The United States embassy in Ottawa published “Fact Sheet: Monitoring Canadian Activities in U.S. Politics” this Wednesday, two days after Albertans forcefully rejected the United States’ unwanted moves on the province.

This ‘fact’ sheet attempts to demonstrate hypocrisy on the part of the Canadian government by quoting the Prime Minister saying we will not interfere in American elections, followed by several quotes and anecdotes from Canadian politicians meeting with Democrats and sharing reality with Americans.

Among the highlights is this gem:

FACT: On October 13, 2026, just three weeks before the U.S. midterms, Canadian Consul General Bernadette Jordan appeared with members of Congress from only one party: Democratic Representatives Becca Balint of Vermont and Jim McGovern of Massachusetts at a Vermont roundtable on U.S.–Canada trade tensions and the impact of tariffs. (Source: Rep. McGovern X post, October 13, 2026)

Meeting elected officials elsewhere is very much the job of our own elected officials. These are not partisan candidates, they are elected representatives. Moreover, what they fail to note is that the states of Vermont and Massachusetts only have Democrats in Congress, with the Republicans having failed to elect a single congressman or senator in the current legislature. The only way that a meeting involving those two states could have included an elected federal representative that was not a Democrat would have been to invite independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

If they added New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, and Rhode Island — the rest of the region known as New England — to that roundtable, they still would not have found a single Republican congressman to invite as there simply aren’t any.

The rest of the points in the fact sheet do not fare a lot better, with several quotes about industry minister Mélanie Joly doing… well, her job. The Republican administration in the United States has openly put pressure on Canada to bend to their will without any particular objective beyond the complete annexation of our country. The US president cites tariffs as good for his country, the path to national prosperity. Joly has openly acknowledged that our counter-tariff strategy targets areas in the United States that voted for tariffs by electing Republicans on that very promise.

David Graham

Foreign Interference in Canada

Last week, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians issued its Special Report on Foreign Interference in Canada’s Democratic Processes and Institutions. As has been widely reported, several Members of Parliament are alleged in the report to have been “wittingly” aiding foreign powers in interfering in our democratic process, …

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2 years ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · David Graham

If the American officials are accusing Canada of election interference by acquiescing to their principled position on the positive impact of tariffs, they may be admitting to their own dishonesty on the file with their voters. If tariffs are so good, then Canada also imposing them should clearly demonstrate to those Republican voters that they made the right choice.

More to the point, the American government has been actively interfering in Canadian politics and elections since Trump’s return to office. Since day one he has attacked our Prime Ministers by describing them successively as the governor of the 51st state. His team has reached out to make a separate agreement with Quebec aimed at dividing Canada and influencing the province’s elections and provided resources to the Alberta separatist movement through a referendum campaign.

If they are concerned about individual Canadians interfering in American elections, they might consider curtailing private citizens like Elon Musk who weighed in during last month’s Quebec election calling for the province to separate. That does not even touch the surface of the prolonged American social networks’ algorithmic efforts to prop up Canada’s far right, most visibly demonstrated through the disinformation-led Ottawa convoy.

David Graham

Enough! Expel Hoekstra From Canada Already

At what point do we say ‘enough is enough’ and declare American ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra persona non grata…

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4 months ago · 86 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

Hoekstra himself invited Tamara Lich to the US embassy to celebrate July 4th as a personal guest of the American ambassador. She, as you may recall, is under house arrest for her role in that Ottawa convoy, which among other things called for the overthrow of Canada’s government — and was supported by MAGA-sympathetic Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. For the Americans to warn Canada about interference in their elections is, yet again, a confession about their own actions.

Their actions are not limited to Canada, of course. The American president has been explicitly calling for the removal of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy while enabling Russian military action against their country. They recent curtailed the Starlink StarShield service to Ukraine’s military to neuter Ukrainian defences against a major air raid while also reducing intelligence access for Ukraine, while cancelling sanctions against the aggressor country and offering Putin access to the American market for his oil, the primary means of funding that war. StarShield service was only restored yesterday, after more than a week of suppressing Ukrainian military capability.

The Concis

Starlink Is Back. Breaking the Dependency Is Key to Victory.

An hour ago, Defense Minister of Ukraine announced that American internet service speed has been restored. A service disruption that started on October 14th, has come to an end ten days later…

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a day ago · 114 likes · 17 comments · Shankar Narayan

The Americans made a commitment in 1994 to defend Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty in the Budapest memorandum. In it, the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, and Ukraine agreed that Ukraine would give up the nuclear weapons it inherited from the collapsing Soviet Union in exchange for protection from military or economic coercion from the signatories. This is quite obviously not being followed by either Russia or the United States.

Canadians are rightly concerned about the results of the mid-terms. The current government of the United States has shown that its intentions toward Canada are similar to Russia’s intentions toward Ukraine, if not quite as far along the road, and that they are actively interfering with our domestic affairs

Whether stating that Republicans in this election are an existential military and economic threat to Canada counts as interference in their elections, I’ll let you decide.

Brandon Doucet

Why Democrats fear a Canadian Awakening.

The Democrats in the USA are very fixated on trying to salvage the Canada-US “relationship”. Why? What’s the reasons behind such obsession? Why should Canadians care about this “relationship” with the USA? And it’s not just Democratic leaders, but also the Democratic voters as well. They seem to fear that Cana…

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2 days ago · 52 likes · 11 comments · The Dark Canadian

Elections Alberta reports some 16 million votes cast out of just under 3 million eligible voters, counting each response to one of the questions on the ballot as a separate vote and muddying the question of turnout.

The provincial election body was not prepared for the degree of interest in the referendum from Indigenous populations and, in some communities, ran out of ballots before voting was complete. That is something that should never occur in any election, much less overwhelmingly impacting a single demographic.

In reading the current numbers, the total ‘remain’ votes exceed the total ballots cast in several other questions. Each question had a lower response rate than the previous one. Of the nine leading questions posed, only one was defeated — and not by much. The ninth question had one-third fewer responses than the first. Not because the questions were any less important, but presumably because voters just stopped voting in increasingly large numbers the further down the ballot they got. It is not by accident, then, that separation was the tenth question on the ballot. The premier of Alberta clearly wanted the down-ballot trend to hold through to the end.

More of a concern in reading and interpreting the deeper results, more people voted ‘yes’ on every other question than voted ‘referendum’ on the most critical one. In other words, significant numbers of Albertans voted to remain in Canada — but with an asterisk. More than twice as many votes were cast to limit immigration than to hold a referendum for separation, meaning a significant portion of remain voters also voted for many of the far right policies on offer.

Voters only voted down a single measure besides the referendum on independence. That one, question #8, was the one that talked about amending the Canadian constitution to escape federal standards on universal health care, although even that was neutralised by support for several other questions calling on decentralisation of federal powers.

David Graham

Alberta Referendum Designed To Undermine Canada

On October 19th, 2026, Albertans go to the polls to answer ten questions posed by the Maple MAGA premier, which, all together, are focused on undermining Canada. Passing individual policy decisions off to the electorate in this manner is to shirk her responsibility to govern, so we must consider them as a package with a specific objective. The questions…

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a month ago · 16 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

These points, directly quoted from the referendum questions, were all supported. I broke down each to its core dogwhistle last month.

• Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration and giving Albertans first priority on new employment opportunities

• Alberta introducing a law mandating that only Canadian citizens, permanent residents and individuals with an Alberta-approved immigration status will be eligible for provincially-funded programs, such as health care, education and other social services

• Alberta introducing a law requiring all individuals with a non-permanent legal immigration status to reside in Alberta for at least 12 months before qualifying for any provincially-funded social support programs

• Alberta charging a reasonable fee or premium to individuals with a non-permanent immigration status living in Alberta for their and their family’s use of the health care and education systems

• Alberta introducing a law requiring individuals to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate or citizenship card, to vote in an Alberta provincial election

• Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to have provincial governments, and not the federal government, select the justices appointed to provincial King’s Bench and Appeal courts

• Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to abolish the unelected federal Senate

• Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to better protect provincial rights from federal interference by giving a province’s laws dealing with provincial or shared areas of constitutional jurisdiction priority over federal laws when the province’s laws and federal laws conflict

None of these questions were asked idly or by accident.

Danielle Smith and her United Conservative Party government had an agenda and a purpose to each. They expected to lose the question on whether or not to hold a referendum on separation. If they were confident, they would have made separation a direct question this time around, not simply a request for a mandate to ask later.

They set up the rest of the referendum to give them a mandate to undermine Canadian federalism and sovereignty anyway, pretending to build on the unity mandate while still working to offer a weakened Canada up to their American masters. Each question picks away at a different aspect of Canadian cohesion, intended to eventually show that Canada is not conforming to Albertans’ expressed desires, with a long game of building resentment to increase separatist support in the future.

Concis Canada

Great Day for Canada

Is there another way to explain this behaviour? Canadian media carrying the torch for the losers, desperately trying to dress up a brutal defeat for the dividers. At what point do we call them what they are…

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3 days ago · 69 likes · 6 comments · Shankar Narayan

One cannot forget that it was this same government that brought in the Alberta Sovereignty Act, whose official government website still today states its purpose as “The act allows Alberta to fight harmful federal laws and defend the constitutional federal-provincial division of powers.”

It is wonderful that Albertans, collectively and overwhelmingly, understood the risks of separating from Canada in the face of a significant American threat on the headline question, for now. That does not, however, end the misinformation and dogwhistles underlying the attempt. Nor does it end either the Alberta government’s efforts to fatally wound Canada in undermining our core values and institutions or the UCP’s efforts toward eventual separation. Whether they fully appreciate the risks posed by the UCP government itself, we will find out next year.

Albertans may have voted for Canada on Monday, but they did so with an asterisk. If we truly want to end this, we had best read and understand the fine print — without falling for its underlying premise.

The Walrus

The Separatists Lost. So Why Does Canada Feel like the Loser?

An attendee stands in the trees during an Alberta independence rally in Edmonton. (Amanda May Erickson / Canadian Press…

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3 days ago · 17 likes · The Walrus

There is little empirical data supporting the claim that there was a dramatic drop in far-right robotic social media posts. Web crawlers were significantly impacted, and in the tech world, those, too, are considered bots. But those weren’t the droids we were looking for.

The story was breaking when I was preparing my last essay, and I started writing on the premise that this story was true. Social media had it everywhere with people posting “bot test” with topics like vaccines, Trump’s history of sexual assault allegations, and other topics that activates troll bots. I went to the source, looking at X (twitter to everyone except the twit that bought it) posts, Truth Social, and so forth looking for any kind of distinct change in post engagements. I was surprised to find no obvious change in patterns, and refocused my writing accordingly.

David Graham

Putting Democracy Before the Firing Squad

The Trump administration’s race for totalitarian control of the country is accelerating, from deals supporting Russia and police intimidation of his adversaries to the looming spectacle of a public execution, and it has everything to do with elections the MAGAs are…

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10 days ago · 13 likes · 3 comments · David Graham

Anna Merlan at Mother Jones wrote an excellent essay called “Drone strikes didn’t take out a Russian bot farm, but we were primed to believe it" a day after Emerald Book posted an equally important piece on the topic “Why the Russian Data Center Strike Had Zero Effect on Social Media Bots.”

Cloudflare, whose own data was often cited as proof that Ukraine had shut down the troll bots, wrote their own explanation Wednesday as well: Yandex outage: Data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots went on the move. Since, there have been numerous other stories on the topic.

Ukraine’s attacks did, without a doubt, seriously impact internet activity both within and coming from Russia, including automated vulnerability scanning and web crawling, but it had no measurable impact on the social media disinformation campaign that so many people assumed and believed. Those mostly live on hacked devices, spread across the internet and controlled through relays to mask their origins.

The Betoota Advocate posted a story entitled: “Trump Accuses Ukraine Of Midterm Election Interference After Russian Bot Farm Strikes” and there was a widely shared X post alleged to be from a Republican congressman that similarly claimed that the Ukraine attack on Yandex amounted to interference in the American mid-term elections. It does not take much analysis to conclude that a site called the “Betoota Advocate” is satire. The feed of the supposed congressman was also a satirical account, and has since been entirely removed from X.

As a result of these satire posts, there are widespread claims on social media claiming that the Republicans are accusing Ukraine of election interference by attacking the Russian bot farms hosted at Yandex. Neither aspect of the claim is true. The bots hit were not social media bots, and the Republicans have made no such claims.

There are, however, real, significant, and related issues that really are taking place. After the Yandex attacks, Starshield, the military version of SpaceX’s Starlink, was slowed for the Ukrainian military and temporarily disabled for devices exceeding 100 mph. This in turn disabled part of Ukraine’s air defences just long enough to allow a Russian attack to get through to Kyiv, disabling power plants and killing at least nine people. Several news outlets around the world are saying this came as a direct order from Donald Trump, though he denies it. It has also been credited as Elon Musk’s idea, although he, too, denies it.

As Starshield’s Ukraine access is under the control of the US military and is operated by SpaceX, one of the two of them had to have taken the decision to impede Ukraine’s access to the system ahead of a Russian attack. As The Telegraph reports, Musk asked Trump to do it.

Wayne Horton

TACO Trump Strikes Again

The order to throttle Starshield, the military upgrade to Starlink, has been reliably traced back to the White House The prevailing opinion is that this was a punishment that Elon “Do I Have All Of The Money Yet?” Musk originally suggested but it took the brains and ethical code of Donald …

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7 days ago · 54 likes · 9 comments · Wayne Horton

While the bot farms were not hosted at Yandex’s data centres, it is entirely possible that some sensitive crypto-related assets, bank records, or other valuable data were destroyed. Whether it was related to Trump’s direct conversation with Putin last week over a diesel deal, revenge for attacking Yandex, or just the predictable actions of a probable Russian agent running the White House, we will probably never know for sure.

With so many real issues taking place, it is important to focus on those that can be fact checked, for which clear evidence exists. The disinformation world cannot become double-sided, into a game of who can convince more people of their particular lies. Tomorrow’s referendum in Alberta, for example, is an existential fight between disinformation and reality, and sticking to the facts has been critical to the credibility of the federalist cause.

Dean Blundell

BREAKING: While You Were Sleeping, Trump Gutted His Own Russia Sanctions Law At Putin’s Direction

If you were ever unsure if Trump is a Russian asset, you can rest easy now. The past two weeks, on top of the past 21 months, should leave no doubt that a Russian Manchurian Peophile/Rapist Trump is burning America to the ground for Putin because he has to…

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7 days ago · 717 likes · 44 comments · Dean Blundell

It is easy to believe that Russia’s election interference bot network, which we do know exists, can be destroyed by a bomb hitting a handful of data centres in the country. It is easy to believe that losing that right wing troll bot farm would impact the upcoming mid-term elections in the United States, and that Republicans would blame Ukraine for interference on the basis of the attack. Spreading the memes stating ‘facts’ for which there is no evidence is to do a disservice to democracy.

It is important to stick to reality, and to remember that everyone, not only people on the far right, may be prone to falling for easy-to-believe memes and false information.

The message here is simple. Trump, MAGA, and Russia’s continuing interference to undermine democratic institutions will not be defeated by spreading false information. We must remain vigilant. We cannot defeat them by becoming them.

Over the past few days, you may have heard about a sudden and eerie silence across social media from the far right, the apparent result of the destruction of several Russian datacentres by the Armed Forces of Ukraine — and all the troll bots that they hosted. This is likely a placebo effect caused by discussion of the attacks and a misinterpretation of the available data, as Emerald Pages explains in Why the Russian Data Center Strike Had Zero Effect on Social Media Bots, which is why I could find no empirical data to support the widespread claims. Regardless, we know that Russia has been interfering in western democracy for at least a decade.

The Existentialist Republic

Ukraine is Successfully Bombing the Heart of Russia’s Online Disinformation Machine.

Ukrainian drones hit Yandex’s largest data center, in Sasovo in Russia’s Ryazan region, on October 8, 26 days before the November 3 midterm. The Sasovo site houses two of the three supercomputers that train Yandex’s AI models. Strikes on October 9 and October 11 disabled modules at Yandex’s Kaluga center and shut down its Vla…

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11 days ago · 4785 likes · 239 comments · Christopher Armitage

Undermining the MAGA movement by attacking the internet’s AI-powered echo-chamber of conspiracy theories and fake news a few weeks before the American mid-terms would be the most appropriate possible response from Ukraine to Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would violate its own sanctions to buy diesel from Russia. That such a sentence is even possible to write is remarkable.

Trump’s decision to purchase less than two weeks worth of diesel fuel from Russia, directly funding their war against Ukraine, to solve a problem caused by his own war against Iran has to be seen for what it is. The alliance between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is no longer being couched or hidden by either dictator.

The agreement itself is doubtful in spite of the announcement. Russia is rationing fuel to its own citizens after Ukraine’s drone counter-campaign has severely curtailed Russia’s oil production. Selling the diesel, while possible, would be at the expense of his own people. With the meat grinder of the Ukraine campaign costing an estimated 50,000 Russian casualties per month, though, it is unlikely Putin has any particular interest in the well-being of his citizens.

Dean Blundell

Trump’s Billion Dollar Russian Payday Only Cashes If Ukraine Surrenders. Now You Know Why He’s Threatening Kyiv.

Trump Is Now Running Putin’s War Effort. The Receipts Are Here…

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10 days ago · 585 likes · 47 comments · Dean Blundell

Russia under Putin has spent much of his 27 years in office undermining western democracy while the former KGB officer turned president uses his time and power to enrich himself. Putin’s own net worth has been estimated as high as $200 billion. Like Trump’s growing fortune, that money does not come from his modest presidential salary.

Trump’s son’s ex-fiancé turned ambassador to Greece was not fired yesterday for soliciting bribes — she was fired for being caught. Her resignation was announced by Trump’s new press secretary who claims to be a lawyer, but whose response to where she passed the bar was … China. What. The American kakistocracy knows no bounds.

As with the great majority of the oligarchs we see, Putin spends his money defending his position, power, and wealth. Suspicions of Russian interference in western elections and referenda have been widespread, and funding for those activities has to come from somewhere. Britain’s latest prime minister, Andy Burnham, unequivocally confirmed last week that Russia interfered in the Brexit vote, something his predecessors have been reluctant to do. Albertans should take note.

Byline Times

‘A Clear Answer’: Russia Intervened in the Brexit Vote

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11 days ago · 113 likes · 2 comments · Peter Jukes

While Donald Trump is openly calling for the ouster of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for objecting to his deal-making with his brother-in-oligarchy Vladimir Putin, the American race for totalitarianism has been continuing at a frenetic pace.

After losing the 2020 election, Donald Trump famously led a coup against the United States government. After he returned to office four years later, he granted immunity to about 1500 of the coup’s violent participants. As I have said since, he did not do so for what they did, but for what he still needed them to do.

Special Counsel Jack Smith’s testimony before Congress two weeks ago noted that the indictments against Donald Trump for orchestrating the January 6th, 2021 coup, and subsequently taking caseloads of classified documents with him to his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, were dropped pursuant to US Department of Justice policy. Trump had been elected president, and therefore the federal government would not pursue charges against him no matter how egregious, regardless of the gathered evidence.

This is consistent with long-standing American policy on non-interference in elections. It has been the policy of the US Department of Justice since 1973 not to prosecute sitting presidents. That policy was instituted in the midst of the Watergate scandal, coming out just a week before Spiro Agnew resigned as vice president. When President Richard Nixon was impeached and resigned before being convicted by the Senate, Gerald Ford — the only president in American history never to be elected to either the vice presidency or the presidency — granted Nixon a full and complete pardon, suggesting that his departure from office would open the door to prosecutions that could not take place while in office.

Interesting history, perhaps, but there is another reason this urgently matters. Monday morning, federal law enforcement broke a related long-standing policy known as the 60-day rule. With just three weeks left to the American mid-terms, they raided the Washington, DC, residence of progressive congresswoman Ilhan Omar, an outspoken critic of the president, although, tellingly, not her primary residence. Trump had mentioned an investigation into her at a rally the previous day, plainly showing a lack of insulation between the investigating body and the presidency.

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

Why Now?

I’ve always pushed back on characterizing the execution of a lawful, court-ordered search warrant as a “raid.” I’ll do my best to stick to that tonight, although the context of the search warrant executed at Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar’s D.C. residence early Monday morning makes it difficult…

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10 days ago · 2069 likes · 185 comments · Joyce Vance

As an outspoken Democrat, she is being harassed by Trump’s immigration enforcement forces for unspecified and unlikely crimes, especially given her arrival in the country as a 12 year old. Were she a supportive Republican, she would be in line for one of the many presidential pardons Trump has offered to MAGA-supporting congressmen rather than a government-sponsored home invasion and public intimidation.

Which takes us to the most Taliban-esque steps this US government has taken to date. US Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has announced he plans to televise an execution by firing squad later this year. Execution by public spectacle is something very few regimes in the world do, and for good reason.

Robert Reich

Public Sadism

Friends…

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13 days ago · 2937 likes · 442 comments · Robert Reich

There was yet another murder in the streets by Immigration and Customs Enforcement a few days ago. This time, a Dominican man was shot and killed in front of his 5 year old in New York City by ICE, which acts effectively as Trump’s private army. Apparently, ICE’s regular public executions are not sufficiently intimidating for the American people. Hegseth needs one to be scheduled and live-streamed to make the point.

Public executions were carried out by only two countries in 2025: Iran and Afghanistan. Nazi Germany, it should be noted, was also a fan of public executions. One day the term ‘Magas’ will be used in the same manner as the movement that inspires them.

Donald Trump was indicted and the indictments withdrawn for attempting a coup on January 6th, 2021. The Russian support, the social media interference, the intimidation of his opponents, the overt presentation of violence to the common people, and the pardons granted to those who supported his coup attempt will all be coming home to roost in three weeks.

The mid-term elections will be an excuse for widespread intimidation and violence and, this time, the country best have the courage to prosecute those involved, regardless of their current titles.

Quebec’s new PQ government promised to reform the province’s electoral system during the campaign, as did Quebec Solidaire and the Conservative Party of Quebec. It is easy to explain the need — the CAQ received more votes than the QS, but the CAQ was wiped clean off the map while the QS held onto 9 seats. The government won the election with barely 28% of the vote, among the weakest mandates any government has ever held in this country.

It is easy to explain the fundamental unfairness of a system where over half a million people can vote for a party and that party can come away without any seats whatsoever. Easy, that is, if we accept the premise that voters vote for parties and not candidates. In this election, the vast majority of voters almost certainly did vote for party rather than candidate.

As always on this question, we have to ask which problem we want to solve. Is the problem that voters are not getting the party they voted for? Or is the problem that voters are voting for the party rather than the candidate?

David Graham

Here We Go Again On Electoral Reform

Inevitably, following an election as unusual and dramatic as this one, Canadian political discourse will focus on electoral reform and the perceived unfairness of the results, of the Trudeau promise to change the electoral system, and the need to throw the strategic voting baby out with the democratic bathwater by adopting Mixed Member Proportional. The…

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

Our system is designed and built around the concept of local representation. We are meant to elect representatives who go to the province or nation’s capital, make common cause with other representatives, and solve our local and collective problems.

There are three fundamentally different approaches to electoral reform. The first is the status quo — which generally wins only because nobody can agree between the other two and among all the possible solutions within each:

Proportionality — the idea that 28% of the votes for a party should get them 28% of the seats — is the most common solution offered, and dispenses with any pretence of representation. If being a well enough connected member of a party is the only requirement to obtaining some or all of those seats, there is no incentive, no reason, to connect with constituents rather than simply with demographics, or to ever call their own party to account. Party loyalty is strengthened, but independent thought and discourse is discouraged. In such a system, ‘representatives’ represent the government to the people rather than the other way around.

In a proportional system, the party with 28% of the vote leading the government is also normalised. Adoption is also complicated by the numerous different proportional systems available, with top-up systems, multi-member ridings, mixed membership, pure lists, and subvariations within those concepts. Even a broad consensus will often fail on the technical debate that follows.

Preferential voting — the idea that each voter has an order of preference among candidates — largely solves the problems we see in Canada’s elections today, but is not generally favoured by any political party because it breaks the bond of loyalty between voters and their party, while preserving and strengthening local representation. You do not get the most liked or most popular candidate in such a system, rather you get the least dis-liked. Like proportionality, the subvariations are numerous, and using different counting algorithms can produce different results from identical ballots. The status quo, then, wins by default.

Quebeckers will need to decide what matters more — partisanship or representation, and ensure that the minority parliament takes their views into consideration if they move forward with electoral reform. Governments considering reform often cop out of their own obligation to research and evaluate the question by deferring to some form of Citizens Assembly rather than assuming their own role as the deliberative body whose specific reason to exist is to perform that exact function.

David Graham

We Already Have A Permanent Citizens Assembly

Having a Citizens Assembly on electoral reform solves the wrong problem. Creating one with a mandate specifically to bring in proportional representation devalues the unfocused solution further. We already have a permanent national citizens assembly in Canada. In fact, we have two of them…

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6 months ago · 17 likes · 11 comments · David Graham

The quirk of the current electoral system giving the Conservative Party of Quebec no seats in 2022 and the Coalition Avenir Quebec no seats in the 2026 election on very similar vote counts raises another important question. As the former governing party, wiped out in seats but not in votes, is the CAQ entitled to any form of existence in the National Assembly?

When Frank McKenna won every seat in the New Brunswick legislature in 1987, the opposition was still granted some budget and power to ask questions as even the unanimous government understood that there still needed to be some form of opposition for our democracy to remain functional. While I have seen calls for similar treatment for the CAQ, it is worth noting that, unlike 1987, there are three opposition parties in the legislature, and so there is no reason to offer any special consideration to the CAQ. Democratic opposition is not compromised by their absence any more than it was by the provincial Conservatives not having any seats last time around.

The most interesting challenge ahead, though, for the Quebec class of 2026 will be in how to handle the question of a referendum on independence. Québec Solidaire is a progressive, left wing party with a lot of good ideas. Unfortunately, independence is also a top-line priority for them, making them completely unsupportable for anyone who believes, as I do, that, in large part, Quebec’s strength is Canada and Canada’s strength is Quebec. Parties whose core purpose is the breakup of the country cannot by their nature cannot be redeemed by lesser policies.

A lot of QS’s supporters are oblivious to the fact that they are a diehard separatist party, with 150 prominent Quebeckers, many of them federalists, signing an open letter endorsing the party on progressive grounds. The PQ’s separatist strategy is to hold the threat of separation over the federal government in order to extract ever more concessions rather than to ever actually achieve independence — for them, success is failure — but QS has a completely different reason and approach on the question.

The balance of power may not bring us to a referendum, but QS will call the PQ’s bluff and force them to be ever more explicit on their aspirations for independence, as much to establish QS as the separatist option as to actually achieve separation for its own ends. Where they’ll take us from there is toward trouble on national unity that we cannot afford at this moment in time. It is not by accident that the Alberta separatists are celebrating the PQ’s win — and Elon Musk is championing their cause.

The PQ is paying lip service to Quebec’s minority anglophone population, with premier-designate Paul St-Pierre Plamondon having committed during the campaign to make many of the anti-English laws in place more rational and effective rather than symbolic, and promised to be a premier for all Quebeckers. As long as this is alongside a commitment to attempt to break up Canada on ethnolinguistic lines the moment Trump leaves office, it is hard to take that as a serious offer.

I left Quebec — for the second time — after my electoral defeat in 2019, but I was born and raised in the province. The minority parliament that the province has selected to be led by a separatist government in the face of the most popular and stable federal government we have had in my lifetime, and next to the most dangerous and unstable United States we have seen in two centuries, will face numerous crossroads.

It is hard to predict where the province will head, but one thing I am sure of is that there is change coming. Whether it is for the best remains to be seen.

None of the five parties spent the Quebec election calling for the unity we need to fight a significant outside threat. The only explicitly federalist party among them made Canadian unity a tepid 64th commitment on their list of 93, lacking any courage of their convictions.

The CAQ, in government for the past eight years, lost so much support that they collapsed completely, with the nascent Conservative Party of Quebec picking up where they left off, suggesting what was already widely suspected — that the CAQ was the Conservative Party.

The progressive separatist party Québec Solidaire has the next best thing to an election win — they hold the balance of power in the minority parliament. Quebec has, once again, fallen into the trap of ‘no to a referendum, yes to the PQ,’ voting on identity and values rather than on the pragmatism the times call for.

Unfortunately for Canada, it means that overtly separatist parties hold a majority in the National Assembly, and pursuing that separatist agenda is the one policy on which those parties will consistently agree. For those poo-pooing the possibility of a referendum, just watch them. Quebec, in spite of collectively hating Trump more than any other part of Canada, has handed him the gift of instability through an informal coalition intent on destroying our country at a time when his administration is looking for exactly that type of weakness. Congratulations, Quebec, you sure showed them!

David Graham

Alberta Referendum Designed To Undermine Canada

On October 19th, 2026, Albertans go to the polls to answer ten questions posed by the Maple MAGA premier, which, all together, are focused on undermining Canada. Passing individual policy decisions off to the electorate in this manner is to shirk her responsibility to govern, so we must consider them as a package with a specific objective. The questions…

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a month ago · 16 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

Now, then, we must brace for Alberta’s referendum on a referendum. The Brexit referendum took place in June of 2016 and Trump was first elected a little over four months later. That referendum was brought in to settle an issue and get it off the table.

Many soft nationalists in Quebec think of a referendum in Quebec in the same terms, and Alberta’s premier claims to be treating their referendum in that same way. They’d do well to remember that it did, in fact, settle the issue and get it off the table — by succeeding, and removing the United Kingdom from the European Union, causing a massive exodus of capital and skill, and lowering the country’s standing within the world in just about every measurable category.

British Columbia’s NDP premier David Eby decided now would be a good time to hold an election, too, a full year before it was expected, in the hopes of catching the opposition Conservatives in disarray after their caucus revolt dumped their short-lived leader, former federal MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay. The result is likely to bring in a largely unknown MLA, Lorne Doerkson, as the premier. You can bet that if he wins the election, he will drop any pretence of being the interim leader. Leaked information this morning also suggests his party is promising the private insurance industry that he will get rid of BC’s no-fault auto insurance. To whose benefit?

In spite of being a relative unknown, he brings his party’s baggage with him, people like homophobic Conservative MLA Heather Maahs who immediately called on the BC government to fold to Trump at the first sign of trouble.

All of these votes share a common thread: they lend toward instability at a time when that is the last thing Canada needs. The American administration wants to annex Canada and steal our resources. They are a sufficient threat that the Canadian military has had to prepare scenarios for an American invasion of Canada, as acknowledged by the Prime Minister.

These are not idle threats. This is not speculation. It is not political theory. We learned last week that Alberta and Quebec separatists have been working with the Trump administration to undermine Canada. With this full knowledge, we are continuing to empower these traitorous groups who would sell us out for their own personal benefit and glory.

The American mid-terms will take place just over a week after the BC election. We will learn very quickly whether or not American democracy is still functional, or, if in the face of an electoral rout, the MAGAs will undermine their own elections, refuse to seat the victors, challenge results, or cheat their way into holding onto power in ways we cannot imagine, likely turning toward violence as they did on January 6th, 2021, the last time they lost.

Dean Blundell

BREAKING: Trump Just Banned the Election Referees. Only Russia and Belarus Have Ever Done That.

October 6, 2026…

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18 days ago · 343 likes · 31 comments · Dean Blundell

Just this week, we learned that, for the first time since the 2000 election — and we know how that election turned out — foreign observers will not be invited to watch the mid-term elections. One wonders what they intend to hide? Recounting hanging chads will seem like child’s play to an administration that says that, were it to happen tomorrow, “Watergate would have been a 12 hour story.”

Quebec having a separatist coalition and a minority that will lead to another election sooner rather than later while Alberta holds a non-binding referendum on whether or not to hold a binding referendum to break up Canada from the other side while American democracy collapses on its face is not a recipe for the long term sustainability of our sovereignty or our country.

Canadian voters need to repudiate those who seek to divide our country and offer it up to the Americans. We need to do it at the provincial level, not only at the federal level, and we need to do it visibly and forcibly.

It is now up to Alberta and BC to succeed where Quebec has failed, and keep the country together in the face of an aggressive and imploding United States.

Tomorrow, Quebec will decide between five parties — two separatist, one agnostic, one afraid of its own shadow on the question, and one that merely believes in the decentralisation of powers. The results, then, should not be any great surprise, given the lack of any candidate daring to be seen near a maple leaf in public.

Two weeks later, Alberta’s 10-part referendum on undermining the Canadian experiment will also present their results, and if there is anything to learn from David Cameron’s Brexit referendum, that is not a tool one can use to make a pesky issue disappear.

The Globe and Mail has done something few traditional media outlets still do: actual journalism, digging into the traitorous connections between the MAGA machine and Alberta’s separatists, stating plainly:

The Globe also found that when Alberta separatist leaders went to Washington to meet with the U.S. State Department, they offered up key assets from the province’s resource portfolio, including access to fresh water and royalties on crude oil, in exchange for help transitioning to independence.

Donald Trump has said since being returning to the presidency a year and a half ago that he wants Canada to be the 51st state. He has described the Donroe doctrine in which the United States are the masters of the western hemisphere, with all countries on the American continent being subject to the whims of the country that takes that name for itself.

Dean Blundell

BOMBSHELL: MAGA's Plan to Break Up Canada Just Got Exposed in Alberta and Quebec

October 3, 2026…

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19 days ago · 1429 likes · 172 comments · Dean Blundell

It is not a coincidence that well-funded, effective separation campaigns have risen in Canada with such fervour and haste during this period. Breaking up Canada into bite-size chunks is the most effective way of controlling our country, our people, and our massive resources.

Albertan separatists, as the Globe tells us, are offering our resources, our fresh water, direct access to Alaska, and an end to Canada’s effective sovereignty on a silver platter to the Americans. That is not something one does if they are seeking autonomy.

The separatist movement in Alberta has no desire to be an independent country. They are only barely pretending that that is what it is about. Their offer to the Americans includes trading Albertans’ Canadian-dollar holdings into American dollars at par in exchange for royalties on their resources.

If the Trump regime had designed the separatist movement, it would not look any different — buy off the people, eliminate their autonomy, steal their resources, and use it all to unite the United States with their one state on the continent that is not physically connected. Better, still, they do not even need to make it an official state in the union, lest they have to add a star to their flag. One can imagine them offering ‘associate’ statehood to Alberta after learning of the term from the Europeans.

David Graham

Alberta Referendum Designed To Undermine Canada

On October 19th, 2026, Albertans go to the polls to answer ten questions posed by the Maple MAGA premier, which, all together, are focused on undermining Canada. Passing individual policy decisions off to the electorate in this manner is to shirk her responsibility to govern, so we must consider them as a package with a specific objective. The questions…

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a month ago · 16 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

Which brings us back to Quebec, whose generations-old separatist movement suddenly has new life breathed into it.

The Parti Québecois, which has already dragged the province through two divisive and destructive referenda on separation, is poised to win tomorrow’s election on a promise of a third.

Québec Solidaire, the election’s only progressive option, focused on dragging the province kicking and screaming back to the strong social support networks and environmental action also names independence as one of its top five priorities, though to their credit they are willing to say so in English. The party is, as a result, unsupportable and misnamed — it should rightly be called Québec Solitaire.

The CAQ, who have been in power for the past eight years, operated on the philosophy that separatists and federalists could work together to govern the province by ignoring the issue and just working on ‘autonomy’ as if that means something different.

The Quebec Liberal Party lacks any courage of their convictions, consistently operating as apologetic rather than principled federalists. Their commitment to ‘regain Quebec’s seat at the Canadian table’ is the 64th of 91 items on their list of engagements, with this comprehensive list of hard-hitting federalist priorities:

• Enter into formal interprovincial trade and reciprocity agreements with Ontario, and conduct economic missions to Ontario, the West, and the East to attract investment in our growth sectors.

• Launch a strategy to promote the French-speaking economy through targeted trade missions and partnerships with French-speaking economic hubs, so that Canadian businesses can access these markets with Quebec as a partner.

• Reinstate the joint Quebec-Ontario cabinet meetings, with the approval of the Ontario government.

• Advocate for the Defense, Security, and Resilience Bank to be established in Montreal.

• Reduce interprovincial barriers, facilitate labor mobility, develop east-west supply chains, and sign reciprocal agreements to be collectively stronger in the face of trade challenges.

The nascent Conservative Party of Quebec sees all the challenges facing Canadian unity and names the problem: centralisation, committing to an autonomous province.

The winner of a debate focused around the degree rather than the fact of independence is not Quebeckers — it is those who benefit from a weakened Canada.

Canadians are by and large united in their opposition to American dominance and incursion into our affairs and our sovereignty. The premier of Alberta and all of the parties in Quebec, however, have missed the memo.

Whatever the results of this month’s Alberta referendum and tomorrow’s Quebec election, the Donroe doctrine is alive and well. It is attacking Canada by undermining its unity and its cohesion, and Alberta and Quebec’s leaders are falling for it hook, line, and sinker, accepting implicit and explicit support from the American dictator and the institutions backing his vision for dominance over the western hemisphere.

We are seeing this years-old quote become more and more true as corporations try to replace labour with artificial intelligence systems, with varying degrees of success. Do not mistake their short term failures for a lack of desire to make this work.

Much of the commentariat is predicting a market collapse for over-hyped AI companies. 25 years ago, the “dot-com” bubble burst, laying waste to over-valued websites and crashing the short-term value of some survivors. What it did not do was end the dot-com’s revolution of our economy and society. It acted more as an extinction event, allowing only the economically fittest to survive, serving to corporatise rather than democratise the internet.

Similarly, even if AI causes a multi-year market crash, it will not kill AI; it will make it vastly more efficient. Overhyped players will collapse. Ones with solid fundamentals will survive. It may not be the big ones we see, it may not be in the form we expect, but AI is here to stay. The environmental problems around energy usage and the vast amounts of water required to cool the immense data centres at the core of AI technology will be solved if the alternative is the total failure of the AI economy. The same applies to the problems of recursive learning, where training material is increasingly itself AI-generated, causing AI-produced material to be, for want of a better term, inbred.

Large language models (LLMs) are destroying peoples’ ability to think, to read, to write. These are the systems that have taken much of the available written material in the world, including visual arts, and used it to train on the structure of language and imagery to generate correct-sounding responses to queries. According to internal documents from Microsoft, it is the largest theft of labour in human history, using lifetimes of copyright material to come up with plausible answers and information.

These AI models are not built around accuracy. Because it works on the basis of “this query should generate a response that sounds like this,” we encounter significant problems of so-called hallucinations. The fundamental engineering structure is not geared toward “this is a factually accurate response to the request.” Rather than being credible, it merely sounds credible, and offers a false sense of confidence to its users.

AI is being used by teachers to generate assignments and examinations and by students to complete them. A large segment of our education system is collapsing into who can write the best prompts, rather than who can perform the tasks themselves.

Employers are using AI to filter job applicants, interact with customers, and replace employees in a wide variety of tasks. Entry level employees are being replaced with AI systems. Senior staffers who rise from the ranks of junior staffers will eventually cease to exist because those entry level staffers were replaced by AI systems and were never hired and developed. Employees themselves are using AI for shortcuts. Everyone thinks they are being clever and saving money.

In the long term, people capable of thinking without AI assistance will become less common. University degrees will be even more meaningless than they have already become. As AI replaces genuine learning, even many people in the STEM fields will not have the skills their degrees ostensibly represent.

Corporate boards will realise that their most expensive employees, CEOs, senior executives, divisional vice presidents, and other high priced decision-makers can be replaced with AI and probably far more efficiently so than lower level employees. AI systems can synthesise data and make decisions with greater efficiency than any chief executive ever could, and can map out a future and analyse share price trends with far more granular detail than any person ever will. Yes boss, they’re coming for you, too.

In other words, there is a lot of pain ahead. But AI, which is not limited to LLMs, is going to become a permanent part of our economy. It is not that we are not already familiar and comfortable with it. We have been using primitive proto-AI systems like spell and grammar check in our word processors for decades.

A generation ago, the United States Navy stopped teaching celestial navigation to its officers, believing it to be obsolete thanks to modern technology like the Global Positioning System. About 10 years ago, the Navy realised that this was a terrible idea, and began, once again, teaching navigation by the stars. The realisation that GPS could fail, that technology in a war setting may not function as expected, has forced the world’s most powerful navy to go back to teaching the basics. Our education system will get there, too, eventually.

All of this begs the question: if AI can replace vast swaths of the economy and human productivity is no longer fundamental to economic productivity, what will happen to the economy, and to us as participants?

There are only two long-term outcomes possible. They are mutually exclusive.

On the road on which we are now traveling, we will fulfil the ultimate goal of unrestrained capitalism: all of the world’s assets will be owned by a very small number of people who control the means of production which, in turn, will be controlled by the automated systems of AI. The rest of humanity will live in increasingly dilapidated shanties, their labour no longer even being required for the comfort of the ruling class. In this dystopian world, AI will be militarised to control the people who no longer have an economic function. AI is not inherently violent, but it is certainly capable of violence. Like the people it seeks to emulate, AI systems will behave according to their upbringing.

It is beyond even the feudalism that the oligarchs have dreamed of and have been pursuing through a half-century of neoliberalism. The only people needed by the oligarchs in such a world are a small band of working class people whose job it is to keep control of the AI systems. Everyone else will simply be superfluous, and the oligarchs do not see a problem with that.

That is the very manifestation of unrestrained capitalism’s end-game.

The other option is the one that we need to pursue, and it will require more than a few essays written without the help of a large language model to achieve.

With the decoupling of productivity from labour, AI has to be treated and pursued as the great democratiser. AI is not inherently bad, but it is only as good as the ethical boundaries within which it lives.

Artificial Intelligence cannot coexist with the full human population in the long term in the absence of Universal Basic Income (BI). If AI can take care of all of our actual needs, then the productivity of the AI-based economy must be shared with all of its participants. We are currently headed for the former, but very much away from the latter. If work is entirely elective because everything is done by machine, then the results of that productivity must be distributed among the population.

Those who choose to work, who continue the skills of our species, who opt to learn the celestial navigation over the GPS as it were, can do so in that reality. In a world of AI backed by a world of BI, the automated systems will augment our society and our quality of life rather than destroying it. Those who wish to pursue purpose or riches could do so, but those who merely want to exist could do that, too.

We are rapidly approaching a crossroads. To survive the oligarchy in a world where productivity is decoupled from labour, we cannot have AI without BI.

With their commitment to separation, the PQ’s desire to weaken and undermine Canadian confederation, in the face of an existential threat from south of the border, will not benefit Quebec nor defend their version of the French language or culture. Their arrival in power with a promise of a referendum will not strengthen Quebec’s social fabric, its economic outcome, or its collective future.

David Graham

If Canada Is Divisible, So Are The Provinces

Alberta is in the midst of a 10-part referendum on whether or not to hold a referendum while Quebec is in the midst of a provincial election that will decide whether they hold their own, in their case, third referendum on whether or not to separate the whole, intact provinces from Canada…

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a month ago · 34 likes · 4 comments · David Graham

The sovereignty that the province would gain would be ephemeral, a fleeting moment of autonomy before coming to terms with their lack of natural allies in an unstable world. They will be forced into the hands of the Americans who will make short work of their language, culture, and economy.

The problems are institutional, at the core of Quebec society and its government. Elections Quebec, the ostensibly non-partisan agency whose very existence is to ensure the fairness of the election, is putting its own thumbs on the scales.

The Quebec Liberals are polling at 23 percent, but only 11 percent among francophones. They are a long way from having serious credibility among the francophone voting population, and it is getting worse for them as anti-immigrant feelings increase throughout the province. That is a political problem the PLQ needs to address on messaging, on substance, on campaign strategy, on having the courage of their convictions after spending year after year, generation after generation, equivocating on their purpose as a political party, on their views of Quebec within — or without — Canada.

They fall into the traps laid for them by the separatists, regularly avoiding saying anything that might irritate the separatist billionaire running Quebecor, Quebec’s very own Fox network, as if equivocation will gain favour from him or his media empire.

David Graham

Linguistic Nationalism Is Ethnic Nationalism

The issue of linguistic minority rights between Quebec and the rest of Canada is one that has not in any way been resolved. Defending English in Quebec is to defend French in the rest of Canada, a point often missed by both sides in the rather ridiculous debate over which European language should be spoken in which part of Canada, whose domestic foundin…

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3 years ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · David Graham

The party relies on its default position among minority voters and the small segment of the francophone population that remain hardline federalists. They do not have the courage to stand up and say the truth: Quebec’s strength is Canada. Canada’s strength is Quebec. That defending French is not a zero-sum game, that Quebec has a role in defending and promoting French across the rest of Canada, of assuring the place of French in the world as a whole.

And it is here that Elections Quebec enters the picture. They have been systematically attacking minority voting rights through this election cycle. Their actions have been condemned and overruled by the province’s own courts. They refused to put English on voter information cards. They are requiring proof of entitlement to English language services at voting stations.

If an individual poll clerk does not speak English, that is one thing. The sheer number of poll clerks required makes it entirely likely that many if not most will be unilingual. We can reasonably believe that some communities will not have anyone who speaks English available to work in a polling station, and, in all likelihood those communities will also have few English-speaking voters.

If, however, the agency that runs the election tells the clerk that they may not speak English to a voter without verifying their license to communicate in English, that is deliberate voter suppression, and should be seen as the illegal act that it is. Every person employed at a voting station should be willing and able to offer service in any language they speak, whether it be French, English, Kanienʼkéha, Yoruba, or Vietnamese. That English-speaking voters are specifically targeted is to interfere and impede with their ability, and therefore their right, to vote.

The provincial Liberals are the only provincial party polling strongly among anglophone and other minority voters. The politics of that are irrelevant. Their ability to win a general election — or lack thereof — equally so. The decision of Elections Quebec to interfere with minority voters is to forego their own neutrality, to take a side in this election, to disproportionately impede support for one particular party, to put their thumb on the scales.

In a province where the legislative assembly unanimously agreed, across party lines, that “bonjour, hi!” was an unacceptable greeting in a store, they have taken it a step further, requiring the provinces anglophones not only to prove their identity, but prove their right to service in English before being granted that service — and at that, only with a court order. Yet somehow, Quebec’s nationalists do not see the similarities between their movement and the ethnic nationalism destroying the United States.

The active and deliberate suppression of a particular type of voters is similar in intent to the actions of Republicans across the United States, who use gerrymandering, resource allocation, geography, and criminal law to suppress Democratic votes. Doing so along ethnic lines, to favour one ethnicity to the exclusion of others, puts Quebec’s separatists in the same category as the white supremacist MAGA movement they claim to despise.

David Graham

PQ Knows Weakening Canada Weakens Quebec

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, the leader of the separatist Parti Québecois and quite possibly the next premier of Quebec made a very telling announcement yesterday — that Quebec would not hold a referendum prior to the end of Donald Trump’s term as president…

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2 months ago · 15 likes · 3 comments · David Graham

Yet, it has to be said, it has to be repeated, it has to be emphasised, that undermining Quebec as a foundational part of what Canada is will destroy Quebec’s own weight, its own autonomy, its own sovereignty, in the face of an existential military and economic threat that shares a massive border with the province.

American strategy is to divide and conquer Canada. Danielle Smith is helping Trump divide Canada from the West, and Paul St-Pierre Plamondon is helping divide Canada from the East. Both would do well to remember the second half of that strategy.

Part of me thinks Mark Carney knows what he is doing and we can trust him. He has proven to be supremely competent, deftly handling the country through an international crisis created by the decay of the American empire next door. He has been easy to underestimate throughout, always surprising with new accomplishments beyond anything we would have expected. But part of me looks at the edges of the plans and thinks woah, thar be dragons.

Not all ideas are necessarily good, and we have already seen the development of a lot of soft-right policies. One of the first things this Prime Minister did was to roll back tax increases on capital gains, the act of which only benefited the wealthiest of Canada’s wealthy, in the name of promoting investment and benefitting so-called job creators. The affordability crisis the rest of us are experiencing through endless sticker-shock is caused by greed among that very class of people, and the appetite to give them more gifts is not — or at least should not be — terribly strong.

Last week’s Canada Investment Summit, as advertised, would suggest that Canada’s economy is headed for an unprecedented boom as wealthy investors from around the world inject vast sums into a wide range of businesses and industries in the country. It could open the door to significant job creation, better economic autonomy, and a more prosperous country.

It could also just make a few people fantastically wealthy while leaving the rest of us holding the bag, as we see in Alberta with over one third of its oil wells abandoned. Thousands of those derelict wells are considered to be orphaned, with no environmental mitigation done by those who built and exploited them, with their owners bankrupted or otherwise out of the picture. They will ultimately be left up to the public to clean up. This is one of the many risks of non-renewable resource extraction, and it exemplifies capitalism in its purest form.

It will be important that such investment comes with real accountability and measurable lifetime net benefits to Canada. The half-trillion-plus dollars expected through this process must be genuine investments, and not simple fire-sales of our collective assets that will not actually benefit our country in the long term. One might take a moment to remember enthusiastic summit participant Stephen Harper’s sale of the Canada Wheat Board to Saudi Arabian interests.

Selling off existing infrastructure does nothing to promote the long term viability of the country. Selling off mineral rights to foreign owners to take outside the country, process, and sell back to us, as is already often the case does not offer a significant net benefit over the long term, either, if we pay more for the finished product than we made selling the raw materials. If anything, Canada should be looking to domestically vertically integrate our natural-resource-based industries to the extent possible, and preserve the value we are extracting for our own benefit, selling off the resulting final products on the international market.

Quebec talks often of ‘la troisième transformation du bois,’ — the ‘third transformation of wood’. The first transformation is the conversion of wood to lumber. The second is the conversion from lumber to panels and parts. The third is the construction of finished products. It is a term we need to adopt more widely in English, as well, along with the concept that it represents.

If we are to extract key critical minerals required to make high end computer components, we should also be making more of the computer components. These vast sums of expected investment can achieve that, as long as it is a stated part of our goals, and we follow through.

From that perspective, what is the objective of selling off operations at Canada’s largest airports? What are we hoping to save? According to the Prime Minister’s press release:

To further unleash capital, the Prime Minister announced that Canada will seek private investment through long-term concessions to operate Canada’s four largest airports. Working with airport authorities and other stakeholders, including airlines and local governments, the federal government will retain ownership of the underlying land and assets, while also bringing in new private capital. The tens of billions of dollars of capital raised would then be reinvested into building the infrastructure that Canada needs for the next generation: regional airports, new local transportation infrastructure, and new nation-building infrastructure, including a sovereign broadband backbone that connects Canadians from coast to coast to coast.

It does sound wonderful. Billions of dollars will fall from the sky — or at least land on Pearson’s runway 33R — and we will be able to invest in new infrastructure using that money. But what we are selling is infrastructure already built with public funds, with revenues reinvested in that infrastructure. Private investors will be looking to increase the extractive value of their investments, and that necessarily means increasing revenue while decreasing costs. The tens of billions of dollars promised are not donations, there is a return expected.

Canada’s aviation sector is already lacking competition and our domestic flights are vastly over-priced. Making airports profitable as an objective does not have an obvious path out of that. But perhaps there is a play here that I am missing.

Public private partnerships are almost never good for the country. Like most forms of corporate welfare, they nationalise risk and privatise profit. When we ask private investors to help pay for, say, a new highway bridge in exchange for the toll revenue, the public component becomes a de facto subsidy of that private investment. Nationalise risk, privatise profit, the capitalist way.

The release talks of the need to make a sovereign broadband backbone. Absolutely — all of our backbone infrastructure should be in public hands, away from the greedy grasp of Canada’s large telecom providers. But our track record as a country would suggest that we would partner with those very companies to build such a system, using public funds to build it and leaving it in private hands to exploit.

Selling off assets that we have already built puts us in the bizarro worlds of Ontario’s Highway 407, owned by a mixture of Canadian pension funds and Spanish company Cintra after being sold by the Mike Harris government for a fraction of its real value, or Chicago’s parking meter fiasco. There, the city sold off its entire parking meter infrastructure for a single one-time payment, along with generous revenue guarantees for the purchaser. Short term gain for long term pain is the inevitable result of selling off public infrastructure for a quick buck.

If we are to have massive amounts of investment accompanied by new tax incentives, deductions, or write-offs, there also needs to be some degree of enforceability. When a company receives a billion dollars in tax incentives to create or preserve some number of thousands of jobs, then walks away from those jobs, we need an effective enforcement mechanism.

There needs to be a paper contract, not just a line item, and there also needs to be a social contract. When a company like Stellantis takes over $200 million in federal money for their plants, then closes them anyway, we have to ask ourselves what we are getting for our investment.

It is possible that the benefits outweigh the risks, and Carney’s track record is of consistently exceeding all expectations. There is little doubt that private investment in new industries and development will be economically beneficial to Canada and offer real job opportunities, and further sever our economic dependence on the collapsing United States. We just have to be careful not to confuse selling our assets with selling access to our vast country and what it has to offer.

Selling your house to pay off your mortgage may be very satisfying, but you will still need a place to sleep tonight. The same applies to the country as a whole.

Being an almost-member of the European Union in this exact way has not been done before, but there are several countries that have relationships with the EU that fall below the standard of full membership, so what an ‘associate membership’ looks like, if we pursue it to its logical conclusion, is a simple matter of negotiation.

It is entirely too early to define what the relationship would look like, but it is not too early for us to express our aspirations for such a deal. Nor, apparently, is it too early for Canada’s Conservatives to reject its final results before any of us know what they might be.

Joining the European single market would be hugely beneficial to Canada, giving us even greater reciprocal access to the European market than we have under CETA. Allowing visa-free access for European citizens and Canadian citizens to each others’ lands beyond the university-focused Erasmus+ program Carney mentioned in his speech, and maybe even including Canada in the Schengen Area that goes beyond the borders of the pure EU members, adding Switzerland, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway, would be a dream come true — though would require beefing up our border with the United States.

Opening the borders between Canada and Europe does have the risk of raising the hackles of the anti-immigrant crowd, though, and Canada’s generous immigration system might cause some tension at that point in the negotiations even from the European side. Associate membership and all this potential trans-Atlantic cross-pollination is far from being a fait accompli.

Wayne Horton

Just the Facts: Canada and EU Associate Membership

There is good reason to celebrate this morning’s announcement. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has proposed opening the door for Canada to become the EU’s first associate member. That is an extraordinary and unprecedented distinction, and a significant diplomatic achievement for Mark Carney and his team…

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a month ago · 76 likes · 12 comments · Wayne Horton

There are direct consumer benefits possible. Canada’s vastly over-priced domestic aviation system could use some competitive pressure from ruthless European low-cost players like Ryan Air, for example.

Participating as part of the much greater European whole would put us in a much stronger position in dealing with the proprietary high tech world including AI, social media, and how to rebuild the traditional news media as something other than a wholly owned subsidiary of the oligarchy. It is the EU driving small but significant changes such as mobile phone manufacturers being forced to use the USB-C common charger, and the upcoming requirement that all mobile phones have user-replaceable batteries. On our own, Canada does not have the weight to make those types of changes stick. If we are teamed up with Europe, those reforms will be forced into the North American market.

We have learned through the Online News Act how ineffective Canada is on its own in this regard. In the government’s efforts to force social media companies to contribute toward the traditional media industry they linked to so prolifically, some social media giants simply… stopped linking them. As Carney suggested in his speech, we cannot survive as a lone tree — we need the strength of the forest to survive the current storms.

The Walrus

Mark Carney: Why I Believe Canada’s Future Lies with Europe

This story was originally published on thewalrus.ca…

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a month ago · 89 likes · The Walrus

Of greater interest, though, is on military and defence matters. Canada under Mark Carney has spent the last several months working on connecting our military capabilities with Europe rather than the Unites States. As with NATO, the European Union has a mutual defence clause. It differs only slightly from NATO Article 5 in that any member under military attack may invoke it, obligating the rest of the union to react according to their own means, but there is not a permanent unified command and control structure to unify the responding forces.

In real terms, the European Union is gradually replacing NATO, and it will be important for Canada to be on the inside of that alliance once the United States realises it has functionally killed its own defensive treaty and alienated every one of its traditional international allies. The greatest military threat to Canada has very much become the United States of America.

Trump’s reaction to the EU and Canada talking should demonstrate that clearly. If Russia’s excuse for invading Ukraine is that they were trying to join NATO, the US’s excuse for invading Canada will be that we were trying to join the EU. In the eyes of both the United Staets and Russia, our countries exist to serve their interests within their ‘regions of influence’, not our own.

Charlie Angus / The Resistance

THE WEEK OF DECADES

There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen. So said Vladimir Lenin. He could have been speaking about Canada in this extraordinary moment in history. It has been less than a month since Canada walked away from the US “negotiating” table, and we are seeing an unprecedented level of movement towards a different future…

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a month ago · 390 likes · 109 comments

Canada’s long term agreement with Ukraine announced last week during President Zelenskyy’s visit is important here. We did not commit to building two million drones in collaboration with them to do light shows over the Toronto waterfront. We are heeding the lessons of their war of Russian aggression as they may apply to American aggression against a Canada refusing to fall in line.

Ukraine has been at the front lines of defending Europe in a brutal conventional war whose casualties number over a million. NATO and European allies have offered significant ad hoc support, but both NATO and the EU appear to have been reticent to include the country into either alliance so far precisely because of that war. Ukraine is neither a member of the European Union nor NATO and their full ascension to either would put the rest of the significantly overlapping alliances directly at war with Russia thanks to their mutual-defence clauses.

It is an honour for Canada to be invited to join the EU in whatever capacity, but in a most Canadian way, we should be holding the door open before walking through it, ushering Ukraine in first with a polite ‘after you!’ As Carney said, the Canada-EU alliance should create “an alliance open enough that others can join.”

There is no ally that has proven its capacity and resolve more thoroughly and at greater cost than Ukraine, and ending western equivocation would finally bring that bloody war to its end. Moreover, we need to know that if push comes to shove and the Americans try to apply the Donroe doctrine by force against Canada, our allies will actually have our backs.

The greatest risk for Canada joining the EU, though, is not found within what Europe has to offer or what Canada can offer Europe. It is also not from allowing current European Union citizens to live and work visa-free in Canada. Nor is it the prospect of becoming more heavily involved in Ukraine’s on-going conflict, nor even in the potential of allies hiding behind the word ‘associate’ should we find our own country invaded by our ostensible NATO ally and wishing to invoke the EU’s mutual defence clause. Rather, it is the knee-jerk reaction of right wing extremists egged on by Russian and American disinformation who want to destroy it from the inside.

As his statement the day this was announced shows, Pierre Poilievre cannot begin to imagine a world in which Canada is not subservient to the United States, regardless of the state of that country. His vision is to preserve NATO as our primary relationship with the European Union. Articles 10, 11, 13, and 14 of the NATO Treaty collectively make it clear that NATO operates and serves at the pleasure of the United States.

Conservatives will actively undermine our cooperation and association with Europe if it endangers the supremacy of the United States. They say “Canada must be independent and sovereign,” which would be the case with European partners — but not American dominance. Canadian sovereignty, to Poilievre, requires permission from the White House. We know what the White House wants, because, under Carney, we walked away from the negotiating table when they told us.

David Graham

Under Poilievre, We’d Have CUSMAGA

I have heard from many Conservatives that under Pierre Poilievre we would have had a deal with the Americans, and they are most certainly right — having a Prime Minister who completely ascribes to the American president’s values would have assured some kind of deal…

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2 months ago · 95 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

Should he and his followers ever achieve power in Canada, their ‘Canexit’ campaign would be far more destructive than Brexit could ever have been. The UK, regardless of treaty, still remains proximate to Europe, surrounded on all sides by EU members.

Like Brexit’s advocates, Canada’s Conservative leader was already circulating misinformation on what our cooperation with Europe could mean on the day the idea became an official concept. No EU taxes, he proclaimed, as if EU members do not control their own tax systems. No EU open borders, he dog-whistled. He would rather make Canada a vassal to a fascist United States than a partner to a democratic Europe.

Should we succeed in making Canada a member of the European Union with whatever qualifier or prefix we determine, the danger is our own political volatility. One bad future government ending the arrangement ala Brexit would cause long-term, catastrophic damage to Canada. A de-Europed Canada would be thrust back into the arms of the Americans with nowhere else to turn, our bridges burnt as our other international partners lose trust in our country, and our closest allies become alienated by our full reversal — and they would be under no geographic imperative to work through it.

We only need to look at how the world is treating the destabilised United States to see how quickly and how thoroughly this can happen. In spite of the clear lessons and the enormous opportunities before us, Canada’s Conservative leader is already out there stating we are better off with Trump than with Europe showing, once again, where his loyalties truly lie.

In the order asked — although not the order Elections Alberta intends to count them:

1. Do you support the Government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration and giving Albertans first priority on new employment opportunities?

Immigration is a shared jurisdiction between the federal and provincial governments. Alberta already has a series of agreements with the federal government, giving the province a say over certain aspects of immigration to the province. If the government of Alberta wishes to renegotiate their agreement with the federal government, this referendum question does not achieve anything new.

However, if the question is treated as the dog-whistle that it is, it changes the meaning rather completely. The phrasing implies to the voter reading it that the mass of arriving immigrants are stealing Albertans’ jobs, while also calling for “economic migration” — that is, moving in search of better jobs. It should be read for what it is: a call for a mandate to only accept certain types of immigrants, and all that implies.

2. Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law mandating that only Canadian citizens, permanent residents and individuals with an Alberta­ approved immigration status will be eligible for provincially-funded programs, such as health care, education and other social services?

This is in the same vein as the first question. Alberta’s UCP government wants to filter immigrants for the right kind of people. Whether that’s ethnicity, country of origin, gender, financial status, or religion can be left up to the imagination. Those who are not accepted by Alberta under the policy this proposes would be denied healthcare and education, even if they were granted appropriate visas by the federal government.

3. Assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for social support programs as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law requiring all individuals with a non-permanent legal immigration status to reside in Alberta for at least 12 months before qualifying for any provincially-funded social support programs?

Right now, when a Canadian resident changes provinces, there is a three month lag for healthcare services. As with the first two questions, this proposes to place a barrier to entry for unfavourable migrants to the province by making them effectively stateless for nine months. Someone moving from Ontario to Alberta on an open work permit, for example, would lose Ontario’s services after three months, and have nine months with no coverage until Alberta accepts that they have arrived.

4. Assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for public health care and education as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta charging a reasonable fee or premium to individuals with a non-permanent immigration status living in Alberta for their and their family’s use of the healthcare and education systems?

Aside from being more dogwhistling about immigrants ‘costing’ current residents unduly, this is also asking Albertans to endorse a slippery slope strategy to privatise healthcare and education. Suggesting that families arriving in the country, and changing provinces along the way, pay premiums for otherwise universal services because their permanent residency applications have not yet been approved serves the dual purpose of opening the door to private payment of those services while also raising the barrier to entry to immigrants the government of Alberta deems undesirable.

5. Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law requiring individuals to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate or citizenship card, to vote in an Alberta provincial election?

It is already illegal for non-citizens to vote. If there is evidence of fraudulent voting taking place, they should be prosecuted individually. This is a MAGA-style fear tactic to suggest that non-citizens voting is a rampant problem. It also raises the barrier to entry for existing citizens to vote, while not being foolproof. Even having an Alberta birth certificate does not guarantee the right to vote in an Alberta election. This is another dogwhistle.

6. Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to have provincial governments, and not the federal government, select the justices appointed to provincial King’s Bench and Appeal courts?

On its face, this can be construed as a legitimate question, but one has to consider why the question is being asked in the first place. I would advise Albertan federalists voting in this referendum to consider that Danielle Smith’s agenda is to assert provincial sovereignty for her province, and defang the courts to prevent them from obstructing her unconstitutional acts. Giving her appointment power over the arbiters of those decisions may not be wise.

7. Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to abolish the unelected federal Senate?

The Senate is worthy of its own extensive writing, and it is on my todo list to do so. The Senate provides a value to our legislative system that is poorly understood but is easy to attack. The purpose of the Senate is to offer a house of “sober second thought” — that is, a legislative oversight body whose occupants do not have to consider their post-political careers and political debts in considering their votes on legislation. Abolishing the Senate is not about improving the quality or equity of our democratic institutions or systems, but about removing checks against short-sighted decision-making and obstructions to extremist agendas.

Once again, while the question appears fair on its surface, it is important to ask who wants to know and for what reason?

8. Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to allow provinces to opt out of federal programs that intrude on provincial jurisdiction such as health care, education, and social services, without a province losing any of the associated federal funding for use in its social programs?

As with some of the earlier questions, this is a backdoor attempt to break Canada’s already hurting universal healthcare system. National standards need enforceability. Having strings attached to federal funds to adhere to national standards is not only reasonable, it is to be expected. If the province wishes to opt out of national standards, they will have to opt out of national funding as well — and tax their residents accordingly.

9. Do you support the Government of Alberta working with the governments of other willing provinces to amend the Canadian Constitution to better protect provincial rights from federal interference by giving a province’s laws dealing with provincial or shared areas of constitutional jurisdiction priority over federal laws when the province’s laws and federal laws conflict?

This question is also a leading question. Provincial law already has precedence on matters of provincial jurisdiction. Federal laws on those matters, as with the Canada Health Act, bring about national standards by attaching funding to the question. In joint or federal jurisdiction, the same should apply. The federal government retains authority over certain aspects of regulation and policy for a reason, ensuring pan-Canadian standards and interests are protected. The only purpose to this is for Alberta to, once again, undermine Canada as a confederated nation.

Which, of course, leads us to the most important question of all:

10. Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?

• Option 1: Alberta should remain a province of Canada.

• Option 2: The Government of Alberta should commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada.

The last time a Conservative government asked a question of its people on breaking a powerful political union that the Prime Minister of the day claimed not to want to happen, the United Kingdom pulled out of the European Union over its own better judgement. A decade on, the country has not recovered from Brexit, and now we’re facing the unexpected prospect of Canada holding a more comprehensive relationship with the EU than the UK has.

Aside from the numerous legal and logistical problems around Albexit, such a move would benefit two major players: the United States, who would be in a position to dominate Alberta’s energy industry to a greater degree than they already do and Russia, whose objective is the destabilisation of western democracies. It is not by accident that those two places are the major sources of funding for the separatist cause.

Elections Alberta has also not done the process any favours by undermining the credibility of the vote, shorting the registration period for special ballots by two weeks on September 3rd, changing it from October 9th to September 25th.

The ten questions on this referendum should be seen holistically. The Alberta government, while premier Smith claims to not want Alberta to separate, is doing everything it can to undermine Canada itself, and each of these questions tackles that objective from a slightly different angle.

While I reject the premise of this entire referendum, if I were still a resident of Alberta, I would be sure to show up and vote ‘no' on questions 1 through 9, and ‘remain’ on question 10.

From the newsdesk of Storei Media

The UCP Doesn't Need You to Vote Yes. It Just Needs You to Stay Home

To put a stick in the spokes is an old expression. It means stopping the wheel, no matter the damage. I tried it once, around age nine. It did not go well…

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2 months ago · 39 likes · 4 comments · Terry Reith

The underlying assumptions of both provincial separatist movements is that, while Canada is divisible into its constituent provinces, the provinces themselves are immutable on their current boundaries. Irony, apparently, is not their strong suit.

The first assumption is false on its face. Alberta exists as a collection of treaties between Indigenous nations and Canada, over which a more or less square province was unceremoniously overlaid after the fact with little regard for those treaty boundaries.

Indigenous Insider

A Covenant Before the Creator: Why Alberta’s Treaties Cannot Be Broken

Before we begin, Tansi, thank you for being here…

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4 months ago · 52 likes · 6 comments · Brandi Morin

Quebec, at the time of Confederation, consisted of barely half of the territory it covers today. It is not a permanently defined territory in a way that would necessarily survive a declaration of independence, though it does not share Alberta’s treaties barring any path toward legal separation.

It begs the question of what a a separate Alberta or Quebec might look like? A quick look at the 2025 electoral map released by Elections Canada shows that Canada’s electorate does not reliably vote along provincial boundaries. Political opinion within each province is not any more uniform than it is in the country as a whole.

If either province declared independence, on what grounds could the ostensibly sovereign governments of Quebec or Alberta state that, say, the entire island of Montreal or the City of Edmonton could not unilaterally declare their own independence, in turn, from those countries?

Montreal as a nation-state could be a formidable country, bearing a powerful economic engine of its own, with its own air and seaports right on the island. It already fills the roles of both the culinary and cultural capital of Canada. Shedding the shackles of Quebec City’s oppressive governance might allow the Greater Montreal Area to thrive, to become our own region’s Singapore, one bonjour-hi at a time.

The Indigenous majority occupying the half of Quebec that was not a part of the province at the time of Confederation, too, could elect to stay in Canada or go their own way altogether. Quebec could leave Canada — but Canada would also leave Quebec. What would be left? Separation is a Pyrrhic victory for its supporters.

A Canada that concurrently lost two provinces would no longer be a functional country — which is what the traitorous Trump-loving Alberta separatist leaders want in the first place — and its dissolution would open the door to a reimagination of our political boundaries.

Alberta’s final disposition is just as unclear as Quebec’s. Support for separation is significantly lower there than it is in Quebec. In spite of the city’s reputation, support is lower in Calgary than anywhere else in the province, according to an Ipsos regional breakdown this summer. If the regions that opposed separation opted to separate from a separate Alberta, that nascent country, too, could find itself without any major urban centres.

Edmonton’s Anthony Henday and Calgary’s Ring Road could just as easily become international boundaries, modern moats against ill-considered foreign-funded disinformation-led separatist movements. Lloydminster, the city that straddles Alberta and Saskatchewan, could decide that border checkpoints down the middle of 50th Ave are less useful than ones west of town.

The Walrus

The Russian Money Behind Alberta’s Separatist Movement

An Alberta independence rally in Taber, Alberta. (Matthew Bruce / Canadian Press…

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2 months ago · 144 likes · The Walrus

There is nothing sacrosanct about provincial boundaries when it comes to separation. The people in the provinces have the freedom to move into or out of each, and the boundaries themselves would be up for discussion and negotiation as well.

The trouble is that few people are saying this part out loud. We assume that the comfortable realities we have will hold because we believe them to be permanent and immutable. Political discourse in this country accepts the premise that Quebec and Alberta can discuss independence as whole provinces without consideration of the malleability of their own boundaries.

The separatist narratives of both Alberta and Quebec rely on fundamental underlying assumptions that have no basis in reality, yet we are not reliably calling them out on this.

The fact is that if Canada is to be divisible, so are its constituent provinces.

Walls and Bridges: Creating Connections in a Chaotic World

Alberta’s Separation from Canada “Is Not Constitutionally Permissible”

I am not even remotely an expert on Canadian Constitutional law, but I know someone who is one, and that is University of Waterloo Political Scientist Emmett Macfarlane. Therefore, I want to encourage you all to read his latest Substack article in which he goes into pro-separation arguments …

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a month ago · 27 likes · 4 comments · Ben Atkinson, PhD

Popular Information

UPDATE: After the Mamdani 9/11 smear, a cover-up

As Popular Information first reported last week, a New York Post headline falsely declared on its July 26 cover: “Thousands of 9/11 families demand Mamdani be banned from 25th-Anniversary.” Reporter Rich Calder reported in the New York Post print edition, which has a circulation of about 120,000, that the petition “has collected 3,515 signatures in a l…

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3 months ago · 711 likes · 53 comments · Judd Legum

The September, 2000, document released by the project, entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” stated plainly: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.”

It was narrower in scope than Project 2025, but, like the more recent document, the authors of the New American Century’s work were central to the administration of President George W. Bush.

It was not the Muslim world, much less future mayor Mamdani’s family, who called for revolutionary change, even if it meant American deaths. It was people like Florida governor Jeb Bush, president Bush’s brother, Dan Quayle, the vice president under their father George H. W. Bush, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s own vice president, and Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s defence secretary. Those were all among the 25 white men who signed the Statement of Principles at the core of the Project for the New American Century, many other of whose names you may remember from the Bush administration.

It was an era and a mission of American hegemony before the advent of social media, Russian interference in western politics, and the widespread disinformation currently undermining our democracies.

Bush won the 2000 election against Al Gore on a supreme court case around which ballots to recount in Florida, on the meaning of hanging chads, and the voting intentions of those provided with a deliberately confusing ballot, and whether democracy would even be served by recounting those ballots. The whole effort should be seen as trial and error practice for Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 and current elections.

The Bush administration, elected on the thinnest of margins and with then-historically low popularity, filled itself with hawks who specifically advocated for a massive increase in military spending and assertion of overseas power, but lacking the public will and mandate to do so.

He, and they, turned the cataclysmic, Pearl Harbor-like event of 9/11 into long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, invoking NATO article 5 for the first time, dragging their allies into their worldview. These wars killed orders of magnitude more people than died in the attack, yet they accomplished nothing toward world stability or even American dominance. Iraq is still a mess. They were outright defeated in Afghanistan, with the Taliban now back fully in control. They are now in another forever war with Iran.

The Walrus

The Taliban’s Laws Are Killing Women and Children

A woman and her daughter leave a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, February 15, 2026. (Siddiqullah Alizai / AP…

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a month ago · 13 likes · The Walrus

After 9/11, then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani claimed the air in New York City was safe to breathe. Giuliani, who went on to be Donald Trump’s lawyer through the Big Lie where Trump claimed to have won a 2020 election he clearly lost, was hiding important information, and tens of thousands of New Yorkers are suffering long term health consequences from it.

But it took today’s mayor Mamdani to release 170,000 pages of previously hidden documents showing the reality.

The Humanity Archive

After 9/11, They Said the Air Was Safe. It Was a Death Sentence Instead.

At 8:46 on the morning of September 11, 2001, Marcy Borders was twenty-eight, one month into a job, at her desk on the 81st floor of the North Tower when American Airlines Flight 11 tore into the building twelve floors above her…

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a month ago · 100 likes · 6 comments · Jermaine Fowler

On the day of the attack, Canada took in tens of thousands of travellers across hundreds of grounded aircraft, as memorialised in the play Come From Away. We, as a country and as a people, were there for the Americans in every way.

Today, the Republican-controlled American government, the direct descendant and spiritual heir of George W. Bush’s administration, have been attacking and undermining Canada’s very existence. While their overseas activities and forever wars have made the past and current Republican presidents’ closest supporters unimaginably wealthy, the United States has lost its global standing, its global power, and virtually every positive aspect of its once mighty global reputation.

They no longer have the power or the ability to assert their power anywhere else. After 25 years of the New American Century, the United States needs to attack their closest neighbour and ally, Canada, because they still need to feel strong and mighty when they are no longer either of those things.

David Graham

Enough! Expel Hoekstra From Canada Already

At what point do we say ‘enough is enough’ and declare American ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra persona non grata…

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4 months ago · 86 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

After spending a year and a half insulting his host country, US Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra is in Gander to mark the anniversary of 9/11 at the epicentre of Canada’s aid to and compassion for his country on that day.

If there were ever to be anyone who should be told to stay away from a memorial for the September 11th attacks, it is not Zohran Mamdani, it is people like Pete Hoekstra, disbarred Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and everyone and everything they represent.

Flock records license plate data from across its network into a centralised and searchable database. In so doing, a vehicle can be tracked across state lines by the Flock automatic license plate readers it passes. The more readers, the more granular this tracking data.

The location and quantity of Flock cameras is not a matter of public record. The company installs them on the basis of local orders, and they are not limited to law enforcement or government customers. The website, DeFlock.org, has documented and mapped reports of over 80,000 of these cameras in the United States. The heat map of cameras looks a lot like a photo of the United States taken at night. They have rapidly become ubiquitous across their country.

The company is waging a public relations defence, assuring the public through their website that abuse will not be tolerated. It is hard to take the claim seriously, given that abuse is the whole reason to create such a system.

We know of numerous cases of abuse of the system by American law enforcement. We likely don’t know about another whole set of cases. Wisconsin used the license plate readers to track a resident leaving the state to buy weed, arresting him on his return. Last week, three Georgia police officers were fired for misusing the system. A Google search for “flock abuse arrests” offers pages of results.

Few police forces will turn down an opportunity for better access to more intelligence. A system that knows the whereabouts of anyone with a car at all times can make a whole host of investigations easier. Tracking license plates at a highly granular level could make systems such as Amber alerts all but a historical footnote. Enter the plate in the database rather than the broadcast text message and you have a better than even chance of finding the car.

To be fair, any network of amateurs with web cams and windows facing the street could collect similar data as an open source intelligence project. Flock, themselves, are not the whole problem, as much as they are the focus of the issue. Without them, someone else would probably be doing the same thing, and likely with less public awareness.

The privacy concerns are real. There are ever fewer freedoms left in the country that claims to be the freest. Some countries have vastly more advanced surveillance systems than the Americans do.

The big concern, though, is how the Flock dataset and system marries to another big problem going on in the United States right now. We know that the Trump administration is concerned about losing the mid-terms in a fair fight. We also know that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been turned into Donald Trump’s own secret police service. Flock and ICE are not two separate, unrelated problems.

Glass Empires By W. A. Lawrence

Crushing Trump’s Most Chilling Election Weapon

Trump wants voters afraid of ICE. His administration should fear what informed voters can do next…

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2 months ago · 46 likes · 7 comments · W. A. Lawrence

We do not know to what extent ICE is abusing Flock, however we can be reasonably certain that they are, given ICE’s known abuses of power over the past year and a half, and their blatant unwillingness to discipline their own employees. Criticising the American administration is enough to get visitors blocked from entering the country. We can infer that they keep extensive data on those who do not support Trump.

ICE is already widely expected to be used to steal this fall’s American elections. They did not buy $16 million of wearable cattle prods two months before voting day for decoration. The risk is great that ICE will use Flock and similar systems to track and interfere with voters likely to vote against the MAGA Republicans in tight races on election day.

The government knowing your whereabouts and limiting that knowledge to finding a kidnapped child sounds noble, but the slipperiness of the slope is clear to see when that government has no moral or ethical qualms. And in spite of Flock’s public relations efforts, we know that the company has been holding training sessions for police on how to use their technology to surveil No Kings protesters, telling us both that they understand their own capability, and on which side of ‘freedom’ they stand.

Flock gives government a critical piece of the mass-surveillance puzzle needed to steal the elections without it being directly attributable. It also gives them critical and expanding data to work with following the election when the MAGA leadership are working to consolidate their power following those elections so that the 2028 presidential election is not in real play. It gives them the ability to know, with reasonable certainty, where their opponents and their supporters are at all times.

Flock, ICE, and MAGA are a dangerous combination. They are not separate problems, they have to be opposed as part of the fascist ecosystem being carefully put into place across the United States.

The games posted to date, all of which are comically crude, are:

• Flappy Bill: Fly the bald eagle down the National Mall

• Build the Wall: Protect the border from the coming horde

• Rio Run: Border patrol along the Rio Grande

• Supply Line: Sort the school lunch to Make America Healthy Again

• Trump Savings Tycoon: Fill your kids’ Trump Accounts

The intent is obvious but bears stating. Gamifying the fascist movement dehumanises it. Framing irregular migrants as the “coming horde” on a simple, free, playable game lowers the age of potential entry into the MAGA worldview.

That “coming horde” game is essentially Tetris with slightly different behaviour. The Make America Healthy Again game offers several unidentifiable food-like items on a conveyor belt and expects you to reject all the ones that come with individual packaging.

Trump Savings Tycoon is beyond bizarre, simply catching flying valuables out of the air with a fishing net to accumulate ‘money’ in the game. It is not clear what message this is intended to convey besides the idea of associating the name Trump with amassing unearned wealth. That, at least, is honest.

Clearly not much thought has gone into the games themselves.

The point here is that the administration is openly mocking the American people. Producing these games, and offering them as an official part of the White House website, is an insult to the intelligence of the entire country, making easy to spread propaganda, and desensitising people to the very real actions behind the entertainment.

In Albania, the country has descended into three straight months of widespread protests demanding the resignation of the president for making a real estate deal with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in what has been dubbed the Flamingo Revolution.

In Canada, most of the country is rallying around severing ties with the United States and building relationships with just about anyone else.

In the United States, the president wants you to fly an animated eagle over DC while teaching the people that aspiring immigrants are nothing but a horde of zombies — and there, it is just another day in what they believe to be the freest country in the world.

The world’s biggest baby’s latest tantrum has him renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America, and his doting uncle Google has acquiesced, displaying the name change to Maps users everywhere except Canada.

The president’s tantrum once again belies what little thinking goes on in his head. For him, it is all about symbolism, image, and the bully’s need to win. Renaming Lake Ontario, to the extent that one can rename something whose name was established by a treaty signed between the United Staets and the Seneca by none other than George Washington, is the same kind of offensively weird and generally pointless symbolism as when he attempted to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of, well, America. You have to accept that his vocabulary is limited. My three year old’s is, too.

There is no longer any advantage or reason to play nice with the American administration, if there ever had been. As has been discussed quite a bit, Trump’s objective is to annex Canada, seize our assets and resources, and have the symbolism of one really big beautiful country.

Dean Blundell

BREAKING: Trump Is Now Quietly Begging Canada to Make It Stop

August 27, 2026…

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2 months ago · 2104 likes · 94 comments · Dean Blundell

Two can play the distraction game, though.

The United States has an embassy and seven consulates in Canada.

Their addresses are:

• U.S. Embassy, 490 Sussex Drive Ottawa, Ontario K1N 1G8

• 1075 West Pender Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6E 2M6

• 615 Macleod Trail SE, Rocky Mountain Plaza Building, Calgary, AB T2G 4T8

• 201 Portage Avenue, Suite 860 Winnipeg, MB, R3B 3K6

• 360 University Avenue Toronto, Ontario M5G 1S4

• 1134 Sainte-Catherine Street West Montréal, Québec H3B 1H4

• 2, rue de la Terrasse-Dufferin Quebec, Quebec G1R 4T9

• 1973 Upper Water Street Halifax, NS B3J 0A9

Unlike the president, the municipalities involved do have the ability to authoritatively change the names of the streets on which those embassies exist, even just for one block. I would recommend names such as Harriet Tubman, Levi Coffin, Laura Secord, or Tecumseh. These consular addresses should appropriately recognise, say, the underground railroad or the last American attack on Canada, and then let Trump explain why he is opposed to them.

Most municipalities have or share what we politely call the local “eco centre” but mostly we refer to them as “the dump.” There is no standardised naming convention for these, but I would encourage every municipality in Canada to refer to the road leading to theirs as “Trump Way.”

While Google Maps honours Trump by listing “Lake America” and the “Gulf of America,” let them also show that, in Canada, Trump Way always leads to a pile of trash.

It is hard to be serious in these ridiculous times, but what is happening is as serious as it gets.

Trump is waging a hot war in the middle east and a trade war with his allies to hide the fact that he has yet to release the entirety of the Epstein Files, as required by an act of congress most of a year ago. He is distracting from the billions he is grafting from the abuse of the power of his office. He is rounding up residents by the thousands for concentration camps and deportations while turning the country into a corporatist police state. He is doing everything possible for himself, while doing nothing to govern his country for the benefit of his people.

Meanwhile, China is rising as a — and likely soon to be the — global superpower, Canada is imagining a post-American world into reality, Europe is more united than at any time in recorded history, and the American people are too busy trying to pay rent on $7.25 an hour to have any idea what is happening to them.

Glass Empires By W. A. Lawrence

From Behind Trump’s Expanding Detention Walls, a Chilling Chorus of Crying Children Echoes Across the United States

The Trump administration is expanding child-detention camps to imprison tens of thousands more children while federal authorities tear families apart behind detention walls. On August 24, 2026, 77 De…

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2 months ago · 53 likes · 12 comments · W. A. Lawrence

At this point, we have to accept that this is the America Americans want. They put this lunatic back in office after having already experienced him. They’re allowing him to destroy their country with impunity, vainly relying on the function of institutions that he has already destroyed to save them, still deluding themselves that the mid-terms will reset their domestic and international clocks to 2016.

Distracting them with our own symbolism while we redirect Canada’s economic and political attention toward the rest of the world seems like the safest course of action. The Americans are destroying themselves and do not need anyone’s help, but there is no great advantage to letting them see that we have moved on. Rename a few key streets in front of US consulates and they won’t notice far less significant events like our conversations with China or the acquisition of Swedish combat aircraft.

Why not? What’s left of our relationship with the United States is well down Trump Way regardless, and that road is always a dead end.

Norwegian military officer Vidkun Quisling assisted the Nazi invasion of his own country and spent the rest of the war as the leader of Norway’s puppet government, from where the term “quisling” derives for a traitor. He ultimately ended up in front of a firing squad, but caused an awful lot of damage on his way there in the pursuit of his own personal glory.

When Smith pursues her referendum on Alberta’s sovereignty, intended to make Alberta subservient to the United States, and Jivani attacks Canada’s government for standing up to the United States in the unprovoked trade war the country is using to destabilise and conquer us, they can only be doing so for personal gain. For people whose job descriptions are specifically about the public good to be working so hard against it, they must have other, stronger motivations, ones that do not include the public interest.

If these Quisling-inspired leaders get what they want, what would it mean for the rest of us if the United States annexed Canada?

First off, Trump says he wants Canada to be the 51st state, not the 51st through 60th states. From the starting line, Canada’s political weight as a sovereign power would be eliminated, reduced to a giant Puerto Rico, a possession rather than a part of the United States.

Our medicare system, already straining from years of its universality being attacked by an increasingly strong private option, would be the first target of our new overlords. Single-payer healthcare would be dead before the ink dried on the surrender agreement between the Quislings and the Maganauts. Having a universal healthcare system would undermine their ability to recruit our citizens into their military, which would be necessary to keep control of a restless northern people.

All forms of gun control would be out the window. Canada does not meet the American quota of unnecessary child deaths required to keep their firearm industry profitable. The gun section at Canadian Tire could be moved out of its locked display windows up to the checkout row next to the Mars bars.

And speaking of Mars bars, American food would be imposed on Canada. They would be allowed to call their candy bars “chocolate” bars, with Canadian regulations on chocolate content no longer applying. While the Americans anticipate the landing of thousands of tons of discounted beef with an unstated source, with curious timing after China rejected a shipment of beef from Argentina because it contained the banned substance chloramphenicol, conquered Canadians could look forward to joining in those low American public health standards. We would finally be able to indulge in American milk with its bovine growth hormone abundance. And we could enjoy sweeter American Oreos and M&Ms, whose US recipes differ from their Canadian equivalents. Imagine the cost savings for American food industry! Definitely worth selling out our country, don’t you think, Mr Jivani?

Our natural resources would become American possessions. Oil, potash, wood, even fresh, drinkable water, would be subject to American whims with no economic or environmental protections. It is what Danielle Smith is working hard to achieve. Energy independence for Americans rather than Canadians, a laudable goal if your objective is to be the leader of an American puppet government in Alberta County.

We would trade the etched image of King Charles for King Trump on our money as we are forced to adopt American currency, selling our discounted resources at domestic rates, no longer able to afford much of anything as the federal minimum wage adopted America’s $7.25 per hour.

Indigenous reconciliation would come to a grinding halt. French language protection would go from a matter of regional cultural identity and political debate to an issue of actual rather than perceived assimilation and oppression. French labels on our candy bars — sorry, chocolate bars now — would be a thing of the past. Want to know which carcinogenic artificial flavours have been added to our deregulated food? You might only know in English, but it would be moot because they would not have to tell you.

With the Trump administration systematically undermining the function of their democracy, currently trying to undermine mail-in voting through presidential executive order, one wonders how much of a say an annexed Canada would have in our own political future.

The Americans would probably grant us a passport, labelled something like the “United States of America - Canadian Administrative Region,” complete with a regional flag clearly showing us as a possession. It would drop us from 7th to 10th on the passport freedom index at minimum. We would have everything that makes us Canadian taken from Canada, but do not believe for a second that annexation would be followed with full citizenship. Canada is far too multicultural and entirely too socialist a nation for the Americans to absorb wholesale. The subsidiary passport would not come with the full rights of American citizens, such as participation in what is left of their elections.

The last thing the MAGA Republicans in charge would ever allow is for Canadians to be granted a vote in American elections, though we might still be granted some token amount of democratic selection for our regional leadership, possibly even up to and including our governor.

If granted statehood, we would receive 2 Senate seats. But with the Senate often balancing on the knife-edge of majority in their two party system, that is not likely. Nor would we get the 40 or so Congressmen that statehood would grant us. Far too many would likely be Democrats — and the Sanders/AOC/Al-Sayed/Mamdani flavour of Democrats at that — for them to handle our voices.

At best, we might be offered the Puerto Rican model of a “Resident Commissioner” who can attend and speak in Congress, but cannot vote. There to observe the destruction coming our way without even token power to obstruct it.

When we look at what the quisling Conservative leaders in Canada want when they offer us up on a silver platter to the American dictatorship, we must understand what is on the table. It is not a mere matter of free passage at the border — there is no guarantee they would even remove border checkpoints for us common folk — but of undermining everything that makes Canada.

Quisling leaders like Jivani and Smith are doing vastly more than offering settlement and partnership with the Americans. They’re offering up Canada as little more than a meal to hungry American oligarchs and the fascist movement they are backing.

Fighting and winning this unprovoked trade war is about a lot more than tariffs and gas pump prices. It is about defending the very existence of Canada as an independent, sovereign country, the seriousness of which cannot be overstated.

What would the deal entail? We can infer from Mark Carney’s lengthy speech announcing withdrawal from trade negotiations what the Americans want from us, and it is not complicated.

Trump has the subtlety of a nuclear blast and the intellectual capacity of the gold leaf that defines his life. He has told us what he wants since returning to the White House, clearly, unambiguously, repetitively.

He does not want a deal with Canada. He does not want trade with Canada. He does not want partnership with Canada. He does not want cooperation with Canada. He does not peace with Canada. He does not want Canada to exist as its own entity.

He wants Canada to be annexed into the United States, its resources to be American resources, its land to be American land, its people to be American people — at least the white, English-speaking ones.

David Graham

Venezuela, Canada, and the Donroe Doctrine

Yesterday’s illegal and violent annexation of Venezuela should dispel any remaining notion that the United States is a functioning democratic country worthy of any form of respect on the world stage. This was Trump’s Czechoslovakia and Canada is precariously positioned as his Austria…

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10 months ago · 34 likes · 2 comments · David Graham

Canada is a vast, rich land, and, on the Mercator projection, it is vastly largely than the United States. Trump wants Canada and he wants Greenland so that he can own the biggest country in the world as part of his real estate empire, while increasing the pool of people who need to buy access to him to accomplish anything. He wants our energy and natural resources because the people that already openly bribe him tell him to want it, just as they tell him to wage an expensive war in the Middle East to make all of them that much richer.

Mark Carney wants Canada to be strong, to protect its multilingual and multicultural traditions, to be economically autonomous and resilient in the face of adversity and uncertainty. He understands the need to diversify our economy and our international relationships, to break our dependency on the only country ever to have posed a direct military threat to our own.

Poilievre, though, has shown no interest or desire to protect Canada, Canadian interests, Canadian health, Canadian values. He has built his leadership around the grievance politics and self-interest that carried the MAGA movement to power in the United States. Like Trump, he advocated against vaccine mandates while getting vaccinated himself. Collective health, collective interest, is not in his vocabulary.

So faced with the same administration, faced with a list of demands from the Trump White House, Poilievre would not have fought for Canada. It is unreasonable to the point of ridicule to think he would have. He would have sought validation and vindication from his idols in the MAGA movement on whose model he built his own leadership.

Vice president JD Vance referred to him as “this guy Pierre Poilievre or something,” reminding us — and him — of his utter irrelevance today. That is harder to swallow for someone like him than the loss of sovereignty for the country he leads would be.

With Poilievre, we would have traded our sovereignty and our autonomy for the Pyrrhic victory of an agreement with Trump. We would be folding up our supply management industry, as his mentor Harper did when he allowed the Canadian Wheat Board to be sold to Saudi Arabian interests. We would be aligning our food safety regime with America’s collapsing food safety systems. We would be locking into the F-35s and the American defence industrial ecosystem rather than escaping it when the single greatest military and economic threat to Canada is the American defence industrial ecosystem.

His objective is to maintain economic access to the United States, whatever the cost.

Every time Poilievre agreed to an American demand, the Americans would have made another demand, and Poilievre would have agreed to that, too. He would have embraced the idea of being the governor of Canada, of being a part of the American empire in all but name.

He would probably have avoided the bulk of the tariffs, he would have stood tall on the burning embers of Canadian independence, he would have avoided American aggression, and he would have done it all by folding, acquiescing, and participating in it, systematically eliminating our sovereignty while telling us that we are stronger for being within American protection, complete with our very own Flock cameras.

So yes, his supporters are right: Poilievre would probably have a deal where Carney does not.

And what a deal CUSMAGA would have been.

Aside from the questionable premise shared by many that Trump’s departure will either happen on schedule, or suddenly restore the United States to its Obama-era self as if nothing happened over the past decade, it is an admission of the fallacies underpinning the Quebec separatist movement.

If Quebec will truly be stronger on its own, why does it need Canada to defend it from the United States? If having Trump in power will prevent an honest debate on separation, what would be different under, say, Vance? What does it say about the movement, and the debate, if the occupant of the White House is even relevant to it?

The reality is that the province’s separatist movement recognises itself in Trumpism and does not like what it sees. The MAGA movement and the separatist movement are both ethnic supremacist movements built around grievances directed at the wrong adversaries, at scapegoats rather than at those who actually caused our very real issues.

The tremendous problems in our society today are not caused by people speaking languages other than French on Montreal’s West Island any more than they are caused by Spanish-speaking slightly darker undocumented labourers working for slave wages across the United States.

David Graham

The Message Is The Same

Quebec’s nationalists are in overdrive trying to dissociate themselves from an overtly white-supremacist rally in Shawinigan over the weekend — but the slogan “I remember a white Quebec” is not far from the Bloc’s own “Quebec is us” campaign featuring almost exclusively white francophones, and their anger is profoundly disingenuous…

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5 months ago · 19 likes · 5 comments · David Graham

Having an exclusively French Quebec where non-white-francophones are pushed out through every available means will not resolve the economic problems of the region any more than having an exclusively white, English-speaking United States would. Asserting an ethnolinguistic majority will not end economic disparity, housing shortages, systemic underemployment, or even prevent degradation of the local language — oligarchs plunder and pit us against each other regardless of spoken language.

It is entirely possible to protect, invest in, and develop French language and culture without the negative overtones of ethnically exclusive policy. The European Union has more than two dozen official languages, and the people of Europe mostly speak their own cultural and regional languages while also learning fluent English — and somehow the continent has not collapsed back into the internecine wars of past centuries or seen its languages die at scale. It is only impossible if one takes the view that only an ethnically pure society can protect its own heritage.

In that, many countries succeeded, including Canada, in virtually wiping out their Indigenous languages through the imposition of majority language and culture. For the movements in question, this approach to the matter of minority language and culture has not reached its conclusion.

In that, the separatist worldview is similar to the MAGA worldview. Ethnic supremacy, the inferiority of other peoples and their cultures and languages, is the driving force. The separatists do not protect French in Canada’s other nine provinces, all of which have significant francophone communities. They do not seek to unify and protect the French language in its own right. Their narrow interpretation of their own identity is all that matters. The MAGAnauts will accept horrific economic and social conditions for themselves, provided that everyone else — anyone they see as an ‘other’ — is treated worse. They are the logical conclusion of the supremacist mindset. And the two are remarkably similar.

The PQ does understand that Quebec needs Canada to protect them from the MAGA world. They recognise that now is not the time to be dividing Canada when there is a much bigger threat south of the border that exposes their own movement by having a both equal and opposite perspective — equal on how, opposite on who. They can also see the Alberta separatist movement and its overt proximity to the Trump cult, and they know that the two discrete separatist movements are largely viewed through the same lens by those who do not support them.

They recognise that weakening Canada weakens Quebec where it actually matters. That Canada, locked in a domestic debate about its own existence cannot also survive an international debate on the same question. That given the choice of their own ethnolinguistic supremacy or being victims of the similar behemoth next door, they need their existing partnership to survive. Yet they keep the door propped open to a third referendum once Trump is gone, believing the international status quo that gives them the luxury of their imposed uncertainty will return.

So when Plamondon tells Quebec that he will not hold a referendum before January 20th, 2029, when Trump’s successor is scheduled to take charge of what is left of the United States, he is admitting that Quebec, in real terms, will not be better off on its own, that it is not equipped to defend its interests or its languages without the weight of Canada behind them, that their own ideas at macro scale will harm them, not only the oppressors they have imagined into existence.

They are maintaining the premise of eventual statehood — just as soon as they no longer need the rest of Canada to protect them. Like the American administration they hope to outlive, they are tacitly admitting to being users, taking without ever giving back.