Your middle-of-the-week info binge ...
Canada is merely
a carcass over which certain interested parties argue:
In the autumn of 2016, Canada 2020 found itself at the center of a political firestorm. The progressive think tank, founded a decade earlier by four Liberal insiders, stood accused of something that sounded almost medieval in its brazenness: cash-for-access. Corporate donors—TD Bank, Suncor, Enbridge, Manulife—were paying tens of thousands of dollars for events featuring Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet ministers. No public disclosure. No transparency. Just money changing hands for time with power.
The organization responded with what corporate lawyers call a "disclaimer"—a donor agreement stating contributions were "not intended as a means to gain access." Problem solved, in theory. Except the disclaimer didn't change the fundamental structure: corporations still funded the events, ministers still attended, and the public still had no idea who was paying for what.
That was 2016. Today, the story has taken an extraordinary turn that would strain credulity in a political thriller. Mark Carney—the organization's advisory board chair—is now Prime Minister of Canada. Tom Pitfield, the president, is not only Trudeau's childhood friend but also runs the Liberal Party's digital infrastructure through a company paid by 97% of Liberal MPs using taxpayer-funded office budgets. His wife, Anna Gainey, is a Liberal MP and former Liberal Party President. And still—nearly a decade after the scandal—there is zero public disclosure of who funds Canada 2020 or how much they pay.
Just three days ago, on May 8, 2026, Canada 2020 hosted its 20th Anniversary Gala at Toronto's Fairmont Royal York with former U.S. President Barack Obama as the keynote speaker. Prime Minister Carney attended. The event was closed to media. Who paid to bring Obama to Toronto? How much did corporate sponsors contribute to attend "An Evening with President Barack Obama"? What policy discussions occurred between a sitting Canadian Prime Minister, a former U.S. President, and undisclosed corporate donors? The answers remain hidden behind Canada 2020's wall of opacity. …
To understand Canada 2020, you must first understand the network of relationships that gave birth to it and continues to animate it today. This is not a story about abstract institutional influence—it's about specific people whose personal friendships, family connections, and business interests converge at the apex of Canadian political power.
Start with Tom Pitfield. His father, Michael Pitfield, served as Clerk of the Privy Council under Pierre Trudeau—the most senior non-elected position in the Canadian government. Tom grew up as a childhood friend of Justin Trudeau. When Trudeau entered politics, Pitfield became his digital strategist, running the Liberal Party's data operations in the 2015 and 2019 elections. He did this through his company, Data Sciences Inc., which maintains an exclusive agreement to manage the party's voter database, known as "Liberalist."
Then came the contracts. In 2021, investigative reporting by The Globe and Mail revealed that 149 Liberal MPs—97% of the caucus—were paying Data Sciences Inc. from their taxpayer-funded office budgets. The collective payments exceeded $30,000. When questions were raised, the federal Ethics Commissioner investigated and cleared Trudeau, finding he was "not involved" in the contracting decisions. The payments continued.
Read the whole thing.
Security experts, human rights advocates and politicians are sounding the alarm about the renewal of a co-operation agreement between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and China’s Ministry of Public Security as troubling details surface at a foreign interference trial.
Court documents filed at the trial of alleged double agent William Majcher reveals that at least 25 Canadian residents were targeted by Chinese police under an anti-corruption program, which doubled as a tool of transnational repression. The affidavit shows that the Chinese nationals may have been forced to return to their homeland against their will to face punishment for alleged financial crimes.
Some of them would have faced life imprisonment, or even a death sentence.
The 63-year-old Majcher, a former RCMP officer, is accused of illegally participating in an international anti-corruption campaign launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping called “Operation Fox Hunt,” which was later followed by a similar campaign known as “Operation SkyNet.” The judge’s verdict is expected on Wednesday. …
China says Fox Hunt and SkyNet seek to repatriate economic fugitives, but human rights organizations say, in reality, the campaigns target Chinese nationals living abroad who are political rivals, dissidents and critics of Beijing.
Research from the Spain-based NGO Safeguard Defenders found that China’s Ministry of Public Security, or the MPS, operated at least 102 illegal police stations in 53 countries around the world, including Canada.
In January before Majcher’s trial began, Prime Minister Mark Carney signed a new strategic partnership with Xi to jumpstart trade and usher in Chinese EV’s in exchange for lowering punishing tariffs on Canadian canola.
The agreement signed in Beijing also included a memorandum of understanding (MOU) titled “Cooperation in Combating Crimes between the RCMP and the MPS.” In the joint statement, the two sides “committed to strengthening law enforcement co-operation to combat corruption and transnational crimes, including telecommunication and cyber fraud and illegal synthetic drugs in accordance with their respective laws.”
On Tuesday afternoon, Vancouver NDP MP Jenny Kwan wrote an open letter to express serious concerns about the government’s lack of transparency in signing the MOU.
Kwan wrote that it is “troubling” that the federal government has “declined to proactively disclose the police co-operation agreement, despite its significant implications for public safety, civil liberties, diaspora communities and national sovereignty.”
In a social media post, she noted that other agreements the prime minister signed while in Beijing were released publicly, such as an economic and trade co-operation roadmap.
The RCMP says the agreement signed in January is a renewal of an MOU previously signed by former prime minister Justin Trudeau in 2016.
The Defence department will need more money to hire additional public servants and military personnel to handle the influx of 300,000 Canadians into a new mobilization force, according to federal government documents.
The mobilization plan now being developed is an initiative being pushed by Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jennie Carignan.
The initiative, outlined in a May 2025 document, calls for the creation of a 300,000-strong supplementary reserve force and a boost to the primary reserves from the current 23,561 to 100,000.
The mobilization plan was first reported by the Ottawa Citizen in October 2025. The new pool of 300,000 volunteers would be used in the event of a national crisis or emergency.
These are civil servants and diverse
masses who don’t know which end of the rifle is which.
What can go right?
Presented without comment:
The Liberal Party spent 10 years importing voters.
— Mario Zelaya (@mario4thenorth) May 10, 2026
Today those voters showed up.
And voted against the Liberal they were supposed to support.
Federal MP Nate Erskine-Smith, endorsed by Mark Carney himself, just lost a provincial nomination race in Scarborough.
He lost to… pic.twitter.com/jANfvvyWti
A Statistics Canada survey on quality of life in Canada has revealed which provinces have the highest life satisfaction — and which ranks the lowest.
Overall, the data showed that 46.1 per cent of Canadians reported a high level of life satisfaction in the second quarter of 2025, up from 40.4 per cent in the same period in 2024. However, that figure slipped from the first quarter of 2025, when 48.6 per cent of Canadians reported high life satisfaction.
The quarterly survey, which polls Canadians over the age of 15, asked respondents: “Using a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 means ‘Very dissatisfied’ and 10 means ‘Very satisfied’, how do you feel about your life as a whole right now?”
Those who responded with 8, 9 or 10 were considered to have high life satisfaction.
The data also broke down life satisfaction by province. At the top of the table, 57.3 per cent of Quebec residents reported high life satisfaction. This was followed by New Brunswick at 53.4 per cent, Newfoundland and Labrador at 51.3 per cent, and Nova Scotia at 49.1 per cent.
At the other end of the ranking is Alberta, where just 38.1 per cent of respondents rated their life satisfaction highly. Ontario came in at 42 per cent, Saskatchewan at 43.8 per cent, British Columbia at 44.8 per cent, and Manitoba at 45.6 per cent.
StatCan did not examine the reasons behind the provincial differences, but the findings arrived amid growing signs of frustration in Alberta.
You voted for green, you voted for poverty:
A majority of B.C. residents are on board with the federal plan to move ahead with Enbridge’s Westcoast LNG pipeline expansion, according to new data from the Angus Reid Institute. This support is evidence of the changing landscape of support for pipelines in Canada’s most western province, says ARI.
There is majority support for the Westcoast LNG pipeline expansion across the country (55 per cent) and in B.C. (61 per cent). Support outnumbers opposition by three to one, according to ARI’s data.
The federal government approved a $4-billion expansion of the southern portion of Enbridge’s Westcoast natural gas pipeline system in April. The pipeline carries natural gas from northeastern B.C. to consumers and businesses in the province’s Lower Mainland.
“There is also a desire for more,” says a May 11 statement released by Angus Reid with the new data. “Half (48 per cent) in Canada, and more than two-in-five (46 per cent) in B.C., believe the federal government is ‘doing too little to build new pipeline capacity.’”
Nationally, three in ten (31 per cent) say the federal government’s approach is about right, while one in five (21 per cent) say there is too much of a focus on building pipelines.
The number of respondents who are in opposition has shrunk by six points compared to 2019, says Angus Reid, when the Trans Mountain expansion was under debate.
A quarter of Ontario’s private trucking schools offering mandatory entry-level training for commercial drivers have never been inspected by the provincial government, Auditor General Shelley Spence said Tuesday, raising concerns about oversight and road safety in the sector.
Spence released a special audit on Ontario’s large commercial truck driver licensing system, finding that 54 of the province’s 216 registered private career colleges offering mandatory entry-level training had “never been inspected.” She also found that of the 81 schools due for a five-year reinspection, 44 had not been reinspected.
“That is true, 25% had never been inspected,” Spence told reporters during a news conference at Queen’s Park. “And then for those that are supposed to be re inspected in a five year period, we found that 44% of those had not been re inspected.”
Asked whether some schools had operated without any government employee ever setting foot inside, Spence replied: “Right, correct.”
The audit examined Ontario’s oversight of commercial truck driver training, testing and licensing. Large commercial trucks account for 12% of vehicles involved in fatal collisions in Ontario despite making up only 3% of vehicles on the road, according to the report.
The auditor general found inconsistencies in both training and testing standards. Ontario requires Class A commercial drivers to complete 103.5 hours of mandatory entry-level training, but auditors found some schools delivered significantly less instruction.
“Based on our students experiences at training providers, we found examples where schools delivered only 59.5 and 81 hours,” Spence said in her prepared remarks.
The report also found some students were not taught key driving skills, including “left turns at major intersections, reverse parking and emergency stopping.”
Spence said auditors used six students to test training providers and found gaps in two cases.
“Two out of six is pretty big ratio, I would say,” she told reporters. “So, you know, that’s a sample, and we sample, I can’t really extrapolate to the whole population, but I will say that it is a problem.”
The audit also found that some unregistered private career colleges continued booking road tests despite having previously been investigated and penalized.
“What we found is that they had been given suspensions the private career college, and yet those students were still registering under another college’s name to take the tests,” Spence said.
Auditors also identified inconsistencies between DriveTest centres. Some locations used lower-speed highways for testing highway driving manoeuvres, while others did not randomly test reversing skills as required.
Spence said the province needs stronger oversight and inspections to improve road safety.
“Road safety depends not only on the rules, but on consistent training, testing and enforcement,” she said in her prepared remarks.
Consider that there are people willing to deny this:
Among the mutilated and butchered bodies of young women slaughtered on October 7, it was their colourful, polished nails that many of the morgue staff remember.
Bright, beautiful, shiny, pink manicures glistening amid the pervasive 'grey and green' of death were often the only reminder of who these girls had been just hours earlier.
Because Hamas-led terrorists had not just executed these women. They had 'deliberately and systematically' defiled them, as the most comprehensive account of the atrocity released by The Civil Commission today shows.
The terrorists shot their eyes, their faces and their breasts, and even targeted their most intimate parts, to destroy their beauty and rob their loved ones of a final goodbye.
Women were stripped, bound, stabbed, shot and burned. They were executed both during and after rape amid an orgy of violence in which 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
Heads were decapitated. Pelvic bones shattered. Even after death, sexual assault continued.
A grotesque, medieval obsession with sexual organs pervaded the crime scenes at the Nova Festival and in the Kibbutzim near Gaza.
At Kibbutz Be'eri, nails, sharp objects, and pieces of metal and plastic were similarly embedded in a woman whose body was discovered naked and bound. On another victim, grenades were used.
While ordinarily newspapers censor the full horrors of such accounts, today, as hard as it is, over 430 witnesses, survivors, experts and medical staff ask that you do not look away.
For over two years they have given evidence to The Civil Commission, an independent Israeli women's rights NGO established in the wake of October 7, 2023, in response to the failure of international institutions to address the sexual violence committed that day.
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