Hey, folks. We hope you’re having an excellent weekend. If you need to give it a boost, our latest episode of The Line Podcast will help. It was, uh, very uplifting.
Also, check out last week’s On The Line, where where Jen Gerson speaks with Ronnen Harary, co-founder of Spin Master, the Canadian company behind some of the world’s most successful toys and entertainment franchises, including PAW Patrol, about how Canada needs to support innovation and entrepreneurs.
And now, on with the dispatch.
It’s nice to be able to start a dispatch without talking about the United States and the trade war. Our topic here is certainly not a million miles removed from either, but it’s its own thing, and we’ll treat it seriously. In downtown Toronto this week, Canada will host a major investment summit. Various investment banks and development funds will gather and hear Canadian governments and officials pitch what this country has to offer — both in terms of what we can sell, but also in terms of what we can build.
You know, if they invest in us.
Let us be blunt: we love this. This is fantastic. We want this to be a massive success and we want this to be a common thing. We think it’s a terrific idea, perfectly timed and we give full credit to Mark Carney for it. This is exactly the sort of pitch in which his prior professional experience provides the most tangible direct and obvious benefit.
But also, let us note the major problem. Canada’s obstacle to investment has traditionally not been a lack of investor interest or global visibility. Canada’s biggest challenge has been, and remains, Canadians.
This was the thesis of Matt Gurney’s recent column, and we don’t need to restate it here at length. As the people responsible for trillions of dollars in wealth gather in Canada, we need to be sure that we can live up to our side of any deal. If someone shows up with a freighter full of gold bullion they want to spend on building things in Canada, are we really sure — like, really, really sure — that we have got our own ducks in a row?
Permits? Can we issue them? Are we going to faceplant because of endless debates about “social licence”? Will a project that global investors are ready to back with a quadrillion gigajillion Euros need 47 years to pass an environmental review? Will stacked layers of Indigenous consultation doom every project?
We aren’t asking this out of reflexive contrarianism. We’re flagging these as questions because this is precisely what the Carney government has itself already clearly identified as Canada’s problems. That’s why we have things like the Building Canada Act and the Major Projects Office. The summit might be arriving before we’ll be able to make much use of whatever interest it may pique.
Our ponderings also brought to mind a speech given earlier this year by Conservative Pierre Poilievre. The Line has not been easy on Poilievre of late, and we make no apology for that. We have found his performance underwhelming, sometimes maddeningly so. But he’s had some random terrific moments. In February, Poilievre gave a speech to the Economic Club of Canada. The speech had some stuff in it we didn’t love, but this part, which we’ll quote at full length, was bang on:
Canada already has free trade agreements with at least 50 countries–many of them middle powers. We should look to deepen those agreements, but their markets are largely already open to us.
But our problem is not that these countries block our products from coming IN but that our own government blocks our products from getting OUT.
Signing meaningless communiques and more stagecraft masquerading as statecraft won’t fix that.
The reality is that some of the worst tariffs imposed on Canada today are those imposed by the government here. Slow permits, changing rules, high taxes, and outright bans on shipping oil from B.C.’s northern coast. We have the second slowest building permits in the OECD. It takes 19 years to approve a mine. None of that has changed in the last year.
Unfortunately, the federal government caused these problems. Fortunately, it can reverse them.
(Thank you to Brother Wells for the transcript.)
What can we add to that? Poilievre was completely right there. Seven months later, he’s still right. We’re bringing the world to Canada. We’d best be sure we’re ready.
Twenty-five years ago last Friday, 38 planes and roughly 6,500 passengers were dropped on the town of Gander, Newfoundland, when the airspace over the United States was closed in response to the shocking terrorist attacks of 9/11. The town of 10,000 folks absorbed these unexpected arrivals with a hospitality so warm and unforced it eventually became a hit Broadway musical.
Gander of course has a unique and longstanding relationship with Americans, in particular the U.S. military. The town’s location along the great circle route made it the premier transatlantic air stop in the 1930s. By 1940, it was the largest airport in the world, and during the war its massive airfield served as a critical staging ground for ferrying warplanes and antisubmarine patrols across the North Atlantic. Control of the airfield at Gander reverted to local and then later Canadian authorities after the war, but the connection to the U.S. military continued through the Cold War.
But that is not the only reason the passengers were so openly welcomed in 2001. Americans were simply our friends, and helping them was as natural as shovelling a neighbour’s driveway or helping jump-start their car. Within days, it was the Canadian government that proposed that NATO invoke Article 5, and within weeks we had warships on their way to the Arabian Sea and special operations soldiers helping hunt down al-Qaeda in Kandahar. Our Afghanistan commitment lasted 13 years, saw 40,000 soldiers deployed, and cost $18 billion. Ultimately, 158 of those soldiers didn’t come home; thirteen of them were from Newfoundland and Labrador.
On Friday, thousands returned to Gander’s Steele Community Centre to mark the anniversary. Governor General Louise Arbour and U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra joined Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Tony Wakeham, former prime minister Jean Chrétien, and various other political dignitaries along with many of the “come from aways” who never forgot the strangers who took them in.
For the most part, the program played it straight: the Ennis Sisters sang the American national anthem, Alan Doyle played some tunes, Arbour spoke warmly of the two countries’ long friendship. It was shaping up to be exactly the kind of careful, sentimental, non-partisan tribute that these things are expected to be.
The context had changed, though. The country whose citizens Gander sheltered is now run by an administration that has made a project of treating Canada as a subordinate to be bullied into line through annexation threats, tariffs, and generalized hostility. A rotating cast of trade officials, Greer and Lutnick and Hoekstra chief among them, spend their days insisting Canada has spent decades ripping America off and that we are negotiating in bad faith. But Canadians know that this was never really a trade dispute; it’s a demand for submission dressed up as grievance over dairy quotas and softwood stumpage rates.
So when Hoekstra turned up in Gander on Friday as a guest of honour, it was already under a cloud of protest. He is the ambassador, after all, who has mocked the elbows-up movement and groused about Canadians’ reaction to Trump’s 51st-state routine. More than 260,000 Canadians had signed a petition demanding his recall before he ever set foot in the auditorium. Then he delivered a meandering speech thanking Gander, but without once mentioning trade.
And so in the end, it fell to the old warrior, Jean Chrétien, to bell the cat. The 92-year-old former PM closed a two-hour program with a speech that called out the actual state of the continental relationship. He told the crowd never to mistake Canadian tolerance for a lack of resolve, or Canadian kindness for softness, and closed with the line, “We bow to no one.” Hoekstra, to his credit, stood and hugged him afterward. Later, walking into a performance of Come From Away, he declined to say anything at all about the speech, shrugging with his palms up.
Predictably, the angriest response to Chrétien’s speech has been from Canadians upset that he had “politicized” a solemn occasion. And so he did. But so, merely by showing up and delivering a speech about enduring friendship, did Hoekstra. An ambassador representing a government that spends its days threatening annexation and tariff extortion does not get to walk into a room built on 2001-vintage goodwill and cash in on it as though nothing since has happened. The apolitical version of Friday’s ceremony was never on the table the moment Hoekstra accepted the invitation.
The people fretting about decorum — and most of it is coming from the same corner of the Maple MAGAsphere that treats elbows-up as an anti-American overreaction and Canada’s grievances as CBC propaganda — might ask themselves why Chrétien needed to say the quiet part loud in the first place. Even opposition leader Pierre Poilievre was on American television last week describing Canadians as “wounded” and “confused” by how we are being treated by the Trump administration. Has he been watching too much CBC as well?
The Americans who came back to Gander to thank the families who took them in were as welcome as ever. But it isn’t 2001 anymore, not by a long shot. The past is a different continent. Hoekstra got a hug on his way out. He shouldn’t mistake it for absolution.
A further note from the InfoWar we think is worth mentioning: this weekend, a clip from Carleton professor Ian Lee made the rounds arguing that Canadians are emotional, that they’ve lost their objectivity, and that Canadians don’t seem to understand the size and scale of the U.S. economy they wish to oppose.
Firstly, we think Lee’s engaging in good faith here and while we think his comments are contextually short-sighted, we don’t think he’s operating with any intent to undermine Canadian resolve in the face of a trade war.
The origins of that clip appear to be from a podcast and digital content shop called The Really Big Show, a NowMedia Group production that seemed to pop up out of nowhere in 2025. We know that the U.S. embassy has cultivated relationships with friendly independent media outlets in the last year, but we admit that we still find it incredibly odd when brand new media shows featuring individuals with little to no previous following show up on the scene, generate impressive social media followings, and land high profile interviews right out of the gate. We at The Line admit that we don’t put as much time and effort into social media as we probably ought to — maybe these guys can give us some tips?
Anyway, we want to be careful, here, because we think that criticizing the Liberal government is, obviously, very, very valid. But when your entire social media oeuvre only ever directs criticism in one direction, while consistently parroting U.S. and partisan talking points without any discernible comparable criticism of the other players in the dispute, well, our eyebrows go up, and so should yours.
We’re just going to point out the obvious: it’s fair to suggest that Canadians are letting our anger get the better of us. But that criticism loses a lot of its potency if it fails to acknowledge that the cause of that anger is justified; that our feelings are a rational response to explicit, purposeful, and repeated provocation by the current U.S. administration. We are not sure how one can look at Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Forward Guidance videos, or even Jean Chrétien’s “we bow to no one” speech, compare them to any of Jamieson Greer or Howard Lutnick’s television hits, or Pete Hegseth and Karoline Leavitt’s denigration of our military, or Donald Trump’s Truth Social Feed, or the incredible Oval Office spectacle of wiping “Lake Ontario” off the map with a sharpie and think: “Oh, yeah, it’s the Canadians who are behaving irrationally and immaturely.”
That person is either operating from a totally different version of consensus reality, or they’ve simply internalized Canadian submission to such an extent that they no longer even recognize the asymmetry of expectation and response. In other words, the Americans are allowed to say, do, or threaten literally anything, and the only appropriate Canadian response is to shut up and take it. Because America is bigger. And might makes right.
We at The Line do not hold to that logic. We believe that while America may be larger and more powerful economically and politically, that we are all, ultimately, equal before God (or whathaveyou). The right to stand up for our own interests, to push back, and, yes, even to insult our American friends and neighbours when warranted — this is an expression of our own equality as humans and citizens of a distinct and sovereign nation. The Americans may not accept that, and that’s fine. Their lack of acceptance does not mean that we, as Canadians, have to accept their frame of reality. We get to decide for ourselves whether we choose to enter this bilateral relationship as supplicants or equals. That’s our choice, not theirs. And it is a choice, not something dictated by GDP or relative market cap. We have agency, here. Be suspicious of anyone trying to convince you otherwise.
What we think Americans are struggling to understand is that Canadians are both angry and acting entirely rationally in their own self-interest.
One last note, here, because sometimes it’s important to say the thing aloud.
While we think it’s important to hold the Liberal government to account, to be skeptical of its claims and concerned about how we’re going to navigate a post-America landscape going forward, it’s time to draw a distinction between healthy good-faith skepticism, and the quisling slop that tries to pass for it. There is a sizeable portion of the Maple MAGA contingent that is emotionally invested in Canada’s failure.
Disheartened and demoralized after the lost Trudeau decade, terminally online, they feel increasingly culturally alienated from the Canada of their memory, and though they may not say so openly, they see Donald Trump as a justified agent of destruction and revenge on a country they’ve grown to resent and despise.
While we at The Line — who have spent long years lamenting Canadian decline — can understand the emotional throughline, we stop short of poisonous despair. Honestly, we find this a lot of “independent journalism” to be far from both. It’s neither independent, nor journalism. It’s self-destruction and self-abasement.
If criticism is rooted in improving the country, it is welcome. If it is instead laced with a desire to see the country suffer for its sins, then it’s suicide.
Lastly, we’d like to make note of another rather remarkable Wall Street Journal piece demonstrating just how far Carney has gone to re-align Canada with Europe in the face of American threats.
If you haven’t read it, do. It’s quite remarkable how quickly conversations around re-alignment between Canadian and EU leaders are taking place.
Interesting discussions of particular note: plans that might allow Canadians to live and work in Europe without visas. And, linking underwater cables, data centres, cloud storage, and new satellite networks that could put parts of our Internet infrastructure outside the reach of American tech companies — and, presumably, American laws. This would be a crucial first step toward reducing the Western alliance’s deep dependence on the American Defence Industrial Base.
We will expect to see more details about these talks in coming days.
Firstly, a few things to note. We at The Line would love to live and work in Europe visa free. (One of us is indeed already an EU citizen via ancestry.) We fully support and understand that if America is going to continue on its current course, Canada is going to need to grow incredibly canny in order to maintain its own survival and sovereignty, including by aligning and shimmying larger powers like Europe and China. A quasi-membership in the EU is a demonstrable and powerful show of support for our country from our allies and, honestly, it would rather warm our hearts to see liberal democracies make real and rapid changes in order to strengthen and buttress one another in an era of challenge and backslide.
That said, Europe is not America. Aligning ourselves more closely to a bloc of nations that is not as economically or demographically salient as America may have long-term negative consequences on Canadian quality of life. This will be especially true if it’s paired with the EU’s notoriously rigorous bureaucratic obstacles, ranging from labelling to onerous rules of origin requirements. All things being equal, we’d be much better off to maintain the closest relationships with America. Alas, all things are no longer equal.
Lastly, we share the lament of one of the WSJ commentators who wonder why all of these details are coming out in an American publication rather than a Canadian one.
Prime Minister… *taps mic* PRIME MINISTER. It’s well past time to stop treating communications with the Canadians you serve as an afterthought. We deserve to know what the hell you’ve been up to in Europe on our behalf. We deserve to understand what the risks and trade-offs of a closer alliance with Europe might be. Also, given that this was not a matter deeply discussed during the last election, Canadians also deserve a say about whether we move forward with re-Europe-inization. This question merits real and rigorous debate, as well as a democratic mandate, earned either through a general election, or a referendum on the issue. And given the general state of things, our preference is an election.
More to come on this file this week.
Well, that’s all for now, folks. Enjoy the last of your weekend and we’ll see you all on Monday.
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Instead of focusing on providing a welcoming environment for European capital, by shepherding their projects through our license Raj, we should be focusing on creating an environment where European, Canadian, and even American capital can be put to good and effective use in Canada.
But the Liberal government has no interest in doing so. We should reflect on why this is. At the end of the day, it's not "Maple MAGA" that is executing national suicide.
"Maple MAGA" is such a tiny, uninfluential cohort. They hold no power in government, in the bureaucracy, or in the media. They have never held any iota of political, cultural, or economic power in Canada. This is just eye rolling.
The vast majority of the media establishment, including the Line, is pro-government and pro-Carney. There are of course exceptions (thinking of a couple writers at NaPo). But the idea that there is not ENOUGH criticism of the govt is cowardly nonsense. We are in our powerless situation because the government, and their Canadian supporters, have neutered Canada. We lack raw power in the face of the USA because Canadians have been unwilling to be full throated in their criticisms of government policy and action. And full throated that we enact policies that grow our power. We are in this position because of decisions we have made about resource development, immigration, military procurement, health care decisions on and on. We continue to choose appearance over substance.
And that's why you get slop like this: "it’s time to draw a distinction between healthy good-faith skepticism, and the quisling slop that tries to pass for it. There is a sizeable portion of the Maple MAGA contingent that is emotionally invested in Canada’s failure."
The criticism here is just so unserious - but it does accurately reflect Canadians' own unseriousness. Let me know when we have a pipeline out east, or we can build resources in spite of FN veto, or we have a sensible immigration policy, or we do something on Chinese interference, or we can build a mine in <20 years (true stat), or we have actual free trade within Canada.