UK Authorities Blur The Migrant Issue; BBC Won't Cover It Anyhow

Donna Jones, police and crime commissioner for Hampshire spoke to #BBCBreakfast about Portsmouth.
The BBC later deleted her last 15 seconds.
Listen and see why …. pic.twitter.com/EDmDfCZFW6

— Robert Abel (@rj_abel) September 7, 2026

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse calls attention to this post, but he takes it too seriously:

This is what they call one of those dangerous ‘ah-ha‘ moments. A British Police Commissioner from Hampshire, was discussing the newest illegal migrant influx that has been happening on the eastern coastline of the U.K. During the final 19 seconds of Donna Jones remarks, she identified the core issue that has perplexed many:

”This is a real wake up call to the government, yet again, that the British people are fed up with the lack of control of our borders. Which is why, we really need to be looking as a country about our membership in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), because that’s why we can’t turn the boats around and send them back to France”

That 19-seconds was immediately cut out of the BBC rebroadcast of the interview. However, the moment was caught and shared on the X platform.

But someonme named John Davies replied,

Of course the excuse about ECHR is crap.
UK sovereign law outranks

— John Davies (@MrAlignIT) September 8, 2026

I asked Chrome AI Mode, "Does UK sovereign law outweigh the European Court for Human Rights?" It replied,

Yes, UK domestic law ultimately outweighs the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) within the UK’s own legal system, but the UK remains bound by it under international law. To understand how this works, it helps to look at the relationship through two different lenses: UK constitutional law and international law.

Under the UK's unwritten constitution, the principle of Parliamentary Sovereignty means that the UK Parliament is the supreme legal authority.

The UK Supreme Court and lower domestic courts cannot strike down or invalidate an Act of Parliament just because it conflicts with human rights.

The Human Rights Act 1998 incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into domestic law. Under Section 4 of this Act, if a UK law breaches human rights, senior UK judges can only issue a "Declaration of Incompatibility." This is essentially a formal warning to Parliament. It is entirely up to Parliament to decide whether or not to change the law.

While the UK Parliament can legally pass any law it wants domestically, the UK is still a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights.

Under international law, the UK has agreed to abide by the final judgments of the ECtHR in cases to which it is a party. If Parliament passes a law that violates the Convention and ignores a Strasbourg ruling, it is not "breaking UK law," but it is breaching international law. This can damage the UK’s diplomatic standing and create international political friction.

What current UK and international law permit regarding whether migrants can be sent back to France is unclear:

Ahead of the start of the party's conference, Reform UK's MPs have been repeating their claim that migrants who are intercepted while crossing the English Channel can just be taken back to France.

It's part of the party's four point plan to "stop the boats".

Both the party's leader Nigel Farage and deputy leader Richard Tice have claimed that the UK is legally entitled to do this.

But BBC Verify has found no evidence that this is the case.

. . . On 19 September [2024], Nigel Farage told BBC Radio Kent that part of Reform's plan for migrants crossing the Channel in small boats would be to "take them back to France".

In June, he said on Question Time: “We’ll pick them up in the Channel and take them back” to France.

. . . According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue (SAR Convention), states are allowed to pick people up from boats if they are "found at sea in danger of being lost".

But these laws do not allow them to be taken to another state without that country agreeing.

. . . On 3 September, Richard Tice said about his policy of taking people intercepted in small boats straight back to France: "We know it's legal because the Belgian authorities have done it."

BBC Verify spoke to the Belgian police when the claim was first made in May, and they confirmed that they have intercepted small boats, treating them "as a rescue operation".

I suspect that if the UK had a leader with the political will to do this, the mere threat of returning migrants to France would force France to revisit the question of controlling its own borders in much the way Trump forced Mexico to control migrants. Since the boats are launched in France in French territorial waters, it ought to be possible to argue that they already had French permision to be there. One thing that's certain is that current UK leadership doesn't have the political will to do this.

"Unofficial" Population Policies?

The video embedded above raises inchoate questions about unofficial or quasi-official UK and French policies on migrants. On the arrival of the super-dinghy in Portsmouth that spurred anti-migrant demonstrations over the weekend, Grannyopterix says at 4:20,

The important thing for a non-Brit to know, any Brit who has taken a ship between Dover and France knows that this neck of water is where the Atlantic and the North Sea bump into each other. It is notoriously rough and dangerous water. And this dinghy went from here, down here, along here, and up there. That's a long journey, and it's not like the short route, is it? . . . It would have had to have been escorted. Apparently it took ten hours for that dinghy to get from here to there. That requires a certain amount of planning and support, I'd say.

OK, so, they went from Gravelines to Portsmouth, and started off by the French police. Now, after that, when they landed in Portsmouth, there was this entire line of buses waiting to ship them out. That again, logistics, planning, you could see this was a well-coordinated operation. I have also read that there were tents there full of new clothes, pajamas, shoes, other necesssary equipment for people who'd jst come and were probably rather damp by that time.

OK, so these buses were waiting for them, the buses left Portsmouth with apparently a police escort, as you can see, and this was all done very late at night. . . and then they arrived at this hotel in London and unloaded. Apparently there were about ten or 15 women in that crew, but as you can see, most of the people coming off there appear to be, well, fighting-age young men.

At least officially, according to the House of Commons Library,

The UK and France deploy resources to detect and disrupt movements of migrants, boats and engine parts, and to prevent them from coming together at the coastline. Law enforcement tactics include conducting checks at road and transport connections, using roadblocks and buoys in waterways, destroying boats near crossing points, and carrying out beach and coastal patrols. Law enforcement extensively uses surveillance technology including drones and thermal imaging cameras.

Actions to deter unauthorised migrants from travelling to coastal areas or staying in northern France include measures to prevent informal living areas being established, rolling eviction operations and a significant police presence in the area.

Nevertheless, in practice, the embarkation into this particular mega-dinghy at Gravelines appears to have been facilitated by Franch police. News reports say 140 migrants were in the dinghy, which reflects the recent change in strategy by traffickers to increase the size of the boats. Buit it's difficult not to surmise that that change in trafickers' strategy is accompanied by much geater tacit cooperation by official and quasi-official actors in the UK and France; the dinghy was escorted over its full voyage across the channel:

FRENCH rescue boats and two helicopters helped a mega-dinghy carrying 140 migrants cross the Channel to a UK beach yesterday.

Five rescue boats escorted the inflatable as it completed the unprecedented 70-mile English Channel crossing on Sunday.

The “safety operation” involved handing out lifejackets to everyone on board, including 20 women and eight “very young children”.

The flimsy inflatable reached Eastney beach, in Portsmouth, intact on Sunday afternoon, with nobody being injured after 14 hours at sea.

This parallels another question that's come up in the Canadian trade dispute: Prime Minister Carney insists he was protecting Francophone Canada by rejecting the recent trade agreement -- but observers have made the point that Canadian immigration policy, which involves widespread immigration from India, threatens to flood out Francophone Canada. The Century Initiative, a project with widespread support from the Laurentian Elite, aims to increase the population of Canada, currently 41 million, to, 100 million by 2100. While it has not been passed by the Canadian parliament, current immigration policy there seems generally consistent with it.

In effect, with the native birth rate stable but current residents leaving, this would add 60 millon migrants from India to the current population of 41 million, with roughly 9 million whose first language is French. This would create a far larger language group whose primary language is Hindi or Punjabi, although Canadian Charter Rights (a weaker version of the US Bill of Rights) currently recognize only English and French as official languages.

If the Century Intiative is implemented, oficially or not, it would simply redefine Canada -- population of Indian heritage would be 60% of the country, certainly overwhelming the French and at least out-voting English speakers. At least in theory, it would require Ottawa to rewrite the Charter Rights, equivalent to a US constitutional amendment, but it would require only a majority in parliament. What's behind this? What's behind the quasi-official encouragement of illegal migration in the UK? Prime Minister Burnham is officially against it:

Andy Burnham will begin the process of courting European leaders when he welcomes Emmanuel Macron as the first foreign head of state to visit him in Downing Street.

The prime minister will meet the French president at No 10 on Thursday as he looks to make inroads on a number of foreign policy objectives, including curbing irregular migration and sealing a new deal with the EU.

. . . Burnham said in a statement on Wednesday: “The progress we have seen this summer [in bringing down the number of small boat crossings] shows what can be achieved when the UK and France work together.

“But I am clear that we cannot be complacent. Smuggling gangs are constantly adapting their tactics, and the UK and France need to respond quickly and stay one step ahead of the criminals facilitating the dangerous crossings.

“The small boats crisis is a shared European challenge, and no country can solve it alone. Working with France and our international partners, we will restore order and control to our borders and prevent smugglers exploiting vulnerable migrants.”

But on the ground, UK and French authorities appear to be not just facilitating, but working fully hand-in-glove with, migrant traffickers and their new policy of using mega-dinghies to regularize migration across the Channel. But neither the UK nor the Canadian parliament is willing to go on record making this level of migration official policy. Why not?

Bartiromo Update

Via PJ Media, citing a source behind a paywall,

It starts with President Trump’s primetime address in July on the 2020 election, in which he laid out allegations of Chinese interference and calling on Congress to tighten voting rules before the midterms. Seeing as how it was a big primetime speech, Bartiromo naturally planned to cover it on her show.

. . . However, the night before the speech, Ralph Giordano, Fox Business Network's senior vice president of programming, texted Bartiromo's production team, instructing them not to cover the speech.

When Bartiromo renewed her Fox News Media contract in February of last year, she reportedly negotiated language specifically barring Giordano from having any say over her show. He kept meddling anyway.

Navarro told Byers in a Friday interview that Bartiromo sent him a screenshot of Giordano's instructions to prove management was blocking her coverage, which he described as "censoring" it. Navarro said he passed the information "up the chain" to senior administration officials. An unnamed high-ranking White House official then called Fox News leadership to complain, effectively outing Bartiromo as the source of the leaked guidance.

It came on the heels of a report from the outlet Status claiming Bartiromo had shared internal editorial guidance with the administration, a report both Fox News and a representative for Bartiromo declined to comment on. Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and President Jay Wallace were reportedly furious, though they let her show continue through the summer before pulling her off the air on August 9.

Bartiromo was named as a defendant in the Dominion and Smartmatic defamation lawsuits, both stemming from 2020 election coverage. Puck also noted that Giordano and Bartiromo already had a tense relationship at the network.

In Friday's post, I tied this to what is simply standard corporate policy, that if anyone reveals internal company documents to anyone outside the company without going througn corporate PR, it can be a terminable offense. This is something whistleblowers have to reconcile with their consciences, but even if they have e-mails that tie the company to murdering toddlers or something, they've got to understand they can be fired for releasing them fair and square.

This is where, on Friday, I couldn't understand why Maria Bartiromo didn't ask Askalawyer.com about it, or failing that, simply talk to her own lawyer about this. Based on the link above, it sounds like she had already anticipated that Ralph Giordano, Fox's Senior VP for programming, would try to meddle in her reporting, and her contract, at least based on the story, already barred him from this.

So as far as I can surmise, Bartiromo did what YouTube lawyer Bruce Rivers advises people against, she turned a misdemeanor into a felony. What was basically a contract dispute that she could have just referred to her agent and her lawyer became a terminable offense. At least, this is what I speculate is the case based on this timeline: (1) She wants to do a story on the 2020 election; (2) Giordano sends her staff a text or e-mail telling them not to; (3) Bartiromo forwards this e-mail to the White house.

Prudence and temperance would have inserted a step (2.5), Bartiromo talks to her agent and attorney and suggests they discuss her contract with Fox's legal. Now, even if Giordano had done something to get Bartiromo's dander up, and she was really, really, really done with Fox, it would have enhanced her value in looking for different work if she'd done this all quietly. Now she's controversial. Walter Cronkite and Edward R Murrow both fully understood they had brands to protect. They didn't let themselves become controversial, at least beyond certain limits, and they were never petty in public.

So even if the Giordano spat was the straw that broke the camel's back for Bartiromo with Fox, her response has damaged her value on the post-Fox job market. Living well is the best revenge, and she seems to have blocked that avenue off.

The Laurentian Elite

Not long ago, I ran across the term "Laurentian Elite" in the context of contemporary Canada. It turns out there's a Wikipedia entry:

The Laurentian elite, also referred to as the Laurentian Consensus, is a Canadian political term used to refer to individuals in the upper class of society who live along the St. Lawrence River and watershed in major Central Canadian cities such as Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto, an area which represents a significant portion of Canada’s population. The term has been used to describe the belief that a general governing political consensus existed in Canada due to the influence of the Laurentian elite from Confederation until the early twenty-first century.

The term is generally attributed to John Ibbitson[.]

. . . Ibbitson described the Laurentians as "the political, academic, cultural, media and business elites" of central Canada who were responsible for shaping Canadian identity. He argued that Laurentians viewed Canada as "a fragile nation" kept together by the federal government but protected from the United States of America.

The entry goes on to say the Laurentian Elite is generally connected to the Liberal Party, but the 2011 election, in which Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada won a majority, is regarded as a turning point in Canadian politics. However, the Liberals returned to power in 2015 and have retained it ever since, returning to a full majority governmenmt in just this past week's elections. It is thought that Mark Carney was able to exploit traditional anti-Americanism via the trade war with Trump to do this. But let's put this in context:

In an address to the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa some 80 years ago, President Harry Truman declared, “Canada and the United States have reached the point where we no longer think of each other as ‘foreign countries.’ We think of each other as friends, as peaceful and cooperative neighbors on a spacious and fruitful continent.”

Since that press conference, US-Canadian relations have taken a quantum leap backward and are now at their lowest ebb since the War of 1812.

Let's go back to my post here on August 25, when I discussed Canada's strategy in the incipient trade war. I cited Chrome AI mode:

The Ontario provincial government launched a television ad campaign in U.S. border markets invoking the legacy of Ronald Reagan to criticize modern protectionism. By using a conservative icon, the ad specifically targets right-leaning and moderate American voters, warning that tariffs on Canadian goods will ultimately hurt American consumers and destroy local automotive and agricultural jobs.

The Impact: These ads have directly provoked the White House, with President Trump publicly condemning them as "foreign-funded propaganda" at campaign rallies.

How is this going? The video embedded above suggests that the Canadian psyop has been overwhelmed with memes. At 0:49:

"When the Americans stop doing memes, stop throwing shade . . . we can have those discussions." Fresh off his three by-election wins, of course Mark Carney's ready to come back to the trade table, but he wants President Trump and the Americans to stop bullying him. Stop making memes! Well, you knbow what happens when you ask the internet to stop making memes? Well, they start actually making more memes. Oh, boy.

He then posts a succession of memes like the one below:

I'm not sure if the traditional Canada of the Laurentian Elite can survive this, and let's not ignore that the tariff threat to Canada is also existential. If the Canadian establishment is portrayed this way from south of the border -- and let's keep in mind that there are Canadians who find this entertaining as well -- it's hard to avoid thinking Canada's existence, at least as it once thought of itself -- is indeed under threat.

The Maria Bartiromo Flap

NEW: The Maria Bartiromo backstory, per multiple sources familiar....

Maria Bartiromo wanted to pursue a story related to China and 2020 election voting conspiracies... a major sensitivity for the network given its Dominion and Smartmatic lawsuits.

A Fox Business executive sent…

— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) September 3, 2026

One of the sponsors to Bruce Rivers's often-hilarious Criminal Lawyer Reacts YouTube Channel is Askalawyer.com. For $50 a month, you can get an AI answer, assisted by a real attorney, to your legal questions, and depending on your business, it could be a real bargain. But Rivers often plugs it when discussing some bizarre arrests and convictions, saying "For $50 a month, he could have used Askalawyer.com to find out if it's OK to rob a bank." Somehow, I get this feeling about Maria Bartiromo.

I don't subscribe to Askalawyer.com -- I'm married to a retired attorney who can just as easily explain why I shouldn't rob a bank -- but I did ask Chrome AI mode, "I want to release a text I got from my boss without going through corporate PR. Is there a potential downside?" It answered,

Yes, releasing a text from your boss without going through corporate PR carries massive potential downsides, including immediate termination, legal exposure, and long-term career damage. Going rogue and bypassing your company’s established communication channels means losing the protection of the organization and exposing yourself to personal liability.

According to AOL,

Bartiromo, fifty-eight years old, has since retained Bryan Freedman. Bryan is a Hollywood attorney who has represented the likes of Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, and Megyn Kelly following their own exits from major media employers.

For $50 a month, she could have asked Askalawyer.com if it was a good idea to send a copy of rhe message from her boss to the White House and avoided the need to pay millions to Bryan Freedman. I think we can be pretty sure that a non-disclosure and non-disparagement clause were both in her contract -- again, for $50 a month, she could have asked Askalawyer.com if either was a good idea. Now she's gotta pay Bryan Freedman to try to fix this.

Here's another reaction:

Maria Bartiromo has learned a lesson that others at Fox News have learned over the years: the patience of the Murdochs is not unlimited, and while they may be conservative and align with Trump in many areas, their ultimate loyalty is only to themselves and their own interests.… pic.twitter.com/x04YfdZG6E

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) September 4, 2026

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse has another insightful reaction:

Maria Bartiromo became increasingly popular amid the MAGA base during the research and revelations surrounding the ‘Spygate’ and ‘Russiagate’ storyline. Bartiromo often had several guests on her Sunday Morning Futures program that highlighted evidence of the corruption in the DOJ, FBI and U.S Intelligence Community. However, it also became more visible that Bartiromo was navigating between sensitive topics that often ran counter to the professional republican class interests in Washington DC.

Over the past few years Bartiromo softened her focus toward corrupt endeavors and began staying away from the most controversial aspects of how the structures of government operate. In a time when nearly all U.S. institutional credibility has crumbled, Bartiromo found herself in that awkward spot where you try to act like you’re not noticing the moment in the show when the marionette strings become visible.

. . . There is always that moment of choice, that time when your influence and affluence no longer run in alignment with uncomfortable truth. It’s a strange dynamic to watch unfold and even more strange when your proximity to the person gives you a different perspective than the average.

Bartiromo did as much as she could, until she couldn’t.

The problem I see is that like it or not, she's voluntarily gotten into the same boat as Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, and Megyn Kelly, which is to say that her ego may have taken over. We didn't normally think of her in that same media-narcissist category, but maybe we just didn't know her well enough. The problem for anyone in her income bracket -- the AOL link estimates her net worth at $50 million and her annual salary at Fox at $10 million -- is that she's being paid to be a team player. If she no longer wants to be on the team, she really ought to keep her mouth shut and be grateful for what she's had.

Sometimes well-known journalists with reputations for integrity, like Catherine Herridge, find themselves in personnel actions that may raise questions about the reasons for their leaving a network, although Herridge left Foz simply because her contract expired, and she left CBS as part of a larger downsizing. Maria Bartiromo doesn't seem to be quite in Herridge's league, and like Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, and Megyn Kelly, she'd gotten rich as a team player before her eventual high-profile departure.

The Foreign Policy Establishmen Looks At Canada, Comes Up Short

After I made yesterday's post, I was still left with the question of what the US alternatives would be if Canada made some sort of move toward a military alliance with Russia or China. The closest I came to anything like an answer was this paper from last June at the Stimson Institute, When Formal Alliances Stop Doing Political Work: The Canada-US Alliance in Crisis. Reading it, I found the usual gas clouds of conventionial wisdom, so I asked the AI oracle, "Is the Stimson Center part of the foreign policy establishment?" It replied,

Yes, the Stimson Center is widely considered part of the Washington foreign policy establishment. Founded in 1989 and named after the legendary bipartisan statesman Henry L. Stimson, the Stimson Center operates at the core of mainstream international relations. It is routinely ranked among the top think tanks in the United States, actively advising government agencies, educating Congress, and shaping conventional wisdom on global security. [emphasis mine]

Apparently conventional wisdom is regarded as a good thing within the foreign policy establishment. Here's basically what the piece says:

By 2014, Ottawa was devoting roughly one percent of GDP to defense, half the NATO obligation it reaffirmed that same year at the Wales Summit. As recently as 2024, Justin Trudeau was dismissing the two-percent target as a “crass mathematical calculation” that missed the point of what Canada contributed. It was a defensible argument, made indefensible by the fact that Canada wasn’t contributing much of anything to compensate.

Mark Carney changed that fast. His government hit two percent in fiscal 2025-26 — the first time since the Cold War ended — with a spending surge his government called the largest since the Korean War, and committed to NATO’s new five-percent target by 2035. More than the numbers, he changed the language, telling Canadians the country could no longer assume the United States would defend it and had to invest in its own capacity to “control its own destiny.”

. . . Then Carney traveled to Beijing in January 2026, and this is where the trouble compounded. During his visit, Carney announced what his government called a “new strategic partnership” with Xi Jinping — the first such meeting between Canadian and Chinese heads of state in eight years.

. . . So, to recap: Canada did everything Washington had demanded for years on spending and then announced a partnership with America’s principal competitor. And, on top of that, Canada’s leader gave a speech Washington read as filing the United States under hegemonic threat alongside China. The suspension of the Permanent Joint Board on Defense followed. Whether or not the reading was fair, it is the one that mattered, and it drained what was left of Washington’s trust in the compact.

Here the limit of Canada’s skating room becomes the point. Carney can describe Canada as a middle power maneuvering between larger ones. But, in addition to drawing on a certain nostalgia for a bygone era when Canada claimed to be a “middle power” that routinely punched above its weight in global affairs, this vocabulary is borrowed from states whose geography lets them use it.

. . . The UAE, for example, practices that kind of multi-alignment — leaning on Washington for security while deepening economic ties to Beijing — because no treaty binds Abu Dhabi to the United States. Canada does not realistically have that option. It can argue with Washington, but it cannot behave as though it stands outside the continental defense system it helps operate. That is what distinguishes Ottawa from Abu Dhabi and Mexico City, and what will ultimately make the middle-power rhetoric impossible for the Carney government and its successors to translate into meaningful defense policy.

So on one hand, the piece concludes that at least as far as Carney articulates it, the Canadian strategy is meaningless. But how, precisely?

One important fact gets lost in the day-to-day friction between the White House and the Prime Minster’s Office. Canada has not had a genuine strategic alternative to the United States since the Second World War, and geography alone makes that true. There is no escaping the American relationship, whatever a prime minister says in Davos. Washington knows it, and some U.S. officials seem to have concluded that Canadian dependence allows for unlimited pressure.

But the authors are talking defense strategy, and that's so plain that it's beside the point. The problem is that Canada is also dependent economically, but the authors are basically saying that's not fair or something.

Washington should stop treating continental defense as a collection point for unrelated economic grievances; coercion aimed at a partner with nowhere else to go buys compliance now and resentment later.

But the current exchanges between Ottawa and Washington, as far as I've been able to see, haven't mentioned defense at all. As of a week ago,

US President Donald Trump has said Canada wants "the benefits of being a state, without being one" after trade talks between the two countries collapsed late on Friday.

The breakdown of negotiations triggered new 50% US tariffs on a range of Canadian goods. Trump also said American farmers had been charged "massive amounts of Tariffs" for years.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called the fresh tariffs a "miscalculation" designed to "hurt and divide us".

The issue basically boils down to whether Canada should get favorable tariff treatment so that it can maintain certain industries like autos at prices it can export to the US market. If it were a state, it would be in the same position as Michigan. If it were a state, it would also have the full protection of the US military, but that's not currently under discussion -- nevertheless, it's relevant to the overall question of whether Canada has a free ride. I don't think you can split the questions in two.

But even under defense alone, the authors neglect the question they do raise: if Carney's "middle power" strategy is meaningless, nevertheless, what happens if he's delusional enough to cogitate a defense alliance with China? I betcha both the US State and Defense Departments have contingency plans for such a thing. Why not bring that up? I asked the oracle, "What prevents Canada from making a defense alliance with Russia or China?" It answered, in part,

Canada shares the world’s longest undefended border with the United States. Geographically, Canada has no choice but to be integrated into North American security. A Canadian military alliance with Russia or China would be viewed by Washington as an existential national security threat, making it practically impossible.

I followed up with the oracle, "What would be the potential US response if Canada signed a military alliance with China?" It gave a remarkably clear-headed reply:

If Canada were to sign a formal military alliance with China, the U.S. response would be an immediate, severe, and existential national security crisis, fundamentally altering North American geopolitics. Given the current 2026 climate—characterized by intense economic friction between Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government and President Donald Trump, including crippling tariffs and Canada's strategic economic pivots toward Beijing—a military alliance would cross Washington's ultimate red line.The potential U.S. response would unfold across economic, military, and political dimension.

For over two centuries, the U.S.-Canada border has been the longest undefended border in the world. A military alliance with China would force the U.S. to immediately deploy the U.S. Armed Forces, National Guard, and massive surveillance infrastructure along the 5,525-mile northern border.

The U.S. would treat the alliance as an intolerable violation of the Monroe Doctrine, which opposes foreign military intervention in the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. military would likely establish a strict naval blockade or airspace restriction to prevent the transport of Chinese military assets, personnel, or advanced weaponry into Canadian territory.

. . . High-level political rhetoric regarding the annexation or forced subjugation of Canada—already a point of systemic friction in contemporary political discourse—would materialize into active operational planning. If Chinese troops or military installations were actively being deployed to Canadian soil, the U.S. would highly consider a preemptive military invasion to neutralize the threat before Chinese forces could establish a permanent foothold.

The problem of "Canadian sovereignty" is neither exclusively military nor economic, but it is in fact existential to both countries. It's worth asking whether Carney is in fact delusional over both the economic and military factors underlying any belief that Canada has much freedom of action in these areas at all -- but he's certainly talking as though it does. They make their own weather, after all.

The foreign policy establishment is pushing the idea that everyone can sit down and talk this out. But if Carney is delusional, can we really?

“When The Americans Stop Doing Memes. . ."

Remarks from Prime Minister Carney to reporters yesterday suggest things aren't going as he'd expected:

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney still sees a path to a mutually beneficial trade deal with the U.S. — once Washington stops playing games.

Carney said any deal with the U.S. “must” recognize Canadian sovereignty, which includes respecting the French language and Quebec culture.

“When the Americans stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough and start being serious about having those discussions — we can have those discussions,” Carney said to reporters on Tuesday.

The problem is that last Friday, Carney was the one who ended negotiations, and the US currently sees no reason to try to reopen them.

Negotiations between Canada and the U.S. have stopped completely. Both sides remain far apart after Carney walked away from a deal that he said “asked too much and offered too little.”

Speaking to POLITICO on Monday night, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said “there’s not like a better deal out there available for the Canadians.”

What fascinates me is that there's no shortage of individual Canadians who understand quite clearly the futility of Carney's position, like the commentator in the video embedded above. At 21:59, she replies to a question, "Is Canada getting itself into a fight it cannot win?"

Yes, it is. It goes back to what I aaid earlier, that you can't have a war between two massively unequal partners like this. It's like flick a flea off the arm of the United States to have this going on. He will retaliate, and they should know this. They should be understanding this just by his previous behavior. . . . He would love nothing more than to completely repatriate the auto industry to the United States. So if they think this is smart, then we really have a serious problem in Canada, and Canadian people, the auto worklers and the people that make a living off the auto industry, and I'm talking about the restaurants, the grocery stores, the 7-Elevens, and the Circle Ks, and all the other entities that live because the auto industry is a thriving industry in their area, they should be screaming to the hills not to allow this to happen.

She goes on to say Carney will eventually be forcrd to back down. The thing that puzzles me is that the great majority of Canadian voices I see, at least on YouTube, appear to be sane and recognize that US tariff policy could in fact break the Canadian economy, but there deosn't seem to be any equivalent opinion from the Canadian opposition parties.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre swung through Southwestern Ontario on Saturday, telling supporters here that Canada should continue fighting for tariff-free trade as the U.S. imposed new ones on Canadian goods.

Poilievre spoke at a public event held here by Oxford MP Arpan Khanna, hours after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Canada walked away from trade talks with the Americans, setting the stage for President Donald Trump to slap an additional 50 per cent tariff on roughly $28 billion in Canadian exports, including electronics, alcohol and dairy.

“Conservatives are determined to put our country first in this trade dispute. We’re fighting every day and every way for tariff-free trade,” Poilievre told supporters at the Woodstock event, the second of four London-area stops planned for the weekend.

I would say that Justin Trudeau's reported remarks to Trump at Mar-a-Lago over the 2024 holidays, that a punitive tariff tweak by the US would be "the end of Canada" were insightfuil aNd correct, and Carney likely understands this just as clearly. But Canada has backed itself into a difficult corner: its military could resist a US invasion for about two days. Carney speaks hopefully of aligning Canada with other "middle powers", mostly in NATO, who have collectively offloaded military preparedness to the US and would be no more capable of military action against the US than Canada itself.

But any attempt by Canada to align itself militarily with either Russia or China would likely provoke economic retaliation from the US even worse than what's now likely. On one hand, Carney is correct: sovereignty is in fact what's ultimately on the line, but the existential question is actually a lot closer than he wants to pretend. Trump's point has been that Canada wants to be treated like a US state, at least as far as having no US tariffs on its exports to the US, but it wants to impose tariffs on imported US goods. Trump says that's no longer possible, and it hasn't been for some time.

Trump is only half-jokingly proposing that Canada become a US state to solve that problem. But there's also the problem of defense: Canada has no serious armed forces, but if it were to pursue an alliance with Russia or China, it would almost immediately be annexed as a territory by the US purely via economic pressure. But that level of pressure is already being applied. I don't think many Canadians are waking up to this reality.