News roundup, 19 June 2026

- Labour Party dissident Andy Burnham won a resounding victory in the byelection in the constituency of Makerfield, winning nearly 55% of the vote compared to 34% for the Reform UK candidate. His vote share was almost double that of Josh Simons, whose resignation triggered the byelection in the first place. Burnham, who until now served as the mayor of Greater Manchester, says that this represents Labour's final chance to reverse its current direction; it remains to be seen whether this will push the party to dump Kier Starmer, much less whether the party could win the next general election by doing so.

- NDP house leader Heather McPherson posted (I'd say tweeted but this was on Bluesky rather than Twitter/X) a quip that billionaires shouldn't exist and trillionaires should be put in jail. This has thrown the folks at Juno News into a tizzy, ranting about a "leftwing hate fest" and misrepresenting the post to boot (McPherson didn't actually call Musk a Nazi, she just reposted someone else's post calling him that, not that I could fault her if she had). Juno News is just a rebranding of the True North Centre for Public Policy, so they shouldn't be taken too seriously, but it's kind of amusing to see what snowflakes they are when you pick on one of their heroes.

- Ukraine launched a massive drone attack on Moscow and some other Russian targets on Thursday. Among the targets hit was the capital's main oil refinery; some 17 people were injured in the attacks, and Moscow's four airports were shut down for most of the day. Meanwhile the Kyiv Post alleges that authorities in a town near the capital refuse to disclose the location of civil defense shelters out of fear of causing panic, saying that this information will only be made public "during mobilization and in wartime". And of course, this conflict is officially just a "special military operation", and calling it a war can get you put in jail or thrown out a window, so...

- The board of directors of the South Winnipeg Community Centre has disbanded and handed control of the facility back to the city. The board had been accused of financial irregularities and other governance-related issues by some members of the community, but an independent audit found no evidence of financial wrongdoing, and the General Council of Winnipeg Community Centres' own investigation found similar results. Despite this, board members continued to receive online harassment, and when you're a volunteer you're only going to put up with so much of this. I haven't been able to find much background on this story, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some sort of culture war nonsense bubbling underneath all this.

- Selkirk has become the first city in Manitoba to take advantage of funding the province is offering to provide free bus passes to youth aged 12-21. They will need proof of enrollment to be eligible, however. The province is still working with other cities, including Winnipeg as well as Brandon, Winkler, and Flin Flon, to get the program in place in time for next fall; it would be nice if the program covered university and community college students as well, at least in Winnipeg and Brandon, as that would probably lead to a reduction in impaired driving.

- Researchers are reporting that some AI systems are really good at finding loopholes in rules. This should give pause to anyone who hopes that some kind of constraints like Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics could be made to work in the real world.

News roundup, 22 April 2026

- The European Union is working on a carbon pricing scheme known as EST2, scheduled to come into effect in 2028. The scheme includes rebates to offset the impact (which will potentially leave lower income households better off); there are concerns, though, that far too little effort is being put into public education, especially regarding the rebates. One of the weaknesses of democracy is that it's not enough to have a good policy, you have to sell that policy to the public - and the more complicated the policy, the harder it is to do that. There's a saying in politics - "if you're explaining, you're losing"; that doesn't mean you should never explain things, but that when your explanation is a response to something that your opponents have already put out there, you have a problem. Given that fact it's especially important to work on educating the public about the tax and the rebates well before the pricing scheme takes effect. Otherwise, opponents of the policy may be able to whip up a populist fury before the actual facts can get out the door.

- Iran fired on three ships in the Strait of Hormuz today, and has reportedly seized at least two of them.

- The Trump regime is demanding what they call an "entry fee" before reopening talks with Canada on renegotiating the Canada-United States-Mexico Free Trade Agreement (CUSMA). The "fee" would not be monetary, but rather trade concessions; normally one would expect concessions to be made in the course of trade negotiations rather than as a condition of entry into said negotiations, but that's how Trump rolls I guess. For their part, Canadian negotiators say that they've already offered some concessions to no avail. 

- When Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), the metro system serving the San Francisco Bay Area, conducted a review that concluded that conventional fare enforcement disproportionately affected ethnic minorities due to the human judgment aspect, they decided instead to upgrade the gates at their stations, replacing the easily-jumped waist-high barriers with metal-framed Plexiglas doors. Besides being more effective and less inequitable than what went before, they found that vandalism dropped dramatically under the new system. Not to say that most fare evaders are vandals, of course, but it seems that a disproportionate number of the vandals are fare evaders.

- A 72 year old Winnipeg man has been arrested after unsigned, threatening letters sent to NDP MLA and cabinet minister Nahanni Fontaine were traced to him. The suspect is facing charges of criminal harassment and uttering threats.

- Chip Roy, a far-right Republican member of Congress from Texas, has introduced a bill which he has dubbed the "Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists" (MAMDANI) Act. This bill would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to allow for, among other things, stripping the citizenship of any immigrant who is a member of a socialist party or who "advocates" for socialism (as well as communism or Islamic fundamentalism).

- Tucker Carlson has apologized for his past support for Donald Trump, as the consequences of the war in Iran become more apparent. Better late than never I suppose, but he should have seen something like this coming.

News roundup, 21 April 2025

- Pope Francis has died. No doubt some of the more conservative Vatican officials are secretly breathing a sigh of relief.

- An awkward truth about efforts to get people to use public transit - if people feel unsafe, they're less likely to use it. For this reason, many are calling for more police on transit. This is controversial; some activists warn that this may discourage many poor and racialized passengers from using the service. The thing is though, if the primary goal of a public transit system is to keep cars off the road, the wealthy passengers who are afraid of the absence of police are more likely to actually switch to driving than the poor ones who are afraid of the presence of police - because they can. Of course this line of thinking will make many activist types uncomfortable, but the ultimate goal has to be minimizing total harm to the community as a whole, and while the harms of more traffic are more abstract and less in-your-face than the harms of causing discomfort to poor and racialized people, they are no less real, and all harms have to be weighed in order to develop the least bad policy. And more traffic is bad for everybody, including poor and racialized people (not to mention the biosphere).

- Following Thursday's leaders' debate, the plan was for a media scrum where reporters could ask questions of the leaders. However, this was cancelled due to what the Leaders Debate Commission called "security concerns". These concerns seem to have involved far-right pseudo-journalists like Ezra Levant; in particular, there was a confrontation between Levant and Hill Times reporter Stuart Benson in the leadup to the scrum after Benson pointed out that another organization owned by Levant was registered as a third party advertiser in the campaign and questioned whether Levant should be accredited as a journalist for the event. This of course sent Levant into one of his trademark emotional outbursts, leading to the cancellation of the scrum. For their part, the commission was apparently unaware of the connection between Levant and the third-party advertiser at the time they accredited him and his outlet; in any case, they were reluctant to shut him out due to his having been able to sue his way into similar events in previous elections.

- JD Vance is warning Keir Starmer's government that there will be no trade deal between the US and UK unless the latter's hate speech laws are repealed; Vance is also demanding that a proposed online safety law and a digital service tax be abandoned.

- It's not just leisure travel to the US that's in decline; it's now business travel as well. The fact that people visiting that country are being arbitrarily detained seems to have something to do with it.

- Following "Freedom Convoy" organizer Chris Barber's conviction for mischief, the prosecution is seeking to use civil forfeiture to seize his truck, which he calls Big Red. Of course he and his sheeple are up in arms about this; meanwhile more sensible people are making interesting suggestions like turning it into a mobile vaccine clinic. Now it should be said that civil forfeiture is problematic the way it is used in some jurisdictions; it is sometimes applied before the actual criminal trial so even if you're acquitted your property has still been seized. That concern doesn't apply here, though, since Barber has been duly convicted of a criminal offense in a court of law.

- The tariffs on China are driving up the cost of small appliances and electronic devices, many of which are made nowhere else (at least for the US market). 

- A knife-wielding American citizen attempted to hijack a small passenger aircraft in Belize, wounding two people (one seriously) before he was fatally shot by another passenger.

- A drop-in centre for the homeless operated by the Brandon Neighbourhood Renewal Corporation, which provided food, washrooms, and showers for people, has been permanently closed due to escalating violence at the facility. Understandable, but the closure is unlikely to lead to less violence in the city overall; probably the opposite is true.

- A Toronto couple with four kids between them took an Uber home from a Raptors game following a flat tire, but as they were unloading the driver took off with one of their kids still in the vehicle. They contacted the company but representatives refused to contact the driver; they called 911 but the company wouldn't provide info even to the police. Fortunately the police located the vehicle by other means; the driver was still unaware of the 5 year old child sleeping in the back of the car. For their part, Uber apologized afterwards and offered a $10 credit in compensation.

News roundup, 4 Sept 2024

- Jagmeet Singh and the federal NDP has evidently lost their patience with the Liberal government, saying that several of the promises made by the Liberals in making the confidence and supply accord have not been fulfilled. Accordingly, they have torn up the agreement, potentially meaning that the government could fall at any time.

- Kamala Harris has a solid lead against Donald Trump in the nationwide popular vote, but remains statistically tied with him in key swing states. So somewhat promising but a sane outcome remains far from assured thanks to the peculiarities of the Electoral College. A big concern is the possibility of something analogous to the "shy Tory" factor in British politics.

- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is trying to get his name removed from the ballot in several states following his endorsement of Donald Trump - but in Michigan and in North Carolina this request has been denied. Yet strangely, he is still trying to get reinstated to the ballot in New York after having been previously removed for misrepresenting his residency.

- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he plans to hold onto the seized Russian territories indefinitely, not because he wants to annex them but as a bargaining chip.

- Doug Ford has severely restricted safe injection sites, banning them within 200 metres of a school among other things. Yet he's more than willing to allow stores near schools to sell one of the most socially damaging drugs. He doesn't like it when this is pointed out, though.

- A list of donors to the so-called "Freedom Convoy" in 2022 includes several of the BC Conservative Party's candidates in the upcoming provincial election.

- The TTC has introduced a feature to its transit app that will show unplanned reroutes in real time. Seems to me that something like that is needed in Winnipeg (and elsewhere).

- While leaded gasoline has been banned for automotive use in most places for decades, it is still widely used in aviation. California is moving to change that, and plans on a full ban by 2031.

News roundup, 19 June 2024

- The NDP's Carla Compton won the Tuxedo byelection by 602 votes. This would have been unimaginable a year ago, and shows just how unpopular the Conservatives are in the city.

- Winnipeg's overall crime rate actually decreased in 2023 compared to previous years, however the rate of violent crime as well as hate crimes have increased significantly.

- Federal health minister Mark Holland accuses the Conservatives of "bullying" dental associations, alleging that they are calling these associations and yelling at them. Holland believes the Tories are trying to keep dentists from signing onto the federal dental program, and thus sabotage the program.

- The benefits of Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act disproportionately go to Republican areas. The reason is pretty straightforward - things like solar and wind farms require a lot of land, and thus generally go to rural areas. This has led to hopes that the Republicans won't kill all these initiatives; that remains to be seen.

- The Winnipeg neighbourhood of Wolseley has long had a reputation for being lefty, greeny types, but perhaps what they really are is NIMBY types, given the hostile reaction from many residents to an increase in the number of buses going through parts of the neighbourhood.

- While some shark species are in decline, the Great White Shark appears to be doing well in the Atlantic - to the point where warning signs are being considered for Nova Scotia beaches similar to those already seen in parts of New England.

- A Hamilton man walked into a mosque and yelled slurs at a Grade 3 gym class while tearing up a copy of the Quran. He has been charged with criminal harassment.

News for U of Waterloo students

The U of Waterloo Federation of Students is holding a referendum on student bus passes shortly. I'm not currently a student, so it doesn't affect me directly... but encouraging students to take the bus is good for everyone. Unfortunately the Feds' page has no info on the date of the actual vote, but someone at the NDP meeting who is a student says it's next week. The only date on the page I linked to is the date of a meeting for forming Yes and No committees. Makes you wonder how much the current Federation really cares about this, but no matter. If you're a UW full-time student (undergrad or grad) you can and should vote (and vote Yes!). If nothing else, consider how much easier it will be for you to find a parking space if other people are taking the bus.