Catching up on the news: mobilizing to Stay, Poilievre loses the plot, the Knicks lose the game, today in Screwworm Chronicles, Andy Rooney on D-Day, Canada U18s win the Americup, and Today's Pride Update

Thomas Lukaszuk (photo by Serena Mak)

Mobilizing to Stay

You know, it occurred to me today that Danielle Smith may well have shot herself in the foot with her Referendum Lite stuff.
She jury-rigged the motion to add a separatist referendum question onto her previously-announced list of nine constitutional questions. I'll bet she thought that adding the separatism question to her list would get her a larger turnout.
But if Alberta anger at the separatists generates a significant "Stay" turnout, then we might well see Smith lose on all of her anti-immigrant anti-federal, pro-MAGA "questions".

Ha!
We're seeing lots of Stay supporters in Alberta now - a substacker who calls himself "FortBison" will be writing about them daily until referendum day in October. Today FortBison is writing about the bus tour of former Alberta deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk:

I like Thomas Lukaszuk’s “Forever Canadian Unity Bus” tour of Alberta, as it mostly runs on heart. That one red-and-white RV could be called the official vehicle of the “Stay Side” who will vote in the province-wide October 19 referendum on whether Albertans wish to stay in Canada or not.
The bright red-and-white maple leaf wrap of the Unity Bus is loveable because it is so unlikely a sight in Alberta. In a land that prefers not to think of national patriotism, thank you very much, the Lakaszuk Forever Canadian Unity Bus does so unabashedly.
Lukaszuk, a former deputy premier of Alberta, posted this on social media: “My strategy for separatism is the same as my strategy for pierogies; stab it with a fork, deal with it directly, and don’t leave any leftovers.”....

The whole article is worth reading.

Sunday Funday: Some funny posts and neat posts. Plus Pride Update, Getting Old(er), Everybody Hates AI, Carney Hat Trick, TrumpWatch, Animal Crackers

Funny posts
Does anyone still remember Wayne and Shuster?
We were watching one of their funniest skits the other day, and I thought I just had to share it.
The setup: A stage director from Hollywood (Johnny Wayne) wants to give the House of Commons a new look and style so it can be more appealing to the public. The NDP party is to wear overalls and carry lunchboxes, and the Liberals and Conservatives are to wear red or blue suits to distinguish them, along with musical accompaniment.

Moving on:

I made $5,000 in one month on Substack. Here's how: I found a niche for my newsletter. I posted every day. I created a value proposition, offering premium content to a focused audience. I sold my 2003 Toyota Corolla. 

- Archer Parquette

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Today's Round-up plus some Canada good news

Hey, I'm feeling not to spunky tonight so this won't be lengthy.

But here are some interesting comments and posts I saw today:

 
A substacker named Linda T is not impressed with the "He Yells" critique of Prime Minister Carney:

There’s a new story making the rounds in Ottawa, and it picks up neatly where an older one left off: apparently, Mark Carney likes to yell at annoying, incompetent politicians.
He must be going hoarse on the Liberal benches...
...The more progressive Liberals complain that he’s too managerial, too pro-growth, too friendly to energy, too dismissive of caucus feeling, the more he looks like someone separate from the very Liberal brand Canadians had grown sick of. The more MPs leak that he’s harsh behind closed doors, the more he looks like a man trying to drag an entitled caucus back to work. The more they warn that he isn’t a real Liberal, the more many voters may think: good.
That’s the irony. Carney’s distance from the Liberal Party may be one of his strongest political assets.
The Liberal brand was badly damaged before he took over. Canadians were tired of the lectures, the scandals, the identity games, the broken systems, and the sense that the country was being governed by people who were always performing virtue while avoiding accountability. Carney gives voters a way to keep the Conservatives out without having to pretend they still admire Trudeau-era Liberalism. He’s a permission structure for exhausted Liberal voters, soft Conservatives, centrists, and institutional Canadians who wanted a change without wanting Pierre Poilievre.
So when Liberal MPs complain that Carney doesn’t treat them with enough deference, they’re misunderstanding the transaction. Carney’s appeal isn’t that he restores the Liberal Party to its old self. His appeal is that he appears willing to discipline, ignore, or override that old self.
That leaves the caucus trapped.
They can’t easily remove him, because he saved them. They can’t easily defy him, because he has numbers. They can’t easily embarrass him, because their own public reputation is worse than his. They can’t credibly present themselves as guardians of democratic accountability after years of swallowing every Trudeau excess. And they can’t appeal to voters by saying, in effect, “please help, the prime minister we backed for power now has too much of it.”
No one is coming to help them.
Carney owns them. Not emotionally, maybe not even ideologically, but structurally. He has the office. He has the majority. He has the polling. He has the floor-crossers. He has the ability to replace troublemakers with new loyalists. Most importantly, he has the one thing caucus MPs usually respect more than principle: the appearance of being able to win.
That’s why the leaks are a bluff. They’re not a rebellion. They’re a flare shot into the sky by people who’ve realized the ship captain isn’t taking orders from them.
And if they keep pushing it, they may find the public reaction colder than they expect...

Today's News: Canada now has an AI strategy. And not a moment too soon.

Prime Minister Carney announced Canada's  AI for All strategy on Thursday, as part of our Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem. The announcement says:

....Over the next five years, this strategy will introduce new legislation, investments, and programs that ensure AI is adopted responsibly, in a way that truly serves all Canadians – building trust, expanding opportunities, and reinforcing control of our sovereignty.
The AI for All Strategy targets an additional $200 billion of economic growth to create 250,000 new AI-related jobs over the next five years and to increase AI adoption from just over 12% to 60% by 2034. The strategy will provide up to 90,000 AI-related jobs and work placement opportunities for young Canadians and make our industries more competitive in the global economy.
Canadians must have confidence that AI is being developed and deployed safely, transparently, and in ways that reflect our values....

The CBC Power and Politics panel talked about it on Thursday:

TL,DW: Panelists Michele Cadario, Shachi Kurl, Rebeca Schulz and Andrew Thomson discuss Carney's AI for All strategy and the issues that AI raises for data centre environmental impacts, water uses, and AI impacts on jobs. They agree that Canadians are neither knowledgeable nor enthusiastic about AI in general.

Today's News: Carney leadership and Alberta separatism and tariffs and Trump and Hunter Biden. Plus today's Pride Update

Today in Carney leadership
I'm shocked SHOCKED! that Carney gets pissed sometimes at Liberal MPs. 

Lack of focus and meandering response killed Trudeau's leadership and I can understand why Carney now says "my way or the highway" - the country, and the Liberal party, needs to get things done bigger and faster. 

In the Toronto Star, columnist Althia Raj has become the go-to journalist for any Liberal caucus MP who wants to bitch about Carney - watching her on the CBC At Issue panel lately, its been pretty clear that Raj doesn't like Carney one bit.

Today Raj writes a mish-mash column of complaints - did you know that Carney sometimes yells at people? Oh, the horror....

...Over the course of several caucus meetings now, [gift link] Grit MPs report Carney lashing out at certain members when he doesn’t like the message they deliver. They include Nova Scotia MP Jaime Battiste, a Mi’kmaw from Cape Breton, raising concerns over negative perceptions of the government’s changes to the Indian Act and receiving a stunning rebuke; Winnipeg MP Doug Eyolfson, a physician, being told not to come to the prime minister with his concerns over the lack of federal response to Alberta’s two-tiered health care Bill 11; and Laval MP Angelo Iacono, who wanted the prime minister to visit his riding and was met with Carney insisting he’d been to Laval recently, though he had not. The experiences have left a lasting imprint on several MPs.
“He yells,” said one MP who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution from the Prime Minister’s Office. “He punches down at caucus all the time.”
Carney has told his caucus members he doesn’t want to hear their concerns, he wants solutions. While it’s a message that resonates with some, hearing complaints can be useful....
Last week, some MPs felt the prime minister’s message was that he’s not interested in what they have to say.
Carney was making the case that the government is focused on national unity, on the CUSMA talks, on growing the economy; it has a plan, and message discipline is key. “If you don’t agree with our agenda, I don’t want to hear it. If you have criticism, keep them for yourself,” was the way another MP portrayed it....

IDK, but it wasn't surprising to me that Carney would be impatient if he hears complaints instead of solutions.

Canada needs some more Forward Guidance now. Plus, today's Pride Update

It feels like we're in a tangled ball of string right now, doesn't it.

While the CUSMA trade discussions are getting underway, we're also hearing about the "recession" data figures plus a revival of Trump's "51st State!" talk while the US economy is likely going to spiral downward as the pointless Iran War and Hormuz closure affects stock markets and world trade. Not to mention the atrocities in the Ukraine Russia War, and the Gaza and Lebanon Wars, and the ICE Gestapo in US cities. And of course the separation referendums in Alberta and Quebec, plus doom and gloom about this summer's fire season and supercharged El Nino weather and horrible heat waves in India and ...
Oh, its all just too much to keep track of. 

I think Canada need another Carney Forward Guidance video right quick, just to get through the summer.

At Routine Proceedings, journalist Dale Smith is concerned that Carney is ceding too much of the "recession narrative" to Poilievre:

....prime minister Mark Carney has been wholly silent on it since the data were released on Friday morning. He made two separate media appearances yesterday but took no questions at either one, and he has avoided Question Period yesterday and he’s avoiding it today, and it really starts to look like he’s ceding the ground to Poilievre, who keeps bellowing his ridiculous narratives while Carney, who is supposed to have the economic gravitas as a former central bank governor, remains absent. And there are important things we should probably be talking about with this data, such as the fact that in periods of slow growth, these indicators dipping below zero are less important than the overall picture, and that overreacting and panicking can lead to greater problems or damage in the longer term. But we’re not having this conversation because, again, Carney is ceding the field, and given that Poilievre seems to enjoy this unearned economic credibility, it’s frankly arrogant to think that his bogus narratives can’t gain traction because they absolutely can, and that will spell trouble overall.

Carney actually did respond to questions today:

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Just another day - some short takes on Canada's so-called recession, Poilievre, Pride Month, Alberta "rednexit", and so on

I'm not an economist, thank god, but I think I understand what the Financial Post writer Pamela Heaven is saying here:

Posthaste: Recession, what recession? Canada's economy is doing better than it has in years by this measure
GDP per person is once again on the rise
Canadian economic data made international news Friday as the latest reading of gross domestic product earned mentions from everyone from investing guru Mohamed El-Erian to the Wall Street Journal.
Canada’s GDP doesn’t often attract such attention, but this time a second quarter of contraction raised the red flag of “technical recession.”
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre seized on the data, accusing Prime Minister Mark Carney of being the only G7 leader to send his country’s economy into recession and calling for an emergency debate.
The numbers were certainly a surprise. The 0.1 per cent decline in GDP in the first quarter shocked observers who had been expecting growth closer to 2 per cent. ‘Historically unusual,” is how Nathan Janzen, assistant chief economist at the Royal Bank of Canada, described it.
Luckily, economists say there is more to a recession than just two quarters of negative growth — namely the 3 Ds — depth, duration and dispersion.
This decline is not even close on depth — amounting to just 0.6 per cent annualized over the two quarters, “barely a scratch in GDP terms,” said Robert Kavcic, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets in a note.
In the past three Canadians recessions, outside the pandemic, the average decline at the weakest point was 5.3 per cent.
Nor is weakness widespread across the economy. The trade war has hit manufacturing, trade and real estate hard, but other sectors like finance, resources and health care are growing, said Kavcic.
Though exports are down, domestic demand has been climbing, and consumer spending has continued to rise.
Duration, he concedes, is getting close. The Canadian economy has been soft since the start of the trade war in early 2025, posting three negative quarters out of four.
However, there is one key variable in this equation that should not be overlooked and when viewed through its lens paints a very different picture of Canada’s economy, say economists — population.
Since the federal government cracked down on immigration after the post-pandemic boom, population has actually declined in Canada over the past two quarters.
So while the overall GDP reading is slipping, GDP per person is on the rise, a welcome change from a few years back when the per capita measure was nose-diving....

So naturally, Poilievre is in a panic. And I guess he thinks Canadians are stupid and easily bamboozled, doesn't he.

Q: Polls show that despite the bleak picture that you're painting, Canadians trust Mark Carney to deal with the economy. Why do you think that despite what you're saying, your pitch is not resonating with them? Pierre Poilievre: THE ILLUSION

- Scott Robertson

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Sunday Funday: This week's good posts and funny posts. Plus- Everybody hates AI, Getting Old(er), Carney Hat-trick, TrumpWatch, Animal Crackers

It was quite the week, wasn't it. Here's hoping June will be better....

In the meantime, enjoy!

Good posts
Industrial-scale farming is mesmerizing:

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Today's News: "Next Year Country" , the Alberta story behind the story, and Trump's no good very bad day

"Next Year Country" 

Thanks for the memories. Canada will have to wait another year to build a team for the 2027 Stanley Cup -- which could well be the Canadiens again. 

I think all of Canada is grateful that the Canadiens worked so hard and got so far. A Game Four loss of 6 to 1 is painful, but it is what it is.
I guess I'll cheer for the Canes in the Stanley Cup.

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Carney to America: Canada doesn't need to lose just so you can win

Carney told New York on Thursday that “Canada strong will help make America great again”

Impressive speech by PM Carney 🇨🇦 https://youtu.be/-Wa2kZIV26s?si=eYDIlUzrtu3jOT5h

- Kier Atkinson 🇨🇦

Read on Substack

So I'm seeing "why is Carney talking MAGA?" reactions on social media. But at a time when Canada is entering into crucial negotiations over whether Trump will abandon the CUSMA agreement, it doesn't surprise me to see Carney take the initiative at the Economic Club of New York with a positive message to counter Trump's zero-sum transactional thinking.
Carney's message is pretty simple - Canada doesn't need to lose just so America can win.

Well, damn! Habs lose. Plus, we need "Elbows Up for Canada" to counteract "shotgun federalism" and horserace journalism

Habs lose

Oh dear.
Maybe it just isn't meant to be this year for the Canadiens. But you're still a hell of a team.

#Habs Lane Hutson: "it seemed like the only guy who showed up was Doby [Jakub Dobeš]. We were just not good enough, didn't answer the bell. The good news is we get another chance to answer the bell."

— Priyanta Emrith (@habsinhighheels.bsky.social) May 27, 2026 at 9:09 PM

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Today's News: Canadian politics, plus fake news and good news, Pope Leo on AI, and a few funny bits

More about that damned Referendum Lite

On Monday, Carney said this:
and also this:

In the Toronto Star, Susan Delacourt writes

Outside Alberta, a political consensus is emerging — not just on how the Alberta referendum should turn out, but on whether it should be held at all....
Premiers like Doug Ford and B.C.’s David Eby have been crystal clear in recent days that they think this referendum — asking Albertans whether there should be another referendum on independence — is a bad idea....
But it was Mark Carney who went all the way out there on Monday, calling it a “dangerous bluff.” This third and most powerful voice meant that Smith’s referendum is getting blowback from a Liberal, a Conservative and a New Democrat.
Carney occasionally reminds us he’s new to the political game and — I mean this in a good way — his comments on the Alberta referendum were not standard political fare. Last Friday, his initial remarks on the subject were more guarded. Clearly, after a weekend of reflection, the prime minister decided to say what was on his mind.
“Is it helpful to ask this fundamental question? No. It’s not helpful, of course it’s not. Is it the democratic will of Albertans? Did they vote for this in the last provincial election? No, they didn’t. It wasn’t on the ballot paper. It wasn’t in the mandates of, or platforms, of any of the governing party and the official opposition,” Carney told reporters.
Many of us have been wondering whether Carney sees parallels to the Brexit vote, which took place in the U.K. while he was governor of the Bank of England.
Yes, as a matter of fact he does, and on Monday he put that right on the line, too.
“I saw firsthand what happened in the United Kingdom when the view was, ‘Vote for this. It will be soft and then we’ll negotiate, etc.’
“They’re still, 10 years later, trying to undo what people didn’t think they were voting for but what they ended up having.”
I applauded this answer as refreshing and considered candour...
The most persuasive arguments for the cause of unity may come not from politicians, but from the private sector, which can lay out the case for why Alberta separatism is a bad business proposition.
You hear some of this already from the corporate sector, pointedly noting that Alberta shouldn’t be risking the instability that drives away investment precisely when this province needs it, in the midst of Donald Trump’s ongoing trade war with Canada....

Rhymes with Duck! Plus other sports updates, and some Canada good news

Damn!

Of all the posts I saw about the Monday night game, this says it best: 

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Hey, Habs - please do that voodoo that you do so well! Plus its Sunday Funday: Riders win, Knicks win, good posts, funny posts, Getting Old(er), Carney hat-trick, TrumpWatch, Animal Crackers

But damn! 

The Habs voodoo wasn't quite strong enough on Saturday night.

#Habs 2 - 3 #Hurricanes (F/OT) MTL stats 🚨Goals: Anderson (4,5) 🏒PP: 0-for-2 🏒Guhle: 3-game point streak (3A) 🏒Danault: 3-game point streak (2G 3A) 🏒Carrier: 3-game point streak (3A) Shots MTL: 12 CAR: 26 Series tied 1-1 Game 3: CAR vs MTL on Monday @ 8pm ET #GoHabsGo youtu.be/g9wHq0uFxS0

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— ChrisHabs360 (@chrishabs360.bsky.social) May 23, 2026 at 9:14 PM

#Habs Martin St. Louis following 3-2 OT loss "I thought they had really good sticks. I thought our execution was not as good, but it wasn't terrible. Overall, I thought it was a battle out there, and I thought we competed. It's a close game—it's a fine line between winning and losing." #GoHabsGo

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— ChrisHabs360 (@chrishabs360.bsky.social) May 23, 2026 at 9:38 PM

Referendum Lite Roundup: The more we see it, the more we hate it

The more Canada is learning today about Danielle Smith's Alberta Referendum Lite, the more we hate it. 

Not only will it screw up the international and national investments Canada needs to maintain Elbows Up, it also makes us a target for American interference in our democracy and economy. Canada doesn't need this investment-killing selfishness, and particularly we don't need it right now.

Carney's response was politic, but unfortunately it wasn't very fired-up patriotic

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