Tag Archives: First Nations

Roundup: A pause after malicious compliance

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Not unexpectedly, the Alberta government is pausing its book ban in large part because of the malicious compliance by the Edmonton Public School Board and others, where they weaponized the bans to show how ridiculous they are, particularly in targeting things like Ayn Rand, which Danielle Smith thinks should be “compulsory reading,” because of course she does. And yes, Margaret Atwood got involved, because one of the books that got picked for the ban was The Handmaid’s Tale, and Smith and company were roundly ridiculed by everyone. As they should be.

But as the government decides that they’re going to either come up with a more targeted criteria, or just take these school boards by the hand and essentially do it for them, nobody is actually talking about how this all started with a moral panic about queer or trans books, and that this is what the outcome is going to be once Smith and her ministers come up with the “targeted” list. And frankly, it’s disappointing to see that Naheed Nenshi is not calling this out either, instead giving credence to the moral panic by saying that this was about the UCP igniting a culture war that backfired on them, and “Instead of just saying, ‘Hey, we found a couple of troubling comic books with some troubling images, let’s take those off of shelves,’ they wrote a ministerial order.” Those “troubling images” are overreactions or taken out of context, but more to the point, they’re queer and trans materials. That cannot be toned down or ignored in the broader scheme because this is where fascism always starts. And no, this isn’t just Smith being a MAGA adherent because a lot of these particular tactics have a more tangible origin point in Orbán’s Hungary, where Americans like Ron DeSantis then adapted them for his own use, and far-right groups took their cues from the US shared their lists with members of the UCP to show their “concerns.” Nothing was an accident. Let’s not pussyfoot around this.

I don't think this has necessarily been intentional by anyone in media, but I am fascinated by the way the narrative around the Alberta book bans has shifted away from the censorship of LGBTQ2S+ stories into being much more "Look, they're even banning Game of Thrones!!"

— Mel Woods (@melwoods.me) 2025-09-02T17:18:21.140Z

In other Alberta news, their bans on students changing names or pronouns in schools, and ban on trans women in sport have also taken effect, so Egale Canada is part of a lawsuit that has been launched to challenge these laws, which will inevitably result in Smith invoking the Notwithstanding Clause, because of course she will, but she’s going to insist that she’s the reasonable one in the room while she’s doing it.

1/ Egale Canada and Skipping Stone have filed a constitutional challenge against the Government of Alberta’s Education Amendment Act, 2024 (formerly Bill 27), which places unconstitutional restrictions on the use of names and pronouns in schools across Alberta.

— Egale Canada (@egalecanada.bsky.social) 2025-09-02T21:21:32.679Z

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-09-02T21:22:03.302Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia has launched air attacks on Kyiv overnight. There were fresh attacks on Ukrainian power facilities over the weekend, and Ukraine has vowed retaliation. Ukraine is also seeing a new troop buildup along certain parts of the front lines. As the school year starts in Ukraine, many more schools have been moved underground as a result of the war. The former Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada was gunned down on Saturday in a political assassination.

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Roundup: Alberta’s book bans take shape

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Because Danielle Smith’s Alberta continues to descend into this somewhat farcical MAGA karaoke, the alleged list of books that the Edmonton Public School Board is proposing to ban from its libraries per the government’s new policy got leaked yesterday, and you can bet that so many of the usual suspects were on it, including The Handmaid’s Tale, books by Margaret Lawrence, George Orwell, and plenty of queer titles as well, including Flamer, Fun Home, Gender Queer and Two Boys Kissing, because of course they are. (Funnily enough, Ayn Rand’s two most famous works are also on this list). These were all targeted supposedly for “explicit sexual content,” which is ridiculous in pretty much every single case (including those couple of panels from Gender Queer that has every single social conservative apoplectic).

Well, the list of books being banned from EPSB is appalling. And it's very likely that an author on this list will get their other works pulled too, especially in the absence of teacher librarians.There are books on this list that changed my life. This is what the UCP is taking away from kids.

— Bridget Stirling (@bridgetstirling.bsky.social) 2025-08-28T17:23:59.383Z

More of the list. It's truly shocking to realize just what this will mean.

— Bridget Stirling (@bridgetstirling.bsky.social) 2025-08-28T17:23:59.384Z

But based on the cheers I've heard Danielle Smith's school library content crackdown get at AlbertaNext Panels and UCP function, her political base absolutely adores this.

— Jason Markusoff (@markusoff.bsky.social) 2025-08-28T21:42:02.703Z

Of course, once the list was leaked, the minister had to start engaging in damage control, and wants “clarification” on the list, but come on. You set up a moral panic, predicated mostly on queer books, and once you started pulling that thread, whoops, the results were quickly exposed for what they really are, because Smith and company didn’t want to be upfront about the homophobia/transphobia that they were clearly pandering to. So now they’re going to take control over the book ban lists directly, which they insisted they didn’t want to do, and you can bet that the books that stay banned will pretty much entirely be queer or trans materials. Just you wait.

Meanwhile, falling oil prices have turned Alberta’s planned surplus into a big deficit, because they refuse to get off the royalty roller-coaster. Every time they insist that they’re going to, they just double down on resource revenues because they absolutely do not want to implement a sales tax, and the province’s books are constantly in an absolute mess as a result. Of course, Albertans also expect high levels of public services for their low taxes, which is a choice that provincial governments have been making for close to five decades now, and lo, here we are again. Maybe they’ll learn this time? (Haha, no, they won’t).

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-08-28T21:27:01.802Z

Programming Note: I am taking the full long weekend off, so I’ll return Wednesday morning.

Ukraine Dispatch

The Russians sent 598 drones and 31 missiles into Ukraine early morning on Thursday, most of them aimed at Kyiv, which resulted in at least 21 dead and 48 wounded, with British and European Union diplomatic buildings targeted alongside more residential buildings. (Photos here, some recounting of the scenes here).

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Roundup: Kenney’s omitted immigration changes

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The Conservatives are full-on throwing everything they can at the wall to see what sticks, and yesterday it was the moral panic over immigration figures. Pierre Poilievre put out a press release decrying that permits issued had blown past the proposed caps, and that the system is “facing collapse,” which I’m pretty sure is bullshit, before promising to propose “fixes” in the fall, which you can already be assured will mostly be comprised of dog-whistles. (And remember, the problem is less with immigration numbers than it is with premiers who are not doing their jobs with regards to building housing of properly funding healthcare).

Enter Jason Kenney, who went on an extended rant about how he “fixed” the system when he was minister, and how Trudeau and company broke it, but this is also revisionist history. He talks about the sweeping reforms he brought in in 2010, and how everyone praised it, but he omitted that he blunted most of those reforms before they could be implemented. You see, in 2010, it was a hung parliament and the Conservatives couldn’t push through draconian immigration legislation, so they needed to work with the opposition (most notably Olivia Chow as the NDP’s immigration critic), and they passed a bill that had plenty of safeguards in place. In 2011, there was an election where they got a majority, and before the 2010 bill could be fully implemented (because the coming-into-force provisions were going to take as long as a year), Kenney rammed through a new bill that curtailed most of those safeguards, and used tales of international migration cartels, and human smuggling rings that would bring people into the country to collect social assistance, which those cartels would then collect, and so on. Yes, there were problems with high rates of claims from certain countries, but like most things, Kenney was less than honest and building his scaremongering case, while also doing the thing where he played economic migrants against asylum seekers, and made “good immigrants versus bad asylum claimants” arguments to justify his legislation.

https://twitter.com/jkenney/status/1960088637925961993

The other thing that Kenney is blatantly ignoring is that the world is not the same world as it was in 2010, and the migration situation is vastly different than it was back then. So yes, the current government is facing different challenges, but I wouldn’t expect Kenney to be honest about well, pretty much anything, because that’s who Jason Kenney is.

effinbirds.com/post/7790141…

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-08-24T20:02:02.229Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukraine has been stepping up drone attacks on Russian oil refineries and fuel terminals, squeezing their war economy.

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Roundup: Carney visits Kyiv

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Prime Minister Mark Carney landed in Warsaw on Saturday for a trip that was announced as being to Warsaw, Berlin, and Riga, when early Sunday morning, he turned up in Kyiv for Ukraine’s Independence Day, along with defence minister David McGuinty. (Photos here). There is a bit of symbolism here because Canada was the first western nation to recognize Ukraine’s independence after it broke away from the Soviet Union. Carney laid a wreath at Ukraine’s national memorial alongside president Zelenskyy and his wife, and also had meetings that included Ukraine’s new prime minister.

Carney announced a new $2 billion aid package for Ukraine—new tranches of supplies of military aid, medical equipment, arms; purchases of items prioritised by NATO including US-made equipment, munitions, and air defence capabilities; drone-counter-drone and electronic warfare equipment; armoured vehicles, as well as more ammunition procured through the Czech process. Carney also said that he was not ruling out Canadian troops being part of any security guarantees if a ceasefire is achieved (not that it’s likely to happen).

Here is a broader look at Canada’s contributions to Ukraine. AP has some photos from Ukraine’s independence in 1991, as well as photos from around Europe to mark this Independence Day.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia captured two settlements in Donetsk on Friday, and another one in Dnipropetrovsk on Sunday. A Ukrainian drone struck the fuel terminal of  Russian nuclear power plant, as we also learned that the US has been restricting the use of long-range missiles against Russia. There was a prisoner exchange on Sunday of 146 prisoners of war on both sides.

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Roundup: The growing incoherence with environmental protections

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This government’s incoherence with regard to its environmental policies continues apace, as Tim Hodgson told Vassy Kapelos that exceptions to things like the tanker ban or emissions cap could be made through Bill C-5, which doesn’t make any gods damned sense. Why have a tanker ban or an emissions cap if it’s only applied on an ad hoc basis? If you want to get rid of them (and with that tanker ban, be ready for a major fight with local First Nations), actually lay out a rationale for it other than hand-wavey nonsense, But seriously, Hodgson is worse than any Trudeau-era minister when it comes to being unable to communicate his way out of a wet paper bag, and I fail to see how he could possibly have been considered a star by Carney.

Meanwhile, while Alberta continues to beat the drum for the obliteration of environmental laws, they keep using examples where there are already permits in hand, and where the market has determined that they don’t see a business case to move ahead, which has nothing to do with government. But hey, why be honest about it?

Oh, and because this government seems to be pinning a lot of hopes on reinventing the wheel, there already was a pre-existing major projects office, but Carney has determined to recreate it under a different minister, just because, and not actually learn any lessons as to why projects take time or approvals take as long as they do.

effinbirds.com/post/7772964…

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-08-21T14:04:55.394Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia launched another massive attack in the early morning hours of Thursday, with 574 drones and 40 missiles, and one of the targets was an American-owned household electronics company based in Lviv, because they know the Americans won’t respond. Ukraine attacked an oil refinery in Russia’s Novoshakhtinsk city. And Putin’s demands include the whole Donbas region, and a prohibition on joining NATO or having Western troops in the country, which are clearly unacceptable because Russia has no intention of ending the war.

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Roundup: The same counterproductive demands, once again

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The “changed” and “humbled” Pierre Poilievre was back on his old bullshit yesterday, calling a press conference in Surrey, BC, to decry crime rates, blame the government, give some misleading bullshit about past legislation, and then take friendly questions from hand-picked outlets. Sounds familiar?

But seriously, we’ve been through all of this before. Calling for a terrorism designation for the Bishnoi gang is not helpful, and risks watering down terrorism designations in general (which is why it was a problem to do it for Mexican cartels at the behest of the Trump administration, not to mention designations shouldn’t be made for political expediency). Tougher penalties for extortion? Extortion with a firearm already has a maximum sentence of life in jail, so why they want a four-year minimum is not exactly doing anything more than current sentencing already does. Repealing the former Bill C-75 on bail? As we have said time and time again, this merely codified Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence on the law of bail and made it tougher for those accused of domestic violence to get bail, so repealing it will do nothing. What is it going to take to drive home that these are not solutions, and will do nothing about the current uptick in police-reported crime (and again, these are small upticks that are well below historic norms)?

Meanwhile, Poilievre, Andrew Scheer, and others, spent their day engaging in supportive posts for transphobes, during Ottawa Pride Week no less. So yeah, up to their same old bullshit because they want to rile up the grievance mongers so that they can begin a new round of grifty fundraising. Poilievre has learned absolutely nothing from losing his seat and the election.

Conservatives are going all-in on transphobia today, as Pride Week in Ottawa is underway. #canqueer

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-08-20T21:13:56.179Z

Ukraine Dispatch

At least fourteen people were wounded in a Russian attack on the Sumy region, three people were killed in an artillery attack on the eastern city of Kostiantynivka, and a gas distribution station was hit in Odesa. Russians claim to have advanced in the Dnipropetrovsk region, while Ukrainians knocked out power in parts of Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia.

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Roundup: Minister shocked at decades-old endemic problem

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Things with the Air Canada labour dispute threatened to veer into farce yesterday as things did not go as the government had hoped. Early in the morning, the Canadian Industrial Relations Board declared that the ongoing strike action by the flight attendants was now an illegal strike—but they didn’t refer it to the courts for enforcement, even though union leaders said that they were willing to go to jail for it (but there is no criminal offence here, merely administrative monetary penalties). And then, gallingly, the minister declared that she was shocked—shocked!—to learn about the allegations of unpaid labour, and ordered a probe of the situation, promising to close any loopholes in the law, but she can’t have been shocked. This has been an ongoing issue for decades. In the last parliament, both the Conservatives and the NDP put forward private members’ bills about this. The NDP in particular made a bunch of members’ statements and questions in QP about the issue, but Hajdu is only now learning about it? Come. On.

https://bsky.app/profile/lyleskinner.bsky.social/post/3lwoofl4ahs2v

Air Canada, meanwhile, is cancelling more flights, because they didn’t think that the union would not obey the back-to-work order (that has no enforcement mechanism). The union is trying to get an injunction because they argue that the order is abusing Section 107’s powers (and they are very likely right about that). And then Air Canada insisted that they won’t negotiate until the planes are flying again…but then talks resumed with a mediator by night, so we’ll see where this is at by morning.

Meanwhile, the broader problem of the moral hazard of continued government intervention, particularly the use of Section 107 (which doesn’t require a legislative process, or anything other than an email or phone call), has other unions on edge that this is going to permanently imbalance labour relations, because employers can simply declare an impasse and wait for the government to intervene. While I do think that these Quebec unions in the CP story are not differentiating between provincial and federal legislation enough (Section 107 is a federal power that applies only to federally-regulated workplaces), but we also know that many provincial governments are not exactly worrying about rights these days, which includes labour rights. Next steps remain the courts, who are likely to strike down these uses of Section 107 as being abusive.

Ukraine Dispatch

The toll from those strikes on Kharkiv and elsewhere early Monday have climbed to at least ten dead and 23 wounded. A Russian general was seriously wounded on the front lines.

At the conclusion of the meeting at the White House, Trump has agreed to European security guarantees (for now, anyway) after Ukraine offered to buy $100 billion in weapons from the US, and  now Trump wants to set up a meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy (not that it will change anything as Putin doesn’t want to end the war). AP has a timeline of the changes in the front lines from February 2022 until now.

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Roundup: A “summit” that achieved nothing

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So, that Trump-Putin meeting went about as well as expected. Trump literally rolled out the red carpet for a murderer and war criminal, gave him a military flypast, and then invited him into his limo (even though Putin brought his own), which freaked out every single security expert on social media and television, because they were alone together, and nobody knows if Trump explained to him the security measures in the vehicle, or if anything else was said with no one else around to hear.

The meeting went nowhere, in spite of talk about an “understanding,” and in the press conference after, Putin went first, spoke at length, flattered Trump obsequiously, and Trump rambled at his incoherent best about how they didn’t come to an agreement, and they didn’t take any questions at the end. But they were chummy, and Trump still thinks he’s Putin’s best friend, and the war will continue, as we all knew it would.

I continue to be struck by Putin's confidence in the idea that he can play Trump. His whole remarks stuck to the idea that the only barriers to peace are Ukraine and Europe. Not even a hat tip to what Russia wants or expects from a deal. Just total bullshit and Trump flattery.

— Justin Ling (@justinling.ca) 2025-08-15T23:29:30.125Z

The fact that they didn't take questions seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that they got nowhere and have nothing to say. At best, Trump is going to be irate that the bombardment of Ukraine continues after today.At worst, Trump is going to be sucked into a vortex of time-wasting summits.

— Justin Ling (@justinling.ca) 2025-08-15T23:30:37.487Z

The Kremlin just dropped this clip of Putin and Trump getting chummy post-press conference.

— Justin Ling (@justinling.ca) 2025-08-15T23:41:32.030Z

Just to hammer this in:I don't know of an example in US history of comparable *in-person humiliation* for a US president. And of course for the country. Trump will soon realize how visibly he was "owned." In view of the whole world.

— James Fallows (@jfallows.bsky.social) 2025-08-16T00:17:22.899Z

The meeting was a disaster for everyone except two people. Trump got his photo op and his ego boost. Putin got his photo op, whitewashing of war crimes and no sanctions. No one in Ukraine, Europe or the United States benefited in any way.

— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum.bsky.social) 2025-08-16T04:12:52.329Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Ahead of the meeting, Russia attacked Dnipropetrovsk with missiles, killing at least one and wounding at least one other. Ukrainian drones hit the Syzrn oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region.

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Roundup: Going to war over the EV mandate

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Pierre Poilievre called a press conference yesterday in rural Saskatchewan to declare that he’s going to war with the government over the EV mandate, during which he said that he’s going to call it a “Carney tax” (for the nonsense reason that manufacturers that don’t meet their targets can face penalties), and he lied entirely about what the mandate does, right up to claiming that this is about killing rural and small-town life in Canada. It’s not only unhinged, but entirely indicative of the fact that Poilievre hasn’t learned a single gods damned lesson about why he lost the last election. These kinds of stunts for the sake of the attention economy aren’t exactly showing him to be credible about, well, anything.

He also once again demanded that the prime minister cancel the loan to BC Ferries for the ships they plan to get from China, because of the canola tariffs, which again, is not how this works. The prime minister can’t tell the Infrastructure Bank what they can and can’t do, because it was set up to ensure that it wasn’t ministers directing their investments. That’s the whole point of making it an arm’s-length agency. (And also, once again, no Canadian shipyards bid on this contract).

But Poilievre also decided to blame Carney for China’s bullying tactics, saying that they smell weakness. Erm, China bullies regardless. That’s why we shouldn’t be giving into their pressure tactics, because it’ll embolden them to do more again, and to do other things, like kidnapping more Canadians, and engaging in hostage diplomacy. Again, did Poilievre pay absolutely no attention for the past decade? Or is this yet more elaborate performance art for the sake of getting clicks on his social media, in the hopes that those clicks turn into gullible people opening up their wallets to him. The answer, of course, is the latter.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-08-14T14:08:08.062Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Ukrainian forces say that they have stabilised their eastern front after that brief breakthrough by Russians earlier in the week. The latest prisoner swap with Russia returned 84 Ukrainians, many of them civilians.

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Roundup: More “Blame Ottawa” clown performance

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Sometimes, it gets very, very difficult to take the state of politics seriously in this country because so much of it is just clown performance. Two examples from yesterday:

1) Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner held a press conference to announce that she was going to table a Private Member’s Bill to stop courts from considering possible deportation in sentencing decisions—even though the sentencing rules were about asking judges to be aware of the potential for unintended consequences, so this bill is really about punching down—and along the way wound up talking about the wildfire situation. In her estimation, the federal government is to blame, and she blamed the federal government for the “forest bans” in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick…except those rules were from the provincial governments. And wildfires are provincial jurisdiction. Nevertheless, she thinks that the federal government needs to do more, but this gets back to the whole point I was making in my latest Quick Take—provinces have the responsibility but have been under-funding their emergency management systems because they know they can call on the Canadian Forces and get them to do it for free. That’s a problem. Rempel Garner is just feeding into this problem through this performance of hers.

2) Pierre Poilievre demanded that the federal government cancel the loan for the BC Ferries contract which will have those new ferries built in China, in retaliation for the latest round of Chinese tariffs on canola. Erm, except that’s a provincial Crown Corporation who contracted for those ships, and the federal government didn’t make the loan, the Infrastructure Bank did, which the federal government doesn’t exercise control over, and even more to the point, no Canadian shipyards bid on that contract. This is just more performance for social media, rage-bait to get his followers angry and opening up their wallets.

1) It is not a "Liberal" loan or a government loan. It's from the Infrastructure Bank, which is arm's-length from government. The loan was made before the procurement process was completed.2) NO CANADIAN SHIPYARDS BID ON THIS PROJECT!Is Poilievre going to force a Canadian yard to build them?

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2025-08-13T17:53:19.054Z

The absolute mendacity of all of this is just exhausting, which is part of the point. It’s a common authoritarian tactic to lie about everything so that people give up trying to inform themselves, and not a single legacy media outlet in this country will actually call them on it. It’s a problem, and we need to do something about it now, before we get any further down the path that the US is taking.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-08-12T14:08:02.942Z

Ukraine Dispatch

President Zelenskyy says that he told Trump ahead of his meeting with Putin on Friday that Putin is “bluffing” about his desire to end the war—and he’s correct.

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