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Rustad has resigned after sleeping on the issue https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/behind-the-scenes-of-john-rustad-s-downfall-9.7005179 The legislature will return to its seats in February.

[BC]

Chaos in the BC legislature as first 20 of 39 Conservative MLAs vote to remove John Rustad as leader after he lost or expelled five Members of the Legislative Assembly in his first year. Rustad responds that he had 71% support from party members in a recent leadership review and according to the party constitution failing to get a majority in such a vote is the only way he can be removed. MLAs are asking their lawyers if the clause about the leader being incapacitated could apply somehow (and maybe asking friends who know friends in the chemical imports business). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/livestory/rustad-removed-9.7001990

This morning Rustad was both leader of the party and Leader of the Official Opposition, tonight he is both or neither or maybe one.  The Speaker looked at the legal issues and is thinking of ending the session early.

Meanwhile the head of the Conservative splinter One BC held an illegal event on the University of Victoria campus of the "its ephebophilia not pedophilia" variety (specifically "they have not found hundreds of unmarked graves outside one specific residential school" - this is true but nobody serious argues that residential schools were therefore good for their inmates) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/onebc-uvic-arrest-9.7000919

"Given the fractal tentacles ..."

"Human flesh isn't kosher"

"tag yourself caligula or mussolini"

Now Quebec MP and former Greenpeace activist Steven Guilbeault is quitting Carney's cabinet over his attempt to ram an oil pipeline from Alberta through BC and First Nations territory to the Pacific fjords https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/guilbeault-quitting-cabinet-9.6995299

The latest minor scandal in Canada is Mark Carney replying to a question about when he last spoke to POTUS with "who cares?" That is not great for anyone in a public-facing position, but he is competent at neoliberal economics and can form and execute a strategy so he could be worse.

[NYT]

She is married to a NYT journalist because of course she is, the Anglo-American oligarchy works that way.  Back when she was being positioned to replace Justin Trudeau, I don't remember the CBC laying out all her connections to concentrated power.

I genuinely wonder sometimes if there's room out there for basically a data news site that just focuses on doing social network analysis of powerful people and their connections.

(Though that said, given something as big-hitting as 538 eventually got killed off, it does feel like data journalism in general seems to be a weaker sector than one might expect in the modern world.)

Europe, I think, has pretty similar issues re trying to attract tenured professors from the US rather than precarious academics who can get things done.

I recently saw this study of journalists in Canada who are married to or the children of journalists https://www.readthemaple.com/breaking-down-family-connections-in-canadian-journalism/ I think this one on social media figures is more about online social networks than who has coffee together or goes to the same Pilates and by the way did you hear about my nephew who is having a hard time getting into his chosen field https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news-creators-influencers/2025/mapping-news-creators-and-influencers-social-and-video-networks You cannot at the same time protect people who reach the top 10% of income and influence in their field from ever leaving it, and help people who are struggling.  Every bad year that someone has requires a good year to balance that, and someone at the top has to drop down to make room.

Edit: Americans talk about elite impunity, the phenomenon where with sufficient wealth and clout you can do almost anything and face no serious consequences. Canada is not like that but it has a lot of cozy and not terribly competent or hard-working people with more money and influence than the average Canadian.

Edit Edit: foreigners might want to refresh themselves on Michael Ignatieff for how this works on the professional-managerial center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ignatieff Its a bit different for righties like Stephen Harper.

[Oxford]

Chrystia Freeland, onetime frontrunner for the Liberal leadership and now a backbench MP, plans to move to Oxford to work for the Rhodes Trust. Her riding association has no comment on how she will square this with being MP in Toronto until the next election circa 2029 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/freeland-uk-rhodes-trust-9.6986521

She is married to a NYT journalist because of course she is, the Anglo-American oligarchy works that way.  Back when she was being positioned to replace Justin Trudeau, I don't remember the CBC laying out all her connections to concentrated power. This is also a sign that Mark Carney has trouble working with some people who are powerful in the Liberal Party of Canada. We also saw the Canadian oligarchs talking out loud when they called for people with tenure at Ivy-league universities in the USA to be brought to Canada (rather than the thousands of adjuncts and postdocs who could do just as good work given the same resources).

[British Columbia]

Two NDP and two Conservative MPs abstained which looks like it might have been an agreement to treat both parties as having the same dignity. That gave a majority of 170 to 168. Its not great that the government is so fragile. I don't know how much experience Carney has in collaborative negotiation as opposed to getting to yes. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/livestory/federal-budget-vote-2025-9.6981042

A longform piece on Mark Carney kept returning to phrases like imperious, arrogant, and thin-skinned https://macleans.ca/politics/mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/ And despite the best efforts of past Prime Ministers, Canada is not a dictatorship like a corporation, and a minority government certainly is not.

I don't see Canadians talking about how Carney is losing interest in climate change and getting excited by spicy autocomplete at the same time figures like Bill Gates are losing interest in one and getting excited by the other.  Carney is not as rich (most online sources guess his net worth in the millions) but he belongs to the international executive-financial class. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/election-2025-leaders-assets-1.7499198 Some Canadians compare him to Michael Bloomberg the elderly exec and former mayor of NYC, but Bloomberg has hundreds of billions of dollars.

In the provincial capital of British Columbia, a riding association of the Conservative party of British Columbia (second largest party in the legislature, up from barely existing two years ago) dissolved itself. The former head has now been elected leader of the Christian Heritage Party of BC rather than join One BC, the hard right/anti-Rustad splinter of the BC Conservatives, or Centre BC, similar but without any MLAs. https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/unhappy-with-rustad-bc-conservatives-in-esquimalt-colwood-dissolve-riding-association-11480605

I post this with the Canadian budget vote underway. The budget is a confidence motion so if it fails the governor general must call an election or give another party a chance to form a majority. A week ago the Liberal government lead by newbie to elected office Mark Carney was three votes short of a majority and has no public agreement with another party.  They got one Conservative MP to cross the aisle. They got Green Party head Elizabeth May to vote yes after returning to commitments to meet the Paris climate agreement (Canada has one of the highest emissions per capita in the world, and those emissions have risen rapidly since 1990). It seems unlikely that the Conservatives will vote yes, so the options are the NDP (7 seats), the Bloc (22 seats), and persuading one Conservative to vote yes.

There is talk of a general strike in Alberta after Premier Daniele Smith preemptively used the notwithstanding clause to force teachers back to work. I believe that would be a proportionate response.

One Federal Conservative MP has joined the Canadian Liberals but right now they don't have enough votes to pass a budget. People who have read all 500 pages say its a very odd document (cutting taxes on yachts and empty homes, lots of talk about liquid natural gas, carbon capture and storage, and Canada's AI future, talk about the need to speed up decisions on proposed construction projects but cutting the federal workforce). Another conservative MP will resign and Conservative head Pierre Poilievre is trying to delay that until after the budget vote.

Head of the BC Conservatives John Rustad survived a leadership review but participation is low and his party is a mess.  BC politics may settle in to the NDP as the sober party of university-educated managers and the BC Conservatives as the party of the people who watch too many online videos and listen to too many podcasts like the US Republicans. That would leave capital in a bind, because they liked having a party that would union-bash but otherwise governed in ways The Economist would approve of. https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2025/09/24/Rustad-Survives-BC-Conservatives-Implode/

The BC Greens now have a 25-year-old leader whose only electoral experience is student politics. She pushes one regressive policy (free tuition for domestic students, people from rich families consume more education in Canada, and there are already large subsidies to low-income students, so that is like "free docking for yacht owners" or "no taxes on your first rental property"). https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2025/09/29/How-Zoomer-Became-Leader-BC-Green-Party/

"Please continue with the horrific book"

"Pretty much a fae trap"

"Well I've unlocked a new irrational fear when going to the loo in the middle of the night... "

"Do I need to get out the etymological dictionaries? "

Two stories from the world of finance: a Ponzi scheme in Alberta which collapsed in 2023 after the rise in interest rates, and someone with an ambitious plan to take replace The Hudson Bay Company with a new chain of department stores but possibly not the capital or expertise.

It probably says something about my circles that most Canadians I know are quite sour about Carney's government already, but it's actually if anything slightly increased its advantage over the Conservatives since the election. Are the Conservatives just in a horrible mess federally or something?

I don't think anyone really likes Mark Carney.  He is a centrist neoliberal with a PhD in economics and a background in central banking.  But Pierre Polievre is a MAGA nutcase and the NDP have no leader at all (and said a lot of economically illiterate things during the last election: centrist economists have a lot of problems, but they are going to spend the next 50 years pointing to the second Trump administration to illustrate their lessons on the importance of free trade, an independent central bank, comparative advantage, etc etc etc.).  And Canada has no good options today and Carney is competent and can form and follow a strategy even if its a centrist neoliberal strategy.  We could do worse!

Trying to break a strike after 12 hours because people who can afford to take vacations by air are facing unexpected expenses is very neoliberal, but its not the worst thing a PM of Canada could do.

For my entire lifetime, Canadian elites were rewarded for integrating more closely with the USA and centralizing power within Canada eg. the dictatorship of the Prime Minister's Office and all the cozy little monopolies and oligopolies in different industries.  That path now leads to becoming something like the elite of Puerto Rico, but they don't know what else to do.  Just the fact that Canada may finally get free trade between provinces like is normal between countries tells you something.  Flailing like Carney embracing chatbots (but they are provided by US or Chinese companies, run on US cloud services, and embody the values of the US elite) or promising 5% defense spending (but will that include a stronger electrical grid and emergency response services; and wait, if climate change is a major security threat, why try to shove pipeline projects where people don't want them at RCMP gunpoint) show the extent of the confusion.

Two stories about the absurdity of trying to make the medicine line real: a golf club in New Brunswick whose main access road was in the USA https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/aroostook-valley-country-club-border-issue-ends-1.7608819 and a rural road on the Montana side which was maintained by county workers from Alberta because at least as many Canadians as Americans used it https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/u-s-blocking-canadian-access-to-road-southern-alberta-county-has-long-relied-on-1.7602645