Most political strategists will privately confess that slogans don’t win votes. They may not move them at all.

Still, slogans do useful but private work. Their real job is internal, as they keep the troops pointed the same way and hand the militants a flag to carry. Spend an afternoon knocking on doors, and you’ll notice that the voter on the porch has no idea what the party’s slogan is. They’ve got opinions, grievances, a mortgage, a view on the leader. But the tagline the war room agonized over never made it up the front steps.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Ask people about the slogans of Canada’s major banks (which spend a fortune repeating the same handful of words over a much longer timeframe than any campaign) and you get very little accurate recall, with the possible exception of Scotiabank’s “You’re richer than you think.” What we remember is usually warm, vague, and out of date.

So slogans barely register with the people they’re aimed at, which makes what happens each election cycle in Quebec genuinely strange.

The writ had barely dropped before I’d read three separate analyses of the same five phrases.

La Presse asked Alain Lavigne at Université Laval, and Radio-Canada asked Bernard Motulsky at UQAM and Martine St-Victor at Edelman. Between them, they delivered full semiotic breakdowns of «Avançons», «C’est possible», «Oser pour vrai», «Le choix de la confiance» and the mouthful «Rassembler. Réparer. Bâtir.»

Motulsky himself concedes, mid-breakdown, that a campaign is never won on a slogan.

Five slogans voters probably won’t remember — and commentators delivering their expert analysis anyway.

So why does the thing that matters least to voters get so much expert scrutiny?

My hypothesis is that Quebec takes its own communication very seriously. It treats creativity, and especially homegrown creativity, as a point of collective pride. Quebec built a real advertising culture, with its own mythology. A political slogan, to many in the province, gets treated as a small act of national self-expression. And just as Quebecers grade the ads that run during Radio-Canada’s year-end Bye Bye, we happily grade the slogans.

Which is the real fun. So let me grade them too.

«Le choix de la confiance» — PQ.

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon is borrowing from the péquiste’s archives: Lucien Bouchard’s «J’ai confiance», 1998. It’s a two-sided coin. It’s about him leading most polls as “best leader,” so trust is his strongest card. And it’s an accusation. You can’t trust the Liberals (ethics). And you can’t trust the CAQ (they changed leaders mid-stream). Confidence as both a virtue and a weapon.

«Avançons» — CAQ.

Over the years, the CAQ has turned the one-word imperative into a house style: «Maintenant» in 2018, «Continuons» in 2022, «Avançons» today. Same franchise, refreshed. The clever part is the distance. Christine Fréchette needs to be Legault’s successor without being his echo, and a verb lets her do exactly that: no nostalgia, no repudiation, just momentum.

«Rassembler. Réparer. Bâtir.» — PLQ.

Three verbs, because someone couldn’t choose one. The charitable reading is that this is a tidy synthesis of the platform, an appeal to reason. Maybe. But a slogan you have to memorize in the correct order is a to-do list, not a slogan. For a leader most Quebecers still couldn’t pick out of a lineup, that asks a lot of voters.

«C’est possible» — QS.

The pre-emptive strike, and my favourite bit of strategy in the bunch. Québec solidaire’s chronic knock is that its ideas are lovely and unaffordable. So the slogan answers the heckler before he stands up. It doesn’t solve feasibility but it relocates the argument somewhere friendlier. It also rhymes with history: «Oui, c’est possible» from the 1995 referendum, and a certain “Yes we can” from 2008.

«Oser pour vrai» — PCQ.

This one fits Éric Duhaime perfectly. He built a career on saying the quiet part out loud, and oser delivers on brand. The word vrai is an authenticity flex, and it implies everyone else is faking. It’s the register of right-leaning insurgents the world over.

You can see the genre. The words rotate; the appetite for parsing them never dims.

Which brings me back to where I started. None of this will decide the election. The analysts said as much themselves. But the sheer volume of ink we spill on five short phrases says less about the five parties than it does about Quebec. A small nation that still believes words are worth fighting over. So it passionately checks the craftsmanship.

What was clear one minute past midnight Saturday took on a surreal quality on Sunday when the front page of this newspaper declared Canada and the U.S. were in an “ALL-OUT TRADE WAR”, in the type size usually saved for moon landings and assassinations.

Trump had just reached for Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 and dropped 50 percent tariffs on $28 billion of Canadian exports. Carney, not one for hyperbole, said Canada had been attacked.

We are rightly consumed by this. But cross the border and this gets reduced to mostly a business item, between weather and sports. Most Americans have no idea their government is at war with its oldest friend. The few who noticed will think we’re the difficult ones, squabbling over hockey sticks, bourbon, and two-by-fours. Which is why the decisive front in this war is the American mind.

Let’s call it what it is: war propaganda.

One of the propagandists who did it best was Sefton Delmer. In 1941, the British government mandated him to get inside the head of the German soldier and turn him against his own leadership. Delmer’s first station didn’t pretend to be British. That was the genius. Instead, it posed as an underground German broadcast, run by a character listeners came to know as der Chef - a foul-mouthed Wehrmacht patriot enraged not by the war but by the party bosses bleeding the Fatherland. He never argued against the war but raged about the rot behind it in Berlin. He wasn’t trying to make Germans stop fighting. He was trying to make them despise the men they were fighting for.

Then Delmer built a more sophisticated version. He put the best dance music on the dial and, alongside it, scrupulously accurate news. Real bombing damage. Real troop movements. More reliable than anything Goebbels was serving.

You see why I dwell on him. The lesson from Delmer is that he didn’t beat the truth with lies, he weaponized it instead. He knew you couldn’t demoralize a man who’s decided you’re a liar. Credibility is the weapon.

Which brings me to a television commercial. Ontario put Ronald Reagan on American TV, warning in his own 1987 voice that tariffs “hurt every American worker and consumer.” Edited, yes. But not fake. Reagan’s own words, his own sentiment. Just a Republican saint telling Republicans the truth.

Trump’s first reaction was a nod: “If I was Canada, I’d take that same ad also.” The tantrum came two days later. He killed the talks and added 10 percent. What enraged him wasn’t that the ad lied, it’s that it didn’t.

So we apologized, pulled the ad, and eventually crawled back to the negotiating table. The one that flipped over Friday night.

The real question isn’t whether Canada should fight. We are in a fighting mood. But it’s an inward campaign with Canadians persuading Canadians of what they already believe.

The higher-value campaign is an outward one, across the border. As important as elbows up are, galvanized Canadians can do nothing to Trump. But demoralized Americans can, because the American paying more for groceries and the truck he can’t afford gets to vote in November. The midterms are one of a few pressure valves Trump can’t tariff his way out of.

Within hours of the tariffs landing, California Governor Gavin Newsom posted seven words no Canadian ad could match: “What the actual fuck are we doing?” New York’s Kathy Hochul called it “needlessly picking fights with our allies and raising prices here at home.” It’s Americans saying what we’d want said, better than we could.

We need no invented dissident. We only need to amplify what Reagan said and what other Americans are saying and help them carry it to the ballot box.

Impolite? Perhaps. Foreign interference? No more than the daily sermons of Pete Hoekstra — the U.S. ambassador 200,000 Canadians want expelled for exactly that.

Last time, we apologized. This time, we should take Trump’s advice.

Years ago, while moderating focus groups in Montreal, I would work through the usual questions about Weston sliced bread. Yes, there is a Weston-branded bread in Quebec. The professionally recruited participants were loyal buyers. Many had used it for years for tartines and sandwiches.

More than a few of them called it “Western.”

Not once but repeatedly with total confidence. I’d even probe to make sure I was hearing it correctly.

Marketers spend a great deal of time and money fussing over wordmarks, packaging, and other elements of the “equity” of a brand. And here were the brand’s most devoted customers perfectly content to call it something else.

I thought about them when Pollara released its survey on the awareness of federal political leaders.

Most polls that claim to measure name recognition tend to make it easy on respondents. They read a leader’s name aloud and ask how you feel. If you have no clue, they offer you to say I don’t know.

This captures recognition, not recall.

Pollara did the harder thing through open-ended questions where you type the name yourself.

It asked 2,023 Canadians a simple question: Do you know who the leader is of the federal Conservative Party of Canada?

57% of Canadians could name Pierre Poilievre. Barely more than half could retrieve his name unaided. That’s the Leader of the Official Opposition who has spent years being ubiquitous, quoted, clipped, and parsed by people like us every single day.

And Pollara were “generous markers.” They counted “Pierre Polisher,” “Pierre Police,” “Poli-somebody,” “Paul Pollivierre,” and my personal favourite, “Poliver (if he’s still in charge?).” Someone wrote “P P” and got the mark.

Even with that generosity, 43% couldn’t name him, including a few who confidently offered “Ford,” “Stephen Harper,” and the beautifully honest “I know his face.”

It’s blurry recognition without recall. And that’s the political cousin of the Weston buyer.

It’s a reminder that the elaborate message architecture we build - things like the positioning, the pivots, the carefully staged announcements— lands on a far smaller attentive audience than we flatter ourselves into believing. The rest are making toast.

The tired grey sedan is wearing two fleur-de-lis flags, two Canadian flags, and, for reasons I cannot easily explain, an Armenian flag. The doors carry two large-sized decals of a grinning Pierre Poilievre under the tagline “LET’S BRING BACK COMMON SENSE TO CANADA.” This is surrounded by a dozen smaller Poilievre headshots. There’s a “CarneyWatch.ca” sticker. That’s worth a visit. There’s what appears to be a homemade “MC START PACKING” sticker. There’s something that may say “MC MUST GO.” And there’s an odd “PIERRE POILIEVRE PREMIER MINISTRE” sign in the back window like a garage-sale price tag. And that’s only what I can see.

According to the Angus Reid Institute’s numbers out this month, Poilievre’s favourability in Quebec sits at 23 percent. It’s the lowest of any region measured, trailing even his brutal national number of 33. Mark Carney, by contrast, is sitting at 58 percent approval in the province. Voting intention for the CPC in Quebec is 18 percent. It’s dead last, well behind the Liberals (41), and behind the Bloc (29).

Some say that it’s not the size of the crowd that matters, it’s the intensity.

Well, Quebec is running the experiment, and the results aren’t great.

One sedan owner and voter, who is presumably a man of tremendous conviction, driving around with the enthusiasm of someone who has personally decided to compensate single-handedly for those who do not share his ardour.

I don’t say this to mock the fellow’s passion. I work in an industry built on trying to manufacture a tenth of that presumably unpaid loyalty. But intensity can only be a part of the strategy.

When your best case study for “small but mighty” is a single vehicle covered with decals, you may like to think that you have found your superfan and he’s contagious. But what you’ve found is your ceiling.

I spent the Fourth of July at a parade in an affluent Dallas neighbourhood. Patriotism was in full ceremonial dress.

And not one red MAGA hat to be seen.

Dallas is a blue city in a red state. But head north and the blue gradually pales until you hit Highland Park. It’s the first significant patch of red on the electoral map and home to the wealthiest ZIP code in Texas. The vote was all around me at that parade but the red hats weren’t.

The hat, it turns out, comes in two versions.

The first is the one we all know. It’s the hardcore believer’s hat. Its wearers think Trump is a genius, or at least a winner, in business, politics, and in life. And they’re not wrong. A man who read the mood correctly when no one else did is a kind of genius. They’re just wrong about what kind.

The second hat is not as obvious. You can buy it online in the same colour and shape, but the white embroidery reads: Relax Snowflake, It’s a Red Hat.

Worn with a smirk, mostly in private, it says: I’m not a believer. I’m in on the joke. But I’m fine being a beneficiary.

Its wearers, and I’d wager that parade route was thick with them, will tell you that Trump is not what he appears. They say that it’s all an act and that underneath the chaos there’s a strategy to get important things done. And they say that people like me, afflicted with TDS, just don’t get it. I’ve heard it.

And every time I hear this from American friends, I think of the movie Being There.

Chance the Gardener, played by Peter Sellers, is a simple man who talks about gardens. But the Washington establishment hears economic metaphors and geopolitical wisdom. Chance never lies. Everyone else does the work, projecting.

Chance is an empty vessel with no appetites. Trump’s are obvious. The “he’s playing chess” crowd isn’t projecting onto a blank canvas, they’re just dismissing anything that contradict the theory. Or, as I’ve heard some acknowledge: “sure, there’s the blatant grift but look at what he’s accomplishing.” Jerzy Kosinski would have recognized them anyway. His satire was never about Chance. It was about Rand, the richest man in the film, and the most thoroughly fooled.

This is the difference between a brand and a movement. A brand answers the question what’s in it for me, and my business? A movement answers a different one: what’s in it for us? The believers bought a movement. The Relax Snowflake crowd only ever bought a brand. Which is why their loyalty behaves like customer retention rather than faith. They’re running a wager and will suspend disbelief as long as the product delivers the tax treatment, the deregulation, the curbing of immigration, etc. And they’re laughing at a joke those in the movement aren’t in on.

A faith has no expiry date. And deliverables like recognition, vindication, and the feeling of being seen are challenging to audit. But a wager can when a tariff shows up in your input costs or a trade war and a real one in Iran show up in your Q3. A wager has settlement dates and the midterms are one.

Nobody in that Dallas crowd will burn a hat they never wore in public. Nor will they call a press conference to announce their bet went bad. Lapsed customers rarely do. They just don’t renew. The loudest political shifts often arrive as a paler shade of red on a map visible only later.

Being There ends with Chance walking on water while the establishment whispers about running him for president. The believers see genius. The wagerers see a trick. Nobody in the frame thinks to ask whether the pond is simply shallow.

But every so often, somebody checks the depth. That’s what midterms are for.

You’re driving home to Ontario on a Friday night after a week in Michigan and surrounding states. The crossings were painless, thanks to your Nexus card. You met customers and landed a few purchase orders. You did what Canadian entrepreneurs still do, building a business across the border. The drive home over the new Gordie Howe Bridge, the one Canada financed and Washington held hostage, was as smooth as it was symbolic.

That night, at the kitchen table, you open the cloud-based accounting software you migrated to years ago because everyone said it was smarter than keeping things on your desktop. It won’t load. The message confirms that it’s not a glitch. This service is no longer available to Canadian users. The entire financial backbone of your business, including your invoices, payroll, tax records, is now locked away.

This hasn’t happened. But the bridge just showed us it could.

Because the bridge saga was never really about tolls or traffic. It was a demonstration of force by the President of the United States who held a piece of essential, Canadian-funded infrastructure hostage to extract concessions. He got his way, so he’ll do it again. The question is what’s next.

Years ago, I handled Quebec advertising for a major American provider of domain names and web hosting. In focus groups, small business owners grew visibly anxious when they learned the company was American. “What if my website goes down? Who do I call?” We took it as concern about customer service and language. Yet what they sensed, without quite articulating it, was a loss of control. They feared that something essential to their livelihood could end up beyond their reach and Canadian laws. What sounded like paranoia back then was prescience.

Consider what actually runs Canadian daily life. Hospital electronic medical records overwhelmingly managed by American companies, with no robust domestic alternative waiting in the wings. Prescription drugs such as insulin, cancer treatments, and antibiotics flowing through American supply chains. The software running millions of small businesses. These are not inconveniences if they’re no longer available in Canada. They are shutdowns with no readily available workaround.

This may sound dystopian but think twice about the era we’re in.

We’ve seen the movie version a hundred times in which the villain seizes the power grid and the city goes dark. The same villain could pull the plug, or forced others to pull it, on the digital and supply-chain infrastructure of modern Canadian life. The switch sits in the hands of American companies answering to an American president who has already shown he’ll flip it.

Even the Government of Canada runs on cloud infrastructure it does not ultimately control. Taxes, immigration, benefits are processed on platforms owned by companies subject to American law. And the men who own those companies have been publicly courting the White House. And since their American business dwarfs anything Canada represents, if they’re asked to sacrifice Canada to protect themselves at home, they would fold.

If making America great again fails at home, making America bigger becomes the legacy play. We should not forget that this is a president who rebranded the Gulf of Mexico and mused openly about Greenland and making Canada his 51st state.

Ottawa knows this and is acting accordingly. Mark Carney is criss-crossing the globe signing agreements to diversify our economy. Sovereign cloud initiatives are finally underway at home. That work is necessary. But its timeline takes years, perhaps a decade, while the bridge just demonstrated that the vulnerability can be weaponized tomorrow.

Nobody worried about a calendar rollover until someone called it Y2K and made the stakes visible. The bridge is a Y2K moment for Canada. Building big things is fine. But what are we doing, right now, about building the smart things that keep Canada from being switched off by someone who won’t hesitate to do it and pressure others to do the same.

Type coalitionavenirquebec.org into your browser this week and you’ll be hard pressed to find the Coalition Avenir Québec. The homepage now belongs to “Équipe Christine Fréchette,” full stop.

The party that has governed Quebec since 2018 has vanished from its own storefront, though not, you’ll notice, from the address bar.

The disappearing act isn’t just cosmetic. On July 9, Élections Québec authorized a change to the party’s registered name. It is now, officially, Équipe Christine Fréchette – Coalition avenir Québec.

The leader’s name comes first. The party is the suffix.

In brand architecture terms, this is a reversal worth discussing.

For thirteen years, the registered name was Coalition avenir Québec – L’équipe François Legault. It used the CAQ as masterbrand, and the founder as a sort of appendix.

Now the hierarchy has flipped. Fréchette is the brand and the CAQ is the legacy descriptor.

Nothing about the leader-as-team construction is novel. The CAQ bolted Legault’s name onto the party in June 2012, months before its first election, and it has appeared on every ballot the party has ever contested.

What’s novel is the motive. In 2012, the founder’s name was added to lend equity to an unknown party. In 2026, the founder’s name has been removed to shed equity from a very well-known one.

You don’t demote a masterbrand that’s working.

Three months into her premiership, with an October election looming, Fréchette’s team has concluded that thirteen years of CAQ brand equity is now a liability and that the surest path to re-election is to run as something new against a record that is, inconveniently, their own.

But there’s a problem with shedding equity in a hurry. The paint dries faster than the plumbing. The website’s own brand-assets page where you download the shiny new “Équipe Christine Fréchette” logo in CMYK and blanc sits at coalitionavenirquebec.org. The old name lingers in the assets, the documents, the digital infrastructure of a party that spent thirteen years building it. Any brand consultant will tell you a rebrand is only as complete as its least glamorous touchpoint. This one stops at the homepage.

And there’s one touchpoint no communications team can reach at all. Quebec’s Election Act puts the party’s authorized name on the ballot, in full. So in October, in the privacy of the voting booth, every Quebecer will read the words “Coalition avenir Québec” one more time. It’ll be right there after the dash, like the ingredient the manufacturer would rather you not notice.

At CANSEC, Canada’s biggest military trade show, the CEO of Germany’s Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems offered the most honest quote of the entire submarine procurement. Oliver Burkhard looked at the orange Hanwha billboards blanketing Canadian airports, the digital boards, the television spots narrated by Peter Mansbridge in English and Pierre Bruneau in French and said: “This is nuts, honestly.”

Burkhard runs a publicly traded German industrial group. That comes with quarterly reporting, supervisory boards, and engineering conservatism. Inside that governance system, his verdict is correct. You’d be nuts to spend that kind of money on advertising to pitch government decision-makers.

The decision is now public. The contract for up to twelve conventionally powered submarines — a program valued at some $70 billion over its life — went to the Germans and their Type 212CD, the boat already operated by Germany and Norway. It’s the NATO choice.

Which makes the Korean campaign look, on its face, like the most expensive failed pitch in the history of Canadian defence procurement. Airport takeovers. Broadcast television. Streaming. YouTube. The two most trusted news voices in the country reading submarine copy to an audience that will never be consulted on which boat the Royal Canadian Navy buys.

On the surface, it’s the wrong audience, media and playbook.

Or so goes the conventional analysis.

The Navy said both boats would do the job. The Prime Minister confirmed both proposals met the requirements. On industrial benefits, Hanwha signed more than 80 agreements with Canadian companies against 18 for the Germans — better than four to one — and Minister Joly still described the two packages as “très comparables.” When one bidder out-partners the other four to one and the official scorecard calls it a tie, the decision isn’t being made on that scorecard.

It was being made on the one axis, geography, where Germany couldn’t be matched. Ottawa has spent the past year diversifying away from American suppliers, becoming the first non-European country to join Europe’s defence-procurement pact, opening talks with Sweden’s Saab for Arctic surveillance aircraft. The current was running toward Europe before the submarine evaluation was finished.

The Germans could read that current. It may explain their most interesting strategic choice: virtual silence. Throughout two years of competition, TKMS refused to join what Le Devoir called the surenchère de séduction. In a category where the product’s entire value proposition is stealth, the quiet bidder is on-brand. The German communications posture mirrored their submarine. Meanwhile, Hanwha’s mirrored a Super Bowl launch.

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So why did the Koreans do it?

Because Hanwha could read the current too. Nobody spends that kind of money believing airport billboards will flip a NATO procurement. The Koreans surely knew that with the subs judged equal and the industrial benefits declared equal, Canada would choose the European partner. They ran the campaign anyway. Which tells you the campaign was never really about this contract.

Consider what the company is. Hanwha is a chaebol. It’s one of those sprawling, family-controlled Korean conglomerates in the mould of Samsung and LG, still steered by its founding family into the third generation. It began in 1952 as Korea Explosives. The name itself abbreviates “Korean gunpowder.” Today it spans defence, aerospace, shipbuilding, solar, insurance, hotels. That family control is the mechanism that freed Samsung to bet a decade on semiconductors. It’s the same structure that frees Hanwha to bet a decade on Canada. And the bets have form. Hanwha didn’t build a submarine business, it bought Daewoo Shipbuilding whole and became a global naval player overnight. It has already cracked European NATO markets with multi-billion-dollar artillery deals in Poland and Romania. When this company enters a market, it does not dip a toe.

And Seoul has declared a national ambition to rank among the world’s top defence exporters by decade’s end, with state money and diplomacy behind it. Hanwha’s Canadian CEO — Glenn Copeland, a former Royal Canadian Navy officer, which tells you something about their homework — said openly that the goal was for Hanwha to become a household name here, like Kia or Hyundai. Not “to win the submarine contract.” A household name.

I’ve seen this movie before. Early in my career, I worked around a Korean brand called GoldStar — cheap camcorders and televisions, advertised with a heaviness wildly disproportionate to the margins on a $499 VCR. GoldStar wasn’t selling camcorders. It was introducing itself. A decade later it rebranded as LG, bought Zenith, moved upmarket, and today it sits in your kitchen and your pocket. The camcorder ads weren’t the campaign. They were the down payment.

Hanwha just made the same down payment, in orange, at scale, and bought three things with it. First, Germany has been selected, but the negotiations ahead are long, and if they falter, there is now a fully credentialed alternative that every official in Ottawa can name. Second, they’ve secured pole position for what comes next — artillery, armoured vehicles, the procurements a rearming Canada has only begun. Third, and cheapest of all per impression: a brand that now exists in Canada, in both official languages, for everything else a chaebol sells, including solar panels, insurance, whatever crosses the Pacific next.

In my agency days, we sometimes pitched accounts we knew we couldn’t win, because the room was full of people who would sit in other rooms, at other tables, deciding other things. You lose the pitch. You keep the introduction.

The Germans won the contract by maintaining virtual silence. The Koreans spent lavishly on a loss they could see coming, because the loss was never the point.

Nuts? Only if you think the campaign ended with this week’s announcement.

On the 250th anniversary of American independence, brands predictably want in by making a statement about the country. Coca-Cola has done exactly that, and it’s a pretty good ad.

A sweating glass bottle dominates the page with the Statue of Liberty reflected in the curve of the glass. The copy runs through the American century. It covers how black-and-white turned to colour, the space program, Route 66, and sea to shining sea. Then it does something most institutions struggle to manage. It sets the civil-rights movement down in the same enumeration. No grievance, atonement, or asterisk.

The music line, with its reference to blues, bluegrass, metal, disco, reggaeton, and banda is the melting pot in rhythm. Black, white Appalachian, suburban, Puerto Rican, Mexican. Coca-Cola has spent more than a century as the closest thing the United States has to a secular sacrament. It’s the drink that bottled the American dream. If any brand has earned the right to narrate the country on its birthday, it is the one that taught the world to sing.

Somewhere a copywriter with a sociology degree met a brand manager. The ad speaks of “the collective effervescence of our dreams.” Collective effervescence is Émile Durkheim’s term — the French sociologist who spent a career studying how societies hold themselves together — for the shared charge that turns a crowd into a society, or a people into a tribe. On this 250th birthday of the nation, Coca-Cola is nominating itself as the ritual that binds. And, to make that clear, the sign-off tells each American that “you’re the real thing.”

It is a confident statement about what America is. However, if the country is so sure of itself, why can’t the people it celebrates find it so hard to agree with one another?

Consider when an independent commission was created a few years ago to study the state of American democracy using focus groups across the country. Participants from across the political spectrum had been quick to identify sources of division but they struggled to name the things that united them as Americans. The commissioners, believing the country needed a shared narrative, were at odds with one another as to what it should be. And so they invited a few outsiders to help.

Yoni Appelbaum, the deputy executive editor of The Atlantic, was one of them. He described the scene in the magazine’s July issue. Jurists, Ivy League professors, nonprofit leaders, journalists and theologians sat in a half-circle in a room in one of America’s great estates. The opening exercise was meant to be the easy one. Just name a single word that every American could still endorse.

Marketers know how this works. Own one word in people’s minds and you have something.

Appelbaum offered the word patriotism. The room recoiled. One participant flinched. One said the word made her feel excluded. Another was offended that anyone could be offended. The facilitator declined to write it on the easel.

The disagreement runs deeper than a word. The room could certainly settle on its to love of the country. The more challenging question was what exactly there was to love, and when the country had been at its best. And that is a more concerning kind of stalemate than it sounds. A nation built on blood and soil can survive an argument about its story. A nation built, as the United States insists it is, on an idea cannot, as the idea is the only thing holding it together.

The Coca-Cola ad sidesteps that problem rather than solving it. So do the postage stamps the U.S. Postal Service has issued for the same anniversary. It released thirteen images of the country “curated” by Ralph Lauren, including a barn with a flag, a vintage pickup, a lighthouse, a sailboat, a cheeseburger, and wild horses. At the centre, a knitted American flag, which is to say a Ralph Lauren sweater. They’re all images that embody “the shared values and unique fabric of our country.” Fabric. A clothier is curating the nation’s fabric. Whether the copywriter meant the pun or not, it’s the perfect word. Fabric you can nod at, the sort that takes no position. Both campaigns trade in the same currency, and it is not controversial in the least. It is Americana.

Americana is the safest material in the country. The trucks, the diners, the barns, the lighthouses, the flag on the porch are the sentimental iconography of the American past, asking nothing of anyone. Ralph Lauren built a sixty-year career on it. And Cracker Barrel stocks it by the cash register. It is the most reliably profitable aesthetic in American retail precisely because it delivers the feeling of belonging without the burden of specifics. It has become so familiar it has gone invisible. Anyone can nod along to Americana, whatever their politics, because a vintage pickup takes no position.

American greatness is another question entirely. Is the country great now? Was it greater once? Does it need to be made great “again”? Americana is the decoration but greatness requires a verdict, and the verdict is split.

The whole fracture hides inside that one word. “Again” presupposes a settled past worth returning to. And that past is precisely the Americana everyone was nodding along to a moment earlier. The same trucks and barns and flags. But the instant that imagery is asked to point somewhere, it points in two opposite directions at once. Half the country reads it as restoration. The past was the peak, and the job is to get back to it. The other half reads the identical pictures as a foundation. The country had a decent beginning, with the greatness still ahead. It’s the same nostalgia, with opposite vectors. One side sees a memory to recover. The other sees a floor to build on.

Read that way, the two ads turn out not to be neutral at all. Coca-Cola resolves the tension forward. Its imagery is pure past, but the ad closes by raising a glass “to what comes next.” It uses iconography from the past to make a forward-looking claim. It honours where the country has been, and suggests its greatness is in what it is still becoming. The Ralph Lauren stamps sit at the opposite pole without uttering a political syllable. The Postal Service’s own marketing chief said the images capture values that have united Americans “since before our nation’s founding.” That “before” points at greatness as something already achieved, preserved, and projected backward into a past older than the country itself. No “next” anywhere in sight.

Patriotism is meant to be the broad container. A love of country big and universal enough to hold the restorers and the builders alike, because both, in their fashion, love the place. “Again” loaded a direction that redefining love of country as loyalty to a particular country, the one in the past. Once that becomes the test, anyone whose love points forward fails it.

So the person who says “I love this country and its best chapter is ahead of it” no longer hears a shared term; they hear a loyalty oath to a past they are being told was better.

The country no longer has a way to say it loves America without specifying “when”. That a roomful of jurists and theologians could not bring themselves to write the word patriotism on an easel is the proof that “again” won.

It also explains why brands stay where they stay. They learned the cost of the other path the hard way. The ones that waded past Americana into a contested claim about who the country is now, and who it is for, discovered how quickly a celebration becomes a boycott. Far safer to sell the barn and the flag and let each customer supply the meaning. Americana is the last shared inheritance nobody contests, which is exactly why every brand reaches for it and almost none reach past it.

All of which leaves Coca-Cola in a strange and revealing position. It may be the last institution in America still willing to use the warm old word in its open, tenseless sense — here is the whole American past, now raise a glass to what comes next. Watching a soft-drink company attempt that where the historians and the politicians have given up is both impressive and a little sad. The ad is betting that the country can still look at its own past and read it as a beginning.

I once had a very wealthy colleague who owned an Aston Martin. That’s the four-hundred-thousand-dollar car best known as James Bond’s car. He proudly drove it everywhere. But on weekdays, he drove a Toyota Camry. That more modest vehicle, he explained, was for the office. He didn’t want clients pulling into the visitors’ lot beside an Aston Martin they were, in a roundabout way, paying for.

It was a smart move, optically. The man understood, better than most, the gap between what you own and what you let people see you owning — particularly if you need their support. In my business we’d call it brand management. Same garage, two cars, and he knew precisely which one belonged to which audience. The Aston wasn’t off-brand because it was expensive. It was off-brand at the office, where his promise was “trusted adviser,” and trusted advisers don’t bill you from behind the wheel of a Bond car.

I thought about him when Mark Carney announced that twenty-four Sussex Drive will finally be restored through a national design-and-build competition. The cost will be carried largely by donors. No single donor may contribute more than ten per cent. Every name will be made public. And a winning design is to be chosen by July 1, 2027. It is, by any honest measure, an elegant solution to one of Ottawa’s longest-running embarrassments. And as I wrote in the Toronto Star, the timing is right for this symbol of Canadian pride.

The positioning, which I’m calling selflessness as strategy, is close to flawless. Carney went out of his way to say he will never live there himself. This, he made clear, is for whoever comes next. It’s a national asset, not a personal perk, and you don’t have to like the man to respect the move.

Which brings me to Pierre Poilievre.

The leader of the Opposition is doing his job, opposing. The future of the prime minister’s residence, he told reporters, should be “the last thing on our minds” when Canadians can’t afford a place to live. It’s a good line, a predictable one, and it probably tests well among his supporters. It is also, and I want to be fair here, perfectly on-brand.

Because here is Poilievre’s brand, distilled: he notices the gap between the powerful and everyone else, and he plants himself on your side of it. That’s the whole promise. A populist is supposed to see that gap and refuse to let the comfortable forget it, and Poilievre has built his brand — for better or for worse — doing exactly that. Opposing a mansion renovation while families are priced out of the market is a textbook expression of the promise. As a piece of messaging, it’s clean.

But a brand was never just the message. The claim is the cheap part; anyone can write the line. What people actually come to believe is the proof point. That’s the thing standing behind the brand promise.

So where does Poilievre’s brand live?

It lives at Stornoway. A nineteen-room mansion in Rockcliffe Park, valued north of four million dollars, maintained by taxpayers to the tune of roughly seventy thousand dollars a year — and that’s before the periodic six-figure renovations that arrive each time a new leader moves in. When he lost his own seat in the 2025 election, his entitlement to the house actually lapsed under the Official Residences Act. He didn’t move out. Andrew Scheer, briefly the official leader, graciously let him stay until a by-election returned him to Parliament.

There it is. The disconnect. In public, Poilievre drives the Camry: modesty, restraint, the last thing on our minds. In private, he lives in the equivalent of a fancy car, and the taxpayers footing the bill are meant not to notice. The difference between him and my old colleague is that my colleague knew which car the office got to see. Poilievre is preaching humble means from the driver’s seat of the four-million-dollar car, engine running.

The irony is that Carney’s brand doesn’t quite match its address either. The man making the case for a proper home for the head of government currently lives in what the government politely calls a cottage. Same structural gap — message in one place, residence in another. But Carney’s mismatch reads as selflessness. He’s arguing for a house he insists he’ll never use. Poilievre’s reads as the opposite. It’s modesty preached from a mansion he wouldn’t leave. Same disconnect, opposite brand effect.

None of this needed to be partisan. Poilievre had an open lane to be prime ministerial. He could have said: the residence of the head of government is bigger than any one party, the donor model is sound, let’s get it done and move on. On-brand and above the fray in the same breath.

Instead he reached for the cheap shot — from inside his own taxpayer-funded mansion. Carney says he’ll never live in a rebuilt 24 Sussex. Poilievre’s response suggests he’ll never be ready to either. A leader who can’t resist the line keeps showing us he isn’t ready to hold the fresh set of keys.

I’ve served coffee and doughnuts at a Tim Hortons in Mascouche, north of Montreal.

It was a necessary requirement for a consulting assignment almost twenty years ago. I spent two days in uniform, filling orders at the counter and drive-through, and changing the pot of coffee every twenty minutes.

Aside from the relentless pace, what struck me the most was how customers talked about the staff. Almost everyone called them les filles — the girls — not dismissively, but the way you’d refer to people you see every day and genuinely like. The women behind the counter who had worked there forever, who knew people by name, remembered how they took their coffee, and asked about the kids or a recent holiday.

Most customers weren’t what Starbucks refers to as ‘familiar strangers.’ They were acquaintances. And they weren’t buying something so much as checking in with people they knew. And leaving the change to really say thank you.

That version of Tim Hortons still exists in parts of Canada. But in a lot of communities, it’s either gone or gradually disappearing.

So when the chain announced earlier this week that it planned to hire 10,000 "local team members," Canadians' ears perked up when they also paid particular attention. They learned that some 4,000 of its 110,000 Canadian employees — about 3.6 per cent — came through the Temporary Foreign Workers program. That's a national average across more than 4,000 locations, and it almost certainly masks significant variation. In some regions and some franchises, the number is likely much higher.

One could argue that this is getting much more attention than the numbers justify. If it were any other company, we wouldn’t be talking about it.

But Tim Hortons has never been treated like an ordinary employer, because for decades it worked very hard not to be perceived as one. Hockey sponsorships, small-town imagery, advertising built around familiarity and routine made the brand highly relatable. Politicians still use a stop at Timmies as shorthand for being close to their constituencies.

As a result, the brand got tied to a particular idea of Canada. One that is modest, communal, local. It worked so well that Tim Hortons didn’t just reflect Canadian identity — it started shaping it.

That’s the problem now. When a brand becomes a national symbol, people start expecting something from it that goes beyond the product. They want the experience to match the version of the country they carry around in their heads. The reaction is emotional and has less to do with the staffing decision that triggered it than with what the brand represents.

You can see this most clearly in smaller communities.

In Toronto or Vancouver, Tim Hortons is a pit stop. But in smaller communities, it still functions as a gathering place where staff know customers, customers know staff, and people linger. And because continuity matters in these relationships and daily rituals, the change is more visible.

The uncomfortable reality is that a lot of what’s driving the discomfort for many isn’t really about a hiring model. It’s about the sense that the country itself is shifting and Tim Hortons happens to be the brand those anxieties get projected onto because no other chain carries the same symbolic weight. A Subway with identical staffing practices would generate a fraction of the outrage.

None of which puts the TFW program above criticism. There are real questions about whether a system designed for temporary labour shortages has gradually become a permanent fixture of low-wage industries. But those questions apply across the entire food-service sector. Singling out Tim Hortons tells you more about the brand’s symbolic position than about its labour practices.

For a lot of Canadians, a familiar version of the country is disappearing. And it’s visibly happening in the places that once seemed to guarantee its continuity.

The brand built the mirror. Now it has to live with what Canadians see in it.

[This column was originally published in the Toronto Star on May 30, 2026]

The organizers had filled four thousand seats in Gatineau’s Centre Slush Puppie, selling thirteen-dollar tickets with all proceeds going to community organizations. Big screen, playoff game, city full of Canadiens fans ready to cheer together.

Then the NHL told them to cancel.

They had done everything right. They’d secured broadcast rights from TVA Sports. They offered to make the event free. They’d been negotiating for weeks. Everything except one thing: getting sign-off from the Ottawa Senators. And under NHL rules, they needed to.

The league’s constitution grants every franchise exclusive territorial rights within an 80-kilometre radius of its home city. It’s a standard franchise protection clause — the kind you find in any well-run licensing system. It protects broadcast revenue, sponsorship value, merchandising, and everything else that builds the local brand.

Gatineau sits five kilometres from downtown Ottawa. So on the NHL’s map, it’s Senators territory — even though it’s a francophone Quebec city of 350,000 whose residents overwhelmingly cheer for a team 200 kilometres away.

In most markets, territorial exclusivity works without anyone noticing, because the franchise boundary and the fan boundary are roughly the same thing. Gatineau is the case where they aren’t.

And the restrictions go beyond screenings. The Canadiens’ own sponsorship guidelines limit any partner’s use of team marks to a 120-kilometre radius from the Bell Centre. Outside that zone: no CH logo, no jerseys in advertising, no official marks. A brand that wants to associate with the Habs in Gatineau has to use “generic clothing/gear.”

A Senators spokesperson told Radio-Canada the team had “very, very little to do with the decision.” They didn’t veto the event. But they didn’t approve it either, and under the NHL’s framework, silence isn’t consent.

The political response was to be expected. The National Assembly voted unanimously to call on the league to reverse its decision — the kind of motion Québec’s parliamentarians don’t pass over a hockey broadcast unless something deeper has been touched. The minister of transport and Gatineau MP Steven MacKinnon called it “une erreur grave.” The mayor weighed in. A petition hit 7,700 signatures within days. Similar watch parties were happening everywhere else in Québec. Just not in the Outaouais.

There’s a broader point here for anyone who builds brands across territories.

Every franchise model, every territorial licensing agreement, every brand guideline document carries within it an implicit theory of how identity works. The NHL’s theory is that identity is a function of proximity. You cheer for the team closest to you.

But the Senators are sitting on territorial rights over a population that, at least right now, doesn’t want their product.

That’s worth remembering the next time you’re drawing lines on a map and calling them a brand’s natural market. Geography is a proxy for identity, but it’s not identity itself.

I was greeted by a floor display of Crown Royal at an LCBO outlet. It was hard to miss. Its promotional hook was clearly designed to stand out in what has become a place full of free goodies with the purchase of bottles and cans. There was no purple velvet bag but it offered a branded cowboy hat and bandana with purchase. A more recent promotion lets you scan a QR code to order a bottle with your personalized label by including a short message like “You Hold The Crown” or “King of the Game” and a person’s name. Of course, Crown Royal’s maker reserves the right to deny printing messages for any reason, including messages that could be considered obscene or in poor taste.

Talking about poor taste, or leaving a poor taste in the mouth, recall how Ontario Premier Doug Ford, not so long ago, put Crown Royal on full display.

Last September, when Diageo announced it was closing its historic bottling plant in Amherstburg and laying off over 150 workers, Ford staged a stunt. Standing at a podium, he poured out a bottle of Crown Royal, and called the corporate brass “as dumb as a bag of hammers.” The tough guy who protects Ontario delivered this ultimatum: “You hurt my people, I’m going to hurt you.”

The performance art of a slowly emptying bottle of whisky dominated the evening news. But as the whisky dried on the pavement, the situation in Amherstburg revealed the fundamental danger of the political stunt. Stunts often rely on too simple a narrative that rarely survives contact with actual governance. And when a leader says “I’m going to hurt you,” the public expects a knockout blow.

Instead, Ontario’s actual leverage wasn’t what the stunt suggested.

Ford’s threat of a retaliatory LCBO boycott was confronted with Canadian economic reality. Crown Royal was bottled in Ontario but it is mashed and distilled using grain from Manitoba, and aged and blended in Valleyfield, Quebec. Threatening Diageo had the potential to trigger an internal trade war with fellow premiers, turning Doug Ford’s worker-defence narrative into a question of national unity.

To smooth over the unfulfilled promise, Queen’s Park took a seat at the negotiating table. The resulting $23-million settlement was announced with great fanfare, framed as a triumph that would “protect jobs and invest in local supply chains.”

But that rosy Queen’s Park press release doesn’t mesh with the reality on the ground in Southwestern Ontario. The settlement didn’t save a single job in Amherstburg.

Worse, it left behind an insult for the local community. Out of $23 million, a mere $500,000 was earmarked directly for Amherstburg to mitigate a devastating economic loss. And because the province brokered the deal entirely behind closed doors without consulting municipal leaders, they accepted terms dictated by Diageo’s legal team.

As Amherstburg council minutes recently exposed, the town cannot even spend that modest compensation on its own terms. The money is locked into corporate-approved buckets like tourism and heritage, and the town is legally required to submit its chosen projects back to Diageo for “review.”

The multinational got a veto over how the town recovers, leaving the residents of Amherstburg with the hangover of Ford’s stunt.

Since the political leadership was reduced to emptying a bottle for the cameras, it needed a deal to protect the government’s optics rather than the community’s interests.

The ultimate irony is that $5 million of that package was earmarked for “Ontario-based marketing and promotion.” Ford allowed a multi-billion-dollar giant to count its own future advertising budget as an investment back into the province. How generous. That’s ten times more for promoting its spirits than providing direct compensation to the town it gutted.

Those free cowboy hats were subsidized by a plan to save face. They leave a bitter aftertaste for a community that needed more than a spectacle.

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The Ontario PC’s television ad during the last provincial election dedicated five of a precious thirty seconds to showing Doug Ford leaving his home for work in the morning while handling a mobile phone call before getting into his Dodge SUV and turning on the ignition. None of this happens without the careful consideration of an experienced campaign manager. One that sees everything from an image-making perspective.

Jean Chrétien had Eddie Goldenberg and Stephen Harper had Ray Novak. The job description also involves telling the principal what they don’t want to hear, and talking them out of the impulsive thing.

Doug Ford’s version is Kory Teneycke. A year ago, Ford said publicly that if Teneycke had been running Pierre Poilievre’s federal campaign, the result would have been different. It was an unusual thing for one Conservative to say about another’s team in the middle of a national race. But, in Ford’s view, it was simply true. The proof was three consecutive majorities and a campaign-management record that’s the envy of every conservative operation in the country.

In January, Teneycke moved to British Columbia to manage Caroline Elliott’s bid for the BC Conservative leadership.

Then the Toronto Star revealed that Ford had bought a plane for twenty-nine million dollars.

A used Challenger 650, referred to as a “private jet”, approved unanimously by cabinet, and announced after the fact. Within forty-eight hours, the premier was selling it. He said he’d heard “loud and clear” from the people. Days later, he couldn’t let it go, telling reporters he’d been inundated with calls urging him to “keep the damn plane.” His government also passed legislation shielding the premier’s phone logs from freedom-of-information requests. A policy a majority of Ontarians find suspect, according to polls.

This fed the story as each step compounded the last. This is precisely the kind of thing a campaign manager talks a premier out of before it becomes a thing.

Now Ford has released a five-minute video on social media, staring into the camera at Queen’s Park, touting his record on taxes, gas prices, highway tolls, and the HST rebate on new homes. The format borrows from Mark Carney’s straight-to-camera address last month, repurposed by a premier trying to change the subject from a twenty-nine-million-dollar plane he won’t fly.

Rather than address the problem, the video works around it and could become evidence of the crisis rather than a response to it.

Surveys from Liaison Strategies and Abacus Data suggest Ontario PCs have fallen from the mid-40s in late 2025 to a statistical tie with the Ontario Liberals — a slide of roughly ten points in eight months.

I’m not suggesting that Teneycke would have stopped the purchase. What a campaign manager does in that situation isn’t necessarily to win the argument inside the room. But a strategist games out what the argument would look like outside the room.

The plane is a small thing in a $244-billion budget but the polling shift isn’t, if it continues. Third-term governments lose for predictable reasons, and the most predictable is that the discipline that got them there erodes faster than the talent that replaces it. Ford has always been a politician who governs by listening, sometimes reversing, and listening again. That works when someone is filtering the inputs. It doesn’t when the filter is gone.

Caroline Elliott is one of five candidates in a BC Conservative leadership race that concludes May 30. The strategist Ford publicly called the best campaign manager in the country will have spent most of the winter and spring of 2026 in Vancouver. He will likely return to Ford’s side if Elliott loses, his reputation enhanced by the very damage his absence helped cause.

When voters turn on a politician, they don’t usually come back, especially when no one in the room is telling the politician why they left, unless the best campaign manager in the country is back in the room.

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“I wish I knew how to quit you.”

The line that defined the movie Brokeback Mountain is also, it turns out, a problem for the Leader of the Official Opposition. Pierre Poilievre cannot quit Justin Trudeau. He tried and lost an election trying. The man who made the Trudeau years his party’s entire reason for being has watched them recede into the rear-view mirror as Mark Carney pulled the Liberals to the right, took a majority, and set up a clear runway to October 2029. And still, Pierre cannot quit Justin.

The numbers, compiled by Le Devoir‘s Boris Proulx from Hansard, are remarkable. Since the 45th Parliament opened on May 26, 2025, MPs have invoked the name of the former prime minister 854 times. Eighty-one percent of those mentions came from Conservative benches. The single MP most fixated on the man who has not held office for over a year? Pierre Poilievre himself, with 54 personal mentions. That’s despite having missed the first two months of this Parliament after losing his own seat in Carleton.

One would think that just as Justin Trudeau has moved on and now makes headlines more for his private than his public life, the Conservatives, too, would have moved on.

But to anyone watching Question Period, the strategy appears to remain what it was during last year’s election campaign. Since the Liberal brand doesn’t poll as well as the Carney brand, the play is to fuse Carney to the Trudeau brand and drag the new prime minister back into the old prime minister’s ledger, particularly on deficits, after the spring economic statement of April 28.

“I have to apologize to Justin Trudeau,” Poilievre joked on Quebec City’s Radio X the next morning. “I thought it was impossible to spend more irresponsibly than Justin Trudeau.”

It’s a decent line. And I suspect it still landed with those with worn-out F’Trudeau stickers and flags. But it’s also a tell. When your best material requires resurrecting your defeated opponent to land the punch, you’ve admitted something about your present opponent that you’d rather not say out loud.

The reason the strategy strains credibility is that Carney, from the moment he was sworn in on March 14, 2025, made a visible point of breaking with Trudeau on energy and environment in particular. Polls show that voters noticed. So much so that Carney himself only recently, at the Liberal convention in Montreal last month, felt secure enough to say a kind word about his predecessor’s legacy, having spent the better part of a year putting distance between them.

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Meanwhile, Trudeau, the man Poilievre cannot stop talking about, is off being tabloid copy along with Katy Perry. He has gone from political force to cultural artifact now. Treating him as a live antagonist in May 2026 tells voters more about Poilievre’s emotional state than about Carney’s fiscal policy.

There’s a reason the Brokeback line lands here, and it’s not just for a laugh. Heath Ledger’s Ennis isn’t saying he wants to quit Jack because Jack is bad for him. He’s saying it because the relationship is the most defining thing in his life, and he can’t conceive of himself without it. That’s Pierre and Justin. Poilievre’s entire political identity was forged in opposition to Trudeau. He spent a decade as the most effective attack dog in Canadian politics, and his target was a single person. When that person left, the dog kept barking at the empty chair.

The Conservatives needed a year to build a critique of Carney. They’ve used it to relitigate Trudeau instead. Every minute spent doing so is a minute not spent defining the actual prime minister, who is busy defining himself into the space where federal elections are won.

I wish I knew how to quit you, Pierre says, fifteen times in fourteen days.

The voters already did.

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The boiling frog story isn’t true. Scientists debunked it years ago. If you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly raise the temperature, the frog doesn’t sit there and cook. It jumps out.

Americans don’t.

At 2:49 on Sunday morning, the President of the United States posted an AI-generated image of himself dressed as Jesus Christ, hands glowing with divine light, healing a man in a hospital bed while veterans, nurses, and praying citizens gazed upward in adoration. Bald eagles flanked him. Fighter jets streaked across the sky. The Statue of Liberty glowed in the background.

He posted it on his own social media platform, which he named Truth.

He then deleted it. But this is 2026. Nothing is deleted. The image was screenshotted and shared thousands of times before dawn.

The context makes it worse. The image appeared in the middle of a late-night posting spree in which Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV — the first American pope — for criticizing the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. Leo had called Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian civilization “truly unacceptable” and warned against a “delusion of omnipotence” fuelling global bloodshed. Trump responded by calling the Pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” He claimed Leo was only elected because the Church wanted someone who could “deal with President Donald J. Trump.” And then, in the same flurry, he posted the image.

Think about what that means. The leader of 1.4 billion Catholics told the president that invoking God to justify war is a corruption of faith. The president responded by depicting himself as God.

This brings us to what TDS actually means.

Trump Derangement Syndrome entered the lexicon as an accusation aimed in one direction: at critics so consumed by opposition that they lost perspective. But the real derangement runs both ways. It has two variants, and both are symptoms of the same condition.

The first variant belongs to the supporters. Not the fringe — the mainstream. The ones who see an image of their president cosplaying as Christ during a public feud with the Pope over a war and process it as normal. As “Trump being Trump.” The derangement here isn’t enthusiasm or loyalty. It’s the disappearance of a threshold. There was a time — not long ago — when a president posting devotional self-portraits at three in the morning would have triggered a constitutional conversation. Now it triggers a news cycle that will be forgotten by Wednesday.

The second variant belongs to the detractors. And it’s subtler. It’s not rage — there’s plenty of that, and most of it is warranted. The derangement is that the rage has become routine. Opponents of this president have spent a decade in a state of perpetual alarm, and the cost is that alarm has lost its meaning. If someone had described this exact scenario in 2014 — the president depicts himself as Jesus while attacking the Pope at three in the morning, then deletes it — it would have read as dystopian satire. An episode of Black Mirror that got rejected for being too on the nose. Now it’s a Monday. The derangement on this side isn’t anger. It’s the exhaustion that has replaced shock.

Both variants are in the same boiling water. They just describe the temperature differently.

That’s why the debunked frog matters. The metaphor was supposed to describe a creature too dumb to notice the heat. But real frogs notice. Real frogs jump. The metaphor doesn’t describe animal behaviour at all. It describes something uniquely, depressingly human: the ability to feel the temperature rising and stay in the pot anyway — not because we can’t tell, but because we’ve redefined what normal feels like.

Pope Leo, from the papal plane, offered the only response that mattered. “Someone has to stand up and say there is a better way.”

He was talking about war. But he could have been talking about the water.

The Conservative Party of Canada launched two new ads this week. They are well produced and professionally executed. One is aspirational.The other attacks the opponent. Together they represent what the party says is a million-dollar-plus investment across television, radio, connected TV, and digital platforms in both official languages, running through the end of June.

And both face the same fundamental problem: the world outside the ad is working against the message inside it.

The first ad: “Affordable. Safe. Strong. Here at Home”

This one features Pierre Poilievre delivering excerpts from his recent speech to the Economic Club of Canada. It could have been titled “Unbreakable.” He speaks of a country that “stands on its own feet,” that “bows before no nation,” a country that is “unbreakable.”

Strip away the party branding and this could be a Mark Carney ad. In fact, it would be a more credible one. Carney has spent the past year building precisely this brand positioning himself as the internationally respected leader who stood up at Davos, pushed back against Trump, and rallied Canadians around sovereignty and economic resilience. The language of national strength is his territory now.

For Poilievre to claim it requires Canadians to perform a remarkable act of forgetting.

This is the leader who, for years, built his brand on the proposition that Canada is broken. “Everything feels broken.” That was the pitch in the ads, the speeches, and tied to three-word slogans. Axe the tax. Fix the budget. The country is broken, and I’m the one who will fix it.

Now the message is: Canada is unbreakable. Or rather, it will be, under my leadership. But for that to land, you’d have to overlook the fact that Poilievre nearly became Prime Minister by shouting that it was already in pieces.

In advertising, we’d call this a brand credibility gap. The new positioning contradicts the equity the brand has built. And when that happens, the audience doesn’t update their understanding of the brand. They just stop believing the ad.

The second ad: “The Same Aisle”

This is the attack ad. And it could be called “Are you better off?” It follows the classic Reagan playbook from 1980: Are you better off than you were four years ago? In this case, the Conservatives frame it around grocery prices and affordability under a year of Carney’s government. It answers the question with news clips like “Canada has become the “food inflation capital of the G7”.

The logic is sound as Carney himself invited this metric when he told Canadians to judge his government by what they see at the grocery store.

But “are you better off?” only works when the audience has concluded, or is ready to conclude, that they chose the wrong person. And Canadians, so far, haven’t.

Carney’s approval sits at or above 60 percent in most tracking. His net favourability leads Poilievre’s by as much as 50 points. Liberals hold a double-digit lead in vote intention.

Canadians may well feel the pinch at the grocery store. But they’re not concluding that Poilievre would have done any better. And that’s the gap the ad can’t bridge.

Any advertiser will tell you: what you fear most when launching a campaign is that something outside your control undermines the credibility of your message.

For these two ads, that something arrived on cue. On the same day the campaign began airing. Marilyn Gladu, a Conservative MP from southwestern Ontario, crossed the floor to join the Liberals. She is the fifth opposition MP to defect to Carney’s side.

Think about the timing. One ad asks whether Canadians are better off under Carney. And on the day it starts running, one of Poilievre’s own MPs answers the second question by walking across the aisle.

No creative execution survives that. You can produce the most polished thirty-second spot in Canadian political advertising history, and it won’t matter if the news cycle is telling the opposite story. And no amount of media spend fixes an environment where your own team is defecting on launch day.

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A jar of Nutella floated through NASA’s Artemis II spacecraft last week, drifting past the crew just minutes before they broke the all-time distance-from-Earth record. The jar spun in zero gravity, label facing camera, perfectly lit.

The internet immediately cried product placement. NASA’s press secretary Bethany Stevens was unambiguous: NASA doesn’t select crew food in association with brand partnerships. An astronaut simply packed the jar as part of the mission’s 189-item menu. One of four people to ever fly around the far side of the Moon just happens to like Nutella on a tortilla. (Bread is banned on spacecraft as crumbs damage instruments.)

None of which stopped Ferrero from capitalizing on its cosmic windfall. Within hours, the brand reposted the clip across social platforms with the caption “Nutella is out of this world,” changed its bios to “Spreading smiles all the way to space,” and launched a giveaway tied to the moment. Brand mentions spiked 910% in 48 hours. You can’t buy that. Which is the point.

We react to a floating Nutella jar because we’ve been conditioned to. Product placement in television, film, and streaming is a roughly $33 billion global industry. In the U.S. alone, it accounts for more than $16 billion a year. Two-thirds of TV viewers skip, mute, or tune out during conventional ad breaks. Brands know this. So they pay to be woven into the story itself — Coca-Cola in The Bear, General Motors in Barbie, Apple in seemingly everything.

All of which is well-documented territory. What’s less explored is a different kind of placement. Not to sell something, but to bring attention to and explain something that desperately needs explaining.

Which brings me to The Pitt.

In a piece for TIME Magazine, TV critic Judy Berman described the rape kit storyline in Season 2 of the HBO medical drama as “a quietly revolutionary depiction of sexual assault.” She’s right. And the reason it’s revolutionary has everything to do with placement.

In two episodes — “1:00 P.M.” and “2:00 P.M.” — the show did something I can’t recall seeing done this well on television. It depicted, in close to real time, the full process of a sexual assault forensic examination. A rape kit.

A young woman named Ilana arrives at the ER after being raped at a Fourth of July barbecue by a male friend. Charge nurse Dana Evans, the only certified Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) on shift, takes over. What follows unfolds across more than an hour of screen time at a pace that would feel slow in any series but on The Pitt — a show defined by chaos, overwhelm, and ER pandemonium — registers as glacial. And intentionally so.

The show walks viewers through every step. The clothing bagged as evidence. Photos of bruises. Black light scans. Wet and dry swabs. Specialized containers that only the SANE can handle. An advocate from Pittsburgh Action Against Rape — a real organization that advised the show’s writers — arrives with fresh clothes and support. Emergency contraception and STI medication are offered. Consent is checked at every stage. The patient can stop at any point. She does stop, in fact — leaving partway through Episode 7 to weigh whether to continue, returning in Episode 8.

The writers built in a surrogate for the audience: a trainee nurse observing the process for the first time, asking the questions viewers need answered. They consulted with the UCLA Health Rape Treatment Center and Pittsburgh Action Against Rape to get every procedural detail right. And they made a deliberate creative choice not to depict the assault itself. No trauma flashback. No graphic reenactment. What happened to Ilana is never detailed enough for viewers to impose their own judgments about whether the assault was “legitimate” or whether this particular victim deserves to be believed.

This is where the distinction matters. Sexual assault is not exactly unexplored territory on television. But most of those treatments focus on the crime. The Pitt focuses on the care. On the process. On the people who do this work and the people who endure it.

And then it delivers the gut punch. After Ilana leaves, Dana — the SANE — is on the phone with the local police, trying to get someone to pick up the completed kit. It’s been sitting there for two weeks. Regulations require pickup within 72 hours. No one is coming.

That’s not a dramatic invention. It’s a documented national disgrace. At least 25,000 rape kits were sitting untested in law enforcement agencies and crime labs across 30 states as of 2022 — and that’s only the states that reported. The actual number is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. In Detroit alone, more than 11,000 abandoned kits were found in a warehouse in 2009, some dating back decades. Testing just a fraction of them identified over a hundred serial rapists.

Call it social issue placement. And sexual assault is just one example of what it could do.

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Think about the issues that the social sector — nonprofits, charities, community organizations — works on every day, largely under the radar. Civic participation. Voter registration. Volunteering. Food insecurity. Mental health access. Youth mentorship. Elder isolation. The mechanics of how a school board works or why someone should show up to a city council meeting. These aren’t issues that lack importance. They lack visibility. They lack the kind of storytelling that makes people who would never attend a town hall or read a policy report suddenly understand why it matters.

The social sector spends enormous energy trying to break through the noise. Screenwriters already have the audience. The connection between the two is a placement opportunity that nobody is monetizing — because it was never about money in the first place.

You can measure the ROI of a Nutella jar floating past a camera in space. Brand mentions, social impressions, sales lift — there are numbers for all of it. You cannot as easily measure the value of a television show explaining what a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner does, or showing an audience of millions that the system built to protect survivors routinely fails them at the last step. Or, for that matter, the value of a scene that makes a viewer think differently about volunteering, or showing up to vote in a municipal election, or understanding how their donation actually gets used.

But anyone who works in the social sector and has spent years trying to get the public to care about something that matters could tell you what that kind of placement is worth.

It’s worth a fortune.

The Quebec government just put out a language campaign that does something I genuinely haven’t seen before. No lectures about proper French. No warnings about decline. No finger-wagging at English. Instead, it does something so much smarter.

It just shows French being lived.

You see an interior designer of Asian heritage — clearly not a native speaker — sitting with her clients, walking them through her choices of tiles and lighting fixtures. In French. A young student standing up in front of his class, doing a book report on a Quebec novel, and you can tell the language is getting to him — the prose, the poetry of it. Young girls outside on a winter night in Montreal, laughing and belting out the lyrics of a French song. It all feels authentic. Unscripted. Quietly powerful.

This is what smart behaviour change communication actually looks like.

And it matters, because for decades, Quebec language policy has mostly tried to limit English rather than make people fall in love with French. Bill 96 is the perfect example. Its signage rules now require French to take up twice the physical space of any non-French trademark. So Burger King is fine. But Canadian Tire has to be flanked by Canadian Tire in letters twice the size. It’s impractical, it’s expensive, and honestly — it’s hard to see how it meaningfully changes anything about the linguistic landscape of Quebec retail.

I want to be fair. If you’ve ever looked at grainy black-and-white photos of Montreal streets in the 1950s, the sheer dominance of English is startling — the storefronts, the painted walls, signs everywhere downtown. We’ve come a long way from that, and that’s a genuinely good thing. The guardrails that got us here weren’t pointless. But there’s a real difference between the work that was necessary then and the work that’s going to protect French now.

Regulation doesn’t change hearts. People speak what they love.

There’s a well-known principle in behaviour change — and anyone who works in marketing understands this instinctively — that intrinsic motivation wins over extrinsic motivation every single time. You don’t get people to do something lasting by scaring them, shaming them, or taking away their options. You get them to do it by making them want to. By tying the behavior to who they are, to joy, to a sense of belonging.

That’s exactly what these ads pull off. And they do something even more subtle that I think deserves real attention.

Look at who’s in them. The interior designer isn’t fluent. Her French is accented, imperfect — clearly a work in progress. And she’s the hero of her spot. That’s a big departure from past campaigns that scolded young Quebecers for mixing English into their French, or that treated language health like a purity test on grammar and vocabulary. The message here, whether they intended it or not, is: your French counts, whatever it sounds like. Show up. Speak it. Read it. Write it. Listen to it. We’ll worry about polish later. First, let’s just make sure French is actually being used — by everyone who lives here, no matter where they came from.

Walk before you run. But walk.

That’s the insight that makes this, in my opinion, the most strategically coherent thing Quebec has ever produced on language.

French isn’t going to be saved by stamping out English or measuring letter sizes on storefronts. It’ll be saved the only way any living language ever is: by people choosing to speak it, read it, share it, sing it on a cold night in Montreal.

Participation. Not purity. Not restriction. Participation.

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Which brings me to October.

There’s a provincial election coming, and the CAQ is probably looking at serious losses. Whoever forms the next government will come in with their own agenda, their own instincts, their own need to show they’re not the last guys. And the temptation — there’s always a temptation — will be to scrap what the previous government built just to plant a flag.

I really hope whoever takes power resists that here.

This campaign cracked something that decades of language policy missed. It found the emotional register that actually moves people. It told a story about French as something living, breathing, imperfect, joyful — not a symbol of resistance, not a political football, but a language people use because it’s theirs.

That’s not a CAQ achievement. That’s a Quebec achievement. And it shouldn’t be a one-off.

I’m a sucker for vintage travel posters. There’s something about the bold typography and the romanticized landscapes. The way a single illustration could make you ache to board a plane to somewhere you’d never been.

So when I first saw the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s social media campaign promoting its “self-deportation” program, my first reflex was delight. The art direction is gorgeous, and the illustration style faithfully channels that mid-century aesthetic. As pure design, these are beautifully executed.

I’m also a huge fan of creative that breaks from category convention and engages its target with unexpected wit, while keeping its message single-minded. When appropriate, I’m a big believer in using humour to tell a brand story. It can disarm, earn attention, and make the message stick.

The operating words here are “when appropriate.”

These posters are anything but.

The product is a $2,600 cash incentive and a free plane ticket for people to leave the country they live in, being promoted with the breezy tone of a Caribbean cruise deal. “Fly to India for free!”, “Safe travels!”, “Via DHS Airlines.”

This is where craft becomes cruelty. The vintage travel poster worked because it sold aspiration. It promised discoveries, and a world opening up to you.

These posters invert that entirely. They appropriate the visual language of adventure to package what is, for the people targeted, the opposite: not an invitation to explore, but a notice to leave.

And the beauty of the design doesn’t soften the message. Instead, it mocks the audience.

In advertising, we talk about “tone” as though it’s a stylistic choice. It’s not. Tone is a strategic decision that reveals how a brand sees its audience. And the tone here tells you everything about how this administration sees the people on the receiving end of this campaign. They’re a punchline. Not citizens or residents with lives and roots and families.

The best humour in advertising works because the brand is in on the joke alongside its audience. It is not laughing at them. These posters do the opposite. They weaponize charm by dressing up coercion in the aesthetics of leisure.

Which raises a question I keep coming back to with this administration. When every policy, program, and communication seems calibrated to demean and debase the people it targets, at what point do we stop treating that as a byproduct and start recognizing it as the actual communication objective?

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