If you listen to the Daily News podcast, you’ll know that I suffered through two snow days this past week. The kids slept with their pyjamas on backwards and with enough spoons under their pillow to get not just one day off, but two. Monday was a PD day where I decided that our family should try downhill skiing (did you know the mountains in Quebec City aren’t just for looking at?). In total, the kids were home for three days last week.

That would be a lot normally but the week before was March Break. Two weeks and only two days of school. The four days after March break, I had promised myself to write a lot for my book and, well, I barely cranked out 2000 words.

But, those 2000 words are fascinating. My next book in the Canada in Decline series is about Canada’s democracy and government. I have the daunting, though fun task of making it exciting to read, so I’ve decided to spend a lot more time on the 1837-38 rebellion. So naturally, I’m dying for my kids to be in school.

The week felt like a marathon not only because my kids were home, but also because I released TWO PODCASTS EVERY SINGLE DAY. Do you know how many podcasts that is? Do you know how many files that is!? It’s EIGHT. That is an insane number of podcasts to produce and host and write and publish. And to do that while also getting my files into SiriusXM (which requires different files/slight recorded edits) without anything going wrong? I did it. I’m so glad I did it but holy shit did this week suck. I wanted to give Canadians a proper look at each of the candidates that I interviewed for NDP leader, but to get them out this week was truly a labour of love for you all.

To say nothing of the two Substack posts I also wrote … I see you, the folks who didn’t like when I used “like” to indicate “about” because I didn’t have time to look whatever I was saying up.

(And special thanks to Matt for his amazing work on the NDP interview videos. I’m pretty proud of myself for filming and scripting them and managing to screw nothing up, but he did the video production).

If you haven’t had the chance to check them out, you can do so here. I’ve heard from a lot of people that said they really appreciated seeing a proper leftwing interview of each of the candidates. We don’t know how their walk will match their talk but at least, we have some pretty useful talk from the top for candidates to judge them by — and don’t forget to scroll past these videos if you want to catch the headlines from the Daily News podcast this past week! And share! Always share :)

Yukon

Strike averted as Yukon University board ratify new collective deal

Ontario

‘Shaken to our core’: Jewish community urges action against antisemitism after GTA synagogue shootings

No abuse of power when city hired Windsor mayor’s wife, says integrity commissioner

Niagara Regional chair resigns over ownership of signed copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf

Nova Scotia

‘I’m sorry’: N.S. government to reinstate $53.6M in grants, funding after backlash

Manitoba

Winnipeg health officials warn about presence of strong animal tranquillizer in drug supply

Caspian Construction paid $45M to $50M above and beyond work it conducted, police HQ inquiry hears

Quebec

Abattoir casher: rattrapage salarial de 24% dès la première année

Alberta

Edmonton police chief’s trip to Israel draws criticism and support

2 people die after giving plasma at for-profit Winnipeg collection centres: Health Canada

PEI

P.E.I. government’s unbudgeted spending on travel nurses ‘alarming,’ says union president

National

MPs reject bill to close arms export loophole despite some Liberal support

Canadian military personnel identified on white supremacist dating site

Don Davies statement

More than 30 Petawawa troops suffer frostbite during Arctic exercise

CRTC orders companies to eliminate fees preventing customers from switching plans

International

At least 42 people killed in days of floods across Kenya

Israeli forces kill Palestinian journalist Amal Shamali in Gaza attack

Iran war updates: US bases will be attacked unless closed, says Khamenei

U.S. Consulate shooting in Toronto being investigated as ‘national security incident’

Eswatini receives third batch of migrants deported by the US

Death toll from Ethiopia floods and landslides rises to more than 100

More than 500,000 displaced in Lebanon as Israel escalates attacks

The news of a CBC Blacklist came out yesterday when former CBC employee Travis Dhanraj presented to a parliamentary committee. He said that there’s a list of 45 people who CBC has formally said they refuse to have on.

Side note (March 13): Bruce Arthur at the Toronto Star talked with anonymous CBC employees who said that Dhanraj’s main beef was that he couldn’t take the show in directions that the show wasn’t intended to be taken. I have written before about how Dhanraj is obviously a conservative trying to make a career of being a maverick, and leveraging his career at CBC to do it. Regardless of what he says or said or will say, my experiences have very little to do with the right-wing campaign that’s being organized around this issue.

There’s no question about whether or not CBC has a blacklist. It isn’t by accident that the most exciting, critical and compelling voices in English Canada are never allowed on the air. The question is: who is on it?

Back in 2015-2017, my career was starting to take off. My kids were in daycare. I was in a transition from leaving my blog at Rabble and moving to something new. I was uniquely located in Quebec City, giving me a bit of an edge to talk about federal politics. I was on The Current three times from 2016 to 2017 talking about young workers, the Conservative leadership race and something else I forget. It was normal for me, and for my fellow lefties, to be on the air.

In April 2017, I was on The National to talk about the anti-Islamophobia Bill M-103. The interview was short. I was involved in solidarity actions fighting Islamophobia in Quebec City and I talked a bit about that.

Someone formally complained against this appearance. They called me an Islamo-Marxist and challenged The National’s decision to have me on. The complaint was eventually dismissed as being without merit, but that was it for me. I felt the door close. I wouldn’t be asked on any current affairs program for analysis anywhere at the CBC, ever again.

Many people thought that the CBC’s attitude towards me was related to l’affaire Humboldt. After April 2018, it had perhaps became that, but in the beginning, no, I had been blocked a year earlier.

The blacklist’s impact was laid bare to me in 2020, where despite the fact that I was Canada’s only journalist tracking COVID-19 deaths related to outbreaks int he workplace, the CBC wouldn’t have anything to do with me. Once I heard Dr. Brian Goldman repeat my journalism on the air, though attributing it to Toronto Star journalists, I knew that my journalism work with CBC was over, forever. Where other COVID-19 experts and personalities would have dozens of interviews per day, I never once spoke with the CBC. This was particularly irritating, given that my journalism was way ahead what I heard coming out of my own local station. They’d usually report what I had already published one or two days later.

There were some exceptions to this. Radio-Canada had no similar limitation. I was on Piya Chattopadhyay’s show once in like 2019. And miraculously, for about two years, I was part of a rotating cast of characters on the Sunday morning television show that talked about random stuff. There, I talked about Dr. Seuss, about the Canadian Screen Awards, drugs — whatever the producers thought Canadians would want to hear about any given week. The one time COVID-19 happened to be the issue, because of my background, I had something to say that sounded more like journalism. Some poor soul at The National clipped my interview and broadcast it, and the Toronto Sun’s Brian Lilley reigned hell upon the corporation for that mistake. (Remember: the blacklist isn’t just a list — it’s a contested space where enemies do everything possible to buttress the corporation’s decision to do the blacklisting).

I’ve also been on CBC Radio’s Syndication service three times in five years, where producers there have a bit more of a spine.

The Sunday morning TV show, The Sunday Conversation was cut on like December 28, 2023. They could no longer risk having people accidentally say anything about Israel. Of course, that wasn’t the official reason for why the program was axed (it was money!) The show was popular and cheap to produce, but it didn’t matter. The corporation was shedding itself of any chance for anyone to stage an on-air protest. The two dozen or so of us who were on the panel may have decided to do something to embarrass the public broadcaster in the eyes of Israel, it was best to cut it entirely.

When they first approached me to join the show, I asked how on earth I was allowed to be on, given the frostiness everywhere else and I was told — it’s Sunday morning. We get away with more stuff here than any other time in the schedule. Critically though, I was never there as a journalist. Instead, as an active and engaged citizen.

I’m far from being alone in having these experiences. Erica Ifill detailed her own moment of realizing that she was blacklisted:

Sarbjit Kaur explained how she felt the door slam abruptly, and that she’s sure it was related to her position on Israel’s genocide.

The corporation cares more about pleasing the state than doing journalism, and you can see the result of that: boring and basic coverage, cowardly commentary, tune-outable television that has chosen to make itself irrelevant.

Given the attention that this has gotten from the Conservatives and the right-wing press, I can only assume that these 45 people are right wingers who the CBC believes are nuts (and I can say that the producers at The Conversation were desperate to feature not-nuts conservatives and asked us all the time for panellist suggestions). The CBC’s bias is clear: they serve the government. Liberal today, Conservative tomorrow. But it’s actively hostile to those of us on the left, and this hostility is done at its own peril.

The final thing I’ll note is this. If you read about the careers of any major literary figures in Canada’s history — both fiction and nonfiction, essayists, poets, playwrights — they all list the CBC as being part of their career somehow. They worked there, filled in on air, wrote scripts, moved in and out of the public broadcaster.

As an Anglophone living in Quebec City, CBC should be my professional lifeline. There are only like 5 working English journalists in this city of 800,000. If it were 30 years ago, there’d be no question that the station would be a source of work, promotion and engagement. Today, it’s so irrelevant to my day-to-day life, that I barely remember it exists. They have never featured any of my five books just because I’m a local author. They have never asked me for analysis or comment. Impossible to imagine they asking for a weekly column. Completely insane to imagine that I’d be asked to freelance (ignore my unfinished radio degree, or the fact that I speak English, or the fact that I live here and sometimes they do need to take anyone, or the fact that I’m a nationally-recognized podcaster). No, I’m on some stupid list somewhere. And as a result, my career gets zero help from what is supposed to be our cultural engine.

I would drop Substack in a heartbeat if the public broadcaster had a similar platform for independent journalists. I would say yes without hesitating to doing something on air. But that’s no longer how Canada works.

As Canada’s primary propaganda pusher in the campaign to criminalize anti-Zionism, he requires a Palestinian activist to do something violent so he can finally point to how anti-Zionists pose the biggest threat to Canadian Jews.

Despite the fact that Palestinian activists do not conflate Jews with Israel as much as Zionists do, and that every single protest that has happened at a synagogue or within a Jewish neighbourhood has very specifically and clearly identified some disgusting act that was happening by or in support of the genocidal state.

Despite the fact that there has never been any call for violence in Canada from the Palestinian solidarity or anti-Zionist movements in Canada.

Despite the fact that after thousands of demonstrations over two years, there has never been a violent act of antisemitism called for or supported by any organizers.

Despite the fact that one of his fellow journalists (if he still calls himself a journalist, I haven’t kept track) was just confronted by the most extreme, racist and antisemitic shitheads in Montreal, for her reporting outing their white nationalist fight club and he apparently forgot how to say anything about that.

Jesse Brown really, really needs you to think that people like me are the modern day KKK and that we are the real threat to Jews in Canada.

After shots were fired at several synagogues in the GTA this past weekend, Prime Minister Mark Carney said that he would be marshalling all police resources he could towards solving these crimes.

Jesse Brown didn’t like this response. It isn’t enough. He wants to see Palestinian solidarity movements criminalized, free speech stamped out, activists like me harassed, silenced and charged by Canadian state security forces. Why? Because he has been non-stop arguing that we’re the ones who pose the greatest threat to the Jewish community in Canada. When asked what exactly he expects Carney to do about us, he wrote:

Of course, comparing a movement that is mostly lead by racialized people, fighting against the oppression of mostly racialized people by mostly white people, and against a rogue nation that has no problem murdering children and constantly violating international law, to the KKK, is both insane and racist.

But Jesse Brown routinely suggests that violence towards Jewish institutions, including synagogues, is coming from Palestinian activists, and especially Arabs. He smears anti-Zionists as being responsible for antisemitic violence, calls for our over policing, and then plays stupid when people ask him to actually explain how any of this is borne out in reality.

It is critical to have a handle on reality when talking about any attacks against any marginalized group. There have been several attacks in the past few years against Jewish institutions, including:

Mohamed Ilyess Akodad, 19, was charged with arson after firebombing a synagogue in Dollard-des-Ormeaux. He wasn’t charged with hate crimes, which is something that someone like Brown could put his investigative skills towards figuring out why.

Adam Riga, 28, was arrested after he spray painted swastikas on a Montreal synagogue. He was eventually found not criminally responsible due to his mental state at the time.

Robert Gosselin, 55, was charged with hate crimes for posting antisemitic content under articles at the Journal de Montréal.

Patrice Belley-Gervais ransacked a synagogue, and while serving jail time for “various break and enters”, was a witness in a different break and enter.

Amir Arvahi Azar, 32, vandalized several synagogues and Jewish institutions. He was charged with hate crimes.

Waisuddin Akbari, 41, was convicted of uttering threats for saying antisemitic things about Jews and planning to bomb synagogues.

Avrom Bobrowsky, 67, was charged with arson. He set fire to his own synagogue.

Anonymous, 14, was charged with hate speech targeting Jewish institutions.

Waleed Khan, 26, Osman Azizov, 18, and Fahad Sadaat, 19, charged with targeting Jews and women in the GTA.

Anonymous, 29, was charged in threatening Jewish institutions.

Helder Antonio De Ameida, 20 and a 17-year-old male youth were charged with firearms offences and having stolen property after gunshots were found to have caused damage to a Jewish school. The police did not charge them with hate crimes and the Integrated Gangs unit was involved in the investigation, suggesting that it was not targeted antisemitism.

There are a few things that we can say about this list: they’re all male. If we want to make a sweeping social comment, men from a diversity of backgrounds and ages pose the absolute threat to Jewish institutions. Some of these people are frighteningly young.

But not one of them did violence in the name of Palestine.

Jewish leaders have said that these recent shootings targeting synagogues are not just an attack on the Jewish community, but an attack on everyone. This is absolutely true, especially if gun violence is randomly hitting Jewish institutions, as in the last case on this list.

As the far right has risen in prominence, antisemitism has usually been mixed with other forms of hatred: racism generally, Islamophobia, violent misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. We’ve seen this with the slew of young people charged with having been radicalized online. We’ve seen this with the four men in Quebec City who have been charged with terrorism for forming a militia.

There is nothing extraordinary about the list above. I can write a similar list of homophobic attacks or Islamophobic attacks. I can name people who have been hurt and killed due to hate crimes related to their identity. I can write a much longer list of the violence that Indigenous people experience on a daily basis. I could also write a list of churches that have been set on fire, often in retaliation for years of enabling and sowing abuse within adjacent communities. What connects all forms of hatred however, is that hatred seeks to destroy social solidarity and make people feel inferior, unwelcome and unsafe. Again: the Jewish leaders are correct.

But as Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues, their ethnic cleansing of the West Bank has taken on even more violent tactics, they continue to bomb Lebanon and now, are engaged in the United States in a war against Iran, Israel’s supporters need to try and distract us from what is plainly obvious to try and maintain some support for the Zionist state. Rather than what is extraordinarily fucking clear, that Israel and the US are the aggressors in the Middle East, some try to tell us that the real victims are Canadians, who might be caught in the cross-fire of a Palestinian movement (or now, Iranian movement) that wants to punish Canadian Jews for Israel’s acts.

Rather than seeing the Palestinian solidarity movement for what it clearly is, Jesse Brown tells us that this is the modern KKK. Rather than linking struggles, like how journalists are being directly threatened for their reporting on white supremacists and how this makes journalists, and especially journalists who hold identities that the far right despises (Jewish included), Jesse Brown lights whatever social capital he still has on fire. He tells us to look at the flame of his career’s self immolation, to look past the real threats to Jews in Canada and see like he does, that critics of Israel are the violent ones. The true threat.

But the flames can say whatever the observer wants them to say. It’s the journalist’s job to look away from the flames and seek out the truth.

I shared it online, saying that it was one of very few articles that actually criticizes Canada’s plan to massively ramp up our military presence. I used “very few” to hedge my comments — I couldn’t think of anything, beyond Alex Cosh’s reporting at The Maple — but perhaps there were a few other pieces too.

What didn’t occur to me was that Truthout isn’t Canadian and so, even if I am, this technically doesn’t count as a Canadian piece of reporting. It was paid for and edited by Americans.

Over on reddit, at least one redditor took issue with a US publication reporting in this way … “Are there no Canadian publications that would print it?” is the question. You can see the thread here:

The short answer is: no. There are no Canadian outlets that will print this kind of thing.

Truthout has been amazing to work with. They pay more than any Canadian outlet I’ve worked for for reported pieces. They actively seek my ideas, but they also push me to write things that I wouldn’t necessarily pitch. The piece I wrote about Alberta sovereignty a few weeks ago was pitched by them (and, of course, wasn’t sympathetic to Alberta becoming part of the US, even if it was published by an American outlet). Others, like my piece about the World Cup or immigration, were pitched by me.

In this case, a pitch I had sent morphed into this due to the rapidly unfolding events in Canada and the Middle East.

Jabbytabby is right to be skeptical of this piece. It’s true that it should be published in Canada. It’s true that it’s weird that it’s in a US publication. It’s especially weird given that there’s no critique in mainstream Canadian outlets.

But it’s solid journalism, accurate and, as a progressive news source, puts forward a frame that doesn’t assume that politicians tell the truth or that war is good.

I hate that this is the state of things today. Our government wants to triple military spending and you won’t find any news organization that reports this news with skepticism. It’s crazy. Canadians of 1980 would look at this country today and wonder: what on earth happened?? (free trade)

Here are the headlines from the Daily News podcast from this past week:

Ontario

1,300 jobs created: Windsor, Ont.’s NextStar Energy battery plant grand opening

Hamilton, Sarnia residents file formal request for Ontario to fix its ‘broken’ air pollution policy

Toronto student jailed in Pakistan over social media content denied bail

High school students in Oshawa walk out in protest of Ford’s OSAP cuts

Officer who shared racist, extremist posts still working with Hamilton police after investigation

Nova Scotia

Threatening online comment prompts cancellation of 2SLGBTQ+ event in Kentville

British Columbia

Unhoused people left without shelter in freezing temperatures in Trail, B.C.

Alberta

Thousands of Alberta seniors to lose income supplement as province faces rising provincial deficit

Saskatchewan

RCMP probing if multiple deaths are tied to ‘hazardous’ drink in Battlefords

National

AtkinsRéalis, Turkish company to explore building Candu reactors

Internal reports shed light on lewd comments and behaviour at Canada’s border agency

Carney says his support for U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran ‘not a blank cheque’

Canada PM Carney says unable to rule out military role in Iran war

Immigration Department experimenting with AI to advise newcomers on where to settle

International

Macron says France will allow temporary deployment of nuclear-armed jets to European allies

US sub sinks Iranian warship in Indian Ocean, Hegseth says

169 people killed after insurgents raid a village in a remote area of South Sudan

Sri Lanka evacuates crew of second Iranian vessel after US sunk IRIS Dena

Mine collapse in eastern Congo leaves 200 dead, authorities say. But rebels dispute the number

Trump says he is open to talks with Iran as conflict deepens in Middle East

‘We’ll run out of food this week’: Israel’s Iran war brings new Gaza siege

When I see people, there is an inevitable question that often, they’re too afraid to ask.

How are you doing, Nora?

When it comes out (which it always does), and the answer in reply is that I’m doing well, it usually is then followed by this: So … how’s the cancer?

Technically, I have no cancer. It was cut out during surgery last July. The margins were clear, lymphnodes were clear. I should be cancer free. But unlike some types of cancer, that doesn’t mean that it won’t come back. That’s why breast cancer patients often have to go through years of treatment.

So — I have no cancer, but I am a cancer patient. It seems simple but I’ve found myself trying to find ways to explain it without having to get into a very long backstory.

Here’s the backstory though, because I don’t hate telling it. My type of breast cancer grows back. It’s fed by hormones. When the tumor is removed, it’s given a score (oncotype) and based on that score, the doctors determine the course of action. All that attention and money spent on breast cancer research has meant that we know a ton about breast cancers and how to treat them.

My score was 21; not so high as to need chemo (or, to take on the risk of chemo — it looks to be the case that hormone-related treatments do as much good as chemo would do, given the score), but still higher than I’d like it to be. So, back in October, I had nine rounds of radiation and then I started hormone therapy. Hormone therapy is highly effective and stops my hormones from feeding any cancer that’s thinking about coming back.

I had my first mammogram post-radiation in December. It was clear.

Cancer free!

But in the name of prevention, I am a cancer patient. The drugs I’m on cause me to be immunosuppressed, under orders to go right to emerge if I develop a fever. I’m at the hospital all the time. I have two years and ten months of treatment ahead of me, at least — three years of daily pill taking of one of the standard breast cancer drugs, and 36 rounds (three years) of a clinical trial drug, which is what has dropped my white blood cell count. I will start Round 3 of 36 this morning. Monthly injections keep me in chemical menopause.

I also have my first symptoms since all of this started. Yes, physically, this tumour has caused me very few symptoms. I seem to have lymphedema in my operated and radiated breast. It’s a pain in my ass — or breast — but nothing more. No real pain. No real worry. Just irritating and lots of lymphatic drainage.

In our culture, cancer has been reduced to amalgams that don’t exactly fit what it’s like to actually have it. Battle and fighting, having or not having, dying or surviving, stages and grades and feelings and fears. These things are easy to market, easy to explain in ads that encourage you to donate to cancer research or support or whatever. And I get it — no one wants the long answer to the short question — so, how’s it's going?

I don’t hesistate to share what’s on my mind when asked (or looked at) and I dont mind the questions. I imagine that others do, so I get that people struggle to talk about this in a way that isn’t weird.

But the question does leave me in a weird spot. I’m not a cancer haver (I hope, but there could be cancerous cells inside of me. That’s what the treatment is trying to address). I’m not (yet) a cancer survivor (too many ongoing treatments for that!). I’m not a cancer defeater or whatever. I’m just a cancer … exister … regardless of how much cancer is actually messing with my insides (likely and hopefully and clinically … none).

Thursday night, I’ll be giving the inaugural Tony Clarke lecture in Ottawa. If you’re in Ottawa, or if you’ll be there for the Broadbent Institute, you should come check it out. The talk is part of the Broadbent Institute’s Progress Summit line-up. Tickets are free but it would be great if you could reserve a spot: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/celebrating-tony-clarkes-legacy-tickets-1982521762961

It felt like the West hit a new high watermark of what’s acceptable. The Ayatollah has been killed, Trump and Netanyahu are celebrating, and Mark Carney is cheering them on. Conservatives are too, rushing into the streets to join alongside Iranians in the diaspora who are thrilled to see him murdered.

Among the NDP leadership candidates, it took most of them until about 2:00 EST to figure out what to say. Not a great sign. The old world is dying and the beasts that have been created by US imperialism are dying too — with them, Canada cheers and civilians are murdered. And their compatriots cheer. Others mourn. Iranians refusing to allow the world to have a unidimensional caricature.

Join the protests, if you can, against American imperialism, Israeli belligerance and oppression.

Thanks again to everyone who heeded my hamfisted call for support this past week. I am now funded to head to Winnipeg for the NDP convention. And in an hour, I’ll be interviewing Avi Lewis, the final of the top four candidates who I’m interviewing for the podcast. With apologies to Tony McQuail — I’m sure you’re cool, I just don’t have the time to do everyone.

Speaking of the pod — here are the headlines from this past week’s Daily News episodes.

Ontario

Hamilton man arrested after woman hit, kicked in ‘unprovoked, hate-motivated’ attack, say police

Ford government stops reports summarizing child welfare network deaths

SIU invokes mandate after man shot and killed by police in Bruce County

Quebec

Education minister investigating reports of IDF soldiers speaking at Jewish schools in Montreal

Saskatchewan

Sask. tree farm CEO charged with offences against foreign workers

Alberta

2 Jasper hockey players killed in crash with semi on way home to Hinton

New Brunswick

Diesel spill at Fredericton construction site leaves residents concerned about fumes in their homes

National

AI minister wants more clarity on OpenAI’s changes after Tumbler Ridge

Brother of Tumbler Ridge shooter charged with attempted murder: court documents

Crown corp. alerted minister’s office about U.S. artillery ammunition sale connected to Israel

1 in 4 Canadians in long-term care were given anti-psychotic drugs without diagnosis, report finds

Conservative MP searches for ‘antifa’ in federal government, Canadian Armed Forces

Carney government says India threat is over — Sikh activists say not so fast

International

Canadians say Puerto Vallarta a ‘war zone’ amid escalating violence

Floods and landslides in Brazil kill at least 25

Kenyan man charged with duping people to fight for Russia in Ukraine war

US military begins withdrawing from key base in northeastern Syria

A packed bus plunges off a Nepal highway, killing 19 and injuring 25

Guinea confirms detention of 16 Sierra Leonean soldiers

Iranian students rally as universities reopen after nationwide protests

South Africa secures release of 11 nationals lured to Russia to fight against Ukraine

Afghanistan promises ‘appropriate response’ after deadly Pakistani strikes

US to provide consular services in illegal Israeli settlement

Chad shuts border with Sudan in bid to stop conflict spreading

I recorded an interview today with Rob Ashton, one of the five candidates running to be leader of the NDP. I interviewed Tanille Johnston and Heather McPherson last week, and hopefully can interview Avi Lewis soon too. (Sorry, Tony McQuail, I’m not sure I’ll have the time and resources to do everyone.)

About those resources: I’m not paid for this. We’re going to release the interviews on Youtube and as episodes of Sandy and Nora and I’m doing it on my own time, and my own dime. Once I get the Lewis episode finished, we’ll release them all. They’re really fun and good and like nothing you’ve seen yet, so get excited for it. I think I’ll also try to grab Bianca Mugyenyi for an interview as well. We’ll see!

I’ve also started writing Book Three in the Canada in Decline series. It’s about democracy and already, I can’t wait for the world to see all the funny little details that I’m putting into this book (like how while “democracy” was barely uttered in the 1000 pages of proceedings of the United Province of Canada, the few references were all negative … thanks to Dennis Pilon for that great detail!) It’s slated to be released in June 2027.

I’m planning to raise some money specifically for that project (my advance is under $4000 — so low that I forget exactly how much), but won’t be doing that until my publisher sends me a cover and we are closer to the release date.

So … I’m asking you to consider donating to this Substack if you don’t already. While my subscriptions have grown by over 32% since last year (!! thank you!!) paid subscriptions are down. I would never paywall my content, and you can see that there is never any “paid subscribers only” posts, so I really do rely on the few who are able to support me, to support me.

I also didn’t try to use the upcoming NDP convention to try and fundraise. I’ve already bought my flights (oh god, I haven’t booked my room yet! I will have to get on that…) and I am ready to be on the ground at a convention that will set the course for the next decade of that party’s future. Maybe I should have asked you to donate to send me, but it would have been dishonest. I’ll be there no matter what!

So please consider donating to this Substack. I’m going to start a subscriber chat (for better or worse?) and I’d love to hear what questions you have that you’d like me to try to write about at the NDP convention. And as always, keep sending tips my way. I have a plan to do a proper rundown of all the things that Carney’s cuts are destroying, so hopefully I’ll be able to write that up soon. But as I enter in an intensive writing phase, you might see a bit less from me between now and June.

I know, send me money for less content. I’m a terrible sales pitch.

Last week, I wrote about the Alberta sovereignty movement for Truthout. You can see that here. It’s been fascinating watching a bunch of yahoos dazzle Danielle Smith, who thinks that she’ll be able to suck and blow fot the entirety of her term. Surely, that will stop working soon, right?

Here are the stories that were featured on the Daily News podcast this week. Check to see what you may have missed!

Ontario

OSAP changes ‘disappointing’ as students face ‘cost-of-living crisis’

Advocate calls on Ontario government to address ‘crisis’ of missing Black boys

Thunder Bay city council declares homelessness a humanitarian crisis

Manitoba

Winnipeg councillor backtracks on proposed 100-metre protest ban after community pushback

More than 1 in 4 patients leaving Winnipeg ERs without being seen: study

Québec

Influence de la firme McKinsey sur le gouvernement Legault : l’enquête abandonnée

Quebec auto board officials lied to hide costs of botched SAAQclic launch, report concludes

Nunavik health orgs call in Red Cross to fight TB outbreak as Quebec support falls short

Northwest Territories

Military fuel truck spill near Kakisa, N.W.T., now estimated at 2,300 litres

National

Anti-feminist ideology ‘increasingly relevant’ to national security: CSIS

Canadian passport holders can travel to China visa-free starting this week

Scotiabank’s 1832 Asset Management sells last shares in Israeli military supplier

International

Israeli military says more than 1,500 Canadians were serving in its ranks last year

Ottawa shakes up immigration system to bring in military recruits

Arbitrator settles flight attendant wages at Air Canada, as labour dispute comes to official end

‘Jordan is next’: West Bank annexation signals ‘silent transfer’

More third-country nationals have been deported by the US to Cameroon, lawyers tell AP

Russia’s Putin meets Cuban FM, says US restrictions ‘unacceptable’

Greece working with another 4 European countries to set up migrant deportation hubs outside EU

Israel kills 11 in Gaza as Trump announces $5bn pledge from Board of Peace

US deploys 100 soldiers to Nigeria as attacks by armed groups surge

Milei’s overhaul of Argentina labor law advances in Congress as unions strike in protest

South Korea’s ex-President Yoon gets life in prison for insurrection

Indonesia says 8,000 troops ready for possible peacekeeping mission in Gaza by June

I remember crouching down behind a moveable wall barrier in the Ryerson library. I was on the phone. Being yelled at. Eviscerated. Time has washed away what it was about. Election stuff, surely. I was 20. He was 31. I didn’t really think about that at the time.

I remember how angry I used to make him. I could push his anger right to the limit. It felt like the only thing between me and his fist was were the bystanders around us. I never set out to make him angry. Near the end, it would go like this: he’d get off the phone. Lucifer again. Whatever she took out on him, he would then take out on me. It was normal, like clockwork. My office mate would always ask after in a hushed tone are you ok? I always was. Used to it. I was 26, he was 37.

Sometimes, when he was yelling at me, his face transformed into the same face as my Grade 7 and 8 teacher, Mr. Guerin. Mr Guerin wanted to like me, but he couldn’t. I could not be liked by a man like him. I shouldn’t have been there, in that class, for that long. It was too long. I was in another world and he needed to be rid of me, but he was stuck with me. We were stuck with each other. Ultimately, I threatened him. In the many moments of him yelling at me or pleading with me or reasoning with me, I would have to fight my brain from turning his face into a giant melon. The melon had a mouth and once, I pretended to cry rather than expose that I was about to explode with laughter.

He had that same melon face.

And yet, I should have thanked Mr. Guerin. Others too. The men who saw themselves as a kind of father figure, but who couldn’t have been more different from that of my father. I learned how to shield myself from being scolded. From being yelled at. Abuse. Screamed at. I learned how to move in a world that hated women like me from the moment I could talk. Uneasily, and bitterly, I accepted that my fate was in their hands and they would use one hand to show me the possibilities while the other, they’d take them away. I’d never be able to make it.

I don’t have many good memories of Mr. Guerin, but it was Grade 7 and Grade 8; the most horrible years to teach anyone. I surely have some funny memories if I think hard enough. I don’t think about him all that often.

I remember the fists through the walls. The glasses of water or beer poured over heads. The fists connecting with faces. A table broken in half by the force of a body slammed on it. The posture. Just the most pathetic man stuff. The crying. The fun. It was always funny to see the violence that was reserved for others, knowing that had I been older and male, I would have been on the receiving end of it. But my age and my gender protected me.

Although, it was also my undoing.

I remember the break-up. The screaming and crying and accusations. Me realizing that it had always been abusive. The worst break-up of my life and it wasn’t even with a romantic partner. I hated that night but was ultimately relieved that it was all over. The customers sitting beside us tried not to look.

There were so many stolen opportunities. So many times, he passed me over. Disciplining me for being too wild or too independent, even though there were few as me who were as loyal. I was never ready to advance. I could never run. There was always someone else who was more strategic, more chosen, more ready, more likeable, more moldable, more immature, more grandiose, more bilingual, more mature, more pretty, less bilingual, less weird, more together, less together than I was. He once told me that he was asked if I could be part of a weekly television panel. Before telling me, he declined on my behalf. He told me after; justified it breezily: you don’t want to be put in a position each week where you have to defend things that you don’t believe in. I’m protecting you.

I didn’t understand what the issue was. Of course I could argue my point of view on any issue, on live television. I had a point of view. I had a solid politic. It hit me: it; everything; all of it was all a facade. There were few politics behind the shroud.

I remember the work that went into me. To discipline me and tame me, make me sharper and better. He took the credit but it was never his to take. It was hers. It was theirs. I guess I was always a little bitter about that too.

And then, when I had to step in to do the work that he was no longer able to do, I was once again passed over. Told I couldn’t do it, though I had been doing it for more than a year. Told I wasn’t good enough, though I was better than enough. Told that I would never be able to do what he did because he did it best, though the person who had been good at it hadn’t been seen in the office in years. I had to accept it. Suck it up. Stay dedicated to the movement. We had battles to win. So many things I had been promised were given away to others. And then, I had to watch everything we built crumble under the weight of bad decisions, marginalizing the wrong people, raising up the wrong people. Using people up.

I saw it. I tried hard to not use anyone. To be sincere amid the chaos of those years.

In English, people reach to the word complicated when they don’t want to say what they mean. It’s an Anglo-saxon trait to cover up the difficult work of actually confronting bad things head on. To say something is complicated is to engage in dishonesty and cowardice. There are rarely complicated things and this was no complicated thing. It was straightforward. I will never again have my stomach sink or my body tense up at the sight of his face or the sound of his name. I try to remember the good but nothing comes to me at all. It’s only the bad, a sea of not complicated complications that set me on a path to constantly bump up against the same silent forces, the same manipulations, the same masculine posturing, the same shitty politics, the same concrete walls, built by people who hate people like me, and who will do everything and anything to keep us out.

So I guess, there is also gratitude, for teaching me how to fight against it and survive. For teaching me discipline.

The Far Right Hate Machine is always waiting for a mass shooter to be identified as trans. And yesterday, they got what they’ve been waiting for and they went wild. My social media feeds were full of people focusing on the gender of Canada’s most recent mass murderer, mostly from bigots and transphobes, and then activists trying to resist the hate.

High profile transphobes from other countries weighed in on the mass shooting. Talk radio had transphobes on to talk about how transphobic they are, to an audience that was still processing what happened in Tumbler Ridge, BC.

One of the things I saw circulated most among left-wing people was a chart that showed that trans killers make up a very tiny number of mass murderers as proof that the trans-panic sewed by the far right and taken up by the right, is nothing more than a campaign of hate rooted in fiction. These were defensive moves.

The Tumbler Ridge massacre is the first mass shooting in Canada’s history that specifically targeted children. It is our Dunblane. There are, of course, some differences. There were more victims in the Dunblane massacre, and the children were younger. The shooter in Tumbler Ridge was much younger. So young that it boggles the mind to think about what kind of childhood she had to bring her to the point where she would be shooting Grade 7s in their school.

Already, we do know a little bit about that life. Yes, as we have all heard a million times by now, she was trans. In a small town. With few supports for trans youth. We also know that she was “known to police.” She dropped out of school “six years ago” (so what, in Grade 8? 9?). She was likely radicalized online and evidence is emerging that that radicalization was far right, O9A-level shit.

All of this, in a community of only 2000 people,

We also know that she had some level of mental anguish. She had a gun license that expired in 2024, when she would have been 16 or 17. CBC notes that a teenager with a gun license is permitted to borrow, but not own guns. Guns were seized from the household at some point for someone’s well-being, and the “legal gun owner” asked the cops to give the guns back, which the cops obliged.

These disparate details give a portrait of a killer that is tragic, with layers of failures related to that legal gun owner (we don’t know who it was yet), to social services and supports, to policing, to the school system (not in trying to prevent a mass shooting, but in whatever caused the shooter to drop out of school so young). Plus, the online world where it doesn’t matter where you are on the planet, if you’re vulnerable, you can be found and manipulated.

The families of the victims have begged Canadians to focus on them, not on the shooter. Obviously, and of course, they are right to make this plea. If we consider the largest mass school shooting, at École Polytechnique, focusing on the shooter is partly why that tragedy was only considered to be an act of a lone, deranged gun man for many years. It was through his victims, the ones who were killed and the ones who survived, that we eventually came to understand that that massacre was the result of hate-based violence. Brutal misogyny.

The shooting at the mosque in Quebec City has eerie echoes to Tumbler Ridge. There were more survivors in Quebec City though not by much, and the same number of victims on site (6 — five kids and their teacher). The big difference is that where Alexandre Bissonnette had an unhealthy need to be with his parents and twin brother, the shooter in Tumbler Ridge also murdered her mother and younger brother. In the case of the shooting at the mosque, it was clear that that was an Islamophobic act of hatred. Though even in the earliest days of the attack, the far right tried to make it into a false flag, or a Syrian refugee who, for some reason, decided to shoot up a mosque.

Those rumours vanished the more that we learned about who Bissonnette was.

And so, in Tumbler Ridge, if we focus on those victims, we can plainly see that this was an attack on children. Why, of course, is the big question, which we can’t yet know. But the facts of the matter are clear: six of the eight victims were between the ages of 11 to 13.

Canada’s Dunblane.

And yet, if you search these two terms on Google News — “Largest mass shooting targeting children” “Largest mass shooting of children,” you get no results. If you search only “trans,” you get dozens of results. Media is responding to the far right’s insistence that this is a story trans violence (!?!) by highlighting this one aspect of many that paint the picture of the killer. All while the real story — the children — are left to the margins, filled by parents who are calling out into the ether for support, love or prayers for this time, as they experience the unimaginable.

There have been, at least, 44 people killed in Canada as a result of far-right violence since 2010. I have a list right here. Not one of these murders was committed by a trans person. This massacre happened not far from another site of far-right murder, in Fort St. John, when a man who was a radicalized extremist murdered the mother of his child.

Until this week, not one trans person had committed mass murder for any reason in Canada, either. Nor had a woman, cis or trans. Let’s refuse to respond to the obvious attempts to bait us into these fake debates and keep our eyes on what matters: the children, the victims and the causes, which are deeply rooted in a society in decay. A society that is actively hostile towards trans youth, and to a school system that is increasingly incapable of holding onto the most marginalized youth. And so, pushing society to be even more hostile and even more incapable, just because an international far-right frenzy wants us to scapegoat an entire population, sows the seeds of even more destruction.

Children always bear the worst ravages of society’s ills. It is not surprising at all, to see that Canada’s first mass shooting against children would happen at a time of crumbling social conditions and increasing desperation. Nor is it surprising to see politicians who support these crumbling conditions race to social media to blame this on the shooter having been trans.

Scroll to the bottom to read a dispatch from Karen Dubinsky who is currently in Havana

There are currently 3000 Canadians in Cuba who are customers of Air Canada. Thousands more, likely, who flew down on Sunwing, Air Transat or WestJet. They are being evacuated and all future flights to be cancelled. Canadians love Cuba. According to the Cuban bureau of statistics, 754,000 Canadians visited the island in 2025, a drop from 2024 when that number was north of 800,000. For many of us Cuba is our go-to beach destination.

I use “us” loosely, as I’ve rarely taken a beach vacation. But I have been to Cuba before, in 2012 when I stayed at the Hotel Inglaterra for a week.

Here’s how the Government of Canada explains the relationship:

Over 1 million Canadians visited the island every year before the pandemic. Cuba is Canada’s top market in the Caribbean/Central American sub-region and is Canada’s largest merchandise export market in that region. Canada is Cuba’s second-largest source of direct investment with significant Canadian investment in mining, power, oil and gas, and some investments in renewable energy, agriculture/heavy equipment and tourism.

Our governments have had diplomatic relations for more than a century. Cuba opened its first diplomatic office in Canada in 1903, and after the Spanish-American war, Canadian banks rushed to get in on the new American territory. Canada refused to break ties after the Cuban Revolution, even though all other Latin American countries, save Mexico, did. Pierre Eliot Trudeau and Fidel Castro had a close relationship.

Trudeau once even tried to paddle a rowboat from Florida to Cuba. (He failed.)

Trudeau was the first NATO leader to speak in Cuba, in 1976, something that shocked Trudeau’s critics in Canada.

The connections between our two countries are deep. And yet, now that Donald Trump is turning the screws to Cuba and to Cubans, where are our leaders?

Seemingly nowhere. Trump has tightened the embargo on the island and threatened that any country that breaks it will face steep US tariffs. They have starved Cuba off Venezuelan oil, triggering the airlines to cancel all flights to Cuba as they cannot guarantee that there will be enough jet fuel to make it home.

Mark Carney has seemingly said nothing about this crisis, despite our long history with Cuba.

In the Toronto Star, Jim Stanford argues that Canada must do three things:

First, Carney should express principled opposition to Trump’s attacks — against both Cuba, and any neutral third parties caught in his crossfire.

Second, he should join other Latin American countries in a united defence of free commerce in the Caribbean and throughout the hemisphere.

Third, we should expand our bilateral commercial, investment, and humanitarian ties with Cuba.

Canada is a global top oil producer, and we can’t even help one of our historic allies, the playground of a million Canadians, because we’re afraid of Donald Trump?

Sure, tariffs have hit many Canadian industries hard. But Trump is 80% bluster. People’s lives are at risk and Canada could pay a key role in not only helping Cubans out, but also in breaking the hold that Trump is trying to maintain across the Americas.

Mark Carney’s Davos speech was heralded as being critical and urgent. In that speech, he correctly identifies, “More recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, and supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot ‘live within the lie’ of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”

And yet, here we have this exact thing playing out in real time, with thousands of Canadians directly impacted and millions of Cubans paying the price of a madman in the Oval Office. Canada, one of Cuba’s closest friends, has the means to lend our support.

But we can’t. Carney’s speech was brilliant because it was clear and accurate. He named the exact bind that Canada finds itself in, and argues that we have to resist it. Except, he himself cannot resist it. “You cannot ‘live within the lie’ of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.” He’s right. We cannot. And yet, Carney’s actions show us that he’s going to try as hard as he can to keep living within this lie.

REPORT FROM HAVANA

February 11 2026

Today I met Madame Marianik Tremblay, the Canadian ambassador to Cuba, who generously received my book on Cuban Canadian cultural ties. The irony of the moment was overwhelming. Two days ago Canada ceased all air traffic to Cuba due to the shortage of oil caused by the Trump administration’s recent blockade. Canada’s actions -the first country to do so - are the exact opposite of the history of cooperative relations in education, music and development assistance my book documents.

Canadian media has focused on unhappy tourists But accompanying me on this visit to the embassy was a Cuban doctoral student at Queen’s University who helped me research this book. His plans to celebrate his wedding with his Canadian partner in Havana next week came to a crashing halt when the bride, her parents, and dozens of friends were suddenly unable to join him and his family in Havana.

Flight cancellations are going to affect Cuban Canadian family plans, musical, artistic and student exchanges, business relationships. The oil stranglehold is obviously going to cause further hardship for Cuban citizens. As Trump himself has explained, this is the point.

Why did Canadian airlines not choose the option, as European airlines have, of refuelling in adjacent countries? When will the Canadian government announce a humanitarian aid initiative? Or send oil? Whatever one’s views on the current Cuban government- and there are divergent opinions among Cubans on the need for change - surely it is up to Cubans themselves, not foreign bullies, to decide on their future.

If you are concerned please write your MP, PM Carney, Foreign Minister Anand.

Karen Dubinsky is Professor Emerita at Queen’s University. She recently published Strangely, Friends: A History of Cuban Canadian Encounters (Between the Lines).

See below for Charlebois’ reaction!

Canada’s self-described Food Processor, the go-to voice to comment on food industry trends, believes that Canada should allow the widespread distribution of raw milk.

Sylvain Charlebois was on far-right, terfascist Meghan Murphy’s podcast this week to, bizarrely and tellingly, gush over how great raw milk is.

In a 5-minute teaser for the episode, Charlebois says, “Dairy farmers don’t want farmers to sell their milk off the farm. That’s why they oversell the concept of pasteurization. They make a lot of money doing that. If you allow farmers to sell raw milk off their farm, they’re going to sell less milk. And if they sell less milk, their quota won’t be valued as much. Those are the things the dairy board thinks about. They don’t care about the consumer.”

Aside from how insane this is, the logic in what he’s saying here makes no sense, as farmers would never make more money selling direct to consumers than they make through a coordinated system of selling through grocery and convenience stores. The supply management system was created to give farmers stability, not undercut their freedom to hustle their milk at the local farmer’s market, but I digress.

Later on, Murphy says, “There’s so much propaganda in Canada telling Canadians that raw milk is dangerous and most Canadians have bought into it.”

Charlebois replies: “I was buying raw milk from a vending machine in Austria … If [Canada’s system of supply management] is not communism, it’s pretty darn close.”

As someone whose family was in dairy farming for at least four generations, the notion that what my grandfather, uncle and then cousin practiced was communism is pretty funny. My uncle, a passionate Progressive Conservative would probably fall off of his chair laughing at this soft-handed man’s comments.

As funny as it is, it’s also deeply concerning that Charlebois is given such profile by Canadian journalists. In the past week alone, here he is commenting in PA Now, here he is blaming taxes (and not profits and a lack of competition) on the high cost of food in Canada, here he is complaining about Fidel Castro, more anti-tax comment, and again, and so on.

Now here he is, on a far right podcast hosted by a former People’s Party candidate arguing that pasteurization being good is a myth pushed on Canada by Big Dairy.

Pasteurization is when you take milk from a cow, heat it up quickly to kill bacteria and then cool it off. You know, just like you might with raw water if you weren’t sure it was potable. Raw milk is when you put your lips on an udder and suck.

It should be obvious to any adult why you might want your milk supply to be pasteurized. It was a long-fought campaign by Big Public Health to pasteurize milk. Not only is the science on this clear, it’s overwhelmingly clear.

From Big Public Health in BC: “According to a US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention study, the rate of outbreaks caused by raw milk and products made from it was 150 times greater than outbreaks linked to pasteurized milk. Children and younger adults were found to be more affected by the illnesses.” Since Canada has had widescale and mandatory pasteurization, we’ve eliminated milk-borne illnesses.

That’s pretty impressive, when you consider that we haven’t managed to eliminate pecan-borne illnesses, pizza pop-borne illnesses, mushroom-borne illnesses, macadamia nut-borne illnesses, chia seed-borne illnesses, and so on. Even in the milk universe, cheap production of oat milk (which I love) lead to a massive listeriosis outbreak that killed two people in 2024. And just today, it’s being reported that an American woman’s baby died likely because she drank raw milk.

Charlebois’ vending machine raw milk in Austria could have killed him or made him very sick. A recent check of raw milk in the country found that 31.5% of the raw milk sampled had too much bacteria in it to be compliant with Austria’s raw milk guidelines. Raw milk is sold in Austria with a warning that it should be boiled before consumed.

At a time where conspiracy theories are eroding public trust in things long seen as public health triumphs, it’s extremely concerning that someone who believes that Big Dairy is behind the lie that pasteurization is good, has any air time at all.

Maybe society is more dynamic when children die more often at a young age. I guess I could argue that it’s my right to be able to consume raw milk and play e. coli roulette if I’d like (which, by the way, if you actually know a farmer, you can skim all the raw milk off of them you’d like, if they’re nice. Just don’t sue them if you get sick). But if I argued these things, no serious news organization would ask for my opinion on the food industry, and rightly so. And yet, somehow this charlatan is pushing Canadians to believe that pasteurization is a conspiracy theory, taxes are why your groceries are so expensive and that farmers are the real communists (I wish).

Update: Sylvain Charlebois is not happy with this article. He thinks that I, as the chair of the CCPA board, am being unfair to him. Not sure what any of my roles have to do with this article, but anyway, here is his defense:

”This is my position: I believe raw milk should be legal to give consumers a choice. That does not mean it’s for everyone—raw milk carries real risks. Pasteurization remains essential to ensuring a safe milk supply. That said, roughly 9% of Canadians indicate they would prefer raw milk, and accommodating that segment could also help reduce milk dumping.”

He also says that what I say he says is inaccurate, but Murphy paywalled the episode. I recorded it, if you’re curious, but know that the quotes above are direct and true to what he said.

Last weekend, a mouse ran across my bed so close to my ear that I swear he brushed it. The two previous nights, we had heard them in the room, but this was the final straw. I spent last Monday as a zombie, tired from having not slept at all, and I haven’t been in my bedroom since.

Tonight, we’re going back into it. By the time you read this, my night was either uneventful, or I’m waking up to realize that a little guy nibbled on my ear. I’m trying to be Zen about this as I have no other option. It’s extremely cold out, the roads have all been opened up for construction; of course they’d find my bedroom as cozy as I do.

I’m looking forward to my mattress though. The guest room mattress is way too soft,

And remember! If you’re in Guelph, we’ll see you next Friday. Grab your tickets to Sandy and Nora Live at the OPIRG Rebel Knowledge Symposium!

Here are the headlines featured on the Daily News podcast this past week:


Saskatchewan

2 Saskatoon police officers heading to England to study transit policing

New Brunswick

Saint John police confirm at least 12 victims in sexual offences investigation at nursing home

Manitoba

18 more measles cases, 4 new exposure sites confirmed in Manitoba

Ontario

Unions, NDP in northwestern Ontario call for government action amid sawmill shutdowns

Ontario PCs bar reporters from policy convention

Lawyer alleges Durham Region police violently assaulted her, dragged her to cells in Oshawa courthouse

Alberta

Paramedics union head: “How do you resource a system when you’re not telling the truth about it?”

British Columbia

ICE wants to buy Pattison building to use for ‘holding and processing’

Victoria police officer will not be charged in fatal shooting

National

A list of Canadian companies profiting off of ICE and Trump’s violent mass deportation regime

Canada will require refugees and asylum seekers to co-pay for health care starting in May

List of suspected Nazi war criminals welcomed in Canada should stay secret, information watchdog rules

More Than 100 Gazans Have Been Accepted to Canadian Universities. Canada Isn’t Letting Them In.

Activist warns of ‘propaganda’ as CSIS officials tout agency’s new approach to Indigenous people

Canadian PM Carney unveils multibillion-dollar push to lower food costs

Rogers shares jump as profit rises on strength in media, sports divisions

International

Israel recovers remains of final hostage in Gaza, opening way for next phase

Hundreds feared dead in attempt to cross Mediterranean during cyclone

Burkina Faso’s military government dissolves political parties

Torrential rains displace thousands in Mozambique as floods wreak havoc

The man killed by a US Border Patrol officer in Minneapolis was an ICU nurse, family says

Days after a disputed election, Uganda’s army is on the hunt for opposition leader Bobi Wine

Cause of plane crash in Colombia that killed 15, including Congress member, under investigation

Russia and Ukraine’s combined war casualties could reach 2 million soon, report estimates

For about two years, I figured I had biohacked my way out of getting sick. I stopped getting colds. I didn’t get a flu. Any time my family was sick, I managed to escape it (including two bouts of pneumonia in my kids). I chalked it up to three things: taking a lot of Vitamin C, giving everyone in the family their own toothpaste, and luck.

My seasonal allergies had also stopped. They had been getting so bad that I was ready to ask my doctor for shots. The last major flare up hit me in the exercise room at the Unifor Family Education Centre in Port Elgin in September 2022 or so. I wanted to claw my eyes out and I was sneezing and blowing my nose everywhere; not ideal for a conference smack in the middle of a pandemic!

But my allergies stopped suddenly too. I went from having severe seasonal allergies in the spring and the fall, to nothing.

The other night, I fell upon a reddit thread in the Breast Cancer group. It turns out, I’m not alone in having such magical breast cancer symptoms. The thread contains about 150 responses from breast cancer patients about all the strange things their bodies did before their cancer diagnosis and sure enough, a few other people also hadn’t been sick, and hadn’t had their regular seasonal allergies.

This post isn’t medical advice. These are the things that you can look back on and wonder about, not diagnostic symptoms to make you start to worry.

When I got my cancer diagnosis, I had to answer a barrage of question before I got the news about my general health: was I unusually tired? Was I sweating through my bed sheets? Did I have any breast pain? The answer to everything the resident asked me was no. I didn’t have any of that.

Except I had been more tired than usual when I was on the road. I had to really push myself through at 4:00 each day to finish the day. Because I wasn’t tired in a day that I worked regularly at home, so I didn’t think much of it. I was pretty surprised to realize that that tiredness evaporated after my tumour was removed.

But the resident didn’t ask me any questions about not being sick or losing my seasonal allergies. Maybe these are Old Wives Tales that old wives now tell one another on reddit. Among some of the replies are people who say that they just knew. That was me, when my tumour grew large enough for me to know it was cancerous. I remember the month between mamogram and diagnosis where I’d mention to people that I was waiting on results. The most common reply to me was “it’s probably nothing.” Statistically speaking, that was true. And it’s not a terrible thing to say to a friend who is worried. But the reactions of the professionals who did the mammogram and follow-up ultrasound told me it was cancer. Within a week of the a mammogram, I knew that whatever was spotted, they had graded it at an 80% chance of being cancer. And I could feel it deep down that I knew that there was no chance I’d luck into the 20%.

Some of the symptoms mentioned in the thread are very interesting and so, in the interest of interest and not medicine or science, here are a few of the most common things in this thread people experienced before their breast cancer diagnosis:

Several women said that they experienced a change in body odour, something that seems to be borne out by scientific literature, in particular for people whose breast cancer is caused by genes. This makes me wonder how hard it would be to train dogs to sniff out breast cancer. I bet not that hard! Probably related, some people mentioned that their pets acted differently around them, including cats massaging the breast with cancer in it, or getting aggressive with the nearby armpit. My cat didn’t help me out at all because he doesn’t care about anyone other than himself.

Many also said that they got a white streak of hair at both temples before they were diagnosed.

Some people talked about how they had new and unexplained food intolerances.

Lots of people reported feelings of depression and even regularly dreaming about death. I guess it was noteworthy because this was new to them so if you’re someone who’s always dreaming about death, you’re probably ok. One person developed anxiety out of nowhere.

There were other comments: surprise double vision, new acne/rosatia and facial hair growth at a much faster rate on the side of the face that was the same side as the breast with cancer in it.

And a few stories of mouth sores, extreme itchiness and unexplained rashes.

What I love about these is that the symptoms went away once the tumour was removed and treatment started. We can see instantly the impact that removing cancer has on our bodies, if we pay attention. I was up to my neck in saving the CCPA the year before my diagnosis and the vibes for me were very bad. The wrong step, and we could have lost everything. Those stakes would have made me feel terrible regardless, but when I look back at how bad the vibes were Summer 2024 (and the vibes were terrible), I know that my body was actually trying to tell me something important.

We have big Sandy and Nora news.

We are doing a live show of Sandy and Nora Talk Politics on Feb. 6 at OPIRG Guelph’s symposium. If you want to attend the event, find out how here: https://symposium.opirgguelph.org/2026-symposium/

Tickets are free (I think…), but registering makes everyone’s life easier. Share this with anyone near and in Guelph!

See you in Guelph, Friday, Feb. 6!!

Here are the headlines featured in this past week’s Daily News podcast episodes:

Nunavut

Malnourishment on the rise in Iqaluit, but experts warn numbers may actually be higher

British Columbia

Vancouver tech firm Hootsuite provides services to U.S. Homeland Security

Teen charged with manslaughter after B.C. girl’s fentanyl overdose: RCMP

Ontario

Man, 33, killed after being shot by police in Brantford, Ont., says SIU

Man shot during interaction with Durham police arrested and charged

Hamilton parents of boy killed by city bus call for Ontario to better support students with special needs

New Brunswick

N.B. RCMP detachment is now closed after man shot and killed: First Nation chief

Alberta

Alberta moves ahead with direct bitumen sales plan

Worker dies at Suncor oilsands site after machinery sinks into muskeg

Saskatchewan

Woman at centre of Chinese family’s immigration nightmare now facing charge in Sask.

National

Indigenous, Black people overrepresented in federal custody in N.S.: StatsCan

A Canadian citizen has ‘died in Iran at the hands of the Iranian authorities’

Carney weighs sending soldiers to Greenland for military exercises with NATO allies: sources

CSE breached law by directing actions at Canadian: report

International

Spain high-speed train crash kills at least 40 as PM promises investigation

Japan’s PM Takaichi will dissolve parliament, call snap election

Progress toward peace in Ukraine was unlikely before Trump’s Davos rant. Now it looks all but impossible

Three journalists among 11 Palestinians killed in Israel’s attacks on Gaza

Two popular Tunisian journalists handed three-year jail terms

European troops arrive in Greenland as talks with US highlight ‘disagreement’ over island’s future

Wildfires raging across Chile kill at least 18, force thousands to flee

Another construction crane collapse in Thailand kills 2 people a day after deadly train derailment

Remote workers at Global Affairs say they’re being forced to transfer to capital

Death toll in Pakistan shopping plaza fire rises to 67, officials say

Syria announces ceasefire agreement with Kurd-led SDF after heavy fighting

Once, I was walking along the street, where rue St-Jean turns into rue Sainte-Foy. There was a giant dumpster parked beside the sidewalk. In it, six or seven young adults were digging for gold.

On the other side of the sidewalk was one of those cheap book places where you’re never sure if the books are used or new. The books used to be laid out on folding tables in what was otherwise an unfinished, empty space. Or at least that’s how I remember it. The building sold and the tenant left, and the books, well, many (or all?) were tossed into this dumpster.

I don’t doubt that the people that night who were reading aloud to one another from books they pulled from the rubble of other books found something they liked. The bookstore was not one of those places where four out of every five books is virtually trash — old text books, computer programming books, old travel guides — the store had a good selection. And then, the selection was tossed.

If the folks at the National Post had gotten wind of the story, it may have been front page. QUEBEC CITY STORE THROWS OUT THOUSANDS OF BOOKS. KNOWLEDGE SET BACK HUNDREDS OF YEARS. HOODLUMS STEAL WISDOM. But it was a simple business decision: the bookstore was kicked out of its space and it made more sense for the store owners to junk the books than try to sell them somewhere else. That’s capitalism for ya. A shame. But nothing more.

Last week, a small frenzy was whipped up over news that a high school in London, Ontario, had had 10,000 of its library books trashed eight months ago.

The school board justified it like this, as reported by CBC: “Most items at H.B. Beal were withdrawn due to age, condition and lack of circulation. Some specifics include physical damage (such as mold), or harmful and outdated content such as racist imagery (blackface) or stereotypical depictions of Indigenous people.”

The images that accompanied the story featured clear, plastic garbage bags full of coverless books. I could only spot a few titles, but I could see that they had junked “Multiple Sclerosis: New Hope and Practical Advice for People with MS and Their Families” and a book that’s title seems to be “The New Our Bodies, Ourselves, updated for the 19—” and the rest of the date is cut off. The New Hope book was published in 1987.

It turns out, that many of the books weren’t even junked. I imagine the junk was junked. But many of the “thrown out” books ended up at local thrift stores (which probably should have been an angle worked when this news was first reported …. eight months after the books were thrown out.) This includes great literary works like, “Great Writers of the English Language, Women Writers, New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, The History of World Sculpture, Dictionary of World Religions, International Wildlife Encyclopedia, volumes 1-22, and The Elements of Style: A Practical Encyclopedia of Interior Architectural Details.”

Reference books. Because these do grow out of date very quickly, as new editions with newer, more current, more relevant editions come out. That’s how reference books work.

I’m a book hoarder like the best of them, but there does come a point where you have to part with certain books. Books about health from the 1980s and 1990s might still have academic interest for high school kids in 2026 but probably, they don’t. And it’s the job of the librarian to be on top of this. Doing so is a library sciences practice called weeding.

If you don’t weed, you never weed. And then you find yourself dead under a pile of books that talk about the most cutting edge colon cancer treatments from 1997.

Sometimes, you gotta throw them out.

The school board did admit that there were some titles tossed due to showing Blackface and outdated depictions of Indigenous people. A vague reference to tossing books not because they were old or mouldy or gross. Tossing them for their ideas. And ideas, even the oldest, most racist ideas, must be protected.

It was enough to set off a media firestorm.

If you want to get a white guy of a certain age riled up, burn a book in front of him. You can choose any book, but it’s best if the book is written by Ayn Rand. Or Kipling. But it works if the book is Anne of Green Gables, even though the man has likely never read anything by Lucy Maud. It works if it’s The Diary of Anne Frank, of course. It especially works if you tell the man that the book you’re reading isn’t equitable enough for today’s standards.

The press decided that the story was about book banning, book trashing, censorship and free speech. Here’s the London Free Press:

The London Free Press got their hands on the list of books that were tossed: According to a spreadsheet documenting the library cull, a copy of which was obtained by The Free Press, the purged books included 128 war history titles, with another 15 from the library’s reference section.

Those culled included books about Shakespeare and other authors and artists, residential schools, teen suicide, addiction, religion, bullying, family violence and child abuse, as well as books about sexuality.

Fictional works included Harry Potter novels, Anne of Green Gables, Lord of the Flies, Wuthering Heights, The Kite Runner, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Colour Purple, among others.

Books by authors such as John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, Harriet Tubman and Mark Twain, as well as Canadian authors Margaret Laurence, Marshall McLuhan and Lucy Maude Montgomery, were among those culled.

The London Free Press quoted Lori-Ann Pizzolato from the Thames Valley School Board saying that they weren’t informed about the book culling (why would they be? It’s a local matter…). She said, “I don’t know enough about why they culled these books, but I was looking at (the titles) – Harry Potter, Lord of the Flies. I wonder why those were removed.”

Yes, I wonder too. What about these books could the new library overlords be trying to suppress?

And right there, it was enough for the regular crowd of fake free speech activists to start hollering.

London-Fanshawe MP Kurt Holman Tweeted this: “Nothing says “inclusivity” like a dumpster full of books. We were warned about this.. in Orwellian novels that were ironically thrown out by London’s Beal Secondary School. We can expect to see a lot more of that if Liberal ideology keeps normalizing Big Brother-style censorship.”

In a show of true government censorship, “The Minister [of Education] has directed that all current and future library collection reviews be paused, pending further evaluation.”

And, because no one apparently has any critical thinking skills out there, here’s National Post columnist Chris Selly: “More than 10,000 books were tossed from the library of London’s H.B. Beal high school last year” This is INSANITY. I’m glad Queen’s Park has stepped in, but at some point the provincial government is going to have to accept its overall responsibility.”

This was all for show, though. It doesn’t take much searching to realize that this was a fake outrage.

If you look, you’ll find several copies of Harry Potter in the Beal library.

And one copy of Lord of the Flies (maybe there should be more?)

And several Orwell titles (here is a screencap of two) …

But it’s not good enough to just look it up online. I asked my friend’s son, a student a Beal, to take a look to see what he could find on the shelf. He confirmed — He spotted some Vonnegut and Steinbeck on the shelves. I didn’t torture him and ask for him to look for everything else.

Once when I was in Grade 10, a classmate of mine opened an old textbook to find an entire plate of fries plus ketchup crushed between the middle of pages of the book. We should have called the Ministry of Education to tell them we were committing an act of scholasticide when we chucked it in the garbage.

This is not the first Ontario-based weeding controversy.

In 2023, the Peel District School Board was accused of zealous weeding, to apparently get rid of books that were not diverse. Among the books that activists said had been culled was the Diary of Anne Frank, and that became the headline for the media.

Except, again, if you search, you will find that The Diary of Anne Frank (and many adaptations of it) are available at libraries across the system.

The controversy took on the same arguments — a very bad school board driven by very stupid equity policies were weeding books like Very Hungry Catepillar for reasons that no one could understand (these people have never seen how much snot gets on board books, I betcha!)

Those men who cry when they see a book set on fire ate it up then. And they ate it again last week.

The controversy at Beal was fuelled by its former teacher librarian, Larry Farquharson. On Substack, he has ranted and raved about the state of school libraries for about a year now. He believes that what has been done to his former library is a grave injustice.

I don’t know Larry, but I know what type of guy Larry must be. Teacher librarians are rare beasts. They are expensive, and school boards have been trying to get rid of them for decades. They are irritating, because they insist that the anachronistic library remain in tact. They are eccentric. The male ones especially, as it’s a field dominated by women. It takes a very special kind of guy to have a career as a teacher librarian. A good teacher librarian.

And I know this because my father was a teacher librarian.

My father’s library was everything and more that you could want in a high school library. It had everything. It had every magazine on the shelves you could imagine (more than my city’s current library system magazine offering has!). There was music and a piano before public libraries were offering such services. The losers and non losers alike gathered at his library. He sold geraniums to kids that he grew at our home for mothers’ day. He took a lot of money in fines to pay for that library. And if the kids couldn’t pay, he asked them to give him something — creating a desk full of silly things like slap bracelets and random items that had no practical use or value aside from my father exacting a price to show the value and importance of the library’s collection.

My father also happened to have one of his practice teaching placements at Beal. I didn’t ask him if he ever crossed paths with Larry, though I doubt it as Larry wasn’t at it as long as my dad, but my dad did mention that the Beal library and its ancillary services were head and shoulders above what was on offer at the time. No doubt, the library remained a diamond in the rough of what is considered objectively to be an adequate library today.

Larry explains his outrage, starting here:

(I’ll note that when my father retired, he dedicated his energy to building a website that posted every live music event at every venue he could find in Canada. I’m glad he didn’t put his efforts into a Substack detailing all the ways that he thought the school system was collapsing. He’d still be at it, a decade-plus later.)

Larry is a man who is against weeding. He believes strongly in the library not only as current education, but also as museum. And that’s fine — it’s a debate that should be had. Ultimately, he writes, “The Library is an amazing, magical place to escape, dream, imagine, discover, acquire and learn, and the combination of print information with digital information creates a truly unlimited portal of potential and opportunity” — and he’s right.

He’s also right that the library, in general and as a concept, is under tremendous pressure. I remember touring the new campus of Lakehead University in Orillia years ago and there was virtually no library. “Everything’s online!” we were told (no it isn’t). My kids start high school next year and the high school library is a dungeon with very few books on the shelves. When I asked if it’s staffed by a teacher, the guide didn’t know how to answer (it isn’t, and the teacher librarian is so extinct here they had never heard of it before). Teacher librarians are easy to cut Because Everything’s Online! (no it isn’t). Ultimately though, the fight to save the library and its physical collection, is a fight against austerity. It’s the same fight against large class sizes, underfunding, crumbling physical plant, class violence.

But these issues might rile up the population into demanding more public funding for the library. Better get the Conservative party and their friends onto the message that The School Board is trying to censor Harry Potter rather than what is really happening — books are being culled and there isn’t enough money to expand the library. Now, the government has suspended local authority to weed and cull as the local experts see fit. That’s true free speech!

There isn’t enough money to hire a teacher librarian. There isn’t enough money to have the library open all the time. There isn’t enough money to replace the torn up copy of The Grapes of Wrath with five copies of The Grapes of Wrath.

Everything’s online anyway.

There are few journalists in Canada who know about censorship as intimately as I know about censorship. I don’t imagine Chris Selly has ever been censored in his life. Seeing a Conservative MP pretend to care about a high school library, in the name of free speech, is ridiculous, given that he didn’t seem to care about his party censoring me and other journalists from covering their last convention.

Censorship is everywhere and it’s rising. Anyone involved in Palestinian activism knows this. Anyone who stands up for justice against greed knows this.

I don’t begrudge Larry Farquharson for being pissed off, at all. He’s fighting for a vision of the library that has been under attack for decades. It’s just that this isn’t a censorship issue; it’s a fundamental question about the commons, public services and open knowledge.

When you know what censorship is, when your career has been plagued by the vague cloud of censorship, you immediately know what censorship is not. Throwing out books might be censorship, but in Canada, given the social conditions and who has the power to censer, normally it isn’t. It isn’t censorship to toss old copies of 1984. Sure, the students should be given the chance to take whatever they’d like that the library is tossing, and yes, maybe books should be donated to local second hand stores (ah, that did happen!) but we need to have a better collective understanding of censorship and what it’s being used for right now.

It sure as hell is not being used to stop kids from reading Steinbeck or Poe or Rowling.

I have nothing to say this week! Here are the headlines featured this past week from the Daily News podcast.

British Columbia

Teen charged with manslaughter after B.C. girl’s fentanyl overdose: RCMP

Québec

François Legault abdique, la CAQ se met à la recherche d’un sauveur

New Brunswick

More than 100 homeless New Brunswickers died in 2025

Saskatchewan

Woman at centre of Chinese family’s immigration nightmare now facing charge in Sask.

Ontario

8 arrests, 29 charges laid at downtown demonstrations: Toronto police

Woman dies in tent fire at Sudbury homeless encampment

Manitoba

Manitoba Tories suspend board member over online comments following fatal ICE shooting

Students and driver hospitalized following school bus rollover in Manitoba

National

A Canadian citizen has ‘died in Iran at the hands of the Iranian authorities’

Workers protest job cuts at The Royal’s long-term care facility

NDP leadership candidate apologizes for using AI to respond to Reddit questions

Canadian veteran who set fire to vacant condo complex, causing $4M in damage, won’t serve jail time

Some Canadians are ready to work in Venezuela‘s oilpatch — if they’re allowed in

Statistics Canada to cut 850 jobs in ‘dark time’ for public service, union says

International

Another construction crane collapse in Thailand kills 2 people a day after deadly train derailment

European troops arrive in Greenland as talks with US highlight ‘disagreement’ over island’s future

NASA Space Station Medical Evacuation of Astronauts Gets Underway

Malaysia and Indonesia become the first countries to block Musk’s Grok over sexualized AI images

Fourth Palestinian baby freezes to death in Gaza since November

Trump says US considering ‘very strong options’ for Iran

Uganda’s military deployed in national capital before presidential election

US to end deportation protections for Somalis

Somalia cancels all agreements with UAE over alleged sovereignty violations

Doug Saunders from the Globe and Mail shared this screencap on Bluesky that asked Canadians what they would prefer: if the US were to invade Canada, would you support Canada trying to negotiate an end to further harm, including accepting concessions? Or, would you want Canada’s military to fight it, even if we fail?

It’s a scenario I’ve been thinking about ever since Russia invaded Ukraine.

The graph shows that NDP voters are the most likely to say that Canada should fight the US militarily — 78% versus just 38% of Conservatives.

Are social democrats more patriotic than conservatives? More aggressive in defending our territory? How are we to read this result?

For this article to work, we have to assume that there is some truth in these numbers. It’s a big assumption. The polling question was asked by EKOS Research and I can’t find the original to fill in the blank info at the bottom of the image. It’s very possible that there is no truth whatsoever in these numbers and so, if that’s what you believe, you can stop reading here.

But let’s say there is some truth to these numbers. If we consider that Canadians, who are meek and polite, and who absolutely do not want to be Americans, see fascism as a threat that is coming from the White House, then it makes sense that the numbers fall in this way. Left wing people want to defeat fascism, obviously.

The corollary to that is that right wing people love the United States and would roll out the red carpet to welcome our new fascist overlords.

This is the easiest, cleanest narrative that a social democrat can conjure — a narrative that NDPer Charlie Angus has hung his hat on in the past few months. On Substack, he has characterized Mark Carney’s plan to triple military spending and massively expand the ranks of the Canadian Armed Forces, as a People’s Army. You can read his arguments here:

Charlie Angus / The Resistance

Canada Mobilizes a People's Army

The government has finally laid its cards on the table. The threat against our nation is real. That is why the Department of National Defence (DND) announced its plans to establish a 300,000-person citizens’ army…

Read more

3 months ago · 843 likes · 424 comments

And it’s clear that there are a lot of NDP voters who are lapping it up. Who love the idea that finally, with all the fascist creep around us all the time, maybe now we’ll be able to actually fight fascism. Like, really fight it. We can take out our anger towards our fascist boss and the fascist architecture that leaves us in pain and depressed, and fascist urban planning that facilitates our fascist reliance on our car to go shopping at fascist stores. We can’t fight any of this but boy oh boy, when the fascist military of Donald Trump marches over Ambassador Bridge, we can finally fight it.

We need to have hope that we can survive the chaos of a Donald Trump presidency, and I think that hope always coalesces around whatever is on offer that seems hopeful. And over the past 4 years, Canadians have been fed a steady diet of propaganda that says: diplomacy is for pussies. The only way to stand up to a bully is to kill him. It’s not surprising that the propaganda seems to be working.

This logic has underpinned the fervour around fighting Russia militarily. And it’s the same fervour that underpins the idea that military action against the world’s largest military and our closest military ally is in the realm of possibility. (Interestingly, this fervour stops for a lot of social democrats, who do not vocally call for Hamas to obliterate Israel.)

What’s missing in these fever dreams, where we imagine that brave Canadian soldiers could resist the US army, is a dose of reality. Canada and the US are deeply integrated. We supply one another weapons and war equipment. Our soldiers fight alongside one another. If the US were to invade, is it even possible that these deeply allied forces are suddenly going to fight against each other? Is the student really going to murder his teacher? Or vice versa? Maybe, but it’s hard to imagine.

Perhaps this dose of reality is why the Conservative voters didn’t choose the military option. Perhaps Conservative voters know more about military and corporate integration with the US than NDP voters do. Perhaps they know that the prospect of defending Canada militarily against the US is complete folly. While some of them will oppose it because they like the US and want to be Americans, the vast majority of Conservatives also want Canada to be Canadian and they live in a world that is so integrated with the US, through business and other relations, that they understand that a military intervention would be a ridiculous prospect.

If you’re further from this world, one where you imagine that Canadians still have sovereignty to defend (no offence but lol), then it’s easier to say you’ll erect a barricade to defend your nation’s honour (The Old Lie). Proof, however, is in the pudding. I’ll believe that people will actually take up arms against an invading American military when I see the same people erect barricades at their local outlet mall and run American commerce out of their town. Or erect barricades the next time a worker is killed on the job. Or erect barricades the next time the boss forces everyone to come in to work for free. You know, the fascism of daily life in Western Liberal Capitalist Democracy.

My position will be called pessimistic and defeatist by individuals whose myopia is perhaps stronger than my own. But that’s a cop-out. There’s nothing defeatist about appealing for sobriety. If Canadians are serious about defending our sovereignty, then they have to get serious about defending our sovereignty, and this passes through two channels that are not cheerleading military expansion.

The first channel is international and it includes fighting for human rights, justice and sovereignty, rather than sucking up to war mongers, international commerce and colonizers who happen to also oppose Trump. Like, for real. Canadians need to build strong internal institutions to leash our politicians — to stop them from always supporting the insane drive for global profits and to actually invest in people and their communities. We need to stop Trumpian fascists in Canada; rein in the likes of Tobi Lutke — the man who made the most money in all of Canada last year — before he does find a way to sell us off to Trump’s administration. We need to divest our assets from destructive projects around the globe and a whole bunch of other stuff that a banker Prime Minister is not going to want to do. You want to practice fighting a revolution? Start at home.

There is also the need to push for relations between Canadian government officials and the leadership of the states across the border. It’s one thing to hold a fascist dictatorship in a country where most people are behind the dictator. It’s entirely different in a country where half of the citizens vehemently hate the leader, or in a federal country with history of civil war that’s been held together by the US being the strongest country in the world. As US hegemony falters, the old cracks emerge already and Canada needs to exploit these cracks to create a buffer to reduce the likelihood of the American even considering military action here.

We also need to completely change how Canada manages its border. Our fascist border policies force people into dangerous situations, including death. These policies give all the power of the state to a police force that has no interest in defending its border against brothers-in-arms. If you think that taking up arms against the United States is possible, perhaps ask why no one has raised a militia to fight CBSA and help migrants who need to cross into Canada. Probably because, for one, the Liberals themselves are the ones furthering these dangerous border strategies.

Canada used to do diplomacy. We have all the nations of the world within our borders and it gives us tremendous capacity to be able to be diplomatic, in theory. The Liberals and Conservatives both abandoned effective diplomacy, but the people do have the power to restore meaning to these words again. If we concede that diplomacy is for pussies and fighting is for Real Men, then we will find ourselves in a fascist trap.

The second course of action is internal. Every basic need that goes unmet weakens our sovereignty. Every cut to data collection, every cut to universities, college mismanagement, indifference to the cultural industries. Every industry dominated by American corporations puts us at risk. Every overcrowded emergency rooms and every child that slips through the cracks weakens our sovereignty. I’ll leave you with this essay, which goes much deeper into what, internally, we should be fighting for so that we never have to live out a military invasion.

Pub Royal was the project that the Cowboys had been working on when lead singer Karl Tremblay died from cancer. He was too young. If you don’t know them, I wrote about them here in terms that most Canadians will understand after Karl’s death —

The day he died, I realized that I had seen the Cowboys more than any other group before, an impressive feat for an anglo Ontarian. Anyway. Just after Karl died, the band released their final album, and a song called La fin de show — the end of the show, obviously — which leaves literally every person in the province in tears for the rest of the day. That song was released alongside the rest of the album Pub Royal and then, their show of the same name toured the province.

If you ever get the chance to see Pub Royal, you should go see it. Deeply Gen X, deeply working class. In the musical, person after person crushed by neoliberalism trying to reconcile what they have become versus what they thought the world was promising them. It’s the perfect album to buy a 12 year old for Christmas and so, since Christmas, Pub Royal has been on high rotation chez nous.

Maybe it’s my new cancer drugs, but I’ve been listening to this on a loop since my kid went to bed after also listening to it on loop. Maybe it’s my new cancer drugs, but the number of people who have called me an apologist for Putin for pointing out that, maybe, Canada spending more on Ukraine in 3.8 years that it did on Afghanistan in 13 years is something we should question, is making me feel crazy. Maybe it’s my new cancer drugs, but I dunno, this line is too much — As Karl Tremblay sings here, Yes, you’ve wasted your life blowing on the ashes of your vain hopes …

Here are this week’s headlines from the Daily News podcast —

Ontario

Charges Dropped Against Nine Arrested at Pro-Palestine Protest

SIU investigating after man in mental health crisis suffers serious injury

Local workers with Ontario Health atHome rally against return-to-office mandate

Kashechewan First Nation in northern Ontario plans evacuation of residents due to water plant failure

Sources confirm senior managers have been dismissed in Greater Sudbury

Quebec

Lack of training, safety instructions resulted in man’s death: Quebec workers’ safety board

Eight migrants cross into Canada near Hemmingford

Manitoba

Power outage, cold damage ‘pulled the plug’ on Pimicikamak infrastructure: Chief David Monias

Alberta

BoG approves proposed exceptional tuition increases

Calgary restaurant owners jailed for financial abuse of temporary foreign workers

Calgary mayor anticipates recommendations from review of 2024 ‘catastrophic’ water main break

National

Chrystia Freeland to step down as MP on Friday

‘Economic war’ and income inequality are key concerns of Canadian bank CEOs

These executives are among the highest paid CEOs in Canada

International

South Korean leader says he asked China’s Xi to act as mediator on North Korea issues

Rising U.S. influence in Latin America could benefit Scotiabank’s growth plans, CEO says

Updates: Seven killed in fighting between Syrian army, SDF forces in Aleppo

RCA : Anicet-George Dologuélé dénonce une “fraude massive”

At least 17 dead as heavy rains trigger flash floods in Afghanistan

US seizes Russian-flagged tanker, another tied to Venezuela as Trump widens oil push

Gunmen kill over 30 in village raid, abduct others in northern Nigeria

Jailed Palestine Action activist ends 60-day hunger strike as health fails

Trump threatens Colombia with military action – as it happened

And if you’re still reading, here is Marie-Annick Lépine singing Loulou vs. Loulou (member of the Cowboys and partner of Karl) singing with Jean-François Pauzé (member of the Cowboys and the song’s author) at les Francos de Montréal in 2024.

There’s a grammatical issue in the headline of this piece. It’s in the present tense, though since Chrystia Freeland burst onto the federal politics scene, she has been consistently choosing Ukraine. I should have written Chrystia Freeland Always Chooses Ukraine but good headlines are supposed to be current. Yesterday, the choice was made official.

Freeland announced that she would finally resign her seat, hours after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Freeland would be a his special economic advisor — something that he pitched to her on Dec. 22 while she was visiting Ukraine. This wasn’t mentioned in Mark Carney’s Dec. 27 announcement about his meeting with Zelensky at the Halifax Airport, as Zelensky was flying to meet with Donald Trump in Florida.

(She isn’t resigning effective immediately though, she’s going to collect a few more days of salary, and will resign sometime soon).

This appointment isn’t a surprise. Indeed, she had already also taken a job in England that was supposed to start on July 1, administrating the Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University. But the order of operations is all off. She accepted the Oxford job while still elected. She’s been doing economic booster speeches for Ukraine while still elected. And Freelend only resigned after Zelensky made the announcement. While we all know how much she loves Ukrainians, we can pretty clearly see how little she thinks of Canadians.

As a Member of Parliament, Freeland played an outsized role in managing Canada’s relationship with Ukraine. She’s Ukrainian whose family roots reach deep into Nazi Ukraine (which is fascinating, given the enormous toll that Nazi violence took on Ukrainians — a significant number of the Soviet Union’s 26.6 million to 42.7 million war dead were Ukrainian, including 1.5 million Jews). Her personal hero grandfather was a journalist who edited a newspaper that had been seized from Jewish owners to become a propaganda outlet for the Nazis.

Thanks in no small part to her advocacy, Canadians have committed $23.5 billion to Ukraine between 2022 and last week — and that doesn’t include the money that we sent prior to Russia’s invasion, like financing electoral reform and national democratic institutions, and promoting women’s participation in Ukrainian elections. (That money was committed just before the last time Ukraine held general elections, in 2019, when Zelensky was elected).

Nor does it include all the money spent to offer residence to nearly a million Ukrainians to ride the war out, or to settle here permanently, with no general plan about how to absorb such a rapid increase in Canada’s population.

It’s trite to say, but $23.5 billion is a lot of money. It’s an insane amount of money. It’s the kind of money that could launch a publicly-owned and coordinated EV battery industry in Canada. It could provide free higher education all students. It could give all artists, defined broadly, a living wage. It could have given disabled people the means to live dignified and well, rather than the paltry sum that Freeland ended up offering — a sum so low that dozens of advocacy groups begged her to increase to save people’s lives. Hell, we could have done some or all of that and still had money left over to send to Ukraine. Instead, disabled people were offered MAID, also under her leadership as deputy prime minister.

She was the finance minister in the post-COVID-19 spending bonanza era that saw Canadians forced to give back money they needed and that government gave to them during the early days of the pandemic. She was the finance minister when the housing and food crises were forcing people into levels of poverty not really seen before in Canadian history. She oversaw the biggest increase between the rich and the poor in Canada.

And yet, $23.5 billion has been sent to Ukraine in the hopes that it can help them fend off Russia. It’s Freeland’s most expensive achievement.

Freeland has been rewarded for this achievement too. She was given an official appointment as “special envoy” to Ukraine, so that Canada could pay for trips to Kyiv her to check in on her apartment there. She has spent infinitely more time advocating for the people of Ukraine than she has advocating for the people of her own riding.

Canada will never have an accounting of how this money is being spent, how much of it has actually gone into corruption and how much of it has gone to kill Russians. There will never be any accountability to be had over the fact that Freeland turned Canada into such a close ally of Ukraine, that we could never play a mediator role to try and bring a diplomatic end to this horrific loss of life, even though it was always only going to end through diplomacy. And Freeland will never have to face the fact that she, above pretty much any other Canadian politician, is responsible for making Canada an enthusiastic cheerleader for this nightmare that has obliterated generations of young men in both countries.

Since Russia’s invasion, Ukraine estimates that 420,000 Russians have been killed or injured — which, I guess we’re supposed to feel good that maybe some of our taxes paid to maim or murder some of these guys. Ukrainian officials laugh at this, saying that the death count only helped to secure 0.8% of Ukraine’s territory (if it’s so minor, was it worth sacrificing so much to keep?). A Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated seven months ago that Ukraine’s casualties are also north of 400,000 people, which, unlike for the dead Russians, we are supposed to feel bad about, and maybe move us to send them even more money to stop any more deaths.

Just don’t look at a map to see just how much territory Russia has taken since 2022.

All the while, Canada’s engagement in Ukraine has juiced public opinion over three years, to say that war is good, actually, it can be the answer — and that the real threat to Canadians is Russians. Therefore, Canada needs to triple its military spending. We must prepare for our own war against Russia. Freeland set up the pins for Mark Carney to elbow them all down.

It would have been so interesting to see how Canada could have engaged with Ukraine, had our position not been lead by a Ukrainian sycophant who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about war casualties. Would someone else had been more tempered and strategic about the support? Given our strategic location, could Canada have played a positive role brokering a deal that would have brought Russia and the United States closer to each other? Would we still be at a place where there is seemingly endless money to throw towards Zelensky? The impact that Freeland’s incessant insistance that Ukraine’s honour must be defended to the death, and that the survival of Western Democracy passes through murdering Russians in Ukraine meant that Canadians only heard one dominant message — there was never any space for anything other than ‘Russia bad, must kill.’

We obviously will never know the answer to any of these questions. But now, Zelensky has the woman responsible for so much support by his side (VOLUNTEERING as she made clear in her statement) who cemented Canada to his side, no matter what.

There’s no greater reward in Canada for the dangerously mediocre than falling up. There is no greater success for the descendants of European fascism than to help lead a country into their own foreign wars in the name of democracy and justice. Freeland has managed to come out firmly on top, with new roles and salaries and volunteer positions that will help her continue in the choir of death. As she now formally serves the economic interests of Ukraine (“As we move from fighting the war to fighting the peace, I think we really have to see this as an opportunity for an economic renaissance,” she said in a speech in early December), Canadians should be asking themselves if we we’ve been played by this woman — someone who, above all else, served a foreign country’s interests with our money and her office.