On 610 CKTB, Jon Liedtke joins Gene Valaitis for Liedtke Has a Take to discuss his latest column, The Comeback Delusion: Why Canada Risks Being Dunked on the Global Stage – Kvetch & Release which uses recent sports events to criticize Canadian geopolitics. He argues that Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberal elite exhibit a delusional, weak “house league” mindset. Consequently, Canada faces a critically underfunded military, compromised domestic security, and vulnerability in upcoming U.S. trade negotiations.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Gene Valaitis: It’s Gene Valaitis on 610 CKTB, Niagara’s News and Talk. All right, it is time for “Litki Has a Take”. And this morning, John Litki has a new take on, uh, comparing the chaotic geopolitical map to the front page of the sports section—the start of the World Cup, the New York Knicks win, and the White House UFC fight. Good morning, John.
Jon Liedtke: Good morning, Gene. This is the only way I can talk about sports.
Gene Valaitis: Okay. [Laughter] Well, listen, the New York Knicks won their first NBA championship in decades. It was a really unbelievable comeback. Uh, but we’re tying it into the, uh, geopolitical map now, and you say Mark Carney and the Liberal elite are suffering from a dangerous “comeback kid Knicks delusion.” A comeback kid Knicks delusion. There, explain that one.
Jon Liedtke: Well, Gene, the Knicks ending their multi-decade championship drought with that wild fourth-quarter rally—it’s great. I mean, that would make a great Hollywood movie, let alone real life. But when we’re talking about the real world of geopolitics, the sheer failure of Mark Carney’s leadership has actually been really astounding. And I’ve done a sort of a about-face about it, really after reflecting on how tragic it’s been with the Gordie How Bridge being stalled and looking at, you know, into the new week of things now, with everything behind us. Carney built his entire political brand on one arrogant premise, quite frankly: he said that he was the lone technocratic savior sophisticated enough to contain Donald Trump. But if we look at the scoreboard, we’re over a year into his tenure as Prime Minister, Trump is more unconstrained than ever, and Canada is in a weaker position than we’ve been in generations. The Liberal elite are trailing on productivity, completely missing in action on the border control at the file, they’re starving our military, but they’re looking in the mirror and they’re genuinely believing that their resumes will trigger that epic, last-minute comeback. But you can’t coast on old prestige when you’re getting blown out on the floor. This is just arrogance, and we’re going to all pay the price.
Gene Valaitis: Okay, we look at your three arenas: the 2026 World Cup, the New York Knicks win, and that wild UFC White House, uh, fight last night. I love this one guy, too: he thanks Jesus, he thanks Donald Trump on his birthday, and then, and then said, “and remember Michelle Obama is a man.” In any, in any event, starting with the 2020 World Cup, uh, across North America, you say our leaders, in comparison, have a house league mindset when it comes to national security. Why is that?
Jon Liedtke: Well, Ottawa is approaching global security, Gene, like it is a weekend house league soccer tournament, where the ultimate goals are handing out participation trophies, keeping things polite, and, you know, they want of course to win re-election. To me, this is a joke. The international order is not a friendly match governed by referees with whistles or handing out yellow or red cards. It’s a multi-trillion-dollar fraud being run by bad-faith bullies and autocrats, and while our establishment is busy policing language or parsing syllables and managing our national decline by actually talking about it at—on the stage, like Mark Carney’s been doing over the past couple weeks, while, you know, do something please. Our adversaries, though, are literally playing for keeps. We’re treating fundamental sovereignty sort of as a hobby sport. We’re not going to be respected on the global stage like this. I mean, Brian Lilly was just talking about this a moment ago. Um, we’re being, quite frankly, systematically dunked on by authoritarian regimes who smell weakness.
Gene Valaitis: Mm. Now, you’re calling out what, uh, you term is our “cardboard military and creative accounting.” So, you think Ottawa is cooking the books when it comes to our NATO commitment?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, I mean, look, we’re running a structurally bankrupt military is what it seems. They’re literally holding asset fire sales that was just reported last week to get rid of surplus, uh, land and buildings, but is that really surplus when it comes to the military? They’re ordering troops to return basic rucksacks and gear because of critical shortages. This is an embarrassment. But how is Ottawa fixing it? Optics, cheap politics, and creative accounting. Trying to count domestic Arctic infrastructure upgrades towards NATO obligations to artificially inflate our defense spending. But if we cut through that noise, our NORAD and Arctic spending should be stripped entirely from NATO calculations. NATO commitments should mean boats, boots, aircraft, personnel, not paving a runway, and none of it, and calling it a combat strategy. So, this shell game can be played, but the real-world order is breaking down outside of our house, and it’s starting to creep inside as well. We’ve had state-sponsored Iranian and Middle Eastern terror networks executing full-contact kinetic operations and planning them here on Canadian soil. Some have been thwarted. Others haven’t been, like the Toronto police officer who just got shot last week. We’ve had multiple major terror attacks thwarted, which is great, but our streets are becoming a violent undercard for foreign conflicts because our domestic security apparatus seems to have failed.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, and, uh, I don’t mean to correct you, but it’s, uh, something near and dear to my heart. Uh, that 43-year-old police officer in Toronto, uh, wasn’t shot last week. He was—he was murdered.
Jon Liedtke: Apologies. Correct.
Gene Valaitis: Um, yeah. Yeah, and, and, um, so getting back to this UFC deal on the front lawn of the White House for Trump’s 80th birthday, and a tie-in to July 4th in the US—its 250th birthday. You always talk about Trump’s “cage match diplomacy.” Now, is that a bad thing if it gets him results?
Jon Liedtke: Well, I don’t know. I mean, if anyone wants to under—if you want to understand the raw, transactional reality of this administration, just look at that cage match, steel match that was on the White House lawn for the birthday. That looked like a cross between Idiocracy and some kind of kleptocratic carnival complete with massive corporate branding. But Washington is showing they’re not playing by the rules of the game; they’re doing it their own way. And is it yielding results? I don’t know. I mean, hours before the event started, seemingly, the US and Iran hammered out the massive peace deal to end the war, open the strait, and I—we’ll see if it works. But it’ll only work if you have leverage, and the US does have leverage, more so than us, quite frankly. Um, but if you enter the, you know, octagon or the claw without muscle, you’re not the headliner—you’re going to be the guy getting paid to take a dive.
Gene Valaitis: [Laughter] Well, that’s interest—interesting. Well, listen, if our leaders refuse to step in and actually defend Canada’s interests both meaningfully and successfully, and that means things like trade deals with the US, um, figuratively, what happens when Canada actually enters the octagon?
Jon Liedtke: [Laughter] Well, we won’t get pushed around, Gene; we’ll be knocked out cold in the first round. I mean, again, if you look at just our streets, the breakdown isn’t just international; it is here. Um, we had a—in—that in Montreal just this past weekend, the disbanding of a 16-police-officer unit because they were allegedly cutting the hair of racialized citizens to keep as trophies. The rot is running deep, and it’s in our institutions, it’s outside of our institutions. We have people who are committing crime—crimes on our streets who know that the bail system won’t keep them locked up. We put people into positions of authority who violate basic human rights, and at least we’re getting them out. All while we are underfunding our military, starving our core institutions, and quite frankly, overtaxing our citizenry right now. This is not sustainable, and if we’re entering into these high-stake trade negotiations with the United States, and they just put on a fighting ring on their executive front lawn, while our own internal security is fracturing like we—like it is, we’re not going to be showing up as a competitor. We’re going to be showing up as a punching bag.
Gene Valaitis: It’s a great take. Thanks, nice job this morning.
Jon Liedtke: Thank you, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: There he goes, Jon Liedtke. “Liedtke Has a Take.” He always does.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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