Well, that’s settled. Mark Carney’s first budget has passed, the Liberal government lives to fight another day and everyone can feel relief that Canada isn’t getting a Christmas election.
But is that relief earned, or justified?
The way in which this budget just barely made it highlights a House of Commons with some unity issues among all the federal parties — except the Greens, who only have one MP.
South Africa has said it does not want to receive any more chartered flights carrying Palestinians, days after the controversial arrival of 153 passengers from Gaza in the country.
Many aspects of their arrival remain unclear and disputed.
The flight was part of “a clear agenda to cleanse Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank”, Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola said on Monday.
The Israeli authorities have not responded to this allegation. However, they said that South Africa had previously agreed to receive the 153 Palestinians.
No one want’s em, least of all other Muslims.
In a development that went largely unnoticed, Liberal MP Salma Zahid recently tabled a petition in the House of Commons urging the federal government to admit members of Jamaat-e-Islami — Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party. The petition noted that in the past, some members of Jamaat-e-Islami had been deemed inadmissible to Canada on security grounds. However, it argued that the group “has engaged in democratic processes and governance in Bangladesh” and that members seeking asylum in Canada are “law-abiding citizens who uphold democratic values.” It urged the government to ensure they receive “fair and just treatment.”
Better yet ban Muslims.
Thousands signed a petition in favour of segregation after a Brazilian woman was attacked on a Paris commuter train — but opponents say it is gender apartheid
When a 26-year-old Brazilian train passenger recounted the trauma of an attempted rape on a Paris commuter line this autumn, a call for the introduction of women-only carriages won support.
More than 31,000 people have signed a petition in favour of the measure, which has already been adopted on public transport in countries such as Japan, India and Brazil. But the idea has provoked angry debate in a French society that has long viewed the creation of women-only areas, whether in sports clubs or swimming pools, as an affront to its — at least theoretical — ideal of equality.
Kovrig is a senior advisor at the International Crisis Group and a former Canadian diplomat, but he is best known to Canadians as one of the “two Michaels” who were detained by Chinese authorities in 2018, in response to the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at the Vancouver airport on a U.S. extradition request.
“I was detained by state security officers when I was coming back from dinner and they abducted me and held me hostage for 1,019 days,” said Kovrig. “I spent about nearly six months in solitary confinement, being relentlessly interrogated, and then another two years in a detention centre, confined to a single cell.
When the attorney general of the United States took personal charge of Operation Mongoose, he declared it America’s “top priority”, saying “no time, money, effort or manpower” was to be spared.
The official in question was Robert Kennedy and the supreme objective that mattered more than anything else was toppling Fidel Castro and “liberating” Cuba from Communist rule.
Operation Mongoose and its famously futile campaign of subversion began in November 1961, inspiring plenty of Hollywood movies but not the dawn of freedom in Cuba.
In just the last few years, Canada has dropped to the rear of the pack on any number of economic indicators in which it used to do quite well.
Canada now has the slowest per capita GDP growth of any other large OECD country. It continues to post the world’s most unaffordable housing. Canada isn’t even one of the richest countries on earth anymore. Whereas Canada used to make the top five as recently as the 1980s, it’s now behind 14 countries that are officially wealthier.
A convicted murderer is challenging the southern Australian state of Victoria’s ban on prisoners eating the Vegemite yeast-based spread, arguing that the restriction breaches his human right to “enjoy his culture as an Australian.”
Andre McKechnie is suing Victoria’s Department of Justice and Community Safety and the agency that manages the prisons, Corrections Victoria, in a case currently scheduled to be heard in 2026.
Former high-ranking officers of the Canadian Armed Forces are mounting a defence of the planned acquisition of 88 American F-35 fighter jets, hoping to put an end to the ongoing courtship between the Canadian government and the Swedish firm Saab.
According to information obtained by Radio-Canada, a dozen former high-ranking officers of the Royal Canadian Air Force sent a letter to the federal government to reiterate the benefits of acquiring a full fleet of F-35s to meet Canada’s military needs.
Federal agents have arrested 130 people in two days in Charlotte, North Carolina, the latest city to face President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration, according to a US official.
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), told the BBC that a number of the people arrested are criminals and gang members. But local leaders say the operation is doing more harm than good.
DHS said a US citizen allegedly injured an officer by ramming a law enforcement vehicle with their car.
There are perspectives from which a snap federal election call might make sense. There are far more perspectives from which it looks like a fever dream trapped in a bubble. Many of them have to do with the New Democrats, who aren’t even an official party in the House of Commons.
My cat is terrified of the vacuum cleaner. After I had it on all morning, I saw this pic.twitter.com/E9gSxXKMSC
— We don't deserve cats (@catsareblessing) November 11, 2025
In his new book, The Big Payback, the British comedian Sir Lenny Henry has called on the UK Government to pay £18tn in reparations for slavery to black British people.
Having spent the past five years researching a history of slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world, what struck me especially about Sir Lenny’s intervention (apart from the figure of £18tn, which is equivalent to between six and seven times the size of the UK’s economy), was the continued dominance of the transatlantic trade in public discourse about slavery.
While the West has engaged in critical discussions over this egregious phenomenon for many years, the same cannot be said for swathes of the Middle East: a region in which slavery and the accompanying trade endured without pause from the seventh to the 20th centuries.
#WATCH: OPP seizes $160M in illicit cannabis and contraband tobacco on Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory – 118,700 plants, 3.7 million cigarettes, 74 charges against 34 people. pic.twitter.com/0o2KdbFPUU
— 401_da_sarpanch (@401_da_sarpanch) November 17, 2025
Canada is apparently considering acquiring a mixed fleet of fighter jets. But this decision is being considered without any real strategic thinking.
Economic considerations seem to be taking precedence over military imperatives, even though several experts and military leaders strongly recommend a single fleet of F-35s, which is considered more consistent with continental defence needs.
