Bordering on Stupidity

Bridges and borders and colonials

“The more time I spent in drawing rooms and trouble spots,” Paul Wells wrote this past week, “the more I found people who didn’t have the faintest idea what would happen next.”

“Partly this is because it’s just as easy to fake it, to surf, to bullshit at the highest levels as it is at the corner store. In fact it may be easier. You’ll be recognized the next time you poke your head into the corner store, and reminded of what you got wrong yesterday.” We can quibble about how easy it is to bullshit people in your own town or province. There are politicians who have made long-term careers being obviously full of crap and a decent few reporters and tons of academics who made huge reputations, some of them nationally, without having the foggiest clue about their supposed subject of expertise.

As if to give him another example of not just knowing what is happening next but what is happening now, Canadian journalists like Jen Gerson have been getting their skulls around the deal to open the Gordie Howe bridge. It is a simple thing. There is an original deal, one that is intact. It lays out the financial relationship between the two countries. That means how Canada gets its money back from the construction and how the two countries will divide the tolls and charges for using the bridge.

When he talks about the bridge and Canada getting its money back, the Prime Minister talks about the real deal, the original one since that’s where those facts about money are. When the Americans talk about the deal, they talk about the side deal and they talk in ways that make Donald Trump look good for making a supposedly bad deal better. They exaggerate, bullshit, and lie. We know that because that is what they do all the time.

This is where Canadian media go wrong. They are American wannabes and so they chase the smoke of imaginary controversies, which the MAGA rage machine constantly spits out. They make up stuff of their own just to fill space. On this one, they follow the lead of the American-owned and perpetually American-spun Bloomberg about what the deal says. They get it wrong.

There are many reasons to doubt the Bloomberg presentation of the story if not their misunderstanding of it. Canada-US Bridge Pact omits Canada’s debt costs” the headline on the latest installment from Josh Wingrove says. The Internet title - the one in the URL - reads “carney-s-gordie-howe-bridge-deal-splits-50-of-net-revenue-for-15-years.”

Both true if they are talking strictly about the side deal but, the headline as written is wrong since it pretends the two deals are intimately connected and the one re-writes the other. That’s the White House bullshit line. The actual deal on the bridge does include Canada’s debt costs. The side one does not. It merely creates a fund with a defined amount of money in it. That deal puts an amount “equivalent to” some money referred to in the actual deal aside and let’s the Americans play with it. The feds did the same thing twice on Hibernia rather than just transfer the actual shares to Newfoundland and Labrador. Anyway, in the Howe Bridge deal, Canada’s core interests are protected and the bridge will open, meaning Canada won. The bridge will speed up trade across the busiest crossing point between the two countries and support billions of dollars of new trade from Canada into the United States. That’s the prize and Canada got it.

The Prime Minister is talking carefully because we need to get the bridge open. Trump is twitchy. He is dumb. Anything could set him off. The Americans need to save face even though they got nothing significant. Canada is not getting sucked into the silly media game, whether it is from Bloomberg spun by the Yanks, or with the Globe chasing a story it did not break and desperate to add something to the story even if they must make it up. Part of that silly game is accepting the words of known liars like Howard Lutnick in an administration that lies constantly about everything as if this time they are telling the truth. Only fools would do that. Fools or people with content to assemble.

Gerson, late of Paul’s old stomping ground at Macleans and these days running a Substack called The Line, this weekend included the supposed loss at the bridge as she told readers Canada is weak and so Americans play with us and attack us.

“Trying to argue facts on wildfires is an absolute waste of time,” she spouted on the former Twitter, over the weekend, “They [Americans] were looking for a reason to retaliate. They found it. They are picking on us because we are the weak. Because relishing in contempt is pleasurable.”

The trade concessions weren’t enough. The bridge concessions weren’t enough. Whatever reparations we agree to for the forest fires won’t be enough. The more we give, the more pleasure they take in watching us squirm. And because we lack backbone, we will squirm.

I can’t even be really angry at the Americans anymore. The pathetic is self-inflicted. We talk a good game; but ultimately this government is just Trudeau with a (marginally) better comms strategy. It’s all symbolism. We’re choosing weakness for ourselves. Carney is smart and exceptionally interpersonally deft. He’s also spent his entire adult life in obeisance to elite power structures. I’m sure he’s never had to tell a Burger King manager to FO. You think he’s going to stick it to American Empire?

The technical term for Jen’s screed is bullshit. All of it. Not a word true. Jen does not know what is coming next. She does not know what happened yesterday and is in a fog about right now. She is a good example of Paul’s new Law, although Paul did not explicitly out her as a poser but she is. Her line about “elite power structures” is the sort of jargon posers use without explaining because they think it makes them sound like they have a clue. They don’t.

Jen starts with the assumption the Americans are strong and right and that Canada is weak and wrong and works backwards. The examples Jen uses of this imaginary weakness Canada supposedly chooses are all made up. She is dead wrong on the bridge. She is also dead wrong on the trade “concessions.” They were trifflings. Not big or important, except ideologically for some. Jen assumes that the Americans are right because Jen is already Americanised. She lives in Alberta, which is for all practical purposes an American colony. L all colonies, its elites - the people with power and influence in the petty provincial locale - bark when their master barks, as it does now, even if the bark is as much a reflex as the latest and coolest trends in language or clothes or food or whatever they just copy from south of the border.

The American trade ambassador is telling Canada its trade concessions are not working because they are meaningless and we knew it. He makes news because people like Jen have nothing to write about. They are lazy and just copy whatever the noisy Americans say. But more importantly, he is whining because Canada is not caving in the talks about trade for a side deal - there’s that word again - any more than Mexico is, as it turns out. Canada is not weak.

The Americans are frustrated so they whine. And when they don’t whine, they lie. Look at Trump in Iran. And when they are not whining or lying, they are caving. TACO. Trump always chickens out. Trump in Iran. The Americans on the bridge, if truth be told. And on wildfires, inevitably.

Tariffs are taxes on Americans. On Friday, Donald Trump threatened to raise taxes on Americans because they are choking on smoke from wildfires in Canada just like western Canadians are choking on smoke from American wildfires. Some MAGA clown launched an attack on Canada last week, a garden variety MAGA politician, along with made up nonsense about Canada not doing basic forest management. More MAGA clowns piled in her jalopy. One of them - a Senator no less - introduced a draft law that would hold responsible whoever caused the fires in Canada. That would be Mother Nature. You could not make this shit up.

If this were not bad enough for the Yanks, Trump’s environmental goon called the Canadian ambassador to scold Canada and included a link in his X posting about the call to the US online map that - like its Canadian counterparts - show where fires are and where the smoke is blowing. It shows the Canadian ones and the American ones, which the goon did not talk about or explain how it is that his people cannot douse wildfires any better than Canadians can. There is stupid. Then there is elected and appointed MAGA stupid.

The fires got Trump’s attention because lots of Americans are not happy about choking on smoke and the MAGA moron rage machinery tripped into gear. That and the fact he is frustrated Canada is not weak and literally everything he is doing is in the shitter except the schemes and scams to line his own pockets and those of his kids. He is a joke but he knows that threatening tariffs fools fools. There is an old man waving his fist at clouds of smoke and another gunning for Gaia. This is America whose number in the sequence of American presidents seems to be the average IQ of his supporters.

It is normal to see this idiocy in the run-up to the American midterms along with this weekend attacks on Chris Nolan because there are Africans in his Greek story - only the women got the MAGA moron’s attention - and Elliot Page. People who cannot spell Odyssey or know what part Page played know that something is wrong because they believe everything they see. If they find out Elliot is Canadian, Page will get double the venom from the people who only remember the Christian gospel is all about hate. Americans who call themselves Christians are angry at a movie the central theme of which is to do to others as you would have them do to you. This is America under 47.

Jen is right that there’s no point in trying facts and logic on these people. MAGA morons are for rage not sense. Generally, the folks behind Trump, like Trump and his enablers too, do not know what is going on in their own bodies, households, or towns, let alone what is happening in a country none of them could find on a map even if someone pointed it out to them first. They know nothing of Canada, are amazed we speak English and not Canadian - there is at least one guy on camera saying that - and only notice us when we stop buying their booze.

This hurts wannabe Americans like Jen and all the Tranna scribblers and “elites” who pay more attention to American media so they can pretend to be American. They cannot admit that Americans don’t give two shits about Canada. They are the national version of the Newfies who read the Globe so they can talk to Mainlanders and pretend they are one of them. Why they - MAGA, Canucks, or Newfies - do these things is as baffling as it is amusing or, more often than not, cringy and pathetic. Just how little self-respect must one have to believe those things and act that way?

Since 1949, the Government of Quebec has pretended there is a border between it and Newfoundland different from the actual border set in 1927. Tellingly, Quebec has never acted on the claim to Labrador despite publishing maps repeatedly that show a made-up border. This one is from the latest PQ Livre Bleu.

There are many things going on across Canada and around the world that affect Newfoundland and Labrador but media in this province only pay attention to a few, like any mention of the Labrador border in Quebec.

“This issue was settled a long time ago,” Premier Tony Wakeham told reporters in late June, “so I’m not going to have any more comment other than that.”

Fair enough.

There is no issue here anyway.

Might be one in the future. But not now.

But more so not now because the Parti Quebecois election promise book says there is an issue with the border. Le livre bleu says that the other borders Quebec currently has are fine and fixed but the Labrador one is a problem. Unfortunately, the PQ book says, there is no way to contest the 1927 Privy Council decision and all these years later it is unthinkable to repair the damage done by the supposedly unfair decision.

Couldn’t fix it before independence since changing the constitution that Quebec supposedly does not recognize would take an agreement with Newfoundland and Labrador that Quebec cannot achieve.

Couldn’t fix it after because Quebec will use the argument of the inviolability of borders to keep Quebec as it is in negotiations.

So they will not do anything but ask Ottawa for some cash, when the time comes.

This is not a problem.

But there are a few things which the people behind this little border shakedown may know or may not know. Let us educate them, anyway, and a few more besides.

To understand where the folks behind this blue book are wrong, let us start with their idea about maritime boundaries, which the authors claim are set on the basis of equidistance. They are not. Under international law, boundaries between coastal states are set generally on the basis of a point being equally distant from the baselines of the coasts between the two states.

But, and this is one of those big buts people should like and not deny.

As in the case of the Saint Pierre boundary, for example, other factors come into play, like proportionality. The result is that France got much less than it and many of Paul Wells’ sort of experts expected from the arbitration panel set to resolve the disputed border between Canada and France offshore Newfoundland. France got 12 nautical miles everywhere except for bulge on the west double that of the 12 mile territorial sea, the bits immediately between Newfoundland and the French islands that were split evenly out from the two shores, and what has been commonly called a baguette to give France a way of getting to Saint Pierre without going through Canada’s exclusive economic zone. What would happen with Quebec remains to be seen.

One of the uncertainties Quebec faces is that the existing border of Quebec within Canada are not of the same sort as those of the other states that have used the principle the PQ would rely on. Quebec has never been a sovereign state, even like Canada and Newfoundland before 1934, and is not now a colony. In fact, Quebec isn’t even like Czech Republic. That matters.

Whatever borders a sovereign Quebec might have would be a matter to resolve in the negotiations between a Quebec government and a Canadian government, which would inevitably be responsible for the interests of those Canadians living in a Canadian province but who voted against secession. Canada would also be responsible to represent Indigenous people whose rights are significant. In other words, Quebec’s current borders to the north, west, and south are not settled at all were Quebec to try to secede.

But the one with Labrador is. History matters.

The border between Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec was, in fact, an international boundary that remains the border between provinces now that Newfoundland and Labrador is part of Canada. Its international origins are unchanged by Confederation. In 1927, Newfoundland - as it was then called - was a Dominion just as Canada was. Both had identical international status. As the government leader in the British Commons Andrew Bonar Law said in the March 1920 Irish Home rule debate, if “the self-governing dominions chose tomorrow to say ‘We will no longer make a part of the British Empire’ we should not try to force them.”

At the 1927 Imperial Conference, the British and Dominion governments agreed that the Dominions are “autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.” Between 1933 and 1949, Newfoundland was a Dominion with a suspended constitution. It was not a Crown colony of Britain. As a separate country, Newfoundland retained all the status it had before 1933 over both internal and external affairs despite not having an elected government.

All but one or two other provinces have the same boundaries they had before becoming part of Canada. Quebec is greatly changed from what it was in 1867. Alberta is entirely made up of land that was federal before 1905. Newfoundland and Labrador alone not only retains its former international land border but it also has a maritime boundary that extends beyond the low water mark, unlike any other province. Under Canadian law, it retains at the very least the three mile limit it had in 1949 and arguably Newfoundland and Labrador’s maritime jurisdiction for the purposes of section 92 of the constitution now extends 12 miles out to sea.

But for the Labrador border with Quebec, that is one accepted by Canada in 1927 and by Quebec, in effect in the 1969 power contract, so it could not be dickered over in some imaginary future secession negotiation between Ottawa and Ville de Quebec. Not without creating for Canada an even more complicated political problem than Quebec secession. That fact - the border is settled - more than the notion of protecting its other borders is why the PQ says it would not fight with Canada over the Labrador line on the map but instead just take money. They know they have no case. They are like Danny Williams: whatever principle they talk about converts to cash at the snap of two fingers. The only question would be the price for which they would surrender their pretend virtue.

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