If you spend any time reading social media or watching Tom Mulcair’s commentary for the Gazette, it feels like the PQ campaign isn’t going very well. Their polls are soft, the seat projection is crashing, and there’s this air that this isn’t happening in the way it was supposed to.

PSPP’s latest foible - the story of his having donated to the Liberals post-AdScam, which was allegedly the moment he became a committed sovereignist - both doesn’t matter and yet deeply hurts. There’s presumably a way those two statements are true, and PSPP has the benefit of a decent personal brand on integrity and moral convictions to fall back on, but it’s another couple of days of a campaign spent on extra curricular nonsense and not the issues Quebecers care about.

But I’m less interested in what the PQ campaign has done than what has happened around it, which is that they’ve been fucked by two countervailing forces outside of their control. And with a month left to the election, it’s hard to know if they’ll get any luck in either reversing any time soon.

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“It’s counterintuitive, but the CAQ at 25%, the QLP at 22%, and the PQ at 30% is better for the goals of the Quebec Liberals than the PQ at 35%, the QLP at 30%, and the CAQ at 14%. In the latter, it’s a narrow PQ majority with a limited path to stopping it. In the former, it’s anybody’s guess how a series of three way dice rolls where the winner’s vote share will start with a 2 goes. And if you don’t want a referendum, we have to lean into the chaos.”

I wrote that in January, the day Legault resigned, and it is still one of the best things anybody has written in English about this campaign. The reality - this week’s Leger poll being 29% PQ, 24% CAQ, and 22% Liberal - is shockingly close to the numbers I pulled out of my ass 8 months ago. And we’re now in a place where despite the PQ being where they’ve spent much of the last two years - 30%, give or take a point - their position is perilous and seemingly on the verge of collapse.

The first structural problem for them is the CAQ got rid of a shit leader for a competent one. Frechette has done a great job of managing the job of Premier with the job of letting nationalists know she’s not going soft on the whole Hating Anglos thing, and between Churchill Falls and the more general sense that she knows what she’s doing, the CAQ are an incalculably more attractive proposition now than in January.

The other part of it, however, was proved on Monday night by the federal results in Chicoutimi. Federal and provincial comparisons are fraught for any number of reasons, not least of which the five party nature of Quebec politics and the 3 party nature of Federal politics outside the east end of Montreal, but they can be useful. And in Chicoutimi, as was true at the last federal election, Quebecers trusted that Carney was doing a pretty good job for the people of Quebec.

The history of the rise and fall of the separatist movement in Quebec is the history of whether Quebecers had even a basic modicum of faith that the federal government weren’t governed by idiots. The throughline of referendums, though both held during Liberal governments, can’t be pinned on ideological lines. Mulroney created the conditions for our near death experience, whereas Harper continued in Chretien’s path towards smothering the separatists with a mostly functional government that didn’t anger Quebec very much.

In 2025, the Bloc got 28% of the vote in Quebec. Last week in Chicoutimi, they got basically what they got last time, and depending on the pollster they’re roughly around that 28% of the vote again. It’s also where the PQ find themselves, because there are a sycophantic 30% of Quebecers who view independence as a good idea regardless of the merits. In a 2 party politics, that’s nowhere close to enough to get anything done, but in Quebec’s five party politics it could, depending on the splits, be enough. The PQ even managed 28% in 2007, which makes it clear there is a floor on the pro-independence vote.

But the problem for the PQ is that Carney isn’t giving them anything to run against. There’s nothing for people to be outraged by, and nothing to make anybody outside the sycophantic diehards to consider the grand experiment of independence at a time when Quebec can’t handle any of its own problems. In 1995, Quebecers nearly voted to leave because the story of post-1984 Canada was a country that was economically stagnant and unable to solve any big problem, as the dual failures of Meech Lake and Charlottetown showed.

Now, Canada is proving to be more resilient, because Carney is clearly on the ball in a way that Quebecers like. Chicoutimi was such a big win that it’s fair to say the Liberals would have won it even without any boost from the trade war, because fundamentally Quebecers think Carney is doing a good job. Not a perfect one, not an immaculate one, but he is stubbornly refusing to give the vast majority of Quebecers any reason to doubt the sense in the status quo. It is a remarkable testament to the success of Carney that he is stopping the PQ from any breathing room.

So I come back to the original question - is the PQ having a bad campaign? In some ways no, because the problems that plague them are beyond their control. But it’s also true that they’ve spent the last two years thoroughly unprepared for a world where the anti-referendum side of politics got their shit together, and they’re now suffering for it.

If the PQ want to win this election, they’re going to need to provide Quebecers an actual reason to elect them, and an actual reason they need independence, beyond vague bon mots about the greatest of Quebec. They need to articulate a reason why this Canadian government will not be good enough for Quebec, and why they need to be freed of the shackles of confederation. They haven’t, because one doesn’t exist. And the truth is, that is Mark Carney’s greatest accomplishment so far.

I have complicated feelings these days about the Carney government. I think they’re mostly good, sometimes annoying because I disagree with their ideological decisions, sometimes angering because they fuck up easy comms policy, but mostly good. I like Carney, and fundamentally he’s doing what he promised Canadians - minding the country well while trying to navigate a crisis not of our own making. It’s not easy and I have a lot of respect for him.

But as a politician, it’s a very funny question of whether his success is the result of his genius or others’ idiocy, and tonight’s byelections don’t really do anything to answer the question one of my American friends asked me tonight. Because in some ways, tonight is a coup for Carney - the Chicoutimi Gambit paid off, with a decisive Liberal win in a seat where they gave the MP a Senate seat to open the seat up. But man, is it impressive beating this clusterfuck of an Opposition?

Let’s start with the NDP, mostly because I don’t care: it’s a good result for them in Beaches, slightly above what I expected for them in July, but the takes are getting slightly crazy. They still lost by 30% and they were buoyed by the Liberals losing one of the biggest personal votes in Parliament. If they think the loss of Guilbeault’s personal vote will be anywhere near as sizable as the loss of Nate’s, they will be in for a rude awakening. Also, losing to the Greens in North Van ain’t great.

The Bloc are objectively a massive loser - this is further evidence that the Liberals have replaced the Bloc as the party of Standing For Quebec, insofar as the Liberals are seen as doing a sufficiently good job to not need the Bloc to defend their interests. It’s also worth pointing out that the PQ are at 29% in both Pallas and Leger post-trade deal falling apart, further proof that outside of a core base nobody in Quebec actually wants to rock the boat. (Quebec politics column coming every Friday in writ!)

But the real story is once again the Conservatives. Three years ago I wrote a column on a byelection night saying that the Conservatives need to fire Jenni Byrne if they want to win the election. Two years ago Byrne wanted the Liberals to win St. Paul’s so that the Liberals wouldn’t be smart enough to notice they need to ditch Trudeau. Now, two years later, we’re back in a world where the Conservatives are once again miserable on a Byelection night, and Jenni is no longer at the scene of the crime. So at some point I have to ask: when is anyone going to put Poilievre out of his fucking misery?

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I have no animus left for Pierre Poilievre. Sunday night saw Novak Djokovic lose at the US Open, and while I can’t deny the talent, he was never my flavour of tennis star. But even in my nostalgic Federer adoration, it was hard to watch Novak struggle, and it was harder in some ways because he was never my guy.

Poilievre is a spineless piece of shit, sure, but it’s also completely insane that I seem to have more compassion for the man than any Conservatives. Dan Arnold tweeted tonight that Poilievre has 6 of the worst 8 Byelection drops in vote share of the post-Harper Conservatives, and while it’s shocking, it’s also somehow not anymore. For something to be shocking there has to be a reason to be shocked, and frankly expecting the CPC to be competent right now is just unreasonable.

I feel bad on some level for Poilievre because I actually do believe in the idea that good governance requires good opposition. I don’t think this current state of affairs is good for Canada. I think it’s better than the alternative of a Poilievre government, sure, but a government with a big lead and better Byelection results than those polls (once properly adjusted for the loss of NES’ personal vote) and without anybody making a clear or incisive argument against it isn’t good for anybody.

This government is not perfect by any means, but it’s not a good thing that this website does more effective criticism of Carney than the Conservatives or the NDP. It’s a failure of both sides that Carney skates on their issues and is able to move on. Nobody takes either Poilievre or Lewis seriously. Nobody cares what they have to say. Nobody is waiting on the wise words of the opposition leader to decide whether Carney made the right decision or not on tariffs. He’s a joke, and Avi isn’t much different. Ford and Wab and Frechette form not so much the Opposition but the group Canadians want the opinions of. At a time of national crisis, the actual Opposition is as relevant as Brady Tkachuk’s geography skills are sharp.

The plain reality is this country deserves a lot better than a Conservative Party led by a leader who has given up. Every policy announcement is just tax cuts rebranded, every initiative a crap redoubling of previous errors, and every one is a waste of everybody’s fucking time. It’s unacceptable for a major party to be led by someone so manifestly unfit to the office he aspires to hold. Poilievre needs to go, if only so this country won’t waste away waiting for a coherent answer to a real problem.

But I keep coming back to the question my American brother asked me tonight. Is Carney good at this or is he just the only competent bastard in a sea of idiocy? I don’t know. There’s some of both in it, and Carney has better instincts than I, and many others, expected. But better is not explicitly good, and I can’t tell if his instincts are good or he’s just floating on terrible opposition. I think they’re good - the McDavid jokes at the 2025 Cabinet retreat and the Sandinista quip on Nardwuar imply that he does have the skills to be human, at the least - but as a political analyst I’d like to see him against anything resembling real opposition.

Then again, the Liberals just won Chicoutimi by nearly 20%, so maybe I should just shut up and be thrilled.

Let’s say the Liberals were to win tonight’s Beaches Byelection by 100 votes over the NDP. It would be an immensely underwhelming result for the party that is supposed to win by 30% by my model. Would it be accurate for a hard news story to refer to it as an underwhelming result? Yes, because it would be one. Would it be appropriate? Of course not, because who do you think you are to state an opinion as a fact, even if it is the only reasonable or correct opinion.

Obviously 9/11 was a terror attack. Nobody would ever argue it’s not one. But the CBC policy to not wade into whether something is or isn’t a terror attack cannot be based on 9/11, nor can or should there be a 9/11 addendum to the rules of journalism because it was particularly heinous. What is and isn’t terrorism isn’t a fact, it’s a subjective assessment based on a combination of factors. The number of dead is a fact, the number of planes and the number of hijackers too. But we know from this country’s history - the 2014 Ottawa shooting - that the definition of terrorism is not fixed or set in stone. It is up for debate, and frankly a debate the CBC or the BBC or the AP should not be the arbiters of. To steal a point from Carole McNeil, do we want 26 year olds rewriting AP wires for CBC News making judgement calls on what international shootings do and don’t qualify as terrorism?

But I’m not that interested in the debate over terrorism. What I’m interested in is the CBC’s stubborn refusal to accept reality as it is and not how they want it to be. The beat up over 9/11 was a bad faith Conservative attack on the CBC for political reasons, and every time you give them a win, they’ll come back for more and more and more.

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The problem, at a more macro level, is nobody actually understands journalism, and especially nobody understands the difference between live, broadcast breaking news journalism and pre-planned, less by the seat of the pants journalism. There is little case for journalists to offer opinion in any situation, but there is no case for it when you are covering, say, an anniversary, because you have the time to do proper reporting, and that means not having hosts or writers randomly expressing their opinions.

Yes, sometimes broadcast journalists don’t meet the standard that opinions and adjectives should only come from experts or panelists on there for their opinion, but that’s because of the nature of broadcast television. If the Conservatives somehow won Beaches tonight, it would technically be a breach of the idea that you don’t express opinions for Cochrane or Rosemary or whoever to call it a shocking upset. Technically it would be! But nobody would care because it’s live television and it’s true, just like nobody cares when whoever on CBC broke the news of Dolly Parton’s death last week and presumably said some nice words about her. But yeah, if you’re going to write up the “shocking upset” for CBC News, you better have someone quoted in the story calling it a shocking upset, or you’re not doing journalism you’re doing opinion.

What I do is not journalism and I’m not a journalist. I occasionally have a scoop or two from Liberal friends of mine, but I’m not a journalist and I don’t claim to be one. I can call things as I see them without needing an expert validator, but the CBC, or any other news outlet, can’t. Because if the standard is “well it’s obvious”, that falls apart really quickly for very obvious reasons. 9/11 is “obviously” terrorism, so is 7/7 … is the Ottawa shooting? The Manchester bombing was and Sandy Hook wasn’t, but what about the Ecole Polytechnique? Is misogyny not an ideological motivator for his crime, and is that not enough to bump it up from mass shooting to terrorism? You pick at the thread long enough and it all falls apart. The CBC is not the arbiters of this nor should they be.

But I’m not really that worked up by the policy, I’m worked up by the utter stupidity on display from the fucking geniuses at CBC HQ. You cannot keep allowing your enemies to make the political weather. You cannot keep allowing the right to attack you in bad faith and not respond. And you cannot then capitulate because you lose the war of public opinion because you didn’t fucking defend yourself.

This was a ginned up controversy by Warren Kinsella and the Toronto Sun that got picked up by the right wing more broadly and then the US right. You have given in to a right wing smear campaign on good journalistic practices, all because you didn’t write a “but if the terror is bad enough you can say whatever you like” clause, even though I can guarantee you no CBC reporter has ever been reprimanded for referring to “the 9/11 terror attacks” on air or in print without the proper attribution.

The CBC doesn’t want to be the source of a culture war. It is one anyway. Every failure of the CBC’s top brass and management comes back to their refusal to live in fucking reality, where their decisions will be interpreted in the worst possible faith by a press that is actively hostile because they want the CBC out of the online news space so they can get better ad rates and by a political party that thinks the CBC are biased against them. The decision a few years back to give executive bonuses at the same time as layoffs was a classic example of them not getting they are a source of conflict. Maybe if they had, they wouldn’t have been stupid enough to fuck it up and do it.

Everything will be twisted and misinterpreted because that’s what these people do. There’s nothing to be done about it and no amount of cowering in fear will fix it. The CBC needs to stop accepting the premise of bullshit attacks against it. It needs to make a case for its own existence that consists of the fact that it is good at its job of journalism. It would help if maybe just maybe anybody at the CBC made the broadcast network make any amount of sense, or money, but even without the broad reworking of the TV channel, the brand is being dismissed because it is allowing bad faith right wing criticisms go unchallenged.

When you allow the premise of these attacks to cement itself, you weaken the brand amongst people who hate you, sure, but also amongst people who would normally defend the CBC. It becomes impossible to defend an institution so stubbornly unwilling to defend itself, because the lack of defence comes off as a mark of defeat. It is cowardice in the face of attack because they don’t seem to think that Canadians will understand a reasonable argument. And if that’s what they think of Canadians, we shouldn’t be surprised when Canadians don’t think much of the CBC anymore.

Because while they might not be able to call 9/11 terrorism without attribution, I can say this free as a bird: giving in to bad faith right wing attacks is journalistic terror, and it’s not good enough.

This story should start not in 2022, or even in 2018, but on Election Night 2012, when it became clear Jean Charest would lose his Sherbrooke seat. Had he won it, the gap in seats would have been 2 - 53 for the PQ, and 51 for the Liberals - and Charest would have had the constitutional right to test the confidence of the National Assembly. With the CAQ holding the sole balance of power and basically nothing between the two parties, Francois Legault would have been forced to make a choice, and end the ambiguity that was the hallmark of the CAQ’s entire pitch.

Post 1995, the ADQ under Mario Dumont and then the CAQ under Legault were striving to be the parties of a different tendency - government for the sake of governing, not for the sake of Defending Canada or Separating From Canada. That was the pitch, that there was something above the National Question that they could achieve because they weren’t tied down to that fight. And because Charest lost Sherbrooke and resigned as Premier, Legault was never forced to show his hand. And that meant that when Pauline Marois stumbled in 2014 he could surge late in the campaign and keep the CAQ alive, before positioning himself as the only viable non-Liberal option for government in 2018. But I find myself fascinated by the question of what would have been, if the PQ hadn’t gotten their scalp in 2012.

This election is spiritually a successor to 2012 in some ways - a messy election where there’s three viable parties, plenty of chaotic three way races, and a crisis that makes the government more viable than we were as cracks show in the party that led for much of the years before. In 2012 it was the student strikes that brought Charest back in the game as the CAQ faltered over fears they weren’t ready for prime time. Now it’s Trump making everyone feeling jittery about electing a government that’s going to be even more chaotic, but the same dual propositions as at the end of 2012 loom again:

Are the PQ actually about to win, and are we sure a PQ minority isn’t the best outcome for federalists?

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“I started something and now I’m not too sure”

Marois’ government was in office, but it was almost uniquely in modern Canadian history not really in power. It existed at the whim of Legault, whose main price was wanting the anti-corruption commission findings before an election. So the Liberals and the CAQ would leave enough members behind to not vote down confidence votes or a rather uninteresting budget in 2012, but other than that the PQ didn’t do very much. They swanned around with the titles and the offices without a way to do much of anything but complain. And it wiped them out for a decade.

Ever since 2003, Quebecers have been even more febrile in their politics than usual. 2007 saw the rise of Dumont’s ADQ, before 2008 tossed them aside. 2012 saw the end of a four year term where three parties led in polls, where Legault was leading and then came third, where the Liberals were dead and then almost alive, and then in 2014 they tossed the PQ aside immediately with a near-death experience for Legault’s CAQ included. 2018 saw a bigger CAQ wave than expected, 2022 was a massacre that saw a new party rise to double digits of vote share (though no seats), and now we have a PQ revival in 2026 (though to what extent). Federally we saw the Bloc jump back to a dominant position in 2004 before falling away, slowly then all at once. 2006 saw Harper break through in the province, 2011 saw the Orange Crush, 2015 saw TrudeauMania redux, and then 2019 saw the Bloc revival. Opinion has never been more in flux.

The reasons for this are complicated, but the quick and dirty version is that Quebec has suffered from bad governance in recent times as politicians have been more obsessed with the National Question than making sure the health and education systems work properly or attracting investment and growth. It’s a problem that the CAQ was supposed to solve, because they were supposed to be the ones who could put the National Question behind them. But the combination of COVID distracting them and their own incompetence has meant they’ve been unable to deliver results, and Legault at the end defaulted to his PQ factory settings - bashing the English and trying to culture war his way out of his death spiral. It didn’t work.

Christine Fréchette is trying to be different, and better, plainly, by understanding that the only path forward for the CAQ is to be robustly the party of the Carneyite wing of Federal politics. Carney’s appeal to Quebecers in 2025, and in winning Terrebonne, was that he was able to get things done and focus on the real crises Quebecers face. She is trying to return the CAQ to its founding principle, that this is a party and a movement designed to be better than the Federalists and the Separatists who care only about labels and titles and not the people they represent. Fréchette is trying her hardest not to be continuity with Legault’s time as Premier, but she does represent continuity with what the CAQ should be, and she is seemingly at least somewhat successful at it so far.

The problem with projecting the election - and the reason I won’t be even attempting it - is that the Quebec electoral map has completely divorced itself from an even casual relationship between seats and votes. The Liberals might win more seats at 22% of the vote than at 27%, because of how scrambled the map is. The CAQ won a massive landslide in seats on 40% of the vote last time because their support was a mile wide but only an inch deep. The Liberals, on the other hand, had support a mile deep, but in very few places. When the CAQ were down in the teens of vote share, they could crater to single digits of seats. But the difference between 18%, where they were a couple months ago, and 23%, what this week’s Leger/Le Journal/TVA polling showed, is potentially 35 seats. There are dozens of seats that could end up as three way contests where 1st and 3rd are separated by 10% or less. Battles of parties where nobody can break 30% will be common. Pretending you know how these dozens of dice rolls will go is a sophisticated game of delusion. I don’t know whether it’ll work, and neither does anybody else.

The assumption has been a PQ majority, because no matter the various pollsters or the various leads they have an annoying tendency to just get over the majority line in the various models thrown around on Twitter. But it was usually in the context of whether the Liberals could chase them down. Right now, there’s no indication they can, in part because of the campaign that they ran in 2022 and because of the uselessness of their current behaviour. Milliard may as well have abandoned the field in recent months, ceding the battleground to the PQ and the CAQ, and relegating them to a side show. Given the work he needed to do to rebuild the party after a bruising 2025, it’s understandable, even if angering. But he’s got to come out swinging with a real offer and get in the fucking game, or this will become a fight he is erased from.

The PQ mustn’t be pleased by the Liberals’ stagnation, because they wanted to run against the Liberals. It is true that that is always their preference - they feel more comfortable fighting the Liberals because fighting them ends up being about nationalism and identity and language in ways they can’t really fight a nationalist-but-anti-referendum party with. But it’s also true that the Liberals are a much better opponent because of the realities of the map. Because the Liberals were “more successful” (read: less horrendously unsuccessful) in 2022 at winning seats, their vote in the seats they didn’t win is horrendously low. The PQ, which beat them in vote share, didn’t have as many peaks in vote share, which meant their baseline vote in many currently-CAQ seats that will decide this election is above the Liberals, and if it’s a two way race, they’d beat the Liberals in. But it the CAQ return, it’s anybody’s game.

Now, that ambiguity and uncertainty cuts both ways - while a two horse race would have more or less guaranteed a PQ majority, it would have been a narrow one. There’s a ceiling on how many seats the PQ can get 35% in. A three way race changes the math, but in both directions. The CAQ surge could mean the PLQ and CAQ hold 70 combined seats, killing a referendum anytime soon. It could also mean that in seat after seat, a combined 50% of the vote for non-referendum major parties splits cleanly enough that the PQ wins the seat with 28%. The PQ’s chances at a landslide are higher now, but so are their chances of catastrophe. And I’d argue the likeliest outcome right now is the PQ’s worst case scenario.

The referendum promise came about as an act of desperation. Plamondon was so desperate to try and revive the PQ that he gambled that this could get the party back to the 20s, and it worked better than he ever could have imagined. He started something and now he’s not so sure, as his announcement that he’ll only have a referendum after Trump leaves office shows. But the entire province isn’t too sure of anything at this point, and haven’t been for two decades.

Quebec wants better, and they have no idea how to get it anymore. They are desperately looking for any port in a storm, any salvation they can get, and they’re sick and fucking tired of being sold snake oil. That’s how we’ve ended up with a polling average that looks less like a ringing endorsement of anybody and has ended up being the equivalent of everyone throwing their arms in the air in despair. And I think in the end the PQ will win - and lose everything in the process.

The PQ has no plan for government except a referendum, and a vague sense that they get that they need to govern well if they’re going to create the circumstances for a referendum to succeed. But without a majority government, they’ll just hang out in purgatory, unable to do anything while allowing the CAQ and the PLQ to rebuild and come fight again soon after. Fréchette will stay as CAQ leader in a PQ minority, correctly being seen as having saved the furniture and even potentially being primed to win again as soon as memories of Legault fade. The Liberals having a map where they knew which seats to target, and more time to build back the Liberal machine off the island, will be racing for a 2028 campaign. And the PQ will sit there, unable to do anything substantive or meaningful to convince people they deserve even more power, sitting ducks at the whims of two political parties who hate them.

Welcome to Quebec 2026. A referendum is behind one door, and the slow public humiliation of the PQ is behind another. Will the PQ win? They’ll probably be in office at the end of this. But will they win? Probably not, because like 2012, being in office isn’t being in power. And I’m increasingly convinced Quebec will start something they’re not too sure of.

However, this crisis doesn’t just provide Carney an opportunity to defend this policy, it is an opportunity to defend a much broader suite of his agenda. And, taken correctly, Carney can neutralize the weakest part of his left flank, and lay the groundwork to kill one of the NDP’s most irritating talking points for the next election.

It’s time for Carney to make the case that his spending cuts are going to enable us to support the workers who need help during this trade war.

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As both a matter of political and economic reality, Carney inherited a government that needed to be slimmed down. The Trudeau government saw more civil servants as a good in and of itself, and allowed for service provision to atrophy despite increases in staffing. It needed to be fixed, and it’s happening, at both a savings to the government and so far no problem to service delivery. To use the classic example from 2025, there’s no actual need for a separate department to scrutinize grant applications to female-owned businesses when there’s already a grant-scrutinizing apparatus at Industry that can just do the job. There was bloat because nobody was looking at the problems holistically.

Carney is going to have to spend a ahitload of money the next few months, assuming this trade war doesn’t end as soon as it started. And if Carney is going to have to do that, he will need to reassure Canadians that he is not frivolously or nonsensically doing so. And doing so becomes an opportunity to tie together two disparate parts of the government’s policy, by correctly making the case that the scope of relief we can offer is aided by not having so many bureaucrats doing jobs they don’t need to be doing in Ottawa.

Tariffs provide an increasingly obvious opportunity to defend one of the government’s best policies that nobody wants to defend. Attacks on the civil service or the size of government are deemed gauche and anti-progressive, as if the idea that people should face consequences for inaction and bad performance that the private sector is built on is somehow offensive to their basic rights. But it’s plainly true that the civil service is not a place for make work jobs for Ottawa residents who can’t find better.

The cost savings of this trimming should be explicitly linked to the generosity of the benefits offered to tariff impacted workers. By linking them together, you force people to understand there is not a magic pot of money that can infinitely sustain us. Yes, there will be tariff revenues that can help, but tariffs will also hurt corporation tax and personal income tax revenues, so you can’t just add tariff revenues and assume we have all this money to play with. But we need to make clear the reason we have the room we do is our diligence.

Canada has one of the best fiscal positions in the world and we do so for a reason. We are not rash and unreasonable about our decisions, and we do not indulge fantasies about our economic strength that defy reality. Even accounting for the fact our provinces can borrow, we still are one of the least indebted nations relative to GDP in the world. And that didn’t happen by accident, or by spending like drunken sailors.

Carney needs to make clear that our capacity for spending doesn’t come from nowhere, but that it is in lineage with our handling of the 1990s and the decisions taken to cut spending and rebalance our economy then have given us the capacity to handle these problems now. But infinitely spending more and more without ever looking at our books is a recipe to needing the sprawling cuts of the 90s, instead of the relatively meagre ones Carney is proposing. It’s an argument that will win over Conservatives who like the spending cuts but are iffy on the tariff induced spending and progressives who like the tariff spending and dislike the civil service cuts.

But more than just one policy decision or one announcement, it is an opportunity for Carney to reconsider the totality of the government’s approach to comms and information. This is an opportunity to do to the comms approach what I criticized Trudeau earlier for being unwilling to do on policy - look at everything holistically. If Carney plays whack a mole here - making a case for tariffs independent of the case for anything else - he will fail to take advantage of the opportunities afforded him by this crisis. More bluntly, he will risk his legislative agenda because he’s unwilling to make a case for it properly and holistically.

Carney is good, even very good, when the moment demands it. He was great on Saturday, and great in ways I have been long begging him to be great. But that needs to continue. On Saturday, Carney trusted Canadians with a lot of information, and they seem to be responding - if the early releases of Abacus’ government approval numbers we’ve seen on Twitter are to taken seriously (they are). Conservatives seem to have expected a different, dumber approach from Carney, and seem to have decided on a talking point - Release The Deal - that ignores that Carney did put very real and substantive details in the window. Canadians aren’t feeling that this is some atrocity of a secret stitch up because it’s plainly not one.

Carney trusted Canadians on Saturday to understand a complicated argument. He needs to continue to do that now by explaining that the government’s cuts are designed to give them room to maneuver when needed - like in a tariff war started by a lunatic. If he does, Canadians will listen. If not, it’ll be a missed opportunity.

In the spirit of my critics, I’ve not written about Friday night’s collapse in trade talks till today for a reason - I wanted to give theAmericans to see if they could agree on a strategy, or at least a press line. Now that we seem to have it - Canada wants the benefits of statehood without the obligations - we can know the story pretty well.

There’s an interesting story in how long it took Trump to come out and be fiesty, and how much approval Lutnick had from Trump before he seemingly fucked the deal on Friday night is unclear. There’s also the fact that there are byelections next week that this weekend’s events probably helped with - especially in Chicoutimi, where the LPC narrowly lead in my model and where Standing Up To Attacks On French will play well. All of this is, to some extent, relevant. But I keep coming back to one thing as we see the events of the last weekend unfold.

Jamil Jivani wants to be the next Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, and yet I don’t think there’s a less apt word for the soon-to-be ex-MP for Bowmanville-Oshawa North is acting these days. Jivani is selling out his country, and every day Poilievre lets him sit in caucus is a day he enables treachery.

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There are plenty of people who have acted, in my view, in an unhelpful way the last week or so. I think Wab Kinew’s characterization of Carney as begging the Premiers - later contradicted - was dickish, and I think those arguing for the release of the draft text are morons whose idea would dramatically undermine any negotiations, whenever they restart in whatever form that may be. I disagree vehemently with the idea that counter tariffs should be avoided due to the economic pain, as Trevor Tombe has suggested, nor am I quite there with others saying we need to dump US Treasuries today. But I don’t think anybody in the above is anti-Canada, or fighting against our best interest. And yet, I do with Jivani, for a simple reason; every other person in this saga can make a case in good faith that they’re advocating what they believe is the best thing for Canada. I think they’re wrong, but I think they’re acting in good faith.

Jivani is clearly not putting Canada’s interests first. He never has, from when he gave an interview to Breitbart about how Canadians are throwing a hissy fit over the 51st State comments and tariffs to now, when he had a self aggrandizing statement out and a media interview ready within 24 hours of the talks collapsing after months of quiet. His argument - that America’s allowed to attack us but we shouldn’t hit back because it’ll “accelerate” their efforts to attack again - belongs in a textbook outlining various methods of psychological abuse, not an actual proposal for Canadian governance.

It would be a bad enough argument in a vacuum, but Jivani’s history with Vance makes it unacceptable. Assuming Democrats flip North Carolina, they have 47 Senate seats that can pretty safely be placed on their side of the ledger. Arguably their next four best chances of victory? Michigan, Maine, Ohio, and Alaska - four states highly integrated with the Canadian economy and for whom these tariffs will continue to be a disaster, at least in the short term. Canada refusing to retaliate would be great for the political fortunes of Dan Sullivan and Susan Collins, which is in turn great for the political fortunes of the Trump/Vance administration. Is he doing it because of Vance? I don’t know what’s in his heart, but he has more anger for Canadians being attacked than our attackers and his fantasy football buddy called Poilievre a nobody and Canada a state in the last 96 hours.

Poilievre’s tolerance of this is cowardice, even if we know why he’s doing it. Poilievre knows his base is psychotically pro-Trump, so standing up for his country and not getting fired becomes a hard puzzle to juggle. So he lets the MP for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue get away with whatever he wants, because he doesn’t have the courage to do what everybody knows is right and fight back against his critics. If I were an asshole, I’d suggest that if Poilievre is too much of a coward to push back on Jivani he is certainly not the right person to push back on Trump.

Oh wait, I am, and Poilievre’s cowardice is disqualifying from ever being PM.

But this has to be about Jivani, because at the end of the day being in Opposition, or opposition, to the sitting government is one of the deepest and most sacrosanct acts you can do in a democracy. It is about caring about your country enough to stand up against its government, to passionately argue for what they believe their people need. It is one of the most noble and important roles, and we have long had a tradition of protecting the importance of that tradition. When we had an actual, unabashed traitor in the job of Opposition Leader, Jean Chretien made sure to give Preston Manning all of the trappings of Opposition in the House, and to include him when appropriate, despite the technical lack of legal requirement. But right now we don’t have an Opposition based around Canada’s best interests.

This is not that. Jivani is acting in a way seemingly designed to protect the interests of the American Administration, while leaving Canadians high and dry. Whether he is actively seeking to do their bidding or just a useful idiot, I neither know nor care. Jivani cannot continue to be a Conservative in good standing, or the Conservatives will have disgraced themselves to the status of a disloyal opposition.

I’ve riffed on Neil Young’s Motion Pictures (For Carrie) enough at this point that it’s one of this site’s staples - a classic song that I have found meaning in many times. But every time I hear it, I find myself coming back to that one word - somehow - that punctuates my favourite lyric. The blithe assumption at the core of that line is the idea that there is a solution, if only we want badly enough for one. And that brings us to the tariff war and the deal we are negotiating, where I am fundamentally confused.

Everybody from Wab Kinew to the CPC and members of the commentariat are complaining that Carney’s signing a bad deal, but I have yet to see a single person actually articulate what it is they want the Liberals to do that they’re not doing beyond platitudinal nonsense about fighting. And I’m honestly done, because I’ve spent the last two days trying to figure out what those who disagree with my Wednesday column could possibly want Carney to do that he’s not, and I can’t come up with any actual tangible actions.

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“I do not know how you exact leverage on a president who thinks the tariffs are making his country richer and uses the stock market as a gauge — when really it’s artificial intelligence investment that is masking the underlying damage that essentially his trade and his foreign policies are inflicting on the U.S. economy.”

David Cochrane said that on CBC earlier today, and it’s a good starting point at what the circumstances are. No Canadian Prime Minister - whether Carney, Poilievre, Singh, Lewis, Mulroney, Harper, either Trudeau, or anyone else - would be able to get a perfect deal that ignores the American psycho down south and maintains perfect, tariff free access that Mulroney and Justin got in their deals.

There are two fundamental criticisms of the deal as we understand it - which is (as we currently understand it) basically booze back on shelves, Keystone, and repealing the Online News Act for sectoral tariff relief. The first is that any form of deal is unacceptable, because the government should somehow be able to turn back the clock to 2024 and get total tariff free access without any concessions, which is obviously ludicrous and not worth discussing. It’s of course the CPC’s position under Poilievre, and the unseriousness of the position merely underlines the unseriousness of the party.

The second, and more important to deconstruct, criticism of the deal, is that there’s no need to do this. Trump wusses out of every threat, and even if he nominally applied a 50% tariff, with the CUSMA exemption and some nominal supports Canadians would be fine, as we have been at every other trade hinge point in Trump 2.0. It’s closer to a reasonable argument, and something that we have to take seriously. But it’s still based on a false premise.

No deal was better than a bad deal in the past. That line, repeated currently, did use to be true, because in the last 13 months, a deal meant across the board tariffs to lower sectoral tariffs. That is obviously a non-starter, and unacceptable to Canadians and to the government. But that’s not the deal on the table anymore - it’s “wins” for America Keystone, booze, and the Online News Act standing in for the across the board tariffs we could never accept.

If you’re of the view that Trump has substantially dropped his demands - and he has! - it’s not unreasonable to ask whether holding out another few months would get even better results. But it fundamentally misunderstands why Trump is willing to take these fig leaves as a victory now, which is to say the 2026 midterms. We have a very limited runway where we have enough leverage to get a deal to lower tariffs without accepting across the board tariffs. Obviously we should fucking take it.

I defended Trudeau and the Online News Act in 2023, and I was told by people that I was wrong. Turns out they were right and I was wrong. Anyone who knows me knows that saying that hurts deeply, but it’s true. And it’s in nobody’s interest to deny that I was wrong. Hell, even Stephen Maher - one of the government’s staunchest critics this week - called the Online News Act “terrible” today. None of the argument in its defence seems to be particularly interested in actually defending it, but merely in claiming that the government should keep it even though it sucks, solely because giving in to Trump is bad.

If you can make sense of that argument I wish you well, cause I can’t.

In broader strokes, however, the argument is that this deal, while helpful to some industries, sets a precedent that will do more damage in the long term than it avoids in the short term. It’s a reasonable argument if you have the patience to undergo significant short term damage for the certainty of long term recovery, but the premise that recovery is certain is fictional. The argument seems to go something along the lines that we just need to get to 2029, when everything goes back to some form of normal. And that’s where I lose my mind again.

If we could be 100% sure - sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that Democrats would win the next Presidential election and that the next Democratic President would immediately offer to reinstate CUSMA as written in 2028, it would maybe be worth a conversation about holding out on a deal for the next 2 years and change. It would cost the Federal government tens of billions in supports to industries who aren’t getting sectoral tariff relief - which now includes softwood lumber, by the way - but you could maybe build an economic analysis that tells me it’s a good idea to take 2+ years of pain for the certainty of brighter days after Trump. But you can’t promise that at all.

The likely Republican nominee is an anti-free trader from Ohio who has no kinship for Canada. Of the likely Democratic nominees, precisely none of them have said fuck all about helping us. Even Democratic Senators and Governors from safe blue states have employed the strategy of trying to guilt Canadians with “we didn’t vote for this”, instead of staunchly standing by their neighbours. Plainly, the idea that either the Democratic Party or the American people can be trusted is for the birds.

So the plan from those opposing this deal is to live in fantasy land. It’s to believe that Carney could get a better deal somehow, or that a better deal is certain so long as he doesn’t sell us out now. I can’t agree because it’s nonsensical, and nobody who is making this case has yet persuaded me of what better actually looks like. Cause it’s not putting workers in steel, aluminum, autos, and lumber out to pasture to save the fucking Online News Act.

I’ve read a significantly larger amount of the criticism of my last piece than usual, and have engaged with my critics far more than usual. Plainly, I usually don’t care enough to read my comments or my replies, because I am usually quite sure I’m right. Here? I’m not positive at all, and so I’ve attempted to engage in good faith with those who see this differently. I’m so confused by the reaction to much of this that I keep thinking I must be missing something. There are smart people I respect greatly who are trying to tell me I’m missing something. And yet I can’t get there.

Every strategy or plan amounts to a prayer more than a strategy. It amounts to the idea that so long as we hold out, and have some form of righteousness on our sides, we will win - a form of “the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice” that needs to be left in the Obama era where it belongs. I am staggered by the number of smart people who cannot explain how we get back to what we had in 2024 without spending years suffering from sectoral tariffs we could lower tomorrow for what are, in my opinion, functionally no cost.

This is about Trump, sure, but this is about me being fundamentally unable to see what others claim is obvious. I have tried to see it, and I can’t. And I’m not prepared to leave workers in steel, aluminum, softwood, and autos in hell on the vague idea that maybe 2029 might bring relief. And until someone tells me what the strategy to undo those tariffs before 2029 is without giving on a bunch of fundamentally irrelevant shit, I’ll continue to think Carney’s doing as well as he can on this front. Because as much as I love Motion Pictures, somehow is not a strategy, it’s a hope.

The place these talks have landed over the last year, since we didn’t sign a bad deal in summer 2025, is that the fact that Trump wasn’t prepared to nuke the CUSMA exemption meant that we could stumble along, because we were not going to accept tariffs across the economy to lower steel and aluminum and lumber sectoral tariffs. I have immense sympathy for those workers, but there’s just no way that would have been the right deal. But now the incentives are different.

Donald Trump has declared today that farmers are the big winners, which you can take or leave as the truth - we’re still waiting for many details - but gives the game away about why the Americans wanted a new round of negotiations now. And it makes clear why now was the time to do a deal with the Americans - assuming it’s broadly what it seems to be, Carney leveraged Trump’s looming bad midterm to get the sectoral tariffs reduced without giving up anything we actually need or care about.

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“I’d be crazy not to follow/follow where you lead”

I get why people are scared of doing a deal with the Americans, I do. I know that Donald Trump will break his word, or at least it’s highly likely. But let’s be very clear about that - if he breaks the deal we can just go back to the status quo of the last year. There’s nothing in what is likely in this deal that will be forever. I assume US booze back on Canadian shelves will be our easiest give, so let’s use it as the example. If the US decides to re-tariff Canadian goods, guess what? We can just take the Bourbon back off the shelves.

Defence spending is something that people are quite worried about, but there are easily ways to increase our spending on “American” defence products that are actually manufactured in Canadian factories. Is Canada agreeing to buying radars and drones from a US company building them in Quebec or Ontario something we should be unhappy about? Of course not.

CBC and Bloomberg are reporting that we’re getting a halving of the steel and aluminum tariffs as part of the deal, the first concrete evidence of an actual give in this negotiation, and it’s from the Americans. Well, unless you count Keystone, which isn’t so much a “give” as longstanding Canadian policy to support because it would be good for Canada. Keystone would reduce the amount of oil that goes south via rail because it would now go by pipe, it would increase the Canadian coffers, and if the reports are true that the Iran War has caused significant and lasting damage to Middle Eastern oil production, then it’ll fill a good chunk of the medium term supply shortage that could be coming.

None of these are real concessions. Carney didn’t want to do the Digital Sales Tax anyways and made a point of giving it up to earn points for a decision he was going to make anyways. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of making a show about letting her pick the wine for dinner knowing full well you’re happy to drink whatever’s put in front of you. If she feels she got a win on the wine, you’re likelier to get the movie you want later that night. I’d say it’s more complicated because it’s the fate of the Canadian economy, but Trump’s not playing 4D chess, he’s playing checkers badly.

There are respected members of the Canadian commentariat who are acting like idiots. The plain and simple truth is that reacting to Americans’ boastfulness is not a real way to judge the deal, it’s on the specific terms that are specifically agreed in the coming hours and days. Look, there’s every chance I’m being too optimistic about how little Carney had to give up to get a very good thing - sectoral tariff relief - and if that ends up being true I’ll rip Carney to shreds tomorrow. But outside of Keystone - which is definitionally not a give because it was already policy (and also Danielle Smith would go correctly ballistic if we didn’t agree to it) - they don’t have a concrete win they can leak yet. Nothing. And that’s probably for a reason.

The other point worth making is that if you’re upset with making any concession, then it comes back to what I started this column with. In an ideal world we’d be compensated for having to deal with this asshole, but we’re not. Unfortunately, when you’re the global hegemon, you get to be assholes and we have to take it. It’s an unsatisfying experience, but it’s true. And it’s reasonable to not want to give him even the fig leaf of success. But that’s how how you run a country, as satisfying as it’d be.

Carney’s not an idiot, and the team negotiating this isn’t one either. As I write this, I’m listening to Weird Fishes, which longtime readers will know is my favourite Radiohead song, and absolutely one of my all time favourites. And I just find myself singing one line, and asking one question.

Why would Carney suddenly sign a worse deal today than has been on the table since July of 2025? He wouldn’t. So if we are actually signing a deal, then we’re going to be the ones winning. And right now, we all would be crazy not to follow Carney wherever he leads us.

PQ Leader and favourite (but by no means guaranteed!) to be next Premier of Quebec Paul St-Pierre Plamondon has announced that Quebec will have a referendum in the first term of a PQ government … but after Donald Trump leaves the White House. So, in effect, the referendum promise is now a promise of a 2029 or 2030 referendum.

On the surface it’s a reasonable decision by PSPP - any referendum held in 2027 or 2028 will be lost, and the best, and frankly only, way to even get close to a majority for independence by 2030 would be to hit the ground running on a provincial policy agenda around healthcare, education, and jobs, such that people are so happy with Plamondon and the PQ that they allow themselves to be swept into a wave of believing that independence would be a good idea. But that won’t happen, and today’s announcement is a good reason why.

The best way to create the circumstances for independence is to govern Quebec well enough that it becomes the shining city on the hill of Confederation. If Quebec was sustainably well-governed, with a consistent pattern of above-trend growth, with increased and improved hospital and long term care capacity, with a booming, bilingual tech sector that was leading on AI and creating opportunities not just in Montreal but also in Montmorency, then sure, maybe some greater number of Quebecers would see Confederation as a cost and a burden. But the PQ will never deliver that, because their fundamental premise makes all of that impossible.

Plamondon wants Quebecers, and the rest of the country, to think that Trump is the aberration, and the source of Quebec’s ills. He is, for some people, in the same way as he is to many Ontarians and Albertans and everybody else in the nation. The problem is he’s not Quebec’s bigger problem, which is that the last fifty years have seen Quebec well governed for maybe 10 years. Charest was fine for most of his time in office, there was like a semi-decent year of Legault pre-COVID if I squint, and maybe you can say the final days of Bouchard once he gave up on a third referendum were fine - though, to be clear, it was a modern economic boom and Quebec was just riding the rising tide of a Federal balanced budget and tax cuts.

The problem for Quebec’s sovereignist party is that this fall is the 50th anniversary of their first win, and that win has condemned Quebec to a never-ending war on the National Question so intense that nobody has the capacity to handle its harder problems. PSPP just admitted that those harder problems have to be handled first in order to earn the trust of Quebecers with an independent country.

But if he thinks delaying the referendum and hoping things are better after Trump’s the solution, he’s going to be in for a shock.

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“Maybe you’re gonna be the one to save me”

The history of Quebec is a history of saviours, self-proclaimed or real. From Duplessis and Lesage to Bourassa and Levesque, from Bouchard and Charest to Layton and Legault, from both Trudeaus to PSPP and Dumont. Hell, I haven’t even said Duceppe or Peladeau or Mulroney yet. The history of post-1960 Quebec politics is of political titans with huge successes and even more spectacular failures, of massive rises and even steeper collapses. As politics across much of the rest of the country has contracted into functionally two party politics, Quebec has embraced the idea of a likely next National Assembly with 5 parties holding seats. More bluntly, Quebecers have been begging for a saviour.

It’s understandable why - the state of pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec was such that they needed a revolution, but 6 years of Lesage wasn’t enough to undo decades of damage. Levesque leaving the Liberals over independence, making the national question the dominant political fight instead of good governance, ends up sinking Bourassa when Quebecers were desperate for better. And from that moment on, Quebec hasn’t been able to flourish, wasting decades on Anglo alienation and constitutional wars instead of the hard yards of attracting growth and prosperity to pay for the standard of living Quebecers expect. Even the best government of this era was good at best, because while Charest managed the province decently and handed off an election loss where the PQ only won 4 more seats than the Liberals and could easily win the next election, it’s not like Charest managed to radically improve Quebec’s fortunes. He stopped the bleeding for a decade. That Quebec is in such a bad place that we have to call that best of the bunch is the problem.

Every new iteration of Quebec Saviour has a distinct flavour to it, but there are echoes to the past. Charest was a combination of experience but freshness, a motif that Legault stole and perfected by running as a Charest-style “experienced outsider” who was so fresh he made a new party. Layton and Dumont rose as charismatic personal figures who wanted to eschew the national question to get their bigger priorities done, though obvious Layton and Dumont didn’t come from the same ideological traditions. And Plamondon and Levesque both rose out of political vacuums - Levesque in the absence of a nationalist option that wasn’t the dying Union Nationale, and PSPP as the only real opposition when the wheels fell off the Legault government in 2023 and 2024.

The problem for PSPP is that in 1976, the PQ were the new kids on the block, and Levesque had done a big job very well in being the Minister who nationalized energy and created Hydro-Quebec in its modern form. When Levesque said he could make Quebec its best, Quebecers had some reason to believe him. What’s Plamondon’s best argument that he can get Quebec out of its decades of darkness? He doesn’t have one, which is the core truth of everything happening in Quebec right now, and why I keep coming back to that Oasis line earlier in this piece.

Quebec is crying out for anybody to fucking save them. They have been failed by decades of political leadership of all parties, tinkering around the edges and buying off voters with promises of brighter tomorrows that never come, either in the guise of a new party crashing through who will do politics differently, the Liberals promising that removing the referendum threat for a while will fix everything, and the PQ pinning all their hopes on the fantastical dream of independence being a solution to all ills. Quebecers need a government that will get on with the job of running their province and making it better, not focused on timings of referendums in the vain hope that once Trump’s gone and we can rest our elbows, suddenly 50%+1 will see reason and vote for independence. It’s as laughable as it is nonsensical.

Plamondon is locked into a referendum promise he needed to make to save the PQ from irrelevance. In the absence of an actual plan for Quebec, it is gone from a part of his pitch to his entire identity, at a time when independence has hardly ever been less popular. Quebec is begging for somebody to save them from their decades of decay, but they’re also begging for someone to stop them from having to stumble ass backwards into a referendum just because the other options can’t get their heads out of their asses. The CAQ took a step towards removal with their Churchill Falls deal, which is a start. But it’s time for the Liberals to fucking go.

The PQ are doing everything in their power to give this election away, and nobody wants to take it. Welcome to the campaign from hell - the stakes couldn’t be higher, and my confidence anybody will meet the moment couldn’t be lower.

Mon dieu.

Does Pierre Poilievre not have anyone in his life who can tell him it’s over?

The last week’s seen 5 polls released so far, all with Conservative deficits above 10%. EKOS and Nanos are, for reasons not particularly coherent, dismissed, but Liaison went from a 9% Liberal lead to a 13%, and then new polls from Spark, Leger, Research Co came back all at varying double digit numbers.

I could do a lot of analysis of those numbers - including that for Leger, it’s actually a slight swing back to the CPC (and a big swing back in Ontario), but that the addition of an EKOS and a Research Co back into the mix of pollsters with a (semi-)recent poll means that the effect should be muted on a good model. I could point out that there’s a tariff deadline next week, and that maybe events could change something. Or I could even point out that there’s still no evidence of who the alternative is that would win the next election for the CPC. But nobody cares.

At some point I’m sure I’ll get around to putting the polls from this week in my model. At some point I’ll probably tweet a model update again. At some point I might even bother mapping the model out for people. But I don’t give a shit to do so today, because it doesn’t matter. Whether the Conservatives project for 94 seats or 87 won’t make a lick of fucking difference, which is that until the Conservatives realize that they can’t keep being the way they’ve been, they’re fucked, and it won’t get any better.

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There’s a new Anthony Bourdain biopic out today, and I’m fascinated to see it. Bourdain’s been oft-cited in these pages as an inspiration of mine - his famous 1999 New Yorker essay is one of the pillars of my writing style, and formed so much of how I think of good writing. Don’t Eat Before Reading This is the single piece of work that most embodies what I want to strive for, even if the totality of Bill Simmons’ catalogue edges out the influence of one masterful work of Bourdain’s writing.

Don’t Eat Before Reading This was Bourdain at his most caustic - a reflection of the time he was in, and of his disillusion with the food world of the time. It is a far cry from the Bourdain that we saw when he was on our TVs, first with No Reservations and then Parts Unknown, because he grew up. I love Bourdain, but the angry, bitter man who called vegans a splinter group of vegetarians akin to fucking Hezbollah in 1999 was not the same man who showed the world the depth of cuisine and culture across the globe for years on TV. He grew, he evolved, and he became something different when the moment called for it.

And that’s where I come back to on Poilievre. Pierre was one of this country’s most effective Opposition Leaders, a force to be reckoned with who systematically drove out a Prime Minister. It took a leader switch and a political act of God to stop him becoming PM. But unlike Bourdain, there’s no pivot coming.

This week saw Dean Allison hold a press conference where a doctor he platformed claimed that COVID vaccines did more harm than COVID. That same doc was an ivermectin truther, for what it’s worth, and when Allison was asked whether Poilievre supported the (self-titled) Allison Inquiry, the answer is allegedly yes. And certainly by no means has Poilievre told the legion of idiots in his party to sit down and shut up.

Poilievre’s policy on trade isn’t any better - we need to make no concessions but also get Donald Trump to completely divest from his longstanding obsession with tariffs as a form of economic strength. Poilievre definitely thinks he’s being clever - no matter what happens on the 19th, Carney will have failed the bar Poilievre set! Either he doesn’t get tariff relief or he conceded too much and Poilievre can say that he would have gotten relief without concessions! It’s genius! Except for the small problem that Canadians aren’t dumbasses.

Poilievre is inventing this fictional reality where the trap he is setting has to be accepted as the framing, but that only works if people believe the premise is fair. But the thing is, Canadians are not willing to accept Skippy’s framings anymore, because they view the person in the office as a fundamentally reasonable person. Trudeau had squandered much of his good will by the end, and the issue set Canadians cared about was one where Trudeau was viewed to be responsible. Now, Canadians view Carney as doing a good job in handling a lunatic. They won’t be mad at Carney for not being to make chicken salad out of Trump’s chicken shit just because Poilievre demands it.

The polls are, if anything, getting worse, and the idea of any sorts of green shoots of recovery is built entirely on the false premise that you can hack and slash the data in such a way that creates the narrative you want. As someone who has routinely fallen victim of that, mostly (but not exclusively) in an American context, it feels good until you’re punched in the face with a loss. Then you feel like a fucking mug, and that’s how so many Conservatives will feel in due time if Poilievre doesn’t resign soon.

The ability to pivot from the stylings that made you successful and at your first peak is hard to capture. It’s hard to understand that the thing that worked for so long is now the problem. Bourdain understood it, and in so doing became not just a firebrand, but a broader part of our public life. Pierre Poilievre will not be a successful Conservative leader anymore, because he cannot escape the talent that brought him to the brink of the government benched. And it is shocking to me that nobody close to him can see what is self-evident to the rest of us and tell him that.

Mark Carney has been very successful at getting things done in his time as Prime Minister. He’s gotten Alberta to agree to a grand bargain on the environment and energy policy, he’s gotten farmers and fishers access to China and other markets, he’s made more decisions about defence procurement than every government’s made combined in my lifetime, and he’s done it all while navigating a lunatic in the White House.

The PM has also been very good at being concerned with appearances. He held a summit with the Premiers in Saskatchewan weeks after winning the 2025 election, the only province he failed to win at least 2 seats in. He’s been to Alberta endlessly, working to stop the perception that he - and more importantly the party he leads - doesn’t care about Alberta and Albertans. When he wants to, he steps up.

Which brings us to last week’s most infuriating news story, which is that the Federal panel assembled in February to fight anti-semitism has met once and has done fuck all. They’re “getting to know each other”, per a former Senator on the panel. Can anybody defend that? No, unless the defence amounts to “they don’t really care about fighting anti-semitism.”

And that’s not good enough.

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If I wanted to be charitable to Carney, I’d point out that he has shown up at many vigils and celebrated important Jewish holidays with the community. I’d point out that the government passed laws strengthening hate crime laws and making it more obviously illegal to obstruct or intimidate people from places of community - houses of worship of course, but schools and community centres too.

I’d also point out there’s very little Mark Carney, Pierre Poilievre, or whoever else could ever hold the Prime Minister’s office can do if a deranged lunatic wants to shoot a bullet at the door of a Jewish school or throw a Molotov cocktail at a synagogue. Deranged and evil people will do what they do, and they should be charged and jailed accordingly. But even in this defence I’m nibbling at the edges because I don’t think that matters.

Canada is a country which prides itself on the idea it stands up for human rights and a better society. It is a country that cares, or at least claims to care. And what we choose to care about, or at least claim to care about, tells us about the values we hold. That Carney is allowing this to fall through the cracks is not, in all likelihood, the result of latent antisemitic feelings deep in his soul. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that the government doesn’t really care at the end of the day. They’re not wanting famed Jewish businesses to be burned down, obviously, but I just don’t get why they don’t seem to care.

There are a lot of self-appointed defenders of the Jewish people who make their arguments extremely badly, who routinely conflate policy on Israel and the state of Canadian Jews, undoubtedly. Nobody who reads this site will be surprised by the fact that I think Jesse Brown and Warren Kinsella are fucking douchebags who do more harm than good to the cause of fighting anti-semitism. Plainly, however, the fact that Kinsella and Brown are windbags doesn’t change the fact that this must be fought against. Too often we’re focused on who is making the argument and not the argument itself, and in this case it’s blinded me at the very least to the depth of concern. Given the state of the Government’s anti-semitism taskforce, I think it’s safe to say they’re also blind to it.

At some point the government shows it cares about the things it cares about, and Carney isn’t showing he understands the moment we are in. I hope that changes, genuinely, and I hope in months and years this column looks silly and reactionary, because of a strong legacy of crosspartisan and apolitical protection of Jewish Canadians and every other group of Canadians. I want to be wrong when I say I don’t know this government gives a shit at the end of the day. I just don’t think I am, and the government isn’t doing anything to make me reconsider. Every week there is some new horror somewhere in this country, and it feels like they don’t care.

Maybe they do, but the very least the government can do is stop giving Jewish Canadians reasons to fucking doubt they do. This anti-semitism taskforce has to get its shit together immediately, with a clear mandate on a clear timetable to come up with an actionable strategy to achieve outcomes. Carney needs to call Poilievre, Blanchet, and Avi Lewis and hold a fucking rally together in take your pick of Jewish neighbourhood in Montreal to show there is no room for anti-Jewish hatred in any of our four parties. And if any of them don’t show, hold the rally anyways and make them wear the fact they put politics over sending a signal to Jewish Canadians.

Because yes, it is true that there is no silver bullet to stopping anti-semitism. It is the world’s oldest hatred for a reason, and the fact that so many people allegedly trying to fight anti-semitism want to conflate the actions of the Israeli government with anti-semitism doesn’t help anybody. But the government can make sure that nobody is in doubt about their principles, and their commitment to doing what they can to limit the incidents of anti-semitism and to supporting communities suffering the consequences of it. And if they’re not prepared to do so, then Canadians shouldn’t be lied to that they are with fake committees more concerned with getting to know each other instead of doing something.

It’s better now that Liaison is also out with a weekly tracker and Abacus is every other week, but there used to be periods where Nanos were the only game in town some weeks, and 3 of the last 4 or 4 of the last 6 polls had been from one pollster. It can mess with our collective perception of reality, thinking that things have either tightened or blown out because of the volume of noise about it.

You’ve seen it in the US much more clearly this election cycle - at the beginning of June Democrats were up 8 in RCP’s (flawed) average, a number which fell below 5 at one point. It’s now back at 7.2%, not because there has been a miracle Republican comeback and then a similar fall, but because the better Democratic pollsters’ results aged out of the average, were replaced by pollsters more favourable to Republicans, and then the first set of pollsters came back into the field. (For what it’s worth, in Nate Silver’s much better average, Democrats have gone from up 7% to up 6% to now up 6.6%, because he knows how to ensure this doesn’t happen.)

Right now, yes, you can make a very limited case that the CPC are recovering slightly. Angus Reid’s got a L+4 only, Abacus is a L+6, and Liaison is back to single digits this week. It looks a bit better, if you exclude Nanos, which currently has a fucking 19% lead. And in the context of 3 recent polls showing a smaller Liberal lead, you can talk yourself into recovery. But it’s bullshit.

Abacus has, for methodological reasons, a sample that doesn’t fluctuate very much and has a higher Conservative floor. (My guess is that it’s recalled vote - some number of actual 2025 Conservative voters remember voting for Carney, so a sample that’s 43% people who remember being 2025 Conservative voters is likely an electorate that in actuality voted for Poilievre more than Carney, in the same way Abacus’ recalled vote showed the NDP way too high in 2025.) Angus Reid showed bigger leads earlier this Parliament, but they’ve never been exactly the Liberals’ favourite pollster, and their poll before was a L+5. Those two aren’t proof of real tightening.

If you want a genuine recovery narrative, you’d need something very different - you’d need a pollster showing a double digit Liberal lead to show that lead tumbling. We know it won’t be Frank Graves, whose tweets have said EKOS’ big sample polling has the CPC on 27% these days (and had a few days previously said LPC at 42%). So if Leger or Pallas come through with some kind of big swing right, then we’ll talk. But they haven’t yet, so it’s still nonsense.

This kind of composition effect nonsense is just that, because it’s an effort to contort yourself into a position that is indefensible. I know, because I’ve done it before, many fucking times. And so, after a probably unnecessarily long intro, let’s go through the 5 Stages Of “Does My Party Have To Fire Its Leader” Polling Grief.

Denial

This is the easiest one - it was how every Conservative was in the two months before the 2025 election and how Liberals were in 2023, when they were using selected crosstabs of certain pollsters to claim everything was fine. This is usually accompanied by arrogant statements like “how could anybody think this trend is real, it’s obviously nonsense.”

Anger

This is where the pollsters and/or the media companies sponsoring the polls are getting yelled at. Today’s example is people being mad that CTV - the firm that paid Nanos to conduct their poll - wrote up an article about that poll and not the broader polling landscape. Other examples include the time Don Davies called Angus Reid a Liberal pollster, every time someone claims are biased for the politics of the commissioning source, and every attack on the modellers.

Bargaining

This is the most mentally fun stage, where you have on some level accepted that your party is in a bad position, but you have a lot of theories about how it could get better. This is where you seee a lot of When and Once statements - “When the campaign starts and the media focuses on our leader, we’ll surge,” “Once we start running ads,” and what not. They’re almost never true, but at least you’ve accepted the fact that the satiation as it currently applies is untenable.

Depression

What I like to call the “if we’re gonna lose anyways, why even bother?” stage. The three months after the Liberals lost the LaSalle byelection and before Chrystia Freeland resigned were the funniest time for this, when people would genuinely claim there was no difference between the Liberals losing with 100 seats and 40 seats. Even before we had any idea that Carney would be this effective, I supported a Leadership change based on the simple idea that losing less badly was a worthwhile investment. That was somehow a controversial idea amongst Liberals.

This is where most Conservatives seem to be. There are some still in the earlier stages, but right now it appears that the majority of Conservatives know that things aren’t working, but aren’t prepared to get to the logical conclusion. Every line of copium about “who would do better?” is firmly in this box.

Acceptance

It will be interesting to see how quick Conservatives get here, because objectively their polling is atrocious and the fundraising data released this weekend suggests that Poilievre’s greatest strength as a leader is now fading. The fact that Conservatives have already hit Depression in the 5 Stages Of Political Grief shows just how bad their plight is. The question is less whether Poilievre can win the next election, and honestly more whether he can survive the year. At some point, the pressure’ll mount, if only out of desperation.

And I am shocked by the number of allegedly sane people buying this shit, based on Doug Ford’s word. Or not even Doug’s word, as it is.

..

The details of when this alleged grand bargain was allegedly struck really matters, because the details make this deal nonsensical. Mark Carney is alleged to have made this grand deal less than 2 weeks on the job, about a proposal there was no public plan for or prioritization of, with a Cabinet that was very clearly designed to be caretakers, when he walked into the meeting solely trying to make sure Ford wasn’t going to come out attacking him during the campaign. There’s no universe where Ford was clearly told yes to expanding Billy Bishop.

What would the benefits to the federal government be to commit one way or the other that early? The Liberals were a fucking shambolic mess at that point in time, scrambling to find candidates and staffers and relying on parts of a creaking machine while tossing other parts overboard. March 2025 wasn’t about taking decisions, it was about hanging on for dear life while we still had a poll lead. Everything radical the government has done - especially where they have done unpopular-but-necessary (in their view) pro-growth policies - they made those decisions once they had trusted people in place after the election, not before.

What is far more plausible is that Carney was non-committal because he didn’t know his ass from his elbow on this issue. Carney wouldn’t have had a strong opinion on this topic, and while I fully believe that Carney would make executive decisions and inform his relevant ministers about it later at this stage of his Prime Ministership, there’s just no way he would have been reckless enough to give a firm yes at this stage of the game.

Did Ford sincerely take Carney being non-committal as an agreement? Maybe, though why we would give Doug Ford good faith benefit of the doubt is beyond me. Does Doug Ford taking a non-committal answer as a yes make it binding, or mean that Mark Carney did something wrong? No, Doug thought the stripper actually loved him, and is now pissed that his delusions aren’t reality. There will be rapprochement in time, because the list of economic projects where Carney and Ford are on the same side is longer than the irritants. But this isn’t really what I’m so mad about, because Doug Ford is a corrupt Bond villain. What I am pissed about is the number of NDPers who are accepting Ford’s version of events uncritically.

Chris Glover, the NDP MPP for Spadina, claimed that there was “confirmation” of a “handshake deal” - Alto for Billy Bishop - based on Star reporting that actually says that PC sources claim there was a deal. That is not confirmation of anything - unless, of course, it is the position of the ONDP that Doug Ford’s word is unimpeachable gold now. Tom Parkin and the usual mouth breathers on Twitter are saying the same thing, that there definitely was a deal. And it drives me crazy because this is emblematic of why people no longer trust the NDP.

I used to resounding shit on the NDP under Jagmeet Singh for being, as I called them, a cancer to Canadian politics because of the cavalier and odious nature of their relationship to truth and honesty. Jagmeet would attack the Liberals day and night for all kinds of sins, but then refuse to vote against the government on the floor. I wrote for 2+ years that if the NDP were seriously opposed to the government as they claimed, they had a moral obligation to vote against the government, and if they weren’t seriously opposed, they needed to shut the fuck up with their over the top criticisms of the Liberals. It was offensive to public understanding to claim to be in staunch moral opposition to a government you were actively supporting, because it meant that nobody believed anything the NDP ever said.

In the same way now, if the NDP are going to take the approach that Doug Ford’s staff’s off the record word to the Star is gospel truth, then why do we need an Opposition at all? One of the main lines of Marit Stiles’ attack on Ford is that he’s a lying sack of shit who will say or do anything to hide Ontarians from the fact he’s destroying health care, education, and everything else we hold dear. And now her MPP is claiming that Ford’s leaked, post-facto spin is absolute truth? Are you fucking with me?

We can throw in Avi Lewis’ comments on how if America wants to invade us we’re fucked, so there’s no point investing in our military too, because since I wrote a column being nice about the NDP they’ve had a hell of a week trying to prove me wrong. Lewis’ defeatism is as ahistorical (look at the recent American military record, bud) as it is self-fulfilling (if we don’t have a strong military it’s much easier for them to win), but above all it is unserious. At a time when Canadians have embraced the idea of higher military spending - including a majority of NDP voters, according to Frank Graves! - this kind of hippy dippy bullshit isn’t helping. It’s also the same logic that led many leftists to say Ukraine shouldn’t have bothered fighting Russia, which is heinously dangerous territory to be in.

The fundamental crisis of the NDP is that I, unlike many die hard Liberals who read this site, think the NDP is a fundamentally useful institution. I want a party that can articulate moral principles and good ideas from the left, to stop the Overton Window and public opinion from shifting too far left. But that doesn’t mean that this version of the NDP is useful or good. The problem for the party, at both the Ontario and Federal levels, is that they don’t know what they’re supposed to be for, focused so much more on the easy dopamine of being against “bad” things and calling Carney insufficiently pure for various crimes against progressivism. Tom Parkin wants to codify municipal rights in a new Ontario Constitution Act, which would do …precisely fuck all to stop the next Premier who wants to meddle in Ontario’s business from just repealing the Constitution Act. But hey, it sounds good, right?

Even if you take Lewis’ defeatism at face value - there’s no way we could stop the US from invading us so there’s no reason to build tanks and submarines - what is the actual pitch there? Canada shouldn’t spend so much on new defence spending, and should spend it on … I don’t know yet. If you’re going to make this pitch, shouldn’t there be a positive answer about what an Avi vision for society would mean? I assume pharma and dental would be listed, but if not weapons manufacturing jobs, what exactly does Avi want to spend the money on? Fuck if I know!

The NDP needs to become a serious organization, or plainly we’re all fucked. The party’s rank unseriousness, defence defeatism, and willingness to accept Doug Ford’s spin as truth all add up to one thing - a party unable and unwilling to understand why voters keep rejecting it.

Until they do, they’re fucked

Dear Minister Solomon,

Canada has a productivity problem, and we are out of time to treat it as abstract. Businesses feel it. Workers feel it in wages that don’t keep up and services that can’t keep pace. When Washington cut non-Americans off frontier U.S. models, it should have horrified us, and more than that it should have clarified everything: our access to the tools that will decide who stays competitive is not guaranteed. That moment is an opportunity to illuminate what’s at stake. AI for All is right. Our economy needs to adopt AI, and we need to build the environment and the social conditions that make that possible. But if Canadians don’t believe this is a net benefit, the strategy stays a slogan, and we will lag behind our peers.

For most people I talk to, AI isn’t a productivity story yet. It’s the slop in their feeds. It’s deepfakes of real people, from a Markham pharmacist running one of the worst sites on the internet to Grok generating sexualized images of public figures. Hell, this site’s usual author is one of the most distrustful people of AI I’ve ever met. He is unpersuaded that any of this is necessary, important, or even worth discussion, in large part because we have not done the work of explaining the actual utility, and the opportunities, of the technology. His views are not a fringe minority, but are shared by a considerable number of Canadians, and until we convince people like him, we will be nowhere.

This is something my home town is grappling with right now. A data centre application on South Service Road - right off the QEW, that, under the Planning Act, goes to staff for site plan approval, not to council. What should have been an unremarkable industrial file is turning into a municipal ballot issue anyway, with mayoral candidates and residents arguing about ground rules council can’t even set. Nearly half of Canadians say we need domestic AI infrastructure for digital sovereignty, but two-thirds would oppose a large data centre a few blocks from their home. People will nod along to the national project until the warehouse shows up on their street.

And it gets tighter from here. Washington is weighing curbs on Chinese open-weight models that American firms have been grabbing because they’re cheaper and nearly as good. Global compute is already constrained. Whether the next chill is Entity List pressure or a harder ban, Canadian businesses will feel it in cost, in what tools they can still reach, and in whether they get to compete only when someone else allows it. You’ve said it yourself: sovereignty isn’t a slogan, it’s compute, cloud, data, energy, connectivity, and talent. Only about one in three Canadian businesses uses AI today, and the strategy wants roughly three in five by 2034. That jump is how we close the productivity gap. Tell people what gets faster, what gets cheaper, what gets built here, before the only story they know is the one that scares them.

You won’t win that argument while government looks careless with the same technology. Ontario’s Auditor General found that only three percent of public servants had finished the province’s AI training, and that thousands were hitting unsecured tools in ways that put Ontarians’ data at risk. That’s bad enough. The harder question is what we do when a system can rewrite parts of the social contract.

When a tool can decide who gets confined how tightly, who gets benefits, or who gets believed, you don’t start by letting it decide. You start by building it as a mirror. Use it first to show us what we already do: our own biases, and the biases baked into the institutions and data we inherited. Name them. Confront them. Only then decide whether, and how, the system gets to act on people’s lives. Ontario’s corrections system uses SAFER for security classification, and it’s now facing a Charter challenge over racial disparities in who lands in harsher conditions. SAFER was treated as a finished product - one that would help Ontario deal with some of the most difficult problems in corrections. It should have been the mirror. Deploy first, discover the bias later, and you permanently alter lives with someone else’s patterns written into the code.

So build trust. Say publicly where AI is being used in government communications and operations, and why. Make training mandatory, not optional. Meet communities where the infrastructure lands with honest accounting on water, power, and noise, so sovereign capacity doesn’t arrive as a warehouse nobody consented to. Communicate your ideals, goals, and values clearly. Tell people what alignment looks like. And push your provincial counterparts to do their part out loud. The levers that decide whether a hyperscaler connects to the grid or clears local environmental rules are entirely in their hands. Here in Ontario we have Bill 40 for connecting high-demand loads like data centres, and the Ontario Energy Board’s Distribution System Code and Transmission System Code protecting the grid and ratepayers. Regions and municipalities can set environmental requirements on water and land use. Those protections only earn trust if people know they exist and are being used. A National AI Literacy Initiative that stops at kits and courses, and never presses provinces to explain their own energy, grid, and environmental safeguards, leaves the hardest part of public buy-in untouched. Trust isn’t a communications campaign after the fact. Canadians will not accept the infrastructure, the adoption, or the productivity gains you’re promising unless they are informed.

Canada can still catalyze investment, bring together leading people in AI and machine learning, and give Canadian companies and labs room to build sovereign capability here: inference, compute, data infrastructure, and the applications that close the productivity gap in the real economy. The government is right to push AI for All, but right now it will not be a success. We need to push harder on trust first. We need to give people a reason to believe AI will benefit them. It’s time to build.

Or we will see the pain of our failures for years to come.

I have a complicated feeling to Avi - I wrote about him for Macleans in April, and I’ve been plenty critical of his party over the years - but my main feeling towards him right now is feeling bad for him, because people who are nominally on his side are setting him up for failure.

Mark Carney called three byelections on Sunday, including one in Nate Erskine-Smith’s Beaches East York fiefdom, and he did so two days after announcing the government won’t allow airport expansion at Billy Bishop, and he did so the week after polling has cropped up claiming Mike Layton might be a candidate for the NDP in Beaches. He’s also doing this at a time when the NDP’s polling is pretty good, and all of this is leading to a situation where Avi can only lose.

So let’s be very clear: the NDP have no chance of winning any of the three byelections being held now, and have very little chance in the byelections later this year, and expecting Avi to win any of them is setting him up for failure.

..

North Van is the easiest to dispatch with - it’s a Liberal-Conservative contest and the Liberals will win easily. Chicoutimi is a seat where there are three serious contenders, and NDP voters will correctly decide to back a credible candidate with a chance of winning under this flawed electoral system. Failures to win, and even failures to be at all competitive, make sense, and should not be held against Avi.

Where this matters is Beaches. It is well known I’ve been a fan of the previous MP, but that’s not the point. The NDP optimism in the seat is built on a fundamental statistical misunderstanding. The NDP vote at the last election was 7% in Beaches, but that number was significantly impacted by NES’ progressivism. Right now my model, with a big affect for personal votes, has the LPC winning by 44% - a margin not particularly dissimilar to what 338 and Poliwave have. But people are trying to do phony math to make it add up to a competitive race where none exists.

People are trying to apply the NDP’s rise in polling to the seat - which is real! - and then take away Nate’s personal vote, add in a big personal vote for Mike Layton, and then throw in a big pile of shit to get to a close race. I have the NDP on 18% of the vote right now after taking Nate’s personal vote away - which, to be clear, will likely be at least somewhat sticky, given Tanveer has worked for Nate forever. If the NDP break 25% without Layton, it’s a miracle. If Layton is stupid enough to run, then breaking 30% would be the miracle.

The discourse over whether Avi should run in any of these byelection seats fell for a basic ignorance of just how badly the NDP had been fucked by Jagmeet Singh’s leadership. None of the seats - including Rosemont! - are winnable for Avi Lewis or any prominent New Democrat. The fact that one of the most leftwing seats in Canada had an NDP vote sub-10% is pathetic, even with Nate being a good incumbent. That it feels like a left wing seat doesn’t change the hole Avi needs to get the NDP out of. In Rosemont, the NDP are facing an immense challenge, as Boulerice was basically elected as an independent in recent years - and when Duceppe left the ballot in 2019 finally, we saw that Quebecers have a deep loyalty to big names that doesn’t extend when they’re off the ballot.

The problem for Lewis is that Singh left a party with lots and lots of room to grow in vote share, but with very little room to grow in seats. That means that a lot of seats that would have been targets in 2013 or 2017 or even 2023 are no longer targets. The NDP has been hollowed out of prime targets by a previous failed leader, which means that Avi is playing from completely behind the 8 ball. Any expectations on the NDP right now fail to live in the reality of that moment.

The government’s decision to announce the decision on Billy Bishop this weekend killed any chance of Beaches going orange. I’m unpersuaded that the government wanted this idea in the first place - I am firmly of the idea that they acted like they would consider it to please Ford, while never having any intention of doing this - but even if they hadn’t I don’t get the sense this would have swung huge amounts of votes. But I get I’m a boring Ottawa resident who doesn’t get Toronto - but in this case, the issue’s now off the table. It’s also if, in many cases, this government knows what it’s doing. (Which is what makes the fucking bridge debacle so fucking annoying, but I digress.)

Chicoutimi represents a fascinating test for the Government, actually, but they’ve constructed it such that it is a free swing. If they win it - they are tiny underdogs in both my model and the Pallas poll of the riding done this week - they get hailed as conquering heroes and more proof of their everlasting strength. But a loss, far from being a crisis, would be written off as a nothing burger - a failure to win a seat the models didn’t think they’d win even if they won 210 seats nationally. The fact that the LPC can manage expectations competently is something the NDP should copy.

Anybody selling a fiction that the NDP are remotely competitive in Beaches is lying. Whether it’s to themselves or the rest of us is for them to know in their hearts. But what I do know is simple - Jagmeet set the NDP so far back that Avi cannot be expected to fix this quickly. If you care about the NDP, stop hyping up the party’s chances and setting expectations in a place the party can’t achieve - all it will do is come back to bite in 5 weeks.

Jesse Marsch’s run as Canada manager this year has been fabulous, and as much as the Davies Saga dragged people away from remembering that at the end, Canada got ridiculously unlucky with pre-tournament injuries, lost our best midfielder to a mid-game broken leg against Qatar, and still played pretty well for much of the rest of the tournament. Was it a perfect performance? No, and the 10 minutes against Switzerland where we entirely forgot how to play still haunts me, but it’s not Marsch’s fault we missed half a dozen clear cut chances across the Bosnia, Switzerland, and Morocco games. If anything, his system gets the credit for creating the chances in the first place.

The last five years haven’t exactly been great for sport in Canada. Between the Hockey Canada of it all, a couple of underwhelming Olympics, the Canadian women’s national soccer team being accused of cheating, and the general clusterfuck that Canada Soccer put itself in financially, it’s not been a good run. Losing Hockey Night In Canada on free to air CBC is another blow, and it all adds up to a situation where we are killing some of our golden geese. The $1B investment in sport is fantastic, but if the Carney government wants to build on the momentum of the World Cup, strengthen sport in this country (which would have many positive health consequences), and solve the crisis of what a modern public broadcaster looks like, he has his chance to do all three. More bluntly, without putting significantly more sports on the CBC, the billion dollars won’t have the impacts we want it to. It’s time to give the CBC a mandate to strengthen Canadian sport.

..

When the Canadian men’s national team started their qualifying campaign for Qatar 2022, the games weren’t going to be aired on TV. The rights were held by OneSoccer, a niche streaming service that almost no Canadians had. Before the first game, Sportsnet struck a deal to air the 14 games thankfully, and despite the choppy and occasional nature of international soccer during the club season, momentum built because people could watch the games.

The snow game against Mexico or going to the Azteca and getting a draw or even getting a draw in the US in that first window were huge moments that built on the success of the women’s team in Tokyo earlier that year. And there was a world where all of those moments were behind a paywall, because Canada Soccer was so broke they gave the rights away for pennies on the dollar just to keep the lights on.

In the aftermath of some incredibly insane commentary from the usual suspects about how Davies shouldn’t play for Canada again because he doesn’t care, there was a lot of talk about how Davies’ decision to commit to Canada when we were dogshit was a turning point for the program, and for soccer in Canada. It’s true, and everybody since who has had dual citizenship, multiple option, and chose Canada speaks to the act of love for Canada Davies’ choice represents. Even if he doesn’t play another meaningful game for Canada - and barring injuries he will lead us out for the next Copa and the next World Cup - Davies is a legend of Canadian soccer forever, and the skeleton key who opened the door for everything that’s come since.

The thing is, the decision by Sportsnet to get simulcast rights for the 2022 Qualifiers is another such moment. But we shouldn’t have had to rely on the smarts of whatever talent and executives figured out that this would be a smart investment for Sportsnet. This Sunday, Canada’s U20 men’s team starts their bid to qualify for the 2028 Olympics in LA. You want to watch? $12.99, plus tax, for one month. We wonder why the Canadian Premier League’s gained very little traction? Behind a paywall. Want to watch the WNT before the 2027 World Cup? Put your credit card down first. It’s simply not fucking acceptable. Canada Soccer has been blessed with a great advocate for soccer in this country in Jesse Marsch, who went from World Cup defeat straight into building up the entire program. He’s kissing the badge and defending his players and advocating for this country, and it is high time his advocacy is met with the proper response.

The CBC should be the ones who have the OneSoccer suite of rights. If they’d like to sell TSN simulcast rights to some friendlies and to the 2030 Qualifiers, great - the CBC should be the ones gaining the profits, not a private entity. I know Canada Soccer is thrilled with the terms of the new deal they did with OneSoccer’s parent company earlier this year - and it is far better than the old one - but the lack of clear role for the CBC is a failure of vision.

It’s also a failure of vision from our politicians that the CBC is losing NHL rights. In Britain, there are Listed Events - games and events deemed so important that they are legislatively required to air free to air. Right now, if the Oilers or Habs or Sens make a Stanley Cup Final next year - which, given the Oilers made it two straight years, the Habs made the third round and are getting better every year, and the Sens were Top 5 in most advanced metrics last year, isn’t insane to consider - Canadians will not be able to watch it for free. How’s that going to help grow the sport in Canada?

It’s also worth noting that at a time when the government is weakest amongst young men, a sports strategy could be immensely useful. Young men tend to be some of the biggest sports fans, and showing them that we care about an issue they care about would be quite good. It’s also worth saying that time spent watching Oilers-Canucks or whatever is time not being spent falling down certain internet rabbit holes.

There are tons of things we need to do to help sport in this country. We need to take advantage of the rising tide of women’s sports in this country, and continue to put PWHL games on CBC in good timeslots. Friday nights are usually a shit NHL slate, as the NHL overloads Saturday with games - work with the PWHL to carve out a Hockey Night In Canada-style national game of the week on a night without any real NHL competition. Strike a deal with Rogers/ Cogeco to air the local OHL or WHL or QMJHL team on CBC Gem, to allow people who don’t have access to their local cable access channel to still watch their local major junior team.

A significant reason why the CBC is so hard to defend is because it is adrift. It is purposeless, it is meandering, and it is inessential to the lives of Canadians outside of the 2 weeks every two years we need Gem for Olympic rights. It can be so much more. The World Cup, and Jesse Marsch’s commitment to building Soccer Canada up, is something we can and should be so proud of. We have a government stepping up to help keep that momentum up, and for that I’m very, very happy. But let’s not rest on our laurels. This country needs a holistic sports strategy that builds up the grassroots, lowers barriers to access, and ensures that sports can be something that unifies communities, and the country, not just the parts of communities that are willing to fork over outrageous sums to Rogers.

I am no fan of Starmer, as longtime readers of my site will remember, and I think he’s pretty close to being people’s composite sketch of the worst politician possible personified. He’s an elite who tried an Everyman schtick, he’s a socially liberal human rights lawyer who tried to pander to the right on a core question of social liberalism (trans peoples’ right and ability to live as themselves) and failed, he ran on continuity Corbynism without Corbyn before running to the right of Gordon Brown, and whose whole argument was he could win where others couldn’t and then starting polling sub-20% within 20 months. He is, pretty explicitly, everything wrong with politics.

His failure is being described as a vindication of the British left, insofar as left defectors to the Greens have meant that Starmer is already on his ass, and the story that will be drawn from this is that other world leaders need to embrace the left, or face a Starmerite crisis. It’s an analysis that I’m sure will be trotted out in Canadian contexts soon, if it hasn’t already - Carney and Starmer are both elites who worked in the top of their professions in the public sector, Polanski and Avi Lewis map decently well, and the argument will go that if the centre left party doesn’t tack left, the obnoxious, unliked outside of his bubble right leader will become PM. Here’s the problem - it’s far too simplistic, and obfuscates the real reason for Starmer’s demise.

He was really just kind of full of shit.

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Keir Starmer is a human rights lawyer from North London who supports Arsenal. He claimed as PM to believe the dangerous and morally horrific idea that trans people are forever their assigned at birth gender. I say claimed, because there is simply no way that a human rights lawyer from North London actually believes this in their soul. Starmer, faced with an issue of moral clarity, chose to pander to a set of beliefs there’s just no way he actually holds. And everybody knows it.

I’m not saying this to absolve him, but to condemn him both morally and politically. He knows he took this stance to try and be where the country was on the issue, not because he believes it. And because of that, nobody actually believes him. The left looked at him like he was a piece of shit who would say anything and everything for power, and everybody else gave him no credit for agreeing with them because they could see it was transparent bullshit. In attempting to not take an unpopular (but morally correct) stance, he alienated the entire country.

He boxed himself in with an insanely restrictive manifesto on tax policy, then realized he needed to raise more revenue and decided to contort himself in 72 different ways to not break the letter of the manifesto (though certainly breaking its spirit), in increasingly public and obvious ways that sounded clever in a Treasury meeting and failed on impact. They wanted to look tough on welfare, but much like their transphobia, earned them nothing on their right flank and deepened problems on their left.

Starmer had a very simplistic, and rather offensive, view of the British people. He thought they were idiots who would rather be spoon fed the answers they had already decided were correct than rational people who could listen to an argument. When he was pitching the overwhelmingly Corbynite Labour membership, he was willing to hit all the buzzwords to make people comfortable with his leadership. Once he’d done that, he became a completely different politician. Not moderately different because of the demands of reality, but a genuinely unrecognizable politician without any reason for it except naked ambition.

Britain faces a crisis of state capacity from the chronic underfunding of services and the incompetence of the Tories, especially in the post-referendum years. What Starmer faced as a challenge is much more akin to what the next Ontario leader will - a public realm in needs of many many billions in immediate problems and long term funding crises that will need steady and stable revenues. That’s not what Carney came in to fix. Due to the combination of devolved powers in Canada giving the provinces most of the delivery-focused departments - health, education, and welfare/disability - and the fact that Carney is coming in to replace a PM to his left, Carney’s political landmines are very different. But that doesn’t mean there’s no lessons for Carney to learn.

The real lesson of Starmer is that the way to succeed in politics is no longer to tell people what you think they want to hear. It is no longer viable to just pander relentlessly, because the gains of being where the majority claim to be are wildly outweighed by the crisis that will come from people being unable and unwilling to believe anything you tell them moving forward. There are some issues where you need to tell the voters that you do not agree. Authentic stands of principle are far more appealing to the electorate than false bromides that cut against your very appeal.

For Carney, that means not resiling from his business record or from the fact that he thinks Canada is stronger when businesses are doing better. Carney shouldn’t start talking insincerely about the big end of town as an enemy, because half of 2025 class of Liberals are his friends from those days. He needs to continue to avoid the mindless populism of both Lewis and Poilievre, because Carney’s entire thing is that he is a serious person for a serious moment. Every minute spent in the mud is a moment that shine dulls.

But most of all, Carney and his team - and every commentator who will have a handy take on What It All Means For Canada - need to understand that the lesson of Starmer isn’t an ideological one, but a larger one about authenticity. Starmer failed not because his beliefs were wrong, but because he had no beliefs beyond whatever he thought would win votes. If Carney wants to win another term, a disingenuous pivot left might be the worst possible move - and ensure he sees the same result as Sir Keir.

Thursday sees the British Open return to Birkdale for the first time since Jordan Spieth won it in 2017, and longtime readers will know the place Jordan occupies in my heart and in my mind. His win in 2017 was a masterpiece, but also a catastrophe - a comfortable lead thrown away, before arguably the greatest four hole stretch in the history of major championship golf. From the terrible drive on 13 onwards, he played boldly, and crazily, and as much fun as his Karen routine on 13 and the long putt on 15 punctuated by the famous “Go Get That” quote are, I’ve always been fascinated by something else - the iron he hit into 14, a 6 iron to 4 feet on one of the course’s toughest holes.

The putt is the narratively satisfying conclusion of the arc, but the resilience to hit what Spieth described as “one of the best irons I’ve ever hit” a hole after blowing the lead is what’s always stuck with me. Spieth is in so many ways a metaphor - for a rapid rise and an even more rapid fall, but also for resilience and for overcoming. Spieth is both the cause of his downfall and the source of eternal optimism, and it is the bane of my existence that I let him convince me that he can rise back to the mountaintop he once occupied.

In a lot of ways, how I feel about Spieth is how I feel about Carney. Spieth angers me in a way that few things and people do, because I care. Probably too much, if we’re being honest, but I care. And that is how I increasingly feel about the Carney government - because this government has immense capacity to be one of the greatest governments in Canadian history, but it could easily be this country’s greatest missed opportunity.

And I’m absolutely terrified we’ll look back at Carney the same way we look back at Spieth’s prime - a story of wasted potential as much as it is successful.

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Carney is as fundamentally fascinating as he is because of how much he is a break from Trudeau while not being nearly as much a break from him as some want to pretend. It’s in both TrudeauWorld’s interests to talk up the differences between Carney and Justin as it is for CarneyWorld. Carney looks like a moderate who is a true Different Kind Of Liberal, making it easier to win Conservative voters, while Trudeau’s reputation looks better with every Carney decision that can be spun as an abandonment of progressivism. It’s a weird thing where both sides of the party handover are incentivized to accentuate the differences, which is leading to a mostly botched understanding of reality.

Carney and Trudeau both believe in climate action, but both also believe that oil production is a means to national unity and that at the end of the day if oil is to be burned it should be done by Canadians for the purposes of making Canadians money. Both would love if Carbon Capture could be a thing, and both believe in the utility of carbon pricing, even if Carney had to throw the consumer carbon tax overboard for political reasons. Both believe that working with America where possible is fundamentally best, and both have understood that conceding on points of optics is better than digging in our heels at the cost of prosperity.

There are differences - Carney’s by no means as populist or as comfortable bashing the rich and the big end of town as Trudeau was, the crime policy is meaningfully more right wing, and Carney is certainly not as interested in the rhetorical flushes of wokeness as Trudeau was (take FeministForeignPolicy-Gate, where we had Carney announce that we have a feminist foreign policy but no longer have a Trudeau-era trademark Feminist Foreign Policy). Is it messy? Sure, but it’s clearly more consistently electorally successful than Trudeauism. But I don’t really get what this government is using its political capital for.

The problem for Carney is that his vision - as outlined in Values, or at least as I understand it from the maybe 25 pages I’ve read of it (so far) and his post-Bank of England work - and his actual governance work are at odds. The green climate guy is building another pipeline with government money, and we’re spending billions on defence infrastructure. There’s very little in terms of an overarching legacy being built, because Carney is still acting like a wartime consigliere, not a peace time Prime Minister. And that’s fine, I’m not mad that he’s treated this crisis for what it is. But I am unsure what comes next.

I don’t know what Carney would consider a success in five year’s time. I’m sure he’d say an increase in economic growth and a return of some high end manufacturing, but if it’s 2031 and Carney’s won re-election and whoever your favourite Democrat is in the White House and tariffs are gone, will the fact he managed us through the storm be enough? Does he want to just be a war time consigliere? Or does he have an actual vision for what Canada will look like when things are calmer?

The reason I am harsh on Carney is because I have hope for him. He is, far more than the last Trudeau years, clearly capable of being a radical positive force for our country. He is the best chance at being a liberal reformer, the kind of transformative politician this country to lock in the good of the Trudeau-era reforms while fixing the structural economic flaws two decades of putting out fires and not being to engage in deep thinking has produced. Is it fair on Carney that I’m holding him to a higher standard? Maybe not, but I know what he can do, so I expect it.

I don’t expect perfection from Carney, and it’s clear even just in what Carney clarified hours after my piece on the bridge deal that he is good at this. But he has the chance to be great. Carney has shown in flashes the combination of political instincts and policy ambition to be a great Prime Minister at a time this country needs one. But he also makes stupid mistakes that make that harder. That combination is why he is enthralling and infuriating in equal measure.

In so many ways, Carney is to our politics what Spieth is to golf. The question is, will we view the Carney honeymoon as the aberration that 2015 was for Jordo, or will Carney find the ability to do what Spieth hasn’t since Birkdale, and consistently rally back from mistakes with moments of greatness. The country’s waiting for a leader to be great, waiting for a leader to grab us and lead us into the future with ambition. To Carney, all I’d say is what Spieth said nearly 9 years ago: Go Get That.

God knows the country needs someone to.

But I do have one strong opinion, and one that’s calcified the longer I’ve thought about it - there’s every chance the Bridge debacle will be a bigger political problem for the government than anything that’s happened so far, because Canadians deserve better than a government unable and unwilling to defend its actions. Donald Trump has leverage, and he has power, but he does not require the Canadian government to smile and nod and pretend to Canadians that the chicken shit we are being fed is chicken salad.

And if the government doesn’t stop giving Canadians the short shrift in a vain and ultimately useless attempt to not rock the boat, they will allow their entire agenda to go under.

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The problem for Carney is not that the deal is an indefensible disgrace. It is, in fact, the only actual solution to getting the bridge open. Hoping that at some point that Gretchen Whitmer or Elissa Slotkin or frankly any Democrat would grow a pair and defend us vocally and consistently - and then hoping Trump would give a fuck even if they did - is about as fantastical as thinking Jordan Spieth is going to win the Open this time next week. (I want to believe, and yet …)

The problem for Carney is that the lack of alternative solution is not inherently an affirmative defence for this decision. It can be one, if someone would like to, I don’t know, affirmatively make it, but when various Twitter friends are making a better case for Carney’s plan than anyone with any actual job, it’s a failure. I get that Trump is zero sum and that the nature of the beast is difficult, but the government needs to do more.

Do we think Donald Trump is really paying attention to what is being said by anonymous government officials off the record to the CBC? No, of course not. Have someone go off the record and make the case that the alternative was the bridge not opening. Or, hell, have Carney say so - Trump will hear that as “Carney admits I won the negotiation”, while Canadians will hear it as “Trump took this hostage and we didn’t have a better choice.” And frankly, even if it pisses Trump off, there are many ways of solving that problem - invite him to play Cabot Links or Shaughnessy next time he visits Canada and present him with a bespoke putter or some shit.

The idea that the potential risk of pissing off Trump has to (pardon the pun) trump the very real prospect of undermining our entire agenda is nonsensical. Even more so, nobody is making the case to Canadians that there is any there there on any of this - we’re not buying an entire fleet of F35s and we can announce that (via unnamed Government sources to the CBC) but we can’t dare say that we did the Bridge deal because otherwise it wouldn’t open and that would be worse? I don’t accept that.

Carney’s whole entire thing is that he is a different kind of politician, because he’s not even a politician. His whole thing is that he is above the normal idiocy of politics, and that has meant being able to say things that people captured by normal political rules can’t say. Carney’s bluntness and occasional dickishness to reporters has been a boon for the PM, because it has shown he is a real person and not merely a robotic politician. And now, he’s going to refuse to do that now? Fuck off.

The thing that Carney knows from the business world is that what is said is as important as what isn’t, but that’s because people in the business world know what to look for. You can say things with plausible deniability in a corporate environment in a way you can’t in politics. It is frustrating I’m sure to have to spell out what is obvious to you, but you have to fucking do it. And the fact that I’m sure it drives Carney crazy doesn’t change that fact.

What Carney needs to consistently do is show an understanding of the reality of the position he is now in and start to fucking fix it. He needs to be slightly more open with Canadians, and give what you might call a Domestic Davos - a speech that allows Canadians to fill in the gaps, that allows us to understand his mind when there are things unsaid and unsayable. Because right now we’re having to assume that he’s swallowing this deal because we need to give Trump something while we diverge on other, more important points. But we don’t know that, we think that, or more accurately we hope that. Hope doesn’t make it true.

At this point Carney’s government pisses me off so much more than Trudeau’s did, because Carney’s government is actually close to being an effective project both politically and on governance. Trudeau’s government was, at the best of times, shambolic but somewhat effective, but Carney’s is better for the moment we are in. But Carney’s government is so full of bad execution in key moments I have no choice but to question my faith in them. It needs to be fucking better, and it needs to be better fast, or this country will start to wonder why it elected Carney at all. And when that happens, we’re all fucked.

Not bad work from Eby, honestly.

Getting the North Coast tanker ban continued - in other words, any pipeline will go to southern BC - will be the headline, but the promises of compensation and revenue sharing are the dogs that actually hunt for a province running a very bad deficit. Eby’s gotten the Feds to do what Smith couldn’t in last year’s MOU - they clearly understood they had the leverage, and they got the Feds to give everything and the kitchen sink, like Alberta did when they signed up for carbon capture and no Federal subsidy dollars on a pipeline in exchange for regulatory approval. (We will come back to this.)

But I’ve been sitting with the details of this deal for a week now, and I’m still coming back to this one question, time and time again - what does Danielle Smith want these days? Because I can’t tell, and I don’t think she knows either.

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Does Danielle Smith want Alberta to own a pipeline in the long term? There is no private sector company wanting to sole-build this pipeline, but Smith needs a pipeline announced before October’s referendum and she wants shovels in the ground by mid-2027 before the next election (if it’s going to be held at the usual time). So it seems like she’s going to start building this thing with public money and then maybe sell Alberta’s stake once it’s in construction? If she’s really on board with government ownership, I mean, welcome Comrade Smith, but I can’t imagine she is.

So what’s the answer? I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody in Alberta does. Smith is having to handle a very difficult, very demanding internal political situation. The UCP is now not a unified federalist party, and as we saw with the Kenney years, the party didn’t actually come together when Wildrose and the PCs were unified again. The three traditions of Alberta politics - rural social conservativism, urban fiscal conservatives with socially liberal values, and the liberal left - never went away. All that’s happened is the coalitions of those three groups at a party political level have changed. The PCs needed a significant chunk of the liberal vote to stay in government in 2012, and Notley in 2023 saw her make big inroads with urban moderates. Not enough, but a lot. Now? Nenshi’s not Notley, which means the UCP is less scared of losing a general election and the harder right wing of the party no longer wants to go along to get along to stop the NDP.

The fact that nobody believes the NDP can win the next election is the underlying current of everything happening in Alberta. I’m not saying that that characterization is true, but because nobody fears Nenshi, the fight isn’t “how do we beat the NDP”, it is “how can we get the version of the UCP we want”. And that distinction means Danielle Smith is more scared of losing power via an AGM than she is of losing power at the ballot box.

I want to be glib and say that this is Nenshi’s fault, and in some ways it is - if he was better at his job, the UCP would care more about governing for the province and not for their psychodrama. But it’s also true that Alberta governed for the psychodrama during and after COVID, even when Notley had big leads in the polls. Alberta’s DNA is that of a conservative province, which means it’s hard to blame Nenshi for too much of the fact that nobody thinks he can win.

So Danielle Smith has gotten a pipeline - maybe! - that she has to foot much of the bill for, even with a small private sector help and the Feds, and she’s probably through her next two major electoral events safely. But is the legacy she wants really owning a pipeline with Mark Carney? Or is this yet another step in Smith’s never ending fight to keep the power she felt taken from her in 2012, without any actual priority for what she does with it?

Smith is best understood, as I wrote about the Calgary arena deal in 2023, as someone desperate for that power she didn’t get and willing to throw the baby, the bathwater, and the bath tub out to keep power. That’s still her mantra, which is why she’s willing to both ram through a referendum to appease her base and then vociferously defend Canada. It’s a balancing act in the name of avenging what Lake of Fire took from her. Understood as such, the willingness to do whatever to keep power makes sense.

Where I’ve struggled more is TMX, and the Feds owning a chunk of this pipeline. And yet, the longer I think about it the more okay I am with it, for a simple reason - if somebody’s going to build this thing and the numbers pencil out, we should probably have the ownership stake.

The problem with Canadian governmental policy is it is too often we have subsidized private entities with tax breaks and deferrals instead of joint ventures where they retain equity stake. In this case, if the pipeline’s a bust, we’re fucked, but the combination of mostly mirroring the existing TMX route and the fact that global instability has made Canadian oil more valuable presumably makes this pencil out. I would like someone to make the case that this will pencil out before I get on board, but at the end of the day if it’s a good investment I’d rather us get the profits.

But at the end of the day this pipeline is an acceptance of our current reality - the price of being a country is a price that means we have to give Danielle Smith what she says she wants. But my question remains - what does she actually want in the long run? Because until she answers that, Alberta will continue on the hellish path it currently occupies, and we will be no closer to getting off the merry go round of bad policy.