Generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT have entered classrooms, universities, and homework routines with astonishing speed and little attention to the long-term consequences. A recent Canadian news report, aired on CBC’s

The National

, also revealed that teachers have mostly been left to fend for themselves.

The current infatuation with AI is part of a recurrent pattern, but the latest educational fad is

far more fundamental in its impact on teaching and learning in classrooms

. It’s time to ask: Are these tools eating away at our brain power and leading schools astray?

Technology evangelists and educators espousing ‘21st century learning’ tout its ability to save time, individualize instruction, and increase access to information. But little has been done to assess its effects on students’ ability to think independently, write clearly, and engage with knowledge deeply.

What’s encouraging is the fact that leading cognitive scientists, evidence-based researchers, and experienced frontline teachers are

beginning to right the balance

.

There is

mounting evidence

that the emergence of ChatGPT and similar AI tools are short-circuiting deeper learning, eroding critical thinking capacities, and undermining the teaching of writing. Our brains, it turns out, need knowledge to function at their best.

Generative AI is proving to be a large learning model which encourages passivity in learners. Leading cognitive scientist, Barbara Oakley, an American expert on learning how to learn, warns that “

mental effort is essential to build real understanding

.” Meaningful learning, according to Oakley, is built through deliberate practice, cognitive struggle, and retrieval of knowledge — all processes undermined when students delegate intellectual labour to AI tools.

Bypassing the productive discomfort associated with writing and problem-solving, students risk becoming consumers of content rather than producers of thought. The process of wrestling with an argument, organizing one’s thoughts, and finding the right words is foundational to critical thinking.

Generative AI, however, short-circuits this developmental trajectory by offering polished outputs without much heavy lifting. If students become accustomed to outsourcing the most demanding aspects of thinking and writing, known as

cognitive offloading

, they lose the capacity to do it themselves.

American education commentator, Natalie Wexler, author of

The Knowledge Gap

, sees AI as the latest educational trend that emphasizes skills over content, inhibiting our capacity to grasp and understand knowledge in context. True critical thinking, she argues, cannot be taught in isolation from a deep base of knowledge. In her view, students need a well-stocked mental library of facts, concepts, and contexts to think critically and write effectively. Generative AI, by providing

surface-level responses to prompts

, may reinforce the illusion that knowledge is readily available and easily synthesized, even when it lacks depth or coherence. Students may come to view knowledge acquisition as unnecessary, assuming that AI can fill in the gaps. This undermines both the cognitive effort required to develop coherent explanations and the long-term retention that underpins higher-order thinking and genuine problem-solving.

British educator and researcher Carl Hendrick, an education professor at Academica University of Applied Sciences, adds another layer to this critique by pointing to the performative nature of much AI-assisted writing. In his work on educational psychology and cognitive learning, Hendrick notes that true understanding is often masked by “pseudo-proficiency” — the ability to mimic knowledge without possessing it. Generative AI exacerbates this issue by allowing students to submit text that appears articulate and logically structured, even when it

lacks authentic comprehension

. It’s what’s in your head that really matters.

Hendrick has also exposed the phenomenon of “

AI ventriloquism

” — students giving the right answers for the wrong reasons. In pedagogical lingo, that might be described as the practice of speaking through AI-generated prose without owning or really comprehending the ideas expressed in your own prose. This not only corrodes academic integrity but also detaches students from the reflective practice essential to developing a personal voice in writing.

Another major consequence of generative AI is the potential degradation of writing by diminishing the writer’s craft. The practice of writing serves as a tool for thinking — what Carnegie Mellon University writing experts Linda Flower and John Hayes

describe

as a recursive process involving planning, translating, and reviewing.

When students rely on AI-generated texts, they miss out on this iterative engagement with ideas. The act of writing becomes mechanical rather than intellectual, transactional rather than transformational. This loss is not trivial: writing is not merely a means of communication, but

a means of inquiry

. It is through writing that many learners discover what they think, clarify their positions, and challenge assumptions.

Overreliance on generative AI has a more subtle but notable effect in serving to

promote intellectual conformity

. Since AI tools are trained on vast datasets of existing language patterns, their outputs often reflect mainstream, conventional thinking. This raises concerns about the homogenization of student work and the suppression of dissenting or original perspectives. True critical thinking involves questioning norms, exploring ambiguity, and entertaining multiple viewpoints — all practices that may be dulled by AI systems optimized for coherence and predictability over original thinking challenging technocratic norms.

Educational technologies are never neutral; they also come built-in with pedagogical assumptions and consequences. Educators must guide students to use AI as a scaffold rather than a crutch, encouraging them to think critically with AI rather than passively accepting its outputs. Overreliance on generative AI risks turning schools into sites of mechanistic interactions and producing students who are adept at mimicry but impoverished in judgement.

Resisting or banning AI is out of the question, but the time has come for a pause in the onslaught. The leading AI skeptics have got it right: genuine learning is built on effort, knowledge, and reflection — three things generative AI cannot supply. The latest classroom innovation may well be leading us astray and actually hindering the core mission of schooling. Surely our mission is not to produce technically fluent automatons, but rather live heads capable of becoming curious, thinking, and responsible citizens.

Paul W. Bennett, Ed.D., is director of the Schoolhouse Institute, senior fellow of Education Policy at Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and chair/national coordinator of researchED Canada.

National Post

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Spurred on by the so-called reckonings over racism in the United States and its legacy of slavery, many Canadian activists have

attempted

to import America’s divisive racial politics

into Canada

. However, examining slavery in Canada on its own terms and in good faith does not result in an identical discourse.

A

report

released Wednesday by the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy — titled, “Slavery in Canada: The Facts Rarely Told” — is a fascinating and grim study into the country’s dark history of trafficking in human beings.

Unsurprisingly, the reality of slavery in Canada greatly differed from the U.S. It was far less akin to the American original sin of mass chattel slavery, and fits more squarely within “Indigenous ways of knowing,” a

phrase

eagerly

promoted

by the federal government.

Indeed, slavery did not arrive in North America with the Europeans. They merely added their own method of this vile trade to the one that already existed here.

As the Aristotle Foundation has documented, vast Indigenous slave networks sent people to New France “from as far away as the Missouri River basin, Upper Mississippi, the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay.”

It was a nexus driven by the desire for wealth, weapons and political power on the part of both the colonists and the Indigenous nations.

Captives

seized

in war were the most readily available source of slaves for these Indigenous powers. The Aristotle Foundation found that 65 per cent of the slaves in colonial New France were Indigenous, stolen and traded along long-existing routes plied by the Huron, Iroquois and others.

This is a deeply uncomfortable truth that should not be sanitized. If the same

criteria

for critiquing colonial societies are applied to First Nations, then dozens of Indigenous cultures were “built on slavery.”

Long after the British Empire formally

abolished

the practice in 1834, it survived among First Nations far longer than is commonly understood.

The Aristotle Foundation’s report specifically mentions Maquinna, the Nuu-chah-nulth chief who resided at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island. In 1803, following a

misunderstanding

with the captain of an English trading vessel, Maquinna orchestrated the murder of the entire crew save for two white men. Both were enslaved for over two years before they escaped, living among Indigenous slaves.

Far from being isolated to the Nuu-chah-nulth, the entire Pacific Coast was a

hotbed

of slavery both before and after Confederation.

The Haida Chief Albert Edward

Eda’nsa

was born in 1810. When he married in 1850,

he owned

12 slaves and received 10 more as a dowry from his bride’s father.

In 1883,

Eda’nsa
still held

human beings in bondage. This was 12 years after British Columbia entered Confederation, 18 years after the end of the American Civil War and half a century after the British Empire abolished slavery.

Chief

Eda’nsa

was one of the last people in the history of North America to have been a slaveholder. Nonetheless, the widespread practice of slavery among First Nations does not absolve the white colonists.

As detailed by the Aristotle Foundation, there was a noticeable uptick in the acquisition of slaves from Indigenous suppliers by the start of the 18th century in New France. In 1725, “fully half of all colonists who owned a home” in Montreal’s commercial district owned an Indigenous slave.

In total, the number of slaves in New France constituted as much as five per cent of the colony’s population. There were also slaves of African descent, though they were smaller in number than their Indigenous counterparts.

A study led by historian Marcel Trudel that was published in 1960 estimated that no more than 4,185 slaves lived in what became Lower Canada from the mid-1600s to 1834, when slavery was abolished in the British Empire.

There was slavery in the English-speaking colonies, as well. According to the Aristotle report, following the War of Independence in the U.S., up to 3,200 Black slaves were brought into Upper Canada and the Maritimes.

Together with the 3,000 Black Loyalists who migrated to British North America, they formed communities that are among the oldest in Canada.

They had to face crude bigotry from white residents in places like Shelburne, N.S., where

race riots

over labour competition broke out. That should not be swept under the rug.

However, an examination of our history of slavery will uncover the inevitable truth that Canada was simply not defined by chattel slavery in the way that the U.S. was. While 10-million people were enslaved in the U.S. from 1619 to 1865, the combined number of slaves in Canada over that period was no more than 7,500.

The biggest impact that chattel slavery had on Canada was how it helped spark the American Civil War, which became a

motivation

for Confederation in 1867.

The numbers and longevity of Indigenous slavery made it the most impactful form of human trafficking in Canada’s history. Is that what advocates had in mind when they declared that the American reckoning with slavery had to be emulated in Canada?

No matter how hard some people wish Canada had been “built on slavery” like the U.S., the assertion is not backed up by the historical record. Slavery did not shape the economic, political or cultural identity of Canada in the way that it moulded the Americans.

The inability or unwillingness to revisit slavery in Canada on its own terms speaks volumes about the ignorance of many on the progressive left.

It is true that the cultural power of the U.S. makes it very difficult to avoid American narratives, but that does not excuse the inauthentic imposition of a foreign history upon our own.

National Post

• Tom Flanagan: Apologizing for slavery would be a distortion of history
• Lynn McDonald: Toronto’s costly push to trade Yonge-Dundas for a name more closely associated with slavery

A few days ago, 

Fortune magazine reported

on a research note from the investment bank Piper Sandler, whose analysts forecast a dismal legal outlook for United States presidential tariffs enacted by executive order under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977. Naturally I seized on this like a Rottweiler would a Milk-Bone. The American news media continues to argue over the economic effects of the tariffs, treating them as a given, while their obvious unconstitutionality is left to lawyers and to a beleaguered remnant of American libertarians.

The Piper Sandler folk noticed. They believe the U.S. Court of International Trade’s (CIT) late-May decision against the tariffs is quite sure to survive upward passage through the appellate courts; the Federal Circuit begins hearings soon. I

wrote about

the CIT ruling at the time, observing that the IEEPA does not explicitly allow the president to adjust tariffs at all, that the law has never before been invoked for that purpose and that U.S. President Donald Trump’s invocation of a “national emergency” is full of logical and procedural holes. Piper Sandler concludes that even a Supreme Court containing Trump appointees is probably too originalist to swallow such an obtrusion onto the U.S. Constitution, stating that a 9-0 loss for Trump is more likely than any Trump win.

Such a final showdown is likely to be many months away, and the courts are allowing the federal government to collect the tariffs now, but they will be subject to refund in the event of a reversal. Which brings us to a remarkable item published by

Wired magazine

last week. Reporters Louise Matsakis and Zoe Schiffer learned that one of Wall Street’s most celebrated lenders has found a promising new line of business: they’re making a market for the rights to those hypothetical future tariff refunds. The company is said to be offering 20 to 30 cents on the dollar: if you have paid a million in IEEPA tariffs, they’re willing to find you a quarter million or so now in exchange for the million you might get if Piper Sandler’s prediction comes true.

This financial creativity might be a life-saving cash injection for some firms struggling to adapt to the tariffs — but the kicker is that the firm plunging into this business, and betting that there may be refunds on the way, is none other than Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm controlled by the sons (aged 27 and 28) of Trump commerce secretary and rabid tariff advocate Howard Lutnick. Lutnick handed Cantor Fitzgerald over to the kids in February after he was confirmed for cabinet. He had a spokesperson tell Wired that he “knows nothing” about the firm’s new “IEEPA Rights” product, has no remaining “insight or strategic control” over the company and has “fully complied” with ethics rules. What can it all mean?

National Post

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On July 17, Deborah Lyons, Canada’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism, abruptly

retired

. Lyons, who

served

as Canada’s ambassador to Israel from 2016 to 2020, came into this role in October 2023 — just a week after Palestinian terrorists carried out their barbaric attacks in Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking over 250 hostages. While she was expected to hold the position for another few months, until October 2025, she decided “

with a heavy heart

,” to step down early.

With the position now vacant, the time has come to permanently dissolve the post — as well as the position of Canada’s special representative on combating Islamophobia. High paying jobs that don’t lead to results are bad. Ones that continue to divide people are even worse.

For nearly two years, as Canada’s Jewish community has been gripped not only by the horrors of October 7 and its fallout, but by surging Jew-hatred from coast to coast, Lyons faced an arduous uphill battle. Still, despite unprecedented obstacles and criticism, she worked diligently to sound the alarm on antisemitism, to bring disparate communities together and — in whatever small ways she could — to mend the wounds of a grieving community that has been completely and utterly abandoned by the federal government.

Lyons has

said

that “every day” she was “waking up to a fight,” that she had to deal with “a lot of angry people … all the time,” often feeling “despondent and despairing” over how reluctant Canadians were to speak up in support of the country’s Jewish population. Of course, criticism of Lyons is understandable. While in her post to combat antisemitism, the situation for Jews in Canada has worsened precipitously. But for Lyons, many of the obstacles she encountered were systemically, institutionally, socially and culturally beyond her control or influence.

One glaring issue that likely made Lyons’ job more challenging, however, was what appeared to be the relentless counter-efforts made by Amira Elghawaby, Canada’s special representative on combating Islamophobia.

Rather than focusing on things like peace-building, reconciliation and creating a united front between Jews and Muslims to counter all forms of hatred and bigotry, Elghawaby spent (and continues to spend) most of her attention on things like “anti-Palestinian racism,” vilifying the only Jewish country in the world (there are approximately 50 Muslim majority nations, by the way), and fuelling the fabricated belief among average Canadians that antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry run and exist on parallel tracks, when of course, they most certainly do not.

Further, while Lyons repeatedly acknowledged the hostages, the victims of October 7, including the eight Canadians murdered by Hamas, and condemned Hamas and other Islamic terrorist organizations, Elghawaby has — for the most part — acted as though October 7 didn’t happen.

Indeed, when she has acknowledged that something did happen on that awful day, it’s always been done in such a way that a moral equivalence is drawn between Israelis who were the victims of a genocidal attack and Palestinians. For Elghawaby, the only thing more elusive than Palestinian sovereignty and autonomy is the responsibility of Palestinian terrorists and Palestinian leadership. Carry out barbaric crimes, start wars, claim victimhood when there’s a response — rinse and repeat. This has been the way Palestinian leaders have operated for nearly a century — even predating the concept of Palestinian identity, which only came into existence in the 1960s and ’70s.

All told, this disconnect between the positions of Canada’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism and its special representative on combating Islamophobia has rendered them not just futile, but problematic. Never in our nation’s history have we so desperately needed moral fortitude, truth tellers and courageous religious and community leaders to come together and face hard truths in unison. Yet for the last two years, this need has been met not just with inefficiencies and obstacles, but what feels like deliberate attempts to undermine relations not just between Jews and Muslims, but between Jews and everyone else.

Canada is at an inflection point — socially, culturally, politically and economically. Major issues could improve in these spheres — or gradually worsen over time as they have been now for many years. It is therefore imperative that every dollar and initiative be spent and developed with prosperity and unity in mind — not the indulgence of endless grievances, the infantilization of entire peoples and the notion that our country can only be unburdened of our sins by relentlessly confirming our guilt.

Step 1 in achieving these things: get rid of useless and divisive positions.

National Post

Casey Babb is the director of the Promised Land Project at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, a fellow with the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, an associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute in London and an adviser with Secure Canada in Toronto.

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I am the grandchild of four immigrants. On one side, southern Italian peasants from small, scorched villages where life was bitter and short. They came to Canada with no English, no status and no illusions. They worked, they scraped, they built.

On the other side was a family that was expelled from Egypt — cast out, humiliated and dispossessed by the country they called home. They arrived here not to be celebrated but to be left alone, to rebuild in peace, far from the politics that ruined their lives. That is the blood that runs through me. And I will not let it be used as a cudgel against my reason.

There is a game being played here in Canada. If your grandparents were immigrants, then you are forever bound to cheer on the borderless, rootless vision of the world dreamt up by tenured professors, Liberal politicians and suburban activists who’ve never had to live with the consequences of the policies they champion.

You are expected to smile politely while the nation is repurposed into a processing centre. You are to say “thank you” and sit down while our foundational culture is hollowed out in the name of “diversity.” And if you don’t, you’re branded a bigot — or worse, a traitor to your own story. It is emotional blackmail dressed up as virtue — and it’s intellectually insulting.

We are told — repeatedly and ritualistically — that “we’re a nation of immigrants.” It’s a favourite line of Canada’s chattering class, and one that is often used to shut down debate. We’ve heard it in Parliament, in classrooms and on CBC panels. This tired mantra is wielded not to enlighten, but to end conversations.

It doesn’t matter whether your ancestors came fleeing war or chasing tax credits, whether they arrived in 1910 or yesterday. The circumstances don’t matter. The numbers don’t matter. The cost doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that you shut up and get in line. Well, I reject it all — absolutely and without apology.

The fact that my grandparents were immigrants does not mean I must support mass immigration forever. It does not mean I must stand aside while my country becomes unrecognizable. It does not mean I must endorse the strain on schools, hospitals, housing markets and communities that unsustainable immigration levels brings in the name of some imaginary moral debt I never incurred.

I owe nothing to the people who use my heritage as a weapon. I am not obligated to carry water for ideologies my grandparents never subscribed to. And I will not pretend that mass immigration, stripped of assimilation and of restraint, is anything but destructive.

I am not a hyphenated citizen. I am not a guest. I am not a perpetual immigrant. I am Canadian. My parents are Canadian. My grandparents — immigrants though they were — became citizens of this country and thought of it as theirs. They never lived as permanent outsiders, and neither do I.

What my grandparents experienced was not this. It was immigration governed by expectations, by rules, by culture, by a shared sense that the host nation mattered and that entry was not a right, but a privilege. They didn’t arrive demanding accommodation. They arrived prepared to adapt. They weren’t told Canada was racist or rotten. They were told to become Canadians. And they did.

Now the very values that allowed them to succeed — things like speaking English or French, respecting the law, earning your place and pledging loyalty to Canada above all — are dismissed as relics of some oppressive past.

You don’t even need to speak one of the country’s official languages nowadays — citizenship

can be granted

without a working knowledge of English or French. The border is treated as a formality, national identity as an embarrassment and Canadian-ness itself as something to be apologized for — unless, of course, it’s being used to signal smug superiority over the Americans.

And through it all, we, the children and grandchildren of immigrants, are told to keep our mouths shut. We’re told we must support the demolition of our national identity, simply because once, long ago, someone in our family got off a boat or a plane.

But I live here. I was born here. I was raised here. I pay taxes here. I vote here. I love this country as mine, not as a borrowed space on indefinite loan from history. So no, I don’t think like an immigrant. I think like a Canadian.

I will not allow my grandparents’ sacrifices to be weaponized against the country they chose. I will not allow my name to be invoked in service of policies that degrade what they built. I will not be guilted, lectured or emotionally extorted into being complicit in our national decline.

So yes, I am the grandchild of four immigrants. But that does not make me a mascot for open borders. And I will not clap like a trained seal while bad policy is being made in my ancestors’ name.

National Post

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Two centuries ago, liberal theorist John Stuart Mill wrote in his classic, On Liberty, that human liberty requires freedom of conscience, thought and feeling: “absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral or theological.” His thinking has recently taken a battering, not least in our universities, but that beating is now joined by the foray of the Canadian Nurses Association into political thought.

In its

2025 Code of Ethics

, the association compels nurses to include a broad set of progressive political beliefs in their professional duties. Among these: nurses must respect the principles of social justice; advocate for the stewardship of the environment; advocate for freedom from oppression; and pursue truth and reconciliation.

On the subject of truth and reconciliation, nurses are encouraged to “develop awareness of the Calls to Action contained in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report to address racism and health inequity; understand the history of and the ongoing impacts of colonial policies and nursing practices on First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples’ health and well-being; and acknowledge the power imbalances that exist due to historical contexts leading to the mistrust of colonial systems such as the health-care system …”

These are political quests which, depending on context, may be worthy of pursuit, but to establish them as professional duties for the nursing profession strays far beyond the requirements of conscientious individual patient care.

Three observations are pertinent. First, these requirements do not have a settled meaning: nurses, like the rest of us, have different views about what constitutes social justice, environmental stewardship, reconciliation and freedom from oppression. If there is a prevailing orthodoxy in the association’s leadership, it is not shared with the rest of us.

Second, as with Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, these new duties will mean what the association says they mean at a given time. The consequence is that the association can hold its members to account for departures from current orthodoxies or the opinions of the leadership; members may not know what their transgressions are until after the fact when they are summoned for discipline.

Third and most important, what business does the association have in establishing these professional duties? It has an undoubted interest in its members’ professional knowledge and skills, their willingness to work collaboratively in the health-care system and their ability to relate to patients including those from many and diverse backgrounds. But, their interest should not extend to telling them what to think, believe and advocate.

Why is this happening? Group politics prevail today and these groups have activists who seek to dominate agendas and silence those who think otherwise. Dissenters are sidelined or choose to remain quiet, hoping the activists will go away. The activists in the Canadian Nurses Association haven’t gone away.

National Post

Peter MacKinnon is a senior fellow of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Aristotle Foundation.

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My suggestion in a column last week after Japan struck a trade deal with the United States — that it might be better if Canada didn’t settle with President Trump just yet — was ridiculed in certain quarters.

Canada is a mouse fighting an elephant and is going to get crushed, said one correspondent.

“‘Elbows up Carney’ will be left in the dust when he caves to Trump,” he said.

But Canada is not without leverage – it just has to be creative … and patient.

The agreement that the European Union signed last Sunday reinforces the point that Ottawa should take advantage of the fact Trump’s attention is elsewhere. The president acknowledged as much ahead of his trip to Scotland last weekend, when he said: “We haven’t really had a lot of luck with Canada … (it) could be one where they’ll just pay tariffs, not really a negotiation.”

That should suit Canada just fine. The strategic challenge is that the status quo is working better for this country than for anyone else. We want to maintain that, without drawing too much attention to it.

The effective tariff rate that Canada is paying is around 6 per cent, including section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum and autos — much lower than the effective rate the rest of the world is paying (the Budget Lab at Yale estimates that at 18 per cent).

This is not the time for “elbows up,” even though Canada would like to get those sectoral tariffs reduced from the unsustainable levels currently being levied. Canadian steel and aluminum producers are currently paying 50 per cent tariffs, effectively killing the export business to the U.S. Aluminum exports have held up relatively well because of the lack of alternative sources of supply. But steel exports to the U.S. have fallen by more than 30 per cent since tariffs were introduced.

The impact on the auto industry is just as grave, as General Motors pointed out when it said tariffs cost it more than $1 billion in the second quarter of the year. Duties on finished vehicles exported into the U.S. are 25 per cent (or 12.5 per cent if the vehicle contains 50 per cent U.S. content).

If negotiators can make progress in reducing those tariff levels to more stable levels, then concessions can be made elsewhere.

It matters less what headline tariff percentage level Canada signs up for (Japan and the E.U. were forced to agree to blanket 15 per cent deals that were more something for nothing, rather than quid pro quo).

It would be manageable if Canada agreed to a 20 per cent tariff, as long as the 90 per cent of exports remained exempt under the U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade agreement and that agreement was extended to cover autos, steel and aluminum.

Under the terms of their deals, Japan and the EU were also forced to agree to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S.

Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC that this means “whatever Donald Trump wants to build, the Japanese will finance it for him,” while Trump himself called the agreement that 90 per cent of any profits from those investments would go to the U.S. “a signing bonus.” This is closer to extortion than a trade negotiation.

Needless to say, the Japanese interpreted the deal differently, saying that they would extend credit facilities to their companies but would have to point out “differences of understanding” in a deal that is still not formalized in writing. Similarly, EU officials said any investment would all come from the private sector, over which they have no control.

Canada, which has twice as much invested in the U.S. as vice versa ($1.2 trillion versus $683.8 billion), should have no problem committing to more investment by its pension funds and banks. Last year an additional $172 billion flowed south.

But Canada should be in no hurry to make a deal while the Americans are focused on India and China, which stopped buying U.S. coal, crude and LNG in June, in advance of trade talks.

The status quo gives Canada a tariff advantage over the rest of the world and it can use the receipts of reciprocal tariffs to keep its steel and aluminium industries on life support (Ottawa collected $2.4 billion in import duties in the first two months of this year).

The Carney government has still not responded to Trump’s decision to double the tariff rate on steel and aluminium to 50 per cent but there is a growing feeling, expressed by B.C. Premier David Eby, that further counter-tariffs are unlikely to change Trump’s mind and are hurting Canadian companies and consumers.

Carney told reporters this week that “negotiations are at an intense phase.” There is a sense on the Canadian side that there is a considerable delta between what the American negotiators agree to and what Trump himself will sign off on. One person involved in negotiations with the first Trump administration said that once agreement was reached with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the former U.S. trade representative, Bob Lighthizer, Trump would sign on. That is no longer the case.

If forced to strike a deal, the Carney government can give a little, as long as section 232 tariffs are lowered to a fixed rate that provides some stability.

A government with a comfortable lead in the polls can afford to take a hit on a Japanese-type deal this fall, in order to maximize leverage when the USMCA deal is re-negotiated next year. That’s the ball game.

Trump and his supporters have been crowing that he has proven his critics wrong; that the sky has not fallen in because of his Liberation Day, that prices for American consumers have not risen and that the rest of the world is shouldering the additional expense by cutting their prices.

It’s true that inflation in the U.S. is benign — 0.2 per cent in June — but most economists believe that price increases have been delayed, not cancelled.

“This is a time lag issue. By this time next year we will be having very different political conversations about inflation and unemployment in the U.S.,” predicted one analyst.

Companies stockpiled imports at the start of the year and have kept prices steady to preserve market share. They are paying for tariffs by accepting lower profits, according to Deutsche Bank. But America’s economy will eventually feel the pain. The Economist estimates it will grow only half as much as it did in 2024, like Britain after Brexit, and inflation will end the year above 3 per cent. The Yale Budget Lab says tariffs are a sales tax that will reduce the real income of Americans by about 1.5 per cent.

This is Canada’s leverage — rising inflation and unemployment, with the mid-term elections looming.

As Paul Krugman, the U.S. economist, noted on Tuesday, the tariff deals just signed tilt the field against U.S. manufacturers, particularly auto companies that will be paying higher tariffs than car makers in Japan and the E.U. that use very little U.S. content.

The domestic pressures on the president will surely rise in the next 12 months, perhaps making him less inflexible.

At the end of the day, all Canada is looking for is what it has already got, along with extended exemptions for impacted sectors.

It’s true that a deal with Trump is never a deal. But at the moment, he believes he is winning and is emboldened.

Ottawa has to bet that this will not always be so.

Playing the long game is the only short cut to a satisfactory outcome for Canada.

National Post

jivison@criffel.ca

Twitter.com/IvisonJ

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There are many irritating things about the Longest Ballot Committee, the group of self-styled democratic reformers that stacks high-profile ridings with scores of candidates who aren’t really running for office,

with the aim of creating ludicrously enormous paper ballots

. It’s completely incoherent, first and foremost.

The long-balloters want to take electoral-reform decisions like proportional representation out of politicians’ hands and give the authority over to some “citizens’ assembly.” They believe politicians ought to “recuse” themselves from such decisions, because they’re in an inherent conflict of interest.

Even if you agree, which you should not, it escapes me how packing the Battle River—Crowfoot byelection on Aug. 18 with 199 essentially fake candidates says anything about that daft citizens’ assembly idea one way or the other. Indeed, among the chief complainants against the longest-balloters are legitimate independent candidates, people who are actually campaigning and trying to make a point, who tend to get lost among scores of other “fake” candidates who aren’t affiliated with a political party. And for what?

The most annoying thing, though, and a very Canadian thing, is that people have been talking about what to do about this movement since it

first became a minor menace at least three years ago

… and nothing has been done, despite some pretty obvious solutions sitting there waiting to be adopted.

Conservative Leader and Battle River—Crowfoot candidate Pierre Poilievre, among others, has suggested not allowing electors to sign the nomination papers of more than one candidate. (The longest-balloters generally use mostly the same collection of signatures for all their fake candidates. You need 100 to qualify to run.) That’s an entirely reasonable proposal. The returning officer in each riding is supposed to check that the names and addresses attached to those signatures are above board; it should not be difficult to notice when duplicates come up.

That alone would make the “scam,” as Poilievre calls it, much more time-consuming for the scammers — and without jacking up the number of signatures required to run, or requiring candidates to live in the riding in question, or other measures that otherwise might be contentious. Maybe the longest-balloters would adapt and find even more obnoxious methods. Trolls tend to do that. But at the very least, it is worth a try.

All that said, Elections Canada —

which is not always known

for excellent decision-making — hatched a very simple and effective solution for the Battle River—Crowfoot byelection: Instead of marking your X on a ballot as long as a beach towel, you will write down your chosen candidate’s name. (Elections Canada assures us spelling errors and such will be treated generously.)

Perhaps it’s not ideal to have different ballot procedures in different ridings — though the Longest Ballot Committee generally only targets one riding per election — but it’s tough to imagine a serious, cogent objection to this idea. If you can read the candidate’s name, you ought to be able to write it down as well. I quite like the idea of driving home to voters that they’re voting for individuals who belong to parties, not for the parties themselves.

(Elections Canada says writing in “Liberals” or “Conservatives” won’t count as a vote, which is a debatable policy — but if you can’t follow simple instructions to pick a name from a list and copy it out with a golf pencil, I’m not super-enthusiastic about you voting in the first place.)

It might also significantly weaken the Longest Ballot Committee. Long ballots are its goal; the clue is in the name. But in Battle River—Crowfoot, the ballot will be smaller than any of us have ever seen —

about the size of a cheque

, just a line on which you’ll write in your preferred winner. The longest-balloters cannot be pleased about that. And Elections Canada did it without compromising anything when it comes to the democratic status quo, which is generally (and appropriately) designed to make it easier to run for office and not harder.

In many ways, Canada runs on the honour system. When people refuse to abide by basic standards of civility, or flout laws and rules just because they can, officialdom often struggles with what to do about it. It is often maddening. For once, it would be nice to see Canada deal with a minor menace like the Longest Ballot Committee without compromising any of our principles.

National Post

cselley@postmedia.com

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