Clapping and cheering filled the basement room of a London community centre on a grey Saturday afternoon in May.
Two masters of ceremony were awarding prizes to everyone who had been arrested while carrying out protests for Youth Demand, blocking roads in the capital to the aggravation of motorists. There was a badge of honour for the bravest protesters.
There was an award called “Rizzing up the resistance” for everyone who had led chants or “generally brought the vibe”, and another called “Fried for Falestine” for those who had been burnt by a flare.
Ontario’s housing minister is conceding that the number of new homes in the province is stuttering and his government won’t be able to hand out incentive rewards to many cities for hitting their targets, but says he hopes new legislation will help.
On Friday, Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Rob Flack accepted that the number of new homes in Ontario was lagging far behind the targets the province set itself, calling the situation “a major crisis” across Canada.
Canada is undergoing one of the most far-reaching demographic experiments in the Western world. In 2023 we admitted 1.25 million newcomers — a historic high — pushing our population past 40 million. Immigration now accounts for 98 percent of national population growth, driven by deliberate Liberal policy under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Despite growing public concern, the much-touted “cutbacks” Trudeau announced just before his departure in January set a target of 395,000 new permanent residents for 2025 — plus an astounding 673,000 temporary foreign workers, seasonal workers and international students. Pledges to “stabilize” population growth have done almost nothing, widening the gap between policy and public sentiment.
Trump Derangement Syndrome has riled and roiled our politics for a decade, and its only achievement has been sending Donald Trump back to the White House for a second term, and for now marginalizing the Democrats, whose approval ratings are stuck in the mid-twenties. Worse for the Dems, their loss in November was what Barack Obama called a “shellacking,” only more so.
The British armed forces face a serious recruitment problem. The army itself, currently numbering around 70,000 personnel, is the smallest it’s been since the Napoleonic wars.
The Labour government’s Strategic Defence Review, published this week, is an attempt to remedy the UK’s military problems, and move Britain towards a position of ‘war-fighting readiness’. It even talks up making the army ‘10 times more lethal’… by 2035. As former British army chief Lord Dannatt scoffed, this was the equivalent of saying in 1938 to Adolf Hitler, ‘please don’t attack us until 1946 because we’re not going to be ready’.
The bankruptcy receivers want to auction the founding document signed by Charles II in 1670. Others say it belongs to the public.
The end came a little bit early for the sprawling Hudson’s Bay Company store in downtown Ottawa on Sunday when the oldest company in North America stopped trading after 355 years.
At about 5 o’clock, I watched as the doors were locked about an hour ahead of schedule. There was little point in holding out for the final hour. Aside from heavily discounted jewelry, which was brought in for the liquidation sale, there was almost no merchandise left on the store’s five remaining sales floors. Earlier in the day, the leftovers had been priced at $1.
Tribune, a historically significant magazine for Britain’s Labour movement which famously employed George Orwell as its literary editor, has been taken over by the Tunisian founder of a Muslim television channel.
The magazine this week said it was “pleased” with the acquisition by Mohamed Ali Harrath, owner of the Islam Channel, which was fined £40,000 (€47,500) by Ofcom in 2023 for content the broadcasting regulator described as “antisemitic.” Harrath is also the founder of the Tunisian Islamic Front. He was granted refugee status by the UK in 2000 after fleeing his country of birth.
Can police use a drone with a zoom lens to peer into the interior of vehicles stopped at red lights? Can police enter a home’s private driveway and look in the windows of vehicles? Can the government track the cellphone location data of millions of Canadians to track their movements? And can a private foreign company scour the internet collecting photos of Canadians for use in facial recognition technology that is sold to police?
A tiny Pentagon office had spent months investigating conspiracy theories about secret Washington UFO programs when it uncovered a shocking truth: At least one of those theories had been fueled by the Pentagon itself.
The congressionally ordered probe took investigators back to the 1980s, when an Air Force colonel visited a bar near Area 51, a top-secret site in the Nevada desert. He gave the owner photos of what might be flying saucers. The photos went up on the walls, and into the local lore went the idea that the U.S. military was secretly testing recovered alien technology.
But the colonel was on a mission—of disinformation. The photos were doctored, the now-retired officer confessed to the Pentagon investigators in 2023. The whole exercise was a ruse to protect what was really going on at Area 51: The Air Force was using the site to develop top-secret stealth fighters, viewed as a critical edge against the Soviet Union. Military leaders were worried that the programs might get exposed if locals somehow glimpsed a test flight of, say, the F-117 stealth fighter, an aircraft that truly did look out of this world. Better that they believe it came from Andromeda.
Case specifics aside the disinformation campaign was not “unknown”.
White British pupils are now the minority in one in four schools in England, official data reveal.
Analysis of school census data, collected from more than 21,500 primaries and secondaries in January, shows that in a quarter of them, the majority of the cohort is recorded as ethnic minority or white non-British.
In 72 schools, no white British pupils are recorded, and in 454, they make up less than 2 per cent of the student body.
The TDSB has long been minority white. But remember The Great Replacement is just a conspiracy theory. Got that?
MPs in the House of Commons have unanimously passed a Bloc Québécois bill that would block any future trade agreements from altering Canada’s dairy, egg and poultry quotas, reigniting debate over the limits of supply management protections in international negotiations.
Bill C-202 prohibits the federal government from making trade commitments that would affect supply-managed sectors.
The cost of living and affordability remain top of mind for Canadians, so it’s critical to understand how taxes affect our household finances.
Canadians pay many different taxes (income taxes, sales taxes, fuel taxes, property taxes, etc.) so it can be hard to know how much you pay in total each year. While some of these taxes are visible – -for instance, you can check your income tax return to see how much you pay in personal income taxes – -many taxes are hidden or less visible.
Forget polyamory. The new normal is solitude, anxiety, and performative healing.
In a new report that should unsettle anyone still clinging to the illusion that our species is thriving, nearly 20 percent of Gen Z respondents say they no longer believe monogamy is realistic. At first glance, this might conjure images of polyamory, open relationships, and fluid arrangements between confident, liberated adults unshackled from centuries of ideals.
But the reality is very different, and in many ways, much more disturbing.
