Canada

A Nova Scotia man who is one of a few deaf professional wrestlers is working on a new project to make wrestling events more inclusive. Justin Marriott has helped set up a team of ASL interpreters who are now at every wrestling event held by the local company Kaizen Pro Wrestling. Gareth Hampshire has the story.

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Last week, Germany's armament secretary and the head of the country's navy were in Ottawa to meet Canadian navy and defence officials and discuss their plans to introduce maritime drones — both surface and subsurface.

"It turns out that this is another area of potential co-operation with great potential," Jens Plötner, the armament secretary, told CBC News.

Remotely piloted underwater vehicles are seen as crucial in protecting the subsurface infrastructure, but how to do it and who is responsible is a matter of active debate.

The Yantar, a Russian research ship that Western intelligence believes is mapping the spiderweb of undersea cables and infrastructure, keeps popping up — sometimes unexpectedly — in several locations.

The ship's habit of loitering near undersea cables — particularly in November and December 2024 — caught the attention of Finnish and Swedish authorities.

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Peter Sandwell, Sweden's state secretary of defence, was also in Ottawa late last week meeting with Canadian defence officials.

He said his country, which is NATO's newest member, has been tracking potential threats in the Baltic Sea.

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A handful of Canadian companies are at the cutting edge of marine drone technology. For example Seamor Marine Ltd. produces drones used for aquaculture, underwater inspection of infrastructure and general underwater exploration.

Plötner said Germany is not building its own drones but "wants to get there."

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Deleted as dupe

let's break down what capital flight, people leaving, government debt, and the gold bonanza mean. The libs are scratching their heads, but from a Marxist perspective, it isn't a mystery. It's just late-stage capitalism playing its greatest hits.

The billionaire class and their lackeys can read the balance sheet of their own system. They see that the profits have been squeezed out of us, the working class is tapped out, and the whole house of cards is wobbling. Hence why we're seeing capital flight. They're pulling their money out because the mobile nature of capital means they can park it in safer markets.

And the gold rush is just the bourgeoisie quietly admitting their entire financial system is built on hot air. They're ditching liquidity for a physical asset that will hold value when the inevitable crash comes. It's a massive vote of no confidence in the very system they built. We're seeing a classic sign of over-accumulation with nowhere profitable left to invest.

Now, about the whole people fleeing abroad thing. The people who are leaving are those with the means to do so, namely, the workers who are still relatively well off. When even the so-called professional-managerial class, such as engineers and other tech workers, are getting priced out of a future and leaving, you know the system is failing. It's obviously problematic since it's a loss of talent, but at a deeper level, it's a crisis of social reproduction for the most privileged group of workers. If the labour aristocracy can't make it, what does that say about the rest of us in the proletariat? The canary in the coal mine has just packed its bags and fled the country.

And then we have the government's role in all this. Our state is the management committee for the bourgeoisie, and it's doing its job perfectly. All that government borrowing and quantitative easing was just socializing the losses of the capitalists during the pandemic, creating a massive bailout for them. Now comes the bill, and they're handing it to us in the form of austerity. Here's what PSAC says about Carney's announcement of sweeping public service cuts.

They're cutting public services to shred the social wage and force us deeper into reliance on the capitalist market, while funneling money into the military. The military needs to be kept happy in case of any social unrest that their austerity will cause, and to tie Canada tighter to US imperialism as the domestic economy rots. The money is going to cops, jets, and bombs instead of our healthcare or education.

We're most likely headed for another 2008 style crash, and these crashes are themselves a feature of the system. They're how capitalism resets itself by devaluing our labour, destroying excess capacity, and letting the big capitalists gobble up everything for pennies on the dollar. It's the centralization of capital in its most brutal form.

And in the political vacuum that we have here, without a strong, organized socialist left to offer a real alternative, people get funnelled into the waiting arms of right-wing populism. They'll blame immigrants, wokeism, or whatever scapegoat the ruling class offers to direct our anger away from them. We're seeing it all over Europe, and it's coming here hard.

The future for Canada is grim with the class war that's heating up like never before. The capitalists are preparing for it with their gold, their capital flight, and their militarized state. The question is, are we? We need to build our own power, our own organizations, and our own vision for a world beyond this parasitic system.

The U.S. Congress is being asked to adopt legislation that could lead to Canada and the United States further integrating their enforcement of the border — including allowing U.S. officers to more freely operate on Canadian soil.

House Resolution 5518, introduced by New York Republican Rep. Nicholas Langworthy, calls on U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to “negotiate or amend existing agreements with the Government of Canada, as appropriate, for integrated cross-border aerial, maritime and land law enforcement operations.”

The bill also calls for U.S. officers to operate in Canada, and for Canadian officers to operate in the U.S., "for the purpose of enhancing border security or law enforcement co-operation or operations, including for the purposes of conducting operations in the land, air and maritime domain.”

The text does not make it clear whether this could allow U.S. officers to operate in Canada unaccompanied by a Canadian official. Langworthy’s office has not yet granted an interview with the congressman nor answered questions sent by CBC News last week.

While some U.S. officers currently work at Canadian airports, Langworthy's bill could see their ability to operate in Canada increase significantly.

Langworthy’s bill is co-sponsored by 13 Republican members of the House of Representatives including upstate New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, part of congressional leadership and considered a close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump.

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Federal privacy commissioner Philippe Dufresne and commissioners in Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec found TikTok failed to keep Canadian children off its platform and collected vast amounts of personal information, including information considered sensitive.

“The investigation uncovered that TikTok removes approximately 500,000 underage users from the platform each year,” said the report. “Where these children were engaging with the platform before being removed, TikTok was already collecting, inferring and using information about them to serve them targeted ads and recommend tailored content to them.”

Face, voice recognition

TikTok was caught using biometric information via facial and vocal analytics. It did not adequately explain to users that their data would be used to infer age and gender for the delivery of tailored ads and recommended content.

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The investigation also found the company’s privacy policy was deficient.

“While TikTok requires users to expressly accept its terms and conditions and privacy policy during account sign-up, we found that such consent — vis-à-vis TikTok’s practices related to tracking, profiling, targeting and content personalization — was not valid or meaningful.”

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In November 2024, the federal cabinet ordered TikTok to wind-up Canadian operations for national security reasons. However, the app was not banned from Canada and TikTok has applied for a judicial review in Federal Court.

Archived

BC Ferries, the taxpayer-owned company operating ferry services along the B.C. coast, didn’t just sign a billion-dollar shipbuilding contract in China; it handed Beijing leverage over Canadian infrastructure.

Behind the bureaucratic talk of cost and efficiency lies a deeper scandal: a taxpayer-funded deal that puts national security, public transparency and Canadian citizens at risk, all to benefit a hostile regime.

When theBreaker.news, an independent investigative outlet in B.C., filed freedom of information requests to uncover the contract’s details, BC Ferries refused to release a single page. The excuse? Disclosure might threaten its financial position, safety and the “interests of third parties.”

This refusal didn’t happen in a vacuum. It came the same day Chinese President Xi Jinping stood next to Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Beijing, giving a vivid display of authoritarian solidarity.

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cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/47582048

President Donald Trump mocked transgender people in front of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose child identifies as nonbinary, during an Oval Office meeting in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday that was intended to focus on trade relations but instead became a showcase of Trump’s familiar culture war politics.

The meeting, held in the presence of reporters, aimed to emphasize renewed cooperation between the two countries, which remain deeply economically intertwined. But as The Independent reported, it “devolved into a political rally disguised as a routine press availability.” Trump repeatedly veered off topic to attack Democrats, the media, and transgender people, boasting that under his leadership, “We have strong borders. We have no men in women’s sports. We’re not going to take your child away and change the sex of your child.”

Sex charges against former fashion mogul Peter Nygard were stayed in a Winnipeg courtroom Wednesday after the judge ruled the convicted sex offender’s right to a fair trial has been breached because of lost evidence.

“I am satisfied that (Nygard’s) right to a fair trial has been substantially prejudiced and will be further aggravated by allowing the trial to proceed,” provincial court Judge Mary Kate Harvie said.

Nygard had been set to stand trial in December on charges he sexually assaulted and forcibly confined a woman, who was then 20, at his former corporate headquarters in Winnipeg in 1993.

Court previously heard Winnipeg police visited the woman for a “wellness check” on the day of the alleged assault after family members reported they could not reach her, and she was interviewed by RCMP after she returned home to Vancouver days later. Records of the two meetings were later destroyed, crippling Nygard’s ability to mount a full defence, Wiebe told court last month. She argued the destruction of the evidence amounted to “unacceptable negligence.”

Excerpt from the article:

If all goes to plan, next February could see the return of humans to the moon. Four people — NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — will see it as no one has before. Not even the Apollo astronauts, as much of it was dark during their missions.

Artemis II is a mission to send the four around the moon, taking them farther than any human has ever been. Their goal is to help prepare for Artemis III, which will see boots on the moon for the first time since 1972.

While they are tasked with testing out the spacecraft's many systems and abilities, the four are also very much human guinea pigs in space.

During the Apollo missions of the 1960s and '70s, NASA collected rock samples from the moon and conducted experiments on its surface, but one thing it didn't do is learn more about how the human body reacts to deep space.

Artemis is looking to change that.

"Our top priority is to bring our friends safely home," said Jacob Bleacher, NASA chief exploration scientist, at a press conference last week.

"To do that, we have developed an integrated research campaign that will support all of our future Artemis missions to make sure that we can travel safely in space and bring everybody home. And that really starts with trying to understand the space environment."

Canada has the most crypto ATMs per capita, but no industry-specific regulations

EES launches on Sunday, Oct. 12 and will be gradually rolled out across the external borders of 29 European countries by April 10, 2026.

If you’re a visitor heading to Europe for a short stay, you’ll need to sign up for the EES, a new automated IT system. A “short stay” refers to a visit to Europe lasting up to 90 days within 180 days. Registering for the EES is mandatory, regardless of whether or not you require a visa to travel to Europe.

Any traveller who crosses the external borders of any of the 29 European countries listed below will be required to register.

A New Brunswick seafood processing company has been fined $1-million for violating rules of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program – the largest ever fine levied by the federal government against companies that use the program for migrant labour.

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40 workers from Mexico and the Philippines began working at the processing plant in May, 2023, under employment contracts between six and 12 months in duration. But workers had their hours cut substantially from what was stated on their contract, according to MWAC. For example, they were initially scheduled to work 12- to 16-hour days, but had their hours reduced to 20 hours a week. They were still paid for 30 hours of weekly work, as per their employment contracts, but were told that the company was “owed” the difference and they would have to find some way of repaying the company, MWAC alleges.

Estefania Montes, a migrant worker from Mexico, told The Globe she struggled to cover her basic living expenses because Bolero only scheduled her to work for 16 of the 25 weeks in her employment contract. She entered Canada in May, 2023, on a one-year work permit under the TFW program and immediately began employment at Bolero. She said she could not afford to pay rent to her employer (Bolero provided migrant workers with accommodation) because her weekly wages were much lower than what was stated she would receive in her contract with Bolero.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-new-brunswick-seafood-processor-bolero-tfw-fine/