Tag Archives: Digital Asbestos

An intent for a 100-year agreement

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday was the first day of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Canadian visit, where there was an announcement in Calgary with prime minister Mark Carney before the pair headed to Banff to address the Cabinet retreat. There were a number of different announcements made, largely with the signature on a “declaration to establish a 100-year partnership,” which means that it’s not finalised, but they still wanted to put on a production. The 100-year thing has already been signed with the UK, and will be more of an intention of long-term support than a binding 100-year agreement of any particular variety, but Ukraine gets the validation of a partner like Canada, amidst the other supports. There was also an energy-partnership signed, new funds for Ukrainian war veterans, and the coordination around new anti-ballistic missile sanctions that Canada is taking the lead on.

One of the big items was a drone deal, where Canada is standing up a drone production industrial base as opposed to an inventory of several thousand drones because of the pace of technological change. A third of that production will head to Ukraine immediately, but this is where Ukraine leads in developing the technology, and Canadian industry will help fund and carry out the production. This is where the future of warfare is headed, and Canada is the first to sign such a deal in the Americas (a number of countries in the Persian Gulf have signed their own deals because of the Iran conflict demonstrated their necessity), but it certainly help ensure that Ukraine has what it needs as the conflict carries on.

Meanwhile, we learned that Carney is still communicating regularly with Trump on issues like Ukraine and Iran (not that he’s bothered to publish a readout of any of these conversations). He spoke about compartmentalising these conversations about the broader trade war happening, but okay. And then he said that he still thinks that there’s a deal to be had with the US, and that we can “strike a fair deal.” We have a fair deal—it’s the New NAFTA. There is no deal to be had with Trump because he doesn’t keep his word, and is a gangster who will always try to take more. Carney may think he’s going for optimism, but he’s just delaying action when we need to make it clear that there’s no going back to “normal” for at least a generation, if not more.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-09-10T13:08:02.542Z

My Latest:

My Xtra column looks at the documents that Alberta separatists have been putting out, and why they may sound great on the surface but have hidden warnings if you look.

Continue reading →

Pinky-swearing data centre expectations

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday morning, minister of digital asbestos, Evan Solomon, was in Markham to announce that the government had created a new framework of “key expectations” for building data centres in Canada, and that 23 major digital asbestos companies had signed on. It all sounds good, until you realise that this is a voluntary code of conduct made with bad faith actors, and that the federal government has pretty much no levers to enforce any of these promises that these companies make, because so much of the regulation is either a provincial or municipal responsibility. So what you have instead is Solomon once again putting on a performance for the cheap seats at the community theatre, and is expecting applause and bouquets for said performance. It’s like we’re back in the Trudeau era of “the announcement is the policy.” This is not serious governance, and governance is the cornerstone of digital sovereignty—that thing that Solomon keeps claiming to care about.

Non-binding 'expectations'? Solomon & Carney are not serious about governing data centres in Canada; they're offside w/ the large & growing anti-data centre public sentiment. These companies won't comply w/ voluntary 'rules.' They have lied about energy & water use. This is weak & shameful.

— Natasha Tusikov (@ntusikov.bsky.social) 2026-09-03T18:53:05.383Z

In technical terms, this is referred to as a "pinky swear." And it's just as binding and effective."The responsible development principles do not include any compliance mechanism or penalties for broken pledges."This is not serious governance.

— Blayne Haggart (@bhaggart.bsky.social) 2026-09-03T17:01:43.644Z

@ntusikov.bsky.social and I wrote this oped about social media regulation, but its main point stands here. Regulatory theory tells us that voluntary agreements don't work with bad actors. The companies listed above are some of the least trustworthy of the past several decades.This is just empty PR.

— Blayne Haggart (@bhaggart.bsky.social) 2026-09-03T17:01:43.645Z

Later in the day, prime minister Mark Carney announced via press release the launch of Digital Transformation Canada, which aims to “refine how the government develops, buys and uses technology.” While this could be a good thing, particularly if it means developing home-grown digital solutions that would get us off of American platforms, that was not really mentioned in the release at all. Instead, it was more about the CEO bullshit around digital asbestos, with “eliminating duplication” and “improve outcomes,” which just sounds like more hype that Carney has swallowed. We have real needs when it comes to our digital sovereignty, but if there is any consideration about how to do that, it doesn’t appear to be coming from this plan as outlined.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-09-03T13:08:02.353Z

Programming Note: I am taking an extra-long weekend, so posts will resume later in the week. Enjoy!

Continue reading →

Hybrid rules are still bad (in case you were wondering)

Posted on by

Because it’s the summer doldrums, The Canadian Press has decided to check in on the “hybrid” Parliament rules, which are inexplicably still in place, long after the height of the pandemic ended. Well, it should be inexplicable, but for those of us with longer memories, we know that the Liberals were trying to institute these rule changes long before COVID happened, and were never able to get them over the finish line (for good reason!) until COVID, and well, they didn’t let a good crisis go to waste. A lot of them were very committed to the idea that these rule-changes are necessary because of parental responsibilities, and so on. Of course, we now have a handful of MPs who simply don’t show up in Ottawa (one of them was NDP MP Niki Ashton, before she got voted out, but there are others), while we are devaluing the in-person aspects of the job, which cannot be ignored.

I have consistently said this, and I will keep saying it—much of the value of what happens in Parliament are the conversations that happen in corridors, in lobbies, at the sides of committee rooms, that you cannot have online. People underestimate how huge that is. Keeping MPs online also keeps them in party silos, where they don’t see other MPs as human beings, but opponents. In-person meetings and the ability to connect on a human level increases collegiality and decorum. (See: Ending evening sittings in the 1990s and the demise of collegiality). But more than that, there is now a culture of presenteeism where they feel they need to be online all the time, when they should be taking leave for family issues, or medical care, or so on. You can pair votes for absences. You can have someone cover for you at committee. This happened for 150 years, and Parliament functioned just fine. The excuses for why they feel they need this are poor, and it creates more problems than it solves. MPs need to wind down these “hybrid” rules, and end remote voting (because that’s particularly offensive to parliamentary democracy), and engage with one another in person like they’re supposed to.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-08-04T19:08:02.941Z

My Latest:

  • My weekend column wonders how it was that Mark Carney had become an even worse communicator than Justin Trudeau was.
  • My column makes note of the premiers’ attempt to get back to a 50-50 healthcare funding formula, ignoring that they got revenue tools they now refuse to use.
  • For National Magazine, I delve into the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision to strike down the law that bars the Ethics Commissioner’s reports from judicial review.
  • My long weekend column looks at the falling crime rates before Carney’s performative tough-on-crime legislation, and points to how credulous he really is.

Continue reading →

Self-defeating speeding up of consultations

Posted on by

The Assembly of First Nations is meeting in Ottawa this week, and so far there have been two major points of discussion among the assembled chiefs—the government’s plans for major project development and their attempts to speed through consultations with Indigenous people, and the First Nations clean drinking water legislation. The common denominator between the two is how the Carney government has been moving backwards on reconciliation issues, and watering down its commitments and obligations wherever possible, which is ultimately self-defeating. These are constitutional obligations that they are trying to skirt around as much as they can, and it’s not going to end well for them, and be costlier in the long run.

On the major projects, the national chief, Cindy Woodhouse Neepinak, is correct in that these plans to try and fast-track consultations were done without any consultation ahead of time, so and that can ultimately call into question the legitimacy of project approvals because they do not have Indigenous consent (and yes, free prior and informed consent is the law both in Canada and internationally). Remember when Stephen Harper tried to gut environmental legislation to speed project approvals and it mostly ended up with more litigation? Yeah, that’s pretty much what is going to happen here. As for the drinking water legislation, the fact that the government watered down the bill that had been ostensibly “co-developed” with First Nations in the last parliament (though your mileage may vary on this description somewhat) in order to match their arguments in other litigation is craven, and again, self-defeating. They will ultimately lose these battles in the courts, and it will have cost them time, money, and lives when doing the work up front could save all of these. There is so much penny-wise-pound-foolish nonsense that keeps happening over and over, and nobody seems to want to learn any lessons.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-07-14T19:08:01.471Z

My Latest:

My column points out Jason Kenney’s enthusiasm for airbrushed versions of history that don’t make straight white men the bad guys, which he considers “defamation.”

Continue reading →

A privacy bill that takes away from the Privacy Commissioner

Posted on by

The federal government tabled long-overdue privacy reform legislation yesterday, which is intended to work in concert with their Digital Asbestos For All Strategy, and while there are some needed updates within it, there are also some concerning aspects. For example, there will be more powers to demand deletions from online searches (“right to be forgotten” powers), and while they are going to give the federal Privacy Commissioner more powers like he’s been begging for, they are going to restrict him to only public sector complaints and hive off private sector complaints to this new Digital Safety Commissioner. They’ve also decided to jump on the “surveillance pricing” hysteria, which both lets Avi Lewis claim a victory, but they have no details on how this will work, to say nothing of the fact that consumer protection is a provincial responsibility!

I have regularly butted heads with the Privacy Commissioners we've had over the past 20+ years, but sidelining an organization with decades of experience to empower an as yet unconstituted body is frankly shocking. #BillC34

— David TS Fraser (@privacylawyer.ca) 2026-06-15T21:41:45.003Z

It's worth noting that there's nothing new in #BillC36 that has anything to do with "surveillance pricing". The provision that the Minister pointed to in his presser has been in PIPEDA since 2001.

— David TS Fraser (@privacylawyer.ca) 2026-06-15T22:42:03.453Z

The fact that they are taking the new Digital Safety Commissioner that is being created as part of the Online Harms legislation, and loading him or her up with these enormous new powers is concerning, as is the fact that this commissioner will report to government and not to Parliament. I worry about creating a new regulator with so much scope of authority that it will need to build an enormous bureaucracy off the start, meaning it will be slow to start up, slow to react, and eventually start empire-building, particularly given how much online regulation it is being asked to do in addition to privacy work. We will have to see if the government bothers to offer a justification for this model (which they may not!) but I suspect we’ve got a long summer ahead of Evan Solomon exhorting the opposition to pass this while pretending it’s the solution to all of our problems.

A modernized privacy law should be something that gets broad support, but I think the creation of this new super-regulator that reports to the government and not parliament may be this bill's undoing. #BillC36

— David TS Fraser (@privacylawyer.ca) 2026-06-15T23:09:34.362Z

https://bsky.app/profile/joshtabish.bsky.social/post/3moeciabcks2u

My Latest:

  • For National Magazine, I delve into Friday’s Supreme Court of Canada decision on why all future Lieutenant Governors of New Brunswick needs to be bilingual.
  • My weekend column on how the Liberals have shamelessly reversed their policies so many times under Carney that they are virtually just Conservatives now.

Continue reading →

A long-term food strategy

Posted on by

Yesterday, before jetting off to the G7 in France, prime minister Mark Carney was in Toronto to unveil the details of his national food security strategy. The initial announcement was a couple of months ago, when he announced the rebranding and expansion of the existing GST credit, and the details for this new strategy could bear fruit (groan!) in the long-term, but I worry that he is raising expectations that these measures will lower food prices immediately. They won’t. Building up new food production infrastructure via greenhouses and vertical farms will take time and a lot of dollars to get off the ground, as will creating new domestic processing capabilities, which we may not even have the necessary labour for. Same thing with bolstering the rules around competition in order to attract new entrants into a marketplace dominated by oligopolies—you can’t unwind that in a day, and certainly not without just inviting in more American companies, which would go against the notion of trying to ensure food sovereignty.

Again—these kinds of investments and commitments to increasing domestic production and processing are good, and overdue. But in the vein of you can lead a horse to water, corporate Canada is not all that keen on investing in things, including productivity measures, because they are too accustomed to relying on trade with the US (which they keep pinning all of their hopes on normalising once more, as though there will be no lasting damage from the country descending into outright fascism), and their whole modus operandi is about getting monopolistic power and becoming a rent-seeker rather than investing in productivity or innovation. And yes, Canadian food prices are very high, and only part of that has to do with the fact that we’re a cold-weather country that needs to import a lot of what we eat. This is a strategy built for the long-term, and that’s great, but I know that by September, Pierre Poilievre will stand up in Question Period every day and declare that this new strategy hasn’t reduced food prices, so therefore we must burn everything down for the sake of tax cuts and going harder on trickle-down economics (and the government will respond by patting themselves on the back). They’re going to have to do the hard work of pushing this and then actually defending, and I have doubts that they are capable of doing just that.

Jennifer Robson has additional thoughts on the announcement.

My Latest:

My Xtra column points out how much Mark Carney patted himself on the back for doing the absolute bare minimum at this year’s Pride flag raising.

Continue reading →

Political blackmail under the guise of a unity speech

Posted on by

Pierre Poilievre kicked off his supposed “unity campaign” in Calgary yesterday (as he skipped the installation of the Governor General to do so), and gave a speech which was little more than a remix of the same campaign speech he’s been giving for three years now. And not even a good remix, but a shitty extended dub mix that is mostly just a lot of electronic noise. In it was the usual litany of invented grievances that Albertans have been touting for years—pretending that the federal government is somehow interfering in their jurisdiction, or that Justin Trudeau’s environmental policies were somehow strangling the province’s resource sector and that the global oil price crash of 2014 didn’t happen (just like the oil price crash of 1981 didn’t happen, and all of their woes were the fault of Pierre Trudeau). It’s a tired mythology that is not true, but is so intrinsic to the core of the invented grievances that have dominated Alberta politics for more than four decades.

But what is particularly dangerous about this kind of tactic is that it hijacks a potential national unity crisis for partisan ends. It makes unity conditional on the conservatives, federally or provincially, getting their own way as though there aren’t political considerations in the rest of the country either. As Andrew Coyne puts it, this message posits that the rest of the country needs to “prove” that it’s worth saving, and if that means dismantling what little federalism we have in this country, then so be it. The notion that the only Canada worth having is their narrow vision of the country, which is exclusionary and frankly mean, is not a unity message. It’s little more than the same kind of blackmail that Danielle Smith and Jason Kenney before her were trying to use in leveraging separatist sentiment to hold a knife to their own throats to force concessions from the federal government because they think it worked for Quebec. (It did not, and Quebec’s economy has never actually recovered). It’s fundamentally undemocratic, and shows them to be little more than crybabies who can’t handle the fact that sometimes democracy means you lose at politics.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-06-08T19:08:01.492Z

My Latest:

  • My latest for National Magazine on Friday’s Supreme Court of Canada decision and the warning they gave to judges about how to do a credibility analysis.
  • My weekend column takes note of the way in which Poilievre’s rhetoric tends to catastrophize what is happening, along his tendency to rewrite history.
  • My Loonie Politics Quick Take on that Conservative MP trying to refuse his raise, and why that kind of populism is poisonous to democracy.

Continue reading →

Digital Asbestos For All!

Posted on by

The prime minister and his minister of digital asbestos, Evan Solomon, released their “Digital Asbestos for All” strategy in Toronto yesterday, which involves giving half a billion dollars to firms to scale up their adoption of said digital asbestos, and doing a lot of back-patting about sovereign capability—or at least laying the foundations for it—and there were some utterly fantastic estimations of just how many jobs this will create. And by fantastic, I mean it looks an awful lot like fantasy. But it’s also a lot about trying to get people hooked, through giving access to ‘trusted [digital asbestos] agents” to all post-secondary students, which is not what professors want and is going to make their lives more difficult as they already have a hard enough time preventing cheating using these tools. They are also promising a “National [digital asbestos] Literacy Initiative” that involves training and tool-kits available to educators, which feels a lot like giving pot to high school students and telling them it’s good for them.

"Provide access to trusted AI agents for every post-secondary student – from the arts and commerce to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and medicine."I'm pretty sure that nobody who teaches in a post-secondary institution asked for this, and this makes their jobs even harder.

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-06-04T15:46:27.206Z

If this wasn’t bad enough, there was a whole lot of handwaving from Solomon about “building trust” and “safety” without actually saying how they’re going to ensure that these platforms can be trusted, or what kinds of safety measures they’ll put into place. On Power & Politics, David Cochrane was giving Solomon the gears about how he can possibly make these kinds of promises when the tech bros controlling these companies have more money than many economies at their disposal so fines won’t be of any use, and they have the weight of the Trump administration behind them, so trying to force them to build any kinds of safety features that they don’t want to build are extremely unlikely to happen. And Solomon wouldn’t answer, but just kept repeating his lines. “Trust” is a whole lot of “just trust me,” and I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough. But that’s all that this government is going to offer, because Mark Carney and Solomon have guzzled all of the tech bro hype, and they’re going to pour all kinds of money into this just as the bubble is about to burst. We’re going to lose so much money, while this government is already cutting spending to programmes that need it, and we’re all going to pay the price because they couldn’t stop guzzling the hype.

My Latest:

Continue reading →

QP: The second time as farce

Posted on by

The PM was once again away, off to Toronto for his big digital asbestos announcement, while Pierre Poilievre was also absent, leaving it up to the very masculine Jacob Mantle, who started listing countries, quoted Big Bird, and wondered which of them was in a recession. Steven MacKinnon noted that we are facing headwinds thanks to the trade war the U.S. launched, and wondered which of those countries he listed he would rather live in. Mantle reasoned that he would rather live in a Canada led by a Conservative government, before giving the “is this a recession or is this technical?” Talking point. François-Philippe Champagne listed the G7 countries and noted the OECD forecast of our having the second-fastest growth. Rhonda Kirkland tried to give Poilievre’s line about a recession or a technical recession, and Wayne Long listed countries that the government has signed agreements with. Kirkland made a Beetlejuice quip before repeating the same talking point, and David McGuinty lamented that the Conservatives have no plans. Gabriel Hardy read the script in French, and Mélanie Joly praised their recent announcements in Quebec. Hardy tried again, and this time Joël Lightbound wondered what Hardy would say to the people in his riding who are benefitting from programmes he voted against. 

Christine Normandin led for the Bloc, and lambasted the government for capitulating on the streaming levy, and Marc Miller considered it hypocritical that they weren’t supporting their new money for the cultural sector. Normandin noted that these funds were from taxpayers and not the web giants, and that in other countries, their levies haven’t raised prices. Miller repeated his same points. Martin Champoux gave the same again, and Joël Lightbound says the Bloc have voted against their cultural funding.

Continue reading →

Roundup: Concerning nomination irregularities

Posted on by

Liberal MP and provincial Liberal leadership hopeful Nate Erskine-Smith has formally filed an appeal over the results of Saturday’s nomination vote in Scarborough Southwest, listing a number of irregularities that included there being more votes in the ballot box than the number of people who registered to vote—34 added votes, when he lost by a mere 19 votes. There were also accusations that a suspicious number of people arrived to vote who “just lost their drivers’ licence” or “just moved to the riding,” and even more suspicious allegations of those who were on speakerphone or video calls in the voting booth, being directed how to vote.

The party’s interim leader had already dismissed this as Erskine-Smith being a sore loser, but there were scrutineers at the event, who are providing affidavits, who pointed to these irregularities, and they are people who have done election monitoring abroad, so we should be fairly confident in their observations. And even more to the point, Erskine-Smith has effectively removed himself from the race and wants an investigation for the sake of an investigation, because these are serious allegations. There have been operatives from both Liberals and Conservatives over on social media saying these kinds of tactics are endemic, but unfortunately most are pointing to the fact that the party allows temporary residents to vote, meaning that again, there is scapegoating happening (and to be clear, when Erskine-Smith says that there were temporary residents voting, his primary complaint was that they appeared to have no idea why they were there, which is not the same as a temporary resident who got involved in the riding association or campaign. There are problems with how these contests are run, but I’m also not certain that putting them under the jurisdiction of Elections Canada or the provincial election agency is necessarily the answer given how much of an expansion of their mandate and capacity would need to be, to the point that it would be unwieldy.

As for Erskine-Smith’s future, he has confirmed that he is resigning his federal seat regardless by the time the Commons rises for the summer. After that, he’s not sure. He lost this nomination, and it’s clear that there is a segment of the establishment within the Ontario Liberal Party that is going to resist him and his plans to make changes to how things are run, so it may not be worth his time and energy if this is how things will play out. It would be a loss for the provincial party, which needs a good kick in the ass, and he might be the best placed to do it, but if the party establishment is going to pull out all the stops to prevent him from getting that far, is there a point? (Meanwhile, Doug Ford will chortle and be premier for ever).

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched over 200 drones early Tuesday, killing at least six people in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Zelenskyy is facing a new challenge now that his former chief of staff has been charged with money laundering.

Continue reading →