This is a special dispatch to hawk copies of my new book: The 51st State Votes.

The book is both a recapping of Canada’s most recent federal election, and a polemic about the Donald Trump-sized existential threat facing the country.

For my Canadian subscribers, I hope that the book serves as a useful reminder of the degree of the challenge we’re facing, and a cri de coeur about the need for us to get serious and confront it.

If any of my American subscribers want to get a copy, I hope the book serves as a useful window into the destructive impact of Trump’s delusional nationalism and beggar-thy-neighbour trade policies.

And for those Europeans, Australians, and Kiwis on the Bug-eyed and Shameless mailing list, I suspect this book will be a useful parallel to the exact kind of political fights happening in your country right now.

The book itself is a breezy 100-ish pages, and covers both the lead-up to the last federal election, the campaign itself, and comes right up to the G7 summit in Kanasaskis, Alberta this summer.

You can pick up a copy directly from Sutherland House Books, or you can find it at your local independent book store or library. (If they don’t have copies, ask them to order some!) For paying subscribers, I have a handy 25% off discount code at the bottom of this newsletter — beneath the paywall.

Below is a brief excerpt, so you can try before you buy.

By the time U.S. Brigadier General Winfield Scott crossed the Niagara River in the War of 1812, his side had mostly known humiliation and defeat at the hands of the British. Yet in July 1814, he invaded the Niagara Peninsula with enormous confidence, certain that his assault would be a turning of the tides.

Dressed in a heavy coat and high boots, sporting his sword and pistols, the ambitious Scott rushed to step from his boat to shore and charge the British. He misjudged his landing and fell into the river, his head sinking below the waterline, his high boots sucked deep into the muck and silt. His men reached in to pull their commander up, ensuring the only damage would be to his dignity. Nevertheless, it was an inauspicious start.

Scott would go on to lead his infantry to victory at the Battle of Chippawa and fight to a draw at Lundy’s Lane, a few kilometres from the majestic Niagara Falls. But like his landing in Canada, Scott’s reach would exceed his grasp. The Americans were unable to make real gains on the peninsula and ultimately retreated to New York. The two sides traded wins and losses. The biggest symbolic blow came later that summer when the British rowed all the way to Washington, D.C, and razed the White House. On Christmas Eve, 1814, a peace was signed.

It may have been an end to war, but it wasn’t kinship. Two decades later, a group of Canadian rebels calling themselves the “Patriots” began to organize an uprising against the British, with help from supporters in America. In 1837, they seized an island in the Niagara River and declared the Republic of Canada. The loyalist militias responded, seizing the rebel steamboat, Caroline, setting it on fire and letting it drift off the falls. In the internecine violence, one American was killed.

Winfield Scott, the hero of Niagara, was dispatched by President Martin Van Buren to quell the tensions that emerged in the border states, as the Americans called for revenge. “If you want war, I need only look on in silence,” Scott wrote to the president. “But if peace be your wish, I can give no assurance of success. The difficulties in the way will be formidable.”

The president chose peace, and that’s what he got. In each local conflict, Scott negotiated a reasonable outcome to avert war. He was so impressive in his ability to avert escalations that a British commander nominated Scott for a medal from the King, an honour that Scott had to refuse. But Scott’s ability to negotiate difficult peace came to define the cross-border relationship for a century and a half.

“For over 150 years, we’ve found a way — in true Canadian fashion — to disagree agreeably, to choose diplomacy over division,” said Mark Carney on April 18, 2025, as the wind whipped the pages in his hands and Niagara Falls crashed in the distance behind him.

“The depth of that kinship is symbolized here, where the border runs between Niagara Falls,” he went on. “The falls come from the same river—divided into two very different experiences—before reuniting to move forward. On each side, there is a town with the same name. Over centuries, the two Niagara Falls have demonstrated that collaboration, not conflict, is the path to great prosperity.”

It was heavy symbolism. But standing across the rooftop from the Liberal leader, it struck me as apt, given the weight of the Trump threat. “Unfortunately, that’s all changed,” Carney continued. “And it wasn’t us who did the changing.”

If you could criticize Carney for anything, it was not going far enough. In just the first three months of 2025, Trump had threatened Canada, and unilaterally announced, enacted, and suspended so many tariffs on us that it was difficult to keep track of what, exactly, was subject to the import duties. After his Liberation Day, Trump had insisted that his global tariffs were both a punishment for the rest of the world and a remedy — a means to get other countries at the table to negotiate new deals favourable to America. But when it came to Canada, Trump was blunt: The tariffs are a means to territorial expansion.

As April wore on and election day came into view, Trump sat for an interview with Time. The journalists suggested that when it came to gobbling up Greenland and Canada, perhaps Trump was trolling. “I’m really not trolling,” Trump interjected. Running through his usual grievances about the trade imbalance, Trump went on: “We’re taking care of their military. We’re taking care of every aspect of their lives, and we don’t need them to make cars for us. In fact, we don’t want them to make cars for us. We want to make our own cars. We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need their energy. We don’t need anything from Canada. And I say the only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state.”

Time asked a shockingly direct question: “Do you want to grow the American empire?” Trump delivered a chillingly cavalier answer: “Wouldn’t mind.”

That day in Niagara Falls, Carney crystalized that pitch he had been making throughout the campaign: Trump was trying to reorder the global economy; he was threatening our workers, retirees, our culture, our language, our businesses, and our resources. This was not an aimless or confused exercise: It was an intentional campaign to seize the country. “President Trump is trying to break us, so America can own us.”

Carney, as I’ve said, offered a refreshingly blunt assessment of the threat. But as we entered the home stretch, it occurred to me that Carney’s tonic was more diluted than he let on. Reciprocal tariffs, the obvious move, had been drawn up by his predecessor. Carney wasn’t keen. His main campaign planks — removing interprovincial trade barriers, fast-tracking energy projects, doubling home construction, designating new national parks — might’ve felt ambitious in regular times but started to feel like a limp response the more we contemplated the scale of the threat.

The fact is, both Carney and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre had a piece of the answer. The Liberals were right to sketch out Canada’s pivot to Europe, and the Conservatives were right about the need for strength at home. When it comes to recapitalizing the Canadian military, there’s no doubt that joining Europe’s defence industrial base would be a boon, but it will mean nothing if we can’t untangle our moribund procurement system and instill the Canadian Armed Forces with an actual purpose. Yes, we need to become productive again, but that can only be done by cajoling cities into reducing gridlock, building new homes, and ending the reign of NIMBY. Ottawa needs to scale up exports of its energy products, but it can’t do that if it is shackled by endless consultation and review. To do big things again, we need a civil service that works, and we need to recognize that, right now, it doesn’t.

Both men spoke of these problems, sometimes in bits and pieces. But Carney’s remedies fell too often into wishful thinking, whereas Poilievre put far too much faith in the idea that wielding a stick could solve all problems.

While no politician can strike the perfect balance between building muscle at home and showing flexibility abroad, the fact is that Canada needs a leader capable of wanting peace, knowing it’s difficult, and capable of conflict, if need be — someone who can fight a trade war, for sure, and also do battle with the status quo at home.

That’s it for this mini-dispatch — I’ll be back in just a few days with a full, proper newsletter.

Read more

If you stumbled across this donation site — which asks for up to $1,725 to help elect Poilievre and his party — you would likely never realize that it was built by the fundraising arm of the Republican Party.

But it was. And even if Poilievre’s team decided ultimately not to hire the Republican fundraisers to raise Canadian dollars, I think it highlights the fact that the Conservatives’ hostility to Trump’s party is relatively recent.

This is the Chaos Campaign, so let’s get to it.

If WinRed, the official fundraising platform of the Republican Party, is responsible for any particular kind of innovation in political fundraising, it is likely its ability to sign up a huge volume of conservative Americans, particularly elderly ones, into signing up for recurring donations. WinRed boasts processing billions of dollars every year — and in so doing, it has racked up a deluge of complaints with the Federal Elections Commission over its pushy efforts to separate people from their money.

Despite not being anything particularly special, WinRed scored an audience in Ottawa to market its wares to the Conservative Party of Canada.

In 2022, WinRed began registering about a dozen domain names like “defeattrudeau.ca,” “no-carbon-tax.ca,” “helppierre.ca,” and “end-mandates.ca.” And it mocked up fundraising pages for the party’s newly-installed leader, Pierre Poilievre: Like the one pictured above.

These domain names and these test websites either point directly to an IP address used exclusively by WinRed, or are hosted on Revv — its payment processor.

None of this was ever made operational. Those domains return 404 errors and the donation page was never configured. But the Conservative Party certainly thought about it.

When I asked the Conservative Party about its conversations with the Republican Party, a spokesperson initially wrote back “the CPC is not using WinRed." When I asked if it considered hiring WinRed, the spokesperson wrote back “no.” When I pointed to the websites, the spokesperson wrote back "the links you refer to appear to be demo pages from when WinRed attempted a sales pitch (a non-successful sales pitch)."

But that sales pitch seemed to span some length of time. The initial sites were registered in 2022, several of the domains were updated in early 2023, with one page featuring a photo of Poilievre at a rally in Penticton from July of that year. The language mentions that the fundraising limit is set to increase on January 1, 2024.

This all occurred just as Poilievre was assuming the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada, and as Trump was sewing up the presidential nomination for the Republican Party.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Conservative Party turning to the Republicans for help with their fundraising infrastructure and there is no evidence that the Conservatives paid the Republicans a dime for these pitches. Although it is odd. Parties tend to rely on trusted, domestic, vendors to build and run their campaign technology, or opt to do it fully in-house — as the Conservative Party has done for years, to great effect. I’m not aware of any foreign party with which WinRed works.

But this is part of a trend, isn’t it? The fact is that the Conservative Party was, at the very least, curious about the Republican Party — and, by extension, Trump — until very recently.

Poilievre, for example, has wholesale lifted Trump’s language around slashing foreign aid and enforcing a “warrior culture” on the military, “not a woke culture.” It’s true that Poilievre has avoided any direct connection between himself and Trump. But he has been happy to sit down with Trump’s enthusiastic fans.

Poilievre has, twice now, sat down with Jordan B. Peterson. When they spoke last, in December, Peterson had just recently “wholeheartedly” endorsed Trump and marshalled his legion of fans to vote for the Republican candidate.

“One of the remarkable things” about the American election, Peterson said, was the “remarkable team of people who aggregated themselves around Trump.” He asked Poilievre: “Can you point to some people who will be key in your administration?”

Poilievre named a handful of his close MPs, including Jamil Jivani, the Member of Parliament for Durham. A long-time friend of Vice President J.D. Vance, Jivani flew to D.C to grab dinner with Vance last year. He posted the photo in December, even after talk of Canada becoming the “51st state” began, thanking the vice president-elect for the “great conversation.”

Poilievre also named Andrew Scheer, the former leader who is now a key face of the Conservatives’ digital strategy; and Leslyn Lewis, the Conservative infrastructure critic. Both MPs are avid Twitter users, and they follow a relatively select few on the platform — Scheer follows about 500, Lewis just 350.

Scheer opts to follow Musk’s government-wrecking DOGE agency, right-wing Trump organizer Charlie Kirk, and a host of other pro-Trump influencers, including an account entitled “retarded post,” which exclusively shares “retarded posts” from critics of Trump and Elon Musk. Lewis, meanwhile, follows a handful of Republican lawmakers and a pro-Trump advocacy group account called “Gays Against Groomers.”

A follow on Twitter doesn’t mean an endorsement, but it definitely indicates an interest. And the Conservatives are certainly interested in an alternative press that loves Trump.

Not only has Poilievre taken questions from the Trump-loving Rebel News, founded by Poilievre’s one-time mentor Ezra Levant, but his party actually advertised on The Rebel’s website. In 2024, a banner ad for the Conservative Party appeared on The Rebel’s website, pointing to a Conservative Party website, denouncing the Liberals for frequently attending “World Economic Forum conferences in Davos to give lectures on their radical woke agenda.”

Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the president has become one of the most-hated people in Canada. He hasn’t just declared a trade war, but consistently threatened to annex us. And Poilievre, like every other serious political leader, has vowed to stand up to him.

When asked on Tout le monde en parle, Poilievre insisted that he has “ferociously criticized Donald Trump.” And that’s true, at least with respect to the president’s tariffs. But this Trump-skepticism is relatively new.

It is certainly possible to over-state how close Poilievre is to the Republican Party and the broader pro-Trump movement in North America. Poilievre has not echoed the ethno-nationalism of Trump, nor the nationalist xenophobia. Poilievre has not pledged mass deportations nor do I think he’s a threat to the rule of law. Poilievre is not a fascist, I don’t think he’ll contest the results of the election if he loses, and I think he is genuinely interested in standing up to Trump if he is elected.

But it is simply true that there were ties being built between the Conservative Party and Trump’s movement in recent years. The Conservatives were friendly enough with the Republican Party to take a pitch from WinRed. Poilievre was intrigued enough by Trump’s popularity to sit down with his vocal supporters and mimic his policies and slogans, even word-for-word. Conservative MPs were interested enough by prominent Trump boosters and activists to follow them on Twitter, inserting pretty grotesque stuff in their timelines.

It has been obvious for a long time that Trump poses an existential threat to the world order and to Canada specifically. Yet the Conservatives have only recently awoken to that fact.

Nobody can doubt the sincerity of Poilievre’s desire to fight for the working class in Canada. And his criticisms of Trump’s tariff policy and unhinged threats to annex Canada are clearly genuine.

But at the very least, I think we can say that Poilievre and his party were naively enticed by Trump’s movement.

That’s it for this little dispatch.

I’ll be back in the coming days with some closing thoughts on the campaign. Stay tuned!

By that metric, the Canadian election is certainly tight. But there’s little doubt that Mark Carney has the advantage.

For the past few weeks I’ve been ping-ponging across the country — first, trying to follow Pierre Poilievre’s media-averse campaign; and now…

Read more

This wasn’t always the case. Once upon a time, as cabinet minister, Poilievre was more than happy to ring up journalists and spar — myself included. Back then, Poilievre perfectly illustrated the paranoid media control of his bosses. The Minister of Democratic Reform, as he was then, knew his files, didn’t feel the need to rely on talking points, and was quick on his feet. If only all government ministers were like this I thought then.

Fast forward a decade and Pierre Poilievre is travelling across the country under the cloak of secrecy, refusing to tell journalists what he’s actually doing each day. Beyond the details of a press conference (where he takes just four questions from hand-picked media) and, occasionally, the location of a rally, the Conservative Party has tried to skirt journalists wherever possible.

But Poilievre has been telling some people where he’ll be. For a choice band of ideologically kindred broadcasters and influencers, Poilievre is happy to show up and make time.

On a brief Chaos Campaign, as we arrive in the home stretch of the campaign, I want to talk about the Conservative cheerleaders — who say something profound(ly stupid) about Pierre Poilievre.

Show up at a Poilievre rally and you’re almost certain to see The Pleb Reporter, a self-styled “YouTube journalist.” When I saw him, in Kingston, he occupied a choice spot on the media riser at Poilievre’s events, holding up his video recorder to get a good angle for the Conservative leader’s remarks. (Since I saw The Pleb, per a fantastic write-up of The Pleb for the National Observer, campaign staff have been ushering him out of the journalists’ pen.)

When Poilievre isn’t talking, The Pleb can be spotted filtered through the crowd, chanting Poilievre’s slogans and insisting that the vote is “too big to rig!” He makes absurd claims about Poilievre’s rallies being the largest in Canadian history: A claim easily disproven.

But it feels true to the The Pleb, and he is emotionally invested in Poilievre in a massive way. When Poilievre hugged him at an event last year and told him to “keep up the great work,” The Pleb was over the moon. He now shares pro-Poilievre (and pro-Trump) memes and content with glee, insisting constantly that the Liberals have lost the campaign and that the Conservatives are on track for a crushing victory. See:

The Pleb is an enthusiastic meme warrior. When he came across this boomer-flipping-double-birds video, seen above, he immediately set about making it go viral. (The Carney-as-Hitler meme is, I hope, unlikely to catch on.)

The Pleb and others in the über-online right-wing rage machine have tried to make this image intently symbolic: An older generation saying fuck you to a younger one. Considering Poilievre is polling well amongst youth and getting absolutely killed amongst the older crowd, it’s no secret why.

The images are not from The Pleb himself, but rather from another strange media figure: Caryma Sa’d, a lawyer who grew a sizeable online following by documenting COVID-19 protests during the pandemic. While she initially seemed to be a progressive critic of the anti-lockdown protests, she soon swung around and has now become one of a constellation of right-wing troll videographers.

I have seen Sa’d at a number of Liberal rallies in recent days, where she and her camera man have heckled journalists and attendees (myself included.) In Peterborough, where she caught the footage of the older gentleman making a rude gesture, she was part of a gaggle of activists — including a pair of people flying FUCK CARNEY and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN flags who were yelling things at the rally attendees. Hence the fuck you from the man in the red sweater.

Never mind the context: Sa’d grabbed the photo that The Pleb used to spin a narrative, one that is now prompting people to doxx the man and remix the footage onto new platforms.

This kind of participatory media-generation is exactly what the Poilievre campaign has wanted from day one. And it’s working.

These are the hangers-on of the Poilievre campaign. Poilievre has not explicitly endorsed either The Pleb or Sa’d.

He has, however, agreed to sit down with Jasmin Laine.

Laine is, according to her Twitter, a “former award winning broadcaster who got tired of being silenced.”1 She now broadcasts to YouTube, Twitter, and Rumble, having amassed more than 370,000 subscribers.

Her channel, which is less than a year old, can only be described as a jumble of Conservative Party talking points smashed together with all the most tin-foil-hat conspiracist innuendo. She is a fan of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, she thinks the World Economic Forum has “infiltrated” the Canadian government, and thinks that everyone but her is brainwashed.

In a video claiming that the World Economic Forum is moving to end freedom of speech worldwide — stopped in their evil mission only by brave social media truth-tellers like her — Laine says the following:

Jasmin Laine: If there's one thing any of us who are proudly awake right now know, it's that the mainstream media, the powers that be, the globalist elites don't want stuff like this to be spoken about.

And, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with any of this. There are plenty of broadcasters out there like Laine. While I roll my eyes at the insinuation that she is a journalist or some brave truth-teller, there are certainly worse media influencers out there than Laine. Is she making people stupider? Yes. But that’s her right.

What beguiles me is that Poilievre has done the pilgrimage to Laine’s condo to sit down for a feature-length interview with the conspiratorial broadcaster.

Read more

Read more

This decision is “unjust and baseless,” Pedneault told a gaggle of reporters at a hastily assembled press conference at his campaign office. "Their decisio…

Read more

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and Liberal leader Mark Carney visited Radio-Canada’s nouvelle maison to participate in Tout le monde en parle, the wide-ranging panel show hosted by comedian Guy A. Lepage, and watched live by at least one million Quebecers every week.

While not a political show per se, it has grown to become a pivotal moment of the campaign ever since NDP leader Jack Layton’s appearance on the show in 2011 helped catapult the party into first place in the province.

For the past decade, every major federal leader (sauf Stephen Harper) has appeared on the dais to chat, pitch themselves to Quebecers, and field some of the tougher left-field questions that they’re likely to get at the official debates.

So, no pressure.

Going into this interview, Carney is in the pole position, though he is at constant risk of falling on his face. Quebec’s sudden infatuation with the former central banker seems to have occurred entirely despite the quality of his French. A pretty brutal interview with Radio-Canada last week may have tried their patience. As I understand it, Carney cleared off his campaign schedule this past weekend to work on his French. That could prove very wise: If he can crack a few jokes or just generally stay with the banter, that's going to prove he is serious and capable of speaking Quebec’s language (on every level.)

Meanwhile, Poilievre’s numbers are dire in Quebec. The theme of his campaign and his personal style is just fundamentally mismatched to the province, and his campaign has always known that. To some degree, they’re still pitching the same message to Quebecers despite the fact that Quebecers don’t like it. It’s something between honesty and trolling. If Poilievre comes on the show tonight and rants about woke culture and the lost Liberal decade, he's just going to irk Quebecers even more. But if he can surprise them — not just by softening his tone, but by actually showing that he’s capable of hearing and responding to peoples’ concerns about him — he just might set himself up for success.

The show is about to start, so let’s get to it.

First on the dais is Pierre Poilievre — because the Conservatives were first to RSVP yes, he got to pick the order. And he opted to go first.

The conversation begins where you’d expect: Since Donald Trump sparked a trade war with Canada, your numbers have dropped like a rock. What are you going to do about it? In response, Poilievre says the same thing he says every day at his press conferences, although he said it much slower.

“Isn’t it frustrating,” Lepage asks, “to be displaced by Mark Carney, who has zero experience as a politician — whereas you have lots?”

Poilievre has his hand at cleverness: “Evidently, if I can go face-to-face with Guy A. Lepage, I can face Donald Trump.”

Now, listen, Tout le monde en parle is filmed in Montreal, a city that is not exactly receptive to the Conservative message. But when I tell you that the audience is silent in response to that little quip — you can hear only a confused “eughn?” from someone in the stands — it is silent. (“Me, I don’t have any tariffs!” Lepage responds, to genuine laughter.)

With that dud out of the way, Poilievre has the floor to give his well-rehearsed pitch: Nobody can control Donald Trump, we don’t have the power to stop this trade war, all we can do is try to make a deal and improve the fundamentals of our economy. You’ve heard all this in English.

A thing to know about Tout le monde en parle is that there’s often a real theme to these interviews that isn’t always obvious until the interview is over. And here Lepage starts building out that theme.

“You haven’t attacked Donald Trump much before this moment,” he asks. “It’s a strategy that seems to be a source of tension within your party. Are you holding back to avoid alienating part of your political base who like Donald Trump?”

“No,” Poilievre responds. “In fact, I’ve ferociously criticized Donald Trump. He’s done a lot of damage to our economy. He’s attacking the United States’ best friend.” In the face of Trump, he says, we’re “weak” but we could be “self-sufficient.”

Jean-Sébastien Girard, Lepage’s sidekick1 on this episode, jumps in with the direct question, citing a pretty well-established narrative around Poilievre in Quebec: “Are you a mini-Trump?” Poilievre shrugs, purses his lips, says “no.” Girard continues: “A medium-sized Trump? A large Trump?”

“I’m about 180 pounds,” Poilievre responds. Again: Dead silence.

Here, Poilievre pivots to his origin story. Trump “comes from a rich family — millionaire parents. Me, I was born to a single mother and raised by two teacher parents who gave me a modest upbringing. That upbringing gave me the capacity to understand humanity.”

“To be more empathetic than Mr. Trump?” Girard offers.

“Yes, absolutely,” Poilievre answers.

Lepage jumps in from the other side: “Over the years, Canadians have known two Pierre Poilievres.” There’s the “abrasive,” “bellicose” leader of the opposition and, more recently, there’s the more moderate leader with the beautiful smile — “like that one,” he adds when Poilievre starts to grin. “Which of the two is the real Pierre Poilievre?” Lepage asks.

This is pretty interesting because Poilievre himself has hinted at this dichotomy.

Conservative ads in Quebec feature Poilievre conceding “there are people who find I have a style that is too direct, too frank.” He follows it up asking those people: “If we should be cute, more docile, when we negotiate tariffs with Donald Trump?”

I’m kind of a dick, but that’s what we need right now is a very clever message that Quebecers are certainly receptive to. It does directly contradict his “nobody can control Trump” line, but still. There’s something to it.

We never quite get there. Poilievre off-handedly mentions that he’s sought advice on this question from former Bloc leader Lucien Bouchard, a politician who certainly rubs some people the wrong way. I’d be curious to know what Bouchard actually told Poilievre, but instead the current Conservative leader uses that anecdote as a springboard back into his “modest” origins. He says this “air of aggressiveness” comes from a place of wanting to “fight for those who deserve better from our country.”

It’s a perfectly predictable answer. But Lepage isn’t done. He pulls up a clip of Poilievre repeating some of those lines verbatim, but ending it with an appeal to the “Canadian promise, where everyone who works hard will have a beautiful life in a beautiful home, on a safe street protected by our proud soldiers under our Canadian flag.”

“This promise of Canada, it’s a bit like the American dream — a dream that was never consecrated — no?” Lepage asks.

“I see a difference,” Poilievre says. The Canadian “contract,” is more accessible than the American dream. Public healthcare, for example, lets the hard-working poor achieve whatever they want.

Again, there was a litany of directions he could have gone with this answer. Lots of chances to subvert expectations. But he doesn’t.

He’s given more chances to do that. Asked about refugees from America, Poilievre talks about the importance of coming legally as opposed to “fraudulent asylum-seekers.” Pressed about banning journalists from his bus and limiting questions from reporters, Poilievre tries his hand at outright lying when he insisted “we take fewer questions from national journalists and more from local reporters.”

“We’ve showed a huge openness,” Poilievre insisted, wrongly. Nobody looks impressed.

As a final question, Lepage asks: "Do you still want to close the CBC? And is it a financial decision, or an ideological one?”

Poilievre, no doubt, anticipated this question. And so he launches into a pretty inspired, if slightly pre-packaged, defence of Radio-Canada, insisting that its shuttering would be a real loss for francophones across Canada, that it would be a blow to Quebec identity, and that its cultural contributions justify its expense.

English Canada already has enough news and culture, Poilievre insisted, so the CBC isn’t needed.

Out of time, Lepage has no follow-up. But he ends the segment with a quick swat on Poilievre’s nose: “Public television is important for a country,” Lepage begins. “There’s none in the United States, and that is a gift to private interests who finance their politicians.” That’s bad, Lepage points out.

And with that, Poilievre is wrapped.

That’s what was said. But the subtext of the whole conversation is actually quite interesting.

Poilievre was invited to explain what differentiates his brand of small-government, libertarian-coded, free-enterprise, ambitious and hard-nosed conservative politics from American politics broadly and the MAGA Republican playbook specifically.

Poilievre wasn’t obscenely bad in this regard. I think he’s tried to highlight the very best aspects of the American dream: Ambition meets compassion, Wall Street meets Ellis Island. But, in refusing to directly criticize the active harm that Trump is doing (beyond how it impacts the Canadian economy) there’s just not enough in Poilievre’s rhetoric to suggest that he’s aware of the dark center of that dream — how ruthless competition breeds cruelty.

But he had ample opportunity to provide some more concrete distinctions and he just totally failed to do so.

If I can generalize about the entire nation for a minute: Quebec has always been rather Americanophilic. It is, to some degree, because Quebec sees itself as a fully different place than the United States. There is no inferiority complex because it has no desire to be like America. This is particularly true right now.

The Liberals are currently making the case that Poilievre is Trump-like — that he uses the same slogans, talks to the same people, and thinks the same thing. But what I think Tout le monde en parle coaxed Poilievre into admitting is that he sounds American in a way that many past Conservative Party leaders didn’t.

In March, Leger polled Canadians on Trump: Just 12% had a positive opinion of the president. That number falls to 9% in Quebec.

The pollster went further, asking Canadians what Trump policies they disliked. Just a single policy — forbidding trans women from women’s sports — had a net positive rating. A clear majority of the country is against abolishing DEI, ending birthright citizenship, banning trans people from the military, suspending aid to Ukraine, withdrawing from the World Health Organization.

In the month since that poll was taken, Trump has only veered into strange and terrifying new places. Leger did not ask, for example, about the growing trend of disappearing legal American residents to El Salvadorian black sites.

Poilievre could have taken aim at any one of those policies as a way to differentiate himself from Trump. But he didn’t. And it’s no great secret why: Because he, or his supporters, agree with many of those policies.

It also struck me that this was, really, the first time on the campaign trail that we’ve seen someone really criticize Poilievre to his face. That’s a strange recognition, in and of itself.

Onto Carney.

Let’s just deal with the obvious bit right off the top: Yes, his French is getting better, but it’s still pretty bad. A weekend of intensive practice likely helped. But clearly his staff also gave him some much-needed advice: Keep your sentences simpler and keep your answers shorter.

In decreasing the square footage of his conversation, Carney manages to avoid falling on his face. But that’s a trade-off. Carney sounds stilted right out of the gate. His answers are quite limited, sometimes confusingly so.

From the top, though, the opening minutes are spent getting the usual lines out: Before we negotiate, the United States needs to respect us. We need to make our economy more self-sufficient. We must find new trade partners.

“So you agree with Pierre Poilievre, then?” Lepage interjected, prompting a look of confusion on Carney’s face. “He just said the same thing a minute ago.”

“Oh, he’s listening to me,” Carney joked. He got some chuckles.

Lepage asks: Isn’t it easier, more fun, to be prime minister than to be a candidate?

Carney responds: “In a sense, it’s easier in a crisis. I have a lot of experience with crises. In a crisis, you have to act. You have to have audacity. To be a candidate, it’s different. We make speeches, we shake hands, we look at cows. We do other things. So in a sense, it’s easier. But it’s also essential to be a candidate. We have to have peoples’ confidence.”

But when I say that his responses were kind of awkward, this is what I mean. It makes sense, but it feels dumbed-down to the point of stupidity.

Lepage perfectly crafted a question that we’ve been dying to hear Carney talk about for awhile now. I’ll transcribe the whole thing:

Lepage: When you worked at the heart of Brookfield Asset Management from 2020 to 2025 — that’s really not a long time — three investment funds were registered in two tax havens. It’s perfectly legal, but recognizing that this practice loses billions in tax revenue annually from the Government of Canada. Do you plan on reviewing these tax haven rules?

Carney: I’m proud of my record in the financial sector, and it’s useful for this moment. Secondly, concerning the structure you’re talking about: The impact of this structure is that people pay taxes here — not in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. So it’s a structure that benefits retirees, teachers, our armed forces, people who work here in Canada. In this case, it’s better for Canada and people who work here, to keep this structure. But when it comes to the tax system, we have to make changes, that’s clear.

It’s not the world’s most satisfying answer. But I’ll have more to say on that later this week.

If the unofficial theme of Poilievre’s interview was his similarities to Donald Trump, Lepage set up Carney for a different type of subtext: Do you understand Quebec? On several occasions, Carney illustrated that the answer is not really.

He decided, at one point, to invoke his much-used line that we don’t need 13 economies in Canada, we need just one. I think Quebecers are perfectly supportive of the idea that the rest of the country needs to knock down needless red tape and outdated interprovincial barriers, and that there are some areas where Quebec can better integrate with the Canadian economy — or vice versa — but the idea that Quebec needs to surrender its economic autonomy is not exactly a winning line here.

Lepage went on to highlight the lack of attention the Liberal campaign is paying to environmental issues — yet another spot where he seems out of step with what Quebec very much cares about. Carney talks frequently about fast-tracking pipelines (“not necessarily pipelines, but maybe pipelines” he offered Sunday night), he’s cancelled the carbon tax, and he’s cancelled a planned hike to the capital gains inclusion rate.

“Certain commentators,” Lepage notes, “have argued that you’ve put your hands in the Conservatives’ cookie jar. Does he have some good ideas, Mr. Poilievre?”

Carney insists there’s a “huge difference” between himself and the Conservatives. What that difference is, though, gets lost in some confusing verbiage around carbon markets — an attempt, I think, to highlight Quebec’s still-going cap-and-trade carbon-pricing scheme? It isn’t terribly clear.

Sometimes his newfound brevity is an asset. Lepage asked Carney the mirror-image of the one he posed to Poilievre — asking him to define the big differences between himself and the former prime minister. Asking, in essence, are you a mini-Trudeau?

Carney prefaces his answer by saying “we have the same values” — solidarity, the environment, reconciliation, etc. “But,” he says, “I put the accent on the economy. I put the accent on fixing this crisis. I put the accent on building our economy.”

“Mr. Trudeau is,” Carney takes a beat. “Less interested in that.”

I’m not sure if that was intended to be savage, but it was. Maybe appropriately so. Carney can’t be afraid to hurt his predecessor’s feelings.

But Carney struggles when he faced questions around Bill 21, Quebec’s ban on religious symbols; and Bill 96, its draconian language law.

Carney gave a perplexing — somewhat condescending — answer in insisting that the only problem with these laws is the pre-emptive use of the notwithstanding clause, giving a rather facile explanation of the tension between positive and negative rights.

It was a particularly stunted answer given Poilievre’s full-throated rejection of Bill 21 just last week.

Lepage gets to the real rub of the interview in the last few minutes. Pointing out that Carney has made gaffes and slip-ups on the campaign — confusing, for example, the mass shootings at L’École Polytechnique and Concordia University, despite the fact that one of his star candidates is a survivor of the former tragedy. Lepage points out “we’ve had the impression, occasionally, that you’re missing some of the sensitivities of Quebec, that you know little about it at all.”

So Lepage gives him a challenge: “What do you know about, or what is something you like about, Quebec? A singer? A town? A characteristic? A cheese?”

“A show?” Carney attempts. “Like Tout le monde en parle?” Wrong answer.

“I know a lot,” he continues, but confessing that his French isn’t perfect, that he makes gaffes, “I’m trying to be transparent.”

Lepage interjects: “A singer? A cheese?”

Carney laughs. “Coeur de Pirate.” A pretty safe answer. (“Ok, good. That’s a cheese,” Lepage joked.)

Girard jumps in with the real test: “What’s the name of the musical-comedy group of the host, Guy A. Lepage?”

This is a prime spot to say, dear reader, that I didn’t grow up in Quebec. I’ve lived here off-and-on for more than a decade, and I consider it a second home. My French isn’t perfect either (though I can now claim it’s better than the prime minister’s) and I don’t claim to be an expert on Quebecois culture. I confess that I could not tell you, off the top of my head, the name of Guy A. Lepage’s band.

But Carney, without missing a beat, responds: “Rock et Belles Oreilles.”

The audience audibly gasped. Girard, visibly surprised, exclaims “ouais!” Lepage gives him a “bravo.” One member of the audience shouted “Woooo!” I’m told that Liberal campaign staff were high-fiving each other in joy. (Liberal staff apparently insisted that he knew this fact all on his own.)

“I know!” Carney says, visibly pleased with himself.

Was he being graded on a curve? Yes. But he aced the bonus question.

Carney may have exceeded expectations, but he by no means put to bed the idea that while he may be well-suited to the current crisis, he remains ill-prepared to handle the uniqueness of Quebec.

Just weeks earlier on the programme, ex-Conservative communications director Dmitri Soudas went on Toute le monde en parle to kick Carney in the shins for not improving his French earlier.

“I deplore the poor quality of Mr. Carney’s French,” Soudas said. “Speaking French isn’t just the language. It’s not a linguistic question. Speaking French is understanding Quebec.”

Despite what he says, I’m just not sure that Carney understands Quebec like he ought to. To date, that’s not been a serious problem. But it is a liability.

A word about Jagmeet Singh, who appeared on the programme last week.

A show like Tout le monde en parle should be a huge gift to someone like the NDP leader. It certainly helped propel Jack Layton into hero status in Quebec. But that really only works if you’ve got something genuinely interesting to say.

Through the interview, Singh was just reheating old talking points that he’s been serving to Quebecers for two elections in a row. He pitched the entire worth of his party on its ability to achieve programs like dentalcare and pharmacare.

“In Quebec, you had 59 MPs. Now, 14 years later, the NDP has only one MP in Quebec, Alexandre Boulerice,” Lepage asked. “Why is it that the NDP message isn’t reaching Quebec anymore?”

“A single MP in Quebec delivered a dentalcare program, a program that helped 50,000 Quebecers,” Singh said.

Now, here’s the problem: Singh didn’t bring pharmacare or dentalcare to Quebec, which already had provincial-level programs in place. I have no idea where Singh got this 50,000 number, but it is a meagre figure just the same. What’s more, Premier François Legault is actively trying to opt out of the dental program.

Believe me when I say: Quebecers are not tripping over themselves grateful that Singh managed to launch multi-billion dollar national programs to provide services that Quebec was already doing.

“Imagine what we could do with more MPs!” Singh continued. And it was, perhaps, the most infuriating answer of all. We shouldn’t have to imagine what you’ll do with more MPs: You have to tell us.

I have to imagine that Singh’s appearance on the show may have actually hurt the three or four high-quality candidates he has in Quebec. What a shame.

That’s it for today.

If you’re wondering where your Chaos Campaign dispatches have been, it’s that I’ve created a bit of a bottleneck for myself: I’ve got a number of interesting (I think so anyway) pieces to come, and they’re each 50% completed. So expect to get a significant dose of analysis and updates in the closing weeks of the campaign.

I’ll be back tomorrow with more!

Edit: An earlier version of this dispatch named Justin Trudeau instead of Mark Carney. I invite you to make fun of me for that.

He repeated that notion again in Trois-Rivières on Friday: “I will be cutting waste, bureaucracy, consultants, foreign aid and other unnecessary expenses,” he declared.

Poilievre appeared on Radio-Canada this week for a lengthy interview. There, Céline Galipeau pressed him on the absurdity of his position. Here’s how he responded:

I have spent the last few days trying to ask Poilievre to explain this position further — to detail why, in the context of America’s full-scale retreat from internationalism, Canada would follow suit. And to detail exactly how much he plans to cut.

Unfortunately, Poilievre’s press team has taken the unprecedented step of banning questions from journalists, except those pre-selected by the tinpot dictators who run his campaign. And I, dear reader, have not been selected thus far. I have shouted these questions at the Conservative leader, but I have been dutifully ignored.

When I followed up with his press team, they responded by sending a transcript of his Radio-Canada remarks — but underlining that “Canada’s funding commitments to Ukraine would be unaffected by our policy on foreign aid.” Everything else, ostensibly, is on the chopping block.

This is an extreme position. Poilievre seems to be promising to enact a $10 billion reduction in Canada’s foreign aid contributions, deeming it all “unnecessary,” aligning us with Donald Trump’s new isolationism and shirking our responsibilities to a world on fire.

It’s worth asking: What does the world lose if Canada cancels foreign aid?

On this Chaos Campaign, I want to talk about the dangerous game being played by the sloganeers and trolls who are using lies to discredit some very real, and very important, development work which happens abroad.

So let’s get to it.

The campaign to discredit USAID began quietly, and ended at an ear-piercing decibel.

In his first term, Donald Trump suggested slashing the US Agency for International Development, vowing to bring home those aid dollars and spend them on needy Americans. Again and again, Congress stopped him.

As Senator Marco Rubio argued then, “millions of human beings are alive today” because of American foreign aid to combat HIV/AIDS. American aid programs “are integral to our national security,” he argued, because they promote stability abroad. That, without American aid, the world would become a poorer, more dangerous, less stable place. “There is no alternative for America in the world today if America decides to withdraw from the world.”

After Trump lost the 2020 election and left office, his apparatchiks toiled in their think tanks and chat groups, pondering how they could lay the groundwork for a second term, unencumbered by nay-sayers like Rubio. And given their total failure at slashing foreign aid, somebody had to build the case against the United States Agency for International Development.

Enter Project 2025.

The effort brought Trump’s true-believers together from all corners of America, with Heritage Foundation in the middle. Their central policy book, Mandate for Leadership, was a sweeping gameplan meant to centralize power in the hands of a re-elected President Trump and dismantle the administrative state as we know it. In the book, they devoted an entire chapter to USAID.

“The Biden Administration,” writes Heritage egghead Max Primorac in Mandate for Leadership, “has deformed the agency by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systematic racism.”

The Project 2025 document spends more than 20 pages laying out reform plans for USAID: Some bad, some good, some terrible. The document argues that a second Trump administration should “reassess all programs of U.S. foreign aid to Latin America and terminate those that have failed to achieve results.” In Africa, a Republican administration “should aggressively ramp down its partnerships with wasteful, costly, and politicized U.N. agencies, international NGOs, and Beltway contractors.” In the Middle East? Washington should adopt the “goal of ending the need for foreign aid through development.”

The document previews a substantially scaled-down, more politicized, and more transactional version of foreign aid. But, critically, the document doesn’t call to abolish USAID outright — indeed, it recognizes some of the critical work that USAID does, in combatting the spread of HIV/AIDS and countering China’s new imperialism.

In making the case for these sweeping cuts, Primorac warns American foreign aid, all too often, was being “diverted to terrorists.” That it was being seized by “the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda.” American aid, the document contends, “effectively finances the social services obligations of corrupt regimes that threaten the United States.”

But Project 2025 did a masterful job in discrediting USAID. Too good a job.

In the first week of his second term, Donald Trump froze all foreign aid and began mass layoffs at USAID. In his second week, hatchet-man Elon Musk announced he would be shutting down the agency entirely.

Musk called USAID “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” alleged that USAID helped fund the creation of COVID-19, accused them of being a “radical-left political psy op,” running meddling operations abroad, and taking food out of the mouths of needy people in America.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is now, notionally, the head of the gutted agency. Once one of USAID’s saviours, he is now responsible for performing its last rites. USAID is gone.

The world has been thrown into tumult because of USAID’s closure. Calculating the effect of America’s total withdrawal of foreign aid will take years: But thousands will die of treatable illnesses, thousands more will die of starvation, and thousands more will die from inadequate responses to natural disasters. As a result, migration will increase, governments will become weaker and more corrupt, terrorism and organized crime will thrive, democracy will suffer, America will become less influential, China and Russia will exert more influence, and the world will become a more dangerous and less free place.

The annual global budget for development, public health, and security has been reduced by at least $60 billion in a matter of weeks. When it is all tabulated, the true reduction could surpass $100 billion-per-annum.

This is going to be a humanitarian disaster and a security crisis. Some impacts will be felt very quickly, others could reverberate for generations.

This didn’t need to happen. Trump could have, absolutely, reduced foreign assistance, targeted some programs more effectively, and focused more on things that demonstrably worked. But you can’t enacted reasonable reforms to an agency which you’ve declared is full of Marxists, terrorist-financiers, and deep state globalists. You can only set it on fire.

This couldn’t happen at a worse time. Fearful for its own security, Europe was already planning on cutting its own foreign aid budgets to put the money into their militaries.

The conversation in Europe, however, is turning towards how countries can step in and deliver the most-critical aid immediately to blunt the worst externalities of America’s frenzied withdrawal. This could take on a ‘hybrid’ approach, which blends investment with aid. We could also see the rise of new internationalists, like Japan, who aspire to become more influential regional partners by promoting stability and good governance in their neighborhood.

Canada can, and should, be at the forefront of that conversation. We’re not. But Poilievre is promising that we retreat even further. Poilievre is suggesting we follow Trump’s lead.

Canada is a free rider on foreign aid.

We are not, as we once were, a country which funds peacekeeping, underwriters development efforts, and finances good public health work. No, we are one of the most miserly rich countries in the world.

Annually, Canada contributes just $11 billion in foreign aid, about 0.38% of its GDP. (A slightly inflated figure, as it includes ample foreign assistance to Ukraine above its regular aid baseline.) Canada, as a share of its GNI, gives less than half what Germany does.

It didn’t used to be this way. Canada used to contribute 0.5% of GDP to foreign aid, particularly at a time when few other countries cared. That made us an incredibly influential and effective country, particularly on the continent of Africa. But steep cuts to our foreign aid at the end of the austere 1990s basically relegated Canada to the class of aid laggards.

Today, however, we are having an extraordinary conversation about our place in the world. Everyone agrees that we’ve got to get tougher, more engaged, and more concerned about what goes on beyond our borders.

And yet the actual plans on how to do that have been lacking. There is some good language on trade and defence, but preciously little curiosity about how Canada — and the West more broadly — can expand their presence in the Global South.

The NDP says they want to up aid spending to 0.7% of GNI. Good. The Green Party wants more, and has some ideas about improving internationalist institutions. Ok. The Liberals have, thus far, been silent on this question. Disappointing.

And there are the Conservatives, who want to “bring our money home.”

So let’s talk about it: Does all Canadian foreign aid go to globalist bureaucrats, terrorists, and dictators?

In service of this grand claim, Poilievre provides just two examples: Canadian funding for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East; and a $250 million cheque for infrastructure-building in China.

On UNRWA, Poilievre is not exactly wrong. Given it is the only agency capable of working on the ground in Gaza, its organization has troubling ties with Hamas. (Which was, recall, the government of the Gaza Strip until the war began last year.) Israel has long alleged that UNRWA operates as cover for Hamas. After the October 7 attacks, Israel submitted the names of 19 UNRWA employees who, they say, were involved in the attacks. A UN investigation confirmed that nine of those employees bore some responsibility for the deadly terror attacks, and fired them.

This is bad. UNRWA is the agency which delivered humanitarian assistance in Gaza. Without it, that aid would either need to go directly through Hamas, which is notorious for stealing aid for its own purposes; the Palestinian Authority, which has had little footprint in Gaza in recent years; or Israel, which has choked off aid from Gaza and simply cannot be trusted to provide aid for the Palestinian people.

Given that, it is infuriating that UNRWA would allow itself to become an easy target for Israel. And this isn’t a new thing: UNRWA has allowed itself to become politicized and co-opted for years. But it also means that UNRWA cannot simply be defunded without a staggering human cost.

And while UNRWA should be held responsible for its staff’s ties to October 7, that negligence does not excuse Israel’s malice in blockading, isolating, bombing, and starving Gaza. Israel could, tomorrow, ensure a place in Gaza for other aid agencies: But it is Israeli policies that limit the activity of these other developer workers.

Hamas deserves ample blame for Gaza’s current reality, but so too does Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. UNRWA, for its egregious faults, is still trying to save lives.

If Poilievre has plans to alleviate the humanitarian and public health crisis in Gaza, and how to stop the real prospect of genocide, we haven’t heard them. Instead, he is parroting smug slogans.

On that premise alone, Poilievre’s position is morally bankrupt. But worth considering that we are not talking about billions, nor hundreds of millions. Canada sends UNRWA $25 million per year — a figure that’s been roughly double over the past year, given the extent of the human suffering. That is just a fraction of its total $11 billion foreign aid envelope.

What about this $250 million in foreign aid we’re sending to China?

Poilievre is right that Ottawa made the bone-headed decision to chip in a quarter-billion bucks into the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, an initiative that was ostensibly supposed to build infrastructure in China, the Global South, and, potentially, in Canada — but which, in reality, was a tool of China’s new debt colonialism.

But the AIIB isn’t part of Canada’s foreign aid programme. It is, as its name suggests, a bank: A source of capital from infrastructure projects. The Bank is meant to post returns, and its members are shareholders, not benefactors. Canada is already reviewing its participation in the organization, and may yet pull out its capital investment. (It should.)

So Poilievre has identified a single grant, 0.0005% of Canada’s foreign aid spending, that he deems problematic; and another initiative that has nothing to do with foreign aid.

What about the other 99.9995% of our foreign aid spending? What else would Poilievre cut?

• We have a $5 million program in Mali which, amongst other things, provided family planning to 270,000 women and trained 140 health workers to provide care to survivors of gender-based violence.

• We have budgeted $500,000 to help Bangladesh to help the 4.6 million people affected by Cyclone Remal.

• We have put up more than $12 million, over five years, to finance the embattled police services in Haiti, which is teetering on the brink of total collapse.

• We have contributed shy of $2 million to improve biosafety and biosecurity in Laos, so that scientists there can study novel virological threats safely.

• Another $2 million has gone to North Africa, where we have helped nab 70 suspected terrorists — and, at the same time, helped dismantle several criminal networks which trafficked guns and stolen cars.

Do we fund some dumb projects? Does some of our aid go to unsavoury actors? Could we do better? Yes, yes, yes.

But Poilievre is not arguing that Canada needs to improve its foreign aid delivery. He’s saying we’re wrong to spend any money at all.

It is easy to say that we should do nothing for people over there when people are suffering here, at home. But that position is both morally hollow, practically wrong, and entirely self-defeating.

Rest assured, if we yanked that funding tomorrow, we would feel the consequences. We would see more refugee claims from Haiti, we would see more victories from the Islamic State in the Sahel, we would see less global growth — and we would see more human suffering.

The entire rich world invests, collectively, to promote development and alleviate suffering because it is the right thing to do. Our nations are rich, to varying degrees, because of sacrifices made by the Global South — capitalism extracts the labour and natural wealth from less developed nations and transfers it to individuals, corporations, and nations in the developed world. This is simply a fact. The promise of global cooperation was always that those prosperous nation-states should, through various means, invest in the growth of those less-developed countries. Wealth is not a zero-sum game: Indeed, the 20th century saw an extraordinary reduction in poverty across the world, just as our collective wealth and standard of living rose significantly.

Good foreign aid generates more prosperity: Which, in turn, generates technological innovation, entrepreneurship, new markets and consumers, and it promotes health, safety, and sustainability.

This is why USAID existed in the first place. It was a recognition that America had the moral authority and moral imperative to do this development work, that it would stabilize economies and governments around the world, and that it would reduce armed conflict and terrorism.

Finally, foreign aid was recognized as a smart proposition because it was so damned cheap. America spent even less on foreign aid than Canada, at just around 0.33% of GDP, yet it invested so much on a dollar basis that it achieved the eradication of deadly diseases, kept populations from the brink of famine, and helped combat the effects of climate change.

Pierre Poilievre knows all this, just as Marco Rubio knows that dismantling USAID will be a security and humanitarian nightmare. But both men are pursuing these plans because it serves as a useful rhetorical narrative.

They are lying to the public and selling simple truths because they trust that voters are too stupid to know the difference.

That’s it for this Chaos Campaign dispatch.

Just a reminder that if you’re not a paying subscriber, you’re only getting a fraction of the good stuff.

This week, I put out a very detailed look at the parties’ housing plans: While it was initially subscribers-only, I just decided to unlock the post for everyone to read. If you want more deep-dives like this, upgrade to a paid subscription now. (Or email me and let me know you’re looking for a complimentary subscription: You’ll get it forthwith, no questions asked.)

I’ll have a proper Bug-eyed and Shameless dispatch this week, plus lots of content in The Star. Stay tuned!

I’m coming to you from overcast Kingston, Ontario, where Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is campaigning.

All party leaders have spent the past 24 hours scrambling to respond to Donald Trump’s quixotic tariff announcement — which, conspicuously, left out Canada and Mexico. While we still face a litany of sector-specific tariffs, everyone is cautiously wondering when the other shoe will drop.

But today’s dispatch is about something else: Houses. Specifically, a lack of them.

While the line between a continental trade war and home prices might not be an obvious one, I consider myself a housing fundamentalist. That is: All of our woes trace their lineage, at least partly, to our shortage of housing; and all of our woes can be addressed, if not solved outright, by building more homes.

Our housing shortage makes us poorer, less productive, and more anxious. It worsens income inequality and reduces upward mobility. It drives anxiety towards immigrants, creates crime, and drives social and political polarization. It makes it harder for us to fight climate change and hampers technological innovation. Perhaps worst of all: It makes people homeless.

That problem has been met with an abundance of promises from Ottawa to get new housing built, and yet a shortage persists.

The mismatch between crisis and response has made people insane. And rightly so. It has made our federal government look deeply ineffective and extremely inefficient and it has driven the belief that we can no longer, as a country, do anything.

It is true that in Canada, the federal government is not primarily responsible for housing. And yet during our last big housing shortage, it was Ottawa who stepped up to solve things. And it is also true that the federal government has considerable tools to help get housing built — through the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, federal transfers to cities and provinces, public transit funding, and a plethora of other subsidies, grants, programs, and initiatives.

The origins of the housing crisis are no secret: We kept adding people to the population without building homes for them.

In 2008, Canada added just over 320,000 new residents to the country. That same year, it completed just under 215,000 homes. The ‘08 financial crisis depressed home construction in Canada, and it would take until 2021 for Canada to get back to that same rate of building. Today, we are struggling to even sustain our level of home construction. While many problems in this country can be attributed to COVID-19, not this. In fact, we got better at building homes during the pandemic.

Over this time, we should have supercharged housing construction. In 2018, the Trudeau government recognized its role in this crisis and launched the National Housing Strategy. It included more than $6 billion in spending and an ambitious plan to get 530,000 households into new or refurbished homes by 2027 — a target that should have been achievable yet was, even then, insufficient.

According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the Strategy has been an abject failure. They project that, over that decade, Ottawa will have succeeded in getting fewer than 80,000 individuals into new homes — less than a fifth of what they promised.

When I pointed out to the former prime minister this massive discrepancy, asking him why those promised numbers didn’t come to fruition, he replied: “Well, partially, they did.” As Ottawa fiddled, the need exploded.

I doubt I need to actually brief you on any of this. Every single person in Canada is, directly or indirectly, feeling the pinch of the housing crisis. Many have become disgruntled and dejected about why we haven’t seen progress on it. Indeed, Canadians recognize the obvious: Things are getting worse.

So let’s break down the why, and look at what the parties are proposing for solutions.

Subsidizing Demand, Banning Supply

While housing construction has stayed mostly flat since 2008, the type of homes we were building slowly began to change.

For generations, most of Canada preferred detached, or semi-detached homes — front lawn, driveway for two cars, a fenced-in backyard. Montreal had triplexes, Toronto had condos, Surrey had subdivisions, but most of the new construction happening focused on the two-bedroom family homes which still rule our cities and suburbs.

This changed in the early 00s. Construction of these new homes slowed — in part because of the recession, and in part because we ran out of space to stick new sub-divisions. Construction of more efficient buildings, like duplexes and apartment blocks, rose, but not by enough to make up the loss. And not by nearly enough to meet the growing demand.

Constructing more apartment buildings and other efficient housing units was a positive sign, but it was lopsided and erratic. Ontario, for example, built 8,000 fewer apartment buildings in 2022 than it did in 2015. British Columbia’s apartment construction plateaued in 2019.

There is a simple, unavoidable reason for this: It is illegal to build useful housing in most of the country.

In those green zones — the dense urban centers, or in more permissive cities like Montreal — dozens, even hundreds, could live on each lot. But the majority of the country is made up red zones, where governments at the municipal and provincial level limit, by law, how many people could live on each plot of land. In those red zones, where only detached homes are allowed, we allowed just a few people on each lot.

Let’s just say the obvious: People in those red zones like living in red zones. They like having a front and back yard, they like having few neighbours, they like having mail delivered to their front door. And, for years, they resisted any effort to change their status quo. They voted against initiatives to ease zoning restrictions, opposed construction of new infrastructure or housing developments, and voted for politicians who wanted to create gentle growth. (See: No growth.)

So we had scarcity, we voted for scarcity, we maintained scarcity. And in that scarcity, prices rose.

That was just fine for those who already owned housing, as they watched their net worth rise steadily. It posed a minor problem for governments, as some voters began to feel anxious about the growing gap between incomes and home prices. For Ottawa, in particular, they arrived at a solution quickly: Subsidize demand.

There is the First-Time Home Buyers' Tax Credit, the First-Time Home Buyer Incentive, the Home Buyers’ Plan, and, most recently, the First Home Savings Account.

If someone took advantage of every single one of these benefits to the largest extent possible, it would free up roughly $100,000 in cash to put towards a down-payment. That may be a perfectly reasonable strategy in a world where there are ample homes but they cost too much. But in a scarce market, this is merely inflating home prices.

If you have 100 apples but 10,000 people who want to eat apples, introducing a $1,000 First Time Apple-Buyer’s Tax Credit is just going to increase the cost of apples by $1,000.

This was the status quo for years. And Ottawa was told, again and again, that their strategy was simply going to make things worse. And they continued.

Over the past few years, politicians have woken up. Well, some of them have.

The Greens and New Democrats: Nonsense Hokum

There’s not much point in talking about the NDP and Green plans, because they aren’t serious.

Both parties are hopelessly lost on this file, perpetually caught between a desire to build things and their discomfort with relying on the private sector to get them built.

This week, the NDP announced their plan to “unlock the financial power of the CMHC to offer low-interest, fixed rate and public-backed mortgages to first-time homebuyers.” Translated: Pump more liquidity into a scarce market.

The Greens, meanwhile, announced they want to “eliminate the unfair tax advantages for Real Estate Investment Trusts” and “stop corporations from buying up single family homes.” Translated: Tax capital going into the market.

Again, these initiatives may be smart in a healthy market. But they will constrain supply, drive up prices, and do little to unlock new builds. There is a way to disincentivize speculation and flipping whilst simultaneously incentivizing building. Neither party has, over the past decade, figured out how to do that.

While both parties may yet unveil stronger housing plans, expect them to promise more affordable housing without any real plan to get it built.

The Conservatives: Good, but Incomplete

No matter how you feel about the guy, Pierre Poilievre deserves credit for stabbing a shot of adrenaline into the heart of Canada’s housing policy.

In 2022, Poilievre began speaking in language which had thus far been Greek to most Canadians: Force municipalities to build more kinds of housing, and faster.

The media focused incessantly on his slightly-conspiratorial language of “gatekeepers,” instead of fixating on what he said next: "Stop blocking the poor, the working class, and our immigrants from the privilege of owning a home."

Luckily, we don’t have to guess at what this will look like: Poilievre already introduced his plan as a private member’s bill: The Building Homes Not Bureaucracy Act.

In effect, the legislation creates a test for “high-cost cities” — if they “unduly restrict or delay” housing approvals, reject building permits, or fail to liberalize zoning rules, they stand to lose billions in federal cash. Poilievre’s government would push those cities to improve their construction of new units by 15% year-over-year. Cities that succeed won’t just stave off punishment, but receive bonuses from Ottawa. The federal government would help out by removing the GST on new construction and putting federal land up on the market.

This is all good, full stop. These measures would very, very quickly increase the amount of new housing being built.

But here’s the catch: Poilievre lists those “high-cost cities” in the legislation, and they number just 22. That list does not, for example, include the on-island Montreal suburb of Mont Royale — a city which killed a massive housing development next to a luxury mall due to outcry from its rich citizens. It includes just a single city in Atlantic Canada, which is being ravaged by the housing crisis. It does not include a single municipality in Manitoba or Saskatchewan. But the list does include Montreal, which already has incredibly permissive zoning rules.

It’s not hard to figure out the commonality: Poilievre is targeting liberal cities, and protecting conservative ones.

Still, it is true that the cities targeted by Poilievre need to get their act together. But a real ambitious plan would also push suburbs, towns, and mid-sized cities — places that are not yet expensive, but which also have an abundance of space and restrictive zoning rules.

Poilievre has some other good ideas, though. His recent announcement to exempt capital gains from taxation, if the gains are re-invested into Canada — including in housing — is just plain smart economics. (I plan on writing more on this in the near future.)

Conservative plans to beef up trade school recruitment recognizes an under-appreciated factor in this mess: Because we have not built enough in recent decades, we don’t have enough people to do the building. Time to train more.

But Poilievre falls into the same trap as the Liberals: He also wants to expand government subsidy problems to slush more money into the market. Despite his constant refrain that inflation is the “worst tax of all,” he would pour billions into a home-buyer’s tax cut.

So there’s lots of good, a bit of bad, and lots of room to improve.

The Liberals: Great, but Can We Trust Them?

Pushed by Poilievre to unveil something useful, the Liberals finally unleashed their Housing Accelerator in 2023.1 The plan unveiled billions in new funding, which was directly tied to cities and provinces adopting more permissive zoning and legalizing more kinds of housing.

And, by and large, it’s been a huge hit. Cities have tripped over themselves to take the cash and upzone their cities. We have witnessed the most dramatic shift in housing legalization ever.

While some wins were easy, other governments have dragged their feet. The province of Ontario and the city of Toronto have resisted taking the bold action necessary to solve this crisis.

It has become entirely clear that more needs to be done.

To that end, Liberal leader Mark Carney has unveiled his plan to get more homes built. And, despite a few caveats, it is genuinely transformative stuff.

Released in late March, the Liberal platform basically falls under two headings: Build Canada Homes, a new government agency tasked with getting the government building stuff again; and make it easier for the private sector build homes.

Let’s start with Build Canada Homes, or BCH: A government-run home construction agency. Modelled after the WWII-era Wartime Housing Limited, the BCH would take over the construction of affordable housing straight across the country — even purchasing new land to do so. We will need to wait for the costed platform to appreciate just how many dollars in total will go into this project, but my back-of-the-napkin math suggests we’re looking at somewhere in the ballpark of $50 billion.2

As a part of this effort, BCH will invest in prefabricated home builders and place bulk orders for these homes. This promise raised some eyebrows: Prefab homes have been promised as a solution to the housing crisis for years, and yet have never come to fruition. (If you want a helpful background on the issue, I recommend this video from About Here.)

Prefab homes will never fix the entire housing crisis, but if they are well-built, well-designed, and used primarily a bridge to help those in precarious housing situations, they have the potential to be the quickest-impact and lowest-cost path out of our current chaos. But this will also require strong-arming cities into allowing them.

As I understand the policy, the Liberals seem to well understand the helpful role that prefab homes can play without betting the farm on them. Good.

The BCH will also provide $10 billion to home builders in immediately accessible capital for affordable homes, in particular for student residences and seniors’ homes.

Onto the private sector side: Carney says he would keep, and expand, the Housing Accelerator, and expand its aim to speed up government approvals — not just expand zoning. The devil will be in the details of how that looks in reality, but it has the potential to energize the program further.

Carney would also bring back the long-forgotten Multiple Unit Rental Building (MURB) tax incentive. This is an interesting one.

The MURB program, which ran from 1974 to 1981, was essentially a tax shelter for those who built or bought apartment buildings. It allowed owners of these buildings to write off a slew of capital costs from their income taxes, including many ‘soft’ costs (such as property taxes.) Simply put: It made apartment buildings better investments than other types of real estate.

The program was particularly studied in relation to its effect on the Vancouver market. The ‘steel man’ case for the program is that it quickly moved investment capital from condos towards apartment buildings, which have suffered by being less attractive to investors. (Except predatory low-margin investors.)

Not everyone agrees. One researcher at the time contended that the MURB program “was not effective in achieving its objective” and that the real effect of the program was to “create windfall gains for existing owners of multiple family zoned land at the time the legislation was passed.”3 (Worth noting that part of this argument turned on the idea that apartment rentals were banned in much of the city, which unfairly distorted the market.

And onto the last piece: Carney proposes cutting municipal-level development charges in half for multi-unit residential housing, with the federal government stepping in to replace any lost income to the cities, for five years.

This is controversial, for a few reasons.

Development charges are generally popular with citizens, because they soak those evil developers and force them to fund the externalities of their new construction — they build sidewalks and transit for the new citizens who will live in these buildings, for example. But development charges have also become a vehicle for some cities to make their budgets work without raising property taxes. I’m looking at you, Toronto.

This has created perverse incentives. Because it is so expensive to build rental buildings and condos in Toronto, they disproportionately become luxury buildings or are built poorly by developers looking to turn profit. Reducing development charges — and shifting the tax burden to homeowners, particularly those who have seen multifold increases in their net worth thanks to skyrocketing property values — is the way to flip those incentives. The CMHC estimates that, without development charges, the total cost to build apartment buildings would fall by about 15%.

But does that mean the federal government should step in and fund this cut in charges?

That’s where this gets squishy. Toronto raised about $518 million from development charges in 2024: We can estimate that roughly half that amount came from charges from multi-unit residential. That means the Government of Canada is providing about $650 million to Toronto over five years to maintain the unsustainable status quo.

Cities with reasonable development charges, like Montreal, will get just a fraction of that money.

So, yes, Carney’s proposal is manifestly unfair. But the simple fact is that the whole country is suffering because of Toronto’s intransigence. The housing crises in Montreal, Halifax, Moncton, and elsewhere were driven, largely, by an influx of new residents fleeing cities with housing scarcity. And this development charge subsidy is something that can be done immediately, with relatively little squealing from Toronto’s or Vancouver’s politicians.

Still, it feels like the Liberals have consistently opted for carrots when a stick would be a better tool.

More fundamentally, the question remains: Why didn’t the Liberals do any of this in 2015?

Where Does That Leave Us?

Between the two parties most likely to form government, we have two solid — and very different — plans.

In my ideal world, we would combine them. Take the Liberals’ plan to get the government building again, and the Conservatives’ hard-nose approach to making the cities and provinces get in shape.

Unfortunately, it seems that each man’s need to distinguish himself from the other has entrenched the parties into worse territory.

“You'll own nothing and be happy,” Poilievre told the crowd in Kingston on Wednesday night, a wink at the bug-eyed WEF conspiracy theories that he loves so dearly. “So if you elect the Liberals, the hope is that, one day, they'll make you a tiny prefab home with no parking space that they will own and you will rent from the government. Does that sound like a bright future to you?” (The crowd seemed slightly confused by this tangent.)

As with so many things, Poilievre’s culture war lens is stopping him from seeing good policy right in front of him.

It ignores the fact that parking requirements are a massive hinderance to building denser housing. We should be building more homes without driveways.

The Liberals, meanwhile, have just an abysmal track record on housing construction. Tapping Nathaniel Erskine-Smith to be housing minister signalled a substantial change in direction, although I do worry that the Liberals’ build-build-build mantra is being diluted by their willingness to stand-up programs and cooperate with intransigent governments which send the message: No-no-no.

The only thing to do now is to absolutely grill your local candidates on how they will, personally — not as a party — advocate for strong solutions to the housing crisis.

We got into this mess because of endemic buck-passing and the ability for a small group of anti-development yahoos to hijack the conversation. The only way out of this is to demand accountability and make it clear that we want more homes.

That’s it for this (longer-than-expected) dispatch.

Expect more of them in your inbox in the coming days, as I try and break the logjam of writing that’s built up over the past week.

I’ll be joining for a chat about Canadian politics at 2:30pm EST today, so tune in for that!

Over at the Star, I’ve got a column about the desperate need for RCMP reform and some jeers for our leaders who have been weak in standing up for Greenland. In the next few days, I’ll have a write-up of my sit-down with Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault — Chaos Campaign subscribers will be getting the full transcript and audio. Stay tuned!

Teneycke is the former director of communications to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the founder of the right-leaning Sun News Network, the erstwhile campaign spokesman for the Conservative Party, and, since then, the éminence grise to Premier …

Read more

With that, Carney announced that he was calling a snap election for April 28. Enter the Chaos Campaign. It is an election, Carney continued, about nothing less than Canada’s sovereignty. And he needs a mandate, he said, to “fight the Americans.”

Just a few kilometres away, at his campaign kick-off, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre was speaking in similar terms. He’s running to unleash the Canadian economy “so that we can confront Donald Trump and the Americans with strength.”

New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh joined the chorus: “We will never be Trump’s 51st state. Not in name, not in values, and not on my watch.”

Most Canadians are taking Donald Trump’s threats, and the election itself, deadly seriously. Still, it is easy, even understandable, to roll your eyes at the rhetoric. To throw your hands in the air, to declare that everyone is being dramatic, to say this, too, shall pass.

It’s a pretty rational reaction. Since the end of the Cold War, Western civilization has been on a pretty consistent march upwards. Not the Dot Com bubble popping, nor the War on Terror, nor the Great Recession, nor Brexit, nor Donald Trump’s first term, nor the COVID-19 pandemic managed to wreck the foundations of our prosperous, friendly, stable, democratic world. Why would Trump’s encore be any different?

After averting total calamity again and again, you could be forgiven for thinking that the world is simply just. Or that some historical spirit is pushing at our backs. Or that things will just always work out for the best.

But that way of thinking is stupid. The Western world continues to be rich, free, and sovereign because we have institutions, civil society, diplomatic relations, and leaders who cooperate to keep us thus. It is no accident, but good planning.

There is now one leader who is dismantling those institutions with terrifying speed, smashing civil society with the full weight of the American state, and shredding those diplomatic relations with glee. With that system of liberal order broken, we can no longer be confident that things are going to work out alright. In fact, the balance of probabilities now suggests that things are about to get a whole lot worse.

How much worse? We should not limit our imagination.

On the flipside, we also shouldn’t limit our imagination as we come up with solutions to the crisis. Earlier this month, I sketched out some top-line ideas about how Canada can go about that.

So, in this dispatch, I want to take a look at some more tangible ideas on how Canada can insure its own future, how it can rewire itself to the rest of the liberal world, and how it can make itself prickly and armoured against a belligerent former ally. To do it, I’ve trawled the usual sources, the leaders, analysts, and columnists who have chewed over this idea in recent weeks; and plenty of other places, from our friends in Greenland to some historical antecedents.

Given the stakes of the campaign, we should all be firing up our idea generators and running them at capacity — and then pressing our local candidates for office about their own ideas, or lack thereof, of how to manage our current crisis.

It’s telling that three major elections of recent weeks — German, Greenland, Canada — all turned on how to decouple from an increasingly-dangerous America. I suspect the global elections in the coming weeks and months will be fought along much the same lines. Learning lessons, as Carney suggests, is a damn good idea.

So, no more table-setting. Let’s get to it.

From North-South to East-West

When British Columbia joined Confederation in 1871, it had a big ask: An east-to-west railway, to be built “at the earliest possible date.”

The Canada Pacific Railway is central to Canada’s origin myth. But building the railway was not just a transportation project, it was an exercise in national security.

Canadians travelling from one coast to another basically had to transit through America. Mail sent from Victoria to Ottawa had to pass through the United States. At various times, America saw Indigenous peoples living north of their border as a threat which may warrant invasion or as “a trump card” to be used so that “every vestige of British power may be swept from the Western half of the continent,” as one newspaper editorial argued. (Canada would, of course, perpetrate its own genocide in constructing this railway.)1

The railway would be the mechanism through which Canada, for good and bad, would expand its empire and facilitate the movement of its own goods, people, and soldiers. It would be the spine of its defense against an expansionist America.

Ottawa was, perhaps, too paranoid back then. American invasion plans were half-baked or nonexistent, and its obsession with manifest destiny was waning by the close of the 19th century. But building the railway was, ultimately, the right thing to do.

A century of peace alleviated the need for such east-to-west infrastructure. Ottawa happily built roads, railways, shipping lanes, and energy infrastructure to run from its territory south into America. Even its ambitions across the Pacific and Atlantic ran through the United States. Albertan oil would be refined in American refineries, Quebec hydroelectricity would power streetlights in New York, and car parts made in Ontario would be slotted into vehicles in Detroit.

This was the right choice, but it always required logic and sanity to prevail on both sides. With a breakdown on one side, Canada has no choice but to rebuild those east-to-west linkages. And, where possible, build them east-west-north.

Mark Carney has already sketched out what this could look like, promising more rail connections, more LNG facilities, more military bases, and more ports. Pierre Poilievre has offered a more narrow vision for that idea, proposing a ton of new energy infrastructure to extract, move, refine, and sell oil and natural gas. There are other ambitious plans out there.

But these plans would be a failure if they existed only to move fossil fuels around. Canada needs more flights connecting its regions, and linking its cities to European capitals — including in Greenland. It needs more ships to ensure trade remains strong with Mexico. It needs better trade infrastructure, to bring goods from ports on the east coast to ports on the west.

This isn’t about one new rail line or a single pipeline. This requires a total strategic rethink about the direction in which our goods move.

If done right, this would not only allow Canada to diversify trade away from the United States whilst also making Canada a useful link in global supply chains and international trade. If America returns to its senses in four years: Great, things can move in four directions. If Washington’s protectionist mania continues, then Canada can continue cementing its east-west flow of goods.

Invest Now — But Smartly

If we’re lacking for inspiration on how to hit the ground running on our re-invention, we should cast our weary eyes to Berlin.

Buoyed by his big election win, but even before he’s formed government, CDU/CSU chair Friedrich Merz has helped pushed a massive constitutional reform package through Germany’s Parliament. The spending plans, totalling €1 trillion, blow through measures meant to constrain state spending. And, good.

Fiscal restraint and austerity are not ends onto themselves, they are tools meant to provide stability in good times and to allow for freedom of movement in bad times. These are bad times, and states need to move.

We’re about to watch Germany use that debt to not only recapitalize its military, but also to invest in more green energy and build out civilian infrastructure.

“We are getting our country back into shape,” reads a preliminary agreement between the first-place CSU/CDU and second-place third-place SPD, “through investments in roads, railways, education, digitalization, energy, and health.” This will include state investments in the “semiconductor, battery manufacturing, hydrogen, and pharmaceutical industries.” This will also include investments in social supports to prioritize “social cohesion.” And it will lead the government to “present a priority list of armaments to be procured quickly, which will quickly and efficiently increase our country's defence readiness.”2

There are lots of pitfalls for this plan. Western investment has become less-and-less efficient over the years — with governments marring their spending with their own red tape and complicated approvals, worsened by tight labour markets.

But Germany seems keen to make one big spending push now, coupled with sweeping reforms to maximize the impact of those Euros, so that it remains on steadier footing for the next decade.

Plans are better executed when they are comprehensive, detailed, and long-term. For years, Western states have been limping from one budget to the next, lavishing money in one direction and then another, hesitant to commit to anything. Those days need to be over. Canada, like other countries in the Eurozone and NATO, needs to put its cards on the table and unveil serious medium-term spending plans — both for national and international security, but also to keep working people from feeling the pain of global instability. Call it a Green New Deal, call it a neo-Marshall Plan, call it whatever you want: Now is the time for those investments.

Create an Arctic Pact

“Greenland,” Jens Frederik Nielsen likes to note, “is not for sale.”

Nielsen is likely to become the prime minister of Greenland, following a big win for the centrist pro-independence Democrats party earlier this month. He now has the tricky challenge of forming government, pushing back against America’s annexation talk, and planning for an independence referendum.

After that, another decision looms large over Greenland.

From the Democrats’ campaign platform:

We must find solutions that ensure that our country can emerge as a strong and independent nation, while preserving and strengthening the areas of cooperation that benefit us all. One of the options to be carefully examined is the construct of free association. […] We need to be open and realistic about our options. The US is the only realistic partner other than Denmark, which is why we need to engage in an honest and respectful dialog with them. A dialog that can lead to cooperation — and perhaps even negotiations — on how they can contribute to our journey towards independence. But again, it must be on our terms. Our country should not be reduced to a strategic pawn in a larger game.3

This is a striking situation which Nuuk finds itself in. The nation’s long path to independence has always turned on the idea that the island would need a partner in independence — and Washington always made sense. But now, with that dream of independence within reach, it is facing threats of annexation from that supposed friend.

This week, a delegation of Trump officials are heading to Greenland to visit a U.S. base — without an invitation. Their visit is prompting panic.

This is an intolerable diplomatic affront, one that Canadians are the best-positioned to appreciate.

While Canada should have no illusions about replacing America as some world superpower, Ottawa should have designs to become the world’s premiere Arctic power.

The international body meant to govern affairs in the high north, the Arctic Council, is essentially defunct. That’s probably for the best. There is no way to operate the Council without Russia, nor is there a world in which it could be effective with Russia. We ought to replace it with something better.

We need an association of like-minded Arctic powers which can patrol the thawing Arctic waters, manage mineral extraction, ensure the peaceful usage of the North, monitor the effects of climate change, and protect the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples who live there. America only cares about mineral rights, Russia wants to use the North for geopolitical ends, and China is looking to expand its neo-colonial ambitions in all directions — all three must be resisted. That falls to Greenland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Canada. So let’s get cracking.

Northerners have been having these conversations for years. Yukon Premier Ranj Pillai told me earlier this year that Yukoners have often felt like they’re “standing in a lonely place,” having these conversations only with other Northerners. That has changed in a big way in recent months. “Seeing Canada come to the table — with the support and the financial commitment — was important,” he told me.

“Leaders in the North and leaders in the South need to understand that the dialog — that the cultural, social, and political engagement — has to happen east-to-west,” Pillai says. That means better connecting Whitehorse to Yellowknife to Iqaluit to Nuuk to Reykjavík to Svalbard, and so on.

In figuring out how we like-minded nations can secure the North, we may be able to strike a better free association deal for Greenland than whatever predatory offer Donald Trump is sure to make.

No to New Nukes, Yes to the Nuclear Umbrella

Read more

Earlier this week, a fringe far-right media outlet ran a hit job on Sasha Carney, child of Prime Minister Mark Carney. This “EXCLUSIVE” report claims that the 24-year-old Carney is not trans but simply “confused,” that they are being hidden from the public eye, and that the prime minister of Canada is a bad father for allowing them to access gender-affirming care.

This hack job is a new nadir for the right-wing alternative press. It is a violation of the unspoken rule that politicians’ kids are off-limits. And, on top of that, the story is factually wrong — an example of the sloppy faux-journalism employed by these anti-trans bigots in the name of a crusade.

“Mark Carney sent daughter to discredited U.K. Tavistock Transgender Clinic,” reads the headline published earlier this week by Juno News.1

If you’ve never heard of it, Juno News is a rebranding of right-wing think-tank-slash- media-outlet True North, founded by Candice Malcolm, a right-wing columnist and part-time conspiracy theorist.

While Malcolm introduced the story on her YouTube show, the piece was written by two Juno contributors, Cosmin Dzsurdzsa and Alex Zoltan.

It all turns on a 2020 essay penned by Sasha Carney in Broad Recognition, a Yale University student magazine.

“In the essay,” Dzsurdzsa and Zoltan write, “Sasha talks about her experiences of feeling confused about her gender as a teenager and receiving treatment at the discredited Tavistock gender clinic in London, England.”

Along with Malcolm, the three seem unsure of why, exactly, they’re reporting this story. They claim Sasha Carney is a “public figure,” insist there is “mystique and intrigue” surrounding their absence from Canadian politics to date, and suggest that Carney is being hidden because “Canadians are not on board for this kind of thing.”

More than 15 minutes into their conversation, Malcolm eventually gets to the rub of what they’re alleging: That Mark Carney failed as a father by sending his kid to the Tavistock Clinic.

“Her father is the prime minister of this country and I think that it's completely fair game to ask him what his positions are given what happened with his own daughter.” A minute later, Malcolm drops even that pretence. “She was born a woman — and I think she is still a woman, just a confused one, sadly,” she says. “What a sad story. I can't help but feel bad for this young woman. And I feel a little bit of anger and frustration at her parents for allowing this to happen to her.”

Not only is it grotesque that these three are using their platform to attack a university student, but the entire story is wrong. They couldn’t even do a hit piece properly.

But since we’re here, why don’t we actually read what Sasha Carney has to say? We might even learn something.

Sasha Carney: “They’re just kids!” one side shrieks, shuddering at the thought of their children being “exploited” by some worldwide political trans agenda. “We all have phases. They’re too young to possibly know!” “On the contrary!” protests the other side. “It is precisely because they’re so young that they must know! This is proof that trans adults are born this way, and know they’re trans from the start!”

You’ll notice that both of these voices are speaking in the third person. There is no time, here, to consult trans children themselves, who only become a tool, a ruler by which to measure “authentic” transness.

I confess I’m not thrilled at the prospect of trawling through someone’s contributions to a university zine — gosh knows I don’t deserve to have my contributions to the campus paper held against me — but Carney’s essay is an incredibly interesting piece.

In it, Carney grapples with the impossible position trans youth find themselves in these days, conscripted into a culture war they never asked to fight.

They are attacked, on one side, by those who see gender-affirming care as something between exploitation and medical experimentation. In this anti-trans crusade — now the official position of the U.S. government — trans youth have no autonomy, no awareness of self, no capacity to resist bad actors; whilst parents who agree with this care can only be rubes or, worse, ideological zealots.

And these trans people are defended, on the other side, by progressives who find purpose in politics by fighting against conservatives and reactionary backlash. These allies, well-intentioned as they are, insist that trans identity is some immutable or static characteristic. They are, the refrain grows, born this way. And, it is implied, they will not change.

But as Carney themself writes, this is an impossibly unfair position to put anyone in — nevermind youth who are struggling to figure out their identity. They are being conscripted into a political war being fought around their conception of self. If that sense of self changes or evolves, they can find themselves suddenly fitting awkwardly in this discourse.

One side insists they’re confused, the other insists they must be sure.

This intense public fixation — driven by politicians and media but often actualized on the ground by parents, friends, strangers — is exactly the thesis of Carney’s essay.

“My teenage years existed in close proximity to this TERF-driven scrutiny, which was fixated on identifying how ‘authentically trans’ people like me really were,” Carney writes. They recount moving to London, when their father took on a job as Governor of the Bank of England.

“A block from my new house was the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust, an imposing grey building which contained the country’s only child and adolescent ‘gender identity clinic.’”

This is the clinic that the Juno crowd says was “discredited” and shut down. The clinic, Dzsurdzsa says, was engulfed in scandal because “children as young as six years old, and under,” were being rushed “into lifechanging, life-altering gender transition treatment.”

This is, to Juno’s credit, partly true. Without unpacking the entirety of the debate around gender-affirming care in the United Kingdom, it is true that Tavistock’s gender-affirming care clinic — Gender and Identity Development Service (GIDS) — was poorly run, that staff concerns were ignored, and that there were inadequate procedures in place to handle the enormous volume of cases the clinic was taking in. GIDS was shut down last year. (Tavistock, which includes a variety of other areas of practice, remains open.)

But Dzsurdzsa overstates just how blameworthy GIDS truly is. Part of the reason the clinic was investigated and shuttered is because of a lawsuit filed by one of its former patients who spent years transitioning, who argued that the clinic did too little to inform her of the long-term risks of gender-affirming care. The court agreed.

Yet the court also heard from a number of patients who had radically different experiences. They recounted how GIDS suffered from a painfully long waiting list, how the therapeutic consultations could stretch on for years before they were prescribed puberty/hormone blockers. “The treatment of hormone blockers may very well have saved my life,” one former patient wrote to the court.

The GIDS case prompted an extensive study of gender-affirming care in the United Kingdom. While the debate about how best to provide that care is still raging, it’s worth noting that the study included an audit of GIDS’ work. It shows there had been a tiny number2 of patients between the ages of 8 and 12 who were prescribed puberty blockers. The audit also shows that a number of those patients stopped taking that medication, without any apparent problems.

While clinics generally prefer not to treat particularly young children, there are always edge cases. And it’s worth underlining that access to puberty blockers corresponds to a decrease in the likelihood of suicidal ideation.

I go through all of this to say: It is so easy to lie about this stuff. It is hard to deal with it seriously. But Candice Malcolm and her ilk do not actually care about getting it right, they care about whipping up fear and anger.

Worse yet, they obsessively censor and ignore what trans people themselves say. Their complaint is not that it’s too easy to receive these treatments — quite the opposite.

As Carney writes:

Carney: I watched as my friend, after a year of weekly appointments trying desperately to get an official diagnosis of gender dysphoria, was denied the diagnosis, and with it any hope of top surgery because they sometimes wore skirts. I watched organisations with names like “Transgender Trend” refer to trans Tavistock patients as “experimental subjects” who didn’t know what was best for them. I watched as my school’s former principal told a national news outlet that trans students like me and many of my close friends were cis women who were only coming out to “cause turbulence” and “adhere to anything a bit radical.” I watched all this happen, and I quietly stopped wearing underwire bras, and wore baggier clothes, and I felt a fierce surge of jealousy every time I walked into the Tavistock for therapy and saw patients turn left, towards the medical spaces [GIDS] I didn’t feel “trans enough” to enter.

Far from an incessant desire to push the “medicalization” of children, as Dzsurdzsa puts it, trans youth frequently find barriers to accessing gender-affirming care. And they face authorities and administrators who have internalized the media narrative that there is a dangerous social contagion at play. That someone is turning the kids trans.

At the same time, Carney argues, some trans activists and influencers have swung too far in the opposite direction: Insisting that only medical procedures can confirm a real trans person. They have committed too aggressively to the idea that trans identity is a diagnosis, instead of an element of one’s identity.

Certainly, gender-affirming care is certainly one way of helping trans people become true to themselves — but it’s not the only way.

Carney: So where does that leave me? Am I a cis woman pretending? A trans man running from my own identity? A nonbinary person finally expressing my ‘true’ authentic self? The truth is, honestly, that most trans children and young adults have experiences not dissimilar to my own. Most lie somewhere in between what trans and cis childhood is “supposed” to look like.

It is, frankly, none of our business where on that spectrum Carney ended up. It is up to the media, politicians, and law-makers to make sure the right procedures, funding, guidelines, and safeguards are in place around medical care — and then to get out of the business of second-guessing the evolving and complicated identities of youth.

I go through Carney’s essay for another reason: While they say they went to Tavistock for therapy, they explicitly say they did not receive medical treatment there.

Nowhere in it does Carney ever say they went to GIDS. While they say they went to Tavistock, they say it was only for therapy. In fact, they explicitly say they didn’t receive gender-affirming care.

Tavistock, the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, is where Carney went. It is not “discredited” nor has it been closed. The Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service, GIDS, has been closed, but Carney writes that they never went to it.

But even if Carney had gone to GIDS, they would have almost certainly received excellent care, it still would have been none of Candice Malcolm’s business, and Juno News would still be unpleasant vultures for obsessing over it.

So not only is this story a ghoulish attempt to attack the child of a politician for their identity, all based on lies and innuendo, but it is wrong. All built on lazy reading and a lack of research.

There is a generally well-respected rule in politics, which goes like this:

Cover and criticize the politicians, but leave their kids alone.

The rule has been broken before, of course. One of its most obscene violators, Rush Limbaugh, did it for sport. “Did you know there’s a White House dog?” Limbaugh asked the audience on his short-lived and much-hated daytime talk show. On the screen flashed a picture of Chelsea Clinton, the president’s 13-year-old daughter. Viewers were so furious that Limbaugh uncharacteristically tried to climb down, insisting it was all a mistake — some rogue technician did it.

As with all good political norms, violations carried consequences. When a Republican congressional aide wrote on Facebook that the Obama daughters ought to “show a little class” because they were standing at attention during the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon, she resigned in shame.

In Canada, where families of leaders tended to eschew the limelight, the norm was even more rigid. One of the strangest exceptions came in 2006, shortly after Prime Minister Stephen Harper formed government. Harper was a bit of a mystery for a lot of journalists in Canada, and the press covered him in those days like he had recently arrived from a distant planet.

On a snow day, a photographer followed Harper as he walked his two young children to school. As Ben, his son, turned to leave, the prime minister extended his hand for a handshake.

It was an awkward moment, caused by the young Harper’s nervousness around the cameras. But the photo prompted howls from Harper’s many critics: This man does not really love his son.

I’m not sure the press even understood at the time that they had violated this sacrosanct rule. But Harper sure did. "The notion that he might be a distant or uncaring father hurt him," a former advisor told for his book The Longer I’m Prime Minister. "It's the only thing I ever saw that did."

We lay off the kids because they didn’t ask for this. Even moreso that the spouses of leaders, the offspring have virtually no power to avoid the circus which surrounds politics. Some opt to jump into politics — like Ivanka and Barron Trump have — but most don’t. Even at a time when most norms and standards of politics have been cast aside, and when polarization has made our politics more toxic and unpleasant than ever, this one rule has held mostly firm.

But places like Juno News revel in breaking these rules. They, similarly, violate just about every standard of fairness, objectivity, and journalism ethics.

Consider the two figures who actually penned this story.

Dzsurdzsa has toiled for years in the Canadian alt media scene. Early in his career he had been contributor to Free Bird Media, a now-defunct media platform which happily conducted friendly interviews with people like Paul Fromm — one of Canada’s most prolific neo-Nazis. Once that fact surfaced, he was fired from his job as a copy-editor at The Post Millennial, another right-wing alt-media site. Now he’s landed on his feet at Juno.

Zoltan appears to have gotten his start during the Freedom Convoy occupation of downtown Ottawa. His particular fixation has been in trying to exonerate the ‘Coutts Four’ — the men accused of hoarding weapons and developing a plan to murder RCMP officers during a cross-border blockade in 2022. (The men were ultimately convicted on an array of weapons and mischief charges, while one was convicted of building a pipe bomb.)

These two men are explicitly partisan and are open about the fact that they are using the trappings of journalism as a means to take on liberals, progressives, the left, trans people, the media — whoever happens to be in their sights.

The first sentence of Juno News’ mission statement reads: “The legacy media is lying to you.” In reality, though, Juno News is lying to you. Not just about the topics it covers, but about its very existence. The outlet is not news. (Nor is it pertaining to the smash 2007 romcom featuring Elliot Page and Michael Cera.)

Juno is an activist outlet made up of ideologues who settle on a story first, then make the facts fit.

The legacy media which they hate so much has ignored them thus far, including on this story. And that’s probably wise: Reporters do not want to add fuel to the fire, and risk drawing attention to this undeserved smear job.

Even the Conservative Party, which has fomented opposition to transgender youth based on lies and innuendo, has stayed away from this. While leader Pierre Poilievre and his team have welcomed questions from Juno News at their press conferences while ostracizing and marginalizing actual journalists, I think their refusal to touch this story is a sign that they still have standards.

But this story — which is cruel on its face, a violation of the rules we have set to make our politics a less miserable affair, and because it is categorically wrong — should hang like an albatross around Juno News’ neck.

That’s it for this Chaos Campaign dispatch.

A big shout-out to , who put the gears to the Juno News crew on Twitter and who provided some feedback on this piece.

As you’re no doubt aware, Canada is likely to see an election call as early as this weekend. So now is the perfect time to upgrade to a paid Bug-eyed and Shameless subscription, which will give you access to the regular campaign dispatches.

Last week, I published a deep-dive into Mark Carney’s somewhat-vague policies, and joined Paul Wells for a chat about the prime minister’s first (and, perhaps, last) cabinet.

If you’re in Toronto this evening, come to the Hot Docs cinema to hear me (and several people smarter than me) chat about about the upcoming election.

The majority of the forthcoming dispatches will be for paid subscribers only.

Can’t swing a subscription right now? Want to try before you buy? Just respond to this email and ask for a complimentary subscription.

Don’t want to hear about Canadian politics? Just click this link and untick the Chaos Campaign box.

For those of you in/around Toronto, I’m taking the stage at the Hot Docs theatre this evening to talk about the tumultuous campaign set to kick off next week.

Until next time!

“I'm a pragmatist above all,” Carney vowed. “And that means when I see something that's not working, I'll change it.”

Not just any change. Big change.

“Change that puts more money in people's pockets. Change that mak…

Read more

Expect more Substack Live events in the near future!

At the end of 2024, Carney had never even held elected office. But after decisively winning a speed run of a leadership campaign, he is set to take the reins of a G7 economy. And he couldn’t have picked a more unpredictable and tumultuous time.

Canada has a housing crisis, a healthcare shortage, an endemic productivity problem — and its government has a delivery problem. There is a land war in Europe, a fragile peace in the Middle East, the looming possibility of invasion in Taiwan, and a declining ability for the liberal world to address these problems. Everybody has a disembodied humanoid in their pocket with ability to regurgitate nearly any piece of humanity’s collective knowledge in a matter of seconds, which sometimes even gets things right, and nobody is quite sure what to do with it. Climate change is still threatening to make the planet uninhabitable in the medium term, and is already causing pain and turmoil right now.

Oh, and by the way, our neighbour keeps threatening to annex us.

He may be prime minister, but Carney will need a mandate. That means Canadians are likely going to head to the polls in a massively consequential election — which, hopefully, won’t be our last.

So, from now until election day, Chaos Campaign will become a running journal of the campaign — the policies, the promises, the scandals, the politicians, the scrums, the debates, and the chaos.

This newsletter will be a looser, quicker, and more frequent newsletter than Bug-eyed and Shameless, so it will be arriving in your inbox separately.

Sometime in the next two weeks, we expect Mark Carney to visit the Governor General and trigger a snap election. When he does, he’ll be hitting the hustings in competition with six people who, just a few weeks ago, saw their own political success in the entrails of Carney’s Liberal Party.

There is Maxime Bernier, the populist conspiracy-monger who has turned the People’s Party he founded into a cult of personality around his own brand of gullible paranoia. He has now tried four times to mount a return to Parliament — failing each time. Can he succeed in retaking his old riding of Beauce? Or will his loser streak continue?

There is Elizabeth May and Jonathan Pedneault, the first party leaders to try and tag-team their way into the House of Commons. Their odds seem long: The Green Party has grown increasingly marginalized as Canada has been hit by a series of non-climate related crises, and a mounting anti-carbon tax consensus seems to suggest that Canadians are putting decarbonization on the back-burner. Still, the Greens are trying to orchestrate non-compete agreements with her fellow progressives, and Pedneault will have a chance to introduce himself as the only Quebecois national leader. Can the Greens convince anyone that they’re the right party for uncertain times?

Jagmeet Singh is about to mount his third national election campaign, and New Democrats find themselves wondering why. The NDP caucus is now nearly 40% smaller than it was when he took the helm in 2017, and apart from a killer TikTok game and some tough words for billionaires, the party seems unsure of its purpose. Their core policy propositions in recent years — dental care, pharmacare, Mulcair — have finally come to fruition, albeit in a pretty anemic way. While the NDP have demanded credit for the programs, nobody seems keen to give it to them. At the same time, Singh has proved to be a fairly effective campaigner who always seems to come into his own as he crisscrosses the country. Can the NDP finally convince the country they can govern — or, at least, that they don’t deserve electoral oblivion?

Last year, Pierre Poilievre was standing on the sidewalk outside Parliament and measuring the third-floor drapes at Langevin Block. For the past two years, his Conservative Party has bushwhacked a path to victory by winning over ardent conservatives and nationalists, those who defected to Bernier or who gave up voting altogether — earning him ample comparisons to populists in America and Europe. Certain analysts have been warning that his ‘Canada First’ risked derailing his shot at becoming prime minister, and they (me) may yet be right. Still, Poilievre’s low-tax build build build ethos might prove the right message for the moment, if he can get past the Trump stuff. So can Poilievre snatch victory from the jaws of defeat?

And finally, there’s Mark Carney. Look out for a special dispatch on the incoming prime minister tomorrow.

See you all on the Chaos Campaign.