Canada

Canada’s National Observer has found that The Epoch Times has now set its sights on Canadians. In the past 12 months, the organization has spent over $300,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads promoting political surveys to collect the emails of Canadians using a series of anonymous pages. Meta failed to detect the ads, allowing them to be viewed more than 22 million times, despite the company's repeated promises to prevent banned organizations from circumventing its policies.

The case exposes what experts call a “simulacra of transparency” — the appearance of platform oversight without real enforcement, said Robert Neubauer, a communications professor at the University of Winnipeg who studies digital influence operations. “All they have to do is just change the name, and they can use the exact same content.”

Neubauer warns that this lack of enforcement is a symptom of a greater shift away from moderation. In January 2025, Meta removed its independent fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram in the US, which was designed to limit the spread of false information.

Neubauer worries that similar changes could soon be rolled out in Canada, creating a “free for all” for disinformation campaigns.

Boy voluntarily entered car 'so that the other youth could record the interaction,' Airdrie RCMP say

A 12-year-old boy escaped from the car of an alleged abductor that he and a group of other children arranged to meet as part of a "catch a predator scheme" they had devised on the Snapchat app, according to Alberta RCMP, who are strongly discouraging this type of vigilante activity.

There are so many ways this could go wrong.

While perusing some coffee to buy from my favourite roaster that also is extremely transparent about pricing, this caught my eye:

$7.35 USD per lb including $0.65 USD per lb "reciprocal" tariff placed on Ethiopian imports. * This coffee entered the US before being imported into Canada.

Hm. Seems the niche importer they worked with to access these particular beans was American. Since we're a small market, I suspect this kind of thing is going to be happening a lot.

I got an initial take from an LLM and apparently the company importing from Ethiopia and re-exporting to Subtext is eligible for a refund on the duty (a "drawback") but a big, um, drawback of that is that it's fairly onerous:

• Many importers use a drawback specialist or broker because the paperwork is complex; fees are usually contingency-based (e.g. 20–30% of the recovered duty).
• For small, irregular shipments, filing costs often outweigh the refund, so many small importers simply don’t bother.
• For large distributors or commodities with steady re-export flows, drawback is routine and worthwhile.

Curious if anyone has similar anecdotes or run across an attempt to quantify this sort of trade flow and effect of US tariffs? I wonder if the impact of this across every little thing adds up to a meaningful amount of inflation?

Maybe I'm just too chronically online, but people seem to complain a lot more about Tim Hortons than other fast food places. Even though they have a lot of the same issues.

Edit: I guess I have bad taste in fast food. I like Tims 🤷‍♀️. I think the prices are reasonable for fast food, and their stuff tastes better than mcDonalds. I don't drink coffee much so I can't compare to other places. I can get why people don't like the company itself though.

Published Aug 18th, 2025
Written by former NDP MP, Peggy Nash

Air Canada workers are on the front lines of defending a crucial constitutional right from being eroded. We must support them with everything we've got.

Over 70 per cent of this workforce at Air Canada is women. I began my union work with Air Canada as a passenger agent at Pearson airport. In bargaining with Air Canada in the 1980s. I remember then, when we, overwhelmingly women, pressed for wage increases, and an Air Canada executive shrugged this off saying that as women we were just working for ‘pin money’. It seems their views of women have not advanced in over 40 years.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/44425022

Key takeaway:

According to police, the resident had woken up to find an intruder inside his apartment. The two had an "altercation" and the intruder suffered life-threatening injuries, police say, and was later airlifted to a Toronto hospital.

Police say the resident is facing charges for aggravated assault and assault with a weapon. 

The alleged intruder, 41, is also facing charges, including breaking and entering and possession of a weapon for dangerous purposes. Police say the man was also already wanted for unrelated offences.

The homeowner does not deserve to be treated as a criminal for defending himself, his family and his home! Canada needs sane self defence laws!

hope this is ok with the sub