News roundup, 29 July 2026

- BC Conservative Party leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay has directed the party's MLAs to stop using the term "First Nations". The terms "indigenous" and "aboriginal" are still considered OK, along with the antiquated and widely deprecated term "Indian". I suspect that part of the motivation is to avoid giving any legitimacy to the idea of them as sovereign nations, but even so she could have avoided suggesting "Indian" as an alternative. I suspect the latter is motivated as much by desire to appeal to the more openly racist voters as anything. Some folks in this Reddit thread suggest another factor - Findlay herself ended up declaring bankruptcy following a legal fight with Musqueam First Nation in 2001 and may carry some residual animus (not that the bankruptcy stopped her from serving as Minister of National Revenue in the Harper government). What's especially worrisome is the fact that Premier David Eby is tanking in the polls, and when average voters get into a "throw the bums out" mood, they stop caring about who they're voting in (if indeed they ever did).

- The Ford government is considering withdrawing support for the Alto high speed rail project in revenge for the federal government's rejection of the expansion of Billy Bishop Airport. This is pure spite, of course; if you're actually concerned about making it easier to get around the country, trying to stop high speed rail isn't going to make things better.

- At least 13 people are dead and numerous others missing after an earthquake struck the Japanese city of Kumamoto.

- Atlanta activist Samuel Tunick, upon returning from overseas, was pulled aside by Customs and Border Protection last year and ordered to provide access to the data on his smartphone. The phone was running GrapheneOS, which allows you to set up a "duress code" that wipes the contents of the phone when entered; he allegedly gave this code to CBP officers when they demanded access. Following this they let him go, but he was subsequently charged with a felony for destruction of evidence. Tunick had been involved in protests against the construction of a police training facility called "Cop City" by critics, and suspects that this was a fishing operation.

- Around 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians who had been given "temporary protected status" in the US due to the conditions in their homelands have had their status cancelled. Their chances of admission to Canada are minimal due to changes to the Safe Third Country agreement. The changes are definitely unfortunate, but were probably inevitable in this political climate; it's unrealistic to expect the federal government to simply accept an influx of people comparable to a medium-sized city, no matter how deserving they are of refuge. This is something that's only going to become more common in the coming years as climate change displaces vast numbers of people.

- A volunteer with the animal rescue organization K9 Advocacy Manitoba was killed by dogs earlier this month in Sandy Bay First Nation. She had apparently visited a home to pick up some puppies, but the owner wasn't home and their own dogs, described as "protective and aggressive", attacked and killed her.

News roundup, 6 July 2026

- Germany's Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (also known by the German acronym BSW) is a nominally leftwing party (it's a splinter group from Die Linke, and its leader/namesake was once a member of the East German Communist Party). So it's rather odd to see them publicly expressing a willingness to make a deal with the far-right AfD should they hold the balance of power following elections in the East German states of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony-Anhalt. This violates a longstanding taboo in European politics. It's worth noting that while superficially leftwing on economic issues, BSW is quite socially conservative, and moreover opposes efforts to get Europe off of fossil fuels. Like AfD, BSW is also quite pro-Russian, which might provide an explanation for the latter position.

- A new poll from Nanos has found that Canadians are approximately evenly split on whether or not the proposed high speed rail link between Toronto and Quebec City should be a priority. Curiously, while the poll data is broken down by age, gender, and region, it does not differentiate between urban and rural respondents, which is probably where you'd find the biggest divide.

- Residents of Winnipeg's Whyte Ridge neighbourhood are concerned that they didn't get emergency alerts on their phones in advance of the tornado that struck last week. Environment Canada says that they had a lot less warning of tornado conditions than they did for the storm in early June, but residents would understandably like to see something done about that.

- Germany's centre-right chancellor Friedrich Merz has introduced legislation to tighten up sick note requirements for workers. Currently, employers can't require a note unless a person is off for at least three days, but under the proposed legislation they would be able to require one for even a single sick day. The measure is opposed not only by unions but by doctors; the German Association of Family Physicians predicts that they "would be flooded with patients who don’t need in-person care and would be better off in bed". Merz, though, claims that Germany "can no longer afford the competitive disadvantage caused by prolonged absences from work". Perhaps he believes that work will not only make you free, but also healthy.

- The cities of Steinbach and Winkler, in the heart of Manitoba's bible belt, will be holding plebiscites on whether to allow cannabis stores to open inside their boundaries. The councils of both cities had rejected a request for this to go on the ballot, but enough signatures were obtained from residents to override this. The vote (perhaps it should be called a "reeferendum") will coincide with this fall's municipal elections.

News roundup, 2 June 2026

- Manitoba Public Insurance is ordering its managers and directors back into the office full time. CEO Satvir Jatana justifies this with a bunch of platitudes about how being in the office "creates opportunities for quick conversations", ignoring the fact that a good chunk of the conversations that happen in the workplace have little or nothing to do with the actual work, as well as "faster alignment and more effective problem-solving" (with no actual proof of course). It's widely suspected that the corporation plans to do the same with its regular, unionized staff at some point in the near future. The heffalump in the room, though, is that forcing the corporation's roughly 2,000 employees back into the office five days a week is going to lead to more traffic, and hence likely more accidents, something that a public auto insurer ought to know. Whether Jatana has just been drinking too much of the corporate Kool-Aid, or whether this is an order that came straight from the government (either to placate voters whose jobs actually have to be onsite, or to prop up the commercial real estate industry) is unclear.

- The council of the United Counties of Prescott-Russell in eastern Ontario has passed a resolution to deny access to county land for the Crown corporation studying a possible high speed rail corridor, even to simply do an environmental assessment on the project. This follows an open letter in April from 12 municipalities (11 townships and the small city of Quinte West) opposing the project. They've made some vague bleatings about "rural character" and somewhat more concrete concerns about expropriation of land. They claim not to be opposed to high speed rail in principle. I suspect that they may be lying about that, though, and that their real fear is that their communities will become even more irrelevant than they already are if fewer people are driving through them. Or maybe it's just that trains are too woke for their liking.

- Robotaxis are starting to spread beyond Silicon Valley, and opposition to them is significant. There are real issues with them - they often can't cope when traffic signals aren't working, they sometimes get confused by construction and don't know how to reroute (even driving in circles), and they've been known to drive onto flooded streets and get swamped, stranding their passengers. Notably, their overall safety record is currently very good, but if they become dominant this could lead to more traffic overall (as instead of parking they will tend to drive around looking for passengers) which could lead to inefficiencies as well as undermining the gains in the safety department. Not to mention the number of people they could put out of work.

- Taxi drivers in Quebec are suing the provincial government for the abolition of the taxi permit system in order to allow "ride sharing" companies like Uber and Lyft to operate in the province. Previously, the permits often served as an investment that drivers could sell or rent out when they retired; while the province's move included a compensation package, the drivers say this is insufficient and that the abolition of the permits was a form of "disguised expropriation". The drivers won the first round, and lost on appeal; they now hope to have their case heard by the Supreme Court of Canada.

- Scientists are tracking subtle changes in the ecology of lakes in the far north in the face of climate change. As the surfaces of these lakes become warmer, the lakes become more stratified, which makes some species of diatoms (a group of algae) more viable and others less so. The ones that are favoured are smaller (larger ones are more likely to sink to the bottom of a more stratified lake, going too low to photosynthesize) and lower in nutrient value, with potential implications for the rest of the food chain.