When it comes to the midterm elections south of the border it seems everyone is an expert. The conventional wisdom is that the Democrats are going to sweep both the House and the Senate.

Lots of Canadians are cheering this even though it will have zero impact on us, including when it comes to tariffs.

As I will show below, if the current polling if off by just a little, the outcome could be dramatically different from the current media consensus.

One man who is an expert on this issue is Frank Luntz, a veteran pollster who used to work closely with Republicans but has moved to a less partisan stance of late. He doesn’t see November 3 being great for the Republicans, but he thinks there are too many unknown variables to call it all for the Democrats at this point.

Here he is talking with Major Garrett at CBS News.

Luntz may have started out as a partisan and may still generally support the ideas of the Republican Party, but generally speaking today, he tries to look at the evidence dispassionately and assess the polling and the feeling on the ground. He doesn’t see a clear answer at this point, maybe by the time we get to November 3, we will have a clearer picture.

Democrat pollster worries about overexcited Democrat voters…

Not to lean too heavily on CBS, but Major Garrett also interviewed Democratic pollster Charlotte Swasey about the possibility that pollsters are oversampling Democrats.

It relates back to what Luntz said about the exit polling in 2016, but has now moved into wider polling.

Does that mean pollsters are off?

CNN’s polling guy runs the numbers…

I have to say that Harry Enten, CNN’s Chief Data Analyst, is highly entertaining. He makes breaking down the polls fun.

Before joining CNN, Enten worked at FiveThirtyEight with Nate Silver. That was one of the media outlets stating that Hillary Clinton had a strong likelihood of winning in 2016, though they weren’t claiming the 95% likelihood of winning.

That wasn’t based on polling, it was based on a bad read of the polls.

I remember interviewing Darrell Bricker from Ipsos just ahead of the 2016 vote and predicting on air that Trump would win. Bricker was just there to talk about the numbers, he didn’t disagree, I just had a different interpretation of the polling than most analysts.

I point that out because I think Enten is careful to note that as much as he relies on data, the data could be off. In this video clip, he points out what that would mean if the polls were off by just a bit.

The 218 seats in the House that he mentions, that is the current majority for the Republicans.

Steve Bannon still thinks the Republicans can win…

Personally, I see a path to the Republicans holding the Senate, but holding the House of Representatives will be tougher for them. Not impossible but tougher.

You have redistricting that has happened and so people are running under new boundaries and we don’t know how that will change things.

The Democrats are motivated against Trump, but are they motivated for their side? That’s unclear, there is no Obama type personality drawing everyone in and the Democratic Socialists will turn some Dem voters off.

Trump, whatever you think of him, clearly motivates his base when he campaigns, which he is doing now.

In the weekend interview with Ted Koppel on CBS, Bannon laid out how he can see his side winning.

It’s not an easy road but…

For both sides, turnout matters…

A truism in politics is that the side that shows up wins.

Voter turnout in American presidential elections isn’t great. In 2020 the 66.4% turnout rate was the highest since 1908.

Strangely in the 2022 midterms, turnout dropped down to 46.1%.

In 2024, 64% of voters showed up to cast a ballot, the second highest tied with 1964. Don’t expect 64% turnout on November 3, the question is will it be as high as 50% like in 2018 or drop closer to 40% which would likely favour Republicans.

So what does all of this mean for the midterms this year?

Trump clearly has problems with some in his own party and independents due to issues like the war with Iran. The Democrats have problems with not having a clear leader or message other than being against Trump.

Just like Republicans can’t just scream “Socialist!” and expect to beat the Democrats, they can’t expect to yell”Trump!” and beat the Republicans.

It’s not clear either side has positive motivation to get their side out to the polls.

What’s the point here…

I’m not pointing to this possibility of the Republicans doing better than expected because I’m cheering for it. You can listen to my comments going back nearly a decade that when it comes to how Canada is treated, I don’t think Republicans or Democrats are good for us.

Once upon a time, Democrats were antagonistic against us on trade and Republicans were our friends. Not that you would ever know this from our media portrayals of the two parties - in Canada’s MSM Republicans are always the devil and Democrats are always the saints.

My point is, this feels like 2016 again where people are going overboard in saying that a Blue Wave for the Democrats is certain. That could very well happen, but I still think it is still too close.

The reality is, neither party is popular with the leadership of both parties according to Real Clear Politics.

A final thought for Canada…

I know for most of you reading this, you understand at this point that even if the Democrats do take the House and the Senate, it won’t matter for Canada and trade. There are a remarkable number of Canadians, including smart people, who think that Trump losing in the midterms changes the tariff issue for Canada.

The tariffs having the biggest impact on Canada are Section 232 tariffs under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

Those will not be touched by the midterms.

The Democrats could win every seat up for grabs in both houses and they would still have trouble peeling back the power Congress gave the President decades ago.

On a whole host of issues, I’m more aligned with the entrepreneurial, risk taking ethos you find in Alberta than the risk adverse view you find in too much of Eastern and Central Canada.

I should have asked Danielle Smith to swear me in as an Albertan during our interview late Thursday.

If I were an Albertan voting in the referendum that is coming up on Monday, I’d be voting YES to the nine and voting Option 1 on the independence question, meaning stay in Canada.

If you aren’t familiar with the other nine questions on the ballot, you can read them all here. Basically though, there are five questions that touch on immigration, four on constitutional issues like appointing judges and abolishing the Senate and then of course the tenth question on whether to have a binding referendum on leaving Canada.

Most of our discussion focused on the nine questions, the ones Mark Carney is now telling people to vote against. It’s an odd position for him to take at the last moment, but perhaps he was just caught up in the moment.

I appreciate Carney, just as I appreciate Poilievre, lending their voices to the call for Alberta to stay.

That said, if we want Alberta to stay and not have the separatist argument come back again and again, we need to do the hard work of addressing legitimate grievances.

Despite some rhetoric, I’m not sure we are there yet.

That was a big part of my column in the Toronto Sun today.

This is an auto-generated transcript that has not been edited

Danielle Smith on Alberta’s Referendum Questions, Immigration and Separation

Brian Lilley:
Alberta votes in its major referendum this coming Monday, with advance voting underway now through Saturday. And there’s more than just a question about Alberta independence on the ballot.

I’m Brian Lilley, political columnist with the Toronto Sun. Albertans will face 10 questions when they cast their ballots. Five deal primarily with immigration, four address constitutional reform, and then there’s the big one: should Alberta begin the process that could lead to a binding referendum on leaving Canada and becoming an independent country?

The woman at the centre of it all is Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. She’s been campaigning for some of the questions, but not for the independence option.

Premier Smith, thanks for joining me.

Danielle Smith:
Hi Brian. I’ve been very clear: I voted for Option 1, to remain in Canada, and I’ve been asking Albertans to vote “yes” to the remaining nine questions so we have a strong mandate to pursue greater autonomy.

Why Nine Government Questions?

Brian Lilley:
Let’s get to Question 10 in a moment. Why the other nine questions? Were they already planned before the separation question emerged?

Danielle Smith:
Actually, it’s the other way around.

The nine government questions came out of our Alberta Next panel discussions a couple of years ago. We knew there was a great deal of frustration during the Trudeau years, particularly when the NDP held the balance of power. Albertans were asking how we could achieve greater autonomy through changes involving the Senate, the judiciary, federal spending, and federal legislation in areas of provincial jurisdiction.

There were also concerns about the complete reversal of roughly 40 years of immigration policy beginning in 2023. In fact, the C.D. Howe Institute released a report on that issue today.

Those nine questions originate from government consultations.

The tenth question came about through a citizen-initiative process. Under Alberta law, if enough people sign a petition, the government is obliged to put the question on a ballot. About 400,000 people signed one petition seeking a vote to remain in Canada, while roughly 300,000 signed another seeking a path toward a binding referendum.

That’s how Question 10 got on the ballot. It’s now up to Albertans to tell us which direction they want the government to take.

I’ve voted for Option 1, to remain in Canada, and I hope others will too.

Immigration and Quebec-Style Powers

Brian Lilley:
Question 1 is perhaps the biggest of the immigration questions:

“Do you support the Government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration and giving Albertans first priority on new employment opportunities?”

Quebec already has significant authority over immigration. Are you simply asking for treatment similar to Quebec’s?

Danielle Smith:
Very much so.

I watched with interest as immigration became one of the central issues in Quebec’s provincial debate. I also noted that one of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first actions was recognizing that several immigration programs had become unsustainable and needed to be scaled back.

What we’re trying to prevent is a repeat of the uncontrolled growth in immigration that occurred in the years following COVID.

The way to do that is to return to the model that served Canada well for decades: selecting newcomers based on whether they have a job and whether that job fills a genuine economic need. Someone arriving with a well-paying job is already positioned for success and may eventually pursue citizenship.

Quebec has had authority over economic immigration since 1991. We’re seeking a mandate to negotiate something similar with the federal government.

Strain on Provincial Services

Brian Lilley:
The immigration system reached unprecedented levels. In 2023, Canada admitted roughly 2.2 million people across all streams when you include permanent residents, asylum seekers, temporary foreign workers and international students. Historically, the total was closer to 750,000.

Questions about residency requirements and requiring some non-citizens to pay for access to services like health care seem connected to those pressures. Was Alberta feeling the strain?

Danielle Smith:
Absolutely.

We assessed the impact of temporary foreign workers in Alberta. We currently have about 246,000 temporary workers, up from roughly 80,000 several years ago.

The analysis showed they generated approximately $150 million in provincial revenue while the province spent about $1 billion on health care and education for them and their families.

That’s not how the temporary worker program was intended to function.

Temporary workers are supposed to come temporarily to fill a labour shortage. Instead, low-skill workers were increasingly admitted and many brought family members, creating costs the system wasn’t designed to absorb.

The original model worked well for industries such as agriculture and tourism, where seasonal workers come for a specific purpose and then return home.

For other jobs, we should first ensure opportunities go to young Albertans and Canadians. Only after that should employers turn to foreign labour for genuine shortages.

There’s also nothing unusual about asking temporary residents to provide their own health coverage. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia and South Korea already do that.

Given the imbalance we’re seeing, Alberta taxpayers shouldn’t be expected to shoulder those additional costs indefinitely.

International Students and Diploma Mills

Brian Lilley:
The Trudeau government also removed many of the restrictions around international students.

Danielle Smith:
Exactly.

We saw a proliferation of fly-by-night private colleges, many of which are now being shut down. Some became diploma mills offering programs that provided little path to employment.

That’s unfair to newcomers who came here expecting better opportunities.

A lot of poor practices developed during that period. We’re simply saying we should return to the kind of system that served Canada well for decades while strengthening oversight of temporary programs.

Constitutional Reform and the Courts

Brian Lilley:
Prime Minister Mark Carney has publicly opposed not only Alberta separation but also the nine other referendum questions.

Did it surprise you that he weighed in against the broader package?

Danielle Smith:
It did, but I’m a pretty persuasive person.

There have been times when the Prime Minister and I disagreed and I was able to convince him to reconsider.

I don’t think it’s sustainable to allow Quebec significantly more authority over immigration while denying similar discussions with other provinces.

If Albertans provide a strong mandate, I intend to have a serious conversation with the Prime Minister about that.

As for the constitutional questions, some amendments would require unanimous provincial consent and others would require support from seven provinces. Alberta can’t do it alone.

The Prime Minister has made his position clear, but it won’t be entirely up to him. Other provinces will have a say, and we’ve already had constructive conversations about provincial jurisdiction, federal spending and judicial appointments.

The Senate may be a tougher challenge.

Judicial Appointments

Brian Lilley:
Let’s focus on the courts. Provincial governments appoint judges at lower court levels while Ottawa appoints judges to higher courts. Are you looking for full authority or simply a formal advisory role?

Danielle Smith:
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Alberta to have a much larger role in selecting judges who serve Albertans.

Initially, Ottawa wasn’t interested in a collaborative process. However, Alberta recently had two higher-court vacancies, and we ultimately reached consensus on both appointments.

To me, that’s encouraging. If provincial and federal governments from different political traditions can agree on strong candidates, that’s good evidence of an independent process.

If we can formalize that approach, great. If not, then we’ll continue pursuing constitutional change. Alberta and Quebec have both raised the issue and we’ll see what sort of mandate Albertans provide.

The Senate

Brian Lilley:
Alberta has six senators representing more than five million people. Atlantic Canada, with a much smaller population, has 30 senators.

Stephen Harper spent years trying to reform the Senate and was unsuccessful. Is that frustration why you’re now raising abolition as an option?

Danielle Smith:
I think people see the basic unfairness of the arrangement.

How is it that provinces like Nova Scotia and New Brunswick each have 10 senators while Alberta, with more than five million people, has six?

Albertans also question whether senators appointed by a Liberal government always represent Alberta’s interests or those of the government that appointed them.

After years of unsuccessful attempts to pursue a Triple-E Senate that would be equal, elected and effective, many people have become frustrated.

This referendum will help tell us whether Albertans still want Senate reform or whether they believe strong provincial governments are the better way to defend regional interests.

I don’t know what Albertans will choose, but that’s why we’re putting the question before them.

Why Stay in Canada?

Brian Lilley:
As I told your chief of staff, if I lived in Alberta, I’d vote yes on the first nine questions and no on the tenth.

You’ve spoken to people on both sides. What’s your elevator pitch to someone who is considering Alberta independence?

Danielle Smith:
First, it’s important to understand that Option 1 is to remain in Canada. Option 2 begins a legal pathway that could eventually lead to a binding referendum.

I’ve voted for Option 1 and I’m asking Albertans to do the same.

There were legitimate grievances during the Trudeau years. No question about that. Separatist sentiment rose higher than I’ve ever seen, reaching as much as 45 per cent in some polling.

When Prime Minister Carney was elected, one of the first things I told him was that these concerns had to be addressed.

While we haven’t achieved everything we want, we’ve made meaningful progress. We’ve seen significant federal policy reversals and a willingness to engage.

That tells me the federation can work. Federal and provincial governments can disagree, negotiate and find compromises.

I want to continue doing that. Let’s remain in Canada while securing greater autonomy for Alberta.

Are You a Separatist?

Brian Lilley:
In central and eastern Canada, some media outlets portray you as a separatist. I’ve known you for more than 15 years and have never gotten that impression.

Why do you think that perception exists?

Danielle Smith:
I think some people misunderstand our laws.

There seems to be an expectation that I should have ignored legislation and ignored valid petitions. That’s not how I operate. If the law exists, governments should follow it.

Brian Lilley:
Critics would argue that you lowered the threshold for citizen initiatives, making this easier.

Danielle Smith:
Both petitions would have qualified under the old threshold as well.

One obtained about 400,000 signatures. The other obtained roughly 300,000. Neither would have had any trouble meeting the previous requirements.

Other petitions failed to qualify, including one related to independent schools and another related to coal development.

When 700,000 people collectively sign petitions asking questions to be put before voters, government has an obligation to provide a mechanism to do so.

Citizen-initiated ballots are common in parts of the United States. California alone has had hundreds dating back to 1911.

In Alberta, the threshold is actually higher than California’s. California requires signatures equal to five per cent of voters; Alberta requires 10 per cent.

Whenever I give speeches, I stand in front of both the Canadian and Alberta flags. I wear a Canada-Alberta pin. For months I’ve been telling Albertans to vote to remain in Canada while giving us a strong mandate for greater autonomy within Canada.

This ridiculous claim is being made by people upset at Prime Minister Mark Carney posting about the anniversary on X Tuesday afternoon.

Was this post political?

Absolutely.

Is it still relevant for Canadians?

You bet your life on it.

Brock wasn’t just a British general, he led a force of British regulars, Canadian militia and Indigenous allies. He died leading the defence of Upper Canada against an American invasion at Queenston Heights. If that battle had gone the other way, Canadian history might have unfolded very differently indeed.

Back in 2012, when the Harper government decided to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, it was Liberal supporters, New Democrats and, of course, the Bloc Québécois all claiming that this war had nothing to do with us. Now, because the person posting the figurine of General Brock is a Liberal PM, we have Conservatives reaching for the smelling salts.

I’m sorry, but we don’t change what is, or is not, our history based on which party is in power.

Those claiming that anything that happened before July 1, 1867, wasn’t Canadian history have no real sense of history. That date is when Canada became a confederation, the Dominion of Canada, not the date that Canadian history began.

No one suggests that American history began in 1789 when the Constitution took effect or that British history started when the United Kingdom was formed in 1707. Nations have histories before they become the countries we recognize today.

Our history stretches back through the centuries...

Just as the War of 1812 is Canadian history, so too is the Seven Years’ War, which saw Quebec transfer from French to British control. The American Revolution is Canadian history as well, given that the Quebec Act, a result of the Seven Years’ War, was one of the reasons for the revolution.

The La Vérendrye brothers, thought to be the first people of European descent to see the Rocky Mountains, also mapped out much of the Northern Plains in what are now North Dakota, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Their voyages in the 1740s are part of Canadian history.

The arrival of John Cabot and Jacques Cartier on the shores of this great land are part of Canadian history, even though Cabot landed in Newfoundland in 1497 and Cartier in Quebec in 1534. Cabot was 370 years before Confederation and Cartier was 333 years before we became a Dominion.

We had the Norse settlement in Vinland sometime around 1021, and that too is Canadian history.

We can say the same for the centuries of Indigenous history, much of it not recorded, but what we do know of it is still Canadian history.

We came from a people, or peoples, and became Canadians...

The idea that Canada magically happened on July 1, 1867, and that anything before that is not Canadian history is ridiculous. Yet it’s something I’ve been fighting for years, and it is always motivated by partisanship and/or ignorance.

I have a very thick book that sits behind me on my bookshelf called Canada’s Founding Debates. It documents the debates that were held in the colonial legislatures from Newfoundland to British Columbia on joining, or rejecting, Confederation.

These debates happened because of the inheritance of the Westminster system of government that we adopted from Britain. Yes, we were a British colony, and part of the country was a French colony before that, but that legacy of democracy is also part of our history.

It is remarkable to sit in Parliament, as I have done, and listen to the Speaker read out rulings that invoke the English Bill of Rights of 1689 as a foundational constitutional document for Canada.

We trace our fight for democracy, for representative government, back to the Magna Carta and the nobles forcing King John to sign it at Runnymede in 1215. No, that didn’t happen in Canada, but what happened in the meadows on that June day 811 years ago informs how we govern ourselves today.

Canadian history is rich, it is complex, and it is about so much more than what has happened since Dominion Day in 1867.

Embrace it, learn it, celebrate it.

Because if we can’t agree on our own history, we’re going to have a hard time agreeing on our future.

That they are willing to speak to a figure seen as so “controversial” or “divisive” by the establishment tells you that things have changed in the Bari Weiss era at CBS.

Weiss, the former New York Times writer, turned founder of the Free Press and now head of CBS News is often portrayed as taking all of these news outlets to the right. I’d disagree with that, I think she’s shifting the media she works with back to the middle and speaking to more than just a liberal Democrat audience.

I met Weiss briefly when she gave a talk to a small group in Toronto more than a year ago. She’s very much a liberal in the classical sense, but also believes in open dialogue which is what I think you get in this full interview.

Don’t get me wrong, this interview isn’t a free pass for Bannon and his MAGA views. Koppel pushes back and gives his own opinions, which are clearly, in some areas, at odds with Bannon’s.

Koppel seems at ease talking with Bannon, though, and they have the kind of discussion that we should have more of. They are exchanging views, debating, exploring and discussing what is happening in the body politic of the United States at a pivotal time.

Things are changing in American politics.

There has been a lot of ink spilled about the impact of MAGA on the Republican Party, the split between MAGA/MAHA Republicans and the establishment. Bannon understands these divides well and makes the case for his own brand of populist, nationalist, right-wing politics.

He also understands what is happening on the left side of the political spectrum.

While less media time, outside of Fox News, has been spent on the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America within the Democratic Party, they too are seeing a divide. Bannon, as a keen watcher of politics, understands why someone like Zohran Mamdani was able to win New York City’s mayoral race when the establishment wrote him off.

He put it all down to ground game and getting out the vote, which is what he says the midterms will be about.

The way Bannon sees it, both parties are heading in populist directions.

The reason Bannon is interesting to listen to, whether you agree with him or not, is because he takes policy seriously and isn’t dismissive of his opponents. He also still has clout in the MAGA movement and gives you insight into how they view things and why, something you won’t get from most of the mainstream media in Canada or the United States.

As I’ve long said, to deal with someone, you have to understand where they are coming from. That includes Canadians listening to people like Bannon as we try to figure out how to get a better trade deal.

Remember when that was a thing that the Carney government talked about?

About Canada...

Yes, of course Canada and the tariff war came up in the conversation, but not as much as I expected. Being a former naval guy, Bannon, not surprisingly, pivoted this all back to defence rather than trade, though it is important to remember that for much of MAGA, the two issues are highly connected.

A couple of the ideas that Bannon expressed to me back in February 2025, when I interviewed him at the same location as Koppel, resurfaced in this interview. He spoke of hemispheric defence, of Canada’s Arctic being our soft underbelly instead of our bulwark.

Most people listening to his comments on Canada in this interview will pay attention to his comments on tariffs and unfair trade. What caught my ear was what China or Russia might do to us: what Russia did to Ukraine, simply seizing territory.

“The Canadians should be very concerned that their northern border, which used to be their bulwark for security, could put them in a situation like Ukraine. That the Chinese and/or the Russians could take a bite and say, ‘Hey, look, you know, we’ve got it. You take it from us,’” Bannon said.

Given the way those two countries operate, it’s not a crazy idea. Mark Carney, though, is busy reviewing plans for a possible American invasion, and The Globe and Mail is publishing opinion pieces about non-violent resistance forces being used to counter a looming American invasion.

Yet the Canadian establishment will tell you Bannon is the crazy one.

It’s interesting to go back and watch my interview with him from nearly two years ago and see how consistent he has been on some of these issues.

That would be the one that Martin lost to Stephen Harper.

It’s been well established that Eby didn’t need to call the election when he did. The man still had two years left on his mandate, three if he wanted to ignore the fixed election date and just go by the Constitution, which requires an election within five years of the last one.

Instead, Eby called an early vote.

He was the one in charge. He was the only one who knew for sure that this was coming, and still he had no plan.

When the campaign started, he tried claiming he needed to call the vote to protect British Columbians from Donald Trump. Voters saw past that and realized it was all about him taking advantage of his opposition being in disarray.

Since then, he’s tried to claim the opposition is unfit to win the election because they only have an interim leader, a problem created by Eby calling the election about 48 hours after B.C. Conservative Leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay resigned. He’s also complained about long wait times for surgeries, if only he knew someone who could fix that, and recently took a beating over his use of the failing $10-a-day childcare system.

Winning campaigns generally have a solid plan and a narrative. Losing campaigns have neither.

Eby’s campaign is in the latter category.

Good campaigns and bad campaigns…

A good campaign has a plan, it has strategy, it has implementation.

Think Stephen Harper in 2005-06 and 2011. Think Doug Ford in 2022 and 2025, or Justin Trudeau in 2015.

Though luck and voter emotions can often have a lot to do with it.

Speak to anyone on Trudeau’s 2015 campaign. They certainly didn’t set out thinking they would win. They were hoping for a solid third place and maybe, if they were lucky, Official Opposition.

Still, they started out the campaign with a set of policy ideas, with a plan to put them before the public, and a narrative they hoped they could sell. Like Trudeau and his 2015 campaign or not, it had elements of success, just like Harper’s winning campaign and Ford’s winning campaigns.

Eby has none of that in this election and looks lost and desperate.

This is why I compare him to Paul Martin circa 2005-06.

Martin, the juggernaut that wasn’t….

When I arrived on Parliament Hill full-time in 2005, it was less than a year after Martin had won his minority government in 2004. That was the election where he was supposed to win the biggest majority ever and failed to do so.

That didn’t deter Martin’s cheerleaders in the Parliamentary Press Gallery and, when I arrived there in March 2005, I listened to all the members of the smart set, the folks I read in the newspaper and watched on TV, as they told me Harper would never be PM and Martin would sweep the election after engineering his own defeat.

That’s what they were still saying when the Conservatives, Bloc and NDP united to defeat the Martin government in November 2005. These were folks weaned on all the latest leaks from the geniuses in Martin’s PMO and his then-unofficial PMO, the lobbying firm Earnscliffe.

As the election was called, the one we’d been reassured by the smart set that Martin and his team were ready for, the Liberals held a fancy kick-off in a bar in Ottawa’s ByWard Market and then loaded us on the campaign buses and headed for Montreal. We then spent several days with not much to do as Martin spent time on friendly territory in Montreal, a place he shouldn’t have had to campaign in.

The problem was, Martin’s team had no plan.

As journalists cooled their heels at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, his staff was reaching out looking for locations for events. They scrambled to put together news conferences and rallies that made it look like they had a plan when they didn’t.

After a time, we headed out from Montreal to Toronto and suddenly had a pit stop in Cornwall.

There was a rally, a completely inappropriate one in a Catholic high school where students, egged on by their teachers, cheered on the Liberal PM. I spotted an old colleague who was in charge of PR for the board and walked over and asked him when this event was arranged.

He told me they had called earlier that day to ask if they could stage an event.

The campaign had no plan. It had no narrative. It was pure bedlam.

I may be watching from afar, but that is how Eby’s campaign in B.C. feels at the moment.

Politically, she’s been affiliated with the left over her academic career but she absolutely reject the censorship that the left has embraces, wants nothing to do with the wok movement, has studied and written on what she calls the aboriginal industrial complex and generally speaks her mind without fear.

She once would have described herself as embracing historical materialism, which centres around class, but has rejected Marxism. The last several years of being cancelled though has set her on a bit of a journey.

I’ve met Frances a few times now including when I was speaking at the George Jonas Freedom Awards for the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms where she was honoured.

This week, after she launched a lawsuit against the University of Lethbridge, I had her on the Full Comment Podcast to discuss the legal action and her fight for freedom of speech.

Here’s a brief clip from our chat on how universities are not performing their duties as they should anymore and have instead embraced authoritarianism.

And here is the full podcast. Listen here or where ever you get your podcasts including on Apple or Spotify.

From the official show notes:

Frances Widdowson was fired from her tenured professorship at a Calgary university after criticizing Black Lives Matter. She has been arrested on other campuses when she tried to engage students in debates about residential schools. Now she’s suing one university for $3 million, alleging it defamed her by accusing her of spreading hate and disinformation. She tells Brian she won’t be stopped because she believes she’s doing what academics are supposed to do: research, question and argue to get at the truth. And she explains why she believes so many professors and universities have betrayed that responsibility by pursuing ideological activism — or worse, by meekly surrendering what they really believe and submitting to woke repression. (Recorded October 7, 2026)

Trump is buying Russian diesel and not Canadian, what a jerk.

That’s what I kept hearing on Saturday. I really wasn’t paying a ton of attention to the news over the past few days. Trying to enjoy Thanksgiving and taking in my nephew’s 10th birthday party were more important to me than whatever was happening with Trump.

We all need a break now and again, and this was mine.

But Trump kept coming up. My brief forays online were filled with similar comments.

So what was really going on?

The trouble with figuring out what is going on when there is a Trump controversy is that so many people go over the top, including Trump himself. DJT makes an over-the-top comment, the media and/or his adversaries exaggerate what he said, and sorting truth from fiction becomes difficult.

That’s the case here.

On Friday, Trump made an announcement that was portrayed in many media outlets as the United States buying Russian diesel. This was paired alongside Trump’s recent decision to allow the import of 30,000 tonnes of potash from Belarus as a rejection of Canada.

What’s the truth?

Well, it’s a lot more nuanced. When you understand the full story, Trump is still being a jerk, especially to Ukraine, but there is no rejection of Canada.

Is the United States buying Russian diesel…

Maybe, but not necessarily.

What Trump actually announced was that he was lifting sanctions on Russian diesel entering global markets. His only real reason for doing this is that the price of diesel is so high it’s impacting the American economy. Heck, it’s impacting the world economy and could hurt him in the midterms.

So Trump made a move to try and lower the price by reducing restrictions on the export of Russian diesel.

“I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter,” Trump posted to Truth Social.

Here’s the full Truth Social post.

A little perspective goes a long way…

To put all this in perspective, 300,000 tonnes of diesel works out to about 2.2 million barrels this month. Canada currently sells the United States about 186,000 barrels of diesel per day, or 5.6 million barrels per month, which is roughly 68 million barrels per year.

The Canadian numbers are just exports to the United States. The Russian numbers are exports into the global marketplace, meaning the U.S., but more likely the E.U.

While Europe will denounce the deal, perhaps with reason, it shouldn’t actually comment.

The E.U. still imports about $3.7 billion Canadian worth of Russian energy each month. Most of that is liquefied natural gas; some of it is oil, especially for Hungary and Slovakia.

When the E.U. criticizes any country for enriching Putin and funding his war machine, it rings hollow.

From the German Press Agency DPA:

“Russian strikes killed over 80 Ukrainian civilians in two days. Moreover, it has stepped up its hybrid attacks against Europe, both EU Member States and NATO Allies,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said in a statement on Saturday.

Suspending sanctions on Russian diesel deliveries would give Moscow “more revenues to wage war,” she warned.

“This is not the time to ease pressure on Russia, and Europe won’t.”

I’m not sure how European leaders can say this with a straight face.

Now, Canada could have and should have done its part to lower European reliance on Russia by exporting more of our LNG. We all know, however, that Justin Trudeau said there was no business case for exporting LNG to Europe, even as Germany, Greece and others were begging for it.

Now, American LNG has replaced much of the Russian product, but Putin’s natural gas still accounts for about 15% of the European supply, even as European leaders denounce this deal.

The Europeans were supposed to phase out their reliance on Russian energy, but it looks like that timeline will be extended even as they denounce this deal.

I’m not a fan of Trump easing these restrictions, but this is about global markets and global prices. It has nothing to do with Canada. As for Europe’s protests, give me a break. They are pure hypocrites on this file.

About that potash...

On September 15, the first shipment of potash from Belarus in four years left the Russian port of Bronka and is expected to arrive in New Orleans on Wednesday, October 14.

Prior to 2021, Belarus accounted for about 8% of American potash imports, Russia accounted for 10%, Canada 75%, and the rest came from various countries. When the United States imposed sanctions on Belarus, Canada took up most of that share.

Russian imports to the United States never stopped, even after the invasion of Ukraine.

While Trump is boasting about the potash deal with Belarus, its level of supply is unlikely to go much beyond what it was before the sanctions, but it could end up putting pressure on Canadian companies to lower their prices.

I’m going to shock you all and recommend that you watch Andrew Chang’s explainer for CBC. It does a good job of breaking it down.

Trump may be helping Putin and irritating allies, but Canadians shouldn’t mistake that for a direct attack on our energy or potash exports.

I’ve written about that issue here for the Toronto Sun, talked about it on radio, TV and various videos. It hasn’t gotten the attention that it deserves in the media, but you can bet the Trump administration has noticed the comments.

Here’s part of what Carney said in his recent interview with the New York Times.

Would the global system be in a better position if we had — I’ve long thought this — diversification of reserve currencies? The answer is yes. That would provide more flexibility. If I were the reserve currency, I would want to keep that position for as long as possible, and so I understand the U.S. position there. But, the U.S. wants a weaker dollar, imbalances adjustment and to retain full reserve currency. And ultimately, our view may be wrong about this, but history tells you and logic tells you that rebalancing — yes, it’s partly structural policy in China — but it’s also going to be monetary reform, and that is going to shift reserve currency composition.

The reason this is a problem for Carney is that this is an issue sure to upset both sides of the aisle in Washington. Keeping the Greenback as the global reserve currency is supported by Democrats and Republicans.

The U.S. dollar as global reserve currency is opposed by China, Russia, Iran and the like.

Carney just put us on the side of that rogues gallery.

One of the people who noticed the comments and has concerns on what it means for Canada is Dennis Molinaro, author of Under Assault: Interference and Espionage in China’s Secret War Against Canada.

Molinaro is also Assistant Professor in Security Studies and International Affairs at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

We chatted about Carney’s move and other threats emanating from China.

I hope you like it.

We’ll get to the results, and what they mean in a moment, but let’s talk about the immigration comments that have many people buzzing.

PSPP, as he is known in Quebec, wants to keep immigration numbers low. That’s not unusual in Quebec where they view controlling immigration to be part of protecting their culture.

What is striking about PSPP’s comments here is the way he speaks forcefully but articulately about how wrong the Liberal immigration plan has been. He rightly ties it to the Century Initiative and points out that the Liberals went beyond what even the Century Initiative called for before pulling back.

He states plainly that this was wrong, but also that the government knew what they were doing.

Not sure how old this clip is, but it is fascinating. And in English.

I’ll have more on this in a column for the Toronto Sun tomorrow.

In case you missed it, I spoke with Marc-Olivier Fortin the other day about the Quebec election results and what they mean.

Canada’s worst minister strikes again…

Melanie Joly was awful at Heritage, she was awful at Foreign Affairs and now she’s awful at Industry.

She’s now threatening legal action against Stelco, the Hamilton based steel company that can’t sell steel to the U.S. anymore due to tariffs. She issued a letter telling the company to reverse layoffs within five days or face the full extent of the law.

Here she is boasting about it in the halls of Parliament. Thanks to Western Standard for the video.

The government has mused that they could force the owners of Stelco to sell the company. On Thursday, Mark Carney was asked if the federal government could nationalize Stelco and he wouldn’t rule it out.

Yes, let’s go back to the days of government owning the means of production!

This is all because when Cleveland-Cliffs, an Ohio based steel company, bought Stelco in 2024, part of the agreement with the government was that they kept employment levels the same for five years. Of course, that was before tariffs came into being, effectively blocking Stelco from exporting.

If the government forced a sale, or worse bought the plant, I don’t think they could do any better at making sales. Meaning we’d be mostly stockpiling steel that no one was buying.

This is all political because Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves supports Trump and his tariffs. He’d also like Canada to raise it’s tariffs on Chinese, Turkish and Korean steel.

Which if we did that, would lower if not eliminate the American tariffs on us.

This should all be part of the trade negotiations with the Americans, but we aren’t having talks. Carney would rather keep the fight going with Trump because he knows it excites his Elbows Up base and is good for his polling.

The Elbows Up crowd, mostly retired of course and not worried about losing their jobs, want nothing to do with Trump.

Not even trade talks.

The Europeans are coming, the Europeans are coming…

Mark Carney was talking about a transformative new alliance with the European Union while he was in Sherbrooke, Quebec for an announcement earlier Thursday.

Carney of course announced this new partnership in Europe after denying anything big was coming in Canada. He spoke about it first in the European Parliament.

You’d think with Parliament back he would take the opportunity to brief the House of Commons on the matter. He knows enough about the deal to say it is transformative and he says it will benefit our economy.

Why not update Parliament?

The Canadian one that is.

Seems that Parliament is beneath Carney.

Too often, they are self-serving, partisan, and devoid of content.

After more than 25 years of covering politics, I understand that two of those are prerequisites for political speeches. Still, even when they are delivering a message, I wouldn’t recommend listening to most of them.

This speech by Marco Rubio, the American Secretary of State, is different.

Sure, you could say it is self-serving in that he likely wants to run for president again after Trump. That said, I’m not sure how well a speech about the wonders of Ancient Greece and the debt that all Western democracies owe to antiquity will do in rousing primary voters a year from now.

The reason Rubio’s speech is worth listening to is its call to history, its appeal to what makes Western civilization superior.

Our traditions of individualism, ambition, curiosity, excellence, scientific inquiry, and self-government. It is these traditions, these virtues, that allowed us to build our great civilizations, and it will be these, along with duty, courage, sacrifice, and excellence, that will allow us to preserve them.

We here in Canada are not Americans, but we share that common lineage through Britain, the Enlightenment, Christendom, and back to Ancient Greece that Rubio speaks about.

This speech is a love letter to the foundations of our civilization.

I encourage you to watch the speech below or read the text below.

SECRETARY RUBIO: There are great ruins all across the world. In many cases, they are places where history seems to have exhausted itself: remnants of distant cultures that have long passed beyond living memory.

But the Acropolis is different.

For thousands of years, the civilization that built what stands behind me has captivated the imagination of the Western world. Generations of our statesmen, artists, and philosophers have looked to it – they’ve looked to it with wonder and they’ve looked to it with awe.

Now time has a tendency to dull the senses: great victories and catastrophic defeats, they seem to shrink to becoming like a footnote in a textbook, another fact for our schoolchildren to memorize and forget. But the Greeks of antiquity, they seem to have an almost mystical hold on our memory. They call us back to them, again and again.

480 years before Christ, the armies of Xerxes arrived in this city and they put its sanctuaries to the torch. Most Athenians had by then evacuated by ship to a nearby island. But there was a handful of them that refused to leave their home. So instead, they barricaded themselves in the rocky fortress of the Acropolis to fight an extraordinary last stand, heaving massive stones down the cliffs onto the Persian invaders and holding the greatest empire of the age at bay for days. They were eventually overwhelmed. The Persians plundered the temples, burned the shrines, and razed the Acropolis to the ground but when the Athenians returned, they gathered the broken remains of the old Acropolis and buried them in the hill where it had stood. And decades later, under Pericles, they raised the Parthenon.

For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood. Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow. And the progeny of the men who built it – the sons of Athens and Rome – have carried their civilization with them to the ends of the Earth.

Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American republic halfway across the world from where I stand now – I stand here today as the Secretary of State of that republic, and a great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the new world from Spain – I stand here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space can ever extinguish.

The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity. Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government: in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city. The city where our Constitution was born – Philadelphia – is itself a Greek name.

The men who founded my country were fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours. They were exceptionally well-read in history – they were vividly aware of their unique place in it – but no other age of the past held their attention or their imagination quite like that of antiquity. Many, many people are surprised to learn that the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was not an Enlightenment philosopher or political theorist. No, the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Greece and Rome’s great men.

Now, much has been written and said about the influence of ancient Greece on the ideas of the American Founders – and, for that matter, on all of the Western philosophers and statesmen that preceded them. Most of us are familiar with the basic history. Athens gave us democracy. Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy. Our ideas of law, of virtue, of citizenship, and republican government were shaped in the Greek city-states. Even much of our political vocabulary – words like democracy, tyranny, the word “politics” itself – found its origins here.

Now, all of that is true. But the things we owe to this place – as Americans, and as Westerners – are actually far far deeper. These institutions and ideas – these institutions and ideas were the outward expression of more fundamental qualities we see in the ancient Greeks – qualities that can’t be reduced to any particular political system or theory.

Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory. An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.

These were not just the formulas or precepts of a particular school of philosophy. They were the characteristic of a people – expressed in their traditions, their stories, their imagination; in the qualities they demanded of their citizens; in the things they lived and fought and died for.

To know them is to know ourselves.

What blossomed here in this place was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man. The Greeks did not just shape history; the Greeks gave us history itself. Much about – much of what we know about many ancient civilizations comes almost entirely from the records of Greek explorers and historians, explorers and historians who didn’t just chronicle the histories of their own people, but ventured outwards to observe and record the sagas of foreign peoples and cultures all across the world.

Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward, to chase the thrill and glory of seeing all that was strange and new. It was this trait – it was this trait that would push the West to create and build things that others could not, marking us out from so many other cultures and civilizations where stability and subsistence were the highest ends of life.

But it is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks; it is the conviction that the unknown canbe known. The confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood – and that there is a rational order to the cosmos, governed by certain fundamental laws, laws that men can observe and the mind can come to understand.

This was the foundation of the Western mind: our math, our science, our medicine. Our philosophy, ethics, and religion. It paved the way for the gospel of Jesus Christ to find fertile soil in Europe and flourish into the empire of Christendom. It was the foundation of the riches of Christian theology – of Augustine and Aquinas and the whole tradition of natural law.

It gave birth to a civilization marked not just by a common culture, it was marked by a common anthropology – a common view of man and his place in the universe. Its descendants would share not just the idea of a natural order, but a distinctive understanding of virtue; of destiny and fate; of truth, goodness, and beauty; of a code that dictates how men ought to live; of objective standards and ideals to strive towards.

For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man’s existence. They organized all of civic life around contest, ambition, competition: in philosophy and poetry, in sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and statecraft. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle – to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.

Now I know that to modern ears, what I just described, this way of life, may sound odd; it may even sound cruel. The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.

The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things. The ancient Greek city-states were filled. They were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But from that constant struggle for distinction – from that came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.

The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it – the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride – is the heart of great civilization. And without it? Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.

Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality. Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.

The word “nationalism” became a dirty word. And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history. And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit. In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.

And with every passing year, we seemed to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.

But others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left – the vacuum left behind by our weakness. And as the West’s confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead.

And now, today, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Because the next decade and the decisions we make will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline. We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.

Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice. We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.

We choose to reach for new frontiers: in advanced manufacturing and super intelligence; in drones, weapons, and warfare; in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility. To unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon and launch a new age of exploration in space.

Now for all their lofty ideals, the ancient Greeks were not naive. They understood that nations have interests. They understood that statecraft requires prudence and diplomacy, but they also understood that it requires the ability to wield force when prudence and diplomacy fail. They understood that power requires not only having the means to defend yourself, it requires the credibility that you are willing to use it.

This is the classical understanding of politics and of statecraft that the Trump Administration hopes to reclaim – reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization.

We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago.

There are already signs.

Across this continent, we are witnessing what we hope will be the beginnings of a generational shift: skyrocketing defense spending, a flurry of new partnerships and programs, expanded manufacturing and production, following on the historic defense commitments made last year in The Hague.

Greece has been at the center of this shift. The people of this nation have proved themselves once again to be an indispensable friend to Europe and to the United States alike, on everything from energy to migration to defense, where Greece has been a model ally.

And it’s our sincerest hope that all of Europe will follow your example.

Though passions may, at times, have strained the bonds of affection between the United States and Europe, it must not be allowed to break them. Together, we must strengthen an alliance capable of confronting threats of our age.

And we can. Because we do not believe the transatlantic friendship should be zero sum. Quite the opposite: our vision is of an alliance whose strength is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a vision we saw in action just last month, in an unprecedented new agreement between the United States, Denmark, and Greenland – an agreement that will reshape the Arctic and bolster the security of all of NATO. All three partners in that deal emerged victorious. All of Europe – and NATO and the United States emerged safer, stronger, and more secure because of it.

We want to win together. We must win together.

Now it’s has become fashionable today to believe that enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the global community over one’s own people. And I think here, too, we have much to learn from the men of ancient Greece because they knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests above all else.

They believed – fiercely – in the ideal of the great man: the exceptional individual who obtains immortality through his own deeds. But they believed that glory and fame, those things were won through striving, sacrificing and achieving greatly for something larger than yourself. The recurring hero of the ancient Greek world was the man who was willing to pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.

We see this in Socrates, who refused to abandon the inquiry into truth even at the cost of his own life. We see it in the legendary stand of 300 Spartans – surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by the vast armies of Persia – who refused the chance to save themselves, choosing to fight to the last man rather than abandon their post or abandon their duty. And we see it in the epic myth of Achilles, who is offered the choice to return home and live a long and peaceful life – but chooses instead to remain at Troy and perish in pursuit of eternal glory.

These – these are the qualities that would shape the Western moral imagination. From the Christian martyr who refused to betray his faith to the patriot who gave his life for his country; from Saint Thomas More to the Battle of the Alamo, running through the immortal closing words of the Declaration of Independence of the United States which says, “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

It is from the Greeks that the West inherited its sense of duty – an unbreakable loyalty to one’s code, one’s cause, one’s country. Our heroes, the heroes of the West are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so: the man who is bound by his word, the soldier who will not abandon his post, the captain, the proverbial captain, who goes down with his ship.

This is wholly different from what we see, even now, for example from fanatics like the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes, and portrays martyrdom as an end to itself.

Our heroes – our heroes may be willing to die for their cause; but our heroes do not worship death. It is precisely because we value life that we come to recognize the heroism in those who would sooner sacrifice it than to betray their principles. Now, we take the West’s conception of these things – heroism, honor, duty – we take these things for granted. We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not. They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it. A civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did.

The men who built the Parthenon were succeeded by the architects of European Christendom, who raised the cathedrals of Milan, Cologne, and Florence. The quest to perfect the human form that moved the ancient Greek sculptors found a new expression in Michelangelo. The Greek philosophers’ search for the structure of the universe was inherited by Copernicus, and then Galileo, then Kepler, and in Newton.

The hunger for new knowledge, that’s what gave birth to Magellan’s first expedition around the world, to Columbus’ discovery of the Americas, and ultimately to Apollo 11’s journey to the moon. And the qualities that led Alexander to conquer the entire known world reappeared in Caesar, then Charlemagne, and Cortes.

And in America, that same tradition rediscovered itself anew. An open and wild land became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition. The Greek aspiration for new horizons became the American frontier spirit. The civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire.

The greatest Americans of every generation have carried the unmistakable features of their forefathers – born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom, hardened in the furnace of medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty, and then carried across the Atlantic to be reborn on the shores of a new world.

Together, we must now rediscover that spirit. We are at an inflection point – an inflection point not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization.

The threats we face today are every bit as real as they were on the dramatic stage of antiquity.

National interests did not vanish in the face of international institutions. War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace. Other states continued to arm, to seek influence, to compete for territory, and technology, and resources, and markets, and energy, and power.

And now, there is war again. There is new competition between great powers again. There is vulnerability, aggression, terrorism, a whole universe of new threats and attacks again.

And so we must rebuild our institutions and our alliances to face these threats together – understanding that the purpose of these things is not to abolish the sovereignty of the nations that constitute them; it is to defend them. And that nations need not abandon their distinct identities in order to recognize their common interests.

We have built a model of that with our partners here in Greece. In our defense partnerships, in energy and technology, in our shared ambition to secure Europe’s borders from the threats of mass migration.

Our friendship dates back to the earliest years of my nation. When Greece rose in 1821 to recover its independence after centuries of Ottoman rule, Americans recognized something familiar in that struggle. Three years later, the great American statesman Daniel Webster, he delivered a famous address to Congress, helping bring the cause of the Greek Revolution before the representatives of the young American republic.

And he began by calling their attention to everything around them. This is what he said in his speech; he said:

“This free form of government, this popular assembly… this practice of free debate, and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind… even the edifice in which we assemble, these proportioned columns, this ornamented architecture, all remind us that Greece has existed, and that we, like the rest of mankind, are greatly her debtors.”

Those words are as true today as they were when he said them. And all of us – not just Americans, but Europeans and our friends across the West – must relearn the lessons our forefathers took from this place and from its history.

The history of Greece – the history of Greece does not just offer us a glimpse – it does not offer a glimpse of our institutions in their earliest forms. The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves.

It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes, and that we should be proud – that we should be intensely proud – of where we come from. We should marvel at what our forefathers carved out of this countryside. The story of our civilization is the greatest story ever known to man. And it began here, with the first men and women of the West. From them – from them – we can rediscover the virtues, the courage, and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time.

Thank you.

There’s already been plenty of attention on his comments about thinking about resigning, which we discuss. But I’m more interested in the man and his story.

That’s where we started, how a man from a farm town on the prairies ended up as Canada’s top soldier and what he saw along the way.

Of course, what happened was a big drop in the number of opioid related overdose deaths from 1,874 in 2023 to 1,189 in 2024 as the province made the pivot.

Now, I can reveal in an in-depth piece for the Toronto Sun that the same can be said of Ontario’s pivot. Across the province, opioid overdose deaths have fallen 37.5%, in Toronto where Premier Doug Ford faced the biggest opposition to this move, overdose deaths fell 44%.

Have you heard that anywhere else in the media?

I only ask because if deaths had gone up province wide by 37.5% and 44% in Toronto then it would have been the lead story for every radio and TV newscast, the Star and Globe would have given prime front page treatment and the questions dogging Ford at Queen’s Park would be endless.

Overdose deaths going down doesn’t fit the received narrative of the chattering classes though, so it’s ignored. Most likely because they can’t believe it.

This is all open source information, freely available online. In my column I’ve shared all the links.

Do consider reading it and giving it a share on social media.

Conservative score big in Quebec as PQ wins…

I know the big news is that the Parti Quebecois won the provincial election in Quebec, but what I’m excited for is the win for Eric Duhaime and the Quebec Conservative Party.

The last time anyone was elected to Quebec’s legislature under a Conservative banner was in 1935. Yesterday, Duhaime and his team won 19 seats making them the third party in the legislature and a potential partner for the PQ on economic issues, but not separation.

Why am I so excited?

Eric is an old friend who worked with me at the Sun News Network and wrote columns for years for the Toronto Sun. He’s also a really good guy, smart, principled and hard working.

Here’s my conversation with Marc-Olivier Fortin, a political commentator from Quebec and former VP of the federal Conservative Party.

Last week, a British Columbia Supreme Court judge issued an absolutely ridiculous ruling. She declared that Section 5(2) of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act is invalid and a violation of Sections 7 and 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

To put that in perspective, she declared that dealing fentanyl, meth, crack or any other hard drug was legal. In her view, charging someone for trafficking in these drugs is a violation of your right to life, liberty and security of the person and your right to be equal before the law.

This was all due to a case involving a pair of activists who sourced cocaine, meth and heroin and distributed it, claiming it was “harm reduction” to deal with the opioid crisis. I detailed this court ruling in my Toronto Sun column last Friday and in a video that you can watch below.

To put it bluntly, this decision by Justice Catherine Murray is horseshit and needs to be overturned.

When it is overturned, this Trudeau-appointed judge and former hotshot Crown prosecutor needs to resign. This decision alone shows that Murray has no business being on the bench and hearing serious cases.

She accepted as fact the pronouncements of activist academics and public health officials that these acts were saving lives. As I detailed in my column, at the time this was going on, opioid deaths in B.C. were going up, not down.

No one involved was saving lives; they were pushing ideology.

The same ideology is causing problems well beyond B.C. I’m working on a piece about opioids in Ontario that will be out soon. The numbers will shock anyone who only relies on the mainstream media.

We don’t need more immigration…

I wrote about this on Friday here in the newsletter and returned to the topic today in my Toronto Sun column. Despite what Mark Carney wants to tell the New York Times, we don’t need to start boosting immigration numbers.

Here are some key points from my column today.

Permanent resident numbers for 2025 are still 45% higher than a decade ago, foreign student numbers are up 75% and asylum claims, mostly from economic migrants skipping the line, are up sevenfold compared with a decade ago.

That is after Carney’s so-called immigration cuts.

So much more to say about this.

A brief interruption…

If you like taking cruises for a vacation, you need to pay attention to this.

I mentioned this a few days ago, and I won’t beat you over the head with it, but my brother who is a cruise industry expert. He spent 23 years at sea and has started his own Substack - it’s free - to offer advice on getting the most of your vaction.

My whole family loves cruising. I don’t. But I do get that many of you likely do.

If so, you need to see what David is saying.

Doug Ford was right on Chinese spy cars…

As many of you know, I took a week off in the summer for a vacation in Portugal. It was a lovely trip and I’d recommend Portugal to anyone. Lots of history, great food, beautiful cities and stunning countryside.

While I was there, I drove a Chinese spy car.

It was a BYD EV/hybrid, as were most of the rental cars on offer when I landed in Lisbon. I found it an interesting experiment.

Despite all the hype, I didn’t find the Chinese spy car to be all that it was cracked up to be, but I did see how it could be a spy car. Yes, all cars these days are equipped with cameras, sensors and microphones all over the place.

Not all of them are connected to servers back in China, though.

Last week, Ontario Premier Doug Ford was vindicated over his description of these vehicles as “spy cars”, a term some laughed at. Now, though, we have evidence from a public document put out by the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD, by German intelligence, by the British and Israeli militaries, and by Norwegian researchers about the spying capabilities of Chinese vehicles.

Mark Carney wants more Chinese EVs in Canada. He also says we are the most European of non-European countries.

If Carney wants to be Europe’s closest partner, he should start listening when Europe warns about the risks posed by Chinese vehicles.

Mark Carney went to Fort McMurray to announce a pipeline. Sort of.

The federal government has declared a new oil pipeline from Alberta to the B.C. coast a project of national interest, the first project the Major Projects Office has put on its list. Premier Danielle Smith was clearly pleased, using her time at the podium to list a string of wins she has secured from Ottawa.

But what exactly was announced?

On this week’s Full Comment, I’m joined by Calgary Herald columnist Chris Varcoe and Edmonton Sun columnist Lorne Gunter to sort out what this announcement is and what it isn’t.

Let’s just say we are all a little skeptical, because there are so many hurdles left to clear before there ever is a pipeline.

Varcoe explains why a fast-tracked conditions document, due by September 2027, is not the same thing as an approval, and why the economics still have to work before any oil flows. Gunter asks why, 18 months after Carney promised to “think big, act bigger,” there still isn’t a shovel in the ground.

Then there is the price tag.

The pipeline is estimated at $35 billion to $44 billion, there are no private investors yet, and taxpayers appear to be on the hook. Add in the Pathways carbon capture project and the proposed Northern Shield pipeline to Ontario, and the public bill could climb even higher.

Finally, are there politics at play here? Was the announcement timed to sway Alberta’s Oct. 19 referendum, and will it change any votes?

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts including Apple and Spotify or below on YouTube.

From the official show notes.

It’s another announcement from Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. And it’s about the same West Coast pipeline they’ve announced before. This time it’s been designated a project of “national interest.” Still undetermined is whether it’s of interest to investors and shippers. Joining Brian are Chris Varcoe, Postmedia’s western business columnist, and Lorne Gunter, political columnist. They discuss the likelihood of this pipeline ever happening, the battles yet to fight, the eye-watering costs, and the dismaying timeline before it gets done. They discuss Smith’s feats in pushing the Liberals to overturn the last prime minister’s anti-oil dogmas. But given Carney’s costly carbon-capture conditions and other roadblocks, simply declaring “national interest” won’t be enough to make Alberta’s oilpatch great again. (Recorded October 2, 2026)

It’s outrageous, but it’s also a little rich. Canadians are angry at Americans for wanting to do something we’ve been doing to them for years.

A story from CBC’s J.P. Tasker is making the rounds. There is nothing wrong with it, no bias or misinformation, but it does lack some important context.

“Florida weighs ditching property taxes and sticking Canadians with the bill,” reads the CBC headline.

It then details a proposal, backed by DeSantis, that would see non-school property taxes drastically lowered for many homes if they are valued below $250,000 and occupied by a Florida resident. That means living there most of the year, voting there and having a Florida driver’s licence.

“I want Canadian tourists and Brazilian tourists subsidizing the state and making it so Florida residents pay less taxes. I don’t want to give Canadians a tax cut,” CBC quotes DeSantis as saying.

CBC’s article understandably focuses on Canadians, but this measure applies to everyone not of the Sunshine State. That would include the thousands of people from Columbia, Brazil, Argentina and the United Kingdom - all big foreign buyers of Florida properties.

Florida’s new message to Canadians…

I don’t get DeSantis. His state sees a lot of money come in from Canada. The latest stats from Visit Florida show that despite a slight decline, 3,174,000 Canadians still visited the Sunshine State in 2025.

In normal times, DeSantis, like most elected officials in Florida, would care about making Canadians happy. It’s not because Canadians can vote for him; it’s because they support the jobs and businesses of the people who can vote for him.

In the past, both Democratic and Republican politicians have worked hard to make snowbirds happy, to make them feel welcome.

Not DeSantis. He’s gone out of his way to do the opposite.

To be blunt, he’s been a jerk, made a ton of inflammatory comments and has turned many people off. I get it. He’s not making you feel welcome, but is this really something Canadians should be upset about?

Canada already does this…

Here’s the part many Canadians seem to forget: we already discriminate against foreign homebuyers.

Did you know that we have a federal ban on foreign property buyers in residential areas of urban settings?

That means that while I can go to Tampa, Orlando, Miami, Fort Myers or elsewhere and buy a house, townhouse or condo, it’s actually illegal for Americans from those cities to come and buy a similar property here. The Trudeau government instituted the ban, which started on January 1, 2023, and then extended it in February 2024 until January 1, 2027.

I’m not sure how stringently this is enforced, but let’s say you were able to bypass it and buy a condo in Toronto.

The Province of Ontario would hit you with a 25% Non-Resident Speculation Tax, while the City of Toronto would add another 10% tax on the purchase price. On a $1 million two-bedroom condo, that’s an extra $350,000 in taxes before you even move in.

Then, if this were a secondary home, a place that you didn’t live in full time, the city would charge you an additional 3% vacant home tax.

Vancouver has a similar vacant home tax, as does Ottawa.

British Columbia has its own vacant home tax, which sits at 3% this year and is going up to 4% next year. In the middle of the provincial election, NDP Leader David Eby threatened another tax hike on non-residents.

And if you ever want to have a vacation home in Nova Scotia, expect to get hit with a 10% non-resident provincial deed transfer tax.

So why is it so outrageous for Florida to do to Canadians what we already do to everyone else?

It reminds me of the line from the Bible in Matthew 7:5, where Jesus says, “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

The politics of making someone else pay…

What DeSantis is proposing is wrong and unfair. So, too, is what we have been doing to others for years.

You know what, though? These ideas, wrong and unfair as they are, remain politically popular, which is why politicians propose them.

Anyone who has owned a cottage knows there is a similar tension over tax rates between full-time residents and seasonal cottage dwellers.

We all want someone else to pay.

In Canada, we have banned foreign buyers, slapped massive surcharges on foreign purchases and increased their property taxes.

When we do it, we call it housing policy.

When Florida does it, we call it discrimination.

We’ve learned more about Mark Carney’s immigration plans from the New York Times than from the Canadian government, because apparently that’s where our prime minister prefers to update Canadians.

This isn’t a new interview. It’s the same one he did two weeks ago when he was attending the United Nations. The first few days, the Canadian coverage of that was all about the “invasion” scenario he laid out for them.

Canadian media took to that like a kitten to catnip.

There was also the issue that I was writing about: Carney’s determination to end the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency.

But in the middle of the interview were three questions from Kathleen Kingsbury, the opinion editor at the Times, about immigration, including when Carney planned on reversing his immigration cuts.

There was back-and-forth and some explaining, but below are the last two paragraphs that some Canadians picked up on earlier this week.

What we’ve basically been doing is first getting the system under control. So if we want to let in 500,000 people through formal immigration and some temporary workers and students, we cap things and we let in 500,000 people. There were years where the expectation would have been for example, 700,000 and it ended up 2 million. The overshoots were, and you know it’s a country of 40 million people.

These are big, big overshoots, and it’s not that easy to get to Canada, right? It is from the U.S. but otherwise you’re flying in or taking boats. So we’ve taken measures to get that under control and we have it under control. So students down by 60 percent, temporary foreign workers down by 50 percent. It happens to be the case. Part of this is tightening, but asylum seekers are down by one-third on a flow basis, and now the question starts to become: When do we resume some controlled increase in the population, which is the nature of Canada. So that will happen, and we just want to make sure that we’ve got it under control.

Carney’s comments have sparked debate about whether Canada should increase immigration, and his use of the 500,000 number makes people wonder if we are moving back into Century Initiative territory.

And while there are plenty of people who say there are too many newcomers and we are still bringing in too many, others believe we need high immigration to achieve high economic growth. I’m a numbers guy, I’m a facts guy, and so I looked at how many people we are bringing in and in which categories.

A short interruption…

This isn’t an ad, but I am shilling for my brother.

See, he spent close to 25 years in the cruise industry and while I was chasing politicians, he was chasing ships and ports. I got to see some cool things, he got to see some cool places.

Not sure which one of us got the better of the situation.

Anyway, impressed by what I’ve been doing on Substack over the last 18 months, he decided to start offering cruise advice. This guy has done it all from D.J. to sales to assistant hotel director, so he knows the industry and he’s giving free advice on what you need to know about cruising.

If cruising is your thing, it’s not mine, then consider subscribing - it’s free - and checking out his material. Here’s a screenshot of some of his headlines and more are coming.

What the immigration numbers say…

While Mark Carney is right that numbers have come down, that’s only from historical highs, not back to historic norms. For the longest time in Canada, we brought in about 250,000 permanent residents a year, but by 2024 that number was up to 483,640.

The government did reduce intake for 2025, but only down to 393,775, which is still more than a 50 per cent increase over the roughly 250,000 a year we used to bring in.

When you look across all categories, more than 2.1 million people came in via all streams in 2024 compared to 756,000 in 2015, the last year of the Harper government. In 2025, our total numbers were still well over 1 million, which is a massive hike over those traditional norms.

In 2024, 7.5 per cent of our total population was made up of temporary residents. The government has pledged to bring that figure down to below 5 per cent. The historic norm is under 3 per cent and, right now, even with all the much-ballyhooed reductions in numbers, temporary residents make up 6.6 per cent of our current population.

So yes, the numbers are down from their peak, but they remain far above historic norms, and Carney is already signalling they could rise again.

Meanwhile, Timmy’s goes under…

You’ve likely heard the story of the Tim Hortons franchisee who has filed for bankruptcy, and part of the reason, according to court filings, is that they can’t afford staff with the foreign worker cutbacks. This particular franchisee owns six locations in Eastern Ontario, places like Hawkesbury, Dunvegan, Vankleek Hill and L’Orignal.

This is small-town Ontario, highly Francophone, and you’re telling me you can’t find locals and need to bring in Indian nationals to work in these remote locations and, without them, you can’t make money?

I’m not buying it.

If a business model only works when most of the staff come from a temporary foreign worker program, then maybe the problem isn’t a labour shortage. Maybe it’s the business model.

Overall, 26 per cent of this owner’s staff were from the TFW program, but one shop had 83 per cent foreign workers and another had 60 per cent.

That goes against the regulations surrounding a program that is being abused all over the place.

“The Government of Canada significantly restricted Temporary Foreign Worker programs,” M.G.B. Ventures Inc. submitted to Ontario Superior Court. “As a result the company employs a lower number of temporary foreign workers.”

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Enter the Notorious M.R.G…

I’m not sure that Michelle Rempel Garner, the Conservative Party’s immigration critic, likes the nickname that I’ve given her, but it fits. She’s been on this file for a while, knows it inside and out, and bases her critiques of the Liberal government’s immigration performance on real numbers, facts and figures.

On Wednesday, she held a news conference to call out Carney’s suggested plan of increasing immigration. She pointed to the problems these high numbers have caused and, like me, noted that they aren’t going down as much as they need to.

“Liberal mass immigration policies have created a youth jobs crisis. They’ve caused emergency rooms to overflow, driven healthcare wait lists across the country out of control, placed massive strain on social welfare programs and provincial education systems, sent rents soaring, and shattered Canada’s long-standing consensus on immigration,” M.R.G. said.

“That’s not fair to anyone.”

That’s the part that too many people don’t get. This system isn’t fair to Canadian citizens, to immigrants who are already here and struggling to get on their feet, and it’s not fair to the people we are cramming into the country, in the words of Justin Trudeau, “faster than we can absorb them.”

“On top of all these issues, Prime Minister Carney’s government issued 112,000 new temporary foreign worker permits and 174,000 new foreign student work permits between January and July 2026,” M.R.G. said.

“To put that in perspective, that’s roughly the population of a city the size of Saskatoon added to Canada in just seven months. That’s crazy.”

Carney says the system is finally under control. Maybe. But if the goal is getting back to sustainable immigration levels that Canadians can absorb, we’re nowhere near there yet. And before Ottawa starts talking about increasing the numbers again, it should prove it can handle the numbers we already have.

A few clips of Carney to share with you today, so it’s pretty much all video today.

That said, here’s the chart I show in the video. It shows where things are at in terms of Canada’s largest export markets.

Add up the next four biggest markets after the US and it’s $75.9 billion USD which is worth just 18.9% of what we sold to the Americans. Take out the Netherlands and put in the EU and it comes to $99.49 billion USD or 24.89% of what we sell south of the border.

I’ve tried to sit back and separate noise from signal.

Respond to what is important, ignore anything that is not. Push for our country to do what is best for Canadian workers and Canadian companies to be able to survive.

For a large part of the Canadian public though, just screaming about how awful Trump is has become the only test of being a true, patriotic Canadian.

I don’t accept that and never have.

Now, when it comes to Alberta’s referendum on staying in Canada or starting a path to leave, I also have a different viewpoint than the standard member of the chattering classes.

If you are a columnist in Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal - even Vancouver, see certain Globe columnists - you are expected to say that Danielle Smith is a separatist and Conservatives across the province want to join the USA. None of that is true but appears to be “received wisdom” as if handed down by God on Mount Sinai.

I’ve known Danielle Smith for 16 years now, not super well, we don’t hang out or vacation together but she is not an Alberta separatist.

Neither are any of the Conservative MPs that I know.

That’s from Pierre Poilievre on down.

On Tuesday, Poilievre gave a speech in Edmonton - ahead of the Oilers season opener - calling for a united Canada that includes Alberta.

The video of the speech is below, but before we get to that, here is my interview with Dane Lloyd, Conservative MP for the riding of Parkland. I first met Lloyd shortly after he was elected in 2017 and we have kept in touch.

Poilievre tapped him to lead the campaign by the federal Conservatives to keep Alberta in Canada - I haven’t seen a Liberal campaign. I chatted with Lloyd from a different location while I was in Saskatoon over Labour Day weekend.

Here now, is Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre talking about why Alberta should stay.

Normal people think yes, that’s probably best. We will only settle this at the negotiating table. Then there is the Elbows Up crowd who react with anger to this very idea.

I’ll share some of their email below.

These folks are the reason that I was writing a little while ago that if Carney ever gets a deal, he may not be able to sell it to the public.

Job losses are mounting…

We saw 500 layoff notices go out from Stelco on Monday, the same day that Trump was boasting about an $18 billion investment for a new iron ore mine and steel plant.

I wrote about that juxtaposition and the fact that due to the now in place alcohol ban, the motorcycle ban and other trade actions we would surely see other job losses.

Job losses are bad, that’s why I’m advocating getting back to the table.

Despite all the rhetoric about defending the French language and protecting our sovereignty, the real reason Carney walked away from the talks was the 25% tariff on Canadian made medium and heavy-duty trucks. All the rest is window dressing, issues used to pump up patriotic fervor.

Anyway, for saying let’s save jobs by negotiating a deal, these are some of the responses that I got.

Here’s John’s email:

Trump wants no cars to be built in Canada and sold in US. Build our own. Use our steel to build the Alberta to Ontario pipeline Ford/Steele were talking about. Put quotas on foreign steel.

Trump is not to be trusted.

I for one will pay a price for the right to be a free Canadian rather than being a vassal:serf to the Americans

Here’s Ed’s email:

Holy Moly, it’s like you are in the Maple MAGA camp, spewing pro-America and pro-Trump propaganda, while belittling Canada because you despise the current federal government. How sad is that !

Just for once, stand up for Canada, instead of grovelling for Trump and his boot licking sycophants. Canadians want a fair trade deal with the US and that means consceding on some issues and the US consceding on other issues. A win/win scenario that will make both countries even more prosperous.

Both of these men are comfortably retired. They don’t face the prospect of losing their job and most likely they are living off a nice government pension indexed to inflation and an investment portfolio heavily weighted to American equities while they flash their raised elbows.

You know who says there is a trade deal to be had? Mark Carney.

“Is there a mutually beneficial trade deal between Canada and the U.S.? Absolutely, absolutely there is one.”

Will Carney call an early election…

People think I’m crazy for suggesting that Carney might call an early election.

I’m worried if he does call one that he’ll win a massive majority rather than have a rough ride like David Eby in British Columbia.

I lay out the reasons why Carney might want to call one in this column, or the video below. It makes sense for him to call one, secure a bigger majority now, play off Trump at the height of anti-Trump and pro-EU sentiment.

Elections can be funny things, you never know what will happen.

Remember my maxim about politics:

Voters are fickle.

Polls can change.

Campaigns matter.

That said, Canada is in a major emotional state right now. A good chunk of the electorate isn’t thinking anything through.

That’s why fighting with Trump is preferable to them even if thousands of Canadians are losing their jobs.

They want the fight.

Some folks just aren’t curious…

One of the things I pride myself on is researching subjects using source documents. If I’m writing about a piece of legislation, I read the bill and if I’m writing about a treating, I read the treaty.

Often, I provide you with links to that source material so that you can see for yourselves.

Sadly, that doesn’t happen often enough in the media or commentariat world. And on social media, everyone is an expert.

Which brings me to all the people mocking Pierre Poilievre for saying that the tax dollars of Canadian workers shouldn’t be going to the EU. Without a shred of research, people are pronouncing on how foolish Poilievre is for saying this.

Here’s the editorial cartoon from the Toronto Sun on the matter.

Here’s an activist doctor, big lefty, in Toronto who fancies himself smart and an influencer. Him, I pushed back on.

Here’s the problem, none of them read the treaties that Norway, Iceland or Switzerland signed to get the kind of deal Canada wants.

There is a good chance that we will be asked to pay for programs that we don’t get a vote on. They may demand that we accept their regulations without getting a vote on them, just like those other countries.

Unlike these other folks, I’ve read the documents. Poilievre is on the right track.

Carney loves foreign media…

Everyone was talking about how Carney loves foreign media, so I went through the record and documented all the big foreign media interviews he’s done since he announced his run for the Liberal leadership on the Daily Show in January 2025.

Enjoy.

There was a lot of infighting inside the BC Conservative Party and it looked like Eby’s NDP could catch the BC Conservatives with their pants down. We still have close to a month to go, but it appears that Eby is facing a lot of criticism for calling an early election.

It also appears that the BC Conservatives, regrouping and appointing Lorne Doerkson as interim leader is a good thing. Doerkson isn’t well known by the public but is well respected around the legislature.

While some of the online crowd who constantly call for purity tests and declare that anyone they don’t like is a fake Conservative, that doesn’t appear to be the case with Doerkson.

One of the leaders of his campaign team is Katy Merrifield, former director of communications for Pierre Poilievre. Last time I saw Katy in person, she was in the lobby of the BMO Centre in Calgary celebrating Poilievre’s leadership review vote numbers.

This week on the Full Comment Podcast, I turned to two BC political veterans for their insights. I can follow BC from afar, but unlike Ontario and Quebec, I’ve never lived there.

Vaughn Palmer has been covering the BC legislature for decades for the Vancouver Sun, while Les Leyne has been doing the same for the Victoria Times-Colonist for about the same 40 years.

They’ve seen a lot but never anything like this. Enjoy this short exchange on the election. I’m on the left, Vaughn is in the middle, Les is on the right.

You can listen to the full podcast, audio only, below. Or you can search and subscribe to the Full Comment Podcast where you listen to podcasts.

From the official show notes:

If you’ve got a majority government with two years left and an unpopular record to defend, calling a snap election might not seem like a great idea. But it did to B.C. Premier David Eby. Brian is joined by B.C. politics columnists Vaughn Palmer (Vancouver Sun) and Les Leyne (Victoria Times-Colonist) to try to find method in Eby’s seeming madness. They consider his scheme to pounce on his rivals’ disarray, with the Conservatives at war over a divisive leader. But they seem to be quickly reconstituting themselves under a new, more popular captain, even as some star NDP candidates step aside. It’s all unfolding amid municipal elections already underway, creating confusion for voters, and leaving British Columbians baffled as to why it’s happening at all. (Recorded September 25, 2026)