Canada

No we do not want your monorail er um golden dome thank you very much.

Marci Shore (Historian) has left states and is now in Canada to begin teaching in fall. Great read.

The latest economic forecasts from TD Bank, BMO, National Bank and Deloitte all suggest that Canada could be heading towards a recession in 2025.

I just sent this email to my MP and you should too.

Dear Mrs. Elizabeth May,

I’m writing to propose something that might sound crazy at first—but I believe it's an idea worth serious national conversation: the Government of Canada should buy Tim Hortons and nationalize it.

Tim Hortons is undeniably a Canadian symbol. It’s been part of our shared national experience for decades. But the reality is, it’s not a Canadian company anymore. Since being sold to a foreign parent company, it’s felt less and less like the Tim Hortons we all grew up with.

It’s not just about ownership. It doesn’t employ Canadians like it used to—especially seniors, who often worked there part-time and genuinely loved the social connection and dignity that came with that work. Now, many of those jobs have disappeared or changed beyond recognition.

Visitors from around the world still come here excited to try “Tims,” thinking they’re about to experience something uniquely Canadian. What they often get instead is low-quality food and a disorganized, underpaid workforce. It reflects badly—not just on the company, but on Canada itself.

Nationalizing Tim Hortons could restore pride in something we all grew up with. It could mean better jobs, higher standards, and a stronger connection to Canadian communities and culture.

I hope you’ll consider raising this idea with your colleagues. At the very least, it’s time we started talking seriously about what we want our national institutions—including cultural icons like Tim Hortons—to look like.

Sincerely,

My name Address Phone number

As Canada's measles outbreak continues to grow, the country is at risk of losing its measles elimination status — a bar set by the World Health Organization.

"The risk is substantial," said Dr. Sarah Wilson, a public health physician with Public Health Ontario who has been tracking the measles outbreak in that province.

Ontario is now reporting more measles cases each week than it once saw over an entire decade, Wilson said. "It is a very different situation than what we experienced in the last decade since measles elimination was achieved," she said.

Canada's outbreak began in October 2024. That means if sustained transmission continues until October 2025, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) can revoke the elimination status.

Canada currently has more cases than any other country in the Americas, according to PAHO.

ON MARCH 5, hundreds of Nova Scotians gathered in front of Province House, the provincial legislature, in Halifax. Many held handmade signs, including one featuring Premier Tim Houston transformed into a Donald Trump doppelganger, and slogans like “Nobody voted for Tim Trump,” “Please dump the Trump playbook,” and “We want democracy. Not autocracy.”

The rally had been organized by community groups and labour organizations to push back against far-reaching legislation that Houston’s government introduced in February. The proposed omnibus bills would, among other things, overturn a four-decade moratorium on uranium mining, give the government more control over universities, and allow non-unionized civil servants to be fired without cause.

“No one knew this was coming,” says Lindsay Lee, one of the protesters, who works at the advocacy organization Ecology Action Centre. “This is not something people were consulted on in any way.”

Houston’s power plays follow a disturbing trend among Canadian premiers seeking to quash dissent and centralize executive control over decision-making, often to override the power of municipal governments or the legislative process. Alberta premier Danielle Smith introduced a bill last year that would allow the government to fire mayors and municipal councillors. Ontario’s Doug Ford is obsessed with tearing up Toronto bike lanes and has ranted about getting rid of “bleeding-heart” judges through American-style judicial elections. In British Columbia, David Eby introduced legislation in March that would allow the cabinet to bypass the legislature in order to respond to tariff threats. After public outcry, Eby walked back that portion of the bill.

As RCMP remain tight-lipped about the investigation into the disappearance of two young Nova Scotia children, a resident who lives near their rural home says she has turned over trail camera footage at the request of police spanning five days before they were reported missing.

Melissa Scott, 44, said she was visited on May 20 by two officers from the RCMP's major crime unit, who inquired if she had any trail cameras set up on her 16-hectare property in Glengarry Station, near the children's home.

Scott said she was given a USB drive to load her trail camera footage onto. She was initially asked to give them her footage from May 1 to May 3, but they later expanded their request to include April 27 to May 3.

Her Glengarry Station property is a roughly eight-kilometre drive from Lansdowne Station down dirt roads, but is also connected to it by train tracks and clearings for utility lines. It's roughly five kilometres east of the children's home as the crow flies.

Canada should ‘move on’ from Trump’s 51st state remarks, says Pete Hoekstra

Canada should ‘move on’ from Trump’s 51st state remarks, says Pete Hoekstra

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64597842

Canada Pension Plan Investments has dropped a net-zero by 2050 target for carbon emissions, according to an annual report released on Wednesday, following several Canadian financial institutions that have backtracked on climate commitments.

Several major Canadian banks, including BMO, TD Bank and CIBC, have also backtracked on climate commitments this year, announcing they were leaving a Net-Zero Banking Alliance backed by the United Nations.

Edited with a new headline.

Interesting podcast about the measles outbreaks in Alberta and Ontario. I got:

1. The outbreaks are primarily among unvaccinated Mennonite communities.
2. Heard immunity (thanks to vaccination) among the general population has prevented exposures from turning into infections.
3. Provincial health ministries are avoiding talking about Mennonites because they want to avoid stigmatization.
4. Provincial health ministries aren't holding regular briefings for political reasons.

But it's a podcast (and I'm too lazy to read the transcript) so maybe I got some of that stuff wrong.

Edit: Fixed the link to the transcript. Thanks @DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca!

Private clinics in Canada are selling access to personal health data without patients’ knowledge, according to a new study that says clients in the pharmaceutical industry are paying millions for this information.

“This is not how patients want their data to be used,” lead author Dr. Sheryl Spithoff told CTV’s Your Morning on Monday. “Patients are generally fine with sharing their data if it’s going to be used for research and health system improvement... but they’re very reluctant to have their data shared or held with for-profit companies.”

Spithoff is a family physician and scientist at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Published in the journal JAMA Network Open early this month, the new study focused on two unnamed health data companies that each had access to between one and two million patient records.

“The entities involved in the primary care medical record industry in Canada—chains of for-profit primary care clinics, physicians, commercial data brokers, and pharmaceutical companies—work together to convert patient medical records into commercial assets,” the study explains. “These assets are largely used to further the interests of the pharmaceutical companies.”

Spithoff’s research uncovered two models for how patient data is sold. In one, private clinics sell health information to a third-party commercial data broker that removes personal information before running analytics for the pharmaceutical industry. In another, private clinics are actually owned by a health data company that uses patient information to develop algorithms for pharmaceutical companies in order to identify and target patients with drug interventions.

In both cases, data is typically used without patients’ knowledge or consent.

“According to a data broker employee, no one sought consent from patients to access and use their records,” the study claims. “Instead, companies appeared to seek out physician consent to access patient records.”

Such practices, the study adds, “could potentially generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.”

Spithoff says the study identified a number of risks with the monetization and sharing of patient data.

“One is that this is likely to give the pharmaceutical industry increased control over medical practices, so we’re likely to see more of a focus on expensive new on-patent drug,” Spithoff said. “We’re also very concerned about how the data are being used—anytime data are been shared, there’s privacy risks to patients.”

A physician interviewed for the study told researchers that patient data is “snatched away.”

“It’s patient’s data but how is it that these companies even can own the data?” the physician said, according to the study. “I don’t see how it should even be legal to provide this information."

Thanks to Friday’s cabinet shuffle, more than half of the entire United Conservative Party caucus in the Alberta legislature is now a member of Premier Danielle Smith’s cabinet.

To be precise, 57.4 per cent of the 47 UCP MLAs now have a cabinet portfolio. When you subtract Speaker Ric McIver, just appointed to replace Washington-bound Nathan Cooper, that rises to 58.7 per cent.

This is not normal and it’s not an indicator of healthy government. There are now 27 cabinet ministers, two of them meaninglessly labelled as associates but in cabinet nevertheless, up from an already disproportionately large group of 25.

Fully four of them make up the junta, for lack of a better word, responsible for managing health care — or, as was argued in my hot take Friday, for dismantling public health care.