Links for November 2nd, 2025
This week from me at TVO: I argue that the person responsible for the actions of Donald Trump is… Donald Trump.
Imagining that Canada’s actions are anything other than a secondary input into the pudding that sits between the ears of the president is something closer to vanity than analysis.
Also, I beg Canada’s political class to get over its phobia about amending the constitution.
our political class is still, by and large, a generation of people nursing the traumas of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Canada was whipsawed by successive attempts to revise the constitution: from Meech Lake to Charlottetown to the second Quebec referendum. I remember the latter two clearly, and I’m under no illusions that it was a good time. But it was also 30 years ago today (happy anniversary!), and the world belongs to the living.
On the podcast, Steve and I discuss the Premier’s ad campaign, Trump’s reaction, and more.
Elsewhere:
Toronto opted not to proceed with the most affirmative reforms to allow small-scale retail in neighbourhoods this week, and it may get worse. Dan Seljak has been organizing for this battle and is continuing the fight:
A setback to meet with will and determination... and grace, too [Change.org]
I’m not going to pretend this was a victory, however, this setback and the opposition to this initiative have counterintuitively galvanised renewed support. I’d like to capitalise on that and ensure the work of everyone so far is channelled into some sort of productive outcome--we have the fate of a corner store and a popular initiative in limbo, we can still eke out some wins and have some fun doing it.
There is nothing more consistently depressing about this city than our insistence to never challenge a status quo that everyone acknowledges isn’t producing the results we want.
Related: Why Your City Should Build a Retail Strategy [Thinking Big By Thinking Small]
Meanwhile, folks on one street are fighting the city’s already too-timid multiplex rules with a demand for heritage protection.
Palmerston residents look to fight housing redevelopments using heritage status [Toronto Today]
Lucas’ group is hopeful a heritage designation can prevent development that they believe would alter the street’s essential character, which he said is defined both by its architecture and by the diversity of its neighbours.
So it’s hard to be optimistic about reforms like single egress building codes, because Toronto doesn’t actually want nice things.
The era of the shoebox condo is over [Globe and Mail]
Dual-stairway rules are just one example of a cacophony of provincial and municipal restrictions and requirements that have long made it hard in Canada to build livable apartments – the kind many people would consider suitable to be long-term homes in big cities.
Yet with detached houses increasingly out of the reach of middle-class homebuyers even in far-flung suburbs, there’s a growing consensus among experts that building apartments that can be desirable homes, including for families, is a key part of tackling the country’s housing crisis.
One of the major themes in MMI’s work, as seen in reports such as Families on the Move, is that intraprovincial migration (i.e., individuals’ families moving from one part of the province to another) is shaping the face of Ontario in ways that continue to be poorly understood by policymakers.
Over the past two decades, families that once lived in the Greater Toronto Area have increasingly chosen to live elsewhere in the province, a pattern that began long before the pandemic and has since accelerated. The provincial government is betting that these trends will reverse; a bet that could cause the housing crisis to persist.
Age Disparity in Shelter Cost per Room [Home: Free Sociology!]
Long story short: shelter cost per room has been getting more expensive, especially for young folks, and in those metro areas where we see the greatest housing shortages, and the age discrepancy mostly comes from older folks locking in past prices, especially as they transition into ownership.
Agglomeration Value vs. Scarcity [Erdmann Housing Tracker]
I think the issue comes from attributing scarcity value to agglomeration value. If all of the high value of New York City homes is attributed axiomatically to agglomeration value, then new homes won’t seem to be able to reduce real estate values. But, that isn’t because of agglomeration value itself. It is because the overestimation of agglomeration value comes at the expense of underestimating scarcity value, so the potential for supply to lower prices is axiomatically denied as a result of being attributed to agglomeration value.
Off the track [Globe and Mail]
How can a light-rail line have taken 14 years, and counting? First, a revolving door of politicians rewrote and ripped up the plans for years before work began, as they often do. Then came design delays, the unforeseen complexity of moving gas and water pipes, mislaid tracks, leaky stations, buggy signalling software and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Experts and some involved in the project say many of the problems were a result of its structure as Canada’s largest ever “public-private partnership,” or P3, a type of contract that typically hands over an entire project – design, construction, some of its financing, future maintenance – to the private sector. Before the advent of the P3 model, governments or their agencies would more or less just design a project themselves, and then hire contractors to build it. And in this case, in order to turn the Crosstown into a P3, the province stripped the city’s Toronto Transit Commission of control of the project.
The shift to renewables represents an agricultural revolution for energy, moving from searching and extracting scarce fuels to harvesting abundant sunlight in place. Much as granaries and refrigeration transformed food markets, storage will turn electricity from perishable to persistent, unlocking a new era of energy abundance.
The folks at Ember are producing some of the most compelling energy analysis of the current moment. Always worth reading. In particular, the point that as storage becomes cheaper we’re going to move way beyond the volume of batteries imagined in utility models because consumers are going to demand it for performance and convenience reasons is an insight worth sitting with.
Emergent Approaches to Combined Arms Manoeuvre in Ukraine [RUSI]
The paper is not an attempt to describe how most units are operating, other than highlighting the pressures that forces must manage in modern operations. Instead, it explores the concepts of operation being developed and successfully employed by a subset of units that have had disproportionate success. Because of the function they serve, these units are analogous to NATO battlegroups. The paper describes how these Ukrainian units combine the tools of modern war, and endeavours to highlight the specific utility of different capabilities and their complementarity.
Really interesting read there about how Ukraine is adapting to new warfighting technology (and, to a lesser extent, how Russia is not.)
How We Lost the Trade War [Paul Krugman]
In 2024, only 38 percent of U.S. imports from Canada entered under the USMCA. That’s surprisingly low, but the main reason was probably paperwork: certifying that a good complies with the free trade rules requires a lot of documentation. For smaller exporters, in particular, that paperwork often wasn’t worth doing, because tariffs were low even for goods not certified as USMCA compliant.
Now the tariffs are much higher, and there has been a rush to do the extra paperwork. In June 2025, 81 percent of imports from Canada entered duty free. Not incidentally, this points to a hidden cost of the tariffs: Companies are incurring significant administrative costs to deal with a vastly more complex tariff system.
Six Things the Climate Movement Gets Wrong About China [The Ecomodernist]
Ultimately, China’s policies are arguably aiming for a world with 2-3 degrees C of global warming in which Chinese industries dominate advanced technologies across the energy sector and beyond. While many implicitly utilitarian climate thinkers have embraced China as the global manufacturer of solar and battery equipment, it is hard to imagine a mainstream climate organization that would actually declare a 2-3C future to be a victory.
In other words, the climate movement gains nothing from holding its nose and abandoning its professed values to indiscriminately gobble Chinese solar panels and electric vehicles. Continued efforts by climate advocates to browbeat China, the U.S., Russia, and developing nations like India or Indonesia, towards lower-warming pathways well below 2C face both dubious odds and also require crucial recognition that China poses more obstacles than it offers solutions. More realistically, if the world is likely trending towards 2-3C of warming, then discussion on China’s role in the climate transition must rightfully refocus on ensuring better, fairer outcomes for people globally now and in the future.
The policies of the Chinese government are undoubtedly an obstacle to better climate policy in China, and that’s extremely important. Is China more of an obstacle to Canadian climate policy than our own domestic interest groups? I’m skeptical.
The Business of the Culture War [Job Market Paper]
Using household-by-second smart TV data, we trace cable news’ emphasis on cultural over economic issues to a distinctive business strategy: culture attracts viewers who would otherwise not watch news (“mobilization”); economics attracts viewers who would otherwise watch competing news outlets (“poaching”); and the number mobilized by culture is greater than the number poached by economics, so culture increases viewership.
…Our estimates suggest that cable news can account for one-third of the time-series increase in cultural conflict since 2000.
Women’s professional rise is good, actually [Slow Boring]
Love or hate Sonia Sotomayor or Barrett, they got to the Supreme Court the same way every justice has — a blend of political and jurisprudential considerations weighed by a broadly sympathetic president. The heft of Andrews’s piece comes from the prospect of widespread de-feminization, which would require massive cultural change and the rebirth of an incredibly oppressive and constraining set of social norms. And neither she nor her allies are willing to actually make the case for it, because it would be horrifying.
“Gender without Children” [Tatiana Pazem]
Using granular health registries matched with administrative data from Sweden, we confirm that MRKH is not associated with worse health, nor with differential pre-diagnosis characteristics, and that it has a large negative impact on the probability to ever live with a child. Relative to women from the general population, women with the condition have better educational outcomes, tend to marry and divorce at the same rate, but mate with older men, and hold significantly more progressive beliefs regarding gender roles. The condition has also very large positive effects on earnings and employment. Dynamics reveal that most of this positive effect emerges around the arrival of children in women in the general population, with little difference before. We also find that women with MRKH perform as well as men in the labor market in the long run. Results confirm that “child penalties” on the labor market trajectories of women are large and persistent and that they explain the bulk of the remaining gender gap.
The Impact of Maternal Mortality Improvements on the Baby Boom [SSRN]
Albanesi and Olivetti (2014) explore the effect of maternal health improvements on the completed fertility of white women. They measure completed fertility as the average number of children women had by the age of 35–44, and use the maternal mortality rate in women’s state when they were age 15–20 as the treatment. Their estimates suggest that improvements in maternal mortality account for 74 percent of the rise in white fertility during the baby boom….
Combining our estimates with the observed changes in maternal mortality, we estimate that, among white women, decreasing maternal mortality explains roughly 47–73 percent of the increase in fertility during our sample period. To the best of our knowledge, we are also the first to examine the effects of maternal mortality on fertility for nonwhite women. Our estimates for nonwhite women suggest that improvements in maternal mortality explain 64–88 percent of the increase in fertility during this period.
How the UK Lost Its Shipbuilding Industry [Construction Physics]
They also seemed to always have an excuse for not making large, new capital investments: when the yards were busy, such investments were disruptive and made it difficult to get on with the business of building ships, and when they weren’t, there was no funding available to do so. Shipbuilders were often small, family-run businesses, sometimes by descendants of the original founders, and they were generally happy to simply carry on business as they always had. And broader ownership did not foster innovation either, with firms distributing their profits as dividends rather than reinvesting them in the business, driving the stock prices of shipbuilders up more than any other manufacturing industry. [emphasis mine -JMM]
Sorry but that sounds like a pretty fair capsule summary of what’s been going on with North American automakers for the last quarter-century or so: aside from a few brief moments usually coinciding with financial crises they’ve ignored the challenge of EVs, and now they’re getting their lunch eaten because of it. Speaking of EVs:
The Musk Partisan Effect on Tesla Sales [NBER]
Using county-level, monthly data on new vehicle registrations, we leverage how changes in vehicle sales over time diverge across counties with differing shares of Democratic and Republican voters. Without the Musk partisan effect, Tesla sales between October 2022 and April 2025 would have been 67-83% higher, equivalent to 1-1.26 million more vehicles. Musk’s partisan activities also increased the sales of other automakers’ electric and hybrid vehicles 17-22% because of substitution, and undermined California’s progress in meeting its zero-emissions vehicle target.
This highway can charge your EV while you drive – at a WHOPPING 300 kW (!) [Electrek]
Last week, four lightly modified battery electric vehicles – a semi truck, a box van, a passenger car, and bus – drove across a mile-long stretch of France’s A10 outside of Paris in a real-world test of a new wireless charging system’s performance. The result? The new wireless charging tech being co-developed by Electreon and Wireless and Vinci Group could transfer more than 300 kW of peak power (and more than 200 kW of average power) to the vehicles as they drove.
We’ve been able to electrify roadways for more than a century with overhead wires but I think the value to something like this is that — big “in theory” caveat here — an in-road charging system could work for both heavy and light vehicles.
The Other John Muir and Making Better Cars [Energy and Stuff]
OK. So I love this car, and think it is the best car I have ever had, except I hate all the servo motors. I hate the windows. I hate the seats. I hate the roof lining. I really really hate how long it takes for the side door to open. I also really hate the low profile tyres and un-necessarily large wheels. I also really hate the TERRIBLE turning circle. It’s not like there is an engine up front to stop you from having a tight turning circle. Oh — and I hate the fact there is no spare tire and no tool kit. And I hate all the bings and bongs and the software that makes me crazy. It also won’t let me drive without my seat belt on, even if it is only to move the car to the other side of the garage. People used to fight for the freedom to do stupid things.
I don’t own this car in the way I used to own my 1959 VW. I had agency. I could fix it anywhere, any time, myself. I could hill start it. It was never bricked. I once drove it with a broken throttle cable, my mate in the back of the car doing the revs with his hand over the back to the engine in the rear. We talked about when I was going to change gears and coordinated. It still GOT US THERE.
Here’s How the AI Crash Happens [The Atlantic]
These private-equity firms put up or raise the money to build a data center, which a tech company will repay through rent. Data-center leases from, say, Meta can then be repackaged into a financial instrument that people can buy and sell—a bond, in essence. Meta recently did just this: Blue Owl Capital raised money for a massive Meta data center in Louisiana by, in essence, issuing bonds backed by Meta’s rent. And multiple data-center leases can be combined into a security and sorted into what are called “tranches” based on their risk of default. Data centers represent an $800 billion market for private-equity firms through 2028 alone. (Meta has said of its arrangement with Blue Owl that the “innovative partnership was designed to support the speed and flexibility required for Meta’s data center projects.”)
Quite aside from the questions of whether and how LLMs actually work the financial opacity really is the big flashing red light on the economic dashboard here.
Treat Big Tech like Big Tobacco [The Argument]
Social media companies are no longer passive hosts but active curators. And the costs of these products are now too high to ignore. They make us addicted to their apps with slot machine-style precision, and they are now helping creators fake reality with text-to-video generation.
The answer is not to destroy these companies or pull the government into the messy and probably unconstitutional world of directly regulating speech. The answer is to remove the special protections they have been granted and finally allow people harmed by these products to hold these companies liable.
Why scientists found lead in protein powders [Chemical & Engineering News]
The Food and Drug Administration sets guidelines for levels of lead exposure from food that particularly at-risk populations should avoid. The current interim reference levels are 2.2 μg per day for children and 8.8 μg per day for women of child-bearing age. The threshold Consumer Reports chose was much lower—0.5 μg per day. That is the maximum allowable dose of lead per day set by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment under the state’s Proposition 65 law, which warns consumers of products that may cause cancer.
If you’ve been worried about that “lead in protein supplements” headline the short version is you almost certainly should not unless you’re a very young child or pregnant.
But don’t take my word for it:
Consumer Reports’ Latest Panic: “Toxic” Lead in Protein Powders [Immunologic]
The big takeaways:
No, you don’t need to panic about lead in protein powder — certainly based on their information
and
Yes, we need regulatory oversight of dietary supplements — which means we need to get rid of the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act to enforce safety (and benefit) of dietary supplements.
Two things can exist at once.
Meanwhile, this one is kind of funny:
According to the review, consuming plant-based alternatives may have several health advantages; for example, replacing dairy milk with soymilk has been shown to reduce total cholesterol (TC), LDL cholesterol (LDL-C), and C-reactive protein, and is also associated with a lower risk of breast cancer.
Furthermore, plant-based meat alternatives are said to reduce TC, LDL-C, body weight, plasma ammonia, and trimethylamine oxide (TMAO) when consumed instead of conventional meat. Substituting butter with soft margarine reportedly reduces TC and LDL-C, and is associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular events and mortality.
The whole “ultraprocessed food” category really really needs to be understood with a bucket of nuance. Anyway, here’s Adam Ragusea on the whole lead-in-protein thing as well in case reading the above didn’t get you to click.