In an essay that went up just hours after Canada rolled out a fresh wave of counter-tariffs targeting billions of dollars worth of American products, Rabble contributor Paul Kahnert circles back to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s statement that he’s prepared to return to the negotiating table “when the Americans start being serious,” and wonders: “How much more serious can the Americans be?”

As he sees it, they’ve “been very serious right from the beginning of (U.S. President Donald Trump’s) second term,” during which he “has constantly repeated 51st state (and) governor of Canada statements, and now, Lake Ontario,” but warns that it’s a “big mistake to think it is just Trump who is the greatest threat.”

In fact, the United States “is now an oligarchy where wealth buys power and then power gains more wealth,” and the “biggest threat are Trump’s billionaire oligarch donors,” including, but not limited, to the “tech oligarchs have changed the name of Lake Ontario on their platforms to Lake America, showing how much power they have gained,” he contends.

“Trump’s tariffs are designed to do just one thing: remove the border between the U.S. and Canada, (so) so those billionaire interests can gain sovereignty and control over our country. It is a return to Manifest Destiny, where the U.S. believed that the United States was divinely ordained to expand its borders to all of North America because the American way of life was superior. U.S. democracy once protected us from any such actions, but no more.”

Those same tariffs are also “a method of redistributing economic advantage toward the wealthiest,” he asserts.

“If your factory sits in the right district, you are suddenly indispensable at budget and election time. Add it up and the tariff regime looks less like border security than a tailored surtax on everyone else’s supply chain. Tariff money is then re-routed to a small circle of domestic balance sheets; all aimed at Trump’s billionaire donors.”

He also takes aim at Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, whose “oil oligarch donors’ scheme to separate Alberta from Canada is further fueling Trump’s scheme to annex Canada,” and calls on Carney “denounce them soundly and do everything possible to stop them.”

Given the “very serious existential threat” that Trump and his “band of billionaires” pose to Canada, it’s time for Canada to “get serious ourselves,” he concludes.

“No purchase of F35 jets, no electricity and no potash south. Export taxes will just make Trump implement higher and higher counter tariffs and then what?  Time to get serious and drop the gloves. It couldn’t be clearer.”

Also keeping a close eye on Smith — and, more specifically, her status as “the weakest link in the national response to (Trump’s) ugly tariff war on Canada”: Alberta-based Rabble regular David Climenhaga, who recaps her bid to “do some reputational damage control” following the last-minute collapse of trade talks in Washington, D.C. last month.

“She trotted out a few pieties about how unfairly (Trump) is acting, plus a similar number of apocalyptic predictions about what will happen if we dare to push back, but at the end of a half hour of characteristic gaslighting it was evident that as long as she remains at the helm in Alberta, the province isn’t about to make any sacrifices to support the country,” he notes.

“In Smith’s version of reality, Canada is helpless and the only thing we can do is beg state and federal U.S. politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, to put pressure on their addled president to do the right thing. But use oil as a bargaining chip, or just the threat of it – as even former UCP premier Jason Kenney has advised, for crying out loud – forget about it!”

Although he acknowledges that there’s “something to be said for the idea that ‘jaw-jaw is better than war-war,’ usually that thought, whether it came out of the mouth of Winston Churchill or Harold Macmillan, comes with a very heavy ‘but’ right after it,” he points out.

“Not in Smith’s Pollyanna view of the American political scene, though, apparently.”

In a separate post, Climenhaga highlighted a report from the Pembina Institute that found the “$13-billion Artificial Intelligence data centre planned by Meta Platforms Inc. in Sturgeon County could add from $270 to $460 a year to Albertans’ electricity bills once the hyperscale installation has powered up,” he reveals.

“Oddly, Alberta media seem to have very little to say about the new analysis.”

Over at Canadian Dimension, Gerard Toal explains how the ongoing Canada – U.S. trade war as a “symptom of our times”: While “ostensibly about trade and tariffs, it is more broadly about the capacity of states to cooperate in response to common challenges,” he contends.

“In this, nationalism plays a big role,” and “we can already see the outlines of three distinct pathways by which nationalism is framing the frightening materialities of climate change: the good, the bad, and the ugly,” he contends.

“At its best, nationalism provides belonging and solidarity to a community of fate. How that community is defined, of course, is deeply contentious. But civic nationalism provides a model for inclusion and an ethic of solidarity and protection for national homelands. But nationalism can also promote exclusivist and nativist conceptions of national identity. This is a nationalism interested in purity and division, in assessing who belongs and who does not. Its impulse is to create hierarchies and draw boundaries.”

As for the “third pathway,” it is “uglier still, an imperial nationalism of territorial expansionism and resource grabbing,” he warns.

“This nationalism of great powers is different from that of other states. It tends to carry a messianic mission in world affairs. Imperial nationalism is the nationalism of states that think of themselves as civilizations, as holders of universal creeds and values.”

Elsewhere on the site, MiningWatch Canada program coordinator Arturo Ezquerro-Cañete takes a closer look at two recent decisions by the Carney government that “lay bare Canada’s approach to corporate accountability,” in his view.

“In June, Carney announced the abrupt closure of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE), a federal office mandated to review allegations of human rights abuses linked to the overseas conduct of Canadian extractive and garment companies and report on its findings. A month later, Canada signed a free trade agreement with Ecuador that grants sweeping protections to Canadian mining investors at a time when Ecuadorians face a deepening human rights crisis linked, in part, to existing Canadian mining investments.”

His conclusion: “The message is clear. Canada is strengthening legal protections for Canadian investors abroad while abandoning any pretense of holding those same corporations to account at home for their conduct. It’s Carney’s ‘principled and pragmatic’ approach to global engagement in action.”

Meanwhile, Press Progress executive editor Rumneek Johal files a fresh dispatch on the latest chapter in the still-unfolding saga of the B.C. Conservative Party, which “has been embroiled in scandal and turmoil, with the departure of nine MLAs who claim their values diverge from new party leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay,” and is now facing allegations of “questionable conduct” and “racial discrimination,” courtesy of one of Findlay’s former senior staffers.

“Findlay’s former Director of Operations and Stakeholder Relations Apollo Chung, who was recently fired, alleges he experienced racial discrimination from Findlay’s former chief of staff, Chris Delaney,” who recently resigned for “separate reasons,” she reports.

“’With Chris’ departure as Chief of Staff, it is time to speak openly about my time working with him,’ (Chung) said in a statement to PressProgress.

“‘During my short time as Director of Operations and Stakeholder Relations, I was repeatedly subjected to racial remarks and questionable conduct from Chris Delaney that I found demeaning, inappropriate and unacceptable. These were not isolated interactions. At the time, I let it go and stayed focused on the job.’”

In an interview with PP, Chung “elaborated that Delaney repeatedly called him a racialized slur, including during a specific incident in July of 2026, which is detailed in a newly filed BC Human Rights Tribunal complaint reviewed by PressProgress,” Jopal notes.

“Findlay and the BC Conservatives did not respond to a request for comment from PressProgress.”

Rounding out the progressive-left roster, The Maple’s Adam D.K. King reminds his readers that Labour Day “is more than a day off work,” but “should also be a day about work: to think about who performs it, who benefits from it and how much power working people exercise over the conditions under which it’s performed.”

Citing the “immortal lyrics of Solidarity Forever,” he argues that workers “quite literally hold society up” — they “build homes and infrastructure, make and transport goods, care for the sick and elderly, educate children, grow and prepare food, maintain public services, and perform the countless other forms of paid and unpaid work that reproduce society from one day to the next,” he contends.

“Yet the people whose labour makes all of this possible exercise remarkably little control over the economy they sustain. Labour Day offers an opportunity to insist that things could be otherwise. It’s a celebration of workers’ contributions, certainly, but it should also be an assertion of workers’ collective power and a reminder that virtually every meaningful improvement in working life has been the result of labour struggle.”

Trending on the right-of-centre side of the Canadian activist mediaverse:

• Rebel News correspondent Tamara Ugolini filed near-real time coverage of Conservative MP Dean Allison’s self-initiated, unofficial “inquiry” into alleged COVID-19-vaccine-related injuries during four days of hearings in Ottawa.
• Her fellow Rebel Lise Merle caught up with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre at a Saskatchewan Roughriders game, and got him to deliver an “unequivocal answer on transgender issue: ‘No men in women’s spaces, period.’”
• Juno News reporter Melanie Bennet turns her spotlight on the “mother of a convicted ISIS terrorist … running to become a public school board trustee in Milton, Ontario.”
• Finally, Juno contributor Alex Dhaliwal goes through the “214-page blueprint for life after Canada” released by the pro-independence Alberta Transition Council,” which explores “how an independent Alberta could handle everything from currency and banking to defence, policing, immigration, pensions, trade and oil and gas.”