Bill Robertson 🇨🇦🇬🇧

British Columbia

[ᗰᗩƳᖇᗩ @LePapillonBlu2]

Here’s my sunset at the Gulf of Mexico. #Nikon #SunsetPhotography

[Bill Robertson 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @eggnognrum]

@LePapillonBlu2 Gorgeous !

[Conservative Party of BC @Conservative_BC]

Megan Knight in Surrey South!

Megan was elected as the White Rock Mayor in 2022 after previously serving on City Council from 2014 to 2018. Her wealth of experience will strengthen our team.

Learn more: https://t.co/WJwvMF1aTG

[Conservative Party of BC @Conservative_BC]

We’re pleased to announce Caroline Elliott in West Vancouver - Capilano.

We’re unified and ready to bring the change BC deserves.

https://t.co/kpBxb03I5R

[TrendingPolitics.ca @TrendPolCa]

BREAKING: The BC Conservative Party announces star candidate @NVanCaroline will run in West Vancouver - Capilano.

[Bill Robertson 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @eggnognrum]

@CTVNews …..trump spews out whatever stumbles around in his mind at the moment

[Bill Robertson 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @eggnognrum]

@CTVNews That’s bs

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

☕️ Here's a question to ponder over your morning coffee. What would have happened if America had simply not spent the last couple of years behaving like a drunk uncle at a wedding, insulting the bride, the groom, the vicar and the man who parked the cars?

The answer is nothing. Nothing at all would have happened to the rest of the world. Life inside America, on the other hand, would have been a great deal more pleasant, because every single problem the country is currently wrestling with was made in America, by Americans, on purpose, and then explained to the public with a lie.

There was no trade deficit emergency. None. So there was no need for tariffs, which means there was no need for the inflation, the diesel and petrol prices heading for the moon, the farmers queuing for bailouts or the bond market clearing its throat every time the president opens his mouth.

Nobody was ripping America off, so there was no need to insult the Canadians until they took their billions and went home, and started filling in the paperwork to become an associate member of the European Union, which is a sentence nobody expected to write in their lifetime. No need to gift-wrap the soybean market and post it to Brazil, and no need to make the average European feel he is doing something noble by putting the bourbon back on the shelf and buying a Mercedes instead.

Iran would have carried on being Iran, which is to say tedious and unchanged. America would still have its bases scattered across the globe with grateful hosts rather than muttering ones, and the allies would still be buying American missiles rather than build their own. Foreign students would still be paying eye-watering sums to attend American universities, tourists would still be queuing in the Florida sun, and the dollar would still be trusted without anyone having to ask an awkward question.

And here is the truly maddening part. Trump would have been more popular than Putin. He would have been sitting on a booming economy, cheap fuel and a world that still picked up the phone, facing a Democratic party so invisible it could have been declared missing, and the midterms would have been a coronation rather than a coin toss.

In other words, the car was running beautifully. And then somebody climbed in, announced that the engine was on fire, and set light to it to prove the point.

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[Bill Robertson 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @eggnognrum]

@CTVNews Does the map properly call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico?

[Bill Robertson 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @eggnognrum]

@alleria_eh NO

[CANZUK International @CANZUK]

President Trump says cutting all trade with Canada would save the USA $90 billion.

If Canada forms a CANZUK trade market with Australia, New Zealand & the UK, it would be worth over $3.5 trillion.

Let's get it done Canada. 🇨🇦🇦🇺🇳🇿🇬🇧

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Bill Robertson 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @eggnognrum]

Stunning picture - LAKE ONTARIO Forever big and beautiful!
#lakeontario #sunrise #Lake_Ontario #RCNavy #HMCS #Canada 🇨🇦

[Roger Litwiller -🇨🇦 Naval Author/Historian @RLitwiller]

On the morning of 22 Oct 2024 I was sailing in HMCS HARRY DEWOLF & watched the beauty of this sunrise over #LakeOntario from the flight deck of this #RCNavy Arctic & Offshore Patrol Ship. I had the privilege to join her ship’s company for their historic 1st transit of the Welland Canal by an AOPS.

[WORLD NEWS @_MAGA_NEWS_]

JUST NOW: Canadian PM Mark Carney will attend Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union address on September 16 and speak to the European Parliament the next day, marking a high-profile show of EU-Canada alignment. The move comes amid a sharp US-Canada trade rift.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

A Photo Op With the Devil, and He Smiled.

Let us be clear about who is standing next to the President in that picture. Kim Jong Un runs a country where an estimated hundred thousand people sit in prison camps for crimes such as owning a foreign DVD, or being related to someone who did.

Three generations of a family can be sent away for one man’s offence. The books written by those who got out are not easy reading. Kang Chol-hwan went into Yodok as a nine-year-old boy alongside his grandmother, and came out a decade later having learned what hunger does to the people you love.

Shin Dong-hyuk was born inside a camp, taught to see his own mother and brother as competitors for food, and rewarded for treating them accordingly.

These are not stories of cruelty. They are stories of a system designed to grind the humanity out of families until they turn on each other. That is what the state does to its people, on purpose, as policy.

Which is why the leader of a democracy cannot post a chummy photograph of himself beside that man and expect the stain to wash out. It does not.

History keeps these pictures. Chamberlain is remembered for one piece of paper; this will be remembered for one grin.

A president who treats the warden of that world as a peer, and does so proudly, tells you exactly what he admires: not freedom, not law, but the untroubled certainty of a man who has never been told no. That is a character flaw, and not a small one. A healthy leader is repelled by a butcher. This one seems drawn to him.

Imagine, for a moment, a European prime minister trying the same thing. A Norwegian, a German, a Dutchman, beaming beside Kim in the sunshine. Parliament would empty. The press would sharpen its knives. We would, quite properly, rediscover the medieval joys of a good public burning. Yet in Washington it passes for statesmanship. It is not statesmanship. It is a symptom, and nobody should mistake it for a sign of health.

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[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Canada has quietly concluded that negotiating with Donald Trump is a waste of breath. After trade talks collapsed on August 21, Mark Carney’s government now expects no return to the table before the midterms, and is building an aid package designed to last the rest of Trump’s term. Patience has become a strategy.
Sounds smart.

[Bill Robertson 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @eggnognrum]

@OJoelsen …one might suspect the smell of power and money somewhere. Juggling his busy schedules of insulting other countries, making threats, and adorning his Oval Office and properties with gold and shiny things. When thinking about these traits I can easily envision Tamatoa in Moana

[Bill Robertson 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @eggnognrum]

e-7531 well past a quarter million signatures and growing - let’s keep it up Canada! 🇨🇦

[Bill Robertson 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @eggnognrum]

@TheTorontoSun Uh huh. And when that insult falls flat maybe he’ll consider changing the name of an american lake in of honor himself - perhaps changing Lake Michigan to Lake Tamatoa has nice ring to it.

[Old Canada Series @oldcanadaseries]

212 years ago today, on August 24, 1814, forces from present-day Canada serving the British Empire burned the White House in retaliation for the American attack on York — now Toronto — during the War of 1812.