Tokyo, Berlin, Washington and Ottawa, what you need to know this Friday...

Plus Americans reverse engineer an Iranian drone to strike Tehran.

We’ve got Mark Carney in Tokyo, Pierre Poilievre in Berlin and Dominic LeBlanc in Washington. The first two visits listed are nice, but it’s the one in Washington that really matters right now.

We are almost a year into Mark Carney becoming Prime Minister and we’re no closer to getting a deal to lift tariffs on Canadian goods.

That doesn’t appear to bother many of Carney’s supporters who seem to believe ending free trade with the United States wouldn’t be a bad thing. David Coletto, the CEO of Abacus Data has been teasing this information for a little while now and released the results on Tuesday.

Just 45% say ending CUSMA would be a bad thing for Canada, 26% say it would be a good thing for the country and 29% were neutral.

Given the way our economy works, ending CUSMA would be a very bad thing. Every working Canadian should understand this, but unfortunately we have a nation reacting emotionally to every musing of one Donald J. Trump and our national media eggs them on, often with false or exaggerated stories with a strong anti-American bent.

Carney signs more MOUs, doesn’t get results…

I was chatting this morning, as I do most Friday mornings, with Bill Carroll on Ottawa’s Newstalk 580 CFRA. Bill raised the fact that Prime Minister Mark Carney likes to talk quite a bit, likes to sign MOUs but hasn’t really delivered.

He was talking more about his international trip to India, Australia and Japan but he could have been talking about another agreement between the feds and Alberta released late Friday.

“Today, the Prime Minister, Mark Carney, and the Premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, released a draft Co-operation Agreement between Alberta and Canada on Environmental and Impact Assessment, which will be consulted on for a twenty-one-day period. This builds on similar agreements completed between the Government of Canada and the governments of British Columbia, New Brunswick, and Ontario,” reads the text of the news release.

There was no signing ceremony or joint press conference, obviously, because Carney is in Japan still, but both Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith had quotes in the news release.

“In the face of global trade shifts, Canada and Alberta are launching the next phase of our partnership. Together, we will build big and build fast to create a stronger, more sustainable, more independent economy for Albertans and all Canadians,” Prime Minister Carney said.

Build big?

Build fast?

Really?

As mentioned above regarding CUSMA, it’s almost a year since Carney became PM - he was sworn in on March 14, 2025 just two days before his 60th birthday. So in almost a year what we are doing is delivering more agreements about agreements rather than delivering major projects to expand and diversify our economy.

This is incredibly frustrating to watch.

“We will need to think big and act bigger. We will need to do things previously thought impossible at speeds we haven’t seen in generations,” Carney famously said last year.

If he were living up to that I’d be cheering him on but he’s not. We get agreements about agreements, we get new bureaucracies for housing and major projects but we don’t get more housing or more major projects.

I support the PM going to India to strike a deal, it’s the right thing to do and he appears to have done an okay job of cleaning up Justin Trudeau’s mess. We are back to where we were when Stephen Harper was PM and signed a deal to move towards free trade with India.

Australia and Japan already have free trade deals with Canada, we just aren’t taking advantage of those deals. In fact, Canada has free trade deals that cover 51 different countries and we still send the vast majority of our exports to one country, the USA.

It’s unlikely that the US won’t always be our biggest trading partner but we do need to diversify. We do that by working existing deals, not looking to sign new ones with countries we already have deals with.

A few thoughts on the war in Iran…

You’ve probably seen Mark Carney quizzed about whether he would completely rule out Canada joining the war against Iran militarily.

Carney smartly pointed out that this was a hypothetical question and that given that we don’t know what will happen that we can’t ever rule out military intervention. A smart leader doesn’t take options off the table, his answer was the right one.

As I’ve written elsewhere though, it is increasingly frustrating to listen to Carney say the right thing about this war and then start back pedalling to appease the left-wing of his party. He knows that removing the regime that sits atop the Islamic Republic of Iran is the right thing, he should say that and leave it at that.

This is a regime that has killed hundreds of Canadians, killed thousands of its own people for protesting the rising cost of living and food, represses basic rights, beats women to death for not wearing their hijab properly and on and on it goes. Calling for this regime to go should be as uncontroversial as saying you like motherhood and apple pie.

Anyway, after Carney spoke about how he wouldn’t rule anything out, our Chief of Defence Staff General Jennie Carignan was speaking to reporters in Ottawa at a defence conference and was talking about how we may need to assist our Gulf allies.

With all due respect to the General, and I mean that, we simply don’t have what our allies need.

General Carignan is just a few years older than me. She received her commission as an officer in 1990, the same year I did my GMT or General Military Training course with Hamilton’s 705 Communications Squadron - back then, Canada had a serious military. The Gulf War happened in 1991 and as I describe in my column for the Toronto Sun, we deployed a lot of people and equipment for that war.

We couldn’t do that today.

That’s not on the General, it’s on the elected leaders who for too long have declined to properly finance and equip our armed forces. Back in 1990 we were still a major peacekeeping force, we could participate in the Gulf War, in Bosnia and Kosovo.

We did valiant work in Afghanistan, but when Joe Biden asked Justin Trudeau to lead a military effort to stabilize Haiti he wavered. In part Trudeau wavered because he’s Justin Trudeau but also because we don’t have the military we once did.

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The Americans are using Iranian drone technology against them…

So the Iranians are known for their drone technology when it comes to warfare. They have deployed these drones to horrific effect in Russia’s war in Ukraine and were in the middle of transferring the technology to Venezuela - a technology that could have hit the Southern United States - before Maduro was removed from office.

The Iranian drones were in some ways designed based off of earlier American technology, but they advanced the product for modern warfare. Now, the Americans have admitted that they captured on the famous Shahed-136 drones, stripped it down, sent it back to the US and reversed engineered it to make it their own.

US military engineers have captured, dissected and reborn Iran’s Shahed-136 as the Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS), a one-way attack drone now seeing first combat against Tehran.

Priced at around $35,000-$50,000 per unit, this Shahed clone mimics the Iranian design’s simplicity, long-range loitering, GPS-guided autonomy and explosive payload but adds US upgrades like inertial navigation for jammed environments and self-destruct fail safes.

Drones have been used by militaries for some time now. Under President Barack Obama the United States ramped up the use of drones for military strikes, but what we are seeing now is something completely different.

This might be one of the biggest advancements in conventional warfare technology since the airplane. Remember that the Wright brothers had their first flight in 1903, and it wasn’t exactly a stellar success. By 1911 planes were being used in war and a few years later in the First World War air forces were stood up in ways that just a decade earlier would have been unthinkable.

We are seeing that kind of moment.