Tag Archives: Referendum

Tariffs to change our behaviour

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As we wait for the deadline on whatever trade “agreement” is supposed to be signed today, there are still a lot of concerning signs about what is in it, whether that’s with the tariff levels, or the “digital trade alignment,” which is very concerning. But much of the discussion today kept going back to the issue of the “booze ban,” which requires premiers to cooperate (and apparently Carney was pleading with them to do so on their call on Wednesday), and they’re not all on board. Some want to ensure that there is actual tariff reductions for industries in their province, while others are sounding more amenable, though there is still a combative tone around the fact that they may put it back on the shelf, but nobody is obligated to buy it, and they will actively discourage people from doing so. And fair enough. But as Jennifer Robson points out here, an official ban could find legal basis for certain of Trump’s tariffs (even though these bans were retaliatory in nature), so perhaps a more unofficial ban and popular boycott action may be the more legalistic approach to take.

https://bsky.app/profile/jrobson.bsky.social/post/3mtkceer5q224

https://bsky.app/profile/jrobson.bsky.social/post/3mtkcefexjc24

Wrote this alongside the very funny @ianmmacintyre.bsky.social, mostly just so I had an excuse to invent the atrocity that is "lobster wine"

— Clare Blackwood (@clareblackwood.bsky.social) 2026-08-20T22:08:22.467Z

Meanwhile, I’m at my limit with the California winemakers whinging that it’s not fair that we’ve banned their product, claiming that they’re allies and not the problem. Erm, except that a good half of the California vintner lobby donated to Trump and his proxies, so yeah, I would say that makes you a problem and that you’re not actually allies. I also don’t exactly see them doing anything to stand up to Trump in any way, so again, not seeing how that’s being a good ally. Meanwhile, JD Vance gave an interview that was trying to belittle prime minister Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre (who is a non-entity as far as the Americans are concerned), and says that the whole point of this exercise is to change Canadians’ behaviour, and that they think we’re moving in a more Trumpian direction, so they’re going to claim that as a win, particularly as they are already boasting that they got “significant concessions” from us as part of this deal. Why do I suspect this is going to wind up being a slow-motion disaster?

I'm at my limit with these guys. Half of the California wine-growers' lobby donated or endorsed Trump and his candidates (and @davidreevely.bsky.social went through and gathered all the receipts a few weeks ago). Don't go insisting you're allies being unfairly treated when you enabled this.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-08-21T01:03:48.040Z

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-08-20T19:08:01.415Z

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A trade deal or future vassalage?

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The back-patting and self-congratulation has already started as word is that there is some kind of deal with the Americans, on certain tariffs, but not actual free trade, and not on any kind of renewal of the New NAFTA. Trump insisted that this means no more trade barriers into Canada for alcohol and for farmers, while Dominic LeBlanc insists that Supply Management remains intact. (Fixing the import quota allocations would actually be a good thing, because the way it’s currently structured is fuckery, and Canada keeps losing at trade tribunals because of it). Premiers did confirm that Carney has asked them to end their booze bans—not that it will stop people from boycotting it on their own accord. But there are other questions that remain, such as Jamieson Greer talking about “digital trade alignment,” and there’s still no word about forestry, or what auto tariffs are going to be. What we’ve heard is that the s.232 tariffs on steel and aluminium are being lowered from 50 percent to 25, but is that really worth it?

We still have no real idea what's in this Canada-U.S deal from last night. There's been a few vague leaks from PM Carney's briefing of the premiers, but now Quebec's premier says a deal is "far from being concluded" and isn't sure she can get behind it.

— Justin Ling (@justinling.ca) 2026-08-20T02:13:16.970Z

There is this weird dichotomy happening between Carney and company talking about diversifying our trade while at the same time pursuing “deeper integration” with the US, as typified by the Keystone XL talk, which just sends even more oil to our captive market. And it remains to be seen just how much Carney is giving up for this temporary relief—and make no mistake, it will be temporary because there is no dealing with Trump, and even if he says he’s got a signed deal, that can implode overnight (and we have seen countless examples of this). I worry most about the likelihood that this gives Trump a win that will let him and his cadre believe that they have figured out the formula for Canadian capitulation, and that this becomes just one more step in pressure that leads to eventual vassalage. There cannot be “deeper integration” that just makes us a resource colony. And all of the Carney apologists are going to be absolutely apoplectic about this notion, but he’s not just giving Canadian businesses time to transition, because most of them have no interest in doing so. Most of them keep hoping that things will go back to the way they were before so that they can continue to be rent-seekers, and Carney has done absolutely nothing to disabuse them of that notion, and that’s a problem, and it’ll be an even bigger problem once we’re a vassal state.

As Goodale' comments here reaffairm, Carney's strategy has always been deeper US integration plus a slight hedge against future bad US economic policy. The belief that Carney's trade diversification and infrastructure projects can balance against closer ties is, and always has been, a fantasy….

— Blayne Haggart (@bhaggart.bsky.social) 2026-08-19T22:38:48.514Z

… b/c in the new normal, stable, mutually beneficial long-term agreements are literally impossible.So long as Carney, Goodale et al hold onto the fantasy that a normal trade agreement is possible & that certainty can be returned to the relationship, Canada will become increasingly a vassal state.

— Blayne Haggart (@bhaggart.bsky.social) 2026-08-19T22:38:48.515Z

What Carney and Goodale and others stubbornly refuse to understand (or don't care) is that trade agreements with the United States today are no longer about negotiating potentially mutually beneficial economic advantages They're tools of domination designed to guarantee subservience.

— Blayne Haggart (@bhaggart.bsky.social) 2026-08-19T22:38:48.516Z

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A brief reprieve from threatened tariffs

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There has been a slight reprieve on the expected imposition of new tariffs, which Trump says has to do with the revival of Keystone XL (which isn’t actually called that anymore). I’m not sure that that accomplishes overall, because it will likely mostly just wind up being trans-shipment for export on the Gulf Coast, and I doubt we have production capacity to fill both that pipeline as well as a second west coast pipeline, and if that means this is an invitation to ramp up even more production in the oilsands, well, that’s yet another climate betrayal by Carney.

Trump says he's pausing the new Canada tariffs for three days because there's a tentative deal which may include reviving the Keystone XL pipeline

— Thomas Seal (@twseal.bsky.social) 2026-08-19T02:20:17.599Z

From PMO:

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-08-19T03:14:59.266Z

Earlier in the day, the rumour being leaked was that the Americans were trying to put forward a deal on auto tariffs to lower them to 15 percent, but with a possible base level of 7.5 percent if the American content was increased. The problem, however, is that according to the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association’s Flavio Volpe, margins in auto assembly run around six percent, so they’d still be losing money, so it’s a non-starter. All of this to say that this is dragging out further, and I’m still not discounting yet more capitulation by Carney to get some kind of a “deal,” even though there is no actual deal to be had.

Proxy voting

Mike Moffatt published an op-ed in the Globe and Mail yesterday that expanded on his previous thoughts about proxy voting for parents with children, which is his way of getting around the notion that not giving everyone a vote undermines the one-person-one-vote ethos. I’m not a fan of this particular logic, and I think that his enthusiasm for how mothers would vote better in the interest of their children (as most mothers would be given the proxy vote using CCB rules in his vision) is wildly optimistic or utopian, I do worry that this would essentially be rewarding people with additional political power for having children, even for the sixteen or eighteen years that they have the proxy, which I find a bit distasteful.

More to the point, I worry about unintended consequences. Like how voting rates plummeted after we lowered the voting age to 18, and how people have been wringing their hands about it ever since. One of my particular concerns is that this becomes yet another de facto gerrymander to increase the weights of rural ridings over urban ones, as rural families tend to have more children than urban ones, and this just perpetuates the already egregious problem of rural ridings being artificially weighted heavier than urban ridings, which in turn favours conservative parties in those areas, and that is often a deliberate strategy (looking especially at you, Alberta). Maybe I’m just being cynical, but as much as I can respect Moffatt’s reasoning, I don’t think it survives the test of reality.

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Engagement is not endorsement?

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From Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, both Anita Anand and prime minister Mark Carney defended their visit and all of the business deals they’re drumming up under the rubric of “engagement is not endorsement,” because remember, Carney’s brand of “pragmatism” is that he’s ready to jettison values at the drop of a hat. Any hat. If any of this feels familiar, it’s because it’s like we’re back in 1995 again, and the Canadian government and all of the mandarins in Ottawa sincerely believe that when it comes to China or any other unsavoury regime that we’re one trade deal away from them improving their human rights. We’ve been down this road—the whole we’ll take your money and hope that it vicariously improves your human rights thing didn’t work then and it won’t work now. All you’re doing is sending the explicit message that so long as you have money, human rights don’t matter.

Carney's readout of his meeting with Prince Bonesaw.No mention of rights, or not murdering journalists and dismembering them because you don't like what they said about you.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-07-09T15:36:38.647Z

Longer release from PMO about the "bilateral relationship" with Prince Bonesaw, and the only mention of rights is in relation to the conflict in Sudan.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-07-09T19:41:27.912Z

Sure, Anand says she raised human rights concerns in private, but what good does that do? In Saudi Arabia of all places, where you get jail time for liking a tweet that ridicules Prince Bonesaw, or where you get lashes for being openly critical. The same Saudi Arabia who murdered and dismembered a journalist who was critical of their regime. It shouldn’t be such a low bar to say that maybe that’s not a regime that we want to do business with. Carney insists that “lecturing from afar” is “ineffective,” but not rewarding them economically is not simply “lecturing.” And if we’re just going to follow the money with no regard for rights or values, then what exactly is the point of having any values? Why not simply become transactional Americans? Let’s give our heads a shake.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-07-09T19:08:01.478Z

Sports betting

The National Post has a longread out about the rise of sports betting in Canada, but in the promotional email they sent around to subscribers, it was titled “Canada rolled the dice on online sports betting. No one saw the harms.” Nope. This is what happens when you have no institutional memory in your reporters. The story only mentions the final bill to legalise betting, which did pass, and how it had support then. There was no mention of the half-dozen or so previous iterations that all went down in defeat, and which were sometimes passed in the Commons through procedural chicanery by the NDP (who were the sponsors of these bills, because their Windsor MP wanted to help the casinos in his riding), with very little scrutiny. It was in the Senate that these bills saw actual study, and yes, there were scores of people, including sports bodies, who outlined the harms of this kind of sports betting. And by the final bill, they had basically given up because the overriding argument, including from the Trudeau government, was “If we don’t legalise it, people will just do it illegally online, so this way we get the money.” But yes, plenty of people knew there would be harm, and nobody listened to them.

Email header from the National Post to advertise their new longread. Completely false—lots of people saw the harms. In the various attempts to legalize it, you had expert after expert in the Senate testifying that this was bad news. Every sports organization said so. Everyone ignored them because $.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-07-09T15:07:49.346Z

The NDP, who kept sponsoring private members' bills to legalise this kind of betting, played every procedural trick in the book to keep trying to pass these bills, until Trudeau came in and decided to make this government legislation.Lots of people saw the harms, but they all shrugged.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-07-09T15:07:49.347Z

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My Xtra column calls out Jamil Jivani’s attempt to rack up persecution points by going to war against Carney’s attending Toronto Pride and basking in the replies.

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Let’s not defund Stornoway

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There are fewer tedious stories than those about electronic petitions to the House of Commons, but the Globe and Mail decided that there wasn’t enough serious news to write about, so they wrote about particularly nonsense petition about de-funding Stornoway as residence of the leader of the opposition. It’s stupid, it’s petty, and it’s cheap, and above all, mean, but why should that stop anyone? The notion that this is about “cost-savings” is just more of the kinds of hairshirt parsimony that creates more problems than it solves for Canada and Canadians, but since when has that stopped legacy media from lighting their hair on fire about it?

“Oh, but no other similar democracy has an official residence for their leader of the opposition!” So what? It was a senator who kicked off the drive to acquire such a residence back in 1946, and the thing about Stornoway is that it has a particularly proud history in that it was where the Dutch royal family stayed when they were in exile in Canada. That it was purchased as an official residence after that means that its heritage as that home in exile is able to be preserved, while it also highlights that in a Westminster democracy, the leader of the opposition is an important position and a modest official residence (and all things considered, Stornoway is pretty modest), is not a huge extravagance. It’s also worth pointing out once again that it’s not fit for a prime minister because it can’t be properly secured. The only reason it’s in as good of shape as it is was because in the mid-to-late nineties, Preston Manning refused to move in there as opposition leader, so it gave the NCC time to do necessary renovations and upgrades, but it’s showing its age once again. So let’s not be petty and cheap, and no matter how much you might dislike the current occupant, there isn’t any justification to defund it as an official residence.

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My column points out that there’s no “silver bullet” to placating Alberta’s grievances, because they’re fictional and they just keep inventing new reasons to be angry.

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Placating Eby for a pipeline?

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Prime minister Mark Carney had a big day of announcements yesterday, starting in Vancouver with premier David Eby, where he announced a bunch of infrastructure projects in the province, most notably a major federal contribution to a tunnel project that the province has been waffling over for years, plus money to expand the port of Vancouver, and a couple of other ports further north. But he also tipped off the coming pipeline announcement with Alberta by saying the northwest coast tanker ban would remain in place, which pretty much assured that any proposed pipeline route would be to the south.

And lo and behold, following a meeting with the president of the Philippines, Carney headed to Calgary to announce with Danielle Smith the next phases of the pipeline project, which would go to the southern route, largely along the existing TMX corridor, and would be a beneficiary of the Port of Vancouver expansion. However, what was not announced was a private proponent for said pipeline—yes, a company expressed interest in a stake, but only a minor one, meaning the federal and provincial governments are going to be the main proponents, with an unknown dollar figure at stake (but justified by talking about how TMX has already delivered a billion-dollar dividend for the federal government). They also claim that they’ve come to an agreement with the Pathways project, which I will believe when I actually see it, because Pathways has been pretty clear that in no way did they want to have to pay for this, and they have made a pretty implicit case that their rhetoric since their creation was nothing but greenwashing and spin to take the heat off of them for their carbon emissions.

Everything about this smells, and all of those conditions Carney laid out with the initial MOU are being proven to be fictional after all. And for Smith to also talk about doubling production in the next fifteen years (while also making announcements about gas-fired electricity plants to power digital asbestos data centres) is just proving how much Carney lied to everyone about his environmental beliefs and credentials.

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A grab-bag of Carney answers

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Prime minister Mark Carney held a press conference yesterday to pat himself on the back for his government’s accomplishments over the spring sitting, but as with most of these exercises, the real interest was in his responses to questions, which he doesn’t do very often. So, what did we learn?

  • That big call with Trump this week with the extremely vague readout was mostly about Iran and NATO, and not about trade.
  • We’re still a long way away from any kind of trade deal with Trump.
  • The six upcoming by-elections will likely be spaced out.
  • We finally got more details on that condo purchase in Vancouver, which is 90 percent provincial funding/10 percent federal, and is intended as rent-to-own.
  • He will be going to Stampede, and plans to defend national unity, and is using Brexit as a cautionary tale (as well he should be).
  • We are sending aid to Venezuela after the earthquakes, and while it might be useful to have some kind of consular services there or in Iran, we’ll go through partners.

Shortly afterward, Pierre Poilievre gave his own press conference to decry the state of the Canadian economy and blame Carney for it, as though Trump wasn’t a factor, or that climate change isn’t affecting things like food prices. In fact, he pretty much admitted he’d accept a bad deal with Trump for the sake of getting a deal. So there’s that.

"It's all an illusion."

— Scott Robertson (@sarobertson.bsky.social) 2026-06-25T19:54:15.597Z

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For National Magazine, I delve into the Supreme Court of Canada’s increasing caseload, and why the Chief Justice’s explanation of cleared backlogs doesn’t hold.

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A long-term food strategy

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Yesterday, before jetting off to the G7 in France, prime minister Mark Carney was in Toronto to unveil the details of his national food security strategy. The initial announcement was a couple of months ago, when he announced the rebranding and expansion of the existing GST credit, and the details for this new strategy could bear fruit (groan!) in the long-term, but I worry that he is raising expectations that these measures will lower food prices immediately. They won’t. Building up new food production infrastructure via greenhouses and vertical farms will take time and a lot of dollars to get off the ground, as will creating new domestic processing capabilities, which we may not even have the necessary labour for. Same thing with bolstering the rules around competition in order to attract new entrants into a marketplace dominated by oligopolies—you can’t unwind that in a day, and certainly not without just inviting in more American companies, which would go against the notion of trying to ensure food sovereignty.

Again—these kinds of investments and commitments to increasing domestic production and processing are good, and overdue. But in the vein of you can lead a horse to water, corporate Canada is not all that keen on investing in things, including productivity measures, because they are too accustomed to relying on trade with the US (which they keep pinning all of their hopes on normalising once more, as though there will be no lasting damage from the country descending into outright fascism), and their whole modus operandi is about getting monopolistic power and becoming a rent-seeker rather than investing in productivity or innovation. And yes, Canadian food prices are very high, and only part of that has to do with the fact that we’re a cold-weather country that needs to import a lot of what we eat. This is a strategy built for the long-term, and that’s great, but I know that by September, Pierre Poilievre will stand up in Question Period every day and declare that this new strategy hasn’t reduced food prices, so therefore we must burn everything down for the sake of tax cuts and going harder on trickle-down economics (and the government will respond by patting themselves on the back). They’re going to have to do the hard work of pushing this and then actually defending, and I have doubts that they are capable of doing just that.

Jennifer Robson has additional thoughts on the announcement.

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My Xtra column points out how much Mark Carney patted himself on the back for doing the absolute bare minimum at this year’s Pride flag raising.

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Political blackmail under the guise of a unity speech

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Pierre Poilievre kicked off his supposed “unity campaign” in Calgary yesterday (as he skipped the installation of the Governor General to do so), and gave a speech which was little more than a remix of the same campaign speech he’s been giving for three years now. And not even a good remix, but a shitty extended dub mix that is mostly just a lot of electronic noise. In it was the usual litany of invented grievances that Albertans have been touting for years—pretending that the federal government is somehow interfering in their jurisdiction, or that Justin Trudeau’s environmental policies were somehow strangling the province’s resource sector and that the global oil price crash of 2014 didn’t happen (just like the oil price crash of 1981 didn’t happen, and all of their woes were the fault of Pierre Trudeau). It’s a tired mythology that is not true, but is so intrinsic to the core of the invented grievances that have dominated Alberta politics for more than four decades.

But what is particularly dangerous about this kind of tactic is that it hijacks a potential national unity crisis for partisan ends. It makes unity conditional on the conservatives, federally or provincially, getting their own way as though there aren’t political considerations in the rest of the country either. As Andrew Coyne puts it, this message posits that the rest of the country needs to “prove” that it’s worth saving, and if that means dismantling what little federalism we have in this country, then so be it. The notion that the only Canada worth having is their narrow vision of the country, which is exclusionary and frankly mean, is not a unity message. It’s little more than the same kind of blackmail that Danielle Smith and Jason Kenney before her were trying to use in leveraging separatist sentiment to hold a knife to their own throats to force concessions from the federal government because they think it worked for Quebec. (It did not, and Quebec’s economy has never actually recovered). It’s fundamentally undemocratic, and shows them to be little more than crybabies who can’t handle the fact that sometimes democracy means you lose at politics.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-06-08T19:08:01.492Z

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  • My latest for National Magazine on Friday’s Supreme Court of Canada decision and the warning they gave to judges about how to do a credibility analysis.
  • My weekend column takes note of the way in which Poilievre’s rhetoric tends to catastrophize what is happening, along his tendency to rewrite history.
  • My Loonie Politics Quick Take on that Conservative MP trying to refuse his raise, and why that kind of populism is poisonous to democracy.

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Digital Asbestos For All!

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The prime minister and his minister of digital asbestos, Evan Solomon, released their “Digital Asbestos for All” strategy in Toronto yesterday, which involves giving half a billion dollars to firms to scale up their adoption of said digital asbestos, and doing a lot of back-patting about sovereign capability—or at least laying the foundations for it—and there were some utterly fantastic estimations of just how many jobs this will create. And by fantastic, I mean it looks an awful lot like fantasy. But it’s also a lot about trying to get people hooked, through giving access to ‘trusted [digital asbestos] agents” to all post-secondary students, which is not what professors want and is going to make their lives more difficult as they already have a hard enough time preventing cheating using these tools. They are also promising a “National [digital asbestos] Literacy Initiative” that involves training and tool-kits available to educators, which feels a lot like giving pot to high school students and telling them it’s good for them.

"Provide access to trusted AI agents for every post-secondary student – from the arts and commerce to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and medicine."I'm pretty sure that nobody who teaches in a post-secondary institution asked for this, and this makes their jobs even harder.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-06-04T15:46:27.206Z

If this wasn’t bad enough, there was a whole lot of handwaving from Solomon about “building trust” and “safety” without actually saying how they’re going to ensure that these platforms can be trusted, or what kinds of safety measures they’ll put into place. On Power & Politics, David Cochrane was giving Solomon the gears about how he can possibly make these kinds of promises when the tech bros controlling these companies have more money than many economies at their disposal so fines won’t be of any use, and they have the weight of the Trump administration behind them, so trying to force them to build any kinds of safety features that they don’t want to build are extremely unlikely to happen. And Solomon wouldn’t answer, but just kept repeating his lines. “Trust” is a whole lot of “just trust me,” and I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough. But that’s all that this government is going to offer, because Mark Carney and Solomon have guzzled all of the tech bro hype, and they’re going to pour all kinds of money into this just as the bubble is about to burst. We’re going to lose so much money, while this government is already cutting spending to programmes that need it, and we’re all going to pay the price because they couldn’t stop guzzling the hype.

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