News / canada
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1 min read
You Built the Bridge and Paid the Toll
Read more . . . →Canada spent $6.4 billion building the Gordie Howe International Bridge. Then agreed to share the toll revenue with the United States for fifteen years. Then scrapped the digital services tax. Then killed the Netflix tax. Then pulled its own retaliatory tariffs off the table. A reporter asked Carney what Canada got back for all of that. He couldn’t name one thing. Not a reduced rate, not a delayed deadline, not a handshake agreement scribbled on a napkin. Six and a half billion dollars and a stack of policy surrenders bought exactly zero goodwill from a man who doesn’t sell it....
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They Work 35 Hours a Month for Free and the Airline Called It a System
Read more . . . →WestJet flight attendants work 35 hours a month for free. That’s not a union talking point — that’s how the credit hour system actually works. The clock doesn’t start when they greet you at the door, stow your bag, do the safety demo, or sit on the tarmac for two hours because the plane hasn’t pushed back yet. It starts when the aircraft leaves the gate. Everything before that — boarding, delays, deplaning — is, according to WestJet, not work. They have a term for this. They call it “the standard pay model.” Four thousand four hundred flight attendants voted...
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He Dug Up a 1930 Law to Put a 50% Tax on Hockey Sticks
Read more . . . →Trump found a tariff law from 1930 lying in a drawer and decided the real threat to America was hockey sticks. On August 19 a 50% tax lands on a stack of Canadian goods — wine, cement, dairy, furniture, wigs, and yes, hockey sticks — under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. That’s the same era of trade law that helped turn a stock crash into a decade of soup lines. He didn’t write new policy. He went to the attic, found the exact legal instrument that made the Great Depression worse, blew the dust off it, and...
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1 min read
Poilievre Ran Out Of Enemies He's Allowed To Name
Read more . . . →Poilievre is sitting at 37% while Carney runs a 66% approval rating, his own seat is now something pundits openly game out losing, and the party that was supposed to stroll into government is watching two-thirds of the country say they’d rather keep the banker. So he did the thing every cornered politician does when the affordability pitch stops selling: he found someone smaller to blame. This week it’s “very hard caps” on immigration, and the line he said out loud is that he wants more people leaving the country than coming into it. That’s not a housing plan or...
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1 min read
Poilievre Blew a 20-Point Lead, Then Called His Best People Liberals
Read more . . . →At the Calgary Stampede this month, Pierre Poilievre stood up and celebrated a BC Conservative leadership win over what he called “Liberal lobbyists from out East.” The men he was sneering at weren’t Liberals. Kory Teneycke ran Doug Ford’s campaigns and worked for Stephen Harper. Nick Kouvalis and Anthony Koch have spent years electing Conservatives. Their actual crime was telling Poilievre the truth last spring: that Trump’s trade war, not Justin Trudeau, was the thing that would decide the 2025 election. He didn’t want to hear it. He blew a lead of more than twenty points, finished with 144 seats,...
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1 min read
Poilievre Congratulated the Man Who Just Left Him
Read more . . . →Pierre Poilievre just watched a fifth MP walk out of his caucus, and his response was to thank the guy. Mark Carney appointed Conservative MP Richard Martel — a sitting member of Poilievre’s own team — to the Senate this week, and Martel took the red chair and left. Four Conservatives before him crossed the floor straight to the Liberals; Martel just got the seat handed to him by the Liberal prime minister instead. Poilievre reportedly found out minutes before it went public. Then he put out a statement wishing Martel well, hoping he’d “continue the fight for affordability, growing...
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Get Out of the Way, Says the Guy Who Wants You to Pay for It
Read more . . . →Yesterday Danielle Smith and Mark Carney rolled out a bitumen pipeline from Bruderheim, Alberta down to the BC coast — a line that’ll run somewhere between $35 and $44 billion depending on which contingency number you believe. Right on cue, Pierre Poilievre showed up to do the one thing he still knows how to do: blame Carney and cheer for oil. “You got one guy standing in the way of it all, and that’s Mark Carney,” he said. “Provide the permit, let the private sector build it, get out of the way and get it done.” Stirring stuff. One problem....
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1 min read
Poilievre Treats Breaking Up Canada Like a Bargaining Chip
Read more . . . →Alberta is putting a question on the October 19 ballot about whether to start the legal process of leaving Canada. The Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition went out there this week and the strongest thing he could bring himself to say was that the people who want to break up the country “are not our enemies.” Carney called the referendum what it is — a dangerous bluff. Poilievre called it a feeling we should sit with. “We do not need a different country, Alberta. We need different government policies in Ottawa.” Read that again. The man who wants to...
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1 min read
Pierre Poilievre, Unity Guy
Read more . . . →The same guy who spent years farming western alienation for votes is now flying to Alberta to ask everyone to calm down. Pierre Poilievre, who built his brand on “Ottawa doesn’t care about you,” is campaigning for Canadian unity ahead of an October referendum on whether the province should pursue separation. He didn’t see the irony. Or he did and is counting on you not to. This is what grievance manufacturing produces. You tell people for a decade that the federal government is the enemy, that climate policy is a personal attack, that elites on Bay Street and in Ottawa...
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Poilievre Called Carney 'Badly Educated in Economics'
Read more . . . →Pierre Poilievre decided his strategy this week was to question Mark Carney’s economic credentials — calling him “very badly educated in economics.” This is the man who has a PhD in economics from Oxford, ran the Bank of Canada through a recession, and then ran the Bank of England through Brexit. Poilievre’s plan after losing three byelections back to back was to walk into Parliament and tell the PhD economist he doesn’t understand economics. Carney walked into Question Period for their first face-off since the majority win and looked like someone who’d heard the insult coming and couldn’t wait. “One...
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