Petroleum over country. For Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, that appears to be the guiding philosophy behind her unscheduled visit to Mar-a-Lago this week. Appearing as a guest of Kevin O’Leary, the television celebrity who openly petitioned for an economic union with the United States, Smith tried to sell incoming President Donald Trump on the value of exempting oil and gas from his promised tariffs. “Our job is going to be to work overtime to make sure that we can make the case for carve outs,” she said.
The good news here, if you can call it that, is that her pitch hasn’t worked yet. Exempting oil and gas might be good for Alberta’s oil and gas sector, but it would be disastrous for every other part of the Canadian economy — including Alberta’s agriculture and forestry sectors. Trump’s tariffs will raise the price of fuel in America, which in turn will pressure his administration to lift them. By exempting oil and gas, he could theoretically sustain the rest of the tariffs for much longer — and do far more damage to Canada in the process.
It’s not exactly surprising to see a quasi-separatist like Smith put Alberta and its oil and gas industry ahead of her own country. But for someone who never seems to tire of standing up to other levels of government, her appetite for pre-emptive surrender to the United States and Trump’s irrational demands is a bit jarring. “We need to be prepared that tariffs are coming,” Ms. Smith told reporters Monday morning. “The biggest irritant to the United States are trade deficits.”
Never mind, for the moment, that trade deficits aren’t inherently or automatically bad, or that America’s trade deficit with Canada is entirely the product of our oil and gas exports. What’s worse than Smith’s unwillingness to educate the American president is her apparent enthusiasm for indulging him. “I think the solution is that we find ways to buy more American goods,” she said. “I’ll put that on the table.”
Um, okay. There’s little the federal government could really do to force Canadian businesses to buy more American goods, and even if it could, it would almost certainly entail replacing made-in-Canada items. More to the point, the surest way to close the trade deficit is to reduce our exports of oil and gas to the United States — something Trump has mooted repeatedly — and sell more of it to ourselves. If this ends up with Danielle Smith and Pierre Poilievre promoting a repackaged version of the National Energy Program, it might almost be worth all the trouble.
Even so, it’s worth pointing out just how far Smith was willing to travel — literally and metaphorically — to bend the knee to Trump. She was the personal guest of Kevin O’Leary, someone who has been engaging of late in what might be described as light treason. As he told the CBC’s David Cochrane, he actively interfered with the sitting federal government and its attempts to negotiate on behalf of the country they represent. "I asked Trump to ignore those meetings [with Trudeau] because those people are going to get eradicated in the next election. I hope he took my advice.”
O’Leary’s attempt to cozy up to the incoming president has nothing to do with Canada. Instead, he’s reportedly trying to sell the incoming president on his bid to buy TikTok — and, simultaneously, the premier of Alberta on his fantastical idea for a $70-billion data centre (one that local Indigenous leaders say they found out about through a press release). Two birds, one stone.
But Smith’s clearly divided loyalties here ought to be a bigger issue. Her eagerness to sell out the rest of the country on behalf of the oil and gas industry is a stark contrast to the patriotism of one Stephen Harper, who now chairs the Alberta Investment Management Corporation. As the former prime minister said during a recent interview, "I have a real problem with some of the things Donald Trump is saying. It doesn't sound to me like the pronouncements of somebody ... who's a friend, a partner, and an ally, which is what I've always thought the United States is."
Nobody can question Harper’s affinity for the oil and gas industry. His government was dedicated to advancing its interests, even as it often ended up doing the opposite. Even so, Harper’s loyalties still extend beyond the narrowly-drawn vantage point of one sector of the Canadian economy. Smith, on the other hand, seems determined to sacrifice almost anything in order to protect that sector. It's worth wondering if there's anything she wouldn't surrender in order to serve it — and if Trump already knows that.
It’s the climate change, stupid
“The future,” Canadian sci-fi novelist William Gibson once wrote, “is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” In Los Angeles, where raging wildfires have already killed at least 24 people, burned thousands of homes, and caused upward of $100 billion in damage, we’re getting an unwelcome preview of what our climate-changed future will look like. It’s one where all the money in the world can’t always save or protect you, but those without means will still suffer the most.
We are not even close to ready for it. Witness the attempts by bad-faith actors on the right — including the president-elect — to target everything from DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and environmental regulations to local government officials and even sign language interpreters (I wish I was kidding) during a fire that fire officials have said repeatedly couldn’t be stopped. Scapegoating like this might be politically convenient, but it does nothing to address the real issue that will keep rearing its head in ever more catastrophic ways.
That’s because, of course — of COURSE — this is a story about climate change. As Bloomberg’s Lauren Rosenthal and Brian Sullivan noted in a recent piece, the ever-rising levels of heat in our oceans may have caused the jet stream to wander off its normal track, leaving a high-pressure ridge stuck over southern California for even longer stretches than normal. That means more heat, less moisture and ideal fire conditions. “One stubborn high-pressure ridge has blocked moisture from reaching Southern California for months,” Rosenthal and Sullivan wrote, “creating a virtual force field that has led to dry conditions.”
The sheer ferocity of the Los Angeles fires reminded West Kelowna fire chief Jason Brolund of those his crews battled in August 2023. “We have first-hand experience with the force of wildfire, but what’s happening there is on a scale that really is almost too difficult to fathom,” he told Castanet. “They’re fighting a fire in essentially what amounts to a hurricane.” And make no mistake: California is the future. “We watch California very closely,” Brolund says. “They are in many ways probably five to 10 years ahead of us, not only in their strategies and tactics and the way that they approach wildfire, but also in the risk and what they’re facing.”
There’s no point in trying to convince climate skeptics of the urgency here. They won’t listen to us. Their insurance companies, on the other hand, might just drive the point home. California’s insurance market has been shielded from the reality change, with ratepayers in lower-risk areas effectively subsidizing costs for higher-risk homes. Right now, California is the only state in the country that doesn’t allow insurance companies to use so-called “catastrophe models” to set prices. It also prevents companies from factoring in the cost of reinsurance, which is essentially the insurance they have on their own policies and the possibility of major disaster-related payouts.
As a result, insurers have been pulling out of the state in droves, a trend that’s almost certain to increase going forward. It’s not just happening in California, either. In hurricane-ravaged Florida, for example, insurers have been taking it in the teeth for years, with 16 becoming insolvent since 2017 and a further 16 deciding not to write policies there any more. "If we're going to have a solvent insurance market in the country,” California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara told NPR, “insurance can no longer be an afterthought in the national and global conversations around climate change. Insurance has to be at the forefront."
As the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) noted in a 2024 report, climate events are happening all across America — and driving up insurance prices everywhere. “As insurers seek to limit their exposure to climate-induced weather events like hurricanes and wildfires,” they wrote, “insurance premium increases and policy non-renewals have become a summer norm in the United States (US), making housing more unaffordable in the process.”
This isn’t just about individual policies or homeowners, either. Climate-driven disasters and their impact on the insurance industry could trigger a broader financial crisis, one that begins — as the last one did — in the housing market. “As more American homeowners become unable to afford insurance,” the CIEL report notes, “they are more likely to default on their mortgages. Increased rates of home mortgage defaults were a key factor in the 2008 financial crisis, and large numbers of defaults could have ripple effects throughout the economy.”
At some point, whether conservative politicians and ideologues like it or not, the government and taxpayers will have to pay the price on carbon emissions. The real question is whether they do it up front to help mitigate the problem or through cleanup costs — and how high those costs ends up being.
Why Wikipedia matters
Life comes at you fast, and it’s faster than ever right now. Take Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that teachers used to reprimand their students for citing as a source. Now, it’s probably the most reliable, shared source of information we have — and certainly the most valuable.
That’s why Elon Musk and his fellow travellers have been targeting it so aggressively of late. Unlike the Washington Post or Facebook/Meta, whose billionaire owners can be swayed by the possibility or proximity to political power, Wikipedia and the not-for-profit organization that controls it is only interested in the truth. As American journalist Molly White wrote recently, “While some news outlets and other entities have proven willing to back down in the face of threats and demands from powerful figures (or has lacked the resources to do anything but), Wikipedia has not. This resilience against control helps explain why figures like Musk find Wikipedia so infuriating. They can buy platforms, threaten lawsuits, or pressure advertisers, but they cannot simply purchase or coerce control over Wikipedia.”
Expect them to ramp up their attacks on Wikipedia and the people involved with maintaining its integrity. Indeed, the right-wing Heritage Foundation (the same group that produced the Project 2025 blueprint) has already declared its intention to “identify and target” volunteer editors who it claims are “abusing their position” by publishing anti-semitic content. According to Forward, a U.S.-based publication that bills itself as “Jewish. Independent. Non-Profit,” the Heritage Foundation suggested in a pitch to potential funders that they would “use facial recognition software and a database of hacked usernames and passwords in order to identify contributors to the online encyclopedia, who mostly work under pseudonyms.”
I don’t expect Wikipedia or its volunteer editors to be cowed by this sort of thing. But the growing attention it’s attracting speaks to the importance of Wikipedia as a shared commons, one that offers access to the truth at a time when it’s becoming both more important and more difficult to find. I’m a regular donor. I hope you’ll consider becoming one, too.
The Green Line should be a red line for Calgary’s city council
It’s been a few weeks since the Alberta government and its sentient MAGA hat of a transportation minister Devin Dreeshen proposed a new alignment for Calgary’s long-discussed Green Line LRT, one that would finally connect the city’s southeast to the rest of the transit network. It would fail to achieve some of the city’s key objectives, including connecting to the Eau Claire site on the Bow River it had already paid to expropriate, and would expose the city to all sorts of potential legal and financial risk.
That’s by design, not defect.
The province’s preferred alignment, one that would run above ground rather than below it downtown, would create all sorts of unnecessary chaos — including diminishing the value of some of its major downtown properties, negatively impacting businesses along the new above-ground route, and making traffic even more unmanageable. It would almost certainly cost more than the city’s alignment, both because of the $1.3 billion in “known costs and risks” that weren’t included in the province’s report and the virtual certainty of it running over budget. While the existing route had been 60 per cent complete as of July 30, the design and de-risking of the province’s new route is only five per cent. That means, according to one expert, the possibility of a 50 to 100 per cent cost increase by the time it’s completed.
Even though the province is clearly responsible for the potential delays, the city would be on the hook for any cost overruns. The same holds for any potential legal challenges or lawsuits filed by impacted property owners in the downtown core. Oh, and the city has until March (when promised federal funds for the previous alignment expire) to figure this all out. As the Calgary Sun’s Ricky Leong wrote, “We’re being asked to take the province on faith. This is an unreasonable request to make: No government anywhere should be afforded this type of deference.”
If anything, this all sounds like a deliberate attempt to sabotage the project without having to take the political fall associated with actually killing it. Dreeshen effectively confirmed that in an interview with the CBC when he suggested that “if Calgary council votes no to the Green Line, then it would be this Calgary council that voted no on the Green Line.”
I don’t envy Mayor Jyoti Gondek or her council colleagues here. They have to make a crucial decision on the basis of incomplete and at times amateurish information, knowing that their partner at the provincial level is trying to force their hand. Maybe an imperfect LRT route, one riddled with political and economic trap doors is better than nothing at all. But maybe it’s time for the mayor and council who rubber-stamped Danielle Smith’s pre-election arena giveaway to finally find their spine and stand up for the people they represent.