Dispatch from the Front Lines: Winner, winner, lobster dinner.
Tim Houston takes the lead in becoming The Line's Captain Canada. Also: a new man for Canada in Washington, nudging our Trump Alarm a notch higher, and heartbreak in the Middle East.
Happy Sunday, Line readers. Lots to get into today. We won’t make you wait for it.
First up, enjoy our latest episode of The Line Podcast.
Also enjoy last week’s episode of On The Line, with Matt Gurney interviewing Canadian entrepreneur Daniel Debow.
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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 in earlier dispatches, we’ve been monitoring the news and looking for signs that Canada is responding with some urgency and intelligence to the threats being issued by U.S. President Donald Trump. Since he announced our 30-day reprieve on tariffs on February 3rd, we’ve been listing positive developments in our weekly dispatches. This is our third since the reprieve, and we haven’t had a lot to offer thus far. We have been underwhelmed.
We don’t often get to put good news in these dispatches, and we want you to know that that takes a toll on us, as we suspect it might take on you.
The news is a bit different today. We aren’t yet in a place to declare victory, but we are in the happy place of being able to report some positive developments.
And for this, The Line wishes to explicitly thank Tim Houston, premier of Nova Scotia.
Last week, Line editor Gurney wrote a column titled I Hereby Propose The Ice Bucket Challenge for National Survival. In it, he suggested adapting the 2010 social media campaign, which sought to raise money for ALS research: people dumped a bucket of ice on their heads and then dared someone else to do the same, while also making a donation to a charity or institute focused on searching for a cure. Gurney’s challenged a provincial premier — his pick was Danielle Smith of Alberta — to preemptively and unilaterally cut barriers to internal trade.
Gurney had proposed that a premier begin by unilaterally harmonizing five or 10 regulations with another province, and then daring that province to then reciprocate, and nominate a third province. And so on and so on. Several astute and clever Line readers, people in positions to know how the sausage is made in Canadian public policy, privately suggested that this was the right idea, but that Gurney had proposed a needlessly cumbersome way to do it. Far better, our friends told us, for provinces to simply begin declaring that they were prepared to recognize products and professionals already recognized by another province. For instance, if your product is deemed fit for sale in Ontario, it could be fit for sale in Manitoba. If you were licensed to practice professionally in a regulated field in British Columbia, you should be able to practice in that same field in New Brunswick.
That is essentially what Houston has proposed. And he has, delightfully, found a way to incorporate that Ice Bucket Challenge spirit Gurney wanted to see.
Here’s how the Canadian Press summed it up:
Houston said the bill — which has yet to be tabled but will be called the Free Trade and Mobility Within Canada Act — would allow Canadian goods and services to be sold in Nova Scotia without the need for further testing or red tape in the province. Workers like roofers, teachers and health-care providers would be among those who benefit from the changes, he said.
However, the lifting of restrictions would only apply to provinces and territories that pass similar legislation, and Houston called on them to follow Nova Scotia’s lead.
We love this. It’s fantastic. It is an elegant way of making a big step, and it also captures that little bit of competitive spirit we are so eager to see Canadians demonstrate.
And we want to do our part, within our limited means. On our latest The Line Podcast, Gurney and Gerson made this pledge, and we’re putting it into writing: if Houston does follow through and gets this legislation passed, your Line editors will fly to Halifax, throw a party, and present the premier with a plaque.
We mean it.
There’s only one catch. We’re going to issue that same offer to every province. And the winner will be the one who gets it done first. Not a proposal. Not a bill. But a piece of legislation that is passed into law.
Right now, Nova Scotia has the lead. And we would love to go hang out in Halifax, one of Canada’s great cities, preferably before lobster season ends. But this offer is open to every province and territory. We will fly to any corner of this country to present any leader with a plaque. First premier with a passed law wins.
Premier Houston, we love lobster, we love Halifax, we love the smell of sea air. We love Nova Scotia and Nova Scotians. Please, move fast on this. We hope to see you soon.
Further to the above, we had two other audience-submitted suggestions for our list of things Canada is doing to harden itself as fast as possible. We’re going to accept one and add it to the list. We’re going to reject the other, but we still laud it.
The item we are accepting: B.C. is fast-tracking proposed natural resource projects, explicitly in response to Trump’s threats. We accept this onto the list with some reluctance — announcements are easy, execution is hard. So. We’re going to accept this onto the list provisionally, and we’re going to check back in three-month increments to monitor their progress.
Consider yourself on notice, Premier Eby. Do you want Houston to get a plaque while you get a chewing out? We didn’t think so.
The item we’re rejecting is Quebec seeking to expand the capacity at the Port of Montreal. We’re in favour of this! But having read about it, it’s clear to us that this is just a pre-existing project working its way through the oh-so-slow process, and not a new response to recent developments. We hope it happens and goes smoothly! But we can’t add it to the list.
But! We value your input. Keep ‘em coming!
For those keeping track, the list, total, now stands at 3.5 items.
New money announced for the Port of Churchill.
Nova Scotia’s variant of the Ice Bucket Challenge for National Survival, with legislation expected imminently. (We will be watching that.)
B.C.’s efforts to fast-track resource projects. (Also watching.)
Our half point is Canada appointing a fentanyl czar (our thoughts on that were in last week’s dispatch).
Keep your nominations coming, and, please, politicians. Hurry up!