Happy Sunday, Line readers. We had a great The Line Podcast on Friday, please check it out.
Last week’s On The Line was great, too. In it, Jen Gerson checks in with Greenland and Europe.
And now, on with the dispatch.
We start with a very brief note of housekeeping. As discussed in Friday’s episode, The Line was targeted for a hack last week. It wasn’t successful, but it did cause us some hassle of having to lock our accounts down. The attack was unusually targeted. Not only were Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson targeted, but a member of Gurney’s family was, as well — despite having very little public profile or exposure.
So, first, please don’t do that. Thanks!
Second, since these incidents are getting more common, The Line communicates carefully. We include our email at the bottom of everything we publish. Look for it! It’s down there. But it’s also here: info@readtheline.ca. Your editors also use secure communication apps. If you need to get in touch with us, start with the email, and we can move the conversation to a secure platform if necessary. Please do not primarily engage with us on social media. We don’t check often, and to be honest, we’re increasingly wary of anything that arrives via those platforms. They’re getting weird.
As we prepared this dispatch, we were monitoring news out of the United Kingdom of some kind of counterterrorism operation near a Royal Air Force base from which American B-1B and B-52 bombers operate. Five men have been arrested and three vans have been seized. The British prime minister and the U.S. president have been briefed. Footage from the scene showed bomb-defusing robots inspecting the vehicles and removing items.
We would say more if we could, but the facts at this time do not permit us to opine with any confidence. All we can really add is that both U.S. and British officials seem to be treating this as a very real and very serious incident. We will watch to see and learn more.
Let us just take this opportunity to offer one of our periodic reminders that every major Canadian military facility and virtually all of our civilian infrastructure, including stuff that is absolutely necessary to sustain life and our civilization, is equally vulnerable. We do not wish to speculate about what may have been about to occur in the United Kingdom, but we don’t have to to note what the Ukrainians did to the Russian strategic bomber force with their drones, which were hidden near the Russian air bases. We shouldn’t need to remind our beloved readers about the drone swarms that suddenly appeared in the skies over Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, home to a significant part of the U.S. Air Force’s strategic nuclear striking force. And we shouldn’t need to mention the way that drones have been dismantling civilian infrastructure and military targets all across the Middle East, easily overcoming the defences offered by even sophisticated military forces such as the United States and Israel.
The future is now, friends. No matter what these individuals in the United Kingdom may have been planning, sooner or later someone is going to loose a bunch of drones from a parking lot or a roadside many miles away from a critical target in the Western alliance, and they are absolutely going to demolish it. It is only a matter of time.
We know that there are elements within the Canadian Armed Forces and the Canadian government that understand our vulnerability and that are moving to address this. We are taking this as yet another opportunity for us to simply urge them to move faster. Time is not on our side.
In a long interview with The New York Times last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney made a comment that has been aggressively, and we think deliberately, misinterpreted. And we’re pissed off about that.
The prime minister was asked if he had prepared at all for the prospect of a U.S. military attack on Canada. He gave the only honest answer that he could have. Rather than summarize it, take a look at the relevant section from The New York Times article:
When pressed on whether he took Mr. Trump’s threats to make Canada a 51st state seriously, Mr. Carney suggested that he had carefully examined the possibility of U.S.-led military action, but declined to discuss in detail what that involved.
“I think you have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk,” said Mr. Carney, a former central banker for Britain and Canada who approaches the world by meticulously assessing worst-case scenarios and drafting responses. He added: “That’s just risk management. That’s not a base case, but it would be irresponsible not to” prepare.
That is a completely honest and accurate answer. Carney is speaking like the central banker he is. Extreme tail risk is banker-speak for something that is theoretically possible and worth being aware of, but that is not considered imminent or probable. Life is full of extreme tail risks. Prudent people think about them and plan for the possibility of living in a world where they could happen, but don’t hinge their daily life around the danger.
This was a weird one for us. We didn’t quite know how to respond to all the idiotic commentary the prime minister’s comment generated. As of Sunday, when we were writing this dispatch, political commentators and Conservative MPs were still accusing the prime minister of fear-mongering about a U.S. invasion.
We’ve really had it up to here with that stupidity. We shouldn’t need to explain any of what follows, but since apparently we do, let’s get at it.
First, the prime minister was asked the question. He answered it honestly. In general, this is the sort of thing we’d like our politicians to do.
Second, the answer was more revealing than the prime minister’s critics are giving him credit for. Calling it an extreme tail risk is how he was dismissing it as something he was not really worried about while acknowledging it was possible and had to be considered. That is the opposite of fear-mongering. Even while answering the question, the prime minister was dismissing it as a likelihood. The people who are pretending the prime minister is trying to fear-monger about this are either acting in bad faith or they’re too dumb to know what an extreme tail risk is. It doesn’t look good on them in any scenario.
Third, and we can’t believe how many people seem to have forgotten this, we knew about this already. The Globe and Mail reported many months ago that the Canadian Armed Forces had looked at some contingency plans in case of hostile military action by the United States. This was kind of a big deal when it was reported. It was talked about for weeks. Here at The Line, Matt Gurney wrote a column about it. Remember?
All the prime minister said to The New York Times last week was that it had been considered and that he considered it unlikely to occur. Nothing was new.
Fourth, and we think this is the part that pisses us off the most, is that the prime minister is being attacked for having received a briefing that was 100 per cent the military’s job and indeed obligation to provide for him. One of the reasons the Canadian Armed Forces have so often proven to be Canada’s only competent federal agency in recent years is precisely because, as a matter of its daily routine operations, it operates a constant threat-awareness and analysis operation. Taking a look at everything that is happening around the world, wondering what it could mean for us, and thinking through how we would respond to a variety of scenarios is literally a major part of the military’s job. It does not mean that it considers any of these individual threats to be likely. It means that the military, and God bless them, knows it’s their job to be prepared for the worst things that could possibly happen, most of which are, by default, unlikely. We’re going to echo Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander during the Second World War and later the U.S. president, who once observed that military life had taught him that plans may be useless, but planning is indispensible. This is what the military does.
We’re glad they’re doing it. Scroll up a bit. You’ll see us talking about threats against Canada and our allies that may seem remote today but must be prepared for. We want the military to be engaged in this kind of work, and our intelligence agencies and our public safety officials. This is what they are supposed to do. And they are also supposed to brief senior leadership on the threat.
Do all these morons in the media and the opposition benches not realize that they are not scoring a political hit on the prime minister here, but attacking the professional performance of our armed forces and emergency-response planners? Are they so desperate for today’s social media win that they do not even realize that they are not targeting Carney, but the security and defence officials who work every day to keep Canadians safe?
Perhaps most depressing of all, and we wish we hadn’t even thought of this, is that they probably do know, but simply don’t care. Because trying to take a bit of Carney’s shine off is worth more to them than standing up for our armed forces and the country as a whole.
Let us be very honest with you. We are not comfortable making a full-throated defence of the prime minister. It’s not really our job. It’s a bit out of character.
But The Line exists, as it always has, to call out bullshit. And this is bullshit. It needs to be said that it is bullshit plainly and loudly and often. This is not about Mark Carney or the Liberal party. It is about taking the country seriously enough to agree that no matter who is prime minister and what party they may belong to, they have an obligation to accept and take seriously the briefings on the various threats to this country.
That’s why we have governments and have militaries. The PM’s answer was calibrated correctly and spoke honestly to the issue at hand. That so many Canadians, who ought to know better, either don’t know or don’t care, is a very bleak sign of how badly brain rotted so much of this country is. And that, alas, is not a tail risk. It’s the current state of play.
Quebecers go to the polls in a week, in a provincial election that is looking a bit more interesting than it did when premier Christine Fréchette, leader of the governing CAQ, triggered an election at the end of August. Unlike the last election, which was dominated by the question of Quebec identity and immigration, no single issue has dominated this campaign. There has been a lot of talk about affordability, the cost of living, and improving public services, and there is a very generalized sense that there needs to be a change from the CAQ, who have been in power since 2018. But looming behind everything has been the ongoing trade war with the United States, and in particular, Donald Trump’s repeated threats to make Canada into the 51st state.
Early in the campaign, it looked like the Trump effect in Quebec might mirror that of the federal election in April 2025, which saw the Liberals under Mark Carney storm back from what looked like a complete wipeout at the hands of the CPC. In the end, Canadians decided that if push came to shove, Carney was probably a better bet for defending Canada’s interest than Pierre Poilievre. And so for a few days at the beginning, Fréchette and the CAQ found themselves running neck and neck with the Parti Québécois and their leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, aka PSPP.
But the pre-election trendlines soon reasserted themselves, and for weeks now the polls have been pretty much stuck, with the PQ running around 29 per cenet, the CAQ and the Liberals around 22 per cent, and the Conservatives at 15 per cent. Because of the way the voters are bunched up in the province the electoral math is looking a bit sketch, but it is possible that PQ could end with with a majority government with under 30 per cent of the popular vote.
So where does Trump fit in? Early in the campaign, in response to the Trump factor mentioned above, PSPP declared that he would not hold a referendum on sovereignty so long as Trump remained in office. His aim seemed to be to give leery voters permission to vote PQ and not have to worry about Trump taking advantage of political uncertainty and weakness in the province, and by extension, the federation. And while it seems to have succeeded in improving the PQ’s polling, the spectre of foreign interference is looming once again in the campaign’s final stretch.
Last Friday, a story broke in the Journal de Montréal that Ottawa had privately warned Fréchette’s government about a report from an obscure American think tank, the Defense Analyses and Research Corporation (DARC), floating funding for the PQ and “psychological operations” meant to stoke Quebec separatism. Fréchette went before the cameras looking suitably grave, said she’d reached out to Carney, and confirmed her government had briefed CSIS. For about a day, it was the most dramatic story of the campaign: Donald Trump, meddling in a Quebec election to help the separatists win.
Except the story turned out to be mostly theatre, and CAQ-produced theatre, at that. A Radio-Canada investigation revealed that Fréchette’s own team had these DARC documents in hand as early as September 12. They spent the following 10 days shopping them to journalists, hoping someone would write about the PQ’s supposed American connections, before finally deciding that the material was serious enough to alert CSIS. CSIS’s own response, apparently, was that the documents were already public: they date to late 2025 and February 2026, and had already been referenced in the Globe and Mail and Le Devoir back in March. So this wasn’t a fresh intelligence disclosure. It was recycled material the CAQ sat on for over a week while trying to place it with friendly media.
The problem is, the underlying anxiety isn’t coming out of nowhere. As Antoine Robitaille pointed out in the Journal de Québec, there’s a long and genuinely strange history here: the RCMP and CIA spied on the PQ in the 1970s over suspected French backing; Bill Clinton nudged the 1995 referendum from the federalist side; and now Trump’s annexationist bluster has flipped the valence entirely, with some Trumpists apparently seeing an independent Quebec as a way to do to Canada what Putin has done to Belarus. Robitaille’s point is that this makes sovereigntists newly vulnerable to a familiar smear in a new guise — from “Cuba du Nord” to “République MAGA.” It does not help that PSPP’s own occasional use of Trumpian talking points gives the insinuation just enough plausibility to stick.
It is clear that the CAQ’s clumsy amplification was intended to sow the precise doubts PSPP’s no-referendum pledge was designed to foreclose. At the very least, Fréchette has “Trump and the PQ” as a live question again. Whether that’s enough to arrest the PQ’s lead, or whether voters simply shrug at a scandal that reporters have already tracked back to its origins in the CAQ’s own war room, remains to be seen.
Thanks, everyone. Talk to you soon.
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Good column. It is also worth noting that the NYT amplified and distorted Carney's remark in an effort to pursue their own political agenda regarding the Trump administration (Trump so bad even the peaceful cousin to the north has to fear an American invasion). But their amplification does not excuse the political opposition from their own distortion. And I echo the comment about the absence of any BC election commentary.
You are right to mention that PM Carney answered the question about US invasion scenarios honestly and reasonably. It would be nice if he used some of that honesty when dealing with his own subjects. This isn’t the first time he has used US Media to communicate. Perhaps he’s honest because US media and commentators -,even the NY Times - do not tolerate obfuscation and word salads as much as the bought and paid for Canadian media and her majesty’s loyal opposition.
Having said that, to my knowledge almost all such interviews are based on agreed upon questions in advance. So raising anew the topic of a US invasion gives the PM a perfect opportunity to wrap himself and his party in the Maple Leaf flag and also benefit the Quebec federalist parties. What’s not to like. His recent hirings of American Democratic advisers seem to be paying off quite nicely.