Ron Kubek has had a long, hot summer. The owner of the Lightning Rock winery in Summerland, BC, and his wife Tracy were evacuated in the middle of the night, via a forest services road to Kelowna, after wildfires spread to within a couple of kilometres of the vineyard.

Everyone is safe and there was no physical damage to the winery but Kubek has had to close the tasting room that brought in up to $5,000 a day.

The announcement of 50 percent tariffs on exports to the U.S. is another blow to the winery that produces around 5,000 cases of high end whites, reds and rosés a year.

“I was ramping up to do 30 percent of my business in the U.S. That died on Friday,” he said, after spending months securing the necessary approvals from U.S. states.

He sent a shipment of 50 cases south last week but expects that to be the last.

“Selling 1500 to 2500 cases into the U.S. would have been huge,” he said.

A bottle of Lightning Rock rosé has a wholesale price of $20, to which a $10 tariff has now been added in the States.

Kubek is stoic in the face of the U.S. tariffs. What really upsets him is that even at a $30 wholesale price, American tipplers are likely paying less to drink Lightning Rock’s wines than Canadians in Ontario and Quebec. Massive mark-ups in the provincially-owned retail outlets in those provinces means the same bottle of rosé has a wholesale price of $38.17 in the LCBO and $43.66 in the SAQ.

“Restaurants usually double the price, which means that same bottle costs around $76. My rosé is really good but it’s not worth $76,” Kubek said.

Lightning Rock is one of thousands of businesses across the country that has been forced to go back to the drawing board. The uncertainty is compounded by concerns over how Canada plans to respond - and what the Trump Administration’s reaction to such defiance will be.

In an article in The Hub, economist Trevor Tombe argued against Canadian dollar for dollar retaliation to the tariffs Trump has imposed.
He quoted the great economist Adam Smith, who said in The Wealth of Nations that retaliation may be justified if there is a probability that it will result in the repeal of high duties. “When there is no such probability, it will seem a bad method of compensating the injury done to certain classes of our people, to do another injury ourselves”.

Tombe argued there is little reason to think that Canadian retaliation will alter U.S. policy. Certainly there were no signs of Trump backing down in his latest rant, which threatened 50 percent tariffs on all Canadian autos from next January.

But it is a mistake to view this trade war in economic terms. It is in reality an attempt by a rogue President to establish political dominance over a friendly neighbour; a display of chest-beating and grunting designed to produce a submissive response from a government Trump considers subordinate.

The last minute demands on trade sanctioning; the first right of refusal on critical minerals; the elimination of cultural and language protections; the repeal of public procurement rules; the exclusion of tariff relief for heavy trucks; and, the enforced purchase of U.S. fighter jets were all designed to undermine Canada’s ability to self-govern, without external interference.

At a press conference in Quebec on Monday, Prime Minister Mark Carney said the attitude at the negotiating table was that Canada is a subsidiary of the U.S. and that Canadian industry should be disadvantaged in relation to American industry. “That is not something we’re going to accept and that’s before you get to constraints on our ability to sign trade deals and the very fundamental issue of culture,” he said.

The calls from those such as Trump’s tongue-bather-in-chief, J.D. Vance, for Canada to “stop taking advantage of the people of America” is designed to give the appearance of solidity to the flatulence coming from the White House. But even the normally docile Fox News was pointing out that these new tariffs are tax on American consumers.

The point of retaliation should not be to inflict economic pain on the U.S. in the long term - the numbers involved are too small for that - it should be to exact the maximum political price from Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

As David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former advisor, noted on social media, the new trade war is going to hit the battleground states of Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Alaska the hardest. The predictive markets have all four as toss-ups in this November’s mid-term Senate elections, with most giving the Democrats narrow leads in all four. Add in North Carolina, Iowa and even Texas and the Republican majority in the Senate (53 versus 47) is hanging on a wobbly peg.

Carney indicated that he’s thinking along those lines at his press conference in Quebec on Monday, when he said car workers in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Alabama all depend on Canada, which buys more American cars than the European Union, Japan and South Korea combined.

If the Democrats do control Congress they will have many more tools to contest the President’s trade policies, even if it is unlikely they will have a veto-proof majority of 60 senators.

So on balance, I would argue in favour of strong retaliation to aid their cause.

Where Tombe is right is that there is a great deal to do within Canada to improve domestic competitiveness, to reform taxes that discourage investment, to recognize professional credentials and to make it easier to build major projects.

The absurdity of Ron Kubek being able to sell his wine more cheaply in the U.S. - even after the imposition of 50 percent tariffs - than in Ontario or Quebec, shows there is much more work to be done in “giving ourselves more than any foreign government can take away”.

In these days of ubiquitous social media, we are what we share. We instantly condone or condemn a given position, without much room for nuance.

Yet a post on Twitter caught my attention because it provoked some sympathy, as well as the carefully calibrated outrage. It was by someone called Sciohn Fhanne, who describes himself as a “Canadian imaginer…an envisioner of futures”. The name appears to be a pseudonym but it is linked to a series of Substack posts, all on the topic of Canada in the 21st century.

The Twitter post posited two provocative views of Canada. The first is of a country that is “cooked - the next Argentina, but without the hospitable weather or cultural charm”.

Fhanne outlined a people who have existed on “inheritance and unearned comfort” for their entire history, who don’t dare to aim high or be great. “They have settled for digging stuff out of the ground and flipping houses, and can’t innovate or add value to the world to save their lives”.

There is much more of the same but you get the gist. This appears to be the author’s jaundiced view of his homeland - a second-class country governed by a complacent elite, whose only sense of self is that they are not American.

He juxtaposed that view with a country that breaks new ground and dares to do hard things; a nation that is growing in consequence by building housing, transportation, AI and infrastructure and attracting the world’s best and brightest to its “culturally magnificent megacities”.

“It is rapidly stepping out of America’s shadow, gaining strength, confidence and power by the day. This is the North Star of the New World.”

It is clear that the author sees this second Canada as science fiction, and in danger of remaining so unless it makes root and branch changes along the lines he recommends.

It is presumably the job of imaginers and envisioners to demand a break with the past in order to usher in a dazzling future.

But for those of us who observe the present, there is enough evidence to dismiss the extremes presented by both visions of Canada as either a backwater or a shining technological beacon on the hill.

The truth, as usual, is found somewhere in between.

I don’t see Canada as a country that is “cooked” or heading towards Argentinian-like decline (the consequence of poor political choices like protectionism, import substitution, high tariffs and nationalization).

A country that was hacked out of the wilderness can scarcely be described as enjoying “unearned comfort”. The claim shows considerable disrespect to the generation that fought for, and died for, the rights to democracy, human rights and national sovereignty in World War Two.

Yet, the statement that we do not aim high has some resonance.

The current trade dispute with the U.S. has highlighted the fact that Canada has ceded much of its digital sovereignty and has become a vassal state when it comes to regulating the digital sphere. As the U.S. Trade Representative’s report in March made clear, the White House considers Canadian tax and regulatory measures on Big Tech to be discriminatory. It demanded, and seems to have achieved, “digital trade alignment” in the most recent talks - that is, complete Canadian capitulation. In addition, up to 60 percent of Canada’s IT cloud is running on American servers - and is subject to American laws like the CLOUD Act, which lets U.S. authorities compel access to data. The Trump Administration noted disapprovingly in the trade report that Canada is seeking “greater control of its own data”, which it viewed as a trade threat. But in practice, despite Canada’s strong tech research presence, its ability to plow its own furrow, and commercialize its own innovation, has had limited success.

Fhanne’s pejorative corollary is that Canadians have settled for “digging stuff out of the ground and flipping houses”. That is unfair. There is nothing wrong with being hewers of wood or drawers of water if that is where the comparative advantage lies.

The claim that Canada has what the world wants is not an idle boast, even if much of those resources are not even in the pipeline yet. This country is already a major supplier of potash, uranium, aluminum, cobalt and platinum. Nickel and graphite will follow.

On fossil fuel, a recent interview with Adam Waterous, the executive chairman of Strathcona Resources, suggested an incredibly bullish view of Canada’s oil production potential. He said that this country could double its output in the next 10 years to 10 million barrels a day, at a time when U.S. shale production may fall into structural decline. He claimed Canada could be “arm-wrestling with Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer” within a decade. “No-one is going to describe us as a middle power then, meaning this is a very dramatic repositioning of Canada on the world stage,” he said.

To be sure, this is not a consensus view but the removal of pipeline constraints and regulatory friction would likely result in a surge in capital spending. Strathcona is making its own scaled down version of that bet by planning to double its own production through 10 percent compound annual growth.

The false dichotomy presented in Fhanne’s post suggests that Canada is not currently breaking new ground or daring to do hard things. Yet in this past week, we have seen the announcement of the largest clean energy investment in North American history. The Churchill Falls expansion and the tentative agreement between Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador to add 14,000 MW of new hydro capacity, will create enough clean energy to power 10 million homes.

The agreement remains non-binding and it could yet fall apart. But if fully realized, it will strengthen this country’s position as a clean energy powerhouse.

To be clear, Canada does not quicken the pulse. I don’t ever see the time when it becomes “a serious contender for the world’s next great civilization”, as the author’s more upbeat vision envisaged.

The country faces problems, some of them self-inflicted, such as the decline in the number of highly qualified immigrants, as it absorbs the vast numbers of foreigners already in Canada (the consequence of disastrous post-pandemic policies). It remains embroiled in apparently endless trade disputes with a giant neighbour intent on breaking it so it can own it.

But the existential threat presented by Trump has shaken Canadians out of their complacency.

The Churchill Falls expansion has been on the books for years and it is no coincidence that an agreement was reached as Trump’s tub-thumping increased in volume.

There is an awareness that Canada could become the next Argentina. But equally, there is a collective realization by the people of this empty place that it is filled with wonders - and there is a determination to not allow that to happen.

I have just turned 60 and so I’d like to take a break from our regular programming to reflect on what, if anything, has been learned in the process of moving closer to the sunset than the sunrise.

As in golf, there are days when you think you’ve cracked it - that the accumulation of knowledge and experience means you’re destined for a future as a single-digit handicapper.

Those days are swiftly and brutally followed by others that confirm the progressive discovery of ignorance and incapacity.

I am not particularly religious - certainly not in the sense of a personal God who rewards and punishes us. But I do identify with Albert Einstein’s comment that we all dance to the mysterious tune intoned by an invisible piper. The smartest man of the 20th century was in awe of the harmony of the universe, a grand orderly design that we can scarcely comprehend. Einstein believed everything is connected, that energy is not created or destroyed; it is simply changed from one form to another.

He compared humanity to children entering a huge library. The child, he said, knows someone has written the books and that they are placed in some kind of order. But the key to that order is a puzzle.

Pride lulls us into thinking we have more control over our destiny than is the case. The surge of technological advances compounds the sense of disorder. I am like a Nokia cellphone in a world of ambient AI wearables, almost inviting the advancing years and the relief they will provide from the need to keep up.

It’s not all downhill. There is the easing of the male libido, with, in Plato’s words, “its bondage to a raging madman”.

Age does offer some insights into the human condition and the road, if not to happiness, then at least a contentment that allows for a quiet mind and “sleeps that beguile the night”.

I am a disciple of Adam Smith and his belief that private enterprise can turn individual selfishness into useful social outcomes. But the expression by the great economist that has had the greatest impact on me was his contention that nothing much can be added to the happiness of a person who is in health, out of debt and has a clear conscience.

The support of a loving family is perhaps one thing that Smith overlooked. We are all the continuation of the generations that have gone before us and part of us will survive through our children. To be tangled in a web of unconditional love is a comfort.

While I sympathize with Einstein and his invisible piper, that does not mean I think we completely surrender freewill. There is a value to determination, best summed up by Tennyson when he said, while much is taken, much abides “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”.

The journey into our latter years is - or should be - taken on the road to character. As David Brooks wrote in his book of the same name, maturity is earned by being better than we used to be - dependable in times of stress; straight in times of temptation. People of character are not indefinitely flexible, they are anchored by permanent attachments to important things, he said. The realization that the universe is guided by laws beyond our comprehension does not provide an excuse to float freely, without conviction.

Rather, aging gives us the opportunity to be the people we always wanted to be.

We have the perspective to dismiss praise and criticism; to disregard rewards and penalties. Oldsters live in the present and don’t worry too much about the future.

I genuinely don’t want or need anything from anyone beyond my immediate family. That is the recipe for contentment and it becomes more achievable as we get older.

Beyond the self, what of the wider world?

It’s been my experience over 35 years in journalism to never ascribe to malice things that could be explained by incompetence. As Christopher Hitchens once said, conspiracy theories are the exhaust fumes of democracy.

Our politics rely on the power of reasoned debate, without which democracy cannot function. There needs to be protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion, in the form of free speech guarantees.

Rigid egalitarianism focuses on the equality of outcomes, rather than the equality of opportunity, which is more correctly concerned with individual rights. Citizens are the best judges of their own interests and should, as far as possible, be able to act as they wish, as long as no one else is harmed.

Change should be incremental, rather than revolutionary, and based on rules-based Enlightenment institutions, anchored in tradition and designed to undermine tribalism, demonization and authoritarianism.

These are the important things to which I am attached - an agenda that could broadly be described as classical liberalism.

It is an outlook that has gone out of fashion, though I am happy to say that our prime minister shares it, based on my conversations with him over the years.

Perhaps the greatest revelation provided by advancing years is that nothing is so grim that it can’t be alleviated by reading P.G. Wodehouse. When I despaired of my greying locks, I was relieved to learn from the great man that there is a cure. “It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.”

If you have made it this far, thank you for indulging me and please forgive the ramblings of a disordered mind.

CULTURAL CODA

TOP 10 ALBUMS

Moving Pictures - Rush

Abbey Road - The Beatles

Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd

Out of the Blue - ELO

Love Over Gold - Dire Straits

Aja - Steely Dan

Hymns from the 49th Parallel - K.D. Lang

Clutching at Straws - Marillion

Grace - Jeff Buckley

Workers Playtime - Billy Bragg

TOP 10 BOOKs (non-fiction)

Steven Pinker - Enlightenment Now

Doris Kearns Goodwin - Team of Rivals

Roy Jenkins - Churchill: A Biography

Winston Churchill - My Early Life

Stephen Ambrose - Undaunted Courage

Erik Larson - The Splendid and the Vile

David Brooks - The Road to Character

Mark Twain - The Innocents Abroad

Pierre Berton - The Last Spike

Michael Ignatieff - Fire and Ashes

TOP 10 BOOKS (fiction)

George MacDonald Fraser - Flashman at the Charge

Cormac McCarthy - The Road

Amor Towles - A Gentleman in Moscow

C.J. Sanson - Dissolution

Gabriel Garcia Màrquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude

William Boyd - The New Confessions

Robert Harris - The Second Sleep

Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall

Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove

John Updike - Rabbit at Rest

TOP 10 MOVIES

Withnail and I

Local Hero

Gregory’s Girl

Life of Brian

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

It’s a Wonderful Life

Trainspotting

Dunkirk

Lord of the Rings - Return of the King

Shawshank Redemption

I have a small understanding of business lingo, having written about balance sheets and income statements for a dozen years as a young journalist.

But even armed with that knowledge, I remain confused about Canada’s deal with the United States over the Gordie Howe bridge between Ontario and Michigan.

To recap, in February, President Donald Trump said the United States would have to be compensated before he would allow the bridge to open. There was speculation that the President was responding to lobbying by the owner of the rival Ambassador Bridge (and Republican donor), Matty Maroun.

Last week, the two governments announced that the bridge would open on July 27th, with Trump claiming victory for negotiating a “MUCH BETTER DEAL” for the U.S.

It is the nature of that deal that is the source of the confusion.

In response to suggestions that the Americans are set to receive half the toll revenues for a bridge that Canada paid for in full, Mark Carney told CTV that Ottawa will receive the revenues, and then pay the costs of construction and debt servicing payments, before splitting the proceeds with the Americans for a 15 year period. He said there was unlikely “to be a lot of net” to split.

Housing and infrastructure minister Gregor Robertson was next out to reinforce that Canada will continue to control the toll revenues, “with half the net profits then going towards local economic development”.

The waters were muddied by reports by Bloomberg News that the Americans did not agree with that interpretation.

Carney was asked again about the terms of the deal on Thursday, and said categorically that Canada is not splitting the bridge tolls.

“It is an agreement for 15 years to split net revenues. Any sharing of the toll revenue won’t happen until all of the debt is repaid. We will split net revenues over the course of the first 15 years - net revenues after operating costs such as manning the toll booths, maintenance, snow removal and so on.

“We expect that after those costs for the first few years, net revenues will be modest, we expect them to be negative.”

So, we’re talking about net revenues now, not net profits. Net revenues are defined as the total amount of money a company makes after sales, discounts and concessions. Net profit is the bottom line, calculated by deducting all expenses, including taxes and interest payments from total revenues.

Confused? You will be.

On Friday, the pride of Edmonton, Bloomberg’s Josh Wingrove, said he’d seen the agreement that shows Canada will pay “economic participation payments” to the U.S., comprising half of net bridge and crossing related revenues for the first 15 years of operations. It did not mention interest payments.

Global TV’s Mackenzie Gray later reported that Canadian government sources have confirmed the U.S. will receive payments prior to Canada recouping the full $6.4 billion in construction costs.

That is clearly at odds with the Prime Minister’s statement that the Americans would get half of what was left over after construction and debt servicing costs.

While Canada may not technically be splitting the tolls, and while there may not be anything to split in the early years, the terms of the deal remain opaque - and deliberately so. The government may be telling the truth but it is not telling the whole truth.

There is an argument to be made that division of net revenues is immaterial compared to the boost in cross-border trade that it is expected the opening of the new bridge will provide.

But that is not the argument the Prime Minister made.

Earlier this week, when I thought Canada had held the line and granted Trump a hollow victory, I said that this deal could be a blueprint for the wider CUSMA negotiations.

But what initially looked like a smart play now appears to be a substantive win for the Americans and a communications omnishambles for the Canadians. Half the proceeds for the bridge named after “Mr. Elbows” have been meekly handed over to the bullying Yanks.

It is possible that there was a misunderstanding - that omission of interest payments in the deal meant inclusion in Ottawa’s eyes. But that seems unlikely.

The facts point to a certain artfulness - and that is being polite - on the part of the Prime Minister.

Carney has a tendency to play on his audience’s assumption that he is smarter than they are. He sounds plausible and asks voters to take him on faith. That works as long as he is being straight with them.

But deep in the Canadian psyche there is a resentment about slickness and proficiency.

If voters start to think they are being played for fools, the edge offered by experience and expertise could become a millstone - particularly if the Conservatives eventually resolve to choose an electable leader.

This one is likely to rumble on, like an 18-wheeler Freightliner Cascadia crossing the Detroit River.

It was lost amid the outrage caused by Donald Trump’s call to FIFA boss Gianni Infantino to overturn a red card for an American soccer player at the World Cup, but financial disclosures at the end of June showed that the President made $2 billion last year, including $1 billion in cryptocurrency profits.

That’s hard to get your head around but I once saw $1 billion in mock $20 bills stacked up - the pile was 20 feet long, 10 feet wide and 10 feet tall. It is an unbelievable amount of money and is solely attributable to the President’s drive to use his office to displace the Corleones as the first family of American criminality.

Trump has dismissed concerns about any conflict of interest, saying: “I found out that nobody cared and I’m allowed to”. Allowed to do what? He did not elaborate. But we know about the dubious stock trades that would have invited regulatory intervention if he hadn’t neutered the Securities and Exchange Commission and been granted a “get out of jail” card by the Supreme Court, in the form of presidential immunity from prosecution for crimes involving “official acts”.

Hence, when Trump bought millions in Boeing stock before a trip to China that led to the sale of 200 of the company’s aircraft to the Chinese government, there was no intervention.

He may not face legal punishment but the polls suggest that voters have noticed at long last. According to YouGov polling for The Economist, Trump’s approval rating hit a new low of -23 this week - 36 percent approve and 59 percent disapprove.

The President is wrong to say: “nobody cared”. Six in 10 Americans, including 21 percent of his own voters, say he is using the office for personal gain.

A majority of voters believe he is dishonest and corrupt, up from 46 percent last year. And just 17 percent of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do the right thing, according to Pew Research. When Pew first asked that question in 1958, three quarters of respondents said they trusted the government. Those numbers have oscillated over time, thanks to the Vietnam War, Watergate, 9/11, the war in Iraq and the Great Recession. But they have never hit the current nadir over concerns about the personal corruption of the president.

Trump’s efforts to create a culture of impunity in the White House has a curious parallel with another supposedly tough on crime and immigration populist in Great Britain. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party has been leading in the polls for the past year, as Keir Starmer’s Labour government has continued to stumble. However, the man who looked most likely to become the next Prime Minister has suddenly resigned as the MP for Clacton, a down-at-heel Essex seaside resort that saw substantial urban improvements after being hit by a tornado in the ‘80s.

Farage was subject of a parliamentary probe into the non-disclosure of a US$6.6 million donation by a Thai-based crypto billionaire. By resigning and seeking re-election in a by-election, the Reform leader has stopped that inquiry in its tracks, while presenting his resignation as an act of principle to clear his name and stand up for “the people” against “the establishment”.

But British voters are growing as tired as their American counterparts of the deception that grasping political leaders are standing up for the people against corrupt elites. What could be more elitist than insider trading or political graft?

Six in 10 British voters do not think Farage has been honest about his financial affairs. Only four in 10 Reform voters think he has been honest. Those numbers do not suggest he will receive a ringing endorsement from Clacton’s voters, even though his only opponent will be Count Binface, the perennial joke candidate who advocates forcing rule-breaking cyclists to ride unicycles and capping the price of a croissant at £1.

The other main parties have said they will not field candidates in what they consider another Farage stunt. “If he wants to spend the summer arguing with a bin, I won’t stop him,” said Rachel Reeves, the finance minister.

At first blush, the blatant dishonesty is distressing. Democracy depends on the rule of law and that depends on trust in institutions. As that trust erodes half-truths, myths, falsehoods and conspiracies propagate.

But both Trump and Farage have peaked. They appear to have lost the most precious commodity a politician can possess - the benefit of the doubt. The polls suggest that people no longer believe them, even when they are telling the truth.

Voters support a leader they trust; one who makes them feel good; one who offers stability, consistency and a vision to make their country the best in the world.

The dubious behaviour of both Trump and Farage has placed that public confidence under great stress. Like water building up behind a leaky dam, it doesn’t give way immediately but it builds and builds and, finally, it ends in catastrophic structural collapse.

Indifference has proven to be a breeding ground for corruption but ordinary people are waking up to the idea that they will be the ones who will pay for their political leaders’ self-enrichment.

As a footsoldier (retired) in the Tartan Army, it warms my heart to see the reception the kilted hordes have received in Boston and Miami.

The story of Wakefield, MA, resident, Mike Morrison, sums up the love affair that has gripped the Boston area. He was awoken at 6.30am one morning on the eve of the World Cup by the sound of bagpipes. He soon discovered that a squad of Scots had set up camp in an Air B’n’B across the road. He can be heard chuckling, as they performed their morning reveille, against the backdrop of a house festooned with Scottish flags.

The post got 9.5 million views and Morrison was invited for beers that evening. He has since been formally adopted as a member of the Tartan Army (he even has a certificate); was gifted a ticket to the Scotland-Morocco game; and is now in Florida with his new mates on the eve of Scotland’s clinch group game against Brazil.

That interaction was duplicated time and again in Boston, as the Scots literally drank many bars dry and put traffic cones on most of the city’s historic statues (a tradition in Glasgow, where the Duke of Wellington is rarely without one).

At the first game at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, a sound meter recorded the Scots belting out the national anthem, Flower of Scotland, at a staggering 125 decibels - the equivalent of a jet flypast at 250 feet.

Taverns throughout the city reverberated to the sound of “No Scotland, no party”, “Take me home, country road” and the ‘70s disco anthem adopted before the last Euros, “Yes sir, I can boogie”. They even cleaned up after themselves on Boston Common.

Mayor Michelle Wu thanked the Tartan Army for bringing “a sense of joy everywhere” and signed a letter of intent to twin her city with Glasgow. The Boston Globe took out a full page ad calling for the Tartan Army visit to be an annual event.

The relocation to Florida was doubly painful for the Bostonians, given the Scots were replaced by English fans, generally considered (at least by me) as classless, unfunny and potentially vicious.

It’s been, as someone called Fitzy posted on social media, “fucking class to be Scottish”.

Quite why the Scots have become best-in-class at being football fans is a curiosity.

Perhaps it is because performances on the pitch are so underwhelming that the fun cannot be conditional on results.

It is probably not unconnected to the historic hooliganism of the English - Scottish fans have deliberately cultivated a culture of friendliness to distinguish themselves. The Tartan Army is a loosely affiliated group of fan associations and travel clubs but there is a formal Tartan Army Sunshine Appeal fund to raise money for children’s charities. Around $30,000 was donated to charities in the Boston area in the last couple of weeks.

The national team also provides Scots an outlet for expressing their deeply-held national identity. Scots are avid football watchers - its leagues are the best attended in Europe, per capita - and they are proud of their football history dating back to the late 1800s when the Queen’s Park club redefined the idea of how the team game should be played (passing and teamwork were unknown at that point). The beautiful game was subsequently introduced to countries like Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina by Scottish coaches.

The Bostonians were oblivious to this back story but they were spellbound by the soft power of the Scots.

Licensing hours were extended and the policing was characterized by the lightness of touch of one of Boston’s finest who juggled a ball 17 times before being mobbed by admiring Scots.

It was all a stark contrast to my experiences with London’s Metropolitan Police in the 1980s, in Trafalgar Square on the eve of a Scotland-England clash. The exchange led to a confusion of ideas: I thought I was having a great time and the arresting officer, who didn’t fancy pulling drunken Scots out of the fountains, thought I was guilty of disorderly conduct.

But we are in more enlightened times now - even in Trump’s America.

It is ludicrous that a tournament built around FIFA’s rallying cry that “football unites the world” is being held in a country where strict immigration controls and geopolitical isolation are the political orders of the day.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino should be subject to a vote of no confidence after his ridiculous FIFA Peace Prize stunt - handed to Trump two months before he attacked Iran (a country that was forced to base its squad in Mexico, despite playing its games in Los Angeles and Seattle).

But even though Trump has given Americans tacit permission to be the worst version of themselves, that has not been enough to spoil the goodwill, the camaraderie and the kindness that has blossomed in Boston.

Though much is taken, much abides. Tennyson’s rejection of stagnation in Ulysses came to mind while watching Steve MacKinnon wrap up the spring session of Parliament on Thursday morning.

As is customary, the Government House Leader trumpets the governing party’s successes and glosses over its failures. In this case, MacKinnon talked about the 21 bills passed in the preceding 14 weeks, which, once supply bills are removed, is a conversion rate of around 48 percent. That is about standard for minority parliaments (which this one has been for most of its duration), according to calculations made by political scientist Ian Brodie in his book At the Centre of Government: The Prime Minister and Limits of Political Power.

It is probably a disappointing return for the government, given it now commands a majority, and can ram legislation through committees. That’s exactly what it did this week with the controversial lawful access bill, C22, that privacy advocates and tech companies warn represents a significant expansion of surveillance powers in this country.

The bill is now through the House and will be waiting for senators when they return from their summer break. “We sent a very, very clear signal that Canada’s elected representatives are behind (giving Canada) what is the last lawful access regime in the G7,” the House leader said.

But majority government status is not an enchanted wand that magically removes all obstacles to Royal Assent. As Brodie noted, over the past couple of decades even majority governments only pass around 60 percent of their legislation.

The fear is often voiced that Parliament has been relegated to the role of providing democratic legitimacy for decisions made elsewhere.

But the institution remains robust and vociferous about expressing the sentiments, opinions and prejudices of its citizens.

C22 did not get an easy ride in the House - the government was forced to split the original bill, C2, into two parts, and remove controversial elements such as allowing Canada Post employees to open letter mail when contraband is suspected.

The current bill promises to help law enforcement obtain digital information more quickly but civil libertarians warn it would create a significant government surveillance capability.

The Liberals were forced to guillotine debate, in what Conservative MP, Frank Caputo, called “the most aggressive programming motion I’ve ever seen”. Needless to say, he wasn’t around during the Harper majority years when House leader Peter Van Loan used closure and time allocation 100 times in four years.

But the House did its job in attempting to check what many people consider to be overreach.

Expert witnesses like Udbhav Tiwari, vice president of strategy at Signal, the messaging app, warned in committee that C22 would compel his company to construct surveillance apparatus that it has always refused to build, in order to tell governments who is talking to whom, when and from where. Signal has said it will leave Canada if the bill is passed in its current form.

A similar warning from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Philippe Dufresne, about the threat to civil liberties means the legislation is guaranteed a very rough ride indeed when it proceeds to the Senate.

It was the Trudeau Liberals who declared they would do politics differently, setting senators free from partisan constraints and limiting the use of closure. I recall one MP complaining that after a decade of Harper “running the country like Mugabe”, the first legislation he looked at in committee was an NDP private members’ bill.

The problem was the newly independent senators took their new found freedom seriously and the opposition parties filibustered in the House, with the result that nothing much got done.

MacKinnon is running a much tighter ship and made the case that all of Canada’s G7 and Five Eyes allies already have lawful access regimes in place. He said the powers at the centre of the controversy will only be used on the rare occasion that a judge grants a warrant. The legislation will give police a “limited, reasonable ability to procure information that will make people’s lives more crime free”.

He said the Conservatives are on the wrong side of a criminal justice matter. “I hope that the conspiracies and the tin foil hats are something that will fade away. But I can now safely say that it is the Liberal Party that’s most clearly for law and order in this country.”

Mocking opposition parties that are outnumbered in the House is one of the perks of majority government. But MacKinnon must know that the battle on C22 is not over yet.

Even though the legislation has passed through the House, it has generated sufficient outcry to suggest to the most oblivious citizen that something is awry.

Parliament remains an effective, rather than a dignified, institution. It still matters.

It may have been made weaker by time, fate and the efforts of successive prime ministers to centralize power. But it remains strong in will, “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”.

After writing about Russia’s threat to attack Latvia, where 2,000 Canadian troops are committed to defending the border, I was musing on that malign nation.

I’ve never been there - and am never likely to go, having been banned indefinitely from entering for my coverage of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

A diplomatic friend who spent four years in Moscow, said the people there are “wired differently” - apparently unruffled by the 1.2 million casualties caused by an unnecessary war. I imagine a Mordor-like land of shadow, ruled by the Dark Lord, Vladimir Putin.

I wondered if it could possibly be as bad as my impression and asked Grok: what positive contributions has Russia made to humanity in the 21st century?

The results were surprisingly far-reaching: major achievements in nuclear power technology, mathematics, physics, space exploration, Internet banking and software.

But just imagine what it might have achieved if Moscow wasn’t spending 30 percent of its national budget on launching wars and cyber-attacking its adversaries.

Beyond its kinetic threat, Russia is widely identified as the biggest state sponsor of global disinformation, spreading its poison to erode social cohesion and trust in the West, and deepen domestic divisions.

On the day that the government of Alberta confirms the wording of the question for an independence referendum in October, Russia’s malevolence is front of mind.

A report released by Disinfowatch earlier this month, said Russia is one of the foreign adversaries trying to exploit the Alberta separatist debate to undermine trust in Canadian democracy and amplify perceptions of political instability.

“Russia’s engagement with Alberta separatism is covert, appears doctrinal, operational and sustained,” it said.

The report identified Storm 1516, a Russian state aligned influence and disinformation operation backed by the GRU military intelligence service, as the source of noxious social media activity and noted the sustained interest in Alberta politics by the Pravda News Network, which has often highlighted the province as being economically exploited.

Disinfowatch also pointed out that the U.S. is engaged in overt “and escalating” interference efforts, some of it converging with Russia’s actions.

Reports suggest senior figures in the Trump administration have engaged with Alberta separatists, while influencers like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon have amplified separatist and annexation narratives, the report said.

One right-wing American organization, Tenet Media, which has commented on the Alberta situation, was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department for receiving nearly US$10 million in covert Russian funding.

At first blush, it’s a pretty gloomy picture for the federalist side. You can envisage the already fractious atmosphere in the province being exploited still further by Russian and U.S.-inspired narratives during the campaign, with reports of separatist support being persecuted by federally-backed Remainers.

The false claim that a referendum would automatically justify independence is sure to be raised. Any vote to stay in Canada will likely inspire claims of fraud, hacking and forged documents.

But the recent example of Hungary offers lessons for ways that federalists can fight back.

In the run up to the recent Hungarian elections, in which Putin’s favourite Viktor Orban was ousted, independent fact-checking networks were established. AI deepfakes and fabricated news stories were identified and debunked.

The opposition Tisza party helped “vaccinate” the public by warning about the dangers of Russian interference and the party built door-to-door connections across the country to address smears and propaganda in person before they escalated.

At the same time, investigative journalists exposed the activity of networks like Storm 1516.

Let’s hope some of these efforts will be replicated on the ground in Alberta.

At the federal level, the government now has the legislative tools to counter foreign interference, following the passage of bill C70 in 2024. In theory at least, it establishes a framework for foreign influence transparency and creates specific foreign influence offences.

A major advantage should be the positivity that running a Yes campaign will generate.

I am writing before Premier Danielle Smith reveals the final wording but it is likely to be based on former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk’s question: “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”

The Stay Free Alberta preference was to ask: “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be part of Canada and become an independent country?”. However, an Alberta judge has quashed that option, citing a failure to properly consult with First Nations.

That is a major boost for the federalist forces, even if Smith tacks on the words: “or leave to become an independent country” to the end of Lukaszuk’s question.

In the world of psychology, so-called “acquiescence bias” reflects the tendency of voters to agree with the proposed statement and support the status quo. One survey before the Brexit vote in Britain found a “Yes” phrasing was worth up to four percentage points.

But, rather than rely on psychological trickery, Lukaszuk’s question allows for an upbeat, positive campaign that celebrates a united Canada.

Most polls show support for Alberta independence at between 27 and 30 percent. But when pressed, only about half of those people are committed secessionists - the other half are upset because they feel the province has been mistreated within Canada. Those people can be won back.

A sustained, patriotic Unity Rally, such as the one that attracted tens of thousands to Montreal in the days before the 1995 independence referendum in Quebec, would be the perfect antidote to the toxic cycle of negativity and half-truths that is already emanating from useful idiots like Jeffrey Rath, and his inciters in Russian military intelligence. Canadians from out of province should flock to this year’s Calgary Stampede and hug an Albertan.

I’m convinced, the Remain side will be lifted by its love of country, which is quite different from the narrow nationalism of the Leavers, who rely on hatred of shadowy enemies to motivate their voters.

But Canada is not Alberta’s enemy, no matter how much some Russian intelligence officer and his network of paid influencers try to make it so. Long may it live strong and free, within Canada.

Full marks to my former National Post colleague Jen Gerson for channeling the intense rage of Max Max’s Furioso in a recent interview about the prospect of an impending Alberta referendum. It’s about time someone called out Premier Danielle Smith for gambling so recklessly with Canada’s future.

Gerson called the impromptu power grab by a rag-bag of separatists “a democratic coup” that runs the risk of a Brexit-style protest vote to send a message to Ottawa. “You can’t hold a secession referendum under these conditions. That’s Crazy Town,” she said.

Smith calls herself a federalist but all of her actions have bolstered the separatist cause. She has studiously avoided condemning them and allowed her MLAs to sign petitions in favour of independence. She regularly frames separatist sentiment as understandable in the circumstances.

To the great glee of the province’s separatist fringe, she lowered the threshold on citizen initiative referendums from 20 percent of all voters - around 350,000 signatures - to 10 percent of voters in the previous election - around 177,000 voters. When the courts threatened to block the progress of an independence petition because of Constitutional concerns, her government introduced a new law that side-stepped the judiciary (at least in that case), opening the way for a referendum on Albertan independence this October.

One thing that is under-appreciated at the moment - but likely won’t be for long - is the importance of the question. Smith has allowed the separatists to set the question - “should Alberta cease to be part of Canada and become an independent state” - allowing them the distinct advantage of running a “Yes” campaign.

I think the Alberta vote, if it happens, is likely to be more akin to Scotland’s independence vote in 2014 than Brexit. The most recent Leger poll last week had separatist support at 23 percent, compared to 64 percent support for the status quo. But campaigns matter, as the Scottish referendum illustrated.

In that case, the independence supporting Yes campaign started 20 points behind in the polls when the late nationalist leader, Alex Salmond, negotiated the referendum question with then UK prime minister, David Cameron, in October 2012, two years before the vote.

Salmond wanted a second question that would have granted more powers to the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, in the event Scots said no to independence. Cameron thought he’d won a great victory by killing that idea. But as concessions, he granted the vote to 16 and 17 year olds, and allowed the separatists to run on the Yes side of the equation.

In the two years, between the 2012 Edinburgh Agreement and the vote in September 2014, the gap in the opinion polls closed to the point where, in the days ahead of the vote, the Yes side was winning. (On 18th September 2024, 55.3 percent of Scots voted no; while 44.7 percent voted Yes).

The narrowing in the polls was a direct consequence of the giddy carnival that was the Yes campaign, downplaying the costs of independence and making an emotional appeal to latent cultural nationalism. It was like the Great Awakening, a nationalistic revival that would have worked with a less risk-averse electorate.

By contrast, the No campaign was an unmitigated disaster.

Cameron headed north and wagged his finger, warning of a “painful divorce”. The one effective counterweight to the Yes side was Mark Carney, then Governor of the Bank of England, who warned that continued use of the pound would impact sovereignty.

No is a small and bitter word and it did not stir the hearts of Scots in the same way that the Yes campaign did, with all its implications of optimism and change.

The No side in Alberta will have similar problems and it should be careful to whom it hands the bullhorn. There is a groundswell of discontent that could go either way if provoked or patronized.

The research of modern referendums suggests support for change dips between closing opinion polls and the actual vote - as it did in Scotland and in Quebec in 1995. Voters usually stick with the devil they know, unless they are provided with a good enough reason not to.

Federal politicians would be well advised to keep out of it, while reinforcing the legitimacy of the Clarity Act, which states that the House of Commons should determine what constitutes a clear question and a strong enough majority to trigger secession.

Parliament could yet insist that the question is reformulated to allow the federal side to campaign on a Yes ticket.

It is ludicrous that the rabble-rousing tail is wagging the dog to the extent that it is but that is the direct result of Smith’s strategic ambiguity. In truth there’s nothing ambiguous about it.

“Danielle Smith says she’s a federalist but she acts like a separatist, (so) she’s a separatist by default,” said Gerson.

Federalist Albertans and the rest of Canada cannot rely on the premier or her government to defend their interests.

Of all the industrial problems facing the federal government, the plight of the automotive sector is the most chronic.

Production has tumbled in recent years - just 1.2 million vehicles built in 2025, down by one third from 2019. Since over 90 percent are exported to the United States, the imposition of a 25 percent tariff by the Trump Administration is a potential death sentence for the industry north of the border.

This week’s spring fiscal update, not surprisingly, presents a more upbeat view than that, acknowledging the auto sector is on the “frontline of global trade shifts”, while suggesting the rise of electric vehicles presents a “unique opportunity” to transform the industry.

The government’s $6.9 billion strategy was already public, including $3 billion in the Strategic Response Fund and $100 million in the Regional Tariff Response Initiative. But the limitations of the federal government’s ability to shape a global market were apparent when payments from the fund to retool Stellantis’ Brampton plant to make the Jeep Compass were halted last November, after the company said it would instead make the model in Illinois.

A research note by TD Economics in February said that automakers have already begun to make changes to their production footprints to offset tariffs that are expected to lead to a further decline in Canadian production of roughly 4 percent this year, relative to 2025.

The Canadian government’s counter-tariffs include penalties for production reductions and it is doing its utmost to boost the electric vehicle sector.

Zero emissions manufacturers are being granted reduced tax rates, and, as part of the $2.3 billion Electric Vehicle Affordability program, customers are being offered a $5,000 rebate this year, declining to $2,000 in 2030.

None of this solves the problem that domestic demand alone is not sufficient to ensure that production volumes are maintained. But there was something new in the fiscal update that was intended to address that problem.

As part of Canada’s duty remission framework, the government said it is considering a potential system where companies earn tradeable credits based on their production in Canada.

The background to this is that Canada has proposed a greenhouse gas regulatory framework that adds costs to manufacturers. The EV standard does not recognize traditional hybrids such as the Toyota RAV 4-hybrid as making meaningful emissions reductions, which forces Canadian manufacturers to purchase compliance credits from EV-only companies like Tesla, which does not make cars in Canada.

The new scheme would, if rolled out, provide domestic manufacturers with per vehicle credits to offset those costs. That may help retain some production that might otherwise flee.

But, in truth, it sounds like a band-aid solution. Industry minister, Mélanie Joly, told a business audience recently that Canada wants “to build the best cars in the world, for the world”, as if we are about to start exporting electric vehicles to Asia.

The industrial strategy is to keep what production we’ve got and use tax credits and direct support to attract new EV manufacturers. But since the EV market in Canada is still under 200,000 units annually, domestic demand cannot sustain a dedicated EV plant.

The Canadian economy has proven remarkably resilient and there are opportunities to diversify trade in many industries. But the auto sector is not one of them. An integrated North American manufacturing system is the only reason cars are built in Canada and its future relies on stable and predictable access to the United States. It is easy to say Canada must reduce its dependence on U.S. market access but in this case, it is difficult to see an alternative.

As BMO senior economist, Erik Johnson, wrote in a recent note on auto production, “the forces reshaping Canada’s auto sector may be larger than domestic policy can handle”.

He suggested that auto production is unlikely to return to pre-2020 levels and that future growth will depend less on traditional assembly and more on associated segments like battery materials and clean-tech manufacturing.

That would constitute industry transformation but not quite the one envisaged in the spring update.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once gave himself an ego check. “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted,” he wrote in his journal.

Andrew Scheer has been making a habit of vulgar mistakes recently, succumbing to the demon of bitterness, especially in his latest intemperate social media post.

In response to a National Post story on the Liberal proposal to change the House committee’s composition to reflect the governing party’s new majority, the Conservative House leader decided to play the man, not the puck, berating the Post for “regurgitating Liberal talking points”.

“I guess because the Post enjoys Liberal bailouts, they are afraid of criticizing the hand that feeds them,” Scheer said.

Having earned a pay-check from the Post for the past 28 years, I am clearly not a dispassionate observer. As a friend to the incomparable Chris Nardi, who wrote the article, I have to point out that he regurgitated Conservative talking points too - quoting Scheer on the only argument of his that makes any sense. Nardi quoted Scheer as saying that the Conservatives will propose an amendment to preserve the opposition influence on committees that oversee government operations. Parliamentary tradition has it that, even in a majority, opposition members chair the Government Operations, Public Accounts and Ethics committees. In the 41st Parliament, during Stephen Harper’s majority, NDP members chaired all three committees, even though the Conservatives had six members on each, compared to three New Democrats and one Liberal.

But Scheer’s claim that the committee structure should reflect the composition of the House at the time of the last election is nonsense. No government in a hurry would countenance such a specious argument.

What is more revealing from Scheer’s outburst is the level of paranoia necessary to make the claim that the National Post is in the tank for the Liberals.

The Post is a big tent and it has changed over the past quarter century. But it was founded on principles that have not wavered: support for open markets, individualism, liberty, limited government, the rule of law and free speech.

When I can’t make up my mind on any given issue, I often think: WWCD - what would Terry Corcoran do? That seems a fairly good lodestar for principled classic liberalism.

For Scheer to attack the Post is like blaming the scoreboard for the score, said Regan Watts, a former senior aide to the late Jim Flaherty.

If this was a calculated move, it suggests the Conservative strategy is to ignore 99 percent of all voters and compete with Maxime Bernier for the 0.9 percent who said they will vote for the People’s Party in the most recent Nanos poll.

If, as I suspect, it was an outburst of frustration, like Hitler accusing his generals of betrayal in the Berlin bunker, it indicates a realization by the people around Pierre Poilievre that the party is over.

(Note to Andrew: this is not to suggest you are a diminutive, moustachioed Austrian corporal; rather, it is a contention that you have a fragile ego that interprets disagreement as a personal attack).

Since the Liberals gained their majority, Poilievre appears to have abandoned his efforts to reframe himself as a conventional consensus politician looking to work with the government during a time of national crisis, which seemed to be his gameplan for about five minutes.

Insiders credit the calming influence of communications director, Katy Merrifield, for instilling a degree of common sense into the Conservative operation. But she has resigned and Poilievre has reverted to his default setting.

We are back to polarizing rhetoric, leveraging anti-establishment sentiment and…attacking democratic checks and balances like the judiciary and the media.

Poilievre is the leader of the opposition - of course he should be pointing out to Canadians the impact of inflation, soaring deficits and the absence of any progress on major projects. “Illusions are not reality,” is a good line.

But the leader appears as bitter as Scheer; that the prize that was once within their grasp has been snatched away unfairly, perhaps forever.

Who thought it was a good idea to say Mark Carney is “badly educated”? I remember Conservative guru Tom Flanagan once saying that attacks don’t work if the source is less credible than the target. Poilievre has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Calgary that he completed by distance learning in 2008. Carney has a PhD in economics from Oxford.

“They keep leaning into crazy. It’s the most bizarre thing I have ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot,” said one prominent Conservative MP. “I don’t think Pierre can wrap his head around the fact that Mark Carney isn’t Justin.”

The majority has given the Conservatives a year or two to sort themselves out. Carney’s agenda is ambitious and, inevitably, parts of it will fail.

The Conservative platform should write itself by the end of 2027.

But there are conspicuous signs it will be delivered by a new messenger. An Angus Reid poll suggested that a majority of Conservatives want Poilievre to lead them into the next election but the numbers who want a new leader are on the rise (three in 10 now, versus one in five last August).

He remains deeply unpopular among the general voting population - two thirds of Canadians view him unfavourably. The prospect of more floor crossers may have diminished for now - MPs say the abuse that Marilyn Gladu received has given others pause for thought.

But that does not mean the caucus has rallied behind Poilievre. In the recent by-elections, the Conservative vote slipped an average of 12 percent from last year. If that were to happen in the next general election, by my calculation 53 of 140 Conservative MPs would lose their seats. That tends to concentrate minds in caucus, even of those who would prefer to keep their heads down and stay out of any internecine warfare.

Large numbers of distressed Conservatives are holding out for a hero. The political equivalent of the Bat signal is projecting into the cloudy night skies of Ottawa, in the hope it will end the bat-shit craziness. It remains to be seen whether anyone answers.

It was with some trepidation that I tuned into a Canadian Heritage committee meeting on the state of journalism, concerned that the industry might finally have landed in the hot frying pan of doom that all commentators everywhere have been predicting for the past three decades.

I should know: I was the media correspondent on The Scotsman in the mid-1990s and provided my share of forecasts anticipating pestilence, famine and death for mainstream media, as digital technologies evolved.

It has been a rocky ride, to be sure, but we’re still here and I can’t help but retain a (perhaps unrealistic) sense of optimism as the latest wave of technological change sweeps the industry - AI.

It would be fair to say that joie de vivre was in short supply at the Heritage committee.

Sheila Gunn Reid from Rebel News, representing the “Independent Press Gallery”, complained about the two-tier media system in which government subsidized outlets get access to government and those not anointed by Ottawa are discriminated against. As evidence, she cited one of her reporters being told by Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada and Global Affairs Canada that they are not entitled to answers. Join the club. No-one gets answers from government media departments, which is the first place the Liberals should go to generate millions of dollars in savings.

The CBC’s Murray Brewster complained last week that he was told he couldn’t get the breakdown of the cost of the new Canadian Forces assault rifle because it was “vendor proprietary information”.

A more coherent critique of the media landscape was offered by Peter Menzies, for three decades a working journalist at the Calgary Herald before becoming a member of the Canadian Radio-television Commission and, most recently, a senior fellow with the Macdonald Laurier Institute.

Menzies said the decision by the Trudeau government in 2018 to provide “hospice care” to publishers has meant that journalists are “now reliant on the corridors of power they are expected to patrol on the public’s behalf”.

He said that unless significant changes are made, that dependence will only grow stronger - which in turn will make the public increasingly suspicious of its content.

There is no doubt that the Local Journalism Initiative, the Online New Act and the Journalism Labour Tax Credit have been crucial in sustaining the Fourth Estate in this country.

Postmedia, which is home to most of my work, put out its six month financial report to the end of February last week. On revenue of $221.8 million, it made a net loss of $16.9 million. The financial statement said that it received compensation expenses of $8.6 million related to the journalism tax credit, helping to cover total compensation expenses of $68.4 million. Last May, the company also received $4.2 million in the initial round of payments from Google under the Online News Act.

There are good public policy reasons for providing this support. It’s all very well for commentators to talk about government providing backing to companies with “broken business models” but they don’t have to deal with the collapse of a company like Postmedia, which owns upwards of 130 titles.

I remain haunted by the words of the late former U.S. Supreme Court judge, David Soutar, who warned 14 YEARS AGO that pervasive civic ignorance was a more significant threat to American democracy than foreign invasion or military coup. He said that when people don’t understand how the government works, they are susceptible to leaders who promise to solve everything if given absolute power.

Soutar foretold the rise of an Augustus-type figure, which would foreshadow the death of democracy, just as happened with the fall of the Roman republic.

Back at the Heritage committee, Menzies argued that a new approach is needed to create well-informed citizens.

The phrase: “Better is always possible” should not be discredited as a notion just because of who said it. Menzies made some good points, such as subsidizing consumers to buy subscriptions through tax credits, as the Portuguese do by paying for two year digital news subscriptions for 15-18 year olds.

In a report for the MLI that he co-authored, And Now the News, he also suggested the CBC be turned into a pure-play public broadcaster that does not compete with the private sector for advertising.

But he had little to say about the new world of AI.

My cognitive bias, which I prefer to think of as prudent positivism, is that AI will save journalism.

The problem for journalism in the digital age has always been about how to monetize the enduring interest in the information we provided. As advertising drained towards the tech giants, newspapers responded by shrinking in size, personnel and ambition, providing less to readers. We were then bemused when readers consumed less.

But we are entering an entirely new world where human-produced content is going to be at a premium. AI can only produce content from content that already exists. Journalism provides fresh, high quality content.

The AI companies on the receiving end of billions of dollars of investment know that their systems are degraded when they are trained on low quality or synthetic data.

It would be no great surprise if tech firms start funding, or even owning, news operations to secure their own flow of reliable information.

The trust factor will become crucial in a world of AI slop and synthetic content.

Contrary to Menzies’ assertion that those patrolling the corridors of power are in the thrall of government, the political journalists I have worked with for decades would boil their grandmothers down for glue for a good story, regardless of whose toes get trampled.

But I recognize that perception is reality, and the perception is that journalism has been corrupted by government money. It is pernicious and let’s hope it is a bridge to a better future, rather than a permanent crutch.

Yet, the fact remains: AI companies need high quality journalism as training data and original reporting will be a scarce resource in a world awash with cheap content.

The industry is sure to change beyond recognition in the next decade, with more independent journalists speaking to small niche audiences and providing human oversight and verification to increasingly skeptical audiences.

But I’m more sanguine about the future of my craft than I have been in years. As usual, I’m with Churchill who called himself an optimist: “It does not seem too much use being anything else.”

Sixty eight years ago this week, the Avro Arrow interceptor fighter took its maiden flight - arguably the pinnacle of Canadian aeronautical engineering history.

Despite its technical superiority, the Arrow was expensive and was built for a job that wasn’t needed anymore, as missile warfare evolved. By 1959, the Diefenbaker government had cancelled the project and the assembly line was dismantled after producing just five aircraft.

At the time - the height of the Cold War - Canada was spending nearly 5 percent of its economic output on defence.

The peace dividend that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 saw that number dwindle to just 1 percent by 2014, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, coupled with Donald Trump’s musings about annexing Canada, has created a near consensus where three in four Canadians support more defence spending.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has embraced the need to create a more resilient Canadian Armed Forces as a means of stimulating the wider economy.

He promised that Canada would hit the target of spending 2 percent of GDP on core defence this year, and 3.5 percent by 2035.

On Thursday in Halifax, he declared the first part of that mission has been accomplished through a $60 billion infusion in the past 10 months - largely through pay increases to the Canadian Forces members and planned infrastructure spending on Department of National Defence bases.

The opposition Conservatives said the 2 percent announcement was the result of creative accounting. Defence critic, James Bezan, said it is “an illusion” that has not resulted in increased capabilities for the Forces but was achieved by, for example, adding in the cost of the Canadian Coastguard and veterans’ pensions.

But, the Defence Industrial Strategy the government unveiled in February is not just an accounting trick. This is an infusion of real money that will see annual expenditure on defence rise to $132 billion a year (in today’s dollars) by 2035.

The expectation is it will add 125,000 jobs and increase the Canadian defence industry’s annual revenues by 240 percent.

“We will see the impact of this spending multiply,” Carney said at a press conference in Halifax on Thursday to announce hitting the 2 percent target.

He had better hope it does, because the government’s finances won’t withstand such expenditure unless it starts to generate economic benefits. This is Keynesian prime pumping at its most rudimentary.

Yet, such is the anxiety at the state of the geo-political landscape there is remarkably little push-back.

Canadians saw reports that the Danes sent special forces and blood supplies to Greenland to defend against a possible U.S. invasion and have realized that, while geography continues to make us neighbours with the Americans, the history that made us friends has been distorted beyond recognition.

I wrote this week that the war in the Gulf is likely to impact Canada’s ability to buy surface to air missiles, as future production by manufacturers is commandeered by their host countries to rebuild their stocks. Canada has announced its intent to purchase a ground-based air defence system by 2029 but those plans may be derailed by a global missile shortage.

The U.S. has announced a new America First Arms Transfer strategy that is likely to have implications for Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy and the plans to wring out maximum benefits in industrial offsets for Canadian producers. The new U.S. strategy is designed to ensure that purchases by foreign governments “build American production and capacity” to support re-industrialization. Canada’s new policy runs directly counter to that idea.

Wayne Eyre, who was Canada’s top soldier as Chief of the Defence Staff until summer 2024, said this country desperately needs its own production lines for many of these munitions. “This includes using our inherent strength in the aerospace industry to produce our own long-range strike and air defence missiles, along with lower cost drones and counter-drone systems,” he said in an interview.

Eyre welcomed the resolve to invest in the defence industry but said “it must be matched with a sense of urgency that comes with a wartime mentality”.

Canada is not currently in the missile business but Eyre’s point is that we have the technical capacity, the financial resources and the political will to think the unthinkable when it comes to confronting the threats in a disordered world.

The real evidence on Canada’s resolve to reduce its reliance on the Americans will come when it finally makes its announcement on the fighter jet replacement program. The Trudeau government announced it would buy 88 F-35A fighters in 2022 but Carney ordered a review of the purchase a year ago.

Ottawa is committed to buying at least 16 F35s but it is entirely possible that it opts for a mixed fleet of fifth generation stealthy F35s and fourth generation Saab Gripens that would be made in Canada and would handle domestic air defence. That would certainly lower the risk of being unable to secure parts and munitions under America’s new arms transfer strategy.

Leaked Defence technical scores revealed last year suggest the F-35 dominated the Gripen in terms of technical and military capability when the two were evaluated head to head.

But Canada may not require all the F35’s capability to protect the homeland.

As General Gregory Guillot, commander of the North American Aerospace Defence Command told the Senate Armed Forces committee last week, NORAD does not need fifth generation fighters to defend the continent. “Their capabilities are better used overseas, where stealth, air-to-ground weapons and penetration capabilities are needed,” he said.

A mixed fleet would appear to be the best solution for Canada’s finances, security and sovereignty.

Unless, of course, we really do think the unthinkable and decide to bring back a 21st century version of the Arrow.

The World Happiness Index is out and since the two principal storylines concern Costa Rica and Canada, it seemed timely column fodder.

It is the best of times for Costa Rica, which was ranked fourth in the global poll that weighs a range of criteria: from GDP per capita to healthy life expectancy; from social support to freedom to make life choices; and from “generosity” to perceptions of corruption.

Young Ticos - 15 to 24-year olds - were ranked the second happiest in the world.

(Young Israelis were ranked third happiest, which seems remarkable in the circumstances.)

This is big news in this part of the world.

It is the highest ever ranking for a Latin American country - Costa Rica was ranked 12th in 2013, which is the baseline for the current methodology.

And it stands in stark contrast to Canada’s performance. Canada was ranked the 25th happiest of 140 countries, down from sixth in 2013.

More worryingly, 15-24 year-old Canadians were ranked the 71st happiest in the world - which suggests an alarming rise in fear, anxiety and anger from previous years.

What to make of it?

As someone who has lived for nearly three years in San José, Costa Rica’s rise doesn’t surprise me.

When you meet people in the street, they will greet you with: “Pura vida” (pure life). It has been appropriated by merchandisers to adorn coffee cups and tee-shirts but it is more than a marketing device, it’s a mindset. The Ticos are by inclination, laid back and optimistic. They are socially and ethnically homogenous, tightly bound in family units, blessed with great weather and surrounded by beaches, forests and mountains.

They know they are lucky to live in a country governed by the rule of law. While the murder rate has risen because of the incursion of drug cartels, it remains far safer than anywhere else in the neighbourhood.

That’s just as well because they shut down the army in 1948 and diverted the funding into health and education. Both have slipped in standards in recent years, to the point former president, Luis Guillermo Solis, told me he’d be loath to rely solely on state healthcare in future years.

But, by the criteria used in the index, Costa Rica is flourishing. Prices are high if you’re shopping at the glitzy Multiplaza mall in Escazu or dining at the Hotel Grano D’Oro. But most Ticos are eating pollo con arroz, washed down by a bottle of Imperial beer, at the local soda, and are doing just fine. The economy grew by 4.6 percent last year, prices are currently falling and the Costa Rican colón has appreciated 45 percent against the Canadian dollar over the past five years.

Costa Rica has its problems - not least of which is traffic congestion. The flood of cheap Chinese electric vehicles has resulted in a surge of vehicle registrations which has outstripped infrastructure improvements.

House prices have risen by nearly one quarter in the past five years, driven by expatriates from the U.S. and Canada buying holiday properties on the coast.

But, despite all its problems, it feels like a country with a future as bright as the pink cherry blossom that erupts everywhere at this time of year.

The view from Canada is much less rosy. While eight of 10 global regions - representing 90 percent of the world’s population - recorded higher life evaluations last year, the mood in the English-speaking world is somber. A friend joked that I should go back to Canada, or even to the U.K. “to spread your usual good cheer” but I’m not sure that even my legendary benevolence would improve the situation.

La Presse somehow chiselled out the Quebec stats and claimed that it would have come in fifth, were it an independent country.

Regardless, the mood recorded among 15-24 year old Canadians is concerning - particularly for those of us who have kids in that age group.

The report linked much of the unhappiness to social media but I was left unconvinced. Latin American countries also recorded high social media usage among its young people, accompanied by high levels of well-being. The study authors suggested that the type of platform is crucial - that algorithmically curated media like X, Instagram and TikTok, more popular in North America, had a much more malign impact than communication apps like What’sApp. I absolutely accept the inherent evil of the algorithms and think we should all watch the impact of Australia’s move to raise the age of access to 16 from 13. Denmark, France and Spain are planning to follow suit.

But the more likely cause of the mulligrubs is economic despair. An Abacus Data poll from 2024 suggested between one quarter and one third of 18-35 year-old Canadians have postponed buying a home, buying a car, going on holiday, changing jobs, pursuing higher education or having children because of the high cost of living and housing. They’re not the only cohort in trouble but they are more likely than older Canadians to struggle to save or pay bills.

This is not a recipe for the political status quo. All parties are aware of the danger of being swept away by a storm surge but it far from clear that federal government policies can restore hope to Generation Unattainable - an entire crop of young people who don’t truly believe they will enjoy the same levels of home ownership, stable employment and financial security that their parents did.

It is a haunting thought that all those professions about leaving a better world for our children has turned out to be nothing but pure gas.

Five years ago, I took a socially-distanced walk around the Rockcliffe neighbourhood of Ottawa with one of its most famous sons - now Prime Minister Mark Carney.

We were talking about the imminent launch of his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All and a large part of our discussion centred on a man held in high regard by both of us: Adam Smith, the intellectual father of modern capitalism.

Carney’s book rejected market fundamentalism and said that while capitalism needs Smith’s invisible hand, it also needs the other side of his personality, the moral philosopher who prioritizes human sympathy, cooperation and empathy.

(Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments argues people form values as a matter of social psychology by working to be well regarded. Carney argued we have strayed from those values).

I was recalling that chat as I ploughed through Canada’s new Defence Industrial Strategy. In a nutshell it plans to spend an extra $80 billion over the next five years, and direct more than two-thirds of that money to Canadian firms with the goal of creating “national champions.”

That, of course, is a form of enforced inequality of opportunity that is irreconcilable with Smith’s paradigm of a liberal economy; a thumb on the scale that renders the idea of comparative advantage null and void. At its most fundamental level, this argues the business case that instead of Canada making maple syrup and Mexico avocados, and the two nations trading to mutual advantage, we will now attempt to grow avocados in Saskatchewan.

Could the move be justified on moral sentiments - on the basis that the priority here is human security, not financial optimization? Smith did support a role for the government in national defence.

But I suspect he would see through that one and fall back on the argument that when people of the same trade meet together, the conversation usually ends up in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices.

Then again, Adam Smith never met Donald Trump.

I wrote about the strategy’s launch in the National Post here but I had an interesting exchange with a veteran of the procurement wars - a man who has the scars to prove it - and thought he added some good perspective that is worth passing on.

For those not willing to shell out on a Post subscription, I said the goals in the strategy are ambitious but so is the level of planned spending. An additional 125,000 jobs, a 240 percent increase in defence industry revenue and a 50 percent increase in defence exports become possible if you are spending $132 billion a year by 2035.

But my suggestion was that the level of spending is unsustainable unless the strategy starts creating economic benefits, such as those envisaged.

For that to happen the three key government departments: the Department of National Defence, Innovation, Science and Economic Development and Public Services and Procurement Canada have to co-operate - something they have never done in the past because each has competing interests.

The government has created the Defence Investment Agency to streamline and coordinate the procurement policy but it remains unclear how it will make a difference to a process where the Forces want the gold-plated kit, the Industry department wants to spread the wealth across the country and the Procurement department wants the others to get out of its kitchen.

The exchange I had with my defence industry source concurred with much of that.

He said the influx of such large amounts of cash, and the speed with which the government wants to act, raises the prospect of more ArriveCAN scams. (ArriveCan was the mobile app pushed by the Canada Border Services Agency during COVID. It turned out to have cost $54 million for something one hacker produced in two days for $250,000. Worse, the developer subcontracted all the work, while the Auditor General found the relevant department “glaringly disregarded basic management and contracting practices”.)

“It’ll be sloppy perhaps but we have the requisite tools in the toolbox to keep the profiteers at bay,” said my source, who wants to keep his head down after having it blown off by the Liberal government on a previous occasion.

More worrying than out and out fraud is inefficiency. The new defence strategy is a replay of the National Shipbuilding Strategy (the 2010 decision to support Canada’s marine industry and build vessels here) writ large.

The NSS has succeeded in delivering five Arctic and Offshore Patrol vessels and three Offshore Fisheries Science Vessels.

It has also begun construction on the 15 new River Class destroyers, employs 21,400 people across Canada and generates billions for the economy.

But a budget that was set at $26 billion in 2008, with the delivery of the first ship envisaged any day now, is now by some estimates expected to cost over $100 billion and we won’t see any new frigates before the early 2030s. Efficient, it is not.

Another interesting observation from my source was that he said there is a “dot.com boom” feel on Bay Street.

“Defence is hot on the Street,” he said. “People don’t know whether this is a real thing over the long term, or a flash-in-the-pan to placate Trump and our Allies. They are getting in while the going is good.”

One concern he has is that the government’s spending will end up being concentrated in Quebec and the Atlantic provinces, leaving Alberta even further alienated. While the military is understandably motivated by its desire for the best equipment, he said regional development agencies have a role to play ensuring the spread of investment across the country.

Industry’s biggest beef with government was that spending on defence was feast or famine, discouraging long-term investment. The new strategy aims to change that by creating constant “demand signals”. My source said the biggest complaint now is the “Shania Twain effect” - namely, that companies are only regarded as credible if they have managed to sell their product overseas. “I have certainly lived it and I know of at least half a dozen entrepreneurs who have left Canada for the U.S. in the last year alone,” he said.

He said he was encouraged by the indications from Carney that export permits will be granted more freely - and not just to Western liberal democracies. He noted that industry minister, Mélanie Joly, cancelled an order of mortar cartridges from General Dynamics in Quebec to Israel in 2024. “Canadians will have to learn to hold their noses,” he said.

The one other area he suggested that Canadians keep an eye on is the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), which has a new $4 billion venture capital fund for the defence sector.

Canada hasn’t developed a new munition of note since the Canadian Rocket Vehicle 7 (CRV7) in the late 1960s.

He suggested BDC might help change the culture of innovation.
“They have hired well - no bureaucrats but folks with balls. I don’t throw flowers often but Isabelle Hudon (President of BDC and former ambassador to France) has smarts and guts. I think they will have a catalytic impact,” he said.

Capital investment for growth? That is a concept Adam Smith could get behind.

The death of Allan Massie at 87 this week, reminded me that I chatted with him about Sir Walter Scott and Scottish politics in the week before the 2014 independence referendum. Massie was a giant of Scottish journalism - for 50 years a columnist at The Scotsman, including when I worked there in the mid-1990s.

A Conservative and Unionist when it was not fashionable to be either, he lamented the decline of the nation in the 20th century and its drift into quasi-socialism and mediocrity.

An adopted Borderer, like Scott (whom he considered the greatest Scotsman), and a keen rugby fan, he would have relished Scotland’s imminent victory in the Six Nations tournament that begins this weekend. This was the product of our chat.

ABBOTSFORD, SEPTEMBER, 2014: A poll Friday suggested two-thirds of voters in the south of Scotland intend to vote “No” in this week’s independence referendum.

It seems a fair assumption those closest to the border have most interest in maintaining the 307-year-old union. And it seems even more likely Sir Walter Scott, the world’s first best-selling author, would approve the folk of his beloved Borders would side with the union.

Scott’s renaissance in popularity has seen both “Yes” and “No” sides claiming him as their own. He was undoubtedly a patriot and a unionist.

Yet no one visiting Abbotsford, his baronial country house in the rolling hills of the Scottish borders, can be left in any doubt he was a committed Tory, who would have shunned the socialists leading the Yes charge.

He would probably have broken Marie Antoinette’s clock and the silver urn gifted by Lord Byron with Rob Roy’s broadsword, all on display in Abbotsford, rather than endorsed the chippy independence movement led by Alex Salmond, the Scottish first minister.

“I don’t think he would have liked what he saw in the temper of the nationalists,” said Allan Massie, the renowned author and journalist, who lives in nearby Selkirk.

“A lot of his novels were about reconciliation and I don’t think he’d have liked the way the nationalists are dividing Scots, as well as dividing us from the English.”

Scott’s views are fundamental to any explanation of how the Scots arrived at the brink of independence after 307 years.

“Scott’s achievement was that he helped create for Scotland a distinctive identity - yes, based on spurious associations with tartan, but one comfortably Scottish within the union and different from the English,” said Mr. Massie.

After the Jacobite rebellions in the mid-18th century, the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment like David Hume and Adam Smith became entrenched in the union as “North Britons” - “revealing the innate superiority of the Scots by out-Englishing the English,” in the words of author James Buchan.

Scott put an end to the North Briton identity and gave birth to a distinct Scottish cultural, if not political, nationalism.

He was party to the belief Scotland had entered a profitable union with England, even forming his own militia to suppress rebellion against the status quo.

But the writer was also a proud patriot who worried Scotland’s sense of itself was disappearing. As such, he sought to immortalize the country’s past in many of the 27 novels of the Waverley series that made him revered at home and abroad.

To give some sense of his popularity, he earned 10 times more from Waverley in its first year in print, than Jane Austen did from Pride and Prejudice in her entire lifetime.

Scott’s work helped define popular notions and stereotypes about Scotland. He virtually invented clan tartans in the stage-managed trip to Edinburgh by King George IV in 1822 that he organized.

He promoted the view the union allowed Scotland to punch above its weight, with Scots becoming the champion empire builders. The warm feeling offered by “the blanket of Britishness,” in the words of popular historian Neil Oliver, carried through both world wars and the immediate aftermath, with the advent of the National Health Service.

But the decline of Scotland’s heavy industry in the post-war years presaged an erosion of the ties that bound the union together.

Clydeside, the beating heart of the Scottish nation, produced 30% of the world’s ships in 1950; yet just 10 years later this was down to 5%. This spiral of decline was repeated in the mining and steel sectors, and sparked the birth of political nationalism.

In 1967, the Scottish National Party elected its first MP and the discovery of “black gold” in the North Sea gave the nationalists the chance to promise a bright new future as an independent country. By 1974, the SNP had 11 MPs and were claiming “It’s Scotland’s Oil.”

When the Conservative Margaret Thatcher arrived on the political scene like a comet, it became apparent the government subsidies that sustained much of Scotland’s heavy industry were on borrowed time.

England voted Tory in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992. Scotland backed Labour, yet got Mrs. Thatcher’s harsh medicine of de-industrialization and the poll tax. Between 1979 and 1981, Scotland lost a fifth of its workforce and Scottish voters have never forgiven the Conservatives.

When Tony Blair’s Labour delivered on its promise of a referendum on a devolved Scottish parliament -a vote that produced a solid 74% in favour -the expectation was nationalism had had its day.

As George Robertson, a former Labour defence minister, famously said, devolution would kill the independence movement “stone dead.”

But, with the Tories a toxic option for many voters, the Edinburgh parliament allowed the SNP to become the natural governing alternative to Labour. Mr. Blair’s foreign adventurism and embrace of the markets went down badly north of the border. The result was the SNP’s victory in Scotland’s 2011 election and the fulfilment of a campaign commitment to hold another referendum.

If Mr. Salmond does become the father of a new nation later this week, he should give thanks to the man who created the sense of a nation.

As Mr. Massie put it, “Scott persuaded Lowland Scots to accept what their grandfathers regarded as the mark of a thief [tartan] and created a coherent Scottish identity within the union.”

The Venezuelan who owns an arepa restaurant in my neighbourhood in San Jose, Costa Rica, told me about his former life.

He was, he said, an economist with the Banco Central de Venezuela, responsible for the country’s considerable gold reserves held by the Bank of England, deep under London’s streets.

One day, he was ordered by one of Venezuela’s 2,000 generals to repatriate a portion of the gold and have it moved to the rooftop of a building in Caracas. The bullion was duly returned but the economist, who knew the precise tonnage involved, recommended against transporting the bars in a waiting helicopter, to the general’s chagrin.

He said the knowledge that millions of dollars worth of the nation’s reserves had been pilfered was dangerous information and he fled the country before he became as “disappeared” as the gold.

(The Bank of England still holds 31 tonnes of Venezuelan bullion in its vaults, valued in 2020 at $1.98 billion, but has blocked Caracas from repatriating any more, after the disputed presidential election in that year.)

The economist said that in the early years of the Chavismo revolution, the regime was just incompetent. After President Hugo Chavez’s death in 2013, and the accession of Nicolas Maduro, it became progressively more corrupt and repressive.

A panel appointed by the Organization of American States to investigate possible crimes against humanity, which included former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler as one of its three members, concluded there is “ongoing systemic violence orchestrated by the state against civilians” and a deliberate policy to provide impunity to mid-and-high level perpetrators of crimes against humanity.

A long post on social media this week by Jeff Kazin, a former head of trading for American food company Cargill, offered a revealing insight into Venezuela’s descent into lawlessness and hunger. He said that a decade of kleptocracy and bribery made it impossible to operate a business in the country. Cargill’s “minute rice” facility was taken at gunpoint, amid claims the company was gouging the local population. Kazin said after the takeover, the plant did not run again. When it was eventually handed back, all the equipment had been stolen.

He said the government controlled the price of food, subsidizing grocery stores and distorting the market. Access to U.S. dollars to import raw materials was tightly controlled, requiring bribes. When foodstuffs were imported, they were looted at the ports. “Even if you could raise a pig, you couldn’t defend it from being stolen,” he said. “People with guns were hungry”.

This is a country that at the turn of the century had a similar GDP per capita as Poland. Then Poland implemented free market reforms and saw its output per head double to around US$30,000 by last year. In contrast, Venezuela adopted socialism and saw its GDP per capita fall by two-thirds to around US$5,000.

This is the regime that Donald Trump has left in place.

The Americans may have had good reasons for ignoring the legitimate claims of Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, in favour of supporting vice-president, Delcy Rodriguez. Officials briefed journalists that trying to install Machado, or Edmundo Gonzales (who was the opposition candidate in 2024 because Machado was banned from running) would have been untenable. Officials said she had no support among the people who held power and installing her would require them to blow up the whole Chavismo system and build a new one from scratch.

That was probably an easy sell to make to Trump, who has proven that he is less than dogmatic about democracy or the rule of law.

On BBC Radio this week, former head of Britain’s MI6, Sir Alex Younger, said the Administration’s approach was likely conditioned by America’s experience in Iraq, where it removed Saddam Hussein’s regime and expected democracy to blossom. “We were hopelessly naive and we paid the price,” he said.

But Venezuela is not Iraq. It has a history of representative democracy going back to 1831, held its first direct elections in 1860 and was a relatively stable democracy from 1958 onwards. During the mid 1970s it was, along with Colombia and Costa Rica, one of three democracies in Latin America. Even Chavez’s revolution was the consequence of free and fair elections that brought him to power in 1998.

Within a decade, it was deemed the least democratic state in South America by The Economist, but autocracy has been the exception, rather than the rule.

Trump’s actions with Operation Absolute Resolve has created an opportunity to act on Washington’s recent National Security Strategy’s for the Western Hemisphere.

It urges the Administration to push out foreign companies that build infrastructure and leverage America’s power to ensure U.S. firms are awarded sole sourced contracts. The plan is to roll back Chinese influence in the region. As the former Cargill executive, Jeff Kazin, pointed out, Venezuela should be an outstanding customer for U.S. grown agricultural products like rice, bread wheat and vegetable oil.

Yet, the way Rodriguez embraced the ambassadors of China, Russia and Iran at her inauguration (and called the U.S. intervention “barbaric”) suggests that whatever she is telling Washington in private, the anti-American, nationalist Chavismo reflex remains deeply embedded.

The alternative is not to become drawn into an Iraqi-style quagmire but to keep the peace for long enough to allow for free elections, which have already demonstrated broad public support for democrats.

There are plenty of international actors who would provide backing for such a police action, not least the Organization of American States, which has long experience in organizing and observing elections. Countries across the region such as Colombia and Peru host millions of displaced Venezuelans and are concerned about the prospect for more refugees.

The Americans still have an aircraft carrier group in the region. They have the hard power to insist that the regime holds elections.

If the Trump Administration truly wants to bolster its appeal to become the economic and security partner of choice, as its National Security Strategy says it does, it has to give the Venezuelan people the chance to sweep away the vestiges of the regime that has been the source of their ruination.

So the Groucho Marx Party - “these are my principles: if you don’t like them, I have others” - has another member.

Michael Ma, who was elected as Conservative MP for Markham-Unionville about five minutes ago, has flipped to the Liberals, taking their standings to one tantalizing seat short of a majority that would keep them in power until 2029. You can hardly blame Mark Carney from encouraging bad behaviour in the circumstances.

But MPs have a responsibility to their constituents.

There will, no doubt, be other unscrupulous Conservatives lining up to get the Liberals over the majority line, like Augustus Gloop diving into Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. To be fair, the lure of personal aggrandizement is matched for some by the push factor of a Conservative Party leadership that appears to relish upsetting the median voter.

However, would-be floor crossers should think twice if they want to qualify for their six years of pensionable service. It rarely ends well. Parliament nerds will no doubt prove me wrong but from memory only a handful of MPs have moved from one party in the House of Commons to another and subsequently been re-elected in the past two decades or so.

Keith Martin left the Canadian Alliance to protest the merger with the Conservatives in 2004, sat as an independent and subsequently won his Vancouver Island riding as a Liberal; Progressive Conservative Scott Brison made a similar journey and won six elections as a Liberal MP; Conservative Belinda Stronach helped Paul Martin stave off a potentially disastrous election in 2005 by joining the Liberals in dramatic fashion and she was re-elected in Newmarket-Aurora in 2006, before losing in 2008; Leona Alleslev won her suburban Toronto riding for the Liberals in 2015 and then for the Conservatives in 2019, before losing to her former party in 2021; while, Jenica Atwin won her Fredericton riding for the Greens in 2019 and for the Liberals in 2021.

The more typical stories are of mediocrities who think they are Socrates fooling themselves that their personal brand will carry them to victory under a different banner.

One such cautionary tale is that of Eve Adams, who won the Mississauga-Brampton South riding for the Conservatives in 2011, beating Navdeep Bains, before crossing to the Liberals before the 2015 election. She later lost the Liberal nomination for the Eglinton-Lawrence seat to future minister, Marco Mendicino, and subsequently failed in her bid for a seat on Hamilton City Council.

The reason that crossing the floor is a career-limiting move is that it connotes a lack of principle. Voters, fools that they are, genuinely value honesty, character, integrity and loyalty. The floor crosser, rightly or wrongly, is seen as having abandoned party esprit de corps for personal advancement.

As David Lloyd George once famously said of serial floor-crosser, former British foreign secretary Sir John Simon: “The right honourable and learned gentleman has twice crossed the floor of this House, each time leaving behind a trail of slime”.

Conversely, the man or woman of principle is prepared to head into the political wilderness if he or she cannot stomach the direction in which their party is heading.

In the course of researching my upcoming book on Irwin Cotler, one of his staff members told me that the Conservatives tried to lure the former justice minister to join them, after failing to unseat him in 2011. I raised it with him and he conceded that the Harper government had extended that option, “including offering me a ministry if I would do so. But it was never an option for me and I made that very clear to them,” he said.

I don’t think I have met anyone in a journalistic career spanning more than three decades who lives their virtue like Cotler, as opposed to merely signalling it.

He summed up an approach that should be standard for all members of Parliament. “For me, it was an issue of principle. I would never cross the floor. My mandate came from my constituents - for me personally but also for the party I was representing. If I felt I could no longer be a member of that party, then my option and responsibility was to resign.”

MPs are billed as “Honourable Members” in Hansard, the official report of all debates. They should live up to that characterization.

Steven Guilbeault’s resignation will come as no surprise to Mark Carney - save, perhaps, for the fact that it took so long.

The former environment minister quit on Thursday evening, after the prime minister unveiled his memorandum of understanding with Alberta premier, Danielle Smith. That deal is aimed at creating the conditions to build an oil pipeline to the West Coast and encouraging new investment in the province’s natural gas electricity generation sector. In doing so, Carney cancelled the oil and gas emissions cap and the clean electricity regulations that Guilbeault had been instrumental in constructing and imposing.

The former environmental activist couldn’t accept the continued expansion of fossil fuel production and so walked away after six years in cabinet.

In his resignation statement, he said he strongly opposes the MOU with Alberta because it was signed without consultation with the province of British Columbia and First Nations.

He said removing the moratorium on oil tankers off the West Coast would increase the risk of accidents and suspending clean electricity regulations, which blocked new gas generation, will result in an “upwards emissions trajectory”.

In particular, he was upset about the expansion of federal tax credits to encourage enhanced oil recover, a carbon storage technology that captures carbon dioxide from industrial emitters and injects it back underground. Guilbeault considered this a direct subsidy for oil production - a business he said he hoped the government was exiting.

In a Twitter post, I called Guilbeault “anti-Pathways” - that is, opposed to the giant carbon capture and storage development that Carney views as crucial to offsetting the building of a new pipeline.

One of Guilbeault’s defenders said he is not anti-Pathways, and that, in fact, he was part of the trifecta, along with Chrystia Freeland and Jonathan Wilkinson, who negotiated the details on the investment tax credit “that will pay 50 percent of the cost of construction to a bunch of rich oil companies”. To me, that showed Guilbeault’s (and his supporters) true colours. If he wasn’t anti-Pathways, he certainly wasn’t pro.

When he said he would back Carney’s leadership bid in January, I wrote that it was an endorsement the aspiring Liberal leader could do without.

The now-prime minister always had in his mind a plan to build, including fossil fuel production, offset by technology adoption and a stronger industrial carbon price in Alberta. Even then, he made clear he was prepared to be pragmatic in a time of crisis.

Guilbeault’s plan was to regulate the industry to death.

It was always going to end badly but, as Carney told me last winter, Guilbeault provided crucial support on the ground in Quebec and any politician’s first responsibility is to win.

Guilbeault should be respected for his deep convictions on climate change and his commitment to leaving a better world to our children.

But he should never have been allowed to dictate environmental policy in this country. He refused to view natural gas as a bridging fuel in the energy transition in a country that has reserves of a resource that will, at current production levels, last 300 years.

He made clear his lack of enthusiasm for small modular nuclear reactors and new road-building.

And he pushed an oil and gas emissions cap that he knew would hit production levels and further (if that were possible) alienate Western Canadians.

His departure - and that of Freeland - give Carney scope to pursue what he hopes is a transformative response to not only Donald Trump, but to federal policies that amounted to driving with the handbrake on. Carney has made his intent clear - to optimize Canada’s resource wealth, while attempting to minimize emissions.

Five years ago, Trudeau was nearly tarred and feathered during a visit to Calgary; Carney received two standing ovations in the same town yesterday.

For too many years under the Trudeau/Freeland duopoly the plan was to redistribute the pie. Now it is clearly about wealth creation.

In my National Post columns, I have been scathing about some of the things the Carney government has done, as is appropriate for someone whose prime directive is the public interest. The decisions to recognize a Palestinian state; apologize to Trump for the Ontario “Ronald Reagan” ad; announce a bunch of major projects that were so advanced they didn’t need to be fast-tracked; split spending into the confusing binary of “operating” or “capital”; and visit the United Arab Emirates on a trade mission in the midst of a genocide in Sudan that the Emiratis had helped to fund were all, to me, missteps.

But, so far, Carney has got the big things right. The budget and this MOU are auspicious moves aimed at ending a decade of stagnation and lost investment.

There is a new mood of anticipation in the country, summed up in the S&P/TSX index, which hit record highs this week on the back of energy and mining stocks. Canadian pension funds are taking another look at the domestic market, intrigued by the prospect of investing in the potential privatization of airports, for example.

Canada is feeling better. There has been a shift in the mindset from saying no to everything to being open to removing barriers that stop the private sector from investing.

Success and prosperity are not guaranteed. But stagnation need not be either.

MEDELLIN: The Plaza Botero in Medellin’s old quarter is a bittersweet kind of place. The passion and playfulness of Latin America’s greatest modern artist, present in the 23 bronze sculptures he donated to the city of his birth, is tempered by the poignancy of the extreme poverty in the surrounding streets.

Ferdinand Botero, who died at the age of 91 two years ago, said he did not paint fat people, he just exaggerated reality. It is no surprise that there is a hallucinatory quality to his work to anyone who has read the novels of his countryman, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

But Medellin scarcely needs amplification. For much of the 1980s and ‘90s, this was the murder capital of the world, the home of Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel.

At the time, Escobar supplied 80 percent of America’s cocaine and generated revenues nearly as large as Colombia’s entire formal economy.

The streets are quieter now but the city feels as if it remains in a kind of post-traumatic shock, a sense of disassociation compounded by addiction, crushing poverty and criminality.

At one point during our visit to Plaza Botero, a shirtless young panhandler, emboldened by misery and desperation, refused to take no for an answer and things nearly got ugly.

Yet, overall a country that was on the verge of becoming a failed state at the turn of the century is not failing anymore. Smart public policy means it is very much succeeding.

Modern Medellin has come a long way since Escobar.

Popular culture has portrays him as a kind of dashing Robin Hood-type figure for his propensity to build housing and football pitches for the poor. But the Medellin cartel’s specialty was murder - bombing aeroplanes and planting car bombs that killed thousands.

In 1991, the murder rate hit 395 per 100,000 inhabitants - nearly 7,000 people - as the cartels, urban militia, guerillas and paramilitaries pursued their own wars.

Escobar was shot by the authorities in 1993, an event immortalized by Botero in his painting, The Death of Escobar. But the city remained in the grip of violence for the next decade or more.

In 1995, a 10kg bomb was planted underneath Botero’s Bird of Peace statue in Plaza San Antonio. When it exploded, it killed 23 and injured another 200 people.

Botero insisted the damaged sculpture be left in place “as a monument to this country’s imbecility and criminality”.

It is a small miracle that, by 2022, the homicide rate was reduced to 15 per 100,000 inhabitants, much lower than many U.S. cities such as Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit and St. Louis. The prosperous and fashionable El Poblado district is safer than Boston or Miami. Even the illegal settlement of Comuna 13, perched high above the city, has seen the crime rate fall, as tourists take the 1260ft escalator to the barrio to see the famed graffiti and breakdancers.

The transformation of this City of Eternal Spring has been dramatic, if uneven, and it is rooted in the improved security situation.

In 2002, Operation Orion saw an armed takeover of the city by the armed forces.

Peace negotiations saw the break-up of militia and guerrilla groups, aided by demobilization assistance programs. An increase in social investment in vulnerable areas, such as the escalator to Comuna 13, a boost to police manpower levels, a phased truce and the jailing of guerrilla commanders yielded a marked reduction in violence.

By 2013, Medellin’s urban turnaround saw it named as the world’s most innovative city by the Wall Street Journal.

The modern city follows the Medellin river along the narrow Aburrá Valley, through the central region of the Andes mountains. The main conurbation is flanked by illegal barrios and high end neighbourhoods, piled high on the surrounding hillsides.

The economy is powering along at an estimated 3 percent this year, driven by construction, real estate, agriculture and private consumption. After years of fear and loathing, Colombians are enjoying a peace dividend. .

They seem more adept than many of their Latin American neighbours at building major infrastructure such as the Túnel de Oriento, an 8.2km toll road tunnel that runs between Medellin and the José Marie Córdova International Airport in Rionegro, which opened in 2019 and halved the journey time.

Rionegro, Escobar’a home town, is bustling with new malls and condominiums, as older, wealthier residents move to the tranquility of the hills to retire. Home sales grew by 37.4 percent nationwide, amid booming demand.

On a Saturday night in the charming old town of El Retiro, where the whole community gathers in the colonial square to eat and drink and stroll and laugh, it seems like the Colombians have gotten many things right. .

But recovery in a country with such an unstable past is inevitably fragile. The former president Ivan Duque was booted from office in 2022, post-COVID and the tsunami of Venezuelan immigration. He was succeeded by the leftist Gustavo Petro, who promised to reduce the poverty that afflicts 21 million Colombians, or 44 percent of the population.

The intentions may have been good but the results have been dismal. In 2024, inflation remained stubbornly high at 5.5 percent, unemployment was 9.1 percent, the fiscal deficit was 5 percent and the Colombian peso was devalued by 15 percent. This has made the country attractive to foreign investors but increased the price of imports for local people.

The political fall-out has been predictable, a year ahead of the next election: Petro’s disapproval rating has hit new highs of 64 percent, far higher than the 29 percent who approve of his performance.

Political and social unrest was heightened with the assassination of presidential rival, Miguel Uribe in August. Nearly three quarters of Colombians now believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.

Petro appears to have glanced at the polls and decided he needed an external adversary to rally the nation. Early in Donald Trump’s presidency, Petro publicly decried the detention and expulsion of migrants. The U.S. president needs little encouragement to get his retaliation in first and has done so over drug policy, calling Petro “a thug” and “a drug-trafficking leader”.

Further, he warned Petro that he’d better “watch it or we will take serious action against him and his country”. U.S. extrajudicial attacks on suspected drug boats have already taken place in the Pacific, as well as off the Venezuelan coast in the Caribbean. Trump has ambiguously threatened action on land, without specifying whether it would be limited to Venezuela.

Petro has argued that cocaine seizures are the highest in history but the Americans are more convinced by United Nations Office of Drug and Crime statistics that say cocaine production was up by 53 percent in 2023 - the 10th consecutive rise.

So far, Colombia has escaped with an across-the-board 10 percent tariff on exports by its biggest trading partner, giving it a price advantage over regional competitors for its coffee and the flowers that are grown everywhere in Rionegro in vast, covered planthouses. Petro is flirting with higher duties - or an even more dramatic kinetic response.

But Medellin has seen worse. As Garcia Marquez, said about human beings, they are not born once and for all on the day their mother gave birth to them. Life, he said, obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

Much the same can be said about cities.