Howdy. Glad you're here today, which is Sunday, Sept. 6, 2026.
It's Pastor's Spouses Day, Read a Book Day, Coffee Ice Cream Day, Barbie Doll Day, Fight Procrastination Day, Great Egg Toss Day, and Pet Rock Day. So grab a book, dish up some coffee ice cream, toss an egg to somebody without cracking it, and take your Pet Rock for a walk while you're at it — just don't put any of it off. Pastors' spouses, you've earned a nap through all of this.
Today in History:
1522: Ferdinand Magellan's ship Victoria completes the first circumnavigation of the globe, arriving back in Spain nearly three years after departure.
1757: The Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution, is born in Auvergne, France.
1781: British Brig. Gen. Benedict Arnold orders his troops to burn New London, Connecticut.
1837: Ohio's Oberlin Collegiate Institute becomes the nation's first coeducational college.
1870: Louisa Ann Swain casts a ballot in a Wyoming election, becoming the first woman to vote in a general election after the passage of women's suffrage laws in the United States.
1901: Anarchist Leon Czolgosz shoots President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York; McKinley dies eight days later.
1939: The Union of South Africa declares war on Germany.
1941: Nazi authorities order Jews over age six in the German Reich to wear the yellow Star of David.
1948: Juliana is inaugurated as queen of the Netherlands.
1952: Television broadcasting begins in Canada, launching in Montreal.
1995: Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. plays in his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking Lou Gehrig's 56-year-old record.
1997: More than a million mourners line London's streets for Princess Diana's funeral, watched by an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide.
2007: Israel carries out Operation Orchard, an airstrike destroying a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria.
Birthdays Today include: Jane Curtin, comedian and actress (Saturday Night Live, Kate & Allie); Roger Waters, musician and songwriter (Pink Floyd); Swoosie Kurtz, actress (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels); JoAnne Worley, actress and comedian (Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In); David Allan Coe, country singer and songwriter ("Take This Job and Shove It"); Mel McDaniel, country singer ("Baby's Got Her Blue Jeans On"). If today's your birthday too, happy birthday from all of us here.
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With apologies to the late, great Roger Miller, I'm a man of memes by no means.
I freely admit the political world would be considerably easier to comment upon if I possessed even a passing talent for graphic arts. A picture, after all, is worth the usual 1,500 words I inflict upon you daily. I don't.
Fortunately, Providence — or perhaps the editors at PJ Media — saw fit to hand that job to Matt Margolis and John Cox, who actually possess the artistic gene I was born without. Thus do we have the graphic below today. So I'll leave the memes to the professionals and get back to what I do best: using entirely too many words to explain why something that looks simple isn't.
Which brings us to the current U.S.-Canada trade fight.
At first glance, it looks almost silly. Here we have two countries sharing the world's longest undefended border, deeply intertwined economies, decades of trade agreements, and an enormous volume of commerce crossing back and forth every single day. Surely, one might think, reasonable adults could sit down and work this out over a Tim Hortons double-double.
But, see, that's the problem with looking at this purely as a spat over tariffs. It isn't about tariffs at all. It's about leverage — and Ottawa appears to have shown up to a knife fight with a strongly worded press release.
Here's the inconvenient math sitting underneath the whole argument. According to current GDP data, the U.S. economy runs about $30.8 trillion, against Canada's roughly $2.3 trillion. That's not a rival negotiating across the table — that's a difference of about $28.5 trillion, which means Canada isn't negotiating with a comparably sized economy. It's negotiating with one more than 13 times its size, and acting surprised when the bigger guy gets to set the terms.
Then there's energy, where the gap gets even more embarrassing for Ottawa. The United States produced a record 13.6 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2025, the most any country has ever pumped, and also hit a record 39 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — America has been the world's largest natural gas producer since 2011 and isn't giving that title back. Canada's oil sands are a genuinely valuable resource. The trouble, from Ottawa's side of the table, is that Washington already has plenty of its own.
And Canada still can't quit the American market even if it wanted to: in 2025, the U.S. imported 3.9 million barrels a day of Canadian crude, making America overwhelmingly Canada's dominant customer. Canadian oil matters to the United States. The United States is Canada's oil industry, full stop. That's not a negotiation between equals — that's a landlord reminding a tenant who holds the lease. Carney might try to shut that oil off, but it's a surefire way to make Alberta the 51st state, which he can ill afford.
Then there's the part of this fight Washington has been increasingly willing to say out loud: Canada's approach to government spending, immigration, and social policy. The Trump administration has argued that Canada's expansive government and rapid population growth eventually become someone else's problem — namely, the strained housing market, the overloaded infrastructure, and the public services buckling under the weight.
Before anyone waves that off as typical American bluster, it's worth pointing out that Ottawa has been saying the same thing about itself. Canada's own government has acknowledged the pressure population growth put on housing and social services, which is precisely why it's now slashing its own targets — permanent residency holds flat at 380,000 a year through 2028, while temporary-resident arrivals get cut from 2025's 673,650 down to 385,000 next year and 370,000 the two years after, with the explicit goal of getting the temporary population under 5% of the country by the end of 2027. Trump didn't write that policy memo. Carney's own government did.
And the numbers behind it are genuinely striking. According to Statistics Canada's 2021 Census, 26.4% of the population was first-generation — born outside Canada — and another 17.6% was second-generation, meaning Canadian-born with at least one foreign-born parent. Add those together and you land at roughly 44% of the country having an immediate immigrant connection. That's not a talking point. That's the census.
None of which means immigration itself is the villain here — Canada was built by it, and immigrants contribute to the economy. The actual question is whether the rate and mix of that growth can be reconciled with housing, infrastructure, employment, and a social safety net that has to be paid for by someone. Even Ottawa seems to have concluded the honest answer, for now, is "not at the pace we were running it." Gee, guys, welcome to reality. You might start by noticing what others have noted from afar: the huge percentage of these immigrants are dependent on large social support outlays.
Even the OECD's own 2025 economic survey of Canada — an organization not exactly known for MAGA sympathies — flags weak business investment and a widening productivity gap between Canada's best firms and everyone else as structural problems, not passing headwinds. And that's where this whole trade fight starts making a lot more sense.
The United States walks in with the world's largest economy, record domestic energy production, a massive consumer market, and an industrial base most countries would trade their currency reserves for. Canada walks in with real resources, a well-educated population, a serious industrial economy, and one very good card: energy and commodities the U.S. genuinely wants. That's a relationship worth keeping. It just isn't a relationship between equals, and pretending otherwise, as Carney seems bent on doing, doesn't change the scoreboard.
Maybe that's the part some people in Ottawa are struggling to swallow. It isn't that Washington discovered some secret new lever to pull. It's that Washington has always had this much leverage, simply by virtue of being what it is. When one side shows up with a $30.8 trillion economy, record energy output, and a consumer market Canadian exporters can't afford to lose, and the other side shows up with a $2.3 trillion economy that depends heavily on access to that exact market, the interesting question isn't why Washington thinks it can ask for concessions. It's why anyone in Ottawa, Carney in particular, assumed it couldn't.
Sometimes the uncomfortable part of a negotiation isn't finding out the other guy is bluffing. It's finding out he isn't — and that he's been holding the better hand the entire time. That's the position Carney finds himself in just now.
The reality is Carney doesn't have nearly the cards he'd like Canadian voters to believe he does. I've already pointed out the leftist proclivities Carney harbors.
Before becoming PM, Carney sat on the board of Canada 2020, a think tank Maclean's has called the outfit that effectively runs Liberal Party policy behind closed doors, with documented ties to Obama-world Democrats and access to Soros Open Society funding streams. More recently, Carney delivered the closing keynote at a closed-door Global Progress Action Summit in Toronto, sharing a stage with Barack Obama, Alex Soros — George's son, now chairman of OSF — John Podesta, Pete Buttigieg, and Sen. Elissa Slotkin.
It's time for either Carney to grow up and face reality, or for Canadian voters to remove him. Preferably the latter.
Thought for the Day: Real leverage doesn't need to be announced. It just needs to be recognized.
VIP members, let's hear your thoughts because your voice matters.
Have a great day today, gang. I'll see you tomorrow.
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