My only minor quibble is that I think Trudeau deserves more credit for rousing the country from December 2024 to February 2025 to oppose the Trump threat, which cut the CPC off at the knees.
Some good news:
Gen. Jennie Carignanโs NATO bid is a reminder that Canadaโs military leadership has quietly changed in a big way.
She became Canadaโs first woman Chief of the Defence Staff, after a career that included Afghanistan, Bosnia, Syria, Iraq, and command of NATO Mission Iraq.
The chair of NATOโs Military Committee is elected by allied chiefs of defence, so this is less of a symbolic appointment and more of a serious test of how Canada is viewed inside the alliance.
The contrast with the politics around women in uniform south of the border makes the moment sharper.
Canada is putting forward a combat-tested general at a time when NATO is deciding what kind of leadership it wants next.
#canada #nato #military
(Source: NATO, Canadian Defence Review, Reuters)
– Canadian Returnee
Read on Substack
๐ด Under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s housing program there will soon be big builds like THIS, all across Canada. ๐๏ธ๐๏ธ๐
Simultaneously, his program to train 100 000 skilled trade workers will feed into the demand for workers, created by these housing projects, and other major development projects. ๐
That is a well-structured and coordinated plan.
See, there are two types of leaders:
1. Those who are driven to build Canada’s economy, and have the skills to do so.
2. And then … those who can only offer the Canadian people daily childish disinformation graphics and videos, toxic slogans like “Canada is broken”, indirect support to separatists, and attempts to SABOTAGE the efforts of the majority government to protect our sovereignty, and build the fastest growing economy in the G7.
That’s why that other guy is polling at 20%.
– Fun Tom
Read on Substack
Its not all sunshine and lollipops, though.ย
Warnings are echoing…
Campbell Clark writes
After a breakneck year, can Carney reset for whatโs next?
In the past two weeks, Mark Carney unveiled an AI strategy, held a virtual meeting with premiers, visited Paris and Dublin, retraced his roots in County Mayo, attended the G7 Leadersโ Summit, and gave Canadaโs World Cup squad a post-game pep-talk in Vancouver.
Itโs been like that for more than a year as the Prime Minister leads a government pouring out plans and strategies and setting new directions.
What Mr. Carney hasnโt done yet is pause to hit the reset button.
… Mr. Carneyโs second full year in power will be full of demands for execution and implementation, pressure to deliver on promises to build projects and homes, develop new industry and, eventually, to tend to some of the things that have been lost in the rush…
Annie Koshy writes Keir Starmer Resigned This Morning. The Playbook Used Against Him Is Now Being Deployed Against Prime Minister Carney:
….[A Conservative attack ad]exists alongside CarneyWatch.ca, a website dedicated to tracking what it describes as Prime Minister Carneyโs broken promises and flip-flops. The site aggregates every criticism, every policy reversal and every opposition attack into a single searchable database designed to function as a permanent negative reference for anyone who searches the Prime Ministerโs name. The Conservatives are simultaneously flooding social media platforms with content built around the Liberal recession narrative, the Brookfield claims and the affordability framing, most of it containing claims that have been fact-checked and found to be materially misleading or outright false, as documented in multiple pieces in this publication.
….This is the playbook. It is not a new one. The same framework that destroyed Keir Starmer in the United Kingdom was not built primarily on his actual failures, though he made genuine mistakes. ….What broke British politics was not Starmer alone. It was the same right-wing populist playbook, the same disinformation ecosystem, the same Reform UK template that Nigel Farage, ally of Trump and central figure in Brexit, has been running for years.
That playbook is now running in Canada. The actors are Pierre Poilievre, the Canada Strong and Free Network, the American political operatives documented in Albertaโs information environment and the Russian disinformation networks CSIS has confirmed are amplifying separatist sentiment. The target is a Prime Minister who has been in office for less than a year, managing a trade war, a technical recession driven by external shocks, an active sovereignty threat from both Washington and domestic separatist movements receiving American government support, and the largest infrastructure and defence investment programme in Canadian history….
Others are also noticing this:
Evan Scrimshaw wants better communications from Carney about what he is doing and why:
…Carney feels like a Prime Minister.. increasingly constrained by the act of politics than the act of policy. In what is the least surprising thing to ever happen and yet a shock to readers of the Star, Carney is not, in fact, starving child care of needed funding, as the government announced another $5B last week. Everything I hear from people lobbying or interacting with the government is the same – make a solid policy argument to Carney and his team and you can win the argument. Where Carney looks much less secure is walking the political tightrope of the job….
Carney needs to be real with Canadians that this is not a continuity government under a new leader. This isnโt Wynne after McGuinty or Clark after Campbell, this is a genuine revolution in what Canadian Liberalism means. Will a few people be pissed at that? Sure, but a lot more will be pissed at the idea that Carney thinks weโre too stupid to notice the bleeding obvious.
…So long as the machine – in this case, the PMO or the PM himself – will not communicate the thoughts and the strain Carney is under, we will continue to run the risk of the public being misled by being told we are both the change the public wanted and the continuity liberals demand. Itโs not good enough, and this nonsense has to end….
Neither Wesley Wark nor Justin Ling are happy with Carney’s support last week for Trump’s Iran MOU. That situation is evolving so rapidly I don’t think it is useful to quote from these critiques now, but in both cases they think Carney made a bad call.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Harper’s former communications director Dimitris Soudas writes How to Convince Canadians Youโre Not Ready to Govern:
…An online activist named Mario Zelaya โ one of the loudest voices in the echo chamber that now believes it gets to decide what conservatism is allowed to be posted an old photograph of the Prime Minister standing near Ghislaine Maxwell. The caption sneered that this is the man lecturing you on how to raise your kids.ย
Then it got shared by a sitting Conservative Member of Parliament. Not a backbencher. Not a rookie blowing off steam. Chris Warkentin โ the Chief Opposition Whip. The third-ranking member of the caucus. โThatโs Epsteinโs accompliceโฆright?โ
Sit with that for a second. The one person in the entire Conservative caucus whose actual job is discipline whose title means keeping the team on message and out of the ditch drove into the ditch himself, and waved everyone over to look.
Let me say plainly what that photo is, because facts still matter even when theyโre inconvenient.ย
It was taken in 2013, at a festival in England, on an estate that belongs to Carneyโs sister-in-law. Maxwell was a friend of the family that hosted it. The picture predates her arrest by years, before any of her crimes were public. Fact-checkers have been over this ground more than once. Theyโve also spent the better part of a year knocking down a parade of outright fakes โ Carney on a beach with Maxwell, Carney at a dinner with Maxwell โ most of them cooked up by AI, several still carrying the watermark of the chatbot that made them. There is no reported evidence of any wrongdoing by Carney connected to Epstein or Maxwell. None.
So this is guilt by association, and it isnโt even good guilt by association. Itโs the political equivalent of standing in a crowded photo and being blamed for everyone else in the frame. Weโve seen this trick before. That same Maxwell photo has been used to smear a sitting American chief justice, who turned out not to be the man in the picture at all. Itโs an old, lazy move, and it survives for one reason: it doesnโt require evidence. It only requires a caption and an audience that already wants to believe it.
Now hereโs the part that should worry every conservative who actually wants to win.
Notice what didnโt happen.
Not a single one of Warkentinโs caucus colleagues shared it. Not one. The rest of the team looked at it and stayed where they belonged โ on the other side of the line. That tells you the instinct in the room is healthy, even if the leadership isnโt enforcing it.
And notice the second thing that didnโt happen. The leader didnโt ask him to take it down. Pierre Poilievre said nothing. The man who wants to be Prime Minister watched his own whip launder a conspiracy smear and decided it wasnโt worth a phone call.
That is the story. Not the photo. The silence.
Because a whip who freelances a smear and a leader who wonโt correct him are telling Canadians something far more important than anything in a 2013 festival snapshot. Theyโre telling you whoโs actually running the show. When the discipline officer is the one breaking discipline, and the leader wonโt touch it, you donโt have a caucus. You have a comment section with parliamentary letterhead [emphasis mine]….
Linda T writes Fine, I Guess Weโre Getting Spied On. She is not happy with Bill C-22 Lawful Access Act or Bill C-9 Combatting Hate Act, and she has questions about the plan to buy unused Vancouver condos too. Her analysis continues:
….Long story short, Carney should be in trouble after a week like this.
Cue the Conservatives to the rescue.
The ever-hapless opposition – or โgovernment in waiting,โ as they like to call themselves, despite showing every sign of being willing to wait forever – has found a way to make all Liberal mistakes feel politically survivable.
Gerald Butts once said hubris was the Liberalsโ kryptonite. Maybe it used to be. Not anymore. These days, Liberal hubris can grow to the size of a weather system and still not cost them an election, because the Conservative Party has become incapable of making itself look like a plausible alternative.
CPC headquarters and a generation of MPs have turned defeat into philosophy. โWe donโt win. The Liberals just eventually lose.โ That seems to be the whole plan now. …
They shrug off criticism with reminders that โLiberals canโt win forever,โ which is both not a plan and not true. Thereโs no law of physics that forces Canadians to hand power to Conservatives after a certain number of Liberal terms. The Liberals absolutely can keep winning forever if the alternative keeps arriving at the door wearing a sandwich board that says, โYou donโt like us, but technically weโre next.โ
So Carney marches on.
Normally, a week of surveillance bills, speech-control concerns, and a Vancouver condo bailout would make a prime minister nervous. MPs would worry about their own seats. Cabinet would worry about losing the plot. Backbenchers would get twitchy. The opposition would smell blood.
But the Liberals donโt face a serious threat. They face the Conservative Party of Canada.
The leader of the opposition is currently politically homeless, using a borrowed seat, and facing a very real problem: where exactly does he run next? He canโt go back to Carleton. Battle River-Crowfoot was useful once, but it was never really his seat, and Damien Kurek – the former MP who stepped aside for him – is already lined up to take it back. So where exactly does Poilievre go? No other Conservative MP is going to be excited to hand over a safe seat again. And if Poilievre runs in a competitive seat, thereโs a decent chance he loses because, once again, a lot of people just donโt like him.
Thatโs who Carney has to worry about.
A party spending its energy protecting a leader who may not even be able to win a seat, let alone a country. And when that leader isnโt front and centre, the party drags out the leader who lost two elections ago because voters didnโt like him either….
Just completely ignoring the relevant facts, because he has a narrative.
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โ Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) June 22, 2026 at 12:21 PM
This is a divisive way to act, too
So next Canada needs to survive the summer, with the wildfires that will be terrible this year, and then the fall with the American mid-terms and likely some Canadian by-elections too, then we’re into next winter…ย
A mind is a terrible thing to lose
Moving on, Washington is convinced that Trump has lost his mind over the Reflecting Pool debacle.
Trump is so wound up about his reflecting pool and his ballroom and all his other interior decorating obsessions that I honestly think a simple online ad campaign mocking his shoddy work might seriously cause him to have a stroke.
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โ Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) June 22, 2026 at 5:29 PM
Reflection Pool As Metaphor has become a meme:
the definition of a reflecting pool is that it is a “shallow, still body of water designed to mirror what is adjacent”. so the DC reflecting pool today is mirroring our current President and his administration and the GOP leadership in DC. If you want to clean that up, vote out every Republican.
– Matthew Dowd
Read on Substack
Over the last week, I haven’t seen many TrumpWatch posts – that’s what I call posts about the world’s most anticipated event. So I wonder if Americans are giving up. They seem to be just in despair now:
Moving on to something happier –ย World Cup stories
I switched on this game just in time to see the Messi goal:
The overhead angle of Lionel Messi’s historic 18th #FIFAWorldCup goal are breathtaking ๐ฎ
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โ TSN (@tsnofficial.bsky.social) June 22, 2026 at 5:53 PM
Today’s France-Iraq match also happens to feature the FIRST EVER all-Canadian officiating team at a #FIFAWorldCup! ๐จ๐ฆ
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โ TSN (@tsnofficial.bsky.social) June 22, 2026 at 4:25 PM
youtube.com/watch?v=u57E… @drjaydrno.bsky.social ๐คฃ๐คฃ๐คฃ #FIFA #CanadaGeese
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โ GhostWarrior โ๏ธ๐ณ๏ธโ๐ ๐จ๐ฆ๐บ๐ฆ (@ghostwarrior.bsky.social) June 22, 2026 at 11:27 PM
This is at an international teams training site in Toronto.
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