Everyone’s favourite bullshit Cabinet minister, Evan Solomon, is putting together a task force to determine the next steps in the government’s digital asbestos strategy. While we wait to see just who is going to be on this task force, because that will say volumes, it’s almost inevitable at this point that this is mostly going to wind up being more hype, because Solomon has guzzled it all down, while prime minister Mark Carney has also bought into it as the cure for Canada’s flagging productivity and other problems (rather than the obvious fact that corporate Canada is lazy). We’ve all heard everything Solomon has said so far. I’m not optimistic at all.

It's gonna be so much more hype. We are so boned.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-09-24T15:21:05.227Z

I’m also extremely sceptical about Solomon insisting that they’re going to take the lessons from the Privacy Commissioner’s investigation into TikTok and its privacy violations in order to shape the new digital asbestos laws, because that would be too much intervention for what Solomon has been preaching about “light touches.” Part of the problem with the TikTok violations are that this is their business model, and while they insist that they are trying to keep children off the platform, they put more effort into hoovering up private data for marketing purposes than they did in using those very same tools they developed to keep kids off the platform, as it was hoovering up their data at an alarming rate. So much of what makes up digital asbestos is similar business models about siphoning that personal data, as well as using techniques to keep users engaged on that platform, hallucinations and all, and not caring about it sending them on delusional spirals that craters their mental health. They don’t care because it’s the business model, and that’s why I can’t trust Solomon to actually regulate—because he has bought into the hype around that model, and if he regulates, the tech bros will cry and whine that they can’t operate in those rules, and he’ll kill the industry, and gods forbid, we couldn’t have that.

Evan fucking Solomon says they'll take the lessons from the TikTok privacy report in order to shape new digital asbestos laws. www.thestar.com/politics/fed…

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-09-25T03:13:46.890Z

Meanwhile at the UN, president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is warning about the destructive arms race happening right now with digital asbestos and drones, and is calling for international rules about limiting its spread. But of course, I can just hear someone like Solomon insisting that we don’t want too many rules, because that will “stifle innovation,” and so on. Absolutely nobody is taking any of this seriously (and no, we’re not talking about Skynet), and we’re heading for some serious problems in the very near future as a result.

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine has attacked the petrochemical complex in Salavat for the second time in a week, further reducing Russia’s refining capacity.

Good reads:

• Following his meetings at the UN, prime minister Mark Carney says Canada needs to find opportunities in the crisis of the American trade war.
• In Ottawa, Carney met with the president of Indonesia and signed a trade deal, the first bilateral deal with an ASEAN member country.
• Carney is now heading off to the UK (where one can bet that he will make the announcement that Bill Blair will become the new High Commissioner).
• The end of summer has now passed, and the F-35 review is not yet completed.
• The government’s plan to offload office buildings is being complicated by the demand for more in-office days for civil servants. (Gosh, you think?)
• StatsCan has some numbers on how non-permanent immigrants transition to permanent status as the government tightens caps in response to “backlash.”
• The new Indian High Commissioner and the new Ukrainian ambassador both presented their letters of credence to the Governor General yesterday.
• A former bank employee has been charged with illegally accessing Mark Carney’s personal bank accounts at the behest of someone on Telegram for cash payments.
• A Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project report shows how the dominance of American tech giants in the online ad market can be a credible national security threat.
• The Quebec government is banning gender-neutral pronouns in official documents, because they need to stop haemorrhaging votes to the provincial conservatives.
• More conflicts of interest have been uncovered in the Alberta Health Service procurement scandal (that Danielle Smith keeps trying to distract from).
• The other report on this same scandal is behind schedule, and won’t be released publicly when it is finished.
• Danielle Smith is basing her anti-trans policies on a bunch of nonsense about puberty that she read online. I’m not even kidding.
• Kevin Carmichael discusses Tiff Macklem’s tough advice for Canadian firms, and puts the current economic moment into historical perspective.
• Justin Ling delves into the delusions about digital asbestos LLMs that are multiplying, in service of the tech bros who are making bank off of it all.
• Susan Delacourt showcases how Carney was demonstrating Canada’s divergence from the US during his time at the UN General Assembly.
• Anne Applebaum recounts her latest visit to Ukraine, the drone factors, and the long-range strikes that Ukraine is making in order to cripple Russia’s economy.

Odds and ends:

It's Danielle Smith. She read some shit about puberty.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-09-25T04:06:31.257Z

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