News roundup, 29 May 2025

- A provincewide state of emergency has been declared in Manitoba due to the wildfires in the north and east. Around 17,000 people have been evacuated, including the entire city of Flin Flon as well as the First Nations communities of Pimicikamak and Pukatawagan and the Northern Affairs community of Cross Lake. Most of the evacuees are being sent to Winnipeg; a reception centre has been set up at an arena in the northewestern part of the city. The military is being brought in to assist.

- Besides the various other provisions in the omnibus bill that Donald Trump has dubbed the "One, Big, Beautiful Bill" such as the ban on AI regulation, the bill also effectively tears up a Canada-US tax treaty that has been in place since 1942. This is presented as a retaliatory measure against taxes that Trump considers to be unfair, such as the digital services tax introduced in 2024. The bill has yet to clear the Senate but this is expected to occur, and Trump expects to sign it into law in time for the 4th of July. More interesting, though, is the fact that Elon Musk is criticizing the bill for increasing the deficit, saying that it undermines his own work at DOGE, and is now leaving his role with the regime.

- Despite the Trump regime slapping tariffs on countries near and far, some countries are getting sweetheart deals. Among them are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which Trump presumably likes because they don't do that nasty democracy stuff and buy lots of American ordinance to drop on Yemen.

- Two Calgary lawyers with the so-called "Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms" are facing possible disbarment for dishonourable professional conduct after they hired a private investigator to spy on the judge hearing one of their cases.

- A Hamilton landlord has been fined $100,000 for four illegal "renovictions". Under the law, tenants evicted for renovations are entitled to "right of first refusal" for their old units, but the landlord immediately offered the units to other people at more than double the rents the original tenants were paying. Evidently he hoped the authorities wouldn't do anything about it; surprisingly, they did.

- Two human smugglers convicted after a family of four froze to death attempting to cross the Canada-US border in January of 2022 have received substantial prison sentences in a Minnesota court. The ringleader was given a ten year sentence; the driver sent to pick them up got 6½ years.

- Germany is offering to host a satellite campus for Harvard University so non-Americans can still attend the institution.

- The Swiss village of Blatten, population around 300, was devastated by a landslide that resulted from the partial collapse of a glacier. One person has been reported missing.

News roundup, 17 July 2024

- The City of Winnipeg has released a transportation plan that calls for residents to be using private automobiles for no more than 50% of trips by 2050 (it's currently about 80%). Of course 26 years is a long time; one would hope that some reductions in car use could happen before then.

- The UBC professor who made an injudicious tweet about the attempt on Donald Trump's life was apparently responding to another one by Shoshanah Jacobs, a biology professor at the University of Guelph, who had posted the video of the shooting with the comment "When 4 inches really matters". That university is also investigating the matter.

- Trump has selected JD Vance as his running mate for the fall. I guess Mike Pence was never in the running this time around. Vance apparently once declared himself to be a "Never Trumper", but it turns out he really meant "not a Trumper until it's necessary to further my political career". He's calling for tax rebates for fossil fuel powered cars instead of the ones for electrics, something that serves no real purpose other than to "own the libs". None of this, though, is enough to prevent some of the Republican base from making racist insults about his wife, who is the daughter of Indian immigrants.

- Wyoming has imposed restrictions on who can bid on oil and gas leases after a conservation organization, Wyoming Outdoor Council, bid on some leases in the hopes of preventing them from being developed.

- A severe storm hit Toronto on Tuesday morning, with roughly 76 mm of rain falling in the downtown core over a few hours and around 100 at Pearson Airport. Major flooding and power outages have resulted.

- Lab-grown meat has been approved in the UK for pet food; this is important because many pets (most notably cats) are obligate carnivores and can't live on a conventional vegan diet. Hopefully approval for human consumption will follow.

- Viet Duong Hoang, an engineering researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, has developed an autonomous drone that can recharge itself from the magnetic fields emitted by power lines without tapping into the lines So far, plans are to use them for the most obvious purpose - inspecting power lines.

- Remember Spirit Rising, the group home operator that made the news a while back for allegedly giving cannabis to their teenage wards, supposedly in the name of harm reduction? That already stretches the boundaries, but at least there was a kind of logic to it. More recently, though, it has been reported that they were also allowing their wards to be sexually exploited in return for alcohol and other drugs. That's worse than Sandra Guiboche's claim that she was helping with harm reduction because she was selling cleaner crack than the competition. And you can bet donuts to dollars that Poilievre will use this case as a "typical" example of harm reduction; one hopes that if he brings it up in an interview the reporter will ask him how many other cases like that he can name.

- Following an inspection that found that some fire safety systems were not working at a North End apartment complex, the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service issued an order to the building's owner last Friday to remedy the situation. In particular, they ordered that the exits must remain clear and that a "fire watch" be put in place over the weekend, to keep the tenants safe until the problems were fixed. Instead the slumlord immediately evicted all tenants with no notice, giving them each a wad of cash equivalent to slightly over a month's rent to go away, presumably calculating that this would be cheaper than making the necessary repairs. Presumably they plan to either charge hire rents for the units once the fix is eventually made (essentially a low-budget renoviction), or else let the building become yet another vacant derelict building that someone can break into and burn down. Housing Minister Bernadette Smith is rightly appalled and condemns the mass eviction as illegal. Be nice if the province could just seize the building, fix it up, and permanently add it to Manitoba Housing's stock; we'll have to see.

- Members of a community Facebook page for Saskatoon's Fairhaven neighbourhood (yeah, those kind of people) are calling on the city to prune the lower branches of pine trees in parks in the hopes that this will stop people from sleeping under them.

- Winnipeg lawyer David Davis has pleaded guilty to professional misconduct after punching an articling student in the groin. He has been convicted of professional misconduct on three previous occasions; nonetheless he escaped with a six month suspension.