Last night, I read an article written by Catherine Morrison and published in The Toronto Star that Prime Minister Carney has asked the provinces to end their U.S. alcohol boycotts:

OTTAWA - Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston says Prime Minister Mark Carney has asked provinces to restock American alcohol on their shelves as Canada finalizes a trade deal with the U.S.

I will tone down my reaction to that news which I posted on social media last night by simply saying I do not like it. Not only is there zero probability any concessions will result in a long-lasting trade agreement with Trump — remember CUSMA, an agreement he demanded we negotiate during his first term but then violated as soon as he started his second term? — but now the Prime Minister is apparently making ones he cannot unilaterally make; he also seems to have made them without prior approval by the provincial governments themselves, who do have to agree to them.

Some people responded to me by saying it does not matter because Canadians will not buy the alcohol anyway, but even if that is true, Carney is yet again sending a signal to Trump that he will continue making concessions if he threatens us. He has made so many of them to Trump for nothing in return since coming to power roughly 18 months ago that any strategy to be “tough” is simply not credible anymore.

Now, that strategy could be credible again in the future, but Carney needs to stop conceding long enough to demonstrate we really mean it this time.

Also, what if the provinces do not end their boycotts? Then Trump will have a new excuse to say we do not negotiate in good faith, and use that excuse to hit us again.

These repeated one-way concessions could easily backfire on Carney politically, too, because many NDP and CPC supporters voted Liberal last year under the belief he would stand up to Trump better than anyone else. It has become increasingly obvious this is not happening, so a recent poll from Leger indicates nearly half of Canadians want any new deal to be immediately followed by a general election, while a majority want no more concessions at all:

A new Leger poll found that nearly half of Canadians surveyed (47 per cent) believe a federal election should be called if a new Canada-U.S. trade agreement is reached, so voters can express their opinion on the deal. This compares to 35 per cent who do not think a federal election should be called in the event of a new deal, while 18 per cent were unsure.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, support for an election is strongest among Conservative voters, at 67 per cent, compared with 34 per cent among Liberal voters. Elsewhere, 51 per cent of Bloc Québécois voters and 45 per cent of NDP voters support calling an election.

When it comes to the details of a deal, the Leger poll found that the majority of Canadians want to limit concessions in trade negotiations and keep more aggressive responses on the table.

For example, 74 per cent support a special tax on electricity sold to the U.S., while 70 per cent support restricting U.S.-owned companies from bidding on Canadian government contracts and 70 per cent support taxing oil and natural gas exports.

Meanwhile, 64 per cent of Canadians support banning the sale of U.S. liquor in Canada, while 63 per cent favour taxing potash exports and 59 per cent support tariffs on a broad range of U.S.-manufactured goods.

Overall, 56 per cent of Canadians surveyed want the federal government to take a hard line and make no more concessions, compared with 31 per cent who favour flexibility if needed.

…

Conservative voters are generally more open to concessions than Liberal, NDP or Bloc Québécois voters — but even so, 51 per cent of Conservative voters still favour taking a hard line in the negotiations.

To be clear, if an election were held today, “polls currently predict a Liberal win, with the latest Liaison Strategies federal tracker giving Carney’s party an 11-point lead over Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, while the PM’s approval has risen by three points to 60 per cent.” Nonetheless, it appears a majority of Canadian voters are getting tired of repeatedly reducing our bargaining power with one-way concessions.

Also, if the CPC smartens up and kicks Poilievre to the curb, the probability is not zero their new leader will attract voters who simply could not support Poilievre. Just like Conservatives were wrong to think voter hatred for Justin Trudeau would carry over to whomever took over from him, Liberals could be wrong to believe voter hatred for Poilievre will carry over to whomever takes over from him.

Another response I sometimes get on social media is Carney is “playing chess” with Trump, and we need to just “trust” him. First, I do not like the chess analogy because if we add “5D” to it, then we sound like MAGAts when they praise their Dear Leader. I do not approve of appropriating MAGA talking points to complement our PM.

Second, I do not feel comfortable with “just trusting” anyone. Mark Carney is a human being, who like all of us is flawed, so putting blind faith in him — or anyone else — is dangerous for a democracy. The reason why we have elections is because no one can be trusted to always act in the best interest of their constituents.

Carney is a brilliant economist, particularly when it comes to Money & Banking and International Finance. He has also been surprisingly impressive as a politician despite his complete lack of background in it. But as Elon Musk taught us all, being brilliant in one thing does not make one brilliant in everything.

Similarly, a career of negotiating with power players around the world means nothing when he is now facing a blithering idiot who does not care about negotiating in good faith, or even keeping any of the promises he makes. Carney seems to be approaching Trump like he is no different from anyone else who has been on the other side of the table in the past; he seems to be approaching him as if they can eventually find a way to come to a rational, long-term settlement, but that will never happen with Trump. A toddler is a more rational and reasonable negotiating partner than Donald Trump.

Anyway, if we really do want to view this as a chess game where we have to “sacrifice a piece” to get a deal which protects jobs and increases economic certainty in Canada, then how has that been working so far? We sacrificed the Digital Services Tax (DST) piece, and Trump came back at us with demands to give up another piece in the form of the Gordie Howe Bridge tolls. So we sacrificed that piece, too, and he immediately came back with demands to sacrifice even more pieces, including alcohol boycotts and supply management. It has been revealed Carney is all for sacrificing the U.S. alcohol piece, while it is still unclear what he conceded — if anything — in relation to supply management, or for that matter, tying ourselves even more closely to the U.S. with respect to natural resources and national defence.

We also sacrificed our oil & gas and potash pieces, but I cannot blame Prime Minister Carney for that in light of the Maple MAGAts who run Alberta and Saskatchewan, especially Danielle Smith with her constant threats of a “national unity crisis” if she does not get everything she wants. Danielle Smith and Scott Moe have selfishly taken our most powerful pieces away from us, and while sad, Carney had little choice there.

But the fact remains that we keep sacrificing pieces in this chess game for nothing in return except continued uncertainty over what will come next. Eventually, we will run out of pieces and the game will be over.

To anyone who thinks our latest concessions to Trump will actually incentivize him to stop attacking us, despite all past evidence to the contrary, keep in mind what I wrote yesterday on his new threats against countries like Canada over “trans-shipments”.

Sure, he probably thinks that means we are smuggling trans people across the U.S. border, but it still shows that even though our latest “deal” is not yet finalized, he is already looking for excuses to break it.

In summary, every concession we make sends a signal to Trump that we will roll over for him whenever he makes a threat. Even if a concession seems “meaningless”, it is far from being so because he takes them all as invitations to keep hitting us. It also sends a message to non-Liberal partisans that maybe they backed the wrong horse in last year’s election, which only makes Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre more likely.

The only way to stop a bully is to fight back. I agree we cannot expect miracles from Carney in just 18 months, but he still needs to demonstrate he is trying to get a good deal for Canadians. By repeatedly offering concessions for nothing in return, and by also apparently making moves to tie us even tighter to the U.S., many Canadian voters will eventually feel buyer’s remorse and give their votes back to the NDP or CPC; they might also decide to not even vote at all.

Canadians have demonstrated patience with Carney since he became Prime Minister in early 2025, but patience can only last so long.

Allegedly, Canada reached a tentative trade deal with Donald Trump, which Adrian Morrow, Marieke Walsh, and Mark Rendell of The Globe and Mail explain as follows:

U.S. President Donald Trump says he has reached a trade deal with Canada and will postpone his latest round of threatened tariffs for three days while the agreement is finalized.

…

He did not specify what was in the agreement nor confirm that, if the documents were signed, he would cancel the planned levies entirely.

I wrote “allegedly” because Trump cannot be trusted to honestly tell us the colour of his own face, so I take it all with a huge grain of salt. Nonetheless:

…he did say the deal might somehow revive the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a Canadian priority project thwarted by U.S. permitting problems and twice cancelled by previous presidents. Mr. Trump wrote that the pipeline “may be awoken from the grave!” and included an AI-generated image of himself pulling it up from the ground.

Furthermore:

The office of U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who led negotiations for the Trump administration, said on social media that the deal will include “comprehensive market access for all American goods, economic security commitments, digital trade alignment” and other unspecified provisions.

If the rumours regarding specific concessions are true, then the Prime Minister has a lot of explaining to do, including to provincial governments who have vetoes over some of these alleged concessions, as well as private companies who — operating in a democracy — cannot be forced to do business with anyone (emphasis added):

If the deal does go through, Mr. Carney will have to convince both the provinces and an angry public largely opposed to trade concessions that the agreement is in Canada’s interest.

Provincial co-operation would be necessary for Mr. Trump’s demands to be met, and key sectors, such as autos in Ontario and forestry in British Columbia, were on the table in talks. Two sources, however, said provinces were not briefed Tuesday on the substance of talks.

…

Canadian oil exports came up in trade talks last year, when Mr. Carney first unsuccessfully tried to reach a deal with Mr. Trump. U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra said in July that Mr. Carney had offered to double oil exports to the U.S., which would have involved Canada agreeing to ship an additional three to four million barrels of oil per day.

It was unclear how Mr. Carney could promise such figures, given that oil production is handled by private companies. It was also unclear how such measures would square with Mr. Trump’s desire to cut his country’s trade deficit with Canada, which is mostly the result of the U.S. importing Canadian oil.

Again, I used the word “allegedly” purposely because nothing Trump says can be trusted at face-value, but I really hope it is not true because the attacks will continue and we will have achieved nothing but to reduce our bargaining power and show the world we are a bunch of willing victims.

And surprise surprise surprise! Trump’s newest excuse to accept all of our concessions and then continue to attack us anyway has already been revealed, and it is called “trans-shipments”. As reported in The Globe and Mail this morning by Rita Trishur:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is developing a new technological weapon to escalate his global trade war – and Canada could easily become caught in its crosshairs.

The White House is warning the world that it is creating an artificial-intelligence-enabled “detective border” to crack down on customs fraud by China and to impose “penalty tariffs” on other countries that enable Beijing’s evasion of U.S. duties.

Although the AI tool is ostensibly being designed to detect abuses of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement and other trade deals, its inevitable algorithmic biases (we are talking about Mr. Trump and his toadies, after all) also risk frustrating Canada’s efforts to diversify trade away from the U.S.

This looming, yet underreported threat is casting a pall over the future of USMCA because it is informing U.S. demands for tighter rules of origin, favouring more American content, aimed at the auto sector and beyond.

Washington’s concern centres on a common trade practice known as “transshipment.” As I explained in a previous column, it occurs when foreign goods make a temporary stop in an intermediary country en route to their final destination.

So just as Trump immediately followed our “deal” over the Gordie Howe Bridge by threatening 50% tariffs on us, he is already following our alleged “deal” on CUSMA with a threat of “penalty tariffs” over trans-shipments.

I have said it many times in the past, and I will say it again now: there is absolutely no point in making any “deals” with Trump because even if he offers anything in return, he will just break those promises as soon as he wakes up from his next Cabinet meeting nap. As Kelly McParland wrote for the National Post yesterday in an article titled “Trade talks with Trump are pointless” (emphasis added):

…[Carney] might also consider that the reputation of one of his predecessors benefits not from something he did, but something he didn’t do. When Jean Chrétien is being toasted by Liberals as a successful and well-remembered leader, his refusal to join the U.S. in its ill-fated crusade in Iraq is a leading reason.

Canada preferred to be friends with the U.S. just as much then as it does now, but was sentient enough to understand that joining it in bad ideas and self-defeating ventures wasn’t a requirement. American President Donald Trump’s misguided tariff war is just such an example. Whatever the temporary pain, Canada would be far better off in the long run avoiding any sort of agreement that lets Washington claim the slightest victory in its attempt to bully concessions out of Ottawa.

Better to walk away, let the White House do its worst and deal with the consequences. That will inevitably be the result under this administration in any case. Whatever piece of paper negotiators wave should a last-minute “deal” be reached won’t be worth the ink wasted on the signatures. As long as Trump is president the U.S. can’t be trusted to keep its word. A quick-fix tariff accord could be signed at breakfast and broken before lunch.

…

The U.S. seems weirdly preoccupied with the boycott of U.S. alcohol, which represents a tiny fraction of imports to Canada; it may be the dispute’s outcome will rest on the ability to talk Premier Doug Ford into allowing California wine and Kentucky bourbon back on the shelves of Ontario liquor stores.

If that’s the case, more power to Ford. There is no such thing as an agreement with Donald Trump, his word is worthless and Canada will have to deal with the end of reliable and sensible trading rules with the U.S. now or later. If something has to be done, it’s just as well to get on with it. Now’s as good a time as any to inform Washington Canada is uninterested in further pointless discussions, and let ordinary Americans get back to bearing the brunt of their president’s expensive obsession.

Similarly, as Mark Johnson wrote for The Globe and Mail today (emphasis added):

Concession after concession. Pounding after pounding. The Gordie Howe bridge shakedown. The cancellation of the digital services tax. Auto tariffs. Steel tariffs. And now the threat of 50-per-cent tariffs on various Canadian goods that may take effect shortly. Elbows up has become pants down.

It’s no longer just a trade issue. The endless humiliations at the hands of the U.S. President have turned this into a matter of national prestige. And for that, people are willing to withstand a lot for victory.

Strike a trade deal with Mr. Trump? We did strike a trade deal with him just a few years ago: the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. He doesn’t care. It’s a different thing every week. The President does what he wants. Why? Because he can.

On that note, I am beyond sick of Trump apologists trivializing our need to fight back against him or expelling Hoekstra with the condescending talking point “It might feel good, but…”, along with some way of saying we are “just being emotional”. The first time I heard it was when a former political leader said it to me personally on Substack Notes around 18 months ago, and it irritated me then just as much as it does now.

This is not the 1890s and I am not your wife!

This person also told me we need to frame a trade deal as a “win-win” situation so we can get one and move on with our lives. Well, I am frankly tired of “winning” so much because I can no longer sit down comfortably.

Fighting back against Trump and Hoekstra is not about “emotion” or “feeling good”. On the contrary, it feels very very bad to be constantly forced to defend ourselves from their attacks, but it has become necessary if we are to protect our sovereignty, as well as our long-term economic wellbeing.

Fighting back is about self defense and demonstrating we will not be willingly pushed around, because no bully ever stops demanding our lunch money if we keep giving it to them; it is even worse when we also give them a little extra for their trouble, which is exactly what we are doing when we offer concessions even when Trump does not even pretend to offer anything in return.

If anyone is being “insane”, it is the people who think we can keep responding the same way over and over again and hope for different results.

To quote Mark Johnson again:

If our prosperity depends on a trade deal, it will only happen when Mr. Trump takes us seriously.

…

Will Mr. Trump retaliate? Yes. Will it hurt? Perhaps. But we’ll only get him to come to the bargaining table when we show we’re not to be trifled with. It’s short-term pain for long-term gain. As former prime minister Stephen Harper notably said earlier this year, we must make “any sacrifice necessary” for our independence.

Crazy? Unpredictable? That’s the point. Mr. Trump isn’t fighting like Mr. Carney expects him to. Maybe Canada should be less conventional, a little more guerrilla. It just might work. So far, the Prime Minister’s strategy hasn’t.

To end this post, I think one more analogy from Johnson is well worth quoting, and it is with respect to the Vietnam War:

History buffs looking for an analogy for our costly trade war with the United States may find one in the Vietnam War. But in this case, the U.S. plays the victorious North Vietnam, while we Canadians are the hapless Americans. We flail away, bewildered and doomed.

We can’t figure out the other side or understand their methods, and we follow a conventional strategy that doesn’t work. And that’s why we’re losing.

As for the historical men, U.S. President Donald Trump is Ho Chi Minh, the president of North Vietnam. Prime Minister Mark Carney resembles then-U.S. secretary of defence, Robert McNamara.

In the U.S. in the 1960s, Mr. McNamara was the establishment scion. Armed with an elite education and great connections, he became president of Ford Motor Co. at just 44. He was so much the epitome of technocratic accomplishment that president John F. Kennedy made him defence secretary soon thereafter in 1961.

Ho Chi Minh was the elderly, frail leader of North Vietnam. But enabled by ruthless killers who liquidated internal opponents, he was able to confuse, disorient, baffle and defeat Mr. McNamara and the U.S.

Up against Mr. Trump, Mr. Carney follows the textbook principles of negotiation: stay rational, keep things cool, be objective and strategic.

Usually that’s the right approach. Usually. Trade talks are just business negotiations but bigger, right? Figure out your options. Look for win-win solutions. Don’t get personal.

The problem is, we’re almost 18 months into the trade war and the Prime Minister’s strategy clearly isn’t working.

Mr. Trump isn’t conventional, and that’s likely why Mr. Carney and his team are flummoxed and foundering.

In closing, I want to thank all of my paid subscribers for their subscriptions, and to encourage the rest of you to also consider paid subscriptions. I love to do research, but I also enjoy paying my bills, so a paid subscription would be very helpful in ensuring I can accomplish both.

As aspiring autocrats are wont to do, Danielle Smith has been working diligently since becoming Premier of Alberta to make the democratic process as difficult and confusing as possible, at least for anyone who might not vote her way. From banning electronic vote tabulators to gerrymandering to calling for stricter voter ID rules, she has gone to great lengths to protect her majority power regardless of how many Albertans do not support the views of her separatist puppet masters.

And she does not even try very hard to hide her motivations, as Corb Lund learned when talking with her about his Water Not Coal petition:

He described her reaction when he asked if he could form the wording of his Water Not Coal petition, and they talked about the wording of the upcoming referendum questions.

Premier Smith told Lund the upcoming referendum questions were worded in such a way that they would be most likely to get the answers the government wanted.

Corb, on recalling Smith saying that, “I didn’t think you were supposed to say that out loud.”

Her anti-democratic policies do not just affect provincial elections, but also municipal ones — especially in the major cities of Calgary and Edmonton where voters are more likely to vote the “wrong” way, in her opinion — which resulted in wait-times of more than an hour at some polling stations last fall.

Well, the process of voting and counting ballots during last year’s municipal elections might be remembered as being relatively quick-and-easy once October 19 comes, because this time we will have ten ballots to complete, each one on a separate piece of paper; with all of the barriers to voting Smith has created, it is expected Albertans might have to spend hours to cast all of these ballots.

And then the vote counting will begin, which is when the problems will get even worse. As reported by Matthew Scace for The Globe and Mail this morning:

Ahead of the vote that could lay the groundwork for Alberta’s secession from Canada, the province’s elections agency says it is soliciting help from the rest of the country to make sure its Oct. 19 referendum runs smoothly.

Elections Alberta is seeking experienced, skilled staff from its counterparts in other jurisdictions to support the agency during the massive undertaking, which will require millions of ballots to be counted in just 48 hours, spokesperson Maia Hanrahan said in a statement to The Globe and Mail.

The elections staff potentially being pulled from other provinces are in addition to at least 60,000 poll supervisors, ballot box clerks, scrutineers and other workers needed, a hiring push the agency has called “one of the largest referendum recruitment efforts ever undertaken in Canada.” By contrast, roughly 13,000 people were hired for Alberta’s 2023 provincial election.

But as of two weeks ago, the agency had received just 24,000 applications from prospective election workers, Ms. Hanrahan said. Returning officers are already reaching out to successful candidates.

Of course, it would be much easier if Elections Alberta could use electronic vote tabulators to count the votes, but as I mentioned above, Smith already put her foot down against that option:

Elections Alberta is printing 45 million ballots, as each of the 10 referendum questions will appear on its own sheet of paper. By comparison, the 2023 provincial election required just 2.9 million ballots for Alberta’s entire electorate, plus an extra, unspecified number for damaged or spoiled ballots.

Additionally, the ballots must be counted by hand, since Ms. Smith banned electronic tabulators in 2024, arguing the machines have failed to produce faster results or increase confidence in elections.

Smith’s arguments against the tabulators are ridiculous, of course, but I guess she is just following orders from the conspiracy theorists who comprise her base.

Furthermore, Elections Alberta’s resources will be even more constrained given the fact Smith has called a by-election for September 14, and it is also preparing for the next general election scheduled for October 18, 2027.

So here is my main point of writing this article today: if at all possible, and if you meet the eligibility requirements, I encourage all pro-Canadians to do what you can to help Elections Alberta with the upcoming referendum. As Matthew Scace explains:

Ms. Hanrahan said applicants don’t need to be Canadian citizens to work as an election officer. They are only required to be an Alberta resident and at least 16 or 18 years old, depending on the job, and to pass a criminal record check, she said.

I also encourage all eligible pro-Canada voters in Alberta to register for a mail-in ballot — which is technically called a “Special Ballot”, but it is really the same thing — in one of the following ways:

Apply to Vote by Mail
Electors can secure a Special Ballot by:

• Completing the online form at specialballot.elections.ab.ca,

• Writing to info@elections.ab.ca, or

• Contacting the Returning Office for their electoral division starting September 21.

The last day to request a Special Ballot is October 9, 2026. Electors are encouraged to apply earlier enough to ensure they receive it and can return it by the deadline.

Once an application is received, a Vote by Mail package will be mailed to the address provided by the elector, which will include a prepaid return envelope. Special Ballot packages will begin mailing to electors on September 1, 2026.

Special ballots may also be picked up in person at:

• Elections Alberta’s head office in Edmonton starting September 1, or

• The elector’s electoral division Returning Office starting September 21.

A designate may pick up a package on the elector’s behalf. A person may apply for a Special Ballot on behalf of an elector only when the elector requires assistance due to disability or illness.

If you still want to vote in person, that is your right and I respect it, but please be prepared for the long-lineups you might encounter; do not be discouraged by them, because the diehard separatists will certainly not walk away without voting first. Do not let Danielle Smith win by letting the separatists dominate the voter turnout.

As University of Alberta Political Science Professor Dr. Jared Wesley advises:

Bring a chair. Bring food. Bring a book.

These burdens are not felt evenly across the population. Lines will be longer in urban areas. Some people simply cannot afford to wait for hours in line. Parents need to pick up children. Students need to get to class. Shift workers have jobs to get to. Seniors and people with mobility challenges cannot stand or sit for long periods.

Many will arrive, see the line, and leave without voting. Only the most committed and the most available will participate in voting day. This sets up a system of privilege that undermines the high-minded virtues of direct democracy.

This is why advance polls and special ballots* are so important — even for those of us who prefer the practice of same-day voting.

The most effective way to increase turnout across the board is to encourage Albertans to vote before Referendum Day. Every voter who casts a ballot early shortens the lines for everyone else while ensuring their own vote is counted.

Both Michaelle and I have complete faith in the integrity of Elections Alberta, which is why we have already applied for our Special Ballots; we are also looking into how we can best assist Elections Alberta in doing its job as efficiently and effectively as possible. Everyone there is working as hard as they can to ensure democracy prevails, but they need all the help they can get from likeminded people given the significant barriers erected by Danielle Smith.

In closing, I want to thank all of my paid subscribers for their subscriptions, and to encourage the rest of you to also consider paid subscriptions. I love to do research, but I also enjoy paying my bills, so a paid subscription would be very helpful in ensuring I can accomplish both.

One would have to be blackout drunk on the Kool-Aid to continue making excuses for Donald Trump. Republicans are supposed to be hardcore-opposed to Communism — which they wrongly believe is synonymous with “socialism” — and yet they continue to bend over for a man who just publicly and unequivocally took the side of one of the most murderous Communist dictators in (at least modern) history over a long-time democratic ally.

I learned that fact this morning from David Akin who wrote the following in his most recent news roundup:

President Donald Trump said Sunday he directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” joint military exercises with South Korea, citing his “very good relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. | WaPo (🎁 link)

What more do Canadians need to stop believing our #1 priority should be maintaining a strong relationship with this country, one where nearly 70% of the voting population either voted for him directly in 2024 or did not care enough to vote at all? And they made those voting decisions despite everything he said and did over the previous ten years, four of which were during his first term as POTUS!

As Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney put it in their most recent dispatch for The Line:

North Korea, it shouldn’t need to be said, is the bad one. It’s the crazy hermit kingdom that has concentration camps for political prisoners in need of re-education, an insane leadership cult, routine execution of dissidents, a nuclear program that has impoverished the country and frequently results in missiles being fired into the ocean over U.S. allies, and, not for nothing, North Korea is providing massive ongoing material support in both personnel and weapons to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

…

But sure, let’s make a bunch of concessions to sign a deal with this guy. Maybe then we can be friends with North Korea, too.

If that is not enough, how about Trump’s war crimes against his own people? As written by Diane Francis for her Substack newsletter this morning on “Decoy-Gate”, where he sneaked himself from a decoy plane to another one in a catering truck following the NATO summit in Turkiye:

So the question is: why would senior administration officials or anyone be left on a plane that US security believed was a potential target and too dangerous for the President? The only explanation was that they were left behind on that plane as decoys, which, the US press has failed to point out, is illegal and constitutes a war crime.

And that’s not the only troublesome issue surrounding this incident.

Using humans as decoys breaches international law. Article 51(7) of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits intentionally using civilians, prisoners, or other protected persons to shield forces or attract/divert enemy fire and constitutes a war crime.

…

A few media outlets and politicians questioned the ethics of turning humans into decoys by leaving them on a targeted plane. There have been plenty of cartoons and scathing criticisms about it, but not one has pointed out that this was illegal.

To repeat, U.S. citizens were being used as human decoys by Trump, and they were not limited to journalists for whom he has always had open contempt; some of them were his own staff and Cabinet members, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Why are Canadians trusting this guy to be a dependable ally to us, when he is not even a dependable ally to his own staff and Cabinet members?

As I argued many times in the past, if we do not stand up for people around the world who need our support, then we have no right to expect them to stand up for us when we want their help. That goes for the peoples of Hong Kong and Taiwan, the Uyghurs, Ukraine, and now also South Korea and the journalists who were used as decoys.

I do not particularly care for “Little Marco” Rubio or Scott Bessent because they have always sided with Trump against the rest of the world — or at least they have since he won the Republican nomination for POTUS in 2016 — and from what I understand they are still siding with him over themselves. They are lost causes so when it comes to their welfare, I will just “mind my own business”.

But I do agree wholeheartedly with Charlie Angus who wrote the following for The Resistance this morning:

The deadline is being presented as a test of the Prime Minister’s credibility. But the reality is his credibility will be more in question if he does announce a deal.

Because there is no deal to be had.

I also agree with Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney with respect to the following:

Our declaration: any significant concession to the United States right now is suicidally reckless. Donald Trump cannot be trusted. A concession now simply sets the stage for America’s next demand. Canada will get no peace from any concession. We are prepared to make swaps with them. If we have to give a little bit to get a little bit, well, that’s diplomacy. We’re fine with that. But a concession simply to continue negotiating? To avoid new tariffs? To keep relations with Washington warm? No fucking way. The moment we take that first step backward, the Americans will force us into another one, and another one, and another one, until they ask for something we won’t give up — and then we’ll be left to fight, but with less.

Mark our words: concessions now mean that Canada will get economically weaker. At the same time, Mark Carney will get politically weaker, both at home and with our other allies abroad.

I just hope Gerson and Gurney are right when they speculate the following, with respect to leaks about the Carney government offering yet more concessions to Trump, which would no doubt be given for absolutely nothing in return:

…we theorize that these leaks are coming from within the Canadian negotiating team. Specifically, we think that the negotiators see the situation basically the same way we do, and are worried that the politicians are turning gutless. We think these leaks have been issued to remind the prime minister and his officials that the public did not elect them to surrender. And based on the changing tone from the Liberal party social media proxies, we think the leaks might be working.

Good. We hope we see more of them. And it’s not hard to find us, hint, hint.

In the end, as David Frum argued yesterday in The Atlantic with respect to “the news that the Department of the Treasury has ended ownership-reporting requirements for U.S. businesses and purged the existing database of ownership information”:

The Trump administration is the most pro-crime administration in United States history—as long as the crime in question is committed by the president, his family, his donors, or his friends. Klein at Brookings noted that Trump is using anti-money-laundering laws to require notice of remittances to Mexico of as little as $200 (the legal threshold is $10,000) even as his associates, including Paul Manafort, are allowed to keep anonymous bank accounts in Delaware.

Across the federal government, enforcement against rich-people crimes has been crippled or abandoned. Inside the Department of Justice, resources have been redistributed away from white-collar-crime enforcement, and Trump has stopped enforcing laws against bribing foreign officials altogether. Pre-Trump, some three dozen lawyers worked on domestic public integrity at DOJ. That figure has been cut to two. The team that policed lawbreaking in the crypto industry has been disbanded.

The Treasury’s announcement last week is merely the latest Trump gift to crooks, cheats, and traffickers. As his popularity collapses among almost every other demographic, Trump seems to recognize that the criminal-American community is his last and most loyal constituency.

The rest of the world should not be joining this criminal constituency by desperately seeking Trump’s approval at all costs.

Before closing, I want to throw a little heavy metal wisdom at you all which is also about how authoritarian governments control perceptions. The following quote from Sepultura guitarist Andreas Kisser via Blabbermouth — who not only grew up under Brazil’s military dictatorship, but who is also no stranger to Jair Bolsonaro’s attempts to return his country to authoritarianism — is an important one to remember, not only when it comes to Trump and other global authoritarians, but also in regard to what we have been seeing lately from Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in her quest to censor library books:

That's why they are scared of art and culture. On a fascist government or a dictatorship, the first one to suffer are arts — movie theaters, music, paintings, poems, newspaper text and books and so on. They are the first. Why do they burn books? Because they change people… Because arts, it touches you in a very unique way. That's a self-knowledge process, to watch a painting or to paint yourself or listen to music and whatever, whatever art form, it helps you to self-knowledge and for evolution, self-evolution. And that's why people are scared. Because they want us stupid so they can control [us]. Divide and conquer.

Alberta is not a dictatorship (yet), but dictators do not start as such; they begin by making populist claims of being “for the people”, and then gradually chip away the rights of those same people until they become “Dear Leaders”. By then, it is too late, especially when everyone else around the world “minds their own business”.

In closing, I want to thank all of my paid subscribers for their subscriptions, and to encourage the rest of you to also consider paid subscriptions. I love to do research, but I also enjoy paying my bills, so a paid subscription would be very helpful in ensuring I can accomplish both.

Always complaining about governments and politics can be exhausting, so I want to make today’s post a fun one with songs about Sunday, which all just happen to focus on different parts of the day.

As I have written in the past, until I was in Grade 6, I had pretty much no knowledge of popular music. Sure, I had records from The Muppets, Disney, and Mini-Pops when I was a very young child, so I had heard covers of songs like “I Love Rock ‘N Roll” and “Satisfaction”, but I did not know about any “real” bands until I was ten years old.

That was when one of my teachers, Mrs. Hartley, instructed us all to sing songs in front of everyone: if we sang solo, we only had to sing one song, but duos had to sing two songs, and trios had to sing three songs.

As usual, I went solo but I did not know what to sing because I did not know any of the popular bands or songs. I therefore went to my older brother, Tim for suggestions and he loaned me his cassette copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico, along with his hand-written lyrics for the song “Sunday Morning”.

While that band was still unknown to a bunch of 10-11 year old kids in 1986 — most of whom performed songs by Bruce Springsteen, Glass Tiger, Corey Hart, Bryan Adams, Loverboy, Madonna, and Cyndi Lauper — my performance was a hit! We were all graded by both the other students and the teacher, and I remember getting a 90% score from the students! It was at that moment that my musical education began, and it has always been influenced by Tim.

The second track that popped in my head this morning coincidentally also focuses on a specific period of the day, and in fact it has been running on a loop in my head since August 7 when Tyler Cowen wrote a blog post on Queen’s song “‘39”.

I became a fan of Queen in 1992 when “Bohemian Rhapsody” was back in the charts due to its appearance in Wayne’s World. I was in Grade 12 at the time, and while going through Tim’s vinyl collection, I came across some records that I ended up playing frequently on his early-1970s quadrophonic stereo system. They included Desolation Boulevard by The Sweet, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, Alice Cooper’s From the Inside, Foreigner’s self-titled debut, Led Zeppelin IV, and Queen’s A Night at the Opera.

Unsurprisingly, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is what motivated me to listen to that record in the first place, but my favourite tune from the album quickly became “The Prophet’s Song”. Other favourites include “Death on Two Legs”, “‘39”, “I’m in Love with My Car”, and of course, the following track which is so short and catchy that it has been in my head for more than a week now.

Since the last two songs coincidentally focus on a different period of the day, my brain demands I do not break the pattern so to complete the trilogy, I give you “Sunday Night Buttermilk Waltz” by The Black Crowes.

I bought my first CD player in 1991, and my dad took me to Zellers to buy some CDs to play on it. One of them was Toys in the Attic since Aerosmith was my favourite band at the time, and I also saw it had “Walk This Way” on it. But another one was Shake Your Money Maker by The Black Crowes because although I knew nothing about the band — other than the section indicated it was “Rock” — I thought the cover looked cool: a picture of the band in a dark room with nothing else but the band logo.

I judged that “book” by its cover, and I was not disappointed!

It has been one of my favourite bands since then, and I will always remember having a great time when I saw them perform on March 1, 1999 at The Warehouse in Toronto during their Souled Out tour. I will never forget one fan complaining to the security guy at the door when his weed was confiscated, crying “But this is The Black Crowes!!!” Despite that impenetrable logic, he did not get his weed back!

I wish you all an excellent Sunday for the entire day!

Cyclists and safety advocates alike suffered a blow recently when Ontario’s highest court ruled in the province’s favour in its self-imposed mission to remove certain bike lanes in Toronto. As reported by Cloe Logan for Canada’s National Observer:

Ontario’s highest court has ruled in favour of the Ford government’s right to remove bike lanes along three major streets in Toronto.

A previous court case had ruled in favour of cyclists, who argued that the province’s Bill 212 mandating the removal of bike lanes along Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue and replacing them with motor vehicle lanes is unconstitutional — a judgement that Doug Ford’s government quickly challenged.

The case went to the Court of Appeal, which ruled Friday that Bill 212 is “the sort of decision legislatures make routinely without attracting any concerns about the constitutionality of their actions.”

The Court of Appeal ruling overturns a lower court ruling which found that Bill 212 violates Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which protects the right to life and security. That ruling also found the law’s justification that removing the lanes will reduce traffic was “arbitrary” and not based on solid evidence.

With respect to evidence, everything I have read is in favour of allowing bike lanes, not just for cyclists themselves but also for those of us who care about health and safety:

During January’s appeal, the judges hearing the case raised concerns that it would set a precedent for repeated Charter challenges of provincial legislation. However, Ecojustice lawyer Lindsay Beck, who argued that the anti-bike lane law should be thrown out, assured the court the case is unique because it is connected to a law that interferes with fundamental rights to safety and is not based on evidence.

Documents commissioned by the province and obtained throughout the litigation process estimated removing the lanes would increase collisions by 54 per cent for road users without reducing congestion.

…

Michael Longfield, Executive Director at Cycle Toronto, said the ruling doesn’t disprove the facts that were validated in the initial ruling: that “bike lanes do not cause traffic congestion. Ripping them out will put people’s lives at risk.”

“This legislation isn’t sound transportation policy, it’s a costly distraction from the government’s real responsibilities and stoking a culture war. Cycle Toronto intends to keep defending our bike lanes to the full extent of the law,” Longfield said.

I have no legal background so I cannot credibly comment on the legality of the Ford government’s war on bike lanes — constitutionally or otherwise — but it does seem clear the government’s policy is not at all justified by any real evidence against them. On the contrary, as reported above, findings evidence provided by the government’s own studies justify keeping these bike lanes.

Even if Cycle Toronto does not appeal this decision to the Supreme Court — which could still happen — eliminating these bike lanes could still backfire politically on the Ford government. As explained by John Michael McGrath for TVO Today:

…the government might be wise to wait and see how politics on the ground in the province’s biggest city play out. Mayoral challenger Brad Bradford has already proclaimed that, if he defeats incumbent Olivia Chow, he’ll remove the westernmost extension of the Bloor bike lanes, which happens to be the part of the bike lane that intrudes into Ford’s own heartland of Etobicoke. There’s a plausible way forward for the Ford government to get what it wants…while maintaining relatively clean hands on their part: if Bradford wins the mayoral election it will be the proper level of government (Toronto City Council) making the decision, not a legislative intrusion from the provincial legislature.

Every other path forward carries the possibility of more political pain for the Ford government. The court’s decision confirms that the legislature has the powers that Bill 212 sought and so Ford can do this directly if Bradford loses in October. But Ford is also less popular today than he was even last year, and the one Progressive Conservative MPP who was loudest in opposition to the bike lanes in Etobicoke was one of the few to lose their seat in the 2025 election: Christine Hogarth was replaced by Liberal Lee Fairclough. Ford doesn’t exactly have the magic touch when he wades into municipal affairs anymore, if he ever did: his preferred candidate in the 2023 Toronto mayoral byelection (Mark Saunders) went down to embarrassing defeat and a Liaison Strategies poll released Friday finds that his endorsement of any candidate in this year’s Mississauga mayoral race (where Ford once promised to “send an army”) would be a net harm to any candidate that received it.

All of which leaves us where we were before last year’s initial decision in the Cycle Toronto case: the Ford government can do this, if they really want to. But the court’s permission doesn’t make it wise or guarantee that it will be politically profitable for the Premier and his party.

Michaelle and I are not cyclists — our typical modes of transport are walking, public transit, and (when necessary) bumming a ride from someone — although we both admit we really should get into cycling for its health benefits. But regardless of how we get around, we care a lot about making it as safe and easy as possible for everyone else for both environmental and health reasons.

That is why we wrote a few articles for our Ride On Substack newsletter back in 2023 on cycling, and this seems to be an opportune time to share them with you today.

In the first one, we looked into how planners can make cycling more attractive year round, even in winter cities, with most evidence coming from Calgary and Edmonton:

This week, your Ride On writers want to shift focus to a mode of transport that is relatively unused, particularly in cold northern countries like Canada: cycling. We admit to sometimes looking at cyclists in the winter and wondering, “How can you do that?” But that is not because we look down on them; on the contrary, we admire them for their bravery!

So this week, we will begin our exploration of cycling by first looking at how cities might improve cycling infrastructure so biking is more attractive. Then, on a related subject, we will focus on concerns cyclists have regarding safety, particularly during winter months. Then we will summarize evidence to indicate whether bike paths are bad for business by reducing the number of parking spaces. Finally, we will examine how the concerns of cyclists might differ based on gender.

We then wrote an article which went further into potential explanations for the gender gap in cycling using international evidence:

This week, while we will still provide further evidence for Alberta, we will primarily focus on international evidence provided by Nuria Pérez Brandón (2019) in her Master’s thesis for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Brandón’s (2019) motivation comes from previous studies which find women are more likely to walk or use public transit than men, but less likely to use private transit or bike to work or school. Furthermore, these gender gaps are more significant for countries like Spain where cyclists tend to be disproportionately male (60% men vs. 40% women), as opposed to Norway where there is little if any gender gap.

So the main focus of this issue of Ride On is why might countries like Norway have a relatively small gender gap in cycling, and what can we learn from it to increase the proportion of trips made using this mode of transit in our part of the world? Since we are primarily interested in increasing the use of cycling for everyone in Alberta, we will also cite some studies that focus particularly on cities in our home province.

Finally, we turned our attention to bike-sharing programs, specifically who uses them, their potential benefits, and business considerations:

In previous issues of this newsletter, your Ride On writers wrote about bike lanes and the importance of cycling infrastructure, but what if one either does not have a bike, or they are afraid of their bike being stolen? One solution is a bike-sharing program, in which a bike can be borrowed like a book from a library, and it can also be returned to any station in the system, just as a book can be returned to any branch in a given library system. Optimally, such a system would enable cyclists to also connect to public transit if desired, significantly decreasing the use of personal vehicles to get from one place in the city to another — an incredible win for the environment.

In closing, when I wrote “we care a lot” above, my brain immediately demanded I listen to the following song by one of my favourite bands growing up, Faith No More. Much like South Park’s Eric Cartman with “Come Sail Away”, I cannot move on with my day until I hear the whole song again! So here it is:

As much as I love Economics, I still regularly remind myself that despite what haters of my profession want everyone to believe, economists in general do not believe economic growth is all that matters. In fact, it is not difficult to identify more important goals than economic growth in its simplest terms.

The reason I bring this subject up again is I read a few very good articles recently which highlight the priority national security should be given over short-sighted definitions of economic growth. I want to encourage you all to read them, too.

The first one was published in The Walrus, where Sushant Singh writes about threats on Canadian national security being created by Chinese spies who are trying to recruit unsuspecting Canadians on networking sites like LinkedIn:

The job offer looks legitimate. The recruiter appears credible. The client is never quite identified. According to an urgent warning issued by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service on June 3, that’s how the Chinese military is attempting to aggressively recruit Canadians.

Titled “Safeguarding Our Secrets,” the joint assessment from the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (which includes Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom) states that Chinese operatives create profiles on professional networking platforms, such as LinkedIn, Indeed, and Upwork. These operatives then pose as private consultants, corporate recruiters, human resource executives, or academic researchers.

I have written in the past that despite my love of free trade, and despite my strong desire for Canada to significantly lessen our dependence on the U.S., I also do not want to recklessly run into the arms of the Chinese government as it has proven time and time again to be a threat to our national security.

As I argued in the past, that does not mean we should necessarily cut ourselves off completely from China, but it does mean we need to be very careful to avoid becoming overly dependent on what is really a substitute bully and abuser of human rights.

On that note, that is something else that matters more than short-sighted definitions of economic growth: human rights. In the case of China, those humans include (but are not limited to) the peoples of Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as the Uyghurs. No trade deal is worth turning a blind eye to the abuses committed against these people.

In fact, I would go further to argue that even if we do only care about economics, then both national security and human rights are still part of the equation. With respect to national security, our allies will have less faith in us as safe trading partners if they fear our security vulnerabilities will spill over into their own countries.

As for human rights, if we want our allies to come to our aid when we need them — especially when it comes to Trump — then we need to do the same for people in other countries when they ask for our help. If the global community views us as being self-absorbed opportunists when other people around the world suffer — for example, by saying we should “mind our own business” and “let them work it out for themselves” — then we will not have much of an economy left when our allies “return the favour” by minding their own business when Trump invades our territory.

To put this argument in more academic terms, think of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) game: the standard game is non-cooperative, meaning every player looks out only for their own selfish best-interests because they cannot trust each other to honour any cooperative agreement. Thus, even though they could all benefit from cooperating with each other, their lack of trust leads to a sub-optimal non-cooperative equilibrium.

That is the very reason why international organisations such as the United Nations and NATO were created: to make it easier for member countries to trust one another, and therefore achieve the mutually-optimal cooperative equilibrium in the PD game.

Furthermore, as explained by Singh in The Walrus, economic consequences of attacks on our national security also include harms to Canadian businesses themselves:

Carney’s assertion that China has become a more predictable partner than the US underscores Ottawa’s frustration with Washington—but has raised alarms among trade experts. Deeper integration with China risks exposing Canadian industries to long-term strategic vulnerabilities, particularly as China increasingly seeks new markets for its exports beyond the US.

The tension inside Canada’s foreign policy is now impossible to ignore. How does Ottawa aggressively chase a trade reset with Beijing when its own security agency is co-authoring emergency public warnings about aggressive Chinese state espionage targeting Canadians online?

The fundamental flaw in this foreign policy approach is its internal incoherence. The Carney administration is treating China as a market while the Chinese state treats Canada as a target. The economic strategy assumes a trustworthy trading partner, while the security reality, articulated explicitly by CSIS, reveals an adversarial intelligence state. A government cannot securely build a deeply integrated strategic partnership when its own security agencies warn that the partner state is actively compromising its workforce.

Singh also explains why it is not just China which should worry us, but also India:

Canada faces an identical policy dilemma with India. The Carney government is seeking to maximize bilateral trade and negotiate favourable market-access agreements with New Delhi. At the same time, Canadian security agencies manage the fallout from transnational operations targeting Canadian citizens on domestic soil. The administration repeatedly attempts to separate the pursuit of commercial treaties from the reality of foreign interference and political violence within Canada’s borders.

In both instances, the foreign policy establishment assumes it can dictate the terms of engagement—that foreign capitals will respect the boundary between economic co-operation and domestic security. Both the Chinese and Indian examples prove the assumption wrong.

Foreign states leverage their economic importance to deter Canadian diplomatic retaliation against their intelligence operations. They understand that Canada prioritizes export growth and economic stability above complex national security disputes—and exploit this prioritization. The Five Eyes alert shows that the Carney government cannot afford to ignore intelligence assessment simply because it complicates the timeline for achieving ambitious trade targets.

Speaking of India, Sushant Singh also wrote a second article for The Walrus in which he asked the question “Is Canada Letting India Get Away with Murder?”

In signalling that it no longer believes India is linked to violent crimes on Canadian soil—a formulation that neatly sidesteps the earlier allegation without explicitly retracting it—the Carney government calculates that moving past the public accusations of the Trudeau era serves Canada’s pressing economic interests. In effect, Carney is allowing the Indian government to use Canadian diplomatic silence as proof of innocence, with India using Carney’s desire for normalized relations to rewrite the narrative of the assassination. When a government stops defending its own allegations because they have become inconvenient, it teaches other states they can wait out the pressure and outlast the memory.

This latest turn of events serves everyone’s short-term interests. It lets Washington claim it has brought conspirators to justice. It lets Ottawa claim it has moved past a damaging dispute. It lets New Delhi claim it was wrongly accused all along. But it leaves unresolved the core issue that sparked the crisis in the first place: whether a foreign state used criminal proxies to kill a person on Canadian soil and what that means for the safety of Canadian citizens. Until that question is answered, the Nijjar case will remain a diplomatic ghost, haunting India–Canada relations long after the trade deals are signed.

Going back to the Chinese government, my final recommendation is an article from Open Canada and the International Journal where Nicolas-François Perron argues that rather than “hedging on China”, the Canadian government is “bandwagoning with Washington”:

The conventional way to describe Canada’s China policy is to call it cautious, hedged, somewhere between engagement and confrontation. But the evidence does not support that description. From 2008 to early 2024, across two Conservative and three Liberal governments, Canada’s grand strategy converged on a single posture: bandwagoning with the United States.

I examined that posture systematically in my research, which reviewed a dataset of 380 parliamentary statements on China from the House of Commons and its relevant committees, 91 ministerial declarations, the major defence strategy documents from Canada First Defence Strategy (2011) through Our North, Strong and Free (2024), the Indo-Pacific Strategy, military procurement records from the Military Balance Plus dataset, and Canadian participation in joint exercises. Across five indicators (threat perception, diplomatic signals, military acquisitions, deployments, and exercises) the patterns line up with bandwagoning, not hedging, not balancing.

That distinction matters because bandwagoning is not just close alignment. It is a strategic choice that prioritizes status as a reliable ally over independent capability, accepts the dominant partner’s threat assessments as one’s own, and treats power as a means to secure partnership rather than as an end in itself. Hedging would mean maintaining genuine policy options, including operational ties with both Washington and Beijing. Balancing would mean building Canadian capability targeted at China. Canada has done neither.

To be clear, I want to highlight the fact the author’s data precede Prime Minister Carney entering politics, and he does address this fact:

It’s worth being explicit about the boundary of this analysis. The dataset runs through early 2024. Since then, both halves of the equation have moved. Trump’s second term brought open talk of Canada as a ’51st state’ and broader assertions of hemispheric dominance that Canadians have not had to take seriously as a security concern in well over a century. At the same time, Prime Minister Mark Carney has pursued a notable reset with Beijing, including a January 2026 visit to Beijing and a preliminary trade deal, all while still sending two-thirds of Canadian exports to the US. Whether this amounts to genuine hedging, or a recalibration of who counts as the reliable partner, is a question the next phase of this research will need to answer.

Nonetheless:

Bandwagoning trades flexibility for solidarity: it treats Washington’s threat assessment as Ottawa’s, and limits independent capability because resources flow into interoperability projects rather than into autonomous Canadian options. And it leaves Canada poorly positioned for moments when the United States itself becomes unpredictable, which under a second Trump administration is no longer a hypothetical. A grand strategy whose central premise is alliance reliability has to grapple seriously with what happens when the ally itself shifts the rules.

In summary, while the U.S. is a serious threat to not only our economy but also our sovereignty, Canada cannot blindly return to relying on either China or India as alternative trading partners. Our own security agencies have revealed credible evidence that both of these countries pose serious national security threats to our country, our businesses, and yes, our economy as well.

Therefore, while Singh correctly argues “Carney must confront the reality that his foreign policy and economic strategy are fundamentally incompatible”, I would clarify that a proper economic strategy would also incorporate human rights and national security; we cannot have a strong and stable economy if it is persistently vulnerable to security threats, and we also cannot have a such an economy when turning a blind eye to human rights around the world erodes the trust our true allies have in us.

In closing, I want to thank all of my paid subscribers for their subscriptions, and to encourage the rest of you to also consider paid subscriptions. I love to do research, but I also enjoy paying my bills, so a paid subscription would be very helpful in ensuring I can accomplish both.

Today, I simply want to encourage all of my Canadian subscribers and followers to sign a petition promoted by “Author · Musician · Activist · Political veteran” Charlie Angus, who wrote the following on his Substack newsletter yesterday:

If you are a Canadian citizen, please sign parliamentary e-petition 7531 calling on the government of Canada to make Ambassador Pete Hoekstra persona non grata.

https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7531

Please also share this petition far and wide amongst Canadians you know, because as a classic shampoo commercial taught us, it can be as simple as telling two friends about it, who then also tell two friends about it…

Mr. Angus is under no illusion that such a petition is binding, but the more signatures it gets, the more seriously the federal government is likely to take it. After all, we are all Canadian voters, and any government of any political stripe is always concerned with being reelected.

It also sends a message to everyone paying attention that even if our own government is preoccupied with constantly caving to Trump for absolutely nothing in return, it is not representative of Canadians in general:

Does a parliamentary petition have the power to force Pete Hoekstra out of the country? No, but if enough people sign, then it forces a conversation about the role the US Embassy is playing in interfering in our affairs and working to sabotage our longstanding relations with our next-door neighbour.

The petition sends a message to Washington that Canadians are not intimidated or fooled by the constant gaslighting coming from the US Embassy in Ottawa.

And it has indeed been sending that message as it is making international news, such as BBC News where Jessica Murphy reports the following:

More than 70,000 Canadians have signed a petition calling for the US ambassador in Ottawa to be expelled for undermining diplomatic relations between the two neighbours.

The online petition accuses Pete Hoekstra of “making repeated interventions in Canadian political discourse” and of having “normalised the Trump administration’s threats to annex Canada as the ‘51st state’” of the US.

In a statement to the BBC, the US embassy said it was aware of the petition but declined to comment further.

So please keep this petition circulating so our federal government knows there will be political consequences for shirking its responsibilities to Canadians so it can take the easy way out.

During my morning reading, I came across an article cited by David Akin in his latest news roundup, in which Cindy Tran reports the following for the Calgary Herald:

Experts estimate the Alberta government has likely accumulated billions in surplus this fiscal year-to-date as crude oil prices remain high.

Trevor Tombe, an economics professor at the University of Calgary, estimates the government has accumulated a surplus of $3.8 billion this fiscal year to date. Every $1 per barrel change in the price of oil is worth about $680 million to the government’s bottom line, according to Tombe.

“It doesn’t take a big move in oil prices to have dramatic impacts on government’s bottom line,” Tombe said.

As Dr. Tombe argues, Alberta’s over-reliance on oil revenues for its prosperity is a very bad thing if we want economic stability, and it is only getting worse:

However, Tombe said while high oil prices would help eliminate the deficit, the province’s main fiscal problem is its exposure to such a volatile source of revenue which it has only become more reliant on.

“Our problem has gotten worse and oil prices being high doesn’t solve that because of course they won’t stay high forever. They’ll fall and then rise again and then fall again… that volatility is worse now for Alberta than ever before,” Tombe said.

Furthermore, even when oil prices are high, that is not necessarily a good thing for the average Albertan:

Tombe said it is never a bad thing for the government when oil prices are high, but emphasized the impact is felt by everyday people. Early after the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, he did some preliminary math and said if oil prices remained around US $90 a barrel it would equate to an additional $1,000 a year for the average family.

“The affordability challenges that people face are made worse by sustained high oil prices,” Tombe said.

This news reminded me of an article I wrote earlier this year, which just happened to also be inspired by a talk given by Trevor Tombe, where I argued that the secret to Danielle Smith’s success boils down to “dumber-than-dumb luck”. Given everything that has been happening in Alberta politics and the economy lately, I think it is worth reprinting it below.

In short, Danielle Smith deserves zero credit for balancing the budget, since she has done nothing to make it happen other than to hope for the best. Despite her degree in Economics, she demonstrates no understanding of its basic principles; if she did, she would do everything she can in her (majority-government) power to make Alberta’s economy less dependent on volatile oil prices, and thus make our economy more stable over the long term.

Of course, she would also not actively create even more volatility in the economy by pandering to her separatist puppet-masters, but her primary goal is always ensuring her own selfish political success. She enjoys the benefits while we incur the costs.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy reading the re-post of my earlier article below.

The Secret to Danielle Smith’s Success: Dumber-Than-Dumb Luck

Yesterday, I experienced the pleasure of attending a talk by University of Calgary Economics Professor Dr. Trevor Tombe at the university’s downtown campus. The talk was on the Alberta budget, and as he was near the end of his presentation it hit me: Danielle Smith just might be the luckiest living politician in the world!

Let me explain.

Thanks to the war in Iran, and the resulting spike in oil prices, it looks like Alberta might not have a budget deficit this year after all! And if it was not for that war, the deficit would have been huge because after revealing the expected size of the deficit last month, she admitted she basically had no plan to balance the budget.

Would she raise taxes? Nope.

Would she cut spending in any meaningful way? Nope.

What is left? Do nothing and hope the problem works itself out (other than to blame Ottawa, because that always works).

And wouldn’t you know, it did! To be clear, that is not a good thing, because there is no justification for this illegal war. But it sure worked out for Smith and her UCP government… for now.

At first, I thought she essentially won a fair coin toss, but that is too simple because that will result in “Heads” 50% of the time and “Tails” 50% of the time. It is actually far easier to win a coin toss than it would be for the UCP to balance its budget by doing nothing but wishing on a star.

No, this is more like trying to win the coin toss hundreds of times in a row. That is because the odds of repeatedly winning it decrease the more times the coin is tossed.

Think of it this way: the probability of getting “Heads” once is simply 50%, but the odds of getting “Heads” twice in a row is 25%. That is because the probability of two independent events both occurring is calculated as follows:

P(AB) = P(A) * P(B)

where:

• P(AB) is the probability both Event A and Event B will occur

• P(A) is the probability Event A itself will occur

• P(B) is the probability Event B will occur

Therefore, if Event A represents the first “Head” flip, and Event B represents the second one, then the probability of both of them happening is:

P(AB) = 50% * 50% = 25%

It then follows that the more times the coin is flipped, the more times we have to multiply it all by another 50%, so the end result gets smaller and smaller.

Back when I taught Methodology and Statistics — or as one student delightfully called it, “Meth and Stats” — I liked to involve my students in a couple of quizzes I lifted from Chapter 3 of Dan Gardner’s excellent book, Risk. I will just repeat one here, and encourage you to read his book for the rest.

In one quiz, which was created by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky many decades ago, I told the students the following: Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in Philosophy. As a student, she was very concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear war demonstrations.

I then asked my students to rank the following options from Most Likely (1) to Least Likely (8), regarding whether Linda:

1. Is a teacher in an elementary school?

2. Works in a bookstore and takes yoga classes?

3. Is active in the feminist movement?

4. Is a psychiatric social worker?

5. Is a member of the League of Women Voters?

6. Is a bank teller?

7. Is an insurance salesperson?

8. Is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement?

As Gardner explains, Kahneman and Tversky gave this quiz to real-life undergraduate students, and they found 89% of the students surveyed thought Option #8 was more likely than Option #6, even though Option #8 had the additional condition of being active in the feminist movement.

So the psychologists gave the surveys again, but this time only those two options were available. Still, 85% of them thought it was more likely Linda is both a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.

Of course, we know from my coin-flip example that Option #6 is more likely than Option #8 because the former option is analogous to flipping a coin once, while the latter option is comparable to flipping the coin twice. It also makes logical sense that if Option #8 is true, then Option #6 is at least equally (if not more) likely because she would be a bank teller either way.

On the contrary, in the minds of the undergraduate students, it was “obvious” Option #6 is the less likely option of the two, because “She has to be an active feminist, too! Read the description!”

As Gardner explained it, these students were allowing their “guts” to overrule their “heads”, also known as The Rule of Typical Things. But we cannot really blame these students for getting it wrong, because when Kahneman and Tversky presented the “Linda Problem” to experts trained in logic and statistics, they were just as wrong as the students on the first go around! Only when the two-option version of the quiz was given to the experts did they — maybe not literally — smack themselves in the heads and say “Of course, Option #8 is less likely!”1

And how did my students rank these options? I cannot remember specific results, but I gave these surveys several years in a row, and most of them also let their guts rule!

Getting back to Danielle Smith, the point of this whole exercise is to demonstrate that the more conditions we add to something happening, the less likely it will happen. And in terms of her strategy of doing nothing and hoping the budget would balance itself, the probability of that happening was exceptionally low!

Just think of all of the conditions that had to be satisfied for this spike in oil prices to happen now:

1. Someone as reckless and incompetent as Donald Trump, who exclusively thinks with his gut, is the most powerful person on the planet.

2. Trump wants to do what no previous POTUS ever did: side with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his decades-long quest to go to war with Iran.

3. The House of Representatives is controlled by Trump via his sycophants, who could almost always be relied upon to support anything and everything he does, regardless of legality and even constitutionality.

4. Repeat #3 for the Senate.

5. Repeat #3 for the Supreme Court.

6. Repeat #3 for his Cabinet.

7. Repeat #3 for the MAGA segment of the “Fifth Estate” — bloggers, journalists publishing in non-mainstream media outlets, and online social networks — who control the minds of a large proportion of the electorate. I include Fox News in this club.

8. His “Secretary of War” is Pete Hegseth, a drunken gut-thinking idiot who believes Red Dawn was a documentary and Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket was meant to be emulated.

9. Trump is in such a hot mess back home — due to the Epstein Files and ICE, for example — that he needed something big to distract attention from that mess.

10. Despite all of the power and resources available to the POTUS, which should guarantee success in the war in Iran, he still failed miserably by having no plan for what to do on “Day 2”.

Those are just ten conditions necessary for the Alberta budget to be balanced by having oil royalty revenues spike so much and so fast.

In summary, Danielle Smith essentially flipped “Heads” many times despite the coin being rigged to always flip “Tails”!

Unfortunately for Albertans, no one can rationally count on this dumber-than-dumb luck to work again because she still has no plan for what to do on her own “Day 2”, and oil prices will inevitably fall again for one reason or another (they always do). She could hope for another lucky spike in oil prices, but that would be like hoping for yet another consecutive “Head”, and we know the odds of that happening are even lower than ever.

In closing, I want to thank all of my paid subscribers for their subscriptions, and to encourage the rest of you to also consider paid subscriptions. I love to do research, but I also enjoy paying my bills, so a paid subscription would be very helpful in ensuring I can accomplish both.

Today is a suddenly busy one for me so I do not have much time to write, but that fact actually reminded me of a recent blog article written by Timothy Taylor, Managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives and Economics Lecturer. Specifically, the article is on “when happiness was invented”; my unexpected circumstances reminded me of it because for people like me, being busy — or to put it more accurately, being productively busy — has a causal effect on happiness.

I therefore encourage you all to read not only this article, but to also follow Taylor’s Conversable Economist blog because it sincerely also makes me happy! Here is just a teaser for you:

In short, the modern idea of happiness in the English language seems to have been invented in the mid-16th century, latched on to translators like Burnet and writers like by Locke the later decades of the 17th century, and then passed forward to modern economics by way of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Jefferson, and doubtless an array of others. In modern times, there are self-help books about finding happiness and serious research and policy based on survey data on reported levels of happiness.

But what came before happiness?

I hope you all have a happy day!

I have been a fan of The Line’s Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney for around 15 years now, and their latest “Dispatch from the Front Lines” is one of their best, in my humble opinion — so much so that I want to encourage everyone to read it.

The Line

Dispatch from the Front Lines: No deal.

Hey folks, hope you’re having a great weekend. If you need a little boost, check out this week’s The Line Podcast, with Scott Stinson filling in for Jen Gerson…

Read more

10 days ago · 77 likes · 39 comments · Line Editor

The general focus of this dispatch is Canada’s relationship with the U.S., not just while Trump is in office but also after he is gone, regardless of which party takes over.

To whet your appetites, they begin their dispatch with a reality check:

First, it is worth starting this conversation by noting that the annexation of Canada and turning it into the 51st state has been, and remains, the official and explicit policy of the United States of America. Ever since Donald Trump first whispered it into Justin Trudeau’s ear at that awful, fateful meeting at Mar a Lago on November 29th 2024, Trump and his team have not wavered from that position.

Sure, there have been half-hearted efforts by Trump apologists at dismissing it as a tease, a jest, a friendly offer, a vague warning about the consequences of Canada’s failures on continental defence, or what have you. But despite having been given numerous opportunities to renounce it, to take it off the table now and forever, and to apologise for having given offence to Canadians, neither Trump, nor Vance, nor Rubio, nor Lutnick, nor Hoekstra, nor any of the multitude of other Slurpee-suckers the American president has surrounded himself with, have chosen to do so.

Indeed, just the opposite…

…

But there is absolutely no reason we should be expecting or hoping for a best-case scenario. We are often exhorted to take Trump “seriously but not literally”, so what would that mean in this case? It would mean something like: In an ideal world, Trump would dearly love to annex Canada. Failing that, he would like to annex parts of it, most likely Alberta. And failing that, he would merely like to subjugate, vassalize, and deindustrialize this country. Lol.

Again, let’s make things plain: this is the current, explicit policy of the United States of America toward Canada. No one in the administration has ever said anything that would lead anyone to think otherwise.

So, what does that mean for a trade agreement? By any sane standard, it means we should not enter into one. We understand that the reality before us is difficult for many Canadians to grasp both intellectually and emotionally; but the Americans are not our friends, they are not our allies, and they are not our “closest trading partners”. They are a country with which by force of geography we have strong economic, political and military ties, and a shared history of peaceable coexistence and cooperation. Those days are done, for now and probably for a very long time to come, and they simply cannot be trusted to uphold their end of any bargain.

They go on to make proposals on how any trade deal with the U.S. should be designed, including how we should retaliate if — but really when — Donald Trump even hints at breaking the deal. They also argue against making concessions simply to “keep Trump happy” because they will “buy us nothing” and even worse, “hurt us”. Moreover, they make arguments in favour of reducing our dependence on the U.S. whenever feasible, for example when it comes to national defence (emphasis added):

Our proposal, stated plainly, is this: where American weapons are truly the best or only option, buy them without delay. Don’t make political hay over it. Just get it done. But where there are true non-American or even domestic alternatives, we should default to them every single time.

And just as importantly, they unequivocally reject any argument that everything will get back to “normal” once Trump is out of office, even if the Democrats take power again. They then go further to explain why it really does not matter how much people in the U.S. like us, because it will not stop them from hurting us in the end:

“We like Canada,” might, in fact, be one of the least controversial and polarizing opinions for an American to hold. But just because someone likes you in theory doesn’t mean they won’t hurt you in practice.

And what has all that goodwill bought us, exactly? Good will that doesn’t translate into restraint on the current administration’s actions is a worthless currency. At this point, it would be better for Canada to be despised and left alone than to be well-liked and a perpetual target.

Please do read the whole thing because it is a must-read and I could not agree more strongly with everything in it. It is truly one of those articles I wish I wrote myself.

Yesterday afternoon, I did another round of door-knocking for For Alberta, For Canada. This was the fourth one I did, each time in a different neighbourhood of my riding.

Across all four rounds, I estimate roughly 90% of people did not even answer their doors, even when their inside doors were wide open and/or we heard them talking inside — such as one guy who kept yelling at his dog to SHUT UP! I do not blame them because I do not answer my door for strangers either.

Given that low response rate, I would not feel comfortable calling the remaining 10% a representative sample.

Nonetheless, we only had one person flat-out say they absolutely want Alberta to separate — she was tensely polite, at least — and one other who told us she absolutely wants to stay in Canada, but she had to come out to the sidewalk so we could whisper our conversation because no one is allowed to talk politics in the house; at least one person in that household is a hardcore separatist.

We saw only two or three separatist lawn signs during all four tours of duty — and for the record, many more Forever Canadian and For Alberta, For Canada signs — so there was obviously no point in approaching those “Let Alberta Decide” and “Send Ottawa A Message” houses. After passing one of them, a guy at a neighbouring house pointed at it and asked us if we went to “that” house. He did not think much of them!

Only a handful of people told us they wanted to “send a message to Ottawa”, and a small number of other ones (at least somewhat) politely said they did not want to talk about it at all, so we can only assume what they meant. One guy kept yawning after we asked him for his views while saying “I dunno”, so evidently he could not care less about the whole thing.

Another handful of people told us they are immigrants so they cannot vote, or they did not live there. Another woman told us she is in the Canadian Forces so she could not give an opinion one way or another, but she will vote. I think it is safe to assume she is pro-Canada given her occupation.

One person opened her door just long enough to slam it in our faces! She did not even let us introduce ourselves, so she had no idea why we were knocking; it would have been easier to just not answer her door, but she clearly wanted to make some sort of statement by being “nasty”.

The majority of the 10% who opened their doors for us either said they were uncertain or were absolutely for Canada! Most of the uncertain people were also interested in learning more about the issue, sometimes asking for our handout before we even offered it to them.

One guy was especially awesome, going on and on about how much he hates Danielle Smith — although he accidentally called her “Notley” a few times — and he moved to Alberta from the other end of the country because he loves it here. He thinks the separatists should pick up and move if they do not like Canada — although he said it in more colourful language — and he wants Smith to be booted out of office because her pandering to the separatists is threatening his livelihood. It was very clear from everything he said that he did mean Danielle Smith and not Rachel Notley, such as when he told us he was an Alberta NDP voter.

I wish everyone was like that guy! I remember when I started teaching, and another Economics professor told me she tended to focus on the negative student evaluation comments, even when there were only one or two of them amongst a sea of glowing praise. She did not want to focus on them, but they were the ones that stuck in her head, especially when they seemed out of line.

I am like her so whenever I go on these door-knocking tours, I approach every house filled with anxiety even though the odds are 99.9% there will be no problem. I just cannot get the rude and aggressive people out of my head, including two others from the time I was door-knocking for something other than For Alberta, For Canada: one woman opened the door and immediately slammed it in our faces before we could even say “hello”; another guy opened his door just so he could aggressively charge at us while waving his hand in our faces and saying “Good Bye! Good Bye!”. Again, he had no idea why we were there; our only sin was being there.

The only other time I ever door-knocked in my life — other than when I had Sunday Sun paper routes as a kid — was when Elections Ontario (Ottawa Centre) hired me to register voters for the 1999 provincial election. Similar to my recent experiences, 99.9% of the people who answered their doors were very nice — or at least polite — and I only remember one guy who was rather rude even though we represented no political party; we just wanted to make sure everyone was registered to vote for whomever they wanted elected! I even pointed that fact out to him, and he just responded “Don’t care!” He seemed to find our mission offensive.

I admit it is bizarre, but now whenever I approach a door 27 years later, I still think of that guy. I am truly a Grade A specimen when it comes to bounded rationality — specifically imperfect information (recall) — in social settings, despite all of my education and experience with people.

Oddly enough, I did not experience this same kind of anxiety when doing some online-texting earlier this year for another cause. I guess it was because I could not see any of their faces, nor could I hear any voices, so I could just raise my eyebrows, chuckle and move on to the next person whenever someone called me a “pedophile” or some other horrible thing. I thought, “okay, that’s it for you!”, and flagged them in the system as “abusive”. In other words, I did not view them as real people; just words on a screen.

But when it comes to cold-calling or door-knocking, it worries me something fierce.

On the bright side, after four of these For Alberta, For Canada tours and the one time I door-knocked recently for a different cause, it is getting easier to remember only the 99.9% when I approach a door. My information set is becoming less imperfect!

And that is a good thing, since I have two more of them scheduled for later this month.

In summary, with respect to the people who did speak to us, only one was openly a separatist — two if we count the unseen housemate of the sidewalk whisperer — while most of the others were either uncertain but open-minded, or passionately pro-Canada. So while it is not a representative sample, it does give me hope!

Now here is also hoping all of those pro-unity Albertans will vote on October 19!

The concessions continue.

Prime Minister Carney’s love for “the cave” is so strong he is apparently now offering a concession he has no unilateral power to offer, since provinces are in control of their liquor monopolies. As reported by David Akin in his most recent news roundup:

There’s been a major development in Canada-U.S. trade talks. The Canadian government is reportedly discussing a deal that would see Ottawa agree to a list of demands from the White House — including an end on the ban on American booze. In return, the U.S. would scrap its plans for new 50 per cent tariffs and the Americans would also agree to lower some sectoral tariffs. The deal isn’t done yet and as Sarah MacDonald reports, some provinces are already pushing back. | Global National

When I read “the Americans would also agree…”, I laugh. They probably also laugh at us for naively thinking they are serious, since they clearly never have any intention of honouring any agreement with anyone.

That all reminded me of an article I posted way back in 2024 — after Donald Trump was elected but before his inauguration — on why Canada should be more like Tom Petty; I want to repeat part of it today because it still stands strong, in my opinion. It is just sad that despite more than 18 months of Trump proving again and again — and again and again — that none of his promises can ever be taken seriously, many of us still continue to demonstrate our insanity.

As I wrote back then, I am not talking about the obvious link to the band, which is the “I Won’t Back Down”. I am not even talking about their later-career gem “The Last DJ”, which was rather controversial amongst… well, DJs (or at least their employers).

No, I am thinking about the band when they were still in their infancy, before anyone would expect them to have any real clout in the music business. I am talking about the recording of their 1979 breakthrough album, Damn the Torpedoes.

Prior to that album’s release, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were a respected band. Their 1976 self-titled debut album boasted songs like “Breakdown” and “American Girl”. They followed that one with You’re Gonna Get It in 1978, featuring the singles “I Need to Know” and “Listen to Her Heart”. Both albums earned good reviews, but the band was still not in the mainstream.

And that is the crux of my argument when looking at what would happen with Damn the Torpedoes: the band did not have significant bargaining power against their record company, like they obviously did during the 1980s and ‘90s when they released albums like Into the Great Wide Open, and when Petty released solo albums like Full Moon Fever — albums filled with original music that could rival any greatest hits package. This was back before Spotify — and even before the Internet — so record company executives held all the power: do what they say or do not get played.

But Petty and his band did not exactly see it at the way. As detailed in the 2007 documentary Running Down a Dream, the battle started when their distributor ABC Records was sold to MCA in 1979. Petty and the band argued their contract should then be deemed null and void because they did not give permission to assign their contract to another company. MCA, in turn sued the band for breach of contract, prompting them to declare bankruptcy.

There is a lot more to the story, and the whole thing is quite fascinating, including anecdotes about band loyalists hiding each day’s recordings from MCA so they could not take possession of them. Eventually, the matter was settled with the band signing a new contract with MCA subsidiary, Backstreet Records.

In other words, in this “David vs. Goliath” scenario, “David” won despite all odds against him.

Of course, this is not an apples-for-apples comparison to the current fight between Canada and Trump. For one thing, if the band did fail in their fight with MCA, they would have really only harmed themselves, while many millions of people could be harmed by standing up to Trump. But as I have argued many times since 2024, we will be harmed anyway because even if we kiss Trump’s ring now and do everything he wants with respect to border security, bridge revenues, trade on dairy, alcohol, steel, and aluminum, etc., he will just come back with more excuses to levy tariffs on us.

And he has done so many times, so we have no excuse to be surprised.

As Dan Gardner argued so well in 2024 when I wrote my article:

…the demands are only a pretext. Even if Canada could satisfy them to Trump’s liking, which is unlikely, he will find others.

The point of Trump’s bullying is — psychological gratification aside — to exhibit his power to the world, just as the Athenians did in destroying a city-state that was as harmless to Athens as Canada is to the United States. That’s why his seemingly gratuitous humiliations are not gratuitous. They’re the point. And in Trump’s mind, if Canada does as he demands it will only confirm that he is strong and Canada is weak, increasing his contempt.

I continue to strongly believe the only way to avoid wasting time being led around by the nose by Trump for the rest of his term — and to also avoid being victimized by whomever follows him, because it will not end with him — is to hit back as hard was we can. If we strategically hit the right targets, then even if we cannot directly change his mind, eventually other Republican politicians will convince him to back off, rather than just cheering for him and making “jokes” about Canada being the “51st State”.

That is especially true now that they are worried about the upcoming midterms. And it does work as demonstrated by all their whining about our alcohol bans and trade barriers on dairy, despite contradictory claims they do not need “anything” from us.

In short, be more like Tom Petty.

Recently, I came across a “disinformation alert” on Bluesky from Dr. Jared Wesley, Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta and author of the Decoding Politics Substack newsletter:

I want to spread this alert as far and wide amongst Albertans as possible, because I do not want any of us to be discouraged from voting by mail based on a confusion created (deliberately?) by semantics: a “special ballot” is both received and returned by mail, so it is really no different from a “mail-in ballot”.

In general, I encourage everyone to follow Dr. Wesley on Blusky and Substack, as he is a great source of credible information regarding the costs and benefits of separation, as well as on misinformation and disinformation surrounding the whole mess.

I also want to again promote various movements to keep Alberta part of Canada, including Forever Canadian, Lead Not Leave, Vote to Stay, and For Alberta, For Canada.

I have personally canvassed for For Alberta, For Canada, and my most recent round of door-knocking was last night. As usual, almost everyone was polite and friendly — even when they said they were either undecided, strongly want Alberta to separate from Canada, or do not even think about it at all because they “are not political” and “pretty much never vote” — but I still encounter a few Calgarians who say they merely want to “send a message to Ottawa” by voting for a second referendum.

I therefore want to tell everyone again that the only message sent by voting for a second referendum is to Alberta businesses, and it is to “leave Alberta for more certain economic climates”. In other words, if we even entertain the idea of Alberta leaving Canada, then businesses will actually leave Alberta.

But do not take my word for it, because they Calgary Chamber of Commerce released the results of a member survey at the end of June in which it found the following:

Calgary, AB, June 24, 2026 – According to a new survey conducted in partnership with Probe Research, nearly half of Calgary Chamber member respondents say they are prepared to leave Alberta and relocate their business to another province if Albertans vote to begin the formal process towards separation from Canada. Only 39 per cent indicate they are unlikely to do so.

Also, the Chamber very recently published an article in which is used Brexit as a lesson against treating a referendum as an opinion poll (emphasis not added):

Brexit demonstrates that governments, financial markets and investors do not interpret referendum results as symbolic gestures. Instead, they evaluate how the outcome could affect future political and economic conditions.

…

The Brexit referendum serves as a reminder that constitutional referendums are not opinion polls. They are powerful political instruments capable of reshaping expectations and influencing economic behaviour. For Alberta’s business community, the central lesson is simple: markets price risk, not intentions.

Before I end this article, I highly recommend reading a piece for the Calgary Herald by Robin Lindsay, who warns us all that a vote for separation will only play into Donald Trump’s hands by making it super-easy for him to annex Alberta as an unincorporated territory so he can control all of our resources, and in the end destroy Canada, as well. And we will only have ourselves to blame:

Separatists are pushing for “a free Alberta.” What they’re not telling Albertans is that Alberta as a sovereign nation will never happen, not because of Canada, but because of the United States’ expansionist agenda.

…

The United States is currently carrying out an economic war on all of Canada — not because of fentanyl or unfair trade practices or forest fire smoke.

The U.S. wants free and unfettered access to Canada’s natural resources — Alberta’s oil, Saskatchewan’s potash, Ontario’s critical mineral reserves. They also want to control the shipping lanes that are rapidly becoming viable in Canada’s far north.

And they want these things without having to sign trade agreements and pay another country fair restitution for those resources. The current U.S. government isn’t interested in paying for something it can get through bullying, coercive measures and force. The American idea of Manifest Destiny is alive and well in this administration.

Alberta as a nation would not stand a month before it’s annexed by the U.S., to become an unincorporated territory. Voting rights would be limited to local government, and there would be no ownership or access to the wealth generated by Alberta’s natural resources.

And the rest of Canada — Alberta’s brothers and sisters — would fall alongside it. Even together, Canada will struggle, a small David against Goliath.

If Albertans choose to let foreign-led rage tear Canada apart, they’ll take our whole boat down. Donald Trump will have his legacy.

And the destruction of Canada will be Alberta’s.

On a side-note, I initially thought this piece was written by Robin Lindsey, the second-reader for my PhD dissertation at the University of Alberta and my greatest influence for how to be a good teacher. The man was, without exaggeration, a major influence on me as a teacher, researcher, and human being.

I met him in 2002 at the Canadian Transportation Research Forum (CTRF) conference in St. John’s just a couple months before starting my PhD program, and he has always amazed me by his combination of brilliance and humility. If anyone deserves to have an ego, it is him but he still does not have one at all.

But then I noticed the author of this Calgary Herald article spells their last name “Lindsay”, so it is not the same person; I actually had to carefully look into whether it was the same person because I have never known Robin to write anything political in the past. Nonetheless, I include the above praise for my former professor because my confusion made me want to write it and I do not want to delete it now! :-)

Returning to the subject of Alberta separatism, please do not believe any of the lies told by Danielle Smith and her separatist puppet-masters who rely on asymmetric information to generate support for their cause. A vote to leave Alberta will not only do significant harm to Alberta’s economy as serious people leave for more certain economic locations, but it will also make it easier for the U.S. to turn us into “Puerto Rico of the North” so they can take over our natural resources and destroy Canada in the process.

In closing, I want to thank all of my paid subscribers for their subscriptions, and to encourage the rest of you to also consider paid subscriptions. I love to do research, but I also enjoy paying my bills, so a paid subscription would be very helpful in ensuring I can accomplish both.

My best good friend and research partner, Junaid Jahangir wrote an excellent article for The Conversation, and I highly recommend you all read it, too. Here is a teaser:

Economics shapes many aspects of our daily lives, from the prices we pay to the policies governments adopt. Yet many of the ideas taught as universal principles of economics emerged from a narrow historical context and have rarely been examined through a decolonial lens.

Junaid is a heterodox economist and Associate Professor of Economics at MacEwan University in Edmonton, who strives to teach the subject differently from more traditional economists like me, but I honestly do not think we differ as much as it might appear. He just does a much better job explaining why the standard models taught in ECON 101 are not realistic.

Furthermore, his critiques of the subject matter of ECON 101 and how it is taught also differ greatly from critiques of other people like Kate Raworth — author of Doughnut Economics — who appear to be far too eager to perpetuate myths of what economists believe and teach. For example, Raworth has argued economists prioritize economic growth above everything else, we just want to “sell off” common resources, we believe the Earth is “inexhaustible”, and we assume there are no interdependencies and we are independent of the living world.

In other words, as I explained in several articles linked below, Raworth’s book seems designed to make people believe the field of Economics has hardly advanced since Paul Samuelson published his introductory Economics textbook in 1948; when she is not citing 19th century economists, she often quotes that textbook as if no textbooks have been published since then.

What I really like about Junaid’s research is he does not want to throw out the baby with the bathwater; he recognizes what we teach in ECON 101 has merit, but it is also just part of an incomplete story. He is critical without being dismissive or slanderous.

And that is where I get to his latest article for The Conversation: although I write a lot about different market failures which are taught in ECON 101, and which do show the basic model of perfect competition is just a starting point for more realistic analyses, Junaid brings up other drawbacks of the basic models which I have never considered. Indeed, I do not remember even learning about them during my own ten years as a university Economics student.

One such drawback of the standard models which is identified by Junaid is they are based on Eurocentric assumptions:

Many foundational economic theories were developed by wealthy European men during periods of colonial expansion. Yet these ideas are often treated as universal principles rather than products of a particular historical context.

Eurocentric economic thought tends to position European economic development as the norm while presenting Indigenous and Global South economic systems as deviations. Decolonizing economics challenges assumptions within mainstream theory about choice, rationality and economic value.

Junaid then provides examples in terms of “the concept of scarcity”, “the assumption that wages reflect an individual’s contribution or value”, “the idea that people always act as fully informed and rational economic beings”, “how economic systems can reproduce inequality by marginalized communities in wealthy countries while relying on resource extraction and low-wage labour in the Global South”, and the insufficient “scrutiny of free trade theory”:

Decolonizing economics also calls for greater scrutiny of free trade theory, which has shaped global development policy. It was advanced by one of the wealthiest economists in history, David Ricardo. Yet many wealthy countries first industrialized through protectionist policies before promoting free trade abroad — a pattern one economist described as “kicking away the ladder.”

This kind of sustained critical examination of mainstream economic assumptions is central to the project of decolonizing economics.

On a side note, I have written in the past about “the idea that people always act as fully informed and rational economic beings” because Behavioural Economics has advanced quite a bit over the last few decades. Nonetheless, Junaid’s argument that we need to incorporate it more into our lectures and research is absolutely correct. He recognizes that problem in Economics without acting like we actually believe people are perfectly rational; that assumption should only be made when it enables us to more easily come to realistic predictions.

Junaid then turns to address the question of “what economic thinking might look like beyond those frameworks”:

This begins by expanding what counts as economic knowledge. Perspectives from the Global South, including dependency theory, as well as contributions from Muslim thinkers and other non-European scholars, offer alternative ways of understanding development, wealth and economic relationships.

These perspectives often emphasize economic approaches that value people, communities and ecosystems over economic productivity. They place greater value on social well-being, ecological sustainability and collective prosperity.

This approach informs policies such as economic reconciliation through greater Indigenous access to capital, resources and opportunities; climate justice measures that recognize unequal responsibility for environmental damage; and debt cancellation for debts incurred by governments without the consent of their people.

As journalist Nick Romeo has documented, alternative economic models already exist across the globe.

Please do read the entire article, because there is a lot more valuable information which I have not quoted above. And if you want to read more of Junaid’s work, I recommend starting with another article he wrote for The Conservation over a year ago, and which I promoted in an article linked below.

In closing, I want to thank all of my paid subscribers for their subscriptions, and to encourage the rest of you to also consider paid subscriptions. I love to do research, but I also enjoy paying my bills, so a paid subscription would be very helpful in ensuring I can accomplish both.

I just finished reading an interesting article written by Adrian Morrow and Mark Rendell for The Globe and Mail in which the authors report the following:

Trade negotiators are reviving a proposal that would see Canadian steel and aluminum exports subject to a quota system in return for lower U.S. levies on the metals, as the clock ticks down on President Donald Trump’s next round of tariffs.

Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Janice Charette, Canada’s chief negotiator, jetted to Washington on Tuesday for the second time in as many weeks as the pressure ramps up to make a breakthrough in stalled trade talks.

…

One key to the discussions, according to four industry and two government sources, is a plan under which Canadian metals shipments to the U.S. would be limited in exchange for Mr. Trump reducing his 50-per-cent tariffs on them, similar to a proposal on the table last fall.

…

Under the framework, Canadian steel and aluminum would be subject to tariff rate quotas, or TRQs, the sources said. This would mean that only a certain amount of the Canadian metals could be exported to the U.S. before an exorbitant tariff would take effect.

Two U.S. industry sources said negotiators are still haggling over what the quotas should be and, in the case of steel, whether there should also be a lower tariff on steel sold below the quota.

In exchange, Canada would see Mr. Trump’s metals tariffs, imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, reduced for exports under the quota limit. Such an agreement could help achieve Canada’s central negotiating goal of easing the pain for key industrial sectors while breaking the logjam on other trade issues.

Economists call these export quotas Voluntary Export Restraints (VERs), and they are not much different from import quotas in terms of their economic effects on the importing country. However, there are still key differences which could make the exporting country even worse off than under an import tariff or import quota, and which also could make the exporting country better off than under these alternatives.

Let me explain.1

Import Quotas

An import quota is a limit on the quantity of a good that can be produced abroad and sold domestically. The WTO opposes them because tariffs are far more transparent in their application, less intrusive in the market, and less of an impediment to changing competitive conditions. Nonetheless, they still exist because:

• Not all countries are members of the WTO, and they do not want to be members. Why? Because an import quota can help them deal with problems of getting enough foreign exchange to pay for imports, so they restrict imports to conserve foreign exchange.

• New WTO members can keep their import quotas for a certain amount of time — a transition period, such as 15 years for Mexico when it joined the GATT in 1986.

In the context of Trump’s trade war against Canada, rather than impose a tariff where there is uncertainty regarding how much imports from Canada will actually fall, the U.S. could instead impose a quota on how much it imports.

In other words, rather than setting a tax (price increase) on imports and letting the market determine the quantity of them, the U.S. would set the quantity of imports and let the market determine the price.

As with import tariffs, import quotas generally benefit domestic producers at the expense of domestic consumers, because they raise the price of the targeted goods whether the source is domestic or foreign.

To further demonstrate the effects of import quotas on both the domestic and foreign economy, please see Figure 1 below where I assume two countries — the U.S. and Canada — and the U.S. levies an import quota on steel coming from Canada.

To make the analysis as easy as possible — without affecting the point of this exercise — the U.S. begins at the free-trade equilibrium where price is P_WORLD. At this point, U.S. consumers buy Q₂ units of steel and U.S. producers sell Q₁ units of steel, and the difference (Q₂ – Q₁) is imported from Canada.

The U.S. then sets an import quota on Canadian steel, which causes the world price to fall because their business is important to Canadian steel producers, so we will lower our price of steel to P₂ to lessen the harm of the quota on us.

Note that the more important is U.S. business to Canadian steel producers, the lower the world price will fall. If the U.S. is really super important to Canada, then the price will fall by so much that Canada will incur the entire burden of the import quota.

On the other hand, if the U.S. is entirely meaningless to the Canadian steel market, then the world price will not fall at all, and the U.S. will bear the entire burden of the import quota.

Realistically, we are both important to each other — no matter what the MAGAts say — so I assume the world price only falls enough for the two countries to share the burden of the import quota.

Now, how do we determine the new amount of imports, as well as the new domestic U.S. price of steel? This time, we actually draw a new supply curve that is also “kinky”, and this kinked supply curve is explained as follows:

• The quota will cause the domestic supply curve to shift right because there is now a maximum amount that the U.S. can import of the good — there would be no shift of any curve for import tariffs, export taxes, or export subsidies as the U.S. government would not be explicitly limiting supply. The market could still supply whatever it wanted under the conditions set.

• However, it will only shift at prices on or above the new world price, because if the domestic price is lower than the world price then we will not want to import any automobiles at all.

• The new domestic U.S. price (P₁) is determined by the intersection of the demand curve and the total supply curve: domestic supply + import supply. Consequently, U.S. consumers buy the amount where that price intersects the demand curve (Q₄) and U.S. producers sell the amount where that price intersects the domestic supply curve (Q₃), since they still operate on that supply curve. The difference (Q₄ - Q₃) is imported from Canada, which is lower than the amount imported without the quota (as intended).

Now, how does the import quota affect U.S. consumers, producers, the government, and the economy as a whole?

1. Since consumer surplus is represented by the entire area below the demand curve and above the price, it falls by Areas (a+b+c’+c”+d). In other words, the import quota harms U.S. consumers because they must pay more for less (Q₄) steel. However, the more important is U.S. business to Canadian steel producers, the less harm will be done to the U.S. because the world price will fall more.

2. Since producer surplus is represented by the entire area above the supply curve and below the price, it rises by Area (a). In other words, U.S. steel producers benefit from the import quota because they can charge more for more (Q₃) steel. This area also represents a mere transfer of surplus from domestic consumers to domestic producers, since someone still gets the surplus despite the import quota. Furthermore, the more important is U.S. business to Canadian steel producers, the less U.S. producers will benefit from the import quota as the world price will fall more.

3. The U.S. government could also earn revenues on the quota, but that is not necessarily true. That is because the simplest method of imposing the quota is for the government to give quota rights to importers (license holders), so they would be the ones to get these revenues — also known as quota rents. More on that in a moment, but like any other kind of revenue, quota rents are calculated as P*Q, so it is Areas (c’+c”+e’+e”). Areas (c’+c”) is a transfer of surplus from U.S. consumers to the quota license holders. Areas (e’+e”) is a terms of trade gain for these license holders at the expense of the Canadian market because it represents surplus that went to no one in the U.S. under free trade.

4. There are also distortions (deadweight losses) in the economy that amount to losses in consumer surplus which no one in the U.S. gets: Area (b) is called a production distortion because the import quota encourages U.S. steel producers to produce too much for too much. Area (d) is called a consumption distortion because it encourages U.S. steel consumers to consume too little for too much. The more important is U.S. business to Canadian steel producers, the smaller will be these distortions because the world price will fall more.

5. The more important is U.S. business to Canadian steel producers, the greater will be the terms of trade gain, and the smaller will be the distortions. It is therefore conceivable that the U.S. could benefit overall from the import quota when the terms of trade gain outweighs both distortions. Therefore, the optimal import quota is the one that maximizes Areas (e’ + e” - b - d).

Now, you might be asking:

Well, they could technically be anyone. If they are not in the U.S., then the U.S. cannot benefit overall from the import quota as it gets no terms of trade gain to outweigh the distortions; even if the distortions do not exist because the world price falls to entirely put the burden on Canada, then the U.S. is no better or worse off than with free trade.

But to give the quota rights to foreigners would be stupid and would therefore justify voting the government out of office. Nonetheless, I would not put it past Trump to give the quota rights to the Russians.

But I digress.

Anyway, let’s say the license holders are in the U.S.. Then that country can still be better off overall as long as the terms of trade gain outweighs the distortions.

But can the U.S. government instead receive these quota rents? Of course, it can! It could auction off quota rights to the highest bidders, and conceivably then take the entire quota rents represented by Areas (c’+c”+e’+e”). It could then use this revenue to help U.S. citizens harmed by the trade war, although this is Trump so he does not care about them.

However, there is a warning regarding auctioning off these quota rights: potential license holders could waste economic resources in their attempt to get these rights, such as lobbying the government for these rights. Such a waste of resources is known as rent seeking, and represents an additional loss to the economy that no one gets, much like the DWL triangles.

So ignoring rent seeking, we can see the qualitative effects of an import quota are exactly the same as those for a tariff: domestic producers benefit at the expense of domestic consumers, the U.S. government can get revenues from auctioning off quota rights, and there are two DWL triangles representing consumption and production distortions to the U.S. economy.

So why do governments focus more on tariffs than quotas? For one thing, import quotas are illegal under WTO rules primarily because they are more distortionary to the economy than an equivalent tariff. The reasoning is as follows:

• If domestic demand rises — meaning the domestic demand curve shifts right — then the tariff price would remain the same, and our imports can rise to satisfy this increase in demand.

• But with an import quota, imports remain exactly the same, causing the quota price to rise. Consequently, the total welfare losses to the whole economy will become larger as increased demand is met with increased domestic production.

Therefore, this is a dynamic reason why import quotas and tariffs differ.

For these reasons, when countries have historically become members of the WTO, they followed its rules by converting their import quotas — including ones used for agricultural products — to equivalent tariffs.

Let’s now move on to the primary inspiration for this article: Voluntary Export Restraints (VERs) on steel and aluminum.

Voluntary Export Restraints (VERs)

The primary difference between an import quota and a VER is with respect to which country implements it: with an import quota, the importing country restricts imports by a certain amount, while with a VER, the exporting country voluntarily reduces its own exports by a specific amount.

Therefore, there is no need to draw a new graph for a VER because it is exactly the same as for an import quota, with one primary difference: it is practically guaranteed the importing country — in this case, the U.S. — will not get the quota rents, because why would the exporting country ever give us those rents?

So in the context of Trump’s trade war, the Canadian government can voluntarily reduce our exports of steel and aluminum, and auction off the export rights so it can keep the quota rents for itself and then redistribute them to Canadians harmed by the trade restrictions.

I do not know if these rights will be auctioned off by the government, but the fact remains it is possible Canada will be less harmed by a VER than we would be if Trump imposed his own import quotas or tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum. Thus, I give credit to the Carney government for considering VERs in return for lower tariffs, although it needs to be repeated that we can never really trust Trump to honour his end of the bargain.

Where else have VERs been used historically? A significant example involves U.S. trade of automobiles with Japan. In the 1980s when Japan was becoming a much more powerful trading partner with the U.S., the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations were, let’s say troubled by the negative effects of Japanese auto imports on U.S. automakers.

One way to deal with this “problem” is the Trump way: levy tariffs on imports of Japanese automobiles. But both of these Republican presidents might not have wanted to do so, perhaps because U.S. auto consumers — and voters — could more easily figure out who was to blame for rising automobile prices.

So instead, they engaged in occasional negotiations with the Japanese government to convince it to voluntarily reduce its own exports of automobiles to the U.S. — perhaps with the implicit threat that tariffs would otherwise be imposed on Japanese imports.

But it did have its funny moments, too, as during a banquet on January 8, 1992, George H.W. Bush was clearly not feeling well and vomited on the Japanese Prime Minister, Kiichi Miyazawa!

Maybe I should not laugh about it, but I do anyway. I remember it being a source of inspiration for comedians on this side of the world, such as Dana Carvey who regularly impersonated the president on Saturday Night Live.

It also motivated a very funny line from Hank Hill on King of the Hill:

But getting serious again, the VERs actually hurt the U.S. even more in the long run because they motivated Japanese automakers to set up shop in the U.S. to get around the VERs — since their automobiles were then no longer imported.

Moreover, to satisfy the persistently high demand for their automobiles, they also changed their focus away from the cheap cars they previously exported for students, and toward high-quality, feature-laden ones. In other words, the U.S. government’s push for trade restrictions only hurt its own auto industry more.

This just goes to show there are always ways for businesses to get around trade restrictions if they try hard enough. It also supports my argument that Canadian VERs on steel and aluminum are better for Canada than U.S. import tariffs or import quotas on us, but they can also easily be worse for the U.S.

In closing, I want to thank all of my paid subscribers for their subscriptions, and to encourage the rest of you to also consider paid subscriptions. I love to do research, but I also enjoy paying my bills, so a paid subscription would be very helpful in ensuring I can accomplish both.

Last Friday, I did some more door-knocking for the For Alberta, For Canada movement. Most people do not answer their doors — I do not blame them because I also do not answer my door when a stranger knocks — but most people who do open their doors are very nice, even if they tell us they are “uncertain” about how they will vote on October 19. I am grateful for their kindness.

However, one argument I again heard from a few of those Calgarians is they do want Alberta to remain in Canada, but in this fall’s referendum, they want to “send Ottawa a message” by voting for a second referendum. As I argued on Walls and Bridges in the past, the message such a vote would really send is to Alberta businesses, and it is they should “leave Alberta for more certain economic climates”.

The Calgary Chamber of Commerce specifically released the results of a member survey at the end of June in which it found the following:

Calgary, AB, June 24, 2026 – According to a new survey conducted in partnership with Probe Research, nearly half of Calgary Chamber member respondents say they are prepared to leave Alberta and relocate their business to another province if Albertans vote to begin the formal process towards separation from Canada. Only 39 per cent indicate they are unlikely to do so.

To make the message of that survey result absolutely clear, Calgary businesses are not waiting for an actual vote of separation to leave the province. If we vote this fall to even think about separation, they will seriously consider leaving Alberta for more certain economic climates.

Well, this morning I came across a new article published by the Calgary of Chamber of Commerce in which it provided some lessons from the Brexit referendum, which anyone who is even separation-curious should take seriously when considering “sending Ottawa a message” (emphasis added):

Research from the Bank of England found that Brexit became a significant source of uncertainty for approximately 40 per cent of UK businesses, while subsequent analysis estimated that business investment was reduced by roughly 11 per cent in the three years following the referendum. Businesses delayed investment decisions, reconsidered expansion plans and faced unresolved constitutional questions regarding future market access, regulations and labour mobility.

The business response extended beyond delayed investment. According to New Financial, more than 440 banking and financial services firms relocated part of their business, staff, assets or legal entities to the EU following the referendum. These decisions illustrate how businesses often move quickly to manage risk and preserve market access, even before constitutional negotiations are complete.

Importantly, many of these consequences emerged long before the UK formally left the EU. Markets do not wait for constitutional negotiations to conclude before responding; they react to uncertainty when it arises. The referendum result itself created an unclear policy environment, triggering reactions from businesses and investors who were forced to consider multiple possible future outcomes.

…

Brexit demonstrates that governments, financial markets and investors do not interpret referendum results as symbolic gestures. Instead, they evaluate how the outcome could affect future political and economic conditions.

In the end, the Chamber summarizes the whole point nicely (emphasis not added):

The Brexit referendum serves as a reminder that constitutional referendums are not opinion polls. They are powerful political instruments capable of reshaping expectations and influencing economic behaviour. For Alberta’s business community, the central lesson is simple: markets price risk, not intentions.

The Calgary Chamber of Commerce is not a political arm of any party, and it is also not a bunch of uninformed dweebs who do not understand the costs and benefits of separation from Alberta. It is comprised of serious people who own and operate businesses in Alberta’s largest city — roughly 32% of the provincial population — a city which is also the business and economic centre of the province.

If separation was in their best interest, they would know it because their very livelihoods depend on Alberta being strong and prosperous. The fact they are threatening to leave the province if we even think about separation is a powerful indicator that no matter what the conspiracy theorists and nutjobs tell us, turning away from Canada is — to put it lightly — counterproductive.

Before ending this post, I want to direct you to the most recent article written by Jason Markusoff for CBC News, in which he throws some water on the argument that the U.S. will be there for us if we separate — another argument I heard while door-knocking last Friday — and it is not about its proven unreliability on anything:

The vast majority of Alberta crude is shipped through pipelines that cross into the States via other western provinces.

While three of Canada’s six transborder oil pipelines cross into the States directly from Alberta, they account for less than one-tenth of Canada’s total export pipeline capacity. The rest gets shipped through British Columbia and Manitoba.

It’s a more imbalanced map for exports of natural gas, that other major Alberta commodity. No gas pipelines go straight from Alberta into Montana; all U.S. shipments transit through other provinces.

What this means is that Alberta’s biggest economic driver would rely on products transiting through a third country to its biggest customer. That third country would be the one it just exited from, and there won’t be a guarantee Alberta’s resources would get a free ride.

“There would have to be agreements put in place. It would not be uncomplicated,” said Sonya Savage, Alberta’s former energy minister and a former pipeline executive.

Of course, the hardcore separatists will just brush these facts away with insults about being biased and paid off by Justin Trudeau or Jeromy Farkas, as well as questioning one’s credentials as a PhD economist — as they do with any counterargument against them — but people who are on the fence about how to vote this fall are advised to take these facts seriously: Alberta would have a very hard time shipping most of its oil and gas to the U.S. without going through Canada first.

And it is not even a matter of building more pipelines directly to Montana because:

Alberta’s oil and gas export pipelines through other provinces trace back to the original “Mainline” conduits for each commodity. In the 1940s and 1950s, the province was emerging as a major producer of fossil fuels. Canada approved separate oil and gas pipelines that travelled eastbound and then south, to serve both Eastern Canada customers and Americans in the midwest.

Subsequent pipelines followed similar routes, many of them straight to the refining and distribution hubs in places like Chicago and Oklahoma, rather than toward the more sparsely populated Montana, Wyoming and Idaho that sit below Alberta.

“I’m not going to go south into Montana and then cross sort of straight down and then straight across,” [Andrew Leach, an energy economist and University of Alberta law professor] said. “I’m going to go on a diagonal through the prairies where it’s easy to build pipelines.”

…

Energy companies would be highly reluctant to build new pipelines that skirt other provinces for the convenience of a future Alberta, Savage said. Not with a full existing system in place.

“It’s far cheaper to ship it along existing infrastructure than it is to build [new],” she said.

One might argue the new nation of Alberta would have leverage over Canada on both maintaining and increasing this access to the U.S. — and the hardcore separatists do indeed make that argument — but it is a pipe-dream (no pun intended). A common complaint amongst many Albertans is that getting pipelines built is difficult because the federal government is — legally or otherwise — concerned with getting other provinces like British Columbia and Quebec on board, not to mention engaging in meaningful consultation with Indigenous peoples which is legally required. So why would those barriers suddenly go away when Alberta is no longer part of Canada?

In closing, I want to thank all of my paid subscribers for their subscriptions, and to encourage the rest of you to also consider paid subscriptions. I love to do research, but I also enjoy paying my bills, so a paid subscription would be very helpful in ensuring I can accomplish both.

Contrary to popular (separatist) opinion, my research is not funded by either Justin Trudeau or Jeromy Farkas, although if they want to send some cash my way in return for writing what I would write anyway, I will gladly take it! :-)

Given the recent news on air travel, including this morning’s tentative agreement between WestJet and its flight attendants to end their strike, I believe this is a good time to publish the following article which was written by my wife and partner in everything, —with minor input from me — for our Ride On Substack newsletter. We hope you enjoy it!

My experiences of fee changes over the years

In the olden days — say 40 years ago — people were allowed to bring on as much luggage as they wished. A little later, passengers were limited to one check-in bag, one carry-on, and one personal item before having to pay for more than just the ticket price. It then changed again such that the ticket price only included a carry-on and a personal item; you would be charged for even one checked-in piece of luggage. Now, a ticket price only includes a personal item. Anything else is beyond your “basic” ticket item, hence the term “basic fare”.

Why do these changes in their fee structure happen?

There are a multitude of reasons one can deduce. These reasons likely include a significant increase in fuel prices, safety, trying to pay airline staff fair wages in light of rising costs of living, and to reduce the environmental impact of air travel.

Rising fuel prices

As many of us have experienced by going to grocery stores and filling our gas tanks, fuel prices have been rising, thus raising the prices of consumer goods, including basic necessities such as food (Kruszewski, 2024).

The price of fuel impacts airlines in two ways, first by directly increasing the cost to fly a plane, as the fuel needed to operate it now costs substantially more for every trip (Szabo et al., 2018). Second, the increase in fuel prices also increases people’s daily living costs, which means they need to pay airline staff more to help them with their daily living expenses. So airlines want to find a way to cover these extra expenses.

Safety

Additionally, heavier planes make for more dangerous flights (Attaccalite et al., 2012; Boyd, 2016). The weight comes from both passengers and the items they bring with them; since it is easier to control the weight of carry-ons, many airlines focus on encouraging people to limit those things via additional charges.

That said, some airline industries now seem to feel they also must account for people’s weight, despite how it might upset some customers and how controversial this move might be in general (Melis, 2024; Tolkach et al., 2023; Stutter, 2024). For example, some airlines have required people who weigh over a specified amount to pay for two seats.

It was exactly that kind of policy which made news back in 2010 when Southwest Airlines deemed director Kevin Smith “too fat to fly”:

In accordance with Southwest’s “customers of size” policy, Smith had purchased two tickets but then stood by for an earlier flight, which had one seat remaining. That is when the airline forced him off the plane.

Smith was irate, tweeting, “So, @SouthwestAir, go f*** yourself. I broke no regulation, offered no “safety risk” (what, was I gonna roll on a fellow passenger?)”When he later boarded another flight, he posted a picture of himself in the seat, writing, “Hey @SouthwestAir Look how fat I am on your plane! Quick! Throw me off!”

Environmental impacts

Flying has a significantly negative impact on the environment (Cerasi and Yaman, 2024), who argue “baggage free airport terminals are the solution for the goal of sustainable airports.”

Furthermore, the heavier the plane the greater the environmental impact of flying it (Bofinger and Strand, 2013). Why? Because the heavier is a plane the more fuel it will need for take-off and for staying in the air (Tolkach et al., 2023). As Bae (2015) communicates, “Reduced weight can curtail fuel costs, fuel reserves, pollution, and carbon footprint.” In other words, the heavier the plane the greater its emissions, leading to a less environmentally-friendly flight, at least for that one plane ride.

Moreover, Tolkach et al. (2023) cite Melis, Silva, and Yeun (2018) who “suggest that the continuously increasing body weight of air travelers negatively impacts airline economics, travel experience, safety, and the regulatory framework.”

The dilemma

Airlines still want to be able to attract customers, despite rising costs. To do so, they try to keep ticket prices relatively low. At the same time, they want to compensate for the factors mentioned above. This is why they needed to come up with a recourse.

In conclusion

Though some airlines also consider people’s weight in the face of fuel cost and safety issues, to best handle these challenges, they mainly focus on “rewarding” people for limiting the weight they bring on planes with lower base prices (the “carrots”), while adding the “sticks” of added fees for added weight. They also “reward” passengers by keeping prices relatively low when they choose to fly during unpopular hours and/or opt for non-direct flights. The lighter is the plane, the safer and more environmentally friendly is the flight.

In the end, these added fees give people ways to keep their ticket prices lower while offsetting rising costs. Hence, while many fliers might complain about these changes in the fee structure — known by economists as second-degree price discrimination via two-part tariffs — I understand it, even if I still do not particularly like it myself.

As regular readers know, air travel has been one of my favourite topics of research and discussion for more than half my life; most recently, I wrote a short note on the threat of a strike by WestJet flight attendants over the issue of not being paid for the time they work on the ground.

Well, it is no longer a threat, because today they went on strike. As reported this morning by Vanmala Subramaniam for The Globe and Mail:

WestJet flight attendants went on strike early Sunday, after they failed to reach a deal with the airline, causing major travel disruption in the middle of a busy summer long weekend.

Talks between the airline and the Canadian Union of Public Employees broke down late Saturday over the issue of wages and ground pay, which is the amount flight attendants get compensated for the work that they perform before a plane departs, and after it lands.

WestJet confirmed the strike and cancelled more than 300 flights as of early Sunday. The airline said it was disappointed by the strike and remained available for the union to reach an agreement.

While WestJet did make an offer to their employees, the “president of CUPE 8125, the local representing 4,400 WestJet flight attendants, said in a media release that the airline’s latest offer didn’t go far enough.”

Therefore, if you plan on travelling on WestJet in the near future, I recommend you look into making other plans. As I learned in an article written by Ana Pereira and Adshayah Sathiaseelan, and published yesterday in The Independent Free Press, WestJet is offering passengers the ability to change or cancel their flights with no fees, but within specific limits:

WestJet is urging passengers to check the status of their flight before heading to the airport. The airline is allowing passengers travelling between July 30 and Aug. 4 to make a one-time change or cancellation with no fees.

Again, that article was published yesterday, so please continue checking with WestJet to see if that date-limit has been extended to when you will be travelling.

Going back to the article from The Globe and Mail cited above, the federal government might use Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code to order WestJet’s flight attendants back to work, just as it did last summer when Air Canada’s flight attendants went on strike for the same reason. But that does not mean the workers will obey that order:

Last summer, Air Canada flight attendants went on strike over the exact same issue, resulting in hundreds of cancelled flights and days of delays. The flight attendants, also represented by CUPE, defied a back-to-work order issued by the government shortly after the strike began, and chose to unlawfully strike to compel Air Canada to come back to the bargaining table with new language around ground pay.

So far, the federal government has not revealed whether it plans to intervene, but if it does, there are worries it would send a very bad message to employers that there is no need to bargain in good faith with their employees, because the government will come to their aid in the end. In other words, such back-to-work legislation can significantly reduce the bargaining power of any group of airline employees from any Canadian airline both now and in the future, which is exactly why WestJet’s flight attendants have their own strong incentives to ignore any back-to-work legislation:

Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu said in a statement on social media that she was disappointed that no deal could be reached to avoid a disruption, but did not say whether the government planned to intervene.

Unions have been highly critical of the government’s use of Section 107. They say Ottawa’s constant interventions undermine collective bargaining because it creates a loophole that works in favour of the employer and prevents them from proposing the best deal possible.

“I guess we are all waiting to see if 107 will be invoked,” said Larry Savage, professor of labour studies at Brock University. “It has become a backdoor way to neutralize pressure on employers instead of forcing them to bargain in good faith. If Ottawa steps in, the question is whether WestJet attendants will accept it quietly. Given what happened at Air Canada, that would be a risky assumption.”

The other issue that caught my attention lately is Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s desired expansion of the Toronto Island (Billy Bishop) Airport. As reported by Robert Benzie for The Toronto Star — gift link provided by David Akin in his latest news roundup — there has been a lot of controversy over this expansion due to concerns of increased noise, air pollution, and worse gridlock at Lake Shore Boulevard and Bathurst Street. In response to those concerns — and possibly also due to worries “about losing a long-held [Beaches—East York] seat to the New Democrats over the Billy Bishop controversy” — Prime Minister Carney put the kibosh on the expansion.

However, as Benzie further reports, there are some very good reasons to allow this expansion to happen while also addressing the concerns of its opponents, which have been provided by the Competition Bureau:

The independent law enforcement agency that promotes competition in business said “secondary airports like Billy Bishop can provide added capacity and competitive choices” for travellers.

“They can help more airlines serve more cities by offering alternatives to primary airports, like Toronto-Pearson,” the Competition Bureau said in a July 21 submission to the federal government’s public consultation on the proposal.

…

…the Competition Bureau’s submission, which drew upon findings from a study the anti-monopoly agency did on the domestic airline industry last year, insisted Canadian consumers would benefit from an improved island airport.

“Our research shows that the entry of just one new competitor on a route between two cities reduces average airfares by nine per cent,” it said, citing a separate “study of the U.S. airline industry found that airlines invest more in improving on-time performance on more competitive routes because of the greater risk of losing customers to competitors.”

As for how the concerns of opponents to the airport expansion can still be addressed:

“Aircraft limitations are not always set in a flexible manner to allow for new technologies that reduce noise and environmental impacts,” the bureau continued.

“Refocusing these restrictions on noise and environmental limits, rather than specifying which aircraft are permitted, would allow additional aircraft that meet those requirements to use the airport,” it added.

“This approach would continue to manage the airport’s environmental, noise, and urban impacts. This would give airlines greater flexibility in offering air services at Billy Bishop, making the airport a more attractive option for airlines and strengthening its competitive impact on nearby airports.”

…

“We recommend that Transport Canada, and other decision-makers, adopt a technology-neutral approach to aircraft restrictions at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport,” it concluded.

“Being free to serve more passengers more efficiently would make Billy Bishop a more attractive alternative to Toronto-Pearson and other regional airports for some flights.”

To summarize everything above, whether we are talking about an airline employer or people concerned about an airport expansion, the Carney government needs to think carefully about how to respond to their demands for intervention. Actions that might seem best for dealing with the immediate issues might have unintended long-term negative consequences in terms of making businesses more powerful at the expense of their employees and customers.

In closing, I want to thank all of my paid subscribers for their subscriptions, and to encourage the rest of you to also consider paid subscriptions. I love to do research, but I also enjoy paying my bills, so a paid subscription would be very helpful in ensuring I can accomplish both.

At the end of 2024 when I was still processing Donald Trump’s reelection, I wrote an article explaining why an economic union with the U.S. would be a very bad thing. Actually, I said I was “skeptical” of the net-benefits of one, but I was being too kind because it would be disastrous for Canada.

This morning, I was thinking about all of the concessions the Carney government has made to Trump without getting anything in return, and I realized that while we are not officially part of an economic union with the U.S., the more control we give up over our own domestic and foreign policies in the name of keeping the peace and trying to hammer our a trade deal with him, the more we might as well be in one.

Therefore, I want to promote that 2024 article again today. Not only do I still stand behind what I wrote back then, I think my arguments are even stronger today. An economic union was a dumb idea then, and it is an even dumber idea now.