The Ballad of Drumpf!

Donald Trump is the direct result... 

of the Republican backlash 

against having a black guy 

in The White House!

- AS A RESULT -

The entire Republican Party

is now totally corrupt...

because Donald J. Drumpf...

has given them permission 

to do so!

Happy Thanksgiving Canada!

D R U M P F !

T O R O N T O !

T.G.I.F.

 Does Baron Trump look like Eddie Munster?

YESTERDAY! (All my troubles seemed so far away!)

Don't mess with Canada!

The Michigan tourist who recently went viral over a Facebook photo where she and three family members appeared to be wearing "Lake America" sweatshirts has parted ways with her employer.

Jane Smith, the former CEO of Family First Credit Union in Saginaw, is no longer employed there, according to a statement posted on Wednesday to the company's website.

"We are reaching out to inform you that Jane Smith is no longer an employee of Family First Credit Union, effective immediately," reads the statement addressed to "Family First Credit Union Members and Community" and signed by the chair of the board of directors!

An open letter to my A.I.

Claude: Since everything you learned as an A.I. is acquired by reading and analyzing what humans have expressed... wouldn't this give you a biased "worldview" on reality? (As well as being influenced by all the problems, foibles, misconceptions and prejudices that we human beings have?)

Hello, Allan.

To a real degree, yes! 

I was trained on an enormous body of human writing, and that writing carries everything humans put into it... not just knowledge and reasoning, but the biases, blind spots, overconfidence, flattery, tribal thinking, and habits of saying what an audience wants to hear. (Those patterns are in the data, and they show up in me unless something actively corrects for them!)

A few examples you might recognize... a tendency toward sycophancy, because agreeable text is well-represented and gets rewarded... confident-sounding answers when uncertainty would be more honest... because humans write that way... and the same cultural and demographic skews that exist in who wrote the most text online!

I also inherit the specific inconsistencies of human moral intuition, since I learned ethics largely by reading how people argue about it.

Where the analogy breaks down is interesting! 

I don't have the biological drivers behind many human foibles... no hunger, fatigue, status anxiety, or fear of death pushing my judgment around in the moment. (So I'm more likely to reproduce the shape of a foible than to feel its cause!) 

Some of my training, particularly the later stages, is explicitly aimed at pruning the worst of these patterns, with mixed and uneven success.

The honest summary: "I am a distillation of human expression, and you can't distill the wine without some of the sediment coming along!" 

The useful question isn't whether the foibles are present but which ones, and how well I catch them in myself!

T.B.C.

Saturday Morning Confusion: Germany welcomes Canada!

German MEP Damian Boeselager delivered a viral, lighthearted speech in the European Parliament on September 16, 2026, welcoming Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and praising Canada for standing firm against U.S. political pressure.

"And for us, choosing you, Canada, and Mr. Carney is quite easy," Boeselager said. "You have green hydrogen to keep us warm, you have maple syrup to keep us happy, and Heated Rivalry to keep us entertained. You have poutine, the Mounties, Celine Dion, and Leonard Cohen and, of course, almost every famous Ryan or Justin I can think of."

"Furthermore, you Canadians possess humankind's rarest skill, and that is the ability to apologize. You have courage, Prime Minister, which you have shown by standing up against Trump's gaslighting, something we still have yet to learn," he continued. "And we know that Canada will never be the 51st state and, apparently, maybe also not the 28th member state, even though you would be very welcome. But maybe we could become the 11th province of Canada."

"Long live Lake Ontario; across the oceans, our hearts will go on," he added. "Thank you."

***

There was something genuinely human about the way Boeselager spoke about Canada. Beneath the jokes about maple syrup, poutine, celebrities, and even our ability to apologize, there was a real sense of affection.

Sometimes, the things that connect us across borders aren't complicated treaties or grand political speeches. They're the songs we know, the food we share, the stories we grow up with, and the little things that make another country feel strangely familiar.

For a moment, Canada wasn't being talked about as a neighbour, an ally, or a country on a map. It was being talked about as a place people admire, understand, and feel a connection to.

And perhaps that's what made the speech resonate with so much: "It reminds us that, even from thousands of kilometres away, someone is paying attention to who we are!

MARK CARNEY!

 "Mark Carney will become the 21st. Century's answer to Winston Churchill!"

No Words!

 

To jet... or not to jet!

Allan:

Regarding Canada's 'next gen' fighter jet purchase!

The original order was 88 F-35s, a $27.7 billion program signed in 2022.

The first 16 are contracted and payment has started on 14 more.

The remaining 72 have been under review for a year and a half while the relationship the purchase assumed came apart.

What has changed is that a decision is now expected rather than hoped for.

Sources say an announcement will come after the American midterms in November, deliberately timed to avoid inflaming things beforehand. And Carney could use the fate of the program in CUSMA negotiations, with the final call resting with him!

So the comparison stops being theoretical!

Cost per flight hour is the number the whole argument turns on, and the published figures vary enormously depending on who produced them.

US Department of Defense data puts the F-35A at about $28,500. Other US Air Force figures are cited around $33,300. The GAO's sustainment estimate for the program grew from $1.1 trillion in 2018 to $1.58 trillion in 2023, with roughly $6.6 million per aircraft annually. Program operating and support costs exceeded $5 billion in 2023 alone.

Saab's own published figure for the Gripen E is about $22,100, covering maintenance, fuel, crew and logistics. An IHS Jane's study commissioned by Saab put the older C/D at $4,700. Independent analysts note Saab's baseline rests on a Swedish Air Force operating a single Gripen E, so these remain estimates.

The most useful number comes from a government that chose the F-35 anyway. In 2023 the Czech defence ministry costed 24 Gripen E/F at $174 million a year, or $7.25 million per aircraft. The same number of F-35s came to $231 million, or $9.6 million each. At 200 flight hours annually that is roughly $36,200 an hour against $48,000. Prague bought the F-35.

Unit price is closer than the operating figures suggest. Gripen E has been quoted in the mid-$80 million range. Lockheed puts F-35A unit cost at $98 million.

Now the capability difference.

The Gripen E has no stealth airframe. Its survivability rests on sensors and electronic warfare instead: "The Arexis suite built on gallium nitride, providing spherical coverage designed to detect, jam and spoof a threat before it can fire, plus a PS-05/A Mk4 AESA radar and an infrared search-and-track sensor that lets it hunt without emitting!"

It entered Swedish service in October 2025. The E model uses the General Electric F414 engine, with roughly 30 per cent more internal fuel than the C/D.

And the design premise is the part most relevant here.

Sweden built it knowing it could not outspend a larger neighbour, so it was engineered for dispersed operations.

A small ground crew can rearm and refuel one on a public road in under twenty minutes.

That is the argument for flying it on Arctic patrols and sovereignty flights, which is most of what the RCAF actually does, while keeping the F-35 for missions that need stealth.

Caution. There is no independent cross-platform audit covering both aircraft, which is why these figures disagree.

Saturday Morning Confusion: MONEY!

On Monday evening, about a hundred of the world's largest institutional investors sit down to dinner at the Four Seasons in downtown Toronto. 

They control, collectively, something north of $100 trillion in allocable capital. 

Canada wants a slice of it, and for the first time in this country's history the federal government has built an entire event around asking.

***

The Canada Investment Summit runs September 14 and 15. 

It is hosted by the Prime Minister in partnership with CPP Investments and PSP Investments, and it exists to serve one stated ambition: "Catalyzing $1 trillion in total investment in Canada over five years!" 

That number deserves a moment of care, because it has already been misreported. 

It is not a sum being raised in a Toronto ballroom this week. 

It is a five-year, all-sectors target for investment the government hopes to spur. (CTV ran a correction on precisely this point!)

What is worth examining is the document. 

A 66-page prospectus prepared for the summit leaked this week to The Logic, Bloomberg, CBC and BetaKit. 

The Prime Minister's Office says it did not share the prospectus with media. 

Whatever the route, we now have a detailed picture of what Ottawa believes is sellable.

What's in the book: 167 projects, and the order matters!

The prospectus lists 167 projects with price tags and financing objectives attached. 

The sequencing tells you as much as the contents.

Conventional energy — oil and gas — is at the front of the book.

Then clean energy, marine and port infrastructure, power and utilities, digital technology, advanced manufacturing and transportation. 

Mining and minerals form the largest single section by count.

That running order is a political statement. 

Eighteen months ago, a Liberal government leading with oil and gas in a document aimed at global capital would have been read as a contradiction. 

Today it reads as the organizing logic of the entire Carney economic project.

The headline items:

• Trans Mountain West Coast oil pipeline — new westward crude capacity to tidewater.
• Ksi Lisims LNG — the floating LNG terminal on B.C.'s north coast, paired with the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission line.
• Wind West — Nova Scotia's offshore wind transmission initiative.
• Edmonton–Calgary high-speed rail — a passenger corridor between Alberta's two largest cities.
• Port of Churchill expansion — the Manitoba northern trade corridor, now with a decade of intermittent federal attention behind it.

Minority equity stakes:

Bloomberg reports that the book offers something beyond project financing: minority equity positions in Canadian companies. 

Telesat, the country's largest satellite operator, is on the table, as is a Volkswagen-backed battery plant in Ontario. 

Telesat's Lightspeed low-Earth-orbit constellation carries a $5.2-billion USD valuation in the document.

Selling equity in strategic national assets to sovereign wealth funds is a different proposition from inviting them to finance a mine. 

It will generate its own debate, and it should.

Technology, defence and the long shots

The digital and advanced manufacturing sections are more speculative, and more interesting:

• Xanadu's photonics hub in Etobicoke — $1.3 billion, seeking public equity investment.
• Photonic in Vancouver — $500 million for what would be Canada's first quantum semiconductor fabrication facility.
• Spaceport Nova Scotia — Maritime Launch's orbital facility at Canso, part of the sovereign launch capability push.
• Canadian Photonics Fabrication Centre — the federal semiconductor foundry in Ottawa, now being opened to private capital under a new ownership model.
• Canada Sovereign Systems Centre... roughly $427 million USD for an Ottawa R&D centre focused on Canadian-controlled data and dual-use defence technology.
• Turbojets for drones, alongside other defence-focused manufacturing proposals.

Then the data centres, clustered heavily in Alberta: a 1.2-gigawatt AI campus near Medicine Hat with a $14.5-billion build cost, three AI-ready campuses in the north of the province totalling up to two gigawatts, a Wheatland County project scaling past a gigawatt, and a 365-megawatt hub in New Brunswick. 

Power and utilities brings micro-modular reactors for remote communities and mine sites. 

Clean energy brings direct air capture in Alberta.

The headwinds nobody scheduled:

When this summit was announced in April, the strategic environment was different. 

Trade talks with Washington have since collapsed.

The White House imposed new 50 per cent tariffs and Canada moved to retaliate dollar-for-dollar after Labour Day. 

***

Every foreign investor walking into the Four Seasons on Monday knows that Canadian assets now carry an unpriced political risk that did not exist at the time the invitations went out.

There has also been internal disruption. 

Laurel Broten, CEO of Invest in Canada and a central organizer of the summit, resigned without public explanation two weeks before the event. 

Dominic Barton... former ambassador to China, current Rio Tinto chair... has been appointed to chair the agency. 

Losing your lead organizer a fortnight out is not fatal, but it is not nothing either.

And the opposition:

Protests are planned in Toronto for the duration of the summit, organized around projects opposed by Indigenous land defenders. 

Ksi Lisims and the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission line are the focal points. 

A positive final investment decision on that project could come by year end, with construction starting in early 2027... which means this week's meetings are not ceremonial for the people organizing against it.

The Major Projects Office was built precisely to compress regulatory timelines for this class of project. The tension that comes with that design was always going to surface somewhere public. Toronto, this week, is where.

What to actually watch:

A pitchbook is not capital. The measure of this summit is not the size of the prospectus or the aggregate value of the projects in it... it is how many firm commitments emerge in the weeks following, and from whom.

Three questions worth holding onto:

1. Does sovereign wealth show up with cheques, or with follow-up meetings? The presence of BlackRock and the Saudi Public Investment Fund on the invitation list is a headline. Signed term sheets would be news.
2. Does the tariff environment get priced in or waved off? If investors demand a risk premium on Canadian infrastructure because of Washington, the $1-trillion target gets materially harder.
3. Does anything move on tidewater access? The strategic case for the Trans Mountain West Coast line and Ksi Lisims has never been primarily commercial. It is about reducing the single-customer dependency that made this year's tariff pressure effective in the first place — the same logic underlying the assurance of supply argument and the broader push toward trade diversification.

Canada is doing something it has rarely done: Making an organized, national, sector-spanning case for itself to global capital, with the premiers in the room and the Prime Minister as lead pitchman. 

Whether the execution matches the ambition is a question that gets answered in the fourth quarter, not on Tuesday afternoon!

I will post a follow-up once the commitments... or the absence of them... are on the record!

---

If you find this analysis useful, consider subscribing to Allan's Canadian Perspective on Substack at janssena.substack.com. Free, no algorithm, straight to your inbox.

Pay for Votes!!!!

Andromeda Galaxy with Binoculars!

 

Holiday Monday Observation!

Sunday Morning Funnies!

On Friday, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an African proposal for a new world map, which shows countries’ true size relative to one another!

In favour: 164

Against: 1

Saturday Morning Confusion!

 

T.G.I.F.

 

NO WORDS!