Canada

In August, Goldberg will make the swim with a clear objective in mind: to be the first openly transgender person to swim across Lake Ontario.

The swim is 52 kilometres and will take between 20 to 26 hours. Goldberg knows it's is no easy task, but he’s motivated.

“It's really important for me to be that person who is visible doing this — and for my swim to be a piece of visibility and advocacy so that trans people can look at athletics in general ... and go, ‘Oh, this is for us too,’” Goldberg told TorontoToday.

Goldberg's swim comes at a time where the involvement of transgender people in sports is under attack by some conservative politicians, both in the United States and on home soil.

In April, Goldberg created a GoFundMe page to support his swim and mission for trans visibility. He aims to raise $12,500 to pay for safety boats and an experienced navigation crew, a medical safety team, nutrition and health supplies, weather monitoring services and training support.

Alongside his athletic effort, the page says Goldberg's open water swim will display the "resilience required to navigate the world as a transgender person."

He's hopeful that his swim will "show transgender youth that there are no boundaries to what they can achieve."

All money raised beyond the fundraising goal will go to LGBT YouthLine, a peer support organization for LGBTQ+ youth across Ontario.

Goldberg is a former peer volunteer with the group. He said working with the organization was a big part of his life and gender transition.

The Conservative Quebec [sic?] platform, unveiled recently by Leader Pierre Poilievre, says: “A Conservative government would put an end to the imposition of woke ideology . . . in the allocation of federal funds for university research.”

Using similar arguments – especially with regard to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies – the Trump administration has systematically cut federal funding for critical scientific research. Projects studying vaccines, infectious diseases such as HIV, and the health of sexual and gender minorities were specifically axed.

Despite Poilievre’s attempts to distance himself from Trump in some areas, his platform reveals he would follow the same path in attacking critical research, which should be free from political interference.

Voters must take this seriously. Canadians deserve better. We deserve a government that won’t muzzle scientists and won’t silence research when it is not convenient for a political agenda.

New vulnerabilities are surfacing. While most polls suggest the vast majority of Canadian adults are resolute in resisting any such takeover, the younger generation (18-35) is much more inclined – given certain favourable terms – to join the United States. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be susceptible to Trump and his appeals.

One of the most unacknowledged reasons is the failure of our school systems to teach the current generation about historic Canadian resistance to U.S. threats, incursions and trade sanctions going back to the American Revolution.

The result that alarmed Colin MacEachern, a former Halifax high school history educator now teaching in Australia, was the susceptibility of today’s students and their teachers to Trump’s bluster and blandishments.

MacEachern wrote on social media that his students would likely have no comprehension of the U.S. doctrine of “Manifest Destiny” or the American threat to Canada that was a major factor in nudging us toward Confederation.

It’s also fair to assume they have little or no knowledge of critical events of U.S. pressure on Canada such as the American invasion of Quebec in 1775, the War of 1812, the 1911 election reciprocity debate, the nuclear warheads controversy of the 1960s or American pressure to join the Iraq War in 2003.

It was December, 2023, and Pierre Poilievre had started a speech to Bay Street executives by spelling out his aversion to them.

The audience took in the scolding with stony faces. You could have forgiven some of them, however, for having a good-humoured chuckle into their buffet plates of cod or chicken.

Shrewder listeners probably understood why Poilievre was casting them as aloof and indifferent aristocrats, while presenting himself as an intimate ally of the country’s aggrieved majority. A year and a half ago, it was still the season for targeting and tarring Canada’s elite, and this was kabuki theatre, using exaggerated, stylized gestures of combat to conjure a sense of conflict and confrontation—even though none existed.

After all, Poilievre was fresh from a flurry of private events at which precisely this crowd had donated thousands of dollars to rub shoulders with him. Just the night before, he had mingled with bankers, real estate investors, and corporate executives at a $16-million French-style manor that boasted an elevator, indoor basketball court, and a dressing room bigger than most downtown apartments.

during the sketch show’s goodnights, Myers’ slogan tee — unveiled after he unzipped his vest — was accompanied by the actor mouthing “elbows up,” a reference to Canadian hockey icon Gordie Howe’s slogan toward aggressive opponents on the ice.

“Fascism doesn’t like to be ridiculed; it likes to be feared,” he concluded. “Satire is an important tool in the toolbox to say that this is not normal — that the cuts [Elmo]’s making are not normal.”

Trump warned he will impose additional tariffs on the European Union and Canada if they band together to “do economic harm” against the United States.

Get @#$%ed, Trump. Good read. Short but detailed about how partnered we are already and what our next priorities should be

Publicly traded companies could have been forced to disclose how climate change would disrupt their business plans, but those efforts were recently brought to a halt by Canadian financial regulators.

This means that, for the foreseeable future, investors and the public will be armed with less information when determining whether these companies have a real plan to deal with the climate crisis — or are relying on environmentally disastrous business-as-usual scenarios.

The move is a win for some of Canada’s largest oil and gas companies that are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and have spent years fighting some of the transparency proposals financial regulators have put forward.

Dozens of people lined up Thursday night to air opposition to and support for Manitoba's plan to add gender expression to the human rights code — a move that would include protections for people to be called by their preferred pronouns.

Derek deVries, pastor at Park City Gospel Church in Winnipeg, said the NDP government's bill would force Christians to go against their beliefs.

"This (proposed) law forbids Christians from following Christ's example. It requires speech he would not permit," deVries told a legislature committee.

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/tbPYgQiQJl0

The Canadian Association of Professional Employees (CAPE) is calling for public pension funds to divest from Tesla. To show solidarity with American workers facing attacks from Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the union says it’s time for the Canadian Public Sector Pension Investment Board (CPSIB) to dump its Tesla shares.

Despite holding no elected position in United States President Donald Trump’s administration, Musk and his DOGE are firing public servants with reckless abandon, placing the entire American federal public sector in jeopardy. Essential workers at the departments of education, health and human services, energy, veterans affairs and defense, as well as the Internal Revenue Service, the National Park Service, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have been summarily fired, furloughed, or pressured to accept dubious buyouts.

In response, CAPE, which represents more than 27,000 Canadian federal public servants, is leading the charge to pull Canadian public pension investments from the controversial electric automobile maker.

Many Canadian institutions use cloud servers run by American companies to store health data, experts say. That, combined with President Donald Trump's stated objective to make the U.S. a world leader in AI and his desire to make Canada a 51st state, means it's possible that his administration could come after our data — perhaps citing national security concerns as he has with tariff executive orders, experts say.

The Conservative Party will end public funding for university research that addresses "woke" topics, according to the Quebec section of the party platform. The platform doesn't define the term "woke," and Poilievre hasn't given a clear answer when asked by reporters.

However, in recent years, the party has increasingly used the term “woke” in speeches, petitions and policy statements to attack the Canadian government’s climate policy.

The right uses the threat of "wokeism" to invoke fear that liberal elites are "remaking the world" and will curtail people's liberties and status, said Imre Szeman, director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability at the University of Toronto.

One of the most worrisome parts of the Conservatives' pledge is that "woke" is a category that it can fill with whatever it wants, he said. "This is why "woke" is an adjective that is able to link up all kinds of unrelated practices, beliefs, opinions, and outlooks. What’s 'woke’ is, in the end, anything and everything that bothers them."

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney said that China is one of the largest threats with respect to foreign interference in Canada and is an emerging threat in the Arctic.

[...]

Asked to elaborate at a news conference in Niagara Falls on Friday, Carney said Canada has to counter Chinese foreign interference threats. He also criticized China for being a partner with Russia in the war with Ukraine and said it is a threat to broader Asia and Taiwan in particular.

Carney said China is the biggest threat "from a geopolitical sense." "We're taking action to address," he added.

[...]