Submitted by The Bureau's Sam Cooper (emphasis our own),
China keeps finding inventive ways to burrow into the West, and Canada's new appetite for Chinese electric vehicles may be the most consequential opening yet.
That is the warning at the center of a report published this week by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and written by Brenda Shaffer, an energy and national-security specialist who teaches at the United States Naval Postgraduate School.
China, she writes, "continues to find creative ways to infiltrate and influence the West," embedding in its exports the capacity to surveil citizens, disrupt transportation and ports, and trigger blackouts and grid damage.
Shaffer situates the electric-vehicle question inside a wider argument about hybrid warfare. China, Russia and Iran, she notes, have each written attacks on Western domestic energy infrastructure into their war doctrines, erasing the old line between the home front and the battlefield. Even brief disruptions to electricity or transit, she argues, could spread public panic and erode support for a distant conflict — the defense of Taiwan being the obvious test.
The cars began arriving in June, the product of a strategic partnership Prime Minister Mark Carney signed in Beijing in January. Ottawa cut its tariff on Chinese electric vehicles from 100 percent to 6.1 percent, opening an initial quota of roughly 49,000 vehicles in the first year. Carney has cast the imports as a low-cost route for Canadians switching to electric, and analysts cited by Shaffer expect Chinese brands to capture a fifth of the Canadian market.
Shaffer leans on an internal Public Safety Canada memo, obtained under access-to-information law, warning that opening the market to "high-risk vendors" invites connected cars that "collect significant amounts of data on Canadians, which can have intelligence value." Her account of the official response is withering. Asked how Canada would protect drivers, the chief of the defense staff, General Jennie Carignan, told reporters only that "we don't have a lot of Chinese vehicles so far," and Defense Minister David McGuinty said he would raise the question with base commanders.
The danger, in her telling, runs well past cars.
A congressional probe found hidden communications equipment inside Chinese-made cranes at major American ports; the same cranes are common in Canadian harbors, where Transport Canada began assessing the risk in 2023. More worrying still are solar power inverters — the devices that feed renewable energy into the grid — of which China supplies about 70 percent worldwide. American investigators have identified undeclared communication components inside some Chinese inverters that experts warn could be used to switch them off remotely and destabilize power grids.
Lithuania has banned Chinese inverters outright and the European Union has moved to bar them from public funding, while Canada, Shaffer writes, has imposed no comparable limits — even as the January partnership commits Ottawa and Beijing to deepen cooperation on solar, wind and battery storage.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre's auto policy would prohibit Chinese-made vehicles from proximity to Canadian Forces bases and other sensitive or strategic infrastructure.
In Washington, where opposition to Chinese electric vehicles is one of the few genuinely bipartisan positions, President Donald Trump has called the deal a disaster for Canada, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Canada would live to regret it, and the U.S. ambassador, Peter Hoekstra, vowed the cars would never reach American roads: "We're not going to open the floodgates to have Chinese cars coming into the US from Canada."
Shaffer's alarm is echoed, from a different vantage, by Michael Kovrig, the former Canadian diplomat held in China for more than 1,000 days. In testimony to Parliament this spring, Kovrig described the deal as a "trifecta of risks" — structural dependence, unfair competition that erodes industrial capacity, and systemic pressure on government policy — and warned that the People's Republic "weaponizes technology, supply chains and market access" to force acquiescence to its agenda.
Commenting this week on his own testimony, Kovrig wrote on social media that opening Canada's market to Chinese electric vehicles "should be assessed not as a normal trade agreement, but as a tactical gamble that risks deep entanglement." The Chinese Communist Party, he wrote, "pours enormous resources into the sector to build scale and sustain overcapacity." He went on: "The pattern is to flood, consolidate and weaponize. We've seen China do this before with solar panels, steel, ships and drones, and EVs are now moving through the same stages in global markets."
The warnings have not slowed Carney's government, which is pressing ahead at full speed. Industry Minister Mélanie Joly spent much of last week in China, courting BYD, Chery, Geely and Shanghai Launch Automotive Technology to build electric vehicles on Canadian soil, and confirmed that the import quota will keep climbing — rising by 6.5 percent a year from 49,000 vehicles in 2026 to roughly 67,000 annually by 2031. Carney, caught on a hot microphone with Trump at the Group of Seven summit in France, defended the arrangement as "less than 3 per cent of our market, 49,000 cars," telling the president, "It's a cap, we capped, a hard line."
Beijing is pleased.
Geely Holding Group's Lotus-brand electric vehicles will reach Canada next month — the first such models sold under the 49,000-vehicle quota — China's ambassador to Canada, Wang Di, told Reuters on Friday. The cars would arrive, he said, "and they will be holding a ceremony when the cars are delivered in Montreal," a milestone in the trade pivot Carney has pursued to move Canada away from dependence on the United States.
On June 26, the Chinese Communist Party's state-run China Daily approvingly reported Canada's pledge to lift its exports to China by 50 percent by 2030. At a Canada Day reception at the Canadian embassy in Beijing, the mission's chargé d'affaires, Mark Richardson, called Canada "a stable, reliable partner — a partner that builds and values relationships for the long term," adding, "That includes with China." Of Carney's January visit, he said: "To say this has been a significant year for Canada–China relations would be an understatement. In many ways, it has been a turning point."
He noted that Canada had become a major energy exporter to China and observed that "the first shipment of Chinese-made electric vehicles has arrived in Canada under a new quota that was agreed in January."
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 22:10California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) on Friday called for a national tax on billionaires. Except, in the original version, it was anyone with a net worth of at least $100 million - as quoted by multiple outlets, citing a post from Newsom's Substack account.
As originally reported by Politico:
His plan to address the country’s yawning wealth gap includes “a true minimum tax on billionaires and those with a net worth of $100 million” and creating a national public equity fund to give all Americans a stake in the economic gains created by artificial intelligence companies.
The post now reads:
"So here is what I support: A national billionaires’ tax. A true minimum tax on billionaires — a modern Buffett Rule — that ensures the people at the very top pay at least the tax rate their own workers pay."
Bitch please.
Newsom also wants to tax inheritance - writing "We also need to rewrite our inheritance rules. Over the next twenty years, this country will live through the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history, with roughly $124 trillion changing hands. If we do not act, that transfer of wealth among the ultra-wealthy will lock in a permanent American aristocracy of inherited wealth, with all the political consequences the founders warned us about."
Notice he cites the massive wealth transfer, but not the level of inheritance he's targeting - as most slippery slopes begin.
Newsom's proposals come after he failed to stop California's legislation from with placing a state-level wealth tax on the November ballot.
Newsom’s proposal follows a failed attempt by the governor, billionaires and progressive groups of persuading the union behind the California tax, SEIU-UHW, to withdraw the measure before Thursday evening’s deadline. Newsom had even privately expressed assurances about an agreement, telling a wealthy donor he expected to negotiate the measure off the ballot, Bloomberg News previously reported. -Bloomberg
"For Newsom, it’s the worst of all worlds, because it puts him squarely in the middle of a national Democratic debate about equity, taxation and affordability," said Steven Maviglio, a veteran Democratic strategist in the state. "His announcement might deflect from that a bit."
Newsom also suggests creating a public equity (slush) fund that would 'take a stake in the artificial intelligence economy.'
Anti-Billionaire-Tax-BillionairesShockingly, California's billionaires aren't exactly excited about all this tax malarkey. In fact, while the anti-tax coalition has been most prominently linked to billionaire Sergey Brin (who's funding other ballot measures that could nullify a wealth tax), Planned Parenthood of California and several labor unions are weirdly also against taxing billionaires - arguing that the proceeds from the tax would benefit select groups, while potentially damaging the entire state's budget because wealthy residents will flee.
Even they know it's just a slush fund.
"We are ready to defeat this convoluted nightmare of a measure in November," a spokesperson for Golden State Promise, a group backed by billionaire Chris Larsen, told Bloomberg, while a different coalition linked to doctors and school boards called California's proposal a threat to "vital funding for education and schools, healthcare and clinics, public safety, and infrastructure projects."
Either way, Democrats continue to actively scheme for ways to extract more money from capitalists.
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 21:35Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,
The Trump administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to approve its policy of detaining illegal immigrants who have been in the country for years without releasing them on bond.
D. John Sauer, then the U.S. solicitor general nominee, testifies during his confirmation hearing in Washington on Feb. 26, 2025. Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesThe petition in Raycraft v. Lopez-Campos was docketed on June 24, but at time of publication did not appear on the court's website because of a sensitive-filings rule. The court's public information office provided The Epoch Times with a copy of the filed petition on June 26.
Adopted last year, the policy represents a change from how previous administrations interpreted a specific provision of the federal Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). It also led to a flood of lawsuits from immigrants challenging detention.
Legal experts previously told The Epoch Times they expected that the justices would at some point intervene after several appeals courts issued conflicting interpretations of the law's detention provisions.
Three federal courts of appeals have rejected the policy, while two have upheld it. The result has been uneven enforcement across the country, raising questions about how millions of illegal immigrants would be detained.
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which amended the INA, required detention without bond for illegal immigrants seeking entry into the country.
The provision at issue, Section 1225 of the INA, says individuals seeking admission "shall be detained" if an immigration officer determines they are "not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted."
In President Donald Trump's second administration, the government said this detention mandate applied to individuals who had already entered the United States. Multiple illegal immigrants have argued that portion of the INA didn't apply to them because they were already in the country and therefore no longer seeking admission or undergoing a formal admissions process.
Instead, they said another provision of the INA - Section 1226 - applied and allowed them to receive bond hearings.
Trump's interpretation introduced a dramatic change in federal policy, David Super, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, previously told The Epoch Times.
The position that illegal immigrants apprehended in the interior of the United States may be held without bond "has not been the policy of any prior administration, including the first Trump administration," Super said.
The policy is part of the administration's broader immigration strategy, which includes ending so-called catch-and-release efforts, or releasing migrants as they await hearings after being apprehended at the border.
In the new petition, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer states that the case is about "eleven aliens who entered the United States illegally and are now present in the country without having been admitted."
The respondents, who were apprehended between June and September 2025, were put into removal proceedings and charged with being inadmissible and being present in the United States without being admitted or paroled. To be paroled is to be allowed into the country subject to a later decision on immigration status.
Several of the respondents were also charged with not possessing valid immigration documents.
Sauer said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ruled that the respondents should be detained under Section 1225 for the duration of their removal proceedings. Several respondents asked for bond hearings before an immigration judge. The immigration judges eventually found that Section 1225 deprived them of authority to grant bond.
The respondents filed habeas petitions with federal district courts in Michigan seeking release. All the release requests were granted. In three of the four cases, the district court also found that detaining respondents without conducting a bond hearing violated their due process rights.
Sauer said the government released the respondents without holding a bond hearing and appealed to a panel of the Cincinnati, Ohio-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. In a divided opinion, the appeals court affirmed.
The panel found Section 1225 does not apply to noncitizens already present in the country because they are not "seeking admission." The panel also determined that the detention of the respondents without bond hearings violated their due process rights.
Sauer urged the Supreme Court to accept the government's appeal.
The legal question is "whether aliens present in the United States after an illegal entry must be detained while their removal proceedings unfold.
"The correct answer is yes: 8 U.S.C. 1225(b)(2)(A) mandates detention for such aliens pending their removal proceedings, and there is no due-process problem with that result," he said.
The Sixth Circuit's holdings are "incorrect," he said, and given the 3-2 split among appeals courts, there is now "an unworkable patchwork of inconsistent immigration enforcement, where aliens present without admission are subject to mandatory detention in some circuits but are entitled to bond hearings and often released in others."
"Immigration enforcement should not depend on geographical happenstance," he said.
It is unclear when the Supreme Court will take up the petition.
Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2026 - 21:00