Tag Archives: Canadian Forces

QP: Asking for theories when we all know the data.

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The PM was present today, as was Pierre Poilievre, so there was a buzz of anticipation for this show-down after his convention (though really, nothing was going to really change). As well, Stephen Harper and several of his former ministers were in the gallery to watch the proceedings in advance of Harper’s portrait unveiling. Poilievre led off in French, and launched into his spiel about “hope” and his “theory” on “hidden taxes” on food price inflation, and wondered what the government’s theory was. Mark Carney said that the industrial carbon price worked out to zero, and there was no food packaging tax, but that the biggest problem was the currency exchange, tariffs, and climate change. Poilievre insisted that it couldn’t be the problem, because other countries face lower food price inflation, and Carney registered his points. Poilievre repeated his first question in English, and got much the same response with an added bit about the clean fuel regulations being good for the canola farmers in his riding. Poilievre again tried to contest these assertions, and Carney returned that he knows that Poilievre is “just visiting his riding,” and after things calmed down, he suggested that Poilievre spend time with the farmers in nis riding to see how the biofuel charge helps canola production. Poilievre retorted that Carney was just visiting Canada, and listed towns in his riding to ask people there about the charges. Carney said he would always be happy to go back to his home province. Poilievre returned to his “theory” and demanded Carney’s, and Carney said that the fall of the Canadian dollar, thanks to Conservative obstruction, was one of the drivers.

Yves-François Blanchet led for the Bloc, and after an acknowledgment to Harper, he asked about the expropriation in Quebec as it related to Mirabel. Carney also acknowledged Harper before saying high speed rail is a national project that is getting consultation. Blanchet railed about the “trauma” of the expropriation related to Mirabel and wondered if he was aware that high speed rail would do the same. Carney insisted that they were cooperating closely with the constituents there about a small corridor and not a huge airport. Blanchet said that C-5 and C-15 were “heartless” bills, and Carney wondered if Blanchet was actually in favour of high speed rail.

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Roundup: Some noticeable omissions from the GDP concerns

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The latest GDP data was released on Friday, when the House wasn’t sitting, so the Conservatives spent yesterday making up for it, both with concern-trolling questions during QP, plus a lengthy statement about their concern about the “grim picture” of the Canadian economy. Yes, real GDP was flat in November, but that seems to be about as far as they are willing to read, because if you scratch the surface, one of the biggest drags on the economy was the fact that those motor vehicles and parts numbers were down 6.4 percent as a result of the global shortage of semiconductors. That is most assuredly not the fault of the Liberal government. Without that drag, it’s likely that the GDP would have been in the positive for the month, in spite of the other economic drags.

All of these words from the Conservatives, and none of them point out that Trump's trade war is the primary cause of this economic malaise (for which we have been surprisingly resilient to date). No, it's all the Liberals' fault.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-02-02T21:38:44.075Z

The thing is, much as with Poilievre’s big speech on Friday, there is absolutely no mention of Trump in their statement like there wasn’t in the speech. Trump and his trade war are having a deleterious effect on our economy, because we grew over-reliant on them as an export market because they’re right there, and they were a willing market that was simply too easy to trade with. Disentangling parts of our economy from theirs is going to take time, and we are taking damage from it, but to be frank, most economists figured we’d be in a recession by now as a result of Trump, and we haven’t been, showing that we had some more resilience than they initially thought. But the fact that the Conservatives cannot acknowledge the reality of the situation in order to blame the Liberals is sad and pathetic.

And it’s not just the GDP data. They’ve been doing this with food price inflation, and putting out a bunch of absolute nonsense to “prove” that their obsession with imaginary “hidden taxes” and environmental laws are the real problems, not climate change, not Trump, not factors beyond our control. Nope, it’s all Liberals and their deficits. And because they get so little pushback on it, from either the government or the media (though, to be fair, David Cochrane was actually producing data to push back on Power & Politics yesterday), they get away with this false version of reality and people believe them. It’s a problem, but nobody wants to actually acknowledge it because that seems like work, or math, which they are allergic to.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-02-02T14:08:02.462Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia is once again attacking Kyiv, Kharkiv, and other major centres, destroying energy infrastructure after a “ceasefire” for a whole couple of days. Russia also claims to have taken another settlement in Zaporizhzhia region.

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Roundup: All smiles with the premiers

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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.

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Roundup: The domestic speech and the response

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Back on Canadian soil, prime minister Mark Carney gave a speech to a domestic audience in advance of his Cabinet retreat, in which he used the location of the Plains of Abraham—where the retreat is being held, at the Citadelle in Quebec City—to praise the foundation of Canada (which the Bloc took exception to), our pluralism and shared values, and our choice to offer a vision of something different to the world. Oh, and he clapped back at Trump saying we live only because of the US. It might have been nice, but he kept veering off onto weird tangents about praising digital asbestos, or federal social programmes like pharmacare that he hasn’t done a single thing with in the past year and has outright stated he’s not interested in expanding. And if anything, the speech exposed a streak of hypocrisy—Canadian values, and pluralism, but we just signed a “strategic partnership” with a country genociding an ethnic minority. We’re going to create thousands of good-paying union jobs, but we just signed “strategic investments” with a country that employs slave labour. If you’re going to pat yourself on the back for your values, maybe try and at least pretend you’re trying to live up to them?

This Carney speech is giving me whiplash. Hooray for Canadian values! (But we’re also going to do deals with people who commit genocide and practice slave labour, and scapegoat immigrants).Hooray for our social programmes, but let’s do more digital asbestos!

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-01-22T19:04:50.878Z

Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre released his own statement in response to Carney’s speech at Davos. The gist of Poilievre’s remarks is that of course Carney isn’t doing enough, that we shouldn’t alienate the Americans and by that we should engage with allies in the country who will help us post-Trump, and that he plans to move a motion next week to pass his ridiculous Canadian Sovereignty Act bill at all stages. (Transcript here).

And make no mistake—that bill is ridiculous. The primary gist of it is to tear up any and all environmental regulation to build more pipelines (who cares about a market case of First Nations consent?), to incentivise the reinvestment of capital gains in Canada (which was a plan so complex that Jim Flaherty walked it back after trying to do it during the Harper years), paying provinces a “bonus” for eliminating any remaining trade barriers, and to require the government to stop letting innovators in this country sell their intellectual property to Americans (and good luck with that one). It’s stupid and unfeasible and will only create a tonne of new problems while solving absolutely none, but he somehow thinks this is genius.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-01-22T15:05:14.665Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian strikes hit locations in Zaporizhzhia, as well as Kryvyi Rih. At Davos, president Zelenskyy gave a speech highly critical of Europe’s indecisiveness and inability to organise enough to project any strength. (Transcript here).

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Roundup: Mixed messages in Carney’s Davos speech

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There has been much praise for prime minister Mark Carney’s speech in Davos yesterday, but I have some fairly mixed feelings about it. For one, much of the speech was a collection of the lines he’s used in previous speeches, and put them all into one place, so rhetorically, there wasn’t much new, even if he invoked Thucydides or Havel. And he’s not wrong that the truth of the rules-based international order was that the “great powers”—meaning the US—exempted itself whenever they wanted, but they also guaranteed its operation, so it was double-edged. And he was also correct in calling out that the instinct to go along to get along won’t save anyone. And he did pledge support for Greenland, NATO and Article V, so that was all good.

Some thoughts from me on Mark Carney’s important speech in Davos. youtu.be/Xj1VHwVgsAY?…

— Roland Paris (@rolandparis.bsky.social) 2026-01-20T18:26:05.275Z

However. The fact that he very carefully avoided naming Trump and the US means that this was not nearly as brave as some people would like. And it exposed some of the hypocrisy of his own positions—for example, saying that appeasing won’t save you is all well and good, but for months now, he has been constantly appeasing the Americans to “keep talks going,” such as how he killed the Digital Services Tax. I also have grave reservations about simply declaring the rules-based order dead and saying that “nostalgia is not a strategy” (while back home, he keeps invoking a false nostalgia about being a country that built things) because the middle powers need that structure, even if America isn’t playing ball. That means leaning into those rules collectively, and appealing to Europe to be the vanguards of that. There was an inherent hypocrisy in talking about his “values-based realism” because there are no values to be displayed when you deal with people who engage in slave labour and whom your government declared was perpetrating a genocide. He wants us to leverage a network of relations with other countries and trade blocs, but he’s cutting Global Affairs and the diplomats who would do this work. There is just so much inconsistency in what he’s saying and what he’s actually doing.

From Carney's Davos speech. This is one of the things I referred to in this morning's column—I fail to see the "respect for human rights" in all of the so-called "strategic partnerships" he's been signing, and shrugging that off as "pragmatic" just winds up reeking of hypocrisy instead.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-01-20T16:33:28.210Z

Carney has spent the past year subtweeting Trump.At a certain point, these words mean nothing if he won't actually come out and say what he's criticizing.

— Justin Ling (@justinling.ca) 2026-01-20T16:15:56.156Z

This is the right understanding of our geopolitical reality, but Carney's actions aren't in line with these statements. We need investment in our diplomatic corps and a clear foreign policy to mobilize Canada to meet the moment. www.cbc.ca/news/politic…

— Jess Davis (@jessmarindavis.bsky.social) 2026-01-20T16:13:17.066Z

https://bsky.app/profile/emmettmacfarlane.com/post/3mcum6ygq3c2h

And getting into bed with other illiberal regimes to counter the one south of us risks tainting us as well.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-01-20T16:54:40.840Z

There was a contrast with Justin Trudeau, who was also at Davos, with Katy Perry in tow, and of course all of the focus was on her, and not the speech Trudeau gave. Where people did know about it, most of the comments were dismissive, but I think he actually has a relevant point in contrast to Carney. While both pointed out that the era of the rules-based international order that protected rights and freer trade is over, Trudeau made a point of talking about respect for international law and respect for allies as the way through the crisis, and that Canada has built up enough credibility globally that people know that if we are in a conflict zone, it’s not to steal oil or sell them Coca-Cola while we replace their system of government. I think that is something that Carney was missing, and it goes the point I was making in my latest column that we have soft power leverage we can use, if Carney wasn’t so intent on just squandering it.

Ukraine Dispatch

The attacks on power infrastructure in Ukraine risks nuclear meltdowns because of the to run cooling systems, which is part of Russia’s strategy.

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Roundup: Loosening the advertising rules they put into place

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The federal government, in their infinite communications wisdom, has decided to change the rules around government advertising so that they can do things like more easily use slogans, and to advertise programmes before they have been passed by Parliament. Worse, their excuses for doing so are utterly ridiculous, saying that the more “dangerous and divided world” needs faster communications and the old process was “too slow and duplicative.” Sorry, you think you need to be able to advertise slogans or programmes that do not officially exist yet because it’s faster? Are you kidding me?

The point of these rules is to create a separation between party and government, and the Harper government had incidents where this got them into trouble, such as when Pierre Poilievre, as minister of Employment and Skills Development, showed up at a government announcement in party-branded attire and got in trouble with Elections Canada for it. These rules exist for a reason, but Carney has decided that they’re inconvenient for him, so he needs to alter them. If the Liberals’ usual kryptonite is arrogance, Carney’s personal brand of it is acting like a magnifying glass. He should be reminded of this fact, before he drives the party off the very cliff he rescued them from.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia used hypersonic medium-range missiles to strike Lviv early Friday morning, which is being considered a “warning” to Europe. That same day, drones hit two foreign-flagged civilian vessels in ports in the Odesa region. Here are Kyiv residents dealing with damage to their homes as a result of these attacks.

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Roundup: Framing headlines to privilege the lie

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Because this is sometimes a media criticism blog, I want to once again return to the issue of how stories are being framed. The shooting in Minnesota has been of particular interest in the last couple of days, and so many outlets are framing it using the lies from the Trump administration. For most of the day, CBC had on their website a headline to the effect of “Shooting victim ‘weaponized’ vehicle: Federal officials” which frames it with the lie as being the “official” version of the facts, leaving people who only read the headline to conclude that was what happened. (I don’t have exact wording as the headline changed when the story got updated later in the day).

Because CBC will always egregiously both-sides everything in order to avoid being called biased, even though they're still going to be called biased anyway.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-01-08T16:27:29.959Z

This is both-sidesing at its most egregious, not only because it is not actively calling out what is a clear lie by the administration, but because it is giving preferential treatment to the lie over the version of events that we could all see on the various videos of the incident. This is the kind of behaviour that let parties and political actors realize that they can lie with impunity—because they won’t be called out on it. Legacy media outlets will just both-sides it, and let the lie fester as those who are predisposed to believe it because it came from their preferred party don’t have their beliefs challenged, and they start making up justifications when evidence no longer fits the lie. We The Media created this monster, and we not only don’t know what to do with it, we refuse to change the very behaviours that created the monster in the first place.

Which brings me back to an example closer to home—Conservative MP Garnett Genuis claiming—falsely—that he was being censored on the York University campus. It turns out that he didn’t get the proper permissions for setting up a table to talk to students for his wannabe Charlie Kirk cosplay, but how was this news story framed by both The Canadian Press and Conservative-friendly Postmedia? With Genuis’ claim of censorship, which again, privileges the lie for those who only read the headline. (And yes, Genuis has a history of lying to play the victim as part of his crybully shtick, which he once tried to do to me in an attempt to get my credentials revoked). And once again, it was both-sidesed, and Genuis doesn’t get called out for fabricating the version of events, meaning he will continue to do so because he knows it works. And We The Media keep letting him get away with it.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian drones attacked Kyiv early Friday morning, killing at least four. There was also an attack on infrastructure in the western Lviv region. Russia is also threatening that any troops sent by other countries as part of a ceasefire agreement would be “legitimate combat targets.” (Some ceasefire that would be).

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Roundup: Twenty years of ignoring a warning

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I find myself a little bit fascinated with the story of the main water feeder pipe break in Calgary, mostly because of what it exposes about municipal politics in this country. Council was presented with a report today that shows that they were warned about this twenty years ago, and that nobody did anything about it during all that time. Twenty. Years. The report was commissioned after the 2024 pipe break, and here it is, broken again, because they didn’t finish the job.

Here is the independent panel's timeline of how risk was identified with the Bearspaw Feeder Main 20 years before it ruptured in June 2024.

— Adam MacVicar (@adammacvicar.bsky.social) 2026-01-07T21:19:54.037Z

City councils didn’t prioritize it because they have been so preoccupied with keeping property taxes as low as possible that these kinds of major infrastructure projects continue to be underfunded and overlooked. City staff apparently have unclear reporting structures so nobody becomes responsible for this kind of an issue, and the author of the report was saying he wouldn’t lay the blame on any one individual or era of council. “This problem existed. It repeated itself. It did not surface to the right level of decision-making. And so it’s very difficult, in my opinion, to lay specific blame on any individual. We had a process weakness that was not corrected.”

The thing is, we have a lot of city councils in this country who are also focused solely on keeping their property taxes down, and placating NIMBYs, and we there is other critical infrastructure in this country that is bound for failure. Councils adopt a learned helplessness when city staff don’t do their due diligence about these kinds of failures, and vanishingly few councils are doing their jobs in ensuring these kinds of issues are actually being dealt with. This could be a warning for other cities to take a second look and ensure that they are doing the inspections and maintenance that was ignored here…or they will rely on normalcy bias and leave it for later because clearly it won’t happen to them, right? I have a feeling I know which is more likely.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia attacked two seaports in the Odesa region on Wednesday, while late-night strikes knocked out power in two southeaster regions.

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Roundup: Lessons learned for the NDP?

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NDP interim leader Don Davies have his year-ender to The Canadian Press, talking about getting out to listen to Canadians, and reflect on the party’s devastating loss, and joking that the best part about being burnt to the ground is the ability to rebuild the foundation. And he’s not entirely wrong there, so long as he’s taking the right lessons. But in the same interview, he’s waxing poetic about pharamacare without actually seeming to understand what the issues are (i.e. the provinces), and totally ignoring the work that Trudeau did into building up the programme from the ground up (such as establishing the Canadian Drug Agency) so that provinces could sign on once they were ready, as PEI did (and NDP provinces refused to, particularly BC and John Horgan most especially).

On the same day, the NDP’s Renew and Renewal Report from the last campaign was also released, and it has a few interesting things to say. Once you get past the usual back-patting about how hard everyone worked and how it didn’t feel like it was doomed, and how the leader’s campaign went well, you start getting into some of the structural problems within the party that really do need addressing. Things like the sense that there is an allergy to fundraising in the party, and that nobody wants to actually do it, which doesn’t really help anyone (but also perpetuates the weirdness that bequests from the estates of dead people are one of the party’s top fundraising sources). And there was also a lot in there about the party not properly developing riding associations, and relying too heavily on the central party at the expense of those associations. And to be frank, this should have been a lesson the party internalized after they got nearly entirely wiped out from Quebec in 2015, because they didn’t build up their riding associations during the “Orange Wave,” but assumed that somehow those MPs would have incumbency advantage forever when they didn’t really establish grassroots after all of those accidental victories.

The other thing that is worth noting is that once again, it draws American examples for inspiration, and again it’s Zohran Mamdani. I suspect the reason for this is that too many people in the NDP’s brain trust are terminally online, and as with so many things, the American discourse pervades and they simply think that it can apply to Canada if you divide it by ten, even though we are very separate countries and that we are not just a maple cupcake version of Americana. I’m also going to note that the report said pretty much nothing about the NDP constantly trying to interfere in areas of provincial jurisdiction (particularly with their “bold progressive ideas”), because again, their American analogues don’t translate to Canada in the same way, but this was apparently an area of introspection they didn’t want to engage in. Alas.

This reminds me of something I've been wondering about. Given the various examples of the NDP being the government or official opposition at the provincial level, I'm not sure why federal New Democrats so often — or so recently? — look to the U.S. for inspiration.

— Aaron Wherry (@aaronwherry.bsky.social) 2025-12-19T21:14:07.891Z

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-12-19T14:24:03.406Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched another missile attack on Odesa, killing seven and wounding at least 15 late Friday. There was an exchange of bodies by both governments—1003 dead Ukrainian servicemen for the bodies of 26 Russians. Ukraine and Poland are working out a cooperation agreement around drones.

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Roundup: Shrugging off the trade irritant list

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Prime minister Mark Carney made remarks on the trade situation with the US yesterday, saying that the timelines being what they are, hope for any sectoral tariff deals will likely be rolled into the broader New NAFTA review taking place next year, in spite of the fact that we had apparently been close to a deal before they got blown up by the Reagan ads (though one should contend that it is more than likely that if it wasn’t the ads, something else would have been used as justification to call off the talks, because this is Trump exercising the so-called “art of the deal.”)

Carney was somewhat dismissive of the capitulation list that the US Trade Representative has laid out, and insisted that this was really nothing, that there are dozens of irritants on all sides, but made the promise again to protect Supply Management, because reasons. This being said, there has been commentary that within the existing market cap there could be better efforts for US dairy access, because of how the supply management system works in that only certain producers are allowed to hold the quotas for imports, and if they want to make it difficult, then the market cap doesn’t get reached. This has long been a complaint for Europe, because frankly, the Canadian system is designed with fuckery in mind. Fixing that might help alleviate some of the complaints, but it would take political will to actually do that (though I’m not sure just what American dairy we would be so eager to import, given that their cheese is nothing special compared to Europe or the UK).

Nevertheless, I am most especially worried about the Online Streaming Act and Online News Act complaints from the Americans, and that Carney would be tempted to dump those as capitulation for the sake of “continuing negotiations” like he did with the Digital Services Tax. The problem here is that Trump is going to bat for the tech broligarchy because they have pledged their fealty to him and offered him up large bribes, so he is bullying other countries on their behalf because they don’t want to be regulated. The fact that these specific complaints continue to be treated as trade irritants and not just tech bros being whinging babies is a problem, and will continue to be a problem so long as they remain his loyal backers.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian shelling near Odesa has killed one person, and hit power systems. This comes after an attack on power systems in five regions the night before. European countries have agreed on another €90 billion loan for Ukraine, putting off the question of frozen Russian assets once again. Here is a look at Russia’s hybrid warfare sabotage operations across Europe, designed to distract and overwhelm those country’s resources.

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