The established ritual for commemorating Canada’s founding is to drive to the quietest place you can near a body of water and drink beer while staring at it. This year, though, Canada Day is not quiet.

Canada's ruling class is rushing to implement massive military spending hikes and Trump-like socio-economic policies, using his bullying as the cover to push through changes for which it has long agitated.

The federal deficit, now estimated at a staggering $92 billion by the C.D. Howe Institute, has ballooned to levels that can no longer be ignored.

With those thoughts in mind, I got some ideas. Open the Canadian border to U.S. citizens, allowing all liberals in the USA to move to Canada. This is the perfect solution for both countries. Maybe we could do a home relocation exchange. Liberals from the USA can trade homes with Canadian citizens who want to move to the USA.

The government faces the choice of running bigger deficits, raising taxes or making major spending cuts to meet its NATO target

In this sense, and perhaps this sense only, Canadians have become more American than the Americans. This year, July Fourth may have come three days early.

Canada will rescind a tax on big US technology firms, just hours before first payments were due, to allow trade talks between the two countries to restart. On Friday, US President Donald Trump called off negotiations over a trade deal, describing the tax as a "blatant attack", and threatened higher tariffs on imports from Canada.

As Prime Minister Mark Carney commits to meet the new NATO spending target of five per cent of GDP by 2035, former vice-chief of the defence staff Guy Thibault tells Power & Politics he supports upping Canada's defence spending but warns the government should focus on improving procurement and supporting Canadian Forces personnel.

Of the many measures in the Republican spending bill, however, some will be particularly relevant to Canada and Ontario. The new law amounts to a near-total repeal of tax incentives for electric vehicles and renewable energy under the previous president’s Inflation Reduction Act.