Canada

How long until they start charging for cushions?

This asshole really is trying to be just like Trump.

The ~~FBI~~ RCMP covered for ~~Biden~~ Trudeau. ~~Biden~~ Trudeau should be in jail. ~~FBI~~ RCMP leadership is corrupt.

The amazing thing is that there are those among us shockingly dumb enough to believe this horse shit.

https://youtu.be/R59JmC0u63I

U.S. Customs and Border Protection says travellers who register at border will be subjected to such measures

Several Canadian snowbirds reported they were fingerprinted and photographed at the U.S. border this month when registering for their winter stay, which U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) told CBC News is now standard procedure.

It's likely to be a long night — and for many municipalities, long days — to tally election results in Alberta, thanks to the switch this year away from machines in favour of a hand count.

The province banned electronic vote tabulators in legislation passed last year, a change some cities warn will take longer, cost more, and increase the risk of spoiled ballots.

"We have prepared significantly, we have increased the number of voting stations, we have increased the number of election workers," said Calgary chief returning officer Kate Martin.

Calgarians are likely to learn the mayoral results on election night Monday, Oct. 20, but it could take a bit longer to learn the winners of the council and trustee races.

Social housing accounts for less than five per cent of the total housing stock in Canada, a relatively low proportion compared to other industrialized counties.

Eight per cent is the average size of the social housing stock among countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In the Netherlands, social housing accounts for roughly one third of the housing stock.

Last year, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged to introduce a renters' bill of rights that would "crack down on renovictions" among other measures.

So far, the government has published a so-called blueprint for the proposed document. NB ACORN says change isn't coming fast enough. "We need an actual action plan," Jongeneelen said.

The Canadian military has for years claimed it will not support Azov or any of its affiliates due to their far-right ideology and neo-Nazi links, but the documents show Azov members met with the Canadian Defence Attaché in late July for what one Azov contact called a "friendly and open dialogue."

Google paid for an Oregon city’s lawsuit against a local newspaper that was seeking water consumption figures for a data centre. The suit was eventually dropped, and the figures revealed the Google data centre accounted for a quarter of the city’s water use in 2021.

There's been a lot of talks for government investment into AI for Canada in the recent boom, but I've never seen anyone make a compelling argument what the practical implementation of it would be.

Generally people are only talk about building AI Datacenters in Canada and they've been known to be extremely large user of fresh water and energy. Which has directly impacted people cost of living with much higher utility costs being passed on them only for some short term construction jobs, moderate tax gains and the handful of jobs a data center employs.

And as usual you know it's bad stuff with Alberta/Danielle Smith leading the way and well known grifter getting involved.

Alberta doubling down on AI data centres with new mandate for utilities minister

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-alberta-ai-data-centres-minister-mandate/

The province’s goal is to have $100-billion worth of AI data centres under construction within the next five years.

Why celebrity investor Kevin O'Leary is proposing a massive AI data centre in northern Alberta

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/why-celebrity-investor-kevin-o-leary-is-proposing-a-massive-ai-data-centre-in-northern-alberta-1.7407506

30 years this month since the Quebec Referendum.

"Washington secured highly favourable terms in both transactions, with the right to acquire millions of shares for virtually nothing, and a board seat in the case of Trilogy.

"The Canadian government reviews all foreign deals in the critical-minerals sector for national-security concerns and has the power to block transactions."

We do not have uranium enrichment capacity for manufacturing SMR fuel. CANDU reactors on the other hand use Canadian fuel.

The article has some examples of how quality journalism can speed up change, such as shutting down the Robert Land Academy earlier this year. Please check out the article since it has a lot of links that I didn't capture in the excerpts below:

A few weeks ago, Senior Editor Harley Rustad sent me a real estate listing over Slack. No note. No context. Just the link. This was odd—Harley, as far as I knew, didn’t moonlight as a realtor. Of course, I clicked.

On 157 acres of Niagara farmland, twenty-five minutes from Hamilton, sat a 57,650-square-foot compound: a “grand foyer,” a commercial kitchen, a gym with a rock-climbing wall and boxing ring, a library, a science lab, a soccer field. Marketed for “educational use, a corporate retreat, or repurposing,” it carried a $9.4 million price tag and the promise of “outstanding potential.”

But the photos told another story: dorms, hallways, a mess hall—all deserted. The place felt frozen, as if everyone had fled at once. It didn’t look like something to buy. It looked like the site of something gone terribly wrong.

And then it hit me. This was Robert Land Academy. Once a “tough love” military-style private boarding school for boys, now abandoned and bankrupt. Empty of students. Empty, too, of the staff who, as we relentlessly reported over the past year, abused them, according to lawsuits filed against the school. What the kids endured is shocking: public shaming, racist harassment, withholding of food, sleep deprivation, forced outdoor exposure in winter, and isolation. The lawsuits—which now number more than eighty in total—claim administrators maintained a system “designed to cover up” sexual, psychological, and physical cruelty. Survivors describe lasting trauma, with some saying the school “destroyed” their childhoods.

This “expansive property,” in other words, was the visual record of a crime scene. It was also proof of justice served: contributing writer Rachel Browne’s series of investigations helped shut down the institution in April.

We’re no strangers to dramatic results. In 2017, a joint investigation with the CBC’s Fifth Estate into seniors who had vanished in Muskoka uncovered secret police documents and new details on the decades-old case. In 2024, our exposé of former art director Ferdinand Eckhardt’s Nazi affiliations pushed the Winnipeg Art Gallery to cut ties with its founding leader and prompted Premier Wab Kinew to strip Eckhardt’s name from Manitoba’s Order of the Buffalo Hunt, one of the province’s highest honours. Michelle Cyca’s recent reporting about so-called “pretendians” forced long-overdue public reckonings for people who have sidestepped accountability for years. And Soraya Amiri’s coverage of Afghanistan has become a trusted record that’s shared in WhatsApp chats, X, and across the diaspora.

The website: https://www.freshetnews.ca/

RSS feed: https://www.freshetnews.ca/feed

An article about what happened: https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/metro-vancouver-local-news-publications

Near the beginning of this year, we published a story about three major Metro Vancouver news publications shutting down: Burnaby Now, New Westminster Record, and Tri-City News.

Those publications were owned by Glacier Media, which attributed the shuttering of those news sites to economic conditions.

Now, some of the people behind those publications have launched Freshet News, “Western Canada’s first non-profit news cooperative that’s union supported, covering Burnaby, New Westminster and the Tri-Cities.”

This June, we spoke with Cornelia Naylor, one of the seasoned journalists who will be part of the new publication. Naylor told Daily Hive that one of the visions for the future was re-launching a print publication, something that still looks to be part of the plan.

Naylor had worked with Burnaby Now for over a decade.

“Our goal at Freshet News is to put community back into community journalism. We’ll tell stories that matter to the community in a way that keeps us accountable to the community. That includes a weekly email newsletter delivered to subscribers, and a planned return to a print edition, as well as opportunities to tell us how we’re doing and how we could be doing it better,” a post on the Freshet News website says.

Other key figures in the new publication include Mario Bartel, Janis Cleugh, and Theresa McManus.

Bartel and Cleugh had both spent time with Tri-City News, while McManus was a reporter with both New Westminster Record and Burnaby Now.

Cleugh said, “Around North America, corporate media is closing news outlets citing a lack of profits. But local news isn’t about making money; it’s a public service that creates connection. It’s good for democracy.”

I was going to post this to !vancouver@lemmy.ca, but I figured scammers might be trying this across the country.

My understanding is that scammers are making fake driver accounts, and then using social engineering to ask the user for their phone number. They then try to break into the account, and try to get the user to tell them the access code from the email by pretending it's required for verification.

Helpful statement from Uber:

“Riders and drivers should never share personal account information, such as passwords or verification codes, with anyone. We take the security of users’ accounts very seriously, and if users believe they have been scammed, we encourage them to report it to us so we can investigate and take action,” Uber said.

Questionable statement from Uber, since they should probably investigate and ban the scammer?

“We ensure that the driver will be sent a warning for this incident. Drivers are sent warnings as well for high cancellation rates, and it’s in the best interest of all users that cancellations occur as infrequently as possible,” support told Mackay.

I'm linking this article here since it has Canada specific information.

How is this regulated in Canada?

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said in an email that it is responsible for the surveillance of chemical residues in foods and how they follow Canadian regulations, while Health Canada sets the maximum level for environmental and industrial pollutants in food.

However, it’s not clear whether these protein products are regulated as food or natural health products, and Health Canada could not respond to CBC’s questions by deadline.

Goodridge wants to see Health Canada set guidelines for these protein powders or dietary supplements, he said.

"There are no specific federal limits for lead in protein powders or dietary supplements," Goodridge said. "This, in my opinion, is a big regulatory gap."

Earlier this year, staff at Nova Scotia Power submitted a proposal to upgrade their cybersecurity. The privately owned company, which supplies most of the province’s electricity, had gone three years since an internal threat assessment flagged key vulnerabilities, specifically the power plants and substations that fed the grid. If approved, the work would have wrapped by year’s end.

They never got the chance. Just three weeks after the proposal was submitted, hackers struck. But not to sabotage infrastructure. Instead, they made off with the personal data of at least 280,000 customers: emails, phone numbers, home addresses, bank details—enough for determined malcontents to impersonate individuals and wreak havoc. Then came the shakedown. The company insists it didn’t pay, and some of the plundered information was posted online. A few weeks after the attack was made public, a Nova Scotia couple, and clients of the utility, logged into their bank account and found $30,000 gone.

Archived link

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“NATO countries defend themselves,” Canadian PM Mark Carney said ... “Certainly, we will do what’s necessary in order to protect those countries.”

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European diplomats have warned the Kremlin that the alliance was ready to respond to further Russian violations of its airspace with full force, including by downing Russian planes, Bloomberg News reported on Sept. 25. That meeting came after three MiG-31 fighter jets flew over Estonia and drones appeared over Poland, in what political observers said was a tactic by Putin to test the alliance’s resolve.

Carney, 60, said Russia’s use of jets and drones over European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should be viewed as a signal of weakness by Putin, not strength. Western allies have discussed tighter sanctions and the European Union is working on a plan to use frozen Russian central bank assets to give a funding boost to Ukraine — a plan that Canada and the UK have joined. “Russia’s under pressure. They’re trying what they can to shift, but they’re under economic pressure,” the prime minister said. “Their military situation — they were making some progress over the course of the summer. That progress has stopped.”

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“President Putin has done nothing but miscalculate in this war. He made the calculation that NATO would become divided. NATO has solidified,” Carney said. “He made the calculation that President Zelenskiy would flee. He made the calculation there would be an uprising in his favor. He has miscalculated consistently in this conflict.”

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The prime minister also hired a former Royal Bank of Canada executive to lead a new agency to build domestic manufacturing and accelerate the rearming of the Canadian military.

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The report (downloadable PDF) of the so-called Expert Panel on Post-Secondary Institution Funding and Alberta’s Competitiveness released last week calls for the government to stop telling universities, colleges and technical institutes how to do their jobs.

Then it proceeds to explain how the province should require the same institutions to do their jobs.

What’s with this apparent contradiction in the murky report from a panel supposedly set up last fall to advise the government how Alberta’s post-secondary institutions should be funded, but then dives into how to respond to MAGA obsessions dear to the hearts of Premier Danielle Smith and her United Conservative Party base?

One key to unravelling this puzzle, then, is simply to understand that when the report says “the government,” it is almost always talking about the federal government, historically a significant funder of Alberta university research despite the fact the institutions themselves come under provincial jurisdiction.

Since May 2024, the Canadian government has sanctioned 17 individuals and seven entities for perpetrating “extremist settler violence against civilians” in the West Bank. Canada has said the ongoing violence “has undermined the human rights of Palestinians, prospects for a two-state solution and posed significant risks to regional security.”

But tax deductible donations made by Canadians to groups that financially support the West Bank settlements are continuing in the face of the escalating attacks on Palestinian civilians, an investigation by CBC's the fifth estate has found.

Most of the 500,000 settlers who live in the West Bank are not involved in physical violence against Palestinians, but critics say their very presence is complicit because it legitimizes the violence some settlers resort to to lay claim to the land.

Calling the federal Critical Minerals Strategy ‘Worthless,’ Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre said the government should be doing less, not more, to spur economic growth

Op-ed by Vina Nadjibulla is the vice-president of research and strategy at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

Archived link

Last week, China’s ambassador to Canada bluntly declared that Beijing would lift its tariffs on Canadian canola if Ottawa removed tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. What was once coercion by stealth is now coercion in plain sight. The message was no surprise—everyone understood that canola tariffs were leverage to pressure Ottawa on EVs—but the timing was telling. It came just as China escalated its trade war with the United States through sweeping export controls on rare earths and critical minerals, while Washington doubled down with threats of additional 100-per-cent tariffs on Chinese imports.

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For much of the past two decades, Canadian policy toward China was driven by commercial optimism—an assumption that access to China’s vast market could be pursued safely within the bounds of international rules and multilateral institutions. That world no longer exists. Beijing’s industrial strategy—built on state subsidies, export surpluses, currency manipulation, and protection of domestic champions—has tilted the global playing field so sharply that further integration with China now poses real risks to Canada’s competitiveness and prosperity.

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This is especially true in critical minerals, green technologies, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and research collaboration—areas Beijing explicitly defines as part of its national industrial and security strategy. China’s tactics in these sectors are designed to absorb innovation abroad, strengthen self-reliance, and ensure others’ dependence. Through policies like Made in China 2025, Beijing pursues self-sufficiency at home—from wafers to battery cells—while using scale, subsidies, and control of upstream inputs to make others reliant on Chinese supply. The result is Beijing’s accumulation of leverage and choke points in rare earths, graphite, gallium, solar panels, battery materials, and critical minerals processing.

This is not just industrial policy; it is a dependency strategy that turns supply chains into instruments of state power. Canada’s response must be to strengthen its domestic capabilities and deepen relations with trusted allies and partners—not expand trade and technological entanglement with a systemic competitor. Building parallel supply chains with allies, rather than hoping for Chinese restraint, is the only sustainable path to resilience.

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We [Canada] should focus on expanding trade and investment ties with Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, the European Union, and trusted Association of Southeast Asian Nations partners. But diversification will remain out of reach without building domestic competitiveness. Rebuilding domestic competitiveness and resilience requires a modern industrial strategy—one that does not solely rely on subsidies—but prioritizes building productive ecosystems and infrastructure, scales skills and technology, streamlines the regulatory environment, and deploys smart public financing to keep and build manufacturing and processing capacity in Canada.

Canada also needs stronger tools of statecraft for a world where global rules and norms are no longer enough: tighter investment screening, robust research-security guidelines, leading cybersecurity capacity, export controls co-ordinated with allies, and an enforceable foreign-interference transparency regime. Finally, none of this will work without sustained public outreach and deeper China competence across government, business, and civil society to build awareness and resilience.

In this age of great-power competition, the goal is not to contain China but to contain our vulnerability to the Chinese Communist Party. The sooner Canada acts on that understanding, the better prepared we will be for the shocks to come.

Prince Edward Island Premier Rob Lantz says he wants a federal investigation into allegations of Chinese foreign interference and money laundering in his province by two Buddhist groups.

The premier has written letters to the RCMP and to a federal anti-money-laundering agency, asking them both to look into the allegations.

In the letters, Lantz says his province is concerned about allegations that the province has been used as an operating base for the Chinese Communist Party.

While the two Buddhist groups have been a source of public speculation and uncertainty over several years, he said comments made by a former solicitor general of Canada and former RCMP superintendent in Ottawa in early October have reignited the issue.

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“Equally troubling are suggestions, made by the same individuals, that Prince Edward Island has been used as a forward operating base for the Chinese Communist Party. These are serious allegations.”

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The Great Wisdom Buddhist Institute in Brudenell, P.E.I., is a monastery for nuns, mostly from Taiwan, about 200 of whom live at the monastery while another 300 live nearby. In 2019, the Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society included about 600 monks -- most from Taiwan -- living on separate campuses in Little Sands, P.E.I., and Heatherdale, P.E.I.

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