News roundup, 26 Aug 2026

- California governor Gavin Newsom believes that Donald Trump will restart trade talks with Canada quite quickly, alleging that the Republicans are turning on Trump as the possible consequences of the trade war hit their constituents. Whether this is really the problem for Trump that Newsom claims is unclear, though; the assumption that it is hinges partly on this fall's midterm elections being free and fair, which is not safe to asume.

- An officer in the US Air Force is facing criminal charges after calling for the impeachment of Trump. Maj. Jason Watson had initially done an interview with a Substack blog called Defenders of Our Republic, then was arrested at a demonstration on the steps of the Capitol in July and again a week ago. After the most recent arrest he was placed into pretrial confinement, where he has been held without bail ever since. 

- A journalist who was found in contempt of court for refusing to disclose her confidential sources is appealing the finding to the US Supreme Court. Catherine Herridge had been found in contempt in 2024 over sourcing for her coverage of Chinese-American scientist Yanping Chen, who had been investigated for possible ties to China's military; Chen had sued the US government for allegedly illegally disclosing information to Herridge. Herridge was ordered to pay $800 for each day she refused to identify her sources, though the payments have been suspended pending the appeal.

- Loblaws, the parent company of Superstore and a number of other regional chains, is reversing its decision to remove country of origin labelling on produce displays. The company had removed the labelling in every province except Ontario and Quebec, both of which make this information mandatory. The company had removed the labelling in other provinces after getting caught mislabelling foreign products as Canadian.

- Six employees at Frankfurt Airport were recently infected with malaria, and one has died. The source of infection is believed to be mosquitoes that arrived by aircraft.

- A ramp agent at Montreal-Trudeau International Airport was killed on Monday when he was run over by a plane. To the shock of many passengers, the aircraft's external cameras captured the accident and showed it on screens in the cabin. The TSB as well as the federal labour department are investigating.

- Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80 from cancer.

News roundup, 21 June 2024

- Chris Skidmore, who served as the UK's energy minister under Theresa May, has vowed to vote Labour for the first time in his life in protest against the current Tory government turning climate into a "culture war" issue.

- Many Liberal MPs think it's time for Justin Trudeau to move on if there's to be any chance in salvaging the party's chances for the election. One unnamed MP said that "if we saw Justin Trudeau jump into a river to save two children being chased by a crocodile, people would say it was his fault", and like it or not, that is probably the case.

- A bill recently passed by Parliament, and now awaiting royal assent, will require companies who make claims about their environmental policies in advertising to provide evidence to back up their claims. Seems reasonable to most, but the Alberta government is up in arms about this; presumably they fear that the oil industry will collapse if they aren't allowed to lie to the public about what they're doing. An oilsands alliance has already removed all content from their website in anticipation of the bill becoming law.

- A search of the Prairie Green Landfill for at least two of Jeremy Skibicki's victims will commence in the fall, once a "targeted zone" where the remains are most likely buried can be identified.

- A man is suing Loblaws and the City of Winnipeg after an incident in 2022 in which he says that two police officers serving as security at the Superstore on Gateway Road made racially offensive comments, apparently under the impression that he was indigenous (he isn't) and then roughed him up when he tried to take photos.

- A strip club in Guelph, which was built in 1891, has been granted a heritage designation.

- Longtime Winnipeg broadcaster Larry Updike has died.

News roundup, 27 May 2024

- The University of Toronto is warning faculty and staff participating in the pro-Palestinian encampment on campus that they may face dismissal if they do not leave the encampment by Monday morning, the deadline given for the camp to be removed. Meanwhile in Germany, protesters at the Free University of Berlin have faced an aggressive crackdown from the police.

- Donald Trump is doing dangerously well in the polls in several key swing states. Clearly something needs to be done about this, and fast. Bill McKibben thinks Biden and the Democrats need to pull out all the stops to make climate change the key issue. Seems reasonable to me; if nothing else it offers something on which the two major parties fundamentally differ, compared to things like the Israel-Palestine conflict where they're too similar to motivate many younger voters. Plus nature keeps sending Americans reminders that this really is an important issue; some of them might even listen under the right circumstances. And with such a high stakes election, Lloyd Axworthy and Allan Rock are proposing that Canada take the lead in sending election observers to the US this fall. Not a bad idea to be sure.

- Members of the German environmental group Letzte Generation have been charged with "forming a criminal organization", a move some fear could criminalize even public declarations of support for the group.

- A startup in the UAE claims that they will be able to use vertical farming techniques to grow several crops not generally amenable to this, including not only hydroponic standards like greens and tomatoes but also things like wheat, rice, and potatoes. Many are skeptical, however, especially since the UAE has not been above a bit of hype in the past.

- The US military is investing nearly $15 million in mines in northern Quebec and the Northwest Territories on national security grounds, apparently to limit China's ability to corner the market in critical minerals.

- The Competition Bureau is investigating two of Canada's largest grocery store chains for possible anti-competitive behaviour. Strangely, there's no comment from Sylvain Charlebois in the article; perhaps the media are starting to see through him.

News roundup, 18 May 2024

- Niigaan Sinclair has some thoughts on the recent incidents at the Food Fare on Portage Avenue, suggesting that the common factor in these and other incidents may be a lucrative black market in meat. He has some interesting things to say:

The motivation for the incident is unknown and the investigation is ongoing, but what is more likely: a teenager stealing food for himself or selling it?

Poverty is driving individuals who don’t want to enter the highly profitable but highly illegal and dangerous drug trade and instead sell something easily shoplifted and sold for a high margin.

It may also be that the stakes of thefts in smaller shops like Food Fare are much higher, leading to the spate of violent incidents.

Ask any of the big-box grocery stores on the outskirts of the city and they will tell you theft of meat is their primary problem. Stealing from a big corporation isn’t often noticeable or cause for the business to fold.

I do take issue with one of the things he says though:

Meat thieves may also be providing an essential service.

As one source who works for a front-line, North End social justice agency told me, it’s a way “poor families” can get cheap access to decent meat.

It's better described as something that's seen as an essential service. Food is definitely essential, but meat is not.

- One of the people the mainstream Canadian media love to consult as an expert when they're doing a story about the food distribution and retail industry in this country is one Sylvain Charlebois, a professor of food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University. He's one of this country's most quoted academics on any subject, and is almost a minor celebrity (complete with a nickname, "The Food Professor"). Notably, he has been quite vocal in the media lately dismissing any suggestion that grocery chains are overcharging, and especially the current Loblaws boycott campaign. Which is kind of unsavoury given his rather interesting relationship with Loblaws. Oh, and it's worth mentioning that he used to be a dean in the university's Faculty of Management until he suddenly resigned his post a couple of years ago after an investigation was conducted into allegations of bullying and harassment. In other Loblaws-related news, a Shoppers Drug Mart in Toronto apparently posted an ad for a volunteer position in their store. That's right - they tried to get a volunteer to "provide support to the staff". After it went viral the ad apparently was removed. I wonder why?

- Last June, Britt Leroux of Windsor, Ontario had a clash with a chap who goes by the name of Bubba Pollock (really!) on social media over her support of 2SLGBTQ+ rights. His response? He gathered a whole bunch more information about her, drove two and a half hours from his home in London, and paid a visit to the hospital where her dying father was in palliative care during visiting hours. He then took a selfie with her unconscious father, and then posted the photo to the comment thread. He has now pleaded guilty to harassment, and is awaiting sentencing. He already has a criminal rap sheet that includes sexual assault and distributing intimate images without consent, and is apparently a supporter of the White Lives Matter movement.

- The US is expected to impose a 100% tariff on electric vehicles imported from China. It's widely suspected that the main reason is fears that American automakers can't compete with them.

- A child under the age of 5 has died of measles in Hamilton, the first fatality in Ontario in 35 years. And no, the child was not vaccinated.

- The ban on single-use plastics has become the latest front in the culture war, complete with a Conservative MP railing against attempts to replace plastic with more benign materials as "woke".

- Alberta RCMP have concluded, using "investigative genetic genealogy" (which involves the comparison of DNA samples with a database obtained from those services like 23andMe and Ancestry.com) that a serial sex offender who died in an Idaho prison in 2011 was responsible for the murders of four young women in Calgary in the 1970s.

- Scottie Scheffler, the world's top ranked golfer has been charged with assaulting a police officer with his car after the cop tried to stop him from driving around a roadblock on the way to the PGA Championship in Louisville, Kentucky. The roadblock was in place because the police were investigating a fatal accident. Rather strange behaviour for someone who professes to be a devout Christian.

News roundup, 13 March 2024

- This past winter (the meteorological winter ends on the 1st of March, not the equinox), was the warmest winter in the US in over a century of records. The Lower 48 had an average temperature of +3.1°C (37.6°F); that's 3°C above average. Those numbers don't fully convey the story, though. Leaves are budding on trees weeks earlier than normal, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario have been essentially ice-free all winter, and mosquitoes were biting in Michigan as early as February.

- Since Paris moved to triple parking costs for SUVs, other cities are looking to follow their example. It's almost as if everybody knew it was a good idea, but nobody had the nerve to go first until Anne Hidalgo did.

- Manitoba's minimum wage will be going up to $15.80 an hour this fall. It did not go up this past fall because the deadline to make a decision on the matter came too soon after the election, and the new government, rightly or wrongly, was reluctant to make a snap decision on the matter. In the long run they want to bring it up to a "living wage", currently pegged at $19/h by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

- The interim leader of the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives, Wayne Ewasko, is following the standard rightwing playbook, calling for parents to be notified when their kids request to be addressed by different pronouns at school. I'm sure that the life of a trans kid in, say, the RM of Hanover would not be made any easier by this (not that it's easy in any case, of course) but it seems the PCs don't care and are doubling down on the far-right messaging that contributed to their defeat last fall.

- Manitoba Public Insurance has suspended the sale of "special risk extension" coverage for truckers that operate outside the province. The Tories are trying to make political hay with this by accusing the NDP of "abandoning" truckers; funny thing is, though, MPI says that they made this move in August, while the Tories were still in power.

- The City of Winnipeg's Executive Policy Committee has voted 5-1 in favour of moving ahead with reopening Portage and Main to pedestrians. It will not be surprising to anyone that North Kildonan councillor Jeff Browaty was the holdout.

- Loblaws, like many grocery companies, has been pushing hard on self-checkout, but they're having to take measures to combat theft, like setting up gates with receipt scanners at the exits. Many customers find this to be an alienating experience, of course. Interestingly, Loblaws claims that this is largely driven by "organized crime", even as many studies find that self-checkout makes thieves of previously honest people (and that's not even counting the number of people who accidentally fail to scan an item). In other places, many chains are abandoning it entirely, finding that it's not even cutting down on their labour costs.

- Many people think of opioid addiction as a big city problem. In fact, in Canada at least, when municipalities are sorted by population, the ones with the highest incidence of hospitalization from overdoses are small cities between 50,000 and 100,000 people, and the next worst are municipalities with less than 10,000. Hospitalizations were actually least common in large cities over half a million.