News roundup, 12 May 2026

- Eileen Wang, the mayor of the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia, has reportedly agreed to plead guilty to acting as an "illegal foreign agent" of China. This apparently involved the creation of a news website for the Chinese community, which carried the Chinese state's version of news and current affairs. That in itself doesn't sound like a crime, however the US alleges that she and her co-conspirator were posting specific articles requested by the Chinese government and reporting back with screenshots and hit counts, all without disclosing that she was doing so at the request of China. That definitely sounds a bit more suspect, as does the accusation that her co-conspirator is accused of "cultivating" her in the hope of strengthening China's influence in California. That said, under other circumstances I'd be suspicious of the truth to these claims; I could easily see the Trump regime manufacturing these kind of charges against a political enemy - but her plea agreement casts some doubt on that possibility.

- Winnipeg's Siloam Mission is laying off 16 staff and reducing hours at its drop-in space beginning in June. The organization is caught in a pinch between increased homelessness (meaning more demands for their services) and a decline in donations (which has been observed across the charitable sector in Canada). The organization is also riven with internal turmoil following the hiring of new CEO Sonia Prevost-Derbecker; she began her term with an organizational review to get to the bottom of the financial difficulties, but was immediately hit with accusations of making derogatory comments about indigenous people (despite being indigenous herself). Not being privy to any internal discussions, I can't say who's to blame - but in any case, as a friend of mine who used to work there says, we can expect the downtown to look worse than usual this summer.

- The backlash against the use of existing social housing stock to house previously homeless people continues. The Your Way Home program, introduced by housing minister Bernadette Smith, ultimately aims to use 20% of Manitoba Housing's stock for this purpose. Several longtime residents of Manitoba Housing buildings are up in arms - but it's worth noting that the biggest noisemaker quoted in the article lives in a building that's not part of the program. More reasonably, Erika Wiebe of the Right To Housing Coalition favours keeping 55+ buildings out of the program and improving support for residents as well as security.

- Ontario's education minister Paul Calandra is ordering school boards to make sure that graduation ceremonies remain apolitical. This follows an incident last year when an Ottawa student included pro-Palestinian remarks in her graduation speech. Calandra warns that he "will not hesitate to consider every tool available to me in the Education Act"; this comes not long after the passage of new legislation that makes it easier for the province to take over school boards.

- A new issue related to data centres has emerged - noise pollution. For one thing, many of these centres generate their own power using gas turbines, which produce a sound similar to a jet engine (since that's essentially what they are). There are also reports of low-frequency vibrations (infrasound) near these centres, which aren't audible to humans but have been associated with physiological effects like headaches and nausea.

- Country singer (and fourth-generation Albertan) Corb Lund is getting called a "woke bastard" for his stance on coal mining in the Rockies. Danielle Smith's government is lifting a moratorium on mining on the eastern slopes that was imposed by Peter Lougheed's government half a century ago and was accepted as necessary by all parties until Smith came along; Lund is among those gathering signatures to force a referendum on the matter.

The right doesn't want to be confused with facts

There's a couple of stories out today that support this thesis. First of all, you may have heard that Arizona's controversial immigration law is needed to stop the rampant crime that those dirty Mexicans are importing. The state's governor, Jan Brewer, alleges that they're finding headless corpses everywhere. But what's really going on?

The Arizona Guardian Web site checked with medical examiners in Arizona's border counties, and the coroners said they had never seen an immigration-related beheading. I called and e-mailed Brewer's press office requesting documentation of decapitation; no reply.

Brewer's mindlessness about headlessness is just one of the immigration falsehoods being spread by Arizona politicians. Border violence on the rise? Phoenix becoming the world's No. 2 kidnapping capital? Illegal immigrants responsible for most police killings? The majority of those crossing the border are drug mules? All wrong.

This matters, because it means the entire premise of the Arizona immigration law is a fallacy. Arizona officials say they've had to step in because federal officials aren't doing enough to stem increasing border violence. The scary claims of violence, in turn, explain why the American public supports the Arizona crackdown.

Source (h/t Blaque and Pensito). So in other words, it's a big lie.

My second example comes from our very own Stockwell Day, who is trying to justify his government's tough-on-crime stance using dubious claims about Canada's crime rate:

Although the official crime rate is going down, a senior Harper government minister says there is reason to disbelieve the statistics and spend billions of dollars on new prisons: an “alarming” increase in unreported crime.

Stockwell Day’s argument is based on a Statistics Canada survey, conducted like a large poll, which showed a slight rise in unreported crimes – though the increase was in property crimes and petty theft, not violent crimes. And the survey was conducted in 2004 – an ironic twist given that Mr. Day made his case only minutes after he maintained that the long-form census is not very reliable because it can be as much as five years out of date.

Mr. Day, the Treasury Board president, is not the first tough-on-crime Conservative politician to disbelieve the official statistics on reported crimes. Senator Pierre-Hughes Boisvenu said last month that “someone, somewhere, is manipulating the numbers.” The latest Statscan figures, released last month, show the number of crimes reported to police dropped 3 per cent last year, and was 17 per cent lower than in 1999.

But Mr. Day also argued that a tough-on-crime agenda is needed to keep dangerous criminals off the streets and deter them with stiffer punishments. The Harper government has dismissed arguments that tougher sentences alone won’t dent crime rates, but now finds itself defending a multibillion-dollar prison-expansion program when crime rates are falling.

From the Globe. Trouble is, there's more crime on TV than ever, as the news outlets trip over each other trying to cover every lurid detail of every crime that happens anywhere on the planet. Now I won't deny that there's a certain fascination with some of those stories, but when the news is dominated by this stuff it can skew the public's perception of crime rates. And unfortunately, right wing politicians love this stuff.

On the Fraser Institute's latest garbage

Yesterday the Fraser Institute, with much fanfare from the media, published a report claiming that taxes for the average Canadian have increased by 1,624%. Sounds bad, eh? Well, this is the Fraser Institute we're talking about, so perhaps it's worth looking closer at their figures. Actually, since I'm lazy, let's just look at what others have already pointed out. Devin Johnson has this to say:

First of all, the Fraser Institute's numbers do not account for inflation. According to the Bank of Canada inflation calculator, the price of a basket of goods increased by 624.84% between 1961 and 2009. Using the Fraser Institute's own numbers, this means that we should expect, all else being equal, that the tax bill of the average Canadian family would increase from $1,675 in 1961 to $12,141.08 in 2009. In fact, according to the Fraser Institute, the average Canadian family paid $28,878 in total taxes in 2009. In inflation-adjusted terms, this represents an increase of 237.85% (or, about 5% per year). When accounting for inflation, the Fraser Institute's figure of 1624% is off by about a factor of seven.

Nevertheless, a 237.85% increase in Canadians' real, inflation-adjusted tax bills is still a shocking increase, right? Well, not really. Once again, according to the Fraser Institute's own numbers, the average Canadian family's income roe by 1383.5% between 1961 and 2009. If Canadian families paid the same proportion of their income as taxes in 2009 as they did in 1961, we should expect the average tax bill to be $23,173.63 in 2009. In fact, according to the Fraser Institute, it was $28,878. This means that the actual average tax bill in 2009 was about 24.6% higher than expected. This is still an increase, but not nearly as shocking as the 1624% figure bandied about by the Fraser Institute. This figure is also consistent with the Fraser Institute's finding that tax liabilities rose as a proportion of total income from 33.5% in 1961 to 41.7% in 2009.

Hmm. Not so shocking, is it? Devin goes on to point out quite a few other things as well; meanwhile Curtis at Endless Spin Cycle points out what we're getting for the taxes we're paying:

- Today we're paying for universal health care
- Today we're paying for a school system that's expected to do far more than teach the 3 R's
- Today more people than ever are attending university and college - not just because they have the opportunity to do so, but because it's a necessity for most jobs today
- Today we're building massive bridges and freeways in our cities, not just slapping down some pavement on an old gravel road and calling that our highway system

Hmm. Taxes don't seem so bad, eh?

A rather curious journalistic error

At least I hope it's an error rather than a deliberate falsehood:

Dozens of Palestinian smugglers have died in collapses and strikes against the tunnels, which are used to bring everything from cigarettes and chocolate to livestock and weapons into the blockaded territory. Israel and Egypt imposed the blockade to weaken Gaza's rulers, the Islamic militants of Hamas, who violently seized power in 2007.

So says an AP story on the CBC website. But as pogge points out, the bolded part is completely false. Hamas were elected in 2007. Hamas aren't great folks by any means, but the MSM should be able to find enough true negative stories about them without having to make up false ones.