Tip Toeing along on the edge

The news lit up like the night sky on Victoria Day with PM Carney ordering the negotiating team home from Washington, a disappointing yet emphatic response to the US's last-minute changes made to the proposal from Trump's team that were unconscionable, unjustified, and unreasonable, according to Carney. Mark Wiseman, Canada’s ambassador to the US, was quoted by the National Post saying it wasn’t just a single issue that prompted talks to collapse late Friday, but a variety of things. As reported by the National Post, Wiseman used the metaphor of a handshake deal to buy a house, only for the would-be buyer to learn that appliances weren’t included, the furnace had no warranty, and neither the garage nor the yard were on the same property.

Dean Blundell is credited as the mind that created the below in blue italics.

According to a Google search, Dean Blundell works as an online political and social commentator, operating his digital media brand Crier Media (formerly DeanBlundell.com) and publishing commentary on X. After his long career as a shock jock morning host on Toronto's 102.1 the Edge and a subsequent stint on Sportsnet 590 The Fan, he shifted away from traditional radio to digital content creation. Though he previously ran a large digital podcast network, he scaled back those operations due to online monetization challenges, focusing instead on independent digital commentary and digital media.

The find-out portion begins now! So where does this go? 

Let me tell you where it goes, and why I think Trump folds before the leaves change.

Expect a fury of announcements this week. Start with what Carney has already announced, on the record. Dollar-for-dollar retaliation on Trump’s $28 billion, coming September 8, targeted at steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics. Focused, surgical, aimed at red-state supply chains, with more support for Canadian workers layered on top of the $25 billion already deployed.

That’s the announced part. 

Now the part I believe is coming, and why the math forces it. For eighteen months, Carney has resisted the export tax. Reporters have asked him about it since the Trudeau days, when Ottawa first war-gamed export levies on oil, uranium and potash. As recently as late July, standing in Alberta, he waved it off: “I don’t see the value of it.” Reliable supplier. People trust us. All of that.

But listen to what he said next, because Carney never wastes a sentence: “There’s other things we can do if we need it.” And then listen to what he said Saturday, after they came for our sovereignty: “Canada fuels American growth. I don’t think they want us to stop sending any of that.” And in his address to the country: “Canada has what the world wants. And we will not allow any nation to determine our future.”

The reliable-supplier doctrine was built for a trade dispute. This stopped being a trade dispute the moment American negotiators demanded control over our language laws and our trade relationships. You don’t owe reliability to a counterparty who just tried to paper-annex you. Every constraint that kept the energy weapon in its holster died at midnight Friday. The premiers are already screaming for it. Ford listed the arsenal out loud: oil and gas, critical minerals, electricity, potash, uranium. The only person who was holding it back was Carney, and the Americans just spent two weeks teaching him why he shouldn’t.

Now flip the board and look at Trump’s side of it, because this is where it gets genuinely dark for the White House.

He is running a 50% tariff war against his largest energy supplier during an oil shock. Hormuz has been functionally closed to commercial traffic for five months. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is sitting at 293 million barrels, the lowest since Reagan’s first term, drained at record pace and pumping at 61% of design capacity. There is no cavalry. The Gulf isn’t coming. OPEC isn’t coming. The only country on Earth with millions of barrels a day of spare heavy crude, pipelined directly into US refineries that were literally built to run on it, is the one he just tried to annex with a term sheet.

Midwest refineries cannot substitute Canadian heavy crude. That’s not politics, that’s chemistry. An export levy on Canadian oil doesn’t hurt Alberta; American refiners eat it and pass it straight to the pump in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Ten weeks before a midterm. Same story with uranium for their reactors, potash for their farms, and the electricity keeping the lights on across the northern border states.

And behind all of it, the thing I’ve been writing about since April 2025: the bond market. The 30-year at levels not seen since 2007. Bessent’s emergency buybacks erased by the market in 48 hours. Japan, China and the UK all selling at once. Foreign central banks dumping $230 billion since February. A president who, asked about Treasury yields, threatened to use the military on his own creditors. And Canada sitting quietly on $460 billion of that debt, fifth-largest holder on the planet, having added over $100 billion to the position since I started telling you this was the play.

Carney’s Checkmate: How Canada’s Quiet Bond Play Forced Trump to Drop Tariffs

Trump needs Canadian oil to keep the pump price down. He needs Canadian creditors to hold his bonds. He needs a deal to hold his midterm. Canada needs none of those things this week. That asymmetry is the entire story, and it’s why I think he caves, publicly, dressed up as some “beautiful new framework” he’ll claim was his idea, before September 8 makes the front page of every swing-state paper.

He walked into this thinking he was shaking down a branch plant. He was actually picking a fight with his gas station, his grocer, his power company and his banker, all of whom turned out to be the same guy, and that guy ran two central banks.

Understand what almost happened Friday night. A foreign government attempted to acquire, by contract, control over Canada’s trade relationships, cultural protections, official languages policy, auto industry, and provincial procurement, with a unilateral-enforcement whip attached, and they tried to do it in the dark, at midnight, on a deadline they manufactured.

The 51st state thing was never a joke. It was a mission statement. Friday was the paperwork.

It failed because one guy read the document. Now comes the invoice, and it gets paid in September tariffs, in energy leverage, and in Ottawa, no longer having any reason to hold back, and in a bond market that just watched the United States try to defraud its fifth-largest creditor at a signing table.

I told you about the bonds eighteen months ago. I told you about the snapback yesterday. I’m telling you now: Trump just started a sovereignty fight with the one country that can raise his gas prices, his food prices, his electricity bill and his borrowing costs simultaneously, and the man deciding how hard to squeeze spent his whole life learning exactly where the arteries are.

Elbows up. Find out.

Granted, Blundell is not the only voice shouting advice about turning off the energy and farming taps, as it were, but everyone that I have chatted with about this is very cautious, citing it's a "use it once" type of action. I'm the same as so many I have discussed Trump with in that I don't understand why we even continue attempting to negotiate since he's proven time and again that he'll say something today and then change it before dawn on the next day. That's not negotiating, at least as far as I see.

The one thing that Trump cannot change is the amount of US Treasury Bills that the planet holds and the economic fallout if those bills are ever called. The beginning of that has already occurred when Japan announced its intention to sell off 1.1-1.2 trillion of it's T-Bills to prop up a bottoming out Yen. Just recently I read that Trump has directed the Treasury department to sell more short-term T-bills and use that money to deal with the long-term T-bills that are being cashed ... not sure if I understand this strategy but it sounds like there's some nail-biting going over the amount of debt they have.

We live in interesting times folks, and no one I know has a working crystal ball.

The only thing that pundits in Canada agree upon is that we should all be prepared for some short term pain before any long term gain.

It's been a tough stretch

It's been a really tough stretch of late, with yet another of my friends crossing over, having lost a battle with a significant health concern. What makes this situation particularly difficult is one, he was a really great friend for a really long time and two, he was as fit a 70+ year old that you could ever meet. Being in my 60's now, I still feel that there are plenty of great years ahead that might be filled with more weddings, more grand children, or family milestones of the like, but my sense of mortality has been shaken to the core over the past 18 months as a number of friends, former colleagues, and former team mates have succumbed to a wide variety of maladies. 

Doug Eves was one of the nicest people I think that I have ever known. Quick with a genuine smile, a razor sharp wit, and a warm welcoming demeanour, he attracted people like moths to a porch's bright light on a dark summer evening. He always had time for you, be it for advice, for consoling, or simply a chat, and he was always present, like you were the most important thing in the world right then. Travelling a similar path for such a long time, we shared so many great moments that our friendship developed that magic when we could pick up right where we left off, despite it being a while since we last chatted, especially after he retired from teaching in the mid 2000's. Inevitably, our encounters would take place on the lakefront trails when he was jogging or walking his dog. See, that's the thing, Doug was an activity junkie, maintaining his high school physique throughout his adult life, and it really shook me that he might suffer an early death.

The quality of our relationship made the news of his passing really difficult to receive.

I first met Doug Eves as a student. Yep, he was a relatively new teacher at my beloved Barrie Central, and I was a high school jock without a care in the world. I didn't have Doug as a teacher, but I was blessed to be on the receiving end of his wisdom as a grade nine wanna-be hooper where he and Al Stevenson were coaches. He was a quiet sort, so imagine my surprise when coach Eves walked from the wings in the infamous Teacher Assembly and crooned out a reasonable rendition of Duke of Earl with the Huddle-rock band. I never asked him why he stopped coaching guys and focussed on girls after our time together, and I hope I wasn't one of the reasons, but Barrie's infamous snow days gifted us a bunch of afternoons to play with and against each other, I time I look back on with a huge warm fuzzy!

When I was hired by the SCDSB for an elementary position at Maple Grove PS, I became reacquainted with Doug the parent as his children Megan and Daniel were standout hoopsters and I was coaching or refereeing. While I was on a first name basis with Megan, we had limited interactions outside of the basketball court, but his youngest Daniel was a different story since we faced each other first in the Elementary Simcoe County championships, and then GBSSA Championships once I made the jump to secondary. Dan was a major component of those extremely talented teams, HIS victories I might add, and you always remember those that got you. Doug and I fostered an adult friendship that seemed to grow steadily with each passing year.

When I made the leap from Maple Grove to Central, Doug was a well established teacher celeb and for the first time, our friendship became professional in nature, even coaching together a handful of times, but it deepened when I joined the lunch time trotters for the daily jog around the bay. All manner of topics were broached during those slogs, and while I gasped out the occasional retort between gulps of much needed air, Ol' Dougie glided along like a gazelle with nary a care, hardly raising a sweat or his breathing alongside me. Another of our Central traditions was to play "Lunch Bucket" with a bunch of other teachers once in a while, and I vividly recall a 60+ Dougie gliding his way around the court, nailing those "Russian Spot" J's like it was his job. 

Super nice, super fit, super athletic, super smart ... if you didn't like Doug, there was something amiss.

After I retired, I qualified for the bi-weekly "Mayor's Meeting" of Old Fart Central teachers, regularly held at one of Barrie's finest establishments, a time to kibitz and guffaw about life, old shenanigans, and our joint passions. I'm definitely of the opinion that Doug's passing hit me so hard because much of our shared moments traversed so many eras in my life. Our group had already lost a few members when it became obvious that Doug was struggling with something causing some communication challenges. Sadly, it wasn't long after that when he and his family needed more help, and our visits became less frequent, though just as fulfilling for both of us. That's Doug in the white sitting beside me in the photo at the right.

Tragically, I was all set to make the trek into Barrie to visit Doug again with long time buddy Ron, also a dear friend of his, when we received a message that Doug had passed early that morning. Even though my previous visits were warning enough that his condition was worsening, the end is like a slap in the face, especially when it's a great friend who was so healthy and vibrant for so long. Like the song, "Only the good die young", but at 73 Doug was supposed to have far more time with Diane, his own children, and his grandchildren. 

If you wish, this is the link to his obituary CLICK 

Dougie, you'll always be close to my heart, and that amazing smile will live on forever in my mind. Those of us you left behind will cherish our moments forever. Enjoy the pain free jogging that Heaven offers.