Mark Carney went to Montreal on Tuesday to announce a new push for defence spending.
The prime minister was announcing Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy a week later than planned after his initial announcement was delayed due to the shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.
The latest round of US-mediated peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Geneva on Wednesday ended without a major breakthrough, as fighting continues in a war that will enter its fifth year next week.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said no agreement had been reached on the thorniest questions at the negotiations in Switzerland, accusing Moscow of “trying to drag out” the process.
“We can see that some groundwork has been done, but for now the positions differ, because the negotiations were not easy,” he told reporters after the talks.
First, some context.
We have half a million asylum claimants in Canada currently…triple from 2022 levels and now accounting for 1 in every 84 people in the country.
— Ben Rabidoux (@BenRabidoux) February 18, 2026
h/t Auntie Polly
President Donald Trump argues that U.S. security demands the annexation of Greenland from Denmark.
There’s no question that Greenland has outsize strategic importance to the United States. The island sits astride the entrance to the Northwest Passage, an increasingly important waterway as melting ice makes the route navigable for both Russia and China. The U.S. has maintained military bases there since World War II. The U.S. established Thule Air Base, since renamed Pituffik Space Base, in 1951 as a lynchpin in its primary early warning radar base to detect potential Soviet missile launches. The 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement between the U.S. and Denmark was a model for Cold War cooperation among NATO’s European and North American members.
Durham Region has created its own “hate police” department.
While those on patrol won’t be carrying a badge or a gun, have the power to arrest or charge anyone or have any connection to Durham Regional Police, they seem to be planning to collect, document and store information about residents in the region in their quest to help victims of discrimination or bigotry.
A tour guide company that organized the trip for a large group of backcountry skiers who went missing after an avalanche near Lake Tahoe has broken its silence.
Fifteen people are believed to have been hit by the terrifying slide on Tuesday morning as snow battered the region. Six were known to have survived, while nine remain unaccounted for.
Mountain rescue launched a huge operation to find them on skis and snowcats, but has been struggling against horrific conditions that saw the entire region cut off.
WTF?
🚨 Courmayeur, Aosta Valley, Italy 🇮🇹
This video is truly shocking
Not so much because of the avalanche, but because of the complete lack of survival instinct shown by the people
Chilling pic.twitter.com/ysHTbhDyjb
— Mambo Italiano (@mamboitaliano__) February 17, 2026
OTTAWA – Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says his party will fight for a united Canada as a movement in Alberta pushes for that province to separate.
Answering a question from a reporter today, Poilievre said the Conservatives are “entirely a federalist caucus” and that he has not had a single member of Parliament on his team express they are in favour of Alberta separatism.
The group Stay Free Alberta is seeking a referendum vote for the province to become its own country, and has until May to get nearly 178,000 signatures.
Assistant to hard-left parliamentarian among those held over fatal attack on 23-year-old Quentin Deranque
Eleven suspects, including a parliamentary aide to France’s hard-left party, have been arrested in connection with the killing last week of a far-right activist in an incident that has shocked the country and laid bare its deep political divisions.
Quentin Deranque, 23, died on Saturday after sustaining a severe brain injury. The Lyon prosecutor, Thierry Dran, said he had been “thrown to the ground and beaten by at least six individuals” during an incident last week.
Far-left activists in Paris tear down posters paying tribute to 23-year-old Quentin Deranque, who was beaten to death by masked "antifascists" in Lyon last week. pic.twitter.com/TQ0hNUyKww
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) February 16, 2026
OTTAWA — Days after she retired in January, the former top bureaucrat at the Department of National Defence warned that the billions in additional defence spending promised by the Carney government is “nowhere near what we need” and is only serving to “plug in the holes in the wrong way”.
Stefanie Beck, the deputy minister at DND until her retirement on Jan. 23, shared a surprisingly blunt assessment of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s record defence investments during a conference on Feb. 2.
Duplicated efforts, fragmented industry and soured collaborations are among reasons region isn’t getting more bang for its defense buck
It was billed as the answer to high-tech U.S. stealth fighters. Instead, an ambitious pan-European project has become a case study into some of what has gone wrong with the region’s defense push.
The French, German and Spanish Future Combat Air System project was meant to build a next-generation aircraft to catch up with the latest U.S., Chinese and Russian models. Now the venture has devolved into bickering between defense companies Airbus and Dassault Aviation—and between Berlin and Paris—over who gets to lead its development, with all sides now questioning its future.
This is who Carney wants us to hook up with, maybe he’ll make Canada a conduit for ChiCom IP theft.
Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump mused about blocking the opening of the Gordie Howe Bridge – built to ease the movement of products, including food, into our country. It highlighted an existential problem: Canada is dependent on the United States for access to nutritious foods, like fruits and vegetables.
Our research team has been tracking the global flows of fresh fruits and vegetables into Canada to assess our country’s food security, and we now have the numbers that should sound the alarm, and inspire the country to take action. The United States potentially controls as much as 82.9 per cent of all fruits and vegetables that enter into Canada. Not only do we import much of our fruits and vegetables from the U.S. – a whopping 98 per cent of our imported lettuce is grown there – but even produce from other countries largely travels here via American highways and shipping ports.
I don’t know why but I get a “The Choco ration has been increased from 25 to 20 grams” vibe from the authors.
A Transport for London advert showing a black man and his white friend harassing a white girl on a bus has been banned for ‘reinforcing negative racial stereotypes’.
The Facebook advert was pulled after just one complaint from a viewer, who said it was irresponsible, harmful and offensive due to how it portrayed black teenage boys.
The short clip showed a black male verbally harassing a young girl. He was accompanied by a white male friend, who sat down close to the victim ‘boxing her in’.
too accurate https://t.co/8iCBiADmwE pic.twitter.com/xl1BqeCxnB
— The Daily Sneed™ (@Tr00peRR) February 18, 2026
A series of UK PSA’s that featured only white men as sex pests was deservedly mocked given Britain is overrun by migrant sex criminals and Muslim grooming gangs.
Amazing that people make these ads and completely ignore the stats. Yes, all white men are evil, and all women of color are the victims.pic.twitter.com/ny5pG2h6Da
— Kevin Sorbo (@ksorbs) February 17, 2026
Prime Minister Mark Carney is facing calls to immediately shrink the federal bureaucracy after Tuesday’s report released by the Parliamentary Budget Officer shows costs continue to increase at an alarming rate.
The PBO’s Personnel Expenditure Analysis says the federal bureaucracy cost taxpayers $71.4 billion in 2024-25. In 2015-16, that number stood at $39.6 billion, a rise of 80% in 10 years.
A federal judge in Texas declared a mistrial on Tuesday after a defense lawyer wore a shirt in court with images from the civil rights movement, delaying a closely watched case in which the Trump administration is accusing a group of protesters of being terrorists and says they are part of a “North-Texas antifa cell”.
US district judge Mark Pittman, an appointee of Donald Trump, declared a mistrial only hours after jury selection began at the federal courthouse in downtown Fort Worth. He abruptly halted the proceedings after MarQuetta Clayton, an attorney for one of the defendants, had been questioning potential jurors for about 20 minutes, taking issue with a shirt she was wearing underneath a black blazer. The shirt contained images of civil rights movement leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr and Shirley Chisholm, as well as images of protests from that time.
Conservative MP Matt Jeneroux has joined the Liberal caucus, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on social media Wednesday.
