September 21, 2026
Nearly half of those in Canada’s North see the U.S. under President Donald Trump as the greatest threat to Arctic security, new polling data suggests.
The polling, conducted for researchers at Quebec’s Observatoire de la politique et la sécurité de l’Arctique (OPSA), asked residents in Nunavut, Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavik for their views on which countries pose the biggest threat, and suggests “heightened anxiety.”
Close to half of respondents (48 per cent) saw the U.S. as the greatest threat to the region, followed distantly by countries more traditionally seen as Canadian adversaries like Russia (30 per cent) and China (12 per cent).
That’s up from 37 per cent who said the U.S. posed the greatest threat last September, followed by Moscow (35 per cent) and Beijing (17 per cent).
The juxtaposition here is really something.
A small-town Michigan credit union is enforcing what used to be a completely ordinary standard of leadership decorum against behaviour modelled on the President of the United States.
She seems to have absorbed the new norm: trolling is funny, offending the target is the whole point, and "LOL Canada won't like this" is apparently a perfectly normal thing for a CEO to post.
Then she ran headfirst into an institution still operating under the old norm: You're the CEO. What the hell were you thinking?
And that's why I find her insistence that "but the shirts were AI!" so bizarre. Who cares whether the shirts physically existed? You deliberately created the image and posted it because you thought insulting Canadians would be funny.
The credit union wasn't evaluating the authenticity of a sweatshirt. It was evaluating the judgment of the person running the credit union.
The weirdest part is that their response feels almost refreshing now. Twenty years ago we probably would have just shrugged and said, "Well, of course they fired her."
That's how far the baseline has moved.