Closed pools, Trump loses it over broken ceasefire and Carney said what...

We've never seen a President like Donald Trump and likely never will again.

We are in a heat wave in Toronto right now, and I’m strangely spending time at a hockey rink. Technically, this week is a vacation week for me, which means I’m not writing or doing videos for the Toronto Sun, but still puttering around.

I’m spending a lot of my time shuttling a visiting 14 year-old nephew to hockey camp in Etobicoke, which makes getting the newsletter out early a bit more challenging.

Thankfully, I get to stay cool at the rink though.

For those of you who don’t live in southern Ontario, the temperature got into the 40s with the humidex over the past few days. My car’s air conditioning was struggling to keep up yesterday, and Toronto shut down several pools on Sunday claiming it was too hot for them to be open.

Mayor Olivia Chow tried to blame the province and its labour code but that wasn’t exactly the truth.

The city simply didn’t have enough staff on hand to give the outdoor workers enough shade and water breaks to keep the pools open, so they padlocked them. That’s not a provincial labour code problem, it’s poor scheduling and management.

Yet another sign of Toronto being poorly run.

Councillor Brad Bradford, who is clearly running for mayor, was getting a lot of traction out of all of this.

A little more important than pools...

Clearly the potential for nuclear war between Israel and Iran is more important than whether swimming pools are open in Toronto – unless you’re one of those kids that was looking to cool off. U.S. President Donal Trump thought he had gotten Israel and Iran to cool down with a ceasefire, but it apparently didn’t take at first.

That resulted in Trump using some colourful and unpresidential language to chastise them both.

According to reports, Trump had a very tough phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and likely laid down the law.

What comes next will be fascinating.

If Trump can get both sides to hold their ceasefire, the question becomes one of leadership in Iran. The Washington Post obtained audio that it said was of Mossad agents calling top Iranian generals and officials and warning them to leave Iran within 12 hours or face assassination.

Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah and a man who works as a sort of opposition leader in exile, is claiming that the regime is falling apart and top leaders and fleeing the country.

As much as I would like to see a free and democratic Iran, I will hold any applause until the end of the show. Things didn’t turn out well with the attempts at democracy in Afghanistan or Iraq and the Arab spring didn’t lead to an outbreak of freedom.

Has Iran activated sleeper cells...

Irwin Cotler, the former Liberal MP and justice minister, is someone I’ve always had a lot of time for given the work he has done on human rights. He’s often spoken out about human rights abuses in Iran and that has earned him death threats from the regime in Tehran.

So, when Cotler says Canada could be a target of sleeper cells, as he told the Globe and Mail, we should listen.

“Right now, their policy is to target Jews and others abroad,” he said in an interview Monday, speaking of the Iranian regime. “We also know that they activate sleeper cells that are already present in the country.”

We know that a good number of members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, or IRGC, have found their way into Canada. We don’t know about sleeper cells, but CSIS has said that they continue “to investigate threats to life emanating from the Islamic Republic of Iran based on credible intelligence.”

Carney said what now???

I go into it in more depth in a longer post that you should read here, but really what is Mark Carney on about? He’s talking again about Canada being the most European of non-European countries and insulting the food in Ottawa.

Not a good look for a PM and really, it makes him look like an out of touch elitist.

Carney is in Belgium and then the Netherlands for the NATO summit and as I reported several weeks ago, we can expect him to announce further increases to Canada’s defence spending. It was just two weeks ago that Carney announced that we would increase our defence spending to meet the NATO target of 2% of GDP this year.

Part of the way we will reach that goal is by reclassifying some spending, such as moving the Coast Guard from being under the Fisheries and Oceans Canada to the Department of National Defence. There will also be a cash infusion to take our total spend from $41 billion to over $60 billion.

We haven’t hit the 2% of GDP figure on defence spending since 1990, and now there is pressure for NATO countries to increase to 5% of GDP. According to the World Bank the last time we came close to that was in 1960 when at the height of the Cold War we were spending 4.2% of GDP on defence.

Defence spending dropped remarkably under Liberal PM Lester Pearson and then further still under his successor Pierre Trudeau.

What to read...

Rick Bell is detailing what Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is up to with he Alberta Next panel that rolls out soon to take the pulse of the province. Should the province take over their own pension plan as Quebec has done or move to provincial police forces as they have in Ontario and Quebec? Those are the questions she will be asking against the backdrop of an active at the moment independence movement that PM Carney has yet to properly deal with.

Is Don Cherry retiring? Some thought so after his latest podcast episode, but Joe Warmington caught up with Grapes at his home in Mississauga and set the record straight.

Terry Newman has the story of Catherine Kronas, who I got to meet a few weeks ago. She’s the Ancaster, Ontario parent who was told she couldn’t attend parent council meetings anymore after she objected to the reading of a land acknowledgement at the start of every meeting.