OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canada vowed on Thursday to make Facebook Inc pay for news content, seeking allies in the media battle with tech giants and pledging not to back down if the social media platform shuts off the country’s news as it did in Australia.
Facebook blocked all Australian news content on its service over proposed legislation requiring it and Alphabet Inc’s Google to pay fees to Australian publishers for news links.
Back in 2018, amid continuing diplomatic tensions between Canada and Saudi Arabia, Saudi television and social media lit up with accusations about human-rights abuses in Canada. One commentator on Saudi TV called Canada one of the worst oppressors of women in the world. Social media accounts tweeted identical lines about missing women and about Canada committing “cultural genocide” against Indigenous peoples. These were rich accusations coming from a country where women were stoned to death for adultery and sought permission for everyday activities from male guardians, and Canada at the time largely paid no heed.
Less than one year later, however, Ottawa inadvertently validated all of these Saudi claims – and then some.
(Go incognito)
Rolling blackouts in Texas have put the importance of oil pipelines into perspective, according to business executives.
Ryan Palazzo, a former chief operating officer of a pipeline construction company and a resident of Houston, Texas, received text messages on Feb. 15 about rolling blackouts to protect the electricity grid which was strained by record low temperatures. Millions have been affected since.
In response to the pandemic, politicians in Ottawa set up an emergency wage subsidy scheme that was meant to help workers. But some of Canada’s biggest firms have milked the subsidy scheme for billions while paying out dividends and laying off staff.
If you asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau whether Xi was a communist, he wouldn’t admit it.
Justin Trudeau claims “diversity is our strength,” but the educational landscape in Canada is anything but diverse, a new report from the Association for Reformed Political Action Canada says.
If you’re wondering what it would take for the Trudeau administration to get over its crush on Chinese communism, I have no idea. Especially once we learned that despite everything, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) is doing its best to pour our industrial secrets into the Politburo’s pockets via … wait for it … Huawei. And by “despite everything” I mean massive evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s hostility to human rights and decency, including putting history’s worst mass killer on their banknotes in case anyone was struggling with the concept of “brutal communist dictatorship and loving it.
This is Globalism, Canada’s China class is hard at work.
You can always tell when something is a bit off when politicians avoid an opportunity to gain popularity.
What I mean by this is that all the polls show China’s government is horrendously unpopular among Canadians, with up to 90% of the country having a negative view.
Similarly, about 80% want Huawei banned.
And an almost-equal number want Canada to pursue trade partners other than China and reduce our dependence on China.
So, getting tough on China would be an easy way for the federal government to score political points.
They would be both standing up for the country, and boosting their own political fortunes.
Canada will fail to hit immigration targets for a second straight year as border restrictions remain in place, according to one of the nation’s top banks.
The country will probably welcome closer to 275,000 new permanent residents this year, versus a target of 401,000, Royal Bank of Canada economist Andrew Agopsowicz said in a report Tuesday. Last year, Canadian immigration dropped by almost half to 184,370, its lowest levels in more than two decades.
Many gun-control advocates have pressed for a national handgun ban, warning that leaving it up to municipalities would create an ineffective patchwork of regulations.
As expected, the long-promised bill also proposes a buyback of a wide array of recently banned firearms the government considers assault-style weapons.
Crevatin said her mother was escorted out of the hospital by security after a nurse “caught” her reaching out to hold her husband’s hand shortly after the move to the fifth floor.
“Most of the nurses in that unit were fantastic and very understanding, but there was a couple that were very into just …following the rules,” she said.
“They’ve been married for 60 years. It’s very hard for my mother not to hold his hand, not to go up close to him, to touch him — especially since that’s our only form of communication with him.”
When the nurse asked her mother to return to her chair, two metres away, she did but Crevatin said two security guards were still called and they escorted her mother out of the hospital.
Amid growing calls for a tougher Canadian stance toward China, outgoing Nova Scotia Liberal Premier Stephen McNeil had some provocative advice recently, suggesting politicians here should actually avoid reproaching Beijing.
The federal government is grappling with China’s imprisonment of two Canadians, a clampdown on political freedoms in Hong Kong and the sweeping suppression of the country’s Uyghur minority.
Gee, I wonder who greased his palms?
