Mark Carney talks energy with Vietnam’s Tô Lâm. Brookfield got there first.
Surprised? Neither am I.
On June 9, Brookfield and Foxconn announced a Vietnam energy partnership for up to 1 GW of wind, solar and batteries.
The money goes through Brookfield’s Catalytic Transition Fund the same fund Mark Carney promoted while serving as Brookfield’s chair and head of transition investing.
Now Carney sits across from Tô Lâm representing Canada.
Carney. Brookfield. Vietnam. Energy.
The connections don’t disappear just because his job title changed.
NFL preseason: “Rest the starters. Someone might get turf toe.”
NBA preseason: “We need to manage their loads.”
MLB spring training: “I got a paper cut. Put me on the 10-day IL.”
NHL preseason: “Let’s fucking kill each other.”
This guy is the CEO of Flock
He takes pictures of you and hands them over to the cops
But, he doesn’t want you to know what he looks like
PLEASE do NOT share his photo!
Anita Anand’s submarine dodge
(My interpretation)
Reporter: How many submarines is Canada actually getting from Germany? Is it 12?
Canada’s Anita Anand: Um… I’ll pass. Can Germany answer this one?
Germany’s Johann David Wadephul: Nope. Your deal. Your question. Suck it up and answer.
Anand: Um, uh, er… I don’t really want to tell you the truth. “12” sounds so much better. How about this… negotiations aren’t at my level, so I’m not responsible.
@Grayspacetakes@ConradMBlack How much military planning is required to immediately capitulate to a vastly superior military force. Whilst the Canadian MSM hide behind their press badges.
It is with great concern for some of my fellow countrymen, inching precariously toward the edge of utter lunacy, that I write this post.
Prime Minister Mark Carney this week, in an interview with the New York Times, went on record saying it would be “irresponsible” not to plan for the possible contingency of a military invasion of Canada by the United States. Unfortunately, Mr. Carney didn’t misspeak or fall victim to a cherry-picked quote taken out of context. His concern was later reiterated by Defence Minister David McGuinty and Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Soloman.
We all know that Donald Trump has a colourful history of spouting off some truly outrageous whoppers from time to time, but even he has never disseminated something as fatuous, dangerous or dishonest as this. And while he seldom backs down from his outrageous claims, whenever he pushes the envelope too far, at least his entourage goes on damage control to walk back some of his excesses – Carney’s guys are doubling down.
Despite these idiotic statements, these are intelligent men. The odds that all three of them would simultaneously become afflicted by the same psychotic delusion is infinitesimally small. The only rational conclusion, therefore, is that they believe, or rather their polling data shows, that enough Canadians are so possessed by Trump Derangement that engaging in such asinine demagoguery is politically expedient.
Sadly, they may be right. The vast coalition of useful idiots and true believers after effectively having their intelligences insulted by their dear leader, are coming out of the woodwork to express gratitude online for the Prime Minister’s caution in preparing for all, including the most remote, contingencies. Others are retreating slightly to hold the line at the fall-back position articulated by Minister McGuinty that, this kind of paranoid delusion is perfectly normal and, “all militaries in the world spend time analyzing risk scenarios.”
I assure you, this is not normal.
Back on planet Earth, the situation is tense and acrimonious (and there is plenty of blame to go around for that), but this is not the more than two centuries of peace along the 49th parallel that followed the signing of the Treaty of Ghent in 1815 drawing to an end. Trump has imposed tariffs on $20 billion (or 2% of the $400 billion per year) of Canadian exports to the US. In other words, amid this unnecessary, escalatory, and foolish trade dispute, the United States will still purchase 200% more Canadian goods and services this year than the rest of the world combined. This situation is like a restaurant’s picky regular customer complaining about an overcooked steak to a prideful chef who, fortified in his own mind by the knowledge he cooked the steak perfectly, refuses to comp the entree. This is not the start of World War III. We are so far removed from a military incursion at our southern border that we may as well be strategizing the response to the equally plausible threat of Santa Claus leading an invasion of elves from the north.
If we woke up tomorrow in some parallel reality where the United States actually was contemplating a full-scale military campaign against Canada, with all due respect to our brave men and women in uniform, the only preparations to be made would be negotiating the terms of our unconditional surrender. Some brave and patriotic Canadians may refuse to submit and instead choose to conduct, as a matter of principle, a brutal and bloody guerilla warfare campaign against the strongest conventional and nuclear military force in the history of the world. Unfortunately, they would be in the precarious position of having to rely on our miserly European allies, or countries like Russia or China, whose recent actions have been significantly more hostile and provocative challenges to our sovereignty than the US tariffs, to supply us with weapons, and they would not remotely be adequate. It’s all so desperately preposterous.
But for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that Donald Trump was indeed the terrifying bogeyman haunting the dreams of the most extreme and hopeless sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome and its frightful sister affliction, Andrew Coyneism, a rare and especially acute form of tweet-induced psychotic maladjustment. Even in this scenario, why would Trump use the military to annex Canada? All he would have to do is offer Alberta statehood, liberation from transfer payments, excessive regulation and carbon taxes, carte blanche to exploit its natural resources, a generous welcome bonus in the form of a $100,000 tax credit to every adult Albertan and replace their Canadian dollars with equal amounts of US currency. They would effectively be acquiring Alberta for the knock-down bargain price of roughly 1x annual GDP.
Simultaneously, the US (including the newly acquired Alberta) would immediately cut off all trade with the rest of Canada. The net impact to Canada of this manoeuvre would be a cataclysmic economic collapse, while the newly composed United States would take a net GDP hit (loss of all trade with Canada, mostly offset by the acquisition of Alberta) of 0.8%. Next would come a full package of sanctions, a naval blockade, and when the rest of Canada became desperate enough, a Chinese belt-and-road style offtake of all of Canada’s resources at bargain prices, which by then, the Canadians would be desperate for. In the meantime, the US would revamp its immigration policy to recreate the brain-drain of the 1990s on steroids, welcoming the top 20% most productive Canadians to flee what had overnight become the third world. Harvard Alumnus Mark Carney might well be among those at the front of the line seeking this emigration opportunity, rejoining 91 percent of his own investments already located there.
There would, no doubt, be a fearsome contingent of Canadians refusing to bend or break in the face of American tyranny, and elbows would be flying up to vertiginous heights with such vigour that the Canadian healthcare system would be overwhelmed by millions of spontaneous emergency room visits of patriotic patients with dislocated shoulders.
I suspect many of you reading this are thinking to yourself that this is so completely far-fetched and absurd that, if serious, I must have lost my mind. Allow me to reassure you that while this is all bunk, it remains at least ten times more likely than the United States military executing a boots-on-the-ground invasion of Canada. Anyone who spends more than one second worrying about such an outcome should immediately proceed to the nearest sink to splash some cold water in their face and pull themselves together.
Are there any limits to the extent Carney Elbowzos will go to justify their obsession with Trump? Just like calling off the trade deal, Gordie Howe Bridge deception and myriad conflicts of interest, turtling on the digital services tax, credibility and transparency are no biggie
Ottawa couldn't even handle a bunch of BBQs, bouncy castles and truck horns in 2022.
Trudeau had to invoke the Emergencies Act.
Preparing for a us military invasion is laughable.
We put nine women in charge of a jury for two weeks and they tried to let a mom get away with strangling her kids. Then they launched a vicious smear campaign against the one black man who stood in their way.
So I’m confident Obama is full of shit here.
@GreatBig_Sea Whether this "poll" is true or not, the ignorance of voters here in Ontario is embarrassing.
They now think that the USA has a force ready to breach our border and turn us all into Yankees... oi vey..