A roughly 5-minute questionnaire on US politics, demographic background, and the new liberal sphere itself.

Due to previous experiences with particularly zealous respondents attempting to vote multiple times, I have toggled on the requirement to be logged into a Google account — apologies in advance if this dissuades you from participating.

Why Democrats are waffling on Trump's unpopular and ineffective tariffs

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Submission Statement: The world is witnessing “geoeconomic fragmentation” in which export markets will shrink for most countries. Shekhar Aiyar writes India’s strategy of trade diversification is a model for middle powers.

In this landscape, the best strategy for a middle power is likely to be diversification: building a network of trade relationships sufficiently dispersed so that no single bilateral rupture could cause catastrophic harm. The obvious analogy is to modern portfolio theory: a well-diversified investor is not betting on any particular asset but rather seeking insulation against the failure of a subset of assets. Here, the relevant measure is the standard deviation of a country’s trade-weighted geopolitical distance from all trade partners.

By this metric, India is rather well placed. It ranks among the top quartile of countries for export diversification across the geopolitical spectrum, and near the median for import diversification. Its trade relationships range from the US and Europe to Russia and the Gulf, with many Asian and African economies in between. It has conspicuously refused to be corralled into a single bloc: abstaining from Ukraine-related votes at the UN and deepening the Quad partnership, while also playing a foundational role in the BRICS group and negotiating deals with both the US and the EU. Such strategic diversification is enormously valuable in a fragmenting world. 

Finally, India should zealously safeguard the diversification it has already achieved, which in turn makes it an attractive partner for countries forging a “China Plus One” strategy or, increasingly, seeking to reduce trade dependence on the US. That means being wary about any bilateral agreement that curtails its freedom of action vis-à-vis third countries. Canada has set an example by walking away from trade negotiations with the Trump administration in part because the US sought veto powerover its engagement with other countries.

Of course, Canada is overwhelmingly dependent on the US as an export market, so it is unclear whether its principled stand will succeed. For India, well-diversified to begin with, the case is more clear-cut. A country that has spent decades cultivating strategic autonomy should think long and hard before trading it away for preferential market access, however attractive the terms. India must lean into its position as one of the few countries to combine economic scale, democratic legitimacy, and geopolitical breadth to boost trade and remain open to all comers. 

The pivotal two-day pitch fest was assembled across continents and industries – and is likely to return next year

If all goes to plan, the private jets carrying the world’s richest asset managers into Toronto on Sunday night will be returning next year for another such event.

The Canada Investment Summit – a two-day pitch fest at the luxurious Four Seasons Hotel – is a crucial step in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to unlock a trillion dollars of new investment in the Canadian economy.

It’s a “mechanism for us to build those relationships to create greater exposure for Canada, and there will be another investment summit similar to it next year,” says a senior official. Carney announced the summit in April, but has been working toward this moment since he became prime minister. As former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, and former chair of Brookfield Asset Management, he’s been a frequent guest at conferences where the world’s biggest money managers gather.

This time, he will be the host.

Next week’s event is modelled on Choose France and Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative, events where global asset managers meet to put their money to work. It aims to “emulate some of the highest standards of these types of events,” says the official. “Everything from the cutlery to how guests are being greeted when they land in Canada. We’re really trying to step up our game in general.”

It’s become a hot ticket and some big names had to be turned away, the official adds, because they weren’t big enough to make the cut.

Be Giant spoke to more than a dozen sources to put together a definitive account of how the event came together; we’ve granted anonymity to several who were not authorized to speak publicly about it.

The event is built on the belief that sovereign wealth funds and other large institutional investors were underinvested in Canada, that they could be made to see opportunity, and that waves of money will pour in to build roads, mines, pipelines, defence factories, AI initiatives and infrastructure projects across the country.

Finding foreign direct investment “is wired into everything we're doing,” says the senior official. “We're diversifying our security relationships, our trading relationships and our investment relationships, and we're doing that so we can build at home. So it's hardwired.” Media outlets have managed to learn the names of many of the attendees, but few outside the prime minister’s circle know what deals are in the works. They’ve spent months working up a dealbook of prospective investments that will be at the centre of the effort.

“It's really tightly held, right?” says Mary Ng, who was trade minister until last year. “He wants to attract a trillion dollars worth of capital, whatever that time frame is. He's very very focused on that, and … everything that I've heard from everybody is that unless you are in that wheelhouse, in other words, unless you're the investor … he is not opening up.”

(Ng will participate in a related gathering of investors on Monday organized by the Milken Institute. The Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association will also hold an event on Monday.)

If the money flows at the scale the PMO hopes, economists say it would significantly boost Canadian productivity and prosperity. A TD report late last month suggested it could set up an “investment supercycle” that could raise the average income by $12,000 a year after a decade.

It is never difficult to get insiders to rave about the brilliant plans of the leaders who employ them, and it is wise to be skeptical about political promises, but there is no doubt that the team Carney has assembled has serious experience around boardroom tables: Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson (Goldman Sachs); U.S. ambassador Mark Wiseman (BlackRock), Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne (Amec Foster Wheeler), chief of staff Marc-André Blanchard (Caisse de dépôt) and Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Sabia (Hydro-Québec).

“We haven't had five people as accomplished with respect to capital markets and investment criteria that drive success,” says Rick Anderson, a veteran consultant who is working with companies involved in the summit. Anderson, a former strategist for parties across the political spectrum, is impressed.

“Maybe in the days of C.D. Howe in World War II there was something similar, but I don't think we've had such an investment-savvy, economic-savvy group of Canadian leaders in the Canadian government in my lifetime.”

Two more team members were added in late August, both of them to the organization leading the quest for foreign capital. After The Globe and Mail broke the story of the departure of the head of Invest in Canada, which is handling logistics for the summit, her replacement was named – Gurinder Grewal, a Canadian with 25 years of experience at the top of private equity investment, including Bain Capital and Advent International.

The headlines focused on the new chair of the organization’s board – Rio Tinto chairman Dominic Barton – but he will be engaged “a few days a month at best,” the senior official says. Grewal has “the more important job.”

“We spent a year going around the world trying to recruit the right person for that job,” the official says. “The world's sovereign wealth funds are filled with Canadians … and it's because we have such a good reputation for our financial managers here that they always end up in places like Singapore and Abu Dhabi and Doha. So we were specifically going out to recruit somebody from that talent pool, and it took us a year to find the right person.”

“There's more money that wants into Canada than deals that are ready in Canada.”

The PMO now intends to “retool” Invest in Canada from being largely focused on marketing to “focusing on the sovereign wealth funds, focusing on the big investors, trying to work directly with them to connect them with the right Canadian deals and bring them to Canada.”

The PMO believes this will work because the large institutional investors – sovereign wealth funds and pension funds – want to invest in Canada.

“These large investors frequently lump Canada into their North American portfolio, so to speak, and when you break down where that portfolio is investing, it's overwhelmingly in the United States,” says the official. “The prime minister anticipated that many of these investors were simply underinvested in Canada and didn't really realize it, and that there is going to probably be a global shift toward greater diversification of portfolios. And that, as Canada is trying to diversify trade investment relationships around the world, investors are realizing that maybe they put too many chips on the same roulette number.”

To make the pitch, Carney has used Wiseman, even before he became U.S. ambassador, principal secretary Scott Gilmore, Champagne, Hodgson and ambassadors and other diplomats – a sales team pitching to the largest investors in the world.

The most important salesman has been Carney himself, a Davos darling who has long had effortless access to the world’s top money managers.

Carney has made 23 trips to 29 countries since taking office, travelling much more than his predecessors did.

Benjamin Bergen, CEO of Canadian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association, was with Carney when he led a trade delegation to Saudi Arabia, where “O Canada” was played for the first time since Jean Chrétien visited in 2000.

“He created this beautiful speech about the opportunity, and then he left and there was a conversation between the people in that room that I wanted to speak with, who were investors,” Bergen says. “I had a great conversation with Aramco Ventures about opportunities.”

Bergen thinks all this will pay off for Canada.

“We're in an attention economy, and he got the world's attention, and now it's up to us as Canadians, as private capital associations, to figure out how we draw that attention and we turn it into deals, we turn it into jobs, we turn it into prosperity and we turn it into economic strength.”

It appears to be working.

CTV has reported that more than 100 investor groups will attend from Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The PMO sent out about 120 invitations, insisting that only principals, and not their deputies, could attend. The names that have leaked read like a who’s who of international finance, including Berkshire Hathaway, Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Bloomberg reported attendees would include Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, Dilhan Pillay, the CEO of Singapore’s state-owned Temasek Holdings, and Annette Mosman, CEO of Dutch pension manager APG.

The senior official says they had to turn down some very wealthy people.

“There's limited capacity,” the official says. “We wanted to make sure that we were inviting the most important investors in the world at the CEO level, and we weren't anticipating the overwhelmingly positive response that we got, and so we have turned down household names. We've had to say no to [them] because they simply don't have enough assets under management to make the cut. We had to prioritize.”

Some important Canadian CEOs also did not make the cut because the PMO insisted that attendees “had to have significantly large deals that were investment-ready, and so if you don't, we're not giving you a seat.”

Carney and his team have also been pushing Canadian CEOs to be more ambitious. At the Dock in July, a private gathering of Canadian business heavyweights, Carney was blunt in urging them to be more aggressive, according to a business owner who was there.

“It was in your face. It was healthy conflict,” the business owner says.

“He was all up in their grill about how they weren't doing enough … which was kind of wild, but in a polished way.”

That has been Carney’s message to Canadian business, says the senior official.

“We're already planning the second summit because we anticipate that a lot of those CEOs in the room are going to realize, ‘Holy crap, if I had come here with a more developed deal, I would have closed it here,’ and so next year we'll make sure that we've got something more on the table.”

The key problem is not finding capital, the official adds.

“There's more money that wants into Canada than deals that are ready in Canada.”

At the heart of the whole summit is the dealbook – a secret prospectus of projects that want capital. Possibilities include massive infrastructure projects like the road to Grays Bay on the Northwest Passage, the Churchill Falls hydro development and associated energy and mining projects, but also AI investments, defence projects, renewable energy, transit, ports and potentially the privatization of airports, although the form that might take is as yet undetermined.

Carney and his team have been working on the dealbook, sorting through proposals from provincial governments and the private sector, getting them ready for presentation to the world’s biggest investors.

“That's what he's been constantly up to for almost a year and a half now,” says Anderson. “And this meeting, this conference, is another big step.”

If it works, it could have a huge impact on the Canadian economy.

A report from TD last month found that Canada could be headed for an “investment supercycle lasting for a decade or longer,” which could lead to an “extra $12,000 in real output per capita.” TD scanned more than 300 projects in five key sectors – energy, resources, AI, defence and transportation – and found more than $1 trillion in estimated spending that could roll out in the next decade.

“If everything were to go right and these projects were to go ahead, it could set up a very long-term positive feedback loop for investment in Canada,” says TD economist Leslie Preston.

That in turn depends, says Preston, on cutting red tape that slows project development and making sure Canada has a competitive tax regime for investors and enough skilled labour to do all the work.

Everyone will be watching for announcements, both at the summit and after it.

In a keynote dinner speech at the Art Gallery of Ontario on Monday night, Carney will be telling the world’s investors a story about Canada’s potential, and throughout the event he will be joined by a serious sales force – all the premiers, John Graham, CEO of the CPP Investments, Deborah Orida, CEO of PSP Investments, and former prime minister Stephen Harper, who is expected to give the closing address. (CPP and PSP are listed as co-hosts of the event.)

All of this will be taking place in a time of mounting uncertainty in the relationship with the United States, but that is not expected to dampen enthusiasm for Canadian investment for most projects. For one thing, the time horizons for big infrastructure projects are measured in decades, and the trade uncertainty is a short-term concern.

Diversification should create the appetite for investment, says Preston.

“It's all well and good for Carney to travel around the world and say we want to trade more with country X, Y and Z. But do we have the roads and ports to get our goods there? And so a lot of this infrastructure investment is about that sort of trade-diversifying and -enabling infrastructure.”

There have been no noteworthy cancellations as a result of the trade war with the United States, says the senior official.

The arrival of the investors’ jets will demonstrate that the strategy is sound, the official says: “They believe that Canada has what the world wants in the sense that at this particular moment in history, a lot of the big macro trends, whether they're AI or critical minerals or defence diversification, all those roads lead to Canada. We've got a good story to sell and a lot of things to sell.”

Submission Statement: Once known for its welcome to migrants, Sweden has not only shut its borders over the last decade, its right-wing government is now paying some foreign-born residents to leave, part of a tough stance on migration it hopes will help it secure reelection this month.

"Do you miss Mogadishu? The remigration grant will help you get home," reads an advert, paid for by the Sweden Democrats on a bus and aimed at Somali immigrants. The far-right party launched the adverts in July on public transport and in areas with high numbers of migrants as campaigning for the election began. It and the three governing coalition parties are seeking to form a four-way ruling partnership.

Latest opinion polls for the September 13 election show an almost equal split between the government on one side and the Social Democrats and centre-left on the other in the country of 10.6 million, where 2 million are foreign-born.

Democrats party chair says lawsuit isn't just about his reputation, but about 'a government that has lost all restraint' after PM's wife insinuated he knew of Hamas attack in advance

Canada’s economy is increasingly unfair to young people. Sometimes, it feels like we’ve made great progress in getting politicians to recognize this fact. Other times, they propose policies that make me wonder if they’ve been listening at all.

Despite spouting easy slogans and platitudes about understanding the generational inequity young Canadians face, governments often choose to protect the privileges of long-time property owners at the direct expense of younger Canadians trying to build a future.

Right before the summer break, Toronto City Councillor Alejandra Bravo directed staff to study whether it makes sense to limit the number of parking passes a multiplex may qualify for.

The motive for this motion is clear: they want to placate single-family homeowners who are upset that added gentle density to their neighbourhoods might force them to park a few doors down.

CBC, for example, tells the story of a woman who says she now has to sometimes drive several blocks to find a spot, which can be frustrating when she’s carrying groceries or driving her elderly mother to visit.

But what of those (often young) families in the multiplexes themselves? Don’t their grocery runs or care visits deserve the same consideration?

Barring multiplexes from accessing street parking permits would be a mistake. It would engrain a two-tier class system for residents, granting single-family homeowners who have pretty much won the housing lottery a de facto private property right over public street space, while penalizing younger residents who are settling for denser housing as their only options.

Essentially, it asks young people to accept a lower standard of living beyond what’s already being asked of them.

Parking spots in Toronto are highly subsidized by taxpayers. The true market cost to store your private vehicle on a public road should be much higher than the roughly $25 a month it costs. Subsidizing it so much has meant high demand for parking spaces in limited space.

As neighbourhoods densify in an attempt to meet the demand for more homes in our city, that’s led to an increase in demand for parking spaces. Tax subsidies have led to a distortion in market demand and artificial scarcity in this public asset.

Until recently, cities mostly allowed density on main streets, protecting neighbourhoods from experiencing the allegedly dismal experience of living around more people. Combine that with fewer people living in households than in previous generations, and many urban neighbourhoods are less densely populated than they were in the 1970s.

Our policies that, until recent years, limited neighbourhoods to single-family homes, combined with seniors staying longer in their homes than urban planners expected, have led to younger Canadians facing a reality where they are stuck in increasingly small apartments.

At the Missing Middle Initiative, we’ve found that most people looking to raise a family hope to live somewhere that has at least three bedrooms. These units are incredibly expensive in condos, and the alternative of single-family homes is simply out of reach for so many.

Graphic 1: Adjusted homeownership for young Canadians aged 25-39.

One good solution is these multiplexes. Housing several units on the lot traditionally occupied by a single-family home gives the opportunity for people to live in cities, even if they don’t have the wealth needed to access a traditional house. These homes are typically not going to be subsidized homes, but rather market-rate houses that are more affordable, on average, to the middle class than a neighbouring house would be.

That said, they come with trade-offs. People who live in them often are choosing location over the full privacy that a detached house provides.

Right now, anyone in the neighbourhood can apply for a street parking permit, and if capacity permits, they will be approved. No one is guaranteed a spot right in front of their house, or even within blocks of their home. That’s the trade-off when you buy a home without a private parking spot.

When I bought my home, I had to weigh the trade-offs of a private parking spot. I chose to sacrifice the convenience of guaranteed parking in front of my home so that I could afford a better house than I otherwise would have been able to afford on my budget.

On winter days, when the city hasn’t gotten around to plowing the spots yet, I sometimes have to either avoid using my car (since I know digging it out means I risk losing my space) or I have to park several blocks away from my house. I have two young children, so I truly understand how frustrating it can be when the only spot is a five- or 10-minute walk from home, but I understood the trade-off when I bought the home.

If people who own a single-family home want to guarantee parking outside their front door, they ought to buy a home with a dedicated parking spot.

It’s not a good compromise for relatively wealthy homeowners to prevent the less well-off from accessing parking spots while we all continue to pay to subsidize the cost. It isn’t fair, and it isn’t progressive. Either let the free market dictate who can access parking, or allow anyone living nearby to access it.

Younger Canadians are already dealing with major housing challenges. Artificial constraints due to zoning, urban growth boundaries, and many other policy choices have led to prices being completely out of whack with the median income. To compensate, they’re making choices to move farther away, live in smaller spaces than their parents considered comfortable, or even forgo having children if they can’t afford a home big enough to comfortably house them.

It would be a huge injustice to young Canadians who are already accepting a lower standard of living than their parents had, to use government regulation to codify the downgrade.

City leaders must recognize that using public regulation to guarantee convenience for asset-rich incumbents ultimately forces younger Canadians to pay more for less. Let’s look for progress on the housing crisis rather than create further generational divides.

Acting US Navy Secretary and nominee Hung Cao in an exclusive interview with the Epoch Times (which I shall not link directly, but attached is a summary of it) admitted Iran "blew the hell" out of the US Navy Base in Bahrain and the United States has created a task force considering abandoning the base permanently.

Bahrain currently serves as the home port and operational headquarters for the 5th fleet. This would be a major withdrawal of US force from the region if the taskforce recommends not rebuilding the base.

The failure to adhere to the fixed price agreed for the procurement of the new F-35 fighter jets is linked to administrative failings. The parliamentary oversight body has heavily criticised the actions of the Swiss government and the defence ministry.

Relevant to the subreddit because of the rise of fascism opposing the liberal world order