Cabinet’s decision to grant Chinese electric vehicle makers a 278,989-car import quota over five years marked “a new path,” says an internal Department of Foreign Affairs memo. The censored eight-page document made no mention of slave-made parts: "If we concede that electric vehicles required forced labour in their supply chain, will you put them on the list of products banned in Canada?" READ MORE
Widespread promotion of online gambling is a “serious mental health concern,” the Canadian Psychological Association is warning MPs. The group urged passage of a private bill to regulate sports betting advertising: "Expansion and promotion of online gambling have become matters of serious mental health concern." READ MORE
Canadians can no longer file private complaints with the Competition Tribunal over false environmental claims in corporate advertising, says the Competition Bureau. No reason was given, though the directive Friday followed one MP’s complaint of misleading claims by the Government of Canada: "The Bureau reviewed its existing guidance." READ MORE
Newly-disclosed records show cabinet was upset by the 1996 resignation of Québec’s lieutenant governor over his participation in an anti-Jewish street riot in his student days. Jean-Louis Roux's resignation was “a difficult precedent,” cabinet was told. READ MORE
Opposition parties in a rare joint protest accuse cabinet of manipulating a Commons committee into conducting an investigation solely to boost a Liberal MP’s re-election. A spokesperson for first-term MP Alana Hirtle (Cumberland-Colchester, N.S.) denied the allegation: "It was a personal, local initiative of the MP." READ MORE
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom writes: "Veterans Affairs struggles to handle thousands of phone calls from current and former military personnel. Staff shortages, technical glitches, and budget cuts are blamed..." READ MORE
Author Wendy Dobson calls China’s system “authoritarian state capitalism.” Analysts similarly called pre-war Italy a “corporate state.” Like the Beijing Politburo of 2026, Mussolini in 1934 mesmerized outsiders with showboat statistics. Italian GDP appeared to defy Depression-era gravity, growing year over year from 1929 to 1939 while the Canadian economy shrank five percent overall. “Everything looks well ‘on the surface’,” wrote economist Henry Schultz of the University of Chicago on a 1934 Italian tour. “No debating, no complaints.” The UK Saturday Review in 1934 put Mussolini on its cover and enthused: “He dragged Italy out of the mire of socialism and in a few years has made it the most successful and prosperous country in Europe.” Interestingly, both pre-war Italy and contemporary China adopted the identical economic tools: over-valued currency, state management of the economy, price controls, abolition of independent trade unions, abolition of dissent, abolition of a free press, restrictions on mobility rights, property rights and rule of law, voodoo statistics and disastrous state spending. In fascist Italy one in five workers was a government employee. READ MORE
Vietnam, China, North Korea, all have labour camps. All abuse human rights and rule of law. Perhaps these realities are too raw for Canadians. Instead we presume common interests and points of goodwill that do not really exist. These are not normal societies as you and I know them; normal gestures are pointless. Governments promote trade with communist countries but there is no evidence this diminishes the power of police states or has ever closed a single prison camp. I know how communists work.
