Grounded Truths

Grounded Truths is a series of articles applying The Conscious Reality Framework to the ongoing tensions and positioning involved with the Canada US relations leading up to the 2026 review of the CUSMA / USMCA agreement. It looks at what's happened, what rhetoric is used to justify actions taken, and attempts to decipher what's really going on.

2026

The Price of the Porcupine (May 4)
When a US ambassador used F-35 procurement as a pressure tactic that the NORAD Commander himself contradicted, what was illuminated wasn't a new vulnerability but an old one that Canada chose, across decades, not to address.
Not A Scheduling Oversight (April 27)
With sixty-five days to the July 1 CUSMA procedural trigger and no date set for formal Canada-U.S. negotiations, the structural problem might be that the U.S. appears to be using the review mechanism itself as a pressure instrument, demanding pre-negotiation concessions.
The Rules Are the Weapon (April 19)
Canada's Sovereign Cloud Initiative, designed to protect government data from warrantless American legal compulsion, has been listed by the USTR as a trade irritant.
The Bill That Doesn't Need to Pass (April 12)
A U.S. House bill targeting Canada's Online Streaming Act doesn't need to pass to be dangerous. It functions primarily as a blueprint and political cover for retaliation if Canada doesn't treat its own cultural policy as a trade concession.
The Cost of the Calculus (April 5)
Mark Carney's first year as Prime Minister is full of apparent contradictions, but they dissolve under a single filter: he is building infrastructure designed to outlast both the current crisis and the next election.
When the Mechanism is the Message (March 29)
The U.S. military abduction of Venezuela's sitting president wasn't a departure from international norms so much as a demonstration that those norms are unenforceable against states powerful enough to ignore them.
The Best Ad He Ever Ran (March 22)
Doug Ford's Reagan anti-tariff ad is widely read as a diplomatic blunder that collapsed promising trade talks; But it gave Ford a PR victory and Carney a face-saving exit from a deal both men may have concluded wasn't worth taking.
The Buy Canadian Boycott (March 15)
The Canadian consumer boycott of American goods was never going to collapse the U.S. economy, but it didn't need to. It just needed to route targeted economic pain into Trump-aligned congressional districts until Republican legislators began breaking with the president on tariffs.

Tariffs, Power, and Perception

Canada & The U.S. (March 2026) (March 11, 2026)
Tariffs, Power, and Perception (August 2025) (August 19, 2025)
Tariffs, Power, and Perception (March 2025 Update) (March 15, 2025)
Tariffs, Power, and Perception (February 2, 2025)