Good morning. Milan is showcasing what a world in the midst of historic change looks like in real time. (In addition to the triumphs of human potential, of course. I do have a heart.) That’s in focus today – plus, why Canada and South Africa can’t seem to meet in the middle.

Manufacturing: German minister says auto industry is in talks to expand footprint in Canada.

Travel: Air Canada has suspended flights to Cuba after the Caribbean country warned it will run out of fuel because of a U.S. oil blockade.

Fintech: As millions of dollars in restaurant tips remain missing, companies involved in the situation disagree over who is the legal handler of the money.

As long as the Olympics have sold themselves as being politically neutral, they have been anything but. This year, the friction is enough to burn a hole in your snow pants.

The Milan Cortina Games are a staging ground for what a historic shift in global power dynamics looks like in real time: U.S. Vice-President JD Vance booed in front of billions at the opening ceremony; NBC facing accusations it “softened” that reaction in favour of a friendlier focus on the country’s athletes; American competitors openly criticizing the actions of their home country; the sitting U.S. President calling one of those athletes a “Loser.“

European lawmakers, meanwhile, have called on global sports organizations like the International Olympics Committee and FIFA to ban the U.S. until it demonstrates “clear compliance with international law and respect for the sovereignty of other nations” after the Trump administration’s military attack on Venezuela and threats aimed at Greenland.

The IOC, itself the product of a rules-based system of global co-operation, was forced to affirm it would not be taking action against the U.S., citing a long-standing principle of “political neutrality” – less than four years after it banned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. And now, the IOC’s position on the Kremlin seems to be softening.

Codes of conduct

If the Olympics are indeed a politically neutral event, not all of its competitors seemed to have received the memo. Coming to the defence of American freestyle skier Hunter Hess, the athlete who attracted Trump’s outrage, was none other than Eileen Gu – the American-Chinese downhill superstar who sparked fury when she announced, as an intense trade war erupted between the two countries in 2019, that she would compete for China.

It all makes for a tangled set of politics – putting a foot down here, stretching a little bit there. In fact, Milan might represent the first year of the Variable Geometry Games (we can workshop it) – the effect of a pragmatic approach recently touted by Prime Minister Mark Carney as a key foreign-policy doctrine. It means, in short, to “actively take on the world as it is, not wait for a world we wish to be.”

Carney has invoked that approach in recent strategic agreements with China and Qatar – governments that sit uncomfortably far from Canada on an ideological spectrum – but which could help the country diversify its trade portfolio. In recent weeks, after the U.S. ramped up its rhetoric around Western dominance, trade allies around the world are racing to put together coalitions for different issues, seizing on slivers of shared ambitions where they can.

That seems to be the path taken by the IOC in dismissing calls for a U.S. ban, and its softening approach on Russia. Pragmatic. Flexible. In fact, for all the focus the Olympic charter places on sport at the service of humankind’s “harmonious development,” variable geometry might be the committee’s most important guiding principle.

Wheels down

There might be a lesson in that for the old world order and its institutions, especially if not all Western leaders are ready to write them off. Which makes the well-travelled Prime Minister’s absence in Milan especially puzzling, Cathal Kelly writes: If Canada and other middle powers need to band together, and that time is now, where better than the Olympics?

“Carney wants to create a new global order of former also-rans. Great idea. So where is he? Plenty of other VIPs are here cooling their heels waiting for the slopestyle to start. Does he plan to do this all on the phone?”

The Prime Minister’s Office said on Sunday he has no plans to attend the Games. A shame: “If Vance was booed as a U.S. proxy, the Italian crowd might’ve carried Carney out onto the field and stuck him up on Andrea Bocelli’s shoulders.”

Carney might be trying to honour the idea of keeping politics out of the spotlight. But an argument could be made that it’s time for some new snow pants.

If Carney isn’t at the Olympics, it isn’t because he’s busy in South Africa. After his speech imagining a new world order of united middle powers, Geoffrey York writes, many South Africans were eager to enlist in his coalition.