By: Al Vigier

Three weeks ago, the Canadian federal government released “AI for All” and named itself the “strategic anchor customer” for Canadian artificial intelligence. The pitch is that Ottawa will buy from sovereign Canadian businesses and drag a lagging country forward.

Only about 12 per cent of Canadian businesses use AI, and barely eight per cent of small firms do. Ottawa’s new strategy wants 60 per cent by 2034. Government buying is supposed to lead the way.

The inconvenient part is that the government is already a serious AI customer. It just buys American, and it buys quietly.

Consider Palantir, one of the bigger U.S. firms in the space.

The Department of National Defence signed a contract with its Canadian arm in March 2020, starting at $14.4 million. It was never disclosed. More than a dozen amendments later, the value had climbed to about $44.4 million by last October, with roughly $46.8-million actually spent. A separate $3.7 million Defence contract surfaced only after a Conservative MP pressed the government on its AI spending.

The Ontario Provincial Police have run Palantir’s Gotham platform since
2015. These are precisely the data-fusion and decision-support systems the new strategy says Canada must own. Ottawa is buying them. From a foreign vendor. Behind a wall of “not for public disclosure.”

So when a strategy promises to anchor sovereign AI, the fair question is not whether the government will buy. It already does. The question is whether it will buy in the open, from Canadian firms, under rules it is willing to show the public. Nothing in “AI for All” forces that. The document is loud about building a sovereign AI base and silent about the foreign systems already running inside Defence and policing.

Look at what the strategy actually funds: $500-million to take equity stakes in promising businesses, $700 million more for compute power, a Trusted AI Certification program, and a missions program starting in health. Notice the common thread. Not one of those is a purchase order.

A government reaches for equity and certification schemes precisely when buying is hard, because writing a clean contract to a small sovereign vendor is the one thing its procurement machinery is built to slow down. Grants and equity are what you offer when you cannot, or will not, simply buy the product. Even the one procurement promise arrives wrapped in process: the strategy routes faster AI buying through a new Office of Digital Transformation: an office, not a mandate to write cheques to Canadian vendors.

The equity idea should worry company founders who might find themselves approached by a government looking to invest. A state that takes a stake in your company takes a seat at your table and plants a doubt in the mind of every allied investor who might otherwise back you. Government-built national champions have a long record of becoming wards of the state rather than competitors in a market. Canada does not need to own its AI companies. It needs to buy from them, in daylight, the way it has quietly been buying from Palantir for years.

Then there is the choice to launch the missions program in health, the most privacy-bound, risk-averse, slowest-procuring corner of the state. If you wanted to prove that public AI buying can work, you would start where decisions are already high-consequence and where the law already demands an audit trail. There are the courts, public safety, and defence. Beginning in health is choosing the venue most likely to stall in pilots for three years, then call the delay a lesson learned.

The test of an anchor customer, as Ottawa wants to be, is binary. Did it buy, in the open, from Canadian firms? There are other things it can do. Make the source lists usable by companies under 50 people instead of treating a security questionnaire as a moat for incumbents. Set a hard floor with a fixed share of every department’s AI budget spent on Canadian-controlled products, not foreign platforms or Canadian-flagged consulting. Hold those Canadian systems to the same auditability the public never got to see in the Palantir files. Then publish the receipts every quarter.

I run Caseway, a Vancouver company that builds the kind of auditable, sovereign decision-support software this strategy claims to want, so weigh my motives accordingly. I also not that I am not asking Ottawa to fund me. I am asking it to do the harder, less photogenic thing it keeps avoiding. They should buy Canadian AI the way it already buys the foreign kind, only out loud. Until then, “AI’s first customer” is a slogan stapled to a country that has been someone else’s customer all along.

Al Vigier is the founder and CEO of Caseway, a Vancouver-based automation and AI company, and a veteran of the Canadian Army, where he was medically released after getting shot.

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

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Hey, everyone. Happy weekend. Happy Father’s Day, to those observing and/or celebrating. And there’s no better way to celebrate than by sitting back and enjoying the latest episode of The Line Podcast.

Also enjoy last week’s episode of On The Line, where Jen Gerson speaks with Mark Kawar, an amateur historian and journalist whose book America But Bigger explores a surprisingly persistent feature of American history: attempts to expand the United States beyond its current borders.

And now, on with the dispatch.

Last week’s stories were dominated by developments on the international front.

Prime Minister Mark Carney was abroad once again. He made a heartwarming visit to Ireland, his ancestral homeland, visiting his family’s home village and meeting with some of his relatives there. Then he was off for a visit to France for the G7. The President of the United States was also there, though he was undoubtedly focused more on Iran than anything else.

More on that later.

Read more

In the latest episode of The Line Podcast, recorded on June 19th, 2026, Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson begin with a foreign affairs roundup. Prime Minister Mark Carney heads to Ireland and France to strengthen ties with Europe while also trying to maintain a workable relationship with Donald Trump. Meanwhile, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visits NATO and delivers some pointed criticism of allies that, while not directed at Canada by name, certainly sounds familiar. Your hosts also discuss the aftermath of America’s confrontation with Iran. Matt argues that the United States has, in practical terms, suffered a defeat — an embarrassing outcome for Trump, but perhaps a useful lesson for the rest of us about the limits of military power.

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Next, they take a quick tour through the provinces. Matt is increasingly worried that Doug Ford could inadvertently throw Canada-U.S. negotiations into chaos, and explains why. Jen provides an update from Alberta, where the political situation remains bizarre. By the end of the segment, both hosts arrive at a grim conclusion: the incentives facing almost every major political actor now reward escalation, confrontation, and nastiness. That rarely ends well.

This episode of The Line Podcast is also brought to you by BioCanRx, a federally-funded Canadian not-for-profit research network helping Canadian researchers bring treatments from labs to patients in clinical trials — all in Canada.

Every day, your immune system finds and destroys different types of threats — both external invaders like viruses, and internal dangers like pre-cancerous cells in your own body. But cancer can sometimes evade detection. Researchers are working to identify flags found on cancer cells, called antigens. By training your immune system to recognize these antigens, immunotherapy can help your immune system destroy cancer.

In addition to funding clinical trials, BioCanRx supports research teams who identify these cancer antigens, and find new ways to target them. Many challenges remain — and we’re working on solving them. You’ll hear more over the summer. For now, go to BioCanRx.com to learn more.

Finally, Jen disappears down one of her trademark rabbit holes and emerges with a sweeping explanation of how she came to fully appreciate the sheer economic power of the United States. Somehow, this journey involves gas pumps, brisket, beef jerky, the Soviet Union, and the defeat of Imperial Japan in 1945. Your hosts find themselves reflecting on what American economic dominance really means, why it has proven so durable, and what lessons Canada should draw from it as we navigate an increasingly uncertain world.

All that and more in the latest episode of The Line Podcast.

All that and more in the latest episode of The Line Podcast. As ever, like and subscribe.

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Please sign up at those options not just for this episode, or future episodes of The Line Podcast, but so that you can also receive our other podcast series, On the Line, which releases new episodes every Tuesday morning. In case you missed it, here is last Tuesday’s episode, where Jen Gerson spoke with Mark Kawar, an amateur historian and journalist whose book America But Bigger explores a surprisingly persistent feature of American history: attempts to expand the United States beyond its current borders.

Thanks, all. Talk to you soon.

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

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By: Jen Gerson

Those who listened to our podcast last week will know that I may have stumbled upon a Grand Theory of U.S.-Canada relations that is both hilarious and extremely uncomfortable for every party involved.

It all came about last week when Simon & Schuster Canada announced the forthcoming publication of former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland’s book Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider’s View of Dealing with a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats, and Other Complicated People. The title referred to a remark Freeland made on U.S. TV host Bill Maher’s show, in which he referred to the U.S. as an “Unreliable Boyfriend.”

Unreliable Boyfriend.

Unreliable Boyfriend.

Let those words sink in for just a minute. I did. And the deeper they sank, the more they began to unlock doors in my brain that I did not actually want to know were there. But now I know.

And now you must know them, too. I’m sorry.

Remember when now-Prime Minister Mark Carney announced his leadership candidacy on the Jon Stewart show? Again, on American television. Politician and host instantly fell into banter in reaction to Donald Trump’s threats of annexation. On behalf of a nation, Carney rejected these overtures: “It’s us, not you, it’s us.” And everybody laughed. Because it was funny.

Why was it funny? Why is anything funny? Something is funny when it touches on something that is true but unacknowledged. Comedy is a fleeting glance at taboo.

And what I’m saying here is that hell of a lot of pathological behaviour on both sides of the border of late becomes much more explicable when you start to frame it through a very specific narrative arc. Namely, through the story structure of a rom-com, a twisted meet cute with a few awkward moments of absurdity thrown in to keep it light. Two romantic leads meet, initially they don’t get along. Circumstance throws them together and, despite major obstacles, eventually, they discover they are more compatible than they initially realized. That’s the play.

Unreliable Boyfriend.

Is that not the unstated subtext of almost all of our language to describe the state of our two nations’ strained ... relations?

After I riffed on this theme too extensively on the podcast, I did a little more digging and I fully regret to inform everybody that this theme is not remotely new. There is documented evidence of our mutual horror and attraction dating back more than 150 years.

I asked ChatGPT to pull up some political cartoons on this theme and without any hesitation, it managed to find half a dozen. The idea of a failed American “seducer” — not a conqueror, mind — was so common in Canadian newspapers at the time of Confederation that it became a reliable trope for our political comedians.

Prior to 1867, these images often played on the theme of our colonies as underage daughters protected by parental Britannia. Our nation came of age during the World Wars, after which the language and imagery evolved to reflect something like a settled relationship. Language like “marriage of convenience” was common rhetorical parlance. Mutual goodwill peaked during NAFTA, at which point we were basically leaving our toothbrushes in each others’ bathrooms. Sure, sure, we kept separate bank accounts/currencies, but we were well on our way to sharing Netflix passwords.

Things got rocky in the early 2000s with Iraq, when we wanted to maintain more independence on defence. For our part, we got too cozy and complacent. We should grant that. Our years of declining military spending, matched by growing social spending suggest that the Americans weren’t wrong to be annoyed by our failure to pull our weight.

And who stumbles into the midst of all this tension in 2016, and again in 2024? Donald J. Trump. A literal rapist who put all our backs’ up by making the romantic subtext entirely too explicit with endearments like “cherished 51st State” along with outright threats of economic coercion.

Suddenly, our weaknesses and trusting relations started to make us feel much too vulnerable.

I am going to embarrass many of my Canadian readers to point out that there is a certain asymmetry in the use of romantic or familial language to describe this partnership. Some Americans have used the metaphor of a marriage to describe our alliance — most notably, John F. Kennedy who addressed Parliament in 1961 with: “Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.”

However, on the whole, Americans are more likely to interpret the dynamic through the lens of money. Canadians, however, can’t avoid describing the relationship through the prism of romance.

This explains more about us than we’d like to admit.

We pretend to hate America. We define ourselves against the United States. But we pretty clearly don’t actually dislike Americans, their culture, their schools, their fashion, their warmer weather — their television shows. Oh, but we would never.

Come off it. We clearly love America. So much so, we’ve developed a neurotic inferiority complex about it. We’re flattered by their attention when we receive it, and paradoxically resentful of their insults, neglect, and crude overtures.

Why else would the 51st state stuff bug us so much? Trump gets under our skin because part of us is just a little bit intrigued by the idea. Otherwise, we’d simply laugh it off.

Instead, our response is “lady doth protest too much” Elbows Up kayfabe.

And of course it is.

We are the smaller, weaker partner, both economically and in terms of population size. Unreliable Boyfriend — at the risk of being castigated for my heteronormativity, the title even assumes the stereotypical gender roles. Canadians are the passive, the pursued. Our own national identity is too fragile to survive that pursuit. True partnership is impossible; consent is self annihilation. We’d be gobbled up and consumed. We’d become American.

Hence the brittle shell of identity protection, which so often comes off as shallow anti-Americanism. We assert ourselves in opposition to The Other.

That said, I don’t think the Americans are as indifferent to us as they like to play it, either. Sure, they may run the world and have more going on than us. The asymmetry of power and attention is real and substantial. But Americans pretend to ignore Canada more than they actually do.

I wish they forgot we existed, but I think there’s something weirdly fascinating to the American psyche about Americans who aren’t Americans. We’re familiar enough to be plausible partners, but just different enough to be intriguing.

When they do pay attention to us, we are the object of their own cultural insecurities and desires. Their left projects their own preference for more social welfare and a more just and compassionate society onto us — often minimizing the degree to which our social safety net has led to failures or trade-offs they wouldn’t accept. This is not so different from typical romantic idealization.

Meanwhile, their conservatives project their fears about their own society northwards. One doesn’t have to spend too much time on conservative American media to see a distorted reflection of Canada as a woke shithole paradise of weakness. This, too, isn’t accurate; it’s simply a dark romantic projection, and the root cause of much of the current U.S. administration’s antipathy toward us.

(I will add, here, that while Canada is reliably more progressive than the U.S., “wokeness” has always been an imported strain of American academic culture. Its intellectual frameworks are not native to Canadian political culture at all.)

They may not be as obsessed with us as we are with them, as our ambassador Mark Wiseman recently noted, but this romance isn’t all in our own heads.

I mean, Unreliable Boyfriend. Freeland really gave away the game, here. She’s not even denying that America is our boyfriend. The objection is that America is Unreliable. The fear isn’t annexation — the fear is an exploitative situationship in which Canada never gets fully invited to party with all the other states, with a voice and vote and equal representation. Why buy the cow, when you can get the oil at a discount to world oil prices?

Am I overthinking this? God, have I gone too far with this metaphor? Too late now, I guess.

Anyway, look, the terrible irony of all of this is that all America had to do to get everything it wanted was simply to be polite and gentlemanly about the arrangement. In another 40 to 60 years, the relationship would have been all but official. Instead — no — they had to slip into the populist meth and threaten to beat us and now we’re out here trying to clear out the emergency cash we stashed in the extra underwear drawer before they wake up and notice.

So now Canada is engaged in an extended and maybe pathetic flirtation with Europe and the Nordic states and reading Eat Pray Love. China may be a worse partner than America on every objective measure, but at least we know what we’re getting there. Meanwhile, we’re going to glam up and go full How Stella Got Her Groove Back on the global stage just to regain a little self respect. America may be the bigger, more powerful, sluttier nation — but don’t pretend like he didn’t notice. That Davos speech stung and we all know it.

Look, the Americans like to play it cool, but they’re not entirely succeeding. For too many centuries, we’ve been circling around one another with no clear resolution, and all that tension has to go somewhere. In this case, it’s channelled toward a long list of trade irritants that eat up more emotional and psychological weight than their actual impact on the American economy justify. Do Americans honestly care that much about supply management and softwood lumber, or whether or not our provincial liquor boards sniffily reject their whiskey? Why are they that upset about boos at a hockey game — they don’t even like hockey that much.

They’re just as messed up as we are. Donald Trump is a one-way mirror into the collective shadow of the American soul. Like all narcissists, he’s a master at identifying weakness. He’s coming back to the 51st-state threat over and over again for a reason. It pokes at something unstated about the nature of the relationship. If they didn’t care just a little, they’d forget we existed at all.

These are not the actions of rational and indifferent trade partners. This is how men behave when they resent women they desire: when they’ve lost the internal moral compass that constrains their behaviour to honourable conduct. This is “know your place” energy.

Unreliable Boyfriend, indeed.

Both Canada and America are immature. If we had grown up just a little, we’d both take a deep breath, admit we have feelings for one another. We’d decide, calmly, whether to move forward on terms of a respectable marriage, or to re-establish healthy boundaries/borders while agreeing to live entwined lives as good friends. Maybe even friends with benefits again one day, but at this point, we’d be unwise to promise anything. Burned once, it will take us time to trust again.

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

To contact The Line with a general inquiry or comment, please email info@readtheline.ca. For other ways to connect with us or to follow us on social media, please see our LinkTree.

By: Clarke Ries

The Wolastoqey people, once called the Maliseet, want title to the western half of New Brunswick. Another aboriginal tribe is seeking title to all of the unceded Crown lands in the eastern half.

Interesting times.

The litigation over the fate of a Canadian province is only in the second round or so of what promises to be a 12-round brawl. The preliminary skirmishing resulted in a denial last month by the Supreme Court of Canada of leave to appeal a pre-trial decision by a New Brunswick court that put limits on the remedies the Wolastoqey can attempt to claim.

For a host of reasons, some specific to the facts of their particular lawsuit, the Wolastoqey are now stuck with a claim for monetary compensation when it comes to land they believe has unjustly fallen into private hands — they’re not getting the land itself back.

The reporting on this has been all over the place, claiming everything from total victory for private property rights to no serious change to the status quo. Reading it, one gets the sense of intrepid wire-service reporters from countries without naturally-occurring ice valiantly attempting to describe a hockey game to their editors back home.

Let me take my best shot at explaining the current state of play when it comes to Indigenous land claims.

First, is the Supreme Court denying leave to appeal the same thing as the Supreme Court making a decision?

It all depends on the wording. Sometimes the denial of leave to appeal will include a phrase like, “for the reasons given by the trial judge, leave is denied.” That’s an endorsement, and it turns the ruling of Justice Knowitall of North Nowhere into a Supreme Court of Canada decision that binds the whole country.

Often, though, as with the Wolastoqey decision, the Supreme Court simply says “leave denied.” That’s harder to parse. You can’t assume that the Supreme Court is in complete agreement with Justice Drapeau of the New Brunswick Court of Appeal. It would be especially foolish to quote any particular line from the Wolastoqey decision as if it had received a stamp of approval from the SCC.

But what you can assume is that the Supreme Court believes Drapeau got it close enough to correct on a point of law of incredible national interest that it decided it wasn’t worth meddling.

The denial of leave to appeal is therefore significant, but only a general indication of what to expect when the issues at stake eventually make their way into an SCC decision. The Cowichan decision out of B.C., which made waves last year with a declaration of aboriginal title to private property and government property alike along Richmond’s south shore, remains a prime candidate to receive just such a written decision.

Here’s the second question making the rounds: does the Wolastoqey decision contradict the Cowichan decision? Should we expect after Wolastoqey that Cowichan will be shot down in flames by the SCC?

Although most reports cast the two decisions as taking rival positions, I get the sense that once you look past the technicalities to the practicalities, the two cases have staked out a broadly similar playbook for handling Indigenous land claims.

Let me explain.

There are three interlocking logistical problems with Indigenous land claims that, collectively, give trial judges fits.

The first problem is that we’re talking about dozens of witnesses and linear shelf feet of historical documents. The Cowichan decision handed down last August took almost two years to write, after a trial that lasted four years — and that was without allowing hundreds of pissed-off private property owners to intervene.

On that note, the second problem is that everyone wants a say. In the platonic ideal of a lawsuit, anyone likely to be impacted by its outcome is entitled to be a party to it, but there’s a push and pull on this point when it comes to Indigenous land claims. The impact to private landowners is potentially severe, but a litigation-clogging tsunami of individuals and businesses can reasonably claim to deserve standing.

Adding too many parties to a case that’s already moving at a glacial pace can render a trial functionally impossible, and the courts do care (believe it or not) about ensuring that litigation occurs at the speed of relevance.

The third problem is that even if the parties try to solve the first two problems by only arguing about certain parts of the disputed land, i.e. the bits that don’t belong to private property owners, it’s tough to avoid writing anything in the ruling that might spook the horses.

For example, let’s say a tribe tries to avoid messing with local homeowners by just claiming the north half of a valley, all of which is government land. But, the historical evidence the tribe introduces to claim the north half of the valley conclusively implies that the tribe was unjustly denied title to the entire valley 200 years ago. How does the judge write that up, in the course of giving the tribe only the north half of the valley, without panicking the homeowners living in the south half about what might be coming next?

These were the problems facing the judges in both the Cowichan and Wolastoqey lawsuits, and there were no obvious solutions.

In both lawsuits, the tribe in question didn’t focus its ire on private landowners. The Cowichan made it abundantly clear that they weren’t seeking the return of land held in private hands, just the land currently owned by the government. Similarly, the Wolastoqey dropped their claim against timber interests, railroad companies, and the Irvings, stating that they didn’t want the land owned by those industrial titleholders back after all, just compensation from the government for unjustly giving it away in the first place.

This was not a selfless favour to private landowners. Instead, it was likely a recognition on the part of both tribes of two strategic factors.

First, demanding the mass seizure of private land from homeowners and business interests would be pulling the pin out of a political hand grenade. It’s the sort of thing that gets the constitution rewritten. The court in Wolastoqey described it as the “death knell of reconciliation.”

Second, going after private landowners is a very difficult legal case for First Nations to make, even without judicial concerns about the impact on reconciliation.

To understand why, imagine that while you are on vacation, the Hamburglar steals your house.

He doesn’t fly off in a helicopter with your split-level dangling from a chain. Instead, demonstrating the fiendish criminal ingenuity that first brought him to the attention of the McDonald’s marketing department, the Hamburglar claims to be the owner, sells it to a very nice couple who are none the wiser, and pockets the cash.

You come home with a Mazatlán sunburn to find the new buyers making grilled cheese sandwiches in what they genuinely believe to be their kitchen.

Do you get your house back?

In many Canadian provinces, the answer is no: the moment title to the land transfers to the new buyers, it’s their property forever. Your remedy is to hunt down the Hamburglar (if you can) and attempt to beat the money out of him (if he’s still got it).

The Canadian legal system isn’t cold-hearted, but its highest priority is to maintain the integrity of our land registration system. If the government transfers title from one person to another, no matter how erroneously, that’s the final word on it.

The very nice couple eating lunch in what used to be your kitchen are referred to by their very expensive lawyers as “bona fide purchasers for value without notice,” which I will saw down to the Dahl-esque acronym “BFP” to save on pixels. They had no idea they weren’t dealing with the real owner of the property, they paid market price for your house, and in return they received “fee simple” title to the land: a government declaration that it was theirs, lock, stock and barrel.

Canada’s real-estate transfer system is structured to prevent that nightmare scenario from occurring. Most people, most of the time, don’t need to worry.

That is, unless you find out that the starter house you bought (or, to be inclusive of Canadians of all walks of life, the lumber mill you financed) is potentially sitting on stolen native land.

The full story behind the Cowichan litigation is fascinating, but the short version is good enough to illustrate who realistically has to worry about the solidity of their fee simple title and who doesn’t.

Back when B.C. was a British colony, a Victoria bureaucrat deliberately disobeyed instructions from the governor to reserve for the Cowichan tribe a chunk of land in the Fraser delta that contained their summer village. Instead, he secretly bought that land for himself. The bureaucrat in question should have been buried under the jail, but he was influential in the fledgling colony, corruption was rampant, and everyone chose to turn a deaf ear to the continuing protests of the Cowichan that they had been defrauded of their land.

Over the course of the next century and a half, some of that land was sold to private buyers, who in turn sold it to other private buyers. Other parts of that land became the property of the B.C. government when the private owners defaulted on their taxes.

Now, here’s the critical part.

The trial judge determined that at the time the government came into possession of its landholdings in the area, it damn well knew that the land had been fraudulently transferred out from under the Cowichan.

While Cowichan requests to the government since the 19^th century for the return of their land had been futile (until now), those requests had been noisy and consistent. Although the B.C. government had fee simple title to the land, it lacked the ingredient that makes fee simple title an ironclad guarantee of ownership: the government wasn’t a BFP. It knew at the time of the land transfer that it was receiving the proceeds of a crime — one committed by a government employee in the course of his duties, no less.

Private landowners, on the other hand, had no clue about any of this. They’ve been buying and selling Cowichan land over the past 150 years unaware that the properties were situated on the legal equivalent of Mount Vesuvius. That very obliviousness will likely turn out to be what saves their butts: they’re BFPs.

So, when Justice Young of the British Columbia Supreme Court held that the government’s fee simple title was invalid and defective, she took pains to point out that this had no implication regarding what would happen if the Cowichan ever came after the fee simple title of private property owners.

Her attempted reassurance had approximately zero effect on the voting public’s anxiety levels (nor those of the money markets), due to Logistical Problem #3. You can’t conclude that a corrupt bureaucrat screwed the Cowichan out of their land without coming to the incidental conclusion that the land was, at one time, rightfully the Cowichan’s — even if your ruling only hands the Cowichan the keys to the land currently owned by the government.

Justice Young tried to duct tape the resulting mess together by declaring that it was possible for aboriginal title to exist simultaneously on the same land as the private property owners’ fee simple title. Nobody really seems to have bought it.

Justice Drapeau in New Brunswick took a slightly different approach.

As with the Cowichan case, he’s on the same page as Justice Young that it’s not realistic to allow private property owners to become parties to lawsuits of this nature, which are battles between First Nations and the government in which neither side wants to involve anybody else.

Not only does it burden the lawsuit with too many parties to function, but Drapeau pointed out that when it comes to arguing about historical title disputes dating back prior to the invention of the electric street light, private property owners have nothing of value to add. If your defence is that you didn’t know about a property’s disputed history when you bought it, what could you possibly contribute to an argument about the details of that history except wordless shrieks of panic?

This painted Drapeau into the same corner as Young, though. It’s functionally impossible to include private landowners in a lawsuit about whether the government screwed over an Indigenous group 200 years ago — but, it’s also impossible to decide that lawsuit without ruling on who truly owns the land, which risks prejudicing private landowners if the local First Nation changes its mind and decides to sue private landowners to get its land back down the road.

Much like Justice Young, Justice Drapeau broke out the duct tape, but he patched the hole differently. He disagreed with her that it was possible for aboriginal title and fee simple title to coexist. Instead, he reasoned that there’s a distinction between a finding of aboriginal title and a declaration of aboriginal title.

If all a First Nation wants is financial compensation from the government for land now in the hands of a private landowner, a “finding” of aboriginal title is good enough, wrote Drapeau. Such a finding doesn’t impact the private landowner’s fee simple title, and the landowner doesn’t need to be a party to the lawsuit.

However, if a First Nation does want to actually reclaim land from a private homeowner, then the court needs to make a “declaration” of aboriginal title, the landowner needs to be part of the lawsuit, and if the landowner loses, there goes their fee simple title.

You may be asking what the difference is between a finding and a declaration. To be blunt, I don’t think there is one.

Law nerds will tell you that “findings” are judicial conclusions about which alleged facts are true, as well as conclusions about the correct application of the law to those facts. When a judge makes one of those findings of fact or law part of the remedy they arrive at to settle a dispute, it becomes a “declaration.”

If that sounds to you like a distinction without much of a difference, I agree. The idea that a judge can “find” as a fact in a written judgment, published for the world to read, that Alice stole Bob’s motorcycle without having meaningfully “declared” in any way that Alice stole Bob’s motorcycle requires either a degree of insanity, or the working of a thoughtful, highly-educated mind — one extremely keen to find a way to publicly announce that something is true as a necessary interim step toward a different objective, while preventing that announcement from resulting in any of the collateral consequences that would normally flow from it.

Under the klieg lights of common sense, this finding/declaration distinction appears to amount to a suggestion by the New Brunswick Court of Appeal that trial courts can sidestep the brain-frying logistical issues involved in litigating Indigenous land claims by adding or subtracting a certain amount of oomph when they reach certain factual conclusions, à la Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy.

Here’s the thing about deftly-applied judicial duct tape, though: if it satisfactorily solves a problem, everyone just pretends the tape was always there and that there is no hole beneath it. And in this case, by denying leave to appeal, the Supreme Court appears to be backing Drapeau’s fix.

If that’s the correct read, which we’ll find out for certain when the Supreme Court actually writes an opinion on this subject — which may be years away — where does that leave private landowners?

Right back where they started before Wolastoqey and before Cowichan. They’ll still be recipients of the mushroom treatment during Indigenous land claims litigation, but going forward, their ignorance can be a little more blissful: unless they’re given direct notice that they need to show up in court to fight for their land, nothing a court does in their absence will affect the sanctity of their property titles.

Probably.

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

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In today’s On The Line, host Jen Gerson speaks with Mark Kawar, an amateur historian and journalist whose book America But Bigger explores a surprisingly persistent feature of American history: attempts to expand the United States beyond its current borders.

This episode of On The Line is brought to you by BioCanRx, a federally-funded Canadian not-for-profit research network helping Canadian researchers bring treatments from labs to patients in clinical trials –– all in Canada.

Cancer can hide from your immune system. So how can we target it? Every day, your immune system finds and destroys different types of threats –– both external invaders like viruses, and internal dangers like pre-cancerous cells in your own body. But no system is perfect — sometimes something evades detection. Researchers are working to identify flags found on cancer cells, called antigens. By training your immune system to recognize these antigens as signals for destruction, some forms of immunotherapy equip your immune system to respond to cancer’s asymmetrical threat.

In addition to funding clinical trials, BioCanRx supports research teams who identify cancer antigens, and find new ways to target them with immunotherapies. There’s still a lot to figure out. Can we train the immune system to hit these antigens before cancer takes root? Why do some cancers still manage to evade therapies designed to find their antigens? Many other questions remain — and we’re working on answering them. You’ll hear more over the summer. For now, go to BioCanRx.com to learn more.

Kawar walks Gerson through the long history of American expansionist ambitions, from schemes that never got off the ground to serious efforts that came much closer to success than many people realize. Along the way, he notes that not every annexation proposal was unwelcome to the people being annexed, and that the historical record is often more complicated than simple stories of American aggression.

This episode is also brought to you by the Forest Products Association of Canada. A stronger forest industry means investing in the mills and facilities that anchor communities across Canada. Companies are ready to modernize with cleaner equipment, better energy efficiency, advanced wood products, biomaterials, and smarter use of every part of the tree. These are productive, lower-emission, export-oriented investments. But good projects need a workable business case. Our economy needs practical tools to unlock private capital and keep investment here. Learn more at fpac.ca.

More importantly, Kawar examines why so many of these projects ultimately failed. The United States has often possessed enormous economic, military, and political power, but translating that power into lasting territorial expansion has proven more difficult than many Americans imagined. Again and again, resistance, geography, politics, and simple practicality imposed limits on what even the world’s most powerful country could accomplish.

The result is a fascinating conversation about ambition, empire, national identity, and the often-overlooked constraints on American power. It’s also a discussion that may hold some lessons for Canadians, should they ever find themselves wondering about the limits of U.S. influence. For whatever reason.

This episode is also brought to you by Cameco. In nuclear energy, timelines and costs matter. Incomplete designs carry real risk of delays and cost overruns. That’s why the AP1000 reactor is the right choice for Canada: it is already operating today and ready now to deliver the power we need, with 100 percent Canadian ownership and strong participation from Canadian suppliers. If we are serious about building Canada and powering it on time and on budget, the choice is clear. The AP1000 reactor is the only option that delivers.

To learn more, visit ap1000.cameco.com.

Visit our main page at ReadTheLine.ca. Be sure to like and subscribe. We’ll be back on Friday with another episode of The Line Podcast.

Be sure to like and subscribe. We’ll be back on Friday with another episode of The Line Podcast.

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We hope you enjoy the episode — and don’t miss us next week. We’ll be back with more On The Line.

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

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By: Mike Colledge

There is a paradox sitting at the centre of modern Canadian life and a challenge at the doorstep for Canadian politicians.

Over the last decade, household wealth in Canada has surged. Between 2010 and 2025, many Canadians became dramatically more asset-wealthy, but you wouldn’t know it talking to them. Over the same period, and particularly in the last five years, these same Canadians became more cash constrained and financially pessimistic. This is because a substantial share of that accumulated wealth is tied up in owner-occupied housing, unavailable for day-to-day living and extremely sensitive to the one policy correction Canada increasingly needs to make.

This paradox is at the centre of the problem facing politicians today, as leaders grapple with the shift from the politics of wealth preservation to the politics of affordability restoration. Simply put, how can Canadians be so rich on their balance sheets, and yet find themselves unable to balance their chequing accounts?

In practical terms, affordability restoration means bringing housing costs and household debt burdens back into closer alignment with incomes, even if that requires slower asset growth, prolonged price stagnation or real declines in housing values. And someone will have to pay for it.

From roughly 2010 to 2025, Canada operated under an implicit political consensus: rising home values were not a problem to solve. Rather, they were evidence of success. Governments at every level became structurally incentivized to protect housing appreciation because it underpinned consumer confidence, household borrowing, retirement security, municipal tax bases and political stability itself. Everyone with a house felt like they were getting rich; those with houses also being the most likely to vote.

The social cost of that model is now difficult to ignore, The byproducts of the wealth-preservation era are affordability collapse and generational divergence. We assumed progress was automatic, and we now know it was anything but.

Ipsos research shows Canadians no longer assume progress is automatic. Large majorities now believe their children face a more frightening future, while many expect younger generations to struggle more with housing, financial security and stability than their parents did.

For most of modern Canadian history, the belief that the next generation would naturally be better off than the last was a structural assumption embedded in Canada’s national identity. That assumption, along with the generational compact beneath it, has now weakened significantly.

But here is what the generational framing and the reflexive “OK Boomer” meme usually misses: the transition will not hurt the people most responsible for the old system. And it may not arrive in time to help the people who need it most today. Instead, the cost may fall disproportionately on a cohort caught precisely in the middle, those too late for the old boom, too early for the reset and too financially exposed to comfortably survive either.

Consider three Canadians.

Jeff is 25. He rents with roommates, carries student debt and treats home ownership as a distant maybe. But Jeff has time. If affordability improves meaningfully over the next fifteen years, through slower price growth, stagnation or real declines, he may still enter the market in his late 30s under materially better conditions. The transition, if it happens, largely works in Jeff’s favour.

Nadia is 38. She did everything right: a good education, career, responsible saving, but is spending her early earning years chasing a housing market growing faster than her income. She is not poor. She is perpetually delayed and enduring. If affordability restoration takes another decade, Nadia may access a more rational housing market in her early 50s. Technically helped. Practically late. She doesn’t have time to catch up, and in almost any scenario, her retirement will be poorer than her parents’.

Then there is Mario. He is 61, not on track to retire comfortably, and he still has a decade or more left on his mortgage. He benefited modestly from rising housing values, but not enough to become financially insulated. He may have refinanced to maintain living standards or help his kids. Today’s affordability challenges have delayed his plans, and potentially, his retirement.

If Canada moves toward affordability restoration between now and 2040, both Mario and Nadia could be squeezed. For Mario, it could weaken asset values at the exact moment he most depends on them, and the retirement horizon would keeps recede. Nadia may finally get into the housing market, but she would have a short runway to retirement and a slow growth housing market that would result in slower wealth accumulation.

Because affordability restoration and wealth preservation are not compatible systems, this is where the politics become difficult. Restoring affordability almost certainly requires some combination of lower asset inflation, higher supply, policy intervention, tax reform or prolonged stagnation in real home prices. But the previous generation’s economic confidence was built on the opposite model and they remain politically powerful. In fact, they’re putting their “elbows up” to protect it.

Every generation unconsciously optimizes institutions around the economic realities it personally experienced. Canada’s decision-makers must design a transition that serves Canadians whose economic reality looks nothing like their own; the question is whether they are capable of doing so.

Canadian MPs cluster in the same life stage as Mario — typically they are late career, asset-heavy, and approaching retirement rather than entry into the housing market. Cabinet ministers skew even older. These are the Canadians writing housing policy, setting tax frameworks, determining supply targets and deciding how aggressively to pursue affordability restoration.

Their formative economic years, the period that shapes instinct, assumption and what feels normal, occurred during the wealth-preservation era. Many own homes that appreciated substantially. Many are within a decade of drawing down the assets they spent their careers accumulating.

The real fault line in Canadian politics over the next two decades may not be Boomers versus Millennials. It may be between protected asset owners and structurally delayed wealth builders. And the most exposed group in that collision is not the oldest or the youngest. It is the cohort in the middle.

Late-stage Boomers, and much of Generation X and the earliest Millennials have more in common than they might think when it comes to affordability concerns, They all (more or less) entered adulthood after the peak decades of broad-based wage growth and during the early stages of housing acceleration and labour-market restructuring. They absorbed repeated recessions, pension erosion, precarious work transitions and escalating housing markets. Some accumulated housing wealth, but later, slower and less than those before them. These “squennials” (squeezed by affordability and between economic eras) did not fully receive the benefits of the old prosperity cycle. But they may also age out before the new affordability cycle arrives.

That is a uniquely combustible form of frustration: people who spent decades trying to reach stability only to discover the economic model changed before they arrived.

The next generation may eventually do better. But if they do, the growing suspicion is that they will do better precisely because one cohort, Mario’s cohort, absorbed the pain of the transition. The evidence suggests people like Mario, the people writing the policies to engineer this transition, lack the personal incentives to absorb the pain themselves.

In short, the people responsible for engineering that transition are largely members of the same cohort.

Their mortgages are being paid down. Their home values compounded for two decades. Their retirement security relies, in significant part, on the asset-growth model that genuine affordability reform would disrupt.

An MP who votes to meaningfully cool housing markets, aggressively expand supply or restructure tax incentives to lower real-estate values is often voting against the interests of their own cohort and, in many cases, against their own household balance sheet. They will face the wrath of voters in their riding who rely on those same interests.

That is a difficult ask of any political class. As a result, policy tends to converge on a managed compromise, an attempt to balance affordability pressures with asset-price stability thus producing a longer, slower, and more incremental transition rather than a decisive reset.

The question is not whether Canadian politicians understand the affordability crisis. Most do. The uncomfortable question is whether the people most positioned to fix it have any compelling personal reason to move faster than the minimum required to manage the optics.

Ipsos has tracked personal financial outlook in Canada for 15 years. In 2010, net optimism sat at plus 30. By 2025, it had fallen to plus 7. That is not a mood. It is a structural erosion of confidence. Slow, persistent and now deeply embedded in how Canadians understand their own economic futures.

The MPs writing housing policy today came of age during the plus-30 era. They built careers, families and balance sheets inside it. The Canadians who will live longest with the consequences of their decisions — Jeff and eventually his children — inherited the plus-7 world instead.

That gap is the distance between the Canada that was designed and the Canada that now exists.

The challenge facing Canada is no longer whether affordability restoration is necessary. It is whether a political system built during the wealth-preservation era can engineer a successful transition away from it, largely counter to their own personal interests. That’s a lot to ask of anyone.

Mike Colledge is Executive Insight Lead at Ipsos Canada

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

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The Line is partnering with Lead Not Leave to provide credible arguments for why Alberta should stay in Canada. Click on the link below to learn more about the initiative.

By: Jared Wesley, Peggy Garritty and Jim Dinning

Alberta separatists are fond of saying our province is trapped in an abusive relationship with the rest of Canada.

At their rallies and town halls, the metaphor is as unavoidable as the opening prayer. Stay Free Alberta spokesman Jeffrey Rath and Republican Party leader Cam Davies are both on record as saying Alberta is in a “toxic and abusive” relationship with Ottawa. Popular separatist memes feature imagery of Alberta as the battered wife fleeing an abusive federal husband.

These comparisons trivialize the experience of people who have endured intimate partner violence.

But let’s take the vile metaphor seriously for a moment. If there is a toxic dynamic in Alberta’s relationship with the rest of Canada right now, it’s coming from the separatists. They are the ones poisoning the partnership by isolating Albertans from the country they helped build, promising a utopian future, gaslighting them into mistrusting their own Canadian identity, and using ultimatums to make them choose province over patriotism.

Let’s start with the isolation, a classic tactic in emotional manipulation.

Separatists don’t simply ask Albertans to reject Ottawa. They ask us to mistrust our own feelings by turning away from neighbours, relatives, treaty obligations, national institutions, and a shared history. They want Albertans to make their world smaller.

Separatists are fond of telling Albertans that the rest of Canada doesn’t respect or deserve us, and that Ottawa can never be trusted. This is like insisting that our fellow citizens are all somehow out to get us despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. “They’re using you,” the separatists insist. “They’ve betrayed you, laughed at you, and you’d be a fool for staying.” With that mindset, separatism is simply a matter of self-respect.

But most Albertans don’t want to leave Canada. They want a better place within it with more influence, more recognition, and — yes — more respect. They want the chance to lead, not leave.

Many separatists know this, instinctively. That’s why they rarely tell the truth about what it would take to achieve independence. Instead, they sell a fantasy version where Albertans resolve all of their grievances with none of the costs or consequences. We can leave Canada, they suggest, but somehow keep all of the Canadian things we love, from our pensions and passports to our markets, security arrangements, and citizenship rights. We can have all of the benefits of Canada’s social and economic union without paying any taxes.

Going well beyond what Quebec once called “sovereignty-association,” the Alberta separatists are promising more than just a great spousal support deal; they’re guaranteeing we can remain friends with full benefits.

The reality: for Alberta to be as prosperous outside Canada as within it, the separatists would need to rebuild the very close ties we already have with the other provinces and our various trading partners. All of those arrangements would need to be negotiated from scratch, with Alberta a lone party bargaining against dozens of others. It makes you wonder why we’d want to leave in the first place, if we’d have to spend years and billions of dollars just to get back to the status quo ante.

That’s why separatists pivot to gaslighting, telling people not to trust their own sense of reality.

Using the classic “DARVO” technique, separatists Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. They reject any risks associated with their project, slag anyone who raises them as anti-Albertan, and then cry foul when asked basic questions about treaties, borders, debt, currency, pensions, trade, or citizenship.

The gaslighting extends to identity. Albertans know who they are. Most of us carry more than one loyalty at a time. The vast majority of us consider ourselves both Albertan and Canadian. Yet separatists keep telling us that these dual attachments are a sign of weakness. They imply that loving Canada makes us naive, submissive, brainwashed, or insufficiently loyal to Alberta. As if our patriotism is some kind of false consciousness.

Then comes the emotional blackmail. If Canada really loved Alberta, it would give us everything we demand. By the same token, if Albertans truly loved their province, they would be willing to leave Canada.

Like a manipulative partner who makes you choose between your spouse and your friends, separatists frame the choice as being between province or country. On one side, pride, courage, and freedom. On the other, humiliation, cowardice, and servitude. Those ultimatums are the hallmark of an unhealthy relationship.

Separatists will label our observations as fearmongering. By pushing back against the separatists’ fantastical claims, they’ll say federalists are bullying Alberta into staying in an abusive relationship with the rest of Canada. Quite the opposite.

In healthy relationships and democracies, people make room for complexity. Albertans can be angry with a political party or level of government without hating the province or country they serve. Through federalism, we are allowed to demand reform without threatening to dissolve the union.

Separatist politics does the opposite, cultivating some of the most obvious traits of toxic relationships. Separatism erases all nuance and dismisses mixed feelings as weakness. Separatists catastrophize, insisting that every federal policy disagreement is an existential threat to the Alberta way of life. To balance this out, they engage in love-bombing — flattering Albertans into believing that they are somehow far freer, smarter, harder-working, and more virtuous than everyone else in Canada.

This makes the separatists’ use of the abuse metaphor so revealing. It is projection. They complain that Canadian culture has shifted away from them while trying to coerce Albertans into choosing one narrow form of identity over another. Separatists charge the rest of Canada with contempt while sneering at fellow Albertans who remain proudly Canadian. They accuse Confederation of trapping Alberta while trying to trap Albertans inside a smaller, angrier province.

Enough. Albertans deserve better than this.

Alberta is not a helpless victim locked in a violent marriage with the rest of Canada. We have agency, wealth, constitutional protections, influence, and opportunity. Yes, we have grievances, too. But these are not proof of abuse. There’s a world of difference between disappointment and oppression.

Their use of the abuse metaphor was always offensive. But if separatists insist on using it, Albertans should judge their behaviour by those same standards.

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

To contact The Line with a general inquiry or comment, please email info@readtheline.ca. For other ways to connect with us or to follow us on social media, please see our LinkTree.

We hope you’re all having a wonderful weekend. We’ve got two fantastic podcasts for you, if you need a little help.

First up, the latest episode of The Line Podcast. In it, your hosts take on some of the biggest stories from last week. Matt explains why the Liberal response to Pierre Poilievre’s pro-Canada speech annoyed him (you can be a patriot without being a Liberal, Liberals). They lament the death of a Toronto police officer (more on that below) in tragically foreseeable circumstances. Jen spins a wildly entertaining, and somewhat disturbing, new theory on U.S.-Canadian relations. Ahem, relations. And they wrap up with a chat about the proposed social media ban for children. It’s a great episode. Check it out below.

(One note: a bunch of our friends in the army have written in to clarify that the army uniform redesign was begun several years ago, before the current PM was in office. Noted with thanks!).

If you’re eager for more, also check out last week’s On The Line. In it, Matt interviews two of his favourite go-to guests. P.J. Fournier of 338Canada.com and 338Canada.ca joins him first. They talk federal politics, including Mark Carney’s popularity surge, and also, bad news for Pierre Poilievre across the board. But they mainly set up the upcoming Quebec election, which is looking like it could be a wild one — P.J. can’t think of a comparable race, and he’d be the guy who’d know. After that, cybersecurity expert David Shipley pops on for a typically cheerful chat about the danger of AI, how it’s already killed Canadians, and how the big social media platforms are absolutely rife with fraud that is hurting people.

Two great chats, one episode. Check it out.

And now, on with the dispatch.

The Line has no desire to politicize the death of a police officer. Late last week, Toronto Police Officer Marco Pinizzotto was killed in the line of duty when he was shot during a raid to execute a search warrant. The warrant was related to a series of shootings across Toronto, including the shooting of the U.S. consulate building several months ago. News reporting has suggested that the perpetrators were involved in a “gun-for-hire” scheme, where attacks would be farmed out to criminal freelancers.

None of this has yet been proven in court, and not all suspects sought by police have been arrested. The man believed responsible for shooting Pinizzotto has not yet been charged; he remains in a Toronto hospital after being hit multiple times by police gunfire during the incident. His injuries are reportedly very serious.

Pinizzotto leaves behind a wife and two young children. Our hearts go out to them. His loss is tragic. We just wish this hadn’t been so goddamned inevitable.

Read more

In the latest episode of The Line Podcast, recorded on June 12th, 2026, Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson begin with an update from Alberta. Jen reviews Pierre Poilievre’s recent speech on why Alberta belongs in Canada. She liked it, with some caveats. Matt was somewhat more encouraged. He also has a few sharp words for Liberals who seem determined to police the boundaries of acceptable federalism. His view is simple: if people are defending Canada, let them defend Canada. Not every argument for national unity needs to come packaged with Liberal talking points. From Toronto, Matt also reflects on a genuine tragedy this week — a police officer killed in the line of duty while confronting a problem that had been allowed to fester for far too long. It’s difficult to discuss without emotion. In his view, it never should have ended this way. But, alas, it was always going to: even if the exact tragedy was unforeseen, a tragedy was inevitable.

This episode is brought to you by Cameco. In nuclear energy, timelines and costs matter. Incomplete designs carry real risk of delays and cost overruns. That’s why the AP1000 reactor is the right choice for Canada: it is already operating today and ready now to deliver the power we need, with 100 percent Canadian ownership and strong participation from Canadian suppliers. If we are serious about building Canada and powering it on time and on budget, the choice is clear. The AP1000 reactor is the only option that delivers.

To learn more, visit ap1000.cameco.com.

The hosts then take a very different turn. In what may be the strangest segment of the year, Jen reimagines 250 years of Canada-U.S. relations as a raunchy romantic comedy full of love, betrayal, heartbreak, and, yes, sex. Video viewers can watch Matt become increasingly horrified as the bit unfolds — not because he disagrees with the analysis, but because he finds himself unable to refute it.

This episode is also brought to you by BioCanRx, a federally funded, not-for-profit Canadian research network that specializes in bringing Canadian cancer immunotherapy research from the lab all the way to patients in clinical trials in Canada. Immunotherapy is about assisting your immune system in identifying unhealthy cells — especially cancer — that have found a way to evade detection. One way researchers are doing this is through something called CAR T. They draw your blood, isolate one type of your immune cells — T-Cells — and use a virus to inject genetic instructions that cause them to grow new receptors designed specifically to find and destroy your particular cancer. In one of the 16 trials BioCanRx funds based on Canadian technology, CLIC-01, the median number of months remaining for patients with late-stage leukemia and lymphoma tripled. Some have been cancer free for years.

You’ll hear more over the summer. For now, go to BioCanRx.com to learn more.

After that, the hosts wrap up with a discussion about children and social media. Both agree that kids probably shouldn’t be spending their lives online. Their concern is that any attempt by the government to solve that problem could easily create several new ones. If recent experience is any guide, they aren’t especially confident Ottawa can regulate this area without making a mess of it.

All that and more in the latest episode of The Line Podcast. As ever, like and subscribe.

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Please sign up at those options not just for this episode, or future episodes of The Line Podcast, but so that you can also receive our other podcast series, On the Line, which releases new episodes every Tuesday morning. In case you missed it, here is last Tuesday’s episode, where Matt Gurney interviewed P.J. Fournier of 338Canada.com and 338Canada.ca about the latest federal numbers, plus a bizarre situation in Quebec. Matt also spoke with David Shipley of Beauceron Security about the latest on the AI and social media fronts. Lot going on!

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

To contact The Line with a general inquiry or comment, please email info@readtheline.ca. For other ways to connect with us or to follow us on social media, please see our LinkTree.

By: Rob Breakenridge

In a speech signalling his grand entrance into the conversation about Alberta’s future in Canada, federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre emphasized the value of a conciliatory approach.

“Those who might vote to separate from Canada are not our enemies, they are our fellow citizens,” he declared. As such, he warned, “Demonizing people who have lost hope is no way to restore it. Name calling, fearmongering and ostracizing will only worsen and broaden the divide.”

It’s a nice sentiment and perhaps even a wise strategy. Poilievre is likely well-positioned to resonate with many of those voters who have legitimate concerns and might be open to voting for separation.

But is this idea of positive and respectful dialogue a two-way street? Are the leaders of the pro-Canada side holding themselves to a different standard than their counterparts on the other side?

Those organizing and agitating for separatism don’t seem bound by any such notions. That could ultimately be to their own detriment, and perhaps it even demonstrates a degree of insecurity. But it does help to demonstrate a curious double standard that’s emerged.

After months on the sidelines waiting for an official campaign declaration, organized federalist movements are now just getting off the starting blocks. The other side, though, has most definitely not been biding their time.

For the past year or so, separatists have had the stage largely to themselves. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case, but it’s revealing to now see their reaction to being pulled out of that echo chamber.

Separatist leaders seem surprised and even offended to learn that they’re not the only ones with strong feelings on this matter and that there are those who are prepared to push back on their fanciful claims.

For more than a year now, separatist leaders have been making all kinds of wild, unchallenged claims about Canada and its defenders — and suddenly they’re crying foul about what the other side has dared to put forth.

Direct criticism is perceived to be an “attack.” Counterarguments are perceived to be “fearmongering,” a standard to which they’d never hold themselves or their own claims and arguments.

Case in point was the reaction to Premier Danielle Smith’s comments earlier this month about the potential price tag of Alberta separation.

Smith’s government intends on releasing a formal analysis to that end later this summer, but she noted the rather obvious and significant costs that transitioning from a subnational government to an independent state would entail.

That includes Alberta’s share of the national debt, which the premier estimates would be roughly $170 billion. Then there’s the cost of national defence, border control, embassies, trade offices. Alberta would take on the responsibility — and expense — of a national tax collection agency and administering programs such as OAS, the Child Tax Benefit, CPP, and EI. The full list would be much longer.

As Smith notes, that’s potentially hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of start-up costs and tens of billions in ongoing costs. That hardly seems controversial, but those comments were not well received by those who have been suggesting that separation is a cheap and easy path to wealthy utopia.

According to Jeffrey Rath, lawyer for the Alberta Prosperity Project and Stay Free Alberta and a prominent face and voice for the separatist cause, the premier is spreading fear.

Rath accused Smith of cranking out “silly numbers to try to scare Albertans into not wanting to leave Canada.”

That’s an interesting accusation coming from someone who has claimed that Alberta has “the highest GDP per capita in the world” (Alberta’s per-capita GDP is roughly on par with Australia and Sweden — outside the top 10 globally and less than half that of those at the top of the list).

Or, as detailed by journalist Richard Warnica, Rath’s colleague Mitch Sylvestre, who headed the Stay Free Alberta petition drive, has claimed that Canada has both the “lowest GDP in the industrialized world” and the “highest and most individual taxes of any country in the world.” Both claims, of course, are demonstrably false and absurd (it’s hard to imagine how Alberta could have the highest per-capita GDP in the world while Canada has the industrialized world’s lowest GDP).

There is more to the separatist cause than just economic arguments, but those are surely the most prominent and compelling for the cause’s supporters and sympathizers. But if those are exaggerated and untrue claims about our current reality or our hypothetical pollyannish future, that should be challenged.

As Smith said, “it’s responsible for us to be very forthright about the costs associated” with separation so that voters “can make an informed decision.” It’s not fearmongering to do so, especially in the face of what separatist leaders are pushing.

The Poilievre case for selling hope instead of “telling Albertans how bad separation would be” might still have merit, but we also need to be honest about what’s at stake.

The reality of this referendum campaign, coupled with some of that sober analysis, could be starting to affect public sentiment. A pair of new polls suggest the support for separation is sagging, sitting at around 20 per cent.

According to another prominent voice in the separatist movement, though, this is much more sophisticated and sinister than mere public-opinion tracking. David Parker, of Take Back Alberta and Centurion Project fame, declared that these polls “are a psychological operation meant to demoralize people.”

It’s not right to demoralize people, according to the same person who has suggested that Canada has “changed in horrible and truly evil ways, into a culture of death,” that it’s “going full communist,” and that its leaders have engaged in an “intentional destruction of our middle class.”

That’s not to say we shouldn’t take these individuals seriously, in that they have clearly exerted some influence within the separatist movement. But there’s no reason to take them at face value when they bemoan the political discourse or suggest their opponents are acting unfair or in bad faith.

Poilievre’s not wrong when he says the goal should not be to “beat” one another in the referendum. It should be to “unite when it is over,” because we will need to find a way to unite after once we’re past all of this.

But, for now, the reality is that we’re locked in a referendum campaign that has two possible and significant outcomes. The side that’s been pushing for this vote is definitely doing everything it can to “beat” the other side.

Federalists should make the most compelling argument for the “remain” side, and should strive to do so based on facts and evidence. But there should be no apologies for trying to win.

There’s no need to refrain from rebutting separatist claims, let alone walking on eggshells or donning kid gloves.

Rob Breakenridge is a Calgary-based podcaster and writer. He can be found at robbreakenridge.ca and and reached at rob.breakenridge@gmail.com

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

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By: Andrew Potter

It’s hard to screw up a university commencement address. Take a captive audience of optimistic young people and their proud parents, have a person of accomplishment feed them some platitudes of how the world is their oyster and they should follow their dreams and go change the planet, and everyone goes home content in the belief that it was four years and a few hundred grand well spent.

But in the graduation season just ended, at least three commencement speakers in the United States had their words of wisdom greeted with a chorus of boos and catcalls from the assembled graduates.

At the University of Central Florida, the audience erupted in booing at a ceremony in early May after real estate development executive Gloria Caulfield called AI “the next industrial revolution.” After she implored the audience “can I finish?”, someone yelled out, “AI sucks!”

At Middle Tennessee State University, the boos came when music executive Scott Borchetta told the grads that AI was a tool they needed to learn how to use.

And at the University of Arizona, the jeering went on for minutes after Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the students to get on board with AI. “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat,” Schmidt said. “You just get on.” The loud response from one member of the crowd? “Fuck this guy.”

It is possible this was all lingering resentment at the knowledge that somewhere around two-thirds of their classmates had coasted or even cheated their way through the last couple of years of their degree. Or perhaps it was more forward-looking: A bleak job market becoming more unappealing by the minute, thanks in part to the very technology being pushed on them by the speakers who had been invited to send them on their way.

But is it possible the hostility might have been coming from a place even more profound? Could the students have been, if only subconsciously, mourning the imminent demise of their pre-AI selves?

For all of human existence until about a year or so ago, the most significant feature of intellectual labour, writing in particular, has been how hard it is. Thanks to the success of the behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow, we have a good grasp of why that is the case. The distinction between “System 1” and “System 2” to describe two distinct ways the human brain processes information and makes decisions has become part of our received wisdom. It has been overused in places, and many of Kahneman’s claims have ended up hard to replicate, but the basic scheme is still a useful way of understanding how our minds work.

System 1 is what is often referred to as our gut instinct or intuition. Think of driving a car on a flat open highway on a clear day, knowing that two plus two equals four, or catching a ball thrown at you from a few feet away. It is fast, almost effortless, and in a lot of ways completely automatic and involuntary; we often don’t even really know how we know or do these things.

On the other hand, whenever you try to memorize a new phone number or email address, do long division or multiply two three-digit numbers, play a musical instrument or learn a dance routine for the first time, you are using System 2. It is slow, voluntary, and explicit, forcing you to hold a number of thoughts and ideas in working memory as you work through the steps. It also requires an enormous amount of effort.

These are not actual modules or parts of the brain, they are modes of thinking, or ways of making judgments, and each involves a key tradeoff. What you gain in speed with System 1 you lose in accuracy, as the cognitive shortcuts it relies on often lead to errors in judgment. For System 2 tasks, the high cost of mental effort is justified by the need to get things right and to make things explicit. When someone insists you “show your work,” they are asking for the evidence of System 2 labour.

The act of writing is pure System 2 work. It is sequential, explicit, and transparent. You have to work through an argument, or a narrative, line by line, clause by clause. Writing a simple newspaper column can take an entire day, a proper book can take years of research, planning, and execution.

AI vaporizes that. Take a few seconds to prompt a chatbot and the sentences come pouring out, sophisticated arguments, inferences, and evidence, leads and kickers and turns of phrase. Some of it is great, some of it isn’t. But any writer who has spent any time with a decent LLM has experienced that moment where it says something better, edits it smarter, makes it more creative, in seconds.

There are AI apologists out there arguing that AI is to writing what the washing machine was to laundry, or what store-bought butter was to the butter churn: it takes away the hard drudgery of the task and leaves the fun, creative part to the humans. Treated as a new tool in the cognitive arsenal, AI is just another step on the way to freeing humans from menial labour, both physical and mental.

But the analogy doesn’t hold. The washing machine and the butter churn allowed humans to trade stupid work for something smarter, while AI does the exact opposite. A new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon and MIT found that when people used AI for even 10 to 15 minutes, they performed significantly worse when the AI was removed, even on tasks they should have been able to answer easily. They argue that repeated AI use appears to prevent you from building the mental model you need to solve a problem yourself. And when instant answers from AI chatbots become routine, using your bare brain for System 2 tasks starts to feel disproportionately hard, “a kind of recalibration that turns normal effort into something that feels like a defect.”

This isn’t just AI-induced laziness. System 1 is your primate brain, the legacy of our evolutionary heritage from the ancient savannah. The hard, focused attention that characterizes System 2 thinking is a currency, and what you choose to spend it on literally defines who you are, what you care about, and ultimately what makes you human.

The rise of AI isn’t just a further stage in the liberation of humans from physical drudgery. It is a direct existential challenge to who you are. The students who booed and catcalled the speakers lecturing them on the exciting new digital tools that were transforming the world under their feet might have been merely irritated by the cheats in their midst, or anxious about the job market out into which they were being sent.

But more than likely, the jeers reflected a deeper unhappiness, stemming from the certain knowledge that they had spent their last days with their pre-AI selves. And they were going to miss them.

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

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In this episode of On The Line, host Matt Gurney is joined by two guests for conversations about politics, technology, and trust.

This episode of On The Line is brought to you by BioCanRX, a federally funded, not-for-profit Canadian research network that specializes in bringing Canadian cancer immunotherapy research from the lab all the way to patients in clinical trials in Canada. Can science help your immune system detect and destroy cancer? Immunotherapy is about assisting your immune system in identifying unhealthy cells –– especially cancer –– that have found a way to evade detection. One way researchers are doing this is through something called CAR T. They draw your blood, isolate one type of your immune cells –– T-Cells –– and use a virus to inject genetic instructions that cause them to grow new receptors designed specifically to bind with your particular cancer. When those cells are re-infused into your body, they hopefully will be able to find and destroy your cancer.

The results are promising. In one of the 16 trials BioCanRx funds based on Canadian technology, CLIC-01, the median number of months remaining for patients with late-stage leukemia and lymphoma tripled. For some, the response was even bigger: they went from being out of options to cancer free, and have stayed that way for several years.

Many questions remain — and we’re working on answering them. You’ll hear more over the summer. For now, go to BioCanRX.com to learn more.

First up is PJ Fournier of 338Canada for a look at the latest political numbers. They discuss the good news for Mark Carney, the bad news for Pierre Poilievre, and why the Liberal numbers may not be quite as strong as they first appear. The conversation then turns to Quebec, where the next provincial election is shaping up to be one of the strangest contests either man can remember. Fournier struggles to find a historical comparison. They also discuss softening support for separation in Quebec, how that compares with developments in Alberta, and a point Matt makes that PJ suspects may not be especially popular with Quebec nationalists — even if he doesn’t disagree with it.

Then Matt is joined by David Shipley of Beauceron Security for a discussion about artificial intelligence, social media, and the growing gap between technological change and political institutions. How much of the current AI boom is real, and how much is hype fuelled by companies racing toward public offerings? Shipley argues that Canadians deserve greater transparency around the Tumbler Ridge case, while Matt notes that he can’t even get straightforward answers about transit delays, leaving him less than optimistic about the prospects for accountability.

This episode is also brought to you by the Forest Products Association of Canada. A stronger forest industry starts with predictability. Mill modernization, bioenergy, mass timber, and advanced biomaterials all depend on reliable access to usable Canadian wood fibre, workable timelines, and clear rules. Provinces lead forest management, and the federal role should be coordinated, complementary, and focused on results. Every unnecessary delay makes it harder to keep jobs and attract investment. For a sector rooted in communities, regulatory efficiency is economic policy. Learn more at FPAC.ca.

The conversation also examines how major social media platforms are being exploited for fraud and manipulation, an issue Shipley has been testifying about. The core problem, he argues, is that the internet moves at the speed of light while politicians move at the speed of Parliament. That mismatch is creating vulnerabilities that are only getting worse. The episode closes with a warning to Albertans heading into a possible referendum campaign: Shipley isn’t telling anyone how to vote, but he is urging people to be extremely careful about what they believe online. Foreign interference efforts are already arriving, and they’re unlikely to get less sophisticated from here.

This episode is also brought to you by Cameco. In nuclear energy, timelines and costs matter. Incomplete designs carry real risk of delays and cost overruns. That’s why the AP1000 reactor is the right choice for Canada: it is already operating today and ready now to deliver the power we need, with 100 percent Canadian ownership and strong participation from Canadian suppliers. If we are serious about building Canada and powering it on time and on budget, the choice is clear. The AP1000 reactor is the only option that delivers.

To learn more, visit ap1000.cameco.com.

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The Line is partnering with Lead Not Leave to provide credible arguments for why Alberta should stay in Canada. Click on the link below to learn more about the initiative.

By: Ken Boessenkool

I confess, I am getting tired of the selective amnesia. To hear Alberta separatists talk, one might think that the last 20 years of conservative activism had simply never happened in this country. They seem to have an ironclad memory for every grievance going right back to 1905 — some of which I share — but routinely forget this province’s many successes; the many times Alberta has led, rather than left, this Confederation.

Elder statesman of the conservative movement, and former leader of the Reform Party, Preston Manning, is the latest tragic example of this tendency. Manning ought to to be regarded as this movement’s great successes — a man who successfully defeated the complacency of eastern Canadian assumptions, and totally upended conservative politics for a generation, eventually making way for prime minister Stephen Harper. Yet, in a recent National Post article, Manning took the loser’s route. Instead of setting his own story as an example of how the west can win, Manning shifted the burden of proof in this referendum battle to the federalist side by asking: “Remain and do what?”

As if we’ve never done anything before.

That is not just defeatist, it is historically wrong.

In 1991 I was the Policy Chair for the Lethbridge Constituency, and eventually worked for its first MP in Ottawa, Ray Speaker. Just for kicks, I went back to my well-worn version of the 1991 Reform Party Blue Book — the insurgent western political party’s ambitious policy document. Far from a physical record of failure, I counted 41 Blue Book policies that have been implemented since 1991. Pretty good!

My personal favourite is the call for energy development to include the “associated costs of environmental protection … rely(ing) primarily on marketplace mechanisms.” No wonder Danielle Smith and Mark Carney’s Memorandum of Understanding is so popular — it supports a pipeline and carbon pricing, like good ol’ Reformers.

I’m having fun, of course, but it does show that Alberta has been leading, not leaving, the national conversation for decades. The first industrial carbon price was created by Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach. We haven’t won every single policy fight, but we do make progress, and we do score big wins.

For example, the two signature policies of Manning’s Reform Party have been implemented, and are now regarded as standard bearers. Thanks to our work, referendums were implemented for attempts at constitutional change. And previous Conservative and even Liberal governments have prioritized balanced budgets.

Let’s take the first example, the defeat of the Charlottetown Accord in 1992. Initially and ironically, Manning supported the constitutional amendments, but then came around and campaigned against it, while mirroring the Reform Party demand that such changes be approved by referendum.

On deficits, in late 1994 I became Preston Manning’s economic advisor and was the staff lead for “The Taxpayer’s Budget,” built on work created by later prime minister Stephen Harper. I believe the Taxpayer’s Budget was the first fully costed shadow budget produced by an opposition party.

Following its publication we — myself, along with Manning, Harper, Jim Silye and Herb Grubel — met with Finance Minister Paul Martin and his staff to discuss our suggestions. We agreed to support budget cuts like the elimination of the Crow Rate if other cuts were regionally balanced. In other words, Reformers played a significant private and public role in the success of the Chrétien government’s 1995 Budget that cut spending and balanced the budget in only three years.

Win for Alberta. Win for Canada. And Alberta was at the table. I know. I was there.

For the next decade, my political work turned to Alberta, including advising on the design and implementation of Alberta’s single rate tax in the late 90s and coauthoring the Firewall Letter with Harper and a few others in the early aughts.

Harper went on to greater things. I tagged along as his policy advisor and would go on to help co-write many of his leadership and election platforms.

The separatists who would treat Canada as a hopeless cause seem to forget or denigrate Harper’s decade in office, too.

A recent interlocutor on Twitter/X recently demanded of me: “Name one lasting Harper accomplishment.”

I can name ten. (You can find more here.)

Win one: Under Harper, the federal tax burden as a share of GDP fell to its lowest level in more than 50 years. Taxes as a percentage of GDP fell nearly 15 per cent. And that meant Alberta contributed less because Ottawa was collecting less.

Win two: Harper’s reduction in the GST did not just reduce taxes, it created tax room for the provinces to fund health care, education and social services. A tax point transfer has long been a central demand of those who want a stronger Alberta in Canada. Harper did it.

Win three: Harper didn’t just cut taxes, he cut spending. With life expectancy and working beyond 65 both going up, Harper raised the eligibility age of Old Age Security from 65 to 67. Less spending, less taxes, lower Alberta contributions.

Win four: Conservatives shouldn’t just do things. Certainly, a future Conservative government will have to undo a lot of bad policy from the Trudeau era. But Harper demonstrated how this could be done. He undid a lot of bad policy, from the Kelowna Accord to the Kyoto Agreement to the unfunded institutional childcare plans of the Martin government. Remember that Wheat Board? We killed it.

Win five: Replacing one-size-fits-all institutional childcare with the largest social program in a generation. Instead of attempting to implement the Quebec daycare system across the board, Harper chose instead to give massive cash transfers directly to families with children. Cash transfers for children went from $4 billion when Harper took office to $18 billion when he left. Over a decade later, spending on those programs is $25 billion. We so convincingly won the argument — Choice in Childcare, we called it — that no party opposes these cash payments to families. Alberta has a younger population and more kids. It gets more.

Win six: Harper supported civil society with tax credits to defray the costs associated with starting a family, raising children, managing disability, incurring costs to earn income, acquiring a home, saving for the future, and bolstering civil society. Lower taxes, lower Alberta contributions.

Win seven: When faced with the global recession, almost half of the relief Harper delivered was in the form of corporate and individual tax cuts. The vast majority of the rest was infrastructure spending — much of which was sent to lower levels of government in an Economic Action Plan that respected federalism. This relief was timely, affordable and mostly temporary. Lower taxes, lower burden on Alberta.

Win eight: Within a few short years following the financial crisis of 2008, Harper balanced a budget that he then bequeathed to the Trudeau government. Lower spending, less need for Alberta to support Ottawa. This success need only be replicated by another Conservative government.

Win nine: Canada had free trade deals with five other countries with Harper entered office. By the time he left, we had 51 such deals with countries in the Americas, Asia and Europe, covering more than 60 percent of the global marketplace. Harper paved the way for Alberta’s natural resources and other goods.

Win ten: Harper passed dozens of pieces of crime legislation — including mandatory minimum sentences — and increased resources for law enforcement to make our homes, streets, and cities safer.

He also eliminated the long gun registry, and created a sex offender registry.

He stayed true to the Firewall Letter by becoming Alberta’s (and all other province’s) Firewall in Ottawa. He boosted transfers without boosting conditions. And he made those social policy transfers equal per capita, reducing billions in extra burdens on Alberta. And he balanced the budget in 2015 without cutting provincial transfers.

Harper boosted Canadian history and spoke about Canada’s founding, and its founding prime minister. He cared deeply about northern sovereignty. He promoted our rich military traditions including the Highway of Heroes. He stood with our allies — Ukraine and Israel in particular — while standing against tyranny.

Oh, right. I promised only ten.

The point of raising all this is not to say Harper fixed everything — he didn’t. Nor is it to say that some people won’t find fault with some of his policies, or how he executed them. However, it’s hard to look upon this list and avoid noticing how prescient many of his policy priorities proved to be. Harper was getting Canada very much on the right track, and there’s no reason to think a similarly conservative prime minister, similarly motivated by good ideas and clear thinking, can’t continue to push the ball forward. Harper wasn’t a revolutionary. His incrementalism was part of his conservative disposition. He made Alberta stronger and united Canada.

He answered the question for his time: Remain and do what?

It is time to ask that question again. But not by pretending we’ve never answered it before. We have. I have. In my lifetime. And I’m not that old. We’ve shown that grievances — when channelled productively — can make positive changes in this country.

So let’s do it again. Because we can. Because we must. And because we will.

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

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By: Jen Gerson

On a long enough timeline, everybody in politics gets exactly what they deserve. Obscurity, censure, influence, and indifference. Sometimes people are up. Sometimes, they are down. But time and history washes everything away but the bone.

On that note, last week all Canadian media stumbled upon — or followed — this rather delicious piece from Toronto Star politics reporter Althia Raj which noted that Mark Carney wasn’t regarded as particularly sweet to many Liberal caucus members.

Fuelled by a parade of members of Parliament who would only speak anonymously, we’ve been treated to quotes like this all week:

“He yells,” said one MP who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution from the Prime Minister’s Office. “He punches down at caucus all the time.”

I don’t suppose that any of these people ever stop to consider that their unwillingness to air their complaints on the record might, in and of itself, prove the justification for the course. Once again, I find myself underwhelmed by the moral courage on display by the Liberal caucus.

More than a dozen apparently signed a letter offering complaints to this effect; but despite being adults who stood up before their peers to be elected to high office, none seem willing to put their names forward. As much as I, a journalist, never resent a good anonymous bitch fest about the boss — on such chaff does the mill of political commentary continue to whirr — I am also under no illusions that this is a good way to earn said boss’s respect.

Last week, some MPs felt the prime minister’s message was that he’s not interested in what they have to say.

Oh, do you think? Is it possible that the prime minister doesn’t care about what his caucus has to say? A caucus that, for the most part, has spent the last decade acting like a collection of pet turkeys who would drown themselves in their own water bowls after a heavy rain.

It’s becoming clear to me that some Liberal backbenchers are only now starting to understand their predicament. They seem to think that their miraculous election comeback last year was some kind of vindication. As if the past 10 years were proof in the pudding that Justin Trudeau was right all along, and that all they needed was a better communications strategy to prove it.

This is incorrect.

Mark Carney isn’t an exoneration of Trudeau’s legacy. He’s our collective revenge for it.

The fact that the two-time former banker is harsh isn’t a character fault. It was his value proposition. Even normies can sense that there’s a bristling asshole under the controlled and polite demeanour and the answer to that from the collective public was: “yes, more of this please.”

In fact, I’m willing to bet that every single time we read a story about Carney yelling at a wooly headed backbencher, demanding his caucus show up to work wearing real clothes and master British spelling, his personal popularity will go up five points. I suspect this is a man who owns only three kinds of socks; charcoal socks, blue socks, and white sports socks. If we get nothing else from this government, I will never again write about a prime minister’s socks. This is better.

One of the reasons this man seems to be so perversely well liked is because he’s mean to Liberals. He’s our most perfect agent of national revenge upon this party. Every single time you have to stand up behind him and smile like a seal while he opens a coal plant, rescinds a carbon tax, expands military spending, renounces a streaming tax, or announces a pipeline, the repressed sadist that sits in the shadow of every pragmatic Canadian heart says: “Good. Good.”

Make them know that the loss of their jejune, self-destructive idealism is the price of power. Let the light leave their eyes.

And I say this without any comment about Carney’s actual accomplishments — or lack thereof — as prime minister. I’m confining myself in this column to vibes.

The exception among governing Liberals seems to be Steven Guilbeault, who had enough sense to leave the caucus for his sins and is now demonstrating why he no longer fits in with the old crowd — namely, he’s willing to explain his beef in public and under his own name. I respect it. Can we make a Sad Steven Guilbeault interview with David Herle a quarterly feature going forward in the name of national unity?

The Liberals are getting exactly what they deserve. No Conservative prime minister could have been a more effective instrument of our national resentment than a Liberal prime minister who will spend the next 10 years forcing these people to dismantle every stupid policy they ever defended; and demand they look sharp doing it.

“He yells.”

Oh, does he?

Do go on. Tell me more. In detail. Vivid, beautiful, and expressive detail. Spare me nothing.

Look, I’m not saying that Mark Carney appeals to the shadow side of the Canadian soul; something lurking unacknowledged in the hearts of our own sunny self-perception as a “nice and polite” people. But I’m not not saying that, either.

Yes, I’m going to inject the usual bit of nuance, here. That, yes, of course there’s a line. If Carney is genuinely psychologically abusive or physically violent, that’s something that should be dealt with. Preferably by a caucus with both the intelligence and the spine to spill him — not that either intelligence or spine has ever been particularly in evidence with this bunch. Which leads me back to my first conclusion: that we’re dealing not with an unprofessional boss, but merely a demanding one. The sort of person a serious adult might expect to find leading a G7 nation. But apparently hasn’t, in recent years.

One might also point out that “MP” isn’t an ordinary job. To be elected to such a position is to hold power in its own right. It’s a role that demands high performing individuals both stand up to their leader, and hold their own against him or her. A caucus can fire the Prime Minister if necessary. In fact, much of this caucus just did so, albeit years later than they ought to have.

These are not staff roles, nor jobs in an ordinary sense, subject to the types of anesthetizing HR codes that have been normalized in so much white-collar work. If you’ve spent your career in activism, or boutique law firms, or the consulting class, then, yes, a boss who points out when you’ve said something monumentally dumb in front of other people under high pressure must, indeed, feel bracing.

If dissatisfied MPs feel that they are being overlooked or badly treated in their role, they can leave. They can sit as independents or join another party. They can prove their worth outside the party structure. They really can walk away from the prime minister, the person who managed to salvage what was left of their party after their own collective and contemptible weakness allowed the government under their care to stagnate and decline for a decade.

Best of luck, you brave, noble heroes. Go get what you deserve.

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

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By: Andrew MacDougall

Could I have done it?

Standing in the tidal waters off Juno Beach, I am placed in my grandfather’s footsteps, 82 years after he visited this place in the late morning of June 6, 1944 — 82 years ago today. Could I have stomached the long overnight crossing of the English Channel knowing that combat and possible death awaited? Would I have given up my comfortable life in the service of the greater good?

I have never had to answer those questions, thanks largely to the efforts of my grandfather and his fellow soldiers all those years ago. And yet, the question rushes into my mind as I survey the shore. Would I have had the guts? Looking around, it’s easy to imagine this place full of death and destruction. I’ve read the history. I’ve seen the footage. I’m the last generation to have had living relatives who did the fighting here.

Unlike my grandfather’s time, there is no artillery, tank, or rifle fire raining down on me. I am not stepping over the bodies of the soldiers of the Queen’s Own Rifles and the other first-wave regiments. I am not pushing on to Beny-Sur-Mer and then on to Villons-des-Buissons a few kilometers down the road. I am not a North Nova Scotia Highlander. I am a civilian here with my two young daughters and my 83-year old mother, not my band of brothers.

But we are here to remember Roland Garfield MacDougall and his brothers in arms who didn’t come back to Canada like he did. We’re in Normandy to honour the lives of the thousands of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren that never were. That my grandfather’s two great-granddaughters can splash about carefree on this beach on this scorching late spring day is a testament to the over 100,000 men who landed here on D-Day and pushed the Germans out of France. Their history is on every corner and every beachfront promenade. My daughters are surprised to see this place is (still) festooned with Canadian flags. We might be forgetting, but the people who live here never will. And how could they? Many of the streets are named after the heroes who liberated France.

These days, the “Nan” sector of Juno Beach is a decidedly tranquil place, chock-a-block with what appear to be 1980s and ‘90s-era holiday homes. The only beachfront shapes my grandfather would have recognized are the silhouette of the villa now known as the “Maisons des Canadians,” as well as the steeple of the Église Notre-Dame-de-la-Nativité in the heart of the village of Bernières-sur-Mer approximately 500 metres inland. Well, those, and the concrete remnants of the German defensive positions, from which so many Canadians were mown down. They’re still here, too, serving as silent markers of death and destruction.

But the Germans didn’t get my grandfather.

For reasons that surpassed his understanding, Roland MacDougall — Ron to his mates — made it home. But not before having his eye plucked out by sniper fire in a town close to Carpiquet Airfield in the month following D-Day, a period during which his regiment was decimated by a battle-hardened unit of Hitler Youth armed to the teeth with tanks and artillery. The battles he was part of eventually produced the surrender of Caen, a key win in the push to close the Falaise Gap and then move on to liberate Paris.

But the win came at an awful price.

A crescent-shaped memorial in modern-day Villons-les-Buissons commemorates the place Canadian soldiers branded as “Hell’s Corner,” i.e. the scene of the month-long battle between 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade and Hitler’s demons. The Canadians fought valiantly here in the days after D-Day, even though they had lost their seaborne artillery support as they were counterattacked on three fronts. But they held the line. And they pushed on from that line in early July as part of Operation Charnwood, the battle that finally saw Caen fall into Allied hands.

The villages of Villons, Buron and Authie are now all reconstructed, their ancient farm village cores now ringed by an array of new-build properties. The memories of Charnwood now lie in the Canadian War Cemetery in Bény-sur-Mer, a few kilometres back toward Juno Beach. It is here that my grandfather’s two best friends from the regiment — Captain Lewis Sutherland and Captain Stephen Bird — take their eternal rest.

Beny is a beautiful place, a fitting and peaceful monument to the 2,044 Canadians who gave their lives in Normandy. I’ve been here once before, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper during the 65th anniversary D-Day celebrations. But those visits are always run on a tight schedule. This is the first I’ve had the proper time to sit and think about the sacrifice made by these men. And doing it in their presence overwhelms me. Why am I here and not the grandchildren of Captains Bird and Sutherland? After all, had my grandfather’s radio operator not called over to him at the exact moment he did, the sniper’s bullet heading squarely for my grandfather’s temple would have killed him, not plucked out his eye and shattered his orbital like it did. And I wouldn’t be here. Nor would the two girls now wandering the rows of the cemetery. My grandfather was a luckier soldier than Bird and Sutherland, not a better one.

The latter is a thought that can wreck you. I now have a deeper understanding of why my grandfather never talked about this place or what happened here. Until, that is, he was diagnosed with brain cancer and lay dying in an Ottawa hospital in 1999. Then it all started spilling out. Stepping over the bodies on Juno Beach. The firefights with the Germans. Laying on the ground with his eye and bits of his skull somewhere around him, his last memory that of a fellow soldier being torn apart by an artillery shell, and that soldier’s leg pinwheeling through the air and landing in front of him just before he passed out.

My grandfather’s openness about the war had actually started a bit earlier, around the time the film Saving Private Ryan came out. I used to take my grandparents to the cinema a fair bit, but he didn’t want to join my grandmother and I in the theatre for Steven Spielberg’s film. But he did ask to watch it when it came out on DVD. And after we watched that magnificent and chaotic opening sequence on Omaha Beach he asked for the film to be paused while he went to the bathroom. He was still there 15 minutes later when I went to call on him; I could hear the tears coming from the other side of the door. “I never thought I would see that again,” he said upon his exit, his one remaining eye raw from the tears. And if I ever meet Spielberg, I will pay him that compliment.

Why did my grandfather volunteer for that life? Why did his friends? Why did so many Canadians from right across the country sign up for their chance at death? In a world now largely free of personal sacrifice, it feels like a question we’re losing the ability to answer. Can the national will still be summoned? Just how did a much younger country manage to mass the men and materiel to fight in the manner that Canada did in the Second World War? How did a Canadian army go from fewer than 10,000 men to a mobilization that eventually incorporated a tenth of the country’s entire population? What would it take to draw four million of us together under arms in 2026? Would we muster ourselves in those numbers to repel forced attempts at a 51st state? Would the fight even last long enough for us to put together a plan?

Truth be told, it’s hard to see it happening. We are now a country of individuals pursuing more solitary and selfish aims. The country is, in so many ways, different to what it was then. Most importantly, our military is a shadow of its former self. But it’s also easy to forget some of the similarities between the Canada of yesteryear and the Canada of today.

Some now worry about national cohesion in the wake of mass immigration. Would we fight together, arm-in-arm? Is there even a Canada, or are we Justin Trudeau’s post-national hotel? But in the late 1930s Canada, like now, was a country of immigrants. Indeed, one of the most striking sections of the Juno Beach Centre’s displays is the pre-war section on early 20th century immigration in Canada. There were hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, there were tens of thousands of Germans and Brits, etc. Between 1896 and 1914, three million immigrants settled in Canada. Between the two World Wars another 1.5 million came. And out of this newness was forged Canada’s most ever effective fighting force, ready to bleed for King and country.

Then, like now, Canada was a country with a sluggish economy. And while we are not currently in the midst of anything like the Great Depression, many young people are undoubtedly like my grandfather was in the mid-1930s, wondering just what opportunities they will be able to pursue. One of six sons of a First World War veteran (with a nasty temper), my grandfather opted to lie about his age and enlist at 16 to get away from the vicissitudes of his life in rural Prince Edward Island. Six years later he was married and on a boat to England. Two years after that he stormed the beaches of Normandy. Precious few these days will think about a career in the military. To be fair, it’s not clear the current military has the means or ability to give them a career, despite recent promises to boost its funding.

What’s not in doubt is that the citizens of Canada in its present guise have a life of material comfort that far surpasses that of their ancestors. My grandfather had to work his farm hard; there wasn’t much in the way of distraction. There was no infinite scroll or bottomless supply of content. He wasn’t coddled or encouraged to get educated in subjects that had little practical application to life as he knew it. He wasn’t encouraged to get educated at all. In that sense, fighting overseas screamed purpose, it screamed opportunity. It screamed a way out.

What’s more, Hitler was a bad man. A horrible man. Arguably the most horrible man who ever lived. The world could see what he was, and acted accordingly. Of course, the men and women who powered Canada’s response to the (second) German occupation of Europe also had a firmer sense of good and evil. It was a more religious society, one that was comfortable dealing in moral absolutes. Canada was good, Hitler was evil. Canada was something worth fighting for, and national socialism something to fight against. Nowadays, there would be a not-insignificant portion of our younger online army who would, if not make the case for Hitler, excuse or explain away his crimes. They would find a reason to run Canada down instead of looking clearly at the sins of its opponents. If the world today can find people capable of endorsing outfits like Hamas and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, carrying a new Hitler’s water wouldn’t be that much of a stretch.

Of course, the kind of war fought by Canada and the Allies couldn’t be fought in the modern world or modern information economy. For one, there could be no “stealth” invasion of Normandy. The bloody internet sees all. Nor would the public bear the carpet bombing of cities like Dresden and Berlin. More to the point, modern societies would not bear the casualty sums tallied across Normandy and beyond. The invasion was a success, even if thousands of Canadians had to die to achieve it. Contrast this to the coverage and reaction to the 165 dead across the 12 years of operations in Afghanistan. We’ve come to expect war to be bloodless, even as the Ukrainians and Russians show us that tech-enabled warfare is (even more of) a charnel house.

But Canada isn’t leading that next generation of warfighting, either.

A few days after visiting Bény-sur-Mer we toured some of the remnants of Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall” defences at Longues-sur-Mer, as well as the impressive American cemetery at Omaha Beach, where nearly 10,000 American soldiers lie. The Allied bombing missed too much of the former, which caused the deaths of too many of the latter. Today, it would be a scandal that paralyzed public opinion. Then, they simply cracked on with the job. Hitler’s forces weren’t going to pause to allow any sort of back-seat driving or reckoning.

But it was a visit to the seaside town of Arromanches that drove home the current paralysis in much of the West.

Thanks to the horrible failure of Dieppe in the summer of 1942, a price paid mostly in Canadian blood, the Allied command decided that a frontal assault on a German-held port would be impossible as part of any broader invasion. Instead of conquering a harbour, they would bring some harbours to Normandy. Enter the “Mulberries,” temporary port structures whose ruins still dot the beaches and waters of Arromanches.

The Mulberry harbours were enormous. They were marvels of engineering and construction, ones that anticipated and compensated for the massive tides off the coast of Normandy. They were built across England, sunk off its south coast (to hide their existence from German spies) and then raised when the time came to drag them across the English Channel as part of D-Day. And their journey from conception to deployment was approximately … two years.

These days, we can’t build anything in two years, let alone a critical piece of infrastructure needed to secure a war. The F-35 was an active topic of conversation when I left government in 2013 and it is still an active topic of conversation today, 13 years on.

What are we even doing?

Maybe it’s because I lost my father last year. Maybe it’s because I’m now 50 and watching my 83-year old mother age. Maybe it’s because the world I knew, one that was anchored in American military might, is now disintegrating. Or maybe it’s because our information economy now tears at our national canvas instead of painting on it. I’m losing the things that gave my life its historic sense of understanding. Standing in my grandfather’s footsteps brings back that meaning. Being in awe of his sacrifice — and that of the others who served here — brings back perspective. I might have troubles, but I don’t have anything like theirs.

Looking at the past with rose-coloured glasses is usually a waste of time. We’re never going to be the country we were when it served up the “Greatest Generation.” But we do need a renewed sense of nationhood. We need to become a place that can once again pull together to do big things when called upon by the world. Different things, surely, but big just the same. What we shouldn’t be in a rush to do, especially in the face of Trumpian disorder, is to further weaken ourselves, whether by continuing our economic and military stagnation, or carving up the country via referendum.

Standing in Normandy, I can see that the problems of this world don’t get solved by going it alone.

Andrew MacDougall is a director at Trafalgar Strategy and former head of communications to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

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In the latest episode of The Line Podcast, recorded on June 5th, 2026, Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson begin with reports that Prime Minister Mark Carney has a tendency to raise his voice behind closed doors when dealing with his Liberal caucus. According to reporting in the Toronto Star, the PM may not always be the calm technocrat he appears to be in public. Your hosts cannot endorse a toxic workplace, of course, but they also suspect many Canadians won’t be especially upset by the news. After all, they argue, a lot of voters chose the Liberals out of necessity rather than affection, and more than a few people might conclude that after a decade of terrible Liberal management, the former PM’s leftovers deserve a real chewing out.

This episode is brought to you by the Forest Products Association of Canada. Canada’s forest industry is a national economic anchor rooted in hundreds of communities across the country. The Canadian Forest Sector Transformation Task Force was created to chart a path toward a stronger, more competitive, and more resilient sector. That means practical federal action on long-standing priorities: stronger supply chains, better productivity, more homes, and regional resilience. Learn more at FPAC.ca.

After that, they discuss Carney’s recent efforts to reassure Canada’s Jewish community. Both hosts agree the attempt fell short. Matt argues that putting Marc Miller in charge of a new advisory panel feels like a very Trudeau-era response to a serious problem — process instead of action. Jen then raises reports that the Trump administration may consider offering asylum to Canadian Jews. She also notes, to Matt’s horror, that he warned months ago that such a possibility could eventually arise. Perhaps, they joke, he manifested it.

This episode is also brought to you by BioCanRx. Nearly half of all Canadians will face a cancer diagnosis in their lives, and Canadian scientists are racing to build better treatments. But it’s not just the science — it’s the logistics of actually getting it to patients.

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Stay tuned this summer, and visit BioCanRx.com to learn more.

Finally, the hosts check back in on Alberta after what was, by recent standards, a surprisingly quiet week. Probably won’t stay that way for long, though. It never does.

Also: Ricky Martin reference!

All that and more in the latest episode of The Line Podcast.

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Please sign up at those options not just for this episode, or future episodes of The Line Podcast, but so that you can also receive our other podcast series, On the Line, which releases new episodes every Tuesday morning. In case you missed it, here is last Tuesday’s episode, where Jen Gerson had a spirited chat with friend of The Line James McLeod about what digital sovereignty would mean for Canada … if we could actually ever get it.

Thanks, as always, and we’ll talk to you soon. Like, subscribe and share!

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

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By: Ariella Kimmel

Mark Carney took to the stage this week at the Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto to give what was billed as a declaration of the crisis of antisemitism in Canada and the government’s actions to combat this pernicious form of hatred.

The prime minister opened his speech by invoking the Hebrew prophets Isaiah and Amos. But the teachings from these prophets were not generic social-justice slogans, they were speaking to a specific people, in a specific land, with a specific name: Israel. To lift Isaiah and Amos out of that context, to deploy their moral authority while carefully avoiding the words “Israel” or “Zionism,” strips the prophets of the very people and place they were speaking about.

That rhetorical sleight of hand wasn’t just a small mistake by the prime minister; it was a missed opportunity to speak frankly and clearly about the hate that has been plaguing our country for almost three years.

At a moment when Canadian Jews are being targeted in ways we have not seen in generations, and when antisemitism is no longer a fringe phenomenon but a street-level, campus-level, and institutional reality, the speech that needed to be delivered was not a carefully calibrated address to a pre-screened audience inside a synagogue, but rather a clear, unapologetic, national statement.

What we got instead from Carney was the politically safe route with a speech about antisemitism, to Jews, in a Jewish space, with little real cost and even less real consequence. The message, once again, is that this is a Jewish problem, rather than a Canadian problem. If this moment is as serious as politicians keep insisting it is — and, let’s be clear, it is — then it demands more than moral platitudes expressed in comfortable rooms to sympathetic ears. Had this speech been delivered in Parliament, that would have given it the weight it deserved, while making it more difficult for those who indulge or excuse radical anti-Zionism to continue pretending this is merely a “policy disagreement” about foreign affairs, instead of what it has become in Canada: a justification for targeting Jews.

While full of nice words, Carney’s speech danced around the central engine of contemporary antisemitism. This is most clearly seen in what was missing, rather than in what he said. He gave an entire speech on antisemitism in 2026 without uttering the words “Israel,” “Zionism,” or “October 7,” meaning there was no reference to the worst mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, the event that triggered this worldwide wave of antisemitism we are now living through, driven by a campaign of delegitimization and demonization aimed at Israel, and at Zionism as a concept.

This is not a small omission; it is the whole story. Since Oct. 7, the surge in threats and attacks against Jews in Canada has not come from old-school neo-Nazis suddenly emboldened by obscure corners of the internet. It has overwhelmingly come from those who cloak themselves in the language of “anti-Zionism” and “social justice,” and from Islamist extremists who view Jews here as legitimate stand-ins for a war thousands of miles away. The chants we hear in our streets are not criticisms of the Israeli government; they are calls for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state and, by extension, the erasure of Jewish self-determination as a legitimate concept. “From the river to the sea” is not a zoning complaint, but a call for a world in which millions of Jews no longer exist where they live today. “Intifada” is not a poetic metaphor, but a call for violent uprising, historically defined by suicide bombings, shootings, and the deliberate killing of civilians. These are the vile chants echoing outside Jewish community centres, schools, synagogues, and in our downtowns. They are chanted not in theoretical debates but in the faces of Jews, in Jewish neighbourhoods, outside Jewish institutions. There was nothing Carney said that clearly stated that these actions have crossed the line from speech to criminal harassment and intimidation, and that law enforcement must act.

Canada does not suffer from a lack of laws to handle the problem. Harassment, threatening people, and vandalism are all already illegal. Yet repeatedly, police have stood back, paralyzed by political calculations, fearful of being accused of “criminalizing protest,” even when protests have ceased to be protests and have become stalking and terrorizing. What we needed from the prime minister was a firm call to enforce existing laws. Not more committees, or more “dialogue,” or more diluted statements about generic racism that flatten every form of hatred into the same vague word cloud.

Let’s be blunt about it: the primary threat to Jews in Canada today does not come from the far right, even though that threat exists. It comes from those who have mainstreamed the idea that Zionism, which at its very core is simply the belief that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, is inherently racist, illegitimate, or evil. Once you accept that premise, it becomes very easy to justify targeting Jews who dare to identify with that “evil.” Suddenly, a mezuzah is a political symbol, a synagogue is “complicit,” a Jewish overnight camp is “supporting genocide.”

So, what would a meaningful speech have sounded like? It would have started with clarity, not vagueness: “The antisemitism we are seeing in Canada today surged after Oct. 7, and it is being driven primarily through radical anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism has become the main vehicle for antisemitism in our time.”

That sentence alone would have sent a shockwave through the political and cultural spaces where the demonization of Israel and Zionism is par for the course, while forcing an uncomfortable but necessary conversation. A serious speech would have called out the chants for “intifada” and “from the river to the sea” for what they are. And then, crucially, it would have been paired with a directive to law enforcement to enforce the laws on the books evenly and fairly.

A meaningful speech would have been honest about where this problem lives politically, challenging not only the fringe far right, but the progressive and Islamist networks that have legitimized the idea that hounding Jews out of public life is a form of “social justice.” Finally, it would have come with a simple, measurable test: “Judge us not by the words we speak in synagogues, but by whether Jews can send their children to school, walk to synagogue, operate their businesses, and show their identity in public without fear or police presence. If that does not materially change in the months ahead, then we have failed, and you should hold us accountable.”

That is the kind of speech that would not die after a few news cycles. Canada does not need more elegantly phrased concerns; what we need is a direct confrontation with the radical anti-Zionism that is being used as cover to terrorize Jews. When the prime minister steps up to that podium, he has a choice to either offer comfort or demand change. At the podium in Holy Blossom, he chose comfort when the country, not just the Jewish community, needed change.

Ariella Kimmel is president of Winston Wilmont, a public affairs firm, and a volunteer within the Jewish community.

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

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By: Jen Gerson

Watching reaction to the mainstreaming of Albertan separatism has been a ride. Over the past week, I’ve witnessed Albertans, politicians, central Canadians, and premiers take their moment, offering candid comments ranging from the conciliatory, to on-point critique, to the spectacularly counterproductive.

And as an Albertan who has been writing about separatism and alienation and policy grievances for more than a decade, I am sympathetic to the many people in Canada who feel compelled to weigh on the pending referendum but fear making matters worse.

The fear is justified.

Every single smarmy and condescending comment from any prominent Canadian will be weaponized by separatists as proof of contempt ahead of the vote. But that doesn’t mean it’s wise to coddle separatists, or to treat some of their more patently absurd and even sinister claims as neutral statements of fact.

It simply means that those who choose to add their voice to this debate need to ask themselves the sorts of questions that we all, frankly, should be asking ourselves regularly: what is our positionality in this — to what extent will geography, background, or class colour or impact my statements in the eyes of someone determined to see me as “The Other”? What is my actual intention, and can I act with enough empathy to be effective?

And, perhaps most difficult: Is this something I need to say at all?

I’m going to offer my own take, for whatever it’s worth, about how to approach this issue honestly, but also with a touch of care and compassion. I don’t believe “Easterners” — nor, for that matter, even western-er westerners, nor northerners — can or should be expected to silence themselves on a question that affects all of us. But I do think there may be some helpful approaches I can offer.

Firstly, I think we need to draw a hard distinction between “western alienation or grievances” and “separatism.”

Western alienation is an ancient sore spot; Alberta has real beefs about House seat representation, equalization, cultural alienation, geographic institutional capture, and the general ennui that accompanies the sense that Canada is in decline and nothing really gets done or built here. For more than a decade, this country has turned pipeline construction and oil development into the front of a pointless and self-destructive war of virtue against the country’s best economic interests. Albertans are correct to be angry about a Canada that pulls its nose up at the very resource development that funds the country’s much self-regarded social safety net.

Albertans are right to be further incensed by the seemingly countless government programs and subsidies and special considerations that go into developing advanced manufacturing in more populous, vote-rich regions, often at the direct expense of the regions that hew wood and draw water.

Who do you think is backstopping all of that, guys? Where would, say, Bombardier be today if Canada’s GDP weren’t propped up by the oil and gas that Quebec is too precious to see shipped through its province?

I cut my teeth as a journalist pointing out these kinds of problems.

But alienation is a very different beast than separation. The latter is fuelled by the former, certainly — but the movement as a whole has morphed into something else entirely. It’s moved away from a productive kind of politics that channels anger into political coalitions and proactive policy improvements and into a counterproductive fantasy LARP that is training its adherents to believe that any or all of these disagreements can be resolved by a secession free of risks and consequences and trade-offs. We’re watching in real time while this movement devolves into something far removed from the “legitimate grievances” that spawned it, into conspiracism, fanaticism and even outright racism in some quarters.

In short, it’s entirely correct to take complaints seriously. It’s entirely folly to act as if separation is a serious answer to those complaints.

I would argue that it’s dangerous folly to even entertain the idea that playing with separation — even via a vote you expect to lose — is something that can meaningfully improve the lives of ordinary Albertans. A lever only works if you can control it, and I simply do not believe that Alberta’s political class can control this one whit.

In recent days, we’ve seen a spectrum of political responses. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre promised that his MPs would be campaigning for Team Canada — a welcome note. Mark Carney has offered anodyne warnings that a separation vote would be “unhelpful” to investment, risks a Brexit-like outcome, and simply isn’t something that Albertans voted to consider — all true, and all arguments I’ve made myself.

We’ve seen Wab Kinew stand up for the “duty to consult,” challenging Premier Danielle Smith directly in an open press conference.

There is an ongoing debate about the legal clarity of that duty, and about the tactical wisdom of attempting to shut down the Citizens’ Initiative petition that would lead to this referendum via court challenges by four Alberta First Nations people.

For a moment, I want to put a pin in those questions to note something else. It is First Nations people who are standing up for Canada, here. Clearly. Unequivocally. Boldly.

And in Conservative circles increasingly alarmed by the implications of UNDRIP, of “nation-to-nation” relations, of reconciliation, and of property rights, this ought to be pointed out.

Who is standing up for Confederation? Who is not?

Who are the patriots, here?

On the flip side, we have also seen comments that are catastrophically misguided.

The NDP’s Avi Lewis won the round by saying Alberta’s separatism movement has “no point of comparison with the historic sovereignty movement in Quebec.”

Regardless of what one thinks about Alberta’s alignments and motives, it’s materially absurd to position only one province’s secession ambitions as legitimate. That’s taking “asymmetric federalism” too far. Either we all have a legal path toward secession, or none of us ought to. We are all citizens subject to the same fundamental rights, or some of us are more equal than others.

I, for one, think there should be no legal path to secession for any province and the second-order outcomes of the last 40 years on this topic ought to be an object lesson in why. However, the law is what it is. Once the hilt of the knife is given to one, everyone will take his turn as he dares.

But perhaps nothing has annoyed me more to date than watching Conservatives stationed in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal tut-tut their fellow Laurentian Elites, as if being Conservative made them immune to the same prejudicial bias. Carney is fanning the flames, and any critique of separatism, no matter how anodyne, is deemed worthy of the highest reproach.

Yes, Conservative strategist Cole Hogan, I am picking on you, here. He and I have crossed swords on Twitter several times on this very point: the more Conservatives undermine the criticisms of separatism from the Liberals, the harder they make it for us Albertan federalists to make exactly the same points.

“We face a national unity crisis. It is not something that can be flippantly dismissed by those in other parts of the country that would suggest that Alberta, for example, should simply pay up and shut up,” said departing Battle River—Crowfoot MP Damien Kurek.

“Alberta deserves a fair voice in the federation, just like every province.”

Of course, if this statement is true, it also presumes the opposite. There have been a range of reactions to Albertan separatism. “Flippant dismissal” is not how I’d characterize the bulk of it.

And implying that Albertans don’t have a fair voice in the federation is a pretty ironic thing to note from an Alberta MP giving a speech in the House of Commons.

They, too, are attempting to define the frame of acceptable debate from the east. There are plenty of Albertans — including Conservative MPs — who are furious not with the presumed stream of callous disrespect and cruelty ceaselessly emerging from the House of Commons. Rather, they, like the majority of Albertans, are angry that we’re wasting our time and energy talking about something as dangerous and counterproductive as separatism at all.
Who speaks for those Albertans?

Guys, I hate to be a buzzkill, but the latest polling shows that Carney and Poilievre are about equally popular in Alberta.

However widespread frustration and grievance, the majority of Albertans at present don’t support separatism as a viable option — and would need to be materially misled and manipulated into voting for even a non-binding referendum to support that position. On this specific topic, Mark Carney is speaking for the majority of Albertans. And those conservatives demanding we treat separatism with the utmost care and respect are themselves seemingly blind to the fact that they are speaking not for the actual majority of the province, but rather to the significant plurality of conservative Albertans who donate to their party and populate their boards and nomination contests.

Albertans are not one thing.

We do not all share the same opinions.

Albertan “grievances” are usually reduced to a stock list of complaints ranging from that cartoon from 1905 featuring westerners feeding the cow that easterners milk, to the reviled Tanker Ban.

But if you poke at this issue for even a moment, you’ll quickly discover that a lot of Albertans don’t actually give a shit about the divided city of Lloydminster; nor about unequal representation in the senate. Plenty of Albertans support industrial carbon taxes and slower growth in the oil sands.

Most Albertans actually consider themselves moderate.

Here’s a fun fact: As part of an extensive polling series conducted by the CBC almost 10 years ago, a shocking 86 per cent of Albertans think the province is too dependent on oil and gas. They also widely supported higher oil and gas royalties, and also increased pipeline infrastructure.

One of the great fantasies about this province is that because it reliably votes Conservative, this makes it a kind of Conservative Cultural Monoculture. (This is in part why the unexpected win of Rachel Notley and the NDP in 2015 proved to be so traumatic for diehard partisans. It shattered their illusions about the Conservative heartland, leading to the forcible reunion of two very disparate conservative provincial parties — all to prevent the horror of the other side winning an election in a two-party democratic system from ever being repeated.)

Separatism takes this tendency to its extreme, treating the majority who dissent from its narrow vision of an Independent Republican future as, somehow, “not Albertan.”

Well, I’ve lived here for 16 years. I’ve covered all of these grievances as the Western Correspondent of the National Post. I am an independent journalist, own a company domiciled in Alberta, I’m someone who takes no money from the federal government. I was born in Calgary and gave birth to my son in the same hospital where I, myself, was born.

And, echoing the reported words of our Liberal prime minister, I think separatism is stupid.

If that means I don’t count as an “Albertan” by separatist logic, then who does, exactly, and why? How shabby and conformist is your vision of this future nation?

I understand there will be much handwringing about the “right way” to approach separatism from around the country in coming months. Self awareness and an understanding of the history of the province are good places to start.

But if you actually want to be helpful, stop worrying so much about other peoples’ tone, get your asses out here, and start making the case for Canada. Which, by the way, really shouldn’t be difficult, especially when the reality of the alternatives are laid out in full view.

And if you really cannot do that — if you really cannot bring yourself to put the good of the country and all of the Albertans within it first and foremost, then perhaps reconsider your own centrality to this debate.

I say this with love, Laurentian Elites, both left and right. It wouldn’t kill you to cede the floor and let some of the other voices in this debate have their moment, too.

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded. No federal subsidies, no bailouts. If you value our work, please consider supporting us by subscribing or making a donation. Donations are not subscriptions and do not unlock paywalled content, but they help keep The Line independent

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In this episode of On The Line, host Jen Gerson sits down with James McLeod of the Canadian Shield Institute to discuss one of the most talked-about — and least understood — concepts in Canadian public policy: digital sovereignty.

This episode of On The Line is brought to you by BioCanRX. Nearly half of all Canadians will get a cancer diagnosis in their lives. Canadian scientists are moving fast to come up with better treatments to help these people. But it’s not just about science, it’s about the logistics of implementing it.

BioCanRx is a federally funded, not-for-profit Canadian research network that specializes in bringing Canadian cancer immunotherapy research from the lab all the way to patients in clinical trials in Canada. Since launching in 2015, they’ve funded 16 clinical trials and treated more than 400 patients across Canada, all with made-in-Canada technologies.

What is immunotherapy? Most immune systems successfully eliminate threats every day — including our own cells when they mutate in ways they shouldn’t. But when our mutating cells find a way to trick our immune systems, things can start getting out of control. That’s usually when we apply the label “cancer.” Immunotherapy is about modifying or supporting your immune system so cancer can’t evade it. Stay tuned this summer to learn more about what Canadian research is doing to fight cancer. Go to BioCanRX.com to learn more.

The word “sovereignty” has become a fixture of Canadian political debate in recent years, particularly in response to economic pressure and even annexation rhetoric from U.S. President Donald Trump. But what does sovereignty actually mean in a world where much of Canada’s digital infrastructure, cloud computing, social media, and online services are controlled by American companies and governed by American laws?

McLeod walks Gerson through the realities of living in a digital ecosystem largely built and operated south of the border. They discuss the vulnerabilities that creates for Canada, the limits of what governments can realistically do to regain control, and the difficult trade-offs involved in pursuing greater independence over data, privacy, and critical digital infrastructure.

This episode is also brought to you by the Forest Products Association of Canada. Canada’s forest industry is a national economic anchor rooted in hundreds of communities across the country. The Canadian Forest Sector Transformation Task Force was created to chart a path toward a stronger, more competitive, and more resilient sector. That means practical federal action on long-standing priorities: stronger supply chains, better productivity, more homes, and regional resilience. Learn more at FPAC.ca.

The conversation also explores what a Canadian digital sovereignty strategy might actually look like in practice. Can Canada build more domestic capacity? Should it? And what kinds of regulatory and policy tools are available to a middle power trying to assert greater control in a digital world dominated by American technology giants?

It’s a timely discussion about privacy, security, national resilience, and what sovereignty means in the twenty-first century. Check out our main page at ReadTheLine.ca and be sure to like and subscribe. We’ll be back on Friday with another episode of The Line Podcast.

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