Surviving mass murder and more
Lisa Banfield, common-law wife of the man who meticulously slaughtered 22 people six years ago, recently published a memoir of her life-on-eggshells with a controlling killer.
Horns locked over dismal state of access to info
The head of Ottawa’s public service got an earful from the federal information commissioner about the dismal state of access to information – the sign of a growing rift between the Liberal government and Parliament’s watchdog on transparency. At a Nov. 12 meeting, Caroline Maynard presented Michael Sabia, clerk of the Privy Council, with statistics detailing the deterioration of the...
RCMP quietly gave awards to officers in N.S. mass murders
The RCMP has handed out 23 awards for excellence to officers and employees in Nova Scotia for their performance during the April 2020 mass murders, in which a gunman impersonating a Mountie murdered 22 people in cold blood.
Library and Archives waives access-to-info fee
Library and Archives Canada (LAC) gets a lot of flak for its processing of Access to Information Act (ATIA) requests, especially for its long delays to respond. But lately they’ve been doing a few things right.
New submarines may have "unCanadian" weapons
A thorough media scan reveals practically no discussion about this important escalation, which would put Canada among only a few Western navies (the United States, the United Kingdom, and France) that operate submarine-launched land-attack weapons.
If you're not watching what's happening in Québec you're losing the plot
You may want to dust off your Bescherelles, Canadian politicos: the battle for the future of Québec is where things are going to happen in 2026. In case you missed it, today the new leader of the Québec Liberal Party, Pablo Rodriguez, announced his resignation. His resignation was precipitated by a terrible, scandalous month for the QLP — one that...
A shrinking landscape for transparency
The federal government this week dumped its load of annual statistics about citizens’ use of the Access to Information Act.
Remembering Stephen Thorne (1959-2025)
Stephen Thorne has died. The bitter, unexpected death of a tough journalist who wrote about death but couldn’t report on his own. He’d have written a damn fine story about it. I was his boss for years, in Halifax and Ottawa, though Stephen had no time for bosses. He followed his nose for stories whether or not anybody asked for...
“Kill everybody.” Will Canada be dragged into Trump’s potential war crimes?
The Canadian government has avoided commenting on the United States’ controversial targeting of alleged drug-trafficking vessels in Caribbean waters.
Why Canada's defence budget is upside-down
I went back to Ottawa this week. It’s been a while since I’ve been in the nation’s capital to talk about peace issues, so when the Senate of Canada contacted me, I had to go. Prime Minister Carney’s Budget 2025 is making its way through Parliament, and the Senate’s Committee on National Security, Defence and Veterans Affairs asked me and...
Air quotes and the politics of tone Why the Pierre Poilievre brand is such a hard sell.
Pierre Poilievre’s recent video attacking Mark Carney could have been a strong argument. If not for the air quotes. When he says Carney promised he could “handle Trump” and “negotiate a win,” his fingers twitch into the familiar inverted-comma gesture. It’s a tiny move, but it says everything. Air quotes don’t persuade; they perform. They turn conviction into commentary and...
What might be Trump’s next challenge of Canada’s independence and sovereignty?
As Prime Minister Mark Carney said, “Donald Trump wants to break us so America can own us.” But what if Trump decides to use military power along with economic tariffs? An Arctic expert writing in The Globe and Mail says we shouldn’t think of tanks or helicopters streaming over the border. Instead, an American show-of-force could begin with a single...
What you need to know about Trump’s Golden Dome threat
I am very worried that Canada is sleepwalking into potentially the most dangerous military project since the atom bomb. Trump’s Golden Dome will put thousands of weapons in space – one of the few places where there are no weapons today – and lock us into a new Cold War with Russia and China that will rob our children and...
The absurdities of Fortress Privacy
Basil Borutski brutally murdered three women one morning in 2015, in Renfrew County, Ontario. He was convicted and sent to prison, where he died. I wrote a book about the case.
Carney's office slammed by access-to-info orders
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s own department is struggling to comply with a flurry of legal orders requiring it to release information to requesters who’ve been denied their rights under the Access to Information Act. In the last two years, Caroline Maynard, Canada’s information commissioner, has hit the Privy Council Office (PCO) with at least 87 such orders after her investigators...
Why are we letting NATO bankrupt Canada?
Canada’s Defence Minister was at the Pentagon this week working out untold arrangements with his mercurial American counterpart, Trump’s Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth (yes, “war” is part of his new job title). Canada’s media seems to have little interest in what Minister David McGuinty was discussing, whether it was
Is Russia picking a fight with NATO... really?
You may have heard the news this week that in a bizarre, high-risk move, Russia sent drones into the airspace of NATO members Poland and Romania (Russia has denied attacking NATO). The scale of the incursion – 19 drones into Poland’s airspace and another drone over Romania – is too many to be just an accident. On September 9 and...
Ancient software cited for RCMP's access-to-info failures
The RCMP has a venerable history of flouting the Access to Information Act, invoking excessive redactions and imposing delays that too often violate the letter of the law. Canada’s information commission raps the RCMP’s knuckles every few years and they always promise to do better. But like clockwork, they soon fall back into bad habits. Requestors who deal regularly with...
Is the U.S. invasion of Canada so unimaginable?
It’s difficult for us to imagine a future that’s different than today, because so much of our understanding of today is based upon our past.
Americans may launch Canadian weapons under Golden Dome
Prime Minister Mark Carney has removed any restrictions on Canada’s military to join President Trump’s Golden Dome, an unproven, half-trillion dollar program to try to shoot down nuclear-armed missiles launched against the United States by Russia or China. According to Ottawa Citizen reporter David Pugliese, Defence Minister David McGuinty visited the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) headquarters in Colorado...
Fake award gets strong recognition in government survey
More than half of the 3,534 Canadians polled by the federal government earlier this year said they had heard of Canada’s National Medal of Service, and most of those had some idea of why it’s awarded.
NATO spending’s first casualty: pharmacare
Canada’s military budget is set to grow so much, the question everyone is asking is: How will Prime Minister Carney pay for it?
Lloyd Axworthy vs. Mark Carney
For readers of a certain generation, Lloyd Axworthy represents a Golden Era for Canada on the international stage during the 1990s after the Cold War. Serving as Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Lloyd Axworthy helped to shift power away from the nuclear-armed superpowers toward increased multilateralism, international institutions, and disarmament. Chief among his accomplishments is the global treaty...
Take note: RCMP note-taking falls short
RCMP officers continue to break rules around investigative note-taking, despite a decade-old commitment to fix the problems.
Bilingualism ruling ends transparency project
A pioneering effort to make the federal government more transparent has been shut down. The National Capital Commission (NCC) removed hundreds of original documents from its website after an adverse ruling from the official languages commissioner.
Spy agency workers complain about open-office workspace
Employees at Canada’s secretive spy agency say their open-office workspace is too noisy and visually distracting to focus on their jobs. “Auditory and visual distractions … from an open-office environment were a concern expressed by most survey respondents,” says an evaluation report from the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE.
Trump ups the ante on Carney for Golden Dome
American President Donald Trump left the G-7 meeting in Kananaskis one day early this week, but not before firing a parting shot at Prime Minister Carney over Canada’s role in the Golden Dome missile defence system, which will put weapons in space for the first time.
Canada closer to joining Golden Dome in secret talks
Canada is moving closer to joining Trump’s Golden Dome scheme, despite widespread opposition expressed by the public in a new poll.
Why is Carney having ‘secret’ talks with Trump?
Looking over media releases from the Prime Minister’s office, you will find in recent days Mark Carney has spoken to the Premier of China Li Qiang, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, and President of Indonesia Prabowo Subianto. But one world leader’s name is conspicuously absent from the list: U.S. President Donald Trump.
Musk’s magical ROAS
Elon Musk has always taken a curious pride in not spending big on advertising. Tesla’s meteoric rise was, in his telling, proof that a superior product—and a CEO with 220 million followers—renders paid media optional.
Info czar rejects call for transparency
Canada’s information commissioner, Caroline Maynard, wields legal authority to order federal departments to release information they’ve withheld from requesters who are seeking it under the Access to Information Act. Well, sort of.
Defence expert shreds Trump’s Golden Dome scheme
It takes this National Defence expert only five minutes to utterly take apart Trump’s Golden Dome missile defence scheme. This interview features an analysis by Prof. Walter Dorn, a Defence Studies professor at the Royal Military College, discussing President Donald Trump’s ambitious “Golden Dome” missile defence initiative. Watch it here:
Longer wait times, abandoned calls at RCMP emergency call centres
RCMP communications centres that receive 911 calls are so short of staff that wait times have doubled – prompting increasing numbers of frustrated callers to hang up. That’s one of the main findings from an internal evaluation that was triggered in part by the fumbles of the Mountie call centre in Truro, N.S., during the 2020 mass murder, which left...
Axworthy: Carney joining Trump's Golden Dome a ‘betrayal’
Former Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy accused Prime Minister Mark Carney of betraying Canadians in a strongly worded opinion article published by The Globe and Mail. Axworthy was responding to the announcements this week, first by Donald Trump and then by Carney a day later, that Canada wants to join and help pay for Trump’s “Golden Dome” scheme that...
How to explain to Americans why we're so upset
There are plenty of problems confronting progressives in the United States right now. So lots of our American cousins may not even be aware of the angst and hardship that Trump is inflicting upon Canada.
Why trouble for the NDP spells trouble for democracy
Parliament will look very different when newly-elected MPs return to Ottawa this month. There will be far less diversity of voices in the House of Commons with the demise of the NDP, and this is not good for our democracy.
Cyber-protection agency a victim of fraud
Canada’s premier agency for cyber-security, which helps governments and businesses defend against bad actors, itself got scammed as part of a wide-ranging IT overbilling fraud worth several million dollars.
The Conservatives’ best-performing ad was probably their most derided
Some dismissed it as the “erectile dysfunction” ad. Others laughed it off as a desperate Hail Mary to salvage a faltering campaign in Southern Ontario—specifically in the all-important 905 region. Well, they can stop laughing. Call it the blue belt now. The Conservatives not only held their ground in the 905—they flipped several Liberal ridings.
Welcome to the new post-transparency
The world is chaotic. Sovereignty, diplomacy, trade, free speech, science are all under assault. Daily life seems suddenly dangerous. Even the weather report is scary. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” as William Butler Yeats put it in The Second Coming (1919). We’ve entered an era of might makes right. Familiar rules are changing. Among the changes is the...
Access to information is AWOL
This will be a very short post on the access-to-information election promises of the five main political parties. That’s because there’s nothing to write about. With the release of the last platform today (Conservative), no party is committing to reforming the dysfunctional Access to Information Act, other than reciting cheap bromides. Some aren’t even offering bromides.
Is the peace movement wrong?
Is it time I admit defeat, pull up my tent and go home? For 30 years I have advocated for reductions to Canada’s military spending, and it keeps rising and rising. Now it’s reached the point where Canada is the 6th highest in actual dollars within NATO (after USA, Germany, UK, France, Poland). Responding to expensive plans to increase military...
The dossier Trudeau took to Mar-a-Lago
Last fall, before the Trump shitstorm, advisers to the prime minister saw the black clouds gathering to the south. The new president had not yet been sworn into office, but it was clear Canada was in the crosshairs.
Mark Carney's $100 apology
The 10 men who have governed the Bank of Canada since its inception in 1934 have been taciturn types, studiously avoiding the mud-holes of public controversy. Central banks trade in trust, and must project immutability and stability. That’s why it was so unusual in 2012 to hear Mark Carney, then governor of the Bank, apologize to Canadians for screwing up.