Welcome! Glad you're here. Today is Aug. 30, 2026 — the beach, toasted marshmallows, and a moment of quiet reflection all sharing the calendar today.
My calendar says it's Grief Awareness Day, Beach Day, and Toasted Marshmallow Day. Head to the beach if you can, toast a marshmallow properly instead of setting it on fire, and if grief has touched your life this year, today's a fair day to sit with that rather than push it aside.
Today in History:
1464: Paul II succeeds Pius II as pope of the Catholic Church, reigning until his death in 1471.
1538: King Henry VIII of England is formally excommunicated from the Catholic Church after pushing through the Acts of Supremacy, breaking with Rome over his annulment from Catherine of Aragon.
1727: Anne, eldest daughter of King George II of Great Britain, is granted the title Princess Royal.
1836: Brothers Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen found the city of Houston, Texas.
1850: Honolulu becomes an officially incorporated city and the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
1890: President Benjamin Harrison signs the first U.S. law requiring inspection of meat products, though the law applies only to goods intended for export.
1963: The Washington-Moscow "Hotline" goes into operation for the first time, a direct communication link established in the tense aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1983: Guion Bluford becomes the first African American to travel to space, launching aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger.
2005: Floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina overwhelm New Orleans' levee system a day after landfall, submerging roughly 80% of the city.
Birthdays Today include: Warren Buffett, investor, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway; Mary Shelley, novelist (Frankenstein); Cameron Diaz, actress (There's Something About Mary, Charlie's Angels [2000] ); Andy Roddick, tennis champion.
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Watching the tussle between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and President Donald Trump unfold — the former "Lake Ontario"/"Lake America," ya know… Well, I've decided it's about time I waded into this fight.
Carney rode into power in 2025 on a wave of manufactured Canadian nationalism, casting himself as the last line of defense against American economic influence — "elbows up," as the slogan goes. Strip away the branding, though, and you find a man deeply, personally enmeshed in the very country he's built his entire political persona around opposing. Grade-one hypocrisy, dressed up in a maple leaf.
Start with his kids. Half of Carney's children have lived and studied in the United States, at Harvard and Yale — the exact institutions you'd expect a man warning Canadians nightly about "American unreliability" to steer his family well clear of. Instead, he sent them straight into the belly of the beast. I don’t know. Perhaps there are no institutions that are blue-blooded enough in Canada to make Carney happy.
Then there's the money, and this is where it gets genuinely rich, pun intended. An independent review of Carney's own ethics-commissioner disclosure counted 515 American-headquartered companies among 567 total holdings — a staggering 90.8%, typically rounded to 91%. Canadian holdings amounted to just four companies, roughly 0.71%. Rebel News narrows it further: of his eight controlled assets, only three are Canadian — Canadian Natural Resources, Canadian Pacific Kansas City, and, amusingly, Lululemon. The rest read like a highlight reel of American capitalism: Tesla, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Ford, and Walmart, according to Global News's reporting on the disclosure.
A man who built his brand warning Canadians away from American entanglement somehow forgot to warn his own portfolio manager.
Then there's Brookfield, where this stops being merely embarrassing and starts looking like an actual conflict of interest. The Conservative Party of Canada points out Carney has actively championed Westinghouse, a nuclear firm his old employer, Brookfield Asset Management, helped acquire during his tenure. Brookfield manages over $1 trillion in assets and, unlike a typical bank, directly owns and operates real assets and businesses — real estate, power grids, renewable energy, and private equity investments. Canadian Conservatives have also flagged that Carney's answer to the housing crisis leans on prefabricated housing, a sector dominated by Modulaire — another company tied directly to his old Brookfield portfolio.
The controversy around Carney's blind trust stems from exactly this overlap: Brookfield is an active owner-operator across nuclear energy, housing infrastructure, and AI data centers — precisely the sectors Carney now subsidizes and deregulates as prime minister. Funny how that keeps lining up.
His defense, when pressed, is standard-issue: it's all in a blind trust, so he can't possibly know what's in it. Sorry, no sale, Mark. A trust doesn't erase ownership — it just moves it out of the spotlight. Democracy Watch's Duff Conacher has called Canada's blind trust laws effectively meaningless, riddled with loopholes wide enough to drive a transport truck through.
In fairness, that 91% figure describes the count of companies in the disclosed account, not the dollar value of Carney's wealth and not a live snapshot of current holdings, since a third party now controls the trades. It's an honest count of a real 2025 disclosure, not a measure of his net worth. That distinction doesn't let him off the hook — it just means the sharpest version of this argument is the accurate one: the documented record shows a man whose investment instincts point overwhelmingly south of the border, whose signature company built its empire on the exact sectors he now legislates, and whose own family chose American classrooms over Canadian ones.
Carney wants Canadians to believe he's fiercely guarding their national interests against American encroachment. Yet every bet he's personally placed, with his own money and his own children's futures, runs straight through the United States. Easy to play the nationalist from behind a podium when your actual wealth is anchored on the other side of the border — and there's still Canadian tax revenue left over to toss around in the meantime.
Now let's talk about Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
Ontario's premier stood up just yesterday, unveiling a sign insisting it would always be "Lake Ontario," as though he's got any actual say in the matter.
But as you might expect from one of Carney's staunchest defenders, Ford's own history is no shortage of scandal. I live within earshot of enough Canadian radio to have been entertained by most of it firsthand. A few highlights from my own notes:
His 2019 overhaul of the Ontario Autism Program was meant to clear a long waitlist but instead threatened to cut off access entirely for many families, sparking widespread protests before the government partially reversed course. That same year, his chief of staff, Dean French, resigned in a patronage scandal after lucrative foreign government postings — including one to a 26-year-old whose chief qualification was playing lacrosse with French's son, at a $165,000 salary — went to people personally connected to French. Ford revoked the appointments but drew criticism for brushing off reporters' follow-up questions.
Around the same time, Ford appointed longtime friend Ron Taverner, a Toronto police superintendent, to head the Ontario Provincial Police, only for it to emerge that the job's qualifications had been quietly lowered specifically to make Taverner eligible; he eventually stepped down under pressure. Separately, retroactive public health funding cuts stripped roughly $177 million a year from Toronto Public Health and Paramedic Services, totaling close to $1 billion over a decade.
The biggest scandal by far is the Greenbelt affair. Video surfaced of Ford, before even winning office in 2018, promising to "open up a 'big chunk'" of protected Greenbelt land to developers. Once in office, he did exactly that. Ontario's own auditor general and integrity commissioner both investigated and found evidence pointing to corruption in how the land was selected and released. The RCMP opened a criminal investigation. Two staffers and two cabinet ministers resigned. Ford's approval rating hit record lows, with a majority of poll respondents calling the deal outright corrupt — and after weeks of defending it publicly, he ultimately reversed course and canceled the whole plan.
There's more. Breaking Ontario's exclusive Beer Store contract to allow alcohol sales in convenience and grocery stores cost $225 million in compensation, with the province's own Financial Accountability Office projecting total losses could reach $1.4 billion to $1.9 billion by 2030.
The Ontario Science Centre closure drew scrutiny after developers with ties to Ford's family bought land adjacent to the site shortly before Ford announced a subway stop there that boosted nearby land values — the closure itself later justified by a disputed structural report.
His push to let private, for-profit clinics handle surgeries once reserved for public hospitals backfired when CBC News found some clinics were being paid more per surgery than public hospitals received for the identical procedure. And in 2018, his own sister-in-law sued him over alleged mismanagement of his late brother Rob Ford's estate; Doug countered that the claims amounted to extortion.
The pattern hasn't slowed. This year alone, Ford's been juggling a $28.9 million government jet purchase, which was quickly dubbed the "gravy plane" — rich irony, given that Ford built his brand attacking government waste. That was reversed within days amid backlash, with Ford later admitting he'd mishandled the announcement. Not the plan to spend that money on a luxury jet for himself, just that he'd screwed up the PR.
Add legal fights over access to his phone records, new restrictions on freedom-of-information requests, a $300 million fund tied to unsold condo developments, and ongoing disputes over media access to his government. One June 2026 Angus Reid poll found Ford to be the least popular premier in all of Canada, at just 21% support — a full ten points below the next-most-unpopular provincial leader.
Back in 2013, Toronto's Globe and Mail was chasing a story, based on anonymous sources, that Doug had been a go-to hashish dealer in Etobicoke during the 1980s, supplying a small circle of dealers and distributing smaller amounts around the neighborhood — allegedly a more significant role than his brother Rob's in that same scene. Doug flatly denied ever being involved in dealing, calling the report "a bunch of sleazy, sleazy journalism," while separately admitting he'd smoked marijuana in high school "like everyone else." He specifically denied ever touching cocaine or crack. No charges were ever filed against him over this; it remained an allegation based on anonymous sourcing, never proven in court.I personally chased that story at the time and suggested even then, that "Ford has got plausible` deniability" on his side in much the same manner as Hillary Clinton does.
We have a more substantiated thread involving his brother, Rob Ford, who was caught on multiple videos smoking crack cocaine, initially denied it repeatedly, eventually confessed on November 5, 2013, took a leave of absence, and voluntarily entered rehab from May to June 2014. He died of cancer in March 2016.
I wouldn't be mentioning Doug Ford at all, except that he's one of Carney's biggest defenders, as the above video shows. Birds of a feather.
So the next time you watch either of these two lecture an American president about accountability, remember exactly who's doing the lecturing.
And before I leave the subject of renaming a lake, for all that the left, both in Canada and in the U.S., says it doesn’t matter, it’s sure got them running around like a stirred ant colony. Someone should perhaps ask Doug Ford and Mark Carney what they think about the validity of renaming Samuel to Samantha.
Thought for the Day: The Washington-Moscow hotline went live only after the world came within a hair of nuclear war to prove it was necessary — a hard reminder that the wisest safeguards usually get built right after the moment they were needed most.
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