By: Rob Shaw

There’s not enough time in the day, or keys on the keyboard, to fully capture the insanity of British Columbia politics over the last few months. So here’s the short version: a desperate NDP premier has called a snap election hoping to take advantage of a U.S. trade war, and a desperate opposition B.C. Conservative party has scrambled to put together a functioning campaign after being driven to the brink of collapse by an abysmal leader.

In short, desperate times have required desperate measures by the main political parties in B.C. recently. And chaos has ensued for voters.

Let’s start with Premier David Eby.

He ended the spring session of the B.C. legislature in May with the lowest approval numbers since taking office in 2022, amid a backlash over how his government’s Indigenous reconciliation laws had put private property rights into question in the courts.

Eby lacked the votes inside his caucus to pass legislative changes. And First Nations leaders eviscerated him publicly for rolling backwards on reconciliation. He pledged to find a solution by the fall. His career hung in the balance. And there were few easy solutions available.

Then, U.S. President Donald Trump jacked up tariffs on Canada, and Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from an American trade deal.

Eby leapt at the opening, appearing earlier this month in flannel dinner jacket, in front of a giant Canada flag, alongside a folksy local rapper who sang about poutine and hockey, to proclaim the province at an “existential moment” of “crisis” that required his leadership.

Tuesday, he rolled the anti-U.S. messaging into a snap election campaign, only two years into his four-year mandate, in an attempt to bolster his chances of staying leader. He currently has a three-seat majority in the legislature, but proclaimed it too “fragile.”

“Join me in saying hell no to Trump and his politics for British Columbia,” Eby said in his campaign launch. “Because the conditions have changed. The moment is here. Let’s meet it together.”

New Democrat strategists are hoping the fear over Trump will blunt any desire for change from voters who’ve had an NDP government now for more than nine years. And by striking early, while the B.C. Conservatives are in disarray, New Democrats also hope to crack open victories in voter-rich Surrey, the Fraser Valley and even the Interior and North.

But in its launch, the B.C. NDP campaign offered zero new policies or proposals. Eby did cite the “chaos” inside the rival B.C. Conservative Party as justification for sending the province to the polls.

To be fair, chaos is perhaps even an understatement for the state of the Conservatives.

Former federal MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay won the party’s May 30 leadership race by only 60 votes on the fourth and final ballot, exposing a base deeply divided over whether to be moderate, or swing hard right.

Findlay stormed into office like she’d won a supermajority, proclaiming an agenda of “faith, family and freedom.” She demanded a salary, clothing allowance, driver and vehicle before even winning a seat. But she rarely showed up for caucus meetings, appearing entirely disinterested in hearing from anyone other than a small group of loyalist MLAs and her husband Brent Chapman (also an MLA).

Findlay quickly purged the Conservative caucus and party of almost all staff, deeming them disloyal to her cause, and installed a new team of — to put it charitably — weirdos, malcontents and grifters.

Her new operations director, Apollo Chung, arrived from the separatist Alberta Republican Party, sowed discord in the ranks, and then was fired after a leaked audio recording in which he allegedly spoke about “stealing” money from the party and donors.

Her chief of staff, Chris Delaney, allegedly offered several MLAs jobs and salaries if they’d give up their seat for the leader to run in a by-election (the RCMP have since interviewed at least three MLAs about whether that was an inducement under the Criminal Code) before he flamed out and resigned.

Her communications director, Cosmin Dzsurdzsa, parachuted in from right-wing website Juno News to proclaim open war with the mainstream media, blacklisting certain journalists and pivoting Findlay towards exclusive interviews with fringe “influencers,” including a gentleman who posted AI-generated videos of Donald Trump beating up Mark Carney.

Meanwhile, Findlay’s party executive director Elaine Allen allegedly hired a private investigator to spy on critics of the leader, including current and former Conservative MLAs, and a journalist (full disclosure: me).

In all cases, Findlay denied any knowledge of anything any of her staff had ever done.

MLAs started leaving; first a trickle, then a flood. Fundraising tanked. The architects of the 2024 election campaign that had vaulted the Conservatives from zero to 44 seats were removed.

By last weekend, 14 MLAs had quit or been fired by Findlay — a third of the remaining caucus.

Former leader John Rustad recalled how after he called for Findlay to step down in a closed-door meeting, he was fired by late-night text from the leader, rehired 15 minutes later, and then fired again by text the next day.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Findlay proclaimed on Friday. But by Sunday, she’d been forced out.

Her reign barely lasted four months, but the damage to the party looked fatal. Eight MLAs had joined a rival party called CentreBC. In a telling sign, the far-right party known as OneBC publicly defended Findlay. The Conservative party was caught in the middle.

B.C.’s business community began to wring its hands about the kind of centre-right vote split that could keep the NDP in power.

Then a funny thing happened. Eby’s early election call Tuesday galvanized the centre-right movement in B.C.

Suddenly, federal Liberal and Conservative organizers started talking. Enemies who’d been fighting online in the wake of the B.C. Conservative leadership race put down their Twitter swords. And within the span of 24 hours, a coalition of some of the province’s brightest strategists were actually working together to cobble together a last-minute election campaign to challenge the NDP.

At the centre of all of this is an interim Conservative leader you almost assuredly have never heard of. His name is Lorne Doerkson and he’s from Williams Lake, in B.C.’s interior. He’s got a low profile, and spent much of his time at the legislature as the assistant deputy speaker.

But Doerkson was named the party’s interim leader for one reason: everyone inside caucus likes him and wants to work with him. So the mild-mannered former newspaper publisher is now the unlikely centre of a provincial election campaign, backed by a coalition of frenemies that are (temporarily) working together to fight a common political enemy.

That’s an extremely truncated version of the last five months in B.C. politics. And it still took more than 1,000 words.

The province is now in the middle of a 32-day campaign that overlaps its municipal elections and is set to conclude Oct. 24. Eby has rolled the dice on his political future, calculating his best chance to survive is to get re-elected with a stronger majority while he’s got cover from Trump and weakened opponents. He may be proven right. Or he may have kicked a hornet’s nest in the B.C. Conservatives, and inadvertently given his opponents a rallying cry to come back together.

Rob Shaw is the host of Political Capital, a daily podcast on B.C. politics and a weekly analysis show. He’s also a political correspondent for CHEK News TV in Victoria, and writes for Business in Vancouver and Northern Beat. He’s covered B.C. politics for the past 18 years.

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.

In this episode of On The Line, Jen Gerson checks in with Greenland and Europe. Canadians seem increasingly open to closer ties with non-U.S. Western allies — but what do those allies think about us?

This episode is brought to you by BioCanRx. We’ve been partnering with federally-funded Canadian not-for-profit BioCanRx to learn how made-in-Canada immunotherapies offer new ways to beat cancer. This September we’re focusing on the “made-in-Canada” part. One way to leverage existing Canadian government investments in biomanufacturing would be to make it easier for Canadian innovators to develop their discoveries into therapies here in Canada.

Aside from organizations like BioCanRx, there are few funding sources for the “translational research” activities necessary to build the significant body of evidence required for clinical trial approval from Health Canada — without which these therapies could never reach patients. If funding mechanisms are created to support translational research in Canada, more Canadian discoveries can generate work for Canada’s biomanufacturing facilities — leading to more sovereign capacity, and more therapies made in Canada for Canadian patients.

But how could we make sure new investments aren’t wasted? More on that next week. Visit BioCanRx.com to learn more.

First, Markus Bernsen joins Jen to discuss the reported U.S.-Greenland agreement, what remains unknown, and why the negotiations have caused so much anxiety in Greenland and Denmark. They discuss military access, investment, sovereignty, and the damage already done to the Denmark-U.S. relationship.

This episode is also brought to you by the Forest Products Association of Canada. Every budget season brings endless ideas for how Ottawa should spend. But some of the best ways to strengthen Canada’s economy don’t require a massive price tag.

For Canada’s forest products sector, real growth starts with dismantling made-in-Canada barriers: cutting regulatory duplication, fixing supply chain bottlenecks, securing predictable, cost-competitive access to fibre, and creating more certainty for investment.

We can’t control every global challenge facing our industry, but we can remove the barriers created right here at home.

Discover how smarter policy drives economic growth at FPAC.ca.

Then Brussels-based foreign correspondent Jack Parrock joins Jen to discuss Canada’s push for closer ties with the European Union. What would “associate membership” actually mean? How much is substance and how much is symbolism? And could Canada and Europe build deeper links in trade, payments and defence as both reconsider their dependence on the United States?

This episode is also brought to you by Cardus. For years, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was one of the most famous atheists in the world. Then she converted to Christianity. Now she argues that faith is the key to renewing Western civilization. Hear her make the case live in Calgary, October 8th, at the 2026 Ian Shugart Lecture, hosted by the think tank Cardus. Get your tickets at Cardus.ca/ayaan.

From Greenlandic sovereignty to diplomacy in Strasbourg, it’s a look at how the Western alliance is being reshaped — and where Canada might fit. As always, like and subscribe. Stay tuned Friday for the next episode of The Line Podcast.

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Enjoy the episode! 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

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: Matt Gurney

So. Ahem.

Has anyone else noticed that the news these days feels an awful lot like the scene-setting exposition that a lot of horror or apocalyptic movies need to get out of the way in the opening scenes, while we’re all being introduced to the characters we’re supposed to be emotionally invested in by the time the terrible things being aggressively foreshadowed start happening?

You all know the kind of scene, right? It used to be easier. You’d have a character chopping vegetables for dinner and not really listening to the radio news report in the background droning on about a military crisis. A frazzled housewife would be dropping the kids off at school while the DJ kills a few seconds between pop songs to mention that crazy story about some people apparently coming back from the dead and attacking people. Or a stern father figure would pause and gaze thoughtfully at the front page of a conveniently placed newspaper reporting on the ominous signs of an imminent disaster.

It’s gotten harder to pull these scenes together in the era of smartphones; nowadays you often need to have some secondary character breathlessly pause to show our protagonist the alarming tweet or video. But the function is the same: you signal to the audience early that something bad is happening, and that our characters aren’t really paying attention to it. They’re leading lives that are just too normal and relatable.

Am I the only one who has noticed that most of the international news today sounds a lot like those set-up scenes? Should we be worried?

Overall, I think no, not really. But I’m less confident in that than I was just a few months ago.

I don’t think anyone is going to deliberately go out and trigger a large global war. But there are a lot of overlapping factors that could come together right now and hand us all a war that no one really sought. And that no one, especially this country, is ready for.

I’ll make the case for my growing worry in a moment. Just for now, though, I want to reiterate that I don’t think this is likely, for the very simple reason that the various nations involved are all still rational actors. I’m using “rational” in the game-theory sense, which isn’t to say that their actions are smart or moral. It means that these various nations have goals and are attempting to realize those goals by making deliberate choices. They may make choices in error, or based on bad intelligence or assumptions, or choices that don’t go the way they intended, but they won’t deliberately do something insane, and will try to accomplish their goals while minimizing cost and risk.

In other words, they’ll likely be deterred from doing something that would, by their own logic, trigger a devastating enemy response. Deterrence is still a thing, and international crises have often been de-escalated by the simple reality that all the would-be combatants, when presented with the full horror of the consequences of their actions, decide to step back from the brink.

That’s the case for optimism. There is a case for pessimism, though, and it rests on two things.

The first is a simple observation that, in recent years, there have been a series of conflicts that seem to disprove the optimistic case above. Hamas started a war with Israel it could not win. Russia started a war with Ukraine it thought it could win, and then refused to de-escalate once it realized it could not. The U.S. seems to be in the middle of a similar miscalculation with Iran right now.

The U.S. position is a bit harder to model out or understand because President Donald Trump is a more erratic leader, with abnormally low pain tolerance, than most. This confounds the rational actor analysis a bit, because he seems as motivated by his personal and family goals as any set of United States national goals. His personal win conditions shift so rapidly that his “rational” choices on a Monday may be obsolete by Tuesday. But still. U.S. institutions are attempting to be rational, to the extent they can be, but the country still can’t figure out how to handle Iranian escalation, and Trump has been reluctant to fully commit U.S. military power. Iran, for all its weaknesses and the appalling nature of the regime, has consistently outthought the U.S. since the conflict began. That seems unlikely to change.

So, yes. We seem to be in something of a rut when it comes to conflicts we’d have expected to be avoided, or ended, not actually ending or being avoided. There is a case to be made that luck has helped us avoid major global conflicts for years, and right now, we seem to have exhausted our supply. Take that for what it’s worth.

But in the present moment, there are a series of factors, especially in Europe, that are probably raising the stakes of a major military conflict there. Some of that ripples out far enough to raise the risk of conflict elsewhere, but we’ll start with Europe and, more specifically, the risk of a conflict between Europe — and potentially NATO — and Russia.

The first issue is given away a bit in how I phrased that last sentence. If Russia were to take a provocative act against Europe, which it might well do for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment, it’s not clear that the U.S. would honour its NATO obligations.

Europe is still heavily dependent on the U.S. for military defence. Trump, Pete Hegseth and the rest aren’t wrong about that, alas. Europe does have a lot of troops and weapons, but it relies on the U.S. for some advanced munitions, for space-based reconnaissance and communication, for intelligence gathering and sharing, and for some logistics. The Europeans are trying to offset these weaknesses, but that’s going to be years of work.

Right now, a potential adversary — Russia, for our purposes today, but really anyone — cannot be sure that the U.S. would come to Europe’s defence, or how it would come to Europe’s defence if it did, or for how long. A potential adversary would also have reasonable grounds to wonder if the U.S. could somehow be enticed to either avoid entering a conflict or withdraw its support if it did.

My personal opinion is that the U.S. would honour its commitments, for now. I think the U.S. security institutions would insist on it and are still powerful enough to prevail. I am less confident that the U.S. would stay in the fight for long, especially if the adversary directly approached the Trump family with commercial incentives to end the fighting, even over the objections of U.S. allies. “Let’s make peace on terms that suck for your allies and your sons will oversee the reconstruction” is not an offer I’m confident the U.S. president would refuse.

In any case, even the uncertainty above is destabilizing. That we are even pondering the question means deterrence has been at least partially eroded.

The second major issue, alluded to above, is why Russia might want to do this.

Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t. Vladimir Putin would understand the danger. But circumstances have changed.

Both Russia and Ukraine, under the brutal pressures of war, have rapidly evolved their militaries around drone tactics. Ukraine seems to be a step ahead of the Russians so far, at least in the big-picture sense. Russia cannot advance on the ground in Ukraine, and Ukraine is now methodically demolishing Russia’s economy, with particular emphasis on its energy and logistics sectors. Russia has not yet been able to solve either of those problems, and the costs are mounting.

But Ukraine remains dependent on Western aid. For Russia, this, combined with uncertain U.S. reliability, poses an interesting question: can the West be frightened out of supporting Ukraine by a provocative enough Russian action? If so, can starting a fight with Europe actually created the circumstances for Russia to defeat Ukraine militarily or force it to accept peace terms that Putin feels he can live with?

To that, we must add two more related factors.

As noted above, Russia is now one of the world’s most drone-forward militaries. It hasn’t been able to overwhelm Ukraine, but Ukraine is a peer in the realm of drones. The NATO nations, unfortunately, are very much not. This has been demonstrated in a series of war games between NATO forces and Ukraine. The Ukrainians have mopped the floor with heavy, advanced NATO tank-and-infantry formations that lack drones and, critically, experience with drones. Meanwhile, the alliance — mainly the United States — is running critically low on several important munitions, including long-range precision-strike missiles and air-defence missiles such as Patriots.

These two factors combine to create a bizarre situation: Russia today may actually have technical and tactical advantages over NATO. That hasn’t even plausibly been the case in a generation or more. But Russia might currently be better able to sustain a drone war than NATO could sustain a conventional war, and it’s not clear to me that the conventional force would defeat the drone force anyway.

Put all these factors together and we find ourselves in a pretty worrying place. Russia has reason to look at Europe and NATO and wonder if it could get away with something. Not conquering Europe. No one is predicting Russian tanks parading through Paris. But could Russia provoke a small fight on NATO’s eastern flank, win it, and then threaten escalation unless NATO accepts a peace deal that sells out Ukraine? Could it launch some air strikes? Grab a peace of land with “little green men” — Russian troops with no flags on their uniforms — and annex it? Trigger a crisis using intelligence along Russia’s border and then send in Russian troops as “peacekeepers?"

I don’t think it could do any of these things and get away with it. I think Europe would fight, with or without the U.S., and that Putin would rapidly find himself in yet another war he couldn’t win.

But I can definitely imagine a scenario where Putin decides to risk it. This would be an example of the “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine that is part of Russian military theory. How do you get yourself out of a problem? Create a bigger problem, one bigger than the enemy can tolerate, and then offer terms to end both.

If it works, you win. If it doesn’t, you’re in a lot more trouble than you were.

Still. Putin might be thinking about it. Russia has already been waging a low-level “hybrid war” against Europe for years, using deniable drone attacks and sabotage. Europe has been content to pretend to not know what Russia is doing, since calling it out in public would compel it to do things it doesn’t want to do. Europe likely also fears a U.S. refusal to aid them, which would reveal NATO to be finished. From the European perspective, for now, a questionable NATO is vastly preferable to a dead one.

But something has clearly changed in recent weeks. The leaders of Germany, Poland and France have all explicitly sounded the alarm about a possible major Russian escalation, and the director of the CIA recently suddenly flew to Moscow, reportedly to warn the Russians not to do anything stupid and to signal the U.S.’s willingness to honour its NATO obligations. Putin might be getting curious about what he can get away with, especially as more and more of his oil refineries go kablooey under an onslaught on Ukrainian drones his military cannot stop.

I noted above that my focus would be mostly on Europe, but that the problem was global. The global element here is the munitions shortages. Right now, other Western adversaries — China and North Korea — are looking at the war with Iran and the risk of war with Russia. And they’re no doubt wondering what they can get away with while the West is focused on the problems we already have.

So far, they are behaving. But if the Iran war continues, if U.S. and allied munitions stockpiles continue to dwindle, if Russia keeps Europe on edge or even makes a move, the rest of the world might decide to just go ahead and see what it can get away with.

This, it hardly needs to be said, wouldn’t be good news for anyone.

I don’t think war is likely or imminent, and I’m reassured by statements by some Eastern European leaders, who’ve said that while tensions are high and the danger is real, they don’t see any new imminent signs of conflict. Good! Let’s hope it stays that way.

But the danger of a major war is real, and rising. The world is a very uncertain place politically, and military technology is changing rapidly in ways that are potentially destabilizing. The NATO countries are powerful because they have large, modern militaries, but drones may have at least partially rendered them obsolete. The uncertainty alone is destabilizing. The less we are confident about, the greater the risk someone decides to roll the dice and see what happens.

A final note: even as the world is destabilizing and many of our allies are warning about the growing risk of conflict, I note that Canada has still not made a decision on a full replacement fleet for our elderly CF-18 fighter jet fleet. The reason for this is clear and is worth naming bluntly: Canada is using this as a bargaining chip in our trade war with the U.S. Until we actually make a decision, we have the ability to use the massively expensive program as leverage. Do we give it to a U.S. company, or to Europe, or both? The moment we make a decision, that leverage disappears.

That makes sense in the circumstances of the trade war, but will look recklessly idiotic if a major war does come in the next few years. If Canadian allies are dying in the skies while we do nothing, or if our pilots get wiped out in their ancient planes, “Well, yeah, but we needed bargaining leverage against Trump” is not going to cut it as an explanation abroad or at home. It’s time for us to get off our asses and make a decision.

Like, today, if possible. Because if we are indeed living through the first-act foreshadowing of a future Third World War thriller, it’d be nice to get some weapons lined up before we start getting into the more intense acts of this particular drama, no?

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.

Happy weekend, everyone. Make it even better by checking out the latest episode of The Line Podcast.

Also, check out last week’s episode of On The Line, where Matt Gurney is joined by Kent Fellows, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, for a conversation about game theory, the trade war, and the challenge of getting Canada’s economy moving again. Plus, very special guest Alan Findlay, the newest member of The Line’s team.

And now, on with the dispatch.

The Snowbirds made their last-ever full appearance in Canada on Sunday, closing out the Aero Gatineau airshow with a typically crowd-pleasing performance. They have two shows left in their season, both in California, then they’ll do a flyover for the Grey Cup in November. And that will be it for the flight demonstration squadron of the RCAF that was formed in the summer of 1971.

Yes, they are supposedly only going on “hiatus” until the replacements arrive for the CT-114 Tutor jets, which have been in RCAF inventory since 1963 and have served as the Snowbirds’ platform since the beginning. The replacement, the government says, will be the Swiss-made, propeller-driven CT-157 Siskin II, with new aircraft expected to become operational “sometime in the early 2030s.”

When it comes to the federal government, especially when it comes to DND procurement, “the early 2030s” is little more than a shrug emoji, a phrase that functions not as a firm commitment, but as an admission that there isn’t one. We are talking, at minimum, about a gap of six to eight years, but more than likely a full decade or more, during which the skies above the Peace Tower will be quiet on Canada Day, during which airshows from Abbotsford to Halifax will have to make do with foreign performers, during which one of the most effective propaganda tools the Canadian Armed Forces (and by extension Canada) possesses will simply cease to exist. But more than anything, it is another thread snipped out from the already threadbare fabric that links Canadians to one another and to the land they share.

There is a passage in Walter Bagehot’s essential 1867 book The English Constitution where he distinguishes between the “dignified” and the “efficient” parts of a constitutional order. The efficient parts do the actual work: Parliament, cabinet, the machinery of public administration. The dignified parts, the Crown above all, exist to inspire loyalty, to focus public reverence, to hold the emotional architecture of the nation together while the efficient parts get on with the frequently messy business of governing. Bagehot’s point is that a healthy polity needs both, where the dignified institutions act as a buffer, absorbing the friction that partisan politics generates while keeping the public broadly attached to the system as a whole.

Canada has always been a country thin on the ground when it comes to dignified institutions. The Crown, already one step removed from true royalty as represented by the Governor General, has for decades been treated by Liberal governments with a shifting mix of negligence, contempt, and condescension. The RCMP has been misused for years, deployed as a political instrument when convenient, starved of resources and leadership when not. The CBC has been allowed to drift into irrelevance and dependency in equal measure, its mandate wildly unfocused and its funding never quite sufficient to do the vague job it has theoretically been assigned.

And then there is 24 Sussex Drive, the prime minister’s official residence, which has sat empty and deteriorating since 2015, its electrical systems a declared fire hazard, its plumbing failing on a regular basis, mould and asbestos throughout, costing taxpayers millions in basic upkeep while the government ran out the clock on successive promises of renovation.

The heritage community has a term for what happens when a building is allowed to decay through inaction rather than intent. They call it demolition by neglect. As a description of Liberal stewardship of our national symbolic heritage, it is hard to improve on. Justin Trudeau’s decision to order the Canadian flag to fly at half staff over federal buildings for the better part of a year — an act of vandalism dressed up as virtue — remains only the most unconscionable and egregious single episode of this broad-based pattern.

There is scant evidence this pattern will change. Yes, Mark Carney has launched a campaign to find someone willing to fix up 24 Sussex, but it is an open question when, or if, that will ever happen. Besides, the problem isn’t with any one project, any given symbol, any particular institution. It is that the Liberal Party of Canada fundamentally doesn’t take the country seriously, and hasn’t for a very, very long time.

In their time, the Snowbirds have performed over 2,700 air displays for more than 140 million people. Sunday afternoon, the constitution of Canada got a bit less dignified.

On that happy note, we have more inspiring news to report from the trenches of the Conservatives’ suicide-by-friendly-fire.

After a scant four months at the head of the Conservative Party of British Columbia, Kerri Lynne-Findlay’s tenure has come to a total and unceremonious end. Those watching the chaos of B.C. politics will know that recent weeks have seen an exodus of Conservative MLAs, along with truly incredible levels of internal sniping, leaks, and dramatic firings from party staff. All of this has been made all the more ominous by the fact that the B.C. wing has, for months, served as a kind of proxy trench for the broader federal movement’s own internal and highly pointless fight about who was Conservative Enough.

We at The Line wrote the federal Conservative party off as fundamentally unserious losers some months ago. Sorry. We have lots of friends in the party and we love you dearly, and we know that there are brilliant and capable people who serve as staff, volunteers, and politicians. No disrespect to any of you personally.

But, also, come on.

You know we’re right. And we know that you know because you say to us privately what you won’t dare say publicly: that a significant plurality of this party’s base has devolved into a totally ungovernable morass of angry conspiracy theorists who are radically more interested in imposing purity tests on fellow Conservatives than actually winning anything. As B.C. has demonstrated, the base is increasingly too fractious to maintain any kind of internal coherence as a party, much less a government. We’ve been harsh in our criticism of the party for how it has handled Donald Trump and the current U.S.-Canada trade file — and we think that criticism is as valid today as it was when the party refused to put down the “Carbon Tax Election” t-shirts in the face of Mark Carney and Trump’s threat of turning us into the 51st state.

But what we’d also note is that, beyond a generalized critique about the absolute state of this country (see above) and a convenient stance about how we need to fix our own problems rather than blame Trump for economic woes, there’s really no coherent ideological vision of what Conservatives want this country to be anymore. From the outside, the whole movement really just looks like social-media directed vibes, and throwing bones to increasingly unappeasable bases.

Yes, we know that those bases show up reliably to rallies, donate to party coffers, and zealously volunteer. But there are just not enough “Real Conservatives” — so narrowly defined — to win an election in this country. To quote the kids today: The math ain’t mathing.

Like, when you’ve lost Stephen Harper, you’ve lost the nation, and we don’t see any obvious road back from that. As long as this movement continues to be content to operate itself like a petty university campus soap opera, not only will they not take power, but they’ll be increasingly ineffective at simply being opposition.

Which is a problem, because a country granting Prime Minister Mark Carney Saddam Hussein levels of popularity actually does need an effective opposition capable of reminding the Mandate of Heaven that he, too, is mortal. Too bad the Conservatives aren’t interested.

Your formidable Line editors don’t have much to add from Friday’s podcast, in which we discussed Carney’s speech to the European Union, and plans to take on some kind of “associate membership.”

We’re not going to get too caught up on whether or not the Prime Minister’s Office lied — again — when an anonymous source claimed that Canada was not seeking such a membership. Because, well, “associate membership” doesn’t actually mean anything.

Or, rather, nobody seems to know what it might entail, if anything.

From what we can see, we’re probably looking at a symbolic acknowledgement that gives Canada a seat at the table to discuss a range of issues from banking infrastructure and defence alliances, to improved work visas, or easier access to European universities. What does not appear to be on the table is some kind of true economic partnership that ties Canada to a currency union, or to the EU’s notoriously sclerotic and mishmash bureaucracy.

So, on the whole ... good? The Liberals have always been good at symbolic gestures, and, well, we’re actually pretty happy with all of the moral support we can muster at this difficult time, thank you.

Getting the EU to more tables means more voices and more weight — which limits the capacity of the United States to unilaterally set terms and demands on issues where Canada has a legitimate interest. If Canada wishes to continue to fight to oppose U.S. vassalization, we’re going to need to be strategic and canny. We’re going to need to play larger powers off one another, shimmying our interests between the gaps issue by issue. It’s going to be a long and hard game going forward.

We understand the strategy, but we maintain some reservations about the unresolved weaknesses. The first, as noted above, is that after almost two years of Trump II, Canada is still very far from having its internal business in order. We generally agree with the direction the Carney government is trying to take the country; we love attracting capital, and we want to build all the things. However, we retain a slow, risk averse institutional governmental culture, fundamental problems of scale and ambition, and a massively too centralized and over-regulated business environment.

If we want to beat Trump, we need to move harder and faster on these fronts.

Our other concern came about this weekend when we saw Donald Trump bragging about some kind of deal with Denmark over Greenland that, he claims, will give him effective control over the long-coveted land mass.

A note of skepticism: we don’t know what’s in this deal, and we wouldn’t be surprised if it was simply a re-statement of the terms of previous agreements that the U.S. had already agreed to going right back to the ‘50s.

But, the fact that Denmark is agreeing to sign anything with the U.S. at this point should suggest that European resolve is not quite where Canada needs it to be. We know that Canadian resolve is high — at the moment. But resolve has to be met with real action, and an equal willingness by other allies to make hard and difficult choices in the face of U.S. pressure. Canada’s unique vulnerability means that our willingness to incur costs in order to preserve as much of sovereignty as possible must be likewise high, but not all of the other middle powers suffer from the same exposure. Many European nations are deeply dependent on the U.S. defence industry and cannot simply swap that alliance out neatly or quickly. This is all the more challenging in the face of a Russian federation that is growing more aggressive by the day. In other words, they have different kinds of risks than we do, and we can’t expect all of them to accept the same level of sacrifice.

On the whole, we at The Line are big plus ones for Liberal Democracies Sticking Together on paper. We just remind everyone that liberal democracies are messy, and to set expectations accordingly.

A few months ago, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a fascinating comment. The Democratic U.S. Congresswoman, very clearly identified with the left-wing edge of the party, was being interviewed about some truly bonkers comments made by Francesca Hong, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for the Wisconsin gubernatorial race. (Our favourite was Hong’s call to cancel Thanksgiving, since it celebrated colonialism; in the end, Hong did not get the nomination, for reasons we think ought to be obvious.) AOC clearly knew she couldn’t actually defend the comment, so conceded that Hong, like many progressive politicians, had made a lot of weird comments that voters would have to learn to forgive. “Woke 1 was crazy,” the Congresswoman said.

We aren’t going to focus any more on the U.S. politics of this; AOC’s statement is useful more as a Western cultural barometer than it is an insight into modern America. But by any standard, AOC’s comment was fascinating. The fact that she felt moved to make it at all was telling, but it also opened so many wonderful other questions. What the hell was Woke 1? When did it become crazy? What is Woke 2? Are we to assume it isn’t crazy? And, critically, your Line editors wondered, what is one position — just one — that AOC then held that she’d now agree was crazy?

The congresswoman’s disavowal of Woke 1 came to mind a few days ago when Jon Kay, friend of The Line and an editor at Quillette, tweeted an image that had been provided to him by a teacher at the York Region District School Board, in the Greater Toronto Area. The image contained a bunch of the usual eye-rolling progressive equity and anti-racism statements that became so ubiquitous in recent years — the years of Woke 1, apparently. See that image below.

This stuff is clearly nuts. We are honestly torn whether to spend any time taking on the specific points, or simply presenting it here, unannotated, and trusting in our readers to laugh at it without any guidance from us. Let’s split the difference and say only this — while it’s obviously appropriate to use the education system to instil civic virtues, and it’s always appropriate to set workplace standards for decorum and conduct, this kind of groupthink thought policing went so far beyond that that it was always going to end badly for the proponents.

Normies thought this shit was crazy, prog friends. Most of them just didn’t want to risk the blowback of saying so because they’re nice people with real lives.

But, as The Line has oft noted, the woke pendulum was swung way, way back to something more like balance. The danger of the blowback is accordingly mostly gone now. Indeed, looking at the above, what struck us most wasn’t just the arrogance or the absurdity of it, but how dated it seems. Those “agreements” above already read like an artifact out of another era.

That there are still little residual deposits of this kind of nonsense clinging on in the depths of the public sector, whether via internal departments or budgets being directed to for-profit “equity” organizations, is undeniable, but we suspect these last holdouts will get fewer and fewer in the coming years.

And will look all the more ridiculous when they’re found. Because they are ridiculous. This kind of nonsense is the last-gasp of the glorious fading moments of the amazing party that was the post-Second World War era. It’s getting harder and harder to remember how luxurious our lives once were — as Line editor Gurney has quipped, a society that has time and energy to fret about micro-aggressions is a society that is blessedly entirely free of macro ones.

That was nice while it lasted, but the moment has passed. We may one day miss the days when all we had to worry about were equity modules.

The Line generally never waded too deep into the culture wars, partially because there was a ton of attention there already, partially because we felt they were distractions from more important issues, but also because we had some faith that sanity would eventually prevail because “Woke 1” was indeed crazy and wouldn’t last. It was simply too unnatural and doomed to eventually die once released into the open. We’re happy to see that happening. One of the only things we find odd is that politicians — like Ontario premier Doug Ford, for example — haven’t taken full advantage of the moment of reckoning and proactively shut this nonsense down. Why let it die a natural death when you can kill it and look like a hero?

Like, now? Ontario teachers should not be subjected to this ever again. Ford has the power, via his education minister, to ensure they never are. What’s he waiting for?

Well, that’s all for now, folks. Enjoy the last of your weekend and we’ll see you all on Monday.

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.

In the latest episode of The Line Mega Productivity Podcast, recorded on September 18th, 2026, prospective associate EU members Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson begin with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s trip to the continent. The reception was remarkably warm, as Canada and Europe explore a much closer strategic relationship.

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Your hosts discuss the trip, the PMO’s continuing inability to develop a workable communications strategy and the credibility problems that creates. But the most fascinating part may be the American reaction. Donald Trump has now threatened retaliation over Canada’s growing ties with Europe. Matt and Jen wonder: is Washington finally beginning to realize just how badly it may have miscalculated?

This episode is also brought to you by Cardus. For years, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was one of the most famous atheists in the world. Then she converted to Christianity. Now she argues that faith is the key to renewing Western civilization. Hear her make the case live in Calgary, October 8th, at the 2026 Ian Shugart Lecture, hosted by the think tank Cardus. Get your tickets at Cardus.ca/ayaan.

Next, they turn to the Canada Investment Summit hosted by the prime minister in Toronto. There’s a lot to like about the ambition behind it, your hosts agree — but Canada now has to actually deliver the projects it is promising. And then there’s Stephen Harper. The former Conservative prime minister closed the summit by praising the initiative and arguing that Canada must reduce its reliance on the United States. Jen connects Harper’s remarks to a point Matt made in his column this week and goes considerably further: did Harper just politely drive a stake through the heart of Pierre Poilievre’s political career? Jen thinks so, and says so on the record: it’s over, Tories. Poilievre is never going to win. Move on.

Finally, Matt provides a quick update on some increasingly serious warnings from Canada’s European allies about the possibility of Russian attacks against NATO territory. Jen then brings things home with a major update from Alberta, now just one month away from its October 19 referendum.

This episode is brought to you by BioCanRx. We’ve been partnering with federally-funded Canadian not-for-profit BioCanRx to learn how made-in-Canada immunotherapies offer new ways to beat cancer. This September we’re focusing on the “made-in-Canada” part.

Federal and provincial governments have made strong investments in the biomanufacturing sector, but Canada’s drug development ecosystem has contracted over time, and there is not yet enough domestic demand to fully utilize many of these advanced biomanufacturing facilities. This becomes a sovereignty problem. If our biomanufacturing facilities can’t remain in operation, we lose the ability to develop and manufacture homegrown therapies. We wait for therapies developed in other countries to make their way here — with no control over when that might happen. BioCanRx requires the research projects it funds to work with Canadian facilities whenever possible, which has helped build and sustain networks across Canada –– but there is still a lot of untapped potential.

How can we make sure our infrastructure isn’t sitting idle? More on that next week. Visit BioCanRx.com to learn more.

All that and more in the latest episode of The Line Podcast. 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 is joined by Kent Fellows, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, for a conversation about game theory, the trade war, and the challenge of getting Canada’s economy moving again. Plus, very special guest Alan Findlay, the newest member of The Line’s team.

That’s all for now! Talk to you guys 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

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: Stephanie Shapiro

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced in the spring of 2025 that Canada would begin a massive rebuilding of the Canadian Armed Forces. After years of underinvestment, the government is talking seriously about defence spending, recruitment and retention, procurement and what capabilities Canada will need in an increasingly dangerous world. But today, on Military Family Appreciation Day, another part of Canada’s defence infrastructure deserves our attention: the families behind the people who serve.

When we talk about rebuilding the Canadian Armed Forces, the conversation understandably focuses on ships, aircraft, weapons and ammunition, and technology. And while it is clearly vital to invest in all those things, militaries are ultimately made up of people, and those people don’t serve in isolation. Behind a CAF member may be a spouse trying to maintain a career through repeated moves, a child starting at another new school, or a family trying to find a doctor after being posted to a province where accessing health-care providers is difficult. Of course, these not challenges that are unique to military families, but military life can compound them. Canadians should expect that their governments will do their best to help military families as they serve our country.

And it is possible to do better. Consider something as basic as access to a family doctor. Millions of Canadians are struggling to find care, and military families don’t expect to be exempt from that reality. But there is an important distinction that should not be ignored: most Canadians aren’t repeatedly required by their employer to move between provinces, and therefore, in and out of provincially regulated systems. A military family can spend years finding a family physician in one province, only to receive a new posting and have to start the process again in another one. The same can happen with mental-health care, specialists and other supports.

It’s not just health care. Because of how our system is set up, a posting to another province can mean a military spouse must navigate a new regulator, pay additional fees, and wait for authorization before getting a job, even when they are already licensed and in good standing elsewhere in Canada. Professional credentials are generally supposed to be portable under Canada’s labour-mobility rules, but recognition is still not always immediate or automatic. Military families do not choose when or where they are posted, and they should not lose months of income to delays by provincial licensing systems. Military families accept that mobility is part of military life, but they shouldn’t have to accept unnecessary barriers created by systems that were never designed around that mobility. This isn’t something that occurs once or twice, either; it can happen every couple of years, with some moving 10-15 times throughout their careers.

It’s easy to see these as small issues, but they’re bigger than family policy. Challenges such as these affect military readiness. Canada is trying to recruit more people into the armed forces and, critically, convince experienced members to stay. How much harder are we making military service because of its impact on families? How much easier would it be to recruit and keep personnel if they weren’t as worried about the toll their job took on their loved ones?

A CAF member worried about their family at home doesn’t leave those concerns behind when they put on the uniform, and a member deciding whether to remain in the Forces isn’t making that decision in isolation. If Canada is serious about recruitment and retention, it cannot treat the quality of military family life as peripheral to defence policy. That is why this week in Ottawa, Together We Stand, along with military family members, stood up and proposed real, practical steps governments can take.

First, Canada needs to make health care more portable for military families. This means Ottawa working with the provinces and territories to develop a national health-care-access framework for military families, so that a posting doesn’t routinely send them back to the beginning of the line for primary care, mental-health services and other essential supports. This isn’t about creating a health-care system separate from the one every other Canadian uses, but about recognizing the unique circumstances of families moved across provincial boundaries because of military service and developing better continuity-of-care mechanisms. Recently, when I was with the wife of a serving military member, she told me about how her husband’s posting changed while she was pregnant with twins. When they got to their new city, she faced a medical emergency, and she had no doctor.

Second, Canada needs to develop a Military Family Mobility Guarantee so that when the military requires a family to move, the financial and administrative penalties that accompany that move are reduced. That means faster recognition of professional credentials for military spouses, better relocation assistance, improved access to child care at a new posting, and employment supports that allow spouses to maintain careers through repeated moves.

Finally, we need to broaden the way Canada thinks about defence readiness. While we measure personnel, equipment, and capabilities, we should also measure whether military families can access health care, housing, and child care; whether spouses can maintain employment; and whether families can access the mental-health supports they need. Those indicators should be publicly reported and incorporated into Canada’s broader defence readiness and retention strategy, because if family instability contributes to someone leaving the Armed Forces, that isn’t simply a family issue.

In an increasingly unstable world, Canada is asking more of its armed forces. We are asking them to rebuild depleted capabilities, respond to an alarmingly unstable international environment and to prepare for challenges we may not yet be able to predict. That makes this exactly the moment to ask whether we are doing enough for the people who make that service possible.

Military families are extraordinarily resilient, but that resilience should justify ignoring avoidable barriers their own government puts in their way. On Military Family Appreciation Day, we must show it through action. Canada cannot modernize its military without modernizing military life. If we want a Canadian Armed Forces capable of protecting this country for decades to come, we need to recognize that strong military families aren’t separate from military readiness, they are part of it.

Stephanie Shapiro is the chief operations officer of Together We Stand, which serves Canada’s military families by honouring their contribution to our country, supporting families in need of a hand-up, and educating the civilian population about the pivotal role these families play in the country’s safety and security

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: Matt Gurney

There was a lot of interesting news to come out of the Canada Investment Summit in Toronto this week. In due time, I imagine you will read about quite a few of those developments here. But as I watched the coverage and viewed the remote broadcasts of the speeches from the event in my own hometown, I was surprised to find myself most fascinated by what former prime minister Stephen Harper had to say. He dropped two genuinely noteworthy gems. And one of them is something that all Canadians need to be thinking about going forward.

Let’s get the purely political one out of the way first. The former prime minister has substantively endorsed the version of events the current prime minister has offered to explain why Canada is in a trade war with the United States. In agreeing that Mark Carney was right to walk away from the negotiations because the U.S. was demanding sacrifices that would have reduced our sovereignty, Harper has declared himself in agreement with the majority of Canadians who have supported the prime minister’s decision, and in doing so, has also put himself offside with a significant fraction of conservative voters.

I’m offering this comment neutrally, without trying to analyze what it means or moralize it, but I think it’s safe to say that there is a significant fraction of the conservative voting base in this country that is either inherently sympathetic to the position of the United States in this moment of tension, or is at least so inherently skeptical of Carney, or perhaps simply the Liberal party, that they cannot accept that the current unfortunate situation might actually be America’s fault and that Carney behaved responsibly and in the national interest. Conservative MP Jamil Jivani has thus far seemed to be the leading voice for those conservatives. If Jivani can be said to lead the skeptical faction of the conservative movement, it’s now possible to suggest that Harper speaks for the faction that agrees with and supports Carney, at least on this file.

What that is going to mean for the conservative movement in this country is going to be fascinating. It will be interesting to see how many true-blue conservatives are willing to criticize or publicly disagree with the most successful conservative Canadian politician in generations. I suspect the number will not actually be that small. But it will be something to watch.

But the most interesting part of the former prime minister’s address was speaking to something more fundamental. I’m going to quote that part of the speech at length, relying on the transcript of his remarks, published by the National Post. Here is some of what the former prime minister had to say:

… it is clear that the current U.S. administration views our level of economic integration as incompatible with our separate sovereignty. Thus, to maintain that sovereignty, we must pursue diminished reliance upon the United States. There will be significant costs to this effort, but those are costs that I hope and believe Canadians are able and prepared to accept.

I find this all, I do find this all very sad, just as equally necessary. And I believe that, in this necessity, our country will also discover, and is discovering, opportunity…. It is an opportunity for Canada to rediscover a long-term agenda for economic prosperity, an opportunity to realize our true potential as a country, which I believe, to be frank, we have come nowhere close to achieving.

We in this room all know very well that this is a competitive world, fraught with shifting politics, fragile supply chains, and other transactional pressures, now more so than recent decades. In the face of such change, Canada cannot simply blame external factors or make other excuses to explain away the difficulties that we face. Leadership is defined by taking accountability for what you can control.

And today, more than ever, Canada must become more internally competitive, more externally connected, and more truly sovereign than it has been. That is the opportunity.

I found those comments by Harper to be striking. Because in the midst of a speech that was resolutely pro-Canada, and also overtly in line with the government’s own position on these issues — that’s why they invited him to give the closing address! — the former prime minister of Canada took a moment to pause and note that what we are discussing here is going to require sacrifice. Specifically, a painful kind of sacrifice. We’re going to have to grow up, stop relying on others and stand on our own. And that is never fun.

On the one hand, you would think that would be a simple statement of the obvious. Of course doing big things requires sacrifice. But what kind of sacrifice? What are the things that Canada will now have to do that it wasn’t doing before? What are the costs of doing those things?

Harper’s comments struck me as interesting because, even though he didn’t go into detail, he was hinting at the sort of things this will require. In effect, we’re going to have to act like a grown-up country. We’re going to have to spend the money and the political capital to build out the infrastructure required to grow our economy on our own. We’re going to have to accept the financial costs of doing these things, but also the political costs of doing these things. And though the former prime minister made no explicit comment about defence or security, I choose, perhaps overly optimistically, to read some of that into his comment about Canada becoming “truly sovereign.”

It’s fascinating to note that none of what Harper is suggesting there, or even maybe simply alluding to, ought to be controversial. Canada is not being asked to make unusual sacrifices, unheard of in the annals of history. We’re being asked to function pretty much like a normal country and do normal-country things. Normal countries develop their own economies. Normal countries get the regulatory systems that oversee economic development and growth right. Normal countries either build the infrastructure necessary to create prosperity, or at least create a regulatory and permitting environment that allows the private sector to do that. Normal countries largely take care of their own security.

Canada hasn’t been doing those things, not for a long time, because we haven’t been a normal country. Or perhaps it’s better to say we were a country that evolved in an abnormal environment, and pleasantly so — our next-door neighbour was, for a very long time, rich, powerful, reliable and friendly, and we optimized ourselves accordingly.

That was fantastic! I got to grow up in part of that period, and highly enjoyed it. But that came with costs for Canada and Canadians, in the forms of capability gaps in our own domains.

And we aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed. Harper’s comments brought to mind some of the hostile rhetoric we’ve been hearing from the United States. Senior U.S. figures, including the president, have huffed and puffed that Canada couldn’t survive without America, and wants the benefits of being a state without actually being one.

We don’t need to take these statements entirely at face value. Clearly, this is designed to be hostile and performative rhetoric that plays to the MAGA crowd in the United States. But there are slivers of uncomfortable truth in some of those comments — only slivers, but still. There are elements of state capacity that are typically held to be the responsibility of sovereign governments that Canada has, for generations, largely outsourced to the United States.

We have police forces and military forces and economic infrastructure, such as electricity transmission lines and pipelines and ports and railways. But we have scaled these things on the assumption that we could rely on a friendly and benign United States to pick up a lot of our slack, and in recent generations, we’ve allowed the scale of the slack to grow.

I don’t want to get into the debate today over whether or not this was naive or logical in the circumstances. Personally, I think it was both, depending on when the question is being asked. But the important thing for our purposes is not to apportion blame so much as to acknowledge reality. One does not need to accept Donald Trump or J.D. Vance or any of them as good-faith analysts of Canadian politics to acknowledge the reality that Canada felt comfortable under-investing in core competencies because we had faith that the United States would backstop many gaps in Canadian capability. Not out of charity, necessarily, because America benefitted mightily, too, but all the same, we counted on them and didn’t invest in ourselves. And we continued to do this even in the face of growing warnings that the United States was becoming less and less interested in that arrangement.

Okay! So that era is over, for now. Canadians seem to support Carney and his government’s efforts to make Canada less dependent on the United States. The long-term goal seems to be a stronger, richer, more powerful Canada that truly can stand more on its own. And in the meantime, Canada will seek new deals and alliances with the rest of the world to help smooth our transition away from the United States. Hello, Europe!

The public seems generally supportive of this. But what about when it hurts? What about when it costs us something? What about when the bills come due? Bills we got away with not paying for generations?

Are we actually prepared, as a country, to pay higher taxes to support a much larger military? Are we prepared to put much more money, and oversight, into our domestic security agencies to offset intelligence that the CIA or FBI once might have freely shared, but which now may come with strings attached or not come at all? Has our political culture matured enough that we can truly expect to see politically controversial proposals for huge infrastructure projects not getting derailed by local NIMBYism? (The recent case study of the Toronto Island airport expansion was not encouraging!) Will entrenched Canadian bureaucratic norms really yield to the pressure from Carney and others to trim environmental assessments and Indigenous consultations down to something efficient enough not to scare away would-be investors?

I hope so. Because I’ve always been bullish on Canada to at least this extent: we ought to be no less competent than any other nation, and our actual advantages in terms of our natural resources and other economic assets are real and massive. There really isn’t any particular reason Canada should not be one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world. We have so much going for us. And most of what we have working against us are things we’ve done to ourselves.

We can undo them, but there will be costs for that. Much like Stephen Harper, I believe this country has never hit its full potential, and I even believe and hope, like him, that we might be willing to do the things we need to do to change that. But for right now, it is just that: a belief and a hope. We haven’t proved that we can yet. I hope that we will. But I confess I worry about that sometimes.

A lot of bills we should have been paying for generations are about to start coming due. Some of these bills are going to be a lot bigger than I think many of us have realized. I hope that, as a country, we are prepared to have the serious discussions about why these bills must be paid and how we will responsibly grow our economy so that we can efficiently settle the tab.

But we’ll see. We had a good run under a very benign hegemon for many generations. We were spoiled. I hope not to the point where doing better has become impossible. But only time will tell.

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: Greg Quinn

Canada’s decision to walk away from a trade deal with the United States appears to have incurred the wrath of President Donald Trump and every member of his administration.

Still: Good job, Canada, and what a good example for the rest of us to follow.

The United States under the current president is not a friend of the free world. It is not a friend of those of us who have sacrificed blood and treasure for it. It is not a friend who shares our values.

And, spoiler alert, it isn’t going to be for a very long time, despite the wishful thinking of those who want to believe that things will get back to normal after Trump leaves.

Why do I think that is wishful thinking?

There has been a generational change in U.S. politics, into which President Trump has tapped. Many Americans have a feeling of disillusionment with the world and a belief that the rest of us have taken advantage of the United States over the decades since the end of the Second World War.

In some ways (i.e. defence spending) that is a fair comment. We did free-ride on the United States. And we did so in the belief that our bluff would not be called. And, boy, has our bluff been called.

On defence, I have no dispute with Trump. He has, rightly, put the rest of NATO on notice and it was right that he did so.

But, apart from that, I probably disagree with everything else Trump stands for. Because, fundamentally, he stands against our core values of democracy, good governance, and the rule of law. He treats allies worse than enemies. He treats those of us who support such values worse than those autocratic and undemocratic states whom he seems to admire more than anything else (probably because he hankers after the absolute power their leaders have).

Those around Trump share his views and his dislike for the rest of the free world. J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and Mike Johnson have all sold their souls for power and position. They are unlikely to change the U.S. approach should the Republicans be re-elected in 2028.

And let’s not hold out hope for the Democrats, either. Because of that generational change in U.S. politics, they will find it hard to row too far away from the politics of much of middle America. Those on the east and west coasts may get all the coverage because they shout the loudest. But they don’t hold all the power and they can’t always convince what is a silent majority.

For decades the rest of us were willing to “trust” the United States. Accept their leadership and generally move in lock-step with them.

That trust has been blown out of the water. All for what?

Trump talks about Making America Great Again. I guess it depends on your definition of great, but it seems to me that large parts of the world have completely lost trust and faith in the United States. And that will take a long time to get back.

However, it seems that much of the leadership of Europe and the United Kingdom (and elsewhere) hasn’t quite gotten the memo on the United States and how it is not (and will not be for a long time) the reliable ally it once was.

On this, maybe it is time for the rest of us to learn from Canada. To accept that sometimes you have to walk away from a bad deal. Sometimes you have to stand up to the bully, and sometimes you just need to do what is right — namely, call-out bad behaviour, call out inappropriate behaviour and say enough is enough.

That is what Canada has done. Prime Minister Mark Carney has done so in his more diplomatic language. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has done so in his own inimitable style.

Both are right. Sometimes you have to say enough is enough.

Canada is being punished for doing the right thing. It will hurt (although it will also hurt the United States). So, the rest of us need to stand beside Canada, work ever more closely with it, trade ever more with it, and accept that that might mean doing less with the United States or being “punished” by it for not being a lap dog.

Does my own United Kingdom and others have the courage to do this?

Canada has led the way in how to deal with the United States. We have more strength together than apart. If we work together, we can minimize the pain on ourselves and show the United States that they can’t always have it their own way.

Ultimately that will hurt Americans politically and economically and may make them become more — but not totally — reasonable. But to do that we need to stand firm and together.

Canada has shown us the way. It is now up to the rest of us to show that we have equal courage and determination.

Are we able to?

Greg Quinn, OBE, is a former British diplomat who has served in Estonia, Ghana, Belarus, Iraq, Washington D.C., Kazakhstan, Guyana, Suriname, The Bahamas, Canada, and Antigua and Barbuda in addition to stints in London. He runs his own government relations, business development and crisis management consultancy: Aodhan Consultancy Ltd (www.aodhaninc.co.uk).

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.

In this episode of On The Line, host Matt Gurney is joined by Kent Fellows, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, for a conversation about game theory, the trade war, and the challenge of getting Canada’s economy moving again. Plus, a very special guest with a special announcement. See more on that below.

This episode is brought to you by BioCanRx. We’ve been partnering with federally-funded Canadian not-for-profit BioCanRx to learn how made-in-Canada immunotherapies offer new ways to beat cancer. This September we’re focusing on the “made-in-Canada” part.

Federal and provincial governments have made strong investments in the biomanufacturing sector, but Canada’s drug development ecosystem has contracted over time, and there is not yet enough domestic demand to fully utilize many of these advanced biomanufacturing facilities. This becomes a sovereignty problem. If our biomanufacturing facilities can’t remain in operation, we lose the ability to develop and manufacture homegrown therapies. We wait for therapies developed in other countries to make their way here –– with no control over when that might happen. BioCanRx requires the research projects it funds to work with Canadian facilities whenever possible, which has helped build and sustain networks across Canada –– but there is still a lot of untapped potential.

How can we make sure our infrastructure isn’t sitting idle? More on that next week. Visit BioCanRx.com to learn more.

First, the trade war. Prof. Fellows recently wrote for The Line about what game theory can tell us about the ongoing trade war, and he and Matt dig into the incentives shaping the decisions being made on both sides of the border. The Americans may be behaving rationally if their objective is to maximize their leverage in the short term. But there are costs to that strategy, particularly as other countries begin making long-term decisions based on the assumption that the United States is no longer a reliable economic partner.

This episode is also brought to you by the Forest Products Association of Canada. Every budget season brings endless ideas for how Ottawa should spend. But some of the best ways to strengthen Canada’s economy don’t require a massive price tag.

For Canada’s forest products sector, real growth starts with dismantling made-in-Canada barriers: cutting regulatory duplication, fixing supply chain bottlenecks, securing predictable, cost-competitive access to fibre, and creating more certainty for investment.

We can’t control every global challenge facing our industry, but we can remove the barriers created right here at home.

Discover how smarter policy drives economic growth at FPAC.ca.

Matt and Kent also discuss the upcoming International Investment Summit in Toronto. It’s a good idea: Canada badly needs more investment, greater productivity and stronger economic growth. But attracting investors to a summit is one thing. Convincing them that Canada can actually overcome the regulatory, political and structural obstacles that have discouraged investment in the first place is another.

This episode is also brought to you by Cameco. Canada is entering a decisive decade for energy, and the nuclear reactor we choose now matters. Incomplete designs carry real risk of delays and cost overruns, and we cannot afford to spend years designing a reactor before construction begins. That is why Cameco believes the AP1000 reactor is the right choice for Canada. It is already operating globally and ready now, with 100 percent Canadian ownership and strong participation from Canadian suppliers. The AP1000 reactor means job creation and supplier contracts, energy security at home, and significant investment staying right here in Canada.

A proven design, built on time and on budget. That is how we build Canada. Learn more at ap1000.cameco.com.

Then, a special announcement: The Line is growing.

Alan Findlay has joined The Line as a reporter and as the first recipient of our Build Canada Fellowship. Over the next year, Alan will be doing fact-based, straight-up investigative reporting into the policy obstacles that are hobbling Canadian productivity and economic growth — digging into what isn’t working, why it isn’t working, and what could be done differently.

And he’s hitting the ground running. Alan will be at the prime minister’s investment summit in Toronto this week, reporting on what the government is proposing, what investors are saying, and whether Canada is actually prepared to make the changes required to become a more competitive place to invest, build and grow.

The Line is excited to have him aboard — and we’re looking forward to showing you what he finds. You can read more about the fellowship here.

Please join us in welcoming the newest member of the team. And as always, like and subscribe.

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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

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 Americans appear to be taking refusal well.

In lieu of bending the knee on the trade file, Canada scheduled the implementation of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods for the Tuesday before a long weekend and then buggered off. U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s obsessive anti-Canada invective in the days since does not suggest any similar intent to touch grass.

He warned that Montreal-based Bombardier will not be allowed to sell its aircraft in the U.S. unless it also manufactures them on his side of the border. He posted about our “currency-dollar” imbalance, implying that the loonie’s lesser buying power compared to the greenback is an insidious Canadian plot. He mused that the U.S. would be better off ending trade with Canada altogether, claiming it would save America $90 billion annually. This is believed to be a deliberate attempt to sap the will to live of the last few fact checkers still operating in the no-man’s-land of what used to be institutional American journalism.

Oh, and if Trump’s reference to Carney as “governor” was too subtle in the AI-generated political cartoon he posted recently, there’s now also the giant map on his Truth Social account in which Canada is labelled “United States of America” and painted with the Stars and Stripes. You can ask Venezuela, now a satrapy of the U.S. governed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in his spare time, whether to parse that message seriously or literally.

We are not living in an age of nuance. We are now in a trade war, aimed to break us to heel.

For generations, would-be intellectual hard-asses spouting off about war, hard power and realpolitik have relished quoting the Melian Dialogue, a dramatization by the Greek historian Thucydides of a conversation between Athens (the local superpower) and the Melians (their mostly-harmless neighbours).

As the Athenian army entrenched outside Melios’s walls, preparing to crush it in retaliation for its refusal to accept vassalization, Athenian diplomats informed the Melians that the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

That’s true as far as it goes, but power-tripping bullies who quote the Melian Dialogue are usually disgruntled when the weak respond to the strong by saying: “Fine, show us what you can actually do.”

A year and a half ago, we witnessed exactly that type of tantrum when Trump hollered in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s face that, “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out. And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty. You don’t have the cards.”

Back then, I suggested that Trump’s fury was an expression of panic at the prospect that Zelensky might publicly snub Trump’s crappy ceasefire plan and then succeed without him.

Why? Because a bully’s pleasure is in dominating cringing subordinates. If their lessers decline to cringe, the bully is confronted with their deepest fear: that if push comes to shove, they’re not actually strong enough to force the submissive displays they’ve been demanding.

Now, a year and a half later, Trump’s worst fears are coming true in Ukraine: the front line has barely budged despite his best effort to throw the Ukrainians to the wolves, and it turns out Russia is the combatant sweating over its remaining cards as cutting-edge Ukrainian drones systematically obliterate Russia’s oil refineries, tanker fleet, and logistics hubs.

The Russian military has now blown 15 consecutive deadlines set by Putin since 2022 to seize Donetsk, the province just across the border that Trump attempted to force Zelensky to concede at the negotiating table. The Institute for the Study of War now doubts Russia will ever fully occupy Donetsk. It’s the equivalent of an invasion of Canada grinding to an ignominious halt in Hamilton’s southern outskirts.

You’ll notice that it’s been awhile since you’ve heard Trump brag about how he’s going to “art of the deal” the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Ukraine isn’t the only country finding more success away from Trump’s negotiating table than at it. Emboldened by the shockingly uncomplicated vassalization of Venezuela, Trump tried the same strategy with Iran: surgically remove the country’s leader in some spectacular fashion, then negotiate terms of surrender with whoever picks up the phone the next day. In and out, 20-minute adventure.

Iran responded by shrugging off metric tons of well-aimed American and Israeli ordnance that liquified most of the country’s executive-level org chart, and then cut off 34 per cent of the world’s oil trade by mining the Strait of Hormuz and winging missiles at any vessel that dares to attempt passage.

Half a year into a fistfight the White House only expected to last a few weeks, the Iran War is shaping up to be the most catastrophic strategic defeat in American history — all because the Iranians, like the Ukrainians before them, refused to play their assigned role in the humiliation ritual.

If the United States really wanted to, it could defeat Iran: it’s been centuries since anyone has successfully bet against the American ability to dominate conventional battlefields over the course of a full-scale ground war.

But the United States — as distinct from Trump and his entourage of increasingly cartoonish viziers — doesn’t want a ground war. The United States doesn’t want to occupy Tehran, which is what it would take to make explosive-tipped projectiles stop flying in the Strait of Hormuz. Americans don’t want the casualties. They don’t want the belt-tightening. They don’t want the hassle.

The American public’s disinterest in actually sacrificing anything to win the Iran War constrained Trump’s aggression to a low-risk air campaign, and pummelling Iran from the skies has accomplished very little at very great strategic expense. America’s global arsenal of precision long-range munitions is nearly empty, while the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to all traffic unwilling to pay Iranian tolls for safe passage, which started at $2 million per ship and may soon increase to five to seven per cent of a ship’s cargo value.

Despite Trump’s attempt to maintain domestic normalcy by draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — vast caverns carved out of salt deposits that once stored half a billion barrels of crude — American refineries are paying about 35 per cent more for oil since the start of the war. Just weeks ago, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve reached its practical operational floor: if extraction continues, petroleum engineers anticipate the Reserve’s pipes and pumps will begin to sustain damage, its storage chambers will begin to collapse, and recovery of the remaining oil will drastically slow.

For the American consumer, the consequences — of the Iran War, of scattershot tariffs levied on a whim, of tax cuts that predictably overwhelmed the paltry savings from DOGE and spooked the bond markets — have already begun to arrive. Inflation is running 50 per cent above the Federal Reserve’s target. American gas prices are up 43 per cent since the start of the year. The cost of beef is up 20 per cent in two years. Stubbornly-high mortgage rates that had just started to fall rebounded this year and are heading to seven per cent. The price of diesel just hit an all-time high.

Neither these effects nor their causes are lost on the American people: Trump’s approval rating among independent voters has declined to 25 per cent, a range usually reserved for the flea that spreads bubonic plague.

Nor is the blast radius confined to the White House. The Republican Party, composed mainly of politicians who would like to be re-elected, keeps getting blown out in special elections that should have been safe Republican wins: for example, the election of a Dem to a state senate seat in Texas by a margin of 14 points, in a district Trump won by 17 in 2024. The polling for the November midterms — less than two months from now — looks like it was produced by a doomsday cult.

In short, Trump’s influence is waning, not just over American politics as a whole but over the Republican Party. Ten Trump-endorsed candidates have lost Republican primaries in the leadup to the November midterms, equalling the total number of Trump-endorsed candidates who lost primaries in 2018, 2020, and 2024 combined.

One morning Donald Trump woke from dreams of a third term to find himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. When the same thing happened to Gregor Samsa, he just became a giant bug. Trump’s metamorphosis is far more horrifying: he’s become a lame duck.

If Canada was in a trade war with a truly “United” States, filled with terrible purpose like it was after Pearl Harbour or 9/11, the strategic move would be to hide in the outhouse until the big bad wolf had finished flattening our cottage.

But we are not in a trade war with an internally-unified giant. We are in a trade war with a failing president whose inconstancy in the face of even mild political pain is so legendary that it’s been immortalized by the acronym “TACO” — Trump Always Chickens Out.

That acronym’s phrasing is imperfect: Trump is not afraid of risk. He’ll happily slap his hand down on stovetops of every conceivable temperature. What Trump can always be counted on to do, once he’s connected the sensation of pain with the fact that his hand is resting firmly on a heating coil that’s just hit 400 degrees, is attempt to snatch his hand away.

This point bears emphasis: Trump does not care whether continuing to touch the stove is in America’s best interest. He doesn’t even care if keeping his hand on the stove will achieve whatever half-baked plan motivated him to lurch toward it like Augustus Gloop toward a river of chocolate. Trump’s self-interest is all-consuming, and if he finds himself in intolerable pain — an easily-blown breaker in a man who lacks all conviction — nothing else matters to him but making the pain stop as quickly as possible.

I once explained that Trump only played a master negotiator on TV — that in reality, he’s a comprehensive pigeon. He has yet again proved it by taking a noticeably light touch with every Canadian product for which he believes shortages or higher prices for American buyers would cause him — or have already caused him — intolerable political pain. He has handed us a list of the weapons that Trump himself believes will make him bleed.

Heavy crude from Alberta, which American refineries in red states are so reliant on these days that even a recent, innocent fluctuation in oil sands output is causing conniptions.

Potash fertilizer from Saskatchewan, which comprises 86 per cent of the supply relied upon by American farms, most of which are in red states.

Auto parts from Ontario, which are a critical feedstock for the manufacturing industry in red states like Indiana and in the battleground states of Michigan and Ohio.

Electricity from Quebec and New Brunswick, whose most reliant customers are in north and east Maine, the base of support for a Republican senator who’s up for re-election in November and behind in the polls.

The strong do what they can, the Athenians informed the Melians, and the weak suffer what they must.

But the weak suffer only what they must.

Quislings and cowards look at Trump and see strength beyond Canada’s capability to confront. Sharper eyes see a politically-crippled lightweight with a glass jaw, leading a political party on the ropes after two years of hammer blows to the American standard of living inflicted by his colossal blunders at home and abroad.

We don’t need to burn down the White House for a second time to win this trade war: like a honey badger harassing an elephant away from a water hole, we just need to persuade the idiot pachyderm currently occupying the White House that his life will be more pleasant if he screws with somebody else and leaves us alone.

But what if we lose, the “realists” moan. What about pragmatism?

A nation derives its longevity from its character, and nothing could be more corrosive to Canada’s national character than meekly raising our haunches in Trump’s direction and assuming the mating position. Kamil Galeev once wrote that civilizations that go down fighting often rise again, fuelled by a national mythos preserved during whatever dark age befell them. Civilizations that quietly accept subjugation rarely do.

That principle matches Canada’s public mood, which seems to be not just defiance but a strange kind of elation in the face of the barbarians at our gates. Canadians are a people who have grown used to mediocrity of late, and what we mostly seem to be feeling is pleasant surprise that our leadership (and by the looks of the polls, our nation) is willing to pay the price to demonstrate some self-respect.

Whatever happens next might really hurt, the consensus seems to be, but at least we’re not going to go out like a bunch of punks. Win or lose, the Americans are going to remember they were in a fight. And in the end, win or lose, Canada will be a better place — and perhaps even more importantly, Canadians a better people — for having fought.

Canada’s decision to drop the gloves has also starkly illuminated where our national weakness truly lies.

Our national weakness is found in the vicarious thrill our homegrown bullies feel watching Trump and his coterie of titanic assholes demolish the foundations of a shining city upon a hill while a chorus of libtards wail in despair and eggheads with too many degrees beg him to stop.

Specifically, our increasingly unacceptable national weakness is that when the demented demolition circus running the American state looks north, our domestic supply of assholes keeps cheering it on from the nosebleed seats.

For years, Canada has hosted a growing subculture of these numbskulls. They idolize the martial, quasi-fascist Spartan culture that Frank Miller glorified in his art, and they’ve been quick to condemn anything and anybody in this country that smacks of weakness, effeminacy, sensitivity, or unseriousness.

But the final irony is this: it’s the numbskulls who have fled the battlefield. They thought Carney was about to knuckle under to a bad deal, and that with “peace in our time” secured on their behalf, they could Statler and Waldorf the terms of surrender Carney had been forced to accept at their leisure.

Now suddenly it’s war, and the numbskulls are in our comment sections, journalism outlets, and press conferences trying to avoid sounding like invertebrates as they urge our negotiators to fly back to Washington and beg for peace.

It has been left to a government composed of, and supported by, the sort of Canadians the numbskulls consider weak, effeminate, oversensitive, and unserious to deliver to a foreign tyrant the line the numbskulls have fantasized their whole lives about delivering.

Come and take it.

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.

Hey, folks. We hope you’re having an excellent weekend. If you need to give it a boost, our latest episode of The Line Podcast will help. It was, uh, very uplifting.

Also, check out last week’s On The Line, where where Jen Gerson speaks with Ronnen Harary, co-founder of Spin Master, the Canadian company behind some of the world’s most successful toys and entertainment franchises, including PAW Patrol, about how Canada needs to support innovation and entrepreneurs.

And now, on with the dispatch.

It’s nice to be able to start a dispatch without talking about the United States and the trade war. Our topic here is certainly not a million miles removed from either, but it’s its own thing, and we’ll treat it seriously. In downtown Toronto this week, Canada will host a major investment summit. Various investment banks and development funds will gather and hear Canadian governments and officials pitch what this country has to offer — both in terms of what we can sell, but also in terms of what we can build.

You know, if they invest in us.

Let us be blunt: we love this. This is fantastic. We want this to be a massive success and we want this to be a common thing. We think it’s a terrific idea, perfectly timed and we give full credit to Mark Carney for it. This is exactly the sort of pitch in which his prior professional experience provides the most tangible direct and obvious benefit.

But also, let us note the major problem. Canada’s obstacle to investment has traditionally not been a lack of investor interest or global visibility. Canada’s biggest challenge has been, and remains, Canadians.

This was the thesis of Matt Gurney’s recent column, and we don’t need to restate it here at length. As the people responsible for trillions of dollars in wealth gather in Canada, we need to be sure that we can live up to our side of any deal. If someone shows up with a freighter full of gold bullion they want to spend on building things in Canada, are we really sure — like, really, really sure — that we have got our own ducks in a row?

Permits? Can we issue them? Are we going to faceplant because of endless debates about “social licence”? Will a project that global investors are ready to back with a quadrillion gigajillion Euros need 47 years to pass an environmental review? Will stacked layers of Indigenous consultation doom every project?

We aren’t asking this out of reflexive contrarianism. We’re flagging these as questions because this is precisely what the Carney government has itself already clearly identified as Canada’s problems. That’s why we have things like the Building Canada Act and the Major Projects Office. The summit might be arriving before we’ll be able to make much use of whatever interest it may pique.

Our ponderings also brought to mind a speech given earlier this year by Conservative Pierre Poilievre. The Line has not been easy on Poilievre of late, and we make no apology for that. We have found his performance underwhelming, sometimes maddeningly so. But he’s had some random terrific moments. In February, Poilievre gave a speech to the Economic Club of Canada. The speech had some stuff in it we didn’t love, but this part, which we’ll quote at full length, was bang on:

Canada already has free trade agreements with at least 50 countries–many of them middle powers. We should look to deepen those agreements, but their markets are largely already open to us.

But our problem is not that these countries block our products from coming IN but that our own government blocks our products from getting OUT.

Signing meaningless communiques and more stagecraft masquerading as statecraft won’t fix that.

The reality is that some of the worst tariffs imposed on Canada today are those imposed by the government here. Slow permits, changing rules, high taxes, and outright bans on shipping oil from B.C.’s northern coast. We have the second slowest building permits in the OECD. It takes 19 years to approve a mine. None of that has changed in the last year.

Unfortunately, the federal government caused these problems. Fortunately, it can reverse them.

(Thank you to Brother Wells for the transcript.)

What can we add to that? Poilievre was completely right there. Seven months later, he’s still right. We’re bringing the world to Canada. We’d best be sure we’re ready.

Twenty-five years ago last Friday, 38 planes and roughly 6,500 passengers were dropped on the town of Gander, Newfoundland, when the airspace over the United States was closed in response to the shocking terrorist attacks of 9/11. The town of 10,000 folks absorbed these unexpected arrivals with a hospitality so warm and unforced it eventually became a hit Broadway musical.

Gander of course has a unique and longstanding relationship with Americans, in particular the U.S. military. The town’s location along the great circle route made it the premier transatlantic air stop in the 1930s. By 1940, it was the largest airport in the world, and during the war its massive airfield served as a critical staging ground for ferrying warplanes and antisubmarine patrols across the North Atlantic. Control of the airfield at Gander reverted to local and then later Canadian authorities after the war, but the connection to the U.S. military continued through the Cold War.

But that is not the only reason the passengers were so openly welcomed in 2001. Americans were simply our friends, and helping them was as natural as shovelling a neighbour’s driveway or helping jump-start their car. Within days, it was the Canadian government that proposed that NATO invoke Article 5, and within weeks we had warships on their way to the Arabian Sea and special operations soldiers helping hunt down al-Qaeda in Kandahar. Our Afghanistan commitment lasted 13 years, saw 40,000 soldiers deployed, and cost $18 billion. Ultimately, 158 of those soldiers didn’t come home; thirteen of them were from Newfoundland and Labrador.

On Friday, thousands returned to Gander’s Steele Community Centre to mark the anniversary. Governor General Louise Arbour and U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra joined Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Tony Wakeham, former prime minister Jean Chrétien, and various other political dignitaries along with many of the “come from aways” who never forgot the strangers who took them in.

For the most part, the program played it straight: the Ennis Sisters sang the American national anthem, Alan Doyle played some tunes, Arbour spoke warmly of the two countries’ long friendship. It was shaping up to be exactly the kind of careful, sentimental, non-partisan tribute that these things are expected to be.

The context had changed, though. The country whose citizens Gander sheltered is now run by an administration that has made a project of treating Canada as a subordinate to be bullied into line through annexation threats, tariffs, and generalized hostility. A rotating cast of trade officials, Greer and Lutnick and Hoekstra chief among them, spend their days insisting Canada has spent decades ripping America off and that we are negotiating in bad faith. But Canadians know that this was never really a trade dispute; it’s a demand for submission dressed up as grievance over dairy quotas and softwood stumpage rates.

So when Hoekstra turned up in Gander on Friday as a guest of honour, it was already under a cloud of protest. He is the ambassador, after all, who has mocked the elbows-up movement and groused about Canadians’ reaction to Trump’s 51st-state routine. More than 260,000 Canadians had signed a petition demanding his recall before he ever set foot in the auditorium. Then he delivered a meandering speech thanking Gander, but without once mentioning trade.

And so in the end, it fell to the old warrior, Jean Chrétien, to bell the cat. The 92-year-old former PM closed a two-hour program with a speech that called out the actual state of the continental relationship. He told the crowd never to mistake Canadian tolerance for a lack of resolve, or Canadian kindness for softness, and closed with the line, “We bow to no one.” Hoekstra, to his credit, stood and hugged him afterward. Later, walking into a performance of Come From Away, he declined to say anything at all about the speech, shrugging with his palms up.

Predictably, the angriest response to Chrétien’s speech has been from Canadians upset that he had “politicized” a solemn occasion. And so he did. But so, merely by showing up and delivering a speech about enduring friendship, did Hoekstra. An ambassador representing a government that spends its days threatening annexation and tariff extortion does not get to walk into a room built on 2001-vintage goodwill and cash in on it as though nothing since has happened. The apolitical version of Friday’s ceremony was never on the table the moment Hoekstra accepted the invitation.

The people fretting about decorum — and most of it is coming from the same corner of the Maple MAGAsphere that treats elbows-up as an anti-American overreaction and Canada’s grievances as CBC propaganda — might ask themselves why Chrétien needed to say the quiet part loud in the first place. Even opposition leader Pierre Poilievre was on American television last week describing Canadians as “wounded” and “confused” by how we are being treated by the Trump administration. Has he been watching too much CBC as well?

The Americans who came back to Gander to thank the families who took them in were as welcome as ever. But it isn’t 2001 anymore, not by a long shot. The past is a different continent. Hoekstra got a hug on his way out. He shouldn’t mistake it for absolution.

A further note from the InfoWar we think is worth mentioning: this weekend, a clip from Carleton professor Ian Lee made the rounds arguing that Canadians are emotional, that they’ve lost their objectivity, and that Canadians don’t seem to understand the size and scale of the U.S. economy they wish to oppose.

Firstly, we think Lee’s engaging in good faith here and while we think his comments are contextually short-sighted, we don’t think he’s operating with any intent to undermine Canadian resolve in the face of a trade war.

The origins of that clip appear to be from a podcast and digital content shop called The Really Big Show, a NowMedia Group production that seemed to pop up out of nowhere in 2025. We know that the U.S. embassy has cultivated relationships with friendly independent media outlets in the last year, but we admit that we still find it incredibly odd when brand new media shows featuring individuals with little to no previous following show up on the scene, generate impressive social media followings, and land high profile interviews right out of the gate. We at The Line admit that we don’t put as much time and effort into social media as we probably ought to — maybe these guys can give us some tips?

Anyway, we want to be careful, here, because we think that criticizing the Liberal government is, obviously, very, very valid. But when your entire social media oeuvre only ever directs criticism in one direction, while consistently parroting U.S. and partisan talking points without any discernible comparable criticism of the other players in the dispute, well, our eyebrows go up, and so should yours.

We’re just going to point out the obvious: it’s fair to suggest that Canadians are letting our anger get the better of us. But that criticism loses a lot of its potency if it fails to acknowledge that the cause of that anger is justified; that our feelings are a rational response to explicit, purposeful, and repeated provocation by the current U.S. administration. We are not sure how one can look at Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Forward Guidance videos, or even Jean Chrétien’s “we bow to no one” speech, compare them to any of Jamieson Greer or Howard Lutnick’s television hits, or Pete Hegseth and Karoline Leavitt’s denigration of our military, or Donald Trump’s Truth Social Feed, or the incredible Oval Office spectacle of wiping “Lake Ontario” off the map with a sharpie and think: “Oh, yeah, it’s the Canadians who are behaving irrationally and immaturely.”

That person is either operating from a totally different version of consensus reality, or they’ve simply internalized Canadian submission to such an extent that they no longer even recognize the asymmetry of expectation and response. In other words, the Americans are allowed to say, do, or threaten literally anything, and the only appropriate Canadian response is to shut up and take it. Because America is bigger. And might makes right.

We at The Line do not hold to that logic. We believe that while America may be larger and more powerful economically and politically, that we are all, ultimately, equal before God (or whathaveyou). The right to stand up for our own interests, to push back, and, yes, even to insult our American friends and neighbours when warranted — this is an expression of our own equality as humans and citizens of a distinct and sovereign nation. The Americans may not accept that, and that’s fine. Their lack of acceptance does not mean that we, as Canadians, have to accept their frame of reality. We get to decide for ourselves whether we choose to enter this bilateral relationship as supplicants or equals. That’s our choice, not theirs. And it is a choice, not something dictated by GDP or relative market cap. We have agency, here. Be suspicious of anyone trying to convince you otherwise.

What we think Americans are struggling to understand is that Canadians are both angry and acting entirely rationally in their own self-interest.

One last note, here, because sometimes it’s important to say the thing aloud.

While we think it’s important to hold the Liberal government to account, to be skeptical of its claims and concerned about how we’re going to navigate a post-America landscape going forward, it’s time to draw a distinction between healthy good-faith skepticism, and the quisling slop that tries to pass for it. There is a sizeable portion of the Maple MAGA contingent that is emotionally invested in Canada’s failure.

Disheartened and demoralized after the lost Trudeau decade, terminally online, they feel increasingly culturally alienated from the Canada of their memory, and though they may not say so openly, they see Donald Trump as a justified agent of destruction and revenge on a country they’ve grown to resent and despise.

While we at The Line — who have spent long years lamenting Canadian decline — can understand the emotional throughline, we stop short of poisonous despair. Honestly, we find this a lot of “independent journalism” to be far from both. It’s neither independent, nor journalism. It’s self-destruction and self-abasement.

If criticism is rooted in improving the country, it is welcome. If it is instead laced with a desire to see the country suffer for its sins, then it’s suicide.

Lastly, we’d like to make note of another rather remarkable Wall Street Journal piece demonstrating just how far Carney has gone to re-align Canada with Europe in the face of American threats.

If you haven’t read it, do. It’s quite remarkable how quickly conversations around re-alignment between Canadian and EU leaders are taking place.

Interesting discussions of particular note: plans that might allow Canadians to live and work in Europe without visas. And, linking underwater cables, data centres, cloud storage, and new satellite networks that could put parts of our Internet infrastructure outside the reach of American tech companies — and, presumably, American laws. This would be a crucial first step toward reducing the Western alliance’s deep dependence on the American Defence Industrial Base.

We will expect to see more details about these talks in coming days.

Firstly, a few things to note. We at The Line would love to live and work in Europe visa free. (One of us is indeed already an EU citizen via ancestry.) We fully support and understand that if America is going to continue on its current course, Canada is going to need to grow incredibly canny in order to maintain its own survival and sovereignty, including by aligning and shimmying larger powers like Europe and China. A quasi-membership in the EU is a demonstrable and powerful show of support for our country from our allies and, honestly, it would rather warm our hearts to see liberal democracies make real and rapid changes in order to strengthen and buttress one another in an era of challenge and backslide.

That said, Europe is not America. Aligning ourselves more closely to a bloc of nations that is not as economically or demographically salient as America may have long-term negative consequences on Canadian quality of life. This will be especially true if it’s paired with the EU’s notoriously rigorous bureaucratic obstacles, ranging from labelling to onerous rules of origin requirements. All things being equal, we’d be much better off to maintain the closest relationships with America. Alas, all things are no longer equal.

Lastly, we share the lament of one of the WSJ commentators who wonder why all of these details are coming out in an American publication rather than a Canadian one.

Prime Minister… *taps mic* PRIME MINISTER. It’s well past time to stop treating communications with the Canadians you serve as an afterthought. We deserve to know what the hell you’ve been up to in Europe on our behalf. We deserve to understand what the risks and trade-offs of a closer alliance with Europe might be. Also, given that this was not a matter deeply discussed during the last election, Canadians also deserve a say about whether we move forward with re-Europe-inization. This question merits real and rigorous debate, as well as a democratic mandate, earned either through a general election, or a referendum on the issue. And given the general state of things, our preference is an election.

More to come on this file this week.

Well, that’s all for now, folks. Enjoy the last of your weekend and we’ll see you all on Monday.

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.

In the latest episode of The Line Podcast, recorded on September 11th, 2026, Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson begin by marking the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They reflect on how profoundly America changed after that morning, how the world changed with it, and how the media environment has transformed in the quarter-century since. They also consider how an attack on that scale would be covered today. Their conclusion? Worse. Much worse.

This episode is brought to you by Cameco. Canada is entering a decisive decade for energy, and the nuclear reactor we choose now matters. Incomplete designs carry real risk of delays and cost overruns, and we cannot afford to spend years designing a reactor before construction begins. That is why Cameco believes the AP1000 reactor is the right choice for Canada. It is already operating globally and ready now, with 100 percent Canadian ownership and strong participation from Canadian suppliers.

The AP1000 reactor means job creation and supplier contracts, energy security at home, and significant investment staying right here in Canada.

A proven design, built on time and on budget. That is how we build Canada.

Learn more at ap1000.cameco.com.

Next, your hosts turn to drones. Canada is partnering with Ukraine as warfare rapidly evolves, and Matt explains why the deal makes a great deal of sense for both countries. Ukraine has extraordinary real-world expertise in drone warfare, while Canada urgently needs to build up its own capabilities. But buying and building drones is the easy part. What exactly is Canada going to do with them? Where will they be stored? How quickly could they be deployed? And under what circumstances might Canada actually use them in, ahem, contingencies? The technology is moving quickly. Canadian defence policy will have to keep up.

This episode is also brought to you by Fractional Execs Canada. Need help with a serious business problem? As Canadian businesses grow they often require expert help to solve key business challenges. Fractional Execs Canada have assembled a team of experienced strategists, implementors, sales and marketing operators that can help transform your business into a growth engine. They match you with the right person, or team to move your business forward at a pace your business can manage.

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Finally, Matt and Jen wrap up with a grab bag of looming problems. The Canada–U.S. trade war has become strangely lower-energy on the American side, and they discuss some of the reasons Washington may be increasingly hobbled in pursuing it. Then there’s time for a quick tour through the AI apocalypse and the latest on Alberta’s referendum.

This episode is also brought to you by BioCanRx. We’ve been partnering with federally-funded Canadian not-for-profit BioCanRx to learn how made-in-Canada immunotherapies offer new ways to beat cancer. This September we’re focusing on the “made-in-Canada” part. Since 2015 BioCanRx has supported the Canadian-Led Immunotherapies Collaborative, or CLIC, in building a truly Canadian pipeline so Canadian patients don’t have to wait for cancer therapies developed elsewhere to reach a clinical trial here.

In the first iteration, genetic engineering happened in labs in Vancouver, a lab in Ottawa created a viral delivery system, and a facility in Victoria modified each patient’s immune cells. The resulting therapy was shipped to a research-intensive hospital where the patient received it. More than 100 patients in B.C., Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario received treatment. Now the network is growing: new biomanufacturing facilities are preparing to produce cells in Calgary and Ottawa, and new clinical trial sites are being onboarded in other provinces. CLIC technology is being used in three active Canadian clinical trials, with more on the way.

So when it comes to producing made-in-Canada cancer immunotherapies, Canada isn’t starting from scratch. Thanks to BioCanRx for continuing to help us share these stories. Visit BioCanRx.com to learn more.

All that and more in the latest episode of The Line Podcast. Check out our main page at ReadTheLine.ca. 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 speaks with Ronnen Harary, co-founder of Spin Master, the Canadian company behind some of the world’s most successful toys and entertainment franchises, including PAW Patrol, about how Canada needs to support innovation and entrepreneurs.

That’s all for now! Talk to you guys 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: Al Vigier

Let me open with a disclosure that doubles as the thesis. I run a company trying to sell into Canada’s defence build-up. I attend the conferences. I pay the association memberships. I sit on a panel this fall. I write op-eds about defence procurement, of which this is one. I am, in other words, a fully paid-up participant in the fastest-growing sector of the Canadian defence economy, which is not shipbuilding, not aerospace, and not ammunition.

It is talking about the defence build-up.

Since February, when Ottawa published a Defence Industrial Strategy framing $180-billion in procurement and 125,000 careers, this country has experienced a boom. Not in delivered capability; the first new destroyer arrives in the 2030s and the fighter file has been in review for a year and a half. The boom is in the layer between the announcement and the delivery. Conference passes and trade-show booths. Association memberships, and there is always one more association. Supplier directories, federal, provincial and private. Readiness assessments. Certification consultants. Industrial-benefits advisory. Defence-practice launches at law firms and accounting firms that discovered patriotism the week the strategy dropped. Newsletter analysts. LinkedIn thought leaders. And yes, opinion columns.

Nobody in that list makes anything that floats, flies or fires. Everybody in that list is invoicing.

Here is the mechanism, because it is worth being precise about. A government announcement creates anticipated money. Actual money moves through contracts, and Canadian defence contracts move at a pace the Procurement Ombud politely describes as burdened by risk aversion and weak measurement. Between anticipation and arrival stretches a gap measured in years, and the gap is a habitat. Uncertainty is what feeds it. Nobody can tell a small firm exactly when the money moves, which rules will apply, or what the real requirements are, so an ecosystem emerges to sell maps of the fog. The government’s own opacity, the unpublished timelines and the certification requirements that industry marketing routinely describes more dramatically than the government does, functions as a subsidy for everyone selling guidance.

I want to be fair to the habitat, since I live in it. Most of these people are not grifters. The conferences produce real introductions. Some consultants save clients from real mistakes. The associations do real advocacy with thin resources. A gold rush genuinely needs shovel merchants, and it is not the shovel merchant’s fault that shovels are profitable before gold is.

But the arithmetic deserves daylight, and nobody inside the ecosystem has an incentive to publish it. For a great many small Canadian firms right now, the cost of pursuing defence work, the memberships, the conference travel, the consultants, the certifications, the unpaid months of business development, comfortably exceeds their revenue from defence work. The build-up is cash-flow negative for the companies it is supposed to enrich and cash-flow positive for the people advising them. That is not a scandal. It is just what the early phase of every announced boom looks like, and it will stay that way for exactly as long as announcements outrun contracts.

So here is a field test, offered from inside the aquarium, for telling the builders from the barnacles. Ask one question of anyone in the defence economy, including me: when do you get paid? If the answer is when capability arrives, when a contract closes, when a product ships, you are talking to someone whose interests point the same direction as the country’s. If the answer is while the process continues, while uncertainty persists, while the anxiety holds, you are talking to the habitat. The habitat is not evil. But its revenue depends on the gap staying open, and you should price its advice accordingly.

Apply the test to the commentary economy too. A columnist who profits from the procurement mess has no financial interest in the mess ending. I would like to believe I pass my own test, since my company only makes real money if contracts actually move, but the readers can score that themselves, which is rather the point of publishing the test.

What would shrink the habitat? Not exhortation. Two boring things, both of which Ottawa controls. Move money faster, because every contract signed converts anticipation into delivery and evaporates a consulting engagement. And publish the rules, because every authoritative timeline, every clarified requirement, every procurement standard stated plainly by the government destroys the market for a paid interpretation of it. The intermediary economy is, in the end, just the market pricing government opacity. Reduce the opacity and the price collapses.

Which suggests the real metric for whether this build-up is working, and it is not the announcement count. Watch the conference circuit. The year the defence trade-show economy stops growing is the year the money started moving to people who make things, because the gap the habitat lives in will finally be closing. I say this as someone with a panel slot in October and a booth budget under review: the healthiest possible sign for Canadian defence would be my whole side of the industry getting smaller.

I will still take the panel slot, though. The boom is the boom.

Al Vigier is the founder and CEO of Caseway, a Vancouver-based AI company. He served seven years in the Canadian Army.

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: G. Kent Fellows

Canada’s latest volley in Donald Trump’s global trade war was launched this week, with the imposition of tariffs ranging from 15 to 50 per cent on around US$27-billion of U.S. imports.

Many prominent Canadian economists and commentators, including academics I know and respect, have argued that this retaliation is ill-advised as it will end up hurting Canadians. Such arguments come from a well-established, even foundational, economic truth: trade restrictions are costly. This means that imposing tariffs against someone who has put tariffs on us causes additional injury to ourselves.

In some respects, those arguing against retaliation are correct. Putting tariffs on American imports to Canada will hurt the Canadian economy. We will all be poorer for it. Incomes will fall, jobs will be lost and prices will rise.

That’s not an opinion, it’s an analysis informed by 250 years of academic research on free trade.

However, as in a shooting war, the act of retaliation shouldn’t be taken because it makes our lives more comfortable. Retaliation has one goal and only one goal: to make the other guy re-think his actions.

If we view the current trade talks as a one-time thing where negotiators show up, reach an agreement or not, then everyone goes home and lives with the consequences, then it probably doesn’t make sense to retaliate. But the die is not cast. There are no stable outcomes when dealing with this era of U.S. trade policy.

At this point I’d like to remind everyone: We have a trade deal with the United States. We negotiated it seven years ago. Trump himself called it “the most modern, up-to-date, and balanced trade agreement in the history of our country.” And yet on Aug. 22, Trump used section 338 of the Tariff act of 1930 to put tariffs on US$27-billion of Canadian exports to the United States.

Section 338 of the Tariff act allows the President to impose tariffs to offset “any burden or disadvantage” imposed on the U.S. economy by its trading partners. This is the first time in history that section 338 tariffs have been imposed, and Trump is imposing the highest tariff rates he is legally allowed to under the provision. Every U.S. President for the last 97 years has had the ability to use section 338 to “correct” for the “burden” Canada has placed on the United States. Why now? Might it have something to do with the fact these tariffs were scheduled to be imposed contemporaneously with planned Canada/U.S. trade talks?

I would love to trust the U.S. judicial branch here. I would love to believe that the United States Supreme Court, faced with clear evidence that Canada’s resilience in the face of Trump’s global trade war, and not a trumped-up argument about unfair trade practices, is to blame for the 338 tariffs. But I don’t believe that.

Viewed from abroad, the judicial branch of the U.S. government no longer appears to be a check on, or balance against, the powers of the executive branch. (Thankfully I don’t have to talk about Congress here.)

And so, we shouldn’t view retaliation as an action in a single trade battle. It’s not something that will be resolved so that we can go on with life, secure in the knowledge that the U.S. government will respect their country’s own laws and honour their commitments. Instead, we should view retaliation as part of a strategy. A “best response” to trade aggression. Something that we commit to whenever Uncle Sam starts rattling the tariff sabre.

Our bully to the south might continue to beat us up, but if we don’t at least try to give him the economic equivalent of a bloody nose, we won’t know whether that gets him to back off.

Lest you think I’m alone among economists here, I note that in addition to those arguing against retaliation, there are also many prominent economists that have argued for it. Including the father of modern economics.

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776 (that date is not a coincidence; the events surrounding the Boston tea party motivated a few things). In it, Smith argues very convincingly that trade restrictions leave everyone poorer. But he also makes a specific comment on trade war retaliation that continues to ring true a quarter of a millennia later.

“There may be good policy in retaliations of this kind, when there is a probability that they will procure the repeal of the high duties or prohibitions complained of. The recovery of a great foreign market will generally more than compensate the transitory inconveniency of paying dearer during a short time for some sorts of goods. To judge whether such retaliations are likely to produce such an effect, does not, perhaps, belong so much to the science of a legislator, whose deliberations ought to be governed by general principles, which are always the same, as to the skill of that insidious and crafty animal vulgarly called a statesman or politician, whose councils are directed by the momentary fluctuations of affairs.”

Trump’s policy decisions can almost all be characterized as short-term thinking. There is perhaps no better example of this than TACO (Trump always chickens out), the term coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong in reference to a pattern where Trump would announce punitive tariffs on a country only to reverse course when faced with market reactions to his decisions.

I don’t know when or even if Trump will chicken out again. I also don’t know if Prime Minister Mark Carney will live up to Adam Smith’s vision of a “crafty animal” statesman or politician. But I do know that Canada is on the frontlines of Trump’s global trade war. We need to be strategic, we need to think long term, we need to retaliate. Adam Smith would expect no less.

G. Kent Fellows is an assistant professor of economics and the director of graduate programs for the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary

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, Jen Gerson speaks with Ronnen Harary, co-founder of Spin Master, the Canadian company behind some of the world’s most successful toys and entertainment franchises, including PAW Patrol.

This episode is brought to you by BioCanRx. We’ve been partnering with federally-funded Canadian not-for-profit BioCanRx to learn how made-in-Canada immunotherapies offer new ways to beat cancer. This September we’re focusing on the “made-in-Canada” part. Since 2015 BioCanRx has supported the Canadian-Led Immunotherapies Collaborative, or CLIC, in building a truly Canadian pipeline so Canadian patients don’t have to wait for cancer therapies developed elsewhere to reach a clinical trial here.

In the first iteration, genetic engineering happened in labs in Vancouver, a lab in Ottawa created a viral delivery system, and a facility in Victoria modified each patient’s immune cells. The resulting therapy was shipped to a research-intensive hospital where the patient received it. More than 100 patients in B.C., Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario received treatment. Now the network is growing: new biomanufacturing facilities are preparing to produce cells in Calgary and Ottawa, and new clinical trial sites are being onboarded in other provinces. CLIC technology is being used in three active Canadian clinical trials, with more on the way.

So when it comes to producing made-in-Canada cancer immunotherapies, Canada isn’t starting from scratch. Thanks to BioCanRx for continuing to help us share these stories. Visit BioCanRx.com to learn more.

Harary takes Jen through the early days of Spin Master and the risks that he and his partners were willing to take while they were still young enough — and perhaps naive enough — to take them. They discuss why your twenties can be an unusually valuable time to take big swings, what entrepreneurs can learn from failure, and why intuition and an understanding of history can matter when trying to distinguish a durable trend from the latest industry bubble.

The conversation then widens to Canada’s entrepreneurial culture. Harary argues that Canada has enormous creative talent but needs to become more comfortable with ambition, risk and the possibility of failure. He and Jen discuss the difference between building and servicing, the importance of protecting time for deep creative work, and why a successful innovation economy needs diversity not simply of backgrounds, but of ideas, experiences and ways of thinking.

This episode is also brought to you by the Forest Products Association of Canada. Every budget season brings endless ideas for how Ottawa should spend. But some of the best ways to strengthen Canada’s economy don’t require a massive price tag.

For Canada’s forest products sector, real growth starts with dismantling made-in-Canada barriers: cutting regulatory duplication, fixing supply chain bottlenecks, securing predictable, cost-competitive access to fibre, and creating more certainty for investment.

We can’t control every global challenge facing our industry, but we can remove the barriers created right here at home.

Discover how smarter policy drives economic growth at FPAC.ca.

Finally, they look at what Canada could do differently. Harary offers ideas for encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation, attracting and developing talent, and creating a culture in which more Canadians are willing to build companies capable of competing globally.

It’s a conversation about toys and business, but also about ambition, creativity, risk and what Canada needs to do if it wants to produce more globally successful companies.

This episode is also brought to you by Cameco. Canada is entering a decisive decade for energy, and the nuclear reactor we choose now matters. Incomplete designs carry real risk of delays and cost overruns, and we cannot afford to spend years designing a reactor before construction begins. That is why Cameco believes the AP1000 reactor is the right choice for Canada. It is already operating globally and ready now, with 100 percent Canadian ownership and strong participation from Canadian suppliers. The AP1000 reactor means job creation and supplier contracts, energy security at home, and significant investment staying right here in Canada.

A proven design, built on time and on budget. That is how we build Canada. Learn more at ap1000.cameco.com.

Thanks for tuning in for another episode of On The Line. Like and subscribe!

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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: Matt Gurney

The trade war between Canada and the United States took another step forward today, with Canada’s retaliatory tariffs kicking in this morning. The U.S. has said it will retaliate, with Bombardier being singled out as a target. This will be the new normal for a while, but not, one presumes and/or hopes, forever. Taking a longer view, the dispute will probably, at some point, have some kind of negotiated solution. Lord only knows how long it’ll take, but my guess is that this doesn’t last forever.

But there is a big spectrum between “now” and “forever.” It might be a long time before we either bend the knee or Trump loses interest and moves on. In the meantime, what we are left with here are a series of choices. Mainly: what the hell do we do now?

A lot of that is going to mean dealing with the United States. There are live debates over how best to respond. So far, I think the government has largely struck the right balance, though I still wish they’d been a lot more transparent than they have been.

But there’s a bigger issue at play here than just managing the relationship with America. What the hell do we do as Canadians?

Don’t think about the States at all. Don’t think about Trump. Just think about Canadians in Canada. What should we be doing for ourselves? Even if the trade war does eventually end, our relationship with the United States is going to require generations to fix. Some very fundamental assumptions about Canadian, well, everything, now need to be reconsidered. I’m the guy who wrote the column about our expectations being a problem, and I’m still having a hard time keeping up with this.

But if there is one thing that I could suggest we should prioritize, it’s simply fixing the problems we have in this country. Really. Just ... do the right things. Fix the problems. Just like virtue is its own reward, making good decisions is always a good decision. It’s bizarrely not something we’ve been good at lately, though, and it’s probably actually going to get harder for a while. In fact, a patriotic rallying-around-the-flag effect is very likely to make it even harder than it already is to get Canadians to actually admit there are major problems in this country, and then insist that the politicians get serious about fixing them.

I’ve been thinking about writing this column for a couple of weeks. Last month I was in the United States for some family business. I was actually there the day Carney called our negotiators home, and I returned to Canada the next day; I joked with some friends that, much like our negotiating team, I was packing up and leaving the United States to show them we meant business.

But one of the things I did notice on my visit to the United States, which included stops in two major cities, was that those American cities were much cleaner than my hometown of Toronto, and in much better repair.

And the especially bizarre thing was, one of these cities was Detroit.

Yes, that Detroit. Astute Line readers — the smartest and best-read people in the whole wide world — will recall that Detroit has not often been held up as an exemplar of civic governance and urban success.

But the downtown looked good. It was safe, clean, well-patrolled; I’m not exactly a regular visitor, but I do pop in often enough to have noted real improvement in the state of things there, even compared to my last visit, which was only about a year ago.

The other major city I visited, Chicago, has always struck me as the best apples-to-apples comparison my hometown of Toronto has with a U.S. city. Chicago has a lot of visible problems. I’m not trying to gloss those over; one thing I quickly noted was a roughly Toronto-esque number of people wandering the streets in evident mental-health crisis, shouting at nothing. But overall, Chicago had much less visible homelessness and was in a considerably better state of repair and cleanliness than my hometown. It wasn’t subtle. Cleaner streets, in better condition, with fewer people obviously living on them. Toronto did not compare well.

And just when the hell did that happen?

I know exactly how Canadians, especially those who will view stating this as some act of sedition, will respond. They’ll note that the crime rates in both Chicago and Detroit are much higher than in Toronto or other comparable Canadian cities.

And that would be correct. I’m not wishing their gang problems on my hometown. I’m simply noting that Chicago and Detroit, both of which I’d visited before, have always had much worse gang problems than Toronto. But Toronto’s downtown used to be pretty clean and safe in comparison to them, especially Detroit.

So what happened? What changed? How did we somehow lose ground?

This is a specific example, but it’s not the only one, just the one that was top of mind for me. Let’s broaden it out. Does the country feel particularly well run to you these days? We don’t have a Major Projects Office for giggles, we have it because we’ve hobbled our own ability to get things built, to just pick one other major example. There are many more. We’ve lost ground on many of the things that were once our advantages: clean and safe cities, sure, but also health care, the success of our immigration system, some of our fiscal discipline. (Our remaining advantage there owes no small amount of thanks to truly mind-boggling levels of federal debt the U.S. seems to have given up on even pretending to take seriously.)

Losing our advantages matters. Canada has always had to work harder. We’re smaller and our weather sucks. That has typically been worth it for millions because things generally worked here pretty well. A lot of things aren’t working here that well.

And we know that. Before the current elbows-up fever swept the land, we spent a few years in Canada asking if the country was broken .... because a whole lot of us were starting to worry that the country was broken. Especially in our big cities and especially for younger Canadians, who are priced out of housing and the normal life milestones that made establishing a family and putting down roots possible.

Almost nothing that people were worried about when we spent years debating if the country was broken have anything to do with Donald Trump. Most of our problems were entirely made-in-Canada. They still are.

And I can prove it! I asked our friends at Ipsos if they could send me a few numbers from their latest survey that asked Canadians specifically to rank their top worries. They sent over their findings from the Ipsos Context Now survey they did in July. And you know what the top issues Canadians are worried about have in common? They don’t involve Trump or America.

Okay, okay, there’s one glaring exception — Canadians did tell Ipsos that the U.S.-Canada relationship was a major concern. For right now, anyway — it didn’t even make the list between 2019 and 2024. But the rest of the issues? The economy, health care, housing, interest rates and inflation, poverty and inequality, immigration, jobs ... these are Canadian issues. A trade war can (will) definitely make some of them worse, but these are largely domestic problems with domestic solutions.

I asked my friends at Ipsos — thank you, Ipsos friends! — how these numbers compared to the traditional issues Canadians have reported caring about. They told me that a lot of the issues bounce up and down — “ebb and flow,” was their term — but that most of the issues are perennial. Every so often a massive event, like the Sept. 11 terror attacks or the COVID pandemic — will come along and make the list of top concerns. But otherwise, it’s what you’d think. Health care, the economy, jobs. Being able to live safely and well.

Cleaning up our streets has nothing to do with America. It’s something we can do ourselves, and used to be better at. Fixing our health care has nothing to with Trump. It’s something we have to do for ourselves, and used to be better at. Crime and justice, immigration, housing, procurement, infrastructure, a bloated and dysfunctional public service and busted payroll systems ... no MAGA influencer did a single thing to create one of those problems for us.

But they’re sure as hell going to use them against us.

So let’s fix this country. Let’s not let our patriotism blind us to where we’ve fallen short. Let’s not make stating plainly that things here could be better, and often have been better, a taboo, something that we dare not speak because Donald Trump exists. Let’s not hold our elbows so high it disrupts the blood flow to our brains.

Detroit is coming back from the dead. What excuse do we have to not do better than we’re doing? And what better way to survive American pressure than simply live well? If that’s what we choose to do, I do have good news. Most of what’s wrong with this country, most of the things holding us back from living as best as we can, are entirely under our control.

And really, when you think about it, always were.

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 Everybody!

Just a quick note from your Line Editors; we’re just wrapping up our Labour Day long weekend. Getting the kids back to school-ready, polishing the lunch boxes, taming feral summer hair — that kind of thing.

We wish were spending a lot less time paying attention to the news. Alas, this is difficult given a now-steady barrage of threats from the White House — the latest, some kind of threat from U.S. President Donald Trump who said Montreal-based airplane maker Bombardier wouldn’t be allowed to sell its planes in the U.S. unless it moved its plant. These kinds of comments are now coming so fast and furious, and are often so economically illiterate and unserious, that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for us to keep track of them all, much less take them seriously.

On our side of the border, we have news from the Peoples’ Republic of China that Canada has re-started some kind of military dialogue, which appears to be happening in parallel with a similar warming of relations between China and the United States. We’re not interested in adding too much to the anti-China critique at present, except to note — we really wish that Canadians were not receiving so much information about what’s actually happening in our government from foreign news outlets. The communications infrastructure and culture that exists at just about every level of government in this country has grown so sclerotic and risk averse that we’re not sure what’s left to advise beyond burning the whole thing to the ground and building it anew. Alas.

Anyway, we will have a lot to say about all the things this week, but in the meantime, we did want to wish you a happy Labour Day. Rest up. The cycle begins anew tomorrow.

-The Line Editors

In the latest episode of The Line Podcast, Jen Gerson speaks with Bloomberg senior White House correspondent Josh Wingrove about the collapse of the Canada–U.S. trade deal, the politics behind it, and why Canadians and Americans increasingly seem to be talking past each other.

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Jen and Josh unpack the breakdown of the latest negotiations, including the competing Canadian and American accounts of what happened and the domestic political pressures shaping both governments. They discuss what Washington actually wants from Canada, how the dispute looks from inside the United States, and what Canadians may be misunderstanding about the political forces driving American policy.

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They then widen the lens to the broader state of U.S. politics: Donald Trump’s hold over the Republican Party, the strength of America’s democratic guardrails, the coming midterms, and where the country may be heading politically. Finally, they consider what all of this means for Canada—and for a bilateral relationship that Canadians can no longer take for granted.

This episode is also brought to you by BioCanRx. Over the summer we partnered with federally-funded Canadian not-for-profit BioCanRx to learn how made-in-Canada immunotherapies offer new ways to beat cancer. This September, we want to better understand the “made-in-Canada” part.

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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 Matt Gurney got a quick update from Rob Shaw about the absolute chaos in B.C. politics and Jamie Carroll about his proposal for Canada to have a more grown-up understanding of the world, starting with changing how we equip — and arm? — the Canadian Coast Guard.

That’s all for now! Talk to you guys 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

Well, 84 weeks in and we’ve hit a new low, everybody. Which is a truly incredible accomplishment in 2026, though I have no doubt that the abasement will continue for the foreseeable future.

Earlier this week, noted American alcoholic war simp Pete Hegseth tweeted.

That was our first sign that things are not going well in America-land.

“(this is real)” he wrote above a photograph of two Canadian women, the first a large, uniformed officer; the other a cadet who appeared to be receiving a medal for her participation in the cadets, a non-military youth program aimed at teenagers between the ages of 12 and 18.

The saga began with a Conservative influencer, who trolled the Instagram feed of the Vernon Cadet program in search of anti-Canada bait to further his popularity with the worthiest MAGA nihilists. He found this image and thought; “Yes. Yes, I will tweet this this to piss on the Canadian military.” He then responded gleefully when Hegseth amplified the nugget, because this is what Conservatism in Canada is now, I guess.

For a decade, the movement has revelled in entirely righteous and warranted anger about the state of the nation — and the Liberals’ role in weakening our shared economy and culture. But loss after electoral loss has curdled a section of this party into a resentment that has so clouded its capacity to see decency or truth that it cowers in pitiful abeyance to a pants-shitting U.S. president who has more appearances in the Epstein files than on The Apprentice.

The Conservative party is dooming itself to pander to a poisonous clot of cloistered Pick Me boys and girls who stand for nothing, will fight for nothing, and believe in nothing. They are an insubstantial but howling wind. They are moving air.

And, while we’re here, cadets aren’t military. It’s a youth program intended to instil the best military virtues in minors. All things that Conservatives would have supported before they began to move in lockstep with … whatever this is.

The post itself really does have a $16 Orange Juice quality to it. The thing could be seared with heat into a Canadian Heritage minute. To watch the U.S. Secretary of War’s attempt to humiliate women in a military-led youth program on Twitter is such a shameful fall from the competence and ideals America once claimed to espouse, that it’s impossible to ignore the reality of it anymore.

America is too far gone.

Even if the country were to pull back from the brink today, it would take a generation to rebuild the norms and trust required for the United States to function, even imperfectly, as it once did.

The 51st state stuff, the sinister memes, the cartographical imperialism, the basic economic illiteracy, the military incompetence, the grifting, the pathetic and ceaseless goddamn whining — all of it has lost its edge. We’ve normalized and overlooked shit behaviour for years not out of fear, but because we’ve hoped that America could, one day, pull itself back to some kind of normal.

But it’s impossible to look at Hegseth’s tweet and fail to understand — at an instinctual level — how much of America’s decline is now on open display. There is no fucking bottom with these people.

I think we’ve reached the end of a real bilateral relationship with the United States. Friendship is over. Even a transactional alliance is pretty damn close to the brink. Trust has broken on both sides.

But I will note that if your single most reliable friend and ally is consistently saying things like “you are threatening us; we feel like our sovereignty is under attack; we don’t believe that this is really about fairer trade but is rather an expression of dominance intended to undermine and vassalize us,” well, then, America has a choice.

A responsible and sane hegemon would attempt to reassure us, thus creating the political room for a mutually beneficial outcome.

“No, of course we’re not trying to vassalize you, oldest friend. Don’t read too much into our social media antics, we’re just in a weird spot. This is actually about the price of eggs on a Tuesday.”

Instead, we’ve seen Trump administration officials sputter with rage at the incredible insubordination demonstrated by Canada’s decision to ... not move forward with a trade deal. They levied more tariffs on top of the other tariffs that were already an abrogation of CUSMA, with more to come, still. Trump has threatened to cut off all trade to Canada and encouraged our businesses to move south. And then there’s the whole “Lake America” thing.

If the goal of all this bullshit was a better trade deal, then the administration would act rationally and in ways that would increase the likelihood of a better trade deal. Instead, it has chosen to double down on all of the behaviours that exacerbate political hostility.

Which means either that these people are very, very stupid, or that this isn’t about trade at all.

Either way, we’re beyond merely not being able to trust them. It’s increasingly difficult to even respect an America that permits this to continue in its name. (By comparison, what was Canada’s most heinous crime against global electoral politics? The lovechild lightweight with the socks?)

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Mark Carney said he wouldn’t return to the negotiating table until the U.S. administration got serious.

“Stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough,” he said. Predictably, pro-meme Americans had an absolute riot with this quote, without really hearing it, or understanding it.

I’ve noted before that Canadians and Americans have very different communications styles, despite sounding the same. When Americans heard Carney, they understood: “We’re not negotiating until you stop doing memes.”

What the Canadian was actually saying was: “We are not returning to the table because we know very well that you can’t stop doing memes.”

So, strap in, kids. We’re trade warring. We’re in it until either the Americans create the conditions required to offer something that is politically sellable in Ontario; or until Carney’s personal approval ratings begin to crack.

And with a Loyal Opposition that looks as serious and credible as the current Trump administration, that crack ain’t coming soon.

“But what about the midterms and the Democrats?” you ask, hopefully, perhaps eyeing for some sliver of light on the horizon. It’s true, none of what Trump is doing is proving popular in America. Democrats have castigated Trump for a stupid and pointless trade war with Canada. Granted, they seem too often overtaken by MAGA stans who dutifully claim that Canada was the aggressor in this war; that we walked away for political reasons; that our healthy cross border trade is actually proof that we’ve ripped America off all these years; that we’re bullies; that we’re owned wholesale by China; anything, really, to show that they, too, can hate loyally and on command. Because if this administration can make their followers hate even Canada, then surely, they can be made to hate anybody. Once that happens, all of the guardrails and internal restraints really will be gone.

I’m sure a lot of decent Americans exist, and they feel very bad about all of this, just not bad enough to do anything to stop it. The Democrats will use Canada and this war as a cudgel when it serves their own short-term electoral interests, but a concession once given is never going to be returned out of goodwill, or an attempt to repair what’s been done. There is no values-driven throughline in American politics. The mid-terms are not going to be decided on ICE detention centres, Trump’s mental capacity, Lake America, or the number of dead children in Iran. Who controls the House and Senate will be decided by how American voters feel about gas and grocery prices. That’s all.

The rest of us don’t exist to them. Foreigners aren’t real people. They do not care. This is not a country that wants to lead the world anymore. It is retreating into itself, and its own narrowly defined self-interest. In the end, they were not so exceptional. Americans are ordinarily human, just like the rest of us.

But it’s so sad to watch.

I spend too much time watching Canadians’ reaction to what’s happening; the Americucks and the Elbows Up, and the Business Certainty types, and the Hopeful Midterm Watchers. I see denial, and anger, and bargaining, depression and fear. All of these emotions are manifestations of grief.

The bilateral relationship is now over and must become something new. Americans are different from what they once were, and less than what they imagined they could be. The world will change in ways we cannot predict.

Anger won’t sustain us in the long run. Denial is self-annihilation.

What’s left when grief clears but clear-eyed acceptance?

It’s time to move on. (this is real.)

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: Rob Breakenridge

It was a trifecta of political victories for Alberta Premier Danielle Smith during the Calgary Stampede.

First, of course, it was the landmark west coast pipeline announcement, made alongside Prime Minister Mark Carney. A second, somewhat more nebulous pipeline announcement followed, this one alongside Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

In between was perhaps the most tangible of all the announcements: Meta’s plan to build a massive new $13-billion data centre in Sturgeon County, just north of Edmonton. Coupled with that was a separate announcement of a $4.6-billion natural gas-fired electricity plant to power this new data centre.

It’s the sort of investment that the premier has been relentlessly pursuing, and undoubtedly makes Alberta the Canadian leader in this field (mind you, it’s not clear who else is actively in this race).

Much to Smith’s chagrin, I’m sure, the response to the announcement — and the prospect of subsequent, similar announcements — has not matched her own level of enthusiasm. That’s forced a pivot, whereby Smith is now both a data centre salesperson and an open-minded, willing-to-listen elected official.

This debate is divisive enough on its own, as we’ve seen in other jurisdictions. For as much as Smith wants to position herself as the champion of this kind of development, by linking herself so closely to the debate, she’s bringing along her own baggage and politicizing it even further.

Her own favouritism and double standards may be tripping up her efforts here, thus undermining the cause of making Alberta Canada’s — or even North America’s — data centre leader.

The Alberta government has now announced a series of town hall meetings, so that members of the public can have a say on this debate. The premier, though, has also shared a lengthy video where she bats down some of the various concerns and criticism around data centre development and touts the many benefits that Alberta’s approach will deliver.

For what it’s worth, I would largely agree with the Alberta government’s approach here. Whatever we think of A.I., or the companies building out this technology and the data centres to support it, none of this is going away anytime soon. If done right — that is, addressing electricity and water usage, as well as concerns over location — there is a lot of upside to attracting these investments.

However, here in Alberta, not all investments and industries are created (politically) equal. We’re seeing first hand how the government red carpet is rolled out for preferred industries as opposed to the hostility and obstacles that confront those industries viewed as undesirable.

The concerns in the data centre debate around rapid growth, a regulatory void, environmental impact, land usage, and aesthetics in many ways echo the recent debate in Alberta around renewable energy.

To be sure, there is no one wind or solar project that would come anywhere close to $13-billion, but all told, it’s still a multi-billion dollar industry that encountered a very different sort of reception from this government.

Ironically enough, it was Alberta’s free-market approach that allowed the province to emerge as a leader in renewable energy. But that was never really a priority or objective of the government, and the perception that renewables were a threat to oil and gas and/or a policy preference of Liberal Ottawa made the industry a political pariah.

It was three years ago last month that Alberta imposed a six-month moratorium on the approval of any new renewable energy projects. The premier initially insisted that the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) asked for a pause, but it later emerged that AESO’s CEO had expressed that he was “not comfortable” with the move, worrying that it could send the industry into a “tailspin,” and send a “closed-for-business message.”

When that moratorium was lifted in early 2024, strict new rules were imposed regarding land use and development regulations, including bans on new projects in certain agricultural areas or land with “pristine viewscapes.”

That’s not to say that there isn’t a need for regulations around wind or solar projects. However if the government’s concerns around reliability and land use and protecting the grid were genuine, you’d expect to see such concerns feature more prominently in their approach to data centres.

One estimate from the Business Renewables Centre Canada found that the moratorium impacted 118 projects worth a combined $33 billion — all privately financed projects, by the way. A study last year from the Pembina Institute found that almost half of those paused projects never got off the ground.

None of that ever seemed to really bother the government, even if they will at times boast of Alberta’s renewable sector when it’s convenient in advancing a certain political narrative. Of course, the variety and scale of electricity generation in Alberta is often held up as the sort of advantage we possess in attracting data centres in the first place.

So, depending on the industry, regulatory uncertainty is either an obstacle for the government to remove or a necessity that companies and investors simply need to live with. The premier holds herself and her government up as pre-development and pro-investment, but they’re quite selective in how that principle applies.

There may be some clever and strategic politics at play here. Smith often seems keenly aware of what’s motivating her political base, and they’re clearly not big fans of renewable energy.

Her political radar might be a little off, however, when it comes to data centres. Then again, this may be her government’s own cynical approach coming back to bite them.

The jury’s still out on whether this is good politics, but we’d be better off if they could keep the politics out of the economics.

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

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.