They aim to please:
Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree pleaded inexperience following a Commons grilling in which MPs challenged his unfamiliarity with public safety issues. Anandasangaree is the sixth safety minister in six years: “He doesn’t even know.”
**
The federal cabinet will decide which energy projects are deemed “nation-building,” says Prime Minister Mark Carney. However cabinet would not override objections from any premier under a bill tabled in the Commons, he told reporters: “Why did you decide to make this a political decision?”
Why did you, Carney?
**
Canadians choose private sector weather forecasts over Environment Canada, says in-house federal research. The finding followed 2022 disclosures the department scooped data on hundreds of thousands of users who downloaded a government weather app: “The most common apps cited included The Weather Network, AccuWeather and ‘the app that comes on my phone.'”
How interesting:
Well look at this interesting information. pic.twitter.com/t0xGhAV5fD
— Ryan Gerritsen🇨🇦🇳🇱 (@ryangerritsen) June 7, 2025
Is that, too, in a blind trust?
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly is indicating that a crackdown on dumping of cheap foreign steel into Canada is coming soon– a move that will help cushion the blow for Canada’s big three steel producers that are grappling with U.S President Donald’s Trump’s 50-per-cent tariffs.Algoma Steel Group Inc. chief executive Michael Garcia has argued on multiple occasions that mills from China, South Korea, Malaysia, India, Vietnam, the Middle East and Turkey regularly dump steel into Canada and make it nearly impossible for the company to compete in its home market. In meetings with federal politicians over the past few few days, he’s pleaded for Canada to immediately place tariffs on all of these countries.In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Ms. Joly said that she’s heard the message loud and clear and strongly hinted that action is coming on dumping.“Our goal is to make sure that we protect our jobs, and therefore we need to protect our market, and we won’t accept any form of unfair trade practices. We need to counter dumping period,” she said.
I think that someone owes Trump an apology.
There is simply no way to make a 2% spending pledge on the NATO commitments because we have no money:
Prime Minister Mark Carney is pledging that Canada will achieve NATO’s spending target of two per cent of GDP on defence this year — five years ahead of his prior commitment which promised to meet the mark by 2030.
Now, before we start ... :
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.”
So, where is this money going to come from?
The stink never goes away:
Tech-shy, not guilty: Amish beat $38K in ArriveCan fines
— Rebel News (@RebelNewsOnline) June 6, 2025
The Democracy Fund overturns convictions against Amish families punished for refusing to use Trudeau’s mandatory COVID app.
Details with @SheilaGunnReid: https://t.co/F7XH5KOx8i
He runs away, just like the other guy did:
Prime Minister Mark Carney abruptly cut short a visit with a Muslim group Friday amid protestors’ chants of “Free Palestine.” Carney did not comment on remarks by the chair of the Canadian Muslim Association who accused Jews of genocide: “These are Muslim values. These are Canadian values.”
These, too, are Canadian values:
An act of vandalism at the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa is an antisemitic attack, the co-chair of the monument committee said Monday.
**
According to Gwyn’s Toronto Star piece, Macdonald’s first and most important achievement was the creation of Canada itself: “Had there been no Macdonald, there would be no Canada for anyone to be a citizen of.”
“Macdonald’s overall contribution to Canada was irreplaceable… The best description of what he did for this country is that because of him, Manifest Destiny never became manifest. This is to say that the Americans’ assumption that all of North America was intended by God or geography to be theirs would never be realized.”
Other achievements during Macdonald’s two terms in office — 1867-1873 and 1878-1891 — were the extension of Canada from sea to sea, partly by building a railway the entire way from eastern Canada to the West Coast; high tariffs to protect Canadian companies from their far more efficient American rivals; creation of the North-West Mounted Police (today, the RCMP,) which he dispatched to the Prairies to impose the rule of law throughout the region.
“South of the U.S. border, the gun ruled. North of it, the law ruled. Below the border, not a single jury ever judged a white man guilty of mistreating native people. Above it, white men were hauled into the courts on charges of treating natives badly."
“Prairie Indians understood the difference. The name they gave to the border was The Medicine Line, suggesting that above it there might just be some fair play and healing.”
Gwyn also acknowledged Macdonald’s alleged faults, albeit tempered by positive observations:
“He most certainly had flaws. He was a drunk, the single fact about him most Canadians are aware of. Known by very few, though, is the fact Macdonald quit, an accomplishment even more difficult in that hard-drinking era than it is for addicts today.”
“In the past few years, Macdonald’s reputation has been assaulted by an entirely new and a deadly accusation. This is that he was a ‘racist’ who, once the buffalo had been exterminated, deliberately allowed Indians to starve in order to clear the way for his railway. Sometimes, 'racist' is escalated into an accusation of him having a ‘genocidal’ policy.
“His actual policy for getting food to the Indians — one his critics always avoid citing — was: “We cannot as Christians, and as men with hearts in our bosoms, allow the vagabond Indian to die before us… We must prevent them from starving, in consequence of the extinction of the buffalo and their not yet (having) betaken themselves to raising crops.”
"Circumstances made that task extremely difficult. Amid a depression, few Canadians were prepared to be generous. The opposition Liberals seized the opportunity and repeatedly charged that by feeding native people, Macdonald was turning them into permanent dependents of government."
“In effect, Macdonald is now a scapegoat so that guilt for misdeeds done in one way or other by all Canadians can be transferred to him alone.”
In 2020, Richard Gwyn died of Alzheimer’s disease, at the age of 86. It was just a few short weeks after Black Lives Matter protesters splashed a statue of Sir John A. with pink paint at Queen’s Park, Toronto. Had he still been in good enough health to understand this mindless desecration, it would surely have deeply saddened him.
This vandalism was only one of several instances of statues of the first prime minister damaged or removed from public view across the country because of Macdonald’s role in establishing Canada’s Indigenous Residential School system.
What Gwyn called scapegoating can no better be seen than by a June 5 Globe and Mail Editorial Board commentary excoriating the government of Ontario’s decision to remove the security boards from the repaired statue because Macdonald’s “legacy is stained by the establishment of a national residential school system aimed at stamping out Indigenous culture, causing generations of trauma.”
Instead, it suggests, “To reflect Macdonald’s legacy properly, remove the protective box now hiding his statue — and erect an equally prominent memorial to the victims of residential schools.”
The editor also claims such a memorial should be in the hands of indigenous bands who best know “how to commemorate that sorry [Indian Residential School] history, in which thousands of children died and more than 150,000 in total were victimized. Position Macdonald’s statue so he is left to gaze at the memorial.”
These inflammatory claims obscure the known facts about these boarding schools.
These facts show that thousands of children were sent to these schools to escape the trauma of dysfunctional home life on poverty-stricken reserves.
They also prove that “stamping out Indigenous culture” was impossible given the short period most students spent in these schools. Moreover, few deaths — and even fewer burials — of indigenous students took place on school property.
Lastly, the indigenous-led Truth and Reconciliation Commission charged with reporting on the history, operation, and legacy of the boarding schools never claimed, let alone proved, that 150,000 students “were victimized” in any way while attending them.
Each of these counter-claims is carefully documented here, here, here, here, and here.
Did Sir John A. Macdonald’s policies and programmes always prove acceptable or beneficial to all indigenous people? Of course not. More importantly, no rational or objective person would ever claim he was anything close to a perfect prime minister.
Still, Richard Gywn’s last sentence in his 2015 essay asks and answers the most critical question of all: “Who else among our 22 [now 24] other prime ministers has done more than Sir John A. Macdonald did for his country?”
**
The City of Hamilton, a champion of selective inclusivity, has a problem with a Christian Heritage Party (CHP) billboard advertisement it claimed could make a transgendered person at a bus stop feel “threatened.”
WARNING: The political ad in question will grievously offend the biologically confused.
It features a smiling woman and states 'Woman: An Adult Female.' Below, it reads 'Bringing Respect for Life and Truth to Canadian Politics.'
The city’s refusal in 2023 to display the ad also arose from a professed duty to protect residents from being exposed to conservative values.
(Sidebar: indeed! If women really existed, wouldn't our scientists have seen one out in the wild? HUH?!)
**
As police in Ontario increasingly investigate killings of women and girls as femicides, advocates say a firm definition of the term must be embedded in the Criminal Code.
It’s a change they hope could be on the table soon after Prime Minister Mark Carney proposed cracking down on intimate partner violence in this year’s federal election campaign.
Ottawa police, who have been using the term since August 2024, said last week they were investigating the death of a 54-year-old woman as a femicide. They arrested a 57-year-old man and charged him with second-degree murder.
I'll just leave these right here:
Bill C-233 would have amended the Criminal Code to make it an offence for a medical practitioner to perform an abortion knowing that it is being sought on the grounds of the child’s sex. At Wednesday’s second reading vote, the House of Commons defeated the bill 82-248.
Eighty-one Conservative Members of Parliament — or two-thirds of the caucus — voted in favour of the bill at second reading. If passed at that stage, it would have moved to the Standing Committee on Justice for further study and expert testimony.
“I fully expected yesterday’s vote result,” continued Wagantall. “I felt well-supported within my own caucus on this issue. Unfortunately, members of the other parties were not able to vote their conscience on whether sex-selective abortion should continue to have a place in our country.”
**
A witness who stormed out of a parliamentary committee meeting in tears Wednesday is demanding an apology from a Liberal MP who put a halt to a planned discussion about violence against women in favour of a debate about abortion rights.
Cait Alexander was on Parliament Hill to provide testimony at a rare summer hearing of the House of Commons status of women committee when she says Liberal MP Anita Vandenbeld re-victimized her as a survivor of domestic violence.
“I am completely flabbergasted,” Alexander said in an interview after the meeting Wednesday.
“This is exactly what it felt like these last few years, where I’m literally showing my bludgeoned, bleeding, bruised body and the people who have authority and power in this country are saying, ‘Well, we care about you.’ But then they silence you.”
Vandenbeld, who serves as parliamentary secretary to the Minister of International Development, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Alexander was one of two witnesses who stormed out of the meeting organized so MPs could hear from advocates for domestic violence victims and a deputy chief of the Peel Regional Police.
(Sidebar: and let's not forget the light sentences.)
**
The police diver who swam to the bottom of the canal found Zainab Shafia in the front passenger seat, her face slumped forward, her fingernails painted a light shade of blue. She was 19 years old and had 10 cents in her pocket. Her black cardigan, drenched after hours underwater, was on backwards.
Sahar, her younger sister, was in the rear of the sunken Nissan Sentra, dressed in a pair of tight jeans and a sleeveless top. Her belly button was pierced (a stud with twin stones) and her nails were polished two different colours: purple on the fingers, black on the toes. As always, the stylish 17-year-old was within reach of her cellphone—about to become a crucial clue for investigators above.
Geeti’s lifeless body was floating over the driver’s seat, one arm wrapped around the headrest, the window beside her wide open. Like Sahar—the big sister she idolized—Geeti had a navel ring underneath her brown shirt. Detectives would later find a note she had scribbled to Sahar, full of hearts and red ink: “i WiSH 2 GOD DAT TiLL iM ALIVE I’LL NEVER SEE U SAD!” She was 13.
Rona Amir Mohammad was slouched in the middle back seat, her soaked black hair rubbing against Sahar’s. At 52, she was the eldest of the dead: the girls’ supposed “auntie,” but in fact their dad’s first wife in a secretly polygamous Afghan clan. The day she drowned, Rona put on a blue shirt, three pairs of earrings, and six gold bangles. She was not wearing a seatbelt. None of them were.
Indeed, Canada in a nutshell.
I was assured that we would be tripping over our dead:
Fred Fischer, a lawyer representing Toronto’s Board of Health, one of the intervenor groups in the case, also told Justice John Callaghan of the Ontario Superior Court that reducing harm reduction services in Toronto during the ongoing opioid crisis would have severe consequences — more people will overdose and die.
A lawyer for another intervenor, a harm reduction coalition, put an even finer point on it. He said that one of the Toronto injection sites not affected by the legislation was anticipating such an immediate and overwhelming increase in overdose deaths in April, after the closures, that the site was in the process of hiring grief counsellors for its staff.
More than two months have passed since then, and now that we’re in June, you might be wondering: How many more people ended up dying because of the closure of these sites?
According to data that’s compiled by Toronto Paramedic Services and Toronto Public Health, the answer, so far, is none. In fact, the number of overdoses in Toronto for the month of April, the first month after the sites had closed, dropped notably.
Toronto had 13 fatal overdose calls in April, one less than in March, when the now-closed injection sites were still open. Thirteen is less than half the number of fatal overdoses across the city in April of last year, and significantly below the monthly average for all of 2024 (19).
Thirteen fatal overdoses are far lower than the average monthly number during the period of Covid-19 emergency between April 2020 and May 2023 (25). The last time 13 was the norm for monthly fatal overdoses was prior to the pandemic.
The number of calls for non-fatal overdoses in April was 161. This may sound like a lot but it’s the lowest monthly total so far this year in Toronto. And 161 non-fatal overdoses are 55 per cent less than the 359 that occurred in April of 2024.
Remarkably, in the third week of April, there were zero fatal overdose calls, something that hasn’t happened in Toronto in months.
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