Tuesday, October 20, 2026
The Unscreened
Canada keeps building formal instruments and pointing them outward. Four returns, one century: the liquor, the holding company, the discovery, the screen.
Ten things
- In the first year of American Prohibition they imported roughly 300,000 gallons of whisky from US distillers, cut it with raw alcohol and water, and shipped back a far larger volume of degraded product .
- Quebec built the Clinical Research Institute of Montreal with its own money: $1.2 million for construction from the Ministère de la Santé in 1964, plus $100,000 a year for eight years , and $3 million through the Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec.
- Centre for International Governance Innovation (2023) on U15 patent assignment; OECD and Statistics Canada on business enterprise R&D; IRPP, To Sell or Scale Up: Canada's Patent Strategy in a Knowledge Economy .
- Corporate histories: Power Corporation of Canada (founded 1925, Nesbitt and Thomson; Desmarais control 1968); Edper Investments, Brascan and Brookfield Corporation.
- Government of Canada, Named Research Organizations, Policy on Sensitive Technology Research and Affiliations of Concern, updated 18 April 2024. science.gc.ca
- US Department of Justice, Eastern District of New York, "NXIVM Executive Board Member Clare Bronfman Sentenced to 81 Months in Prison," 2020. justice.gov
- Every figure is from a public record: corporate histories, a US federal award database, a Department of Justice press release, published OECD and CIGI statistics, and a policy list on a Government of Canada website.
- The Policy on Sensitive Technology Research and Affiliations of Concern denies federal research funding to anyone affiliated with a foreign institution connected to military, national defence or state security entities.
- USAspending.gov, prime award search, recipient country Canada, awarding agency Department of Defense, FY2021–2026. usaspending.gov
- The argument is about absent instruments, not hidden hands, and absence is the harder problem because there is nobody to prosecute for it.
Five questions
Which term completes this sourced statement? “In the first year of American _____ they imported roughly 300,000 gallons of whisky from US distillers, cut it with raw alcohol and water, and shipped back a far larger volume of degraded product .”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “Centre for _____ Governance Innovation (2023) on U15 patent assignment; OECD and Statistics Canada on business enterprise R&D; IRPP, To Sell or Scale Up: Canada's Patent Strategy in a Knowledge Economy .”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “Government of Canada, Named Research _____, Policy on Sensitive Technology Research and Affiliations of Concern, updated 18 April 2024. science.gc.ca”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “Every figure is from a public record: corporate histories, a US federal award database, a Department of Justice press release, published OECD and CIGI statistics, and a policy list on a _____ of Canada website.”
Which term completes this sourced statement? “_____.gov, prime award search, recipient country Canada, awarding agency Department of Defense, FY2021–2026. usaspending.gov”