22 August 2026

Bravo to Mark Carney


I'll add some commentary later, but for now this will suffice:


This from the New York Times:
The morning after he pulled negotiators from trade talks in Washington and set off a new round of American tariffs, Prime Minister Mark Carney called the U.S. proposal “a bad deal” and said Canada was “at war” with the United States...
In a muscular [and bilingual], 22-minute speech that let Canadians — and Americans — know exactly where he stands, Mr. Carney said that Canada was under attack by President Trump’s punishing tariffs.

“You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” Mr. Carney said.

But unlike his electrifying speech at Davos that spoke of a rupture in the world order, Mr. Carney explicitly named the United States as an aggressor and a threat to Canada and the global economy.

We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed,” he said in an address to Canadians on Saturday. “We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”Among other things, Mr. Carney said that American negotiators pushed to roll back Canada’s efforts to promote Canadian and French language content in online streaming services, subsidies for industries like publishing and film production and even mandatory labeling in French, an official language in Canada, as well as English on packaging...  [note that Carney's speech was bilingual, alternating between English and French]

As he did on Friday night, Mr. Carney suggested on Saturday that Canada would now double down on its strategy of disengaging from the U.S. economy, expanding trade with other countries and diversifying Canada’s economy.

“Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us and I promised: ‘That will never, ever happen,’” Mr. Carney said. “We are keeping that promise. Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America.”

There will be lots more analysis and commentary available tomorrow, and especially Monday when the financial markets start responding... 

This from the I Fucking Love Australia Facebook thread:
Twelve hours after telling his negotiators to come home, Mark Carney stood up in Ottawa and did something no one in Washington saw coming, because none of the bastards own a library card.

He quoted a sixty-year-old slogan. Seven polite little words: "We are masters in our own home."  Sounds like a tea towel, right? Mate, that phrase is dynamite with a bilingual fuse. It's the battle cry Quebec used in 1962, right before it seized the fucking power stations. And the bloke who just aimed it at Washington owns the grid half of America's northern border runs on, two-thirds of America's imported crude, the uranium, and the fertiliser.

Trump thinks he's in a trade war. He's actually standing in a house where the other bloke holds every lever, and on Saturday the other bloke smiled and mentioned it. In two languages. With the pulse of a man ordering a flat white.

The full breakdown is live: the hidden threat in the speech nobody clocked, the energy numbers that should terrify the White House, the Doug Ford playbook that started it all, and the question Canberra's too gutless to answer.

King Carney doesn't forecast the weather anymore. He makes it.
And this from the same source slightly earlier:
At two minutes to midnight, Mark Carney looked at the most powerful man on Earth, checked his watch, and told his negotiators to get on the plane. Fuck this wanker, we're going home.

And half the world's press still thinks he stormed out. He didn't storm anywhere, mate. The bloke ran two central banks through two catastrophes, and he's just done the coldest piece of arithmetic in modern trade history: the midterms are TEN WEEKS away, Trump's approval is circling the drain, and every deal signed with that man is worth the paper, the frame, and fuck-all else. Ask CUSMA. He tariffed his own trophy deal over BOURBON SHELF PLACEMENT.

So Carney walked, matched him dollar for bloody dollar, and left the demolition to American voters. Why sign anything with a bloke whose signature depreciates faster than a secondhand jet ski?

The full evisceration is live now: the Depression-era law he dug out of the shed, the whiskey ultimatum you won't believe is real, and why an empty calendar is the most aggressive document in world politics right now.

King Carney reads the clock. And the clock says November.

I wasn't going to post this one on the blog because I thought it was too crude, but tonight I'm mad as hell.

19 comments:

  1. While I agree with the sentiment, it's wearying to see more and more AI content (two images above) and Facebook reposts here. Even that Facebook post is largely AI (that first Facebook extract, Claude says is AI, ChatGPT says is 75% AI, Gemini says is AI with a human adding the colloquialisms, human here says it's AI which is why I checked it).

    Not my blog, one might say. But long-time readers and commenters like me do perhaps help to make community blogs like this what they are. This used to be more butterfly migrations, arthouse films and cool human achievements (I realise that still goes on to some extent). The sources used to be The Atlantic, Washington Post, Vox.

    Number of posts with Facebook content in July 2011, 2016, 2021, 2026: 0/124, 0/47, 0/61, 18/48.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. Every now and then I have to re-emphasize what TYWKIWDBI is, and what it isn't. this is NOT a "community blog." It's purpose is not to gather like-minded people to reinforce their common beliefs. It is only a PERSONAL blog. This is where I store things that I find interesting so I can look them up in the future. This is where I store my movie reviews so I know whether to watch them again. This is where I scream in the night when my anger and rage needs an outlet. You can read, or not. I don't give a fuck.

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    2. I consider myself suitable chastised :)

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    3. And I hereby retract the expletive. :-) I've been a little frazzled recently.

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    4. I found your profanity refreshing and satisfying! I’ve often kinda wished you’d do a bit more of it actually. Yeah. Swear more please, blog-owner, as that will better serve to please me, the reader-client. Satisfy my whims!



      Serious note, sincerest wishes the source of your befrazzlement resolves for the better.

      Delete
    5. Claude says is AI, ChatGPT says is 75% AI, Gemini says is AI

      Why would you trust an AI system testing for AI? It's a conflict of interest juxtaposed with self-flagellation. It's just a turducken of nonsense.

      Reminds me of an old Dutch tv ad in which the folks from WC eend recommend ... WC eend.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsvHeLUOoxs
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiowLL3FT2E

      (don't mind the youtube translated subtitles, they're nonsense, but the point of the ad is that the professor in their lab recommends their own product. And yes, they're in on the joke)

      Delete
  2. I like what Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said regarding negotiating with Trump: "You can't get a good deal with a bad person."
    And Trump is, by more than one objective metric, a very bad person.

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  3. I want that door mat!!!!!
    bobbie

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  4. Or: "Sorry, America, the Strait of Yourbooze is closed."

    Google AI estimates Trump’s tariff war has cost the US 350K jobs and cut growth by 0.4%, while Canada has lost 70K jobs and 0.6% growth, but now the losses will rise. Canadians have eagerly made non-tariff-driven sacrifices (boycotting US travel and booze). Tariffs are truly lose-lose!!


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    1. Just to be clear, those numbers are from Tax Foundation, an independent non=profit group that evaluates economic policies.

      https://taxfoundation.org/research/federal-tax/trump-tariffs-trade-war/

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  5. Codex
    Carney is highly respected in the top echelon of global markets. Risk adverse stable. He regulated banks so that the house of cards wouldn't happen before the toxic assets situation. Prevented canada from sliding into a major recession in 2007. He learned French in the last little while. When he speaks the markets listen. He doesn't insult. Exceptional.

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  6. Codex
    Addendum it has come up in the past will come up in the future. Some people call him a banker. He was early in his career and left, talented enough to have had a very lucrative career at Goldman and others but chose not to. He was blamed for Brexit in the media. He actually advised against it as Bank of England Governor and predicted their recession. His skill is to keep countries afloat economically (oversimplification). He can't protect the middle/upper middle class because he can't perform miracles but understanding the future of global markets how intertwined and dependant they are; few understand it better than him. Canadians are lucky to have him.

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  7. I do trade with Canada.
    Until the last two years there was no tariff on NEW parts we import from Canada.
    Now there is, courtesy of Trumps tariff last year. It amounts to about 12%. I’m not sure if Trumps latest hike will take it to 50% or not.
    There was no tariff on parts I send for repair and return.
    Trump invoking Section 338 ( a depression era thing which has never been used) to the tune of a 50% tariff may change that. Will probably change that. I’ll find out soon enough.
    If it does, what that will mean is I will no longer be able to sell a customer a refurbished power supply for $750.00.
    It will drive the price up to $1000.
    A new one? $1800. That’s almost half the price of the product it goes in, which will also see a 50% price increase.

    In a word, UNAFFORDABLE.

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  8. Auto parts? Computer parts? (just curious)

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    Replies
    1. Air ground radios used by the airlines industry. There are more than just power supplies involved. That was just an example.
      Interesting though...none of the AG radios we use (3 vendors) are manufactured in the USA.

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  9. It would be nice if the NY Times referred to our Prime Minister as Prime Minister Carney… rather than Mr. Carney.

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    1. This is slightly off-topic, but it often strikes me that way the NYT refers to people is just ... odd.

      Pretty sure the styleguide is a document that has lofty goals that just break down in reality.

      One of the things is that they insist on using people's full legal names, even if people aren't know that way in general. They also do a lot of Mr. and Ms. where that's just kinda dated. You can just refer to people by their last name.

      And part of the Mr./Ms. thing is that that allows them to ignore titles. They'll mention it one time, and then drop to Mr/Ms. Oddly, in other articles, they do just go by last name.

      When it comes to academic titles, they suddenly become very weird. Medical doctors are always doctors, but PhD's are not. And they refer to that as "courtesy titles', even though both are legally protected.

      Funny side-note, Dutch distinguishes between medical "dokters" and academic "doctoren", using the Dutchefied spelling for MDs and the Latinized version PhDs. English has no difference, which is occasionally confusing.

      Anyway, I digressed.

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  10. All that, and he's doing America a favour as well

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