The Trump administration players continue to try and spin their own versions of how the talks collapsed, with Trump insisting that we’re “nasty” and the “worst” (because we won’t just submit), we also saw Howard Lutnick claim that Carney has manufactured all of this because of the Quebec election and the Alberta referendum, and that once those over, Canadian officials will come flooding back to Washington to resume talks. Sure, Jan. Meanwhile, Dominic LeBlanc has taken notes of their denials over certain files, and is taking those as assurances that the “trade irritants” they keep identifying won’t be brought up any longer and publicly saying so. Clever.
Lutnick accuses Mark Carney of "manufacturing" a controversy over trade so Alberta doesn't secede from Canada
Meanwhile, Trump’s continued tantrum saw him sign an executive order to demand that the US Department of Interior change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America, which is going to be another loyalty test for MAGA adherents going forward. And of course, we had a bunch of Canadian media outlets falling all over themselves to try and get reactions to this (and a certain CBC guest host was extremely cringey about it), when we don’t need to respond to this. We can just ignore it, guys. Take Shannon Proudfoot’s advice here, and treat this like a toddler having a meltdown in the cereal aisle. He’s trying to get attention, and if you don’t give it to him, he’ll move on to something else, and you won’t have to make an ass of yourself trying to “get reactions” to this bit of nonsense. Nobody wins by taking this seriously, so just stop.
The last time the Americans tried to claim Lake Ontario in 1813, we intentionally lured them into Fort York and then blew up our entire gunpowder magazine to kill as many Americans as possible.A foundation part of Toronto history is "blowing our own fort to smithereens rather than being American"
I mean this very, very seriously: It is absolutely an option for us to ignore his idiotic Lake America stunt. We can do that. We can just tune it out like you would block out a child howling at you in the cereal aisle, recognizing that to do anything else would be to give the whiner what they want.
— Shannon Proudfoot (@sproudfoot.bsky.social) 2026-08-27T17:54:13.273Z
My Latest:
- My column takes note of where we’re at with the trade war, and the fact that Carney spent a year-and-a-half making concessions for a deal that was never real.
- My Loonie Politics Quick Take points to the difficulties about sacrificing the Online News Act for a deal that didn’t come to pass, which would be a Pandora’s Box.
Ukraine Dispatch:
Russia pummelled Ukraine with drones and missiles for hours early Thursday, targeting ports, industrial facilities and retail distribution centres. President Zelenskyy has appointed two prominent commanders to oversee the defence of strongholds in the eastern Donetsk region.
Noteworthy:
- The federal government removed the counter-tariffs on seafood imports in large part because of processing jobs in the Maritimes that depend on those imports.
- Susan Delacourt remarks on the Trump administration’s continued theatrical overreach with this latest renaming tantrum.
- Paul Wells talks to Quebec’s finance minister, Éric Girard, about the state of things, just as the election in that province kicks off.
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