Saturday, August 22, 2026, 9:30 PM Pacific Time
You’re listening to Incorrigible Myths, an independent public-interest publication built around current affairs, human behaviour, and pattern recognition through long-form analysis.
Through this publication, the aim is to create some distance from the constant churn of headlines and examine the forces underneath them: the pursuit of status, the seductions of power, greed presented as necessity, corruption protected by narrative, empathy that bends around power and personality, resentment that hardens into identity, and the remarkable human capacity to normalize contradictions when they are repeated often enough.
Incorrigible Myths is published in Canada as independent public-interest commentary and analysis, protected by the freedoms of thought, belief, opinion and expression recognized under Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Socrates believed that a meaningful life requires us to question what we are told and examine how we think.
Plato approached the same problem through the allegory of the cave, where people exposed only to shadows for long enough eventually began to mistake those shadows for reality.
Thousands of years later, that warning remains useful because political culture is especially good at producing shadows of its own. Strength is repeatedly presented as volume, dominance, unpredictability, intimidation and the willingness to humiliate an opponent, until those performances become so familiar that we can begin mistaking the performance for the underlying quality. A leader who threatens loudly may therefore appear stronger than one who speaks carefully, even when the more restrained leader has prepared more thoroughly, possesses greater strategic room and is considerably more willing to absorb the consequences of saying no.
Thousands of years later, that warning remains useful because political culture is especially good at producing shadows of its own. Strength is repeatedly presented as volume, dominance, unpredictability, intimidation and the willingness to humiliate an opponent, until those performances become so familiar that we can begin mistaking the performance for the underlying quality. A leader who threatens loudly may therefore appear stronger than one who speaks carefully, even when the more restrained leader has prepared more thoroughly, possesses greater strategic room and is considerably more willing to absorb the consequences of saying no.
Today’s word is affability, which usually refers to the quality of being friendly, approachable, pleasant and easy to talk to, although that definition becomes much more interesting once the conversation stops being pleasant. Warmth is easy when everybody agrees with you; the harder test arrives when interests collide, deadlines tighten, money is at risk, dignity feels threatened, and the person across the table is asking for something you believe you should not give.
That is why this is not really an article about whether Mark Carney is “nice.” It is an investigation into something much more consequential: whether civility, restraint, predictability and self-possession can coexist with hard boundaries, economic retaliation and the willingness to walk away, and whether we have become so accustomed to aggression as the visual language of power that a less theatrical form of authority now looks unusual simply because it does not advertise itself in the same register.
The question sitting underneath everything that happened between Ottawa and Washington this week is therefore larger than tariffs, trade agreements or the political personalities temporarily occupying either side of the border.
What if strength does not have to be ugly?
1. The Rooms That Changed My Definition of Strength:
I should begin by telling you where I am standing, because it shapes what I notice. I was born in India, later lived in the United States for several years, and now work from Canada as an independent writer and geopolitical analyst. Living across those environments has given me no special authority to declare that one culture has solved human behaviour better than another, but comparison does something useful: it makes patterns that once felt normal begin to look like choices.
Over time, particularly through reading about psychology, behaviour and nervous-system regulation, I have become less impressed by the person who can dominate a room and more interested in the person who can remain cognitively present when everyone around them is becoming reactive. The distinction is important because volume can masquerade as conviction, unpredictability as strength, intimidation as confidence, and submission as peace when the person yielding simply does not believe they can afford to say no.
I have watched versions of these mechanisms in rooms much smaller than countries, and I have become increasingly interested in what happens when people can remain approachable without becoming compliant, can maintain a boundary without turning it into revenge, and can disagree without requiring the other person to be humiliated before the disagreement feels resolved. I do not claim to have mastered any of that myself. I am interested because I am still learning to recognize it.
The loudest person in the room is not necessarily the strongest person in the room, and increasingly I find myself wondering whether much of modern political culture has forgotten the difference.
2. Before Affability Had a Name:
On April 19, months before the Canada-US confrontation reached its current breaking point, I was reading commentary about Carney and sent a message to the brilliant Aussie writer/American history Professor behind IFLA, whose work I had been following. My message was casual, “Thought about you while going through this,” while admiring Mark Carney’s composure, resolve, and the way he carries himself under pressure.
I was not conducting an investigation that evening, and I certainly was not predicting what would happen four months later. Looking at the exchange now, what interests me is something more modest: I had apparently started responding to a behavioural contrast before I had a useful word for it.
What caught my attention was not conventional charisma and certainly not agreement with everything Carney or his government might do. It was the relative absence of theatricality around decisions that were becoming increasingly confrontational. That curiosity stayed with me, which is one reason the events of August 21 and 22 became more interesting than another trade-war headline.
April 19, 2026. Months before the current rupture, I was already paying attention to the contrast in Carney’s approach.
There is also a useful confession contained in that screenshot. I like aspects of this leadership style, and the message sitting on my phone makes that obvious. That preference is precisely why the economic claims, historical analogies and strategic assumptions surrounding Carney deserve more scrutiny rather than less.
Admiration is not evidence.
3. From The American Chaos Subscription Plan to This Moment:
On June 19, I approached the same behavioural problem from almost the opposite direction in The American Chaos Subscription Plan, where I wrote about political systems organized increasingly around grievance, emotional activation, spectacle and the repeated production of enemies.
The point of that essay was never that ordinary Americans were stupid or uniquely responsible for the system surrounding them. Quite the opposite. I argued that millions of people are exhausted, financially squeezed, overwhelmed by information, exposed to political polarization and outrage-driven media environments, and repeatedly offered emotionally satisfying villains in place of difficult solutions.
One line from that article has stayed with me: we need more regulated human beings, not more emotionally reactive ones.
AFFABILITY approaches the same question from the other side.
If one form of politics continuously raises the emotional temperature, what does power look like when somebody deliberately refuses to organize every disagreement around humiliation, grievance or domination? What happens when a political leader concludes that negotiations have failed but does not need the failure itself to become a performance of personal rage?
On August 21 and 22, Canada suddenly had an unusually consequential case study.
4. The Night the Negotiations Broke:
The remarkable thing about the final hours is how close the two countries appeared to an agreement immediately beforehand.
On August 18, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would temporarily postpone a threatened 50 per cent tariff on a set of Canadian goods, saying that a deal had effectively been reached. Carney’s response was noticeably more qualified: he said there had been “substantial progress” but that important work remained. Reuters subsequently reported that negotiators were discussing a package that could have lowered American tariffs on Canadian-built vehicles from 25 to 15 per cent and cut steel and aluminum tariffs from 50 to 25 per cent, while Canada considered concessions involving retaliatory duties and the return of US alcohol to provincial shelves.
Reuters: Canada and the US moved close to an agreement
By Thursday, Canadian Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc was publicly describing the agreement as “very close.” Negotiations continued in Washington, and the remaining differences appeared narrow enough that the political expectation shifted from whether there would be a deal to what the final terms would contain.
Then the structure changed.
According to Carney, the United States introduced late demands that Canada considered economically unacceptable and incompatible with the independence it had been trying to preserve. Washington tells the story differently: US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer argued that Canada retreated from elements that had already been substantially negotiated and rejected what he described as exceptionally favourable treatment. Reuters’ reconstruction confirms that significant disagreements remained over vehicles, steel, aluminum, market access and broader terms, but the full negotiating text has not been released publicly, which means some questions about who moved which position during the final hours remain contested.
Shortly before midnight, Carney suspended negotiations and ordered the Canadian delegation home. At 12:01 a.m., the new American duties took effect.
The United States imposed a 50 per cent additional tariff on roughly US$20 billion of Canadian exports, covering goods including wine, furniture, dairy products, cement, clothing, fishing equipment and hockey products. Unlike many earlier duties, these measures do not preserve the normal CUSMA exemption for qualifying Canadian goods. Reuters calculates that the affected trade represents just over 5 per cent of Canadian exports to the United States: not enough by itself to collapse the Canadian economy, but potentially devastating for individual businesses whose American customers suddenly face prices that no longer make commercial sense.
Reuters: US tariffs take effect after negotiations fail
Canada responded by announcing dollar-for-dollar countermeasures scheduled to take effect September 8, concentrated in areas including steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper and electronics. Carney also said additional support would be provided to businesses and workers exposed to the dispute.
That is the chronology.
The psychology becomes interesting only after the chronology is clear.
5. Two Governments, Two Accounts:
It would be convenient to transform the breakdown into a morality play in which one side negotiated sincerely and the other never intended to reach an agreement, but the public evidence does not justify that level of certainty.
Washington’s formal argument begins with Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a rarely used provision allowing the president to impose duties of up to 50 per cent against a country determined to discriminate against American commerce. The Trump administration specifically accused Canada of discriminating against US alcohol, dairy and motor vehicles. The White House proclamations laid out those claims in July, while Greer said Canada had retaliated against US trade measures and treated certain European or other foreign goods more favourably than comparable American products.
Access the source here: USTR: Greer’s case for the Section 338 action
The legal setting is itself significant. In February, the US Supreme Court struck down Trump’s much broader use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose global tariffs, ruling that Congress had not delegated tariff authority through that statute. The administration therefore turned increasingly toward other statutory mechanisms, including Section 338. Reuters described the Canadian action as an unprecedented modern use of that Depression-era authority.
Carney’s account of the latest negotiations is broader. In his August 22 remarks, he said Canada had been prepared to remove remaining retaliation affecting steel, aluminum and autos if the United States substantially lowered its own duties, encourage provinces to return American alcohol to shelves, and make administrative adjustments around supply management without dismantling the system. He said Canada would not compromise sovereignty, French-language protections or cultural policy, and described the final US terms as “uneconomic” and “unfair.”
Reuters adds an especially important piece: Carney said the final American position included restrictions on Canada’s ability to negotiate future trade arrangements with other countries and less favourable treatment for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, including Canadian production of trucks such as the Ford F-series and GM Silverado. That moves the disagreement beyond the narrow question of whether a bottle of bourbon returns to a provincial liquor store. The underlying issue becomes who gets to determine the boundaries of Canadian economic policy.
The responsible conclusion is therefore narrower than either government’s rhetoric. Canada and the United States came close to an agreement, both sides contemplated concessions, and the remaining dispute expanded into areas Canada considered fundamental enough to justify walking away. Where the negotiating record remains confidential, readers should resist pretending that partisan certainty can substitute for documents.
6. When a Promise Becomes Expensive:
Political promises are inexpensive while nobody has submitted the invoice.
Carney’s own rhetoric had been unusually explicit well before this week. On August 22 he returned to a warning he had made the previous spring, saying: “Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us. And I promised: ‘That will never, ever happen.’ We are keeping that promise.” The quotation is not a meme or a paraphrase; it appears in the official transcript of his remarks.
Note for Spotify & Apple Podcasts:
The full video of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s August 22 address is included with this post/episode, along with the official transcript from the Prime Minister’s Office for anyone who wants to watch the remarks in full and examine the language directly or Acccess the source here: Prime Minister’s Office: Carney’s August 22 address
The rhetoric preceded the rupture. The question now is whether the economic preparation beneath it can withstand the cost.
This is where the article could easily become sentimental, because refusing pressure always looks cleaner from a podium than from the payroll department of a company that has just lost its largest customer. Carney himself acknowledged that retaliation would raise costs, reduce choice and hurt American companies and states that had no role in creating the dispute. He said Canada was taking the step “reluctantly.”
That qualification is worth paying attention to.
Not because reluctance proves wisdom, but because leadership should be capable of recognizing the cost of its own decisions. A country does not become stronger by pretending retaliation is free, and a leader does not become more courageous by hiding the bill.
The harder question is whether Canada spent the previous eighteen months building enough alternatives that saying no has become economically more credible than it once was.
7. Affability Is Not Submission:
This is where psychology can clarify something political language often muddles.
Affability is not identical to agreeableness, passivity or conflict avoidance. In social perception research, people commonly evaluate others along dimensions resembling warmth and competence: whether intentions appear benign and whether the person appears capable of acting effectively. Studies across cultures and political environments have repeatedly found both dimensions relevant to credibility and trust.
There is also a useful distinction in research on status between dominance and prestige. Dominance acquires influence through threat, coercion or the capacity to impose costs; prestige acquires influence through demonstrated knowledge or competence that causes others to confer respect more voluntarily. Both routes can produce power, and importantly, research involving more than 140,000 participants across 69 countries found that economic uncertainty can increase preferences for more dominant leaders by reducing individuals’ sense of personal control.
That finding should complicate any smug interpretation of contemporary politics. When people feel economically insecure, the appeal of domination may not arise because millions have suddenly developed defective moral character. A leader who projects certainty, aggression and agency can offer psychological relief to people who feel control slipping elsewhere in their lives.
The alternative, however, is not weakness.
Research on emotional regulation in leadership suggests that strategies such as cognitive reappraisal, in which a person changes how they interpret an emotionally charged situation before acting, can be associated with better performance than simply suppressing emotional expression after the reaction has already arrived. The evidence is not strong enough to peer into Carney’s mind from a television screen, and it would be irresponsible to try, but the general principle is useful: regulation is not the absence of emotion; it is the ability to keep emotion from becoming the only information available to a decision.
That is what makes Carney’s observable behaviour interesting. Canada negotiated, contemplated concessions, reached a limit, withdrew, announced retaliation, acknowledged the costs and continued saying that a mutually beneficial relationship with Americans remained possible.
Whatever one thinks of the policy, that sequence is different from the assumption that anger must become visible before resolve becomes believable.
8. The Power to Walk Away:
Negotiators sometimes describe leverage as the quality of the alternative available when no agreement is reached. The idea is intuitive: the side that believes it cannot survive without the deal is negotiating under a different psychological and economic constraint from the side that has somewhere else to go.
One of the commentators I have been reading called this walk-away power, and beneath the colourful rhetoric there is a serious principle.
The ability to establish a boundary often depends on what was built before the boundary became necessary.
A worker with transferable skills can leave a bad employer more easily than someone whose entire livelihood depends on one narrow role. A business with ten customers is less vulnerable to coercion from its largest account than a business with one. A person with a functioning life outside a relationship has more freedom to negotiate honestly inside it. The analogy cannot be stretched too far because countries are not individuals, but the underlying structure translates surprisingly well.
Canada’s problem is that it does not yet possess anything approaching economic independence from the United States.
Reuters examined Carney’s diversification strategy in June and found the stubborn geography underneath the rhetoric: nearly 70 per cent of Canadian exports still go to the United States, down from roughly 76 per cent a year earlier, and foreign investors continue to value Canada partly because CUSMA connects Canadian production to the enormous American market. More than 85 per cent of bilateral trade remained tariff-free at the time.
Reuters: Canada’s diversification push collides with US dependence
That is the first reality check.
* Canada is diversifying.
* Canada is also still deeply dependent.
Both statements can be true at the same time.
9. Canada Has Been Building Alternatives:
What has changed is the direction of travel.
Non-US Canadian exports reached C$213.8 billion last year, according to government data cited by Reuters, an increase of 16 per cent from the previous year. Carney’s government has pursued new or expanded relationships with Europe, China, the United Arab Emirates and Indo-Pacific countries, while publicly targeting a doubling of non-US exports over the coming decade.
Energy infrastructure provides perhaps the clearest example of how physical capacity can change geopolitical possibility. The expanded Trans Mountain pipeline, completed in 2024 after extraordinary cost escalation, tripled capacity to approximately 890,000 barrels per day and gave Alberta crude a direct route to the Pacific. By 2025, China had become the largest buyer of oil shipped through the expanded system, averaging about 207,000 barrels per day, while Canadian crude exports to non-US markets had risen sharply. South Korea, Japan, India, Taiwan and other buyers also entered the picture.
Reuters: Trans Mountain opens Canadian crude to Asian buyers
Canadian aluminum is demonstrating a similar, if smaller, adjustment. Reuters reported in May that higher American tariffs and tight European supply were encouraging Canadian producers to redirect more metal toward Europe, with Canada’s share of US aluminum imports already declining from earlier levels.
Those are not declarations of independence. They are examples of dependence becoming less absolute at the margin.
Carney’s larger infrastructure programme is more ambitious than the completed evidence. His government says 27 projects referred to the Major Projects Office represent roughly C$500 billion in prospective private investment, while Ottawa is promoting new ports, mines, energy corridors, transmission infrastructure and defence investment. Those figures represent a pipeline of proposed or developing projects rather than C$500 billion already converted into productive assets, an important qualification when assessing the scale of Canada’s investment momentum.
Reuters’ examination of proposed oil pipelines illustrates the gap perfectly. Projects currently contemplated could increase export pipeline capacity by approximately 45 per cent, or 2.25 million barrels per day, by 2035, but filling them would require Canadian oil production to rise much faster than current industry plans suggest and could require well over C$100 billion of new investment.
Reuters: Canada’s pipeline ambition meets the production problem
This is what mature optimism looks like: Canada has begun building exits, but some of the doors are still architectural drawings.
10. The Ledger Between Two Countries:
The second reality check runs in the opposite direction, because American economic power does not mean Canada has no leverage.
In 2025, according to the US Energy Information Administration, the United States imported an average of 3.9 million barrels of Canadian crude oil every day, making Canada overwhelmingly its largest foreign crude supplier. Bilateral energy trade was worth approximately US$137 billion that year, with about US$111 billion flowing from Canadian energy exports to the United States.
Access the source here: US EIA: the Canada-US energy ledger
The composition of that trade makes replacement more difficult than the simple phrase “America produces plenty of oil” suggests. Much of the US Midwest refinery system is configured for the heavier crude grades Canada supplies. EIA notes that nearly all crude used by refineries in the Midwest and Mountain regions comes from Canada, meaning pipelines, refinery design and geography create a kind of industrial plumbing that cannot be rerouted overnight.
Natural gas is similarly integrated. Canada provides virtually all American pipeline natural-gas imports, although the United States is itself a major producer and net energy exporter, so the relationship is better described as regional infrastructure dependence than national energy helplessness. Electricity is more variable: Canadian power remains important in particular northern markets and historically represented the large majority of American electricity imports, but drought and changing market conditions have reduced those flows in recent years, and some regions have occasionally exported electricity back north.
Then there are the less visible dependencies. Canada is the world’s largest potash producer and a dominant supplier to American agriculture. It is also the largest source of uranium delivered to US civilian nuclear operators, accounting for about 32 per cent of 2025 uranium deliveries according to EIA.
The correct conclusion is therefore not that Canada can “turn America off,” which is satisfying rhetoric but terrible economics.
It is that North America has spent decades creating systems in which each country contains pieces of the other country’s economy.
This is not independence. It is interdependence.
And interdependence becomes politically dangerous when either participant begins treating mutual reliance as ownership.
11. The Numbers Behind Carney’s Confidence:
Carney used Saturday’s speech to make several unusually strong claims about Canada’s economic momentum, and because I am sympathetic to the broader argument he is making, this is precisely where skepticism becomes most necessary.
The employment picture is genuinely encouraging. Statistics Canada reported that employment increased by 75,000 in July, while unemployment declined to 6.4 per cent, the lowest rate in two years. Since April, employment had increased by 181,000, concentrated largely in private-sector employment and self-employment.
Access the source here: Statistics Canada: July 2026 Labour Force Survey
Across the border, the US unexpectedly lost 23,000 jobs in July, although its unemployment rate remained substantially lower at 4.1 per cent. That does support Carney’s broader argument that Canadian employment momentum has recently been stronger, but his statement that Canada is creating jobs at “four times the rate” of the United States is highly dependent on the period and denominator being selected. Without reproducing the government’s exact comparative calculation, I would treat the four-times number as a political summary of a genuine recent divergence rather than an independently established universal ratio.
Foreign investment is easier to verify. Statistics Canada reports that foreign direct investment into Canada reached C$96.8 billion in 2025, the highest annual inflow since 2007. The stock of foreign direct investment reached roughly C$1.6 trillion. More than half of the annual inflow still came from the United States, which again makes the same point: Canada is attracting capital while remaining deeply intertwined with the economy from which it is trying to reduce dependence.
Foreign demand for Canadian debt has also been striking. In the first six months of 2026, non-resident investors bought a record C$175 billion of Canadian debt securities, according to Statistics Canada, including large purchases of federal government bonds.
Growth deserves greater caution. The OECD’s June outlook projected real Canadian GDP growth of approximately 1.2 per cent in 2026 and 1.7 per cent in 2027, with infrastructure and government investment supporting recovery from the 2025 trade slowdown. Those figures are consistent with a resilient economy, but they hardly describe a boom, and Carney’s “second-fastest G7” formulation depends on the comparison set and forecast vintage being used.
Several other claims in the speech, including that Canadian foreign direct investment is running at twice the rate of the nearest G7 competitor and that Canada currently ranks first globally for infrastructure-investment attractiveness, require more methodological context than the speech provides. Until the underlying comparison is reproduced independently, they are best described as government claims, not settled facts.
That may sound pedantic. It is actually the point.
If the argument of AFFABILITY is that confidence does not require performance, then the evidence should be strong enough that we do not need to improve it with adjectives.
12. What Canada Could Lose:
The current round of tariffs covers only a fraction of Canadian exports, but macroeconomic percentages can conceal highly concentrated pain.
A national economy can absorb a sector worth 1 or 2 per cent of GDP while the people inside that sector experience something closer to economic catastrophe. Reuters has already reported concerns about closures, layoffs and loss of US orders among businesses exposed to the latest duties, particularly smaller firms that cannot redirect production quickly.
Ontario remains exposed through autos and manufacturing. Quebec has already experienced factory layoffs related to earlier steel tariffs. British Columbia remains heavily affected by softwood lumber disputes. Agriculture, fertilizer, industrial machinery and construction supply chains remain vulnerable to further escalation.
Retaliation also has domestic costs. Canada’s own countertariffs will make some American goods more expensive, which Carney openly acknowledged. The more Ottawa tries to protect Canadian producers by raising the relative cost of American alternatives, the greater the possibility that Canadian families and businesses absorb part of that difference.
That is why “a principled decision can still be expensive” is more useful here than any patriotic slogan. It forces the argument back onto consequences, where serious policy analysis belongs.
If the confrontation lasts months rather than weeks, political unity will increasingly be tested not by abstract support for sovereignty but by the distribution of economic pain. Provinces whose industries lose disproportionately may begin asking whether the national strategy is sharing the costs fairly. Governments that look united when announcing retaliation can become less harmonious when deciding who receives relief.
The strength of Canada’s response will therefore be measured partly by whether it can protect the workers being asked to absorb the price of national leverage.
13. What America Could Lose:
The American side of the ledger is equally easy to simplify.
Tariffs are imposed legally on the importer at the border, not mailed as an invoice to the foreign government. What happens afterward depends on market conditions: an importer can accept lower profit margins, force suppliers to lower prices, raise consumer prices, substitute domestic products, automate, reduce employment or combine several of those responses.
Recent Federal Reserve research suggests the burden has been overwhelmingly domestic. A February New York Fed analysis estimated that Americans had absorbed around 90 per cent of the cost of Trump’s earlier tariff increases, while the Congressional Budget Office estimated that US businesses might absorb around 30 per cent of import-price increases in the near term and consumers around 70 per cent.
Reuters: New York Fed finds Americans bore most tariff costs
There is nuance here too. New Boston Fed research published this week argues that strong productivity growth allowed some tariff-exposed firms to absorb more of the cost without passing it fully into prices, estimating that tariffs still added about half a percentage point to core inflation but that productivity blunted the effect.
In other words, tariffs are not a vending machine where a 50 per cent duty automatically produces a 50 per cent increase at Walmart.
But they do create costs.
* They alter investment.
* They distort supply chains.
* They change margins.
And eventually the people who own, operate, work for or buy from the affected businesses become part of the economic mechanism.
That means the political pressure will not necessarily begin in Washington. It may begin in Michigan factories, Midwestern refineries, border-state farms, New England energy markets or American businesses that depend on Canadian inputs and suddenly discover that a policy described as punishment for Canada is also entering their own cost structure.
14. Masters in Our Own Home:
Carney’s most historically interesting language may have nothing to do with the tariff percentages.
“In Canada, we are masters in our own home, from coast to coast to coast.”
To an audience unfamiliar with Quebec history, that can sound like ordinary political language. It is not.
Maîtres chez nous, usually translated as “masters in our own house,” was the slogan used by Jean Lesage’s Quebec Liberals in the 1962 provincial election during the Quiet Revolution. It became associated with a larger assertion of economic, cultural and political control, particularly the nationalization of Quebec’s hydroelectric industry. The Canadian Museum of History identifies it directly with the 1962 campaign.
Access the source here: Canadian Museum of History: the history of “Maîtres chez nous”
In this case, there is little need to speculate about whether Carney understood the reference. Five days before the trade rupture, during a speech announcing a major clean-energy agreement involving Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec, he explicitly invoked Jean Lesage and explained that “making the weather” means being “masters in our own home.”
The reuse is politically fascinating because language once associated principally with Quebec’s assertion of autonomy is being widened into a Canadian argument about sovereignty.
This is where Friday’s idea of CLUELESS returns with even greater relevance.
Information is not automatically understanding. A person hears a sentence; context reveals the history stored inside it.
That distinction was the central argument of Friday, August 21’s Incorrigible Myths investigation, CLUELESS, and it is worth reading alongside this article because the same principle is operating here: the clue can be sitting in plain sight while its meaning remains invisible until we know what surrounds it.
15. When Partisans Become Canadians:
The response inside Canada has also been notable because the trade confrontation is temporarily rearranging normal political alignments.
Reuters reported that Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a Conservative, backed Carney’s refusal to accept the final US terms, while federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre also supported a strong Canadian response. Other premiers have differed on tactics, and those differences will matter if the conflict persists, but the immediate reaction demonstrates how an external threat can temporarily elevate a broader identity over partisan affiliation.
Quebec provides an even more striking example. Reuters reported today that support for Quebec independence has fallen to around 30 per cent, near multidecade lows, even as American tariffs have caused genuine industrial damage inside the province. For many Quebecers, American unpredictability appears to be making continued membership in Canada look more protective rather than less.
Reuters: US pressure reshapes Quebec’s sovereignty debate
Social psychology has long examined how groups that normally compete can cooperate when a meaningful superordinate identity becomes salient. But there is a danger hidden inside the mechanism: stronger in-group cohesion can produce hostility toward the out-group.
That is where Canada should be careful.
National solidarity is not made more legitimate by contempt for Americans.
I have no interest in replacing American exceptionalism with Canadian exceptionalism. The intellectual failure would be identical, only the flag would change.
Canada can defend its sovereignty without converting ordinary Americans into villains.
16. Ordinary Americans Are Not the Enemy:
Having lived in the United States, that abstraction is difficult for me to separate from the people behind it. I have seen what it looks like when someone in a grocery aisle recalculates a purchase because the total has outrun the budget, and when households are forced to fit rent, medical care, fuel, food and childcare into the same unforgiving month.
“The American consumer” may be useful economic shorthand, but the consequences ultimately arrive at the level of ordinary households.
That is why I resisted calling ordinary Americans stupid in The American Chaos Subscription Plan, and I resist it again here.
People living under persistent financial pressure, political polarization and information overload become vulnerable to simpler narratives not necessarily because they lack intelligence, but because cognitive bandwidth itself becomes expensive. Research has repeatedly shown that uncertainty can increase the appeal of dominant leaders, while the architecture of social media further rewards emotionally activating content.
One study examining more than 35 million Facebook posts found that roughly three quarters of forwarded news links were shared without the user first clicking through to the underlying article, while politically aligned and extreme content was especially likely to travel that way. Another large study found negative news articles were substantially more likely to be shared to social platforms than neutral or positive ones.
Those incentives matter because outrage does not merely reflect the information ecosystem. It can become something the ecosystem teaches us to perform. Research on millions of social-media posts found that positive feedback for expressions of moral outrage increased the probability that users would express more outrage later.
That brings us to one of the stranger paradoxes surrounding Carney.
17. The Media Paradox:
Some of the writers who helped send me down this trail use extraordinarily aggressive language to celebrate a politician whose appeal, at least in this episode, partly comes from the fact that he does not.
Dean Blundell writes with a flamethrower. The Australian writers I follow are even more exuberantly profane. I enjoy reading both, which is why pretending to observe their style from some pristine academic distance would be dishonest.
But the contrast is analytically useful.
* A columnist competes for attention.
* A prime minister manages consequences.
* Those jobs operate under radically different incentives.
Online media rewards novelty, negativity and emotional activation because those things are unusually shareable. Political leadership, at its best, should be operating across a much longer time horizon, where the purpose of communication is not merely to win the next thirty seconds of attention but to preserve options, manage alliances, reduce misunderstanding and prepare populations for costs that cannot be edited out of reality.
That may be one reason aggressive leadership appears immediately legible while restrained leadership requires a longer attention span.
Rage tells you instantly what it wants you to feel. Competence often requires you to keep listening.
18. The Clock:
Another theory circulating among commentators is that Carney believes he can simply outlast the current American political moment, with the November 3 midterm elections only weeks away.
There is evidence that time is becoming politically uncomfortable for the White House, but not enough to conclude that “run out Trump’s clock” is the Canadian government’s actual strategy.
The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll puts Trump’s approval rating at 33 per cent, the lowest of his current presidency, while voters now narrowly prefer Democrats to Republicans on economic management. Republicans hold only a narrow House majority, and Reuters has described control of both chambers as increasingly competitive ahead of November.
Reuters/Ipsos: Trump approval falls to 33% ahead of the midterms
But a changed Congress would not erase presidential tariff powers. It could increase oversight, alter appropriations, reshape political incentives and make future escalation more difficult, but Congress does not automatically become a giant red reset button for Canada-US trade on November 4.
The simpler explanation may therefore be the better one: Carney concluded that the agreement available on August 21 was worse than the economic cost of waiting.
We do not need a secret chessboard to understand that decision.
19. What I Think Happens Next
My first prediction, with high confidence, is that Canada and the United States eventually return to negotiations. The relationship is simply too large, too integrated and too economically valuable for permanent disengagement. The current dispute is better understood as a fight over the terms of interdependence than an attempt to eliminate interdependence itself. I would reconsider that forecast if Washington begins systematically dismantling CUSMA institutions rather than using tariffs as leverage within the broader relationship.
My second prediction, also with high confidence, is that the old assumption of automatic Canadian reliance on the American market does not return even if the tariff fight is settled. Infrastructure planning, energy strategy and corporate diversification are already adjusting to the possibility that American market access has become less predictable. Trans Mountain, shifting aluminum flows and expanding trade diplomacy are evidence of a structural adaptation already underway. The pace can change, but the incentive is unlikely to disappear.
My third prediction, with moderate confidence, is that Canada will still send the majority of its exports to the United States five years from now. Geography remains an extraordinary competitive advantage, and duplicating a continental network of roads, pipelines, railways and factories across an ocean is expensive. Diversification will reduce concentration rather than replace the United States.
My fourth prediction, with moderate confidence, is that Canadian political unity begins to fray if the confrontation persists long enough for regional costs to diverge sharply. Unity is easiest while the dispute remains symbolic and the retaliation is newly announced. If Ontario manufacturing, Quebec steel, British Columbia lumber or Prairie agriculture experience materially different pain, domestic politics will eventually return.
My fifth prediction, with moderate confidence, is that energy, critical minerals and infrastructure increasingly become the centre of Canadian foreign policy. The world is rediscovering that sovereignty is not merely a constitutional idea; it also lives in transmission lines, pipelines, ports, mines, refineries, shipping capacity, nuclear fuel and the ability to reach more than one customer.
The evidence that would prove the broader thesis wrong is straightforward: if diversification stalls, infrastructure projects remain permanently aspirational, investment weakens, Canadian businesses fail to find alternative customers and the United States can repeatedly impose new conditions without absorbing meaningful reciprocal costs, then today’s language about sovereignty will have outrun the economic foundation beneath it.
That possibility should remain visible.
20. What Affability Looks Like When It Costs Something:
Back in April, when I typed “brave Carney” into a message, I was not conducting an investigation. I was responding instinctively to something I thought I saw.
Four months later, after reading the negotiating record, the economic data, the energy dependencies, the psychological literature, the American case and the Canadian one, I think bravery may actually be the less interesting word.
The word that stayed with me today was affability, provided we understand it properly.
* Not niceness.
* Not endless accommodation.
* Not the fear of making another person uncomfortable.
Affability becomes consequential when someone possesses enough agency to say no and does not require hostility to make the no credible.
Perhaps that is why the word feels relevant to this particular moment. Carney has not eliminated conflict. He has escalated an economic confrontation and accepted consequences that may hurt Canadian households and businesses. Whether that decision ultimately proves wise will depend on outcomes we cannot yet know.
The behaviour nevertheless offers a useful distinction.
* You can acknowledge that a relationship has changed without pretending the other side has ceased to be human.
* You can recognize interdependence without accepting ownership.
* You can negotiate in good faith without negotiating indefinitely.
* You can establish a boundary without needing the boundary to become revenge.
Affability without autonomy can become people-pleasing because the pleasantness may actually be fear wearing good manners.
Affability with autonomy is different.
Then civility becomes a choice.
21. What If Strength Does Not Have to Be Ugly?
Carney keeps returning to the language of weather. Canadians, he said Saturday, cannot control the storm coming from Washington, but they can set their own course and “make our own weather.”
There is a human idea inside that metaphor that I keep returning to.
* You cannot control somebody else’s weather.
* You can spend enormous amounts of energy forecasting it, organizing yourself around it, anticipating every shift and reducing your choices so that nothing you do risks another storm.
* Or you can gradually build a life capable of withstanding weather you do not control.
Countries do this with diversified trade, infrastructure, energy security and domestic capacity.
Businesses do it with multiple customers.
Workers do it with skills.
Human beings do it through relationships, knowledge, self-sufficiency, boundaries and the difficult process of understanding that dependence and connection are not identical things.
I have lived in India, the United States and Canada, and the longer I watch institutions and human beings under pressure, the less interested I become in performances of invulnerability.
What interests me now is self-command: the ability to remain cognitively present when emotional escalation would be easier, to protect something valuable without needing to hate whoever threatens it, and to maintain enough curiosity to keep testing your own position even when the evidence appears to be moving in your favour.
Canada is now the country from which I watch this confrontation unfold, and that changes my emotional distance from the story. I care whether Canadian workers lose jobs, whether small businesses survive, whether retaliation raises prices, whether infrastructure promises become physical reality and whether national solidarity remains mature enough not to harden into hostility toward ordinary Americans.
That investment makes skepticism more important, not less.
Caring about Canada is precisely why Canada should be fact-checked too.
Perhaps countries, like people, occasionally need to see another model before remembering that another model is possible. Not a perfect model, because Canada is not perfect and Carney is not beyond criticism, but a different model of what authority can look like when confrontation becomes unavoidable.
I wrote in June that we need more regulated human beings and fewer emotionally reactive ones.
Today I would add something else.
Perhaps we need leaders secure enough to understand that strength does not become weaker simply because it speaks quietly.
And perhaps being human does not require becoming softer.
Perhaps it requires becoming strong enough that cruelty is no longer necessary to prove strength.
Incorrigible Myths is published in Canada as independent public-interest commentary and analysis. The views expressed here are my own and are grounded, wherever possible, in primary documents, books, court records, public data, credible reporting and research that readers can examine for themselves.
This episode is not an instruction about what anyone should believe, whom anyone should support, or how anyone should vote. It is an invitation to examine the record more closely, distinguish documented fact from allegation and interpretation, revisit history that may have been buried beneath the daily news cycle, and arrive at your own conclusions.
The purpose is not to tell readers which leader to admire. It is to ask whether we have spent so long confusing aggression with strength that we have forgotten how much discipline it can take to remain recognizably human while exercising power.
Before I leave you with today’s thought, there is one line I keep returning to because it captures something larger than this particular dispute. Power will always create opportunities to dominate, retaliate and humiliate. Character is revealed in what we choose to do with that opportunity.
“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”Frederick Douglass
Thank you for giving this work something increasingly valuable: your time, curiosity, and sustained attention.
Whistleblower, ™Incorrigible MythsAn independent public-interest publicationVancouver, Canada
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