Here's the questions Premiers should be asking Mark Carney...

PM meets with Premiers in Muskoka on Tuesday for update on Trump.

Mark Carney will arrive in Muskoka to meet with Premiers from across the country on Tuesday.

This is a meeting that was billed last week, erroneously by some media outlets, as a meeting Carney had called. There were demands to know why he wouldn’t just meet the premiers in Ottawa where the feds own all kinds of buildings with meeting space.

Because this isn’t Carney’s meeting, it’s a meeting of the Council of the Federation which is the Premier’s organization and it was already scheduled. As for the location, as much as I like Deerhurst, it’s not a fancy, high end resort and hasn’t been in years.

It’s nice enough but the last time I was there it had clearly seen better days and was worn and dated. This is not the Premiers, or Carney sitting in the lap of luxury.

Premiers opened their meetings in Muskoka with several First Nations leaders.

Update on trade talks...

Carney is arriving for the second day of the three day conference to update the Premiers on trade talks with the United States. If I’m one of those Premiers, I’ll be asking Carney whether a trade deal with the U.S. is possible without tariffs.

Last week, Carney was saying that was unlikely, as I wrote at the time, that seemed realistic. Trump had said clearly at Kananaskis that he’s a tariff guy with a different viewpoint than Carney.

“I’m a tariff person. I’ve always been a tariff person. It’s simple, it’s easy, it’s precise,” Trump said standing next to Carney.

But as I posted here earlier today and was writing about in my latest Sun column, Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said a deal for Canada without tariffs is possible.

“If you're willing to open yourself up, and really open your economy to American business to ranchers, fishermen, farmers, and businesses then of course we'll make a better deal with you but if you're going to keep your tariffs and your tariff barriers holding us down then of course it seems fair that you should pay a tariff to do business with the greatest customer on earth the American consumer.”

As I say in my column, that leads to a lot of questions about what we would need to open up about or what price we would have to pay for a deal with no tariffs.

Premiers may want to ask about that on Tuesday.

Watch the whole video below.

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Toronto’s deep decline...

I know it’s a national sport to hate Toronto, and as native of Hamilton, I’ve played it more than most. That said, Toronto is a great city with a lot to offer and it is at the centre of our national economy.

As a country, we need Toronto to do well to help the whole country do well, but sadly Toronto is in decline.

I was writing about this in the Toronto Sun in light of the murder of a 71 year-old grandmother.

Toronto is a city in decline in every possible metric. There is no worse example than the murder of 71 year-old Shahnaz Pestonji last week

Just before 10 a.m. last Thursday, Pestonji was performing the most mundane of acts, picking p groceries. As she was loading her groceries into the car, a 14 year-old boy says he demanded her car keys and when she said no he stabbed her.

The young man even went on social media to talk about what happened and while police were looking for him, his name was plastered everywhere. Now, it’s illegal for us to publish his name or his image due to the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

Where is the leadership at city hall or Toronto Police HQ to ensure the city is safe, clean and livable again?

It’s absent. So it’s time for wholesale change.

This story brings me back to the Supreme Court ruling I was writing about last week.

It’s insane that this horrible ruling hasn’t received more coverage, that it hasn’t been denounced. The 7-2 ruling rewrites the law in ways Parliament considered and then rejected.

The end result of the ruling is that it will be extremely difficult to ever give a person under 18 an adult sentence again no matter how heinous the crime.

Giving police their due...

Since I harp on about the horrible leadership at the Toronto Police Service so often, I should give the front line officers their due for arresting the Hamasnik protesters who blocked traffic and refused to move. They’ve been doing this at will since October 7, 2023 but the officers have been warned to be careful about the politics and sensitivities of all of this.

That’s led to few arrests on their side and at times, more arrests of Jewish counter-protesters just to keep the peace.

With 11 arrested on Saturday, I can say it may have taken too long, but job well done.

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About Canada’s role in fentanyl...

Had a great conversation with Professor Jonathan Caulkins last week about his report on fentanyl seizures from Canada versus Mexico across the United States. He’s very knowledgable about the entire criminal underworld and studies financing and logistics of criminal enterprises.

He’s on the record of saying not much fentanyl is seized in the U.S. from Canada, but we talked about the role Canada and Canadians play in the international drug trade. The conversation was doubly interesting given that it came just after the bust I wrote about last week showing deep Canadian connections.

Give a listen.

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