Dispatch from the Front Lines: Shouts in D.C., confessions in London
Also: our 30-day reprieve is ending. Probably.
Hey everyone. Hope you’re having a great weekend. And we’re confident that our latest The Line Podcast would make it better!
Also enjoy last week’s episode of On The Line, where Jen Gerson and Duncan Dee chatted about the horror show that is North American air travel these days.
We make our usual requests of you! Please like, subscribe and share widely. That means here at the main site, of course, but also on our distribution channels: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all the others. A nice review helps, too!
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!
It’s hard to believe, but that episode above completed our first full month of On The Line. It took many, many months of work to launch the damned thing, and then the first month flew by. We’re having a blast and really just hitting our stride. The response so far has been terrific, but we’re certain that the best is yet to come. Stay tuned for the next episode on Tuesday.
And now, on with the dispatch.
You know what else began a month ago, more or less? Canada’s 30-day reprieve from tariffs. The clock runs out on that one on Tuesday. As promised, we’ve been tracking announcements made by anyone in Canadian governance, at any level, that gave us any sense that we were using that month well and effectively.
We’re realists at The Line, or at least we do our damnest to be. We know that there are hard limits on state capacity that will need to be addressed, and we understand that big institutions and bureaucracies can only move so far so fast. But emergencies are a fact of life. We joked — well, sort of joked — during a recent podcast that we wanted to see the Canadian state writ large to use the 30-day extension as if we’d been given ironclad, rock-solid intelligence telling us that aliens were going to invade the Earth in 30 days, set on eating us all. We wanted that level of urgency.
We didn’t get it. We just didn’t.
We didn’t get nothing. Some things were announced. When we left you last week, our list was as follows:
New money announced for the Port of Churchill.
Nova Scotia’s variant of the Ice Bucket Challenge for National Survival. (We will be watching that.)
B.C.’s efforts to fast-track resource projects. (Also watching.)
A half-point for naming a fentanyl czar.
We can offer this update this week — Nova Scotia has introduced the promised legislation, and Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, newly re-elected with a reduced majority (but still a majority!), has signalled that Ontario will match the legislation, moving Ontario and Nova Scotia into sync on many regulations and licensing rules. Good! We hope to see more of that.
We also noted last week that Saskatchewan premier Scott Moe made an interesting announcement:
Alberta’s Danielle Smith, for her part, has said that her province is looking into matching this move.
And this is … good? We think. Your Line editors confess that while they think this is all in the spirit of the Ice Bucket Challenge for National Survival, they aren’t really sure how this would work. Pipelines that cross provincial borders fall under the ambit of the federal government, not the provincial ones. Does Moe mean that any federal permits that are issued will be accepted automatically by Saskatchewan? Does that include local permits? Building permits? Landscaping permits?
We don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade. And we have asked friends in both provinces to help us make sense of this. As of right now, we confess that we don’t quite get it.
So we’ll withhold judgment on this one, and give you all an update when we can — hopefully next week. We’d love to add another item to the list! We just want to understand what the hell this is before we accept it.
So stay tuned, and keep an eye out for Tuesday’s reprieve expiration. Trump may extend it again.
He may not.