The Senator’s body had not even cooled yet when his sister was sworn in. The funeral won’t take place for another week. And she is already announcing her intention, with Donald Trump’s backing, to run in the general election to keep the post.

Widow’s succession is not without precedent in the United States, but it is extremely rare. In normal times it might signal continuity, the completion of the work of a politician’s mandate. There may be an element of that here, though one wonders which aspect of Lindsey Graham’s work they wish to continue.

In this case, the next-of-kin succession should be taken as a message in its own right. The President’s health is obviously frail. He has annual checkups that last days every few months. He has had multiple cognitive tests, suggesting that his cognitive decline is being actively monitored. His end, in short, is coming.

JD Vance may be the heir apparent to the presidency through the Constitution, but we already know that the Constitution does not mean much to the Trump administration. Vance is not politically saleable, making jokes that fall flat, getting booed, and generally not being the obvious charismatic successor that the MAGA movement will need to retain power.

David Graham

American Succession

American vice president JD Vance, born James Donald Bowman, will likely be called upon to replace Donald Trump in the White House sooner rather than later. Trump hasn’t been seen much in days, and Vance says he’s ready to take over if “a tragedy happens,” not normal rhetoric for a vice president performing his duties…

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a year ago · 11 likes · 3 comments · David Graham

It is unlikely that he will be left in the position of vice president long enough to take over the role of president. The oligarchs bankrolling the MAGA movement need someone in place who can pick up the torch and carry it forward, who can continue the anger and deception that is allowing them to rob the American people of their futures without losing their support.

The vice president, though, cannot be simply fired. He needs to go of his own volition or be impeached and forcibly removed from office. With Vance being the face of the Iran peace deal which was dead before the ink dried, it appears that he is being set up for failure. When they need him to be gone, they will make it untenable for him to stay.

Meanwhile, Senator Mitch McConnell has been in hospital for a month without any verifiable confirmation of life. A photo of him sitting up in a hospital bed in non-hospital clothes holding the day’s Washington Post in his hand along with a statement was issued a few days ago, however he has not said a word publicly since — or in his own voice — due to his continuing ailment. However if he was in good enough shape to get dressed and sit up in bed, even the most basic video appearance should be possible.

It has been pointed out that if he holds onto his seat until August 3rd, Kentucky’s Demoratic governor can be prevented from holding a special election for his seat prior to this year’s mid-terms, in which he was already not planning to run.

The American population is being tested to find the limits of their tolerance. If Donald Trump dies or becomes fully incapacitated, how long will it take for the administration to acknowledge the fact? And what have we learned from the state of Vance’s vice presidency, the record of McConnell’s health, and Graham’s succession?

It all opens the possibility that one of Trump’s own children, likely either Donald, Jr, or Eric, will eventually find themselves in a position to be suddenly appointed to a surprise last-minute vacancy in the vice presidency just as their father ceases to be able to hold the office.

And all the precedents to make it happen will have been established and tested.

After the Second World War, the United States rebuilt much of the European and Asian economies, including those of their wartime adversaries Germany and Japan, and the countries they invested in largely became prosperous, peaceful nations, as well as their closest allies.

The same cannot be said of the United States themselves, whose motives for building a large middle class and a network of strong capitalist democracies were to undermine the spread of communism from their arch-rivals, the Soviet Union, and thus win over the hearts and minds needed to prevail in the Cold War.

With the Soviet Union defeated and Communist China being essential to Capitalist America, the need for a strong middle class has all but disappeared. The oligarchy needs a weak and increasingly defeated middle class to consolidate their wealth and power. They also need a strong military to deal with all the new adversaries they have created for themselves in propping up their own economic excesses, imposing their will overseas, and ultimately keep their population subdued.

A country with strong social programs, universal healthcare, equal access to education, full employment and a vibrant middle class cannot recruit vast number of volunteers to its armed forces. Trading killing and potentially dying for the possibility of going to university or seeing a doctor is less of a good deal if you can go to university or see a doctor without enlisting.

Countries with those strong social programs either have mandatory conscription or small, professional militaries where their members serve primarily because they want to serve. Every encounter I have had with Canada’s armed forces has shown people who genuinely want to be there, who see it as a profession which offers them a sense of purpose.

The United States has an immense military designed to project imperial power and protect and enrich the oligarchy, where conscription is not done directly through the draft, but through lack of options for vast segments of the population. Where vast, expensive weapons programs are intended to create vast industrial profits, where enemies are needed to justify the expenditures.

What if there was a compromise to all this? With the forest fires raging across Canada and the nitwit in the White House accusing Canada of blowing smoke his way, I am left wondering if there had been a third way. One in which the oligarchs could have made their money, the United States could have projected their power, the country could have universal healthcare and social programs in a way that did not tie military service to their access, where service was not primarily about being part of a killing machine, where the only access to the benefits of socialism are accessed by fighting for the owners of capitalism.

There is a way for the country to project immense power throughout the world without also creating enemies, where the sight of the American military arriving could have been generally seen as a positive more often than as an invader or interferer. And it’s one they already did, however briefly, and regardless of their motivations that may not have been entirely altruistic. The Marshall plan in Europe and the similar efforts at rebuilding in Japan showed what they are capable of projecting and doing. The results speak for themselves in the countries addressed.

In 1948, as the Cold War heated up and the Soviet Union tried to prevent western access to Berlin, which was within East Germany but divvied up among the conquering victors, the Americans launched an airlift to use military transports to bring food and basic supplies to the city to keep it afloat. For 15 months, American and British aircraft brought in 13,000 tons per day of supplies to the city, across over 200,000 flights, in what became known as the Berlin airlift.

The American military has a budget approaching one trillion dollars per year. It is such a vast number that it is impossible to comprehend. They have weapons platforms that cost hundreds of billions of dollars, with the F-35 lifecycle cost alone exceeding two trillion dollars. Individual warships have populations greater than three-quarters of the country’s municipalities.

The country has 76 B-52 Stratofortresses in service, 19 B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, 41 B1-B Lancer bombers. They have thousands of other combat aircraft. They have around 900 assorted cargo aircraft without even counting their helicopters, capable of transporting large numbers of people in difficult circumstances.

None of it is set up for to project positive power, to serve a good that does not involve attacking a ‘bad’.

Imagine, now, for a moment, that the this same vast military might had been used the way it was for 15 months between 1948 and 1949 throughout its history. When there was a humanitarian crisis or a natural disaster, that the American military-industrial complex turned its profitable weapons-development platforms and use into assistance, showing the great power of the great capitalist industrial economy to the world without stealing resources, or killing or displacing anyone in the process.

What would it look like? The United States Army Corps of Engineers has spent over a century building civilian infrastructure from the Panama Canal to the Library of Congress. In the 1960s they built Afghanistan’s ring road. There is plenty of precedent for doing good.

Mass evacuations following natural disasters would be cheaper than vast long distance bombing raids, and the arrival of the air force and navy in those circumstances would be a welcome sight rather than a concerning one. Each C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft can hold 350 people comfortably and the US has over 50 of them. At just one flight per day per aircraft that type alone could move 18,000 people per day out of harm’s way.

In events like this month’s vast wildfires, imagine bomber streams coming in dropping vast quantities of fire retardant. A B-2 can carry 27 metric tons of weapons. A B-52 can carry 32 metric tons. A B-1B can carry 34 metric tons. What if those weapons were precision-guided canisters of fire suppressing foam? Each B-52 could carry 32,000 litres of water instead of a giant bomb. It would be much slower than a standard CL-415 amphibious water-bomber, but it would more than make up for it with capacity, range, and sheer numbers, and does not preclude the use of those purpose-built aircraft. What if the thousands of smaller, high speed fighters and attack aircraft could rapidly react to such incidents around the world and stop fires rather than starting them?

The military would still have their enemies — but they would be the disasters and challenges that are the common enemy of all the people. The oligarchs would still have their vast weapons platforms, and the industrial profits that come with them. A military that shows up to help rather than to impose would be a welcome sight, something to be a part of for reasons greater than being the only way to gain access to government social programs.

In foregoing all but the most essential military operations in the traditional sense, the doctrine of shock and awe could simply be the doctrine of awe. The projection of American power would be one of good will, not one of imposed will. The arrival of the vast imperial machinery of the United States military would be welcomed, not feared. Where the good will generated toward the United States would result in more open markets and better relations, where other countries and populations would want to trade with the friendly giant instead of having to.

The trouble, though, and the reason the country will never see its own potential in this way is simple. Helping others is socialism. Killing them is capitalism.

Most notably, Poilievre wants Canada’s military to “reinstill a warrior culture, not a woke culture.”

While Canada has built a reputation over the handful of wars in which we have participated as fierce fighters, we have never defined ourselves as a warrior nation or our military as a warrior culture. Indeed, it was Canada’s Lester B. Pearson who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering United Nations peacekeeping.

The warrior comments can be found at about minute 20:40 in his speech (below). Fortunately, YouTube permits playing it at double-speed so the whole thing can be listened to in a tolerable amount of time, if you are so inclined.

It is worth comparing it to the speech made last fall by Pete Hegseth to a room full of the United States’ top military leaders taken off their posts to hear him. Full video of that below. The similarities are striking in tone, content, and intent.

It makes one wonder whether Pierre Poilievre understands the country he seeks to lead, shares any of our overarching collective values, or has any ambition for us as a nation rather than for himself as an individual.

This is far from the first time he has shown that he is philosophically close to American MAGA values. It is strikingly clear that he views Canada as little more than an American vassal state, serving no purpose of our own.

This week, Prime Minister Mark Carney honoured American Senator Lindsey Graham (no relation!) by absurdly stating, "Throughout his career, he stood resolutely in defence of democracy and freedom," in spite of Graham’s own record of standing very much against democracy and freedom in the United States. He may have, at some point, embraced democratic values, but those died after he lost the 2016 primary to Donald Trump and fully embraced him (following a game of golf) instead.

The Warning with Steve Schmidt

Lindsey knew better. He chose worse.

Lindsey Graham was a lonely and unprincipled man who betrayed his country for power and his decency for attention…

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16 days ago · 2705 likes · 207 comments · Steve Schmidt

There is no honour or value in beatifying a deplorable human being just because that person has died. When Trump finally kicks the bucket, there will be dancing in the streets throughout the world. It will be important for Canada’s leaders to figure out on which side of history we wish to find ourselves at that moment. Let there be no kind words of condolence offered for his end, only for the end of the suffering he has caused.

Carney is systematically out-manoeuvring the Trump administration in policy and negotiation with little regard to optics. Optics are often the enemy of good policy, but they are nevertheless real, and they do matter. There is no doubt that saying a few kind words about a disgusting abomination of a human being upon his death is intended to treat the American administration with the same kind of spoiled child handling that we witnessed at last week’s NATO summit by the entire collection of the alliance’s leaders.

Geddry

Containment With A Pocket Square

Good morning! One of the small pleasures of watching foreign commentary on Trump is that the hosts and guests are often less burdened by the American press’s pathological need to translate obvious instability into “unorthodox style.” They just say the thing…

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18 days ago · 142 likes · 3 comments · Mary Geddry

We have to avoid the trap, however, of going too far, of placating and appeasing Donald Trump in our efforts to avoid his uncontained wrath, of evading his ruthless vengeance on even the vaguest perceived slight. There is a great deal more at stake than the orange menace’s ego.

The American dictatorship will not die with Trump. The American threat to our sovereignty and our economy will not die with Trump. The MAGA movement itself will not die with Trump. His successor will neither be as profoundly stupid nor as easy to manipulate as Trump.

The wealthy oligarchs behind the MAGA movement are watching, looking for vulnerabilities, testing the limits of what allies and adversaries will reject, tolerate, or accept. Every inch that we give now will be taken as a mile later by the smarter, more ruthless dictator that follows.

We are already reorienting our trade and defence posture away from the United States, mostly toward Europe, as last week’s submarine announcement showed.

Concis Canada

Canada Picks Germany

Since this morning, as I kept working, there was one constant background hum: what is Canada going to do…

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21 days ago · 167 likes · 37 comments · Shankar Narayan

While building out these alternatives, we can continue to manage Trump’s ego in the hope that his death will bring the defeat of his movement followed by a great reset, a restoration of how things were until November of 2016, an end to the global nightmare that we are currently living. It is a fantasy, but a pleasant one.

But the real risk is that in outwardly placating the Americans, even while discreetly breaking our interdependence with them, we are enabling and legitimising the alternative. Calling Lindsey Graham a defender of democracy and freedom when his record is anything-but lends credence to the Maple MAGA movement and their equal lack of respect for democracy and freedom in Canada.

Which leaves us vulberable to another dangerous position. One in which we leave the door open to Pierre Poilievre’s vision for Canada, where we embrace the MAGA movement with an eye toward including ourselves within, and subservient to, the great white warrior culture described by Pete Hegseth and the rest of the Trump cult.

We will get there by legitimising Lindsey Graham’s legacy and accepting Pierre Poilievre’s rhetoric. Our elbows will need to go just a little bit higher.

The irony of a party whose reputation is built around financial management outspending and underperforming their rivals without being able to balance their own books is delicious. It is an easy story to write, an easy joke to make. Conservatives can’t manage their own books — how could you expect them to manage yours?

The Conservatives are not the party of sound financial management. The right wing has never been about balancing the books or taking care of the common people. There is a reason they have spent the past century trying to turn “socialist” into a swearword, and accused anyone who opposes them of being “communist.”

The philosophy of the right is about giving license to greed, about legitimising structural imbalance, about extracting value from the public purse to their own ends, for their own purposes, and depriving wider society of its benefit to force people to turn to profit-making ventures for ever-more essential infrastructure and services.

David Graham

Private Money In Politics Is The Root Of Our Rot

Nearly all the problems we are facing today share a common root cause: the role of money — and those who have too much of it — in politics…

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6 months ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

The very fact that the Conservatives are consistently the biggest fundraisers and the biggest spenders does not mean they have the widest support among Canadian voters, the best ideas, or the competence to do the job they are ostensibly seeking. It simply means that they have the greatest understanding of the importance of spending money to make money, of the essential role of private money in the public policy forum we call politics.

We should not be shocked that the Conservatives are spending nearly $100 million in a calendar year, but rather that it is either possible of necessary for money to have that level of impact in politics, regardless of party.

There is no mechanism for someone who has bills to pay and lacks significant savings to run for political office without courting donations so high that they can collect a salary from their own campaign machinery. There is no way to do so without turning to private money.

Donors may well believe in the candidate, but they also largely believe in the candidate’s future ability to take their calls at a rate comparable to their philanthropy. The same applies to the whole political party. The donations come with strings attached, however tenuously, however little even the donors recognise it.

Electoral politics, then, revolves around access to money, not a discussion of ideas, or as a recognition of competence or hard work. Those without money are consistently left out of the debate, the discussion, the candidate rolls, the party structures. Those with money are able to spend it with impunity to influence public policy debate toward objectives that help them gather ever more money.

Open debate on policy is a public good and must be treated and funded in that manner. Public policy cannot and must not be about chasing donations or be decided on who can spend the most.

When the Conservatives manage to spend nearly $100 million in a single year, it is not a testament to their abilities, their values, their work ethic, or their public support. It is not a recognition of their competence in gathering or managing money, as their associated deficit plainly demonstrates.

Rather, it is an indictment of a political system built around money when it should be built around the people.

Since April, 2025, he has served as Donald Trump’s spokesman in Canada. The things he has said and the things he has done offer a window into Trump’s own intentions toward us, and his level of respect for our country and our independence.

Canada and Canadians can only be so nice for so long.

Hoekstra, born Cornelius Piet Hoekstra, himself an immigrant to the United States from the Netherlands, is credited as a contributor to Project 2025’s core document, Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise.

The document lays out a Christian nationalist vision for the United States with an all-powerful absolutist presidency and a restructured government around hard right ideology, and it has been systematically implemented over the year and a half of Trump’s second presidency.

If we consider Hoekstra’s involvement in writing this document and his subsequent appointment as the United States ambassador to Canada, we must take his mandate to be the implementation of Project 2025 with respect to Canada. His actions, in this context, make far more sense than the cop-out of seeing him as little more than a belligerent drunk being rude to his host nation.

Project 2025 only mentions Canada a few times, and the meaning is often far clearer in retrospect. Take this excerpt from about two-thirds of the way through, for example:

Similarly, the United States must work with Mexico, Canada, and other countries to develop a hemisphere-focused energy policy that will reduce reliance on distant and manipulable sources of fossil fuels, restore the free flow of energy among the hemisphere’s largest producers, and work together to increase energy production, including for nations that are looking for dramatic economic expansion.

His embrace of Alberta separatism makes sense if the objective is to fold Canadian energy production, which exists primarily in Alberta, into the United States’ domestic market.

The American theft of Venezuelan oil since their decapitation raid last fall to arrest Maduro has resulted in at least $8 billion of seized oil revenue. With the devastating earthquakes in the country last month, the United States is offering about $150 million in aid — and asking the public to donate rather than returning the money they took from the country in their time of need.

It would be naive to think that their view of Canadian oil or its value, or their respect for our autonomy over it, is any different.

David Graham

Canada's Fragile Place In The World

While Mark Carney returns from the European Political Community Summit as the first non-European leader ever to be invited, Pierre Poilievre is spending this week at the Canada Strong and Free Network’s Ottawa convention playing second fiddle to Danielle Smith next to headliners…

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3 months ago · 34 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

Hoekstra has made his country’s case on the F-35 vs Saab Gripen fighter choice clear, as well. Earlier this year, you may recall, he told Canada that if we do not choose the American F-35 fighter for our air force, the United States would see the NORAD agreement as null and void and patrol Canadian airspace with American jets at will.

This offer — either give up your sovereignty on defence spending and weapons systems selection, or just straight out give up your sovereignty — is the clearest possible statement of how Hoekstra and the administration he represents sees Canada. It fits with Trump’s longstanding rhetoric about annexing Canada as a whole into the United States, with his frequent 51st-state rhetoric.

Hoekstra may not fully understand why Canadians are not embracing his country as our feudal overlords as much as he would like us to, but it is not stopping him from continually disrespecting our country and its very existence. Who can forget when he even had ideological partner Doug Ford demanding an apology for his words and behaviour, without any irony.

Or his recent screed denying Canada paid for the Gordie Howe bridge that his government refuses to allow to be opened between Windsor and Detroit — after Canada footed its entire bill.

Which leads us to the most recent slap in Canada’s face by the ambassador — the invitation of Tamara Lich to the United States embassy for their Independence Day celebration. Lich, you may recall, was convicted in connection with her role in organising the Ottawa freedom convoy, which, among other things, called for the overthrow of Canada’s government. She had to obtain permission from per probation officer to take leave from house arrest to attend.

To understand the symbolism and the deep institutional insult to Canada that this represents, imagine that the government of Canada had invited January 6th coup leaders to the Canadian embassy in Washington, DC, during the Biden administration.

Hoekstra is the representative of the United States to Canada. His actions, by definition, represent the will of the American government. The message he brings is loud and clear, and it is not one that is welcome on our soil.

There comes a point in time where we must put our elbows up and kick this disgrace of an ambassador out of Canada — along with everything that he represents.

As far as I am concerned, that time has come.

This is fanciful, of course. Given the implications, for Canada to eject the American ambassador would probably take a full-scale military invasion, and even then we would keep them here so that we would have someone to negotiate with. So, I suppose, we will continue to pretend he is just a belligerent drunk and carry on accordingly.

Dean Blundell

VIDEO: Trump's Drunk MAGA Ambassador To Canada, Pete Hoekstra, Says He Can’t Figure Out Why Canadians Hate Him. Let Me Help.

Pete Hoekstra is throwing himself a party today…

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23 days ago · 1044 likes · 84 comments · Dean Blundell

Charlie Angus / The Resistance

"Lying Pete", It’s Time To Debate Your Lies

Imagine my surprise to receive a letter from the Ambassador of the United States…

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21 days ago · 532 likes · 117 comments · Charlie Angus / The Resistance

In that universe, the one where ad hominem attacks on an aging but well-meaning president had not forced him out of the race at the last minute to be replaced by Kamala Harris, a comfort settled over the US that the threat was over. In spite of having allowed a convicted felon and impeached seditious traitor to run, the American electorate had shown themselves wiser than their electoral regulators.

For Canada, the defeat of Trump south of the border allowed our own right-wing troll to take power. The warning we needed was not there. The visceral reaction to Trump’s echo never happened. The same anger about the rising cost of living and the dwindling middle class that brought Trump to power the first time had settled over us as well, with Canadians rejecting the Liberal government and choosing Prime Minister Poilievre.

In that scenario, one in which a dishonest and malevolent leader had taken Canada’s reins on false promises of prosperity for a working class he despises, it would have been Canadians disgusted with our leadership, jealous of the quiet grandpa next door.

It would have been the organisers of the Ottawa ‘freedom convoy’ who would be in positions of power in Canada, representing us on the world stage. It would be Canadian ambassador to the United States Tamara Lich welcoming January 6th leaders to our Washington, DC embassy, embarrassing us in the corridors of American power, rather than yesterday’s embarrassment of Pete Hoekstra welcoming her to the American embassy for Independence Day.

It is easy for us as Canadians to believe that we are somehow better than the Americans because we elected internationally respected figure Mark Carney as our leader and they have a president whose declared grift is over $2 billion from his first year in office, owing mostly to his relationship with cryptocurrency.

It is easy for us to forget that, just four years ago, Pierre Poilievre was advocating in favour of Bitcoin and pushing to make Canada a major player in the cryptocurrency world. That a year and a half ago, in spite of this and his active leadership campaigning among the blaring horns of the Ottawa convoy that he was so high in the polls that the question was not whether he would win, but whether there would be a credible opposition left to counter him.

We know from this record and from his behaviour since he lost an election he was sure to win where his values truly lie. His refusal to vacate Stornoway, even symbolically, during his absence from elected office, then criticising the Carney plan to finally renovate our embarrassment of a Prime Minister’s residence. His rhetoric against the government’s plans to improve housing access while his own time as employment and social development minister saw the country lose 800,000 affordable housing units when his government refused to renew their agreements. His railing against that same cost of home ownership while building his own portfolio of revenue property, taking part in the housing supply crunch he pretends to care about.

His position on taxation and social programs is well known. Cut taxes for the rich. Cut services for the poor. Had he taken power, that is how he would be governing.

If we want to see what an entitled grifter pandering to the wealthy would look like, we need only look at Donald Trump’s United States. Fortunately for Canada, Trump got there first — and showed us in time for Canadians to get the message before our last election.

But the story does not end there. There is always another election around the corner. If the moderate centre continues to try to defer action on or ignore genuine progressive ideas, Canadian frustration suppressed by the embarrassing spectacle next door will bubble over once again.

We need to diversify our export markets away from the United States and neuter their efforts to take away our energy resources through sham separatist movements, yes. We need to do things we are not naturally comfortable with such as fully funding our armed forces and preparing them for asymmetric warfare to face the real, tangible threat from next door, something anathema to traditional left-wing progressives. These are happening, and they are important.

But we also need to improve genuine outcomes for the population, ensure minimum living and income standards for all, rein in obscene wealth and corporate greed, end externalisation, get money out of politics, establish genuine universal pharmacare, end the rise of two-tiered healthcare, solve homelessness, rebuild efficient, affordable, interconnected public transit infrastructure, address planned obsolescence in our technology and prepare for the seismic shock of unresolved waste and climate change.

If we do not tackle those with the same fervour, with a plan, commitment, and action, that alternate universe where the grifters take over Canada, too, will not be a curious bit of fiction. As Canadians, it will simply be a deferred state of affairs, ready to resume here once Trump has been defeated there.

David Graham

Progressives Lack Ambition

Since the advent of Reaganomics and the rise of the neoliberal movement, the working class in the west have fallen ever-further behind the obscenely rich. We, collectively, have the resources to end homelessness and hunger in our countries. We have the ability to end child poverty, make higher education and public transit free, switch our entire energy …

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10 months ago · 14 likes · David Graham

A Prime Minister’s residence is not a mere formality, nor should it be seen as nothing but perk of the job. Aside from the practical impacts of having a permanent secure facility with the social infrastructure to welcome nations and the communications infrastructure needed to run a country in a crisis that does not need to be moved every time its occupant changes, it is a symbolic representation of how the country sees itself.

We are known for our self-deprecating humour. We are world-famous for selling off our raw resources and buying back the value-added products that they made. We Canadians have a reputation for apologising when someone else steps on our toes.

We are largely a caring, polite society, which is why so much of the country recoils in muted horror at how our neighbours to the south carry themselves. In fact, we live as a reaction to that southern reality.

The official residence of the leader of our national government would, in any other context, be a condemned building. Unmaintained for so long that it is simply no longer safe to occupy, it is a statement in how Canadians are perennially embarrassed to show any pride in who we are.

We look at the ostentatious pillars of the White House and we say: that is not who we are as a country. We will not spend our pooled resources on something so apparently pointless, something that does not serve am obvious greater good.

The Knowledge Architect

The Problem They Needed

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a month ago · 15 likes · The Vertical Dispatch

Which takes us to now, with the Prime Minister living in the Governor General’s guest house at Rideau Cottage. His official residence is entering its second decade unoccupied, stripped to the studs, a construction site without a plan. No Prime Minister has wanted themselves or their government to be involved in fixing it, lest it be seen as selfish, as an investment in their own comfort, in fear that they be accused of spending on themselves while citizens still have unmet needs. It is a tacit acceptance of the implication that the residence is a mere perk, not a building of greater symbolic importance.

Eventually, though, we have to pee or get off the potty. Pragmatically speaking, 24 Sussex should probably be torn down and rebuilt from scratch, but it is the official residence of the Prime Minister. We don’t just tear down buildings of symbolic importance, even if the symbolism has become that we are embarrassed to take pride in ourselves as a country. So we must decide what to do with it.

The Prime Minister, wanting to solve this problem as he ruthlessly and methodically solves so many others, offers a compromise. It needs to be redesigned and rebuilt, which needs an architectural plan, and he is preparing a competition open to Canadian firms to come up with the best one. Perfect.

But to pay for it, he does not want to commit government funds, even now, turning to the Rideau Hall Foundation to accept charitable donations for the cause. And to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest between himself and his nation, he is committing never to live in the resulting residence. So Canadians, if you want the next Prime Minister to have an official residence worthy, put your money where your mouth is and donate to the project!

In so doing, we are turning to private donors to solve this problem of the public perception of ourselves as a country. The irony is profound. The house that, along with the Governor General’s residence at Rideau Hall across the street and the nation’s other official residences, represents how we see ourselves is not even worthy of us as a country investing in it with our pooled resources.

It is not really a question of money. We are spending billions restoring the entire Parliamentary precinct in a generation-long project creatively called the Long Term Vision and Plan. Modernising 24 Sussex would be a rounding error in the context, and should probably be folded into that plan.

Pierre Poilievre, who lives in another deeply symbolic publicly funded mansion, says that we should not waste our time and energy fixing the Prime Minister’s residence. But the leader of the opposition in our country should have security and social infrastructure in the same way as the Prime Minister does, not because he is seen as the ‘Prime Minister in waiting' but because we are a country that is open to debate and dissent, one that takes pride in allowing the government to have a functional and effective opposition, that celebrates the fundamental underlying democracy that it represents.

It is that attitude, that easy political point of saying how dare we maintain a public building used by a politician, that has brought us to where we are.

The Prime Minister is right to make a plan to renovate the building. He is neutralising it as a political issue by committing to not living there himself, but in so doing is tacitly accepting the accusation that it is a mere perk of the job.

The problem with soliciting donations, as much as the symbolism, is that private money has no business in public projects. It does not matter if the donor list is public. It does not even matter if there are donation limits. The average person will not donate to such a project, so its promoters will have to go after moneyed interests who want their name on a plaque at the front door of the Prime Minister’s residence. This project is not a question of charity, not a problem to be solved through philanthropy.

David Graham

The Philanthropy Myth

In a properly functioning society, charity would not need to exist. Food banks, medical foundations, historical societies, and so many other groups and organisations we take for granted as normal charitable organisations are universally a symbol of the failure of our social imagination, a logical conclusion of the common view of government as a negative…

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a year ago · 18 likes · 2 comments · David Graham

Seen together, having private funds fund the private residence of the Prime Minister offers a whole new level of symbolism that Canadians did not ask for and will ultimately not find welcome.

Funded by private donors, the question of who has an interest in contributing as an individual, and why, will never be satisfactorily answered. In the short term, it will probably be a spectacular rebuild. There is no doubt that the competition will find a practical yet worthy design. But in the long term the donations will dry up, the symbolism broken, the underlying doubts about its noble and symbolic purpose confirmed, and the stigma on using public funds strengthened rather than broken, taking us right back to where we are today.

We must have the courage of our convictions as a country to ensure that buildings like this are maintained permanently, properly, and appropriately by a non-partisan government body. The National Capital Commission already owns the land and building and has a role to play in this regard. It is not, and should not be, a political question. This is a national building and should be maintained with public funds, and done so with pride.

To give in to Conservative talking points about the inherent selfishness of investing in an official residence for the Prime Minister, while unironically using official residences themselves, is to wave the white flag of surrender over 24 Sussex.

It is time to have enough pride in ourselves as a country to, at the very least, evict the rats from the residence.

Through my years on Parliament Hill, I always took pride in giving tours to anyone visiting. On more than one occasion, I tagged along with a public tour group as they traveled the corridors of Centre Block, always interested in hearing new stories or unexpectedly answering a question from the public.

I took many people to parts of the building that were not normally accessible to explore, and tagged along whenever I could when long-time staffer Kevin Bosch gave what was dubbed the “sex, blood, and guts” tour of the precinct, offering my universal access as a complement to his universal knowledge for an unforgettable experience.

Feldman, who was already a veteran staffer when I started on the Hill, has since had a varied and interesting career in both partisan and non-partisan roles. His work has brought a lot of memories back for me through this book, especially those incidents described for which I was present.

After the Samara Centre for Democracy launched their book Tragedy in the Commons, I asked a member of Samara in the gallery at a committee meeting if they’d consider eventually writing a lighter book called Comedy in the Commons relaying the sillier and more unconventional side of the place. While they did not seem terribly interested in the idea, Charlie’s nailed it with his tome. It’s in that spirit that I share a few of my own off-beat stories from my time there.

Prior to becoming a professional political staffer and then full-blown politician, I worked as a news feed editor and writer for a series of on-line high tech news sites, most notably Linux.com. In that capacity, I traveled to the capital to cover a conference called the Ottawa Linux Symposium every summer. In the many years I attended the conference, I never visited Parliament in spite of being across the street from the Hill for days at a time. It was not from lack of interest — I had been watching CPAC since I was a teenager as about the only interesting thing the television had to offer, and had been participating in election campaigns most of my life. At the time, I stated that I did not want to visit Parliament until I worked there — but never believed I actually would.

During the symposium in the summer of 2008, I finally relented, going on a public tour for the first time — and jinxing my tech-journalism career. A few months after, in the midst of the 2008 crash, I and all of my colleagues were unceremoniously laid off as the news site changed hands without including the personnel, leaving me with an existential question of what to do next with my life. By the summer of 2009, I was working as a constituency assistant to an MP, and in the summer of 2010, freshly divorced and starting over in every way, I arrived on the Hill, more or less unannounced and with no concrete plan of how to turn my physical arrival into a paycheque, much less a career, and started volunteering my way into the place.

Very quickly, I began learning of the culture on the Hill, of the endlessly free food and trinkets offered by lobbyists, of the work ethic required to survive, of the ambition and burnout that affected staffers, of the practical side of Parliament. I learned of the traditions and taboos, of the complexities of numerous security agencies, of the lines between where the public could go, where staffers could go, and where only Members and their accompanying guests could go.

For a long time after I arrived, I heard of a mysterious vending machine, referred to simply as ‘the coke machine.’ But, I was told, I had to find it for myself. I asked many people for information, and was generally sent to generic vending machines in common areas of the building.

Eventually, with some hints, I wandered down a freight elevator to a sub-basement level and was confronted with it: an active, stocked, vintage, Coca-Cola machine with the 1969 logo selling traditional cold glass bottles, clearly actively maintained as it accepted $1 coins. It became a main-stay of my tours.

Through most of my time on the Hill, I worked in suite 672 of the Confederation Building. The Member’s office within the suite was room 666. One winter morning, I was working at my desk when I was greeted with a loud crash in my boss’s office. I went in to investigate, and found the glass of the window by his desk shattered inward with glass scattered all the way to the far wall, and briefly observed a hammer dangling on the end of a rope outside, quickly retreating upward.

Puzzled, I called security at the front desk and inquired as to where to report a broken window. They confirmed that the front desk was in fact the right place, and a few minutes later an officer from House of Commons security showed up, confirmed that the window was indeed broken, and opened a report. Not long after, someone from Public Works and Government Services showed up with a piece of plexiglass and glued it over the remnants of the shattered window without removing the shards.

I inquired as to what happened and learned that, while the window had broken inward into House of Commons security territory, it had been done from outside. With the RCMP responsible for security on the grounds outside the building, that made the investigation their bailiwick. It turned out to have been caused by an ice clearing operation on the roof of the building. At least that cross-jurisdictional investigation was solved relatively quickly.

David Graham

The Lighter Side of Hill Work

When I started working for him, Scott Simms was the elected chair of the Atlantic Liberal Caucus, and, as the biggest regional caucus in the emaciated 2011 National Liberal Caucus, they met in the same room as the full National Caucus. As we were no longer government or official opposition, the meetings took place in the…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

Some months later, my boss nearly missed a vote in the House of Commons Chamber as we did not hear the bells ringing. Whenever there is a vote in the House, bells referred to as ‘division bells’ ring across the precinct for 30 minutes (with some rare 15 minute exceptions). The bell will ring once every few seconds for 15 minutes, then ring twice every few seconds for the next 10 minutes, then three times every few seconds for the final five minutes, allowing Members to gauge their remaining time by sound. In parts of the precinct such as committee rooms, the bells are muted and supplemented with a strobe light to reduce interruption.

The bell nearest our office was outside the door that opened directly to the building’s main stairwell. That door, helpfully, was sound-proof. Concerned by my boss’s near-miss on the vote, I inquired with the House how to get one of the strobe lights installed in our office so that we would not have a repeat of the experience nor be deafened by its remedy.

Within a few hours, someone from public works showed up with a giant drill and put a hole in the wall over the door between my and my boss’s office. And then a few days later, a team showed up with a clipboard and asked some questions. Then a team came to measure the hole and take some more notes. This repeated several times over the next few weeks as several more departments got involved.

I learned that they could not install the flashing light in our office without also doing so in the offices in the floors above and below ours. The expense of doing so put the cost of the work into contract tender territory. Weeks became months. The drill hole continued to mock me.

Meantime, we were in a meeting one day and could hear a vague noise and commotion out in the hall. We ignored it, wrapping up the meeting without rushing, and opened the door to see our guests out. On doing so, we determined that the grinding noise we were hearing was a decidedly unassertive fire alarm out in the hall. Fire trucks were arriving before we figured out that we supposed to leave, and the alarm was silenced before we started down the stairs.

We were not, apparently, the only ones to notice this failure as within a few weeks a fire alarm — and strobe light — was installed in my office which, we determined fairly quickly, was substantially louder than the original.

With the fire alarm rapidly updated to provide a strobe, 133 days after my initial request for a strobe light for the division bells, that, too, was realised. I came into my office one morning and discovered a strobe light flashing incessantly in my office while no vote was taking place. I requested help with that and several times over the next few weeks a technician came, opened the box containing the flashing light and adjusted it with the help of a screw driver.

The strobe light that would prevent my boss from missing a vote in the House of Commons worked, apparently, by listening to the audio channel for the division bell and activating the light if the sound reached a certain threshold. I rather expected it to be a more boolean signal —either ring or don’t ring — but was learning an awful lot about the structure and operation of government with the help of flashing lights.

In 2013, after observing MPs in action and influenced by all these shenanigans around lights and windows, I came to understand that the bar to public service was lower than I had anticipated. I decided to run in the riding where I grew up and where my permanent address had been since moving back from Ontario in 2010. It was not a safe riding for the Liberals. In 1980, when Pierre Trudeau won 74 out of 75 seats in Quebec, the part of the riding I grew up in was still part of Joliette — the one riding Trudeau senior’s team did not take in the province that year, losing to Roch Lasalle. Through the 90s and 2000s, it was among the safest seats for the Bloc.

I noted, as a Hill staffer running for office that if, in the election, I were sent to Ottawa, I would leave Ottawa, however if I were not sent to Ottawa, I would remain in Ottawa.

When, two years later, I did win, I kept the office at 672 and Scott Simms, who I’d worked for over the previous nearly four years, moved to East Block. Mine was an awkward shaped office roughed into a hallway, but it had its own bathroom and, more importantly, it was already my office. By keeping it, I was up and running within days of winning my election rather than the weeks it normally takes rookies to get started.

Scott, for his part, told anyone who would listen in the weeks that followed that there were two things he did not believe would ever happen: Justin Trudeau winning the boxing match, and David Graham winning Laurentides—Labelle. He was, it is worth noting, proud to have been wrong about both.

Once elected, I started to explore parts of the buildings I could not get to before. The staircase down from the Peace Tower by the carillon and the catwalk around the ceiling of the House of Commons chamber were among my favourites. The catwalk, with a head clearance of about four feet, no significant lighting, and many structures in the floor, was a hazardous walk. Sadly, that item did not stay on the Bosch tour very long — it is the only place I explored that the Sergeant-at-Arms closed even to Members of Parliament upon learning of it.

I avoided the national spotlight as a Member of Parliament, wanting to focus my efforts on my home riding of Laurentides—Labelle, not on myself or on building a profile. I was well known within the bounds of my riding, recognised everywhere I went whether at events or gas stations. The moment I was outside my riding, I was a complete unknown, and I found comfort in that. Going back to Ottawa offered me a degree of anonymity. I saw no personal or political advantage to changing that status quo.

So, in the fall of 2016, when we had a debate required by the Standing Orders on the subject of the Standing Orders, a line I included in my speech resulted in my only national media play of my time in office: about tearing my pants.

I noticed fairly quickly after taking my seat that the seats are physically pointy. The arm-rests are designed with a point rather than a curve at the leading edge. Anyone who sits down with their pockets even slightly flared will find that they will catch on those pointy chairs and rip the pocket right off their suit pants.

In discussing this with colleagues, I learned that this problem crossed party lines. It was both frustrating to visit the Hill seamstress as often as I did, and a bit of a running joke. So I included passing reference to it in a ten minute speech on House procedure.

It was picked up by media outlets across the country. Global, for example, published an article entitled MPs keep ripping their pants in the House of Commons — and aren’t happy about it. Even CBC radio’s flagship program, As-it-Happens, called me for an interview on the topic. I declined interviews with comedy shows on the topic. For months after my speech, any time anyone ripped their pants in the Chamber, they called me over to show me.

Given the nature of the problem, and the institutional embarrassment in actually solving something so goofy, the Chamber has been replaced, but the chairs have not. Nor was the fact that my speech directly resulted in other changes to the Standing Orders nearly as interesting to the public as the prospect of Members of Parliament walking around hiding gaping holes in their trousers.

This is hardly a comprehensive list of anecdotes from my time. With a young child while in office, Halloween offered endless opportunity for antics. And ask this Douglas Adams fan about sitting in the 42nd Parliament!

Parliament, in spite of appearances and reputation, is a deeply human place. The people working there in every capacity are people. I am but one of tens of thousands of people who have worked on the Hill over its history, and each one of those people has stories and anecdotes to share, most of which have never been written, much less compiled.

If you enjoy this kind of story and want to learn of the stranger bits of Parliamentary history, then pick up Unparliamentary and settle in for a completely different perspective on the centre of Canadian government.

Following the Paris G7 meeting, the French president invited the American dictator to a dinner at the Palace, home of French King Louis XVI, famously guillotined for treason in 1793 along with his wife Marie-Antoinette, concluding the French Revolution. The Revolution itself was largely precipitated by the domestic financial troubles caused by helping the United States win their own war of Independence against the United Kingdom.

When Trump had dinner at the Palace, it was in the Hall of Mirrors. It is an ornate, dazzling location for which Trump has long held an obsession. The dinner was billed as an event to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the French-backed independence of the United States.

Geddry

The Hall of Mirrors

Donald Trump went to Versailles for a dinner celebrating the 250th anniversary of American independence and left having signed an Iran agreement in the one European palace most associated with postwar settlement, defeat, humiliation, and reparations…

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a month ago · 240 likes · 9 comments · Mary Geddry

The Hall of Mirrors at the Palace is best known as the site of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, in which Germany was forced to sign a humiliating peace treaty for which the terms were dictated to them, not negotiated, bringing a formal end to the First World War. The treaty required Germany to pay the western allies the equivalent of roughly US$600 billion in today’s money in war reparations.

It is appropriate, then, that Macron invited Trump to use this location to sign his memorandum of understanding with Iran to end the war he started with them. As with the German surrender of 1919, the United States do not seem to have had a lot of say in what they were agreeing to.

The first clause of the agreement includes peace for Lebanon, which is specifically named three times, and effectively means Israel holds a complete veto over the success of this armistice, able to force the United States back into a war it has already lost by continuing its own operations.

The United States, prior to starting this war principally to distract from the still-unreleased complete Epstein files, had 19 military bases in the middle east. Most of them were arrayed in a way that surrounded Iran, projecting theoretical power against an adversary the British and Americans created for themselves over western corporate control of the nation’s oil reserves, when they worked to overthrow a democratically elected government, leading directly to the Islamic Revolution.

It is significant, then, that the memorandum of understanding includes the declaration that the United States “undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days” of a final peace agreement.

Up until Trump invaded Iran, the Strait of Hormuz operated as an international waterway with unimpeded access for the world’s commercial shipping industry. The commonly accepted figure is that around 20 % of the world’s crude oil transited that Strait prior to the war.

The agreement restores unimpeded access to this commercially important waterway “for 60 days only” solving a problem created by the war that did not exist prior to the war, and giving effective permanent control of the previously international waterway to Iran. This fleetingly temporary undoing of American damage is the United States’ only accomplishment in this deal.

Not unlike the German surrender at Versailles, the agreement also provides significant war reparations:

The United States of America undertakes, with regional partners, to develop a definitive mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 Billion, for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It is hard to read this agreement as anything other than a complete capitulation by the United States to an enemy the United States created for itself, attacked unnecessarily, and was defeated by in near record time.

That the American President signed the articles of surrender to Iran in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles is evidence that there is no aspect of history that any member of the American administration has ever read.

That the French president was able to so masterfully troll Donald Trump in this way to demonstrate it, moreover, will mark the moment at which the once mighty American empire truly became the open laughing stock of the world.

That they give Israel a veto over their own surrender within its terms has also ensured that peace never actually comes. The surrender agreement, as much as one exists, is already dead. The US will need to be defeated as many times as they have claimed victory for this war of choice to actually end. The empire has no close.

Dean Blundell

BREAKING: Trump’s $300 Billion Surrender Deal With Iran Lasted Less Time Than A Costco Rotisserie Chicken

June 19, 2026…

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a month ago · 1403 likes · 61 comments · Dean Blundell

Elon Musk’s rise to the world’s wealthiest man is well-documented as an exercise in the ruthless application of public funds to private benefit. In 2025, he ran a government agency called the “Department of Government Efficiency” that systematically raided every major US government department and left with vast amounts of data. All federal investigations, and there were several, involving his businesses also magically disappeared through this exercise. Not surprising, then, that a year later his net worth exceeds Canada’s entire gross national debt.

Dean Blundell

Elon Musk’s $1.77 Trillion Magic Trick: How An Illegal Immigrant Turned Your Tax Dollars Into The Biggest IPO In History — And The Smart Money Thinks You’re The Mark

June 16, 2026…

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a month ago · 231 likes · 13 comments · Dean Blundell

For a man who claims to be the world’s biggest taxpayer, his net take from the government is still overwhelmingly in the positive.

The ludicrously wealthy avoid paying taxes by borrowing against their investments, typically their shares. The gamble is that the value of those investments will rise faster than their principal and interest, and the fact that they have not sold those assets make them untaxable as they are considered to be ‘unrealised gains.’

The solution here is plainly obvious and requires only a modicum of political spine to implement. It is a problem common to both Canada and the United States. It is so simple it could probably be fixed through a Private Members Bill, and may not even require a Royal Recommendation.

Any asset that is exercised should be considered an asset that has been realised. If someone is using $40 billion worth of shares as collateral, for example, then those $40 billion of shares have been assessed and applied as a real-world value and have therefore been exercised — and should therefore be taxed, at the very least as a capital gain.

The wealthy will tell you that capital gains taxes are a tax on inflation, as if their portfolios only increase in value by the inflation over the same period. If their $100,000 investment becomes worth $400,000 over a 10-year holding period, but inflation has decreased the buying power of $400,000 by half over the same period, the capital gain is still measured at $300,000 and, in Canada, we tax only half of that amount as income. Thus, even if it is partially a tax on inflation, that is algorithmically considered within the tax structure.

But it isn’t, really. Capital gains is fundamentally a tax on unearned income, not inflation. If the value of your shares rise, your only action was to watch them do so — the increase in value comes from a combination of the work of the employees and the level of interest in other investors in buying those shares from you. If your rental property is making money, the people renting from you are the ones doing the work to make you that money. In both cases, your value increased based on the contributions of others. There is real income — but it was not earned by you, and until you exercise it by selling the shares or the revenue property, that income is not even taxed.

Passive income, then, is simply the accumulated value of the work of other people.

Obscene wealth like that achieved by Elon Musk is made possible through this concept. The more wealth accumulated through the contributions of others, the more society tends to celebrate those people as a success, and the more we shield them from contributing to society through taxes.

Some contribute to charity, sometimes in large amounts. But for the most part, even that bit of wealthy chivalry has died. Andrew Carnegie left a legacy of public libraries, stating that he had gained his fortune through the education obtained through the use of libraries. Today’s equivalent tech moguls have no such sense of gratitude, obligation, or purpose.

David Graham

The Philanthropy Myth

In a properly functioning society, charity would not need to exist. Food banks, medical foundations, historical societies, and so many other groups and organisations we take for granted as normal charitable organisations are universally a symbol of the failure of our social imagination, a logical conclusion of the common view of government as a negative…

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a year ago · 18 likes · 2 comments · David Graham

Elon Musk wanted to be a trillionaire, and did not care who he hurt along the way or how he did it. He destroyed USAid on his way there, an action which has directly been credited with the death of hundreds of thousands of people in the year since. He cut a $15 million screwworm prevention program in the US which is now costing the government $1 billion to fix as, you guessed it, screwworm is back.

It was not long ago that Bill Gates was the wealthiest man in the world with a net worth of some $40 billion. Within a few years, we heard a new term — centibillionaire, and pretty quickly there were several of them.

Now, we can add the term trillionaire to our lexicon. That door has been flung open, and it won’t be long until someone else walks through it as well.

That we are not, as a society, overwhelmingly and revolutionarily disgusted with the rise of the centibillionaires and now the trillionaires is a great shame upon us all. For many people, a millionaire is a rich person. But a billion dollars is such an unfathomable amount of money that it is just a thing. It is no longer an amount of money, it has become an object in its own right.

For Musk to be a trillionaire is not widely understood to be an overwhelming concentration of wealth so much as an understanding that he is the first person to acquire this new thing. I have a train set — he has a trillion. That’s interesting, now back to work.

Billionaires should not exist, much less trillionaires. Individual people should not hoard more wealth than entire nations. We cannot rely on charity and philanthropy for them to contribute back to society — for the most part they don’t even pretend any more.

Our oligarchs must be brought to heel. If they are spending money they claim not to actually have, then the shell game must be called and they must pay the taxes associated with having it. If that forces them to sell their shares and investments rather than simply borrow against them, that is also okay — we will quickly learn the real value of their stated assets. And so will they.

Both sound innocent, even positive, on the surface. Bill C-22, however, is built around police and CSIS demands for better access to data. Big tech are apoplectic, this time for the right reasons. While an industry built around surveillance capitalism being mad about the government wanting improved surveillance tools offers a degree of irony, they have a point.

The Signal Technology Foundation, which offers the popular free encrypted messenger service of the same name, has warned that Bill C-22 may force them to leave the Canadian market. Signal is not an American tech giant grazing on the rage machine to feed the oligarchy, it’s a charitable non-profit operating under the IRS’s strict 501(c)3 rules with the simplest mission statement:

Protect free expression and enable secure global communication through open source privacy technology.

Signal’s perspective is that Bill C-22 opens the door to allowing the Canadian government and its police and intelligence services to force cryptographic back-doors into their software. If a back door exists in an algorithm for the benefit of the police, then a back door exists. Once that is the case, the security at the core of the service no longer does.

Michael Geist

Tech Exodus: Why Bill C-22’s Privacy and Security Risks Will Drive Digital Services Out of the Country

Over the past week, a growing number of tech companies have warned that they may be forced to leave Canada if Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, remains unchanged. The government’s response to warnings from Signal, Windscribe, NordVPN, App…

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2 months ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Michael Geist

Bill C-34, introduced only a few days ago, takes on the noble task of protecting children on the Internet, including a social media restriction for children under 16 years old. The proposed law isn’t all bad by any means, but there are three major problems with the inevitable proof-of-age model that I see.

First, algorithmic manipulation by social media is not a problem unique to children. The current state of the United States in particular is a potent example of how voting-age adults are particularly vulnerable to the manipulated curation of information. Having children grow up without exposure to the problem won’t solve it if we don’t pivot our entire education system toward preparing our population into a mass of people taught to apply critical thinking rather than broken into soul-crushed factory workers with no factories left in which to work.

The second is that, when it comes to technology, there is always a way around it, and there is nobody better than the youth at finding it. By turning a whole pillar of society into a forbidden fruit, there will be a strong incentive for an entire generation to look to unregulated and possibly even dark web social media, and the parents won’t even know it’s happening. Technologically applied age restrictions, as a practical matter, are not an effective tool.

For those of us who grew up in the boundary generation between searching drawers indexed on the Dewey Decimal System and entering a simple search string into Google to find information, the idea of any older generation controlling what the younger generation does on the Internet is something of an entertaining notion.

As the late Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams wrote in the Salmon of Doubt:

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

The result is that older adults will find themselves unable to convince their social media apps that they are in fact of age, while children will be able to convince their social media apps that they are when they, in turn, are not.

The trouble is that in order to apply laws that enforce age restrictions, you must establish processes that reliably establish age, which takes us to the third and most serious problem.

If social media apps are required to collect government identification in order to establish legal age, we will be forcing the vast majority of the population to be turning their ID in all its glory and detail over to the already ethically-challenged social media industry, most of which is not even in Canada. This opens the door to very serious privacy concerns, improves the quantity and quality available to the big-data marketing machine — providing information such as likeness, residential address, medical conditions relating to driving restrictions for example, and exact date of birth for virtually the entire population.

Michael Geist

Everything All At Once: Bill C-34 Combines Platform Duties, a Kids’ Social Media Ban, AI Chatbot Regulation, and a Powerful Digital Safety Commission Into a Risky “Trust Us” Bet

The government tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, earlier today, marking its third attempt at online harms legislation after the failed 2021 consultation and Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act that died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election…

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2 months ago · 21 likes · 3 comments · Michael Geist

Governments the world over are flailing in trying to deal with the impact of AI and social media, and the survival of legacy media. These disparate legal approaches taken on individual items by individual countries will not ever solve these problems.

The real solutions come down to cracking down on the algorithmic and worker abuses at the core of the problem in the first place. If social media manipulation of society is the problem, age-limiting who gets manipulated while providing more accurate data to the manipulators won’t solve it. The manipulation itself has to be addressed and curtailed — and that is something Canada cannot do on its own.

Through the age of traditional broadcast media, we put significant emphasis on Canadian content, ‘CanCon’ for short. Today, just about the hardest place in the world to see Canadian content is in Canada. I have referenced it many times over the years in different fora, but my favourite example of this is a Cineflix production known as Mayday, a TV show that has been running for 26 seasons offering clinical analysis of plane crashes, airing in multiple languages in nearly every country in the world.

But if you are in Canada, the only way you can legally watch the full run of this Canadian-made show is with a Crave account, Bell Canada’s streaming service. The first 20 seasons of the show were available on DVD (until the distributor went out of business) in several other countries, but were region-encoded and no version was available here in the country in which it was produced. You could buy the DVD sets on line from Australia or the United Kingdom, but you would also need to buy a region-free DVD player as they were encoded against the North American market.

It is, of course, Bell’s right to maintain a domestic monopoly on the content it purchases or produces while maximising availability in other markets, but it speaks to the real problems Canada has across its content creation and media industries: namely, media ownership and vertical integration.

Michael Geist

From Making Web Giants Pay to Making Taxpayers Pay: Government Announces Plan to Kill the CRTC’s Online Streaming Ruling

The government today killed the centrepiece of its broadcasting policy, announcing it plans to issue a new policy direction to override the CRTC’s Online Streaming Act decision on Internet streaming service contributions less than two weeks after the…

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2 months ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · Michael Geist

While the $600 million the government is committing to directly funding Canadian content is welcome, it is hard to imagine that this money won’t be absorbed by Canada’s media and telecommunications oligopoly.

There are a number of regulatory and legal solutions we should be considering alongside direct funding that might actually begin to solve our internet and foreign-dominated content woes. None will be popular with the telecommunications lobbyists well-paid to prevent such outcomes from coming to be.

The first is breaking the vertical integration of Canada’s media giants. Production and distribution of content should be separate. Our internet service providers should not also be our newscasters, content creators, and cell phone providers. The government must examine the big three telecommunications providers from an anti-trust perspective to increase genuine competition at all levels of the information and entertainment supply chain.

If we lack the public imagination and political will to nationalise our fixed and mobile Internet service providers as the public infrastructure that they are, they must at least be regulated to neutrally provide equitable service to Canadians on both sides of the connection, the creators and the consumers.

The second is to state that any Canadian production that receives any public funds must be made reasonably available to all Canadians. Funding our domestic cultural production needs is at the centre of the purpose of government, but public funding of private profits needs to come to an end across the economy. If we are funding a public good, it is because it is a public good. It needs to be administered and regulated with that as a central premise.

The third is through regulation. Social media giants and what the CRTC calls Internet broadcasters like Netflix and Youtube have to be given legal parameters around how they work, how they filter, and what they label.

If we go to the grocery store, we have country of origin labelling laws that affect every product we buy. The internet has no such requirement, but there is no reason that it could not be done. Internet content providers including social media companies could easily be required to place clear country of origin labelling on all content, and be forced to provide country-of-origin filters.

It would not be unreasonable to open Netflix and be able to specifically select Canadian content, for example. It would be even better if there were a Canadian streaming service that syndicated rather than limited our own cultural production. Both the National Film Board and the CBC already offer their own streaming services, but are among the most siloed of those available to Canadians.

Facebook being required to list country-of-origin based on the owner of the content, as well as the physical location from where it was uploaded where applicable, could be quite informative on that score. X’s voluntary disclosure of country-of-origin for its user accounts has been enlightening, although also demonstrated the technical challenges of identifying physical traffic sources in the age of tor nodes and VPNs.

It would not be effective to do any of this on our own, as the Online News Act has allowed social media giants to essentially ignore Canada, however Canada and Europe are in a cooperative mood at the moment. Synchronising our Internet content policies would serve to make them far more effective for all of us. Europe has been effective in using its sheer market weight to force changes like USB-C charger compatibility for iPhones, for example, something that Canada could never achieve on its own.

David Graham

Net Neutrality and the War On News

As the federal government and tech giant Meta (Facebook) continue their entrenched battle over access to, and payment for, Canadian news, we might consider what is really at stake…

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3 years ago · 4 likes · David Graham

On the news and information side, we should also be considering legal changes to make the knowing production or distribution of objectively false or misleading information to be an offence. For both news and general content, Internet broadcasters and social media providers must also be required to offer unfiltered content streams not curated by reaction-based algorithms.

Attacking both misinformation and the emotional feedback loop that makes it profitable is critical to reclaiming the Internet as a valuable and productive feature of our society, rather than the means of its own destruction. Foreign-funded misinformation will out-score quality domestic content in every algorithm.

Producing, identifying, and labelling Canadian content is only half the battle, of course. $600 million of publicly funded content that nobody wants to watch would not materially advance the cause of our domestic culture. Nor is Canadian content that Canadians have to jump through additional hoops to watch in Canada in any meaningful way beneficial.

Mandating clear country of origin labelling and filtering would provide the data needed to direct public funds toward the type of domestic content that Canadians actually want, if we have the patience to make this a multi-year project. Ensuring publicly-funded Canadian content is available to Canadians will also ensure that this data is of some empirical value.

There is a caveat to all of this, though. Any such regulation has to be approached with caution. Canada’s lawful access regime currently winding its way through the House as Bill C-22 and through a soon-to-be introduced bill on age limits for certain Internet activities offers a warning. Any data the government collects has to be limited in scope, existing to control funding flows, not toward infringing the rights and privacy of the public.

Money alone is not the solution to our digital culture woes, especially if it exists as just another gift to the media oligopoly. Asserting the role of the government through anti-trust action and thoughtful regulation in concert with other countries, though, might at least start us on the right track.

It was also born of a desire to document the stories from the four fleeting years I spent holding federal office, and the two facets are very much related.

In politics, there are two main types of people: those who want to do, and those who want to be. Like the worst people in any office hierarchy often rising to the top, politics favours the be category, because they are the ones that put themselves in front of the cameras and the crowds and court adoring fans, who build the profile and reputation needed to stay in the public imagination, who say the things that get the headlines. The be-ers do enough actual work to have a reason to find another camera and receive another accolade, rather than for any intrinsic value or sense of accomplishment.

The do-ers only do the public relations necessary to allow them to do the actual work they want to do. They don’t seek public attention, they show up early, go home late, and don’t rest until they achieve their objectives.

Writing here has been a way to draw attention to the work that needs to be done, and to reference realities that we do not want to acknowledge. In eschewing the public profile of office beyond what was necessary to build name brand recognition within my local community, I did not do the public relations work necessary to continue the grunt work I enjoyed, avoiding rather than chasing cameras, having no larger profile, no capture of the wider imagination.

I wanted to solve specific problems, to have some modicum of positive impact on my community and the world from this one opportunity to be at the table. I saw caucus and committee meetings as the places I could do those things, but the electors don’t see those. As Catherine McKenna or Steven Guilbeault might tell you, having a seat at the table may get you heard, but it doesn’t necessarily get you listened to.

Busy with a young family and the daily grind of real-world work in a gruelling but interesting 24-hour-on-call environment where I now find myself in the post-political world, this substack has become my primary outlet for participation. I write primarily for myself, to say what I feel needs to be said, and just hope that someone somewhere who needs to hear it does.

I have always detested marketing, growing up believing that if a product needs to be advertised it is because it cannot stand on its own merits, in a household where Adbusters was core reading material from its first issue.

In my writing, which I try to maintain the discipline to do twice a week, the results, the readership, the sharing, speak directly to how politics works and how politicians rise — or don’t. The most-read and most-shared articles I have written here are also the most partisan. Colourfully sharing my especially dim view of Pierre Poilievre gets read and spread like nothing else.

Discussions of policy ideas, paths to solve the problems I see, how to address unpopular issues or take unpopular positions? Decidedly less interesting.

The least-read piece I have published here so far in 2026 was an honest and pragmatic assessment and nuances of fair pay for those holding elected office.

David Graham

What Is Fair Pay For Politicians?

The two most common reactions I received to the remuneration of Members of Parliament during my brief time in the role was: ‘that is way too much money’, and ‘that is not nearly enough money’. There is no goldilocks zone for politician pay, but the salary is only a part of the question…

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2 months ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

The most popular piece was warning that Canada is not safe from American attack.

David Graham

The American Threat

Conventional wisdom is that the United States would not attack Canada. Several people have said it to me since my recent essay warning us to materially prepare for the possibility of asymmetric war with our former ally…

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4 months ago · 76 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

Both are important, but sharing ideas and visions and goals should be what drives us.

We have so many problems to solve. Canada and the United States share much in common, and not all of it is positive. We are living the third generation curse of national generational wealth — the third generation being the ones that had no part in building it and are most prone to squandering it.

We have spent my entire lifetime ripping out or squandering our national infrastructure and resources. We have missed untold opportunities to look centuries ahead and plan for the well-being of our grandchildren’s grandchildren instead of our own individual stock portfolios. We lack ambition across the entire anglosphere, trading the future for the present.

Meanwhile, countries we culturally deride and see as some sort of rival like China are modernising faster than we can even begin to comprehend, building out infrastructure and decarbonising while we fight over control of the world’s dirtiest oil.

There are conversations to be had, there are visions to pursue, there are ideas to share, and this little corner of the Internet will continue to be my little folding chair at the edge of the very large table of public discourse.

It is the public platform necessary for me to pursue the work I want to do, to the benefit of the grandchildren of my eventual grandchildren.

It was the Bloc’s own social media post disavowing the racist slogan of the protest that first crossed my news feed. Then the deeply separatist St Jean Baptiste society’s post condemning, without irony, all forms of intolerance and racism. The leaders of the Parti Québécois, the premier, and every Quebec nationalist ever to sow the divisions underlying the slogan jumped on the bandwagon over the weekend. Their own urgency to dissociate from a slogan that did not mention them helped it spread far more widely than it otherwise would have.

In 2015, I ran in the rural Quebec riding in which I had grown up, believing that the orange wave of 2011 had proven that the province was finally ready to move on from this type of nonsense and discuss real issues. That, though fluently bilingual, I was and would always be, and be seen as, an anglophone, but that it would finally no longer matter. I was born in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts and even as I had lived in other places, I had always been proud to be a Quebecker, with my own heritage documented in the province going back to 1647.

David Graham

Language Politics: False Division

After the Bonjour-Hi debacle of 2017, the National Assembly’s war on linguistic minorities only got worse. It hasn’t ended; two weeks ago, the government of Quebec launched a $2.5 million ad campaign to promote “Bonjour” as the only greeting in the province…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · David Graham

I won my seat in that election by a thin margin. A week earlier, I would probably have lost to the collapsing NDP. A week later, I would probably have lost to the rising Bloc. But I was sworn in on November 10th, 2015 and received an overwhelmingly positive reception across a riding that had spent a generation being among the safest Bloc seats in the province. We got to work showing that the federal government could, in fact, do something.

Through my first years in office, the Bloc was a dead issue. It had all but collapsed. The small caucus of 10 people itself cleaved into two caucuses. Quebec society had moved on, and we were fixing badly overdue problems like rural telecommunications infrastructure that were leaving the regions behind. There were still overtones of the nationalist debates, of course, especially around secularism in the public service as the provincial government fanned the flames over visible religious symbols in the public service. It hadn’t gone fully away. But locally, I could do the job I was elected to do — bring the concerns of my community to Ottawa, and get them addressed.

Then the Quebec National Assembly, nervous across party lines about a federal government actually achieving for Quebec, had their ridiculous ‘Bonjour-Hi’ motion. The province was bending over itself to explain how being greeted with a bilingual question, leaving the door open to the customer’s choice of language of service, would destroy Quebec society and set French back generations.

Late one evening in that period, without premeditation, I flippantly said ‘bonjour-hi, madame la présidente’ at the start of a speech in the House of Commons on campaign finance reform, and found myself in a media quagmire of my own making, with a new-found target on my back.

The Bloc’s newly elected leader, Yves-François Blanchet, meanwhile, was bringing the Bloc movement back from the brink. The Conservative propaganda machine had done a number on Justin Trudeau’s reputation, turning the once-popular prime minister into a political albatross. Immigrants crossing into Canada at Roxham Road were fanning the flames of nationalist sentiment.

Identity politics were fully back on the front burner. As I went door-to-door and through the hundreds of community events that clogged my calendar, I was asked increasingly negative questions. A common one, often phrased bluntly, was: ‘what are you doing about all these immigrants?’ to which I would answer ‘like my wife?’ Such a response often left them tongue-tied. Argument won — vote lost.

As the 2019 election drew nearer, I felt a frost come over my riding. People who had expressed genuine appreciation for the work my team and I had managed to do were suddenly cold to me. Previously strong supporters were yelling at me on their doorstep about Trudeau and immigrants. Folks from towns too small for their own neighbours to find on the map expressed fear of Islamic terrorism, which they saw as the obvious outcome of letting those immigrants into the country.

The mood I remembered from my childhood, where anyone who was not seen as a pure Québécois-de-souche was not a real Quebecker, was coming back with a vengeance. The Bloc was rising, even if my own party’s Montreal organisers, insulated from rural realities and attitudes, refused to see it coming.

When the 2019 election finally arrived, the Bloc Québécois slogan was ‘Le Québec, c’est nous’ overlayed with photos of happy white francophones. For those of us who were not pure enough, it was a clear message. ‘Quebec is us’ was an exclusive, not an inclusive, slogan. It was a message of division, that Quebec belongs to a certain kind of Quebeckers, the kind seen on those posters. It was a message I took personally as support for the Bloc skyrocketed across my riding. People who had promised me their support bailed toward this divided vision as my Asian wife, whose five spoken languages do not include French, clearly got the message. I went on to lose by nearly 9,000 votes.

When the overtly white supremacist protesters, wearing ICE-style masks, paraded in a town with the decidedly non-white name of ‘Shawinigan’ with a banner reading “I remember a white Quebec,” it was not by accident, and it did not appear in a vacuum. If the province’s nationalists are genuinely as upset about it as they say, then this is their time for some serious introspection.

Otherwise, they are just upset that the quiet part got said out loud.

His kids are now reported to be in school in Buenos Aires. Perhaps there, they will grow up learning about what their father has been a part of doing.

After the Second World War, thousands of Nazis fled Germany. While they went to numerous countries, Adolf Eichmann’s Mossad extraction to Israel, trial, and execution for his key involvement in the Holocaust resulted in Argentina becoming synonymous with these escaping war criminals.

Thiel’s choice of Argentina, then, is deeply symbolic. Nazis escaping after the war were refugees from their own destruction. They had systematically destroyed their own country, their neighbours, and put in place industrial concentration and death camps to legitimise their own sense of moral and ethnic supremacy.

Argentina, today, is run by Javier Milei, a Trump ally. It was only a few months ago, while the American dictatorship was cutting domestic social programs and claiming bankruptcy that they offered Milei a $20 billion bailout to stabilise his crashing economy, conditional on him winning his own re-election. It is no surprise, then, that the country’s government is willing to offer itself as a safe haven for the current generation of escaping Nazis.

Peter Thiel, it should be remembered, wrote in 2009:

Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

It is not a position he has left as open to philosophical debate. He has spent his time since systematically undermining the very fabric of democracy, presumably in the interests of his own freedom.

The company he chairs, Palantir, is at the centre of the American government’s Big Data drive which, in case you were wondering, is not aimed at analysing trends to fix social programs for the betterment of society.

The simultaneous existence of a privately-run database of all details of all people, and an on-going effort to detain and deport “illegal immigrants” by the millions is not coincidental. The United States, even under ostensibly progressive Democrat leaders, already had among the highest incarceration rates in the world. In raw numbers, the United States imprisons more of its own citizens than any other country in the world.

Controlling a people, though, requires more than for-profit prisons and grossly inflated prison populations. It requires full-on concentration camps, and the United States is still building those, in case the lack of recent headlines on the topic caused anyone to forget. Industrial imprisonment requires industrial data, and so it is no surprise to find Palantir’s name turn up here.

Glass Empires By W. A. Lawrence

Alligator Alcatraz Was Only the Prototype

One camp empties this week. Three more are taking its place…

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2 months ago · 100 likes · 26 comments · W. A. Lawrence

When one of the wealthiest and most connected people in the country, whose efforts have gone into installing an openly corrupt government, says that he does not believe democracy and freedom are compatible, you’d best believe he intends to put his money where his mouth is.

Freedom, as it exists for the masses in the United States, is ephemeral. American freedom today is over which brand of car to share ownership with which bank to commute too far to which soul-crushing job while feeding your family from a narrow selection of fast food and grocery chains. The owners of the auto manufacturers, parts suppliers, and fuel companies are the same people, and they own the food supply chain. Freedom in the United States exists principally in the minds of the peasants serving their feudal lords, who are themselves the only ones to have actual freedom.

That true freedom is the ability to enjoy life, to have control over your own time, your own location, your own health, your own priorities. It is the kind of freedom that comes with having enough money that daily stresses are essentially optional, offloadable to others. All are freedoms systematically denied to a working class convinced they are the freest people in the world.

From Thiel’s point of view, freedom and democracy being incompatible is probably correct. True democracy empowers the people, and an empowered people will recognise the oligarchs for what they are, that the assertion of genuine democratic powers is the only way for the masses to enjoy genuine freedom. The extreme prison populations, and the concentration camp system being built to further expand it without the benefit of due process, is essential to keeping freedom exclusive to its current owners.

If, after following in Eichmann’s footsteps in being a key architect of the American concentration camp system, Thiel feels a need to move to Argentina to protect his own freedom, it may be that the Big Data he is working on has warned him that he has pushed too far.

The democracy he fears, that his allies have tried to suppress and destroy, may be regaining enough strength to defeat his brand of freedom. He has access to data that the rest of us do not. He may have seen through his own palantir what the future holds for him and his fellow oligarchs, and he is making sure he, like Adolf Eichmann, has an escape plan.

The sudden need for the person at the very centre of the most extensive data and analysis on every person in the United States ever gathered to hedge, to get his own family a safe haven out of the country, is the most positive sign yet that the collapse of the fascist American administration may finally be on the horizon.

In both cases, such an act does not serve the interests of the people. The primary beneficiaries are political adversaries.

In the ten years since the Brexit vote, there have been widespread allegations and evidence of foreign interference in the Brexit referendum and across British politics more generally, generally attributed to Russia.

From a timing point of view, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine started two years earlier in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea. The west reacted with angry words and financial sanctions which hurt the Russian economy while the country claimed that its invasion was legal, justifying it with a sham referendum after the fact that was rejected by the United Nations general assembly.

In the aftermath of that invasion and its international reaction, western powers started seeing widespread social media-driven disinformation campaigns guiding public opinion away from hardliners against Russian expansionism as we started becoming aware of Russian bot-farms.

By 2016, a stale western establishment vulnerable to plausible disinformation about why the middle class is disappearing started getting defeated by an electorate who had reached the wrong conclusions.

That summer saw the Brexit referendum pass when the Conservative Prime Minister ran the referendum to end the question. That fall, Trump beat Hillary Clinton to take the White House with all the grace of the Crimean invasion. Both of those events had significant Russian assistance, and both relieved pressure on Russia.

Nigel Farage, a leading figure in the Brexit movement, was quoted in 2014 as saying that Vladimir Putin was the world leader he admired the most. Farage, who today is running for Prime Minister of England and has a good chance of winning, is embroiled in controversy for accepting a cash gift of five million pounds from a crypto magnate who, he claims, wants nothing in return. Crypto is a favourite of those looking to mask the origins of money, convenient for those whose political interests diverge from those of their country.

Donald Trump, another heavy investor in crypto, for his part spent his first term trying to get the G7 to readmit Russia, which had been expelled as a result of the Crimean invasion, something he has continued to do in his second term. With Trump’s Russian connections and influence well-established, it is time to connect the dots back to today.

David Graham

New Enemies — Foreign and Domestic

In recent days, the Musk-Trump administration and their allies have made a further series of terrifying moves and decisions. So fast and furious is their shutdown of the current world order and their national democratic institutions that it’s hard to keep up, and the collusion of the oligarchic media owners is making it increasingly hard to share the in…

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a year ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · David Graham

It needs to be plainly stated that Russia and the United States are now allies, and America’s historical alliances are of no further value, existing only to the extent that geography forces them. As with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and subsequent invasion of the rest of Ukraine, the United States under its new autocracy has openly called for the inclusion of Canada into their union, and is actively politically undermining Alberta to prepare it for a sham referendum.

Comprehensive voter information about every Alberta voter was recently leaked to the province’s separatists. The group that got the data has been linked to American Ambassador Pete Hoekstra.

Premier Danielle Smith is taking the half-pregnant David Cameron Brexit approach to the prospect of a referendum on the province’s independence, hoping to hold it to wash her hands of the issue while also working with those who want it to succeed.

None of this is a coincidence and it is not going to end well for Alberta, regardless of the outcome should the October 19th, 2026 referendum go forward, in spite of court rulings against it.

Russia wants a fractured west. The United States wants Canada’s resources and land. Their interests intersect somewhere between Fort McMurray and Calgary, and they have found the people they need to pursue them.

The school of thought that says politicians should make minimum wage because that would force them to raise the minimum wage is a logical fallacy. Politicians should raise the minimum wage to a genuinely liveable wage because politicians should be people who have the best interests of the public, not of themselves, at heart.

Paying politicians minimum wage will not bring such people into elected office in any meaningful way, and would likely further reduce the already dangerously low percentage of politicians who run for the right reasons. Rather, it would ensure that only those who do not need an income will credibly offer themselves in election. As the billionaires filling the White House today should remind us, those people are not driven by the principled pursuit of our collective best interests.

The state of New Hampshire famously pays each of its 400 state representatives $100 per year. Louisiana pays its state reps $16,800, which is still more than their country’s minimum wage. Texas pays its state reps $7,200 a year — about half of minimum wage. New Mexico does not pay its state reps at all. Only California, Pennsylvania, New York, and DC pay six figures. The National Conference of State Legislatures lists both salary and demographic information for every state.

In Canada, there is no central website that lists each province’s legislative remuneration, but the range is quite a bit narrower, with all ten provinces treating it as a full time job with salaries ranging between about $85,000 in PEI and about $157,000 in Ontario.

Federally, MPs currently earn $217,000 CAD per year while American congressmen make $147,000 USD — about $202,000 CAD. MPs’ pay is indexed around an industrial average to detach MPs from their own pay raises, while the Americans have had their salaries frozen for the past 17 years.

But none of that really matters, because in nearly every case, elected politicians are not banned from having outside income or financial interests. Some even argue in favour of such secondary income so they can feed their families, without any sense of irony of the impact of their policies on the average citizen’s ability to feed their own families.

In the United States, the current controversy is around the ability — and extent to which — American legislators trade on the stock market, profiting off of information they learn from their positions in office. There are few members of either the American Senate or the American House whose net worth increases while in office are proportionate to their pay. Nor are they consistent with growth in the general public’s investment portfolios, for those voters wealthy enough to have one. A 2014 study showed that among the top 20 congressmen, the average increase in net worth was a staggering 422% per year — and Democrats are nearly as lucky as Republicans in this regard, in case you were about to jump to any conclusions.

In Canada, MPs are bound to the Conflict of Interest Code for Members of the House of Commons, which itself is a part of the Standing Orders, the rules by which the House governs itself. The Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner has the power of investigation, but the enforcement action is limited to a report back to the House of their findings, leaving it to the legislators themselves to deal with a colleague found to have fallen out of bounds.

Should MPs as a whole one day decide, as their American counterparts already have, that if everyone profits through conflict of interest then nobody can be held accountable, there is no current mechanism to stop it as even public shame is proving to be of no effect south of the border.

Regardless of the stated intent by Republican Speaker Mike Johnson to crack down on conflict of interest, for which he is doing a miserable job, and of the existence of ethics committees and commissioners and policies in some form in nearly all elected bodies, the very ability of lawmakers to have outside income is inherently corruptible.

A significant number of Members of Parliament are landlords. The vast majority own assorted stocks. Only a very small group of them must place their assets in blind trusts, but one can reasonably assume even they are aware of what went into those trusts when they entered office. Whether outcomes consciously benefit them or not, it will more than likely impact their perspectives when debating policies or casting votes.

An elected body where members of all parties own revenue property will not naturally solve the housing crisis. An elected body where members of all parties invest in the casino that we call the stock market will not seek to break monopolies or end the planned obsolescence that generates unnecessary sales and waste throughout the economy at the expense of share value. They will not spend their time seeking ways to make sure that employees are the primary protected creditors of a failing business rather than the investors, lenders, and shareholders.

David Graham

Private Money In Politics Is The Root Of Our Rot

Nearly all the problems we are facing today share a common root cause: the role of money — and those who have too much of it — in politics…

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6 months ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

Elected representatives need to be paid sufficiently well that their focus is on the task at hand, not on their own well-being. They must not spend their time wondering how they will make a living should they lose office, which will also tend to corrupt their decision-making. Why would they publicly make policy that might negatively impact a potential future employer?

To truly do their jobs, to build elected bodies that will make sure that minimum wages rise, that cost of living increases are brought under control, that greedy corporatists are held to account, they also must be free of outside financial consideration, of outside interests. They must see potential for making a post-electoral living that is not based on the sale of their rolodexes and networks to interests whose focus is on influencing the governments they left.

A legislator who is paid $7,200 per year but who makes $4 million in stock trades is probably overpaid. The $7,200 is inconsequential to them and becomes an insult to citizens rather than remuneration for a job well done. One who makes $85,000 and who eschews all other financial opportunity probably is not paid enough for the hours and level of responsibility. The raw dollar salary is not the full story.

The right pay for politicians can be measured on the question: what is the amount needed that will allow them to have their primary professional focus be on doing their job to the best of their abilities, without outside interest or consideration? It is not so much a specific number as it is a philosophy.

This is not unique to the role of an elected representative. Every employer should be ending the current race to the bottom and asking the same question about how they pay their employees. Politicians are hardly the only ones looking for side hustles to pay their mounting bills. In the case of public office holders, we are the employers — and must lead by example.

Since the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) Callais decision just three weeks ago, the former Confederate states have been in overdrive, using the decision as cover to eliminate any remaining representation for the country’s black population. It is an obvious and total power grab and a constant reminder that the Americans never fully resolved the question that caused their civil war more than 160 years ago.

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

The Redistricting Race To The Bottom

Southern states continue to push redistricting as far and as fast as they can, seemingly for no purpose other than the incessant desire to please an audience of one. First, the table setting: Here’s where things stand tonight…

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2 months ago · 1735 likes · 161 comments · Joyce Vance

Trump is what the president of the United States would look like if the Confederate States had comprehensively won that war. He is, in essence, the first Confederate president of the entire union. Everything he does is about enriching himself and his fellow slave-owners, suppressing minorities and those he considers beneath him, and consolidating his own power and wealth.

With the American population turning on him, but his fellow pedophiles, billionaires, and white supremacists wanting to hold on to power, the situation is vastly more dangerous than we allow ourselves to believe.

The MAGA Republicans are openly stealing Congress. Their Supreme Court is enabling them in every way they can, while some of the nation’s top jurists are facing serious allegations of corruption in their own right. And yet, in spite of the plain evidence of all three branches of their government being rotten to the core, there is enough of a subset of the population that still supports them to enable it all.

Just enough.

The Trump administration wants to keep that fervently loyal crowd on board with the promise to these poor uneducated racist folk propping up this fetid government that they, too, can become rich if they are sufficiently loyal to the mad king.

And thus comes his latest project, the details of which started leaking on Friday.

The Treasury department has a slush fund called the Judgment Fund, intended to settle “actual or imminent litigation against the government.”

As you may have heard, Trump has been pursuing a lawsuit against the United States Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion, accusing the government of unauthorised release of his tax information during his first mandate. Of course, he controls the department that has to respond to that suit, and he has no qualms about conflicts of interest. The settlement he is offering is to drop the lawsuit, and use this Judgement Fund instead to pay $1.7 billion out to anyone deemed to have been oppressed by the Biden administration — such as participants the January 6th coup.

They are even calling it a “weaponisation fund.”

Glass Empires By W. A. Lawrence

Paid to Riot

Once political violence becomes financially profitable, democracy enters liquidation…

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2 months ago · 286 likes · 16 comments · W. A. Lawrence

January 6th had approximately 1,500 identified participants. $1.7 billion is over $1.1 million per person of government money being prepared to pay directly to those who attempted to seize the federal government.

There is an election this fall that the MAGA Republicans cannot win fairly, and might not even win unfairly. Holding on to power may require violence, if graft and cheating are not sufficient. And the message from the Confederate administration is clear: if you participate on our side, we will protect you and we will reward you. We will even make you rich. So get ready, we’re going to need you.

None of this is by accident. The election this fall will not be normal. Do not expect the United States to restore itself to anything resembling a functional democracy through action limited to electronic ballot boxes that do not even keep proper records. They are preparing to hold on to power by force, and are preparing the brownshirt army to help, in plain sight for all to see.

The American war in Iran may appear to be a bumbling fiasco run by an incompetent administration full of yes-men after the purging of anyone with anything resembling experience or conscience from any position where this could have been prevented. Militarily, the United States has already lost this war, mercifully far more quickly than their defeat in Vietnam, and yet there is no particularly obvious reason to have waged it in the first place.

Unless, of course, the relatively low casualty defeat was the point.

The price of gas has gone through the roof. This will inevitably raise the price of everything else as increasing transportation costs trickle through supply chains. The cost of gas has not gone up with the price of gas, meaning major oil companies are increasing their already obscene profits from their largely domestic supplies. From this perspective, trickle-down economics is a real thing.

Airlines are adding fuel surcharges to deal with rising fuel prices, but are explicitly unwilling to commit to revoking those surcharges should prices come back down. Delta CEO Ed Bastian was quoted as saying as much during an earnings call in April:

Fuel recapture is going to be important no matter what we do, and the degree to which we can retain any of the pricing strength that we talked about from industry rationalization, that will certainly help us boost our margins this year and clearly into next year as well.

In other words, dropping fuel prices with consumers already used to paying the higher rates from the surge will improve their bottom line. It is hard to imagine that grocery chains will be any more charitable.

In order to assuage concerns about high fuel prices, the Canadian government temporarily cut the $.10/litre excise tax on gas. The price drop was immediate at the pumps, and within days was completely erased with further price increases, with the collective taking an ever-smaller cut. The price of gas here in Moncton is now around $1.93 per litre, up about $.60 since the Iran war began — with less of it going to the government, and therefore our future, than before.

The Trump administration, and their Canadian patsies in the Conservative party, have been doing everything they can to kill all forms of renewable energy projects and programs. With this oil price play taking place through the war in Iran, it should be obvious why. Creating a captive market for oil forces the consumers to spend all their money on fossil fuels because the alternatives have been systematically and deliberately destroyed. We are quite literally being forced to sell our future in the interests of short-term profits.

This is not the only way that American policy is fleecing consumers to the benefit of the oligarchs.

Who can forget Donald Trump’s tariffs imposed on most of the world by declaring myriad “emergencies” like Canada being responsible for entirely too much fentanyl smuggling, when the real numbers show that Canada’s contribution to this problem is statistically insignificant, with less than 1% of fentanyl entering the United States from its border. It was simply an excuse — an obvious one — to impose tariffs willy-nilly.

An American court earlier this year declared that this was not legal and ordered a reimbursement of some of those tariffs. This week, some $35.5 billion USD in collected tariff revenue became eligible for reimbursement — to the businesses that passed them on to the consumers rather than to the consumers who paid them.

Yet again, the tariffs had nothing to do with drug or trade policy, and everything to do with robbing the American public to put in the hands of our oligarchy.

We see it over and over again. Mega-corporations like Starbucks, Amazon, and Wal-Mart, to name but a few, have gone to great lengths to fight any prospect of unions organising in their businesses, shutting down facilities rather than allowing anything that might allow their employees to be paid reasonable wages. Their extremely wealthy owners see this as necessary to preserve their wealth, status, and influence.

And that is the point. Every major policy decision coming out of the United States, most of which have consequential impacts on Canada and numerous other countries, are focused a single overarching objective: enriching the rich at the expense of the masses. Social programs are cut for the people while social programs are expanded for the corporations and the oligarchs. Students are drowned in unforgivable debt to make them beholden to this structure before they ever enter the workforce.

There is no amount of money, no amount of power, no amount of influence that these billionaires will ever find sufficient. The very existence of billionaires should offend the sensibility of every other person. There is no rational reason to have that level of wealth, and no ethical way to gain it. Yet few who ever achieve the status of billionaire ever consider how to give back to a society that allowed them to get to that point.

And for those who do, being that wealthy is so self-perpetuating that it is genuinely hard to give it all away. The upward economic syphons are so powerful that being a billionaire is a virtually unstoppable force, once the threshold is crossed.

Consider the case of MacKenzie Scott, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife. In their 2019 divorce, she walked away with an estimated net worth of $38.9 billion. By the end of last year, to her credit, she had made an estimated $26.3 billion in donations to various causes and charities — and, in spite of giving away what would appear to be over two-thirds of her wealth, her net worth is now estimated at $42.7 billion.

If the oligarchs have managed to fix the system this thoroughly to ensure that their limitless wealth continues to grow at rates the rest of us cannot even begin to comprehend, the long-term viability of western democracy and civilisation itself is in obvious and existential danger. There is no such thing as sustainable growth, much less infinite growth, as our resources are ultimately finite. One can ultimately either sustain or grow. At some point, the obscenely rich will reach their physical limits; there will be no working class, no masses to provide still more wealth to them, no assets left that they have not already taken.

This is, in large part, the purpose of the current AI revolution. If a completely broke working class can no longer generate wealth for the oligarchs, perhaps a synthetic work force can replace them. As many have said, the problem AI is being used to solve is not so much knowledge, capacity, or ability — it is wages. It is a huge waste of the phenomenal potential of that technology, which could and should instead be used for the betterment of all.

The two most dangerous types of people are those with everything to lose and those with nothing to lose. At some point, when everyone left falls into one of those two categories, these two discrete groups will come to a head and there is no predicting the outcome of that conflict.

We can be reasonably sure, though, that the price of gas will no longer be of significant consequence when it is over.

Among her past roles were Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the UN Secretary General’s special representative for international migration. This is hardly a comprehensive list.

As our head of state, she is everything that Donald Trump is not. She stands against everything he is. And as neighbouring heads of state, the contrast is a signal to the rest of the world of what we believe and where we stand as a country.

Rare is it for me to disagree with Matt Gurney, who has taken the public but very narrow view that Arbour’s appointment is a missed opportunity to placate Alberta’s foreign-funded separatists by having a Governor General from the province.

The Line

Matt Gurney: Not choosing an Albertan to be GG is an alarmingly obvious missed opportunity

By: Matt Gurney…

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3 months ago · 110 likes · 188 comments · Matt Gurney

Who would have been the right choice from Alberta, of equal value and impact to one of the most respected names in international justice? Former Edmonton Liberal MP Anne McLellan? Former NDP premier Rachel Notley? Former Minister and national advisor on LGTBQ2+ issues Randy Boissonnault? All would be qualified public figures from the province, but none would placate the joint Russian-American operation to break up Canada through amplifying Albertan feelings of ‘alienation’.

Perhaps the appointment of Danielle Smith would have been better — it would solve two problems at once, removing her from her destructive leadership of the province while offering an olive branch to the movement she leads with vague and unconvincing efforts at plausible deniability. We might soon find out, through her, though, that disallowance is still a technical power belonging to the Governor General, and she could just as easily refuse to assent to federal legislation.

Perhaps, then, the best approach to picking our head of state who holds technically real, if only theoretical, power, is to choose someone who has genuinely served the country, the world, and the rule of law. Where she is from within Canada is irrelevant. For this role, what matters is that she is from Canada and represents the best of what Canada has to offer.

Arbour is known internationally for indicting sitting heads of state for war crimes, and for the prosecution of sexual violence as a crime against humanity. She rose to international prominence for the indictment of sitting Serbian president Slobodan Milošević on those charges.

Arbour is known for her tenure as a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, where, as CBC noted this week, she took a decidedly progressive position on issues such as marijuana, noting in a 2003 dissenting opinion:

A law that has the potential to imprison a person whose conduct causes little or no reasoned risk of harm to others offends the principles of fundamental justice.

After her tenure on the Supreme Court, one of few justices to retire from the role voluntarily before their mandatory retirement, she went off to the United Nations as the High Commissioner for Human Rights and then as the Secretary General’s special representative on mass migration.

Every aspect of her career is a poke in the eye of Donald Trump, and an obvious contrast to who Pierre Poilievre might have appointed in his idolatry of Trump.

First, opposite the world’s leading misogynist, Canada has appointed a profoundly accomplished woman to the role of head of state — our third in a row.

But her accomplishments systematically counter everything the American dictator is attempting to do.

She defends democracy. She defends human rights. She defends minority rights. She upholds the law. She prosecutes war crimes. She prosecutes sexual crimes as crimes against humanity. She defends the rights of migrants. She will now hold and demonstrate those values in the name of an actual, rather than aspiring, King.

Each and every one of these points is in direct abject contrast to Donald Trump, and is a statement to the world of where we stand relative to our neighbour.

Her appointment as the King’s representative in Canada is a statement of how Canadians see ourselves, how we want to present ourselves on the world stage, and who we want to be. It matters a whole lot more than which province she is from.