Most Canadians consider online information reliable and are confident they can tell when it’s not, says internal polling by Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault’s department. Guilbeault has proposed “concrete action” to police news and information on the internet: "66 percent feel confident in their ability to tell if online content is fair and balanced." READ MORE
Federal agencies quietly arranged to ship hundreds of thousands of Covid masks to Québec when all other provinces faced shortages, according to internal emails. Political aides in the Prime Minister’s Office stressed “we should be careful about what we say” in giving Québec preferential treatment: "The plan is for them to go to QC." READ MORE
Cabinet will fully implement a facial recognition system for 25 million Canadian passport holders within two years despite little proof of identity fraud. The program would see federal agencies compile a database of millions of Canadians’ faces: "Don’t you think it’s a bit too late to prevent the misuse of that information?" READ MORE
A fifth of Canadians believe match fixing is commonplace in football, hockey and other professional sports, says federal research. Cabinet legalized bookmaking August 27: "My hope is we won’t wait for that scandal to happen in Canada before we take some serious and significant action." READ MORE
Records in a British Columbia court case detail the decades-long impact of wrongful conviction in a notorious 1981 murder. The number of Canadians jailed for crimes they did not commit is not known, though cabinet since 2019 has reviewed 47 claims: "Exoneration and eventual compensation was long and arduous." READ MORE
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, writes for Blacklock's each and every Sunday: "By the entrance, names of employees and their whereabouts. Andy went for a dental appointment; Shawn is in a conference; Barbara on vacation..." READ MORE
Membership in hate groups has long been linked to economic failure. Few millionaires joined the Aryan Nations. More contentious is a theory that all human beings are prone to irrational impulses that pit Catholic versus Protestant, English versus French, white versus Black. “We are hardwired to be ethnocentric,” writes Kenneth Stern, director of New York’s Bard Centre for the Study of Hate. Stern argues we are programmed through millennia to instincts that long ago meant survival but today make no sense whatsoever. Consider the story of the spider and the sedan. He quotes social psychologist James Waller: “Automobiles kill far more people today than do spiders or snakes. But people are far more averse to spiders and snakes than they are to automobiles. Why? Because for most of our ancestral history, spiders and snakes were a serious threat to our survival and reproduction, whereas automobiles did not exist.” READ MORE
I was on a flight to Europe when the pilot made an announcement: “For all those of you sitting on the left side of the plane, look down and you’ll see Greenland.” Everybody on the right side of the plane stood and craned to have a look. I laughed. It reminded me that every Canadian has some interest in the North even if they can’t quite see it. Norway has a true northern strategy. Norwegians understand the riches of the North will sustain their country for the next hundred years. These people have a plan. Canada has no plan. The cost of our myopia is human destruction in the North. Not everyone quite sees it, but somewhere in our national psyche I believe Canadians recognize we are a northern nation.
