Wednesday Night #2307

Sadly, no more Go Habs Go this season. The dilemma for fans: do you cheer for the Hurricanes who defeated the Canadiens, or transfer your affections to Canada’s baseball team – the Blue Jays? Meanwhile, Montrealers celebrated the Montreal Victoire 2026 Walter Cup champions.
Canadiens’ Cup quest consumed Quebec
Journalist Lysiane Gagnon once wrote that Quebecers view politics and hockey similarly: that if one political ‘team’ tries harder, voters will support them.
In this week’s column, Andrew Caddell says the end of the Montreal Canadiens’ playoff run highlighted the team’s unique cultural importance to Quebec and francophone communities across Canada. Despite falling to the Hurricanes, the Habs united fans from coast to coast, with watch parties filling arenas, bars and public spaces. Caddell notes the team has long been tied to Quebec identity and nationalism, arguing that successful Canadiens teams have historically relied on strong Quebec talent. He also points to the Montreal Victoire and their championship as a bright spot for Montreal sports fans. Drawing a parallel between hockey and politics, he suggests Quebecers often view elections like sporting contests, with the upcoming provincial election likely sparking the same question fans ask after a big game: “Did you win?”
So lots to look forward to as the Quebec election looms.

Welcome back Peter Berezin!
Since Peter’s last report, Statistics Canada reported Friday that national GDP contracted for a second consecutive quarter, a development that formally marks a technical recession, but many economists are pushing back against the label, arguing that the economy doesn’t exhibit the broad-based weakness typically associated with a true recession. We look forward to Peter’s take on what lies ahead, especially in view of Tuesday’s announcement that Trump to hit more than 60 countries including Canada with new tariffs over ‘forced labour’
So far, Peter is more concerned with The Economy and AI
Earnings Bubbles Are Still Bubbles
“The AI bubble is a different type of bubble. It is primarily an earnings bubble rather than a valuation bubble. Like all bubbles, the AI bubble will burst. For now, however, our AI demand indicators do not suggest that this is imminent.”
Boom Before Doom: The Terrifying Reason To Be Bullish On AI
“The fact that you are reading these words at the dawn of the AI age suggests that there might not be many observers in the future, plausibly because AI will advance so rapidly and become so powerful in the near term that it will end up destroying humanity in the medium-to-long term.
• AI promises to be as transformative as the Agricultural or Industrial Revolutions. Both revolutions saw GDP growth rise more than 30-fold relative to the previous epoch.
• With great power comes great risks, however. In particular, bad actors could utilize AI for malevolent purposes. The AIs themselves could also end up inadvertently pursuing goals that are harmful to humans.
• Computational irreducibility poses a huge problem for AI safety because it implies that one might not be able to predict, even in principle, what an AI system will do until it has done it.
• A literal interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that there will be timelines where humanity survives AI doom and other timelines where it does not. This generates a selection effect in which people only experience the positive outcomes of AI.
• This selection effect operates at the individual level too, helping to inform one of what to expect if, for example, one is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease.
The divide grows daily between those who believe that AI is the solution to the world’s problems and those who agree with Daron Acemoglu that The Pope Should Have Gone Further on AI –If anything, he has not gone far enough in pressing the question of what the technology is being designed to do.

Earlier in May, Peter published Seven Reasons Why The Hormuz Crisis Has Yet To Cause The Global Economy To Crash, noting that “The global economy has weathered the oil shock reasonably well so far. However, the risk of a recession will increase meaningfully if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed into June”. He adds “BCA’s geopolitical team thinks there is only a 30% chance that any deal between the US and Iran survives for more than 12 months.”
June is here. See Strait of Hormuz Week 13 Update: Mines, Blockades, and “Dark” Ships in Long reads/videos
What’s Going on in Shipping: a comprehensive Week 13 recap of the ongoing maritime conflict in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. The update explores several critical topics: The “Ghost Armada” & Spoofing, Blockade Enforcement, Global Economic Impact, Geopolitical Escalation, and the “Ceasefire” Paradox.
A few ships are getting through, but so far there is no agreement between the U.S. and Iran, although Trump seems to have grown tired of the (mis)adventure he once titled Operation Epic Fury

A conversation with controversial economist Gabriel Zucman – “the left’s new favourite economist”.
In the past few years he has arguably seized the mantle from Thomas Piketty to become the favourite economist of left-wingers everywhere. While fighting battles with other academics about the accuracy of his voluminous data on inequality, he has relentlessly campaigned for taxes on wealth and advised left-wing politicians from Elizabeth Warren to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Henry Curr, The Economist’s economics editor, sat down with Mr Zucman on Tuesday (2 June) to interrogate his thesis. Does he think that there are good billionaires as well as bad ones? Wouldn’t his proposals punish entrepreneurship? And how would a global wealth tax actually work?
features a conversation.
The discussion focused on Mr Zucman’s new short book “We Need to Tax Billionaires”.

Israel continues to attack Lebanon remorselessly, apparently managing to disrupt relations between Trump and Bibi to the point that Trump shouted “Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”
There is more than a bit of truth to the accusation. We believe that the current rise in regrettable incidents of antisemitism reflects reaction to Israel’s ruthless pursuit of war on Gaza and the West Bank.
Israeli army captures strategic castle in Lebanon in deepest incursion into the country in 26 years (with some spectacular pictures)
Israeli troops captured strategic mountain topped with Crusader-built Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon in the deepest incursion into the country in more than a quarter-century

Media
What will become of CBS, or for that matter, any of the media giants that have succumbed to takeovers by tech billionaires whose main desire is to not offend the occupant of the White House?
CBS News Fires Scott Pelley of ‘60 Minutes’; former “CBS Evening News” anchor was ousted after months of tensions between staff and Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief.
At a staff meeting on Monday, he accused the network’s editor in chief, Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” citing the ouster last week of the program’s leadership team and two on-air correspondents.

Canada-Quebec
Doug Sweet raises questions about Quebec politics in light of Tuesday’s announcements by Mark Carney and Christine Fréchette
Carney announces $10 billion for Quebec infrastructure and transit Premier Fréchette says the province got ‘even more’ than its fair share.
The PQ leader showing no gratitude, whined that Ottawa’s just trying to undermine the sovereignty movement. And so Ottawa should!
Doug suggests that the bigger question may be why Carney chose to do the deal with Fréchette when his provincial Liberal cousins are desperate to get Milliard back on the rails. Are the feds starting to think Fréchette might stand a better chance of blocking PSPP (or at least keeping him from the majority he’s been dreaming of for the last couple of years)? Comments, please!

Varia
AP exclusive: Under Notre Dame cathedral, a ‘dig of the century’ unearths 1,700 years of history
The cathedral was rebuilt and reopened in late 2024, and now Paris wants to soften the hot, bare square in front of it with trees and shade.
But in a city this old, the soil cannot be turned until what lies beneath it is excavated, in case it is damaged during works.
So a slice of Notre Dame’s forecourt has become an excavation site — an open pit ringed by barriers and crossed by a wooden walkway, a few steps from the line-up.
At the cathedral’s birth in 1163, the entire square was packed with medieval houses, split by a single street, said Camille Colonna, the archaeologist leading the dig.
Below them lie Merovingian and Carolingian grain pits, from the sixth to the 10th centuries; below those, darker and deeper still, a dense Roman quarter from the fourth and fifth centuries.
Twenty centuries are stacked in 4 meters (13 feet) of earth…

Do these words make you sound smarter? The bias is spreading.
English speakers love the Romance vocabulary. AI noticed.

Long reads/videos
Strait of Hormuz Week 13 Update: Mines, Blockades, and “Dark” Ships
What’s Going on in Shipping: a comprehensive Week 13 recap of the ongoing maritime conflict in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Host Sal Mercogliano breaks down the latest developments as of May 31, including the sighting of a suspected naval mine in Omani waters and the US military’s enforcement of a blockade that has disabled five commercial vessels.The update explores several critical topics: The “Ghost Armada” & Spoofing, Blockade Enforcement, Global Economic Impact, Geopolitical Escalation, and the “Ceasefire” Paradox.

How Does Trump End This? with Jon Allen (video)
As Donald Trump’s war with Iran enters its fourth month, Peter Donolo, Jeremy Kinsman and guest Jon Allen unpack how a conflict once promised to be short and decisive became a global crisis.

Gwynne Dyer: Take the long view on ‘global war’
A consensus has emerged, at least in western media, that we are on the brink of a real war with the gloves off, maybe even a “world war.”
The Russian dictator Vladimir Putin will overrun the rest of Europe as soon as he is finished with Ukraine. Donald Trump will invade Cuba even before he has finished with Iran. Israel will annex southern Lebanon, having driven out its population. China will invade Taiwan. Then someone will go nuclear, and we are off to the (final) races. Or so they say. The first question to ask is: “Why would they?”

The Private Pearson: A New Perspective on Power
Private Letters, Public Matters: The Family Correspondence of Lester B. Pearson
Reviewed by Colin Robertson

The Arch Is Atrocious
Trump’s colossal monument would mar Washington’s skyline and disrupt one of its most sacred spaces.