Supriya Dwivedi

Supriya Dwivedi

Alberta separatism is the latest niche for disinformation merchants

A network of inauthentic YouTube accounts that were portraying themselves as homegrown Albertans have spent months pushing for Alberta secession and American annexation, an incident report from the Canadian Digital Media Research Network and the Media Ecosystem Observatory found. The network has racked up nearly 40 million views by "exploiting genuinely-held grievances and repurposing them to advance narratives that normalize...

Supriya Dwivedi

Canada’s most popular premier just put out another policy that people love. The problem is it’s a terrible idea

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew is the country’s most popular premier. That’s unsurprising. He has a penchant for pursuing policies that tend to poll well and is known for having his finger on the pulse of the people. But while pursuing policies because they poll well may work some of the time — as with Kinew’s recent announcement to ban surveillance...

Supriya Dwivedi

Avi Lewis is smart to shed light on surveillance pricing

New NDP Leader Avi Lewis has set his sights on bringing an end to the practice of surveillance pricing, calling it a “crystal clear example of why we desperately need government guardrails to protect us from the triple threat of Big Tech, AI and corporate monopolies that dominate every sector of our economy.” During a press conference in Ottawa flanked...

Supriya Dwivedi

Mark Carney’s new majority is a blessing in disguise for Pierre Poilievre and Avi Lewis

Coming off three byelection wins and a handful of floor-crossers, Prime Minister Carney is now armed with a newly minted majority government. The benefits of going from a minority to a majority for the government are quite clear. As the PM noted in a press conference earlier this week, a majority government will make for a much more substantive and...

Supriya Dwivedi

American courts just gave Carney a roadmap for reining in YouTube and Meta

If the Carney government was looking for a fool-proof roadmap on how to rein in large online platforms from knowingly causing harm to their users — including children — the recent judgments from California and New Mexico provide some excellent guidance. First, a jury in New Mexico found Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, liable for misleading its users...

Supriya Dwivedi

Ottawa needs to open up on CSIS' foreign interference claims

The Carney government needs to get its story straight on foreign interference and transnational repression — especially as it relates to India. After this government insisted that the Indian government was cooperating with the Canadian investigation into the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar and other crimes like extortion and arson, the Indian government said there was never anything to investigate...

Supriya Dwivedi

Cherry-picking leaves Conservative Quebec MPs in the pits

When I was in the first grade, my hometown junior hockey team, the Granby Bisons, played the team from Trois-Rivières. After trailing Trois-Rivières for a while, Granby had finally managed to tie the game. Trois-Rivières decided to change up their goalie and put Mannon Rhéaume in net. My little, six-year-old mind was blown. A girl! Playing hockey! With boys...

Supriya Dwivedi

Critics of Idlout's floor-crossing should offer Canadians something better

Channeling his inner DJ Khaled, Prime Minister Mark Carney has gotten “another one.” A floor-crosser, that is. Lori Idlout is the latest MP to cross over to the government benches, this time from the NDP, making her the fourth floor-crosser and edging the Liberals ever closer to that coveted 172 seat majority. The Liberals now have 170 seats in the...

Supriya Dwivedi

Carney is making Poilievre's excuses too easy

After avoiding the media for several days during the India leg of his 10-day international trade trip, Prime Minister Mark Carney finally addressed the media and spoke to the controversy caused by the unnamed Privy Council Office official who erroneously claimed India was no longer involved in foreign interference or transnational repression in Canada. During the back and forth with...

Supriya Dwivedi

OpenAI's deal with Trump is putting Canadians at risk too

In a stunning showdown last week between the Trump administration and frontier AI company Anthropic, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth demanded that Anthropic allow its AI models to be used for “any lawful purpose,” without any restrictions. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused and laid out the company’s two red lines for its models’ usage by the US government: barring...

Supriya Dwivedi

Mark Carney’s trip to India might be good for the economy. Is it good for Canadians?

Prime Minister Carney is headed to India, Australia, and Japan as part of Canada’s ongoing efforts to shore up trade. While Australia and Japan are uncontroversial trading partners, Canada’s relationship to India is more problematic. Carney’s entire trip occurs against an alarming backdrop: rampant extortion in Canada; a guilty plea in a murder-for-hire plot in the US that once again...

Supriya Dwivedi

After Tumbler Ridge, the Carney government needs to lead on AI regulation

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Tumbler Ridge shooter sent messages about gun violence to OpenAI’s ChatGPT over the course of several days last June. The posts were flagged by OpenAI’s automated review system and roughly a dozen employees debated whether the posts indicated the possibility of real world violence. Ultimately, however, OpenAI leadership decided...

Supriya Dwivedi

Jivani's Washington rendezvous reveals Conservatives just aren't serious

Last week Conservative MP for Bowmanville-Oshawa North, Jamil Jivani, stated that he was going down to Washington, DC, in an effort to help move Canada-US trade relations along. Jivani has a longstanding friendship with the US Vice President JD Vance, so it would make sense for him to leverage his personal relationships in a professional capacity. Except, of course, Jivani...

Supriya Dwivedi

Why do we regulate vacuum cleaners more strictly than social media?

The federal government is reportedly considering a social media ban for kids under the age of 14. This move, as first reported by the Globe and Mail, isn’t entirely surprising given that in the wake of Australia’s social media ban for kids under the age of 16, many other countries such as Denmark, Spain and France have been considering their...

Supriya Dwivedi

Donald Trump is famously unreliable. But this is how we know what he really plans to do

One of the more perplexing aspects of living through the Trump 2.0 era is knowing when to believe what the American president says. After all, it can be easy to dismiss a lot of what emerges from Trump: he is notoriously mercurial, seems highly persuadable and has a propensity to say some truly odd things. But part of learning to...

Supriya Dwivedi

Trump will use the Greenland argument to grab Canada's Northwest Passage

Back when I was in law school there were two second-year classes taught by a beloved professor that basically every student wanted to get into. One focused on international armed conflict and the other focused on maritime law. The international armed conflict class came with a much heavier reading list, so along with a few friends of mine, we opted...

Supriya Dwivedi

Mark Carney’s minister’s tepid, late-night response was anything but ‘elbows up’

It reads like the kind of thing that, just a few years ago, would have been unbelievable. But on Elon Musk’s social platform X, formerly known as Twitter, the AI chatbot Grok built into the site is being used to pump out deepfake non-consensual intimate images and even child sexual abuse material (CSAM). In response to international outcry, Musk limited...

Supriya Dwivedi

Mark Carney's elbows are up on a bended knee

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “elbows up” rhetoric hasn’t exactly translated into action, and the recent events surrounding the American capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro are just the latest example of this. Don’t get me wrong: nobody expects Carney or Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand to go out of their way to antagonize the Trump administration with bravado-laden statements. Anything...

Supriya Dwivedi

When it comes to vaccines, Canada is normal no longer

Canada is being battered by an especially bad flu season. None of this should be particularly surprising, since we had data from the southern hemisphere’s flu season to suggest once winter reared its head here we would be in for the same flu-induced misery as our cousins below the equator. In a normal country, this kind of advance notice would...

Supriya Dwivedi

Mark Carney’s bill to protect kids has one big blind spot

In the last federal election, the Liberals pledged to better protect children online from sexual exploitation. They also promised a suite of measures aimed at cracking down on sexual and intimate partner violence, including making murder motivated by hate like femicide a first-degree offence. Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act, introduced earlier this week is a direct result of the...

Supriya Dwivedi

Conservatives choose rage-bait over real debate on hate speech

The Liberal government has agreed to amend the Criminal Code to remove religious exemptions from the country’s hate speech laws, hoping to secure the Bloc Québécois’ support for its Bill C-9. This has prompted outcries from faith communities as well as the Official Opposition: that the move is an assault on freedom of expression and freedom of religion. Currently, the...

Supriya Dwivedi

Mark Carney is giving in to the bros

Before leaving for the recently held G20 in Johannesburg, Canada had laid out its priorities, for the summit: “improving critical mineral supply chains, using AI for sustainable development, preventing wildfires and natural disasters, reforming development funding and debt, and advancing gender equality through economic growth.” During a press conference at the summit, however, Prime Minister Carney explained to reporters that...

Supriya Dwivedi

Ottawa must counter Meta's bad policy idea with a better one

Big Tech companies have allegedly failed to adequately address child sexual abuse material — and encouraged children younger than 13 to use their platforms, according to court filings in a US lawsuit against Meta, Google, TikTok and Snapchat. The most detailed allegations in the court filings are reserved for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. Some of the...

Supriya Dwivedi

The budget just barely passing shows that Mark Carney is still a political rookie

With 170 MPs voting for the budget and 168 voting against, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first budget passed by just 2 votes, putting an end to weeks of election speculation in Ottawa. Notably, both the Conservative party and NDP had two abstentions apiece. Had those MPs voted along with the rest of their party, the budget would have failed, and...

Supriya Dwivedi

Lessons for Canadian progressives from the Mamdani campaign

The success of the Zohran Mamdani campaign in the New York mayoral race has progressives all over the world taking notice. So it’s not unsurprising that Canadian progressives would look south for some inspiration on how to run a campaign that can actually win over voters.

Supriya Dwivedi

Is Pierre Poilievre’s time as Conservative leader over? Not so fast

If a week can feel like a lifetime in politics, someone should ask Pierre Poilievre how many lives he lived in the past week. Normally, when a minority government releases a budget, the leader of the Official Opposition spends the time after talking about all the ways the budget failed to meet the moment for Canadians. Instead, Poilievre spent budget...

Supriya Dwivedi

Carney apology to Trump shows rift in Team Canada approach on tariffs

There seems to be a major rift forming between the hit ‘em back attitude of Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s newfound “get clocked in the face for the greater good” approach. After the Trump administration spent the better part of last week and a bit complaining about an ad paid for by the Ontario government that...

Supriya Dwivedi

Canadians don’t want an election. This is why Ottawa might

Welcome to an early edition of election speculation season, a time-honoured Ottawa tradition. You see, in normal times Canadians don’t usually go to the federal polls a mere six months after the last time they did. But in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not in normal times. First, let’s state the obvious: Canadians do not want another election. Elections are...

Supriya Dwivedi

Ford’s anti-tariff ad was dumb, but not for the reasons you think

By now, you’ve probably heard US President Donald Trump is very upset that the Ontario government spent up to $75 million on an ad for American television that used former president Ronald Reagan’s own words to positively describe free trade while admonishing the use of tariffs. Initially, Trump seemed unbothered by the ad, referring to it at first without the...

Supriya Dwivedi

Carney’s capitulation to Modi is embarrassing

After inviting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Alberta for the G7 this past June, it was clear to anyone paying attention that Prime Minister Mark Carney was going to take a starkly different approach to defending Canadian sovereignty and protecting members of the Indian diaspora in Canada — particularly Sikh Canadians — than his two predecessors, prime ministers Harper and Trudeau.

Supriya Dwivedi

Mark Carney isn’t who he said he was

Six months after being elected, the Carney government continues to enjoy high polling numbers from a Canadian public that is still nervous about Trump’s impact on Canada. Thrust into a political scene that required a lot of tough talk from Mr. Carney, voters assumed they were getting someone who would stand up for Canada to Trump. Outside of terminally political...

Supriya Dwivedi

Mark Carney should learn from Trudeau: don’t let Trump trump everything

One of the reasons the Conservatives lost their fourth straight election after ten years of a Liberal government is because Prime Minister Carney was perceived by the Canadian electorate as being the best to deal with Trump and his tariff tantrums. After blowing past a self-imposed arbitrary deadline of Aug. 1, Canada is still effectively without a “deal.”

Supriya Dwivedi

The Conservatives may soon have to choose between Pierre Poilievre and winning elections

After a fourth consecutive electoral loss to the Liberals that saw the Conservatives remain on the opposition benches for the 10th year in a row, the party has a serious decision to make. Pierre Poilievre has a leadership review scheduled for January that he is all but certain to pass. But before they rubber stamp Poilievre, Conservative members should think...

Supriya Dwivedi

I served in Justin Trudeau’s PMO. This is what I think of Mark Carney’s first big mistake

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decision to invite Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Canada for the G7 has generated a lot of chatter. Unfortunately, there’s a lot that has been missing in the conversation. For starters, the Indian government’s belief that Canada is soft on extremists seeking to establish an independent Sikh state known as Khalistan isn’t exactly new. In...

Supriya Dwivedi

Have you heard the one about Justin Trudeau attacking your free speech online? Trust me: that’s just rage farming

From the people who brought you classic hits such as: adding gender identity to the Human Rights Act would criminalize free speech and signing onto the UN Global Compact on Migration would mean Canada’s immigration policy being set by “foreign entities,” comes the newest sensation on the scene — portraying the Online Harms Act as a total affront to freedom...

Supriya Dwivedi

My fight against a cancer that threatens our country

This last year was the worst year of my life. In January, my non-smoking 40-year-old husband, Anoop, was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and died seven months later. As it became public that my husband had died from such an aggressive form of cancer, I started to get messages from anti vaxxers that my husband had died from something...