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.

Syracuse And The Bigger Problems Of Higher Ed

Syracuse University has been in the news lately, starting last spring:

Syracuse University will eliminate 93 academic programs identified as having low or no enrollment, the private New York institution announced Wednesday.

But unlike many colleges making cuts, Syracuse is not doing so out of financial necessity, according to Lois Agnew, the university’s provost and chief academic officer.

But according to the Wall Street Journal, the cuts are in fact due to financial necessity:

This school year, which began Aug. 24, enrollment fell short, sending the school into a 1.5% budget shortfall.

Syracuse also added nearly half a billion in debt to build desperately needed new dorms, which brought on a bond market reprimand. And it recently cut programs it said weren’t popular.

A national brand-name institution with a $2.5 billion endowment and a storied 150-year tradition is suddenly beginning to flail.

But the problems aren't unique to Syracuse:

Fewer young people are enrolling in college, as the country reconsiders the value of a university education. Tuition that has outpaced inflation for decades has saddled students with high debt and yielded uneven returns on careers. The current tough job market, squeezed by the rise of artificial intelligence, has added to the anxiety.

There could be even fewer students in the future—as the birthrate falls, the number of 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. is set to decline.

The first institutions to feel these headwinds have been lesser-known colleges with nominal endowments. That has led to a surge of mergers and closings among small private schools. But the cracks in the business model of higher education are now prompting a realignment much further up the food chain.

. . . At the same time, the Trump administration’s disruption of billions of dollars in federal research grants has thrown a question mark over Syracuse’s nearly $200 million research budget. And Trump’s continued pressure on student visas is disincentivizing international enrollment—a revenue stream on which Syracuse depends.

Left unmentioned is the questionable value of the product itself, leaving aside whether it carries with it the assurance of a white-collar career. I've discussed here the stories about the high percentages of students who cheat on exams and papers with AI, but this deflects attention from the pre-digital age of analog plagiarism from sources like Cliff's Notes, where the percentages were just as high -- and this in turn leaves aside the problem of professors wno plagiarize, often highly prestigious ones.

On the other hand, the Journal does bring up another issue I've noted here, the increasing luxury of student accommodations, which by the way increases the cost of college overall:

Through the 1990s and early 2000s, universities spent billions upgrading facilities in an arms race to attract affluent students who carefully weighed where to enroll based on the quality of dorms and amenities, such as lazy rivers and climbing walls.

Syracuse fell behind. It hasn’t opened a new dorm since 2009, and years of reviews showed students wanted more housing near the main campus. The school outlined a plan to modernize student-housing a decade ago when finances were stable.

In 2025, it borrowed $458 million to build new dorms near its main campus. The risk was exacerbated because the school has a relatively small endowment for a university of its size.

In fact, universities are competing for the most affluent market share, which includes the foreign students who pay full freight:

Northeastern, BU and NYU have seen application numbers surge and the percentage of applicants admitted plummet—a measure of selectivity that boosts a school’s prestige and ability to draw more students willing and able to pay full sticker price.

The three enroll 40% or more of undergraduates paying the full price, compared with just 21% at Syracuse, according to 2023-24 data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the most recent available.

As a result, Syracuse’s competitors can concentrate their financial-aid budgets on a smaller percentage of students, while Syracuse has to spread its allotment over a broader pool. That means that for students who get some sort of financial aid, Syracuse costs thousands more than its competitors.

Wait a moment. The schools that gain in prestige can be more selective, which means they can admit more students wealthy enough to pay full fare, and they can attract these students with luxury accommodations -- but they insist on being able to implement DEI? Isn't this incongruous? But here's another data point I ran across in preparing tbis post:

First, before you dive into it, take a guess about the percentage of adults in the US, aged 35-54 with a bachelor's degree or higher. Got a guess? If you have a college degree, you probably said something like fifty or sixty percent, based on my sampling of twenty people or so. If you didn't, your guess is probably much lower, usually ten or fifteen percent. There's a lesson there, in itself.

The answer: 38%. You're probably surprised, either way.

Now, what was it in 1940? Got an guess in your head? The answer: Just under 5%. Yes. You read that right.

What is higher ed supposed to be doing, and is it doing it? If my wife and I had children or grandchildren, from our current perspective, I think a better use of household education money would be to put the kids in Catholic K-12 schools and let college more or less take care of itself.

The Guardian On The Trade War

Since Mark Carney is a member in good standing of the transatlantic globalist elite, the UK Guardian ran a puff piece on him over the weekend:

Mark Carney stood before a walnut-veneered lectern, his face drawn tight, as he announced that talks with Canada’s biggest trading partner had collapsed. “Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us,” he said. “And I promised: that will never, ever happen. We are keeping that promise.”

For years, the former central bank governor had worked hard to calm markets. Now, he was asking Canadians to accept uncertainty and confrontation.

Near the end of the press conference last Saturday, a reporter made reference to the sombre, combative tone of the speech: “Why does it feel like today Mark Carney is going to war?”

The prime minister paused.

“We were attacked. You’re at war when you get attacked,” he said. “We got attacked.”

I suppose you could characterize this as an "attack", but it was neither a surprise nor sudden. The "attack" is nothing but tariff uncertainty; Canadian companies, or companies based elsewhere but assembling merchandise in Canada for US export, have been reacting for over a decade to the prospect of increased US tariffs, which raise the price of Canadian-made goods in the US. The Canadian commentators in the video embedded above make the point:

$1 TRILLION+ left between 2014-2025. Now the auto-sector sequel: Honda $#15B suspended, GM CAMI $2B shut down, Umicore, $2.7B paused, Northvolt collapsed, Brampton production shifted south, Oakville EV plan scrapped, Oshawa shifts out. There's not much of an auto industry left in Canada after this.

Just in the past few days, Crown Royal, which still makes its whiskey in Canada, nevertheless moved its export bottling to the US side of the border due to the same tariff uncertainty. Canada's problem is that the prior tariff environment allowed companies to locate manufacturing in Canada for export to the US. The mere possibility that this could change has caused companies to reevaluate manufacturing in Canada. There's little Carney can do to change the economics of the situation; "elbows up" will simply stiffen US resolve -- and the question simply isn't whether the US actually imposes higher tariffs, it's just the possibility that it might.

Nevertheless, the Guardian says Carney's in charge:

One of Carney’s prescriptions – forging deep relations with like-minded “middle powers” and restructuring to lessen reliance on former allies – has already taken shape in Canada, at a speed and degree to which the pollster David Coletto described as a “wartime-footing government without a war”.

“It’s a government organised around an external threat that’s willing to suspend its own party’s orthodoxies, centralise power to move fast, and measure itself in outcomes rather than values,” he wrote.

“The public has hardly blinked,” Coletto said in an interview. “Mark Carney’s approval rating has just sustained itself through this entire period.”

. . . Polling shows that Carney remains the leader Canadians trust most to steer the country through economic uncertainty. But the prime minister has also embraced a role that would once have seemed almost incongruous: asking a country vastly smaller and less powerful than its neighbour to stand its ground.

He said in his recent address: “Canadians don’t submit to the weather – we thrive in it. We don’t wait to see which way the wind is blowing. Or surrender ourselves to the waves to be storm-tossed by events.

“We set our own course. We make our own weather. In Canada, we are masters in our own home, from coast to coast to coast.”

Trump's response has been to troll Carney, starting with renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America -- which Google Maps has confirmed:

Google Maps has officially begun displaying Lake Ontario as “Lake America” to users in the United States.

The move comes days after President Donald Trump ordered the historic lake renamed amid his escalating trade war with Canada.

The change began rolling out over the weekend, making Google the first major online maps provider to implement Trump’s latest geographic rebranding.

Trump continued the trolling over the weekend:

"When I announced that I was running in the 2024 Presidential Election, right at the beginning, Ford was getting ready to close their Big Factory, in Detroit. Then, because I was leading in the Polls, they figured they would leave it open a little longer to see what happened. Now it’s running 24/7, and it’s one of the most profitable Car Plants in the World!" Trump wrote on Truth Social.

"There are many other examples, for both Ford, General Motors, and others. I’ve revived, and indeed saved, the Automobile Business in our America. That’s because of what I’ve done with TARIFFS. One of the Worst Abusers is Canada," he said.

Trump said the U.S. doesn't need Canadian products.

"I don’t want Canadian cars, I don’t want Canadian parts, I don’t want Canadian anything. They’ve been ripping us off for decades, and it’s going to stop. This should have happened long ago with other Presidents, just as stopping Iran should have happened long ago," he wrote.

"They want to be treated like a State, but they aren’t one. I deal with the Leadership of many Countries, but I find Canada to be the worst. They are entitled no longer!" he added.

And now we're back to the question of Canada becoming a state, which Trump is implicitly tying to the tariff question. If Canada becomes a state, there are no tariffs in either direction. If tariff uncertainty remains in any form, companies will just continue to move out of Canada. Sundance at Conservative Treehouse puts this in the context of whether we terminate the USMCA:

I think we have finally figured out President Trump’s long-term strategy here. Essentially, we have been flummoxed over why President Trump has not yet triggered the 6-month USMCA (CUSMA) termination notice yet. However, he appears to be intentionally drawing this out.

. . . with an all-in perspective on termination, the moves President Trump is making now are all just to prolong economic pain and block investment while retaining the termination notice as the hidden ace.

Trump doesn't have to do anything; the economic pain is all on Canada's side, and it's already been having an effect. The Guardian is simply ignoring the reality on the ground.

Migration Lowers Wages

Via the Nrw York Post:

An ultra-exclusive Hamptons yacht club catering to the wealthy and well-connected was forced to suspend its members-only restaurant service for multiple days after several of its kitchen staff were booted from the country over visa issues, The Post has learned.

The swanky oceanfront Devon Yacht Club in Amagansett — which reportedly charges around $100,000 in initiation fees — canceled its Wednesday night dinner service after its foreign cooks had to leave the US because of problems renewing their H-2B temporary work visas, according to a letter sent to members the same day.

Food service was also canceled Thursday and was not expected to be back up and running until Friday’s lunch service, the club informed its deep-pocketed members — a group that once included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s parents.

“The H2B visa approval for our cooks is still not resolved,” the letter obtained by The Post stated, referring to special visas that allow US employers to fill seasonal or temporary positions with foreign nationals.

Eight staffers from the club were reportedly booted from the country, according to local outlet, The East Hampton Press.

However, the precise circumstances aren't clear:

In a statement to The Post, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said, “Neither [Customs and Border Protection] nor [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] were involved in this incident.”

Similarly, the East Hampton Town Police Department confirmed it had “no records or indication of outside agency activity.”

H1B and H2B visas are a form of indenture, something everybody denies. The H1B visa is for "highly skilled professionals in specialized white-collar roles" (cough), while the H2B visa is for temporary, non-agricultural seasonal labor. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Are H2B visas a form of indenture?"

Legally, H-2B visas are not a form of indenture, but human rights organizations and labor experts frequently compare them to modern indentured servitude due to how the program is structured.

. . . Critics, including the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), argue that several core mechanics of the guestworker program mimic historical features of debt bondage and indenture:

The employer owns and controls the visa. If a worker quits or is fired, they instantly lose their legal immigration status and must leave the country. The visa is non-transferable; a worker cannot freely quit to take a better job at a different company without a highly complex, pre-approved petition process from a new sponsor.

Many workers take out high-interest loans in their home countries to pay third-party recruiters for job placement, visas, and travel. Even though charging these fees is technically prohibited under U.S. regulations, the practice remains widespread. This leaves workers trapped by massive debt before they even begin working.

Because complaining about wage theft, poor housing, or unsafe working conditions can lead to termination—and subsequent deportation—workers rarely report abuse.

This raises the question of exactly who got the kitchen workers deported -- apparently there was no CBP or ICE action involved, snd there were no complaints to the local police. So was the yacht club itself somehow involved? The Devon Yacht Club has a hinky recent history here:

Devon Yacht Club is a private facility tucked away on Napeague Bay, and been in the spotlight for the past year or so due to a controversial plan to redevelop the facility and the subsequent expulsion of a handful of members who spoke out against the plan.

. . . This saga adds to what has been a bumpy summer for Devon Yacht Club, starting with a string of lawsuits that stemmed from the expulsion of the members for what they say is opposition to the divisive redevelopment plan, which called for the demolition and relocation of club structures about 30 to 40 feet inland. Court papers say the cost was to clock in at $35 million.

So did the yacht club replace the deported kitchen staff with other H2B workers, or did they hire local workers? Did they have to pay the local workers more? So far, we don't have answers.

In my tech career, I often worked alongside H1B workers, which are at least theoretically required to have bachelors' degrees for "highly skilled" work, but in reality bachelors' degrees are optional for many tech jobs, and it's generally recognized that college graduates are underemployed as things stand: /p>

Overall, 52 percent of college graduates were underemployed one year after degree completion. That is, they were working in jobs that don’t typically require a bachelor’s degree to obtain. For those initially-underemployed workers with ten years of data, 45 percent of them were still underemployed after a decade, even given the post-pandemic labor market conditions that favored workers.

The whole idea that we have to import foreign workers to compensate for labor shortages is a scam. We import foreign workers to keep wages down. But the big unspoken truth about all such imported workers is their English language skills are pretty poor, they're difficult to work with as a result, but anyone who complains about this gets into hot water.

Ceutans Fight Back

With Ceuta abandoned by the coward socialist dirty Sánchez, the men of the city are taking things into their own hands and going after the invaders. pic.twitter.com/c8JwoRucqL

— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) August 28, 2026

Via the BBC:

A month after tens of thousands of migrants entered the city of Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in North Africa, there have been outbreaks of violence as tensions mount between locals and foreign arrivals.

The Spanish government has been accused by opposition parties of struggling to manage the crisis effectively.

Ceuta's residents have complained of feeling unsafe on the streets, as well as expressing concerns about the burden being placed on public services.

. . . Earlier this week, the government centralised management of the situation, overriding the local authority, after criticism that it had been slow to respond.

Defence Minister Margarita Robles also apologised to those in Ceuta who "may have felt, or who even still feel, abandoned or not sufficiently cared", as the government unveiled plans to overhaul the country's immigration laws.

Much of the recent ill-feeling in the city appears to be driven by government plans to move migrants into existing public buildings, such as sports centres, in order to be able to process their legal status in an orderly way and return those not eligible for asylum to Morocco.

Many local people, and [Mayor Juan Jesús] Vivas, oppose this initiative, due to concerns that it will move the migrants closer to residential areas.

What I'm noticing here is an approach similar to that of the UK, whereby once migrants enter the country, they're assumed to have applied for "asylum", paperwork or no, and they're placed in facilities where they remain indefinitely while being "processed". In the case of Ceuta, of roughly 80,000 who simply crossed the border illegally July 30-31, about 70,000 were summarily shipped back, while about 10,000 who chose to stay seem somehow to have acquired a legal right to be "processed" indefinitely, with some segment of those deemed OK to remain more or less permanently.

If the UK is an example of how effective immigration policies have been in limiting illegal border crossings, only about 4% of those who arrive illegally, for instance in small boats, are ever returned to their countries of origin. The question for Ceuta is why the 10,000 who crossed illegally but stayed can't be shipped back just as simply.

The video embedded above suggests that Ceutans have become frustrated with this circumstance. The problem is that no matter the good intentions of the ciizens trying to chase them out, this can only be done by trained military or police units that can encircle them in an organized way and force them back across the border. The most small groups of vigilantes or demonstrators like those below can hope to accomplish is to embarrass the government into taking action, something the government is never going to do.

I'm starting to question whether the UK-style parliamentary system used by 21 EU countries as well as Canada can cope with the Western migrant crisis. It looks like only a strong executive can mobilize government response, which is something the US has demonstrated.

How Goes The Trade War?

I can't help it, I've been chuckling for days about Trump renaming Lake Ontario:

“If you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake. Now, all we need is an ocean. So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific,” Trump said.

Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said New York would be defying Trump’s wishes on renaming the lake that hugs its northern border.

“New York won’t be calling it that,” Hochul declared on X.

Carney also rejected the rebrand, saying that “the name is more than 400 years old” and “comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big.’”

“We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms,” he tweeted. “Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.”

The prime minister broke off trade talks with the US on Friday and claimed that “America is trying to break us so that they can own us,” but that so long as he was in charge it would “never, ever happen.”

Trump is, of course, trolling Carney, and Carney's reaction is predictably Canadian-huffy. The problem I see for Canada is severalfold. First, even Carney in the quote above is tacitly acknowledging that any substantial change in the US-Canada tariff balance would seriously harm Canada, but that balance is inevitably going to expire.

Second, Canadian anti-US sentiment is primarily in the eastern part of the country, and it's based on the tradition that loyalists were forced to flee to Canada after the US revolution. But this has never been as strong in the western provinces, and in addition, Canada is deliberately diluting the traditional population by importing immigrants, primarily from India:

Canada has a long history of immigration. Millions of people from all over the world have chosen, and continue to choose, Canada as their new home. In 2021, more than 8.3 million people, or almost one-quarter (23.0%) of the population, were, or had ever been, a landed immigrant or permanent resident in Canada. This was the largest proportion since Confederation, topping the previous 1921 record of 22.3%, and the highest among the G7.

Given that the population of Canada continues to age and fertility is below the population replacement level, today immigration is the main driver of population growth. If these trends continue, based on Statistics Canada's recent population projections, immigrants could represent from 29.1% to 34.0% of the population of Canada by 2041.

Old-fashioned anti-American rhetoric won't work with this group. Beyond that, anti-woke comic Ben Bankas, Canadian born but now a US resident, routinely asks his Canadian audiences how many are trying to emiograte to the US; typically, just about the whole room raises its hands. This is another group that anti-US rhetoric won't sway.

I got to know quite a number of the old-fashioned style Canadians in my younger years, including a family that nearly became my in-laws. The condition that they weren't Americans was a major part of their identity. Our beer isn't like American beer. The Americans like Las Vegas. The Americans have to have air conditioning. The Americans are violent The Americans didn't want to pay the bill for the service the UK did in fighting the French in the French and Indian War/War of the Spanish Succession, so they held the Boston Tea Party.

This was even harder for my almost-in-laws to justify: they'd moved from Canada to the US to get a higher standard of living, which was a matter you couldn't bring up with them. The parents and their older children had been born in Canada, and although they'd been down here for some years, they continued to congratulate themselves for being Canadian. The problem was their youngest daughter, who was born in the US. That poor girl affected the most Canadian vocabulary and speech of any in the family and was loudest in her denunciation of Americans. Somehow this drove the family dynamic and formed her personality.

I just don't see how you can sustain a national identity by saying you aren't like Americans, especially if your official policy is to expand the population via immigration -- many of those immigrants chose Canada as Plan B, when the US was Plan A, and they'll continue to try to get to the US.

There's something delusional about Mark Carney and something deeply unhealthy about Canada.