bhaggart.bsky.social
Professor, Political Science, Brock University
Knowledge governance, IPE, Sydney Swans tragic
Co-author, with Natasha Tusikov, The New Knowledge: Information, Data and the Remaking of Global Power (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).
2,146 posts
1,022 followers
513 following
Regular Contributor
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I think, and I’d be more than happy to be proven wrong, that the big mistake has been in thinking that the US crisis is a technical problem that a bureaucrat (which is what Carney is at the end of the day) can solve. But the problem is political, and requires political skills.
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FWIW, I think history will be very kind to Trudeau’s prime ministership.
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I also wonder if “suffer-no-fools” Carney will tolerate the failures that will necessarily happen if one encourages greater civil servant independence and risk-taking. One person’s justifiable risky action is another’s foolish decision.
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And we’ve now had four decades of looking to business to save the civil service from itself. It has continually not worked. Trying to get government to run like a business has led only to worse services and worse governance. It keeps failing. But maybe this time, because… Mark Carney?
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Law and technology are less important than mindset and ideology.
An AI society is a surveillance society. It leans authoritarian, making it harder to justify privacy guardrails of the kind (correctly) demanded here.
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As true today as it was when I wrote this back in January. There is no agreement worth the paper it's printed on with the US under the current administration. Threats and promises are equally disposable. bsky.app/profile/stew...
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Except the US has been working successfully for the past decade (under Biden and Trump) to paralyze the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism. And Canada knows this.
More likely is that things are exactly as they appear.
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The larger problem remains: a reduction won't come for free, and would only last until the next time the US identifies a "problem" or policy they don't like. Which they will. Because there's always another problem. It's a path toward becoming a vassal state.
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I mean, like, hello, is this thing on?
financialpost.com/commodities/...
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Canadian healthcare is in crisis, public education is in crisis, Canadians can't afford a place to buy or rent, food prices are through the roof. And Carney's response is to quintuple military spending.
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Current military spending in Canada is about 6% of national budget and this will likely rise to 25% in a few years if Carney actually follows through. This is a massive transformation of the Canadian state into a war economy.
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New prime minister ramming through massive bills with Conservative support that are are designed to steamroll treaties and environmental regulations, and pledging to increase military spending 5x it's current level. This is essentially a massive conservative government with no opposition.
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The needed response is as obvious as it is difficult to accept for a generation of policymakers who have only known a world of laissez faire economics and free trade. It starts with abandoning the fantasy that a trade agreement with the US is worth pursuing.
www.theglobeandmail.com/business/com...
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Carney’s strategy is fatally flawed. It can’t work, because he’s misdiagnosed the problem, which is US authoritarianism and long-term unreliability. His political inexperience is showing, and it will hurt Canada’s long-term prospects.
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Any concessions Canada offers will buy us partial, temporary relief, AT BEST. Our best strategy has always been to treat the tariffs as a given and get serious about building up the domestic economy as fast as possible. Which would involve much more than what we’re seeing from Carney domestically.
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Carney could not be more wrong to think that putting security on the table to get a better trade deal strengthens Canada’s hand. The problem isn’t the offer, it’s the negotiating parter. The only thing that would work is offering complete subjugation. Adding security is giving away the store.
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Canada is not being well-served by Carney’s flawed, misguided US strategy.
The self-imposed deadline was just a dumb move all-around. This only works in negotiations when *both* sides agree to it, or if one side can impose their will on the situation. Which is definitely not the case here.
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And at number 69, my most-streamed song of 2023, courtesy of Melbourne's Flyying Colours (note the spelling). Smooth shoegaze that goes down easy.
#Best100 #MusicSky
youtu.be/cHHgy19s5z0?...
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(Spoiler: They desperately, feverishly want to believe in what genAI companies are selling. Expect a general, cross-country watering down of copyright laws. For the record, it’s the wrong move from a policy perspective, but there you are.)
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If Trump hadn’t won in November, a politically inexperienced central banker like Carney wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of winning anything. Lucky him.
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I’m coming around to the view that Carney has used Canada’s existential crisis with the US (which still exists) as a pretext for a long-planned run at the prime ministership, and now to push through a suite of policies that he would’ve pursued even if Trump had never been elected.
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Is it to appease the US through a deeper (!) security partnership with an authoritarian regime that doesn’t feel bound to any agreements?
And if this level of defence spending is so important, why the hell is Carney pushing through a tax cut and not raising taxes?
It doesn’t add up.
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Are we spending it to create an AI-soaked Canadian version of the US military-industrial complex? Which, as has happened in the US, will warp technological development toward surveillance-heavy military and security objectives and outcomes at the cost of developing more humane technologies?
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Are we spending this money so that Europe won’t abandon us if the US turns its eye toward Canada? But Carney just said that Trump no longer wants to annex Canada, and Carney also wants deeper security cooperation with the US.
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The 2% (now 5%) target was predicated on supporting a US-led alliance in defence of a democratic Europe and “the West”. The uncomfortable reality is that the US is no longer interested in this mission and has turned on its old allies. So what are we even doing here? What’s the mission?
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Add to that the silliness of beginning with any arbitrary spending target, instead of first figuring out what you need to do and *then* working out how much it will cost.