Tag Archives: Inuit

Roundup: All smiles with the premiers

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Mark Carney is meeting with the premiers today, after having them all over for dinner last night, and already everyone is having a big love-in, showing that they have a big united front as the country deals with the ongoing threats from the US and Trump administration. They’re all in agreement that these aren’t “normal times,” and David Eby and Danielle Smith played nice on the issue of Alberta looking to ram a pipeline through their territory (which appears to have Carney’s enthusiastic support, per Question Period on Tuesday), and I will admit that this is a big change from the latter Trudeau days, where nearly all of the premiers were lining up to take shots at the federal government.

However. Carney is letting them get away with all of their bullshit, particularly on the big things that the provinces need to be doing to Build Canada Strong™, whether that’s building housing, or taking care of their major infrastructure, or doing something about healthcare rather than letting the collapse continue. If you have a “Canada is broken” complaint, you can pretty much be guaranteed that it’s because of provincial underfunding, but the federal government is taking and will continue to take the blame, because the federal government refuses to call them out on it, and Carney is keeping this up. It’s all smiles and laughs, when it was the premiers who created the situation with immigration that the federal government had to step in with (to the long-term detriment of the country), and it’s the provinces who are exacerbating things like the affordability crisis. If Carney wants to fix things, that means leaning on the provinces to start doing their gods damned jobs.

With that in mind, I’m going to look askance as the territorial premiers want dual-use infrastructure funds to flow to them rather than have the federal government fund these projects directly, because we’ve never had provinces or territories take federal funds and spend it on other things before. And Gregor Robertson is calling on premiers to increase their spending on transitional housing, given the scale of need. Oh, you sweet summer child. The premiers don’t want to spend their own money on these things, even though it’s in their wheelhouse. They want you to spend federal dollars instead, because that’s how they’ve learned how to play this game. Just asking them to increase spending nicely isn’t going to do anything, but I can pretty much guarantee that the federal government won’t play hardball on this so that they don’t look like the bad guy, even though they’re going to take all of the blame. What a way to run a country.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-01-28T23:01:45.031Z

Ukraine Dispatch

More Russian drone and missile attacks on Kyiv and across the country overnight, and it could be as much as three weeks for some Ukrainians to get power back because of the attacks on infrastructure. Meanwhile, the US keeps stalling to give more time for Russia to keep up these attacks.

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Roundup: The Donbas of Canada

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The mask is off. US treasury secretary Scott Bessent was on a far-right TV show to mouth the faux grievances of Alberta, and is providing succour and support for the separatist loons in the province, making it abundantly clear that the US plans to do to Alberta what Putin did with the Donbas region in Ukraine. We’ve watched the Americans also make these promises to independence-minded politicians in Greenland, some of whom naively believe that the US will simply recognise their independence from Denmark and leave them be when that isn’t their plan at all. And you can bet that they’ll start making these same promises to the Parti Québécois if they form power in the province in the next election, because they would absolutely love to break up Canada so that they can absorb the pieces.

So far, the government is downplaying this, with François-Philippe Champagne saying he’ll “remind” Bessent that they are working with Alberta to develop their resources, which is frankly not nearly enough. The US is openly meeting with separatists—those separatist organisers are openly bragging about their “high-level” meetings in Washington—and one of the top members of Trump’s Cabinet is openly supporting them. At the bare minimum, the US ambassador needs to be summoned, and if he doesn’t properly explain and apologise, then he should be expelled in order to send a message that this kind of interference is absolutely unacceptable.

And then there’s the problem of those separatists who are taking it upon themselves to “negotiate” in Washington. You might think that someone like Danielle Smith might denounce them for these actions, but she has bent over backwards to ensure that they have the easiest ride possible to their referendum, because Smith thinks that she can leverage it for her benefit. And Carney has been utterly silent, believing that his bending the knee to Smith is what is going to solve the separatism issue, even though these people have no interest in actual policy resolutions and have made hating Ottawa (and anyone named Trudeau) their whole personality. This is going to need a much stronger hand, and a forceful pushback against this American interference before it can fester even more than it already has.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-01-23T23:56:01.434Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Kyiv and Kharkiv have come under Russian attack in the early hours of the morning. The constant attacks have worsened the power grid situation, as temperatures have been falling as low as -16ºC.

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Roundup: The domestic speech and the response

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Back on Canadian soil, prime minister Mark Carney gave a speech to a domestic audience in advance of his Cabinet retreat, in which he used the location of the Plains of Abraham—where the retreat is being held, at the Citadelle in Quebec City—to praise the foundation of Canada (which the Bloc took exception to), our pluralism and shared values, and our choice to offer a vision of something different to the world. Oh, and he clapped back at Trump saying we live only because of the US. It might have been nice, but he kept veering off onto weird tangents about praising digital asbestos, or federal social programmes like pharmacare that he hasn’t done a single thing with in the past year and has outright stated he’s not interested in expanding. And if anything, the speech exposed a streak of hypocrisy—Canadian values, and pluralism, but we just signed a “strategic partnership” with a country genociding an ethnic minority. We’re going to create thousands of good-paying union jobs, but we just signed “strategic investments” with a country that employs slave labour. If you’re going to pat yourself on the back for your values, maybe try and at least pretend you’re trying to live up to them?

This Carney speech is giving me whiplash. Hooray for Canadian values! (But we’re also going to do deals with people who commit genocide and practice slave labour, and scapegoat immigrants).Hooray for our social programmes, but let’s do more digital asbestos!

— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-01-22T19:04:50.878Z

Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre released his own statement in response to Carney’s speech at Davos. The gist of Poilievre’s remarks is that of course Carney isn’t doing enough, that we shouldn’t alienate the Americans and by that we should engage with allies in the country who will help us post-Trump, and that he plans to move a motion next week to pass his ridiculous Canadian Sovereignty Act bill at all stages. (Transcript here).

And make no mistake—that bill is ridiculous. The primary gist of it is to tear up any and all environmental regulation to build more pipelines (who cares about a market case of First Nations consent?), to incentivise the reinvestment of capital gains in Canada (which was a plan so complex that Jim Flaherty walked it back after trying to do it during the Harper years), paying provinces a “bonus” for eliminating any remaining trade barriers, and to require the government to stop letting innovators in this country sell their intellectual property to Americans (and good luck with that one). It’s stupid and unfeasible and will only create a tonne of new problems while solving absolutely none, but he somehow thinks this is genius.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2026-01-22T15:05:14.665Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Russian strikes hit locations in Zaporizhzhia, as well as Kryvyi Rih. At Davos, president Zelenskyy gave a speech highly critical of Europe’s indecisiveness and inability to organise enough to project any strength. (Transcript here).

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QP: Supporting the “entire” MOU

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As the final sitting week for the year began, the prime minister was in town but absent from QP. Pierre Poilievre was present, however, and he led off in French, and called the Liberals “grinches” before raising the Food Price Report, blaming “inflationary taxes and deficits,” which is of course, nonsense. François-Philippe Champagne said that Poilievre is talking about imaginary taxes, while the main measure in the budget is a tax cut for 22 million Canadians. Poilievre repeated the same question in English, listing the imaginary “hidden grocery taxes” this time. Champagne boisterously praised the “good news” in the budget after being warned by the Speaker for using the budget document as a prop. Poilievre said that if the Liberals want to solve the cost of living crisis, they should build more pipelines to boost the dollar so that they can buy more food and houses, and then gave some revisionist history around the demise of Northern Gateway, and wanted the government members to vote for their own MOU to build a pipeline. Tim Hodgson said it was a “sad day” because conservatives are divided, listing conservative premiers who support the MOU “in its entirety.” Poilievre declared that in the “spirit of Christmas,” he engaged in an “act of generosity” to lift words from that MOU as part of their Supply Day motion tomorrow, to get Liberals to vote on a pipeline to the Pacific and lift the tanker ban, admitting that they were wrong. Hodgson suggested he not cherry-pick parts of the MOU and support the entire MOU like premiers were doing. Poilievre said the only ones dived is the prime minister who is “divided against himself,” and demanded he take a position and vote for their motion. Hodgson repeated the premiers that support the full MOU, and invited the Conservatives to support it. Poilievre said that meant there were parts that they didn’t agree with, and again demanded the government vote for their motion. MacKinnon praised Danielle Smith for signing the MOU and listed the other measures in it that the Conservatives apparently don’t care about.

Christine Normandin led for the Bloc, and took swipes at the Conservatives for pushing back against removing the religious exemption for hate crimes, and now the prime minister has also pushed back. Sean Fraser stood up and said that they need to take action to combat hate, and that the house needs to support it, but suggested that amendments were the responsibility of the justice committee. Normandin wondered why the prime minister sided with the Conservatives and the religious right to keep the religious exemption. Fraser again talked around this before again insisting this was the domain of the committee. Rhéal Fortin took over to ask the same question, and Fraser defended the bill in order to protect communities facing hate crimes, which means collaborating with different parties, and that he looked forward to the decision of the committee.

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Roundup: New hate crime legislation tabled

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The government tabled new hate crime legislation yesterday, and while I’m not going to delve too deeply into it here because I’m writing something more substantial about it for another outlet, I wanted to make a couple of observations, starting with the complaints of every reporter in the room during the press conference, which was that they didn’t have copies available at the time, nor did they have press releases available, so everyone was essentially flying blind. Part of this is a function of parliamentary privilege—no one can see the bill until it has been tabled in the House of Commons (or it violates the privileges of MPs), and upon first reading it can be ordered printed, which is why there is a delay on seeing the bill. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, and you would think that some of the more senior reporters would know this, but of course not. It was also the fact that they had the press release immediately after it was tabled, but that was in part a function of the clock (the minister had a flight to catch). But the inability to at least furnish press releases was a legitimate complaint, and the minister’s staff (or the department) should have known better.

This being said, much is being made about the fact that certain symbols are being criminalized if used in the context of promoting hate, and some of the reporters in the room just could not wrap their heads around that context. “But what if someone is wearing a t-shirt?” “What if they have Nazi memorabilia in their house?” The minister was not going to engage in hypotheticals, but the fact that there is context to these offences was a little too abstract.

Some of the reactions were expected, such as the concerns that this is going to impact legitimate protest even though the government has tried to make a clear delineation in the language of the bill that intention to intimidate because of hate is the target, and yes, there are specific legal tests about this. Of course, one of the biggest problems is that we already have laws for most of these offences, but police simply don’t enforce them, and that could be the case after this bill passes as well. Or it could wind up that this bill provides more clarity for police and prosecutors than the existing jurisprudence, but that remains to be seen.

Ukraine Dispatch

Russia claims it has taken control over two more village in Donetsk region, while president Zelenskyy says that Ukrainian forces have inflicted heavy losses on Russians on the frontline counteroffensive near two cities in the same region. Russian jets violated Estonia’s airspace as part of their latest test of NATO resolve.

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Roundup: Reassuring Inuit leadership

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Mark Carney was in Inuvik to have his meeting with Inuit leaders regarding Bill C-5 and the major projects they are hoping to build, and seems to have convinced them that nothing is going to impact on their particular treaty rights, even though it’s still a lot of “just trust me,” because I cannot stress enough that he gave himself the power to override pretty much any legislation with that massive Henry VIII clause in C-5, meaning that he intends to use it. Said Inuit leaders didn’t seem quite as exercised about the colonial structures being built into the Major Projects Office and its proposed Indigenous advisory council (which reports to PMO and not to the Indigenous nations they are supposed to be representing), but again, we’ll see once things are a little more fleshed out.

During the meeting, Carney and Anita Anand announced that Iqaluit resident Virginia Mearns, who is Inuk, will be Canada’s new Arctic ambassador, a role that Mary Simon once held. As part of this office and Arctic strategy, there are plans to open new consulates in Alaska and Greenland.

Meanwhile, the demands for PONIs continue to dwell largely in fantasyland, with projects that have no proponents being demanded approval of, nor projects that have a particular economic case to be made for them. It’s just “more pipelines.” Like, come on, guys.

Programming Note: I’m off for the next week-and-a-bit. See you on the far side of the long weekend.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-07-24T21:27:03.912Z

Ukraine Dispatch

Two people were killed in a Russian attack on Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine, while at least 33 were injured in a glide bomb attack on Kharkiv. President Zelenskyy has introduced a bill to restore the independence of the anti-corruption agencies, and says he welcomes input from friendly governments.

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Roundup: Longest Ballot nuisances reach a new record

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The Longest Ballot Committee crybabies have reached a high—or low—by organising some hundred candidates to be on the ballot for the Battle River—Crowfoot byelection, and they want to reach 200 when the nominations close on the 28th. It’s ridiculous and abusive, and they’re now full-on masturbating in the media insisting this is about the purity of democracy and that it’s not even about protest when this is about trying to force the government to hold a citizen’s assembly for electoral reform, because they don’t think politicians should write their own rules. Erm, except that’s what self-government means. Politicians write their own rules so that the King doesn’t. Revolutions were fought for this ability.

As for citizen’s assemblies, they are demonstrably bullshit—they’re tools used to launder accountability because there is no way to hold them accountable because you can’t vote them out for the decisions they make, and most of the time, they are easily manipulable to deliver the kinds of answers you want them to give, usually by gaming the “experts” who guide them. It’s another form of manufacturing consent, much like how referendums are easily manipulable by the government who organizes them, by shaping the questions and the conditions of those referendums to deliver results they want, at which point they manipulate the responses they get. In this case, they want this citizen’s assembly to deliver proportional representation for them (which system of PR? Who can say? But yes, that matters), because they’re crybabies who seem to think that if the person/party you vote for doesn’t automatically win, then your vote is “wasted.” There’s a technical term for that—it’s “sore loserism.” And Parliament really needs to get their shit together to close the loopholes in the rules so that the Longest Ballot organisers are stopped.

Meanwhile, the push to lower the voting age has been given a new push because the voting age is being lowered to sixteen in the UK, amidst complaints that Labour are trying to put their thumbs on the scale of the next election because their popularity is plummeting. I’m not a big fan of lowering the voting age to sixteen—teenagers make a lot of dumb choices, and just yesterday, the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed that youth frequently don’t have the moral blameworthiness to know the severity of consequences in criminal activity, but they would for voting? I can guarantee you that it would mean that voter turnout percentages would plummet even further, just like they did when the voting age was lowered to 18, and we’d be in for a whole new round of handwringing about that. If teenagers want to be politically active, they should join political parties and learn how to organise, and participate in nominations and leadership contests (which is another reason why we need to reinvigorate grassroots party democracy). I’m just not convinced that lowering the voting age to 16 is going to solve any problems.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-07-18T22:56:07.793Z

Ukraine Dispatch

A mass Russian drone attack overnight has killed at least one person when they struck apartment buildings. Russian forces claim to have taken control of three villages along different parts of the front lines. Ukraine’s top commander says that their forces are holding firm outside of the key city of Pokrovsk.

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Roundup: Countdown to a trade deal?

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Even before the G7 summit officially got underway, prime minister Mark Carney had his bilateral meeting with Trump, and it was this somewhat awkward situation where Trump defended having a “tariff concept” and said that Carney had a “more complicated” plan (how could “free trade” be more complicated?”) but there was word that talks were “accelerating,” and later in the day, we got a readout from that conversation that said that they were aiming to get a trade deal within 30 days, so no pressure there (not that you could really accept such a deal for the paper it’s written on because this is Trump and he doesn’t honour his agreements). Trump also claimed to have signed a trade deal with the UK (which he called the EU at the time), and held up a blank page with his signature on it. So that…happened.

Holy crap. The US-UK trade deal is a blank sheet of paper and only Trump signed it. (Genuine screen grab).

— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers.bsky.social) 2025-06-17T00:13:56.113Z

The rest of the summit took place, and then suddenly Trump decided he needed to leave early, right after the Heads of Government dinner, citing important business in Washington, with allusions to the Israel-Iran conflict, but he did wind up signing a joint communiqué that calls for de-escalation in said conflict, so we’ll see how that holds up. Trump leaving early does mean that he won’t be around the arrival of either Volodymyr Zelenskyy or Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum, who had hoped to have bilateral meetings with Trump on the sidelines of the summit, so that does blow a hole in what they expected to come for, particularly for Sheinbaum who rarely travels.

Meanwhile, here are some of the highlights of the day. Tsuut’ina Nation council member Steven Crowchild spoke about his meeting with Trump during his arrival in Calgary. EU officials confirmed that Carney is likely to sign a defence procurement agreement with them during his visit to Brussels in two weeks.

— Effin' Birds (@effinbirds.com) 2025-06-16T22:08:16.537Z

Ukraine Dispatch

A Russian drone and missile attack struck Kyiv in the early morning hours, wounding at least twenty. Ukraine received another 1,245 bodies, ending this repatriation agreement, bringing the total to over 6000 war dead.

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QP: Attacking Gregor Robertson’s real estate holdings

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While the G7 summit was happening in Kananaskis, things in Ottawa were heating up over a closure motion on the One Canada Economy bill. Andrew Scheer was here but didn’t lead, and left it up to Melissa Lantsman to lead off, and her decried environmental legislation that is supposedly killing energy projects, and demanded that legislation be repealed. Tim Hodgson urged her to pass the One Canadian Economy Bill. Lantsman urged him to repeal all environmental legislation, and Hodgson said that industry and unions supported their bill. Jasraj Hallan took over to also demand that “radical” environmental laws be repealed, and this time Julie Dabrusin took over and said that becoming an energy superpower needs to ensure projects are low cost, low risk and low carbon. Hallan tried again and got much the same answer. Gérard took over in French to also demand that environmental legislation be repealed, and this time Steven MacKinnon noted that their electoral platform was predicated on passing this bill. Deltell tried again, and got much the same answer.

Christine Normandin led for the Bloc, and she decried the “gag order” in Bill C-5 that gives the prime minister exclusive power to define projects in the national interest, and said this as much like Poilievre got elected. François-Philippe Champagne stood up to praise the bill. Normandin again sniped that this was essentially like getting the Conservatives elected, and MacKinnon got up to insist that everyone was behind this bill. Patrick Bonin repeated the same concern about the bill, and had to be warned about unparliamentary language. MacKinnon got back up to essentially taunt that the Liberals won the election.

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Roundup: The changing votes of the 905

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There was an interesting piece in the Star over the weekend, where a bunch of their reporters went out into the 905 belt around Toronto, in order to talk to newcomer communities who have been increasingly switching their votes from the Liberals to the Conservatives, and managed to capture a few of those ridings this time around (and costing the Liberals their majority). But while we shouldn’t always assume that immigrant and newcomer communities will be Liberals, even though there has been this particular trope that they have been told to vote Liberal because Pierre Trudeau really opened up immigration into this country back in the seventies, I do think that trope is overused and misses some of the other points, like the fact that they often pick up on dog-whistling by Conservatives, or that their ways of trying to engage with newcomer communities can be ham-fisted (such as the famous example of Jason Kenney going to every ethno-cultural buffet event and saying things like “I hear you guys hate the gays too. You should vote for us!” And no, that didn’t wind up being successful, even though a mythology was built up around it that doesn’t reflect voter turnout).

What I found instead in this Star piece was that in many of these communities, they were blaming the federal Liberals and Justin Trudeau for things that are squarely within provincial jurisdiction—like housing, or the uptick in crime that that has been hammered away at in those areas. No, none of the reporters made this distinction in the story, and we find ourselves back in the place where nobody in this country wants to hold the premiers to account for their failures. (For their corruption, yes, to an extent, but not their failures to do their jobs). Pierre Poilievre has successfully weaponised the incompetence of the premiers against the federal Liberals and Trudeau in particular, which Trudeau let him get away with time and again because he refused to call the premiers out. But the even bigger irony is that these are regions that have increasingly been voting for Doug Ford, who has been the cause of, or done nothing about, the very problems they are raising as to why they switched their votes.

I would also note that there are some other fairly disturbing undertones in some of the responses from these voters—far-right talking points like “mass immigration,” for example, or the fact that they appear to be pulling up the ladder behind them. They immigrated this country and bought houses in these suburbs, but immigrants who came in behind them and can’t find affordable housing are the problem? Do you see the issue here? I think this is a warning sign we should be paying more attention to, but again, if the premiers did their fucking jobs, we wouldn’t be seeing some of these issues able to take root within these newcomer communities.

Ukraine Dispatch

An overnight drone attack on Kyiv has injured at least 11, as Russia is calling for a ceasefire in advance of celebrations to mark the anniversary of VE Day. The mayor of the Russian port city of Novorossiisk has called a state of emergency after an alleged Ukrainian drone attack. Ukraine says that they shot down a Russian Su-30 fighter jet with a missile fired from one of their maritime drones.

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