Roundup: Carney’s first call with Trump

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Day six of the campaign, and things took a slightly different tone as the tariff issue still loomed large. Mark Carney remained in Montreal, where he had his first call with Donald Trump since becoming prime minister, and they both gave very civil readouts, but the tariffs are still coming, as are the retaliatory measures. Carney then had a virtual meeting with the premiers, before holding his announcement for the day, which was about a $5 billion fund for trade corridors and infrastructure, dedicated in particular to east-west trade and ports to different destinations than the US. Today, Carney will be back in Ottawa to meet his campaign volunteers in Nepean (but no word on any actual door-knocking).

https://bsky.app/profile/jrobson.bsky.social/post/3llh4c35vnk2a

Pierre Poilievre was in Nanaimo, BC, to essentially re-announce his previously revealed, completely unconstitutional promise of locking up fentanyl traffickers for life. This is just going to capture low-level users whose lives are already miserable, but sometimes the cruelty is the point. When asked about the latest tariffs, Poilievre continues to hope for a change in tone out of Trump (and is not facing the reality of a dead relationship), but then went into a rant about how only the oil industry can make us economically viable. Poilievre will be in Winnipeg today.

Jagmeet Singh was in Toronto to announce a policy about banning corporate landlords from buying affordable units and jacking the rents, and tried to tie it to Carney and Brookfield. Of course, Singh’s plan is mostly unworkable because much of it lies within provincial jurisdiction, so that’s not unexpected. He’ll be in Ottawa today, canvassing with local candidates.

In the wake of Kory Teneycke’s pillorying of Poilievre’s campaign, other Conservatives on the campaign are coming out the woodwork to talk about how the campaign is shambolic, the leader isolated, and that the wheels have already come off of it. In other campaign news, the National Post dug up Mark Carney’s PhD thesis and got an academic that they run op-eds for—and who donates to the Conservatives—to declare that aspects were “plagiarised.” They weren’t really, and the only real plagiarism here is the lifting wholesale of far-right US tactics (see: Claudine Gay at Harvard), but hoo boy, the stench of desperation coming off the Conservatives as every one of their candidates screamed over social media about this non-scandal. In a similar example of the media pushing a non-story comes word that one of the funds Poilievre invested in holds Brookfield stocks, after all of his grief about them (but again, they’re funds, he doesn’t direct them Meanwhile, Breach Media found evidence that Poilievre’s wife helped her uncle stay in the country after he was deemed inadmissible and was ordered to be deported, and contrasts it to Poilievre’s rhetoric about “illegal border crossers” needing to be deported.

https://bsky.app/profile/emmettmacfarlane.com/post/3llhfo4w3vc26

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian drone attack on Dnipro killed four late Friday, and drone attacks on Poltava damaged warehouses owned by the state gas producer, in spite of the “energy ceasefire.” Russia claims Ukraine destroyed a gas infrastructure unit in Sudzha, but Ukraine said Russia did it. Now that Ukrainians are out of Kursk region, they have started fresh incursions into the Belgorod region. Ukrainian intelligence, corroborated by two G7 allies, suggests that Putin is planning a fresh offensive on three regions in order to strengthen Russia’s negotiating position with the US.

https://twitter.com/ukraine_world/status/1905766350825607175

Good reads:

  • The Fiscal Monitor shows the federal deficit was $26.8 billion from April to January, with only a couple of months left in the fiscal year.
  • The Logic has a deep dive into the problems with lifting interprovincial trade barriers, most especially around labour mobility.
  • The RCMP are using AI to help fight child sexual exploitation online (some of which is AI-generated), but privacy concerns remain.
  • Liberal incumbent Paul Chiang apologised for essentially telling people how to get the Chinese bounty on one of his would-be rivals.
  • The Liberals dropped their Calgary Confederation candidate for an undisclosed stayed sexual assault charge from 2005.
  • David Eby is walking back from the extraordinary powers he was seeking in his legislation to respond to the tariffs.
  • Jennifer Robson wonders what problem Poilievre is trying to solve with his TFSA announcement, and if there wasn’t a better way to achieve that goal.
  • Paul Wells considers Thursday’s extraordinary presser by Carney, what it represents, and the shifting tone in the capital post-Trudeau.
  • My column looks at the soon-to-be decimated state of the federal NDP, and calls on them to actually figure out what kind of party they want to be.

Odds and ends:

For Xtra’s Rainbow Votes newsletter, I ponder the Liberals’ decision to parachute Evan Solomon into one of the gayest ridings in the country.

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