Dispatch from the Front Lines: Dropping the gloves for Canada
Plus, have more babies, but avoid those White House meetings. And more!
Hey folks! Shout-out to our friends in eastern Canada (especially in the GTA), who are actually experiencing one of those rare Canadian events — a snowstorm that isn’t a total bust. This one was real, and with one Line editor off on a holiday, the other is having to squeeze dispatch duties in between shovelling efforts. So let’s jump right into things.
First up, enjoy our latest episode of The Line Podcast.
Also enjoy last week’s episode of On The Line, with Jen Gerson interviewing Canadian defence and Arctic security expert Rob Huebert.
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Because there’s been some confusion about this: we are distributing The Line Podcast and On The Line through the same channel. We just have the one main The Line account across all the platforms. Follow the links above and you’ll get access to both podcasts when they come out. Easy peasy!
And now, on with the dispatch.
As promised last week, The Line has continued to monitor what Canadian officials have announced as tangible responses to harden this country in the face of an increasingly openly hostile Trump White House. Last week, our list stood at one item: Manitoba premier Wab Kinew, in partnership with the federal government, had announced money to increase the utility of, and rail access to, the Port of Churchill, on Hudson’s Bay. We said then that we would update you all in a week on what we could add to that list of one.
Alas, the list remains at one. Or maybe 1.5.
To be clear: we may have missed things. It’s a big country. Many announcements are made and some fly under our radar. We repeat our earlier request to our readers — don’t take our list as a determinative statement, take it as a call for assistance. Tell us if we are missing anything and we will add it to the next update, with thanks and (if desired) credit.
This week, readers did suggest some items for the list. One suggestion, made by a few of you, was to count the premiers’ trip down to D.C., which we will discuss more below. We appreciate those who brought this to our attention, but we don’t think that really fits the spirit of the exercise, so we didn’t add it to the list. The trip to D.C. was unusual in some ways, but it’s not a new thing that has been announced to harden Canada during the 30-day window.
A podcast listener did write in and offer an intriguing suggestion for the list, and noted that we failed to mention it on the latest The Line Podcast. The suggestion was the announcement of Canada’s fentanyl czar, a position we had promised to create when Trump gave us the 30-day reprieve from tariffs (though it was a lot less than that for steel and aluminum!) We’ve been mulling this one over since our listener suggested it. We confess we’re torn — not split, just torn. It technically is a new thing we have announced, and it does technically serve (in theory) to harden Canada (our skepticism is based on the possibility that, as is so often the case with the government, the announcement of the czar may be the totality of what having the czar will end up meaning).
That’s the case for putting it on the list. But. Since we were forced into it as a condition of the reprieve, and it isn’t something we decided to do on our own during the reprieve, we don’t think this really fits.
To resolve this quandary, we’re invoking our prerogative to make up rules at The Line as we go, and we’re giving that a half point.
So yeah. Thirteen days into our 30, our list of things we have done with that borrowed time stands at … 1.5.
We’ll update you again in a week. Keep the ideas coming!