The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal are right to admonish Canada for failing to meet the minimum defence expenditure required of NATO members. This shouldn’t be about the money, or even the military, but about pulling our weight and being able to support others—both of which are foundational Canadian values.

The failure of our imagination on this question is perhaps most disappointing. I see an opportunity to address a number of problems at once: put graduates to work by challenging them to design and patent versatile hardware (as useful in combat as, say, fighting forest fires), bring manufacturing to economically marginalized areas, all while diversifying the economy with new trade potential. That’s innovation, job-creation, investing in future business leaders, and military spending that isn’t limited to crates of arms piled in a warehouse. We’ll need those, too, but we needn’t be so literal about meeting our obligation here. We could lead.

The three best things that I read last week about—uh, let’s call it “the decision”—were David Frum’s (post-press conference) lament in the Atlantic, Stephen M. Walt’s rather reassuring review of the logical extension of the current problem in Foreign Policy (I didn’t know the anecdote about Nixon!), and the Economist’s gentle attempt to best-case the worst-case, at least on the economy.

Speaking of economic analyses, but back home, let’s appreciate Tony Keller’s review of “all-government budget deficit (the combined budgets of federal, provincial and local governments)” in the Globe and Mail, for rising above the idle catastrophizing we’ve been force-fed these past few months with actual facts—and, also, because it includes this devastating line about current leadership trends:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford this week rolled out an online tool to help people quickly find a place to buy booze. No word on an app to find a family doctor for the millions of Canadians without one.

Here’s a passage from Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, Orwell’s Roses (2021), which is perhaps the most precise summary of her subject’s enduring legacy:

Orwell stood apart from his peers in his capacity to critique the sector of the left that had drifted toward authoritarianism and dishonesty without joining other leftists who became conservatives tolerating other forms of brutality and deception. Doing so meant charting his own path across the uneven ground of midcentury politics, and it made him after his death a totemic figure claimed by people across the political spectrum.