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Fareed Zakaria interviews Steve Bannon

Start at 38:17.

Bannon locates the inception of the populist revolt which led to Donald Trump in the financial crisis of 2008.

“If people think the Washington elite is arrogant towards the rest of the country, it is as nothing compared to Brussels and the City of London financial elites towards their own countries”.

 

I like people who are able to explain at a high level of abstraction what is happening: fact driven, insightful, and as much as possible, above the fray.

Jordan Peterson does this in academic subjects, Peter Zeihan in energy, demographics and large scale political outcomes,  and Steve Bannon in why Trump made it to President, and why he must prevail.

“With China and NAFTA and everything else, we are at the beginning stages of a major  renegotiation of the economics of the United States and how we are treated in the world and what our place is in the world. It’s at the heart of the Republican Party and the re-formation of the Republican Party. His biggest enemies in this are the Republican Party….”

Zakaria has some good points in rebuttal, too.

And Bannon comes right back.

A superior interchange among very intelligent people.

“The United States is more than an expeditionary humanitarian military force that is there to be the world’s police force and they [the deplorables]  are paying for it. They are asking for a re-calibration.”

 

 

 

 

Observations on China

 

 

 

 

The following is drawn from a university professor who has spent nine years in China. From my perspective it is always fascinating to hear the testimony of what it is like to live in a society that has not known Christianity and which has no God but the political leadership, where Caesar is God, and no gods, no ethics, and no general sense of how life should be lived apart from scrambling for money. When there is nothing else but Mammon and tyranny, this is what it is like. (Francis Fukuyama writes more generally about the corrosive effects of tyranny on social cohesion).

In a way, I sympathize with Chairman Xi’s emphasis on rule of law because in my experience laws/rules/norms are simply ignored.  They are ignored quietly so as not to embarrass the enforcer, however, frequently, the enforcer knows rules or laws are being ignored but so long as the breaker is not egregious, both parties continue to exist in a state of blissful ignorance.  Honesty without force is not normal but an outlier.  Lying is utterly common, but telling the truth revolutionary.

I rationalize the silent contempt for the existing rules and laws within China as people not respecting the method for creating and establishing the rules and laws.  Rather than confronting the system, a superior, or try good faith attempts to change something, they choose a type of quiet subversion by just ignoring the rule or law.  This quickly spreads to virtually every facet of behavior as everything can be rationalized in a myriad of ways.  Before coming to China, I had this idea that China was rigid which in some ways it is, but in reality it is brutally chaotic because there are no rules it is the pure rule of the jungle with unconstrained might imposing their will and all others ignoring laws to behave as they see fit with no sense of morality or respect for right.

I had a lawyer tell me about the corruption crackdown, and even most convicted of crimes, that people referred to them as “unlucky”.  As he noted, there was almost no concept of justice even if people recognized the person had done what they were accused of having done.  The discipline stemmed not from their behavior but they were cannon fodder for some game chosen by a higher authority.

China wrestles with these issues like clockwork every few years after a tragic incident goes viral.  A common one is when someone is run over by a car and pedestrians just step over the body until a family member finds the body.  The video goes viral, prompts a week of hand wringing, and then censors step in to talk about Confucianism and how the economy is growing.  There is no innate value given to human life as precious.

A friend of mine in China who is a Christian missionary, told me a story about a time he was invited to speak at the local English corner they had in the apartment development where locals would get together hopefully with foreigners and practice English. He was asked to speak on what is the meaning of life, perfect for a part time missionary. He said he knew what people would say having lived in China for sometime but even so was stunned at how deeply and rigidly held the belief that making money was the entire meaning of life. There was no value system.  There was no exogenously held right or wrong, only whether you made money.  With apologies to a bastardized Dostoevsky, with money as God, all is permissible.

I could talk at length about that what I have observed, but I am not a human rights expert and what type of cultural changes or evolution it engenders.  However, while the well known cases draw attention, these attitudes and responses set the tone for a culture where individuals, respect, and truth mean nothing.

This has impacted my broader thinking in that executive space (thinking of the United States but also applicable elsewhere) is that laws need to be enforced consistently not at the whim of the superior.  If the law exists it should be enforced and consistent, otherwise it should be removed.  Currently, the United States is going further and further in a direction where laws are applied inconsistently shifting from varying enforcement regimes under different executives.  Law is not law if the government can choose whether to enforce it. Law has become the whimsy of sovereigns prone to political fancy.

and much later in the article, after a discussion of the openness of the USA to immigration, he continues:

Conversely, China is a rising power but probably more importantly is a deeply illiberal, expansionist, authoritarian, police state opposed to human rights, democracy, free trade, and rule of law.  Just as we need to consider the state, speed, and direction of change in the United States, China has been deeply illiberal authoritarian for many years, is becoming increasingly illiberal, and is accelerating the pace of change towards greater control.  It both puzzles and concerns me having lived in China for nearly a decade as a public employee to hear Polyanna statements from China “experts” in the United States who talk about the opening and reform of China or refuse to consider the values being promoted. I was left mouth agape once when someone I would consider a liberal internationalist who values human rights informed me he was focused on business and would leave those other issues aside.  The values represented by China cannot be divorced from its rise and influence.

The rise of China represents a clear and explicit threat not to the United States but to the entirety of liberal democracy, human rights, and open international markets.  We see the world slowly being divided into China supported authoritarian regimes of various stripes that support its creeping illiberalism across a range of areas.  The tragedy of modern American foreign policy is the history of active ignorance and refusal to actively confront the Chinese norm or legal violations. The Trump administration is utterly incapable of defending the values and assembling the coalition that would respond to American leadership as they face even greater threats from China….

The concern is not over Chinese access to technology to facilitate economic development for a liberal open state. The concern is over the use of technology to facilitate human rights violations and further cement closed markets.  That is a threat for which neither the United States or any other democracy loving country should apologize for.

I should note that I like many other am concerned about the level of government surveillance on citizenry.  However, equating Beijing to Washington in many of these specific issues is simply non-sensical authoritarian apologetics.  Let me just briefly run through some of the enormous differences. First, some have argued tech firms gather data which is true but does not distinguish what happens to the data. Unlike China, the US government does not have free access to all electronic data.  Second, China uses control over electronic communication in vastly draconian cyber dystopia ways compared to the wide range of opinions that are allowed online in the rest of the world.  By simple comparison, Winnie the Pooh is censored in China while in the United States the debate is over whether some information should be restricted that is deemed inaccurate. It is nothing less than authoritarian apologetics to attempt to equate the two in any serious manner.

 

Good news: The Cold War may be over

As the media go hysterical over Trump and Putin meeting, it is important to ask yourself this question: who gains by making Russia the bogeyman? Instead of, say, Islamic terrorism, Islamic invasion of Europe, mass emigration from Africa or Mexico, or the advent of thinking machines, autonomous cars, and microbiological weapons? Eh?

As Spengler observes, Russia has always been governed by thugs, and on the scale of Stalin or Lenin, Putin’s long list of assassinations is less than the first 3 days following the  Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

 

President Trump offended the entire political spectrum with a tweet this morning blaming the U.S. for poor relations with Russia. “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity,” the president said, and he is entirely correct. By this I do not mean to say that Russia is a beneficent actor in world affairs or that President Putin is an admirable world leader. Nonetheless, the president displayed both perspicacity and political courage when he pointed the finger at the United States for mismanaging the relationship with Russia.

The hysterical shouts of “treason! Munich! disgrace!” are a sure sign that the Party of Davos  is offended, and they are getting really scared that the changes they deplore keep on happening despite their shrill control of the mainstream media.

Something new is aborning, and like all births, it is messy, bloody, shitty and horrible to look at. But wipe off the baby and cut the umbilical cord, tie it up and tuck it in and you have a new baby. The birth of the new will look ghastly for a while but the process of replacing the Post World War 2 American Imperium with something else is underway. As Steve Bannon says, “we don’t want a European protectorate, we want a European alliance.”

Mostly we want to go on living as nations, and not as helots in service of the Davos crowd.

John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, has not exactly adapted to the news.

John Brennan, who led U.S. intelligence under Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter: ‘Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors’. It was nothing short of treasonous.’

You may expect more of the same. Unless you realize that the world is changing before your eyes, and that the US Deep State in particular does not want to change its anti-Russian focus, nothing will make sense. As Orwell once noticed, it is hard enough to see what is in front of our eyes. It is not treason, it is the downgrading of the threat from a declining Russia to its actual proportions. In the meantime, beware of Russians bearing soccer balls, but not more than one should be wary of open borders, Davos thinking,  intersectionality and the decline of educational standards.

The last time I can remember an event so large was the fall of the Soviet Union, but the important fact is that this time the change is happening here.

Vladimir Putin gives Donald Trump a football from the 2018 World Cup in Russia during their press conference in Helsinki 

 

Ford

 

Mrs. Dalwhinnie voted separately from me yesterday. Later, she shook her finger at me and swore me to absolute secrecy. Then she allowed as how she had voted Conservative in the Ontario elections.

Given the results of the election, I suspect there have been many many such conversations across Ontario yesterday, as long time Liberals, the indifferent, and the usually non-voting joined the committed Conservatives to crush the Ontario Liberals.

There are several reasons for this defeat. The most significant is the most obvious: after 15 years in power, every party needs to be purged. But in addition the Ontario Liberals were moving  the province in the direction of Venezuela. Oh I grant you it would have taken another fifty years to ruin the place, but intentions count.

Green energy, spending lavishly, ramping up the  debt to absurd levels, green energy, hugely expensive electrical power as a result of subsidizing green energy: you know the drill by now.

It all starts in the excesses of compassion and caring. Let these two forces run without any countering forces for 15 years and you have Ontario. People are being ‘left behind’, and government exists to do something about the left-behinds. So we raise the minimum wage because it is the “right thing to do”. Consequently people whose productivity does not reach $14 an hour are let go, or cannot find work. Compassion, doing the right thing, without any reckoning of practical consequences: that is the Ontario Liberal way.

Also, the planet is being ravaged by the menace of global warming. So green clean energy policies drive us off steady reliable low cost fossil fuels to  forms of energy that blight the countryside and provide rents to friends of the regime  who put up the windmills and charge the taxpayer/ratepayer for grossly inefficiently produced electricity. Double bonus for the Ontario Liberals: you get to posture as greenies and yet provide high-priced contracts to friends of the regime. That you impoverish your province is beyond the point. 75,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost as industry migrates out of the province to Great Lakes states and even [gasp!] Quebec.

When the basic facts of the situation are examined, it is surprising that the Liberals lasted as long as they did. The explanation lies in the long time it takes  for the electorate to draw the right inferences from political crap they don’t read in the papers to their electricity bills to the appropriate conclusions that their government is not working for their interests. In Ontario it took at last a decade.

When I hear a politician talking of compassion and caring, I look for my wallet. I know my money is about to be taken and misspent.

So where is your idolatry of the Supreme Court now, o ye Court Party?

Surely even the idolaters of the Supreme Court of Canada must be having some doubts this morning as to its  inerrancy. It was a classic case of “the way we make decisions is more important than the decisions we make.”

Not merely has the Supreme Court defended interprovincial trade barriers, with all their damaging effects on national wealth generation, and allowed them to be established on the flimsiest of grounds, but it has done so on the basis that the trial judge was a naughty boy for stepping out of judicial precedent to rule in favour of Comeau’s beer buying in the first place.

As the case summary reads:

Common law courts are bound by authoritative precedent. Subject to extraordinary exceptions, a lower court must apply the decisions of higher courts to the facts before it. A legal precedent may be revisited if new legal issues are raised as a consequence of significant developments in the law, or if there is a change in the circumstances or evidence that fundamentally shifts the parameters of the debate. Not only is the exception narrow, it is not a general invitation to reconsider binding authority on the basis of any type of evidence. For a binding precedent from a higher court to be cast aside, the new evidence must fundamentally shift how jurists understand the legal question at issue.

                    This high threshold was not met in this case. The trial judge relied on evidence presented by an historian whom he accepted as an expert. The trial judge accepted the expert’s description of the drafters’ motivations for including s. 121  in the Constitution Act, 1867 , and the expert’s opinion that those motivations drive how s. 121  is to be interpreted. Neither class of evidence constitutes evolving legislative and social facts or a comparable fundamental shift; the evidence is simply a description of historical information and one expert’s assessment of that information. The trial judge’s reliance on the expert’s opinion of the correct interpretation of s. 121  was erroneous. To depart from precedent on the basis of such opinion evidence is to cede the judge’s primary task to an expert. And to rely on such evidence to rebut stare decisis is to substitute one expert’s opinion on domestic law for that expressed by appellate courts in binding judgments. This would introduce the very instability in the law that the principle of stare decisis aims to avoid.

 

Thus for the Supremes the case turns on the use of a historian’s evidence of what the trade provisions of the constitution mean – though at the same time for the past decades the Court seems to bend over backward to listen to the tribal lore of groups of a few hundred Indians to block economic development. “To cede the judge’s primary task to an expert” is the fault which the Supreme Court declares the basis of validating the restrictive trade practices of the provinces that block economic development.

In short, the economic stultification of Canada is defended by a rule that arises internally from the legal profession’s forms of decision making.

So the issue does not turn on an appreciation of the role that provinces play in the blockage of economic development. The Comeau case does not turn on the issue at hand, which is intrerprovincial trade barriers, but on the Court’s concern that nothing be upset by lower court decisions, but hey!, when the Supreme Court invents law out of whole cloth, that is their right and duty.

 

Look at the test the Supreme Court sets out for interprovincial barriers.

….Restriction of cross‑border trade must be the primary purpose of the law, thereby excluding laws enacted for other purposes, such as laws that form rational parts of broader legislative schemes with purposes unrelated to impeding interprovincial trade.

The restriction must only form a rational part of “legislative schemes with purposes unrelated to impeding interprovicnial trade”.

  • This is a bad decision on its merits: it establishes that the flimsiest rationale will suffice to colour a protective scheme that interferes with trade within Canada;
  • It is economically illiterate: it fails to consider the multi-billion dollar question at the core of the issue: the economic  consequences for the Canadian economic union of the law and the courts interfering with economic development.

If ever there was a case of the Court seeing the mote in the other guy’s eye and ignoring the beam in its own, it was the Comeau decision. Let us inhibit economic development for stare decisis. Economic barriers 9- trade freedom 0. How’s that Supreme Court working for ya?

 

Pinker versus Taleb

 

Rebel Yell has said that a communist can live with a national socialist as long as they have the same ideas of cleanliness and tidiness. I incline to agree, and it is in this irenic spirit that I declare my willingness to live with Steven Pinker, but NOT agree with him. We are not as far opposed as two totalitarians, but we have our issues.

I have just read Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin in the Game; they make a fascinating contrast in styles. The issue between them concerns two different and largely incompatible ways of knowing the world.

I had heard that Taleb had written incendiary reviews of Pinkler’s previous work, The Better Angels of Our Nature, wherein Pinker argues that we have entered an era of declining losses by death in war, the Long Peace, following World War 2. Taleb thinks this is nonsense; the post world war 2 peace is just an artifact of not having had a serious war in 70 years, which will most assuredly come, says Taleb, we know not when, but we had better not bet against it.

Pinker is a Montreal-born professor of psychology who teaches at Harvard. He opposes political correctness, disparages the blank slate idea of mind, upholds the reality of group IQ differences, regards Islam with a baleful eye, and rightly considers that we are living in and age of unprecedented, widespread and increasing prosperity. His main axis of attack is against the prevailing catastrophism and cultural negativism at universities and in modern culture more generally. His books demonstrate that the world is getting better for everyone, rapidly. So far so good.

Taleb says in effect, not so fast, dude. On the main contention of The Better Angels of Our Nature, that human propensity for violence is declining, Taleb maintains:

we as humans can not be deemed as less belligerent than usual. For a
conflict generating at least 10 million casualties, an event less
bloody than WW1 or WW2, the waiting time is on average
136 years, with a mean absolute deviation of 267 (or 52 years
and 61 deviations for data rescaled to today’s population). The
seventy years of what is called the “Long Peace” are clearly
not enough to state much about the possibility of WW3 in the
near future.

Pinker’s cheerful reasonableness really grates in Taleb, and I can see why. Taleb comes from the Dark Side: his formative experience was growing up in Lebanon’s never ending civil war in the 1970s, whereas Pinker’s folk came from the Snowdon-NDG side of Westmount Mountain in Montreal, where hard working Jewish immigrants rose the ladder of success after escaping anti-semitic persecution in Tsarist Russia.

So one guy in his youth experienced the world going to shit, and the other experienced the pleasant rise from Yiddish-speaking working class to  professoriate in two or three generations of Anglo-Montreal. And then off to Harvard where, through a stellar intelligence and hard work, he has written a series of highly successful books, most of which attack contemporary nonsense.

Yet Pinker manages to go off the rails in ways that send me and Taleb crazy. He accepts that the world will on average experience a 1.5C rise in temperature by the end of the 21st century, and perhaps by 4C or more. (Many reasonable people think so too, though I think the higher figure of a 4 degree C rise in a century is rubbish.) In any case the projections of increase are beside my point.

It is the proposed solution and his treatment of it that crosses over into well-reasoned insanity. It concerns planetary engineering by cloud seeding to lower the intake of solar energy.

Pinker writes:

For all these reasons, no responsible person could maintain that we can just keep pumping carbon into the air and slather sunscreen onto the stratosphere to compensate. But in a 2013 book the physicist David Keith makes a claim for a form of climate engineering that is moderate, responsive and temporary.“Moderate” means that the amounts of sulfate and calcite would be just enough to reduce the rate of warming, not cancel it altogether…. “Responsive” means that any manipulation would be careful, gradual, closely monitored , constantly adjusted and, if indicated, halted altogether. And “temporary” means that the program would be designed only to give humanity breathing space until it eliminates greenhouse gas emissions and brings the CO2 in the atmosphere back to preindustrial levels.

How many heroic assumptions are made in this paragraph?

  • that we know enough to calculate the amounts of particulates to dump into the atmosphere when we cannot even measure an average global temperature when no such thing as an average global temperature exists – and that is just the beginning of the heroic assumptions along this path of reasoning.
  • that there would exist an institutional opposition strong enough to call a halt to the engineering, when all our experience to date shows that opposition to measures to control global warming are treated as a combination of treason and heresy.
  • that we can reduce CO2 to preindustrial levels without engendering the very poverty that burning fossil fuels extracted us from.
  • That we should reduce CO2 to preindustrial levels, when the evidence points to the greening of the planet under the influence of more CO2, which had sunk in the last ice age to levels so low (140 ppm)  that vegetation was starving for the CO2 it craves.

No engineering of the planet can by its nature be moderate, responsive or temporary. Can you imagine the shit storm if someone challenged the idea that global cloud seeding was not merely working, but plunging us back into the next ice age? That sea ice was expanding, glaciers descending and climate season shortening? Is there the slightest chance that the current toxic debates on climate change would be less dangerous when we have a world wide program of “moderate”, “responsive” and “temporary” cloud-seeding?

I kept hearing that Nassim Taleb was contemptuous of Pinker. He referred to him as a “higher level journalist” in his recent book, Skin in the Game. Then I read Pinker’s modest proposal, in the light of Taleb’s analysis of risk, and I understood. The tails of the distribution curves are always longer and fatter in reality than they are in the pure Gaussian bell curve, says Taleb, and gambling the planet on some wanker’s idea of “moderate, responsive and temporary” planetary engineering struck Taleb as the kind of idiocy only a Harvard professor could believe. As David Keith is also a Harvard professor, the two of them are drinking each other’s bath water, and I am sure both are splendid chaps, but they do not understand risk, and I think Taleb does.

Then, in Pinker’s final chapter on religion and humanism, Pinker comes up with this sort of gem:

“If the factual tenets of religion can no longer be taken seriously, and its ethical tenets depend entirely on whether they can be justified by secular morality, what about its claims to widsom on the great questions of existence?”

I keep wondering whether Pinker has connected the dots between religious decline and the raging SJWs he confronts at Harvard. Does he not see a link between empty rage, the confused, deeply unhappy people, and the fact they have been raised on a monoculture of “secular morality”: that the students he opposes and who try to shout him down are the products of a culture in decline from right understanding of man’s place in the universe? In short, the products of secular humanism?

The content of secular morality is a weak reed; it changes with every passing fancy, it denies the objective nature of truth. The difference between Islam and western concepts of political correctness is that Islam has fixed its “political correctness” for all time, ours changes with the week, into ever more insane attempts to explain inequality by every device other than that people, cultures, and religions are unequal, in fact, objectively unequal.

In short, in matters of what is central to happiness, the modern student is a shorn lamb in the wind, and people like Pinker are the sheep shearers, though they do not know it. Pinker wonders why their environment is so ideologically extreme and anti-enlightenment. Here we pass over into Jordan Peterson territory. Peterson has been dealing with the little savages from suburbia and has drawn direct links between secular values, post modernism, and the absence of religion.

Nevertheless, I warmly recommend both Pinker and Taleb. Pinker knows the world by facts and book learning and discussion; the other knows it by taking big risks with money and surviving, and by working out heuristics, which is Greek for rough and ready rules. The man who wrote the Black Swan and made a fortune betting against the real estate boom which crashed in 2007 is not to be trifled with. Taleb’s defence of religion is a remarkable insight into its value. He comments that God put Jesus into fully human form to show He had skin in the game.  Taleb is full of insights into bullshit detection, and his view of Pinker is that the professor is a higher form of BS. This may be true, it is certainly uncharitable, but Pinker can be read to profit regardless.

I know whom I would trust in a bar fight, both to see it coming and to get out in time, and to have enough tough friends to make an attack on us a painful waste of time.

I doubt that Pinker has seen the inside of the kind of bar where men can be seen wearing reflective outerwear from working on the roads, and where the men drink American domestic beers. But he would make an excellent dinner guest, as long as we could avoid the topic of religion and global warming.

The Liberals are having a bad month: blame ideology

 

 

On trade issues, the global free traders who constitute our federal Liberal government are supposed to be the masters. Instead, they have in the past several weeks encountered rebuffs.

  • China has handed us our hats and asked ‘what’s your hurry?’ The Chinese did not want to make our free trade deal contingent upon extending various labour rights, employment equity provisions, and other crunchy granola to the Chinese populace.
  • Canada has angered long time allies Japan and Australia by intransigent demands in the Trans- Pacific Partnership trade talks.
  • The US is proposing absurd demands of its own in the NAFTA re-negotiations.

I cite Andrew Coyne who, on trade matters, is  sane.

If there is a common thread, in particular, it seems to be the Liberals’ insistence that agreements on liberalized trade should also commit the signatories, disparate in outlook and development though they may be, to Liberal Party of Canada policies on labour, gender, indigenous rights and climate change.

It is not clear what business these have in a trade deal, or why the economic interests of this country should be hostage to the project of imposing “progressive” values on other countries that are not even universally shared in our own. Certainly our negotiating partners have a right to be wary, for fine-sounding principles have a way of being turned to protectionist ends: seemingly even-handed environmental policies, for example, that just happen to hit other countries’ industries harder than our own.

Terry Glavin is one of the few who can still rouse himself to fury at China’s “gangster state”, as he calls it:

In a recent analysis prepared for Global Affairs Canada, Ottawa’s Centre for the Study of Living Standards calculates that at least 150,000 Canadian jobs were lost to Chinese imports during the first decade of this century, and at least 100,000 of those jobs were in manufacturing….

The Communist Party elites have amassed fortunes to themselves equal to the Gross Domestic Product of Sweden. They have the money, the guns, the technology, the numbers, the UN votes, the lot. And now Beijing is openly and explicitly waging an ideological global war against democracy, the rule of law, free speech, the “rules based” global economic order, the whole schmeer. They’re quite candid about it, too.

So let’s see: the Liberals are cosying up to China, snubbing the Japanese-Australian Trans-Pacific Partnership, and getting nowhere with NAFTA (not entirely their fault). Also they are not getting pipelines built to export Albertan oil. Since Alberta is now paying for Confederation, but is in recession, and Ontario is heading into the toilet, long-term, with politicized energy pricing and grotesque levels of debt. Am I missing something?

The reason I do not comment much on politics in Canada is that there are only a few issues we have to get right.

  • Relationships with Quebec
  • Relationships with the United States
  • Management of our economy

Quebec is quiet, but holds up pipelines and continues to be subsidized excessively by English Canada, particularly by Alberta. It is better managed under Premier Couillard than at any time since the 1960s.

Relationships with the US are so-so, or only as good as Trump wants them to be.

Overspending continues in Ontario and Ottawa, and one of the few tasks of the federal government, to build piplines and unify the country, is left undone. Quebec, by contrast, is starting to be run effectively.

If I were the federal Liberals, I might begin to be concerned. This government may not be turned out in the next election, but I am beginning to think their re-election is not as secure as it seemed a year ago.