News roundup, 30 March 2026

- Avi Lewis has won a convincing victory in the NDP leadership race, receiving 56% of the vote on the first ballot. Heather McPherson came a distant second, at 29%. This does not sit well with provincial leaders in Alberta and Saskatchewan. He will need to find an opportunity to run for a seat in the House of Commons; one is expected in Beaches-East York as Liberal incumbent Nathaniel Erskine-Smith is expected to jump to the provincial level, and the NDP has held this riding in the past. Of course if McPherson wanted to be really spiteful she could resign herself, and put Lewis in the position of having to defend the Green New Deal while running in an Alberta riding.

- Toronto plans to create city-owned nonprofit grocery stores, following the lead of New York's mayor Zohran Mamdani who has similar plans. The idea is to locate the stores in underserved areas and undercut the major chains. There is no timeline for this, however, and city staff warn that it will not be cheap.

- The Carney government has just passed legislation that makes people ineligible for refugee status if their application comes more than a year after their first entry to Canada. The law is retroactive to 2025, meaning that some claimants' applications will be cancelled.

- The International Congress of Mathematicians, the largest conference in the field, is scheduled to be held in Philadelphia this summer, the first time in over 40 years that it will be held in the US. Many prominent mathematicians are threatening to boycott the event if it isn't moved to a more civilized country.

- Michael Ma, the Conservative-turned-Liberal MP for Markham-Unionville, has been accused of casting doubt on the use of China's Uighur population as forced labour. Following a backlash, he has clarified his statement.

-Winnipeg city council is moving ahead with plans to build a bike lane on Wellington Crescent, where a cyclist was killed in 2024. Unfortunately they are also scrapping plans for a temporary lane in the interim; one Redditor on this thread speculates that the permanent lane is going to be put on the boulevard so as to avoid removing or narrowing any traffic lanes, which couldn't be done with temporary lanes. They think council may fear that if they temporarily remove a traffic lane, the narrower street will become normalized and there will be more opposition to, say, removing trees to build the lane on the boulevard. On a positive note they also plan to reduce the speed limit to 40 km/h on that stretch of Wellington, but compliance would be better if the street were made narrower.

- Scott Fielding, who served as finance minister under Brian Pallister and Heather Stefanson (and previously as city councillor for the suburban St. James-Brooklands ward) has been arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a coworker at KPMG, the consulting firm where he went to work after resigning from the legislature.

- Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) and Alphabet (parent company of Google and YouTube) have been hit with a $6 million judgment by a court in California that found that the companies deliberately designed their products to be addictive. The plaintiff had become hooked on YouTube at the age of 6 and Instagram at 9. The companies are expected to appeal, of course. This comes just after Meta was hit with $375 million in damages by a New Mexico jury for misleading its users about the safety of its products and facilitating child exploitation. There are hopes that this is the start of a major reckoning for the tech industry, but you can be sure that the Trump regime will do its darnedest to protect them.

- The autonomous vehicle company Waymo has been aggressively lobbying the BC government to try to convince them to allow autonomous vehicles on the province's roads. The government is standing firm, so far at least.

News roundup, 14 Nov 2024

- Tom Homan, selected by Donald Trump to be his "border czar", has cited the Canadian border as an "extreme national security vulnerability" and says that there will be "tough conversations" with Ottawa about security. Andrew Coyne, in yet another grim prognostication, predicts that Trump's plans for mass deportations may lead to numerous undocumented residents in the US trying to flee to Canada - and as Coyne points out, "whatever our leaders may say, we have neither the capacity to accommodate them all nor to refuse them – not with a nearly 9,000-kilometre border we have never had to defend until now."

- A strange fact - a significant number of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's constituents voted for her, but voted for Trump for president. To her credit, AOC did not sweep this fact under the rug, but instead went to her Instagram page to ask what they had to say. Their answers may hold a fair bit of significance for the Democratic Party, assuming that they have another chance in 2028. On the subject of counterintuitive voting decisions, it's worth noting that despite often using highly racist rhetoric, Trump actually won 46% of the Latino vote, and 55% of the Latino male vote. Juan Williams thinks that the reason is painfully simple - a lot of Latino men did not want a woman as president and were willing to overlook Trump's racism for that reason. Plenty of discussion in this Reddit thread.

- A Dutch appeals court has struck down a 2021 order from a lower court that would have forced Shell to cut emissions by 45% over 2019 levels by 2030. The court ruled, essentially, that while Shell does have a responsibility to cut emissions, and that developing new oil and gas fields are at odds with this, courts are not empowered to make any specific order (such as an end to new exploration).

- A Tory candidate in Nova Scotia's provincial election, which is being held later this month, is being accused by the Liberals of illegally bribing voters after her campaign handed out Tim Hortons gift cards to citizens.

- The controversy over math requirements for education students in Manitoba is being debated in the pages of the Winnipeg Free Press, with mathematician Anna Stokke facing off against education professor Martha Koch. Koch argues that such decisions should be based on research, which she says supports the changes being brought in by the government. That is all very well except that what we're talking about here is social science research, which is usually a lot less rigourous than the term "research" would suggest to the layperson. That said, keeping the requirements more stringent could have the disadvantage of reducing the number of people going into teaching; maybe we're stuck with a tradeoff between quantity and quality of teachers here.

- Wab Kinew has conducted a cabinet shuffle, splitting some department responsibilities and adding Nellie Kennedy, Mike Moroz, and Mintu Sandhu to the cabinet. Moroz will head the new Department of Innovation and New Technology. Kennedy is the first Muslim woman to serve in the province's cabinet.

- Delays in Ontario's court system are now so bad that the majority of criminal cases are now ending before trial, in order to comply with the 2016 R v Jordan ruling. This includes not just petty crimes but serious ones like sexual assault. The situation is being attributed to a shortage of judges, prosecutors, and actual courtrooms.

News roundup, 8 Nov 2024

- Manitoba premier Wab Kinew is trying to be optimistic about the province's prospects for dealing with the incoming Trump administration, including the proposed 10% tariffs that Trump wants to impose on all imports. Disconcertingly, the best thing he could come up with was to point out that we have a lot of minerals critical to the American defense industry. Also disconcertingly, I can't think of anything better to shelter the province's economy. Meanwhile, Quebec premier François Legault is calling on the federal government to "act quickly" to secure Canada's borders, as he expects migrants fearing deportation from the US to attempt to cross the Canadian border in large numbers. And south of the border, California governor Gavin Newsom has convened a special session of the state legislature to call for increased funding for legal defenses against the anticipated actions of the incoming administration.

- Manitoba's legislative session has wrapped up for the year. The government successfully passed several significant pieces of legislation, including landmark changes to labour law (a ban on replacement workers and changes to make it easier to certify a union) as well as rules restricting the sale of machetes. Controversially, the labour provisions were included in the omnibus budget bill, something often done by governments of all stripes but seen by many as a way of avoiding scrutiny.

- One move by the Kinew government has to do with changes to the certification of teachers. Most controversial is the removal of the requirement for education students to have a minimum of six credit hours in mathematics. The Tories are opposed, of course, but more notably, University of Winnipeg mathematics professor Anna Stokke, who was among those who petitioned for the requirement to be introduced in the first place in 2015. University of Manitoba professor Martha Koch disagrees with Stokke, claiming that better math education in teachers sometimes leads to worse outcomes; it's worth noting, though, that Koch is a professor of education, not mathematics; I'm more inclined to believe what Stokke says about the actual level of math knowledge that she sees in her students than whatever pet education theory Koch is drawing on. Having said that, loosening the requirements might be helpful in alleviating the shortage of teachers; nonetheless, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and this might be one of those occasions where the Tories are right about something.

- The Quebec government is considering legislation to force medical graduates to reimburse the government for the cost of their education unless they practice in the province for a yet-to-be-determined period of time. The government has expressed a willingness to use the notwithstanding clause in order to avoid constitutional challenges; one constitutional lawyer thinks this would not work, though, since mobility rights are guaranteed in a section of the Charter not covered by the clause.