Believing herself clever, Alberta premier Danielle Smith is trying to lay a trap for prime minister Mark Carney, but it’s a really obvious trap and Admiral Ackbar can see it from a mile off. Because she is apparently now a socialist, Smith has decided that the provincial government will take the lead on proposing a pipeline to the northern coast of BC, with the “advice” of three pipeline companies, but none of them will actually be the proponent as this goes to the Major Projects Office. Smith claims that she is trying to get around the “chicken and egg” problem of not having any interested proponents in such a pipeline, and hopes that she can get it off the ground so that a private company will take it over, but remember that it’s not 2014, and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of market demand. (Oh, and she wants to use digital asbestos to help map the route, which is even more hilariously sad).

This is very much a dare to everyone to oppose her. BC premier David Eby has called this out as a stunt because it’s not a real project, with no real proponent, and no buyers lining up for any of the product. The Indigenous rights and title-holders in the area are not interested in the project, and are opposed to a bitumen pipeline going through their territory and off their coast, because this would also require lifting the tanker ban because Smith wants to ship bitumen through it, which is a “persistent” product unlike LNG. Carney has previously said that if the province and First Nations are opposed to the project, it won’t go ahead, but he has also given himself the power to override pretty much any objection, or the tanker ban, or any of it, if he really wants to. But a refusal is largely what Smith is counting on, so that she can once again play the victim, and blame the federal government for a lack of market interest.

In a sense, the province wasting millions of dollars on this for the sake of grievance theatre is not new. Jason Kenney sunk $1.3 billion into the dead Keystone XL project in an attempt to revive American interest in it, even going so far as to proposed to fund its construction if the proponent wouldn’t to try and challenge the Biden veto. This feels like more of the same, where she is sinking money she doesn’t have into a losing prospect in an empty gesture in order to secure her political future by playacting as the great defender of Alberta and its ossifying industry. But there are going to be epic tantrums, and she’s going to try and use the threat of separatism to try and get her way (because she thinks it worked for Quebec and doesn’t understand how much it devastated the economy in that province), and we’ll see if Carney is actually prepared to handle it, because so far, he’s telling a lot of people what they want to hear, and those messages are starting to collide.

Ukraine Dispatch

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is now going the longest it’s been without external power for cooling reactors, increasing concern. This after Russia also attacked the area near Chornobyl, which also briefly cut its external power supply.

Good reads:

• Mark Carney named former Clerk of the Privy Council John Hannaford as his “personal” representative to the EU, replacing Stéphane Dion.
• Mélanie Joly says the government plans to drive more competition in order to help reduce the cost of living.
• Fisheries minister Joanne Thompson denied Marineland’s request to ship thirty of its captive beluga whales to China.
• The government is giving itself the option to buy into Algoma Steel as part of their loan to help with the tariffs.
• Here is a look at where the government is using more digital asbestos for translation purposes (and I can guarantee this is going to turn into a national scandal).
• The chair of the CRTC says that the results of a court challenge of the Online Streaming Act could force Parliament to amend the law.
• The CEO of Canada Post says he supports the government’s proposed changes.
• The US State Department has approved the sale of a HIMARS rocket system to Canada, but still requires congressional approval.
• The Logic has a longread about the slow pace of rebuilding in Jasper, which suffers from much of the same problems with housing shortages as the rest of the country.
• An argument is being advanced for the Competition Bureau to take more of an active role in breaking down the remaining interprovincial trade barriers.
• The Canadian Press fact-checks social media claims that say it will soon be “criminal” to own a gun in Canada (for all the good it will do).
• Senator Amina Gerba took a couple of English courses in Vancouver, and attended a couple of other meetings in the process, and the usual suspects have the vapours.
• Yves-François Blanchet has already started playing the game of “I don’t know if I can support this budget,” and claiming it’s because the deficit is too high.
• Union leader Rob Ashton has officially joined the NDP leadership race.
• Ontario is going to miss its already weakened climate targets by a significant margin, because of course it will. (Thanks, DoFo!)
• The Ford government is underfunding childcare, not living up to their agreement, and crying poor and saying they need more federal dollars.
• Stephen Saideman expounds on how Trump and Hegseth’s performance at Quantico is now the new low bar for civil-military relations.
• Marcello di Cintio brings the receipts in calling out Conservative hypocrisy around their calls to scrap the temporary foreign worker programme.
• Justin Ling calls on Canada to start preparing for further separation from American military operations now that they have become a fascist regime.
• Althia Raj correctly points out that Danielle Smith’s fantasy pipeline proposal is a dare to Carney, and a bone to the separatists in her province.

Odds and ends:

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