News roundup, 9 Oct 2026

- The Alberta government is ordering the City of Edmonton to revert to its pre-2024 zoning bylaws and parking minimums. The city had overhauled its bylaws to allow multiplexes to be built in neighbourhoods that were formerly single-family exclusive. One might think that this is a matter that the citizens of Edmonton could decide on (and in fact already decided on when they elected the current mayor and council last year), but Danielle Smith doesn't care what Edmontonians want. No doubt she fears that if Edmonton and Calgary build more dense housing, they might grow in population by attracting urban cosmopolitan folks from elsewhere, and thus have a larger share of the provincial electorate. This would eventually leave the simple rural types outnumbered and thus make the UCP unelectable in its current form.

- An investigation by MPI and the City of Winnipeg has found that a large number of rideshare (Uber/Lyft/etc) drivers, who are required to have a higher level of insurance in order to register with the city, have been downgrading their coverage once registered so as to get out of paying the higher premiums. As many as 36 of them have gotten into accidents in a 1 year period, resulting in $189,000 in claims that MPI may now try to recover from the improperly insured drivers.

- The BC Conservatives have dropped Joachim Agou as their candidate in the constituency of Victoria-Beacon Hill following the discovery a series of offensive social media posts. These include one in which he praises a driver who ran his car into pro-Palestinian protesters, as well as several pro-Trump (and implicitly racist) posts. Unfortunately this will probably have little impact on the polls, which show the party significantly in the lead with only a couple of weeks before the election.

- Conservationists fear that a grove of blight-resistant American Chestnut trees in West Virginia could be cut down to make way for a data centre. There is a great deal of confusion and secrecy about the ownership of the land and the company's plans; activists fear clearing could start as early as next month.

News roundup, 17 July 2026

- The Smith government in Alberta has launched a web portal where people can complain about bike lanes, which some people call a "snitch line". Municipal leaders in Calgary and Edmonton are pushing back, and you'd kind of expect that this ought to be a municipal matter, but as we've already seen with the Ford government in Ontario, provincial governments are happy to interfere if they think it will win them support from people who live in bedroom communities outside those cities who can't abide the fact that they're sitting in traffic in their $80,000 pickup trucks while people on $80 bicycles whiz by them on bike lanes. Looking at the actual site, it doesn't ask for any contact info, meaning that the same person could enter multiple complaints about the same bike lane. I'm sure that the aforementioned exurban commuters will be passing the link around telling their friends which bike lanes to complain about. On the positive side, it also means you can make multiple submissions that are full of gibberish to waste the government's time.

- Namaygoosisagagun First Nation in northern Ontario was destroyed by a wildfire on Monday; the community was evacuated with no fatalities and residents are now living in hotels in Thunder Bay. The wildfires are also seriously impacting air quality in significant parts of the US, including New England, New York, and the Midwest. 

- Donald Trump is once again raising doubts about the integrity of the electoral system in the US, even ordering law enforcement to investigate officials that he believes are "covering up" problems. No doubt Trump's definition of "covering up" would include failure to find any evidence of problems that the Fuhrer believes to be there. The fact that the midterms are right around the corner and the Republicans are concerned about the outcome of said midterms probably has something to do with this.

- China is having a conniption about the UK's renationalization of British Steel, saying that it harms the interests of the privately owned Chinese corporation Jingye Group that previously owned the company. I can't help thinking there's an irony in there somewhere.

- The Western Canada Lottery Corporation is apparently concerned about the fact that younger people are less inclined to buy lottery tickets than their parents. They're trying to get around this by hiring influencers to promote lotteries. This seems like a pretty questionable move on the part of a Crown corporation; the point of having such a corporation surely ought to be to control gambling, rather than to promote it.

- Corus Entertainment, which owns the Global TV network along with numerous radio stations (including Winnipeg's CJOB) is laying off dozens of people across the country; they say this is driven by declines in radio and TV ad revenue. The Winnipeg Free Press is also shuttering its weekly community papers; of the four people employed by that division, two will be given positions at the Free Press itself.

News roundup, 3 July 2026

- The Bank of England has announced that fossil fuel companies' debt will be downgraded from October onwards. Other central banks are taking similar measures; some 40 of them use a statistic called "weighted average climate intensity" (WACI); notably one of the easiest ways to improve that statistic is to sell US Treasuries. The fact that it's the Telegraph (aka the "Torygraph") reporting this is particularly interesting, given that paper's general hostility to things like renewable energy. Unfortunately, the changes that result probably won't happen in time to stop the collapse of the Thwaites glacier and the resulting sea level rise (possibly up to 2 metres by the end of this century), but it might buy some time to adapt to the rise.

- Spain has banned state-owned enterprises from entering into new contracts with Palantir on national security grounds. Other places are taking measures as well; London's mayor Sadiq Khan recently blocked a £50 million contract that the Metropolitan Police had negotiated with the company. Palantir intends to sue over the matter.

- Wally Daudrich, the former Manitoba Progressive Conservative leadership candidate who was disqualified from running in the Turtle Mountain constituency, has left the party in favour of the far right Keystone Party. He will be running for the latter party in the upcoming byelection in The Pas-Kameesak.

- Edmonton seems to be making excellent use of the land formerly occupied by the decommissioned City Centre Airport. The new neighbourhood, called Blatchford, is being developed with a lot of mixed use midrise buildings with retail on the main floor. This is something that many would see as simply good sense, but it's been difficult to build in much of North America for many decades due to archaic zoning laws. The buildings will be heated and cooled by a shared geothermal system and be well served by the city's LRT.

- A recent study in BC has found that life expectancies in the province are diverging. As of 2024, the provincial average has increased since 2004, and in most of Metro Vancouver (with the stark exception of the Downtown Eastside and vicinity) as well as the Victoria area, people can be expected to live substantially longer. A resident of Richmond born in 2024, for instance, should have an average life expectancy of 89.4 years. The Downtown Eastside itself, not surprisingly, has the lowest life expectancy in the province, but notably the province's interior is doing badly as well - and the farther inland you live, the worse your life expectancy is on average. It's not simply that the interior isn't gaining, it's actually retreating - the life expectancy there actually rose between 2000 and 2014 and has been declining since.

- Nine monks on a pilgrimage walk in Thailand were killed when they were hit by a pickup truck driven by an 11 year old boy. The child is in custody.

News roundup, 23 Jan 2026

- One of the things about Donald Trump's sudden retreat in the Greenland crisis is the extent to which it undermines his case for taking the territory in the first place. After all, if it were really essential to national security as he was claiming, there would be no room for compromise - but yet he backed down quite abruptly, no doubt having been finally convinced of the economic disaster that could result to his country - and his and his friends' stock holdings - if he went ahead and Europeans started dumping Treasuries and other key American securities. One hopes that this might, ever so slightly, chip away at his tough-guy image among the MAGA crowd. This is certainly not the end, or even the beginning of the end. Is it the end of the beginning? Time will tell.

- A leaked internal ICE memo advises officers that they don't need a warrant to enter private homes, contrary to officially acknowledged training materials (not to mention the Constitution).

- The US has followed through with its threats to withdraw from the World Health Organization. Under their own laws they're supposed to give a year's notice and pay all outstanding fees (around $260 million), but a State Department official denies this.

- Pierre Poilievre says that he will not run in his current riding in the next election, saying that Damien Kurek (who stepped aside to allow him to sit in the House after he was defeated in his old riding of Carleton) will be allowed to have the riding back, no nomination needed. Where he is going to run remains to be seen; maybe he'll just slink away with his tail between his legs if we're lucky.

- Edmonton mayor Andrew Knack reports that there has been a disturbing amount of harassment of snowplow operators as well as a city councillor, Erin Rutherford. Plow operators have had shovels thrown at them, while Rutherford has been the target of an online disinformation and doxxing campaign by rightwing influencer Jesse Watson (who was Rutherford's opponent in the last municipal election). More information about this charming character may be found here.

- Power generation from coal has declined in both China and India for the first time in 52 years, with clean energy technology taking up the slack.  

- A teacher in the Louis Riel School Division in southeast Winnipeg was suspended for five days without pay and transferred to a different school after mimicking a nine year old's temper tantrum to mock the child, prompting other kids to do the same.

- Investigators in Queensland have concluded that the Canadian woman found dead on a beach surrounded by dingoes most likely drowned and that the bite marks on her body were inflicted after death. 

News roundup, 8 Jan 2025

- A woman was shot and killed by ICE agents in a traffic stop in Minneapolis on Wednesday, apparently while serving as an observer keeping track of the agency's activities. The city's mayor, Jacob Frey, has condemned the killing and called for ICE to "get the fuck out of Minneapolis", but of course the Trump regime is spinning it as "domestic terrorism" on the part of the victim, claiming that she was trying to run down their officers with her vehicle (there's video here so you can judge for yourself). The Minnesota Department of Public Safety says that they will investigate the shooting "with federal authorities"; sadly that probably means that nothing will happen to the suspect, at least not through legal means. There are a couple of photos said to be of him here though. More information on the victim may be found here.

- Donald Trump mused about cancelling this year's midterm elections while speaking at a retreat for Republican members of the House. He quickly walked that back, but warned that he will be at risk of impeachment if the Republicans don't win the midterms.

- A professor at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee who was fired after posting a tweet with Charlie Kirk's famous quote on gun violence being a necessary evil shortly after Kirk himself fell victim to it has been reinstated and will be getting a $500,000 payout from the university.

- An antiwar protester in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was arrested immediately after being interviewed by a local TV station, as the cameras still rolled. 

- A newly enacted ministerial order by the Danielle Smith's education minister, Demetrios Nicolaides, requires schools to remove "sexually explicit" books from their libraries. School divisions are complying, but notably most of them, including those in the big cities, are not revealing what books are on the banned list. This is in stark contrast to the response to an earlier version of the order announced in July, which specifically included written descriptions as qualifying as "explicit". Back then, the Edmonton public school board publicly released a list of books that would have to be removed based on their interpretation of the order. Among the books listed were some of the usual suspects (The Handmaid's Tale, The Color Purple, A Game of Thrones, American Psycho) as well as some that you don't usually see on such lists (including The Godfather, Jaws, and, amusingly enough, two Ayn Rand novels (The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged). This put one of the activists who had been calling for the bans in the first place into a tizzy, accusing the school division of "malicious compliance" (and Smith later called it "vicious compliance").  It appears that the new version is more directed at comics/manga/graphic novels; perhaps the school divisions figure those aren't such a good hill to die on as stuff that older folks recognize as literature, so they're keeping their heads down for now.

- In the last couple of days Winnipeg has seen antisemitic graffiti at a school and Islamophobic graffiti at a mosque. While it's possible that one was done as a sort of collective revenge for the other, I think it's more likely that the people responsible don't come from either of those communities.

- Donna Cox, a councillor for a Manitoba municipality, was reinstated by a court after an attempt to remove her. The Rural Municipality of Thompson (a confusing name, since it's nowhere near the city of the same name) had rescheduled council meetings so they conflicted with her work, then removed her after she missed three consecutive meetings. The change in schedule happened shortly after Cox was elected; previously, council had alternated between morning and evening meetings, but then the entire council except Cox voted to hold all their meetings in the morning. I'd be very curious to know what kind of policy differences Cox has with her colleagues; this sounds malicious to me.

News roundup, 26 Jan 2024

- Pierre Poilievre likes to say that "Canada is broken". Well, he's actually kind of right about that, but not for the reasons he and his followers think; it's nothing that can be laid at the feet of the present-day Liberals (or the Conservatives, or any other party). As the Globe and Mail's Andrew Coyne points out, there are serious problems with representation by population - and they're burned right into our constitution. Perhaps the worst of these is a 1915 amendment known as the "senatorial clause" (section 51A of the Constitution Act), which stipulates that no province may have fewer seats in the House of Commons than it has in the Senate - meaning that PEI, which was given four Senate seats as an enticement to join Confederation in 1873, is guaranteed four seats in the House in perpetuity, despite having a population smaller than Sudbury. Someone on the rabble.ca discussion board once referred to the province as "Canada's constitutionally protected rotten borough".

- The suspect in Tuesday's shooting incident at Edmonton's city hall has been identified as a security guard employed by the Corps of Commissionaires. He had apparently recorded a "manifesto video" (since deleted from YouTube) that one commentator described as "salad bar extremism", referencing grievances ranging from the war in Gaza to "wokeism" and taxes. He also cited both racism and immigration as other grievances, which suggests that he's not all there; this seems to be at least as much a psychiatric story as a political one. When a traumatic event strikes a provincial capital you might expect the premier to make some sort of statement, even if it's just a "thoughts and prayers" one, but she was too busy welcoming Tucker Carlson to address the matter.

- Kenneth Law, the man accused of selling toxic substances to suicidal people, has just had his charges upgraded to first degree murder. No detailed info about the reason for this upgrade, but it seems to suggest that the authorities think that he actually enjoyed causing deaths as opposed to say, just wanting to help people ease their suffering or even wanting to make money off of them. There have been people like that before, such as William Melchert-Dinkel, though notably even he was not actually convicted of murder.

- Coal is expected to account for a smaller share of global electricity production than renewables by next year; new projects are going online all the time. This does add to my conviction that the hardcore doomers are wrong; I believe civilization as a whole is going to make it in the long run. A reality check though - even in the best case, a lot of people won't make it; there's just too much warming locked in already. How we deal with that grim reality is going to be a big test of our ability to balance idealism with pragmatism in the coming decades.

- Alabama just executed a man by asphyxia with nitrogen, the first time that particular procedure has been used in the US.

- There's a risk to having parrots in a zoo - they might learn some naughty words and use them in front of zoo visitors. One facility in the UK has decided to run with it, though.

News roundup, 24 Jan 2024

- Donald Trump has won the New Hampshire primary by an 11 point margin; Nikki Haley is not giving up, however, and this is sending Trump into conniptions. Meanwhile Hawaii has joined the ranks of states planning to keep him off the ballot.

- A Federal Court judge has handed the Freedom Convoy (or as some have called them, the "Flu Trux Klan") a significant legal victory by ruling that the use of the Emergencies Act did not meet the standards of reasonableness. The judge in question, Richard Mosley, was appointed to the court in 2003, thus it would have been the Chrétien government that appointed him. One person commenting on this Reddit thread remarked that while the invocation of the Emergencies Act would indeed have been unnecessary if the police had done their jobs, they did not; perhaps the judge was unwilling to open that can of worms though. In any case, the decision is being appealed.

- Ken McDonald, the Liberal MP for Avalon in Newfoundland, is calling for a leadership review, though he stopped short of calling for Justin Trudeau's resignation. It's worth noting that McDonald voted against his own government on the carbon tax issue on two occasions. Nonetheless, Trudeau's brand has become sufficiently toxic that McDonald has a point, though the question of who could replace him looms large. On a related note, a recent poll suggests that most Canadians who plan on voting Liberal would do it to stop Pierre Poilievre rather than out of enthusiasm for Trudeau and the Liberals.

- The City of Winnipeg is suing the owners of two vacant buildings over unpaid inspection bills and other  fees. The provincial government is looking at further measures, so that such buildings could be expropriated and turned into social housing, though this will take some time. No doubt something needs to be done for housing, in any case, and more than just a few expropriations. The Free Press' Brent Bellamy has some ideas for other measures.

- A long-serving and high profile Winnipeg city councillor, Janice Lukes, is considering a run for the federal Conservatives, despite some possible qualms about Poilievre.

- The City of Calgary is planning to turn one of the parking lots at an LRT station into social housing, though this is getting pushback from park-and-ride users. The city says that there will still be enough parking for this, however, while adding an estimated 200 to 300 housing units.

- A man entered Edmonton's city hall and opened fire with a firearm described by police as a long gun capable of firing multiple rounds, then threw a Molotov cocktail. Evidently he's not a very good shot; nobody was injured. The suspect has not been identified publicly as of this post, but given that he was captured alive I'm guessing he's probably white. Whether this was politically motivated, the actions of a disgruntled employee, or a failed attempt at suicide by cop remains to be seen.

- Democrats in Minnesota plan to introduce legislation prohibiting municipalities from introducing mandatory parking minimums, something widely recognized as necessary to facilitate the construction of more housing.

- The cap on student visas announced by the federal government is raising concerns at universities and other postsecondary institutions; these institutions get a lot of revenue from international students, and that needs to be replaced somehow.

- Pro-Palestinian protesters were attacked with an unknown foul-smelling substance at Columbia University in New York City last Friday. Some protesters sought medical treatment; police are investigating.

- A Russian IL-76 military transport plane has crashed in the Belgorod region of Russia; 74 people, including 65 Ukrainian POWs being transported for a prisoner exchange, have been reported killed. Russia claims that the aircraft was shot down by the Ukrainian military; Ukraine has not yet commented on these allegations.

- Pastor Dwayne Waden of Elevated Life International Ministries in High Point, North Carolina received a complaint from his wife, a manager-in-training at a McDonald's, that her employees were "disrespecting" her. In response, he apparently showed up at the restaurant, punched a cook in the face, and shoved the man's head in the direction of the deep fryer. I guess he interpreted "turn the other cheek" as "turn the enemy's cheeks towards the hot oil".