Good News: Canada Has Been Pretty Quiet (Not Required)

The situation(s) in Canada seem to be quieting down today.

Truckers are still in Ottawa, but not blocking downtown. Police are threatening action, but not taking any.

On Tuesday, truckers disbanded their blockade at the I-15 border crossing. This followed the arrest of 13, and the charging of 3, for weapons violations and conspiracy. Both the truckers and the RCMP believe this was a small cell within the group, and not representative of the whole. Truckers averred that taking down the blockade was a good faith effort on their part.

Canadian banks are in discussions about how to proceed after Trudeau's government indicates they have been deputized to identify problematic financial donations. There are anecdotal reports that some accounts have been closed. Everyone is confused about how this applies to banks that operate on both sides of the border, people and corporations who have accounts on both sides of the border, and people with dual citizenship.

Canada's Minister of Finance specifically singled out people who may be a "... Member of a pro-Trump movement who's donating ...". We're living in interesting times: I have no doubt that there's a real issue here, but this would have been regarded as a serious diplomatic breach not that long ago. In most contexts, the principle of Westphalian sovereignty still applies: government officials in one country are not supposed to harass private citizens in another country.

There are bank run rumors on the internet, (and confirmed simultaneous outages of online banks on Wednesday evening). Lots of debate about how credible these are. This misses the point: all bank runs start as rumors, it's the spread of rumors and acting upon them that's the problem. It does not seem like this is going to be a problem at this point.

As near as I can figure, this is true. A letter has been signed, and sent to Trudeau and Biden, demanding a reconciliation of vaccination rules on both sides of the border. The signatories include 2 Canadian Provincial Premier's, and 16 U.S. state governors ... including Utah's Spencer Cox. Interestingly, there's a contiguous block of those governors' states in the intermountain west and plains that depend on border crossings from I-15, I-29 (I mistakenly called that I-35 in class), and I-25 which ends before the border but feeds traffic to the other two.