News roundup, 30 March 2026

- Avi Lewis has won a convincing victory in the NDP leadership race, receiving 56% of the vote on the first ballot. Heather McPherson came a distant second, at 29%. This does not sit well with provincial leaders in Alberta and Saskatchewan. He will need to find an opportunity to run for a seat in the House of Commons; one is expected in Beaches-East York as Liberal incumbent Nathaniel Erskine-Smith is expected to jump to the provincial level, and the NDP has held this riding in the past. Of course if McPherson wanted to be really spiteful she could resign herself, and put Lewis in the position of having to defend the Green New Deal while running in an Alberta riding.

- Toronto plans to create city-owned nonprofit grocery stores, following the lead of New York's mayor Zohran Mamdani who has similar plans. The idea is to locate the stores in underserved areas and undercut the major chains. There is no timeline for this, however, and city staff warn that it will not be cheap.

- The Carney government has just passed legislation that makes people ineligible for refugee status if their application comes more than a year after their first entry to Canada. The law is retroactive to 2025, meaning that some claimants' applications will be cancelled.

- The International Congress of Mathematicians, the largest conference in the field, is scheduled to be held in Philadelphia this summer, the first time in over 40 years that it will be held in the US. Many prominent mathematicians are threatening to boycott the event if it isn't moved to a more civilized country.

- Michael Ma, the Conservative-turned-Liberal MP for Markham-Unionville, has been accused of casting doubt on the use of China's Uighur population as forced labour. Following a backlash, he has clarified his statement.

-Winnipeg city council is moving ahead with plans to build a bike lane on Wellington Crescent, where a cyclist was killed in 2024. Unfortunately they are also scrapping plans for a temporary lane in the interim; one Redditor on this thread speculates that the permanent lane is going to be put on the boulevard so as to avoid removing or narrowing any traffic lanes, which couldn't be done with temporary lanes. They think council may fear that if they temporarily remove a traffic lane, the narrower street will become normalized and there will be more opposition to, say, removing trees to build the lane on the boulevard. On a positive note they also plan to reduce the speed limit to 40 km/h on that stretch of Wellington, but compliance would be better if the street were made narrower.

- Scott Fielding, who served as finance minister under Brian Pallister and Heather Stefanson (and previously as city councillor for the suburban St. James-Brooklands ward) has been arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a coworker at KPMG, the consulting firm where he went to work after resigning from the legislature.

- Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) and Alphabet (parent company of Google and YouTube) have been hit with a $6 million judgment by a court in California that found that the companies deliberately designed their products to be addictive. The plaintiff had become hooked on YouTube at the age of 6 and Instagram at 9. The companies are expected to appeal, of course. This comes just after Meta was hit with $375 million in damages by a New Mexico jury for misleading its users about the safety of its products and facilitating child exploitation. There are hopes that this is the start of a major reckoning for the tech industry, but you can be sure that the Trump regime will do its darnedest to protect them.

- The autonomous vehicle company Waymo has been aggressively lobbying the BC government to try to convince them to allow autonomous vehicles on the province's roads. The government is standing firm, so far at least.

News roundup, 26 March 2026

- The last shipments of oil to make it out of the Strait of Hormuz are expected to reach their destinations over the next 8-10 days. Since there isn't expected to be any more for the foreseeable future, expect dramatic increases in fuel prices, and outright shortages in some places. Even if the strait is reopened, it will take time to restore oil reserves; whether voters will understand who to blame for this has yet to be determined, but Trump seems to be desperately looking for a way out.

- Polls in Hungary continue to show the opposition Tisza party widening its lead over Viktor Orban's Fidesz. An election is set to take place on the 12th of April, unless Orban finds some excuse to cancel it.

- A building formerly owned by Providence University College and Theological Seminary is being converted into transitional housing for formerly homeless people. When complete it will have 118 units; critics say that more is needed. Meanwhile the college that used to own the building is laying off staff due to the cap on international students.

- A CBC investigation has found that the RCMP conducted intensive spying operations on indigenous organizations across the country, including the Manitoba Metis Federation and the National Indian Brotherhood (now known as the Assembly of First Nations).

- Russ Wyatt, who represents Transcona on Winnipeg's city council, has been charged with sexual assault after a man claimed Wyatt drugged and assaulted him after meeting him on social media. While mayor Scott Gillingham is urging Wyatt to go on leave, council has no mechanism to suspend a member facing criminal charges.

- A committee of Winnipeg city council has voted to revoke a conditional use permit that allowed a West End family to keep pigeons. This follows concerns from neighbours about the impact of feces, but also fears about aviation safety due to the proximity to the airport. For their part, the family say that the pigeons are important therapy animals for their autistic child.

News roundup, 4 June 2025

- The Manitoba government has announced that around 1,000 hotel rooms have been made available for evacuees from the north. Some of this is the result of the cancellation of a conference that was being held in Winnipeg for Manitoba and Saskatchewan courtroom staff. Some evacuees are still having to go further afield though; hundreds are now as far away as Niagara Falls. In other wildfire news, much of the the village of Denare Beach, Saskatchewan was destroyed on Monday. Flin Flon is still intact but faces potential threats from all directions. And the chief of Pimicikamak Cree Nation is calling for the RCMP to help round up residents who are refusing to leave.

- A lawsuit filed in a Calgary court alleges that the Red Deer Public School Division, upon hearing a report that a Czech exchange student attending one of their schools had sexually assaulted a teenage girl, got the suspect out of the country before police could investigate, and even destroyed evidence. One might hope that there would be pressure for criminal charges against school division officials for this, but the locals are no doubt too busy trying to keep the drag queens out of their city to deal with people who actually aided and abetted a sexual offender. And in this Reddit thread it is alleged that the chair of the school board is an ex-cop who describes herself as a "proud Conservative". Wonder why she's so soft on crime then?

- Alberta now has 710 cases of measles; of these, six are in the Edmonton region and 13 in Calgary. In other words, it's not that Albertans per se are backward and unenlightened, it's just that rural Albertans are backward and unenlightened. I suspect you could draw a pretty direct line to the increased political polarization in that province; a lot of people who are of a broadly conservative bent would previously have gone along with such things as vaccination because it's what you're supposed to do, but now defying any kind of measures for the common good is such a part of the conservative identity that they follow the blue shepherds all the way to the slaughterhouse.

- Elon Musk is now calling Trump's "one big, beautiful bill" an abomination due to its impact on the deficit. Some think this could motivate some Republican senators to vote against the bill, but that remains to be seen.

- An Idaho woman who was jailed for two months for her involvement in the Jan 6 putsch has apparently had a significant change of heart. She declined the presidential pardon she was offered, saying that she and her co-conspirators were guilty and that the pardons are just an attempt to push a false narrative about what happened on that day.

- The sheriff's office in Johnson County, Texas obtained data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reading cameras across the US in order to investigate whether a woman left the state to get an abortion.

- Newark Mayor Ras Baraka is suing interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba for false arrest and malicious prosecution following his arrest on a trespassing charge after he attempted to accompany three Democratic members of Congress for an oversight tour of an immigration detention facility.

- A number of US states have amended their building codes to require roofs on new builds to be reflective, in order to limit heating. This did not sit well with the manufacturers of the synthetic rubber traditionally used for making some kinds of roofs - and they successfully lobbied Tennessee to repeal the new rule. 

- Actor Jonathan Joss, best known for his voice role in the animated series King of the Hill, was shot dead in an apparent anti-gay hate crime on Saturday.