As of early Saturday, we have come to a terrible impasse with the US. American tariffs will be painful for both countries. More painful to us because we depend more on that trade. But painful for both countries.

My colleague Trevor Tombe estimates that up to 90,000 jobs could be lost in Canada as a result of the initial tariffs, if this dispute lasts. That’s 90,000 workers without work. Tariffs will also make the cost of living harder for people who are already borrowing heavily to pay for the daily bread.

I don’t envy the Prime Minister, and I appreciated his comments on Saturday. I thought he was wrong and struck the wrong tone, but I appreciated his comments, nonetheless.

Punitive tariffs are cruel and run against our century-long partnership as allies and friends. Canada didn’t start this fight. The American tariffs are unjustified and a terrible idea. But tariffs against 5% of our trade are a crisis, not a war. Calling it “war” is an overreaction and not helpful.

Our tone should be one of regret, not triumph.

We live next to the US and we are going to be in their orbit for centuries to come. Our instinct is to be angry and proud. We have reason to be angry and proud. But we and our children will have to live the decisions we have make in the next few days. We can be angry and proud, but we also must be smart.

The Prime Minister should be honest and transparent. To be blunt, his record as PM has not always lived up to those standards. He does not like to be questioned or to explain himself. He attacks reporters who ask pointed questions. When he attends Question Period, he condescends not to answer the questions that are posed.

He fibbed about the Gordie Howe bridge deal. Mr Majumdar was right to call that out. Mr. Carney didn’t want to admit that he had caved in to US pressure, so he … fibbed. When he got caught - because the Trump Administration called him on it - he went to ground and killed a parliamentary committee hearing on the deal. His government should have explained what really happened. Instead, he took the weak path three times: by caving, by fibbing, and by hiding. The Trump Administration noticed, and I am sure they expected him to cave again.

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Mr. Trump’s first tweet about tariffs on Canada was 635 days ago (as of Sunday). His first tweet on the 51st state stuff came a few days later. We knew tough trade talks were coming and we wasted time by not preparing. We waited 100 days so senior Liberals could talk Mr. Trudeau into retiring and then talk other Liberals into crowning Mr. Carney. Mr. Carney wasted the rest of the time pretending legislation would get projects built and secure interprovincial free trade. He travelled all over Europe without getting CETA ratified.

The result? As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, “Canada has recorded five straight quarterly declines in business investment, as companies scale back or cancel capital-expenditure plans amid elevated economic uncertainty.” The Americans know this, too.

What’s done is done. We can only move forward. But let’s be clear about how we got here.

What now?

First, there are dozens of projects waiting to hear if the PM thinks they are projects of national importance. That’s how Bill C-5 works - the Prime Minister is the decision-maker, not the “Major Projects Office”. He should green light those projects on Monday. Conservatives calculate there are another 500 projects waiting for federal permits. They should all be approved this week. Get the lawyers drafting the documents and the autopens signing them. Put out a record big Canada Gazette.

Secondly, we’ll be tempted to give extra EI to the workers who are laid off. We should resist that. Income support, yes. But as jobs are lost, income support has to get those workers retrained as quickly as possible. Federal and provincial leaders should have no patience with training institutions. We need training right way, in case the lost jobs do not come back. We need to turn auto workers into machinists and engineers. That sort of thing.

Thirdly, Parliament should be recalled for a pro-growth budget of tax and regulatory reforms. We have spent more than a decade penalizing investment and growth. That has to end. If the Americans want to impose tariffs - meaning taxes - on their investors and businesses, we should go the other way.

I am not a fan of counter tariffs. They hurt us more than anyone else. It would be better, in my view, to go on an investment offensive. We cannot wait for a summit that flatters the Prime Minister’s ego. We need ministers to be callimg up CEOs who are thinking about investing in the US this week and do what is necessary to get them to invest here instead. An example: American states are putting in new moratoriums on data centres. Rather than impose counter tariffs, let’s make it easy for those data centres to move to Canada. Really easy. Permits in days, not years. Quick construction - the retraining piece matters. Quick pro-investment agreements with unions, First Nations, and communities. And challenge the courts not to block projects while we are in a crisis.

Finally, we have to be ready to go back to the negotiating table. The only reason we negotiated last week was because Trump forced us back. He knew Mr. Carney was weak and wanted to deal while he was at his weakest. When we get back to talks, we must be stronger at home.

In the meantime, we also need high-profile, high-level diplomacy to America’s political and community leaders. We can speak to the Trump Administration by speaking past the Trump Administration. Premier Smith has been successful in making the case as to why Canadian energy is valuable to the US. We need to make the same case about lumber, steel, aluminum, auto parts and hockey sticks.

One more factor: trouble in government debt markets. Canada has been borrowing at good rates for a while. Everyone breezing on about borrowing heavily to keep Canadians whole during a trade war need to wonder how long the borrowing can go on.

What’s done is done. Mr. Carney assembled a majority government and now he faces a crisis. Wasting more time is not going to help. When it’s possible to open up talks again, and let’s hope that is soon, we must be stronger.

In Canada, federal and provincial ministers are supposed to be responsible for what goes on in their departments. “Ministerial responsibility” requires ministers to take questions in Question Period, before committee, and during estimates review. In theory, they were once supposed to at least think about resigning if something went badly off the rails in their department. That principle has disappeared from recent editions of the relevant official documents.

Beyond that, the centralization thesis associated with Donald Savoie alleges that ministers rarely matter when it comes to real decision-making in government.

According to the thesis, a prime minister / premier and a small coterie of political staff and permanent officials set a government’s agenda, draft mandate letters, set budgets and sometimes step in to make day to day decisions that most ministers must suffer to implement. “Governing by lightning bolts.”

People who hang around politics – elected officials, public servants, staffers, journalists and lobbyists – can usually tell you which ministers are on a very short leash.

I set out my views on this thesis in At the Centre of Government. If you haven’t read it, what are you doing with your life?

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Ministers are politicians and politicians like to deal with political issues. The routine administration of a department’s work sometimes gets less attention. They rarely insist on having their pictures taken while issuing routine permits, renewing routine licences, or signing routine correspondence.

And so, over the last year or so, I have been surprised to see how much Alberta Transport Minister Devin Dreeshen has been talking about his department’s crackdown on unsafe trucking and fly-by-night trucking schools.

Transport minister is the best job in a provincial cabinet. You get to travel wherever you want. Every business owner, local official, or community leader wants more roads and transportation infrastructure. They are always happy to play host in anticipation that a ministerial visit will lead to jobs and new pavement. Caucus colleagues want pavement too, so all sorts of political favours can be traded when drafting the annual capital program. Every project is a potential photo op filled with grateful mayors, MLAs, construction workers, and contractors, all in colourful protective equipment.

And let’s not forget that better transportation really matters to a provincial economy. Other ministers have to sit around boardroom tables talking about strategies and pretending they can do something about productivity, innovation and competitiveness. The transport minister gets to be wooed, gets to see paving, gets to see things moving. Concrete results, as it were.

Mr. Dreeshen does all this with aplomb.

Earlier this year, during the Alberta legislature’s estimates review, he even looked like he was having fun answering questions from NDP MLAS about highway snow clearing. He leant a seemingly sympathetic ear to every worry and concern.

But it’s the enforcement bit that impresses me.

It’s not in his mandate letter. That’s all about passenger rail and photo radar and projects that matter to the premier. He carries the can, as assigned, for the government’s broader concern with building trade corridors to BC and Saskatchewan. That’s long, slow work that also matters to the province’s future.

The province is short of trucks and truckers. Every business feels the pinch. It matters that trucking schools are getting more truckers into the economy. And given that trucking is often a first step into the Canadian job market for immigrants working on their English language skills, good trucking schools get newcomers onto a payroll and integrated into our province. Trucking supports thousands of families.

No doubt, his department would rather not enforce safety standards on trucking schools. Bureaucrats rule from the bureau – the desk – and bureaucracies prize office work over field work. Inspecting a trucking school is time-consuming, tedious, exacting and sometimes dangerous. Writing up summonses, collecting evidence, shutting down operations – people who want to do that kind of work usually sign up for the police, not the transport ministry.

And yet, Mr. Dreeshen pushes on. Trucking matters, but safe trucking matters even more. Safety advocates usually want better road design or improvements in vehicle engineering. (1) But as anyone who has braved Alberta Highway 2, especially the part that traverses Mr. Dreeshen’s riding, or Ontario’s 401, or any of Quebec’s four-lane freeways, can attest, safe truck drivers are a matter of life and death.

So, Mr. Dreeshen decided to focus on the source: driving schools. Some are run by unsavoury characters. Trucking schools that get shut down for safety reasons in one province pop up in others. They exploit student drivers desperate for work and shippers desperate for trucking capacity. Responsible trucking schools, scrupulous trucking firms, and drivers of all sorts pay the price. He’s also going after trucking companies, shutting down “chameleon carriers” who try to skirt safety regs.

The Dreeshen safety drive is making real progress and sending a message. Earlier this month, he reported his department has issued more than 440 administrative penalties and closed down 20 unsafe firms. And citizens in Ontario are paying attention.

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Canada has too few police and far too little criminal law enforcement. The success of Toronto’s youth shooter-for-hire rings in helping foreign governments sow terror among the city’s Jews and American diplomats is evidence of that gap. But police investigations and criminal prosecutions are high-end, ponderous assets that cannot tackle every enforcement problem.

Trucking is only one example where administration measures can make a real difference. Canada also has a human trafficking problem, a problem that can and should be tackled with better provincial labour enforcement. Crummy commercial and residential construction, closer regulation of real estate transactions and the used car business, and routine commercial registration – ministers have dozens of tools to clean up all these problems if they want to follow Mr. Dreeshen’s lead. It means getting officials out from behind their desks and into the field to enforce their laws.

At the federal level, better import and immigration enforcement could have a big impact, too.

It is true, provincial enforcement can get out of hand. A provincial criminal law is a step too far. It risks “inducing a multi-level reduction of liberty while simultaneously muddying the lines of accountability,” as Dennis Baker puts it. (2)

But enforcing laws that are squarely in provincial jurisdiction is what provincial ministers ought to be doing. Insofar as shady trucking schools, construction firms, and real estate operations are in cahoots with organized crime, administrative enforcement cuts the opportunities for violent crimes, too.

Mr. Dreeshen could have just travelled the province getting the easy photo ops at paving projects. But he’s doing a lot more. He opened up the law books and realized he and his officials had more than enough authority to go do something useful for the province. He did not need the premier’s encouragement. No need to check with political staffers or central agencies. He just got on with the business of taking his job seriously. Anyone who wants to be a minister, take note.

1. The classic treatment is O’Rourke, P.J. 1991. “Protectors of a blameless citizenry.” In Parliament of Whores. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press.

2. Baker, Dennis. 2014. “Provincial Criminal Law.” Canadian Public Administration, 57: 275-294.

· I worried that this week’s special post, which was supposed to go out last Thursday, would get me labelled “unpatriotic” given that a lot of that is aimed at skeptics of Mr. Carney’s government these days.

· Instead, it got a lot of encouraging feedback from paid subscribers. Thank you all for the notes.

· I decided the post needed a bit of an update and a release to free subscribers.

· And for online conservatively minded influencers: there might be more appetite out there for pointed criticisms of Mr. Carney’s record, and less appetite for hand wringing about the state of the Conservative Party or of conservative thinking in Canada. If we are two or three years from the next election, then an online debate about ourselves is useful. But if we are months away from an election where Mr. Carney’s ballot question is “How Canadian are you?” then we need a different focus.

As Canadian and US negotiators sit down for another three days of trade talks, we have reason to worry.

First, these trade talks are going on with zero transparency. Is Mr. Carney looking for a small deal to reduce the Trump tariffs? A broader deal for a new USMCA? Or an even broader deal to expand continental cooperation? His silence is enabled by media incuriosity. Mr. Carney’s office does nothing to enable deep reporting on his trade efforts with deep briefings about his thinking. Instead, his government and the Trump Administration feed reporters a diet of self-serving leaks and canned news conference answers. And the main criticism from too many conservatives is about the cost of flying Mr. Carney to Italy!

Secondly, Mr. Carney negotiates after a year of poor economic growth, one that followed a decade of poor economic growth. Lower immigration, combined with no productivity gains, makes for unimpressive economic growth and poor job prospects.

And thirdly, zero productivity growth is the result of zero private investment. Outside of natural gas, where it looks like pipelines and export terminals will be built, Carney’s policies and his frenetic international travels have not impressed private investors. To convey the illusion of investment, Mr. Carney will preside over a Trump-like investment summit next month. Davos comes to Toronto. The PR will be easy. The growth is illusive.

A decade ago, Mr. Trudeau’s economic strategy focussed on driving tech investments with mega clusters and other government programming. And Canada had all the elements for success: strong AI researchers, strong post-secondary programs to train up talent, and a generation of entrepreneurs that wanted to build. But the rest of Mr. Trudeau’s agenda – high personal taxes, ever higher capital gains inclusion, and inflationary policies on housing, drove all that talent to the US, as Build Canada showed us this week. Ten years later, Canada watches as our people, our ideas and our training contribute to gargantuan compute investments in the US and an eco-system of start-ups testing ways to take advantage of AI. Mr. Trudeau’s effort amounted to an expensive flop. The US economy got stronger while our economy got weaker. No one in Canada wants to talk about it, but the rest of the world noticed.

How much better are Mr. Carney’s early efforts? A year ago, he had bipartisan cooperation to pass Bill C-5. We were supposed to be building resource and export projects at speeds not seen in generations. We were supposed to be, finally, eliminating interprovincial trade barriers. Once again, Canada has all elements for success: an enviable track record of producing resources and secure access to the world’s two major oceans. Armed conflict drives up the premium for dependable supplies. So far, Mr. Carney has no more to show for his efforts than Mr. Trudeau does.

The only economic indicator going up is inflation, especially food inflation. The Canadian middle class is being squeezed. Those hoping to join the middle class are being crushed. Young and not-so-young Canadians are borrowing at record rates. And they’re not having families, which is both a cultural and demographic crisis.

The closing phase of any trade negotiation always has the parties predicting doom and preparing their publics for failure. At least Laura Dawson thinks Canada and the US are closer than they appear to be. Or maybe those in the private sector hope for success because economic conditions are so glum. Talks could fail and we could stumble into even higher tariffs. Or, since the even the new deadline is Mr. Trump’s, maybe Mr. Trump will give us another extension. He continues to set the agenda and the timetable. Mr. Carney reacts.

How did we end up in this unenviable position? Why did we put off negotiating with the US until Mr. Trump forced us to the table with the threat of tariffs?

Mexico, our USMCA partner, has been talking with Washington for months. As Marco Navarro points out, and his piece is worth a read, President Trump has insulted Mexico as crudely and frequently as he once did Mr. Trudeau; Mexico, he reminds us, “possesses the richest inventory of anti-American grievance in the hemisphere.” (1) We get taunts about being the 51st state. Mexico gets labeled a narco-state. They ignore the provocations and get on with business.

Meanwhile, in Canada, Mr. Carney and his supporters argued for months that we might not even try to sign a new trade agreement with Trump. Trump was unreliable. Trump was getting weaker. Trump did not respect agreements. This argument had a superficial veneer of strategic virtue and political necessity. No deal was said to be better than a bad deal, as if those were the only two possible outcomes.

But putting Canada’s largest bilateral relationship into a politically induced coma was never smart. There are always Canada-US issues that have to be settled in the near term. When we negotiate them one at a time, we lose an important advantage: our ability to bargain across issues. The deal to open the Gordie Howe bridge is so bad - so bad - that Mr. Carney shut down a parliamentary investigation to avoid having to explain it in public. Domestically, the tactic worked: no committee hearings, no embarrassing media coverage. But our trade partners spotted the weak hand and the weak outcome.

Distancing Canada from the US made it impossible for Mr. Carney and his ministers to make the case for trading with Canada to the thousands of communities, businesses and farms that depend on it. Surrendering the field of ideological battle in the US put Canadian interests behind. The repeated trips to Europe did not make up for it.

And the lack of clarity on trade arrangements did little to boost private sector investment in our economy.

Now, if Mr. Trump goes ahead with punitive tariffs, Mr. Carney will face an economic crisis. And an even bigger unity crisis.

The Threat to Team Canada

Brian Mulroney famously told the premiers to stay out of the negotiations on the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. That was not merely a matter of political style. The federal government could tell Washington that it alone spoke for Canada. And Mr. Mulroney was strong enough to make his instruction stick. He drove a remarkably good deal.

Mr. Carney’s government is not strong enough to do the same.

The Team Canada model started to break down before Mr. Carney took office. Justin Trudeau’s disastrous Mar-a-Lago dinner with Mr. Trump exposed Canada’s economic weakness was after ten years of zero-growth policy. Then, a few days later, Mr. Trump’s “51st state” tweet exposed Canada’s political weakness. Liberals realized they mess they had made, axed Mr. Trudeau, and triggered a leadership race that left Ottawa rudderless for months.

When Liberal infighting paralyzed the federal government, provinces started pursuing their own interests.

Danielle Smith moved quickly to secure her own Mar-a-Lago meeting with Mr. Trump and established direct relationships with American decision-makers. She is eloquent on how America benefits from Canadian energy and proven to be the only Canadian leader who can move the US debate. Canada’s oil and gas exports have been exempted from Mr. Trump’s tariffs. Someone also pushed the American farm lobby to pass on worries about Canadian potash supplies to the White House. Potash has also been exempted.

Doug Ford took a different approach. He used Ottawa’s weakness to make himself Captain Canada and call an early election. Ontario has had a deep supply of anti-Americanism since it was Upper Canada. Mr. Ford went on to victory.

Mr. Carney now faces an unpleasant dilemma. To pursue a coherent trade approach with Washington, he needs the provinces to follow his lead. That means either making a deal that would put provincial interests into conflict or retaliate in ways that would put provincial interests into conflict.

Quebec wants its dairy interests protected. Ontario, whose seats are critical to Mr. Carney, wants its manufacturing interests protected. Alberta wants its energy interests protected. Premier Ford points to energy exports, not his industrial base, as leverage to be used. Quebec’s premier warns against hurting dairy.

The ongoing Chicoutimi by-election and Quebec’s provincial election, where the polls are shifting, make all this tricky.

The oil “weapon”?

So does the Alberta referendum. Ms. Smith is the strongest advocate for Remain. But if oil and gas exports become trade weapons, her case will be weaker. Mr. Carney has said both that “everything is on the table” and that energy exports are not. Let’s be generous and say he is leaving his options open.

Canada sells oil to the US at a discount. That discount is so important that the Alberta government reports the size of it on its economic dashboard. (2) But the discount is not a gift to the US; it reflects the relative value of Canadian grades as well as the limits to our export capacity. The discount cannot be “captured” by an export tax without harming Canada’s competitive position in the US market.

If a new pipeline to the US really is possible, as Mr. Trump’s tweet suggests, that will further complicate Mr. Carney’s agenda. Does more oil ship to the US, accepting the price discount but also a lower cost of pipeline constructions, or does ship on a new, more expensive west coast pipeline, made more expensive by a carbon capture and storage project that will do nothing to stop climate change? Does Mr. Carney want to diversify Canadian oil exports away from the US market? Or does he want a symbolic carbon project?

Elbows up

Mr. Carney’s electoral mandate was for “Elbows Up.” His told Canadians that only he understood the Trump administration, only he could play a tough game, and only he could negotiate quickly to protect Canadian interests.

But that election message was not devised with trade in mind. It was devised to turn the tables on Pierre Poilievre. And it did so effectively.

The election is now over, and negotiations are moving into overtime. Mr. Carney understands one side of the American political spectrum. His COO is an Democrat. He is close to Michael Bloomberg and other opponents of the Trump Administration. He likes being praised by Trump opponents at Davos. He launched his political career on an American anti-Trump talk show and can get booked on another one whenever he wants. Being admired by that crowd aligns with his electoral interest if he wants to go the polls while Mr. Trump can still be portrayed as a threat to Canada’s existence. Then, he can cash in his political experience to move back to the US and move up a rung in financial circles.

But the interests of his Democrat friends are not Canada’s interests. Doing a deal with Mr. Trump risks Mr. Carney getting a frosty reception the next time he visits New York or Davos. Not doing a deal risks the Canadian economy and Canadian unity.

Mr. Carney inherited a weak hand and then weakened it further with a year of inaction. Will he keep play weakly?

(1) M. Navarro, “Mexico kept its head. Canada raised its elbows,” The Haultain Brief, August 1, 2026.

Haultain Research

Mexico Kept Its Head. Canada Raised Its Elbows.

Donald Trump has insulted Mexico more crudely and more often than he has insulted Canada. Mexico’s negotiators are three rounds into talks and 85 per cent of their exports still cross the border tari…

Read more

18 days ago · 51 likes · 12 comments · Marco Navarro-Génie

(2) WCS Oil Price, https://economicdashboard.alberta.ca/dashboard/wcs-oil-price/

First, these trade talks are going on with zero transparency. Is Mr. Carney looking for a small deal to reduce the Trump tariffs? A broader deal for a new USMCA? Or an even broader deal to expand continental cooperation? His silence is enabled by media incuriosity. Rather than enable deep reporting with deep briefing, his government and the Trump Administration feed reporters a diet of self-serving leaks and canned news conference answers.

Secondly, Mr. Carney negotiates after a year of poor economic growth, one that followed a decade of poor economic growth. Lower immigration, combined with no productivity gains, makes for unimpressive economic growth and poor job prospects.

And thirdly, zero productivity growth is the result of zero private investment. Outside of natural gas, where it looks like pipelines and export terminals will be built, Carney’s policies and his frenetic international travels have not impressed private investors. To convey the illusion of investment, Mr. Carney will preside over a Trump-like investment summit next month. PR is easy. Growth is illusive.

A decade ago, the Trudeau government focused its economic strategy on mega clusters that were supposed to drive tech investments. And Canada had all the elements for success: strong AI researchers, strong post-secondary programs, and a new generation of entrepreneurs willing to build. But the rest of Mr. Trudeau’s agenda – high personal taxes, high capital gains tax rates, and inflationary policies on housing, drove all that effort to the US, as Build Canada showed us this week. Ten years later, Canada watches as our people, our ideas and our training gargantuan investments in the US among compute hyper scalers and an eco system of start-ups aiming to take advantage of AI. Mr. Trudeau’s effort amounted to an utter and expensive flop.

How much better are Mr. Carney’s early efforts? A year ago, he had bipartisan cooperation to pass Bill C-5 so we could build at speeds not seen in generations and eliminate interprovincial trade barriers. And again, Canada has all elements for success: an enviable track record producing resources and secure access to the world’s two major oceans while armed conflict drives up the premium for dependable supplies. So far, Mr. Carney has no more to show for his efforts than Mr. Trudeau does.

The only economic indicator going up under Mr. Carney is inflation, especially food inflation. The Canadian middle class is being squeezed, and those hoping to join it are being crushed. Young and not-so-young Canadians are borrowing at record rates. And they’re not having families, which is both a cultural and demographic crisis.

The closing phase of any trade negotiation always has the parties predicting doom and preparing their publics for failure. Laura Dawson thinks Canada and the US are closer than they appear to be. Or maybe those in the private sector hope for success because economic conditions are so glum. Talks could fail and we could stumble into even higher tariffs. Or, since the mid-week deadline is Mr. Trump’s, maybe Mr. Trump will extend it.

How did we end up in this unenviable position? Why did we put off negotiating with the US?

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The headquarters where she worked is known as SHAPE, or Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe. Despite its name, SHAPE is not just responsible for Europe. It is NATO’s global military command headquarters, overseeing Alliance military operations around the world.

According to The Canadian Press, NATO security officers identified concerns about the intern and alerted Belgian military intelligence. Belgian authorities then searched both her home and workplace.

A later report by CTV and CP24 says the intern had been screened by both CSIS and the RCMP before taking the position. The same report noted that Public Safety Minister was asked whether the government was confident she had never worked in another federal department before joining NATO. He declined to answer directly. (2) Earlier today, CBC reported that a woman matching the description of the intern arrested in Belgium might have worked at the NRC, Statistics Canada, the Canadian Space Agency and the World Trade Organization. If it’s true that she is in her early 30s, she is a bit senior in experience to be working as an intern. (“CBC identifies Canadian woman accused of spying at NATO military HQ,” July 29, A. Wong et al., //www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canadian-nato-intern-espionage-arrest-biwei-zhang.)

Before going any further, I should be clear about two things. First, I do not anything about this case beyond what has been reported publicly. Second, the accused is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court. I have seen people unfairly damaged by one-sided media reporting before the facts were established and do not want to get ahead of the Belgian judicial process.

One of the unanswered questions is how long this investigation had been underway.

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We celebrate ours on July 1. That marks the day, in 1867, when the British North America Act came into effect. Canada – more precisely the “Dominion of Canada” - became a federal union of colonies. I suppose we could celebrate our national day at some other point on the calendar. The anniversary of Vimy Ridge, or the Statute of Westminster. Maybe the anniversary of the 1982 constitutional amending formula. But the big event was Confederation, and earlier this week we marked our 159th Dominion Day. (Do you use some other name? If so, why? “Dominion” is uniquely Canadian.)

The American decision to throw the big party on July 4. Their struggle for independence stretched on for years. There are many dates that arguably marked the start of the United States. The best pick is probably July 2, the day the rebellious colonies declaring themselves independent in 1776 with the Lee Resolution. Or, October 19, the day the British capitulated at Yorktown in 1781 and brought the armed struggle to an end. Or the Treaty of Paris, the final settlement of that struggle, which was signed on September 3, 1873. Or the anniversary of the US Constitution, which went into effect on March 4, 1789.

Instead, Americans celebrate the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776. That is why this year’s July 4 is America 250. Americans are not celebrating the decision to declare themselves independent, but the day their leading statesmen agreed on the reasons or the case for independence.

That case included, as you might expect, a list of complaints about British policy in the American colonies. The quartering of troops, the Quebec Act, the taxes, and so on. But not many people can recite those bits of the Declaration today. Instead, what keeps our attention 250 years later, is the philosophical grounding and political reasoning of the Declaration. And because that political reasoning is so powerful, from time to time, some Americans try to downplay the Declaration and the celebration of July 4.

What is the philosophical basis? What was that political reasoning? That certain truths are self-evident. That those truths include the proposition that all of us are created equal. And that we are endowed by our creator with inalienable rights, like the rights to life, liberty and, the right to pursue happiness.

The Declaration does not claim that these rights only belong only to certain nations. They are not the rights of Englishmen or Scotsmen or Americans alone. The Declaration claims them as natural rights that extend universally, for all humans.

Those were big claims, revolutionary ones at the time. To avoid dealing with that ambitious scope, sometimes we fall for the easiest criticism of the Declaration, that Mr. Jefferson and his colleagues were hypocrites. But that criticism is too easy. Yes, they owned slaves, and chattel slavery cannot be reconciled with the Declaration. Those slave owners stand condemned. They could, and should, have emancipated their slaves, but chose not to do so.

But like many flawed humans, the drafters of the Declaration created something greater than themselves. Like the stone mason whose handiwork stands in the great cathedral. Like the poet who captures the moment of beauty in verse. Like the musicians whose performance elevates themselves and their audience. Like the teacher whose own failings do not detract from the lesson. The power of the Declaration is not reduced by the sins of the drafters. It is elevated above their sins.

Every so often, the Americans debate whether that Declaration tells us anything about the kind of nation they created in 1776. Some say the Declaration set up the US as a nation built on the idea or the creed that all humans are created equal. That creed opens the American nationality to anyone who accepts it. Others, even today, argue instead that the US is a nation built on a cultural or even an ethnic basis. In this view, Americans whose ancestors arrived centuries ago are more authentically American than those from more recent stock. I am not a US citizen, so I leave this debate to my American friends. But as a student and a friend of the United States, let me suggest why this debate matters to the rest of us. The 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence matters beyond the United States.

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One drawback of the first-past-the-post (FPP) electoral system is the need to redraw riding boundaries every so often. Canada and Alberta grow unevenly. Some areas grow quickly and others hardly grow at all or even shrink. Ridings that start out with similar populations end up with vastly different ones. To keep ridings about equal in population, someone has to redraw the map of ridings every few years. But there is no perfect answer to the questions who should do redraw the map or how they should do it. The rules of “redistribution” are always controversial.

Moreover, because redistribution is specialized and technical, some stakeholders pay more attention than others. Busy citizens, for example, pay the least attention. At election time, they take for granted that they cast their vote in a riding, that candidates run to represent that riding, and that someone counts the votes fairly to determine a winner. Few citizens can explain where ridings come from.

Potential candidates pay a bit more attention. Anyone thinking of running for office needs to find a riding. The electoral map makes some ridings more attractive than others for a candidate. Would-be candidates do not usually commit to running in a particular riding until the boundaries are set. They know when the map is finished, but do not pay much attention to where it comes from.

The stakes are highest for the two remaining groups: incumbent MPs/MLAs, and political parties. For these two groups, redistribution can dramatically change their work. Because of that, a class of political consultants has emerged to advise incumbents and parties on how a redistribution could help or hurt them. And, to stay in business these consultants have to persuade incumbents and parties that they can manipulate redistribution to their advantage.

Although incumbents and parties both have strong interests at stake, thier interests diverge.

An incumbent MP or MLA usually does not want to see any boundaries change. New boundaries mean losing voters that they know are friendly and picking up voters with unknown allegiances. An incumbent can lose donors and volunteers. Losing a key fundraiser or campaign volunteer can be devastating. An incumbent usually only welcomes a new electoral map when it decisively boosts the likely margin of victory. It is nice to win by a 10-point margin. Always nicer to win by 20 points.

Parties – meaning party leaders, campaign managers and central officials – also follow redistribution closely, but for different reasons. A party does not want a new map that gives all their incumbents a 10-point boost. Those extra 10 points are wasted in a riding the party already holds. Better to have those votes distributed to ridings the party has a chance to pick up from another party. A party always favours a redistribution that has its incumbents winning narrowly while picking up more seats in total.

For party leaders, redistribution creates a problem of managing caucus expectations. Caucus members listen to consultants who promise that, with the “right” map, the circle can be squared, with every incumbent getting an easier path to re-election and the party can pick up more seats. In the short-term, the party leader might want to portray re-distribution as a panacea. But in the long-term redistribution will be painful for incumbents. The leader should prepare caucus members for the coming pain.

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Most Canadians who study redistribution think the federal redistribution system is the ideal. It is sometimes said that the federal system keeps the politics out of redistribution. This is just false. As O’Brien and Bosc put it:

In each decade between 1960 and 2000, Parliament adopted legislation either to suspend or to amend the redistribution process for one reason or another. After both the 1971 and 1981 censuses, the readjustment process was suspended to permit amendments to ... the formula for representation in the House and to make some changes to the readjustment process itself. The redistribution process was suspended twice following the 1991 census.

Similarly, in the midst of the redistribution following the 2021 census, the government proposed and Parliament passed Bill C-14 to add an additional seat to the electoral map of Quebec.

No scheme of redistribution is immune to political considerations. The stakes are too high for incumbents and parties not to try to influence it.

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For decades, Alberta has experimented with different approaches to redistribution. Dallas Miller, chair of the province’s recent Electoral Boundaries Commission, drew up a helpful history of how Alberta has gone about redistributing seats in the legislature and included it in the panel report (Report, Appendix D). The one commonality of Alberta’s redistribution process is its explicitly bipartisan nature. Successive versions of provincial law have typically let lets the premier and opposition leader of the day each name members – these days, it’s two each – to each redistribution panel with a judge usually serving as the chair.

The current Alberta electoral boundaries were drawn by the 2016-17 Electoral Boundaries Commission. That was appointed by the NDP and Wildrose; each party nominated two members. The boundaries it set were first used in the 2019 election, which was also the first election contested by the UCP. The UCP won just shy of 55% of the vote, which yielded 72% of the seats at stake. The NDP won 23% of the vote and took 28% of the seats.

But that map was notably less favourable to the UCP in 2023. In that election, the UCP won 53% of the vote and 56% of the seats. But if only 1,700 votes had shifted, six Calgary ridings would have flipped to the NDP and that party would have formed a majority government. In other words, the UCP was nearly deprived of a majority government even as it won a clear majority of the votes. So, it is easy to see why the UCP paid extra attention to the 2026 redistribution. The UCP prepared for that redistribution by making two key changes to the law. First, they added two new seats to the electoral map. Secondly, they let the Commission create “hybrid” ridings that mix urban and rural populations.

Miller’s Commission delivered a split report in March 2026. I will not get into the controversy about the report. Suffice to say that the Smith government rejected it and established a new process that will see the legislature expand to 91 seats. A legislative committee will oversee an expedited re-redistribution by a new independent advisory panel. The panel’s proposed map is due by October 22, 2026, with a report to the legislature shortly after. My New West Public Affairs colleague Monte Solberg is a member of that panel. So is Gerard Kennedy, I valued colleague at the U of A.

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Part of the challenge that faced Miller’s Commission and will face the new panel is demographic. The pace of change in the province’s population is accelerating. Since the 1960s, Calgary and Edmonton have often grown more quickly than the rest of Alberta. As the graph shows, for about 20 years Calgary and Edmonton combined held slightly more than half of Alberta’s total population. But over the last ten years, the growth of these urban centres has quickly outstripped growth in the rest of the province, and the pace of that change is accelerating. Some of the political impact can be mitigated with hybrid urban-rural ridings, but eventually this shift will have to be reflected in the legislature. Alberta is urbanizing more quickly. Its legislature will have to urbanize as well. And if the UCP is to continue in office, it will have to urbanize, too.

Or will it?

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This week marks the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum. That narrow Leave vote began the UK’s departure from the EU. Over the weekend, Brexit opponents lined up to provide their “I-told-you-sos” on air (1). Coincidentally, Brexit impresario Nigel Farage was also on air, but in his case speak about the resignation of the sixth British prime minister since the vote.

The “I-told-you-so” case was buttressed by an updated paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research on the economic impact of Brexit (2). The paper’s co-authors, a group of university and central bank economists, summarized their findings as follows:

This paper examines the impact of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016. … [W]e combine estimates using macro data with estimates using micro data collected through our Decision Maker Panel survey. These suggest that by the end of 2025 Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating steadily over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by 12% to 13%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process. Comparing these with contemporary forecasts shows that these forecasts were relatively accurate in the short to medium term, but they underestimated the impact over a decade.

There you go. Brexit had “negative impacts”. It shrank the UK’s GDP, hurt investment, cut employment and lowered productivity. Experts warned about it at the time. You should have paid attention. Zakaria repeated the claim on Sunday.

But the basic data available through the OECD shows a different story. Britain’s economy has done decently well since Brexit. In fact, for the last twenty-five years, Britain’s per capita GDP has closely tracked that of France (3). The two nations started the 21^st century tied on this measure, they were tied through the Brexit process, and remain tied today. One left the EU and the other remained. Look at the graph of per capita GDP and see if you can spot the impact of Brexit. I cannot.

Certainly, Germany has grown faster than the UK. It has also grown faster than France. The US has powered ahead of all three. But you need an awful lot of expert massaging with “macro estimates” and feedback from the “Decision Maker Panel” to make it look like Brexit reduced the British economy by 6-8%.

Which leads to the headline’s conceptual problem. Would the UK have done better under different policies than the ones it adopted in recent years? Maybe. But Brexit itself was simply an event. A decision. British policy makers have made thousands of decisions since then, as have the leaders of its main trading partners. Taken together, they also influenced the UK economy. Who deserves credit, or blame, for what has taken place since 2016?

Some Brexit campaigners hoped that, once the UK was liberated from EU decisions and the EU’s crazy scheme of fiscal transfers, it would become a northern Singapore by liberalizing regulation, reducing taxes, and boosting living standards. The six UK governments since 2016 have not followed that path, and the Starmer government’s decision to hike taxes while leaving government unreformed will not make things better. Those governments could have liberalized, and things might have turned out even better. But the economic consequences of Brexit have been downstream of the statecraft – the politics – of the process. They were not inherent in Brexit.

This becomes clearer with a less controversial example. The Czech Republic and Slovakia have taken different paths since they split in 1993. The Czech Republic has trended up to EU standards of per capita GDP, while Slovakia has lagged. Which outcome is the result of the split? Which is the result of good economic policy?

Or take any of the dozens of other examples drawn from the 20^th century’s decolonizations. Many former colonies became independent countries. Some did better economically than others. Is decolonization to be blamed for the laggards the fault or to be credited for the successful?

These are pointless questions, designed to keep ivory tower seminars busy. Keep that in mind as Albertans approach the October referendum.

Three weeks ago, Premier Danielle Smith suggested that it would cost Alberta $400 billion to leave Canada (CBC News, “Alberta premier warns separation could cost $400B,” June 3, 2026). She cited the costs of duplicating Canadian policies on national defence, OAS, etc. And she might be right. There will be costs involved in separating.

What assumptions lie behind that $400 billion figure?

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In response to media questions about the U.S. deal with Iran, Mr. Majumdar started by repeating the decade-long Conservative position: that for almost 50 years, Iran has pursued nuclear weapons, organized terrorist campaigns, attacked its neighbours, aspired to commit genocide against Israel, and brutally repressed its own people. He could have added that Iran’s violent attacks have killed Canadians. He did remind reporters that progress on these problems would benefit the Iranian people and the broader Middle East.

Asked if he thought the recent war against Iran was worth it, he wisely refused to give a definitive answer. The war is almost certainly not over. But he noted that we can all now see that Iran was building a massive drone and missile force to protect its regime and their nuclear enrichment program. The world cannot tolerate the danger of a nuclear enriched Iran.

So far, so good.

Having set out the case, he turned to criticizing Mr. Carney.

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It’s the normal greeting, but there is nothing natural about it. I doubt the fellow’s family is from a francophone country. He probably had to learn the “Bonjour” bit. French is not commonly spoken, even at home, in Calgary. According to the 2021 census, Calgary has more than twice as many native Tagalog speakers as native French speakers. Someone had to decide to prioritize French over several other languages.

So, why the bilingual greeting?

We know the answer: it’s part of the political accommodation that keeps Canada together. In 1867, Confederation required an accommodation for Quebec’s civil law, provincial control of education, and certain language guarantees at the national level. Without those accommodations, no Confederation. A century later, Quebec had a new “Maîtres chez nous” energy, and the federal government responded by creating new official language rights to show that the new energy could be accommodated within Canada. After the 1980 Quebec referendum, the federal government and nine provinces created a constitutional guarantee of equalization and new education rights for francophones outside Quebec. After the 1995 referendum, federal legislation gave the National Assembly a veto over certain types of general amendments to the Constitution.

Some Canadians have always opposed these accommodations. In the late 1970s, a short book predicted that bilingualism today meant French unilingualism tomorrow. That never happened, but the book was probably a best-seller. There was a long effort to marginalize - to “other” – these opinions. But by 1989, when a tiny protest in Brockville ended in a trampling the Quebec flag underfoot, national news coverage encouraged English Canadians to condemn it. A few years later, a “No more Quebec leaders” ad permanently capped the potential rise of the Reform Party. No national broadcaster would air complaints about these accommodations today.

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For reasons that my lifelong devotion to the social sciences cannot comprehend, Ontario and Quebec opinion leaders seem to be taking the risk of Alberta’s upcoming referendum with profound insouciance. One Le Devoir opinion columnist wrote of her disbelief that anyone in Alberta could imagine an independence campaign, which she observed was surrounded by a degree of evil (“degré de malfaisance”). On what basis might Albertans think themselves hard done by in Confederation, she wondered? Mr. Carney’s former Quebec lieutenant announced his resignation from politics and was given every possible opportunity by federally subsidized media outlets to express his hostility to expanding pipeline capacity for oil and gas exports reaching beyond the United States. A national columnist, who recently published a book alleging that Canada’s democracy is in a sorry state, wondered whether provincial independence referendums should even be tolerated.

Back in 1995, political and media leaders alike avoided provoking Quebec opinion in the run up to the referendum. They worried Quebec really might pull the plug on Confederation. Today, no one tut-tuts opinion makers who talk down to Albertans about what drives the impulse to Leave. Why is that?

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The question that Premier Smith has put to Alberta voters is the clearest question on independence ever put to a vote in Canada.

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The anniversary of Bill C-5, which was supposed to change the course of history, approaches. The deadline for completing Canada-Alberta MOU came and went. And it has been 500 days since Mr. Trump announced a trade war with Canada.

Mr. Carney has now flattered the egos of enough frustrated opposition MPs to secure his majority. The timeline of his government and of Mr. Poilievre’s opposition is now clearer.

That timeline will pass more quickly for the government than the opposition.

In Opposition, the days draaaaag on. For the next three years, Conservatives face the long slog of boring, mostly futile opposition. They will fill social media with clips about misspent money, conflicts of interest, and Liberals rewarding Liberals. But on the average day, more Canadians will partake in curling than will recognize Conservative efforts. Talking heads will advise them to move to “the centre” or “give Canadians a positive vision”. That advice will not be useful, except as filler for op-ed pages, Twitter posts and YouTube. Memories of the glory days of 2024 when the prospect of a thumping majority and the promise of cabinet positions will fade only slowly.

Whereas in government, those three years will zip by. The crush of meetings, phone calls, summits, visits, briefings notes and issues management. Trying to find time to get things done is hard. And Mr. Carney will discover it is easier to advance your priorities in a minority government, where the constant risk of an early election encourages daily progress. With a majority, results can be deferred to a future date.

The Liberals are in a race against time.

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A few years later, I was up early and getting showered in anticipation of Mrs. Harper visiting the Brodie home to meet our newborn daughter. Phone rings, Mrs. Brodie answers. Laureen can’t come – a floor crosser. A few years later on, I was waiting to meet Mr. Martin’s Chief of Staff. We were to arrange a meeting between Mr. Harper and Mr. Martin to arrange the peaceful transition of power. Who do I meet? That floor crosser. I did not mention that at that very moment I was also working to receive a floor crosser from Mr. Martin’s government.

And, finally, I have already confessed in public to the number of times that the words “Mulroney patronage queen” passed my lips back in my Reform days. Now I count working with the dear Senator LeBreton as a highlight of my time in PMO.

So, go ahead. Accuse me of being cynical about party allegiances.

I’ve only met Marilyn Gladu a few times. Once, she asked me to sign her papers for the Conservative leadership and I obliged. She always struck me as a harmless oddball. That made her a good representative of her riding and most other ridings. Sarnia has produced its share of oddballs. A couple subscribe to The Thursday Question.

Much woe comes to political leaders who overreact to by-election losses and floor-crossings. That May 2005 floor crossing, the one that came a few days after Chloe’s birth, was consequential. It sobered up a caucus that wanted to win but wasn’t sure winning was worth the trouble. Suddenly, everyone knew they had to win. Losing the Perth-Middlesex by-election was also consequential to the Canadian Alliance and Mr. Harper was right to react as he did. Otherwise, most by-elections and floor crossings are noise not signal.

What signals can be found in this week’s noise?

First, Mr. Carney’s effort to restore the Liberal Party of the 1990s continues. For a decade, the Liberals had litmus tests and a sharp ideological agenda. Every cabinet had to be gender balanced. Every policy had to be seen through a gendered lens. Every MP had to line up to pretend that the Charter protects abortion rights. Representation was the essence of governing. No Senate caucus, legal weed, tampons in every bathroom, and free birth control as a right of citizenship. Sneakers to see the King.

That era of the Liberal Party’s long history might turn out to have been an aberration rather than a turning point. Today, a few old white guys run the Party again. When the cameras are on her and she is her happiest, Ms. Gladu recites Liberal talking points about a woman’s right to choose and unanimous consent to pass the conversion therapy ban. (Are these talking points outrageous? Aren’t they also Conservative talking points?) But recruiting her moves the Liberal caucus another step away from its “post-national state” era. Behind closed doors, her voice will add diversity to internal Liberal debates. If the Government Whip has a sense of humour, she will be Karina Gould’s seatmate on Monday.

By taking in Marilyn Gladu, the Roger Gallaway wing of the Liberal Party returns to Parliament. Don’t know that history? The crescent of southwestern Ontario from Windsor’s suburbs north to Sarnia, then north-east to Goderich, south through London and St. Thomas, and then back to Windsor once had a lot of firearms-owning, socially conservative, largely Catholic Liberal MPs. Mr. Gallaway even coined some good lines about de-funding CBC. Today, they show up in Conservative Fund direct mail pieces. But back in the 1990s, Mr. Chretien found those MPs helpful.

Flipping those ridings in 2004 and 2006 was the first step in the Conservative Party’s growth. Pat Davidson took down Mr. Gallaway in 2006. Bev Shipley nearly took out Rose-Marie Ur in 2004. She retired after the close call and Bev flipped Middlesex-Kent in 2006. Would a retro revival of 1990s Liberal strategy make southwestern Ontario a crescent of swing ridings again? Conservative campaign strategists must be wondering.

The online outrage over Ms. Gladu’s move is mostly noise but points to some signal. The Covid lockdowns showed Canadian society at its authoritarian worst. Snitching on neighbours, embracing vaccine mandates, erecting fences around churches. For a disaffected segment of Canadian society, the Trucker Convoy wasn’t an emergency but a beacon of hope. Marilyn Gladu became a minor figure in their pantheon of heroes when she proposed a “freedom caucus” of parliamentarians to resist future efforts at snitching, mandates and fences. So her case is different from the other floor crossings of 2026. The Convoy mobilized hundreds of thousands of Canadians into politics. Many showed up en masse to Poilievre leadership rallies; they swelled the Conservative Party’s membership rolls in answering his call to help fix a broken Canada. For them, Marilyn Gladu’s floor crossing is as inexplicable as it would be if Tamara Lich left Rebel News to join the At Issue panel.

So, was Ms. Gladu’s “freedom caucus” and her position on conversion therapy nothing but performative pandering to an audience she found it convenient to court for a while? Is she that opportunistic? I don’t know. Is a woman who dresses up for a TV appearance as the Grim Reaper a performative pandering actor? Or just another oddball MP in a business full of oddballs?

My advice – this issue is free to all readers; the advice is worth what I’m charging – is to nominate a new Conservative candidate in Sarnia-Lambton quickly and mobilize whatever is left of the Convoy Conservatives to beat Marilyn Gladu. And then plan for a Liberal campaign that features even more retro 90s themes.

The Artemis II moon mission speaks to my inner six-year-old and I must finish writing and rush home so I can catch the first splash down since 1972. Watching that last one on grainy black and white was thrilling – Mom, they sent a helicopter to pick up the astronauts and fly them to an aircraft carrier. Splashdown will be even better on 1080p.

Like men of my age, I later watched The Right Stuff and soaked up its portrayal of how human the humans were who piloted the first space and moon missions. Humans of great accomplishment but also humans who feared and learned and lusted and revelled in glory. Much later, like men of my age, I watched in shock as less ambitious Space Shuttle missions ended in sudden death and destruction, live, before our eyes. I watched Challenger’s STS-51L on the big screen at Gert’s Pub on the McGill campus.

Humans have an urge to explore the remarkable beauty of God’s creation. Some of us are content to explore it closer to home. Monte Solberg’s Wonderstruck is devoted to the “all creatures, great and small” side of creation. Others admire the stars from a terrestrial base with the naked eye or complicated telescopes.

The lucky ones, the dedicated ones, the astronauts get to see creation without the interference of our life-sustaining but refracting atmosphere. Their photos give us a taste of a different view of creation. But those astronauts see with their own eyes and, God willing, will return to earth later today to tell us about it, just as Moses returned from the mountain to tell us about God’s commandments.

NASA’s earlier missions launched some great political careers: John Glenn, Jack Swigert, Harrison Schmitt. Others went the other way, from politics to space: Bill Nelson, Jake Garn. In Canada, the late Marc Garneau flew and then served.

Victor Glover of the Artemis II crew and the Churches of Christ seems like a natural for politics. Christina Koch and Red Wiseman could fit public office as well. Jeremy Hansen wouldn’t be the first CFB Cold Lake colonel. Every party should aim high when recruiting candidates. Higher than the likes of Marilyn Gladu. And voters should expect it.

The current U.S. Constitution, which took effect 237 years ago, was the country’s second effort at a constitution. Drafted in the shadow of the Articles of Confederation’s failure, its compact and cogent text – just 4,500 words – sets an enduring framework for republican self-government. It first separates the branches of government, then mixes them again to establish a set of checks and balances. (1) The document is venerated, as its framers hoped.

Canada’s Constitution, which marked its 150^th anniversary in 2017, was not our first effort, either. It also reflects the lessons its various drafters learned from the shortcomings of earlier colonial constitutions. And it is far from compact. The 1982 amendments alone run to nearly 3,000 words. The federal-provincial division of powers, as amended, approaches 1,800 words.

That written text also provides for a separation of powers, but the mechanisms that mix those powers to create a set of checks and balances are mostly unwritten. The constitutional conventions of responsible government, requiring ministers to have the confidence of the House of Commons, are rooted in Lord Durham’s report and set out in scholarly sources. Rules governing money votes appear in sections 53 and 54 of the 1867 document. Despite talk of a “fusion” of powers or even prime ministerial dictatorship, the foundation of our checks and balances remain clear for anyone who wants to examine them.

No written constitution can serve its people indefinitely without change. The American and Canadian framers were both far-sighted and understood this. Article V of the US Constitution sets out a few paths for amending it. Even in time of upheaval, American leaders have respected those paths. Think about the Reconstruction Amendments. Canada’s amending rules have changed over the years. Since 1982, they have been codified in Part VI of that year’s amendments.

Formal amendments are not the only means by which our constitutions can change. Informal changes and improvisation have sometimes struck at the core of both country’s systems checks and balances. Improvised challenges to the checks and balances of both constitutions have usually provoked sober reactions to restore them by some other means. As James Madison wrote in his summary of modern political science, checks and balances work because ambition is made to counteract ambition (Federalist #51). When someone is able to overreach, the counterbalance of ambitions goes astray, and countervailing ambition must eventually reassert itself.

The nature of warfare, for example, has changed over 237 years. Although the US Constitution grants Congress alone the power to declare war, raise armies, and maintain a navy, presidents have increasingly asserted the power to respond to an even initiate armed conflict in their role as commander-in-chief. But over time, it became clear that small armed conflicts that start without a declaration of war sometimes become de facto wars. Once politics allowed it – when the presidency and Congress end up being dominated by opposing parties and the President of the day fell into disrepute – Congress adopted a joint resolution known as the War Powers Resolution. Although the constitutionality of the Resolution remains questionable, presidents have generally abided by it. They report to Congress but note that their reporting is “consistent with” rather than “pursuant to” its provisions. In practice, the War Powers Resolution restored a measure of checks and balances that had been disrupted by changes in the nature of war.

This brings us to the current war with Iran.

Any regime whose foreign policy is based on “Death to America” arguably poses an ongoing, imminent threat to the United States. The Islamic Republic has carried out direct and proxy attacks on American interests for years. It is reported to have plotted attacks on American soil.

Nevertheless, successive Congresses have declined to declare war on Iran and President Trump has declined to consult Congress as the War Powers Resolution asks. As the scale of the US war effort expands from limited bombing to widespread bombing to naval warfare and possibly ground attacks, the checks and balances of the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution are disappearing. With Mr. Trump’s party holding slim majorities in both chambers of Congress, they have not moved to reassert those checks and balances. A request for supplemental appropriations to replenish munitions might restore a partial restraint. A new war powers resolution might emerge when the control of the president and Congress next diverge. But until then, Mr. Trump is acting boldly. If the US Constitution and the War Powers Resolution were wisely drafted, he is acting foolishly.

The Carney government’s position at this week’s Supreme Court of Canada hearings in the Bill 21 case is just as bold as Mr. Trump’s approach to the Iran war.

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But instead, the deputy minister of foreign affairs, David Morrison, was moved to PCO as the Prime Minister’s “Senior Diplomatic and International Affairs Adviser.” And Dominic Rochon, currently CIO at Treasury Board, was moved to PCO as Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet (National Security and Intelligence). The deputy NSA, Ted Gallivan, was promoted to deputy minister of immigration and is not, as of now, being replaced. So, what happened to the office formerly called “National Security Adviser”?

The creation of the National Security Adviser’s role was announced in Mr. Martin’s national security strategy of April 2004. Bill Elliott, who had been PCO’s assistant secretary for security and intelligence, took it on and served through the Harper transition. But the role really came into its own as Mr. Harper tried to forge a “whole of government” approach to the Afghanistan mission. Margaret Bloodworth, Marie-Lucie Morin, Stephen Rigby, and Richard Fadden, his best-known NSAs, moved into the job after they had been deputy ministers of departments or heads of agencies.

Inside Ottawa, influence and reach flow from rank. As a PCO assistant secretary, Mr. Elliot would likely have had the same rank as an assistant deputy minister in another department (if anyone has documentation to show otherwise, please send it – I couldn’t find anything in the public record). The subsequent NSAs all held “full deputy” rank and served just under the Clerk of the Privy Council, above the deputy secretaries and well above assistant secretaries.

Now, Mr. Morrison, the new diplomatic adviser, probably takes his “full deputy” rank with him to his new post. Mr. Rochon is probably, like other deputy secretaries, the equivalent of an associate deputy minister in another department. In Ottawa’s pecking order, the national security and intelligence role has been downgraded.

Vincent Rigby, himself a former NSA, had this to say of the change in speaking with Carleton’s Wesley Wark (1):

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Earlier this week, the Supreme Court rendered a quick judgement to overturn the results of last year’s election in the federal riding of Terrebonne. While legal scholars await the Court’s reasons, the political world now waits to see when Terrebonne will be re-run and whether the result will change.

Last fall, Procedure and House Affairs heard testimony on what went wrong in Terrebonne, and this week’s decision from the Court definitively determines that things went badly wrong. When they did, Elections Canada claimed it did not have the legal authority to ensure the correct counting of ballots.

In Canada, we typically assume that we run elections well. Elections Canada is an arms-length, non-partisan agency. Canadian observers, especially political scientists, compare our system favourably to the American one, where election administration is a partisan or bipartisan affair. We tell ourselves that elections can, and therefore should, be run on a non-partisan basis by an arms-length agency of experts. We often assume that we can simply accept the accuracy of official election results because the agency is run at arms-length. Recall the Harper government further entrenched Elections Canada’s position by taking the power to appoint local returning officers away from Cabinet and giving it to Elections Canada.

These assumptions are misleading and dangerous.

They are misleading for many reasons. First, the view of political scientists or the general public about the fairness of our elections is immaterial. The only thing that matters is whether the losing party or candidate accepts the results. And they only accept the results because they can appoint scrutineers to observe every step of the election. When election processes are transparent to scrutineers they can be double-checked and problems documented. Scrutineering, not Elections Canada, gives candidates confidence in election results. We only rely on Elections Canada because scrutineers find so few problems. The agency’ arms-length status is a secondary guarantee, and its claims to non-partisanship are irrelevant.

(The last thing I did before announcing the results of the 2022 Conservative leadership race was ask the chief scrutineers for each candidate if they had any challenges to the results or the process. I asked each of them to report their assessment to their candidate. In 2017, Mr. Bernier’s campaign alleged irregularities in the leadership election process. Notably, his scrutineers did not substantiate those complaints, so no one took the complaints seriously.)

Those assumptions are also dangerous. When candidates or parties call into question the legitimacy of elections results, protestations about Elections Canada being arms-length does nothing to rebut their protests.

Multi-partisan election administration that is transparent to scrutineers would be just as reliable as Elections Canada. It might be more so.

But if we accept that we are not going to move to multipartisan election administration any time soon, then shortcomings of the agency’s work in Terrebonne and its reaction when those shortcomings became public show we are overdue for a systematic review.

Given that ridiculous claims about election administration have become commonplace in US politics - that corrupt practices ‘delivered’ the 1960 election to Kennedy, or that their Supreme Court ‘handed’ the 2000 election to Bush, or that Georgia’s election administration ‘robbed’ Abrams of the governorship, or that … well, there is an entire industry devoted to making claims about the 2020 presidential campaign - we are sometimes reluctant to raise questions about how our elections are run. But we cannot have more Terrebonnes.

And given that Elections Canada is a virtually unaccountable agency - the agency’s head has extraordinary job protections, and the agency sets its own budget - the reluctance to hold it accountable has let problems of elections administration fester.

What to do?

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For decades, official Ottawa—government and opposition MPs, public servants, political staff, journalists, academics and think-tankers—has avoided public discussion of how the next change of government should be managed. The informal rule has been: “Too early, too early, too early—oops, too late.” Keeping transition planning out of the public view suits everyone. Governments don’t want to talk about what comes after them. Neither do their political staff. Opposition parties don’t want to look like they’re measuring the drapes. Public servants don’t want to be seen speculating about election outcomes. Journalists don’t want to be deprived of a “scoop” about secret plans.

In Canada, transition planning usually rests on an assumption that the public service is a politically neutral institution. As Ken Kernaghan describes it (1), the political neutrality model itself rests on several assumptions: That politics and policy are separate from administration; elected officials decide, public servants execute. That public service appointments and promotions are based on merit, not partisan affiliation. That public servants do not engage in partisan political activity or publicly express personal views on government policy. That they provide candid, objective advice in private, while ministers accept public responsibility for decisions. And that in return for loyalty and professionalism, public servants enjoy security of tenure so long as performance is satisfactory.

Accepting this model turns the planning of a transition in government into a particular kind of exercise. The task of a transition team is to help an incoming prime minister pick a cabinet and senior staff, structure the cabinet’s decision-making, and then align the expert and permanent public service to the incoming government’s priorities. During transition periods, for example during an election campaign, public servants study the policy agenda of an incoming government, prepare implementation plans, and organize briefings for new ministers. Security agencies conduct background checks on prospective ministers and staff. Outgoing offices are dismantled; incoming ones established. The government machinery then moves on.

By that standard, the Harper government’s transition embraced the neutrality model. Stephen Harper appointed only one outsider to the public service when he became prime minister, if the late Richard Dicerni can be described as an outsider. He became the DM of Industry Canada. Mr. Harper’s government created new agencies, but appointed career public servants to run all but one of them: Mary Dawson became Ethics Commissioner, Kevin Page became Parliamentary Budget Officer, Christiane Ouimet became Integrity Commissioner, etc. (2) All of Mr. Harper’s Clerks of the Privy Council were seasoned deputy ministers.

Even in the mid-1970s, when Kernaghan was writing about the norms of a politically neutral public service, he noted how those norms were starting to erode. The public service unionized, and the unions were active in politics. Public servants starting getting political rights in the late 1960s, meaning they could take a leave of absence, run for office, and then return to the public service. In the 1980s, evolving interpretations of the Charter of Rights held that public servants had even broader political rights. (3) Episodes like the al-Mashat Affair and the Sponsorship Scandal exposed public servants to public scrutiny and ministers blamed them in public for misfires of administration. As Yes, Minister, reminds us, policy and administration might be separate, but there are always problems in the administration of policy and in the policy of administration.

Nonetheless, public service leaders and transition teams continued to cling to its core tenets of the political neutrality ideal for many years. As late as 2014, one think tanker even criticized Wayne Wouters (the most circumspect public servant!) for crossing the line into politics. In that case, he was criticized for defending the work of public servants! (4)

But, the programs of the Trudeau and Carney governments have finally killed off the political neutrality model. And so our model of transitions will have to change.

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That is my conclusion after seeing CBC News give Stephane Dion a platform to lecture Albertans about how they should and should not express their unhappiness at policies he helped design. (Link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/stephane-dion-alberta-separation-…

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Whenever I ran across Julie, I reminded her: if only she had had a third daughter, Mr. Harper would have won in 2004. Jenni and Jerra keep her spirit alive.

I have kept the most important for last. Because without Doug, how? How? How?

I had been volunteering for my friend Marian Meinen for many months, starting when her nomination campaign was still in its planning stages and then through the long early months of the Perth-Middlesex by-election campaign. Waiting for the Chretien and Martin forces to sort out their civil war and settle on a candidate to succeed the late John Richardson took an eternity. Spoiler alert: the PC riding association picked well when they picked Gary Schellenberger.

Political Operations sent out a campaign manager for the general, an old hand who nonetheless didn’t work out. Mr. Harper and Tom Flanagan fired him, and reached into the New Brunswick corner of the bullpen to send in a fellow named Doug Finley. I drove out to a Stratford B&B one morning to meet the new guy. He was as sick as a dog from making the drive across half of Canada in one go. I drove back to London a bit worried, to be honest.

But the next day - I think it must have been a Sunday - I returned to Stratford to find a campaign office was up and running. Doug had rented an old fast food joint. And it was full of volunteers from Doug’s old haunt, Haldimand Norfolk. The unstoppable Wally Butts was there! Doug had rebounded from his cold. The campaign office had organization. Objectives. A plan. This was all so new. Doug kept repeating, over and over, so as to reassure us all - I have never lost a campaign. Alas, Marian went on to serve as a staffer rather than an MP. Spoiler alert: for Diane Finley. But the British government must be thankful that Doug wasn’t around to work on the Scottish independence vote.

By the time the Perth-Middlesex results were known, I was already in OLO. I saw how the results pushed Mr. Harper forward. Within a few days, Mr. MacKay had won the PC leadership, opening the door to negotiations. Also within a few days, Doug arrived in Ottawa to head up Political Operations. All the Byrnes and many others were soon at work with a new tempo.

A few weeks after the 2005 Convention, Doug moved to OLO as Mr. Harper’s special advisor on winning. His overhaul moved me into the Chief of Staff role, Doug to be Campaign Manager, and Patrick into joining full time. I have never had a better working partner than Doug, nor worked as feverishly as I did with him to get the team ready for an election.

Doug did not sleep for months. He ran the first of a few winning national campaigns for Mr. Harper, and a winning riding campaign for Diane. She soon added “Honourable” to her business card as a minister. Doug later added his own “Honourable” to his business card when he went to the Senate. I love Diane, and miss Doug daily.

Without Doug, let us all be clear, there’s no 2006 to celebrate.

He and Lawrence, and, I assume, Mr. Mulroney, crafted the Quebec platform for the 2006 election. Did Paul dream of eventually being the ambassador who would keep an eye on the Quebec government’s delegate at UNESCO? If so, we were lucky he resisted the allure of a posting to Paris to stick around Ottawa and Gatineau. Paul anchored the Quebec side of the 2006 war room and he earned its credibility with the rest of the war room through his honesty, decency, and good humour.

Mr. Harper’s tactical French owes its fluency and cadences to his hard work with many staffers, parliamentarians, and teachers, but in a set piece his French relied on Paul’s drafting. Speech writers often bear the frustrations of their principals when trying to put their thoughts, plans and ambitions into words. Paul bore those frustrations with calm and equanimity. Bridging the solitudes is tough. Mr. Harper was committed to doing it. Without Paul, who could have put the effort into such wonderful prose?

Thankfully, Lawrence got elected. Of course, he became the lead minister in Quebec and a sure handed member of cabinet. He and Paul were inseparable, and I was glad I had a share of Paul’s wisdom as well. Mr. Harper got as much out of Paul as Lawrence did. His passing left a hole in our hearts the size of le grand homme, and I enjoyed the camaraderie of last night’s reunion all the more for his memory, as I am sure Paul would have wanted.

Nigel Wright was part of Harper’s team long before he took on the chief of staff role. He was Irving Gerstein’s partner in building the Conservative Fund as soon as the Conservative Party was formed and remained a source of close advice to Mr. Harper as well. Nigel’s reputation in financial and business circles, across Toronto society, and in Ontario conservative circles bolstered the new party and its leader’s credibility.

Someday, maybe enough time will pass that I can put down on paper Nigel’s role in the international affairs of the government. Someday, maybe enough time will pass that I can get over how his time in government came to an end, in that most Harper-era “scandal” of keeping the taxpayer whole from his own funds.

I wish I could say we were friends; it’s my fault we weren’t. I didn’t give Nigel enough time to make him one. His untimely passing was a stunning shock and made me enjoy last night’s time with old friends far more for having lost the opportunity.