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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a month 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 day 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 day 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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2 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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6 days 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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15 days 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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11 days 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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8 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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3 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.

The Cambridge English dictionary has several definitions of capitalism. It splits the noun in two based on context, and this distinction says a lot more than its words.

In politics, reads the definition, a capitalist is “a person who supports capitalism.”

In economics, continues the definition, a capitalist is “a person who invests large amounts of money in a business or businesses.”

Capitalism, for its, part, is defined in the same dictionary as “an economic system based on private ownership of property and business, with the goal of making the greatest possible profits for the owners.”

And there is the trouble. Making a profit is not, on its own, the problem. The “greatest possible profits” is. The idea that every worker, every client, every provider has to be pushed to the breaking point, to externalise expenses onto society at large, to squeeze out a few more dollars for the owner class that wants another yacht, is neither a necessary aspect of a free market economy nor even an original feature of capitalism.

Extremist right-wing economist Milton Friedman is often blamed for this current situation. His 1970 New York Times op-ed “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” was so defining in capitalist philosophy that the article remains available without, I note with a hint of irony, being paywalled some 56 years after its publication.

Friedman’s ideas are horrific but they are easy to understand and hard to refute. They were bought wholesale by the capitalist class, eager to accept moral justification for their greed. The whole basis of his op ed is that business has no social responsibility, that corporations are not participating members of society but rather their only purpose is to extract wealth from the economy and funnel it to those who run them.

After half a century, these ideas have resulted in inequality, social destruction, and environmental destruction on levels the pre-revolutionary French would not be able to grasp.

Billionaire capitalist Nick Hanauer gave a Ted talk in 2014 in which he warned the capitalist class to get control of themselves, and that doing so would be to their own benefit. That the only two possible outcomes from where we are headed — 12 years ago — is toward either revolution or a police state.

The western capitalist experiment has been so successful, its propaganda so effective, that revolution remains remarkably unlikely. But it does not take much looking to find strong evidence of the United States being a police state, with Canada and other western democracies only being more tame in our defence of Friedman’s underlying philosophy. We are not on a different path, we are only years behind.

When I look at what capitalism means, I have no trouble with the idea that we can have a free market economy, but I cannot accept that profit without responsibility can be its only function.

We may be surrounded and governed by capitalism — but that does not make us capitalists.

The federal government does not have direct jurisdiction over numerous aspects of the country. A key one is minimum wage which, while it has been steadily rising across Canada while being frozen for the past 17 years in the US, is still at a level insufficient for most people to pay rent in most of the country. Canada Housing’s table of what income levels have what housing budgets seen next to Statistics Canada’s table of average rents across the country shows this disconnect.

Canada’s federal minimum wage applies to a minuscule fraction of the workforce. For the vast majority of minimum wage workers, provincial minimum wages apply. Anyone who works any job should make enough to live — very few people take work for the sheer joy of working rather than for the income it provides. But it means the federal government has extremely limited tools to ensure all of our citizens can expect to be paid a living wage. There is, however, one tool we have not used that we might consider: the criminal code. The drafting instructions for such a legislative change might read something like the following. Amend the criminal code of Canada to:

Make it an offence to knowingly pay an employee an amount insufficient to provide a reasonable standard of living including the real cost of commuting within a reasonable distance of the place of work without requiring outside income, subsidies, grants, or other government programs, when measured on a pro-rata basis against a 37.5 hour work week, punishable by an administrative monetary penalty equivalent to twice the minimum difference, restitution and, for repeat offenders, penalties up to and including the revocation of the corporate charter and possible jail time for the individual or individuals responsible for the the application of the illegal monetary remuneration policy.

David Graham

How Minimum Wage Should Work

There is no excuse for any employer to pay any full time worker less than the realistic cost of living within reasonable proximity of their place of employment. Minimum wage needs to be reformed, not just as a dollar amount, but as a concept. And it should be enforced under criminal rather than civil law. To criminally underpay someone does not have to …

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a year ago · 11 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

The same principle can be applied to many problems around, for example, corporate responsibility, corruption, climate change, wealth disparity, waste, or malicious public policy.

The disposable culture we have invented over the past century is in many ways a crime against humanity. We laugh about banning plastic straws in what is an obviously completely symbolic gesture. We should be taking it further. Recycling is not a game, something we do at home but forget about at work or on vacation. Selling or distributing products without a realistic lifecycle plan is to externalise a significant portion of the costs associated with its production, distribution, sale, and use.

We can chastise consumers for throwing out recyclables and compostables, or we can go to the root of the problem that makes it difficult to dispose of properly in the first place. It is perfectly reasonable to require every aspect of a fast food or take out meal, for example, to be sold entirely in compostable packaging, all of which must be taken by back the vendor. There are even bioplastics — including straws — that will break down in industrial compost facilities. It is possible to have our consumerist comforts and some modicum of environmental responsibility coexist.

Planned obsolescence is the idea that we build products and technology knowing that when we sell it, a certain period of time from now it will no longer be useful and have to be disposed of. There is no requirement for the manufacturer to take it back and deal with it. There is a strong financial incentive to do this. Who still uses the indestructible Nokia phones of 25 years ago? Or iPhones from just five years ago? How about that fridge from 1970 that won’t die? What hardware can’t do, software takes care of, if we take a moment to recall Apple’s settlement over deliberately slowing down older phones using software updates.

Products intended for consumption that vent directly to the atmosphere don’t even have the appearance of a plan. Fossil fuels are designed to combine with airborne oxygen and be expelled into the ether, but even electric cars also shed things like tire particulate. None of these have anything resembling a lifecycle plan — they are entirely left to society at large to deal with.

Deliberate action that contributes to climate change is another moral crime that is rewarded through capitalist dogma rather than dealt with through justice.

All of this, if manufacturers and distributors are not willing to address the problem, can be addressed as a criminal matter.

Alaska has a specific crime called “wanton waste” which addresses the failure to consume hunted meat and carries a year in jail. Such perspective must not be limited to the casual hunter.

To continue our drafting instructions, we might suggest:

Any person (including a corporation) who, through the manufacture, distribution, or sale of any product that, if not recycled through a practical and provided method, is known or suspected to cause impact to climate or the environment is guilty of the offence of wanton disregard for the planet.

Punishment should be tangible. Rather than nuisance-level financial penalties that the biggest offenders would not even notice, they should rise to the revocation of corporate charters and the liquidation or seizure of all related assets. Administrative monetary penalties should, by design, exceed the cost of good behaviour. By having it be a criminal matter with real consequence applied equally across the entire economy, no corporation would feel compelled to disregard their moral and environmental responsibility in the interest of staying competitive — their competitors will face the same requirements and consequences.

We treat drug addiction, homelessness, and poverty as problems of crime, but we do not recognise that the people we charge with those crimes are the victims, not the perpetrators, of those crimes, which are generally born of public policy choices.

Public policy itself should be a matter of criminal law. If politicians make policy that deliberately impoverishes, segregates, imperils, or otherwise endangers people or populations, why is there no criminal liability for that? Honest attempts to make better policy that do not work out are one thing and what politics is supposed to be about, but knowingly bringing forward public policy designed to worsen class divides or drive worse outcomes for specific segments of the population, and selling out our future health and viability for short term gain shows, by its nature, criminal intent.

It may be possible to hold employers criminally liable for underpaying their employees or corporations responsible for destroying the environment — but it must also be possible to hold policymakers criminally liable for the continued existence of homelessness or the continued runaway catatrasophe of climate change which are also, fundamentally, policy choices.

If we want to fully fund law enforcement, we ought to point them at the real problems.

Canadian English is an odd hybrid of British and American spelling. The loss of the ‘u’ in a number of words like colour and flavour south of the border is said to be an artefact of cost-cutting, when printing charged by the letter, while we savoured the 21st letter, though there are other contributing factors. We also tend to ‘Americanize’ the ends of some words, so we ought to keep the centre but galvanise the write.

To normalise the use of -ise over -ize would be to move Canada’s on-going boycott of the United States right into the dictionary, to remind ourselves that while we are proximate, we are not the same and assert our cultural independence from the United States, one cheque at a time.

It is often said that Canadians speak American and spell British. It is unlikely that when we open up the bonnet of the language we would begin describing lorries driving on our nation’s dual carriageways, but we could throw petrol on this tyre fire by considering it.

The use of written language as a tool of assertive cultural definition has precedent. The father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, switched the country and the language from Arabic-based to Latin-based characters in 1928 in an attempt to modernise and westernise the country in the years following the collapse of the Ottoman empire.

But he was hardly the first. Indigenous cultures across North America adopted writing systems starting with the Cherokee syllabary in the 1820s, inspired by European writing systems but deliberately distinct from it. Canadian syllabics followed within a generation and gained widespread adoption. All could have simply used or based their writing on the Latin alphabet, but opted to retain and distinguish their own cultures with the purpose-built writing systems.

David Graham

The Gift Of Indigenous Languages

As the country largely grinds to a halt to celebrate Christmas today, it is worth considering some of the most important gifts we have been given — and at what cost. The Indigenous peoples have given up their lands, their cultures, and their languages, leaving profound influences on our society whose origins we seldom recognise…

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2 years ago · 15 likes · David Graham

Ukraine, now four and a half years into resisting Russia’s three day military operation, has a rising movement to consider abandoning their Cyrillic writing system, associated with Russia, in favour of a Latin-based written interpretation of their language. While it is not on the verge of happening, the existence of the discussion is a reminder of the profound role of the symbolism of written language.

Canada’s distinct flavour of English, with bits borrowed from both British and American versions of the language, is and has long been its own cultural statement. With the rising aggression of the United States, an appropriate defence is to overtly reject the insidious rise of Americanised spelling and verbiage. We must escape the grey zone of an ambiguous alliance where we are constantly attacked, then attacked again for pushing back, while being told we must retain a status quo no longer in our national or cultural interest. Our connexion with the Americans has been broken.

I encourage Mark Carney and the federal government to pursue their policy of diverging from American writing, American policy, and American dependence. It is a subtle but important way of showing that our subservience is being stuffed into our national boot, that Canada is further away from American statehood than at any time since Monroe. And it is being done in the most understated, Canadian way.

Yesterday, we learned that Donald Trump-owned Truth Social is selling API access to Donald Trump’s tweets for $100,000 per month. The value? He says things that influence the market, and if you want to beat the market’s organic reaction, having access to those posts seconds faster can make you a fortune.

Dean Blundell

BREAKING: Trump Is Now Charging $100K A Month To Let You Steal Money With Him.

August 1, 2026…

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a month ago · 501 likes · 75 comments · Dean Blundell

This brazen corruption is not unique. He has turned the presidency into his personal money printer. Worse, the entire American political establishment is going along with it, not only the MAGA Republicans.

The fact that American politicians can and do trade stocks and invest on the basis of information they learn from the positions they hold is mind boggling. There is no incentive to act in the public interest when their congressional salary is not their only source of income nor even their primary source. It is so rampant and wide-spread that the financial disclosures of their conflicts of interest don’t even make the news any more. Campaign Legal has gathered the data, showing that nearly half of American Congressmen and Senators hold individual stocks (rather than only investment or index funds), with only a thin majority of them being Republicans.

There are people on the American left, in office, with integrity, who understand what is happening and what needs to happen, who are calling it for what it is. That they are not participating in that corruption is what is preventing them from having sufficient power and resources to deal with it.

The old Democrat establishment are more concerned with Zohran Mamdani than they are with Donald Trump. They are more worried about a social democratic mayor fixing things that “centrists” have said could not be fixed than they are about a president who is destroying everything they claim to stand for, about Bernie Sanders or AOCs’ popularity than their own neoliberal policy failures.

It can only be assumed that they are enjoying cashing in on the instability and volatility being created by the president, that they do not want to kill the golden goose.

To address the president’s overt corruption, they also have to acknowledge and address their own practices. They have to seal the holes in their own ethical rules and conduct. Instead, letting the president make billions of dollars through crypto, branding, and selling access and services offers cover to those making more discreet fortunes. They can get angry while quietly laughing all the way to the bank.

I have been struggling to understand why their country as a whole continues to act like this president is somehow normal, that the differences of opinion and action are little more than partisanship. That the corruption is just this man being himself.

Glass Empires By W. A. Lawrence

Democrats Lack a Unified Plan to Counter a Republican Refusal to Seat Midterm Winners

A certified election victory may no longer guarantee a seat in Congress. The House majority can deny the oath, while courts may decline review. Mike Johnson kept Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva wai…

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a month ago · 173 likes · 62 comments · W. A. Lawrence

Meanwhile, Trump is systematically dismantling the core structures of American democracy while ripping off the people for every dollar he can get his hands on. Even the war he is waging in Iran is more about market manipulation and making himself and his enablers — I doubt he has any genuine friends — rich.

Selling stock trading companies quicker access to his market manipulation is quite literally announcing his own corruption while inviting high rollers to buy into it. It is to dare the country, the judicial system, the political system, the people, to do something about it. It is a statement that he is so corrupt and that the system is so beyond repair that he does not even have to pretend it is anything else.

Where are the American people? This is way past a simple vote in the midterms. It is not something that can be solved with a form letter sent to a member of congress. It will take concrete collective action — something that a country built around the idea of individualism is not prone to doing — to address the kakistocratic kleptomaniacs currently in charge of their country.

David Graham

Where Are The American People??

What do you do when there is a war in which neither side deserves to win? The American attack on Iran has opened wide the reality of the situation for the rest of the world, but the American people appear to be completely paralysed, unwilling or unable to rise to the occasion and react effectively…

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5 months ago · 30 likes · David Graham

While no Conservative government has taken Canada from deficit to surplus since the 19th century, and economic outcomes are consistently better for the general public under both Liberals and Democrats, the right wing has successfully sold the notion that they are the great defenders of the economy.

As the Trump administration is proving, once again, the only part of the American economy that is doing well is the owner class. Those with enough assets to have real investments are making a killing. The ever-increasing proportion of the population working for subsistence — if that — wages are getting destroyed. For Trump, the “golden age” he describes is referring to his own assets and those of his supporters.

The American right is accusing the left of being communists while taking control of the means of production in what even the right-wing Cato institute refers to as “state capitalism.” Under Trump, the US government has heavily and often forcibly invested in numerous corporations, often blatantly exchanging equity for regulatory approval.

The QAnon movement, if you recall that conspiratorial underpin of the MAGA world, is built on the premise that the west is controlled by the “deep state” who are a sadistic group of child molesters — who will be arrested and executed by Donald Trump. The idea that Trump could possibly be a sex offender after having that backing seems unreasonable to his supporters, but the spread of this wild notion, again, appears to have been far more of a confession.

It is hard to get accurate facts out about any of it as what they call the “liberal media” is increasingly a wholly owned subsidiary of the MAGA movement. The more they accuse the media of a left wing bias, the further to the right goes the media.

The Republicans are a homophobic lot, overwhelmingly opposed to nearly all gay rights, gender fluidity of any sort, and especially sexual contact between people of the same sex, rooted in a Christian ‘family values’ philosophy that sees women as subservient to men, and homosexuality as breaking that hierarchy. Yet Grindr, the gay hook-up app, consistently crashes during major Republican events. And it is ‘family values’ Conservatives who keep getting caught in homosexual relationships. Once again, the accusation is the confession, made all the more ironic in that if they had not locked themselves in the closet and shouted about its existence, nobody would actually have cared what they did in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

In Canada, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre caters to this viewpoint, having once again explicitly refused to attend any of this year’s Pride events.

Bubble Pop with Rachel Gilmore

Poilievre is 'not planning to' attend any Pride parades. Here's why that actually really matters!

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has confirmed he will not be attending any Pride parades this year — something that might not come as a surprise to anyone who has been watching his rhetoric lately…

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2 months ago · 168 likes · Rachel Gilmore

Poilievre’s consistent accusations against Mark Carney should be taken in the same light. Poilievre’s anger at Carney standing up to Trump’s illegal tariffs, his outrage at Carney getting the Gordie Howe bridge open, his description of Carney living on the public purse, are all confessions. Poilievre would not have defended Canada against Trump, he could not have gotten that bridge open, and he has been living on government money for more than 20 years, even refusing to leave the publicly-funded opposition mansion at Stornoway after losing his election.

That last bit had plenty of precedent. Preston Manning famously derided Stornoway through his time in public life until he became leader of the official opposition in 1997 entitling him to the residence by virtue of his office. After some brief public hesitation, he decided that he should live in the building he had promised to turn into a bingo hall.

The notion that “all politicians are the same” is an essential part of right wing philosophy, masking their own malfeasance behind an intellectually lazy premise.

The objective of all of these is to neuter criticism of their own actions. A public that has been told that the left cannot balance a budget or manage the economy will not blame the right for not being able to, because it is easier to accept that all politicians are incompetent than that they believed the liars.

Right wing government buying up or taking control of private enterprise and the means of production is not communism because communism is bad.

The traditional and social media world being almost entirely owned by far-right oligarchs is justified as a perfectly reasonable counterpoint to liberal media bias.

Republican leadership having so many sex offenders at the top is not an issue because the crazy left wing deep state does it too!

Right wing leaders living on public salaries and housing subsidies while buying up real estate portfolios and shutting the poor out of the housing market is not a problem because the Prime Minister dares to live in his de facto official residence!

David Graham

Jamil Jivani Followed Stephen Harper's Example

While we listen to former Prime Minister Stephen Harper call on Canadians to “‘make any sacrifice necessary’ to protect Canada’s independence and unity,” we need only remember the letter he published in the Wall Street Journal attacking Jean Chrétien for keeping us out of the US-led war in Iraq…

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7 months ago · 65 likes · 1 comment · David Graham

Which takes us to Jamil Jivani, the Conservative MP who brags about being university friends with American vice president JD Vance. The one who traveled to Washington to negotiate on Canada’s behalf without any such mandate. The one more comfortable with American leaders and philosophies than Canada’s. He has spent this week accusing Mark Carney of wanting to be the leader of the Democrats.

It is an absurd argument, barely worth dignifying with a response, except that it was published in that bastion of liberal media bias, the National Post. His premise is that Carney met Josh Shapiro, Elissa Slotkin, and Pete Buttigieg, all potential candidates for the Democratic nomination in the 2028 election, back in May at an event organised by the Center for American Progress.

Jivani states in his bizarre op-ed: “Canada needs leadership that will do what’s necessary, not what’s fashionable. That means treating Canadian families as a priority, not chasing international applause or globalist approval.”

While he is accusing Carney of wanting to lead the Democrats, something which Carney would have no interest, reason, or even American constitutional ability to do, it is Jivani who has been spending his time in office trying to be a part of the Trump administration, to portray himself as a leader in the Republican movement and its Canadian subsidiary, while seeking international applause and American approval. To paraphrase his own conclusion, Bowmanville—Oshawa North deserves a Member of Parliament who will put Canada first.

It is increasingly clear that Jivani intends to succeed Poilievre, to take over the Maple MAGA movement, and to continue the Conservative path toward Canadian subservience to American interests as little more than a vassal state.

The accusation is, once again, the confession.

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

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

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

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

David Graham

American Succession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Warning with Steve Schmidt

Lindsey knew better. He chose worse.

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

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2 months ago · 2705 likes · 207 comments · Steve Schmidt

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

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

Geddry

Containment With A Pocket Square

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

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2 months ago · 142 likes · 3 comments · Mary Geddry

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

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

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

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

Concis Canada

Canada Picks Germany

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

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2 months ago · 167 likes · 37 comments · Shankar Narayan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Graham

Private Money In Politics Is The Root Of Our Rot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Graham

Canada's Fragile Place In The World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dean Blundell

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

Pete Hoekstra is throwing himself a party today…

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2 months ago · 1044 likes · 84 comments · Dean Blundell

Charlie Angus / The Resistance

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

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

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2 months ago · 532 likes · 117 comments · Charlie Angus / The Resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Graham

Progressives Lack Ambition

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

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a year ago · 14 likes · David Graham

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

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

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

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

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

The Knowledge Architect

The Problem They Needed

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3 months ago · 15 likes · The Vertical Dispatch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Graham

The Philanthropy Myth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Graham

The Lighter Side of Hill Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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