There was a new Nanos poll out on Tuesday:

And no wonder.
Maybe its because Poilievre’s Conservative party doesn’t know what is important to Canadians, and what is not

The latest “Team Pierre” email is Very Concerned about trans athletes. #cdnpoli

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— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) July 28, 2026 at 3:17 PM

As Kim replies

Poilievre amplifies a locker-room grumble while Carney works on urgent, volatile world issues.
Stay within your capabilities, I guess.

— KimFromNovaScotia (@kimns.bsky.social) July 28, 2026 at 4:49 PM

Maybe its because Alberta separatists appear to be losing steam, making Poilievre even more irrelevant.

Maybe its because he just has nothing to say that Canadians want to listen to anymore. 

In Inspirement Magazine, Annie Koshy describes how Poilievre’s false claims about Canadian events have been used in Trump’s 51st State rhetoric:

….Press conferences held by Pierre Poilievre generate livestreaming and wall-to-wall coverage simply because he is the Leader of the Official Opposition. Regardless of whether they contain any verifiable news.
Every time he takes to the podium, his statements are broadcast in real-time, fully and completely. Complete with demands, accusations, and blame directed squarely at Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberal party. His words are aired, transcribed, headlined, and distributed to millions of Canadians, as if their utterance alone constitutes a newsworthy event. The critical question of whether what being said is actually true is now treated as secondary to what is sufficiently quotable. And this matters.
… He called Canada’s 0.1 percent GDP contraction a Liberal recession, a characterisation that four major bank economists, the Bank of Canada itself and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business attributed primarily to American tariff pressure and external economic shocks rather than to domestic policy failure.
He repeated the claim that Prime Minister Carney refuses to pay his taxes in Canada, a statement contradicted by the documented fact that Prime Minister Carney is a Canadian resident who files and pays Canadian taxes, with his assets in a blind trust independently controlled and approved by the federal Ethics Commissioner.
He continued to describe Brookfield as Prime Minister Carney’s company while his own financial disclosures confirm he holds investments in a Vanguard ETF whose top holdings include both Brookfield Asset Management and Brookfield Corporation.
He stated on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Canada admits one million immigrants per year, a figure no government data supports. He falsely characterised a sentencing outcome in the Holocaust monument vandalism case to more than half a million social media followers, claiming no real jail time was served when the offender had in fact spent months in custody at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre before being released on strict bail terms after pleading guilty.
…At the Conservative convention in January 2026, Poilievre blamed Liberal policies for fuelling separatist movements in both Alberta and Quebec. He argued that Ottawa had been stomping on Alberta’s energy sector and Quebec’s jurisdiction….
…Poilievre’s unity call is contradicted by his sustained rhetorical strategy of framing every domestic policy debate as a fight between ordinary Canadians and liberal elites. This framework is explicitly borrowed from the populist playbook, designed to fuel division in every jurisdiction where it is deployed.
The consequences of this failure are not theoretical. When Trump posted about the ’51st State’ back in June, he used as his justification the same Liberal recession framing that Poilievre had been feeding into Canadian and American media in preceding days. The Leader of the Official Opposition’s economic narrative was picked up, amplified, carried across the border and deployed by a foreign head of state as an argument for annexing Canada.
This is evidence of how treating Poilievre’s claims as news without interrogating their accuracy comes with consequences. Misinformation about Canada’s economy was produced domestically, travelled internationally, and returned as a threat to Canadian sovereignty. That chain of events deserves to be stated plainly and connected explicitly in coverage that understands what is at stake….

Here’s a good response to the Nanos poll:

We should petition for Poilievre to oust Smith and become Premier of Alberta so he can tank the UCP

— cm 🍁 (@cmcalgary.bsky.social) July 28, 2026 at 2:57 PM

Trump in Iran
Things aren’t getting any better.  I wonder if the general public in the United States is aware of just how badly everything is going for America and for all their allies in the region. 

I thought this cartoon described Trump’s situation exactly:

Here is Richard Wolff

And here is Paul Krugman

… Trump isn’t backing down because his war of choice is extremely unpopular, although it is. Nor is he backing down because the economic costs of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are too great, or because the fiscal cost of the war is skyrocketing, while the country faces enormous deficits and rising long-term interest rates. Trump says he doesn’t care about any of that. And in a way I believe him — because even a fully reopened Strait won’t recoup his standing with voters fast enough to salvage the midterm elections for Republicans.
No, most reports, like this one from the Wall Street Journal, say that Trump is backing down because military professionals have finally managed to convince him that U.S. stocks of advanced munitions are so severely depleted that the current rate of use will soon leave America critically weakened. Moreover, replenishing those stocks will take years once the shooting ceases….
…True, this war was never winnable, and perhaps we should be thankful that U.S. defeat became obvious before Trump committed ground troops and needlessly sacrificed thousands of American lives. But we should also consider that this defeat shows how deeply and pervasively Trump and Hegseth have crippled the U.S. military. Their incompetence, corruption and irresponsibility have weakened us with incredible speed. And it will take many years for America to recover, if it ever does.

And here is Phillips O’Brien

Wildfires Update

Source

And thanks to NorthernPoV for his comment here yesterday to alert me to this Tyee article about the importance of alerting travellers about highway closure warnings, in a province like the BC where mountain ranges limit road choices.

… Fire is highly dependent on localized and often unpredictable weather. It cannot be known for sure that a fire will “make a run” many kilometres in one direction until it begins doing so. And until recently, such runs were relatively rare. But climate change has altered the dynamic.
For a decade, I’ve closely watched as fires threaten communities near me and as local governments issue evacuation alerts and orders. The frequency with which orders were issued without prior alerts having been given suggested that local governments hadn’t fully processed how today’s climate-change-stoked weather allows flames to cover larger distances much quicker.
But to my eyes, they’ve gotten much better. This year authorities have timed alerts exceedingly well, giving residents in most areas as much time as possible to make preparations.
Now we need our transportation officials to follow suit…
Today, as I write this, there are evacuation orders for properties along Highway 8 between Merritt and Spences Bridge and along Highway 97 between Williams Lake and 100 Mile House. Both orders suggest the potential for significant fire behaviour along the highway.
If you look at BC Wildfire’s extremely useful map and website, you can get a sense of the danger to those two roads.
DriveBC’s channels, on the other hand, do not currently provide that information to the general public.
When highway closures come late, we often see videos of drivers passing through dicey conditions on highways just before they are closed….

And in Europe:

Commonwealth Games Update
Amaze amaze amaze! Such an outstanding team

Félix Dolci gold on men’s vault and bronze on men’s parallel bars

Lia-Monica Fontaine bronze on women’s balance beam

Maude Charron gold in women’s 63kg weightlifting

Charlotte Simoneau gold in women’s 69kg weightlifting

Camryn Rogers gold in women’s hammer throw

Kylie Masse gold in women’s 50-metre backstroke

Nicolas Guy Turbide bronze in men’s S13 50-metre freestyle

Lorne Wigginton brone in men’s 400-metre individual medley

Oliver Dawson silver in men’s 200-metre breaststroke

Sophie Angus bronze in women’s 50-metre breaststroke