The Carney bounce is real. After polls by EKOS and Mainstreet showed a surprising surge in Liberal fortunes, the Angus Reid Institute — long viewed as a more Conservative-friendly pollster — reported a similar uptick in its latest soundings. After bottoming out at 16 per cent support in late December with Trudeau still at the helm, they now have the Liberals under Mark Carney’s theoretical leadership at 29 per cent. 

The Conservative Party of Canada and its various proxies seem awfully nervous about this, and as well they should. But it’s the federal NDP that should be downright terrified. They’re the ones, after all, who are now at risk of being completely wiped out in the next election. In the same pair of Angus Reid polls, NDP support dropped from 21 per cent to 13 per cent. In our multi-party first-past-the-post system, that’s a very dangerous place to be. Indeed, when those results are mapped out, they produce an NDP caucus with just 11 seats. 

Remember: in the 1993 federal election, the Progressive Conservative Party won 16 per cent of the vote, and ended up with all of two seats. It’s not hard to see how a similarly catastrophic outcome could play out for Jagmeet Singh’s NDP. Strategic voting is the bane of the NDP’s existence at the best of times, but with Donald Trump openly threatening Canada’s sovereignty and Pierre Poilievre doing as little as possible to push back against it, the lane for the Liberals to run as defenders of the national interest is as wide as it’s been this century. No, the next election will not be about the carbon tax, but it also won’t be about NDP mainstays like social justice or economic inequality. It will be about Canada’s survival and safety, and who is best equipped to fight for them. 

This is not a political equation that the NDP (as it’s currently constituted) is designed to solve. Opposition to military spending and national economic infrastructure like pipelines are articles of faith among their supporters, and their interest in things like trade policy and economic growth are fleeting, at best. And if Liberals have been excessively harsh in their judgment of our shared past, as Conservatives like to argue, then the NDP has been all the more so. And while 72 per cent of Liberal supporters said they have a “deep emotional attachment to Canada” and “love the country and what it stands for” in a recent Angus Reid survey, only 49 per cent of New Democrats felt that way.

There’s also an intellectual rudderlessness to the NDP all across Canada right now that’s all the more dangerous in light of our suddenly turbulent political waters. Look at the Ontario NDP, which decided to meet Doug Ford’s opportunistic snap election call with a campaign launch announcement about….removing tolls on Highway 407. “That’s change,” Ontario NDP leader Marit Stiles said in a video. 

Is it, though? As housing advocate and economist Mike Moffatt said on social media, “the NDP are going to spend tens of billions of dollars to lower prices for drivers but maintain punitive taxes on desperately needed housing construction. Prioritizing cars over homes. Please make it make sense.” Alas, I cannot. 

Progressive pundit Evan Scrimshaw was even more withering in his criticism. “The other problem, as a chorus of a million urbanists will tell you, is this won’t actually solve congestion,” he wrote on his Substack. “Induced demand is real, pricing congestion reduces it, and we literally have evidence of this in New York City. The idea that the correct move for serious progressives is a Dipper version of ‘Just One More Lane, Bro’ road politics is so offensive to actual serious progressives as to be disqualifying.”

In the process, it may help disqualify the federal NDP in Ontario as well. Jagmeet Singh’s brand of Dom Perignon socialism was already a bad fit for the moment, given the intense cost of living pressures people have been facing. Angus Reid’s tracking has his favourability rating at a record low of -25, with 58 per cent of people viewing him negatively and just 33 per cent viewing him positively. Now, with the self-described “tariff man” back in the White House and a fight for our economic lives on our hands, he’s an even bigger albatross for the NDP given his longstanding indifference to economic policy that extends beyond blaming billionaires. 

If Singh had pulled the plug on parliament before the United States election, and before Justin Trudeau decided to walk out the door, things would look much different. Sure, the Conservatives would have won their majority, and probably a pretty big one too given their massive lead in both popularity and fundraising. But the NDP might have been able to outflank the Liberals and position themselves as the de-facto progressive option in the next election. They might have even wiped them out in the process. 

Instead, they’re now the ones staring down electoral oblivion. They’re not dead yet, of course, and any number of events could theoretically revive their fortunes. Maybe Mark Carney really is the second coming of Michael Ignatieff. And maybe Pierre Poilievre’s political makeover melts away in the face of an election campaign. But if you’re a federal New Democrat, those are bets with increasingly long odds. At some point, they’ll have to look a little harder at the people who keep wasting their chips. 

Danielle Smith isn’t done with COVID-19 conspiracies 

As legendary Texas political writer Molly Ivins famously said, “you got to dance with them what brung you.” That appears to be the logic behind Alberta premier Danielle Smith’s latest flirtation with COVID-19 conspiracy theories, a controversial report by self-described “dissenting” doctors that cost taxpayers $2 million.

Its recommendations include an “immediate halt” to COVID-19 vaccines without “full disclosure” of their potential risks, and a full elimination of access to the vaccines for healthy children and teenagers. It also praised the virtues of so-called “infection-acquired immunity” and suggested that doctors should have been allowed to prescribe “alternative” medications like — you guessed it — Ivermectin. 

The (actual) medical community in Alberta responded quickly. The Alberta Medical Association released a statement describing the report as “anti-science” and “anti-evidence,” noting that “It speaks against the broadest and most diligent international scientific collaboration and consensus in history.” 

Braden Manns, a professor of medicine and health economics at the University of Calgary, told the CBC that “It's dangerous, frankly, that this report now exists on a government website. … Distrust of public health officials is at an all-time high. This is not going to help." The report was so heavily laden with tinfoil, in fact, that one of the doctors whose name was listed as a contributor to the report, Dr. John Conly, demanded that it be removed. “It was a gross error,” he told The Globe and Mail. “I’m a big promoter of vaccines.” 

Gary Davidson, the doctor who Danielle Smith describes as a “contrarian,” defended the group’s work. “There’s no such thing as consensus in science,” he said. “That makes no sense. Science is about questioning everything, experimenting and improving whether it’s true or not.” 

This is, of course, an invitation to all manner of toxic conspiracy theories, from flat-eartherism to anti-vaccine activism. We know that vaccines work. We know that the COVID-19 vaccine is safe. And we know that treatments like Ivermectin have been proven ineffective for treating respiratory illnesses. We know this because of the very science that Dr. Davidson claims to be defending has produced any number of life-saving consensuses. 

The existence of a consensus doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be periodically tested and challenged, whether that’s with new data or new approaches to studying it. But the approach to science at work in this report is, fittingly enough, the public health equivalent of the kind of science that informs climate change denial. It hangs onto the tiniest outliers and most obviously gerrymandered data in order to validate a pre-existing belief. It rejects the idea of consensus precisely because that consensus is at odds with their own beliefs and biases. It’s the very opposite of the scientific method. 

Either way, it has no business being validated by a government in this way. Smith and her team will almost certainly try to back away slowly from the report they funded, content to use it as a sop to the anti-vaccine community that is disproportionately represented within (and perhaps atop) their party. But they should be forced to own it, wear it, and account for the damage it will do to Alberta’s reputation among doctors, scientists, and other experts who might have considered moving to the province. 

Your move, Mr. Nenshi. 

Did DeepSeek just deep-six Kevin O’Leary’s “Wonder Valley”? 

As I wrote back in December, Kevin O’Leary’s $70 billion AI project was always more sizzle than steak. But it’s worth updating the issue in light of a pair of events that make the highly unlikely idea almost impossibly fanciful. 

First is the news that O’Leary’s idea actually came from someone in the Government of Alberta. This tracks. O’Leary isn’t exactly known for coming up with his own ideas, after all. But inserting himself into the process of selling other people’s ideas? That’s far more on-brand. 

 “I received a call, months and months ago, from somebody in her party and they said, ‘listen, why aren’t you bringing any of these developments to Alberta, we’ve got fantastic metrics,” he told CityNews in a recent interview. “We set up a call with her staffers and her and she said, ‘look, I won a court case, a litigation against Gerald Butts in October of 2023, where I got back my rights and I can issue permits for projects like this in province.”

Almost none of that is actually true. There was, of course, no court case against Gerald Butts, the former principal secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who resigned in 2019. The case in question is presumably the one where the Supreme Court of Canada found in 2023 that portions of the federal government’s Impact Assessment were unconstitutional. The federal government has since gone back and made the necessary amendments, and the Impact Assessment Act very much — for now, at least — remains in force. 

As to the permits? Well, the provincial government is welcome to do as it pleases, although the admission that it preemptively promised a permit before an application was even filed seems like an obvious avenue for legal challenge. More importantly, Smith and her team seem to have forgotten about the Indigenous community living in the region. The Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation apparently found out about O’Leary’s proposal through his press release, and they are clearly unimpressed by the lack of proper consultation. “Our people are here to remind Mr. O’Leary and Greenview of the international treaty, Treaty No. 8, that allows us all to share this land,” Chief Sheldon Sunshine said in a statement. “There is protocol. There are legal requirements. They are not being followed.”

That’s bad. The latest news from the AI world might be even worse for O’Leary and his government partners. DeepSeek, an AI model being built by a Chinese company, recently announced that it has matched the performance of the major American models using a tiny fraction of their budget. That sent shares of Nvidia, the most valuable chipmaker in the world, crashing down almost 20 per cent. The drop wiped nearly US$600 billion off the company’s value. It also sideswiped power companies whose shares had rallied on the prospect of massively increasing demand for their electricity. Shares of Constellation Energy, Vistra, and GE Vernova all fell more than 20 per cent on the day. 

Why? Because with its more efficient AI model, DeepSeek may have completely re-written the business case for data centres and the electricity they consume. As Bloomberg’s Michelle Ma and Mark Chediak write, “The DeepSeek development ‘calls into question the significant electric demand projections for the US,’ analysts led by Julien Dumoulin-Smith at Jefferies wrote in a note on Monday. AI represents about 75% of overall US power demand forecasts through 2035 in most projections, Jefferies said.”

Eric Gimon, a senior fellow at clean energy think tank Energy Innovation, suggested a parallel between the AI data centre boom and the dotcom crash at the turn of the century. “Back then,” the Bloomberg piece notes, “telecom company Global Crossing Limited spent billions on fiber optic cables, betting that all the companies of the era would need more bandwidth. What they didn’t bet on was that engineers would figure out how to make those cables more efficient. ‘It was an over-optimism of market demand and underappreciation of the ability to do more with less,’ Gimon said.” 

None of this is good news for “Wonder Valley”, a project that already has a bunch of strikes against it. In addition to the concerns from local First Nations there’s also the enormous demand for water it would place on an already stressed ecosystem and the not-small problem of convincing tech employees to live in a  more resource-oriented economic and cultural environment.

Ironically, the biggest hurdle of all might be the guy Smith and O’Leary traveled to Florida to woo: Donald Trump. His threatened tariffs, and the economic instability it creates, will make companies think long and hard about locating assets like data centres in other countries — and especially on the other side of the US border. 

That’s one of the reasons why Trump is doing this, of course. The mere threat of tariffs or instability will force companies to re-assess their investments and where they want to make them. It’s a safe bet that neither Smith nor O’Leary ever found the courage to raise this with him. 

Quick Hits

Want to learn more about DeepSeek and its impact on….well, everything? Start here. 

Could a voucher system help restore trust in media — and improve the fortunes of online startups like Canada’s National Observer? Mark Edge thinks so, and it’s an interesting idea. 

And finally, is it time to end the public funding of separate school systems in Canada? Yes. 

That’s all for this week. I dare not even imagine what the next seven days might bring.