"I Have A Lot of Friends Named Albert!" ... Or Something

Not one of us.

Not anymore: 

Mark Carney misidentified the first Alberta prime minister in a videotaped tribute to “great Albertans,” records show. Carney’s office could not name the first Alberta prime minister when asked: “I think when I come to Parliament of the great Albertans.”

 

Also - that sounds like blackmail to me: 

Prime Minister Mark Carney warned that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s referendum question on potential separatism is a “very dangerous bluff” and argued that it is “not helpful” to ask such questions.

Speaking to reporters from a residential construction site in Ottawa, Carney had a stark warning for Albertans ahead of Smith’s referendum question on provincial sovereignty in the fall: be wary of what you’re voting for.

“It is often advanced that ‘vote for this, and it’s a free option’, ‘vote for this, and we will strengthen your hand in future negotiation.’ That is a very dangerous bluff,” Carney said.

 

What is dangerous is keeping oil in the ground when we could be sweeping up.

But, you know, Brookfield.

 

 

 

Minority Oligarchies Want to Throw Their Weight Around, Too

Getting rather big for their taxpayer-funded britches:

Indigenous Canadians should be formally consulted on all new foreign treaties, the Assembly of First Nations has told the Senate. Consultation with chiefs must be mandatory, they said: “First Nations have engaged in trade since time immemorial.”

 

Why?

Did you do anything to even secure meetings?

Will pay into the bottomless Ukrainian kitty? 

How are those grave funds coming along? Did you find anything yet?:

May 27, 2026, is the fifth anniversary of the announcement from the Kamloops First Nation, in which Chief Rosanne Casimir told us that ground penetrating radar (GPR) had located 215 previously unknown graves containing the remains of missing Indigenous children.

Media, politicians, and academics uncritically accepted the story. The New York Times even amplified it by speaking of a “mass burial site,” making it sound like the outcome of a civil war. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered the Canadian flag to be flown at half-mast on federal buildings for almost six months, an unprecedented display of public mourning. MP Leah Gazan persuaded the House of Commons to vote that the Indian Residential Schools constituted a genocide. The resolution had no legal effect, but the impact on public opinion was substantial.

Despite all the hype, the Kamloops narrative began to fall apart almost immediately. Sarah Beaulieu, the Kamloops GPR operator, cautioned that excavations would be necessary to confirm the findings because GPR could discover soil anomalies but not identify what was underground. An alternate explanation for the 215 soil anomalies emerged when it was re-discovered that the Kamloops Indian Residential School had installed a sewage disposal system in the 1920s with thousands of feet of weeping tile in the area where unmarked graves were allegedly found.

Difficulties continued to pile up. Independent researchers found death certificates showing the place of burial for almost all students who died while attending the Kamloops school. So, who were these missing children? No one came forward with the names of children who had disappeared. In any case, the claim was implausible because both the Indian Affairs bureaucracy in Ottawa and the school administrations kept detailed lists of all students. The schools were supported by per capita payments, so they wanted to ensure they got all the money to which their enrolment entitled them, while officials in Ottawa wanted to ensure they didn’t overpay.

On the third anniversary of the Kamloops announcement, the First Nation’s leaders threw in the towel, admitting that what had been found were not graves but soil anomalies that might be potential grave sites. But the Kamloops narrative has acquired a life of its own and is now embedded in the minds of true believers.

Earlier this month, we also learned that a CBC-affiliated comedy series called Northland Tales conducted an elaborate hoax, attempting to embarrass several high-profile critics of the Kamloops narrative, such as academic Frances Widdowson, B.C. MLA Dallas Brodie and MP Aaron Gunn. Should public money be spent to trash the reputations of people who take one side in a public debate?

The CBC sting operation was obviously a hoax, but was the Kamloops narrative a hoax in the same sense of being a deliberate deception? Some think so, but I don’t. I believe it was confirmation bias, caused by an inexperienced GPR operator meeting a tribal leadership wanting to believe their own folklore about unmarked graves and missing children. That the Kamloops leadership ultimately repudiated the finding of human remains showed goodwill. But goodwill or not, the original announcement unleashed a moral panic that will persist for years.

In the wake of the Kamloops announcement, Parliament adopted the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which is now unsettling the received constitutional jurisprudence of Aboriginal title. Perhaps as significant (and more sinister in my view) is the attempt of MP Leah Gazan and sympathetic academics to criminalize residential school “denialism.”

Gazan said in the House of Commons on Oct. 31, 2025: “Denialism is spreading: twisting facts, denying genocide and reigniting harm. It is not only hurtful; it is dangerous.” Her solution for dissent is to amend the Criminal Code to make it illegal.

Let this sink in for a minute. A politician is urging other politicians to regulate the writing of Canadian history, prosecuting historians who don’t agree with the official interpretation of the evidence. Gazan’s private member’s bill probably won’t pass. The real danger is that the Liberal government may add it to a piece of its own legislation and pass it with its new majority. Let us hope the governing party remembers that its name “Liberal” is derived from the Latin liber, meaning “free.”

 

So, people who get millions of taxpayer dollars to locate children for whom there are already records now want to dabble in international affairs?

What can go right?

The audacity!, some might exclaim.

 

 

 

And Yet We Pay For Both the CBC and the CRTC

To wit:

New CRTC data confirm a sharp generational divide between Canadians who rely on TV newscasts and those who get their news on the internet. “A lower proportion used regular television as a primary source for their news and information content,” said in-house research. 

 

Two unaccountable agencies that serve no purpose in the twenty-first century.

 

Here We Go Again

Like so:

May 27 of this year will be the fifth anniversary of the shocking announcement that the unmarked graves of 215 missing children had been found on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. But the announcement turned out to be a nothing-burger. On the third anniversary, the band’s leadership admitted that ground penetrating radar (GPR) had found only “soil anomalies” that were “potential” graves.

Now, just in time for the fifth anniversary of the Kamloops non-discovery, the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation of northern Alberta has announced the discovery of 62 potential grave sites on its reserve. They claim they are looking for the remains of “82 children between the ages of seven and 16, who went to St. Francis Xavier Residential School between 1907 and 1962.”

In some ways, this effort is more sophisticated than the Kamloops grave hunt. The searchers are using multiple imaging technologies, not just GPR. The work is being supervised by Dr. Kisha Supernant, a prominent archaeologist from the University of Alberta. And the Nation is avoiding exaggerated claims about what has been found.

Nevertheless, the conceptual foundations of the project seem fundamentally flawed. First, who are these 82 children whose burial sites are unknown? What relation do they have to the 45 named students who are listed by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation as having died while attending the school?

Second, the searchers are using their equipment in known burial grounds. According to the CBC story, “Nine of the 62 are not within a cemetery location … but rather in areas where there's likely to be buried human remains.” Let me reverse that contorted phrasing in the interests of clarity. Fifty-three of these 62 possible graves are in recognized cemeteries, and nine are in other places known to have been used as burial sites.

The true headline should be, “Searchers find possible graves in cemeteries.” And, to quote Dr. Supernant, “We have no idea if these are children from the residential school or not … It's possible that some of them could be, we really just don't know that yet.” Only the ever-credulous CBC could build a national news story out of such meagre information.

This is just the latest in a long line of post-Kamloops announcements that missing children’s remains had been found, or may have been found, or could be found in the future. But not one verified grave of a child who attended an Indian residential school has actually been found.

All this fruitless searching is possible only because of federal government funding. “Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation is applying for funding to continue the work through a federal program called the Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund. ‘I think this is just the beginning of a lot of research,’ [Chief] Sunshine said.”

Your tax dollars at work.

 

 

Good

This:

Proton VPN has become the latest tech company to oppose the Liberal government’s proposed legislation on lawful access to data, saying there is “no universe” in which the company would scrap its policy against logging users’ data.

Ottawa’s Bill C-22, also known as the Lawful Access Act, would expand law enforcement’s authority to access digital information and subscriber information. It would also require digital service providers to retain metadata about user activities for up to a year, and force telecommunications and online service providers to grant authorities access to user data.

The federal government has said the goal of the bill is to provide law enforcement with tools to better tackle crime. The legislation is being studied by the House of Commons public safety committee, where stakeholders and experts are providing recommendations to improve it.

Proton VPN, based in Switzerland, said on May 19 that the European Union’s highest court had “struck down this type of mass data retention legislation twice already, suggesting it won’t stand up to scrutiny.”

The 2006 EU Data Retention Directive would have compelled all internet service providers and telecommunications service providers in Europe to collect and retain subscriber information, but the European Court of Justice declared the directive unlawful in 2014.

Proton VPN General Manager David Peterson said that complying with foreign surveillance orders without a legal process is a criminal offence under Swiss law.

“We'll defend our Canadian users and never compromise them. We will fight C-22’s application by every means available,” he added.

 

Oh, look - someone else is fighting for us!

 

No Country For Anyone

A new denialism has been born:

Philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the infamous phrase, the “banality of evil,” to describe her observation of Adolf Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. She observed how ordinary Eichmann appeared, how disturbingly normal. A bureaucratic instrument in the killing of six million Jews, Eichmann was indeed evil, but he performed his part banally — like part of a machinery operating routinely. Killing was a strategy. There was no emotion.

Similarly, what we learned this week with the timely release of Israel’s Civil Commission report on October 7 sexual violence, aptly titled “Silenced No More,” was eerily similar. The sexual crimes that were committed on that tragic day were implemented by fanatics and psychopaths but were pre-planned by Palestinian commanders much like the Nazi Eichmann. I refer to them as “Palestinian” and not as “Hamas” so as to strip away the mask we often use to pretend they are someone else — as we did by referring to “Germans” as “Nazis”.

Shortly after that horrific day, I walked the grounds of the Nova music festival where over 360 young people were murdered and raped. The ground was soaked in blood. The grass was charred. Personal effects littered the landscape. Witnesses described scenes of horror. People mutilated. Dead. Bleeding out. The road nearby was still scorched. The trees that many of the rape victims had been tied to leaned toward the ground, as if they themselves had been violated.

Silenced No More follows other critical reports on sexual violence including The Dinah Project. This latest report however is significantly more extensive. Its authors say it is the “first to systematically assemble, verify and analyze the evidence on sexual and gender-based violence during the attacks and in captivity.”

As the report says, “what emerges is not a collection of isolated incidents, but a coherent and repeated pattern of violence, carried out across multiple locations and phases, from the initial attacks, through abduction and transfer, to prolonged captivity and deliberate digital circulation of abuse.”

In other words, the sexual crimes themselves were heinous beyond comprehension. But they were planned and then executed by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s henchmen, not dissimilarly to the banality of evil Arendt described. Nazi commanders in Berlin drew up plans and motivated the SS to commit mass murder. Palestinian commanders went one step further beyond cold murder: barbaric rape, torture, and humiliation to terrorize an entire nation.

Israel’s detractors have tried to silence the rapes and heinous crimes that occurred on October 7. Feminist groups still refuse to condemn them. It took the United Nations months to acknowledge they even happened. Now this week, The New York Times published a controversial opinion piece that unleashed a firestorm by alleging rapes of Palestinian prisoners. This was done at the very same time the Silenced No More report was released. Coincidental? To the casual observer, it appears this was an attempt to distract and muddy the waters with controversy.

Either way, The New York Times article says it drew its alleged evidence from just 14 people. Conversely, the 300-page Silenced No More report drew its evidence from 430 testimonies and interviews; 10,000 photographs and videos and 1,800 hours of visual material. The researchers found rapes and gang rape, sexual torture, and mutilation, forced nudity, executions linked to sexual violence, post-mortem sexual abuse and sexual assaults carried out in the presence of family members — something none of us can possibly imagine.

What is unique especially was the Palestinian weaponization of digital media: “Perpetrators recorded, livestreamed and distributed acts of abuse and torture through social media and victims’ own digital accounts. In many cases, families first learned of the fate of their loved ones through images and videos sent by perpetrators.”

The people who committed these atrocities were Palestinians from Gaza who broke through the fence on the morning of October 7. Some were part of Hamas; many were ordinary civilians. All were Palestinians who committed heinous war crimes and crimes against humanity. Each of their victims had a name, had a family and lived a life. Silence No More is a report that will ensure they are not forgotten and that those who committed these evil atrocities will be held to account.