Day seventeen, and while the western leg of the tours rolled along, the announcements were decidedly more tepid after Monday’s double-headers. Mark Carney was in Delta, BC, and announced that his housing plan would favour more homes built with Canadian lumber, hence trying to offset some of the issue with higher American tariffs on softwood. Carney starts the day in Calgary, before heading to Saskatoon.

Pierre Poilievre was in Edmonton, and promised to crack down on tax havens and book $1 billion to the treasury for it—a wildly optimistic number considering that you usually need to spend a fair amount to recover that much because doing the work of cracking down takes a lot of resources. And along the way, he essentially said he’d open the door to small businesses to evade taxes because resources would be directed away from them. This was really just an attempt to take a shot at Carney because Brookfield used Bermuda as a tax haven for certain investments, which Carney could not sufficiently and explicitly denounce when asked about it, for which the Conservatives and NDP pounced. The other notable part of the day for the Conservatives was Poilievre badgering and hectoring reporters to lavish praise on the size of his Edmonton rally, which sounds awfully similar to another guy obsessed with the size of his…crowds. Poilievre starts his day in Sault Ste. Marie, and then heads to Brampton.

Jagmeet Singh was in Vancouver and his home riding in Burnaby, and didn’t make any actual announcements—he just sent out a series of press releases sniping at Liberal candidates who were in the real estate business in the area and Carney himself, for what it’s worth. Singh remains in Vancouver, and heads to Saskatoon later in the day.

In other campaign news, Poilievre’s tone toward Carney is getting a harder edge as he insists that Carney was not a businessman but a “political grifter,” (never mind that Poilievre has also never  been a businessman), and we’re into trading jabs about haircuts and resumes.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian drones attacked Dnipro and Kharkiv overnight, injuring at least 17 people. Russians also claim to have driven Ukrainian soldiers out of the Kursk region. President Zelenskyy says that two Chinese nationals have been captured fighting alongside Russians in the eastern Donetsk region, and that they have information that there are more.

Good reads:

• There has been a rise in asylum claims at Quebec border crossings, with a particular rise in Haitians fleeing the US before their protected status is removed.
• A former employee of the Bank of Canada has filed a complaint citing that not enough senior managers are competent in French.
• Conservative candidate Andrew Lawton’s past remarks about various minority groups have again come up, as groups demand he be removed as a candidates.
• Some former New Democrats, particularly at the provincial level, have been endorsing federal Liberal candidates this time around.
• In Maclean’s, Don Gillmor explains the oil market, why the US remains dependent on Canadian oil, and why the golden age Poilievre and Danielle Smith is gone for good.
• Flavio Volpe does the math about why the auto industry can’t operate with Trump’s tariffs, and will just shut down rather than operate underwater.
• Justin Ling raises the question of how Poilievre expects to stand up to Trump if he can’t even hold his own against journalists.

Odds and ends:

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