As Canadian fury grows against Donald Trump with each new outrage, Mark Carney has found a sweet-spot.
As long as Carney keeps his elbows up, signalling his defiance of the menacing U.S. president, Canadians have mostly given the prime minister a free hand in running the country.
And Carney has used this considerable leeway to quietly consolidate corporate power in Canada — with dangerous consequences that are receiving insufficient media attention.
Premier Danielle Smith wants to hold a referendum in October on measures to limit immigration to Alberta and changes she believes would give the province more rights under the Constitution.
In a 13-minute televised address Thursday evening, Smith said she wants Albertans to vote on nine questions on Oct. 19. She said the subject of each question was based on what the Alberta Next Panel heard the most when consulting with Albertans during town halls and through written submissions last year.
“The fact is, Alberta taxpayers can no longer be asked to continue to subsidize the entire country through equalization and federal transfers, permit the federal government to flood our borders with new arrivals and then give free access to our most-generous-in-the-country social programs to anyone who moves here,” Smith said.
I am honoured to speak directly with Albertans about the road ahead for our province, the choices we face together, and how you will have the final say in shaping Alberta’s future within a strong and united Canada. pic.twitter.com/rAyK0awCvM
— Danielle Smith (@ABDanielleSmith) February 20, 2026
Contrast Smith with Doug “My Buddies Need Cheap Labour from 3rd World Dumpsters” Ford.
Coyne gets his ass kicked as always.
This is utterly unhinged. https://t.co/Lo7ADE4ZS0
— Andrew Coyne 🇺🇦🇮🇱🇬🇪🇲🇩 (@acoyne) February 20, 2026
Our trailblazing Prime Minister was at the podium in Montreal. “Over the last few decades,” Mark Carney said, “Canada has neither spent enough on our defence nor invested enough in our defence industries.”
That has to change, he added, setting out plans for far more domestic spending on military hardware because “the assumptions that defined decades of Canadian defence and foreign policy have been turned upside-down.”
CALGARY — Premier Danielle Smith’s Chief of Staff, Rob Anderson, says Smith will address staggering immigration numbers on Thursday in a televised address to the province.
Anderson was reacting to a post by David Coletto on X, CEO of Abacus Data Canada on Wednesday.
Watch the tv address of Premier @ABDanielleSmith to Albertans tomorrow.
This absolute insanity needs to stop. It will. https://t.co/iCjlOHF9ld
— Rob Anderson (@FreeAlbertaRob) February 18, 2026
There are few things in politics more indecipherable or meaningless to the average Canadian taxpayer than a government announcing a 10-year plan, which is why Prime Minister Mark Carney keeps doing it.
Ten-year plans give the government lots of runway before it has to produce results.
Canada’s immigration crisis is back in the spotlight, with new data showing the population has grown 34.6% since 2000 — and reports Ottawa will spend $1B this year on related costs.
h/t Patti Jo
The federal government is shaking up its main economic immigration program to facilitate the entry of high-skilled military recruits for the Canadian Armed Forces, part of Ottawa’s renewed focus and spending push on the defence sector.
On Wednesday, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada announced new categories for selecting immigrants via Express Entry, a points-based system that is the main entryway for skilled workers seeking permanent residency.
The thing about “the world stage” is not just that it’s a place for play-acting. It’s also a global venue for wishful thinking, the construction of heroes and villains and imaginary plot twists and sometimes whole-cloth inventions of scenes that sometimes bear almost no relationship at all to events in the real world.
Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC), has called for “justice” to be served to politicians and others responsible for promoting the “dangerous” COVID jabs and and mandating them on the Canadian public.
“The truth about the covid vaccine revealed! For years, they called us ‘anti-vaxxers.’ They called us conspiracy theorists. They ridiculed us and silenced us,” wrote Bernier in a recent post on X.
Two weeks ago, Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre met in the prime minister’s Parliament Hill office in an apparent attempt to find common ground on the government’s legislative agenda.
“My message to him is to work with us,” Poilievre told reporters afterwards.
Perhaps Carney took that message more literally than Poilievre intended.
As Canada looks to diversify its trade partners, it can’t be “naive” in dealing with the Chinese regime, which is a leading perpetrator of transnational repression, researchers behind a new report say.
The Feb. 17 report by the Montreal Institute for Global Security (MIGS) says the issue of transnational repression is a “systemic threat” affecting thousands of people across the country and undermining Canada’s security, democracy, and sovereignty.
The Canadian government’s long-awaited defence industrial strategy formally landed on Tuesday and arrives in the shadow of a push by the Trump administration to further make the United States the arms-maker of choice among allies.
The new strategy has been in the works for more than a year and promises to use defence investment to leverage the Canadian economy and jobs.
It sets out a series of important, high benchmarks for the country to achieve over the next decade, including buying and maintaining most of the military’s equipment domestically.
Mark Carney went to Montreal on Tuesday to announce a new push for defence spending.
The prime minister was announcing Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy a week later than planned after his initial announcement was delayed due to the shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.
First, some context.
We have half a million asylum claimants in Canada currently…triple from 2022 levels and now accounting for 1 in every 84 people in the country.
— Ben Rabidoux (@BenRabidoux) February 18, 2026
h/t Auntie Polly
OTTAWA — Days after she retired in January, the former top bureaucrat at the Department of National Defence warned that the billions in additional defence spending promised by the Carney government is “nowhere near what we need” and is only serving to “plug in the holes in the wrong way”.
Stefanie Beck, the deputy minister at DND until her retirement on Jan. 23, shared a surprisingly blunt assessment of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s record defence investments during a conference on Feb. 2.
