Mark Carney is meeting with the premiers today, after having them all over for dinner last night, and already everyone is having a big love-in, showing that they have a big united front as the country deals with the ongoing threats from the US and Trump administration. They’re all in agreement that these aren’t “normal times,” and David Eby and Danielle Smith played nice on the issue of Alberta looking to ram a pipeline through their territory (which appears to have Carney’s enthusiastic support, per Question Period on Tuesday), and I will admit that this is a big change from the latter Trudeau days, where nearly all of the premiers were lining up to take shots at the federal government.

However. Carney is letting them get away with all of their bullshit, particularly on the big things that the provinces need to be doing to Build Canada Strong™, whether that’s building housing, or taking care of their major infrastructure, or doing something about healthcare rather than letting the collapse continue. If you have a “Canada is broken” complaint, you can pretty much be guaranteed that it’s because of provincial underfunding, but the federal government is taking and will continue to take the blame, because the federal government refuses to call them out on it, and Carney is keeping this up. It’s all smiles and laughs, when it was the premiers who created the situation with immigration that the federal government had to step in with (to the long-term detriment of the country), and it’s the provinces who are exacerbating things like the affordability crisis. If Carney wants to fix things, that means leaning on the provinces to start doing their gods damned jobs.

With that in mind, I’m going to look askance as the territorial premiers want dual-use infrastructure funds to flow to them rather than have the federal government fund these projects directly, because we’ve never had provinces or territories take federal funds and spend it on other things before. And Gregor Robertson is calling on premiers to increase their spending on transitional housing, given the scale of need. Oh, you sweet summer child. The premiers don’t want to spend their own money on these things, even though it’s in their wheelhouse. They want you to spend federal dollars instead, because that’s how they’ve learned how to play this game. Just asking them to increase spending nicely isn’t going to do anything, but I can pretty much guarantee that the federal government won’t play hardball on this so that they don’t look like the bad guy, even though they’re going to take all of the blame. What a way to run a country.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-01-28T23:01:45.031Z

Ukraine Dispatch

More Russian drone and missile attacks on Kyiv and across the country overnight, and it could be as much as three weeks for some Ukrainians to get power back because of the attacks on infrastructure. Meanwhile, the US keeps stalling to give more time for Russia to keep up these attacks.

Good reads:

• The government has signed an MOU with South Korea with the intention of bringing South Korean auto manufacturing and investment to Canada.
• Mark Miller’s office says there are talks with Meta/Facebook about restoring news links to their platforms (but I wouldn’t hold my breath).
• There are thousands of cuts coming to the CFIA and Global Affairs, neither of which makes any sense (and is just pennywise and pound foolish).
• The Centre for Cybersecurity says that ransomware actors are using digital asbestos to make it easier to target victims.
• ITK president Natan Obed is calling for collaboration with Inuit with any defence spending plans in the Arctic to avoid the mistakes of the past.
• The Logic takes a deep dive into how defence start-up companies are hoping to get the Canadian Forces to reform their procurement processes so they can participate.
• Here is a look at Canadian companies who are doing business with ICE.
• Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner is moving a bill to make changes to the Divorce Act with regards to domestic violence and coercive control.
• The other NDP leadership candidates seem to be putting distance between themselves and Avi Lewis in their positioning.
• Ontario’s PC party has banned media from their policy convention this weekend.
• Kevin Carmichael parses the interest rate decision and what the Bank of Canada said in the latest Monetary Policy Report.
• Heather Scoffield walks through the issues and politics driving the government’s enhanced and rebranded GST rebate.
• Kristin Raworth remembers Kirsty Duncan as someone who very much cared about the issues and people she advocated for, right up until the end.
• Althia Raj ponders the dynamics at play with Poilievre’s leadership review vote.

Odds and ends:

Heads up that the #HoC is sitting Friday hours tomorrow (because they're not sitting Friday for the Conservative convention). That means 11 AM #QP.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-01-29T02:18:29.511Z

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