Canada

Earlier this month, the federal government announced billions in funding for its Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS) to help reindustrialize and reinvigorate Canada’s military and defence supply chains. Now, a group of Edmonton organizations is looking to make the city a hub for security and defence.

The Edmonton Region Defence Alliance (ERDA) is a newly formed, partner-led consortium of leaders across innovation, aviation, workforce, and economic development based in the Edmonton Metropolitan Region (EMR). Led by a steering committee that includes the University of Alberta, the Northern Institute of Technology (NAIT), Alberta’s Industrial Heartland, the Edmonton International Airport, and Edmonton Global, the ERDA’s purpose is to advocate for the EMR as a defence hub and to serve as a bridge between regional organizations and the federal government’s DIS needs.

Sonia LeBel, juge « extrêmement préoccupant » le fait que des militaires israéliens aient donné des conférences dans des écoles au Québec.

IN DECEMBER 2025, United States president Donald Trump struck a deal that—uncharacteristically for such a spectacle-driven politician—barely registered among the general public.

The agreement committed the Belarusian government to releasing 123 political prisoners, a significant concession from one of Europe’s most entrenched authoritarian regimes. In return, Washington agreed to lift sanctions on Belarus’s potash exports—sanctions it escalated after the country’s rigged 2020 election and later expanded, in 2022, when Belarus allowed Russia to use its territory to invade Ukraine.

Why potash? Blame Canada. The United States can live without many imports. It can’t farm at scale without our potash. In 2024, the US imported about 12 million tonnes of the fertilizer from Canada, all of it dug from Saskatchewan, where it enters the US tariff-free under the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement (CUSMA). Cut that supply, and American agriculture could grind to a halt.

As CUSMA heads into renegotiation this summer, the mood in Washington appears confrontational. Reopening Belarusian exports would give the US access to one of the few alternative global reserves—and, with it, leverage in an area where it currently has little.

As workers filed out of Diageo's Amherstburg, Ont., Crown Royal bottling facility for the last time on Wednesday, some expressed anger — not just at the company that put them out of work, but at the provincial government for not following through on a promise to pull Crown Royal off shelves if the plant closed.

"You told me man to man that the day I walked out of here, being the last person, you were going to pull it off the shelf," said Doug Benekritis, the Diageo chair for Unifor Local 200, addressing Premier Doug Ford directly.

"As far as I'm concerned, I held up my end of the bargain and you didn't." Benekritis said the region helped propel Ford into government with its election of several Progressive Conservative MPPs but says he'll "never vote Conservative again."

O’Leary said that “with the benefit of our continued learnings,” the company “would refer the account banned in June 2025 to law enforcement if it were discovered today.”

The changes come after OpenAI’s head of policy, Chan Park, O’Leary and five others from the company met with members of Carney’s Cabinet on Tuesday in Ottawa — a meeting ministers later described as “disappointing.”

“We are reviewing OpenAI’s letter carefully and will have more to say in the coming days,” a spokesperson for Canada’s AI Minister Evan Solomon said in a statement on Thursday.

Canada’s Liberal government threatened to regulate AI chatbots if tech companies, like OpenAI, cannot demonstrate they have safeguards to protect Canadian users.

“Of course a failure occurred here. I mean, look what happened. This is a horrific tragedy,” Solomon said Wednesday.

Hmmm. The article indicates a broken window, and further 'medical and forensic evidence'. If the broken window was the point of access, it might indicate that a lot of the cuts sustained by the alleged intruder could be traced to the broken glass. That fact would change the entire scenario. It then becomes 'much ado about nothing'.

Canada is donating an additional $2 billion of military equipment, including more than 400 armoured vehicles, to Ukraine as the embattled Eastern European country's war with Russia rolls into its fifth year.

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the assistance on Tuesday at the same time as Global Affairs Canada announced additional sanctions on individuals and companies that are helping fuel Moscow's war effort, including Russian firms that specialize in artificial intelligence, drone production and individual tankers that smuggle Russian oil to market.

The prime minister also announced a three-year extension of Operation Unifier, the Canadian military training mission that has — since 2015 — helped instruct an estimated 47,000 Ukrainian soldiers.

"We're in it for the long haul," Carney said on his way into cabinet Tuesday on Parliament Hill. "Russia is failing. The sooner they come to the table and actually participate in peace negotiations, the better it will be."

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Speaking to journalists following the meeting, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia has not achieved its objectives in his country and that the next trilateral meeting aimed at getting a ceasefire — involving negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and the U.S. — would happen within a week or 10 days.

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Carney, who also participated in the coalition meeting, echoed Zelenskyy's sentiment.

"Russia is failing to achieve all of its objectives, four years into this conflict, 12 years if you include its annexation — its illegal annexation — of Crimea," Carney said.

"Four years on, Russia is failing militarily, strategically and economically."

Part of the enhanced sanctions package, announced Tuesday, targeted 100 ships that are part of Russia's "shadow fleet" of tankers.

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Archived link

A new artificial intelligence (AI) agent could equip Europe to better defend itself against the barrage of Russian disinformation attacks.

Cipher is Canadian-developed AI software that has proven to accurately and quickly detect Russian disinformation targeting Canadian networks, on both the far right and the far left of the political spectrum.

Now that Cipher has passed the testing stage, the researchers are training the AI agent to distinguish those same narratives in the Russian language.

The researchers hope it can be rolled out in Europe for those at the forefront of efforts to combat Russian operations that sow distrust in Western democracies and institutions.

Marcus Kolga, who runs the foreign disinformation monitoring platform DisinfoWatch in Canada, tested Cipher to see how well it stood up to his 20 years of experience reporting on foreign interference.

"What would usually take, for an analysis piece, maybe half a day to a day, was really being crunched down to a few hours, and (it) was scarily accurate," says Kolga, who tested out Cipher in its early stages and still uses the AI agent to expedite his work.

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The tool uncovered persistent efforts to deliberately sway Canadian public opinion on Ukraine with the goal of eroding the support Kyiv receives from one of its staunchest allies.

Brian McQuinn, an associate professor in international studies at the University of Regina, is one of the project leads. He has been researching the role of social media in armed conflict.

McQuinn worked with Kolga on the 2023 report The Enemy of My Enemy, which detailed how Russia uses information operations to undermine Canadian support for Ukraine amid the Russian invasion.

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The Cipher project began three years ago under the AI safety research program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). McQuinn worked with project co-lead Matthew Taylor, an associate professor in computing science at the University of Alberta, who directed a five-person team of engineers in creating the sophisticated software.

Beyond mapping out where Russian disinformation is spreading online, with reports processed down to the last 24 hours, Cipher also shows trending themes.

This type of analysis provides experts with more detail on how Russian operations are shifting over any period of time.

"We are able to track and show on a day-to-day basis ... where are the Russian networks investing their limited resources (and) what themes they are targeting day in, day out, and how they are changing over the weeks and over the months," says McQuinn.

"It really shows you the extent to which they are responding to events almost in real time."

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Deceptive narratives are often disseminated by Russian state-controlled outlets such as RT and Sputnik, then amplified by social media influencers. From there, they spread across Canadian social networks, occasionally making their way into mainstream news coverage.

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The next challenge for the Cipher team is fine-tuning it to more accurately predict how Russian disinformation will spin the narrative around any expected events. Experts like Kolga can then get ahead of the attacks to suppress how far they could spread.

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Police warn Moninder Singh, head of the Sikh Federation of Canada, his family are also at risk

Police in Canada warned a prominent Sikh activist of “credible threat” to his family’s life, days before the prime minister, Mark Carney, visits India in search of new trade deals.

Moninder Singh, who heads the Sikh Federation of Canada, said officers visited his home on Sunday, to warn him that a confidential police informant had passed information suggesting he and his family were at risk.

In 2023, the former prime minister Justin Trudeau accused India of orchestrating the high-profile assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, another Sikh activist and Canadian citizen. Canada’s federal police and spy agency later repeated the accusations.

Singh, a close friend of Nijjar, said he believed the Indian government was behind the most recent threat.

MBFC
Archive

Here is an Invidious link for the video (6 min.) (original is here)

Former Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland doubts the effectiveness of Canada's trade agreement with China, saying China should not be trusted.

"China today, when it talks to countries like Canada - and I would personally say this is sad - is casting itself as the reliable partner...my own view is we need to be a little bit skeptical of commitments from China."

"A lot of Canadians are now coming to the conclusion that Beijing can be trusted more than Washington. I think that's really sad ... and it is [also] not in the national American interest."

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Out of the gate, the Conservative Party of BC’s leadership race feels less like a search for the next premier and more like a purity test to identify the party’s most uncompromising conservative. This right-wing virtue signalling buries the party’s central challenge of broadening its appeal beyond its base.

In a recent poll conducted by Clear Impact Strategy, two-thirds of B.C. Conservative members appear haunted by worries their party could choose a closet liberal who does not lead with conservative principles.

Unsurprisingly, leadership candidates leaned into this fear. Yuri Fulmer, Caroline Elliott, Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Harman Bhangu, Bruce Banman and Sheldon Clare marketed themselves as some variation of a “real,” “reliable,” “strong” and “proud conservative” to “repel the centrist shift” “without apology.”

This is navel-gazing at its most parochial — a debate that forgets general-public normies outside of the conservative bubble.

Unsurprisingly, leadership candidates leaned into this fear. Yuri Fulmer, Caroline Elliott, Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Harman Bhangu, Bruce Banman and Sheldon Clare marketed themselves as some variation of a “real,” “reliable,” “strong” and “proud conservative” to “repel the centrist shift” “without apology.”

This is navel-gazing at its most parochial — a debate that forgets general-public normies outside of the conservative bubble.

For starters, conservatism is a broad, amorphous term. More damagingly, this kind of purity spiral encourages both members and leadership candidates to embrace an ideological maximalism focused on scoring cheap conservative cred in two ways.

The first is a candidate’s distance from any association with the defunct BC Liberal Party, despite how that party was the main electoral vehicle for conservative voters in British Columbia for nearly three decades.

The second scrutinizes past alignment with so-called “woke” liberal ideology, from reciting land acknowledgments to supporting sexual orientation and gender identity, or SOGI, resources in schools — an anti-woke version of cancel culture.

Global Affairs Canada has announced $8 million in funding for Cuba as the country grapples with U.S. President Donald Trump's oil embargo.

"This funding is part of an international assistance program to strengthen local food security and nutrition," according to a news statement from Global Affairs Canada (GAC).

GAC says the funding is meant "to scale up food and nutrition for vulnerable Cubans."

The funding — to be released immediately — will be delivered through partnerships with the World Food Program and the United Nations Children's Fund, the statement said.

Following the historic turnout of over 350,000 participants on February 14, 2026 (the largest diaspora demonstrations in the history of Toronto), Iranian-Canadians and supporters of freedom will once again gather in Toronto this Saturday in renewed solidarity with Iran’s Lion-and-Sun Revolution.

The rally comes in response to the regime’s recent mass killings and escalating repression inside Iran, and reaffirms the Iranian diaspora’s unwavering support for the people of Iran and their call for freedom, justice, and democratic transition, as well as to reiterate the requests from the Canadian government and the West. The rally will highlight the urgent need for international action, accountability for crimes against civilians, and increased pressure on the regime’s repression apparatus.

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The demonstration, organized by Cyrus the Great organization, will take start at 1:00 PM [Saturday, February 28, 2026] at Yonge Street and 16th Avenue in Richmond Hill moving north toward the intersection of Yonge Street & Major Mackenzie Dr.

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The Survivors Circle for Reproductive Justice said an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 individuals have been sterilized in Canada without proper consent — some as recently as last year.

We Canadians need to address the issue of forced sterilization in our own country before we start accusing and condemning other countries of the practice.

Health Minister Marjorie Michel says Canada needs to take action on men’s health, as she launched the first step toward a national strategy today.

The federal government is seeking feedback from people across the country, starting March 2.

Michel says the consultations are important to help the government understand the priorities as it looks to tackle the issues that lead men to poor health outcomes.

Data released by Movember Canada last summer shows men are three times more likely than women to die by suicide, and are less likely to ask doctors for help with a range of symptoms.

Movember has called for Canada to launch such a strategy, and is an independent partner in the work.

Michel made today’s announcement along with colleagues from other political parties, and says the issue is a non-partisan one.