In the latest episode of The Line Podcast, recorded between November 5th and 6th, 2026, Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson are joined by special guest Stephanie Levitz of The Globe and Mail.

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First up, a brief explainer: due to Jen being at a conference, part of this episode was recorded earlier in the week, after the midterms, but before the Canadian federal budget had been released. To avoid ignoring one of the huge stories of the week, Matt recorded a special segment of the podcast on Friday, after Jen had left for her event. In that segment, Stephanie Levitz joins Matt for a quick discussion of the federal budget. What’s in it, what’s missing, and what does it tell us about the Carney government’s priorities? They take stock of what Ottawa is promising, what it’s actually prepared to spend money on, and what Canadians should take away from it all.

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 month we’re addressing common questions, like: are immunotherapy technologies dual-use?While many immunotherapies are personalized using a patient’s own cells, the research and manufacturing infrastructure behind them can produce other important products, like vaccines. The people behind those research, manufacturing, and clinical delivery processes are also extremely capable and versatile. Greater support for translational research and clinical trials would help grow this workforce and build capabilities that extend well beyond cancer. In a health emergency, that capacity could also help Canada respond quickly to urgent needs for new treatments and vaccines .Thanks to BioCanRx for continuing to partner with The Line to share this information. Visit BioCanRx.com to learn more.

And then, as recorded earlier in the week, Matt and Jen have a lengthy discussion about the U.S. midterm elections and what they mean for Canada. They consider the political forces shaping the results, what the elections tell us about Donald Trump’s America, and what Canadians should expect from Washington in the years ahead. Whatever happens in American domestic politics, Canada still has to figure out how to deal with a neighbour whose political priorities and relationship with the rest of the world have changed dramatically.

Finally, your hosts pivot from the American midterms to how they’re being received here in Canada. Jen breaks her own rule about not talking about the Conservatives and talks about the Conservatives. Matt, meanwhile, has a warning for some Canadian conservatives: he thinks they’re having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that they’re Liberals now. And the sooner they figure that out, the better.

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

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Please sign up at those options not just for this episode, or future episodes of The Line Podcast, but so that you can also receive our other podcast series, On the Line, which releases new episodes every Tuesday morning. In case you missed it, here is last Tuesday’s episode, where Jen Gerson speaks with Jeff Collins, director of the Palmer Institute for Canadian Leadership in Charlottetown, P.E.I., about Canada’s military procurement problems, the country’s evolving national security strategy, and whether our newfound enthusiasm for getting our elbows up against the Americans makes any sense when it comes to national defence.

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: Josh Dehaas

Canadians, we are often told, value our public health-care system beyond almost all other things that define us as a country. But cracks in that bedrock principle are showing.

New polling conducted by Leger finds that more than one in three Canadians under the age of 55 (34 per cent) say they’ve “paid for private health care services because they wanted to avoid long wait times or unsatisfactory services in the public system.” For those 55+ it’s just 18 per cent.

Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of Canadians under age 55 (64 per cent) told Leger we should “keep our public health care system, but allow patients to use their own money, or their extended health insurance, to pay for surgery at local private clinics if they cannot get timely care in the public system.” A smaller proportion (although still a majority) of those 55+ (56 per cent) agreed.

Ipsos found a similar age gap last year. When asked whether governments in Canada should “allow patients increased access to healthcare services provided by independent health entrepreneurs,” younger Canadians were most strongly supportive. Two-thirds (66 per cent) of those aged 18-34 agreed with allowing more access to private care, compared to 50 per cent for those 55+.

Why are younger Canadians less likely to support private health-care options? A few theories.

First, older Canadians tend to consume far more legacy media like CBC News and CTV News, which have dogmatic views about health-care. The legacy media often frames its reporting as though any steps toward a European-style mixed system, where most people get most health care from a public system most of the time, but where private options also exist, as sacrilegious and un-Canadian. On TV news, private is a dirty word.

Younger Canadians, by contrast, get their news more from podcasts and social media, which offer more diverse views on the subject.

Speaking of social media, another possible reason younger people are more open to private care is that we’re bombarded with ads on Instagram and YouTube for online pharmacies and online doctors — and many of us have tried them. Once you’ve used online private care, you’ll avoid bricks-and-mortar clinics at all costs. Why waste half a day going to a doctor’s office and a pharmacy when you can pay $50 to see a doctor on your smartphone from bed and have your prescription arrive in your mailbox? And if you can see a doctor quicker by paying, where’s the harm in that?

Finally, and I suspect this is the biggest reason, Millennials and Gen Z-ers simply don’t trust the government to provide for them the way older generations did. We faced excessive disruptions to school, work and social life during the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily to protect older people from the virus. Many of us have been unable to afford to buy homes and start families, while Boomers buy second homes and vacation in Tuscany.

We don’t trust the institutions the way older generations did so we don’t expect the public health care system to be there for us when we need it. We’re open to other options.

Josh Dehaas is Litigation Director (interim) with the Canadian Constitution Foundation. The survey by Leger was commissioned by the Canadian Constitution Foundation, Second Street and MEI ahead of this week’s Prescriptions for Health Reform Conference in Toronto.

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.

Canadians cannot help but watch the U.S. midterms with mixed feelings: uncertainty, trepidation, glee, and even cautious optimism. The repudiation of the Republicans may prove a fatal political blow to U.S. President Donald Trump, and the authoritarian populism that has consumed American politics over the last decade. The results are particularly welcome in most of Canada, which has weathered the brunt of Trump's threats, ranging from economic coercion, punitive tariffs, and trade wars. There is no question that America's heel-turn has profoundly damaged the bilateral relationship between the two countries — traditionally among the closest in the modern world.

Further, that change has fundamentally altered Canada's politics, and self-conception, mostly for the better. This is a country that is more open toward acknowledging its problems and taking itself more seriously as a direct result of a U.S. foreign policy that increasingly looks as if it seeks to vassalize its closest friend and neighbour.

So, is there room to embrace a bit of quiet optimism that the midterms will mark the beginning of the end of Trumpism and all its works; or does Canada need to continue to stand on guard for a true north strong and free?

Your Line editors can't agree.

So, they're going to argue. Because that's what they do.

Presenting the case for optimism: Jen Gerson. Pessimism: Matt Gurney.

Let's begin.

Gerson: I’m going to start this fight by bounding the case for optimism just a little bit. I don’t think this is over. I don’t think all is forgiven. I don’t think we can look at the results of the midterms and simply assume that Donald Trump and the forces that put him in power are an anomaly or a blip. The President’s hold on power over two terms is and ought to remain a warning sign to Canada, and to all of America’s allies. There is something transactional, avaricious, and authoritarian intrinsic to the country’s nature. Many of the Great Power forces that are undermining what we once assumed was a durable Western liberal democratic order are still very much in play. And, more worryingly, we have very good reason to be concerned that American institutions are no longer up to the task of resisting any of this, nor of defending the fundamental values upon which American economic, military, and cultural dominance has traditionally sustained itself.

But, I don’t think the midterms are an anomaly, either. I don’t believe Americans are, as a people, too far gone. I think most of them — at least those outside the current U.S. administration — still wish to see themselves as Good Guys, as the heroes of a broader moral order, even if they might disagree vehemently about how that heroism asserts itself both domestically, and abroad. And I think that desire will prove deeply corrosive to the kind of amoral and transactional imperialism that Trump and Trumpism is seeking to impose on the world.

Is that too much to conclude from a Democrat sweep that was broadly rooted in dissatisfaction with higher costs of living? Maybe. But I’m not so sure that it’s a simple thing to extricate values from material consequences of abandoning those values. Or, as the kids would say, America is starting to Find Out.

Tariffs proved to be radically unpopular: the American people were able to recognize a tax grab by a different name. Threatening Canada ultimately made life worse for ordinary American people, and they responded.

For Canada, we’ve shown that we can resist American domination effectively, if we choose. And Americans demonstrated that they still retain the capacity to choose a different path for themselves; they were able to vote in an election that was not totally undermined by either gerrymandering or violence.

My final note of optimism rests in history. Weak and short-sighted people are the ones who tend to be overawed by the superficial and aesthetic strength projected by authoritarian regimes. However, in the long run, power that is exercised by fear is a brittle thing. By comparison, systems that are free and democratic are messy, exhausting and often inefficient, but they are durable, precisely because they are rooted in processes that produce real consensus. The free are always slow to get going, but once we go, we won’t be outdone. Is the fact that Canada has, by all accounts, credibly outmanoeuvred America, 10 times its size, in the ongoing trade war — that U.S. officials now appear to be pushing for an easy resolution — not some evidence of this maxim?

Once fear breaks, it breaks heard. The midterms are not the end of America’s flirtation with authoritarianism, but it may be the beginning of the end of the fear that will sustain it.

Gurney: I’ll stipulate that all of that is possible. I do think Jen is being optimistic, but I’ll be generous and grant that it’s a plausible theory of the case. She could be right. I hope she is. I’ll also meet her where she is on a different point — I also like Americans and think your typical American is good. To be honest, I probably like the median American more than the median Canadian. There’s a snooty and priggish streak in us that’s often absent from them, and I don’t claim to be immune from it myself.

But I’m the guy making the pessimist’s case here, and I’m lucky enough to have drawn the assignment that fits my view anyway. So here’s what I’m taking from Tuesday: nothing. Zero. Zip. I conclude nothing from it, at least as it concerns Canada and, by extension, the rest of the world. I think the Americans voted against a party and a government and, despite his claims, a president, that they had concluded (correctly) was working against their interests. And I don’t think the slightest thought went into what this ought to mean for any of us.

Jen probably remembers how, after the general election two years ago, The Line adopted “The Americans have a right to choose their own destiny” as something of a mantra. Or maybe a coping mechanism. Whatever you want to call it, it was true then, and I think it’s true now. What has been shattered, for me, is two particular bits of faith in the American people and its processes.

The first is that the Americans care about, or are even aware of, the uniquely vital global role that they chose to take on after the Second World War. Our format here today doesn’t suit a full historical summary, but suffice it to say, after the war ended in 1945, the United States’ political class recognized that the war had shattered the pre-existing world order. The great powers that dominated the world in 1939 were either effectively destroyed or, in the unique case of the British, triumphant but bankrupt. The Americans concluded, and I think they were correct, that America’s choices were to withdraw to something closer to their historical isolation, or dramatically increase their role in global politics, to supplant the capitalist and/or democratic empires that were no longer able to function in their traditional roles. Had they chosen the latter, the American leaders knew, that was likely to result in the Soviets expanding as much as they wanted. America, thankfully, chose the former, and the world trusted them to do it. We sometimes lose sight of how remarkable that trust was, and how much America’s history as a (more or less) non-imperial power played into that.

This was not charity. This was to America’s enormous benefit. They truly did lead the world. And then, in the last decade, they just … lost interest. I can understand some of the why — I really can. But what I still struggle to accept is how little awareness there seemed to be among Americans how much better off they were living in the world they’d built. America pulling back as it has from the world stage isn’t just a betrayal and abandonment of allies. It is, first and foremost, a recklessly suicidal act of geopolitical self-harm. And I don’t think they know that. I’m still not sure they know that.

I don't know how anyone is supposed to take them seriously again.

The second point, I can make more briefly. Once again, I agree with Jen — the average American is lovely. But there is an unfortunate but I think now undeniable element of just rank hypocrisy and immaturity in the U.S., as a political unit. In many ways, the Americans have generally been better model citizens than is the case across many democracies. They’ve had a thriving political culture, high rates of volunteerism and charitable donations, etc. I had once dared hope this might have hinted at a degree of maturity as democrats (small-D, of course). As it turns out, a great many of them, and primarily the ones who’d claim ad nauseam to believe in a higher being and live according to a divine standard, looked at a narcissistic windbag serial adulterer and notoriously unethical business operator and said … you know what? We like this guy. And then, even after that ended badly in 2020 — and it was the American people who decided that, not just my opinion — by 2024, enough of them had forgotten all they’d learned, and decided to give it another go. With a bigger margin of victory!

This is one of those things that, once seen, cannot be unseen. Modern America is a deeply unserious nation. I don’t think it was always so, but it is now. And growing up, or growing up again, is going to take decades. I think we should wait on that before declaring all is forgiven. Because there’s no map covered in big blue arrows all pointing left that gives me any faith that tens of millions more of these guys wouldn’t hand power right back to Trump or his party if they believed for a second they’d save a dime on a gallon of gas. All that happened on Tuesday was that they did not, in fact, believe that. Trump did not have the credibility to make the case that his party was making things better, and the voters conducted themselves accordingly. Okay! I’m just not willing to give them the credit of assuming that now having been twice bitten, they’ll finally get around to the shy part. Once really t

Gerson: The problem, of course, is that I mostly agree with Matt’s points. From the outside, America looks like a nation that’s lost sight of its purpose. I don’t see people who know what they stand for, what they want to do, or who they want to be anymore. My guess, admittedly from across the border, is that the nation never really recovered from the disillusionment it suffered as a result of the war in Iraq. And if you’re just a massively powerful and wealthy near-empire republic that no longer really believes it has any higher moral purpose or leadership role to serve for the greater good of humanity, what’s left?

I’m reminded of that glorious five-minute speech from Ned Beatty in the 1976 film Network — a movie so cynical and transgressive that I don’t think any studio in Hollywood would dare touch a script like it in 2026.

“We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.”

That’s a long-winded way of putting it, but what I’m trying to say is that absent guiding purpose or soul, what they’ve got is the pursuit of capital, comfort, and eventually, collapse. The assumption that that’s all there is. Trump is the living face of that mentality. He’s a straightforward narcissist; a weak nation’s fantasy of a strongman. And the consequences of putting someone without character or direction in such a position of authority were both inevitable and foreseeable. He is self-indulgence, and decadent decline, and a mark on America’s claims to exceptionalism.

But in Matt’s observation of decay, I see the greenshoot, too. This loss of self-faith makes Americans a threat not only to others, but, in the long run, to themselves. As Americans isolate and pull back from a position of responsible global leadership, so too will they witness a decline in the material benefits of that leadership. I can’t be the only person who anthropomorphizes America, and sees a third-generation frat boy, a legacy admission to an Ivy League school squandering the family trust fund on crypto schemes. Self-assured, entitled, without conscience or a sense of duty — and radically more vulnerable to misdirection and fate than he may realize. Empires fall. Populations revolt. Oligopolies turn on themselves. Aristocrats die in poverty. It happens all the time.

I reiterate my point above: one cannot extricate values from material benefits that those values ultimately create. You cannot forever revel in the vast wealth accrued by power while also undercutting the very thing that makes you powerful. This is especially true when the benefits of both wealth and power are so radically unevenly distributed, and the social mobility entrenched by a democratic system calcify into an oligopoly.

In short, the system that Trumpism would create is inherently self-limiting because it is corrupt and amoral.

But … America is just so damn big and wealthy and powerful, and its ruling class is so comparatively insulated, that it may take generations for new incentives and values to take hold. It’s going to take time, time and consequences, for Americans to re-learn why it is in their own best interest to be a serious and graceful people. And it’s going to fall on us in Canada — among others — to become serious, sovereign, and effective enough to create those incentives, to apply pressure, to resist coercion, and to extract consequences for bad behaviour. We cannot serve our purpose simply by being angry and smug. More is required of us.

I share with Matt a belief that the Democrats can’t be trusted to behave any better than the Republicans going forward. Once norms break down at an institutional level, the trajectory of a national character is re-set. And I do think those norms have broken down. Further, I don’t see any political faction willing to risk the real political capital to force meaningful reform, to restore a values-based political culture, or to champion norms or limits on executive power.

It’s going to take more than simply voting blue in one election.

We’ve been speaking here at The Line about what it would take to restore trust between Canada and America again. There are practical answers to that question: Restore CUSMA as the governing trade agreement between the two countries. Post a significant bond that Canada can draw upon if any of those terms are fundamentally abrogated by the U.S. administration. Sever the last-minute deal that extracted more cash from the Gordie Howe bridge just weeks before it opened.

For me, the most important is a formal apology for the threats of annexation. It’s not just the words themselves, it’s a show of understanding about why the words are important. Weak people who pretend to be strong are the ones who fear amends and repair — it takes true strength of character to acknowledge the harm done to the other, and to accept the momentary sacrifice of pride required to restore trust between parties.

Apology signals equality — a show that Americans are willing to see us as equals as people, even if they outclass us in economic and military power. There’s something of a spiritual virtue in this, recognizing that individuals are something more than a number on a ledger. Just a tiny bit of humility and vulnerability from a country secure in its strength would tell us quite a lot about how Americans want to move forward in the world. Do they wish to be leaders, or dictators; a republic, or an empire.

Friends apologize to friends. Imperial hegemons don’t apologize to vassals.

All that said — is this really beyond the realm of possibility? I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine any or all of these things happening eventually. Nothing is static. All systems move and adapt. I suppose the case for optimism relies on time, time to let the inevitable consequences of poor choices play out, and time for Americans themselves to see the value of the relationships they’ve squandered.

Gurney: I … I did not expect Jen to go full Network like that.

Jen opened her segment above by largely conceding much of my argument. I’ll do the same and grant that time does indeed really, really matter. I’ve made this quip before, but, I’m an optimist heart, but only on a really long horizon. Look at the column I wrote yesterday! I’m a Trekkie. We all believe that we’re just riding out the shit era before we get to the good stuff.

So, yeah, Jen’s probably right … on a long enough timescale.

I want to get into the meat of what she said, but first, I want to talk about her notion of some kind of reconciliation. We’ll probably get some individuals in positions of power offering mea culpas; we have seen some already. But something formal on behalf of the United States? No chance. And not just because of what Jen correctly noted — hegemons wouldn’t so deign. I also just think we’re working against a pretty fundamental element of human nature here. People are ashamed, hate being called out, and recoil from accusations, particularly those that catch them by surprise.

This is going to drive a lot of Canadians nuts, but I think we’ll have to just write that off and live with it. Any whiff of Canadian grievance would catch many Americans by surprise. American opinion polls show that we remain popular with Americans (less so with Republicans). That’s nice and stuff, but I suspect that that’s because a lot of Americans do not know that we had a dispute at all. I’d put the number of Americans who are aware that we are mad at them as many one in five, and they’d be roughly equally split between being embarrassed about it and thrilled, eager to dish out some more.

I can live with that? Like, I think right now, of the aware group, it’s probably a split, maybe even tilted a bit in our favour. If Americans start finding out we’re mad at them because they start hearing that we want some kind of apology, we’ll probably not like how that ends up for us. So maybe we just let that slide.

But to Jen’s broader point, I’d say that a really fundamental concern I have, and it’s an awfully pessimistic one, is that rather than planning around some kind of eventual American return to normal, well, this might be that. All of us are prisoners of our own perspective — we are shaped by our life experiences, and a little bit by what our parents and maybe our grandparents went through. Beyond that, only weirdos that enjoy and study history — ahem — really have a broader view. And speaking as our representative weirdo here, the broader view is not necessarily a happy one.

This is really just yet another opportunity for me to trot out my “your expectations are a problem” thesis. Basically all of us, and certainly every Canadian in any official role, has only really known the version of the United States that emerged from the Second World War, so the last decade seems really friggin’ weird to us.

But zoom out a bit and, honestly, not so much. First off, the American republic has existed for 250 years, and they seem to get a bad case of the crazy every four or five generations. The country was born of revolution, and a bloody war that pitted brother against brother. Not quite a century later, they decided to have yet another bloody war that pitted brother against brother. If you’re willing to be a bit loosey goosey with the numbers, it’s very possible for us to look at today as a delayed return to that pattern of American self-destruction. (Or, as some have said, we can look at some of the political, social, racial and economic upheaval of the 1930s and 1960s as a less violent version of the same crazy.)

Even without going all The Fourth Turning on you, consider what we’ve heard from the White House in recent years. Trump has run an administration that (nominally!) wants to avoid foreign entanglements, seeks to interact with the world mostly via trade, which it intends to dominate, believes in high tariffs to foster a domestic industry, and has imperial designs on its neighbours in the Western hemisphere, including Canada, Greenland, Cuba and Panama (which is coveted specifically because of the Canal linking the oceans). You could pair this with some really nasty internal divisions on race and immigration. If you wrote down a little cue-card summary of what Trump wanted and showed it to a random American drawn from every decade in the country’s history, a lot more of them would find it familiar than bizarre.

Put in the most basic term: we have to consider the possibility that the America we knew and loved between the Second World War and very recent years was a historical fluke. An anomaly. And that what we’re seeing from America today isn’t a weird tantrum borne of the trauma of 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2008 Great Recession or the COVID-19 pandemic. This might just be the magic of that incredible American experiment in relatively benign global leadership as it existed during the Cold War finally and maybe inevitably wearing off.

If so, Trump isn’t a freak event we can outlast. He’s just the start of the reversion to the American mean.

(And yes, before anyone tries to argue with me in the comments, “relatively benign global leadership” is doing a lot of work. I know that. This piece is long enough already. Spot me that one, will ya?)

Gerson: So, we mostly agree? We just haven’t decided on what kind of timescale we’re considering, and what “normal” even means.

Either way, I think Canada has to plan a future around the assumption that the Trump era, and the “values” it represents, are a new normal. We can’t assume a return to goodwill and must make our own strategic assumptions around the most pessimistic case. Because, well, of course we do. And one midterm result won’t change that.

Plan for the worst, sure. But we can still hope for the best, too.

Gurney: I never tell anyone not to hope. Hope is good. It’s healthy. Sometimes it’s all you have.

All I’ll add here as my parting thought is that the U.S., Canada and the rest of humanity is now in a position where we are dependent on the Democratic Party to not screw things up. They ran a good campaign. They really did. They stayed focused on pretty moderate, bread-and-butter issues and pulled off a massive win. They have a mandate to go hard after the GOP on corruption, and I hope they do. Heads should roll. A reckoning is warranted.

But I just have no faith that they aren’t going to screw this up by going after all kinds of fringe issues that will play well with their left-wing fringe while alienating the moderates. They did avoid that trap before the midterms. Whether they can stay disciplined in victory is, to put it mildly, not a foregone conclsuion.

But hey. Like Jen said. We can hope.

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By: Matt Gurney

There is a lot happening out there in the world, if I can be forgiven a statement of the obvious. Political upheaval, economic woe, technological revolutions, brutal and devastating wars. Someone like me is amply supplied with writing topics, and then some.

So why can’t I stop thinking about a fictional character, and how sad I am we’ll never see him again?

Sir Patrick Stewart, the British actor, passed away last week at the age of 86, after a short illness. That’s sad. I genuinely felt sorry for his loved ones and friends. But I wasn’t heartbroken about it. The man was 86, had lived a full life, and enjoyed good health almost to the end. We should all be so lucky.

What did get me, though, is that Sir Patrick’s death means the end of his greatest character — Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation and its various spinoffs.

Picard was not Sir Patrick’s first role, far from it. He was well into middle age when he got the part. His career until then had been mostly spent in the United Kingdom, much of it with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Coming over to America to do a sci-fi TV show was just a way to bank some real money before heading home and doing more theatre. No one knew him in America as an actor, and no one really thought that the show would go anywhere. Certainly it wouldn’t match the cultural power of the original series from the 1960s, right?

Wrong. Star Trek: The Next Generation, after an admittedly bumpy first two seasons, became wildly popular, in a way a TV show just couldn’t be today, not with all our attention distributed across various streaming apps. Sir Patrick became recognizable to millions. When the series ended after seven seasons, there were four movies, and then, in 2020, a new show, Star Trek: Picard, brought the character back for three more seasons, showing an elderly Picard, now a retired admiral, getting in a few more adventures in his final years. Along the way, his success as Picard gave him numerous other acting opportunities, and made him a wealthy man.

It also turned Picard himself into one of those special, rare fictional creations — a character that is so beloved by the fans, so inspirational, and depicted so wonderfully over many decades, that the character becomes larger than the actor.

There is a funny little irony here — Jean-Luc Picard and Sir Patrick Stewart were not alike. What follows may sound like speaking ill of the dead, but that’s the furthest thing from my mind; a lot of what I’m about to say is Sir Patrick’s own version of his life (his memoir was quite revealing). He was born poor, raised in an abusive household, never finished much school, and was probably saved by finding acting in his teens. He was passionate about acting but otherwise lighthearted, even a bit silly. In his personal life, he made some poor choices, including wrecking two marriages via infidelity, which he admitted to regretting as he aged. He said he had no real relationship with his children, both from his first marriage; they sided with their mom in the divorce brought about by Sir Patrick’s affair with a younger Star Trek co-star.

But the characters he created rarely reflected any of that frivolity. Sir Patrick himself at times seemed surprised that he kept getting cast as serious, brilliant, thoughtful moral exemplars. He was mature enough to realize that he simply possessed the skill to play those kinds of characters, even while being little like them. He was blessed with other attributes, too: a handsome face, a stern mien, a rich, deep voice ... he was a natural for Shakespeare, and the kinds of characters Shakespeare wrote. He played them well, but he wasn’t those men.

And what a man Jean-Luc Picard was! I was just a kid when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered, and probably didn’t even start watching it until the third season. That was good timing, as the third season was when the show suddenly got really good. And a huge part of why it was good was because Picard was a wonderful character, and Sir Patrick brought him to life completely.

Picard was not a perfect man. He was standoffish with his peers, and a bit precious and stubborn. He was awkward around children and, often, attractive women. He was largely estranged from his family back on Earth, who had not supported his decision to leave behind the family business (a traditional vineyard) to spend his life in the stars, as an officer in Starfleet, the combined exploration and defensive service of the United Federation of Planets, a democratic union of like-minded worlds of which Earth was a member. Picard could be prideful and even, at times, arrogant. He could be a hard man to like and had a string of failed relationships, wrecked by his single-minded focus on his career at the expense of all else.

But he was an easy man to respect, and in time, love. Jean-Luc Picard was principled, even when those principles cost him. He had integrity, and held himself, his subordinates and even at times his superiors to the standard they all claimed to share. He would use violence when needed, but only when needed, and only as much as required. When he had to fight, he’d fight ferociously, and with true military genius, but even his victories were tinged with regret — he lamented the loss of life, especially if he was the one forced to take it. He protected the weak from the strong, even when the strong were wearing the same uniform as him. He believed in justice, and despite the unavoidable military missions he’d sometimes be assigned, his true passion was exploration and learning, particularly the history of both Earth and other worlds. If he hadn’t been a starship captain, he’d have been an archeologist.

It’s hard to imagine a much better role model than that! And Sir Patrick stepped into that part like he’d been born to play it. He made Picard one of the great characters in science fiction.

Sir Patrick played Picard for more than 30 years, and over that time, the character evolved, as it should have. He mellowed, and allowed himself to overcome the painful losses of his early career and draw closer to his shipmates. He became more open to romance in his later years, not wishing to be alone. As shown in the three seasons of the Star Trek: Picard series, he also became, as men sometimes do, embittered by advancing age, unable to stop thinking about the things he wished he’d done better, or stop grieving the losses he’d suffered along the way. Indeed, those last three seasons were largely about him finding a way to make peace with a life that had been imperfectly lived, finding happiness himself and helping those around him, including Starfleet and the entire Federation, be better versions of themselves, too. One could wonder if some of Sir Patrick’s life was bleeding through onto the page, there.

No matter. Picard was someone you could believe in, which is strange, since it’s hard to believe that such a man could ever thrive today. In an era of bitter social division and cultural conflict, we have come to accept that even moral people will only be able to do little bits of good while having to tolerate a lot of bad. We expect institutions to fail and become corrupt and for the good people inside them to simply tolerate what they must, or give up and move on. We have come to abandon hope that there are still people out there who’d dare to say, no, this is wrong, and I will not support it. And we certainly don’t expect those people to be heeded if and when they do.

Star Trek is science fiction, of course. But in recent years, as the world has fallen apart around us, it’s not the warp drives and deflector shields that seem so impossible. It’s men like Picard. Honourable, principled men, bending the universe to the cause of what’s noble and right by the sheer conviction of their arguments, and, sometimes, maybe with a bit of justified, proportional force. One of the bitter ironies for me in recent years has been watching our space technology rapidly progress, making something like a Star Trek future seem more possible in terms of the gizmos and gadgets, while also seeing us largely revert as a species, moving further away from what Picard embodied.

I think that’s why last week’s news hit me so hard. We didn’t just lose an actor, or a character. We lost a reminder that once, not all that long ago, it seemed possible that that was our future — not the starships and the transporters, but the morals, the values, the courage and the accountability.

Sir Patrick Stewart will be missed by his family and friends. Jean-Luc Picard will be missed by Star Trek fans. But me, just speaking for myself? I miss the belief that one day, the world would belong to men like that Starfleet captain. Because we need them more than ever. And they’ve never seemed more make-believe.

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

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In this episode of On The Line, host Jen Gerson speaks with Jeff Collins, director of the Palmer Institute for Canadian Leadership in Charlottetown, P.E.I., about Canada’s military procurement problems, the country’s evolving national security strategy, and whether our newfound enthusiasm for getting our elbows up against the Americans makes any sense when it comes to national defence.

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 month we’re addressing common questions, like: are immunotherapy technologies dual-use?

While many immunotherapies are personalized using a patient’s own cells, the research and manufacturing infrastructure behind them can produce other important products, like vaccines. The people behind those research, manufacturing, and clinical delivery processes are also extremely capable and versatile. Greater support for translational research and clinical trials would help grow this workforce and build capabilities that extend well beyond cancer. In a health emergency, that capacity could also help Canada respond quickly to urgent needs for new treatments and vaccines.

Thanks to BioCanRx for continuing to partner with The Line to share this information. Visit BioCanRx.com to learn more.

Collins draws on his experience working at the Department of National Defence and elsewhere in the federal public service to explain why Canada has such a difficult time buying the equipment its military needs. Why do procurement projects take so long, cost so much, and so often fail to deliver what was originally promised? And what would actually have to change to make the system work?

The episode is also brought to you by the Forest Products Association of Canada.

For years, the Forest Products Association of Canada has called for action to reduce regulatory duplication and create greater certainty for mills, factories, and investment.

We’re encouraged to see the federal government taking action to make Canada’s regulatory system more coordinated and predictable, removing made-in-Canada barriers that have held the sector back. This is an important step for forestry and for communities across the country that depend on the sector.

Now, we need to move from promises to production. Canadian jobs, stronger supply chains, and new opportunities for communities from coast to coast to coast depend on it.

Canada’s forest sector is ready to do its part. Learn more at FPAC.ca.

Jen and Jeff also discuss Canada’s national security strategy and the growing pressure to reduce our military dependence on the United States. Political enthusiasm for greater Canadian independence is one thing, but the practical realities of continental defence, military integration and procurement are quite another. How realistic is an “elbows up” approach to our most important defence partner?

This episode is also brought to you by Cameco. Building Canada’s energy future means creating jobs for Canadian workers. That’s why the AP1000 reactor is the right choice for Canada: it is already operating and ready to deliver the power we need. Choosing the AP1000 means a reactor built by Canadians, creating skilled jobs in construction, fabrication and the trades while keeping more investment and economic benefits here at home. If we are serious about creating Canadian jobs and strengthening our economy, the choice is clear. To learn more, visit ap1000.cameco.com.

It’s a conversation about bureaucracy, military readiness, national sovereignty, and whether Canada can finally get serious about equipping its Armed Forces for a much more dangerous world. We hope you enjoyed the episode, and as always, 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: Jared Wesley

There is a troubling pattern to the way Danielle Smith’s UCP approaches governance.

When it doesn’t get its way, it rewrites proven processes and disregards the norms underpinning them to engineer what it wants.

Whether it’s undermining legislative officers, loosening ethics rules governing gifts to politicians, re-writing the rules of direct democracy or overriding municipal decisions it dislikes, Smith’s UCP lacks any reverence for institutions that have kept government’s power in check.

That tactic appears to now have been extended to redrawing electoral maps. We probably shouldn’t be surprised.

When Canadian politicians redraw boundaries to give themselves an unfair advantage, that’s cheating. More specifically, it is gerrymandering: the American-style, partisan practice of carving up electoral maps not seen on this side of the border in half a century.

But how do we know when governments in Canada cross the line when drawing lines?

I’ve studied electoral boundaries commissions and chaired one myself. Three key questions come to mind when deciding whether a government is gerrymandering.

The first is a process concern.

Was it open and independent? Arms-length boundary commissions used across Canada and throughout Alberta history ensure voters get to choose their representatives, not the other way around.

Before we adopted independent commissions, governments would get to draw the lines on the map, often to cement their grip on power or stall their opponents’ advance. We’ve since evolved in ways Americans have not. Today, transparency, non- or multi-partisanship, and meaningful public consultation are all safeguards against this sort of crass partisan manipulation. Hiding proposed maps from public scrutiny, skipping hearings, and denying citizens the chance to challenge draft boundaries are beyond the pale in Alberta. Even further beyond the line: tearing up independently drawn maps in favour of those crafted behind closed doors.

On this count, the UCP has failed. After an independent commission spent months consulting Albertans and produced a map, the Smith government rejected it and created a new process by striking a new “advisory panel.” This is often a tactic that governments use to get a preferred result from a “neutral” panel composed of their chosen appointees.

The UCP went even further, explicitly removing the requirement for public hearings (which the panel never conducted). And, in a move not seen since before Peter Lougheed was premier, they will not have a formal opportunity to provide comment before it is imposed on them.

Can the UCP reconstruct the boundaries process in a legal sense? Sure. Should they do it from a democratic perspective? Absolutely not.

The next two questions involve looking at the outcome of the process..

First: Does the new map provide effective representation? The Supreme Court of Canada has established that electoral boundaries must preserve two principles above all others: voter parity and communities of interest.

The goal is to ensure citizens have a reasonably equal voice in government, while maintaining in single districts groups of citizens with shared geography, history, culture, economic pursuits, social connections, and other distinct representational needs.

Most of the time, maps are updated purely on the basis of demographic shifts, with drafters struggling to keep these communities of interest together. When commissions split them, the public responds swiftly and loudly, often resulting in reversals. Be on the lookout for maps drawn to deliberately break up historic groupings.

How does this apply to Alberta in the present? The new map raises serious concerns. The disparity between the most and least populous ridings is higher than before. Lethbridge’s two urban ridings would be carved into four constituencies extending far into the countryside to the province’s eastern and southern borders. Three northwest Calgary ridings would also be made “rurban”, diluting urban voices by combining them with rural ones and vice versa.

The biggest cleavage in Alberta, surveys and elections repeatedly show, is between folks who live in cities and those who do not. They constitute distinct communities of interest who, in this case, are being “cracked” into multiple districts with no rationale beyond an apparently partisan one. In the end, urban dwellers have different interests and representational needs, just as rural residents risk losing their distinctive voice when absorbed into urban-dominated districts. And again: residents, themselves, will have no meaningful opportunity to voice their concerns or support for this reconfiguration. In previous engagements, they resoundingly rejected “rurban” ridings.

Why would the UCP process produce such an outcome? That brings us to the final question: Does the new map systematically favour one party?

Gerrymandering works by packing opposition supporters into a handful of districts, cracking their voting blocs across multiple constituencies, or otherwise drawing artificial boundaries that manufacture favourable outcomes for the party in power.

Oddly-shaped ridings — like rurban ones — are one clear giveaway. But so, too, are lines on a map that divide actual communities of interest to consolidate partisan ones.

The litmus test involves determining whether the new communities created have anything in common beyond helping the governing party stay in power.

Do they create more safe seats for the governing party, fewer competitive ridings, and/or an increased chance of winning the next election? Do they diminish the clout of opponents within the governing party itself by outnumbering them in new districts?

Again, the new map is very troubling. The UCP’s electoral strength lies disproportionately in rural areas and its popularity is waning in the cities. Stretching Calgary and Lethbridge districts into surrounding conservative territory would represent a clear intent to reduce competition and reverse the NDP’s momentum. Why else would they meddle with these areas and leave others alone?

Smith’s chief of staff, Rob Anderson, said on Monday that the NDP was complaining about the new map because “they don’t want any change whatsoever that could level the playing field.” This is a clear tell that the changes will benefit the UCP.

At the same time, the rurban ridings take the wind out of separatist sails. Factions within the UCP are mobilizing to control nominations and the leadership. Rurban ridings would reduce the ability of predominantly rural separatist forces to take control of constituency associations at a pivotal moment in the UCP’s history. If Premier Smith is unable to oust separatists from her party by other means, gerrymandering might do it.

Beyond these partisan calculations, one to benefit the party and one to benefit Smith herself, there is no apparent rationale for rejecting the majority report and redrawing the boundaries in the ways they have.

Overall, the problem with the UCP’s new map has as much to do with process as the outcome. They have abandoned a rules-based approach that provided independent oversight and public input for one that allows its hand-picked appointees to draw their own lines behind closed doors. Why did they do it? Simply because they didn’t like the outcome.

Gerrymandering is a gateway to other forms of democratic backsliding. Once governments learn they can do away with free and fair elections, honouring other democratic norms seems quaint. Worse yet, manipulating electoral boundaries weakens the ability of citizens to hold them accountable or reverse the changes. If there is a red line for conservatives committed to democracy in this province, the UCP is crossing it.

Jared Wesley is a professor of political science and leads the Common Ground project at the University of Alberta.

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: Alex Muir

Going into the elections tomorrow, Donald Trump is as unpopular as any president in 80 years going into a midterm vote. Price inflation has outrun paycheques in most states, and the Democrats’ closing argument, corruption, now ranks at or near the top of voters’ concerns. Nobody serious expects Republicans to have a good night — the question is which kind of Democratic win it will be.

There are two plausible answers, and they differ more than the topline national polling suggests. The first is a narrow Democratic victory: taking 20 to 25 House seats, and a Senate that ends up closely balanced within a seat either way. The second is a big win: 35 to 40 House seats and a real Senate majority. The same environment could produce either one.

What both cases share

1) A president whose job approval is in Truman territory. The New York Times/Siena history chart puts Trump at 34 per cent approval going into the midterm. That is one point above Harry Truman’s 33 per cent in 1946 and below George W. Bush’s 37 per cent in 2006 (New York Times). The averages are a bit kinder: 37.4 per cent in the Silver Bulletin and 38.4 per cent in the RCP average, five points below his standing on Election Day 2018 (RealClearPolitics). His net approval, about −27, is eight points worse than Bush’s −19.3 in 2006 (MS NOW). Truman’s party lost 55 House seats. Bush’s lost 30. Trump’s own party lost 40 in 2018, when Gallup had him at 40 per cent and the Times average had him at 42 (Gallup).

2) A late, regional squeeze on pocketbooks. Over the year to September, consumer prices rose 3.7 per cent and private-sector hourly earnings rose 2.9 per cent (both not seasonally adjusted; September wages are preliminary). After adjusting for regional inflation, real hourly pay fell in 39 of 51 states, counting Kansas’s dip of less than a tenth of a point. Florida was flat (BLS).

This matters because the losses are concentrated in the electoral battlegrounds. The Washington Post, measuring a basic family budget against household income, found costs outpaced incomes in 42 of 46 battleground districts from 2019 to 2024. The worst was New York’s 17th District, a Harris-won Republican seat, where costs rose 34 per cent and incomes 19 per cent (Washington Post via Yahoo).

3) A closing issue set increasingly focused on corruption. In the final CNBC All-America survey, 36 per cent named government corruption as one of the country’s most important issues, ahead of cost of living concerns like groceries at 34 per cent and gas at 23 per cent (CNBC). Fox News found 88 per cent extremely or very concerned about corruption, compared with 85 per cent for inflation (Politico). A record 89 per cent tell Gallup that government corruption is widespread (Gallup).

Democrats are spending a lot of money tying corruption to prices. “Corruption is why your costs are high” is how strategist Jesse Ferguson summarizes the playbook, and Blue Rose Research found that making the connection raised Democratic support by about three points (Politico). In some places this has meant a return to messaging about Jeffrey Epstein: $36 million in ads, including more than $20 million from Senate Majority PAC in Alaska, Maine, Iowa, Ohio, Kansas and Georgia (Politico).

The map decides the size

All three forces are present in both scenarios. What differs is how far into Republican territory they reach. Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics argues that waves “hit a wall” around “solid Trump +10 seats or their equivalent.” (RealClearPolitics) Historically flipping seats that are +10 or above, while not impossible, is unusual.

Only 25 Republican-held seats sit between Trump +0 and Trump +10; those would be the first to flip. Another 19 sit between +10 and +14, including 14 in the Trump +12 to +14 range alone. With the House at 216 Democrats and 218 Republicans, a net gain of about two flips control. The RCP generic-ballot average is Democrats +8.3 (RealClearPolling). On a uniform swing (which isn’t likely to happen), that lands almost exactly at the wall. Everything that follows comes down to whether the wave stops there or goes past it.

The case for a normal win

The normal-win case rests on the levee holding. Trende puts it bluntly: “If the Democrats win the popular vote by eight points on this map, and get 15 seats — that’s extraordinary.” His own model, which applies historical flip rates by partisan band, produced about 23 seats in a 2018-style year (Poll Vault).

The economic squeeze supports this view more than it first appears. To begin with, it is relatively recent. District wage data runs through March 2026, and through then paycheques still beat prices in most competitive seats: real wages had fallen in only 27 of the 81 (BLS QCEW). The turn came with the spring fuel spike following the intervention in Iran. It is also regional, particularly hitting the Midwest and Northeast, where inflation ran 4.1 to 4.3 per cent, while Texas pay kept growing. A grievance that is new and regional moves votes at the margin. It rarely produces the broad, uniform swing needed to flip seats deep in the other party’s territory.

The corruption message has limits, too. Gallup’s “most important problem” question, which is open-ended and doesn’t hand respondents a list, still has economic concerns ahead of government and leadership by 38 per cent to 26 per cent (Gallup). Corruption ranks first when pollsters split the economy into groceries, gas and inflation. Some 41 per cent of independents in the CNBC poll say neither party would handle corruption well. Republican strategists describe the Epstein ads as “Republican base suppression,” aimed at keeping soft Trump voters home (Politico). That approach can tip a close race, but it is a weak lever to flip a district Trump won by 10 or more two years ago.

Then there is the possibility of systemic polling error, which cannot be ruled out. A two-point miss takes the national margin from D+8.3 to about D+6.5. That puts the limits of the wave around Trump +8 seats, which means the Democrats pick up 16 to 20 seats. Somewhere between that and the uniform-swing +25 seats is where a normal win lands: 20 to 25 seats, and a viable majority that will feel like less than the environment promised and Democrats expected.

The case for a big win

The big-win case starts from the same chart and points to the 19 seats beyond the wall. Four more points to the Democrats across the board would nearly double their gains, from +25 to +44, and 35 to 40 seats sits right in that Trump +12 to +14 band.

The national numbers to reach it are within view. NYT/Siena has Democrats up 11 on the generic ballot (New York Times). RCP’s John McIntyre notes that 13 of 18 pollsters’ final surveys are at or near their best Democratic numbers of the cycle. He argues that a swing modestly smaller than the 2025 Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races would still produce about D+11, and that “no one should be surprised if Democrats land on the ‘over’” (RealClearPolitics). Democrats led by 8.3 points at this point in 2018 (their last big midterm gain against Trump) and gained 41 seats.

The swing won’t be uniform, of course — but it also doesn’t need to be. In Republican-held battlegrounds, rents rose about nine per cent in three years, compared with four percent in Democratic-held ones (Washington Post via Yahoo). A swing heavy in the Midwest and Northeast could reach Trump +12 seats there even if the national number stays near D+8/9.

The corruption message is also built to reach exactly those voters. Democrats are buying time on Fox News and right-leaning YouTube channels (Washington Sun). In the POLITICO Poll, 47 percent of Republican midterm voters call Epstein attacks fair game (Politico). A senior Republican official called the ads “openly scratching at a sore that we already sort of have” (Politico). This is important because the logic of redistricting is that Republican voters in Trump +12 districts continue to behave like Republicans. A message that persuades five per cent of them to stay home or switch is how a wall gets breached.

The Senate: one seat or six

The Senate magnifies the gap between the two scenarios. Republicans hold 53 seats. Democrats need a net gain of four, because a 50–50 tie goes to Vice President JD Vance. The 270toWin consensus of seven forecasters puts 49 seats at least leaning Democratic, 46 Republican and five toss-ups (270toWin).

With every race called by the RCP average, Democrats finish at 53, flipping North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Maine, Alaska and Kansas (RealClearPolling). Iowa would be the 54th. Nate Silver warns that the races are “not a bunch of independent coin flips” (Politico), and the correlation runs both ways. A miss toward Democrats would also put South Carolina (Graham Nordone +2.7) and Nebraska, both recently added to RCP’s toss-up list (RealClearPolitics), potentially on the board. It will be surprising if Nebraska, Florida (Moody +6.1), and Mississippi are actually close enough to be interesting, but if they are then the levee has well and truly burst and the Democrats are having a dream night.

What to watch Tuesday night

The early returns will show quickly which election this is. The first signals:

• Trump +10 to +14 districts. If Democrats are winning Republican seats in that band, especially in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and New York, the wave has broken through. If they are winning Harris-won and single-digit Trump seats but falling short in that band, the levee is holding.

• Iowa and Kansas. These are the Senate races most exposed to potential polling error. If Democrats win either one, the averages were not overstating them. If they lose both, 51 seats becomes a ceiling.

• Texas, Florida and Mississippi. These are states where real wages held up and Democrats closed on corruption. Strong Democratic showings there would mean the corruption message did work the economy couldn’t.

The difference

The two cases are based in the same environment: a president at historically low approval, falling real wages in 39 states, and a corruption message reaching voters who backed Trump two years ago. They disagree about a band of 19 districts and a handful of Midwestern statewide polling results.

A normal Democratic win would still give them control of the House and potentially even the Senate: a six to eight-point popular-vote victory on a map designed to minimize change by both sides. A big win would be the largest seat swing in a generation, compressing 2006 and 2008 into a single election. Essentially which one we see depends on whether the wave stops at Trump +10 districts, or reaches Trump +14. We will have window on which kind of night its going to be fairly early, from Florida, Georgia (Don't expect Atlanta results early though), and North Carolina.

Alex Muir is a principal at Pulse Decision Science, a full-service research and data firm based out of Washington, D.C, and a Senior Advisor at Innovative Research Group in Canada. He has provided polling, data analytics, or qualitative research to presidential primaries, gubernatorial races, U.S. House and Senate races, and independent expenditures. He also does corporate and public affairs work in both Canada and the United States. He has worked with political, corporate, and non-profit clients in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Mexico, Ukraine and Israel. He is married to Line editor Jen Gerson; Gerson abstained from any role in the preparation or publication of this article.

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, Line readers. Did you check out the latest episode of The Line Podcast? It was a fun one!

Also, please check out the latest episode of On The Line, where BioCanRx president and CEO Stephanie Michaud joins Matt Gurney for a conversation about one of the biggest problems facing Canadian health care: Canada produces world-class medical research, but too often struggles to turn those discoveries into treatments that actually reach Canadian patients.

Now that you’re all caught up, let’s get into the dispatch.

Read more

In the latest episode of The Line Podcast, recorded on October 30th, 2026, Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson begin with the newly released National Security Strategy. Your hosts agree that it’s directionally correct, in that it’s talking about the right things. But they also wonder whether this is going to be another example of a problem Prime Minister Mark Carney keeps discovering in government: it’s one thing to say what should be done, and quite another to get the government bureaucracy to actually do it. Some of the problem is simply that the government hasn’t had a clear sense of direction. A new strategy can help fix that. But a lot of it is going to come down to a bureaucracy that either cannot do what it’s being told or will actively resist doing it. And the only way the PMO is going to fix that is by busting some heads. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

We hope.

This episode is brought to you by BioCanRx. We’ve been partnering with federally-funded Canadian not-for-pro fit BioCanRx to learn how made-in-Canada immunotherapies offer new ways to beat cancer. This month we’re addressing common questions, like: is Canada behind on immunotherapy?

Canadian researchers continue to be global leaders at discovery research. Where Canada lags behind is in bringing these discoveries from the lab to the patient. While many immunotherapies come to Canada for clinical trial or market authorization, few are based on Canadian research or developed in Canada, meaning we access them when their international sponsors choose, at whatever prices they want to charge — provided Health Canada approves and the provinces decide to pay.

Developing more Canadian discoveries into approved therapies in Canada would help reduce Canada’s dependence on other countries, enable our health systems to learn what it takes to deliver these novel therapies while collecting data to assess their value via early stage clinical trials, and provide patients with much-needed access to advanced therapies. A win-win-win scenario.

BioCanRx continues to work with researchers and policymakers to deliver on this mission. Thanks to them for continuing to partner with The Line to share this information and visit BioCanRx.com to learn more.

Next, your hosts turn to a fascinating report by Christopher Nardi of the National Post, who took a deep dive into the challenges facing the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). Matt and Jen praise the unusual transparency of CSIS director Dan Rogers, who agreed to be interviewed for the story. But Matt zeroes in on one particular thing Rogers told Nardi and throws up his hands in frustration. Because if Rogers actually means what he’s saying, he’s doomed. And CSIS with him. And the reasons are depressingly familiar to anyone who had already listened to ... the first segment of the podcast.

This episode is also brought to you by Cameco. Building Canada’s energy future means creating jobs for Canadian workers. That’s why the AP1000 reactor is the right choice for Canada: it is already operating and ready to deliver the power we need. Choosing the AP1000 means a reactor built by Canadians, creating skilled jobs in construction, fabrication and the trades while keeping more investment and economic benefits here at home. If we are serious about creating Canadian jobs and strengthening our economy, the choice is clear. To learn more, visit ap1000.cameco.com.

Finally, Matt and Jen discuss the ongoing negotiations between Canada and Europe. Hopefully nothing breaks later on the day of recording, but as things stand, your hosts are wondering why everyone has spent so much time arguing about what to call the relationship instead of explaining what the relationship will actually be. Speaking as two middle-aged people who would very much like to start spending their winters in southern Europe, they’d appreciate some actual progress on this front. And hopefully soon.

Oh, and, AI was asked to simulate a human civilization, and accidentally created Canada. It ended badly. So, yeah. There’s that, too. Sigh.

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 BioCanRx president and CEO Stephanie Michaud joins Matt Gurney for a conversation about one of the biggest problems facing Canadian health care: Canada produces world-class medical research, but too often struggles to turn those discoveries into treatments that actually reach Canadian patients.

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: Gregory Jack

We are just a few weeks from the mid-term elections in the United States, which, if the polls are to be believed, could provide a rare double-rebuke of the governing party if the Democrats manage to take both houses. Lest this column be mistaken for political interference by Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, I will refrain from any further discussion of who might win the mid-terms and focus my comments here on the state of the relationship between Canada and the United States, and a recent Ipsos poll conducted in both Canada and the U.S. to update our understanding of how citizens of both countries view that relationship.

We have known for some time through our polling that Canadians believe this dispute will continue for the foreseeable future. Our most recent poll finds that 67 per cent of Canadians believe Canada-U.S. trade and economic disputes will continue for several years, essentially unchanged from 70 per cent in February, 2025, and 68 per cent in October, 2025.

What has changed is Canadians’ expectations of what is possible. Today, just 35 per cent of Canadians believe that Prime Minister Mark Carney will secure a new trade deal with the United States. That’s down from 40 per cent a year earlier. Yet, despite declining confidence in an agreement, approval of the federal government’s management of Canada-U.S. relations increased from 51 per cent in September, 2025, to 62 per cent this month. Somehow, expectations are decreasing even as approval increases.

Canadians are also increasingly more comfortable with Canada hitting back. Support for retaliatory tariffs increased from 51 per cent at this time last year to 61 per cent today, even when respondents were reminded that Canadians might pay more. I think we have internalized that this trade war is going to continue to cost us, and to varying degrees, Canadians are accepting of those costs.

Beyond retaliatory tariffs, which are already in place, Canadians strongly support measures that build adaptive capacity: 80 per cent support giving Canadian-made products preference in government purchasing, 79 per cent support helping businesses enter non-U.S. export markets, and 78 per cent support worker retraining. This accords well with the prime minister’s “build” agenda, his efforts to seek out new partnerships in Europe and elsewhere, and his “middle power doctrine” first articulated at Davos earlier this year.

It is tempting to say that Carney’s performance is the reason why Canadians are feeling so emboldened. He continues to lead Canada through an incredibly unstable period, and reap high marks for how he has done so. In many ways, though, the situation Carney inherited is responsible for his good fortune. He has been able to unite Canadians around Trump and our response, and create urgency where none existed before to embark on nation-building projects and remove regulatory barriers that a government of a different party and in a different time would have been derided for.

Trump says the U.S. has all the cards, but it seems increasingly clear he dealt Carney a pretty good hand himself, by his very presence and petulance against Canada, which Carney has played exceptionally well to secure both his both electoral victory last year, and use to maintain his popularity.

It is in many ways reminiscent of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin’s efforts to slay the deficit, which they did at great cost to the provinces and Canadians’ pocketbooks in the mid-1990s. They were able to do so because Canadians accepted that it was necessary medicine to preserve Canada’s fiscal solvency, just as Carney has successfully convinced most Canadians that the things he is doing — from walking away from the table with the United States and imposing retaliatory tariffs, to removing environmental regulations and even striking deals with countries less aligned with our values, such as Turkey or China — are not just necessary, but even desirable. On the other hand, Canadians have concluded that our previous relationship with the U.S. is desirable no longer.

We asked Canadians what their ideal bilateral relationship with the United States looks like. A quarter (24 per cent) still say it should be Canada’s closest ally and partner. But a further 25 per cent say we should be close, but with each country being more economically independent than they are today. And four-in-10 (40 per cent) want something ranging from merely transactional (16 per cent) to more distant (24 per cent). There are not a lot of partisan differences here, as NDP, Liberal and many Conservative voters alike are taking a realistic view of where things are with America.

This isn’t the relationship Americans want with Canada, though, despite the rhetoric out of the White House. Three-in-10 (31 per cent) of Americans still view Canada as their closest ally and partner today, compared to just 11 per cent of Canadians, and a similar proportion — 34 per cent — say that is the relationship they want going forward. Just nine per cent of Americans want a more distant relationship. There is a serious fissure between how Canadians and Americans currently view the relationship.

Unsurprisingly, there are significant partisan differences in the U.S., as Republican voters side with Trump, while Democrats and Independents continue to view Canada more favourably than Canadians view America. We also find that a lot of Americans don’t know enough to say. While Canadians are clearly troubled by the U.S. relationship, many Americans may be somewhat oblivious to the rhetoric coming from their leaders.

Necessary neighbours but not necessarily friends may be the best way of describing where Canadians are at these days. In Mark Carney they see a prime minister who is expressing that view, and doing what he can to reduce economic reliance and sever the emotional ties that once bound us together. Through our polling on this issue over the past 20-plus months, we have seen a shift from emotional reaction in March, 2025, to something framed around resilience, protection and preparedness. Most Americans, with the exception of some Republicans and to the extent they pay attention at all, still hope to return to something resembling the previous relationship, and still see us as a trusted ally and partner.

This also explains, to a certain extent, why so many Canadians can’t understand why the Americans can’t figure out how hurt and upset Canadians are. They have bigger issues to worry about, most pressingly the war in Iran and affordability, and to the extent they think of Canada at all, they see us still as a reliable partner that will get past the current dispute and return to the way things were. Canadians do not believe that, if they ever really did once the 51^st state rhetoric and the tariffs started.

The mid-terms may have created some pressure for the United States to act; even as the president says the U.S. “has all the cards,” they have dropped tariffs on some goods to potentially save the seat of a vulnerable senator in Maine. If a deal is indeed at hand, Carney will have to explain to Canadians that he got what he couldn’t have in August. He may be painting himself into a corner where any deal with the U.S. looks like he is walking back or disappointing Canadians itching for the fight. It can’t help that the U.S. is also setting Canada up as a potential cause for losses by alleging political interference.

Carney seems to realize this, and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to make a deal, saying earlier this week that none is imminent. Why would he want one when expectations of a deal, even with costs known, diminish even as his approval rating improves? Again, despite the president’s rhetoric, Carney seems to have time that Trump does not.

Maybe the mid-terms will reset the relationship to some extent, and perhaps time will indeed heal many of the wounds. But our polling clearly shows what I believe most Canadians feel in their gut: it’s never going to be quite the same again.

Gregory Jack is Senior Vice President, Public Affairs, Ipsos Canada

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

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By: Andrew Potter

For anyone old enough to remember the Cold War, the idea of an American president supporting Russia in a war of naked aggression and conquest in Europe is unthinkable. Yet it has been two weeks now since Donald Trump announced that he had agreed to a diesel deal with Vladimir Putin, effectively joining the war in Ukraine on Russia’s side.

Trump hasn’t sent troops into battle, but he does not really need to. Between the Elon Musk-fronted strangling of Ukraine’s battlefield Starlink terminals, the oops-we-did-it-again failure to share crucial intel with Ukraine of Russian missile launches, the slow-rolling by Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon of already-paid-for air defence missiles, the backroom strong-arming of Ukraine’s allies in Europe, and Trump’s waiving of new sanctions against Russia, it is abundantly clear which side Washington is on.

We are a long way from what was arguably the high water mark of American global leadership against authoritarianism. Standing at the Brandenburg Gate in June, 1987, ostensibly there to celebrate Berlin’s 750th birthday, Ronald Reagan used the occasion to call out the Soviet Union. Directly addressing Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan said: “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

The low water mark is even easier to date. In late April, 2025, a day after one of Russia’s most savage bombardments of Kyiv to that point, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Vladimir STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Let’s get the Peace Deal DONE!”

The relative status of the two men, with these two addresses, couldn’t be more glaring. Reagan was issuing a command, secure in his moral position, fully confident that he was on the right side of history. Trump was pleading, grovelling, abasing himself and his office before the whims of a murderous dictator.

How are we to understand the strange, formidable hold that Vladimir Putin has over Donald Trump?

The usual explanations don’t quite work. The oldest is the kompromat theory, descended from the Steele dossier and from Trump’s decades of murky dealings in Russian real estate and beauty pageants. The dossier has never been properly verified, notwithstanding the established facts about Russian interference in the 2016 election and the endless contacts between Trump’s circle and Russian businessmen and officials.

The second is simple greed. Trump wants Russia back into the global fold, goes the argument, because he wants to do business there. Trump’s people certainly keep interesting company: pro-Russian lobbyists, a Russian-American investor and Trump ballroom donor with Kremlin ties who got a Treasury licence in ten days, an oligarch paying for Don Jr.’s wedding. But Trump reportedly cleared US$2.2 billion in 2025 by monetizing the presidency, through crypto, merchandise and real estate, with none of it involving Russia. He doesn’t need Putin to get rich, and the domestic grifting train still has two years left to run.

The third explanation, that this is all about the midterms and gas prices, collapses on the basic math: the four million tons of Russian diesel that Trump convinced Putin to dispense is about a week of American demand, and it is headed for a global market, where the price is set. It won’t do anything for what Americans pay at the pump, but it will put an extra few billion dollars into Russia’s war chest.

The most plausible interpretation is that Trump is in love.

This doesn’t mean the root of Trump’s attraction to Putin is sexual. What appears to draw Trump to Putin is what the ancient Greeks called eros: the passionate longing for what one does not possess. Trump looks at Putin and sees everything he wishes he were: steely, cold-blooded, ruthless, and completely without mercy.

Trump is none of these. He is impetuous, weak, vainglorious, fickle and spineless. There is a reason “TACO” became the organizing concept of his administration. But the Greeks understood something about eros that isn’t captured by most geopolitical analysis: the lover is always the weaker party. He pleads, flatters and cloys. He forgives everything and demands nothing, because demanding would risk the beloved’s displeasure. “Vladimir, STOP!” is the sound of that dynamic, a man begging someone he can’t bring himself to confront.

It also explains Trump’s profound loathing of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Eros has a dark side, and that is jealousy. Zelensky is everything Trump isn’t: a man who actually faces down the strongman, at enormous risk and cost, and doesn’t flinch. Every time he does so, every time he defies Putin or resists Trump’s demands that he capitulate, Zelensky reminds the American president of his own weakness. Hence the fury, the ritualized humiliations, the demand that he be replaced.

The Greeks saw that love was a form of madness that could overrun rational thought. When romantic or sexual passion loses its balance with reason, eros turns to mania, an obsessive, out of control desire marked by jealousy, emotional volatility, and a destructive fixation on the beloved.

Trump’s infatuation with Putin is what is driving American foreign policy right now, with the rest of the world getting dragged along. The ones paying for this mania are the Ukrainians, the Europeans, and everyone else who ever counted on America standing for something.

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

In this episode of On The Line, BioCanRx President and CEO Stephanie Michaud joins Matt Gurney for a conversation about one of the biggest problems facing Canadian health care: Canada produces world-class medical research, but too often struggles to turn those discoveries into treatments that actually reach Canadian patients.

Stephanie explains why it can take so long for the newest and most promising therapies to make their way into the Canadian health-care system — and why so much science developed by Canadian researchers ultimately ends up being commercialized in the United States. Canada has extraordinary researchers and institutions. So why do we keep losing the economic and medical benefits of their work?

This episode is brought to you by the Forest Products Association of Canada. Budget season in Ottawa is filled with asks for new programs, new tax measures and new investment. But for Canada’s forest products sector, the biggest opportunity for growth doesn’t require new spending — it requires smarter rules. Regulatory inefficiencies are costing the average Canadian mill an estimated one million dollars a year each. That’s money that could be reinvested in workers, communities, and modernization instead. The Forest Sector Transformation Task Force gave Ottawa a clear playbook. As the federal budget takes shape, the fastest way to unlock private investment is to remove the made-in-Canada barriers standing in the way. Learn more at FPAC.ca.

Matt and Stephanie also discuss what it would take for Canada to become more independent of the United States in biotechnology and health care. If Canadians really want to get their elbows up, this is one area where the country already has many of the ingredients it needs. They look at opportunities to work with international partners, build domestic capacity and create a system capable of taking Canadian discoveries from the laboratory all the way to Canadian patients.

And, unusually for On The Line, there’s some optimism. Stephanie believes Canada has a genuine opportunity to build on its existing strengths and become a global leader in biotechnology — creating economic opportunities while also helping Canadians survive terrible diseases and live longer, healthier lives.

This episode is also brought to you by Cameco. Building Canada’s energy future means creating jobs for Canadian workers. That’s why the AP1000 reactor is the right choice for Canada: it is already operating and ready to deliver the power we need. Choosing the AP1000 means a reactor built by Canadians, creating skilled jobs in construction, fabrication and the trades while keeping more investment and economic benefits here at home. If we are serious about creating Canadian jobs and strengthening our economy, the choice is clear. To learn more, visit ap1000.cameco.com.

Disclosures x 2: BioCanRx has been and remains a sponsor of The Line. This was an interview we wanted to do because of what Matt Gurney learned while his wife battled a devastating cancer diagnosis; an employee at BioCanRx is an old friend of Matt’s and offered his help soon after the diagnosis, which is how The Line and BioCanRx began speaking in the first place. For the record: BioCanRx did not seek or receive any editorial control over this interview, was not provided questions in advance, nor asked for them, and requested no changes to the finished product. For further transparency, the only edits to this podcast were to cover your intrepid host choking while sipping water, like the seasoned broadcast professional he is, and a doorbell ringing. Exciting times!

We hope you enjoy this episode, and as always, 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

In the end, the expected close race to be the next mayor of Toronto was not, in fact, remotely close. Olivia Chow, the left-wing incumbent, easily defeated challenger Brad Bradford. While recent polls had suggested a race that was narrowing into a toss-up, the reality was different. Chow won an outright majority of the vote and defeated Bradford by at least 130,000 votes, or roughly 13 points (there are a few polls outstanding, but not enough to change those numbers by much).

So, yeah. Not exactly a photo finish.

I’ll leave it to the polling nerds and political operatives to figure out what happened here with the false hope for Bradford. Something was clearly wonky somewhere. Explaining the outcome itself is easy enough — Toronto is a left-leaning city, Chow had incumbency, and a ground-game supported by unions, the NDP (most readers will recall that Chow is the widow of Jack Layton, the late federal NDP leader), plus Progress Toronto, a progressive political group. It was always going to be hard for Bradford, or anyone, to defeat that.

Maybe it was particularly hard for Bradford. Astute readers will notice that in my intro above, I noted — neutrally and I suspect uncontroversially — that Chow is left wing. I didn’t assign a partisan affiliation to Bradford. He certainly ran against Chow from the right. But Bradford is one of those political animals who seems to match his stated beliefs to the occasion. As near as I can tell, he ran from the right, on issues like law-and-order, public safety and fiscal restraint, because the incumbent was on the left. In an alternate universe where the incumbent was a conservative, I have a hunch that Bradford would have put on a keffiyeh, begun every stump speech with a land acknowledgement and pledged subsidized groceries.

His most sincerely held belief seems to be in his own political destiny. The rest, he’ll figure out on the fly.

If that sounds uncharitable, rest assured I’m barely exaggerating. Bradford started his political life, and just a few years ago, as a pretty bog standard Toronto downtown progressive, with maybe a bit of a tilt toward the centre ... but only just maybe. His pivot to the right required him to pledge as mayor to reverse decisions he’d supported as councillor. Only Mayor Brad Bradford can undo the damage Councillor Brad Bradford did to Toronto, I quipped earlier in the race. The rank political opportunism, combined with what we could politely call a likability issue — this Toronto Star profile of Bradford was absolutely savage, but not particularly contested — and we end up with the result we got. Say what you will about Chow’s policies, but she’s generally well liked, and for the very simple reason that she’s a pleasant person. Sometimes, in politics and in life, that matters.

It may seem odd for me to say this now, but, I’ll make a disclosure. For all that, I voted for Bradford. I did so expecting him to lose — I was surprised by the scale of his defeat, but not the defeat itself. And I did so with a pretty crippling degree of non-enthusiasm. Bradford was not my ideal candidate.

But I voted for him for the simple reason that I’ve watched something very dark settle into my hometown over the last few years, targeting this city’s Jewish community. Since the Oct. 7 attacks, Toronto’s Jews, who once dared believe themselves fully assimilated and safe to live their lives with as much or as little obvious outward faith as they chose, have been attacked, harassed, threatened and intimidated. This has gone on for years and no one in power seemed much to care. The response from officialdom was tantamount to “Thoughts and prayers and good luck!” It wasn’t until the U.S. government started paying attention, after its downtown consulate was struck by gunfire, that Toronto police seemed to remember that they are allowed to arrest people for committing crimes.

Because that’s what the Jewish community was confronted with — crimes. This isn’t about peaceful marches against Israeli military actions, which are legal and legitimate. It’s about assaults on Jewish persons, attacks and vandalism on Jewish businesses, religious sites and schools, and protests, nominally against Israeli military actions, in parts of the city that had no link to Israel whatsoever, but just happened to have many Jewish residents. It was rank intimidation, and Bradford, to his credit, was one of the few who’d say so openly.

I don’t think Chow is an antisemite. I also recognize that a lot of what went wrong in recent years is shared among other levels of government. The feds and Ontario have not draped themselves in glory. But she is the final elected authority in the city where this basic breakdown in the social contract was taking place, and I’d hoped the electorate would be alarmed by that enough to send a message.

I guess they did, come to think of it. It just wasn’t the one I hoped they’d send. I’ll take it at face value, in any case, and I suspect my Jewish friends and neighbours will, too.

It’s not that I assume that a vote for Chow is a vote against Toronto’s Jewish community. Far from it. There are also a lot of reasons one could not feel great about voting for Bradford. I know this as a guy who did not feel great about voting for Bradford. I get it.

But in the final analysis, even though Toronto is a big and complicated place, it seemed to me that there was a pretty clear and fundamental moral issue at the heart of this campaign, and Bradford, Lord help us, was the one on the right side of it.

A vote for Chow was, if nothing else, a vote that didn’t care about what Toronto’s Jewish community has suffered. In the overwhelming majority of cases, I suspect people never even thought about it at all.

I wish they had! Antisemitism is a canary in our societal coal mine. I regret to inform you all that the poor little bird has thoroughly asphyxiated. A close reading of history — even a passing glance at it, come to think of it — is pretty clear that that is not generally a sign that things are going well.

Oh well! Best of luck to Mayor Chow and all those elected or re-elected to council in our country’s largest city. You have a lot of work to do, and I wish you success. I also hope you’ll take a moment to remember those Torontonians who now live in fear in their own city because of a conflict a world away.

Bradford, thoroughly imperfect as he was, spoke for them. I hope someone else will step up.

But we’ll see.

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

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

By: Rob Shaw

B.C. Premier David Eby led his New Democratic Party to a crushing defeat Saturday, after an early-election gamble that will go down as one of the worst political blunders in Canadian political history.

Eby had a three-seat majority in the legislature and two years left in his term when he tried to take advantage of dissent within the B.C. Conservative opposition by calling a snap election Sept. 22.

To say it backfired would be a tremendous understatement.

B.C. voters cut his party in half, reducing the NDP’s 47 seats to 23, in preliminary results. Instead, the province elected the first B.C. Conservative government in 98 years, elevating the party from 44 to 59 seats. The B.C. Greens held two seats.

Nine ridings remained too close to declare Sunday, and will wait for Elections B.C.’s final count Nov. 6, though appear evenly split between the Conservatives and NDP.

“This is obviously not the result that any of us wanted,” Eby said in a short, sombre concession speech.

“A number of my colleagues, some of the hardest-working MLAs I know for their communities, were not elected tonight. It breaks my heart, and I accept full responsibility for that outcome.”

On that, at least, there is no dispute. Eby and a small group of senior strategists made the call to go early, concluding that the Conservatives would be dragged down by the disastrous four-month reign of scandal-plagued leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay, and that extending a nine-year NDP government would look palatable by comparison.

The outgoing premier did not listen to critics within his party who said that his timing was wrong, that his focus on U.S. President Donald Trump as a political foil would not hold, and that his decision to launch a provincial campaign at the same time as a previously-scheduled municipal one would anger voters.

Conservatives also quickly ejected Findlay and her radical supporters, unifying on-the-fly into a more traditional centre-right campaign that combined mainstream elements of the federal and provincial liberal and conservative movements.

At the centre of it all was the accidental premier, as he came to be known, Lorne Doerkson — a virtual unknown to most of the electorate just five weeks ago.

The 58-year-old from Williams Lake never aspired to hold the province’s top office, instead settling for the role of assistant deputy speaker. But he was the consensus choice of a fractured Conservative caucus at a critical moment. On more than one occasion, Doerkson admitted publicly that the whole whirlwind election campaign built around him was just as much of an incredible surprise to him as it was to everyone else.

Nonetheless, he found his footing. The campaign kept Doerkson focused on bread-and-butter issues, like the economy, cost-of-living and health care. When the NDP unearthed offensive social media posts by two Conservative candidates (one of whom suggested Hitler was perhaps misunderstood), Doerkson fired them almost immediately, whereas previous Conservative leaders have hedged on giving ground to left-leaning outrage.

Election night saw a blue wave crest through the province.

The Conservatives already had a strong hold on the North, Interior and Fraser Valley, but managed to gain critical ground in the suburban communities of Coquitlam, Maple Ridge, Burnaby and Richmond. The party ran the slate on voter-rich Surrey, a key battleground, picking up all 10 ridings. And under Doerkson, the Conservatives pushed into new territory in the urban centres of Vancouver and Greater Victoria, upsetting the NDP in previously-safe ridings like Saanich South and Vancouver-Yaletown.

The B.C. NDP largely failed to get out its vote, haemorrhaging supporters. The party was also undercut by the B.C. Greens, which split the progressive vote. The Greens held their two ridings, while increasing their share of the popular vote as a kind of safe harbour for disaffected New Democrats.

The election proved consequential as a kind of referendum on new political parties that had popped up in the last two years due to floor crossings at the B.C. legislature.

OneBC leader Dallas Brodie, whose far-right agenda included attacking First Nations and proposing restrictions to abortion, had claimed to be representing a wide swath of British Columbians, despite being elected in 2024 as a B.C. Conservative on an entirely different slate of issues.

Voters rejected her party entirely. Brodie went from the incumbent in Vancouver-Quilchena to last place, with four per cent of the vote.

CentreBC, which had been designed as a moderate liberal alternative to the B.C. Conservatives under leader Elenore Sturko, also failed to elect any members.

In his first address as premier-elect on Sunday, Doerkson offered a conciliatory tone, thanking Eby for his public service and acknowledging that 37 per cent of voters still backed the NDP, even with its massive loss of seats.

“To the British Columbians who voted for another party yesterday, I heard you,” Doerkson said.

“Starting today, I am your premier as much as anyone else’s. You will have a government that listens to you, works for you, and respects you, however you marked your ballot.”

Eby’s epic blunder proved Doerkson’s stunning gain. Yet the new premier-elect, smartly, did not gloat upon it. Good idea: The results from voters speak more strongly than anything he could say.

Rob Shaw covers B.C. politics for CHEK News in Victoria, and is a contributor to Business in Vancouver. He hosts the daily podcast and weekly TV analysis show Political Capital.

rob@robshawnews.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.

Good Lord.

Thus concludes the dispatch.

We kid, but only barely. It’s been a wild few weeks. We are going to keep this dispatch reasonably snappy, because our plan is mostly just to reset to the present and then dive into covering the various overlapping aftermaths going forward from here. There’s a lot to cover.

And there’s no better way to start than by checking out the latest episode of The Line Podcast.

If that doesn’t scratch your podcast itch, we’ve got a great On The Line for you. Check out Jen’s interview with Patrick Lennox, author of On Treason, a new book examining the moral and political consequences of betraying one’s own country.

And now, God save us, on with the dispatch.

Firstly, about that referendum, eh?

Your Line editors have nothing more to say about the referendum, nor about Alberta separatism. Over the past year, they’ve poured every single word they could come up with on that topic onto podcasts and these here pages — and they’ve lost quite a few followers for their trouble. Very well.

Bluntly, we’d be entirely happy to forget the whole regrettable political stunt ever happened and simply move on.

Unfortunately, we’re peering into The Line Palantir and, whoo boy, nobody’s putting this orc baby birthed by evil magic back into the ground.

Read more

In the latest episode of The Line Podcast, Matt Gurney returns from a leave to care for his wife and wonders if he’s missed anything over the last two weeks. Turns out he has. It’s his first chance to sit down with Jen Gerson and talk about the Alberta referendum, and Jen — finally having gotten some sleep — offers her concluding thoughts on … all that. Matt gives his reactions and asks Jen a fairly basic question: what, exactly, was the point of the whole exercise? They agree that Danielle Smith doesn’t come out of it looking particularly good. They also agree she might just skate anyway, especially since the separatists lost so badly that a lot of them might just move on to the next grift.

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 month we’re addressing common questions, like: is Canada behind on immunotherapy?

Canadian researchers continue to be global leaders at discovery research. Where Canada lags behind is in bringing these discoveries from the lab to the patient. While many immunotherapies come to Canada for clinical trial or market authorization, few are based on Canadian research or developed in Canada, meaning we access them when their international sponsors choose, at whatever prices they want to charge –– provided Health Canada approves and the provinces decide to pay.

Developing more Canadian discoveries into approved therapies in Canada would help reduce Canada’s dependence on other countries, enable our health systems to learn what it takes to deliver these novel therapies while collecting data to assess their value via early stage clinical trials, and provide patients with much-needed access to advanced therapies. A win-win-win scenario.

BioCanRx continues to work with researchers and policymakers to deliver on this mission. Thanks to them for continuing to partner with The Line to share this information and visit BioCanRx.com to learn more.

Next, your hosts turn to the catastrophe at CFB Wainwright, where some of the worst instincts of Canadian governance were on full display. The safety of the troops and care for the families of the fallen obviously come first. But the disaster also became a textbook example of how Canadian institutions respond to emergencies by smothering transparency. Matt and Jen go through what was known, what was revealed and, yes, read aloud what may be the worst official communication ever produced by a Canadian government comms person. Matt also responds to criticism that the military probably didn’t yet know the answers to the questions The Line wanted answered. There’s just one problem with that defence: someone leaked The Line the memo. They knew. So ....

This episode is also brought to you by Cameco. Building Canada’s energy future means creating jobs for Canadian workers. That’s why the AP1000 reactor is the right choice for Canada: it is already operating and ready to deliver the power we need. Choosing the AP1000 means a reactor built by Canadians, creating skilled jobs in construction, fabrication and the trades while keeping more investment and economic benefits here at home. If we are serious about creating Canadian jobs and strengthening our economy, the choice is clear. To learn more, visit ap1000.cameco.com.

Finally, Matt offers a personal update on the family medical emergency that took him away from the podcast. He’s still figuring out how much he can and should say publicly, but he has some broader thoughts about Canada’s health-care system. It turns out all the clichés are true: it can be astonishingly good and absolutely awful at the same time. Matt also has some very sharp and specific criticisms of one group of hospital professionals. He thinks the problems there are serious enough that they could end up collapsing the system, literally. Canadians will die because of this; Canadians are already dying of it, and Matt got to watch one of those deaths with his own eyes.

The harder question is what anyone can do about it.

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

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Please sign up at those options not just for this episode, or future episodes of The Line Podcast, but so that you can also receive our other podcast series, On the Line, which releases new episodes every Tuesday morning. In case you missed it, here is last Tuesday’s episode, where Jen Gerson speaks with Patrick Lennox, author of On Treason, a new book examining the moral and political consequences of betraying one’s own country.

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: Greg Quinn

Acres of newsprint (virtual and real) has been expended recently following the suggestion that Canada might have a closer relationship with the European Union. As someone who worked for the Brits (but who is also an EU citizen via my Irish passport) let me add to that volume.

But I’d also like to calm some agitation in the process.

Let us start with a clear and unarguable fact — this is not about the EU taking control of Canada, or Canada abandoning its sovereignty or principles to some European “superstate.” Honestly, it isn’t. And if Canadians are worried about that I’d suggest they look to those Albertan friends and colleagues who seem to be cozying up to some fairly nefarious Americans who do want to make Canada the 51^st state.

What Prime Minister Mark Carney, and anyone sensible in the Canadian political system, is doing is seeking to align with like-minded countries. Countries who do not threaten it with annexation. Who do not interfere in its electoral processes and who were not actively promoting one side over the other in referenda. Let’s leave that to the Russians and the Americans.

What the Prime Minister is seeking to do is exactly what he spoke about at Davos — working together with other middle powers because we are stronger together. If we’re not at the table we will be on the menu and get eaten. And the only way to be at the table is to work together.

But this isn’t just about politics. It’s also about economics. About seeking to find new markets. To try and reduce dependence on the United States, which is not a country any of us can really trust anymore.

Canada will never, of course, be able to remove completely the importance of its American neighbours for trade purposes. Indeed no one is suggesting it should. But it can reduce its dependence. And it does that by reaching out to countries who share its values. In a way that, sadly, the United States no longer does.

So what is wrong with talking to the EU about a closer trading relationship? No one complains when Canada talks to the United Kingdom or other countries about that. The only tangible difference is that Canada is talking to a block of countries, not to one at a time.

But in reality that makes absolutely no difference at all.

The Prime Minister himself said:

‘We should deepen our people-to-people ties, allowing our youth to live, work and study where they want on either side of the Atlantic.’

Please, someone tell me what is so wrong with that?

Associate membership, or whatever it is called — keep in mind here that the actual term does not yet exist — would guarantee Canada’s sovereignty, independence and strategic autonomy. It would enhance youth and labour mobility, and build economic and strategic cooperation in finance, defence, critical minerals and energy.

Once again, can someone tell me what is the problem with this suggestion?

Indeed I’d be encouraging my own UK to follow the same line and (re)build the same relationship with the EU.

That Donald Trump publicly mocked the concept of a closer Canada-EU bond as “laughable” and warned of potential tariffs should it come to pass is probably another reason why it is a good idea. Despite the U.S. President’s commentary, his country has lost significant amounts of influence and understanding in this world. Making America Great Again has entailed cozying up to dictators and alienating allies.

If I was Canada, and indeed my advice to the U.K. is the same, I’d take this as an indication of the need to build the relationship with others, including the EU.

So let’s not get too worked up about this. Let’s take it for what it is — a sensible approach to build relationships with like-minded countries in the face of a hostile and provocative neighbour and “ally.”

In the face of the threats and comments being thrown at Canada, it would be reckless and a failure of leadership if Carney didn’t seek to build these new relationships. And anyone who says otherwise, whilst approving of U.S. interference, should probably take a long, hard look at themselves in the mirror.

Greg Quinn OBE is a former British Diplomat who has served in Estonia, Ghana, Belarus, Iraq, Washington D.C. (seconded to State Department), Kazakhstan, Guyana (as High Commissioner), Suriname (as Ambassador), The Bahamas (as High Commissioner), Canada (as Consul General Toronto and Calgary), and Antigua and Barbuda (as resident British Commissioner) in addition to stints in London. He now runs his own government relations, business development and crisis management consultancy: Aodhan Consultancy Ltd.

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.

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 month we’re addressing common questions, like: is Canada behind on immunotherapy?

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BioCanRx continues to work with researchers and policymakers to deliver on this mission. Thanks to them for continuing to partner with The Line to share this information and visit BioCanRx.com to learn more.

Lennox traces the political developments that brought Alberta to the brink of a separatist referendum, including Bill 54 and changes to the province’s citizens’ initiative rules. They discuss lower signature thresholds, corporate financing, and the role these changes have played in opening a path to a referendum. Lennox argues that the process reflects deliberate political engineering rather than a spontaneous expression of popular discontent.

This episode is also brought to you by the Forest Products Association of Canada. Budget season in Ottawa is filled with asks for new programs, new tax measures and new investment. But for Canada’s forest products sector, the biggest opportunity for growth doesn’t require new spending — it requires smarter rules. Regulatory inefficiencies are costing the average Canadian mill an estimated one million dollars a year each. That’s money that could be reinvested in workers, communities, and modernization instead. The Forest Sector Transformation Task Force gave Ottawa a clear playbook. As the federal budget takes shape, the fastest way to unlock private investment is to remove the made-in-Canada barriers standing in the way. Learn more at FPAC.ca.

Jen and Lennox also examine the role of unelected separatist organizers, questions of democratic legitimacy, and the possibility of foreign interference. At what point does advocating for independence cross the line into something more serious? And what happens when a domestic political movement seeks support from a foreign government whose interests may be fundamentally opposed to Canada’s?

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It’s a conversation about Alberta separatism, sovereignty, democratic accountability, and why Lennox believes Canadians need to take the threat of treason seriously in an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment.

We hope you enjoyed the episode, and as always, like and subscribe.

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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: Jen Gerson

Albertans sent a strong message to Edmonton, Ottawa, and the entire world last night; they’re ready to put this incredibly embarrassing chapter in our shared political history to an end.

With what appears to be an incredibly high turnout and votes still being counted Tuesday morning, the province elected overwhelmingly to avoid the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada. With almost 80 per cent of ballots counted, the “Remain” option had 76 per cent support.

The results ought to demonstrate Albertans for what they truly are — a mostly sensible and pragmatic people, if occasionally very slightly insane. God bless.

The question, naturally, will drift to the matter of what happens next; will this province’s separatists, having had their say, move on to some new moral outrage or political intrigue? Can we put this errant madness to sleep for another generation or two — or will the grifters and kooks who have boosted their profiles and fattened their nest eggs on this gambit continue to haunt AI slop generators and small-donations pages for years to come?

In truth, I’m not sure anyone can say for certain whether even this pleasantly decisive victory will put an end to the separatists’ grand ambition to lead North America’s very own landlocked vision of Moldova. I’ll note, the court challenge over the Stay Free Alberta petition still appears to be a live matter, so it’s possible we have not yet heard the last of it.

It’s equally possible, however, that the manic energy spent on this campaign will find a new lease at the United Conservative Party’s AGM next month — or, heck, maybe find itself enmeshed another moral panic over magic ostrich eggs or something.

For the moment, I’ll offer a few observations of the actual campaign — in so much as there was one. Third Party Advertising rules and spending limits around this referendum made it difficult for both federalist and separatist forces to coalesce around both a clear leader and a clear message. Many people and groups from across the political spectrum came together from the federalist side — and I think Thomas Lukaszuk’s Forever Canadian campaign deserves especial mention, here — but if your impression was a vote that came off as unusually chaotic, this is why.

Due is also freely and happily given to the Vote to Stay campaign, and the Lead not Leave team, the latter of which put together some of the brightest policy minds in the province, and worked with us here at The Line, along with other publications, to produce proposals and op-eds to help improve the country, and Alberta’s place within it. That work won’t end today.

That noted, one of the criticisms I frequently received about the federalist side is that we failed to make the case for Canada.

While Prime Minister Mark Carney did offer a compelling argument for Alberta’s historical role as a contributor to many of the legal and moral developments we most value about Canada in the final days before the vote, I think that critique is fair.

However, there was a reason for it.

The federalist side understood that it had been backed into a rhetorical trap even before the vote had been called. Making the case for Canada reversed the onus of responsibility in the debate, forcing the pro-Canada side into a defensive posture against separatists who could not only lay out some entirely legitimate problems with Confederation, but then propose independence as an unfalsifiable solution to those problems.

The vast majority of Albertans, though many of them angry about the last 10 years of federal governance, had no desire to hold this vote at all, and the provincial government earned no real democratic mandate to foist it upon us.

The onus, therefore, was not on the federalist side to make the case for staying in Canada. The onus was on the separatists to credibly convince voters that leaving Canada was a responsible and practical solution to their stated grievances.

They failed. Spectacularly.

The results of this vote reflect the will of Albertans. Support for separation has hovered between 20 and 30 per cent for years, and there’s no evidence that either side managed to persuade a single vote either way. But even though staying was by far the most popular position going in, federalists started this campaign with a tricky disadvantage.

The people who supported staying were, by and large, individuals with real reputations and credibility — and, therefore, something real and valuable to lose if they lied. The other side, by comparison, was overwhelmingly dominated by kooks and crooks who suffered no reputational penalty for saying whatever crazy idea or claim slipped out of their mouths.

What we were left with is one side trying to defend an imperfect but reality-based status quo, a Confederation in which competing interests have to vie for their preferred policy choices. In the real world of politics, that means Alberta has to fight to have its voice heard; it has to make the case to the rest of Canada in order to win. And it means, sometimes, this province will lose on a policy debate or piece of legislation.

On the flip side, we had a separatist movement that could make up whatever it damn well wanted and often portrayed a fantasy of an independent Alberta in which citizens would pay virtually no taxes, be better run, and would somehow manifest every preferred policy and pipeline by dint of a new flag and a re-drawn map on a border. The further we travelled down the social-media propaganda rabbit warrens, the more likely we were to find a deeper aim. Some way to escape the broken modernism of Canada; and a return to an Alberta that was universally white, Christian, rural, and blandly “conservative.” This was a fever dream of an “independent” nation that was totally divorced from both geopolitics and the reality of the province today; which is, in fact, as pluralistic, urban, and irreligious as any other place in Anglo Canada.

Separatists are not, and have never been, representative of “Alberta.” They are the minority even as they claim to speak for the province as a nation.

The problem is that it’s rhetorically impossible to debate a dream. There’s an impossible asymmetry to overcome; fact vs. fantasy, credible vs. non-credible, real grievance vs. conspiracy theory, plausible but emotionally unsatisfying solution vs. simple cure-alls. And those people who are grounded in fact and reputation are at a perpetual disadvantage on the debate pitch against those who are not.

You can’t really have a productive argument with a fiction writer about a world that exists in only his own imagination. It’s a little like trying to hold a serious discussion about the allocation of scarce health-care resources in the Shire.

It’s a pointless exercise with fundamentally unserious people, and pretending otherwise is not only dishonest pandering, it grants the kook-aroos and their ideas the illusion of real intellectual weight.

The separatists haven’t earned the right to be debated on equal terms. Note, I’m not talking about censorship or deplatforming, here. Separatists have not been censored and have had plenty of platforms willing to treat their claims with stone-faced consideration.

But if they actually want to be taken seriously, they’re going to have to start behaving in a way that is serious.

That means following in the path of this country’s democratic traditions. They’re going to have to put together an explicitly separatist party, craft a real and plausible party platform, earn votes, and win in a free and fair election.

Only then will they have earned the right to be taken at face value, or to be deserving of anyone’s time or consideration.

They have not done that.

The fact that we held this referendum at all wasn’t a heartwarming exercise of democratic will — it was a failure of leadership by the provincial government, and of Danielle Smith in particular, who eased the way for this vote via Bill 54 in order to placate her separatist base and ease tensions within her own party.

That was, and remains, an insanely reckless thing to subject an entire province to in order to save one party and one premier’s political ass. Conservatives are very quick to notice when the federal Liberal party conflates its interests with Canada’s interests writ large.

Hello? Tapping the mic, here. This thing on?

This province is led by a small cadre of “Conservatives” who have proven themselves perfectly willing to risk political instability, and to tempt foreign interference and economic consequences in the midst of a generationally dangerous moment in history in order to plow forward with a self-serving and juvenile democratic stunt.

Albertans, in their wisdom, had the good sense to reject this nonsense.

The separatists’ loss is both embarrassing and well deserved.

The last open question is whether or not there will be consequences, and for whom.

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.

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 month we’re addressing common questions, like: are there better ways to manufacture therapies?

A groundbreaking approach that streamlines new therapy production is “closed system manufacturing,” in which a product is made within a single, automated platform without exposing it to the surrounding environment. When properly implemented, this can reduce costs compared to manual production in a clean room and increase patient access –– while still meeting Health Canada’s safety and quality requirements. BioCanRx-funded researchers have already used closed system manufacturing to create therapies for more than 100 clinical trial patients. Last week, BioCanRx convened a meeting at Health Canada that brought together regulators, policymakers, industry and stakeholders to discuss regulatory alignments that could enable many more organizations to deploy these systems. They are now producing a report that will help Canadian decision-makers unlock the promise of advanced therapies for patients across Canada.

Thanks to BioCanRx for continuing to partner with The Line to share this information. Visit BioCanRx.com to learn more.

First up, Prime Minister Mark Carney makes his final push in Alberta ahead of the referendum. Is Carney genuinely committed to repairing Alberta’s relationship with Confederation, or is this just another political exercise? Jen and Andrew discuss what the Liberals could actually do to address Western grievances and make Canada work better, preferably without reopening the Constitution. There are reforms worth considering, but are Canada’s political leaders prepared to make them?

This episode is also brought to you by Cameco. Building Canada’s energy future means creating jobs for Canadian workers. That’s why the AP1000 reactor is the right choice for Canada: it is already operating and ready to deliver the power we need. Choosing the AP1000 means a reactor built by Canadians, creating skilled jobs in construction, fabrication and the trades while keeping more investment and economic benefits here at home. If we are serious about creating Canadian jobs and strengthening our economy, the choice is clear. To learn more, visit ap1000.cameco.com.

Next, U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra has warned Canadians to stay out of American elections. Your hosts consider whether he’s got a point, whether he’s being spectacularly hypocritical, or whether both things can be true. Should Canadians learn to use their indoor voices when discussing American politics? Or does staying quiet simply reinforce a double standard in which Washington gets to interfere wherever it likes while everyone else is expected to meekly accept their status as a vassal state? Jen and Andrew discuss where legitimate advocacy ends and foreign interference begins, and how Canada can defend its interests without making every disagreement a partisan or regional fight.

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Finally, Pierre Poilievre has a plan for a tariff-free North American auto pact. Would he like some unicorns and aliens to go with it? Jen and Andrew examine the Conservative leader’s proposal and the political reality confronting his party. Is there a plausible path back to relevance for the Conservatives? Can they regain momentum and become, at the very least, a functional opposition? Your hosts have some thoughts.

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 spoke with Gregory Jack from Ipsos for a survey of the major problems on Carney’s plate.

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.