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Conceivably Trudeau was unpopular enough that Carney might have still made his move, dragging his European-influenced history and CV and connections with him. And that's still irrelevant to what "reality" is right now. "Why" the present is what it is, is at least a little bit interesting, but...

Either such a deal is going to require some non-zero amount of "you have to follow EU regulations in respect of..." or it's not. If it's not - if it's just some agreement to increase the percentage of stuff covered by CETA - then fine. No kind of special membership is needed for that, though...

An amusing aspect to all of this has been watching the general attitude in Canada flip from disapproval of "foreigners buying our country (infrastructure, corporations)" to "here, have anything you want".

See also: Hong Kong.

A decades-long general observation: when corporations screw up, politicians are quick to bring them (and individuals within, if any can be pegged) to account. Politicians are much less quick to bring accountability to either themselves or public services. I conclude that it is preferable...

Kind of odd to proclaim "the reality is" and then cite a hypothetical. The "reality" is the situation we are in, and the proposals the GoC and EU have advanced. "We wouldn't be here if..." is a deflection, and not useful.

What is it we need that existing trade agreements (and our exporters' voluntary compliance with EU trade regulations) don't already provide? Anything substantial? Anything at all? It would be funny to have spent months loudly reasserting our sovereignty in response to Trump's idiocies, only...

Fire drama is mainly a function of whether a fire lands on a community.

Suppose for the sake of argument the claims are true that privatized airports are often more cost-efficient and provide better service to users, and that these claims are based on empirical observation and comparison of privatized and non-privatized airports. Do random speculations and fears...

It is vital to understanding how the US government works and how and why things happen the way they do, as opposed to just ranting against the Trump Lives In My Head Outrage of the Day, to pay attention to the separations of powers and not pretend they have atrophied to the point of...

It doesn't matter which president it accumulates under. Congress does the budgeting; presidents just make budget requests. "Which president is responsible for the most debt" is one of the dumbest fucking games on the internet.

Sure, all things that have short time horizons, and thus not what I am writing about. Also, money is fungible and - as I have written repeatedly on this side for decades - Congress controls the money. Trump can promise a new benefit - to cut a $5K cheque to every adult citizen, or to give all...

Before proceeding to design new armouries, it'd be worth first fixing in place how the Res F is going to be trained. If more stuff is moved to long blocks of time (eg. mandatory annual concentrations at which all the individual and collective BTS stuff is rehearsed and tested), the need for a...

Bond buyers aren't demanding higher long-term yields ten and thirty years out because the Trump administration keeps shuffling goalposts that have impacts on a horizon of a few weeks or months. They're demanding higher long-term yields because they don't want to lose money to ham-fisted...

If new defence facilities are on the table, they could be more than just one-company armouries. Against that, too much "hey, this might be useful too" feature creep could bloat the costs beyond all reasonable limits.

If deficit spending is the major underlying problem (it is, for pretty much everyone so affected), and in the US Congress retains full control of appropriations (it does), focusing attention away from other factors and using it as another haranguing point against Trump isn't particularly...

Long-term rates aren't just a US problem, and are a consequence of many factors. See here. "For insight, I plot some of the international pattern. (Sorry, Fred only goes to June for the other countries.) It’s a global phenomenon. And it lines up roughly with fiscal policies. The US actually...

There's a lot of stuff on the fringes and most of it never goes very far. What's interesting about the particular case is the amount of stuff being blurted out by at least a couple of jurors about people who started the trial with ideas in motion and brought their "lived experiences" into the mix.

Substitution of anything for merit is never a free lunch.

And yet the societies that assemble from these components are not the same.