This is my tribute to my Hungarian freedom fighting father and mother.

The following is an excerpt from the book my wife Shelley and me are writing called SHIMJELLY BEEN—Supernatural Love: Dream to Reality

SOVIET STEEL

Suddenly, a huge blast rocks the ground that feels like a 9.0 earthquake. A quick scream turns to gurgles. The cloud of dust and smoke chokes out the lungs. Then silence. Everyone freezes. In that frozen moment, my father’s past surged forward and took over...

The revolution erupted on October twenty-third, nineteen fifty-six, six days into the inferno of 1956. The Danube churning, a silver serpent slicing Budapest in two—Buda to the west, Pest to the east, bound by the iron sinews of the Chain Bridge the air crackled with defiance, a celestial signal echoing from Sumerian sands to Hungary’s wounded heart, full metal impact.

Beneath the bridge’s shadow stood my father, his mind in Kispest, on Rozsa Utca-Rose Street, thinking of home—he stood resolute, a Táltos griffin, his lion’s heart thundering, eagle’s wings poised in spirit, a Shamanic force born of Hungary’s ancient soul.

Named for Saint Imre, the prince who led pagans to Christianity’s cross, he carried the weight of that sacred shift, his clan Torma/Tormási lineage a bridge between the primal Táltos/Shaman of the Árpád dynasty and the Áldott Táltos, namely: Christ brought to the Hungarians by Saint Imre, now reborn in his defiance.

As he faced the river’s icy jaws, memories of his life surged—a flood of his past, perhaps his last moments before the revolution’s next deadly step. Rozsa Utca had forged him, a rough Kispest street where he brawled as a boy, commanding respect as the son of a police captain. His father, my grandfather, walked a tightrope under communism, a double life of compliance to the regime and loyalty to the Hungarian people. Protecting them was his silent vow, even as he waited five years for the family’s first car, gazing through a fence until it was paid.

Imre, toughened by fights and hardened by World War II’s decimation, stood proud, a warrior shaped by Hungary’s scars. Yet Transylvania called louder as he stood there, a mystic pull to his roots or past lives, where the Torma lineage wove back to the Árpád dynasty and pagan Táltos/Shamans. He visited its shadowed forests often, drawn to the land’s primal pulse, his Shamanic heritage whispering of powers beyond the mortal veil.

My grandfather, John Torma, had shielded the people with the same fierce heart. Fighters, protectors, warriors—all pulsed in Imre’s blood as he stood, the weight of their legacy anchoring him against the coming risk. He snapped out of the memory as András and thirty men came into focus standing with him, a brotherhood split by fate’s cruel hand: half were grizzled veterans, ferocious men of battle, their scars earned in wars past, faces carved by the weight of conflict; the other half were child-men, teenagers sixteen to nineteen, high school and university students turned feral by loss.

Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandfathers, grandmothers—slaughtered in the Soviet invasion’s hell, their grisly deaths forging these youths into warriors of vendetta.

In six days of revolution, their anguish birthed a steel-like resolve. Their young hearts were wild with a desperate need to protect the homeland at any cost and pay back with vengeance the slaughter of the innocent they loved so desperately. Gripping submachine guns and rifles, their breaths misted in Budapest’s frigid air, these men and boys stood united, a constellation of defiance against the Iron Curtain’s chokehold.

Stalin’s Vultures

Above, Stalin’s Soviet troops perched like vultures on the Chain Bridge, a bloodthirsty horde driven by their leader’s unrelenting cruelty. Whipped into compliance by Stalin’s iron will, some Soviets fought with drunken savagery, intoxicated by liquor to dull the bitter cold and hunger they weren’t prepared for, their screams wild as they sought blood.

Others, hollow-eyed conscripts, killed to survive, knowing disobedience meant death by their own commanders’ hands. Their gunfire spat death into the dark, a chaotic roar of bullets raining from both banks of the Danube. The river, a silver serpent splitting Pest from Buda, churned below, its icy floes clashing like the jaws of a prehistoric beast.

Freedom fighters, desperate to defend both sides of the city, had commandeered riverboats to ferry men and arms between Pest’s fervour and Buda’s stronghold. But the Soviets, swarming from the north, struck from both banks, their bullets and shells shredding the boats. Splintered hulls sank, crashing against the bridge’s massive footings, pinned alongside jagged ice floes.

The wreckage, fused with the river’s frozen breath, formed a treacherous footbridge—half-submerged, undulating, alive. Boats lodged against stone, their timbers groaning under the river’s weight, while floes shifted and churned, a restless mosaic of ice and ruin.

My father’s eyes, sharp as an eagle’s, scanned the chaos. The Chain Bridge, their path to Buda Castle, was sealed by Soviet steel. The only way was the river itself—a deadly dance across this moving, breathing bridge of wreckage.

Beside him stood András, his best friend since childhood, a brother forged in World War II’s fires. Their bond transcended words, a synchronicity of souls, as if their spirits moved as one, guided by the same unseen hand. No glance was needed; they knew each other’s heart, each step a silent vow to lead or die.

My father, the Shamanic griffin, took the first leap without fear, blazing the trail like Attila storming the steppes. His men—veterans and child-men alike—followed, a constellation of courage, jumping from floe to shattered boat, then back to floe, hugging the bridge’s underbelly to dodge the Soviet hail.

The footbridge lived, treacherous and unforgiving. As my father stepped onto broken timbers, the wood sank beneath his weight, water lapping at his boots, only to rise again as he sprang to the next floe. The ice, slick and shifting, dipped under each man’s tread, forcing nimble leaps to stay afloat.

It was as if they walked on water, defying the Danube’s icy jaws with Shamanic grace. Drawing on what seemed like a previous life.

Above, Soviet bullets screamed, cutting men down mid-step, the bloodthirsty Soviets’ aim as wild as their drunken roars, their hunger and cold fuelling a frenzy that cared little for precision. Crimson stained the floes, veterans and child-men alike falling to the river’s merciless jaws, their young lives and seasoned souls claimed by the Danube’s relentless hunger.

Yet my father, Imre Torma, the warrior, pressed on, his lion’s heart a drumbeat against fate, his eagle’s spirit soaring above the chaos. András, his spiritual shadow, matched his every move, their synchronicity a beacon through the hail of bullets.

Together, they guided the men—grizzled warriors and vengeance—forged youths—across the treacherous footbridge of ice and wreckage, each leap a defiance of death itself. The shattered boats groaned, sinking and rising under their steps, while the floes shifted, forcing split-second bounds to the next precarious hold.

It was a dance of Shamanic grace, as if the ancient spirits of Hungary’s pagan past whispered strength, while Saint Imre’s Christian light steadied their resolve. The Soviets’ bullets tore through the air, claiming more lives, the young fighters’ eyes burning with the fury of lost families, the veterans’ scars pulsing with battles remembered.

My father led, blazing the trail like Attila storming the enemy, his every step a vow to reach Buda’s shore. When he finally touched the muddy bank, András at his side, he turned, his heart instantly shattered with grief. Only eight remained—twenty-two souls, grizzled and green, swallowed by the river’s primal pull, their blood mingling with the ice, their spirits ascending to join the Sumerian stars.

Substacks are coming but I have two messages.

Alberta’s Conservative WEF darling harvesting demoralized separatists and Conservatives in Alberta outnumbered by immigrants in their big cities.

We have to see clearly. Only then do we win.

Stay tuned for more.

It amazes me how Canadians continuously fall for the dupe. Over 100 years, and Canadians have been used, abused, taxed to death, and now the country is being literally destroyed. Every time the people want to stand up for themselves, whether you think it’s right or wrong, the government comes in and crushes the alternative thinking to what the globalists want.

The city of London has had this country or colony, however you see it, under full control since the slaves or serfs or subjects were given the right to govern themselves on behalf of the crown.

Not a single citizen is represented by anybody in the government because everybody in the government swore the allegiance to the crown and at no point did they ever swear allegiance to the people.

When Danielle Smith was voted in as the premier of Alberta, I knew the fix was in.

Of course, that wasn’t different when Rachel Knotley was premier, because ultimately Alberta’s premiers have always been the servants of the city of London. God bless the free men and women and let’s hope that at some point they’ll wake up.

Giddyup, they are coming with hats on!

Philip the Fourth didn’t need to explain himself to his subjects. He was the crown, and the crown’s sovereignty was his sovereignty.

The Templars were erased because they held the crown’s debt, not because they had wronged the people. The people had no say in any of it. They were subjects, and subjects serve.

Canada still runs on that same logic, and it does it in public, on television, in both official languages, right in our faces.

Every prime minister, every cabinet minister, every member of the Privy Council swears allegiance to the Crown. Not to the people. Not to the Constitution.

To the Crown. Take a breath and ponder that just for a moment. The Crown.

The oath is read aloud in English and in French, so the entire country hears it — Quebec included.

It’s not a hidden ritual.

It’s a televised one.

And here’s what makes it work: repetition.

Say the same words long enough, in the same ceremony, year after year, and people stop hearing them as words. They start hearing them as reality.

Canadians don’t consciously think of themselves as subjects.

Yet the oath is the mechanism that keeps the subject relationship alive, without anyone having to say it out loud.

Compare that to the American executive.

The President swears to defend the Constitution and the people. The executive branch exists to serve the republic.

Nowhere in the Constitution Act, 1867 — the British North America Act, renamed in 1982 — does it say that the prime minister or the ministers of Parliament owe allegiance to the people.

Because they don’t.

They owe it to the Crown.

The oath is written right into the founding document itself: section 128 requires every member of the Senate and House of Commons to swear allegiance to the Sovereign before taking a seat, and the Fifth Schedule sets out the exact words — “I do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles the Third.”

The oath isn’t missing from the law. It IS the law.

The symbolism isn’t decoration. It’s the load-bearing wall.

A nation that swears its leaders to the Crown, in public, in both languages, every single time, is telling its people exactly where sovereignty sits — and it isn’t with them.

The oath taking ritual in both official languages is burned into Canadians’ psyche.

Canadians like to believe they have a different identity — a gentler one, a more moral one, a superior one.

They tell themselves they are better than Americans.

But when you look at the fundamental difference — how American leadership stands behind its people, fights for them, and swears allegiance to them, while Canadian leadership leaves them last — it is almost as if the Canadian has been given a fiction to believe in.

A fiction that they are better.

And yet, at the end of the day, their government puts them last. Let me repeat that, LAST!

That is the whole difference.

The American president swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution — a document the people themselves ratified, that enumerates their rights and limits the government.

Even an American who has never read a word of it is protected by that oath, because the oath binds the executive to the people.

The Canadian prime minister swears allegiance to the Crown — an institution above the people, not of them. The people are wholly left out of the equation. One oath puts the people first. The other puts them last.

When can we stop the fiction and just say, F^ck the crown?

Three dates. One day. October 13th.

In 1492, three ships pressed westward across an ocean nobody had crossed. The official story is discovery.

The deeper story is economics.

Columbus wasn’t sailing for glory — he was sailing because Portugal had locked up the eastern route to Asia. Spain couldn’t buy its way into Asia’s markets on Portugal’s terms, so it invested in domestic capacity — ships, navigation, crews — to create its own supply chain. Don’t depend on your rivals for what you need. Build your own path.

That is the exact logic Alexander Hamilton wrote down 300 years later in his Report on Manufactures, submitted to Congress in December 1791. His famous line: every nation ought to endeavour to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.

Scott Bessent the Secretary of the Treasury, quoted it at the Economic Club of New York this June. “The nation that cannot produce what it needs is not truly secure. The nation that depends on its adversaries for critical inputs is not truly sovereign”.

Columbus was running that playbook before Hamilton had a country to run it in.

That’s not conquest for its own sake. That’s economic statecraft.

President Trump’s 2026 Columbus Day proclamation gets this right, even if it doesn’t use the word. He calls Columbus a legend whose vision, fortitude, and perseverance unleashed a dynamic of history that led to the creation of the greatest, freest, and most just Nation in history.

That’s not just a holiday speech, it’s the Hamiltonian thesis applied to the founding of America itself.

And the statue tells the story better than any paragraph. The original Columbus statue stood in Baltimore from 1984, dedicated by Ronald Reagan, until NGO rioters tore it down and threw it into the harbour on July 4, 2020.

President Trump installed an exact replica on the White House grounds this year. The monuments are back.

The erasure campaign lost.

American pride is returned.

But here’s the question the Columbus story forces: sovereignty for whom?

Columbus found the route. Hamilton built the doctrine.

Looking back on October 13th, 1307, King Philip the Fourth of France arrested the Knights Templar at dawn across his kingdom.

The Templars were the first international banking network — letters of credit, deposits, transfers across Europe and the Levant. They were exempt from taxation and owed allegiance to the Pope, not to any king.

That combination made them the first transnational financial power, and Philip owed them the equivalent of 8 tonnes of silver, roughly 17% of a year’s royal revenue. He could not repay.

So he erased the debt by erasing the creditors.

Philip was the crown, and the crown’s sovereignty was his sovereignty.

He freed himself from obligation through torturing, burning and executing the Knights Templar.

505 years later, on October 13th, 1812, Sir Isaac Brock fell at Queenston Heights defending the British Crown in Upper Canada against an American Republic born out of rejecting crown sovereignty in favour of popular sovereignty.

Think on that for a moment. Brock’s sacrifice was real, but the political order he fought for, vested sovereignty in the Crown, not in the people.

These two latter October 13th moments force a clear but uncomfortable question: when life is sacrificed in the name of sovereignty, is it really for the people or for the crown that claims to speak for them?

And here is the explicit parallel: the Templars were the first transnational financial power that answered to no electorate, held the crown’s money, and got eliminated when it became inconvenient.

Modern media and political power works the same way — institutions that answer to no electorate, hold the crown’s money, and get eliminated when it becomes inconvenient. The only difference is that Philip needed one dawn raid.

Today’s version needs a press release.

Let’s look at the curious case of Chrystia Freeland’s book launch on October 13th.

Freeland’s book IS the requisite press release!

A journalist-turned-politician who spent a decade inside the crown’s machinery — trade minister, foreign minister, finance minister, deputy prime minister — now publishes her insider account of power through one of the world’s most prestigious publishers, narrated by herself on the audiobook.

Her roots are in media.

Her family roots run even deeper: her mother, Halyna Chomiak Freeland, moved to Kyiv in 1992 and spent a decade helping draft Ukraine’s constitution and its civil and criminal procedure codes through the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, an NGO funded by, none other than George Soros.

The family has been building legal and political architecture for transnational power since the formation of the new Ukraine.

And get this little bit nobody talks about. Freeland became the CEO of the Rhodes Trust July 1st 2026.

Cecil Rhodes wrote in his will that he wanted to bring the whole uncivilized world under British rule, to recover the United States, and to make the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire.

And Freeland’s book is about building a new Western civilization.

He drafted a secret society to do for the English-speaking world what the Society of Jesus did for the Catholic Church.

Rhodes House was built as a memorial to that vision — a library of Empire, a headquarters for scholarships designed to produce future leaders of the English-speaking world.

It surely wasn’t about the people.

Freeland takes her opportunity to use her media power to gaslight the world and attempt to restore the British rule.

The crown doesn’t need to burn its creditors anymore. It publishes them.

Long live Freedom.

I say FUCK the crowns.

S2:E4 Truth. Love. Rebellion: Jim Torma of “ShimJelly” on

Art as a Weapon Against Canadian Tyranny”

@the_irascible

Jim Torma; a slam poet, award-winning folk dancer, and activist who led an artist revolt in Toronto — a fight over live-work lofts that shook the real estate industry and rattled City Hall. On this episode of Dangerous Intellectuals, the founder of ShimJelly TV and Fear.Academy explains how activism, art, creativity, and love became weapons against Canadian government overreach, and why he founded a political party to defend the underdog and the bond of man and woman.

Torma is putting that rebellion on the air. If you search for Canadian freedom, artist activism, Toronto politics, sovereignty, or how creators push back on state control, download this conversation now. Truth. Love. Rebellion.

When CBC ran its piece on Niagara wineries reacting to Trump’s booze ban, they led with ice wine. Pillitteri shipping product four months early, U.S. buyers “flabbergasted” by the fifty percent tariff.

It’s a good story.

It’s also the wrong story.

Ice wine is a tiny slice of Niagara’s wine economy. It’s a premium, seasonal, export-driven niche — and yes, China is the biggest buyer. At the small wineries I know, roughly 90 percent of ice wine goes to Chinese tourists, Chinese Canadians traveling, or Chinese buyers.

That market is real, but it’s a rounding error next to what actually moves the region.

CBC went further than that. On the very day the ban took effect, September 29th, they published a piece titled “U.S. bans on Canadian booze hit producers on one of trade war’s thorniest fronts.”

The emotional centerpiece wasn’t a Niagara grower.

It was Joan Kautz, head of global sales for Ironstone Vineyards in Lodi, California, who said: “I don’t like it, but I understand it.” And: “We’ve been building the market for 30 years and it all went away overnight.”

Link is here:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/us-canadian-booze-ban-whisky-wine-beer-9.7361385

That’s a real loss for a real family business. But notice the pattern. The California wineries going under are the small ones — Ironstone, McManis Family Vineyards selling off 3500 acres.

Big Players aren’t Closing

Meanwhile, the piece buries the Niagara story behind a link halfway down, and CBC knows exactly how readers work: nobody clicks a link mid-article. They finish the story they’re in.

Media games.

So the sympathy lands, the deflection lands, and the elephant in the room — Niagara’s wine industry being decimated — stays off the page.

CBC is a publicly funded broadcaster. Its mandate is to inform Canadians about what matters to them.

When the biggest story in Canadian wine is happening in Niagara and the lead quote goes to a California sales executive, that’s not journalism.

That’s narrative management.

They’re playing cat and mouse with the truth, and the mouse is Niagara.

What CBC ignored is the bulk of Niagara’s wine production — the everyday table wines, the VQA reds and whites that fill the LCBO shelves and the tasting rooms.

That’s where the real damage lands.

Growers who Left

Before this ban, there was a glut. Too many grapes, not enough buyers. I know of two dozen small vineyards that got turned away when they tried to sell into the wine industry. They couldn’t cover costs, so they stopped taking care of the vines. Some repurposed entirely — selling grapes for vinegar, for preserves, for other products. Those growers are gone from the wine industry for good. That capacity doesn’t come back easily.

Big Growers

Then there’s the other end. Forrer Farms grows about 250 acres of grapes for Arterra specifically. The family business was founded by Jack Forrer in 1960, and Ray Duc has sold his grapes to Arterra to this day.

In fact, Duc’s father-in-law sold part of the original vineyard to Jackson-Triggs back in the late 1990s, when that winery was just getting established — that relationship helped Jackson-Triggs get off the ground.

Arterra has a massive American marketplace. With an outright ban, not just a tariff, that relationship is in serious jeopardy. 250 acres is not a small operation — that’s a serious farm, serious employment, serious revenue. And Forrer is one of many growers now in serious jeopardy, not the only one.

The Cascade

Here’s the mechanism nobody’s connecting. The 2026 harvest is mostly baked in — contracts for this year’s fruit are largely honored. But if U.S. access stays closed, the loss becomes embedded in planning. Wineries project lower output. Lower output means lower grape demand. Lower demand weakens grower leverage. And in a glut, wineries protect their core suppliers and buy less from everyone else.

Ontario’s regulated system sets minimum grape prices, but a price floor can’t force a purchase. If a tonne of grapes becomes a tonne of excess inventory, the rational move is to buy less. The pain shifts from price to whether there’s a buyer at all. Grapes are perishable — wine can sit, grapes can’t. That gives wineries leverage when demand drops.

The realistic chain runs from 2027 to 2030: how many tonnes will wineries actually commit to over the next vintages? Niagara has had thousands of tonnes of grapes go unsold in recent years. The test isn’t whether a contract breaks this week. It’s whether the tonnage comes back.

The Trickle-Down

Here’s the part nobody’s connecting. As wineries get squeezed, they cut costs wherever they can. Staff, hours, marketing, expansion plans — all of it gets pulled in. Henry of Pelham’s Paul Speck told the Globe and Mail they were planning to aggressively build their business around the border states before the trade war killed that.

That’s one winery.

Multiply it across the region.

The Permanence Problem

The Trump administration is openly pursuing what officials call a Hamiltonian economic system — tariffs, state support for domestic industry, and strategically structured trade — a sharp departure from the Keynesian economics that has shaped policy for decades. With the administration in power for over two more years, Niagara’s wine industry can expect this step to be permanent for at least that duration. The chilling effect is lasting.

That leaves wineries with a hard question: will they spend the money bottling wine they can’t sell and have no market for? They won’t.

Now factor in the European mirage and you clearly see that market is not an escape hatch — it is heavily protected, with tariffs, geographical indication rules, and sanitary standards that make entry nearly impossible for Canadian producers.

The Okanagan

Niagara and the Okanagan aren’t equally exposed. B.C. exports only a few million dollars of wine to the U.S. annually — Wine Growers B.C. puts it between $200,000 and $700,000. Some individual Okanagan wineries rely heavily on American customers, and for them the door is slammed shut. But the regional exposure is small.

Ontario is different: 90 percent of Canadian wine shipped to the U.S. comes from Ontario. Historically, Ontario accounted for about two-thirds of Canada’s wine exports, and the current provincial share isn’t yet publicly pinned down. That means the September 29th ban doesn’t just touch ice wine.

It threatens a much broader base of Ontario’s wine industry.

The Domestic Market can’t absorb it

Ontario has roughly 186 wineries producing about 711 million dollars in revenue and supporting about 22,000 jobs. Niagara grows about ninety percent of Ontario’s grapes — roughly 18,000 acres, 65,000 tonnes a year.

That volume is not sustainable selling into the Canadian market alone.

There just isn’t the demand.

Ontario VQA wine holds about a 30 percent market share in the province. The other 70 percent is imports — from Australia, Chile, Italy, Germany, and others and Canadian wines are substantially more expensive at the LCBO, than comparable imports.

The Softening is Already Visible.

Wine Growers Ontario’s own scorecard shows winery retail store sales down 16.6 percent in value and 20.6 percent in volume over the twelve months ending March 2026.

The patriotic spike that followed the U.S. shelf bans is fading, and consumers are drifting back to cheaper imports — Chilean, Australian, Italian — that match or beat VQA prices.

A Chilean Cabernet sells for under 15 dollars while Ontario VQA bottles start much higher and climb fast. As consumers cinch their belts under economic pressure, the habitual shift from expensive VQA wines to cheaper imports accelerates.

The consumption trend makes it worse.

Canadian wine consumption has fallen for four straight years — down to about 1.9 glasses per person per week. Per capita wine drinking dropped from 14.2 litres to 12.1 litresbetween 2021 and 2023. Premium wines are hit hardest: the Vintages segment declined 5.3 percent last year as consumers trade down. Cheaper wines are holding their own. VQA isn’t.

The Tourism Collapse

And then there’s the thing that makes Niagara different from any other wine region in Canada: tourism. Niagara Falls’ mayor has said Americans typically make up about 25 percent of the region’s visitors but roughly forty percent of its tourism revenue. Over 3 million American visitors a year, out of 13 million total. That’s not a side business — that’s the backbone.

The math behind that is stark. Three million American visitors are twenty-three percent of the crowd, but they account for forty percent of the spending. That works out to roughly $320 dollars per American visitor, against about $144 dollars for everyone else — $2.21 for every $1 dollar a non-American spends. Put another way, 3 million Americans spend as much as 6.7 million other visitors would.

And the effect isn’t spread evenly across the region. Niagara-on-the-Lake draws 3.5 million visitors a year and generates $648 million dollars in revenue — about 25 percent of the region’s tourism economy. Its international share runs 35 percent, and most of that is American. The wineries, Queen Street, the Shaw Festival — that’s the draw. The ban doesn’t just cut day-trippers at the Falls. It cuts the exact crowd that makes wine country work.

The anti-American sentiment pushed by the Canadian government has had a chilling effect. I’ve watched it myself. Establishments that used to fly both the Canadian and American flag now fly only the Canadian one — or no flag at all. Once that visual signal goes up, Americans stop feeling welcome. And they stop coming.

The Distillers and Brewers

It’s not just wine. Dillon’s, Forty Creek — Niagara’s distillers are still producing, but they’re exposed. About 93 percent of Canadian liquor exports went to the U.S. in 2025. The microbreweries along the wine route depend on the same tourist traffic. When Americans stop crossing the border, everybody downstream feels it.

The Bottom Line

CBC chose to report on ice wine because it’s a clean, dramatic story with a sympathetic character. But the largest segment of Niagara’s wine economy — the growers, the bulk producers, the tourism-dependent businesses — is getting hit hardest and getting the least coverage. The ice wine market will survive. The question is whether the rest of Niagara’s wine industry does.

And here’s the part that should worry everyone who thinks this is temporary. The growers who already left aren’t coming back. Vineyards don’t replant themselves. The capacity that walked away during the glut is gone for good, and the ban is accelerating that.

Canadian wine consumption has dropped 20 percent — one in five glasses gone. That’s not just first-time buyers drifting back to cheaper imports. There’s an economic crisis in this country, and people are cinching their belts. The cascade is already in full swing.

Picture a transport truck coming down the highway with its brakes gone.

The cars in front of it are the vineyards and the wineries — the grape posts, the vines, the families who planted them. They’re the only thing slowing the crash and when the truck finally stops, the cars in front are the ones that get wiped out.

This isn’t a pause in the wine business. It’s a train wreck.

Seventy-three percent of Niagara’s wine market is gone, with nowhere to send it. Ninety-three percent of Canadian spirits exports are gone, with no alternative market that will take them. The ice wine market dodged a bullet. Now the question is whether anything else in Niagara’s wine country does.

Then when you look at the truck, and you take a hard look at the driver, you realize it’s the one and only, Doug Ford.

More to come.

https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/photo-gallery-the-week-in-pictures/image_ca74d51c-c09a-4f50-85e5-57a17147c080.html

I started this piece researching how government got captured by banking interests. I wasn’t looking for media. But the closer I scratched the surface, the more it kept surfacing — The Guardian, Thomson Reuters, the Desmarais family and La Presse. So I followed the thread.

Tomy shock that thread kept pulling. I had already written a piece testing Breitbart’s line — that politics flows downstream from culture. My research, including a visit to the AGO, pointed the other way. Politics is upstream. It’s dictating what culture becomes.

Then I did a deep dive into who actually holds power, and the dots started connecting on their own. Danielle Smith built her career in media before becoming Premier of Alberta. Chrystia Freeland spent decades at the Financial Times, Reuters, and the Globe and Mail before becoming Deputy Prime Minister. Evan Solomon went from interviewing prime ministers at CBC and CTV into cabinet under Mark Carney. Wab Kinew was a CBC host and actor before becoming Premier of Manitoba. Melissa Lantsman and Tim Uppal were political pundits before becoming deputy shadow ministers.

And that’s just the names you know. My research identified roughly twenty-two people across both the Liberals and Conservatives — about eleven or twelve on each side — with extensive media backgrounds now holding top positions in government, from provincial premiers to federal cabinet.

The pattern underneath is older than any of them. Roy Thomson was made Baron of Fleet — a hereditary peerage from the Crown. The Thomson family still controls Thomson Reuters through a trust, and Reuters itself sits behind a Founders Share structure designed to keep it from ever falling into outside hands. The Desmarais family, media royalty in Canada, converted La Presse into a not-for-profit trust. The Guardian did the same. These aren’t separate stories — they’re the same structure wearing different names.

I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe these are events driven by aligned incentives. Media trains people in exactly the skills power needs: how to pivot, shift narrative, and build followings. And the pipeline into power runs through it.

The conclusion I came to: media isn’t just covering government. Media isgovernment. It doesn’t matter which party wins.

The full piece drops soon. If you want to see where the thread leads, subscribe now.

When the Pentagon pushed Claude out of its classified systems, the obvious question for me was, what replaces it?

I think we are starting to see the answer.

Grok.

Not because the Pentagon is building a new single model dependency.

Maven is becoming the platform, with several models underneath it. That matters, but on the hardest and most time-sensitive side of warfighting, targeting, intelligence, real-time operational work, Grok is already there.

Grok’s speed appears to be a key part of that.

The most telling sequence to me is this. On February 23rd, 2026, XAI reached an agreement allowing Grok into classified U.S. military systems.

That was before the final rupture with Anthropic the day after.

Then Pentagon CDAO Cameron Stanley stated that Grok Gov was deployed inside Maven for missions, including targeting and intelligence.

This is the key to it all.

During Operation Epic Fury, Grok Gov was part of the Maven workflow that supported the deployment of more than 2,000 munitions against roughly 2,000 distinct targets in the first 96 hours.

That, to me, is not theoretical capability. That is a real operational use.

Then Emil Michael said something that caught my attention. He said Maven users found Grok “way faster” than both Claude and newer ChatGPT models.

Speed in that context isn’t about convenience. It’s about capability.

So, yes, Claude may go on to be an extraordinary commercial AI workhorse. But that’s a different battlefield.

The Pentagon’s building a multi-model architecture with Maven at the center and within that evolving system, Grok has moved directly into some of the most sensitive, operationally consequential territory Claude once occupied.

X.Ai is blowing past all of them.

I wanted to share a video interview I did with Rich of Rich Does Politics and Burning Bright of Badlands Media. These interviews will begin to show up on our SHIMJELLYTV Channel on YouTube as we grow. Here is the video link! I hope you enjoy it. Please share your thoughts and comments.

Watch it here before my article if you want.

Very impressed today with President Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly. He came out talking about how America is back — its strongest economy ever, most powerful military, energy dominance, twenty-one trillion in new investment commitments.

Murder rates at their lowest in a hundred twenty-five years, DC crime down eighty-seven percent.

He polished the jewel and brought America out of its demise.

On Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, he had a global audience and pinned the chaos squarely on Iran — thwarting oil transport, creating massive pain worldwide.

Read between the lines and the subtext is clear: his political enemies want to destroy America’s direction, and what better way than high energy costs to turn regular people against the president trying to lift the country. In that open forum, with all the world’s media present, he threw down the gauntlet — telling the City of London and the Bankster Empire their days are numbered, their control and their fomenting of war are coming to an end.

What is truly crucial is that regardless of the midterms, he keeps forging toward peace, prosperity, and the technological revolution of this century: superintelligence.

He renamed AI to superintelligence, the same way the Y2K fear-mongers — Alex Jones included — screamed the computers would destroy the world, the hysteria about controlling AI is the same as Y2K, it was a farce.

He’s telling the truth: the world is headed toward peace, prosperity, low fuel prices, and the climate-change hoax is getting trashed.

He exposed the UN as against the people, not for them — for the elite to feed off the people.

That feeding ends under his term, election or not.

The UN purged four thousand bureaucrats, the fat bleeding countries dry, streamlining the UN toward its actual mandate: for the people, not the oligarchs.

Line by line, every peace statement showed the UN working in the opposite direction — yet sovereign nations, not the General Assembly, are the ones making peace happen through direct agreements.

He laid down an ultimatum: be the United Nations for the people, or sovereign nations take over peacekeeping — and the UN risks becoming a shell of itself. Let’s look at some of the point by point notables.

America’s position. Strongest economy, most powerful military, energy dominance, twenty-one trillion in new investment. Murder rate lowest in a hundred twenty-five years, DC crime down eighty-seven percent, military budget at one point five trillion.

Iran and Hormuz. Navy escorted more than a billion barrels out of the Strait, twenty-two to thirty-seven ships a day and night, more oil flowing than at any point since the war. Security Council condemned Iran’s attacks on commercial shipping. Time for Iran to stop fomenting war and striking its neighbors.

Russia and Ukraine. Told Putin to settle it, working closely with both leaders, twenty-five thousand young people dying each month. It will happen faster than people understand. Meanwhile Canada is literally banking on war. DSRB is getting lined up for that very objective.

Gaza and the Board of Peace. Security Council unanimously endorsed the twenty-point plan and approved the board. Nearly thirty countries joined, Trump chairs it, Gulf states and Turkey poured in billions.

The group actually delivering peace while the UN makes Russia the boogeyman.

Cartels and the Western Hemisphere. Cartels called the ISIS of the region — killed, exiled, or detained as enemy combatants. Ninety-seven percent of sea-borne drugs stopped.

Maduro ousted in Venezuela, Cuba’s regime under pressure, freedom coming. Unprecedented Greenland deal: permanent US control of its security, two major new bases.

Eight wars settled. Cambodia-Thailand, Kosovo-Serbia, Congo-Rwanda, Pakistan-India, Armenia-Azerbaijan, plus Gaza and Iran. The UN never once offered to help.

The IMO tax. Stopped an obscure UN body from secretly setting up the first global carbon tax on shipping — ten to twenty percent on global trade costs, maybe more.

President Trump stated unequivocally “There is no global government, and while I’m president, there will be no global taxes.”

The ICC. Out-of-control rogue institution, anti-American tribunal with no jurisdiction over the US. Never allow show trials of US service members.

Trump called on every member nation to resign immediately. I wonder how the ICC darling, Governor General of Canada Louise Arbour, was feeling about her show trials? Or how Special Prosecutor Jack Smith feels as House Republicans drop explosive Arctic Frost transcripts.

Let’s not forget he was at the Hague doing ICC work too.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-republicans-drop-jack-smith-transcripts-explosive-arctic-frost-records-fight

The UN itself. Fifteen percent budget cut, over four thousand positions eliminated. Human Rights Council called craven hypocrites for ignoring Christian persecution. UNESCO, meant to protect cultural heritage, instead promotes mass migration that destroys the cultures it’s supposed to safeguard.

Superintelligence. Rejected any global scheme to control AI and renamed it superintelligence. Interesting how MSM and select individuals pushed to effectively control AI to do who’s bidding? Whoever wins that race wins everything — the US is leading China by a lot.

Immigration and culture. No human right to illegal immigration, only a right to remain a sovereign nation. Sounds like the sovereign fight against the globalist.

Transgender mutilation of children has to stop. Shock went through the assembly with those few simple words. While he thanked Melania, the First Lady for saving the children of war. What a juxtaposition!

The midterms and the war economy. “I’m not running. I did that already and won in a landslide.”

America keeps marching on its current trajectory no matter what happens in November.

The Democrats want control back to restart the war economy; he wants to break down the global City of London war machine. The UN and its agencies failed their citizens, left people behind in the name of globalism, and let bureaucrats and elites feed off the misery. That ends.

The ultimatum. Sovereign nations are already doing the peacekeeping the UN was built for. Either the UN serves the people, or it becomes a shell — and the oligarchy’s days of feeding off the people are over while Trump is in power.

In closing — how I see it.

Trump threw down the gauntlet. He told the UN: shape up and do what you were supposedly built to do all along — or it’s over.

Because under the cover of rhetoric, under the cover of words about peace and human rights, the UN’s actions have been exactly opposite. It has fomented war instead of preventing it. It has attacked America while ignoring the persecution of Christians. It has sat silent in its own Human Rights Council while Christianity is assaulted globally. It has let unelected bureaucrats feed off the misery of ordinary people in the name of globalism, while the people it was meant to serve get left behind.

Everything the UN claims to be, it is not. And now it’s time for it to actually become what it’s supposed to be — or it’s over. The UN is over.

That’s how I saw it. Eight wars stopped. Peace built by sovereign nations, not by the General Assembly. Four thousand bureaucrats cut. A global tax killed before it could bleed the world. And a president who doesn’t care about the midterms because the direction is set: peace, prosperity, and an end to the oligarchy feeding off the people.

The gauntlet is down. The choice belongs to the UN. But the future belongs to the people — and Trump just made sure of it.

The government and the elite class think most Canadians are stupid and bank on it.

I am here to say otherwise!!

Here’s my working estimate.

If we assume, as Canada has in other high level government hosted situations, that the host absorbed a substantial share of travel and hospitality then 10 million feels, to me, like a reasonable starting point not a floor proven by documents, but a starting point for a serious estimate.

WHEN you scale up security, transportation, hotels, and production, it’s not hard to construct a model that lands in the 15 to 20 million plus range.

Could be less if corporations covered everything themselves, highly unlikely but we still need the ledger.

Let’s not forget the summit was hosted by the federal government, yes, but also in partnership with CPP Investments and PSP Investments.

That raises legitimate questions about who paid for what. How much came from federal departments? How much from CPP? How much from PSP? And how much, if any, was picked up by participating firms?

I’m totally ready to be corrected when a real number comes out. Until then, SHOW US THE LEDGER!

Below is a full cost universe for anyone curious as a reference.

This is split by who potentially pays. So, planning and admin, staff time, PMO and departmental coordination, calls and meetings with invitees, invite management, scheduling, briefing books, legal, procurement, accounting, insurance, consultants, temporary staff and volunteers, advance teams.

Then travel. Commercial or business class airline tickets, maybe private aviation where applicable, airport ground handling, baggage, insurance, ground transport like limos, executive sedans, SUVs for security, shuttles for staff and delegates, drivers, parking, fuel, dispatchers, maybe motorcades, staging areas, traffic control.

Security, RCMP or local police protective details, paid duty officers, airport and venue screening, perimeter, credential checks, emergency medical plans, cyber security, secure comms.

Venues and production, the main venue rental, Art Gallery of Ontario spaces, setups, teardowns, staging, large screens, projectors, AV gear, microphones, lighting, recording or streaming services, power, backup generators, internet and Wi-Fi build-outs, tech rehearsals.

Hospitality, hotel blocks for delegations, suites, early arrivals, late checkouts, breakfast, lunch, dinner, gala meals, coffee breaks, receptions, service staff, kitchen rentals, linens, tableware, floral, decor, dietary accommodations, gratuities, tech and coms, like registration and delegate management softwares, maybe a mobile app. secure Wi-Fi, radios, phones, translation booths and headsets, captioning, sign-language interpretation, printing for badges, signage, programs, protocol and VIP services like dedicated liaisons, protocol officers, special gifts, meeting rooms.

Then media and public coms, like press center setup, backdrops, risers, photographers, video crews, media monitoring, social media contractors.

Then there’s the behind the scenes logistics, shipping gear, freight, warehousing, loaders, waste removal, overtime, contingency reserves.

Big picture, whether the public or partners covered each item still needs to be disclosed. Until we see invoices or cost sharing, treat any global figure, including mine, as just an estimate. Not yet an invoice.

The food was great I hear!!

Elite welfare class are so uppity.

UPDATED: SEPT 20, 2026

The update today comes as a video update. I hope you watch it. I also included a CBC article of utmost importance down under the video link.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bishnoi-letter-threats-police-9.7341131

Wow!! Canadians must be ecstatic! Let’s cheer our government!! We are short by $500 Billion but hey that’s not the point, we got $500 Billion right?

I would say “we cannot verify a single dollar of the nearly $500 billion headline as unconditional cash transfers.”

Ottawa says “nearly $500 billion committed,” but much of the number is financing capacity, aspirational targets, or “up to” over 5 or 10 years. Loans and underwriting can turn into debt for borrowers, not gifts or grants.

As of today we see no new summit dollar proved as an unconditional transfer. That’s accurate and powerful. As for timing, based strictly only on disclosed caveats, the first identifiable closing I can see is about $90 million for one mining deal that could close around September 21st, but even that has conditions.

Everything else is deployment over years or contingent on approvals, customers, permits, and returns.

So, let’s look at the first $250 billion in actual cash deployment, there is no enforceable public timetable that gets us there but let’s look at in anyway.

Let’s examine some dates. Let’s highlight that 2031 is the end of the 5-year window for many of these maybe funded projects. Where will Canada be by that program horizon? The gap between those two things is exactly the real story, right? Collapse?

“presence and prospective investment aren’t the same as guarantees.”

CPP (Canadian Pension Plan) and PSP (Public Sector Pension) are verified co-hosts with their CEOs front and center.

OMERS has a known domestic investment objective but is not named in Ottawa’s $500 billion figure. People deserve that clarity.

These funds are there to evaluate, co-invest, and signal investability, to make sure projects are investable from a risk and return standpoint, not to subsidize government agendas.

So their presence signals openness to future deals, but that’s not the same thing as wiring money today.

Let’s walk through some of the headline figures now. TD announced a 150 billion dollar commitment over five years, but that includes lending, underwriting, advisory services and other financing.

That’s debt.

It creates capital for borrowers but also debt and interest obligations, Scotiabank’s “more than 100 billion dollar financing pledge functions in a similar way.

BMO’s is “up to 70 billion dollars” over 10 years. Up to over 10 years. Those are not small qualifiers.

CIBC has 2 billion dollars for Canadian SMEs (Small & Medium sized businesses), and that’s concrete financing capacity, but still business borrowing to access capital.

RBC’s 1.4 billion dollar initiative includes “up to” about 416 million of its own capital with the rest intended to be mobilized.

So again, that’s a real initiative, but not 1.4 billion dollars wired out the door.

Power Sustainable says “invest and mobilize,” Ontario Teachers says, “invest where it meets our return objectives,” Sun Life says, “seek to deploy over five years.”

And Bell’s 52.5 billion dollar Saskatchewan AI build is explicitly covered by a non-binding MOU with phase development dependent on customer commitments, permits and approvals, that is not cash in hand.

Then there’s the Generation Mining Financing via the Canada Growth Fund.

Here we do see something tangible. But these also have closing conditions, even the $700 million through the BDC for defense tech requires actual transactions before funds reach companies.

So here’s my standard, and I’m sticking to it.

Can I identify one dollar of the “nearly $500 billion” headline that has been irreversibly transferred into a new project or investment account with no material conditions remaining?

Today, I can’t. That doesn’t mean the projects are fake, but it does mean the closing hasn’t happened and it may still be quite a ways off or eventually abandoned.

So when will the first $250 billion move? TD and Scotiabank alone clear that level, but their horizons run roughly five years.

Reuters cites a government source expecting significant transactions could take 12 to 18 months to materialize. In other words, 2027 into 2028. There is no published timetable that gets $250 billion into real projects by a specific near date.

That’s why CPP, PSP, and OMERS matter here.

They’re there as potential equity investors who can put “patient capital” to work if projects meet their standards.

Remember URSULA von der Leyen and her “lazy money” statement about retirement funds?

They’re not there as loan guarantors, at least not based on anything I can verify today. So here’s my interim verdict. We have a pitch and very big numbers, but as of today, we have zero dollars verifiable by me as new, unconditional cash transfers completed.

As of 3:26 p.m. September 15th, the summit has produced a claimed “nearly500 billion” in commitments, but the government’s own objective is one trillion over five years.

So this is not a target that was supposed to be reached during a two-day summit. Within today’s total, look at the pension side separately.

CPP investments could provide up to 25 billion in equity through the new Maple Fund with Brookfield, a 50/50 structure, but every single investment still has to be approved case by case.

PSP is talking about an additional 25 billion in Canadian investments over time.

Then we have OMERS, while not counted in today’s new total, has a standing plan for at least10 billion of new Canadian investments over five years and has already put about 1 billion into Canadian equities during the first half of this year.

That’s meaningful potential capital, but it’s not 60 billion sitting in a bank account, ready to spend.

It’s also worth being clear that this is pension money that’s being invested, with an eye to risk and return. Not grant money.

So the correct phrasing is, significant targeted investment frameworks that must still find qualifying deals, not funds that have already poured into projects.

What matters next is the ledger. Which projects get approved, how much capital goes into each, when, and on what return profile. That’s the real measure of whether today’s headline turns into bricks, steel, and productive assets or remains a ton of smoke and mirrors.

If that is the case, then what was it cover for? What were those stakeholder private meetings about at the event that was not open to public scrutiny? Why at such an event with over the top fanfare was there a need for secret meetings?

What else was announced during the Canada Business Summit?

Running the evening of September 15th right after the summit was the Canada Leadership Investment Forum. Kevin Reed was speaking at the OVIN fireside chat. Ontario Vehicle Innovation Network.

Now the picture becomes ever clearer.

OVIN itself is not Ontario’s military-vehicle procurement agency and its stated core mandate remains automotive and smart mobility. But the technological ecosystem it develops — autonomous systems, AI, batteries, advanced manufacturing, sensors and vehicle technology — overlaps substantially with technologies Ontario is now explicitly seeking to commercialize for defence and dual-use applications.

And that makes Kevin Reed appearing through an OVIN-related event considerably more interesting in the context of the DSRB. Ontario is simultaneously building a defence-industrial strategy, promoting dual-use technology and campaigning for Toronto to host the proposed Defence, Security and Resilience Bank. Ontario’s own 2026 defence document actually contains a section titled “Toronto’s Bid to Host the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank.”

The forum was not simply an OVIN automotive event. It was deliberately constructed to bring together government, institutional investors, financial institutions and industry executives around investable projects in defence, automotive/advanced manufacturing, energy, infrastructure and technology. The official program describes it as a private, invitation-only gathering for C-suite executives, senior government officials, institutional investors and industry leaders.

That connection is worth digging into: OVIN → Ontario auto/manufacturing companies → dual-use/defence conversion → DSRB financing.

Kevin Reed appearing through an OVIN-related event is considerably more interesting in the context of the DSRB. Ontario is simultaneously building a defence-industrial strategy, promoting dual-use technology and campaigning for Toronto to host the proposed Defence, Security and Resilience Bank. Ontario’s own 2026 defence document actually contains a section titled “Toronto’s Bid to Host the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank.”

The confirmed lineup included federal Industry Minister Mélanie Joly; Ontario Economic Development Minister Victor Fedeli; Reed; APMA president Flavio Volpe; Canada Infrastructure Bank CEO Ehren Cory; Building Ontario Fund COO Alena Thouin; Ontario Power Generation executive James Brewer; MHI RJ Aviation president Ismail Mokabel; and LUNR Aerospace CEO Jeanue Chung.

On the organizing side were OVIN/OCI, PwC Canada and BLG. Particularly notable are Laura Wood, PwC’s Global Defence Leader; Jessica Sheridan and Marin Leci, co-leaders of BLG’s Defence & National Security Group; and Raed Kadri, who heads OVIN.

Stay tuned, this story is evolving and the military industrial complex is on steroids in little peaceful Canada.

Who da thunk?

Buckle up Canada. As the countries businesses crumble the WAR machine will be your salvation!!

I spent weeks laying out how our culture, politics, media, government, central banks, City of London and powerful families are all tied together. Follow those connections long enough and it stops looking like a conspiracy and starts looking like a system, a machine whose parts may act alone but converge when interests align.

Wealth seeks power, power seeks government, and government guards something none of them can replicate, the pooled savings and security of its citizens. And too often, it behaves as if that pool is theirs to use, rather than a trust to protect.

Which brings us to now.

Mark Carney is pushing what I see as a war bank. Stephen Harper chairs a major public investment institution. And in the symbolism of our time, these worlds converge at the Art Gallery of Ontario, a cultural flagship, hosting a conversation about defense, AI, energy, pipelines, uranium, and the financing to support it, the DSRB.

Not just another bank, but an architecture for a war economy. We hear talk of defence bonds. Scotiabank, for one, positioning around related instruments. All of this packaged in the rhetoric of security and resilience. Canada sells itself as peacekeeping, yet we’re building the financial rails of war: funding production, funding Ukraine, scaling drone technology. Yes, drones can survey, but the same industrial base can be wired directly into battlefield systems.

Meanwhile, the largest pools of Canadian capital, CPP, OMERS, Alberta’s public assets, and others, are increasingly in orbit around the same project. I have believed for some time that our fiscal condition is far worse than advertised and that war becomes the all-purpose solvent to move money, relax scrutiny, and recast priorities.

Carney at the bank during the crucible years, Harper as Prime Minister then, these aren’t distant histories. They’re live wires running into today’s moment.

Different coloured jerseys, same rooms, same capital pools and cartels. And Canadians in the end, how much real choice do they have? Carney and Harper the heads of Canada’s Hydra!!

The ties start with who is hosting. Carney is hosting this in partnership with CPP Investments and PSP themselves. So CPP and PSP aren’t just attendees, they’re hosts. Canadians are represented whether they like it or not. In the room and on the chopping block.

Carney left Brookfield to enter politics and he also spent thirteen years at Goldman Sachs. That matters because PSP CEO Deborah Orida came from CPP before PSP and she also worked at Goldman Sachs.

Then there’s the Harper side. He’s there as AIMCo chair, Alberta’s public asset manager. So the opening and closing figures literally bracket Brookfield and AIMCo worlds.

Then you get a huge mix of public and private capital. BlackRock, Blackstone, Temasek, APG, plus Crown corporations and pension pools.

The banking bridge is direct. Tom Porier now sits on the CIBC board, Hasenfratz for years, Carney and Orida earlier in their careers. The tech and defense names are already tied into public capital. CPP has invested in Cohere, PSP in Telesat, Xanadu via BDC and so on.

So they’re not just pitching for public money, they’re already inside that ecosystem.

What’s most revealing isn’t just one firm like BlackRock or Brookfield. It’s the convergence: government, pension capital, banks, private asset managers, energy and tech/defense all in one investment architecture. That doesn’t prove anything untoward, but it does give us a pretty clear network to interrogate.

If we want to keep going, I’d pull the Telesat PSP thread first and the CPP Cohere one second, because those are concrete money ties, not just biographies.

My DSRB piece is the spine because I’ve already framed the causality: tariff war to Carney’s global pivot to DSRB to pension capital to my captured country thesis.

I believe Toronto will be officially confirmed as the DSRB headquarters, as Ontario is bidding hard and the Front Street site has been floated as an interim option. I also predict that CPP and OMERS will commit to buying DSRB bonds.

The writing is on the wall and in the room. DSRB explicitly plans to tap capital markets and pension funds, and OMERS’ CEO has publicly backed bringing the bank to Toronto.

The summit is basically a live demonstration of the capital pools Carney would need for something like DSRB. Sovereign-linked capital like Temasek, giant pensions like CPP, PSP and APG, and private megafunds in sectors that the DSRB is designed to finance. Critical minerals, defense enabling tech, dual use infrastructure. In my study and evaluation this is not separate from the DSRB argument. It’s the same cast, same sectors. This summit as it is playing out is a live update to my DSRB Substack.

Basically, when I first wrote about the proposed DSRB, what I call the WAR bank, the key question was who ultimately provides the capital once defense (WAR) becomes an asset class. Governments? Banks? Pension funds? Some combination?

Here we are just a few weeks later and some of that machinery is coming into view. On September 8, Scotiabank published a dedicated Canadian defense issuance framework, essentially a rulebook under which it can eventually issue instruments like Canadian defense (WAR) bonds.

Nothing has been issued yet, but the plumbing is now in place and at the ready.

Set that next to the DSRB. Designed to mobilize public and private capital at scale, to use sovereign backing to access much larger pools of institutional money.

Then look at what’s happening today and tomorrow in Toronto. The Prime Minister is hosting, with CPP and PSP, an investment summit. Roughly 300 institutional investors are in the room, including BlackRock, Blackstone, Singapore’s Temasek, Dutch pension giant APG, and more. The sectors on stage, nuclear and power generation, critical minerals, satellites, AI, quantum, aerospace, precisely the terrain the DSRB is being built for.

This is a clear on-the-record convergence of the same capital and industries to bring the DSRB to life.

Ontario continues to push hard for Toronto as the DSRB’s permanent headquarters. The city is not confirmed yet, but OMERS’ CEO has publicly endorsed bringing the bank here. None of that means pension money is formally committed to DSRB securities, or does it? Time will tell but I would bet hard yes if it was a Polymarket bet. Let’s not forget that it does show that the financial architecture around the war bank is no longer theoretical. It’s in cue.

There are two important last minute updates. First, Power Corp. shows up as a corporate partner of the AGO.

Second, Power Sustainable, part of the Power Corp group, announced a ten billion dollar Canadian investment mobilization just before the summit.

The Canada Investment Summit opens tonight with a gala dinner at the AGO, with Carney delivering the keynote in a place where Power Corp. is already a corporate partner. The centre of the Canadian Art world in Toronto.

So, while no Desmarais is on the summit stage, the Desmarais financial ecosystem is in the room. Monday’s main program at the Four Seasons makes the architecture clear. Carney opens with PSP’s Deborah Orida, CPP’s John Graham is there to make the case to investors.

Then there’s a global capital panel with heavyweights like BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Blackstone’s Jon Gray, Temasek’s Dilhan Pillay, and APG’s Annette Mosman. Energy and critical minerals and uranium, AI and quantum, defense and advanced manufacturing, it’s all there. CAE, Telesat, Bombardier, Linamar.

It’s almost a sector-by-sector overlay with the DSRB mandate.

Then the Honourable ex Prime Minister of Canada, Harper closes the summit, not as a retired politician, but as AIMCo board chair. That means the summit is bookended by the Prime Minister and the chair of a major crown asset manager and ex PM.

That’s not normal.

Now, none of this proves conspiracy. It proves convergence — politics, pension capital, private capital, defence and tech, even culture, all in one room at the moment Canada is helping build a new defence financing architecture. The war bank isn’t operational yet, but the financial ecosystem that could bankroll it is already assembling in Toronto. And that is worth watching.

When I first wrote about the proposed DSRB bank, the core question was who ultimately backstops this kind of defense financing model. Governments, banks, pensions?

A few weeks later, it’s less theoretical. Scotiabank has now published a Canadian defence issuance framework, a template for future defense-linked instruments. Think WAR bonds!!

It’s not a bond sale yet, but the pipes are in place. Now place that beside what’s happening in Toronto right now. Prime Minister Carney has convened what is being called the Canada Investment Summit, with CPP and PSP as formal partners.

Canada Investment Summit 2026 - Canada.ca

Those pension funds aren’t guests, they’re the hosts. CPP manages roughly $780 billion, PSP about $320 billion. That’s workers’ retirement money. And it’s already tied directly to some of the companies on stage.

CPP has money in Cohere, PSP in Telesat. So again, this isn’t a cold pitch. Then consider who opens. Carney’s Goldman and Brookfield background, PSP’s Deborah Orida, ex-Goldman, ex-CPP, opens with him. CPP’s John Graham makes the pitch.

Then in one session, you get Larry Fink, BlackRock, John Gray, Blackstone, Temasek, APG. This is an astonishing concentration of global capital.

Now the companies Canada is putting in front of them are just as telling. OPG and Suncor, TC Energy, that’s power and pipelines. Cameco and Tech, that’s uranium and critical minerals. Cohere and Xanadu, advanced tech now treated as strategic industries.

Then the defense and advanced manufacturing session: CAE, Telesat, Linamar, Bombardier.

This is right where the DSRB logic lives. And Bombardier is not incidental. Just days ago, President Trump threatened to block Bombardier jets from the U.S. market unless manufacturing moves south. Having that company’s CEO on stage underscores the economic pressure around defence-capable manufacturing. Now layer in the cultural frame.

The summit opens with a gala inside the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The AGO isn’t a neutral ballroom. It was transformed by the Thomson Collection and a $100 million gift. Woodbridge, the Thomson vehicle, still controls about 70% of Thomson Reuters.

Thomson Reuters appears on the AGO’s corporate member list, as does Power Corporation, which is controlled by the Desmarais family. Days before this summit, Power Sustainable, part of the Power Corp group, announced a ten billion dollar Canadian investment push and is co-hosting a private, invitation-only CEO breakfast in Toronto through the Milken Institute the same morning the summit begins.

So even without a Desmarais on stage, the institutional ecosystem is in the room, in the city, at the cultural venue. Then we have the closing speaker, ex Prime Minister Stephen Harper, not as a retired politician but as AIMCo board chair, one of Canada’s major crown asset managers.

That literally bookends this with the Prime Minister of Canada opening and an ex-PM Crown Asset chair closing.

Meanwhile, Premier Doug Ford is aggressively pitching Toronto as the DSRB headquarters. Toronto’s bid leans on Bay Street, the big banks, giant pension funds, capital markets. Ontario has even identified 200 Front Street West as a potential interim site and is preparing a $500 million Resilience Bond that could support DSRB activity if Toronto wins. The city has not been officially selected yet, but all of this tells you where the bid is aimed. So for me, this summit functions as a living addendum to the DSRB piece.

The bank itself is still in formation, but the ecosystem of capital, sectors, and institutions that could ultimately bankroll it is no longer abstract. It’s in Toronto this week.

The names in that room are not random. Larry Fink is the man who bought up American single-family homes until a presidential decree stopped him — and now he’s in Toronto, with a Canadian real estate market on the edge of collapse, looking at the same playbook. The Desmarais family has shaped Canada’s media narrative for decades through Power Corporation, and the Thomson family — the Barons of Fleet, tied to the City of London — gifted the Art Gallery of Ontario the collection that transformed it.

The Thomson family doesn’t just own Thomson Reuters — they hold roughly seventy percent of it, which means they control the voice and the narrative of one of the world’s largest news organizations.

The Desmarais family didn’t stop at media. They poured major funding into the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and a family member sits inside it curating the collection.

So the same circle — culture, politics, media, government — runs through both Toronto and Montreal, the same families shaping what Canadians read, what they see in galleries, and now what they’re being asked to fund.

Both families sit inside the cultural venue hosting this summit. Stephen Harper closes the bookend as AIMCo chair, the same man who sat at the other end of the gutting of Canada’s wealth, when our sovereign gold was swapped out for fiat paper and we were left with nothing to backstop the country. Mark Carney opens it, the man who ran the Bank of Canada through the crucible years.

This is not a summit. This is the assembly of a war machine. And the war machine exists to do two things: cover the destruction of the 2008 to 2010 financial crisis, and fuel the few with the money of the many.

The average Canadian will not benefit.

Their pensions — CPP, OMERS, PSP, the pooled savings of workers across this country — are being gambled on a war economy that will enrich a handful of corporations and families. Never forget that peace destroys a WAR bank.

If the instruments sour because peace is achieved, it will not be the banks that pay.

It will not be the Desmarais or the Thomsons.

It will come out of the pension funds, the retirement money of ordinary people, used as the backstop and the guarantee for a venture built on death.

The banks have built the pipeline.

Scotiabank’s framework, the defence (WAR) bonds, the sovereign backing — all of it exists to make sure pension money can flow into war.

That is the architecture. That is the gravity. And that is what is being assembled in Toronto this week, with your money, in your name.

Canada sold itself to the world as peacekeepers — blue helmets, quiet diplomacy, the honest broker. That was the brand.

The reality being assembled in Toronto this week is the opposite: a country whose pensions, whose cultural institutions, whose media families are all being wired into a war economy. The peacekeeping myth was the cover. The war machine is the product.

The average Canadian is being asked to fund it, in their name, with their retirement money, while the few get rich and the many pay the price.

RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA to WAR WAR WAR!

The Gallery as a Weapon

This started with a friendship. Beth is a sweet woman we got to know in our old neighbourhood — grandmother to Rebecca. We talked a lot about the gallery, about our background, about what we’d done before. That drove her to invite us to take her and her granddaughter Rebecca on a tour of the Art Gallery of Ontario, and later we will visit Royal Ontario Museum. Rebecca is a very sweet little girl, very heavy into art. My wife Shelley is a fine artist with beautiful work and a digital creator as well — the natural guide.

It was an innocent day out. Nothing about it felt like a thesis. Just family, a gallery, and a little girl who loved art.

Something happened to me inside that building. I broke away from their tour and wandered on my own, and a feeling came over me — dark, magnetic, like the works were pulling me toward something I couldn’t yet name. I had to go back and revisit each one to understand why.

The first was the Rubens — The Massacre of the Innocents. Stark chaos on the canvas. King Herod ordering the slaughter of the firstborn, mothers fighting to keep their children alive, soldiers moving through the scene. The soldiers weren’t the main subject, but they drew my eye. Innocence being killed at the behest of a king. Empire’s violence, dressed as history. That painting reminds me — the massacre is ongoing to this day.

Then on my way to the Henry Moore gallery, in the next hallway I stop in my tracks, the de László — two Sikh officers of the British Indian Army, dignified, serving the empire. Soldiers again.

Different empire, same function.

Something moves inside me. I can’t put my finger on it.

I enter the Moore display and I immediately become grounded in familiarity of a different kind. I spent so much time drawing in that room and working with mental health survivors and the lonely and depressed only to see them smile and breathe.

I turn and walk through what I call the belly of the beast, the glass and wood magnificence overlooking Dundas. They haven’t changed the street name yet. I look down and visualize the bustle of the past across the street. Artists, cafés melding and now only quiet, stillness and emptiness. Gone. I turn and continue walking.

Then I see it — the No Limits show. The work looks opulent, stunning in a bling way, beautiful — laser-cut glass, marble, steel and sound. Black and chrome, black and gold, very over the top. I looked closely for meaning, something I always do before reading about a show. I try not to influence my first take, my first feelings. It was imposing, intricate and I struggled to find meaning. My eyes finally hit a description stating the symbols had no meaning. I stored that message.

But the bling sat on top of something darker. Guru Nanak’s words about boundlessness, about no limits — and right beside them, a shrine to twenty-one soldiers who fought to the death for the British Empire, bare-handed after the ammunition ran out. A show called No Limits, and the loudest thing in it was a memorial to men who died for an empire. The British Empire. It disturbed me to see this juxtaposition.

The feeling was the connection.

The Rubens soldiers killed at the behest of a king. The de László officers served the empire. The Sidhu soldiers died for the empire.

Three works, one gallery, one thread — and I hadn’t read a single wall placard yet. The dots connected before the research did.

That’s how I got into this. Not through study. Through a feeling in a room, on a day that started with a little girl and her grandmother and my spidey senses in overdrive.

I learned years ago not to ignore the gut, especially when it’s been right time after time, and at times life-saving.

Before the feeling in the gallery, there was the work. Shelley and I ran a program born from our smART scKOOL initiative — Art as Therapy and Beyond — out of a studio space in an old church on Roncesvalles Avenue in Parkdale-High Park.

Every Thursday we cooked an organic meal and opened the doors to the homeless, the depressed, small kids who were depressed, broken families, mental health survivors. We sat with them in front of art and let it do what medication couldn’t in a million years. We got known, for the place to come to, before you went ahead with your suicide. it worked.

Then we convinced one of the biggest hospitals in the city — the one with a lockdown wing for mental health suicide patients — to let us in. A fifteen-week pilot under the smART scKOOL banner.

The president of the foundation set aside $250,000 dollars for a full year of operating costs. The caveat was the pilot which had it’s own funding from the same source, the foundation.

By week eleven we had cleared out the floor. Suicide patients were leaving and not coming back. It was working — and it was scaring the elite class that had spent decades gaslighting the public about how effective pharmaceuticals were. How it was the chemicals in the brain that needed chemical manipulation. Let’s not forget how effective electroshock therapy can be too.

Meanwhile our program, run by two people with no psychology degrees, no prestigious speaker circuit, no credentials, was the most effective tool in their arsenal.

By week twelve we were told we weren’t a good fit.

They paid us out for the full fifteen weeks, then the head of psychiatry took the $250,000 dollars and rolled it into pharmaceuticals for that floor.

The patients didn’t come back. The attempts didn’t happen again, until a new fresh group of the depressed.

But the model had to die and the drugs were needed to hook the new suicide victims. The system was in self-preservation mode.

The medical model traces back to 1910, when Abraham Flexner — an education administrator, not a doctor — published his report, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation. The money that reshaped the schools came from the Rockefeller Foundation and its General Education Board, where Abraham’s brother Simon ran the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.

It could not allow healing through art as a form of therapy to survive. In order for the empire to maintain its power, it needed to terminate the program for its own survival.

That’s how we got to know the Art Gallery of Ontario. Every two weeks we brought our mental health survivors, the poor, the elderly and seniors who were lonely, the kids and families that were broken, on a free tour of the gallery. We used the gallery as a tool to heal and to bring people together.

Over the years we visited nearly two hundred times. And eventually the AGO itself instituted a program for the poor and handicapped — free tickets and tours — and other people started copying what we had actually created as a model.

On this visit with Rebecca, I saw the AGO with very different eyes. The first thing that stopped me was a 1916 double portrait by the Hungarian painter Philip de László — Risaldar Jagat Singh and Risaldar Man Singh, two Sikh officers of the British Indian Army. The wall text spoke of their dignity, their turbans, their overlooked contribution to the British empire war effort. It was presented as a quiet act of recognition.

Then I looked at the artist. De László was not a standard artist. He functioned on a totally different level — right inside the elite world, the aristocracy, and the royals.

Born Fülöp Laub in 1869 in Pest, the eldest son of a Jewish tailor and seamstress, he rose from humble origins to become the portraitist of kings, emperors, popes, and presidents. He changed his name to László in 1891 as a patriotic act.

His first royal commission came in 1894 — the Bulgarian royal family. By 1899 he had painted Emperor Franz Joseph. In 1900 he painted Pope Leo XIII, winning the Grand Gold Medal at the Paris International Exhibition and international fame.

That same year he married Lucy Guinness of the banking branch of the family, locking him into one of Europe’s wealthiest dynasties.

He was invested with the Royal Victorian Order by Edward VII in 1909. In 1912 Franz Joseph ennobled him — hereditary Hungarian nobility, the title de Lombos. He settled in London in 1907, became a British subject in 1914, and effectively took over John Singer Sargent’s clientele after Sargent’s retirement.

By his death in 1937 he had painted an estimated 2,700 portraits and held twenty-two orders and seventeen medals from royal and presidential sitters.

His sitters read like a roll call of power: four American presidents — Theodore Roosevelt, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover; Kaiser Wilhelm II; King Ferdinand of Bulgaria; the Queen of the Belgians; Lloyd George; Mussolini; Admiral Togo; maharajas; and the majority of Europe’s royal houses. He kept a “sitter’s book” filled with names that bulked large in history.

Lord Selborne summed it up: “Has any one painter ever before painted so many interesting and historical personages?”

The 1916 Sikh portrait itself was done for his own pleasure in his London studio, near the Indian Cavalry Officers’ Institute. Both men signed his visitor’s book in Punjabi on May 1, 1916, shortly before their regiments were sent to France for the Somme.

It is a rare, dignified image of middle-ranking colonial soldiers — not maharajas or generals — and it is now on view at the AGO for the first time outside the United Kingdom.

The painting never left the family. De László kept it in his studio until he died in 1937. It passed by descent to his son Patrick, then into a private UK collection around 1975.

In April 2023, the UK government classified the de László portrait of two Sikh officers as a national treasure — the same designation reserved for Rembrandts and Old Masters — and slapped a temporary export bar on it. Just think, National Treasure status. That raised my eyebrows.

The painting is small, but the price tag was six hundred fifty thousand pounds, because the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art judged it met category 3 of the Waverley criteria: closely connected with British history, and of outstanding significance for the study of the Indian contribution to the First World War. Peter Barber was the committee member arguing its importance as UK cultural significance.

Peter Barber’s original appointment to the Reviewing Committee in 2015 came directly from then-Culture Secretary Sajid Javid.

Javid, a British-born politician of Pakistani family background, came to politics from a career in international banking. At 25 he was a vice president at Chase Manhattan, and later joined Deutsche Bank in London, working in international and emerging markets and eventually rising to senior managing director.

In April 2014 he was moved from the Treasury into the Culture portfolio. He himself acknowledged that disconnect joking early in his tenure, “My name’s Sajid Javid. I used to be a banker.” and noting that people were asking what a banker knew about culture. Banking, media, and the art world have long shared the same rooms — from documented money laundering through galleries to the CIA’s quiet funding of the cultural avant-garde in the Cold War.

Now lets examine the “outstanding significance”.

Its not about the art. It’s about the war.

Two middleranking Sikh officers of the British Indian Army, painted in 1916, about to depart for the Somme — soldiers of Sikh heritage fighting for the empire, frozen at the moment of departure. The UK government decided that image was too important to leave British soil. Just stop and contemplate that for a moment.

The bar was temporary — three months, to give a British institution time to raise the money. No buyer came forward, the licence was refused, and the painting stayed in private hands in the UK until it crossed to the AGO in 2026.

So the national-treasure designation didn’t keep it home. It just marked it as something the empire wanted to keep — and then let go, at exactly the moment it was needed somewhere else.

It crossed the Atlantic for the first time as a two-year loan to the AGO. The AGO lists it simply as “Private Collection.” No lender named, no public donor, no press release explaining who arranged the loan or why Toronto.

The AGO’s own curator framed the loan around Toronto’s Sikh community and the under-told story of Indian soldiers in the First World War.

Again, the contribution to war.

I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe these are events driven by aligned incentives — galleries chasing the same funding, the same audiences, the same cultural moment shaped by the elite that know importance.

Politicians chasing the same votes. Media chasing the same narratives. Nobody has to coordinate for the pattern to emerge. But the pattern is real, and it is a trend: Sikh-focused artwork being promoted through the high-end art gallery network, public and private, across Canada.

Sidhu’s show opened at the AGO in December 2025. The de László loan arrived in 2026, explicitly framed around the same community. Two major Sikh-focused works in the same institution, back to back, both tied to the same narrative.

That is the “trend” — and trends are observable, documentable, and they don’t require proving intent. Yet I see the intent.

The elite commissioned the elite, to tell the masses what and who to admire. De László operated inside the aristocracy and the royal courts of power and influence.

He was not painting for the common man. He was painting the world the common man was supposed to look up to. Fast forward to now and his work is being used to tell a new story — one that lands in the same moment as the sculptures, the speeches, and the politicians.

The pattern isn’t only in Toronto. In Montreal, the Desmarais family built the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion at the Museum of Fine Arts — inaugurated November 21, 1991, designed by Moshe Safdie, home to the museum’s major exhibition galleries. Paul Desmarais Sr., founder of Power Corporation, put in roughly ten million dollars in 1986 after Bernard Lamarre spent a Trans-Siberian train ride with him, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and Senator Leo Kolber pitching the expansion.

The building carries his father’s name. The family and Power Corporation funded it.

Here is the part that really matters.

The man on that train was not just a passenger. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was the Prime Minister of Canada — the same man who had invoked the War Measures Act in 1970, the same man who had stared down the FLQ and the separatist movement in Quebec.

Now he was sitting across from Paul Desmarais, the man who owned La Presse, pitching him to expand the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. A Prime Minister, a media baron, and a senator, on a train, shaping what a city would look at on its walls.

Politics shaping culture, in real time, in the open.

The relationship was far from new. During the October Crisis, La Presse’s coverage was more supportive of the police and military response, and more focused on law and order, than the Toronto Star — which was more critical of the federal government and more open to negotiating with the FLQ to save the hostages.

Desmarais himself was a committed federalist. His name was on the FLQ’s kidnapping list in 1970, and Trudeau personally ordered troops to escort him home.

The paper’s editorial line matched the owner’s politics: condemn the FLQ’s violence, support the governments’ crackdown, and keep the critical space open for Le Devoir instead. Do you see the thread — Desmarais was backing what Trudeau was doing. The same media baron who would later fund the museum expansion had already stood with the Prime Minister when the state reached for its hardest tools.

And the chief curator of that same museum is Mary-Dailey Desmarais — Zhao-Ionescu Chief Curator, PhD in art history from Yale, on staff since 2014, chief curator since 2020. The family that built the pavilion now curates what goes inside it.

But the Desmarais reach didn’t stop at the gallery walls. Paul Desmarais Sr. bought La Presse, Montreal’s leading French-language newspaper, in 1967. Through Gesca, they controlled a string of outlets that looked independent but weren’t — La Presse, Le Soleil, Le Droit, Le Quotidien, La Tribune, Le Nouvelliste, La Voix de l’Est. At their peak, those titles accounted for more than 45% of francophone daily circulation in Quebec. They also held radio and television stations in Ontario before selling those off.

In 2015 they sold the six regional papers to Groupe Capitales Médias.

Then in 2018, Power Corporation-The Desmarais family handed La Presse to a nonprofit trust in 2018 — fifty million dollars, severed ownership ties, the Guardian model I wrote about. See: https://tormatime.substack.com/publish/post/214114441

But the family didn’t leave. Pierre-Elliott Levasseur, Paul Desmarais’s son-in-law, sits on the board as president. The family stepped out of ownership and stayed in the room — the same model the Guardian adopted decades earlier through its Scott Trust, which has held the paper since 1936 to shield it from commercial and political pressure. A number of media organizations worldwide have made the same shift.

That’s the circle in one institution: the money, the building, and the person deciding the narrative, all under one name.

The same structure as the Thomsons at the AGO — except here the family didn’t just fund the gallery and own the press. They ran both, then converted the press to a trust while keeping the curatorial seat inside the family.

Before Ranbir Sidhu’s monumental sculptures landed at the AGO, another Sikh-heritage artist was already moving through major Canadian institutions — and her path was different. Keerat Kaur is a Canadian artist of Sikh-Punjabi heritage, trained as an architect, licensed with the Ontario Association of Architects. She studied biology and visual arts at Western University, then earned a Master of Architecture from the University of Toronto. Her practice spans painting, sculpture, writing, music, public art, and architecture — rooted in Punjabi language, Gurmukhi script, and Sikh philosophy.

In 2026 she had two major institutional shows running at the same time. Sweet Speech opened at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on April 14 and runs until September 20 — her first solo exhibition in a Canadian fine arts museum, built around the Sikh concept of mithi boli, sweet speech: humility, love, and truthfulness in language. Then If Gardens Could Dream opened at the Surrey Art Gallery on July 4 and ran until August 30, exploring migration, memory, and cultural knowledge across the South Asian diaspora. A second Surrey work, Symbol Harvesting, a stop-motion animation, ran July 22 to September 28 at UrbanScreen. Both were curated by Suvi Bains. The gallery even ran a Punjabi-language tour of the show on July 30.

Unlike Sidhu, who jumped straight from rap-world furniture to a museum debut with no gallery history, Kaur climbed the institutional ladder — public projects, biennials, then major museum shows. Both types of artist landing in major galleries in the same window is what makes the pattern harder to dismiss as coincidence.

No dedicated commercial gallery represents her publicly. Her work is listed as courtesy of the artist.

The word “Punjabi” is doing specific work. Khalistan — the proposed independent Sikh homeland carved out of India’s Punjab — is a Punjabi project. The movement traces to the 1940s, gained armed momentum in the 1980s under Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, and has been diaspora-led ever since. Canada is now home to the largest Sikh population outside India — roughly 772,000 people, about 2.1 percent of the country. Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Khalistani organizer and former head of the Canadian chapter of Sikhs for Justice, was shot dead in Surrey in June 2023 — the same city where Kaur’s show now runs. CSIS has noted that a small number of Khalistani extremists continue to use Canada as a base for promotion, fundraising, and planning of violence primarily in India. The referendums themselves are non-binding and concern Punjab in India, not Canadian soil.

I’m not saying Keerat Kaur’s paintings advocate separatism. I’m saying the galleries are normalizing the Punjabi frame — the language, the script, the diaspora memory, the ancestral land — as Canadian culture. And that frame sits one step away from the political project that wants Punjab severed from India.

The politics is already there. Jagmeet Singh, NDP leader until 2025, is a Canadian-born Sikh of Punjabi descent — his parents are from the Malwa region of Punjab. Harjit Sajjan was born in Hoshiarpur district, Punjab. Maninder Sidhu, Minister of International Trade under Carney, is from Punjab and has lived in Brampton over thirty years. Ruby Sahota’s parents immigrated from Punjab. Randeep Sarai immigrated from Punjab at age eleven and built his practice in Surrey. On the Conservative side, Tim Uppal, deputy leader, is Sikh, born in New Westminster to Indian immigrant parents — the first turbaned Sikh in Canadian cabinet, under Harper. In the 2025 election, twenty-two Punjabis were elected to Parliament. The SGPC, the body that manages Sikhism’s holiest sites including the Golden Temple, has publicly honoured Canadian Sikh MPs at Amritsar.

So the circle closes. The galleries embed Punjabi culture into Canadiana. The speeches elevate Sikh soldiers and Sikh sacrifice. The politicians — many from Punjab families — carry the frame into government. And the counter-narrative, the crime busts, the trucking networks, the Khalistani referendums, runs underneath it all, unmentioned in the museum wall text.

Then I walked into the Ranbir Sidhu show, No Limits, and it stopped me cold.

Sidhu was born in 1982 in Maidenhead, England, to a traditional Sikh family with deep Punjabi roots. His mother was a Partition refugee. His father was born in what is now India under British rule, while his grandfather was living in the British colony of Kenya. This family history is steeped in British colonial legacy. He was raised in Scarborough, Ontario, in a strict Sikh household. His father, who owned a metal fabrication shop, put a drafting table in his bedroom at age eight and demanded he draw every day.

When I first started to research beyond what was on display at the gallery I realized, it fit the Drake and Jay-Z world Sidhu came from and not through the art world track. Ranbir built his career in the rap industry through his company Futurezona, making luxury custom furniture and sculptures for Drake and Jay-Z. He created a diamond-dusted, gold-flaked OVO table for Drake, and multiple high-end works for Roc Nation — including a desk with 88 dots, Jay-Z’s reference to 1988, the year he was selling drugs in the Marcy Projects.

And then — with zero history in the traditional art world, no gallery shows, no slow climb, no credentials whatsoever — this man is handed a full museum debut at the Art Gallery of Ontario with three massive new sculptures created from scratch just for this exhibition. This is not the norm. This is highly unusual.

The sculptures weren’t made in an art studio. They were fabricated at EM Dynamics, a Scarborough machine shop run by Ranbir Sidhu’s uncle, Dave Sidhu, who’s led the company for over thirty years.

EM Dynamics is Controlled Goods Program certified and publicly advertises defence manufacturing — prototyping and custom components for helicopters, combat and armoured vehicles, emergency response vehicles, and shipbuilding programs.

The same machines, the same hands, the same shop that produced military-grade parts also produced the three massive sculptures now standing in the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The show received funding from the Government of Canada — federal tax dollars going toward a provincial institution. The sponsor list on the wall itself tells the rest of the story: Private Wealth as supporting sponsor, Soberman Goldstein & Associates Ltd. as contributing sponsor, the Koolum Foundation — a Sikh philanthropic organization — as generous support, and the Canada Council for the Arts as the institutional backer. Sikh community money, corporate money, and federal money, all in the same room, converging on the same narrative.

The AGO itself is heavily anchored by the Thomson family, who have poured enormous amounts of art and money into the institution for decades. The same family owns Reuters — now Thomson Reuters, one of the most powerful news agencies in the world. The lineage runs three generations: Roy Thomson, the first Baron Thomson of Fleet, who built the newspaper empire and was ennobled by the British Crown in 1964; his son Kenneth, the second Baron, who bought the Rubens in 2002 for £49.5 million and donated roughly two thousand works worth over three hundred million dollars to the AGO; and David, the third Baron since 2006, who merged the company with Reuters in 2008. The title is hereditary. The family holds dual Canadian and British citizenship. Their deep ties to the City of London and the British establishment are impossible to ignore.

Julian Cox was the curator. His entire career was built on photographs — founding Curator of Photography at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, before that at the High Museum in Atlanta and the Getty.

A monumental metal sculpture show is a genuine departure from his lane. He met Sidhu at the opening of the KAWS: FAMILY exhibition at the AGO in the fall of 2023.

After that conversation, Sidhu shared his work with Cox, leading to multiple studio visits and a long series of discussions. Cox personally visited Sidhu’s studio multiple times and then championed the exhibition. The forthcoming exhibition catalogue is edited by Julian Cox himself, and it includes an interview between Cox and Sidhu, alongside essays by scholars from institutions such as the ROM and Tate Britain. Cox announced his departure from the AGO in March 2026, last day April thirteenth — before a replacement had been found.

The Sikh content is not incidental. It is central to the meaning of the work. The sculptures reference Guru Nanak, Sikh history, and the Battle of Saragarhi.

Cox’s own words: Sidhu’s works push the aesthetic and technical limits of metal as a medium, combining memory, material, innovation and the future into a single artistic vision.

The AGO was proud to present his first museum exhibition. Cox didn’t mention that it was Sidhu’s only art exhibition in his life.

I go back to the wall text that curiously says there is no special meaning in any of the text or numbers or letters displayed in the work. As an artist myself, I know that when you lay a pen down, you don’t do it for no reason.

Symbols carry cultural programming whether the artist admits it or not. A Sikh turban, a number like 88, a geometric pattern — these aren’t neutral. They land in a mind that’s already been shaped by decades of exposure to what they mean.

The fact that the wall text denies meaning is itself a meaning. It says: don’t look too hard, just feel. And feeling is exactly where the narrative slips in.

The 21-soldier sculpture — Fortress of Memory — memorializes the 21 Sikh soldiers of the 36th Sikh Battalion who fought to the death at the Battle of Saragarhi in 1897, refusing to surrender. On September 12, 1897, twenty-one soldiers of the 36th Sikh Regiment of the British Indian Army held a signal outpost against an estimated ten to fourteen thousand Pashtun tribesmen. They fought for over six hours. All twenty-one died. All twenty-one were posthumously awarded the British Indian Army Order of Merit — the highest gallantry award available to an Indian soldier at the time, and the only time in history an entire unit received it for a single battle.

Next to it, the wall text carries a line from Guru Gobind Singh, from Deh Shiva Bar Mohe Eha in the Dasam Granth: “May I never turn away from righteous deeds… when the last days of my life come, may I die fighting in battle.” A death-before-surrender prayer, paired with a memorial to men who did exactly that. That is the martyrdom frame — and it is the gallery’s own framing, not mine.

This is not a peace installation. It is a war installation. It honors a fight to the death — soldiers who died for the British Indian Army, not for Canada, not for peace, but for an empire.

And the sculptures that honor them were built in a shop that does defence manufacturing for the military. The same hands that make parts for combat vehicles made the art that glorifies soldiers who died for the British Empire.

The empire is always there, but it has a way of cutting itself out of the final picture. The sacrifice was for the empire. The wealth extracted was for the empire. The soldiers were loyal and gallant, and they fought to the death — but ultimately it was for the benefit and the wealth of the empire. And the empire is invisible at the end of the day. What you see is the art. What you see are the soldiers. What you see is the sacrifice, the story.

But the empire, even though it is shaping everything and people are giving their lives for it, the empire is almost invisible.

The Odyssey sculpture maps Guru Nanak’s sacred journeys, and the wall text there carries his words on the boundlessness of creation: “There are myriads of planets, solar systems, and galaxies upon galaxies. If one speaks of it, there is no limit, no end.” Sidhu says he grew up hearing it.

The spiritual frame and the martial frame sit side by side, and the wall text never tells you which one to weight.

So let’s connect the dots. We have the British-connected Thomson family controlling one of Canada’s most important cultural institutions. We have the Canadian federal government helping fund the show. We have an artist celebrating Sikh soldiers who fought and died for the British Indian Army. We have a curator whose entire career was photography suddenly championing monumental metal sculpture. We have a fabrication shop that also does military-grade work. And we have wall text that tells you there’s nothing to see.

When you see all of this together — British colonial ties, federal funding, a powerful media family with a royal British title, and a narrative that elevates warriors who served the British Empire — you have to ask: What story is really being pushed here, and why?

I’ll be straight with you. The work itself is breathtaking. The design and craftsmanship are exceptional. I appreciate that as someone who has created art and architectural concepts my whole life. But that beauty is exactly what makes it dangerous. When something is this mesmerizing, people let their guard down. They think they’re just looking at art.

They don’t realize they’re being fed a very specific narrative — one that, in today’s climate, risks deepening divisions inside Canada.

And here’s the thread that ties it to the de László. The de László painting shows middle-ranking Sikh officers of the British Indian Army — dignified, overlooked, serving the empire. The Sidhu installation shows Sikh soldiers of the British Indian Army dying for the empire.

Two works, one gallery, one narrative: the Sikh as loyal warrior of the British Empire. The gallery is setting a framework of war — not peace, not reconciliation, not the common good. War. And the war is always the empire’s war.

The reverence didn’t start at the AGO. It runs through the highest office in the country.

Sir John A. Macdonald, April 1867, before Confederation: Sikhs on the ready from the British Indian Army.

Stephen Harper, May 6, 2014, at a Vaisakhi event on Parliament Hill, focused his speech on Private Buckam Singh — a Sikh who came to Canada in 1907, faced discrimination, volunteered for the First World War, served with the 20th Battalion in Flanders, was wounded twice including at the Battle of St. Eloi, and later died from tuberculosis. Harper said: “Sikhs have always contributed and never hesitated to defend the great values for which Canada stands.”

Justin Trudeau, 2016, a formal apology in the House of Commons for the Komagata Maru incident — 376 passengers, nearly all Sikhs from Punjab, denied entry in 1914 under racially restrictive immigration laws, forced back to India, where British Indian police opened fire at Budge Budge, killing roughly twenty. Trudeau was apologizing for Canada’s role in the denial of entry. The shooting was carried out by British colonial police in India, not Canadian authorities.

Mark Carney, April 2026, at a Vaisakhi event in Ottawa during Sikh Heritage Month: he praised the community for enterprise, achievement, and seva. To most English speakers, seva sounds like charity — volunteering, helping out. In Sikh tradition it means something older and harder: seva in its martial form — the doctrine of the Khalsa, the armed brotherhood founded in 1699 to defend the faith by force. That lineage runs straight through to the 36th Sikh Battalion at Saragarhi — the same twenty-one soldiers Sidhu’s sculpture memorializes. Carney didn’t have to say ‘soldier.’ He said the word that already means soldier to the people he’s addressing. The frame hasn’t changed since Macdonald’s 1867 letter proposing a Sikh army to hold San Francisco. Only the medium has.

All at moments when “old stock” Canadian war dead — British, Scottish, Irish, European descent — were also being honored.

The contrast is the argument. I’m not saying these speeches are wrong. I’m saying the timing and the framing are doing cultural work.

Or is the cultural work only the beginning — the soft opening of something harder.

On one hand, we revere Sikhism and Sikh soldiers as warriors who fight to the death. On the other, the FBI is busting Indian trucking company after Indian trucking company. Sikh and Khalistani networks warring against one another, bringing a fight from India to Canada. The Brampton “King” busts. The Khalistani assassination attempts. The Bishnoi clan. This is documented, sourced reporting — not speculation.

I’ve documented the busts in a previous piece — the links are there for anyone who wants them. I’ve also argued that Canada is being used as a vector — that the City of London is using Sikh trucking networks and crime gangs to attack the United States. That’s my read, not established fact, and the receipts are in those pieces. I’m not re-litigating it here. I’m pointing at it.

The reader who wants receipts follows the links. This keeps the piece from becoming a crime report while still showing the other side of the reverence — the side the galleries and the speeches don’t mention.

This is the mechanism. Culture sets the frame. Media tells you what to think about the frame. Politics acts inside the frame.

Evan Solomon is the case study. Before politics, he was one of CBC’s most prominent political interviewers — hosting Power & Politics and The House. Those roles put him in direct conversation with prime ministers, senior ministers, CEOs, central bankers — the core of Canada’s power network. In June 2015, CBC cut ties after a Toronto Star investigation by Kevin Donovan, the Star’s chief investigative reporter for decades. The reporting said Solomon had a private art brokering arrangement with his friend, art collector Bruce Bailey, connecting Bailey with wealthy buyers. Solomon received commissions of about ten percent, adding up to roughly three hundred thousand dollars. Reports identified Jim Balsillie, co-founder of Research In Motion, and Mark Carney, then Bank of England governor, as buyers connected through these dealings. No suggestion either acted improperly. The issue was Solomon’s conduct and disclosure.

Bruce Bailey is the money side of the same room. An investment banker turned early-stage investor and major collector, he became one of the Museum of Fine Arts’ most significant benefactors in Montreal. He built a salon model where bankers, artists, philanthropists, museum directors, and central players from the finance world mingled — not a celebrity culture, an influence culture. The Solomon affair exposed the overlap for a moment: sales of works by Kim Dorland and Peter Doig to high-profile buyers, no allegation against the buyers, but a window into how art, media, and elite finance intersect.

Despite the scandal, Solomon re-entered elite political broadcasting through a private network. SiriusXM hired him in 2015. By 2016, Bell Media brought him in. In June 2016, CTV announced he would host Question Period — one of the country’s marquee political programs. He also subbed on CTV National News. Millions of Canadians who watched him interview prime ministers on CBC kept watching him interview prime ministers on CTV. The brand transferred. The trust transferred. The influence transferred.

And then he ran for office. He now sits in cabinet under Prime Minister Mark Carney — as Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, and Minister responsible for FedDev Ontario, appointed May 2025. The same name that appeared in reporting about the art deal controversy is now his political principal. That doesn’t prove conspiracy. It illustrates how tightly interwoven Canada’s media and governing elites can be.

On the Conservative side: Tim Uppal, a Sikh, shadow minister. Uppal served as Minister of State for Multiculturalism from 2013 to 2015 under Harper, defending the niqab-at-citizenship-ceremonies policy and the proposed “barbaric cultural practices” hotline — both of which critics said disproportionately targeted Muslim Canadians. A Sikh Conservative defending policies that critics said targeted Muslims: the same cross-pressure, the same mixed signal about inclusion versus assimilation.

CBC is funded by the federal government. The same families who own the galleries own the presses. The circle is complete: the elite shape the culture, the culture shapes the politics, and the politics protects the elite. The public are the observers.

The people are observers now. The laws that govern them are written by the politic. The culture they consume is shaped by the power brokers — the benefactors of the major museums, the lords, the barons, the institutions that decide what hangs on the walls. And as we move further into the twenty-first century, the people are more and more separated from the power over their own future. The elite shape the culture, the culture shapes the politics, and the politics defines where we land as a human race. The people are displaced from the final decisions about their lives, their cultural future, their own identity — all defined by the elite.

And the elite are out of touch with the needs and wants of the families and the people they rule over. What they’re doing is a small minority, a very small group of people, with their own ideology of what people should be — an ideology that does not jibe or mesh with what people really want. People want to be free. They want to be the drivers of their own futures. They don’t want to be dictated to. They want to grow their own culture, their own family, their own identity. And here we have the elite dictating to us what our Canadian identity is to be — whatever flavor the elite decide they want to supplant into our culture and what we are as Canadians.

We’re finding more and more that the elite are programming the many for the benefit of the few, and we’re being disconnected from who we really are.

Art, as beautiful as it is — because it can unlock the mind so easily — is also an incredible weapon the elite are using against the people. It is a travesty that art is directed, guided, and controlled by the elite.

And the mechanism has a name: the art critic. The media entities that own the galleries — La Presse, Reuters, Thomson Reuters, and all the assets they control — employ art critics who hold enormous power. They determine what art is in and what art is out. They dictate what is good art, what is worthy of real value, and what is worthless. The final understanding and outcome of a work of art is not dictated by the art itself. It is dictated by the critics who influence the viewer through their narratives.

I have listened to art critics on so many occasions, and I find it almost insulting to my intelligence — when I look at the work myself and gain my own interpretation based on my own experiential knowledge, based on who I am. These critics are shaping the narrative of what is acceptable and what is not, what is worth a lot and what is worthless, all because they themselves are part of this elite class that determines what will sit on a museum wall and what will not.

The omission is jaw-dropping. The modern art world is saturated with anti-war and anti-imperial sentiment — the Winnipeg Art Gallery publicly commits to dismantling the culture of whiteness and runs an Anti-Colonial Social Club. Yet the same institutional class elevates twenty-one soldiers who died for the British Indian Army at Saragarhi, and strips out the one fact that explains why they died. The empire is cloaking itself. The City of London is doing its work: stripping the actual reason these men gave their lives, turning imperial martyrs into Sikh martyrs, and washing the British Indian Army out of existence at the exact moment decolonization is the stated focus. The same pattern travels. The Slough show — Sikh martial memory moved through the high-end gallery network — went from the UK to New York, then to Calgary, then into Toronto. The empire that these soldiers fought and died for is the one quietly erasing itself from the story.

That is the travesty. Art was supposed to be the one place where the individual mind meets something true. Instead it has become the one place where the individual mind is told what to think.

The Canadian government is now framing the warrior who gave his life to the empire — loyalty, fighting to the death — at the exact moment Canada is in a trade war with the United States. And they are calling it a war.

But the seeding came long before the tariffs. During the 2025 federal election campaign, comedian Mike Myers gifted Mark Carney a small red-and-white figurine of Sir Isaac Brock — the British general who died at the Battle of Queenston Heights on October 13, 1812, fighting the American invasion of Upper Canada. Myers and Carney filmed the now-famous “elbows up” campaign ad that same day. Myers, a Canadian-born star with deep ties to American entertainment and the Democratic orbit, acted as a kind of kingmaker — lending his notoriety to the anti-American frame.

On April 19, 2026, Carney released a YouTube address to the nation with the figurine sitting on his desk. He said Brock “fought and gave his life for our forebears,” that “before Canada even existed on paper, it had a shape in Brock’s imagination,” and that the statue reminds him “when we’re united as Canadians, we can withstand anything.” He spoke of valiant Canadians in their wars — and of Sikh valour alongside them. This was months before the tariff war. The public was already being built into a frenzy of anti-Americanism, a remembrance of a war bygone, before the free trade talks were ever blown up.

The monument itself was restored in parallel. Parks Canada announced one point one million dollars for the masonry work in September 2025. Total project cost, including planning and design, is reported as two point two million dollars — masonry, mortar, lead roofing. The work ran from September 2025 through spring 2026, and the monument reopened in July 2026. The Friends of Fort George are running commemorative tours and events around the October 13 anniversary. The symbolism is unmistakable: a fully restored monument to a war between the British Empire and the Americans, at a moment when the political class is talking about war with the Americans again.

I want to be precise about the history. It was not “Canadians” versus Americans. It was loyalists, Upper Canadians, British regulars — the British Army was the largest contingent — French-speaking Voltigeurs, and Indigenous nations, including Tecumseh’s confederacy, fighting against American forces. There are different framings of why the Americans came. One is that they came to liberate the Canadas from British rule. America had been built on breaking away from that same empire. The British goal was to break the Americans as completely as possible — an empire goal that ultimately failed. Carney, I believe, wants that empire to continue living — through Canada, on this continent — at the very moment the United States is trying to rebuild itself as a sovereign, self-sufficient power through reshoring, tariffs, and what many call the Hamiltonian economic model. That’s how I read it.

The deeper point is the inversion. Andrew Breitbart said politics is downstream from culture. Right now the politic is upstream — shaping the culture. The Sikh warrior narrative in the galleries, the Punjab-connected politicians in both major parties, the speeches elevating fight-to-death loyalty — this is a battle cry being amplified inside a community of roughly seven hundred thousand Sikh Punjabis in Canada. I’m not saying Canada has the military capacity to wage a hot war. I’m saying the public sentiment is being pushed. The art, the speeches, and the restored monument are all pointing the same direction: toward division from America, toward a fighting spirit, toward a narrative where loyalty to the empire’s frame is the highest virtue.

The empire is invisible again. What you see is the soldier. What you see is the sacrifice. What you see is the monument and the empire is the one still being served.

The Sikh warrior tradition is centuries old — the lions of the Indian Army, the men who carried the burden of fighting to the death. In Canada that tradition is being lifted onto a pedestal at the exact moment the institutions are dismantling whiteness. The Winnipeg Art Gallery publicly commits to decentring and dismantling the culture of whiteness. Yet the same class of institutions elevates a community of roughly seven hundred thousand Sikh Punjabis while the majority population — still around sixty-nine percent white — is told its history is the problem. Harper honoured Private Buckam Singh, one of only about ten Sikh Canadians who served in the First World War, out of the hundreds of thousands of old-stock soldiers who died. Chrétien, in a fiery September 11, 2026 speech in Gander, told the crowd “we bow to no one.” Are we edging the Sikh community toward martyrdom again — this time for a new empire, a new Khalistan, a new freedom that may never come? The transnational networks are already violent. The rhetoric is already martial. The galleries are already framing the sacrifice. The only question left is whether the martyrdom is symbolic — or real.

Are we being set up for a spark into a hot war?

For Shelley, on her birthday, September 8th,2026.

There are birthdays that count years, and then there are birthdays that feel like they count distances, generations, memories. Lives. Perhaps even time itself…

Today, as you turn older by another year, Shelley, I don’t only see these years. I see a road vanishing backward through centuries, as if, just for a moment, that straight line of time softens.

Long before there was a Hungary, your people, the Welsh people, lived beneath a sky too wide for borders, for the Magyar horsemen, for firelight and stories, for the táltos and for mysteries that belonged to birth, to healing, to the sacredness that surrounds life itself.

Somewhere in that ancient world is a name my family carried to me, Torma, Tormási, Tormás. An Árpád great-grandson recorded at the edge of Byzantium, half in the old world, half in the new.

I know what was handed to me, in stories at the table, in voices saying, remember where you came from.

Then came Stephen’s world and his final days. A king with no son left, turning not to a general but to Mary, entrusting his people to her protection.

A nation placed under a woman’s mantle.

That matters to me, because Hungary isn’t just where my blood began, it’s something inside me, pagan memory and Christian faith, both wrestling and reconciling.

Sophia, wisdom, not identical to Mary but held within her, the seat of wisdom, the idea that wisdom enters the world through a woman’s body.

In Constantinople, the city Tormás once entered, Holy Wisdom towers above the altar with Mary and child.

The sacred feminine, the great lady, and wisdom, three echoes, three different ways of reaching toward the same mystery and while all of that was unfolding through centuries, another river flowed.

Wales.

Your people’s story, your ancestors. For generations, those two rivers never touched, never knew they were headed toward the same ocean.

Until Canada, That is where they met.

Yet before Canada, before I had a name for it, there was a dream.

A woman I had never met or had I, and then one day she was simply there. And something in me said, “There you are.”

We have now walked nearly 40 years together in this life, through projects, through impact, through impossible things that somehow still bent to our hands.

The world changed around us. We changed within it, but we did not leave each other and continued to love unconditionally.

Then once, I dreamed an ending I wouldn’t accept and in this life, I walked into the middle of it and refused the ending I’d been shown. I can explain that, because I lived it.

That moment taught me something that was profound, time may not be a wall, maybe it’s something that can bend or be collapsed. And if time can bend, and my love was the catalyst then what does that make love?

So today isn’t just a birthday. It’s a recognition point. The number seven returns on this date. I take that as a private whisper, not a proof, a nudge.

In our own myth, we called ourselves Neo and Trinity, not because of a film, but because it gave a name to what we felt.

Recognition, partnership, return and most importantly eternal LOVE.

And so Shelley, born on the Nativity of Mary, the day that celebrates the birth of the one who would carry wisdom into flesh, I honor your life.

Not just the years we’ve held hands in this world, but the long arc that feels older than both of us.

Happy birthday, my love. I knew you before I knew your name, and still I find you.

The unanswered questions surrounding the Biwei Zhang NATO espionage case begin long before the alleged damage — they begin with how she got through the door.

September 4, 2026 Update

The investigation surrounding Biwei Zhang, the Canadian woman arrested in Belgium on suspicion of espionage while working at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe — SHAPE — has now entered another significant phase.

CBC is reporting that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service is overseeing a multi-departmental damage assessment into what Zhang may have accessed during her years moving through Canadian government institutions and international organizations.

Investigators are attempting to reconstruct her reported roles across multiple agencies and international placements: where she worked, what systems or information she may have encountered, where she moved, whom she communicated with and whether there were accomplices, intermediaries or handlers involved.

That is a sweeping undertaking.

And it matters.

If the allegations against Zhang ultimately prove true, determining what she may have accessed, what information may have been compromised and whether anyone else participated would obviously be essential to understanding the potential national-security consequences.

But there is a huge problem with beginning the public discussion there.

We may be putting the cart before the horse.

Before asking what damage Zhang may have caused once she was inside the system, there is a threshold question that comes first:

How did she get through the door in the first place?

That question opens an entire chain of other questions that, so far, have received remarkably little public attention.

Start at the Beginning: How Did SHAPE Select Her?

SHAPE’s published internship process indicates that applicants apply directly to SHAPE.

That distinction matters.

It means we should not simply assume that Global Affairs Canada recruited Zhang, selected her for the position or initially sent her to NATO.

If Zhang applied directly to SHAPE and SHAPE subsequently selected her, then the first stage of the story occurred before the Canadian security-clearance machinery was engaged.

That produces the first unanswered questions:

How did SHAPE select and approve Zhang as a candidate in the first place?

What information was available to SHAPE when her application was considered?

What employment history did she provide?

What references were examined?

What identity information was supplied?

What previous international and Canadian government employment was disclosed?

And what preliminary screening, if any, occurred before SHAPE decided that she was a candidate it wanted to bring into NATO’s strategic military headquarters?

These questions are especially important because Zhang was reportedly not an inexperienced university student walking into her first institutional placement.

Her reported employment history stretched across Canadian federal institutions and international organizations.

So what exactly did SHAPE know about the person it had selected?

That is the first part of the accountability chain.

But it is only the beginning.

Then Comes the Canadian Handoff

Once SHAPE selected a Canadian applicant, national security vetting had to occur.

And somewhere between those two points — SHAPE selecting Zhang and Canada conducting the security process necessary for her placement — an administrative handoff took place.

That handoff may turn out to be one of the most important and least examined parts of this entire affair.

At some point, somebody at SHAPE contacted somebody in Canada.

Who?

Who at SHAPE notified the Canadian government that Zhang had been selected?

To which Canadian department or agency was that notification sent?

Who received the file?

When was it received?

What information accompanied it?

And perhaps most importantly:

How did Global Affairs Canada become the sponsoring Canadian department?

That has not been adequately explained publicly.

If SHAPE selected Zhang directly, Global Affairs did not necessarily know anything about her application when she originally submitted it.

But at some point after her selection, the file landed on the Canadian side of the Atlantic and Global Affairs became involved as the sponsoring department.

That is a critical transition.

It establishes the moment at which the Government of Canada became formally involved in facilitating her placement.

And identifying that moment would allow us to reconstruct everything that happened afterward.

Why Global Affairs?

There is another question embedded in that handoff that deserves considerably more attention.

Why was Global Affairs Canada the sponsoring department?

SHAPE is not simply another international diplomatic institution.

It is the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe — NATO’s strategic military headquarters.

And Zhang was reportedly working in an information-technology environment.

That makes the choice of sponsoring department particularly interesting.

Why wasn’t the Department of National Defence the Canadian sponsor?

Could National Defence have sponsored the placement?

Could another Canadian security institution have been involved?

Was Global Affairs automatically responsible because this was an international posting?

Was it selected because of an established administrative arrangement with NATO?

Did SHAPE request Global Affairs specifically?

Or did somebody within the Government of Canada decide that Global Affairs would take responsibility for the file?

There may ultimately be a perfectly routine bureaucratic explanation.

But that explanation needs to be provided.

Because the sponsoring department is not an irrelevant administrative footnote.

It is one of the links connecting SHAPE’s selection decision to Canada’s security-vetting machinery.

And once we know who received the file and why Global Affairs became its sponsor, we arrive at the next stage.

When Did CSIS and the RCMP Enter the Picture?

Canada’s own security-screening architecture can involve multiple institutions.

CSIS has said that it provides security assessments concerning Canadians seeking sensitive positions with international organizations, including NATO.

Canadian security-screening guidance also provides for law-enforcement checks involving the RCMP as part of the broader screening architecture.

Ultimately, however, an assessment is not necessarily the same thing as the final administrative decision.

That distinction is critical.

So we need to know precisely what happened in Zhang’s case.

When did CSIS receive the file?

When did the RCMP become involved?

What information were those organizations asked to examine?

What information did they have available to them?

What did they report?

Were concerns raised?

Were discrepancies discovered?

Were additional questions asked?

Were any conditions attached to the assessments?

Did anybody recommend additional investigation?

And, crucially:

Who made the final decision that Zhang could receive the clearance necessary to enter SHAPE?

That is where accountability ultimately resides.

There was a chain.

SHAPE selection.

Canadian notification.

Sponsorship assignment.

Security screening.

Assessment.

Administrative decision.

Clearance.

Access.

Every link matters.

The Earlier Fraud Finding Makes the Vetting Question More Important

There is another element that makes reconstruction of that chain particularly important.

Public reporting has identified an earlier Public Service Commission matter involving Zhang and a federal job application.

According to reporting on the case, Zhang sought judicial review after the Public Service Commission concluded that she had committed fraud in an application process for a Canada Border Services Agency position by applying using two different names and email addresses and subsequently failing to clarify whether she had submitted multiple applications.

That history does not establish espionage.

Nor does it establish that information concerning that previous matter necessarily appeared in whatever security-screening process was later conducted for NATO.

Those distinctions matter.

But it raises an obvious and legitimate vetting question:

Was that information available to the people conducting or approving Zhang’s security assessment?

If it was available, how was it evaluated?

If it was not available, why wasn’t it?

And if identity discrepancies had previously been identified elsewhere within the federal system, were those discrepancies visible to the institutions responsible for evaluating her suitability for sensitive international work?

Again, the issue is not whether an earlier administrative finding proves espionage. It plainly does not.

The issue is whether Canada’s security-vetting system was capable of assembling and assessing the information already held within Canada’s own institutions.

That is precisely what a serious examination of the original clearance process should establish.

Now CSIS Is Helping Assess the Damage

And this brings us to one of the most uncomfortable institutional questions in the entire case.

CSIS is now reportedly overseeing a multi-departmental effort to determine what Zhang may have accessed and what damage may have resulted.

That is an entirely understandable role for Canada’s intelligence service.

Espionage and foreign interference sit squarely within CSIS’s national-security mandate.

But CSIS also has a security-assessment role in the process through which Canadians can obtain access to sensitive international positions.

That creates an institutional tension that should not simply be brushed aside.

It does not establish that CSIS did anything wrong.

It does not mean CSIS approved Zhang on its own.

And it certainly does not establish that CSIS possessed information that should have caused the clearance to be denied.

Those facts have not been publicly established.

But it does mean that an institution involved in one part of the security-screening architecture is now participating in determining the consequences of what allegedly happened after the person passed through that architecture.

That creates, at minimum, an appearance problem.

The institution helping examine the downstream consequences had a material role within the upstream security system.

That is precisely why the damage assessment and the examination of the original vetting process should not be treated as the same investigation.

They answer fundamentally different questions.

The damage assessment asks:

What happened after Zhang got inside?

An independent review of the vetting process would ask:

How did she get inside?

Canada needs answers to both.

The Vetters Cannot Be the Only Judges of the Vetting

This is why independent parliamentary and national-security oversight matters.

CSIS should absolutely participate in determining whether sensitive information was compromised.

The RCMP should participate where its mandate requires it.

Global Affairs should reconstruct its records.

National Defence should determine whether Canadian or NATO military information was potentially exposed.

And Canada should cooperate fully with NATO, SHAPE and Belgian investigators.

But there is a separate accountability question that should not be left entirely to the institutions that participated in the original process.

Who examined Zhang?

Who assessed her?

What records were checked?

What databases were consulted?

What warnings existed?

What information was missed?

What information was known?

What recommendations were made?

And who signed the final authorization?

An independent review does not presuppose institutional failure.

It determines whether institutional failure occurred.

That is an important distinction.

If Canada’s screening system worked exactly as designed and Zhang successfully deceived highly competent investigators despite a thorough examination, Canadians should know that.

If relevant information existed but was unavailable because federal departments failed to communicate with one another, Canadians should know that too.

If information was identified but discounted, we need to understand why.

If procedures were inadequate, they need to be changed.

And if every procedure was properly followed but those procedures themselves were insufficient to meet the threat, then the procedures need to be reconsidered.

None of those questions can be answered merely by determining what Zhang allegedly accessed after entering SHAPE.

The Damage Assessment Is Downstream

This is the distinction that risks becoming lost as attention shifts toward the damage assessment.

The damage assessment is necessarily downstream.

Investigators are now trying to reconstruct what Zhang allegedly did after obtaining access.

They will presumably examine computer systems, network records, badge movements, communications, physical access, documents, contacts and whatever other evidence remains available.

They will attempt to determine whether information was removed, copied, photographed, transmitted or otherwise compromised.

They will examine whether Zhang allegedly acted alone or whether others were involved.

They may attempt to identify handlers, communication channels or foreign intelligence connections if the evidence supports those possibilities.

That work is essential.

But none of it answers the upstream question.

The upstream investigation begins before Zhang ever walked through SHAPE’s doors.

It begins with the application.

Then the selection.

Then the Canadian notification.

Then the sponsoring department.

Then CSIS.

Then the RCMP.

Then the security assessment.

Then the clearance decision.

Then the authorization that allowed access.

Only after all of those things occurred could the alleged espionage inside SHAPE have become possible.

That chronology matters.

Reconstruct the Entire Chain

What Canada needs now is not simply a damage assessment.

It needs a complete reconstruction of the decision-making chain.

Start with SHAPE.

When did Zhang apply?

Who selected her?

On what basis?

What documentation did SHAPE possess?

When did SHAPE notify Canada?

Then follow the file across the Atlantic.

Which Canadian institution received the first notification?

On what date?

Why did Global Affairs become the sponsor?

Who made that decision?

What responsibilities did sponsorship carry?

Then follow the file into the security apparatus.

When was CSIS contacted?

When was the RCMP contacted?

What exactly was each organization asked to determine?

What information did each possess?

What did each report?

Were inconsistencies identified?

Were previous government employment records examined?

Was the earlier Public Service Commission matter known?

Were the different names associated with Zhang examined and reconciled?

Were her previous international placements reviewed?

Were foreign contacts examined to the extent legally permitted and required?

Were any concerns escalated?

Then identify the final decision-maker.

Who possessed the authority to say yes?

Who signed?

When?

And based upon what information?

That chronology should exist.

If it does, Canadians deserve to understand it.

If it does not, the absence of such an accountability trail would itself be significant.

This Is Bigger Than One Clearance

There is also a broader reason this matters.

Canada is not examining this case in a vacuum.

CSIS itself has repeatedly warned that foreign intelligence services — including those of the People’s Republic of China — actively seek Canadians who possess access to government, military, technological and other sensitive information.

Canada and its Five Eyes partners have specifically warned about sophisticated recruitment methods aimed at people with access to privileged military, political and economic information.

That is the threat environment in which security clearances are being granted.

The question therefore extends beyond one woman and one NATO internship.

Can Canada’s security architecture connect information held across departments?

Can it detect inconsistencies in employment and identity records?

Can information from previous federal hiring processes be appropriately surfaced during later national-security screening where legally permissible?

Who owns responsibility when several institutions participate in a clearance?

And when a Canadian is being placed inside an allied military headquarters, is the division of responsibility between the selecting organization, sponsoring department, intelligence service, police and final clearance authority sufficiently clear?

Those are structural questions.

And the answers matter not merely to Canada.

They matter to Canada’s allies.

A security clearance is ultimately an act of trust.

When Canada clears a Canadian for sensitive work inside an allied institution, Canada’s partners are relying, at least in part, upon the integrity of Canada’s security apparatus.

That makes this an alliance issue as much as a domestic accountability issue.

So Before We Ask What She Saw, Ask Who Opened the Door

The investigation now appears to be concentrating heavily on reconstructing Zhang’s footprint.

What did she see?

What could she access?

Where did she go?

Whom did she speak with?

What systems did she encounter?

Was anything compromised?

Was anybody helping her?

Those are necessary questions.

But they are not the first questions.

The first questions occur months earlier.

Who selected her?

Who notified Canada?

Who decided Global Affairs would sponsor her?

When did CSIS enter the process?

When did the RCMP enter the process?

What did they find?

What information did they possess?

Who reviewed their findings?

Who made the final decision?

And what precisely did that decision authorize?

Until those questions are answered, we have only half of the investigation.

Because there are really two potential security failures to examine here.

The first is the alleged activity itself.

The second is whether the system designed to prevent precisely that kind of activity failed to stop it.

Perhaps the screening process was exhaustive and Zhang defeated it.

Perhaps information was compartmentalized.

Perhaps critical information never reached the people making the decision.

Perhaps the process contained vulnerabilities that nobody recognized.

Or perhaps the investigation will ultimately establish that the Canadian screening system acted appropriately on everything reasonably available to it.

We do not yet know.

And that is exactly the point.

Those conclusions should emerge from evidence — not assumptions and not institutional self-examination alone.

Canada should determine the damage.

But Canada must also examine the doorway.

Because before we determine what Biwei Zhang may have done after she was inside one of NATO’s most sensitive military institutions, there remains a simpler, more fundamental and arguably more consequential question:

Who let her in — and why?

Prime Minister Carney says Canada was involved “from the start.” But what counts as “the start”?

The publicly reported timeline doesn’t begin with Canada detecting a problem. It begins with Allied Command Counterintelligence — ACCI — noticing Biwei Zhang in early 2026 and producing an initial report in February of the same year. At that time, ACCI was commanded by U.S. Army Colonel Angela Reber, who also commanded the U.S. Army’s 650th Military Intelligence Group.

Above her was U.S. Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe and simultaneously head of U.S. European Command. So the counterintelligence structure that first surfaces in this case had a strong U.S. command component.

Then came April 21st. An alarm triggered an evacuation at SHAPE. During that evacuation, Zhang was reportedly observed near the building housing the office of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, while suspicious activity was reportedly detected in that building’s access-control system. The cause of the alarm has still not been publicly explained.

I say that with some weight behind it. I’ve spent years designing evacuation plans, security protocols, and access-control systems — including bids for work at the Department of National Defence — and I’ve taught detection technology, infrared, ultrasonic, microwave, seismic perimeter sensors, CCTV, RF and the full stack. I know the difference between free egress and controlled zones, and how alarms and evacuations actually function in practice. From that informed perspective, this looks less like a random coincidence and more like a plausible diversion — a moment of managed chaos in which an attempt at unauthorized access would be easier to conceal. None of that is proof of who triggered the alarm or for what purpose. But it makes the reported access-control activity more significant, not less.

Here’s the part that should stop you cold. The request for Canada’s permission to investigate Zhang did not come before the April 21st breach. It came after. The European consortium reporting — Intelligence Online, Le Soir, Follow the Money — puts ACCI’s first report in February, the SHAPE alarm on April 21st, and only days later, the meeting where Canada’s agreement was obtained. Nothing public shows Canada being consulted before that incident.

Carney’s “from the start” is the only counter-claim — and a senior government source told the Globe it meant CSIS kept him updated. That’s not the same as being asked to authorize an investigation. Oh the irony! The very same CSIS tasked with vetting Zhang. The documented Canadian involvement begins after April 21st. Not before.

The central questions remain unanswered. What triggered that April 21st alarm? Why was Zhang near the SACEUR office area during the evacuation? What exactly was happening within the access-control system? And if an unauthorized access attempt occurred, was anyone else involved?

Days later, ACCI and Belgian military intelligence met, and Canada’s agreement was obtained for a broader investigation. That’s when Canada’s involvement is described — not at the detection stage. Nor was it Canada that detected it originally.

And now there is another extraordinary event to place directly into that timeline. In June — after the February counterintelligence report and after the April SHAPE security incident — Zhang reportedly travelled to Poland on official NATO business. Her trip coincided with NATO’s Coalition Warrior Interoperability eXercise, CWIX 2026, conducted at NATO’s Joint Force Training Centre in Bydgoszcz from June 8 to June 26. CWIX is a major NATO exercise involving the testing and interoperability of command, control, communications and information systems.

The reporting does not establish that Zhang herself participated in CWIX, and that distinction needs to remain clear. What it does report is that she was in Poland on NATO business during the exercise. Think about where that falls in the chronology. By then ACCI had reportedly been concerned about her for months. Its February report already existed. The extraordinary April 21st incident had already occurred. Canadian consent for the broader investigation had reportedly already been obtained. Yet in June, this Canadian former intern was apparently still sufficiently operational within the NATO environment to travel to Poland on official NATO business.

That creates another major unanswered question: if she was already the subject of this level of counterintelligence scrutiny, why was she still travelling on NATO business? Was that travel simply allowed because investigators did not yet have sufficient evidence to intervene? Was she compartmentalized and being watched? Was allowing her to continue operating part of a counterintelligence strategy intended to identify contacts or accomplices? We don’t know, but the Poland trip now belongs squarely in the investigative chronology.

Then, on June 30th, Colonel Reber handed ACCI and the 650th to another U.S. Army colonel, Christian Gregoire. So Reber was the commander during the February report, the April incident, Canada’s reported consent to the expanded investigation, and Zhang’s June trip to Poland. Gregoire inherited the command only weeks before the case moved into its public phase.

On July 24th, Zhang was arrested in Belgium. The case became public July 25th.

And then, on August 5th, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canadian officials had been involved “from the start,” adding the cryptic phrase, “draw your own conclusions.”

That brings us straight back to the question at the centre of this chronology: what does “the start” mean? Because the publicly reported timeline starts with ACCI’s concerns and its February report. It proceeds through the April SHAPE incident. Canadian consent to the broader investigation is reported only after that escalation. Canada unquestionably becomes part of the story. But based on the publicly reported chronology, Canada does not presently appear at the beginning of the counterintelligence story. ACCI does.

And now we know something else: between that April escalation and Zhang’s July arrest, she was still travelling internationally on NATO business. That makes the missing months — February, March, April, May, June and July — potentially some of the most important months in this entire investigation.

Canada does have a real gatekeeping role here. CSIS provides security assessments for Canadians seeking sensitive positions at NATO. Global Affairs Canada makes the final clearance decision. The RCMP piece also fits — screening can include law enforcement record checks — and given the sensitivity of the file, Parliament’s Public Safety Committee has launched a study into the federal screening and information-sharing system. So the way I think we can say it safely and strongly is: Canada was the vetting country. But the public’s chronology starts with ACCI spotting suspicious behavior and producing a report before Canada’s consent is reported. And that gap is the accountability question. What did Canada’s full screening process actually capture? What did it miss, and why was this person approved? That’s the failure point this piece can credibly centre.

One more piece I think is crucial, and still unanswered. Who triggered the alarm? Investigators still don’t know why that alarm went off. That’s not a minor loose end. If that alarm was deliberately triggered, who had the access to do that? And the investigative reporting now says that Belgian security services suspect possible accomplices inside and outside NATO. That doesn’t prove the alarm was part of a coordinated breach, but it makes the question unavoidable. If someone else was involved — if someone else inside SHAPE assisted or enabled access — that’s a separate and profound security breach. And it’s why I think one of the biggest questions now isn’t just “what was Zhang doing?” It’s “what was everyone else doing?” Starting with that alarm.

The Bigger Picture

Strip away the specifics and a pattern emerges. The United States is scrutinizing Canada on three fronts at once — military, financial, and intelligence — and the common thread is reliability.

A porous screening process that cleared a Chinese-Canadian into NATO’s command structure. A banking system that laundered terror money through TD. Energy and mining assets tied to Beijing through a Chinese FIPA that predates most of this scrutiny that was created by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and a northern border where Khalistani and Indian networks have already carried out cross-border violence, including an assassination attempt on Canadian soil.

That border is also a drug corridor. Transnational Sikh trucking networks move fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamine in both directions — from Mexican cartels up through California into Ontario, from Brampton’s “King,” Guramrit Sidhu, down into New York State, across the Trans-Canada into BC and back. The FBI’s Operation Dead Hand caught Sidhu’s network and the precursor chemicals bound for Edmonton.

Then in July came Operation Hard Ball — another FBI sweep that charged thirty-seven defendants across three India-based syndicates, including the Bishnoi gang, seized roughly a thousand kilograms of cocaine, and linked some of the same trucking routes to the assassination of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia.

I’ve documented roughly five hundred million dollars in busts; the trade itself is estimated at over ten billion dollars annually. This isn’t ideology alone — it’s ideology fused with organized crime, and it runs through the same border the Americans are now watching.

This isn’t a coordinated campaign against Canada. But it doesn’t need to be. The Donroe Doctrine — Trump’s own national security strategy revived the Monroe Doctrine as a “Trump Corollary” — gives Washington a single lens through which all of it reads the same way: a neighbor whose weaknesses are now America’s vulnerabilities.

That lens is now trained on NATO itself. If the alliance’s counterintelligence can’t catch a breach involving its own staff — and if, as Belgian security services suspect, internal and external accomplices were involved — then NATO stops being an asset and starts looking like a liability. The United States is extricating itself from needless wars, realigning toward peace with Russia and China, and it will not tolerate a northern border that is porous to Chinese influence, terror finance, and espionage. My conclusion is that Canada is being measured against a standard it is currently failing to meet.

And that is exactly where the next story begins.

About the author

I’ve spent over a decade in physical and electronic security — designing access-control systems, perimeter detection, and evacuation protocols, including bidding on work for the Department of National Defence. I’ve taught detection technology at Niagara College: infrared, ultrasonic, microwave, seismic sensors, CCTV, the full stack. I’ve installed systems for chiefs of police, judges, and lawyers, including mob families and I’ve worked alongside private investigators on surveillance and counter-surveillance.

That background is why I follow this story the way I do. When an alarm goes off at SHAPE and nobody can explain why, I don’t just read the reporting — I hear the system.

Here we are in the middle of a tariff war. Twenty-five percent here, 50 percent there, and Canadians are told to buy Canadian.

We are told Trump is evil. We need to revolt against America and the Trump administration.

It’s the patriotic thing to do!!

The masses line up, hearts strung out waving red communist flags feverishly, with a sole maple leaf bordered by big fat red walls…. Shhhh, we are hemmed in.

It’s the flag you know. Be proud!

I am Canadian …….. crowd roars.

Prime Minister Carney tells us to choose Canadian.

The crowd roars.

Premiers tell us to stand up for Canadian businesses. Buy Canadian! Do the right thing!!

The crowd roars!

Do you remember what I saw. Did you?

Meanwhile, provincial systems punish and financially crush Canadians for buying Canadian.

Let’s check on those damn brass tacks, shall we?

Consider the New Brunswick Meade case. A Nova Scotia producer’s $11,300 order was pushed toward 25,000 by Alcohol New Brunswick’s markup. That’s a 90% increase. Damn, that makes Trump’s tariffs seem like weak sauce in comparison.

A B.C. winery faced a lower landed price into the U.S. after a 50% tariff than in Ontario or Quebec by a sizeable amount.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.7280613

And just think, even the dirty IMF calls internal barriers para: obstructive and punitive, over 40% in some sectors, and OECD work ties supply management to over 46% higher consumer prices. If 46% isn’t a price gouge I don’t know what is.Half and Half was $1.99 two years ago, it’s $4.25 today.

Even the globalist oligarchs think it’s way out of line from normal slavery.

They did say Canada was a model that the WEF could point towards.

None of this makes foreign tariffs less painful.

But why are Canadians being so hosed? Is this why Canadians are referred to as hosers?

This is financial rape and all I see is the red cult fighting the blue cult while the people feed on each other.

I see Canada as thirteen colonial economies pretending to be one, and as long as we tolerate protectionism at home while denouncing it abroad, we will be gaslit into paying the bill.

Show Canadians the emperor has no clothes.

Clean up our own house.

Tear down the walls we control and be fair to hardworking Canadians.

Stop demanding this bullshit patriotism as a cover price, and when the smoke clears and the mirrors break, it’s the hardworking Canadian paying each and every time and the slavers keep making a fortune.

That has to change.

Canadians are being gaslit to empty their wallets while the political class laugh all the way to the bank.

Harper says he consulted Carney and advised dollar for dollar, tariff for tariff action and Canadians will feel the pain but it’s necessary, this coming from the guy that sold Canada to China through the Chinese FIPA with the backing of his MP’s bar none.

And let’s not forget Poilievre backing supply management to the death while saying it in French in Quebec, knowing his gaslit followers in English speaking Canada, won’t clue in.

No wonder they laugh behind the scenes. Did you see it? I pay attention to what matters.

Canadians are being disrespected, abused, gouged…………… all the while waving a flag.

What does that mean………..

I am Canadian but that was then and this is now.

Remember?

The NATO spy story just got much, much bigger, and Canadian coverage has gone beyond dead in the water.

On August 28th, La Lettre, together with Le Soir, Knack, and Follow the Money reported that Belgian security services suspect that Canadian citizen and NATO intern Claire Biwei Zhang may have had accomplices inside and outside the alliance.

That is a serious escalation.

This is not a routine legal matter playing out in a foreign court, but a Canadian citizen, vetted by Canada’s own system, placed inside NATO, now reportedly linked to a wider security concern inside that alliance.

None of this proves guilt or suppression, but it does raise obvious questions.

Who are the alleged accomplices? Are they NATO personnel, contractors, interns? Are any of them Canadian?

Here we are on August 31st, in the wee hours and there is no trace of this reporting in CBC, CTV, Global News, the Globe and Mail, National Post, or the Toronto Star.

This loud silence is not confined to legacy media. I can’t find coverage in outlets like Rebel News, Juno News, True North, or the Western Standard either. These outlets usually operate from completely different political and editorial positions, yet here, the result is the same.

So where has the Canadian media been for the last few days?

The early story was covered. The alleged spy and the alleged vetting failure, but now that European reporters say that investigators suspect possible accomplices inside and outside NATO, and describe unexplained activity after Zhang was already detained, the Canadian conversation appears to have simply stopped.

That’s newsworthy in itself. It’s fair to ask why. But the silence is only one part of what makes the August 28th reporting so remarkable. While a Canadian former NATO intern, Claire Biwei Zhang, sat in a Belgian prison awaiting a detention hearing, her already searched Mons apartment was entered again, and passwords on several of her social media accounts were changed from outside the prison.

If the prime suspect is behind bars, who is still active?

What on earth explains the post-arrest tampering? Who changed those passwords? Who entered that Mons residence after investigators had already searched it, and why was that residence not under lockdown?

Look at it from this angle: if someone took the risk to re-enter that apartment, then a plausible reason is that they believed something was still there that Investigators missed or didn’t remove.

Otherwise, why go back?

Pair that with remote password changes while the suspect was detained, and the picture is of activity that didn’t end with the arrest. That’s not easy to explain.

At the very least, it creates a picture in which activity around the suspect apparently continued after the principal suspect was already in custody—and depending on what investigators ultimately establish, it raises the question of whether some kind of rogue outfit or network was still operating.

Then there is the anonymous source. That becomes the second riddle.

NATO didn’t advertise these embarrassing developments. A well-informed source did. That distinction matters.

If NATO itself did not officially announce that the apartment had been entered again and that passwords were changed, then the question is, who wanted that information public?

That doesn’t prove a NATO whistleblower.

The source could be connected to Belgian investigators, law enforcement, intelligence services, NATO, or someone briefed on the case. That leaves open the possibility that someone close to the case wanted to signal that the story was larger than official reassurances suggested.

Was somebody concerned about what was happening?

Was somebody trying to force scrutiny?

That question takes on a different weight once you factor in another reported detail: Zhang’s reported April proximity to SACEUR’s office, of General Alexus Grynkewich. General Grynkewich is a United States four-star general and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe. That’s NATO’s top operational military commander.

A Canadian citizen accused of espionage was reportedly discovered near his office. That’s not a minor proximity. That raises far more serious questions than how she passed screening.

Who helped her?

Who was active after the arrest?

Were there other Canadians involved? This isn’t just a Canadian embarrassment. It potentially touches the trust architecture of the alliance itself. A serious breach of trust, at the very least.

That brings us directly to Washington. I did a deep dive and a wide sweep, and so far, no statement from Kash Patel, John Ratcliffe, Pete Hegseth, the FBI, CIA, Pentagon, or White House.

Washington hasn’t said a word yet. That silence is conspicuous.

Ottawa on the other hand was discussing screening, European investigators are digging, and Washington is quiet. That absence doesn’t prove a fracture. It’s an open question, not a conclusion, but it’s worth watching.

If Washington weighs in for the first time, that will be a major development.

Canadian politics adds another strange puzzle. Pierre Poilievre demanded answers early on, Conservative MP Dane Lloyd pushed for a parliamentary probe, then after August 28th, silence. No new attacks, no fresh demands, crickets. That’s odd.

The opposition had every political incentive to pursue a story about an alleged Canadian security screening failure inside NATO. Instead, after the August 28th revelations, the pressure appears to stop. Why?

So an alternative lens is worth at least considering. If the leak didn’t come from NATO messaging, then maybe it’s coming from someone close to the case who wants the vulnerability out in the open. That doesn’t prove corruption, and it doesn’t prove a whistleblower, but it fits the possibility of someone uncomfortable with an “everything under control” posture.

Beyond NATO lays the Five Eyes apparatus.

Canada and the United States aren’t just NATO allies; they’re intelligence partners in one of the world’s most consequential information sharing relationships. If trust and screening integrity come into doubt, the ripple could reach intelligence sharing.

There is no public evidence yet of a rupture, but could this episode begin to test that confidence? That’s a forward-looking question, and it matters. That leads me to the most serious level of the discussion.

The entity we know as NATO could trigger World War 3. That doesn’t mean one individual could simply push a button. That’s not how the alliance is structured, but alliances that manage immense military power carry enormous consequences if their security is compromised. The danger is not a rogue actor pressing a button.

The danger is manipulated intelligence, provocation, miscalculation, escalation. That’s where catastrophic risk enters the picture in theory. So, if investigators genuinely suspect assistance from within and outside NATO, then how deep any such penetration might be, becomes an extremely important question. Not for speculation alone, but for thorough investigation.

Were there other Canadians involved? We don’t know.

And so, at the end, the piece returns to the source. Perhaps the most consequential figure in this story is not the alleged spy, but the person who put those post-arrest details into the public domain.

Who wanted us to know, and why? Was it a warning, an attempt to steer, an act of conscience?

We don’t know but, there is one more possibility worth putting on the table.

What if Washington’s silence does not mean Washington is doing nothing? What if it means Washington is doing more?

We know Belgian authorities are investigating. We know shape counterintelligence became involved. We know Canadian authorities have been drawn into questions about how Zhang was screened and gained access, but we don’t know whether the United States quietly launched its own parallel counterintelligence assessment.

Given what is reportedly at stake, why wouldn’t it? Would Washington simply depend on others to tell it what happened, or would America want its own answers? Could American counterintelligence be independently reconstructing who Zhang spoke to, where she went, who may have assisted her?

Could that help explain Washington’s public silence?

There is no evidence at this point that this was a CIA operation or any other American directed intelligence operation. That distinction matters, but so do the questions. This brings us back to the core mystery. Who knew activity continued after Zhang’s arrest?

Who knew about the apartment, about the password changes, about suspected accomplices? Who decided the rest of us needed to know? If Washington really is quietly doing more, then the silence isn’t the end of the story, it’s the beginning of another one, one where allies themselves might not be fully aligned on what happened or who to trust.

That’s where I land with this.

Not with answers, but with a question that refuses to go away.

Today we are back to court for more answers, or will it end up being even more questions.

Addendum

Based on how I see things I believe that US military intelligence with the CIA and FBI are working this case fully independent of any of the NATO countries.

NATO has shown quite clearly that it has the interests of perpetual war as it’s number one focus.

The target is Five Eyes.

The network of spying used against a sitting president and weaponized against the sovereign republic of the United States of America is going to answer for it’s rogue activities once and for all.

Five Eyes will become irrelevant based on the tech now available to replace them. The City of London’s 500 year old legacy is coming to an end.

Belgium Update: August 31, 2026 1:23pm ET 7:23 Belgium time.

What we now know as of now!!

There is a major development as the Belgian Chamber of Indictments has ruled on the detention matter and ordered the Canadian former SHAPE intern to remain in pre-trial custody for another month. The timing couldn’t be any more suspect.

Belgium’s Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office confirmed the decision in a written statement today, August 31.

Crucially, today’s proceeding is being described as the hearing of her appeal against the earlier detention decision lodged at the end of July and to have been heard by August 15th.

In other words, the appeal we have been waiting to have resolved appears to have been dealt with: she lost the challenge to her continued detention.

Reuters reports that the Chamber of Indictments extended her detention by one month and that her lawyer had not immediately responded to a request for comment.

Finally Canadian reporting has now picked it up.

The Canadian Press reported from Ottawa this morning that the Belgian prosecutor confirmed the extension and again noted that Canadian federal officials are proceeding on the basis that the suspect is Biwei Zhang, also known as Claire Zhang.

What has not emerged in this first wave is almost as important: the prosecutor has not publicly identified the alleged third country, disclosed the evidence underlying the espionage allegation, or provided new details about suspected accomplices. Nor has the prosecutor said a thing about the activity after her detention including the entry into her residence while she has been incarcerated. Strange.

The investigation remains framed as suspected espionage for a third country and participation in a criminal organization.

So the silence we were discussing has now broken — and the result is significant: she remains behind bars for at least another month.

So my comments stand. Is this related to the Xi Trump meeting, NATO’s relevance in a changing world or an attempt by NATO itself to scuttle any agreement between China and the US?

Let’s not forget that without the US as the bully and bulldog for NATO the EU becomes neutered militarily and destroys any perception of power by its member states as a group aligned.

This would leave the three superpowers to agree to peace thereby sidelining the City of London and Bankster Gangster Empire to flounder with its vassal states.

Canada being one of them. More to come I am sure as September 24 nears with Trump meeting Xi at the White House.