Last week the American side announced that a trade agreement with Canada was all but wrapped up. In anticipation of the signing the United States paused implementation of 50% tariffs on non energy or critical mineral goods and services from Canada not covered under the USMCA agreement for three days.

Canada's prime minister, Mark Carney, then announced his refusal to sign and those tariffs are now in effect.

There are three things to notice about all this:

Ballad of the Dempster Run

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the folks who turn north for a lark;
Where the road runs thin through the gravel din
And the spruce stand black in the dark.
And this is the tale of a married pair
Who answered the long road’s call—
From Whitehorse north in a rented Ford,
Past Dawson and over it all.

Lessons from the politicalization of Covid

Several decades ago I got called in to help rescue a company in receivership largely because they had hired a big name infotech [IT] consultancy to upgrade what had been a working System 38 "architecture" to Microsoft Client-server. My predecessor has been spending about $2 million a year and had, in reality, done pretty well at it - well enough I thought that his upgrade proposal to the i400 (AS/400) should have been a corporate no brainer.

Canadian prime minister Carney has bet the country on Trump losing the mid-terms but I believe, or at least I hope, that he's going to lose big on this.

Unfortunately he really has bet the country because the two most obvious consequences when he loses are, first that the Canadian economy, already in recession, takes a further nosedive into depression; and, second, that western separatism gets a sufficient long term boost to significantly accelerate the break up of the country.

So what can be done? Three suggestions:

At present the announced wording for the Alberta Government's independence referendum scheduled for October 19th, 2026 is:

Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?

This asks two different, non mutually exclusive, questions:

I asked perplexity.ai to produce a list of promises made to Alberta by Prime Minister Mark Carney over the last year. Here's what it came up with:

November 2025 MOU: Federal Commitments to Alberta

The federal government committed to the following in the MOU signed November 27, 2025:

Canada is my country, but sometimes it feels like I should go around apologizing for the utter dishonesty of its leadership, its media, and the consequent ignorance of its people.

There's an old joke about why the people of Halifax didn't join the American revolution against the crown - they didn't have a permit. it's funny because it's not literally true, but it is true to history, true to the national temperament, and true in its consequences: 250 years of economic servitude, refused opportunity, and failed ambition.

A shocking lack of sympathy: whining to my dog's vet about the horrible cold I am just getting over - the kind where dying looks like a great option and the sooner the better - "oh", she says, "a man cold". Well, a good thing my dog likes her..

Distracted, busy

It has a been a bit since I posted anything - sorry: been working on learning how to use blender/godot = 24/7 frustration because I just don't understand enough about the jobs these tools are used for. Plus my son got hit by someone running a red light and Allstate Insurance is not covering themselves with glory on this one.