The UK morphed their Infrastructure Bank into the National Wealth Fund, with a net-zero and industrial strategy mandate, complete with leverage targes and published accounts.

By contrast, Ottawa is borrowing to create an SWF-branded vehicle that adds to an already crowded field of public investors

Used properly, these are macro instruments that shift large pools of capital into infrastructure over years. They can support growth and resilience but aren’t designed to help with cost of living. In spite of this, the CSF is being branded as making life more affordable for Canadians.

The UK treats it’s fund as a macro tool. Medium-term climate competitiveness lever with a development-bank risk profile. Seperately they do targeted work on micro-level issues.

Canada is trying to sell the same machinery as a cost-of-living fix.

A macro-level tool is being marketed as affordability policy is problematic.

Canada’s CoL crisis is driven by micro failures such as market power in key sectors, housing supply constraints and a tax/regulatory system that protects incumbents.

A cleaner, more honest line would be to sell it as an industrial-policy fund. Elsewhere, the Spring Update does take some direct swings at housing, competition, and tax issues. But these concrete structural measures are quite thin compared to the scale of market power issues.

The Canada Strong Fund might do useful things. Patient capital at scale, deployed into infrastructure over a decade is something sorely needed. Long-term thinking has been absent from government policy.

But useful and honest are different standards, and Ottawa is choosing branding.

When a government names a macro instrument after affordability, it sets a test the instrument cannot pass. The cost-of-living crisis lives in grocery bills, rent, and fees. The CSF lives in 10-year deployment cycles and co-investment term sheets.

That gap will compound.

When Canadians are still stretched in 2027, the fund will be mid-deployment and largely invisible. The distance between the promise and the policy will be the story. The government will have written the headline themselves.

Ottawa preloaded its own credibility collapse & called it a wealth fund.

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This started as a simple checklist. After reading the news of the latest floor crosser in parliament, I like many others, was struck by how incongruous her politics seemed with the ideology of the Liberals, even in their current centre-right form.

I was reflecting with a friend about my disappointments with Carney’s approach to building a majority in such a morally bankrupt way. I want to be optimistic about his governance. But he can’t hide behind pragmatism forever. And being the leader who wrote the book on climate policy, then killed the carbon tax on day one, doesn’t look great.

Then I read . He focused on moral cowardice in light of the 81st anniversary of the execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the 109th anniversary of Canada’s victory at Vimy Ridge.

Please read it if you haven’t.

Charlie Angus / The Resistance

Confronting the "Great Grovel"

This week, we watched as the world economy and the lives of countless civilians were threatened by the mobster in the White House. And what was most striking is the unwillingness of so many with the power to do the right thing to stand up against the nightmare unfolding…

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2 months ago · 390 likes · 103 comments · Charlie Angus / The Resistance

Charlie zeroed in on Bonhoeffer’s triumvirate of evil, stupidity, and moral cowardice as the operating logic of the current moment. It got me thinking about how you could use that as a framework to actually place world leaders. Not as polemic, but as methodology.

It started as a checklist between evil, stupid, and cowardice. I focused on patterns I could identify.

Basic patterns.

Evil would be a pattern of disregard for human life.
Stupid would be a pattern of acting against their own self-interest.
Cowardly would be a pattern of grand gestures and retreat.

But it needed to account for something like limited power. So MbS would be completely unconstrained, and everything was a deliberate choice. Same for Putin and Xi. But democracies have built-in safeguards.

Carney being a minority PM (barely and only for a few more days) means he doesn’t have the mandate to do whatever he wants.

Trump became a weird edge case where there are constraints, but he does whatever he can to circumvent them.

Clearly, a checklist wasn’t enough.

So it became a chart.

Every leader is assessed across three dimensions.

Intent is measured by a pattern of disregard for human life. Actual behaviour over time rather than virtue signalling soundbites.

Capability is drawn from demonstrated expertise, institutional knowledge, rhetorical and policy competence.

Agency is how constrained the leader is by forces outside their control, such as government structures and constitutional requirements. It separates won’t from can’t.

The framework produced four character types: Evil, Spineless, Inept, and Principled.

The Principled quadrant, which covers high capability, good intent, and the will to act on both, is currently empty. This is exactly what Charlie was lamenting in his newsletter.

I iterated a lot and learned some stuff along the way.

Ineptitude is rare by design. Systems generally cull it early. Getting to the top requires enough situational intelligence to survive the climb. When you do see genuine ineptitude, it’s usually a domain-specific blind spot in one critical area. Merz’s macro read is the clearest current example I could think of.

The hardest distinction is ineptitude vs. spinelessness. Do they understand the situation and retreat anyway? Or do they genuinely not understand it?

Macron understands pension reform. He has a master’s in public affairs and spent time in the financial sector. But he has also repeatedly miscalculated political will. It’s not ineptitude.

Merz applied a 1990s fiscal rulebook to a 2020s crisis and didn’t anticipate that mainstreaming far-right migration framing would legitimize the AfD rather than absorb its voters. That’s inept.

The second hardest is inept vs. evil. Trump’s failures look like ineptitude. We’d probably all like to believe that it is. But his mechanism is not caring. That’s evil.

Evil dominates the chart because the system rewards it. It’s been true since Machiavelli (probably before) that ruthlessness, strategic calculation, and willingness to harm are assets when it comes to building political power.

The Principled quadrant being empty is probably the most interesting thing about the chart.

Full methodology available here:

Vibes-Based and (occasionally) Peer-Reviewed.

World Leaders 2026: The Methodology

I’ll do my best to explain something that’s mostly vibes-based and subjective as hell…

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2 months ago · Jeremy

Obviously, this is heavily opinionated, biased and reductivist. It’s based on my personal reading, and I’m no expert.

When another friend asked how I came up with the rankings, I quipped, “Like all good stats, the methodology is opaque and mostly vibes-based.” I’m not going to deny that.

But Charlie’s newsletter this morning concluded with something more hopeful than a world run by stupid, evil, and cowardly people.

He writes,

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For now, I’ve got 13:
'

🇷🇺 Vladimir Putin | President of Russia

🇨🇳 Xi Jinping | General Secretary, President of China

🇮🇳 Narendra Modi | Prime Minister of India

🇸🇦 Mohammed bin Salman | Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia

🇫🇷 Emmanuel Macron | President of France

🇮🇹 Giorgia Meloni | Prime Minister of Italy

🇧🇷 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva | President of Brazil

🇪🇺 António Costa | President of the European Council

🇬🇧 Keir Starmer | Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

🇺🇸 Donald Trump | President of the United States

🇩🇪 Friedrich Merz | Chancellor of Germany

🇨🇦 Mark Carney | Prime Minister of Canada

🇯🇵 Sanae Takaichi | Prime Minister of Japan

Every leader is assessed across three dimensions: intent, capability, and agency.

Intent is measured by a pattern of disregard for human life. High malign intent means the harm is deliberate and consistent.

Capability is drawn from demonstrated expertise, institutional knowledge, and rhetorical and policy competence. For example, Carney’s 9 reflects both his pre-office resume (Bank of Canada governor, Bank of England governor, PhD economist) and his in-office performance as a communicator and crisis manager during the trade war. The capability is not in question. The spineless placement is confirmed by his in-office record: the leader who wrote the book on climate has, in his first year, killed the consumer carbon tax, scrapped the EV mandate, reinstated LNG tax credits, and shelved the oil and gas emissions cap. All under the guise of pragmatism. He knows better.

Agency shows how constrained the leader is by forces outside their control. For example, MBS, Putin, and Xi are more or less fully unconstrained. Every choice is theirs. Democratic leaders operate within institutional safeguards. Carney in a minority government, at least until the by-elections, has real structural limits. Trump is kind of an edge case. He’s constrained on paper by America’s famous checks & balances. But he’s also systematically working to dismantle any constraints on his power.

The four character types the chart produces:

• Evil — a pattern of deliberate disregard for human life

• Spineless — a pattern of grand gestures and retreat. Someone who knows better.

• Inept — a pattern of acting against their own stated goals with a genuine failure to read the situation

• Principled — good intent, high capability, acts on both. (Currently empty.)
  

  ---

On ineptitude specifically: Genuine ineptitude is rare at the top because systems cull it early. When you do see it, it’s usually domain-specific: competent enough to reach the top but with a blind spot in one critical area. Merz’s macro read is the clearest current example.

The hardest distinction on the chart is inept vs. spineless. Macron’s pension reform miscalculation looks like ineptitude, but was a failure of political will, not understanding. Merz’s fiscal orthodoxy looks like ideology but is a genuine failure to model consequences.

To spot the difference, I looked for evidence that they understood the situation but still retreated.

The second hardest is inept vs. evil. Trump’s failures look like ineptitude. That’s by design. His mechanism is not caring.

Leaders can occupy more than one category. Merz is both inept and spineless (the fiscal orthodoxy is inept, the migration framing is spineless.)

Full overlap across all three is theoretically possible but rare and currently absent from this list. The system that produces leaders usually doesn’t allow for that terrifying combination.

This isn’t a problem that’s unique to 2026. Power tends to filter for these traits unless actively constrained. Systems reward short-term wins over long-term thinking and caution over courage. Without strong institutions and accountability, these three tendencies become the default modes of governance.

But it’s not all name-calling and nihilism. Yes, the language is blunt. That’s on purpose. Good leadership requires the presence of accountability, learning, and moral clarity. Those qualities don’t fit neatly into any of these categories. That’s why they stand out.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with this. I’d actually prefer it if they didn’t.

Known Blindspots

Selection bias: 13 leaders, all from wealthy or geopolitically dominant states. No African heads of state, no Southeast Asia, no Latin America beyond Lula. The sample skews toward the Western-dominated international order.

Western interpretive frame: The categories assume individual moral agency as the primary unit of analysis. That’s a culturally specific lens rooted in liberal democratic tradition.

Information asymmetry: Access to information about Putin, Xi, and MBS is filtered through Western media and intelligence frameworks. What looks like evil may be partially obscured by what’s simply unknowable from the outside.

The methodology is built on judgment calls: Intent scores, capability scores, and category assignments are all argued, but none of them objectively. The constraint dimension is the least intuitive because it’s encoded visually rather than explained in text.

Snapshot problem: This is a 2026 assessment. The chart captures the current state, not the trajectory. A leader mid-decline or mid-correction looks the same as one who has been static.

The Principled quadrant assumes it’s possible: Leaving it empty implies no current leader qualifies. That’s a strong claim the methodology doesn’t fully defend. It’s possible the framework itself makes principled leadership unclassifiable.

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