Your middle-of-the-week wink ...
From the most "transparent" government in the country's history:
Federal managers may have breached an Act of Parliament in awarding sweetheart contracts to a millionaire ArriveCan supplier, Auditor General Karen Hogan said yesterday. The contractor, GC Strategies Inc. of Woodlawn, Ont., is already under RCMP investigation for alleged fraudulent billing: “At any time we could have been stopped.”
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The Department of Public Works, largest landlord in Canada, is concealing figures to make it impossible for taxpayers to determine what it spends on office space including leases with suppliers, auditors said yesterday. “The department estimated before the pandemic 50 percent of the office space was underused,” said a report.
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Interest costs on the national debt will hit $70 billion by 2029, the Budget Office warned yesterday. It compares to a pre-pandemic debt servicing charge of $24.4 billion annually: “Debt charges will reach $69.9 billion by 2029.”
This won't be a problem in the future, will it?:
While Christians remained the world’s largest religious group at the end of the decade that ended in 2020, Christianity’s growth did not keep up with global population increase. But Islam – the world’s fastest-growing major religion – increased its share of the world population, as did the religiously unaffiliated, the Pew Research Center found in a report released Monday.
Even as the overall number of Christians – counted as one group, across denominations – continued to climb to 2.3 billion, the religion’s share of the world’s population decreased by 1.8 percentage points to 28.8 per cent, a falloff driven in large part by disaffiliation. The Muslim population, on the other hand, increased by 1.8 percentage points to 25.6 per cent, according to the report, which examined changes in religious demographics through an analysis of more than 2,700 censuses and surveys.
Also:
— @amuse (@amuse) June 1, 2025
The culture of death extends beyond the usual hot topics of abortion and euthanasia.
It also extends to things like loss of faith and values and the normalisation and embrace of cultures that are stunted and detrimental to stronger and more stable ones.
We've been to this precipice before. We know what happens when we fall.
And - there should be no light blue passports, no claims, no unwillingness to adapt or speak English. None of that:
Consider what we have normalized. We grant citizenship with barely a civic test, no language requirement worth enforcing and little expectation of loyalty beyond tax compliance. We proudly announce immigration targets in the hundreds of thousands while our housing stock lags, our social cohesion frays and public trust crumbles.
None of this is an accident. It is the logical conclusion of viewing the country as a company, and its population as a customer base to be expanded endlessly, without regard for the cultural, spiritual or institutional foundations that make collective life possible in the first place.
And yet, we are told this is “inclusive,” even “just.” But inclusion without integration isn’t unity — it’s fragmentation. Justice without memory isn’t fairness — it’s erasure.
You can see this everywhere in the Anglosphere. In Britain, national identity has been reduced to bland civic values and royal pageantry, while the actual fabric of Englishness has eroded. ...
And here in Canada, we have taken the worst lessons of each. We have built a society in which the only shared value is economic growth, and even that is slipping away.
We speak of reconciliation but have abandoned rootedness. We talk about “communities” but fear the idea of a common culture. We boast about our diversity while shunning any real attempt at unity.
When people feel alienated in their own country, we tell them to check their privilege. When they long for identity, we call them intolerant. When they worry about the future of their children, we show them a carefully curated graph with some cold economic figures.
This is not just a policy failure, it’s a moral failure. A country is not an economic zone. It’s not a human resources department. It’s not a project in demographic engineering. A country is a home, a story, a people. It is a chain of memory binding the living to the dead and to those yet to be born.
If citizenship is just a contract, it will be broken. If culture is just cuisine, it will be consumed. And if nationhood is just numbers, it will eventually be replaced by something colder and far more dangerous.
Canada must remember what it is, or risk ceasing to be anything at all.
A majority of Canadians reject the idea they live on stolen Indigenous land, and the older people are, the more likely they are to say they don’t, according to a new public opinion poll.
Among all respondents across Canada, 52 per cent said they did not live on stolen Indigenous land, with 27 per cent saying they do. The remaining 21 per cent said they didn’t know or declined to answer. ...
More respondents in the youngest cohort, 18-to-24-year-olds, agreed they did live on stolen Indigenous land (41 per cent) than rejected the idea (37 per cent). That contrasts with those in the oldest age group of 65 years or older, who overwhelmingly said they did not live on stolen land (65 per cent) with only 15 per cent agreeing they did.
(Sidebar: well, younger cohort, leave.)
In between them, the remaining age groups were on an unbroken sliding scale in their answers: the older they were the more likely they were to reject the statement they lived on stolen land, and, conversely, the younger they were the more likely they were to agree that they did.
The sentiment rejecting the idea they live on stolen Indigenous land was a low majority regardless of the respondents’ region in Canada, except for in Atlantic Canada, where most people still rejected the idea, but at a nationally low rate of 44 per cent, with 29 per cent of Atlantic respondents saying yes, they do live on stolen land.
We don't have to trade with China:
The Chinese national says she sent an estimated five to 10 packages but some were lost in transit.
U.S. prosecutors have charged another Chinese national for smuggling biological materials into the United States and lying about the scheme.
Han Chengxuan, a PhD candidate from Wuhan in central China, was arrested upon landing at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport on June 8. An FBI agent said authorities had intercepted four packages of biological materials that Han allegedly sent to members of a University of Michigan laboratory.
She was the third Chinese national charged in a week for smuggling materials for biological research. The previous two, accused of smuggling a crop-killing fungus, include a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan’s Molecular Plant-Microbe Interaction. The criminal complaint said Han was a Chinese Communist Party member who has shown loyalty to the Party.
The complaint said Han admitted to shipping an estimated five to 10 packages, but several were lost in transit. She said that her professors at both the Chinese and U.S. universities, as well as the recipients, had no knowledge of what she sent, characterizing them as a “surprises,” according to the FBI agent.
The packages contain neither the correct documentation nor the permit required for importing roundworm-related materials, the complaint noted.
The shipments allegedly went to two recipients: one active member of the lab and another among the faculty and staff at the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan.
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F. graminearum is a concerning fungus, as it can contribute to billions of dollars in agricultural losses, Gary Bergstrom, professor emeritus at Cornell University specializing in plant pathology, told The Epoch Times.
The fungus typically infects crops during the flowering season in rainy weather, according to Bergstrom. It affects kernel development in grains and can significantly reduce yield if not treated. It can also contaminate crops with mycotoxins—toxins produced by fungi that can cause poisoning in humans and livestock when consumed.
For example, the fungus can infect corn either through the stalk or through the top of the ear, causing “ear rot.” The infection leads to mold growth in kernels, significantly reducing yield and producing inedible corn.
F. graminearum releases four different mycotoxins, the best-known being deoxynivalenol (DON).
DON, also called vomitoxin, can induce vomiting and food poisoning-like symptoms in humans and animals.
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The deal follows two days of talks in London, where rare earth exports were a major point of contention. Trump said the agreement — pending final approval from both him and Chinese President Xi Jinping — also includes a provision allowing Chinese students to continue studying at US colleges.
"Our deal with China is done, subject to final approval with President Xi and me," Trump said in an online post.
"Full magnets, and any necessary rare earths, will be supplied, upfront, by China. Likewise, we will provide to China what was agreed to, including Chinese students using our colleges and universities (which has always been good with me!)."
"We are getting a total of 55% tariffs, China is getting 10%. Relationship is excellent! Thank you for your attention to this matter!"
Did Trump forget the fungus? The fungus?!
Canada does not have a justice system but a legal one:
A B.C. man convicted on child pornography charges has been allowed to serve his sentence in the community, in part because of the “relatively modest” size of his collection, a judge has ruled.
Mark Keenan pleaded guilty to possessing and distributing child pornography in Kelowna provincial court, and was handed a conditional sentence of two years less a day.
The 54-year-old will be under house arrest for the first 18 months of his sentence, then bound by a 6 p.m. curfew for the remainder.
Also - as Bill Shakespeare said: "He that doth fuss around shall, heretofore, find out":
When will the mother claim that her bratty snowflake was turning his life around?
Burn:
The California governor is seeking an emergency court order to halt troop involvement in Los Angeles.
A federal judge has denied California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s request for an emergency restraining order aimed at stopping President Donald Trump and the Department of Defense from federalizing the California National Guard and deploying U.S. Marines to Los Angeles, following violent clashes between immigration officers and protesters.
Ladies and gentlemen, Misters Sly Stone and Brian Wilson:
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