We now learn that Champagne’s partner, Anne-Marie Gaudet, is vice-president of the environment for Alto, the company behind the Liberals $90billion soon-to-be boondoggle to build a high-speed rail link from Toronto to Quebec City.
This information was disclosed in a letter released by
Champagne on Monday. The finance minister said he wrote the letter in September
and sent it to Prime Minister Mark Carney. In the letter, Champagne said he was
“proactively” applying a conflict-of-interest filter about Alto because of his
relationship with Gaudet.
The letter said Champagne was recusing himself from any
dealings with Alto.
Two months after apparently writing that letter, Champagne
presented a federal budget highlighting “Alto High-Speed Rail: Canada’s first
high-speed railway,” which is estimated to cost upwards of $90 billion.
Why is it that five months after that budget, Canadians are
only now learning about a rather large potential conflict of interest
concerning the minister and Alto?
If the minister thought it right to tell the prime minister,
surely he could have figured it out that it was also right to tell Canadians.
But he didn’t figure it out and worse the prime minister
hasn’t figured it out either.
On Tuesday, Carney was defending Champagne with the kind of
blind arrogance that was also the habitual fallback position of his
predecessor.
In a press conference, Carney thought the most important
thing to remind Canadians was that ministers have spouses and partners who are
allowed their own careers.
But that’s not the point. Of course they are allowed careers
and no one is objecting to Gaudet working for Alto.
What’s really important is to have a conflict-of-interest
process in place that is transparent and timely. Champagne’s decision to write
to his leader was not transparent and considering it has only just been made
public, it was certainly not timely.
Carney went on to say that Champagne had followed all the
rules.
“There are rules, there are regulations and the minister,
the finance minister, has followed those rules and regulations in notification
of the ethics commissioner in recusing himself from dealings with respect to
Alto,” said Carney.
The letter is not on the website of the ethics commissioner
and John Fragos, Champagne’s spokesman, said it was the ethics commissioner’s
decision not to post the finance minister’s letter on the website.
On Tuesday, the ethics commissioner confirmed that the
office was copied on the September letter but said because of confidentiality
rules all the information it was authorized to release was in the public
registry.
But why didn’t Champagne ensure that the letter was posted
for all to see? Even better, why didn’t he just announce it for all Canadians
to know?
Apparently, Champagne felt it important to let the ethics
commissioner know that in 2016 he had received two tickets to the benefit
performance of Céline Dion in Quebec. We know because it’s on the
commissioner’s website.
But Champagne didn’t think it important to make sure that a
possible $90 billion conflict of interest was similarly posted.
Maybe he thought that was not his job. But transparency is
part of his job and in that he singularly failed.
It’s not as if Champagne hasn’t been part of a government
that has had its share of ethical problems despite entering office with a
pledge for openness and transparency.
In case he’s forgotten a few “ethical” highlights would
include: giving WE Charity a sole-sourced $912-million contract despite having
connections to the Trudeau family; ditching Attorney General Jodie
Wilson-Raybould for refusing to cave to the prime minister’s demands; defying
the Speaker of the House of Commons by refusing to hand over documents and
Justin Trudeau taking a free vacation at the Aga Khan’s home in the Bahamas.
The Ethics Commissioner also found breaches of the rules by
former Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc (he handed a lucrative Arctic surf
clam licence to a company linked to his wife’s cousin); former International
Trade Minister Mary Ng (she helped in awarding two contracts to a company run
by a close friend) and former Finance Minister Bill Morneau who was found to
have broken ethics laws three times in the WE debacle.
Only a few years ago, a clearly frustrated outgoing Ethics
Commissioner Mario Dion told National Post that the Liberals needed to take
ethics more seriously. Their constant ethical failings were undermining public
trust, he said.
Referring to the Conflict of Interest Code, Dion said, “The
act has been there for 17 years for God’s sake, so maybe the time has come to
do something different so that we don’t keep repeating the same errors. After
17 years, maybe we should realize that something is not working.”
What’s not working is the Liberals who refuse to display any
humility when it comes to how they should act.
All for a railway that won't be built, too.
Paying for professional liars:
Cabinet polled catchphrases and logos in attempting to ease the housing crisis, records show. The Privy Council commissioned federal focus groups on marketing techniques most likely to convince Canadians that cabinet would address shortages: ‘Branding concepts could be used by the federal government.’
The limits to mass unvetted migration are cosmetic.
The Liberals can't afford to have the dwindling old-stock voting alone:
Last month, Bill C-12, the Strengthening Canada’s
Immigration System and Borders Act received royal assent. The law gives the
Minister of Immigration, Lena Diab, the power to pause applications “in the
public interest.” It also retroactively bars persons with expired one-year
permits (such as student visas, or temporary work permits) from subsequently
filing refugee claims, as they can now do when other avenues to permanent
residency are closed. It also eliminates the loophole whereby persons who enter
the country illegally and remain undetected for 14 days can also file a refugee
claim, under the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement.
(Sidebar: this trash.)
These changes would result in the dismissal of 19,000 such
refugee applications, according to Diab. That’s a drop in the bucket of the
288,271 pending asylum claims currently clogging the system. Immigration
lawyers and refugee advocates are nevertheless crying foul and plan to contest
the law in court. ...
How did we get here? For years, the Canadian government opened wide the floodgates on immigration, admitting five million newcomers, including students and temporary workers, between 2022 and 2024, in a country of 40 million people. This created predictable outcomes: colleges relied on foreign students to fund their operations. Hundreds of thousands moved into communities where there wasn’t enough housing, creating shortages and driving up rents. Students and temporary workers flooded the low-skilled job market, such as fast food, delivery and hospitality work. Today we have a youth unemployment rate of 14.1 per cent, more than double the national rate of 6.7 per cent.
Also - why stay in a failed country?:
Meanwhile, Jedwab said Canada is experiencing its own “exodus” of both citizens and permanent residents emigrating around the world, not just to the U.S., though it remains the top destination.
Citing Statistics Canada data, he noted roughly 120,000 left Canada in 2025, three per cent more than in 2024 and the fourth straight year the figure has climbed. More than half (53.9 per cent) were prime-aged workers between 25 and 49, “often mid-career professionals in peak-earning years,” many of whom are highly-skilled immigrants like doctors, engineers and scientists who are leaving at twice the rate of their lower-skilled peers.
Seniors (55 and older) account for almost one in seven permanent departures, “with 16,609 leaving in 2025 — an 80.5 per cent increase compared to a decade ago.”
As part of the data study, Jedwab sought to compare the socio-economic profiles of Canadian nationals living in the U.S. and Canadian citizens born in the U.S.
Using Canada’s 2021 national census to understand the latter and the 2021 American Community Survey for insight into the former, Jedwab found that “rather than politics or ideology, economic motivation is the main driver in moves across the border by Americans and Canadians respectively.”
“Even with controls in place, the data point to vast differences in education and income,” he noted.
For instance, U.S. citizens originally from Canada are more likely to earn incomes over CAD$100,000 and those workers aged 25-54 were far more likely to earn over that amount than their American-born population counterparts in Canada. In 2021, almost 36 per cent of the former were earning more than $100,000, more than double the U.S. national average (16.2 per cent).
In terms of education, both cohorts have more university degrees or higher than the overall population, but Americans hailing from Canada are slightly more educated.
The Canadian-born Americans are also more likely to be homeowners.
Jedwab also used the most recent American Community Survey from 2024 to get a better understanding of current Canadian-born Americans, finding that more than one in three are 65 and older (34.4 per cent), they are predominantly Anglophones and, despite almost half being well-educated (48.1 per cent), many of those who arrived between 2019 and 2024 earned less than $80,000 annually (64 per cent).
I'm sure this will invite the usual international indignation:
Many other family members also spoke out in favor of a death penalty for terrorists.
However, once the bill was signed, it was immediately condemned by European governments and a social media campaign based on lies was quickly whipped up, claiming that the bill was racist because it would execute Arab Muslims rather than Jews. All of that is completely false.
The bill only applies to non-citizen terrorists who live under military jurisdiction. It doesn’t apply to Israeli citizens, Jews or Arabs, or whatever their religion may be. The legal basis for this is much the same as the Article III military tribunals that were used in Gitmo after 9/11.
Media and social media accounts chose to completely ignore MK Limor Son Har-Melech, whose bill it was, because her story was too sympathetic, in favor of retweeting a brief clip from a Hamas-linked account, featuring Itamar Ben Gvir, a leader of her party, celebrating the bill.
There was no mention that the bill had come from a survivor of terrorism, that it had been championed by family members of terror victims, or that it was made necessary by disastrous hostage deals like the Shalit deal and the Hamas hostage deal which freed thousands of Islamic terrorists to kill again and which incentivized future attacks and future hostage taking.
The European Union claimed that the bill was “deeply concerning” because “the death penalty is a violation of the right to life”. The terrorists facing the death penalty violated the right to life of others and will do so again if they are set loose. As the EU would indeed like to see happen.
It's not capital punishment.
It's MAID.
I thought that everyone liked MAID.
We don't have to trade with China:
And now for something completely different:
At just 31 syllables in Japanese, the tanka (literally, “short poem”) spread quickly — reshared and rewritten as others swapped out Okamoto’s umbrellas for their own accumulations: “all these open tabs” or “all these clean clothes sitting in the dryer.”
To date, the tweet has received more than 55,000 likes and helped launch Okamoto’s literary career. She has since published two books — the tanka collection “Water Bus to Asakusa” (2022) and “Rakurai to Shukufuku” (“Lightning and Blessing,” 2025), a blend of poetry and essays — and contributed to anthologies and independent publications.
More broadly, the tweet sparked renewed interest in tanka itself.
Written in a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable structure, tanka is one of Japan’s oldest poetic forms, with a history spanning more than 1,300 years. Haiku, a shorter offshoot, developed from renga (linked verse) during the Edo Period (1603-1867). And while haiku has gained global recognition, it is tanka that has recently captured the attention of Japan’s younger generations.
“Haiku is more descriptive of the environment … frogs jumping into ponds and such,” says Damiana De Gennaro, an academic at Stockholm University whose main area of research is tanka communities, referencing a classic haiku by Matsuo Basho (1644-94). “But what tanka does is communication between people.”
Tanka doesn’t require a kigo (seasonal word) like haiku and often has an addressee, like Okamoto asking someone else — perhaps a romantic interest — whether they’re sure they want her.
The reworking of Okamoto’s poem, the kind of back-and-forth that fuels virality on social media, has precedent in tanka’s past: A practice known as “honkadori” in which poets borrow familiar phrases or structures from earlier works to create new poems. Rather than plagiarism, it is understood as homage.
That flexibility helps make tanka more accessible. It can be written quickly, in everyday language and with few formal constraints. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as people spent more time at home and online, many young Japanese gravitated toward what some have jokingly called “granny hobbies” like knitting, gardening and poetry.
De Gennaro says while tanka communities already existed before 2020, the pandemic increased interest. “Everyone was lonely, isolated and wanted to share something,” she says.
