Canada

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55539035

This time in Poland. The USA is firmly on the path of Fascism on so many levels, and it’s all to feed USA MAGA with false information. The winner of all bottom-of-the-barrel ambassadors is, of course, Pete Hoekstra, who has managed to insult both his Canadian ánd Dutch guest countries. https://www.thedailyscrumnews.com/recall-u-s-ambassador-pete-hoekstra-its-time-for-him-to-leave-canada/

Archived link

People said he was crazy to start a farm based in African foods. ‘It’s good to be crazy in a good way,’ Canadian Black Farmers Association founder Toyin Kayo-Ajayi says.

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Toyin Kayo-Ajayi’s favourite meal is pounded yam, with cassava and egusi — protein-rich African melon seeds, roasted in oil with spices and blended into a paste (pumpkin seeds will do if that’s all you can find). You can add turkey, chicken, fish, shrimp, kpomo (cow-skin) — any meat you want, with some broth and African spinach or amaranth — to turn it into a stew.

Cassava and yam are central foods in his Nigerian culture and other Black cuisines across Africa, South America and India. He’s growing the tropical produce in greenhouses in Miracle Valley just outside Mission, B.C., about a 90-minute drive east from Vancouver.

Kayo-Ajayi was told again and again that farming in Canada would be out of reach — it would be too expensive, the climate too unforgiving for the tropical crops he dreamed of growing. It wouldn’t last.

But he says enthusiasm for his five-acre farm has only grown since he got started in 2020. For five months of the year, he can grow tropical produce in greenhouses. His soil, which he makes himself, consists of clean silt, sand and goat manure. It’s working so well, he says, he is now selling it online and trying to get it stocked in stores. He’s still experimenting at a small scale, but the food he grows, like cassava and yam, he mostly supplies to the African Foods Food Bank, an organization he launched to provide healthy food to Black families.

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Donating to the food bank helps more people access African produce that may be out of reach in Canada. Imported cultural food, like cassava, can face extreme mark-ups by the time they get to the grocery store. On top of rising grocery prices and systemic income inequality, those mark-ups can put these foods out of reach. “If it’s somebody that is still low-income, now, he’s struggling to afford the cultural food,” Kayo-Ajayi explains.

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Food growers are the roots of the entire agricultural sector, which generates $149.2 billion annually, or seven per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product.

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While Kayo-Ajayi’s priority is getting cultural foods into Black homes at reasonable prices, he says supporting food growers stands to benefit all Canadians as the United States imposes tariffs and threatens annexation.

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“It’s something that is beneficial for our community and for Canada,” he says. “Everybody wins.”

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Kayo-Ajayi says he invested a lot of money personally before he started getting funding. “You have to prove that you can do something before you can get support,” he says.

Since then, the Canadian Black Farmers Association has received funding from organizations like Agriculture Canada, the Vancouver Foundation and the Supporting Black Canadian Communities Initiative. But he says he needs a lot more funding to get the farm going at a bigger scale and get to the point of selling soil.

“This is my passion,” Kayo-Ajayi says. “To me, somebody has to do it. It costs a lot, but guess what? The reason why you have a little is to be able to use the resources you have to make a difference in somebody’s life. To me, investing in another human being is my best investment, and I’m doing it this way.”

• Canada expands support for Ukraine's energy sector and security
• Russian strikes severely damage Ukraine’s power grid
• New partnership targets investment, non‑Russian energy supplies

Canada will step up support to Ukraine's energy sector, working with industry to supply oil and gas equipment on favourable terms and boost renewable energy investments, the two governments said on Wednesday.

Russia has targeted power stations, electricity transmission lines and gas facilities as part of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022. Russian strikes this week on Ukrainian power infrastructure killed three people and left tens of thousands without power and heat.

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On Wednesday, Ukraine and Canada agreed on a strategic energy partnership at a meeting in Paris, where Canada's government said it would work with industry to transfer oil and gas sector equipment to Ukraine on concessional terms, and promote investments in Ukraine's energy security.

Canada will also alert domestic industries to opportunities to invest in Ukrainian renewable energy projects and reconstruction of hydropower plants, according to the published agreement.

"This is not simply reconstruction. It is modernization under pressure," Canadian energy minister Tim Hodgson told reporters.

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The two sides will carry out risk assessments and exercises to counter hybrid threats to energy infrastructure, and strengthen commercial relations on nuclear fuel supply.

The deal, which includes sharing technical advice on developing infrastructure for non-Russian gas supplies to Ukraine, is not legally binding and planned investments would need to be followed up with companies.

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Shurat HaDin (SH), an Israeli lawfare organization, is attempting to “shut down” The Maple.

On January 25, SH tweeted that it has “issued urgent legal notices to Stripe, Apple Pay, and all major credit card networks demanding they cut off services” to The Maple.

SH has boasted that its mission is “bankrupting terrorism one lawsuit at a time.” Its activities have included suing UNRWA, a $1 billion lawsuit against Al Jazeera in 2025 and legal challenges against some people and groups who support BDS.

On February 4, The Canadian Jewish News reported: “[Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, SH’s founder] hopes that if authorities take a serious look at [The Maple’s] legal status, that could ‘serve as an alert, as a red flag for others’ to caution against similar projects.” She added, “Even opening an investigation brings attention to the website owners, and to others to take a step back and perhaps not to participate. And this is what we [SH] want.”

The Maple has not been contacted by any payment processor or law enforcement agency, nor have we received any formal legal threats of any sort, from anyone.

[This is an op-ed by Lihsin Liu, Director General of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Vancouver, Taiwan’s de facto consul general in Vancouver, Canada.]

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As Canada strengthens trade ties with China, it must also maintain firm guardrails to defend Indo-Pacific security and peace in the Taiwan Strait. Beijing’s growing military pressure, economic coercion, and alignment with Russia threaten global supply chains and stability, making a balance between engagement and deterrence essential for Canada’s interests.

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China has allied with Russia on the frontline of Ukrainian war. China and Russia have grown more closely aligned through forums such as BRICS and expanded strategic cooperation, including China’s increased investment under its “Polar Silk Road” to support trade and access in the Arctic. They have also engaged in intensive grey-zone tactics toward Taiwan, including media infiltration, economic coercion, transnational repression, and the sabotage of undersea cables that are critical to communications across the Western Pacific Rim.

China is attempting to weaken Taiwan’s democracy and undermine the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait. While over half of the global container traffic passes through this international waterway each year, the magnitude of any fallout should not be underestimated. Any conflict that arises from the Taiwan Strait will impact the world including Canada.

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The issue of Taiwan is not an isolated bilateral talking point, but an overwhelming concern on international security for stakeholders in the region. Besides, China has weaponized trade with Canada in the past, and may very well do so again. If Canada undertakes future actions to safeguard Canadian citizens’ human rights from China’s transnational repression, address overcapacity and non-market behaviours originating in China, or defend the rules-based international order in ways that do not align with the PRC’s purported “core interests,” it should expect political and diplomatic pushback.

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As Prime Minister Carney has entered into a new partnership with his PRC counterpart on trade and re-engagement, Taiwan hopes he could also have firm guardrails and express Canada’s support for a peaceful status quo in the Taiwan Strait after he returns home. Taiwan, like so many other stakeholders in the region, is ready to deepen its partnership with Canada to establish reliable, resilient, and predictable supply chains defined by strong protections on intellectual property and rigorous protocols on fair trade. From critical minerals to liquefied natural gas and carbon capture to artificial intelligence, we can advance the frontiers of innovation and open new pathways to prosperity.

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PRIME MINISTER MARK CARNEY was scheduled to deliver a much-anticipated speech to the Munich Security Conference this past weekend. The mass-casualty shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, changed that. Carney dispatched a senior delegation to Germany in his place—a crew that included Foreign Minister Anita Anand, Defence Minister David McGuinty, and Minister for AI and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon.

Understandable, given the circumstances, but unfortunate. MSC is where the world’s power brokers gather each February to take the temperature of global order. If there was ever a conference the prime minister needed to be at, it was this one. Why? Because organizers decided to confront head-on the realities of the changes to international relations brought on by the Donald Trump administration.

In this, it has to be said, they are following in the footsteps of the speech that Carney delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 21. That speech talked about the global rupture caused by the Trump administration and suggested there was no going back. It urged avoidance of nostalgia and talked of a necessary reframing of international relations led by coalitions of middle and other powers. Carney missed the opportunity to reinforce that message, especially to his European counterparts, and to start to build some of the coalitions he talked about.

To set the stage for its conference, the MSC issued a conference report in advance of the gathering. This year’s version is entitled “Under Destruction” and features on the cover an elephant with, what I take to be, several gouges out of its hide. Maybe it’s limping as well.

Right off the bat, the report describes Trump as a “demolition man,” not unique in that role but, by far, the most consequential actor on the world stage. It suggests the United States, under Trump, has jettisoned the foundational understanding of how multilateral institutions and universal rules, open trade, and liberal democratic principles all served as strategic assets for the US. The Munich conference report finds a new order taking shape, what it calls a “neo-royalist” and “deals-based” order, characterized by the emergence of accepted spheres of influence, “private rent-seeking and distribution by involved actors” and “deal-making on a personalist basis.”

The global spread of measles shows no signs of slowing down in 2026, including explosive outbreaks in travel hot spots like the southern U.S. and Mexico, prompting warnings from public health officials for Canadians to check their vaccination status before heading abroad this winter.

Mexico has reported more than 2,700 new cases so far this year, government data shows, with most infections detected among infants and young children. Meanwhile, more than 900 new confirmed cases have been identified across the U.S., according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Measles case counts are soaring in Florida, fuelled by an outbreak involving roughly 60 cases at a university near Naples on the southwest coast, alongside a fast-growing outbreak in South Carolina that’s the country’s largest since the disease was eliminated more than two decades ago, with hundreds of infections reported to date.

Dozens of new infections have also been reported here in Canada to start the year, including a growing cluster of more than 70 cases and counting in Manitoba, mere months after the country lost its measles elimination status following a massive outbreak throughout 2025.

Here is the original report: Transnational Repression in Canada (pdf)

Researchers behind a new report on transnational repression are warning Canada must not be “naïve” as it seeks better relations with China, which remains a top perpetrator in intimidating and harassing dissidents abroad.

The report by the Montreal Institute for Global Security (MIGS) called transnational repression “one of the most serious yet least understood threats to security and democracy in Canada,” and said China remains a leader in such efforts.

It cited several examples, including so-called “police stations” and online influence campaigns targeting Chinese Canadian diaspora communities. Families still living in China have been threatened, the report adds, and women have been targeted with sexual AI deepfakes.

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They acknowledged India, with which Ottawa is also seeking to repair trade and diplomatic ties, as another example.

“We must not put ourselves in agreements that could put our citizens in danger,” said Kyle Matthews, executive director of MIGS.

“We have to keep our eyes open, and we can’t close our eyes to the authoritarian threat that China represents, and still is. As many of the countries around the world that deal with transnational repression will tell you, China is one of the biggest players, if not the biggest player.”

The report comes a month after Prime Minister Mark Carney travelled to China and struck agreements on trade, business and travel that he said would forge a “recalibrated” relationship after years of diplomatic strain.

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On Sunday, China announced it was dropping its visa requirement for Canadian tourists and business visitors, a move that those behind the report said must be met with caution.

“We should not for a moment think that Canadian citizens travelling to China are not under threat of being monitored,” Matthews said.

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Marie Lamensch, MIGS’ global affairs director and the report’s co-author, said it will be important for Canada to maintain its own visa requirement for Chinese travellers in order to ensure agents of the Chinese Communist Party aren’t coming to intimidate Canadians.

Co-author Phil Gurski, a former analyst for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), said the agency’s security screening branch should play a role as well.

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“If there are visitors coming from the People’s Republic of China, they should be vetted through CSIS, which has its own intelligence sources, has alliances with its counterparts around the world,” he said. “And if CSIS comes up against information that indicates somebody is not being truthful or forthcoming in their background or their intentions on coming to Canada, they should be denied entry.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51027997

Archived

• The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has created a global network of individuals and organizations as part of its united front system. In four democratic states—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany—this network includes more than 2,000 organizations. These constitute latent capacity that the Party can mobilize to advance the Party’s agenda.
• Beijing’s network is the product of protracted co-optation of existing civil society organizations overseas and the global expansion of domestic united front elements. The Party has spent decades assiduously cultivating overseas Chinese community organizations, co-opting local leaders and institutions to embed its preferences within civil society. Even groups that previously spent decades supporting the Republic of China (Taiwan) now fly the flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
• The Party leverages this global network to support its primary goal of national rejuvenation. According to the Party’s definition, rejuvenation entails unification with Taiwan and making the PRC the global leader in terms of national power. United front work supports this goal by contributing to the PRC’s diplomatic, economic, scientific, and even military development, as well as the Party’s ability to respond to crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
• This includes engaging in malign and illegal activities in foreign countries. Overseas groups with ties to the united front have directly supported illicit technology transfer, espionage, talent recruitment, and voter mobilization on Beijing’s behalf. These groups also engage in transnational repression, monitoring, harassing, and/or intimidating dissidents, ethnic minorities, and other critics of the Party.
• In democratic countries, these groups influence political decision-making by conditioning stakeholders to consider Beijing’s interests and sensitivities. United front organizations have been instrumental in shaping the approaches of local governments and political actors, particularly where oversight is weak. They have influenced legislation and public statements, and managed official engagements with the PRC.
• Where the CCP encounters opposition, the united front functions as a political weapon to isolate, neutralize, or counter Beijing’s critics. The united front system leverages its network of organizations to remove impediments to the achievement of core CCP ambitions through influence, subversion, co-optation, and coercion. These goals include building support for and neutralizing resistance to the annexation of Taiwan.
• Constraining the CCP’s ability to interfere in democracies requires active transparency. Much of the CCP’s united front activity is at least partially visible in democratic societies. Better education and information sharing could help officials and the general public recognize risks and avoid entanglement. United front groups are rarely listed in existing foreign agent registration systems, limiting the ability of governments to monitor or investigate them.

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Overseas united front work goes beyond attempts to harness the wealth and knowledge of Chinese diaspora communities to support national development goals. It also seeks to further the Party’s interests, which are increasingly global. The country is currently the world’s top trader, accounting for over 14 percent of global exports in 2023. It leads international institutions and forums with partners across the globe. And even its military is beginning to venture ever further afield and expand its international footprint.

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The united front system operates on a global level. But when democratic countries recognize united front work as a problem, they rarely view it as a global issue. As a result, efforts to build information-sharing platforms or to work with allies and partners to combat CCP activities within democratic societies are minimal—if they exist at all. This includes cooperation at both the governmental and non-governmental levels. Civil society organizations frequently work to spread awareness internationally on salient issues, something that would be useful for building a better understanding of how the united front operates beyond the countries covered in this report. The attention paid to united front work in conferences and fora that focus on challenges posed by the CCP is disproportionately small given united front work’s negative impact on democratic societies. Raising the visibility of issues related to united front work helps build transparency and navigate the complex landscape of security challenges together while preserving democratic values.

“You’re picking basket-weaving courses and there’s not too many baskets being sold out there. Go into healthcare, go into trades,” shared Ford. “Those are where the jobs are.”

If Ford was really serious about promoting healthcare and the trades, he would make OSAP loan/grant ratios dependent on the course taken. Make OSAP 90% grant 10% loan for the trades and health care, and 90% loan 10% grant for basket weaving courses.

The investigation into last week's shootings in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., that claimed nine lives has moved into a new phase after police cleared the two crime scenes.

Excerpt:

Candian VCs who rely on the Crown corporation have feedback on its “steady hand” approach. Who’s listening?

In 2022, the federal government commissioned a report asking Canada’s VCs what they thought about BDC, the Business Development Bank of Canada.

The report offers a candid evaluation of the Crown corporation and Canada’s largest direct and indirect venture capital investor, but here’s the thing: the report was effectively forgotten, and its recommendations were never actioned. Few people even know it exists!

But BetaKit obtained the report and revealed its contents to the world. Reporter Madison McLauchlan, who broke the story for BetaKit, joins to discuss the report and the questions surrounding it.

How many people are overdosing while they are patients at British Columbia’s hospitals?

This data is essential to understanding the importance of opening hospital-based overdose prevention sites, addiction medicine doctors told The Tyee.

In an atmosphere where the province’s drug policy is a hot-button topic, it’s also key to developing public understanding about why the sites are necessary, doctors added. This is because it is safer for both patients and staff when patients who use substances are able to use them at adjacent overdose prevention sites, rather than feeling pressure to either be discharged early or use substances illicitly in places where they can find privacy, such as hospital bathrooms.

But after seven months, seven freedom of information requests and two Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner complaints, The Tyee is no closer to a strong understanding of how many people are currently surviving overdoses as patients in hospitals across B.C.

The federal government sometimes left people on Canada's no-fly list without lawful justification, according to a recently released report from one of the country's intelligence watchdogs.

The National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) probed whether the Passenger Protect Program, more commonly known as the no-fly list, is working and whether the government treats individuals reasonably and fairly.

"A well-functioning program is crucial for public trust in both national security and individual freedoms," the review agency wrote.

Passenger Protect Program allows the government to bar individuals — Canadians and non-Canadians — believed to be a threat to aviation security from boarding a commercial flight to, from or within the country.

Premier Doug Ford had choice words for students expressing concerns over recent cuts to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) Tuesday, telling them to "not pick basket-weaving courses" and to invest in education that gives people in-demand jobs.

Speaking to reporters at Queen's Park, Ford said he received "thousands of calls" from students over the long weekend, who expressed concerns about the province cutting the amount of grant money students can receive through OSAP.

“I mentioned to the students, you have to invest in your future, into in-demand jobs,” he said.

“You’re picking basket-weaving courses, and there’s not too many baskets being sold out there.”