Ottawa, Washington, and the world are eagerly awaiting the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Tariffs have been among the key measures Trump has used to reshape U.S. international relations since his second election, often wielding them, or the threat of them, for trade leverage or broader geopolitical aims.
In the wee small hours of January 3, Canada’s economic future sustained a serious blow.
It was at that time that American law enforcement, supported by the US Army’s Delta Force, apprehended the brutal Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, enforcing a years-old indictment for narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and related offenses.
(Incognito)
For years, the Cuban regime has insisted that its presence in Venezuela was benign—limited to doctors, nurses, and sports trainers offering humanitarian solidarity. The deaths of 32 Cuban military and intelligence personnel while defending Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro have now shattered that fiction.
As early as March 2019, Cuba’s ambassador to Canada, Josefina Vidal, appeared on CBC News to denounce Canadian reporting on Cuba’s security intervention in Venezuela. She dismissed the claims outright: “The assertion that thousands of Cubans would allegedly be inserted into the structures of the armed and security forces of Venezuela, supporting the government of (legitimate) President Nicolás Maduro, is a scandalous slander,” she said, demanding proof.
Occam’s razor is the principle that the most plausible explanation of events is the simplest. Most often this is true. To account for Donald Trump, however, we need a different hermeneutical instrument.
Say hello to Occam’s kazoo: the principle that the most plausible explanation, so far as Mr. Trump is involved, is invariably the stupidest. To understand his motives in any given situation, pick the most aggressively simple-minded, crudely self-serving, absurdly moronic rationale you can think of. You will not be far wrong.
Coyne needs help.
Utter bullshit. Contemptible, criminal, murderous bullshit. https://t.co/3GXyqkByDT
— Andrew Coyne 🇺🇦🇮🇱🇬🇪🇲🇩 (@acoyne) January 7, 2026
A major geopolitical fault line shifted Saturday morning, as the United States arrested Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro after a quarter century of socialist tyranny.
This is a good thing. Canada did not recognize Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela, and with him out of the way, we hope that Venezuelans will finally be able to enjoy freedom and democracy.
The good news about the U.S. abduction of Nicolás Maduro is that Venezuela is finally rid of a corrupt, violent and buffoonish leader.
The bad news is that the country may soon be under the power of another corrupt, violent and buffoonish leader — Donald Trump — who is itching to use his military might on other countries in the Western Hemisphere.
That means nervous calculations are taking place in the capitals of the countries he has threatened: Havana, Bogota, Mexico City, Ottawa and Copenhagen.
Ginned up outrage. The Star uses a pic of an astro-turfed demo and didn’t Maher once compare Antifa extremists with the men who landed on D-Day.
Rapidly changing global events make clear that Canadians are now paying a steep price for the lost decade of economic growth under the government of former prime minister Justin Trudeau.
Where the previous Liberal government should have focused on making Canada an energy superpower by expanding our energy infrastructure, given our vast oil and natural gas resources, it instead downplayed them, using the ridiculous argument that the age of fossil fuels was ending.
Happy New Year. Or not, depending on where you find yourself these days. If you’re deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, that’s in a cell in Brooklyn, N.Y. If you’re U.S. President Donald Trump, that’s on the catbird seat in Washington, D.C. And if you’re Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, that’s on a tightrope in Ottawa, trying to strike the right note with an ally that looks more like an aggressor every day.
Canada is heading into a period of higher debt that could exhaust the federal government’s taxation and borrowing capacity, reduce its credit rating, and trigger a financial crisis similar to the one seen in the 1990s, according to Simon Fraser University economics professor Herbert Grubel.
“You can’t pile on debt forever. There must be a critical point at which people who are lending you money say, ‘we don’t trust that you can repay it,’ and you get into a crisis,” Grubel told The Epoch Times.
Grubel recently warned in a recent Financial Post op-ed that Canada is heading into a “1990s-style fiscal reckoning” due to unsustainable debt levels. He forecasted in his Dec. 4 article that if the trend continues, the government’s taxation and borrowing capacity will become exhausted and revenues won’t cover the cost of running the government and paying interest on the debt, and could even lead to bankruptcy.
The White House says Donald Trump and his close advisers are discussing options for taking over Greenland, as the US president continues to argue it would benefit his nation’s security.
His demands have been rejected by the island’s leaders and by Nato member Denmark, of which Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory.
Where is Greenland and why does it matter to Trump?
Ouch.
🚨 TRUTH NUKE: “Greenland obviously would NOT exist were it not for the United States of America. We defend it. Canada would CEASE to exist without the US military. They’re free riders.”
It’s time to re-claim the entire Western Hemisphere.pic.twitter.com/EhcZoaZBBj
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 7, 2026
‘The Danish cannot handle the surveillance of the Arctic and Greenland… We are the front yard of the US.’
Danish-Greenlandic political figure Jørgen Boassen on why he is in favour of America gaining control of Greenland. pic.twitter.com/PoNu0fTA6D
— GB News (@GBNEWS) January 6, 2026
Here is the true purpose of AI.
A round of applause for El Newevo Presidento Trump Maduro. pic.twitter.com/Eb5vhJ6HLL
— Plux 🫧 (@MrPlux) January 6, 2026
h/t Lenny S
In the calculus of modern-day populism, there is no greater currency than the decisive act. In an unprecedented moment this past week, the world watched as U.S. President Donald Trump cashed in, deploying American special forces to snatch illegitimate self-proclaimed leader of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro from Caracas and deliver him to a New York jail cell.
In the immediate aftermath, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre did not hesitate to add his own signature to the transaction. By congratulating Trump on this “arrest” and branding Maduro a “narco terrorist” who must rot in prison, Poilievre has done more than just celebrate the fall of a tyrant; he has signalled a willingness to dismantle the very international order that keeps a country like Canada safe.
Maduro is bad but Poilievre is worse cuz he’s a populist like Trump and they do bad things like topple Narco State dictators.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent actions in Venezuela and his overall strategy for the Western Hemisphere should serve as a warning to all Canadians and require a more fulsome response from its political leaders, Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations says.
Bob Rae, who finished his five-year ambassadorship last November, told Global News in an interview that the U.S. under Trump is rejecting multilateralism in favour of asserting its dominance over the hemisphere, without “any notion of legality.”
Do we need to beef up security for Doug Ford in 2026?
I ask after the surreal capture of Venezuela president Nicolás Maduro this weekend. It was like a Michael Bay blockbuster with a similar running time. One second, Maduro is planning another defiant dance video. The next, American wizards knock out the lights in Caracas as the skies rumble with F-22 Raptors and heavily armed extraction teams.
h/t Mauser
OTTAWA — As 2026 starts with high-consequence geopolitical events in Venezuela and Iran, Canada continues to present itself to the world as stable, prosperous, and benign. Yet the defining lesson of this past year is that our perceived strength is increasingly an illusion — a façade sustained by political denial, regulatory weakness, and the monetization of risk.
Across multiple fronts — land ownership, real estate, immigration, organized crime, and national security — the same pattern has repeated itself. Warnings were issued. Evidence accumulated. And Ottawa largely chose inaction.
The U.S. raid-and-capture operation in Venezuela that ended the rule of Nicolás Maduro and upended power politics in the Western Hemisphere was unusually complicated. The motivations behind it were perhaps even more complex – and so are the lessons that the Delta Force blitz provide for Americans and for governments across the globe.
Here are some of the important political currents running beneath the surface of the astonishing episode, which has provided a template for evaluating the early 21st-century Trump Corollary to the early 19th-century Monroe Doctrine – two policies that have no legal basis but still establish distinct American spheres of influence and behaviour and enforce them …
