Quiet Canines Podcast

In current political debate, defenders of capitalism often attack social democrats, branding them as communists and warning that their ideas threaten freedom and prosperity. This raises a question worth sitting with. What would those same voices make of the philosophies held by Indigenous nations such as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Mi’kmaw Nation?

It is vital to establish that these are living communities today. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy currently includes the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora Nations. Their foundational values run counter to the core tenets of capitalism.

Capitalism is an economic system defined by private ownership and the pursuit of profit. It relies on a reality where individuals and corporations control resources rather than the public. Private property grants the legal right to own, control, and accumulate assets. The primary force of the system is the profit motive, and every decision about production, investment, and distribution is calculated to maximize financial gain for the owners. In the end, capitalism organizes society around the steady accumulation of wealth.

These Indigenous nations practice a disciplined foresight. The Seventh Generation value is rooted in the oral constitution of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. This principle instructs leaders to weigh not only the present but the generations to come, including those whose faces are yet beneath the ground. Chiefs consider how present choices will affect descendants who have yet to be born. The world is treated as something borrowed from future generations.

The principle of Netukulimk is a central Mi’kmaw value meaning to take only what you need. It means using the bounty of creation to support the individual and the community without jeopardizing the integrity, diversity, or productivity of the environment.

These teachings connect present choices with obligations that extend beyond the people making them. They demand that we leave descendants clean water, stable ecosystems, living cultures, and meaningful choices. A system built on accumulation sits in direct tension with a philosophy that treats excess as a threat to communal survival. One system promises endless extraction. The other tries to ensure there is still a world left to inhabit.

The founders of the US Constitution actually predicted this vulnerability. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison warned that the greatest threat to a republic was “faction,” meaning a group of citizens becomes so consumed by a common passion that they destroy the permanent interests of the community. The founders deeply feared direct democracy because they knew it allowed charismatic demagogues to bypass institutional guardrails by appealing directly to public emotion. They would view the election of Donald Trump twice as a total failure of the checks and balances they designed.

The core problem America faces today is structural instability. When Joe Biden was elected, the world treated Trump’s first term as a temporary aberration. The fact that Trump won a second term proves that every four years, the world now expects a potential Trump 2.0, or someone worse. Even if a reasonable President wins in 2028 and begins to restore international agreements, world leaders know that four years later, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Elon Musk, or Donald Trump Junior could take power and tear everything down again.

In 2022, 83 percent of Canadians considered the United States a reliable partner. Today, only 35 percent do. Canadians now view China more favorably than the US.

For those of you who did not vote for Donald Trump, you should put a Canadian flag on your luggage when you travel the world. If you did vote for Trump, was this what you expected?

Let me know in the comments.

In 1874, British Columbia made it illegal to light the fires that had protected the land for thousands of years.

Long before Canada built a system for fighting wildfire, First Nations were lighting small ones on purpose. Knowledge holders chose the place, the season and the weather. The flames cleared dry vegetation, fed the soil, opened travel routes and improved berry patches and habitat for deer, elk and moose. They also broke the land into patches, so a later wildfire had nowhere easy to run.

The Bush Fire Act ended that in British Columbia. It arrived a decade before the federal ban on the potlatch and served the same purpose. Both removed ceremony and pressed Indigenous people toward assimilation. When Banff was created in 1885, the federal government forcibly removed Indigenous peoples from the park and kept fire off the land for almost a century.

The fuel stayed. It is still there, and the climate is getting hotter.

Canada has started to reverse this. Parks Canada returned fire to Banff in 1983. Gitanyow and Xeni Gwet’in are burning again. But British Columbia burns about 10,000 hectares a year. New Jersey burns more.

Sometimes the right fire has to come before the wrong one does.

When governments know something causes harm, why does change take so long?

The world is on fire. The climate is obviously warming. Yet governments keep investing in pipelines.

Cigarettes are a useful case study.

In 1950, major studies linked smoking to lung cancer. Britain’s Royal College of Physicians warned the public in 1962. The US Surgeon General concluded in 1964 that smoking caused lung cancer and chronic bronchitis. In 1981, studies linked secondhand smoke to lung cancer. In 1986, the Surgeon General concluded that involuntary smoking caused disease, including lung cancer, in healthy nonsmokers.

Everyone knew by 1950. But Canada didn’t ban smoking on flights of two hours or less until 1987, and smoking wasn’t banned on international flights until 1994. Broad bans covering workplaces, restaurants and bars didn’t arrive until the 2000s. Ireland introduced the first comprehensive national workplace ban, including pubs, in 2004.

It took five decades for governments to ban something they knew was killing people.

Tobacco companies were the reason for the delay. One infamous industry memo said, “Doubt is our product.” They funded scientists and front groups, attacked credible studies, lobbied politicians, and recruited hospitality associations to warn of lost jobs and closed businesses. They promoted smoking sections and ventilation as reasonable compromises that left workers exposed. Their goal was to make delay look responsible. In 2006, a US federal court found that major cigarette companies had fraudulently denied dangers they understood.

Momentum finally grew when secondhand smoke was reframed as a workers’ rights issue rather than a private choice. Health groups, unions and local governments built coalitions. Had that framing come sooner, the bans probably would have too.

We’re watching the same playbook with climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced its first assessment in 1990, after Exxon’s own scientists had produced accurate warming projections. Fossil fuel interests have since financed misinformation and lobbied against climate policy, exactly as the tobacco industry did.

And here we are, 36 years later, and the world is burning.

Perhaps the answer is that climate activists need to treat this as a human rights issue. A warming planet isn’t an abstract environmental concern; it’s a threat to the right to life, to health, to food, water and shelter. Framed as private cost or consumer choice, action stalls. Framed as a violation of basic human rights, it becomes something governments can be held accountable for. The tobacco fight was won on those terms. The climate fight can be too.

Plans to build the world’s first commercial octopus farm in Gran Canaria, Spain, have been scrapped, in a major victory for octopuses and the global animal welfare movement.

Plans by Spanish company Nueva Pescanova to farm one million octopuses per year were leaked in 2023, sparking widespread concern among scientists and animal welfare organisations.

Octopuses are highly intelligent, curious and solitary animals, making them fundamentally unsuited to intensive farming. Confining them in crowded, barren tanks would inevitably compromise their welfare, while the proposed production system raised serious concerns about breeding, high mortality rates, the absence of humane slaughter methods and the environmental impacts of farming a carnivorous species that relies on wild-caught fish for feed.

Eurogroup for Animals, Compassion in World Farming, AnimaNaturalis, INTERCIDS and Aquatic Life Institute continuously called for plans to be halted, highlighting its potential impacts through evidenced reports on the immense welfare and environmental risks of farming octopuses. Eurogroup for Animals coordinated its network on scientific advocacy, legal action and public mobilisation, engaging national and EU policymakers on the issue. Meanwhile, momentum grew internationally, with a number of US States introducing a ban on octopus farming.

While this is a significant milestone, it does not mark the end. As other companies continue to explore octopus farming, there is an urgent need for the EU to introduce a ban that prevents similar projects from emerging in the future, ensuring that these sentient invertebrates remain protected.

Brazil is not allowing American officials into the country because it thinks Trump is trying to interfere in its presidential election.

On July 24, Brazil denied visas to Assistant Secretary Riley Barnes and Deputy Assistant Secretary Samuel Samson. Brazil said that the delegation intended to cast doubt on Brazil’s electronic voting system before the October presidential election.

Jair Bolsonaro was subsequently convicted of plotting to overturn his defeat and is serving a prison sentence of 27 years. Doesn’t that sound an awful lot like Donald Trump? Too bad he’s not in prison.

Flávio Bolsonaro has revived doubts about the voting system. Trump’s playbook declares voting systems vulnerable, invokes foreign manipulation and portrays election officials as conspirators. Trump is hoping you’re stupid enough to believe that when he loses, the system is rigged. When he wins, the system is fair.

Fascist leaders have historically attacked confidence in elections, portrayed democratic institutions as corrupt and treated only their own victories as legitimate.

Should Canada follow Brazil’s lead and deny entry to officials from the Trump administration who might be here to influence what’s going on in Alberta

Elon Musk has been taking too much ketamine. He’s spent months attacking Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, and he says he’s making an AI version of the movie that’s historically accurate.

We are talking about a god impregnating a queen in the form of a swan, a woman born from an egg, half divine children, prophetic omens, Aphrodite steering human desire and gods intervening in battle.

These are religious and legendary materials, not history.

Nolan gave the role of Helen of Troy to Lupita Nyong’o, who is Black, and another role to Elliot Page, a trans man. Musk branded Nolan a racist against white people, said he had lost his integrity and accused him of insulting the Greek people.

He called the trans casting one of the most twisted things he had ever heard.

In 2021, the United Nations World Food Programme handed Musk a plan showing how 6.6 billion dollars, a sliver of his fortune, would feed 42 million people on the edge of famine across 43 countries. Instead of carrying out the plan, he was the driving force behind the dismantling of USAID, which helped poor and unstable countries develop.

Musk was raised in apartheid South Africa. With a father like that, it’s really no surprise he turned out to be a terrible human being.

Nolan’s Odyssey opened to 124.5 million dollars in the US and 264.1 million dollars worldwide, which is the year’s biggest debut for a film.

Do you think Musk’s AI version will be that popular?

Colman Domingo said Musk’s accurate version would be whiter than Christmas at Cracker Barrel. The sad part is that Musk has 240 million followers who consume his b******t.

What do you think of Elon Musk? Am I being too harsh?

Here’s how I would teach Donald Trump that climate change is not a hoax.

What if we convinced our governments that climate change is a national security threat?

That’s what MI5 and MI6 told the UK government in a report released in January.

It tells us that “ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse.” This presents a threat to “UK national security and prosperity.” It says “the world is already experiencing impacts including crop failures, intensified natural disasters and infectious disease outbreaks. Threats will increase with degradation and intensify with collapse.” The results will include geopolitical and economic instability, increased conflict and competition for resources. “It is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food.” It also warns that “conflict and military escalation will become more likely, both within and between states, as groups compete for arable land and food and water resources.”

We can see it happening right now. In the Greater Horn of Africa, humanitarian analysts warned this July that failed rains, a looming super El Niño, soaring food prices, and armed conflict are converging into a famine risk stretching into 2027. Livestock are dying, livelihoods are collapsing, and millions face displacement. This is exactly the cascade the UK report describes. Ecological stress is becoming a security crisis.

We have also seen the devastating forest fires in Canada and around the world.

This isn’t a report by some tree hugging environmentalist. It was written by the UK’s intelligence agencies, and they are warning the government that we are headed towards ecosystem collapse. They argue it is a more dangerous threat to the country and society than terrorism.

So when Mark Carney says emissions will rise, I think that is an admission that he is not doing his job, which is to protect the country from national security threats.

I’ll put a link to the report in my Substack bio so you can read it and send it to Mark Carney or whoever your president or prime minister is.

Remember the famous line from A Few Good Men? “You can’t handle the truth!”

In Trump’s case, the line might be, “You can’t post the truth.”

We all know Trump is a pathological liar, but he is getting more efficient. In a Truth Social post about the Gordie Howe Bridge, he squeezed three lies into one post. Here’s what he said about the bridge that just opened between Ontario and Detroit.

Claim one: Canada disinvited the US to the opening ceremony. That’s actually true. After Trump said he would put 50 percent tariffs on Canada, we told him he was no longer invited to the party. I think the real reason is Canadians didn’t want Trump eating all the hotdogs.

Claim two: Canada is paying substantial tariffs to the US. False. American businesses are paying those tariffs, which means higher prices for Americans. That’s why every premier in Canada says tariffs are stupid.

Claim three: The original deal was terribly negotiated by a previous administration. It was reached in 2012 between the Stephen Harper government and Republican Michigan governor Rick Snyder, then given federal approval by the Obama administration, who had no role in negotiating it. In 2017, Trump and Trudeau backed the bridge’s completion. Has Trump forgotten 2017? Probably.

Claim four: The original deal no longer stands. Absolutely false. The deal is unchanged.

Canada and the United States signed the Canada United States Mexico Agreement or CUSMA in 2020. Donald Trump praised it then but has repeatedly violated it since. He recently announced 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods. This action follows previous illegal tariffs targeting Canadian lumber and automobile industries, which undermines the trade agreement built to protect Canadian exports.

Despite these provocations, Trump avoided imposing tariffs on Canadian oil and critical minerals. This provides Canada with significant leverage due to American reliance on these resources. Currently, data shows about 75 per cent of Canadians believe American negotiators are not operating in good faith. Many feel any agreement is futile while Trump remains in office.

Nevertheless, political figures like Pierre Poilievre continue to demand that Mark Carney make a deal. This aligns with a small minority view and ignores the lack of trust. The situation highlights a pattern where agreements are ignored and economic pressure is applied selectively. This forces Canada to navigate negotiations with an unreliable partner. Canada must use its strengths in critical sectors, because direct negotiation with a party that breaks rules has proven ineffective for long term economic stability.