Toronto Blue Jays' improbable last-to-first run

As perpetual also-rans the Toronto Blue Jays clawed their way back into Major League Baseball's World Series after another comeback win last night against the Seattle Mariners, many people are probably wondering,"How the hell did that happen?"

Toronto has pulled off an improbable last-to-first stunt. After a horrible 2024 season, the Jays won the American League East Division this year, ahead of a strong and highly-fancied Yankees team. They also went on to beat the Yankees reasonably easily in the first round of the post-season, before dismissing Seattle in a roller-coaster seven games in the AL Championship Series.

What's interesting, though, is that they have done it with pretty much the same team as had such a dismal season just a year ago. Same manager too.

This year's stars, like Vladimir Guerrero Jr., George Springer, Alejandro Kirk, Bo Bichette and Addison Barger, all played for the Jays in 2024. They just didn't play that well (Guerrero Jr. excepted). This offensive nucleus just seems to have turned it around this year. 

After a bad season, the Blue Jays had a pretty active time trading at the Trade Deadline and in the off-season. But it wasn't those acquisitions that has made the difference this year; it was the existing roster players. In fact, most of their big trade plays (Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto, Roki Sasaki) came to nothing, and one big one they did make, Anthony Santander, proved disappointing, even before his injury.

Yes, they acquired some quality on the mound, with Max Scherzer and Jeff Hoffman, but it has mainly been Toronto's hot batting that has got them where they are today (and, in the post-season, they have even done it without Bo Bichette, who is still off injured).

So, the old guard are getting it done. Don't ask how, just go with it. They now face the defending championship - and huge favourites - LA Dodgers next. Oh, and Shohei Ohtani... But it still feels pretty nice being in the World Series again after all those years (I'm still wearing the 1993-4 sweatshirt from last time).

Should Canada favour China over America?

Prime Minster Carney has been keen from the get-go to reset and improve business relations with China, certainly compared to the frosty (although arguably much more principled) stance of his predecessor, Justin Trudeau. Carney is nothing if not pragmatic, quite happy to throw out one-time priorities like environmentalism in the interests of keeping the voters happy.

In an ideal world, we would not like to be dealing with China at all - it is still a global pariah. What with its human rights record, its aggressive bullying approach to international relations, its unpalatable and corrupt judicial system, its underpayment of workers, its persecution of minorities, its commercial spying, and its political interference, it doesn't really have a whole lot going for it as a trading partner. 

But this is far from an ideal world. If it is a choice between Xi Jinping's China and Donald Trump's America - and, like it or not, that's what it has come down to - that decision is becoming an increasingly tough one. Would you prefer to be mauled by a bear or a dragon? 

Mr. Carney has been pretty cagey when asked for a definitive opinion - understandably so - but he is maybe starting to indicate a preference for China, at least to some extent. Foreign Minister Anita Anand flew to China just this week to retry and repair the soured Sino-Canadian relations, and there are sogns that Mr. Carney is seeking a face-to-face meeting with Mr. Xi. Everyone seems agreed that such a rapprochement will be far from easy, for a number of different reasons, but that doesn't necessarily mean it should not be attempted.

Maybe that is the right path to take, the lesser of two evils. At least China doing something about its horrendous climate change and pollution record, while the USA under Trump has pulled back from all such policies. And is Trump's enboldened policy of weeding out immigrants any better than China's treatment of its own minorities? And China does make some very good cheap electric vehicles, again whether you like it or not, and they could single-handedly re-start Canada's stalled push towards electrification and emissions reduction, so should we really be refusing them?

China is starting to look like the future, the US like the past. Certainly, it seems to be a stronger advocate for globalization than the USA at the moment.

Mark Carney's softening towards China is apparently in line with Canadian public opinion. According to a recent Angus Reid survey, Canadians have a much more favourable view of China than they had (27% favourable in 2025, compared to just 10% in 2021, and 16% just earlier this year). However, that does means that 59% still view the country negatively. In terms of trade, though - and this is mainly what has changed Canadians' views on China - 51% say that Canada should focus more on its economic relationship with China, up 15% from 2023, and de-emphasize China's poor human rights record in the process. This pragmatism - some might say callousness - matches Mr. Carney's  own.

What is the right line to take with China, then? Trump and his tariffs (and the various repercussions of tariffs, intentional and unintentional) have put Canada - and China, for that matter - in a very difficult position. Even back in the Biden days, Canada felt obliged to follow suit and slap a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs (and other, lower, tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum), in the full knowledge that China would not take that lying down. True to form, China immediately slapped tariffs on Canadian and pork.

China has made no bones about its willingness to remove those tariffs if Canada removes its own tariffs on China, which sounds pretty reasonable when you think about it. After all, Canada initiated this (albeit at America's bidding), and we really don't want to be the tariff aggressors here. And, frankly, we don't even have much of an EV industry here to protect. It's hard to be in a situation where China appears to be taking the moral high-road away from us. But you just know that any moves to go soft on China will lead to retaliation from the Trump administration. Rock and a hard place? Game of chicken?

Probably the best option is the one not stated: align more with Europe. Certainly, it's inadvisable - and always was - to put too many eggs in one basket. 75% of Canada's exports go to the USA, and that is never a good idea. There is no time like the present to rectify that situation. And I wouldn't trust China much further than I can throw it. India, ditto. Europe still seems like the most civilized part of the planet right now. Surely, that is the way to go.

In praise of a Canadian domestic automotive industry

Sometimes - well, quite often really - I read an article and think, "Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking!" One such article appeared in this weekend's Globe and Mail, and concerns the Canadian automotive industry.

For decades, Canada has been in what the article cheekily calls an "abusive relationship" with American automakers (i.e. car companies like Ford, GM, and technically European-owned but still very American Stellantis). Time after time, these companies go through bad patches and the Canadian government has to dig into its increasingly empty pockets to come up with billions of dollars in bailouts, in the full knowledge that they will have to do the same thing all over again a few years later.

Time after time, Canadian governments at all levels have put serious money into sweeteners - bribes, basically - to encourage behemoth American companies (and, to a lesser extent, car companies from other countries) to invest in Canadian factories, parts production, battery plants, etc. This kind of "corporate welfare" is endemic, and nowhere is it quite so pervasive as in the auto industry.

And now, of course, the whole industry is subject to the whim of one person, Donald Trump, and you know he's not going to do us any favours. So, here we go again, hand into the government pocket.

Now, I get it, the car industry is a big employer, particularly in Ontario, and that is probably the single biggest reason for all the billions in corporate welfare paid out over the years (that and the power of the auto sector unions). It directly employs about 130,000 people, but up to 600,000 in total by some counts when including the supply chain, dealerships and other related industries. Even this pales into insignificance against other aggregated industries and services, but it is admittedly a large and important industrial sector.

Specifically, it employs a lot more than the 14,000 or so employed in the farming of oilseed and grains, which is largely why the plaints of the Prairie provinces about retracting the Canadian tariffs on Chinese EVs so that China will retract its tariffs on Canadian canola are going unheard (another reason, of course, is how the Trump administration would react to Canada falling out of lockstep with US tariffs on China). The whole question of whether Canada should be preferring the USA over China, and whether it should be blocking Chinese EVs in particular, is a thorny one, deserving of its own analysis (and which I have looked at elsewhere).

The other thing the Globe article touches on is another question I have been asking for some time: why doesn't Canada have its own car production industry? If Korea can do it, and Japan and Sweden, why can't we? The Canadian auto sector and its unions are constantly reminding us that we have all sorts of expertise and a skilled well-trained workforce here. Why, then, are they all in service to American overlords?

It's partly inertia - that's the way it's always been for the last hundred-plus years, and it's hard to break from that. The whole industry has been developed around the north-south integration and it is (or was) highly efficient. Also, as we now know to our cost, those American overlords are fickle, and really don't care about Canadian workers. They would up sticks and move at the drop of a hat if circumstances dictate, as we have just seen with Stellantis. And, more to the the point, they are in thrall to would-be dictator Trump, and will bend to his will with nary a thought for a hundred years of shared industry development.

Paradoxically, Canada buys about two million cars a year, almost exactly the same number as it assembles, but the cars it makes are almost all sent to the US market, and most of the cars it buys come from the US. Which seems like globalizion madness, except that ther are compelling commercial reasons why that happens. Economies of scale, yadda yadda. (Remember that crazy graphic of how a vehicle produced in North America crosses the border multiple times?)

So, if now is not the time to pursue a Canadian-owned domestic automotive industry, then when? Actually, it has been tried, and failed miserably. "It's just not possible to build a car company from scratch" was the conclusion. The last time that happened was Elon Musk's Tesla, and he had billions of dollars of capital behind him.

Imagine if all those billions in corporate welfare paid out to already wealthy American companies had been ploughed into developing a domestic industry? Well, it wasn't, and so here we are, beholden to our hateful American masters. Such a shame.

Hamas may not be able to find more hostages - the ceasefire should hold regardless

According to the UN, 84% of the buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed by Israeli bombing (in some areas, like Gaza City, this rises to 92%). Most of the enclave consists of masonry rubble, many metres thick.

And Hamas is somehow supposed to find the remaining 19 dead bodies of the missing Israeli hostages?

Frankly, I'm surprised they have been able to find as many as they have, and to have kept so many alive under the constant bombardment.

I feel for the relatives of those whose bodies have still not been recovered. But to use this as an excuse to continue bombing, as Netanyahu has vowed, just seems wrong. 

I think that Hamas has kept their end of the bargain in good faith insofar as they are able. An end to the hostilities is more important than a handful of individuals. 68,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel over the last two years; how many more thousands are to be sacrificed for the sake of some dead bodies?

That may sound callous, but not half as callous as authorizing further killings in the pursuit of an impossible task.

How Canadian immigration got out of hand, and why we still need more of it

Immigration has been a hot topic in the media for a long time now, and I have commented on it from time to time in this blog, principally on how immigration in Canada used to be an all-party vote-winner, universally approved, while in recent months it has suddenly become a political kiss-of-death, widely derided. 

But I thought that Tony Keller's analysis in the Globe and Mail last weekend was a very good summary of a confusing and often misunderstood situation.

In Canada, public opinion has whipsawed from 68% saying that immigration makes the country stronger as recently as 2019, to almost the direct opposite (64% believe that Canada should taking in fewer immigrants in 2024). (UPDATE: An Environics survey in October 2025 yielded a slightly more nuanced statistic: the percentage of Canadians who think there is too much immigration has been rising rapidly in recent years - from just 27% in 2022 to 44% in 2023 to 58% in 2024 - but 2025's poll actually saw a small decrease to 56%, although this is still a majority).

Before the 2020 pandemic, immigration was one of the few issues where Bay Steeet and the social justice warriors and all the provinces seemed to be pretty much on the same page. Now, and in recent years, the country seems inexorably split.

So, yes, it seems that the Trudeau administration got carried away and mismanaged the file in the years from 2015, and particularly since the pandemic and its aftermath. But, if you remember the labour shortages in the early 2020s and the businesses clamouring for new sources of labour, not to mention sluggish economic growth, poor productivity and chronic underinvestment by businesses, I think you can see that much of this was not just due to misguided Liberal ideology, as Pierre Poilievre would have us believe, but more to a poorly-managed response to an urgent economic need. I firmly believe that a Conservative government would have gone down pretty much the same road, whatever Poilievre might say now.

Then, though, the temporary foreign workers program - both the official one and the less official one - got out of hand, as did the foreign students intake, especially in the less-supervised community college system, which apparently didn't even bother to monitor whether students were attending classes or just working multiple part-time jobs. The student visa program turned into an alternative low-wage temporary foreign worker program, eventually growing far larger than the official TFW program. THAT part was botched for sure, and still needs additional controls.

All of this watered down everything that had made the Canadian immigration system so successful and so popular, and we are now witnessing the backlash, largely stoked by a housing shortage, stagnation in real GDP per capita, a post-pandemic spike in inflation that was really nothing to do with immigration but became conflated with it, and a spike in youth unemployment which is also almost certainly not caused by immigration but by a weak economy and, yes, those tarriffs. And, of course, by nefarious politicians.

Like most backlashes, it has been overblown and exaggerated, an excessive reaction to a bunch of poorly-understood perceived problems. Let's not forget, there is still a pretty iron-clad case for substantial immigration, and it would be a huge mistake to decimate Canada's highly successful and necessary immigration system. Rightly or wrongly, immigrants fill jobs that natural-born Canadians can't or won't do, and for less money. Provided there are checks that immigrants are not being abused or taken advantage of, then, as a country with a low (and falling) fertility rate, we still need more rather than fewer immigrants.

The dark side of China's renewables push

Like so many things about China, it's hard to known what to think about its huge investments in renewable energy.

As with electric vehicles, high-speed trains, etc, China leads the world in renewables. It is bringing online each year more clean energy than the rest of the world combined, in fact twice as much as the rest of the world combined! Renewables now make up over half of China's power generation capacity. It also exports vastly more clean tech than the rest of the world, and the top several wind and solar exporters are all Chinese. And - whatever the USA under Trump (or even Canada under Carney) is doing, as it lurches back towards a 20th century reliance on coal, oil and gas - China is not slowing down: it plans to increase its renewable energy production six-fold in the coming years.

And so it should. For the last twenty years or so, China has accounted for the largest share of fossil fuel greenhouse has emissions, and it still has a huge number of legacy coal power stations, although renewables are now starting to replace them. The last year saw the first slight decline in Chinese CO2 emissions.

So, what's not to like? Well, as usual, China being China, anything good is tinged with unfortunate blemishes of bad stuff.

Much of China's renewable resources are in the north and west of the country, including the area in and around Tibet, which it has been illegally occupying for decades. The clear air at high elevations, the abundant sunshine, constant winds and fast-flowing rivers, make for a renewable energy bonanza, and China is developing it at a furious pace. 

Take, for example, a new solar energy development on the high Tibetan plains. Talatan Solar Park is 162 square miles in area, seven times the size of Manhattan, or about the size of Chicago, and still growing. Wind turbines, hydroelectric dams, and pumped water generation contribute still more to the huge amount of renewable power generated in the area. 

Thing is, though, 90% of China's population and the vast majority of its heavy industry and its power-hungry data centres are in the south and east of the country, over 1,000 miles away. Nothing daunted, China has developed a massive network of ultra-high-voltage transmission lines (800,000 - 1,000,000 volts or even higher in some cases) stretching more than 2,000 miles. These transmission lines use direct current (DC) technology, ensuring little or no transmission losses. Huge pylons march across the country, most of it reasonably unpopulated.

But there is some population, and, not too surprisingly, it turns out that a million volts overhead is not particularly healthy. Sparks fly from umbrellas and fishing rods, resulting in numb hands, and there are rumours of people being electrocuted. 

But, this being China, there have been no protests, no official investigations, and no statistics or reports to work with, just vague rumours and some stoic endurance for the national interest. NIMBY is just not a thing here.

Should we, then, laud China's attempts to kick its nasty coal and fossil fuel habit? Well, I guess so, but it must tempered with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Mr. Trump goes to Egypt

Donald Trump is going to Egypt to sign his peace deal. All on his own, as far as I can tell, because Israel won't be there and Hamas won't be there.

Which is pretty bizarre, don't you think?

France may have the most dysfunctional politcal system in the western world

Everyone, in all countries, complains about their political system and their politicians. It just goes with the territory. But, it has to be said, France does it better (worse?) than most.

The latest? President Emanual Macron, who has presided over a veritable revolving door of prime ministers - three in the last year alone - has reappointed the last PM to resign.

Sébastien Lecornu was appointed Prime Minister on September 9th 2025, but he resigned 27 days later, on October 6th, shortly after unveiling a new cabinet. Then, just 4 days later, on October 10th, Macron appointed Lecornu again.

You have to think that Lecornu really didn't want the position - he has said publicly that he only did so "out of duty", not a great basis on which to proceed. And you have to think that Macron had to really persuade him (it would be interesting to know just how). Presumably, Macron couldn't convince anyone else to take the job.

Dysfunctional? Just a bit. And you have to wonder how long this arrangement will last, especially given the circumstances.