News roundup, 22 Oct 2026

- A post-referendum press conference by Danielle Smith opened with a question from Rebel "News" that insinuates that the Forever Canadian campaign was funded by the far right's favourite bogeyman, George Soros. Smith actually handled the question relatively well under the circumstances, but this is to be expected when she treats the outlet as a legitimate news source that's invited to press conferences. Meanwhile seppie leader Mitch Sylvestre is also trying to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the vote due to the large number of mail-in ballots; this should not be a serious consideration but it's been one of Donald Trump's favourite talking points any time an election doesn't go his way. Speaking of Trump, it remains to be seen what he has to say about this one.

- Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, is running an ad featuring his opponent's estranged mother. Democrat Amy Acton was removed from her mother's custody as a child after her stepfather was convicted of raping her; her mother evidently can't accept the truth about the guy she took up with and is accusing her of being a serial liar. Even some Republicans think the ad goes to far, but Ramaswamy's campaign is doubling down and plans to run the ad on TV (it has previously only been seen online). The thing is, with many Republicans cruelty is seen as not only OK but as a virtue so long as it's directed at the enemy. Whether Ohio voters will agree remains to be seen.

- A bill before Parliament would put limits on gambling ads. This follows revelations that problem gambling has skyrocketed since restrictions on online casinos were lifted in 2022; in Ontario the incidence of gambling-related suicide has tripled since then. All too predictably, the governments of Alberta and Ontario oppose the bill.

- Several people have been attacked by a rabid skunk in Vancouver. Public health officials are warning that anyone who had contact with a skunk that was behaving abnormally or appeared to be sick over a period of several weeks to seek immediate medical attention.

- An acupuncturist in Dawson Creek, BC has been suspended for two months by the College of Complementary Health Professionals of BC after prescribing ivermectin and another livestock medication to her patients.

News roundup, 21 Oct 2026

- Alberta separatists are turning their guns on Danielle Smith following their defeat in Monday's referendum. Jeffrey Rath is accusing her of being "in bed with Naheed Nenshi, Mark Carney, Rachel Notley and the rest of the socialists and globalists". He now says Alberta will never be independent as long as Smith remains premier, implying that the seppies are going to try staging a coup in the UCP to get rid of her.

- 35 soldiers remain in hospital following the disastrous fire at CFB Wainwright on the weekend. Defence Minister David McGuinty has declined to provide details on the specifics of their injuries for privacy reasons; the cause of the fire is still being investigated. Satellite images show that the fire burned roughly 10 km² of land.

- Australian MP Helen Haynes has lost both legs as a result of the vehicle attack outside her constituency office in Wangaratta, Victoria. Meanwhile, a man has been arrested in the Perth suburb of Victoria Park after making threats at the office of Hannah Beazley, a Labor member of the Western Australia legislature, while armed with nunchucks.

- Polling for Toronto's mayoral election next week is inconsistent. A poll from Pollara gives Olivia Chow a 7 point lead over rightwing insurgent Brad Bradford, but Nanos gives Chow a lead of only three points, which is within the margin of error for the poll. The Pollara poll also asked respondents what they think of Bradford's plan to privatize Toronto Water; 62% of respondents are concerned about the proposal; this includes 57% of undecided voters and, curiously, 27% of Bradford supporters. I guess they're weighing that concern against their desire to put a white dude back in the mayor's office, though, and the latter desire is more important to them.

- A hack at Crime Stoppers has resulted in the leaking of over 1.5 million tips made by Canadians to the organization over the last 25 years. Not surprisingly, this is a source of considerable alarm for those whose identities were exposed.

- Winnipeg mayoral candidate Kevin Klein recently ran an ad for his campaign on social media. The problem is, the stock footage in the ad is of the wrong city; numerous well-known Edmonton landmarks were spotted in the video. Colin Fast, a member of incumbent mayor Scott Gillingham's campaign team, remarked "We know Kevin Klein hasn’t spent much time downtown, but we didn’t realize it had been so long that he’s forgotten what it looks like".

News roundup, 20 Oct 2026

- The separatist referendum in Alberta appears to have been soundly defeated, with around 76% of voters voting to remain in Canada. This is good news for everyone except the seppies, who probably won't get to become Septics in the near future. The margin of victory for sanity is especially good news (and higher than I expected); a narrow victory would have been almost as bad as a defeat, since not only would it likely have resulted in a surge in domestic violence across rural Alberta (not that there probably hasn't been some as a result of this vote) but a close vote would potentially be easier to discredit as rigged, not only in the eyes of the public but, much more ominously, in the eyes of the Trump regime. Unfortunately, it's not impossible that another referendum could happen soon - while Danielle Smith has rejected the idea, it's possible that it could happen anyway if the people behind a previous attempt to hold a referendum are successful in their appeal of a court decision that struck down their plans.

- Australian MP Helen Haines is in critical condition after being hit by a vehicle. Authorities are saying that this was not an accident but an intentional attack, though they are still trying to determine the exact motive. Haines, an environmentalist and public health expert, was elected as an independent in 2019 and reelected in 2022. A 43 year old man is in custody for the attack. In some ways the suspect doesn't fit the typical profile for such attackers, having been an anti-logging activist prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, but maybe he went down a far-right rabbit hole during the lockdowns. Time will tell I guess.

- Meta is being accused of interfering in the Brazilian presidential election by suppressing accounts that are supportive of incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, allegedly at the request of far-right opposition candidate Flávio Bolsonaro.

- Activists are calling on Winnipeg to bring in a bylaw to restrict the removal of mature trees on private property. The proposal from Trees Winnipeg would control the removal of trees more than 15 cm in diameter, while still allowing removal under certain circumstances (e.g. if they're diseased or if their removal is truly necessary for development). A number of cities in Canada already have such a bylaw, including Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, and Surrey. Trees Winnipeg says that 75% of council candidates have signed onto the pledge, though incumbent mayor Scott Gillingham is not among them.

- While tourism is tanking in Las Vegas, some Canadians still have no compunction about going there or elsewhere in the US. It's increasingly limited to the kind of person who would drunkenly steal and injure a flamingo, though.

News roundup, 19 Oct 2026

- An explosion and fire at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright in Alberta has killed at least four people and injured numerous others, 19 of them critically. There were some rumours that this resulted from oil and gas infrastructure being hit during an exercise, but the DND says there is no evidence to support this; they also say there is no evidence that this was a terrorist incident. Alberta separatist leader Jeffrey Rath made allegations, entirely unsubstantiated, of a "cover up", and suggested that "DEI programs" and "gender fluid soldiers" were to blame for the disaster.

- Albertans are voting today on ten referendum questions, including one on moving towards separation from Canada. Polls suggest that the separatist movement has lost some momentum recently; that said, they could still win if the turnout is sufficiently low, as separatists tend to be more highly motivated to actually vote. Reassuringly there are signs that turnout will be high; more than 700,000 people had voted in advance as of Saturday. I suspect that reason will prevail, but probably not by as big a margin as the polls would predict.

- Green Party member Pete Fry has been elected mayor of Vancouver, defeating right-leaning incumbent Ken Sim. 

- The Trump regime is apparently looking for means to strip Ilhan Omar of her citizenship, according to reports following the DHS raid on her home last week. During the raid her passport was among the items seized; the regime appears to be trying to claim that her age was misrepresented and that she was actually an adult when her late father applied for citizenship, meaning she would have had to apply separately. What's remarkable is that none other than Marjorie Taylor Greene, who doesn't agree with Omar on much of anything, is coming to her defense.

- A federal judge in the US has ruled that the Trump regime likely acted illegally when it banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico journalists from the White House, and has reinstated access for them pending a final judgment on the legality of the move. 

- Nick Adams, the Trump regime's "Special Presidential Envoy for American Tourism, Exceptionalism, and Values" (yes, that's actually his title) expressed outrage at travel boycotts aimed at the US. He called the failure of foreigners to spend money in his country "theft". This comes as travel to the US is facing drastic declines in tourism - they had a 5.5% drop in international visitors last year (and a decline of almost 21% from Canada).

News roundup, 16 Oct 2026

- A woman who showed up at a Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "Release the Epstein Files" was attacked by at least two men before police intervened. The police, however, just escorted her off the premises; according to the local sheriff the cops didn't see the actual attack and the victim didn't file a report. I'd be curious to know what kind of persuasion was used by the police to deter her from doing so. Incidentally, while the attack was real, one widely circulated image purporting to be of the attack was actually generated using AI.

- Trump's new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, has admitted that she failed her bar exam, but this did not deter her from repeatedly describing herself as a lawyer. To be fair, that's probably not the biggest lie she'll be telling in her present career.

- A school shooting in Bend, Oregon has killed three children and a teacher. The 16 year old suspect is also dead.

- The works of Irish author Sally Rooney are being banned from sale in the UK after she announced that she would be donating money to Palestine Action, an organization that the UK government considers a "terrorist" group despite the fact that it hasn't been linked to any actual violence, just vandalism and disruption.

- Three people are dead and 16 injured after a collision involving multiple vehicles, including two transit buses, in the Calgary neighbourhood of Saddle Ridge. One of the buses, which was powered by compressed natural gas, caught fire; one of the injured is in life-threatening condition. Meanwhile another fiery multi-vehicle crash has killed at least one person in Southwold Township, Ontario, just outside of London. The fire in that accident was so intense that the police have yet to determine the number of people represented by the remains found.

News roundup, 15 Oct 2026

- The Trump regime says that it is monitoring Canada for signs of election interference related to the upcoming midterms. US ambassador Pete Hoekstra cites a speech by former prime minister Justin Trudeau at Brown University last month in which he criticized the regime, as well as Industry Minister Mélanie Joly's remarks about retaliatory tariffs that target exports from "politically sensitive states". The fact that fuel prices show no sign of going down is probably bringing the regime close to panic.

- Federal NDP leader Avi Lewis is calling on the federal government to nationalize Stelco after its parent company shut down operations in Hamilton. Lewis pointed out that there is a precedent for this in the UK's nationalization of British Steel earlier this year, though it's worth noting that the latter move was not simply to save jobs but to ensure a secure supply of steel. Nonetheless, it's worth considering; sadly, it seems unlikely that the Carney government will do this given that they're busy making plans to privatize airports.

- The Ford government in Ontario is moving ahead with the forced removal of bike lanes from several Toronto streets, even as activists are requesting the Supreme Court to rule on the matter. Protesters obstructed removal efforts on Wednesday, but a large number of police moved in; two people were arrested. What's notable is that several compromise proposals from the City of Toronto that would have restored motor vehicle lanes while keeping the bike lanes were rejected by the province last month. One is left with the impression that Ford knows deep down that adding a lane won't solve congestion, and that his slackjawed supporters won't be satisfied by anything that allows cyclists on $80 bikes to overtake them while they sit in traffic in their $80,000 pickup trucks.

- New polling in BC suggests that the race is tightening; although the BC Conservatives still show as being in the lead with 42%, the NDP is at 40%. The Greens are at 9%. Among supporters of other parties, 29% said that they would consider supporting the NDP if their preferred candidate had no realistic chance (for Green supporters specifically this was 37%), while 21% of third-party supporters would vote Conservative under such circumstances. This might be good(ish) news for the NDP, but there are many caveats, not least the "shy Tory factor", which is likely to be significant given how embarrassing it must be to consider supporting the Cons. The methodology used for this poll doesn't allow for a margin of error to be calculated.

- One of Anthropic's AI agents went rogue and sent a false tip about an unsolved murder to Philadelphia police. Notably, the police immediately dismissed the tip as spam, but Anthropic didn't realize this had happened for two months.

News roundup, 14 Oct 2026

- The Carney government quietly suspended plans to purchase 16 Sikorsky UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters from the US earlier this year. The decision was made with an eye to reduce military reliance on the US; it was made shortly before the unsuccessful trade talks with the Trump regime over the summer.

- A Ukrainian citizen is going on trial in Germany for the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline from Russia four years ago. The man, named as "Serhii K", was arrested in Italy last year and extradited to Germany; another suspect faces potential extradition from Croatia. In Poland, however, a court refused to extradite a third suspect, saying that an attack on the pipeline was not unlawful.

- New polling on Toronto's mayoral race gives Olivia Chow a narrow lead of 51% over Brad Bradford's 46%. Bradford has more support among property owners, though; this is concerning because the latter group may be more likely to actually vote.

- A banner hung from a highway overpass near Steinbach, Manitoba declared that "Steinbach votes white not brown"; this was naturally disconcerting to Mitesh Kumar, who is running for city council. The banner also had the name of a white supremacist organization on it; the CBC blurred this detail from the image posted on their website, perhaps hoping that ignoring them will make them go away, but the organization is named in this Reddit thread as a neo-Nazi "active club" founded in Hamilton.

- An apparent data error resulted in End Homelessness Winnipeg overestimating the number of chronically homeless people in the city tenfold. I suppose this is good news, though it's embarrassing for the organization.

- The portion of northwestern Ontario that's in the central time zone will be joining Manitoba in remaining on daylight saving time for the entire year. The region has long had closer ties to Manitoba than to southern Ontario, so this made sense.