Thursday, October 15, 2026

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.

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