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Jul 29 2025

The Roundup: PM's Qualities. Ford focus. EU deal

MON JUL 28 2025
David Akin's Roundup
PM's Qualities. Ford focus. EU deal
Note to readers Apologies for the delay with Monday's newsletter. The publishing platform server crashed. - DA
Canada
What Canadians Want in a Prime Minister and Who’s Delivering on It
Canadians have a clear and widely shared view of what they want in a leader: calm under pressure, principled over partisan, thoughtful, strategic, and in touch with ordinary people. When measured against these expectations, Mark Carney significantly outperforms Pierre Poilievre on nearly every dimension. The contrast is especially striking among accessible voters – those open to voting Liberal or Conservative but don’t currently support those parties – who see Carney as better aligned with the leadership qualities they value most. [Abacus Data]

Next year’s FIFA World Cup will be the biggest ever, with the three countries hosting a record 48 teams. Between June 11 and July 19, they will play 104 matches, most of them in the U.S.

With millions of fans expected to cross borders to attend the games, U.S. President Donald Trump’s harsh immigration policies — which include travel bans on some countries, immigration raids and mass deportations — are generating anxiety. [CP]
Lori Turnbull: ... let’s call B.S. on the tactics of the Longest Ballot Committee, which are disconnected from its stated goal and potentially damaging to the democracy that they claim to care so much about. Long ballots are not a design flaw of first-past-the-post systems. In fact, if we were to switch to a proportional system like the single transferable vote, our ballots would be longer because parties would run more than one candidate in multi-member ridings. What the Longest Ballot Committee is really doing is mocking the provisions in our election law that make the ballot accessible, particularly to independent candidates without powerful networks, all while claiming to have a beef with the concentration of power in the hands of political parties. [Policy Magazine]
Jeffrey Simpson: In English Canada, this kind of group identification, and the self-victimization within some groups, has become fashionable to the point of being obligatory in cultural institutions beyond universities, including museums, publishing, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (in contrast with Radio-Canada), and the Liberal Party, at least as it was under Justin Trudeau. The cardinal question that MacKinnon, a president emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan, raises in his new book-length essay is whether narrow group rights are trumping individual rights, thereby creating “illiberalism,” which, in turn, leads to more political and intellectual polarization. His answer: yes. His plea: let’s work against this trend. [Literary Review of Canada]
The Provinces
A behind-the-curtain look at the insatiable political ambitions of Doug Ford
I had asked Ford, back at his house, if he had his eye on the PMO, and he said, “Ask me in a little while.” So, in his office, I asked if Teneycke coming for Poilievre was about laying track for a run at the CPC leadership. “We’ve never sat down and had that conversation. I’ll tell you one thing. I love my job. I have the best job in the world. I have just a huge amount of work to do and an agenda to move forward. And you never know. And people ask. You never know what the future brings.” There are certainly barriers between Ford and Parliament Hill. For one, he has only Grade 9 French. But he’s taking lessons. “Comme ci, comme ça,” the premier answered when I asked how it was going. According to one insider, Ford is serious about a run and believes he can win without Quebec if he can connect in Alberta. A more practical obstacle: Ford hates flying so much that he has to sit far from the window, eyes forward. Staff can’t say anything to him, not even a comment about the weather. This could make campaigning in Fort McMurray difficult. For the record, Teneycke denied that a federal run is in the works: “If he wanted to be doing that right now, I’d be running a leadership campaign. And I’m spending 0.0 per cent of my time on it.” An excellent deep dive from Katrina Onstad [Toronto Life]
Aurora
Elsewhere
U.S. and E.U. Reach Preliminary Trade Deal
The European Union and the United States agreed on Sunday to a broad-brush trade deal that sets a 15 percent tariff on most E.U. goods, including cars and pharmaceuticals, averting what could have become a painful trade war with a bloc that is the United States’ single biggest source of imports. [NYT] (🎁 link)
Politicians working out in public is a bipartisan custom. But Democrats are increasingly posting weightlifting content in hopes of reaching male voters in the so-called “manosphere” that Trump mastered during his campaign. They are also trying to move past the ongoing arguments – fanned by Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill – over former President Joe Biden’s physical and mental fitness. I'd argue CPC leader Pierre Poilievre has been doing this for years, appearing in public, for example, in tight t-shirts that shows off a muscular torso or having his team post some pictures of him working out. In 2013, CTV did a whole story about his fitness routine. Mind you, we saw Justin Trudeau boxing from to time-to-time and, in the final weeks of Jagmeet Singh's leadership, the NDP released a video of their leader boxing. So it's definitely a thing for political communicators.  [CNN]

Afghanistan’s Taliban recently suspended chess over concerns that it encourages gambling, which is banned in Islam, a move that takes away yet another activity from the country's population. [Radio Free Europe]
Media
Why it matters who owns a newspaper
The heated Lords debate raised fundamental questions about who should own newspapers, and the link between ownership and editorial content. On one side were those who argued that Britain’s newspapers faced an “existential threat” without outside investment. On the other were those who warned against the potential influence of a foreign power on one of the UK’s longest standing publishers. [The Conversation]
Science and Technology
The idea of robotic metabolism combines various concepts in AI and robotics. The first is artificial life, which Wyder termed “a field where people study the evolution of organisms through computer simulations.” Then there is the idea of modular robots: reconfigurable machines that can change their architecture by rearranging collections of basic modules. That was pioneered in the US by Daniela Rus or Mark Yim at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1990s. [Ars Technica]
The Calendar
  • 0900 ET : Sault Ste Marie, ON - Industry Min Melanie Joly tours Algoma Steel.
  • 0930 ET : Prince County, PE - PM Carney makes an announcement.
  • 1330 ET : Armstrong, BC - Secretary of State Buckley Belanger makes a funding announcement
Issued this day ...
… in 1998: Sc 1742a se-tenant block of 4. Scenic Highways — 2. Design: Lou Cable
What an appropriate stamp issue to mark today as the Akin family begins our summer holiday on a road trip that will take us over one of the ‘scenic highways’ depicted in today's issue, the 2nd quartet of three issued by Canada Post from 1997 to 1999 that feature some of Canada's scenic highways.

The Akin family has done Highway 2 through New Brunswick  (Sc 1741) plenty of times over the years and, if you haven’t done it in a while, you’ll be pleased to hear that it is now a fully separated four-lane highway all the way from the Quebec border past Fredericton, on to Moncton and through to Nova Scotia. Route 2 is essentially the NB portion of the Trans-Canada Highway. We’ll be doing most of Route 2 from east to west as part of a holiday beginning today which will take us from Ottawa — >Saguenay Fjord National Park—> Forillon National Park —> Grande Digue, NB  —> Ottawa.

Our travels this year won’t take us to PEI but it’s a place I’ve visited often, first as a kid with my parents and later as a parent with my kids. And it’s almost impossible not to do (sc 1742)  “Route 20”, the Blue Heron Drive, during any visit to PEI. This 30-km stretch of secondary road runs through “Anne’s Country”, west of Cavendish and east of Malpeque Bay and will take you to the birthplace of Mary Maud Montgomery .

Still on our family bucket list of drives we want to do: (Sc 1739) the Dempster Highway that connects Dawson City YT to Inuvik NT and (Sc 1740), the Dinosaur Trail, a 48-km loop that runs northwest of Drumheller.

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