrote. “Government officials have an opportunity to extort bribes from the firms trying to enter an industry because they have the power to issue the industry licenses. They also have an opportunity to extort bribes from the incumbent firms by simply colluding with them and keeping the regulations unchanged and/or strengthening the regulations to increase the costs of entry for new firms. Finally, regulations and the discretionary power given to government officials to extract bribes create incentives for firms to operate in the unofficial economy.”

Specific to the U.S., they examined two decades of data to see how red tape affected the honesty of public officials.

What they found shouldn’t be surprising: “Using the U.S. Justice Department’s data on the number of federal convictions for the crimes related to corruption, and controlling for several economic and demographic variables, we find a positive and statistically significant relationship between federal regulations and corruption.”

February 16, 2026

M1918A2 MOR: How to Make a Non-NFA BAR

Filed under: Government, History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Sept 2025

Prior to 1986, Group Industries imported BAR parts kits and then manufactured and registered full-auto receivers for them. This produced transferrable guns which were subject to NFA registration and the $200 transfer tax — which was a much more significant sum at that time than it is today. Some of the potential customers were people (like reenactors) who wanted guns that looked and handled like real BARs but were not regulated by the NFA. To satisfy this subgroup of customers, Group designed a receiver which neither had nor could be adapted to have a gas piston, rendering the gun manually operated. It would fire from an open bolt, but had to be manually recocked after each shot. This was not legally a machine gun, and he made 68 of them.

When the Hughes Amendment to the FOPA passed in 1986, manufacture of new transferrable machine guns ceased, and Group Industries went out of business. Its assets were sold off, including a number of parts kits and unbuilt M.O.R. receivers. One of the buyers was Ohio Ordnance Works (then called Collector’s Corner). They got ten receivers and after selling them, decided to develop a semiautomatic BAR for that same non-NFA BAR market. That gun ended up being the M1918A3, which is still available from them today.
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February 14, 2026

The EU’s plans to drain the “wine lake” … again

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Government, Wine — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canada isn’t the only place with rigidly governed agricultural cartels … the European Union has always been a big fan of governing agricultural markets by fiat rather than allowing the markets to sort out how much of which product should be produced. One of the biggest markets actively distorted by EU regulation is the wine industry, where faulty regulations ended up paying for a vast over-supply of wine in the 1980s and 90s. Rather than eliminating the regulatory structures, the EU continues to prefer letting bureaucrats dictate to producers:

When the Common Agricultural Policy was established, it was quickly determined that one of its core objectives would be the protection of farmers, ensuring stable incomes and food security. In the wine sector, this logic translated into strong interventionism aimed at expanding and stabilizing production.

For decades, Brussels subsidized vineyard planting, protected minimum prices, and absorbed producers’ economic risk, disconnecting production decisions from signals of demand. Producing more ceased to be an economic choice and became a politically safe decision.

This approach created a structural market distortion. As wine consumption began to decline across Europe for demographic, cultural, and economic reasons, the artificially incentivized productive structure remained intact and unable to adjust.

It was in this context that, during the 1980s and 1990s, the first major shock occurred, known as the wine lake: massive wine surpluses with no outlet. Even then, Brussels treated this episode as an isolated and temporary phenomenon, ignoring the fact that it was the direct consequence of existing policies. By persisting with the same strategies, the problem ceased to be episodic and became structural.

In the early 2000s, the European Union was finally forced to recognize that the wine crisis was not temporary. However, instead of removing production incentives and restoring the market’s adjustment function, it opted for a new form of intervention: subsidizing the voluntary uprooting of vineyards. The decision to destroy productive capacity ceased to be economic and became administrative, decreed from the European political center, with profound effects across several countries.

This model, presented as temporary, set a dangerous precedent. Rather than allowing less viable producers to exit the market through prices and economic choice, the state began paying for withdrawal, subsidizing the costs of adjustment and normalizing the idea that the correction of public policy errors should be financed with more public money.

This policy did not solve the underlying problem. It merely reduced cultivated area temporarily, while leaving intact the regulatory architecture which had created the initial distortion. The sector became trapped in a cycle of incentivized expansion, predictable crisis, and administrative correction.

It is within this framework that the Wine Package emerges as the European Union’s latest set of measures for the wine sector. The package relies on an administratively planned reduction of supply through financial incentives for vineyard uprooting, complemented by regulatory adjustments, temporary support measures, and crisis management instruments. Instead of allowing the market to adjust to declining consumption, Brussels once again opts for the destruction of productive capacity as a policy tool. Although the package includes support measures and environmental framing, its central axis remains the administrative reduction of supply.

The impact of these decisions is not marginal. The European wine sector represents a significant share of the European Union’s economy, sustaining approximately 2.9 million direct and indirect jobs and contributing more than €130 billion to EU GDP.

February 13, 2026

The selective ability to override any non-criminal law is a “useful tool to have”

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

The Canadian government is trying to get even more power to exempt their friends and favoured companies from needing to comply with any federal laws or regulations through a provision in an omnibus bill before Parliament. It may sound like a tool to dispense privileges and favours to politically well-connected individuals and organizations, but that’s only because that’s exactly what it does:

In a little-noticed provision included in the government’s latest omnibus bill, Carney government ministers would be able to override almost any non-criminal law they wanted, and provide special treatment to any person or corporation who requested it.

When pressed about the clause in a House of Commons committee this week, Minister of Canadian Identity Marc Miller called it a “useful tool to have”.

The provision is included in C-15, the 634-page “budget implementation” bill currently before the House of Commons.

Among its hundreds of amendments and orders are new powers allowing ministers to hand out special exemptions from any “Act of Parliament” under their purview.

This means that the minister of health would be able to issue exemptions from the Canada Health Act, the Indigenous services minister could oversee exemptions from the Indian Act and the minister of finance would be able to override the Income Tax Act.

Furthermore, ministers could hand out these exemptions to any “entity” they wanted. Under federal guidelines, an “entity” can mean everything from an individual to “a corporation” to an “unincorporated organization”.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see all kinds of ways that this provision could be abused to circumvent the normal rules everyone else is bound by. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Wall Street Apes reacts:

I can’t even believe this is real

Canada Minister Marc Miller is questioned about their new bill under the Liberal government led by Prime Minister Mark Carney that would EXEMPT ALL MINISTERS FROM ALL LAWS

Yes, you heard that correctly

Hidden in the omnibus budget implementation bill, section 208 or clause 12 amends the Red Tape Reduction Act to grant federal cabinet ministers broad discretionary powers

Ministers would be able to temporarily exempt any individual, company, organization, or entity from the application of almost any provision of any federal law (or regulations made under those laws) that the minister is responsible for administering or enforcing, with the sole exception of the Criminal Code

They can themselves, and deem anyone they choose exempt from ALL laws. The only exception is the criminal code

He says you can trust them because “Canadians expect us to act reasonably”

(Holy cr*p)

On her Substack, Melanie in Saskatchewan explains why the rule of law is not optional in Canada:

So let us play this forward. A Beijing connected firm establishes operations in Canada. It hires lobbyists. It meets with the appropriate minister. It argues that certain federal regulations are barriers to innovation or economic growth. Under Bill C 15, that minister could grant a temporary exemption. The company does not need to change Canadian law. It does not need to persuade Parliament. It only needs to persuade the right minister.

That is what should alarm Canadians.

When laws become selectively waivable by political discretion, they cease to be stable guardrails and become negotiable privileges. And power, once granted, is never granted because someone intends to leave it unused.

You tell us this is about economic growth amid trade tensions. Yet Canadians were told you were elected to steady the ship on trade and tariffs, to negotiate strength abroad, to stabilize economic uncertainty. Instead, trade tensions persist, tariffs remain contentious, and what advances efficiently is domestic policy architecture that conveniently aligns with the climate finance world you know so well.

Brookfield’s climate investment arm stands to benefit enormously from aggressive climate frameworks. You remain heavily invested. The potential for substantial personal financial gain is not speculation. It is disclosed reality.

You were not elected to refashion Canada into a climate investment thesis calibrated to suit global asset management portfolios. You were elected to manage trade pressures and protect Canadian economic interests.

This exemption clause is not a minor technical detail. It is a structural shift in how power is exercised. If it is so defensible, extract it from the omnibus bill and introduce it as standalone legislation. Let it be debated openly. Let Canadians see it clearly.

Implement a robust foreign agent registry immediately. Answer why a government that acknowledges compromised parliamentarians believes this is the moment to expand ministerial discretion over who must follow federal law.

The rule of law is not optional.

And Canadians did not vote for a system where compliance is mandatory for citizens but negotiable for the well connected.

January 23, 2026

Canadian schizophrenia: “Resist US aggression!” but also “Disarm law-abiding civilians!”

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

Returning to a topic I’ve been mocking all week on the socials, in The Line, Matt Gurney gently suggests to the Canadian government that it’s just not reasonable to expect Canadian civilians to wage some kind of fierce guerilla war against a feared American invasion while actively disarming Canadians who legally own guns:

A lot has happened, is the thing. A lot is still happening. And it all seems to be happening faster.

But it’s still worth slowing things down just a little bit when the news stories arrive in particularly baffling sequences. Consider just two you may have seen this week: Canada is thinking about fighting an insurgency in case the Americans invade us, and Canada is also working hard to disarm its civilian population. Can I just interject here a moment and suggest that these goals are at odds? That this might be a stupid way of doing things? That the Canadian federal right hand would be shocked and appalled to discover what the left hand was doing?

Let’s take a minute and set up the insurgency thing. It comes from an article published this week in The Globe and Mail. Canadian soldiers are not frantically digging trenches quite yet. The overall consensus is that a U.S. invasion of Canada is unlikely. But clearly, the current trajectory of U.S. geopolitics has shifted the prospect from “batshit crazy” to “it would be weird but we should probably think about it”. So the military is thinking about it — it’s now a contingency being considered, just like the military plans for natural disasters or less bizarre military scenarios, like a war requiring a mobilization or an attack by a terror group or hostile nation on Canadian soil.

And what is the military thinking? Allow me to quote from the Globe:

    The two senior government officials said military planners are modelling a U.S. invasion from the south, expecting American forces to overcome Canada’s strategic positions on land and at sea within a week and possibly as quickly as two days.

    Canada does not have the number of military personnel or the sophisticated equipment needed to fend off a conventional American attack, they said. So, the military envisions unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular military or armed civilians would resort to ambushes, sabotage, drone warfare or hit-and-run tactics.

    One of the officials said the model includes tactics used by the Afghan mujahedeen in their hit-and-run attacks on Russian soldiers during the 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War. These were the same tactics employed by the Taliban in their 20-year war against the U.S. and allied forces that included Canada. Many of the 158 Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014 were struck by improvised explosive devices or IEDs.

Mmm. This yogurt is tasty.

Let me say three things here: first, I can confirm some of the Globe‘s reporting via my own sources. I know for a fact that members of the Canadian Armed Forces are talking, in a very conceptual, high-level way, about what an insurgency against an invader could and would look like in Canada. I do not know of any serious plans or preparations. But discussions? Absolutely. Second, the plan above, in very vague terms, is probably about correct, in terms of how the Canadian population could resist an invader. The actual shooting war would be over almost immediately — the U.S.’s military advantage would be overwhelming. I think two days is optimistic, frankly. I’m not sure it would take much more than two hours to smash any meaningful military resistance.

So, longer term insurgency against a larger and more advanced force would be the only real option, and in that kind of fight, we’d have some real advantages. We’d be a tougher nut to crack, in many ways, than either Iraq or Afghanistan.

But only if we don’t hobble ourselves first. And this brings us to the third point I’d like to make: did you notice the part about “armed civilians”? Because I sure did.

Civilians, sometimes augmented by experienced military personnel in technical and leadership roles, are always the backbone of an insurgency. They have to be. Insurgencies are hit-and-run affairs, and you can’t do that if you’re driving a tank back to a base. In order to be effective, the population must be armed, or somehow have the means to arm itself. Not to be cute, but the resistance being armed is a necessary precondition for a successful armed resistance.

And we are disarming ourselves.

For the record, Canada and the US have historically had plans to defend against one another even at times we’ve otherwise been very peaceful and friendly. About a year ago, Big Serge suggested updates to the old US “War Plan Red” scenario invasion of Canada:

The country’s political and economic center of gravity is the urban corridor from Toronto to Montreal, but a significant share of the Canadian Army is dispersed, with large garrisons in Quebec, Halifax, and the western provinces. Only handful of brigades are garrisoned in the critical theater.

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

The war will be won quickly and decisively, without massive destruction of Canadian cities, if American forces can establish blocking positions to isolate the urban corridor from peripheral Canadian garrisons. In this maneuver scheme, we utilize highly mobile elements including 1st Cavalry Division and airborne forces to block the highways into Toronto, while an eastern screening group isolates the urban centers from reinforcements scrambling in from Quebec.

Proving my near-Nostradamus-level ability to foresee the future, I remarked that “As to why Trump would want to invade a frozen failed state on the brink of bankruptcy, even Big Serge doesn’t have an answer”. Now, of course, the biggest risk to US security would come from Canadian “snowbirds” in Florida, Texas, and Arizona, who may be prone to driving their motor homes or golf carts to attack ICE and US Border Patrol facilities before the Bingo games start at 8.

January 21, 2026

We’ll resist the Yankee hordes with our … um, strongly worded tweets?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A brilliant example of the general case of progressives never taking into account the impact of their own pet schemes is the Canadian Armed Forces including “armed civil resistance” as part of their contingency planning for an American invasion … at the same time that the Canadian government is moving heaven and earth to disarm as many Canadians as possible:

Jason James writes:

Canadian military planners have modeled a potential US invasion from the south.

Their plan?

An armed civilian resistance.

I’m not sure if they’ve checked in with the Liberal government yet, but they’ve outlawed most “assault style” weapons (meaning anything that could actually be used to mount such a resistance).

And depending on where the US invades, they might have a difficult time finding civilians who actually own anything beyond kitchen knives.

Furthermore, anyone who does own hunting rifles or the few legal “assault style” weapons would be more inclined to fight on the side of the Americans than defend a socialist wasteland that sold their future to China.

So what’s the plan then? Mobilize the Mexican cartels and Chinese organized crime gangs who actually have some fire power? Form a militia of IRGC operatives and Indian drug gangs to fight American special forces?

I highly doubt any of them would be interested in walking into certain death for a country they have no allegiance to.

So I guess we’re down to a handful of lesbians and communists armed with broom handles defending Vancouver and Toronto from the greatest military power the world has ever known.

Good luck with that, comrades.

No disrespect to James, but the weapons the federal government are trying to confiscate are not “weapons of war” or “assault weapons” — they are mostly semi-automatic guns that look vaguely like military weapons. The feds offered to send all confiscated weapons to Ukraine as they fight a desperate war of defence against the Russian invaders and need anything they can get. And Ukraine refused the offer because these weapons would not be useful in combat. But the basis for confiscating them in the first place is that they’re all dangerous military weapons.

This is likely what would happen if such an invasion materialized:

Of course, you can always depend on Not the Bee to provide a tasteful selection of topical memes.

January 19, 2026

Regulating the clankers

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

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Kevin T. Frazier and Antoine Langrée consider how artificial intelligence can be regulated by state and federal bodies:

Yes, I’m still 12

President Donald Trump’s executive order on artificial intelligence invites analysis of a question so complex that it rarely gets asked: “What exactly do states have the authority to regulate?”

The current, somewhat trite answer is, “The residuary powers reserved under the Tenth Amendment”. Omitting the legalese, that means that states can do whatever the federal government cannot.

States have the power to look out for the health, safety, and welfare of their residents. Thus, for instance, they have the power to address local concerns through zoning laws, professional certifications via licensing regimes, and ensure public safety through law enforcement. These authorities make up what’s often referred to as a state’s “police powers”.

While this generic reading of state power is not necessarily wrong, it’s imprecise. As the AI Litigation Task Force created by Trump’s EO starts its work, a more specific answer is warranted.

The task force is charged with challenging “unconstitutional, preempted, or otherwise unlawful State AI laws that harm innovation”. Reading between these lines, its mission is to contest state laws that interfere with the Administration’s vision for a national AI policy framework. This isn’t an unlimited charge, though. Federal courts reviewing state laws will only strike them down if they fail to align with the Constitution’s allocation of authority or otherwise prove unlawful.

Many stakeholders in AI debates liberally interpret the authorities afforded to states. Based on concerns of existential risk to humanity and the idea that states must protect the health of their citizens, state legislators have proposed and enacted laws that impose significant obligations on the development of AI. Some assume they must have this right, since protecting the lives of their residents is a core priority and unquestioned authority of state governments. After all, since the founding, states have been able to enforce quarantines out of a concern for public health — aren’t aggressive AI laws just extensions of such public health measures, but tailored to the threat of modern threats?

It’s not that simple. States’ police powers are reasonably broad, but not unlimited. States must respect both an upper bound — the purview of enumerated powers reserved for federal authority — and a lower bound—the rights retained by the states’ citizens. These constraints have been tested in litigation throughout our Constitution’s history, notably when state law conflicts with the federal government’s exclusive authority over interstate commerce and when states unduly limit the freedoms of their residents.

These notions are relatively blurry and highly contextual. As national regulatory policy evolves, so too does the extent of preemption. The Lochner era, for example, was a paradigm shift for state police power: as courts expansively interpreted the individual liberty to contract, states’ police power over health, labor protections, and market regulation shrank significantly — only to be restored later. Likewise, individual liberties and valid justifications for their abridgment have evolved to fit developments in civil rights law — from Brown v. Board to Dobbs and Lawrence.

Despite these significant changes in context, the constitutionality of states’ exercise of their police powers follows a bounded framework. This can be observed in the jurisprudence on public health measures — a prime example of police powers. Quarantine orders, from nineteenth-century epidemics to Covid-19, have a direct link to protecting local communities — one of the most important elements of state police powers. They respect the upper and lower bounds of police powers. First, they are geographically specific: they only affect local residents or people coming into local communities. Second, they directly reduce the risk to state residents: quarantines are known solutions to real threats to the health and safety of local communities. They infringe the individual liberties only insofar as is necessary to protect state residents’ vital interests.

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