There's a bit of Canada on Artemis II. And no, we're not only talking about Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut being part of the crew…

Canada is certainly putting its (maple) flavour on this historic mission in a few meaningful ways.

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Nearly two years after tabling the initial legislation, the government’s belated nomination of a former British Columbia Elections head to oversee the foreign agents registry is “better late than never,” say NDP public safety critic Jenny Kwan.

Though the Foreign Influence Transparency Registry is not expected to be a “silver bullet” against election interference or transnational repression, much work remains before it is locked and loaded to address the problem, and lingering concerns remain about who will ultimately determine its aim, according to national security experts.

“I really hope Canadians don't take this as some sort of silver bullet,” national security expert Dan Stanton told The Hill Times. “I think the registry is going to be good for elections and as due diligence to buttress the Lobbying Act, but I think a lot of Canadians believe it’s going to catch spies, and it won’t.”

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Interim NDP Leader Don Davies says Boegman's appointment is a 'positive development,' but called the nearly two-year delay in setting up the foreign influence registry 'inexcusable.' The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

Davies also added that, while he appreciated the heads-up, his colleague and his party’s public safety critic, Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East, B.C.), had not been provided the same courtesy, despite her “driving force” in pushing the government to act.

Kwan, who has been warned by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) that she is an “evergreen target” of interference and repression by the Chinese government due to her advocacy on human rights, told reporters she was “cautiously optimistic” and welcomed Boegman’s appointment as “better late than never,” but that the work was far from over.

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While Stanton said he is generally optimistic about the nominee selection and the independence of the eventually operational registry, one of his primary concerns is that the average Canadian may expect more from it than it can deliver.

Stanton said the registry will create the appearance of deterrence against clandestine influence operations, but the vast majority of registrants will do so for benign relationships and agreements. However, he added that malicious actors would never register in the first place, nor would any proposed financial or criminal penalty be sufficient to deter them in the most extreme cases.

“I don’t want to sound like a downer, but this registry is just ticking a box,” Stanton explained. “The government shouldn’t be let off the hook simply because we have a registry; it’s not going to make us safer on its own. That requires better counterintelligence and law enforcement.”

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Op-ed by Vina Nadjibulla is Vice-President of Research and Strategy, Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s January 2026 visit to China marked a pragmatic recalibration of Canada–China relations.

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While the trip succeeded in recalibrating relations and reopening dialogue channels, the harder work begins now. Ottawa must manage three interlinked challenges that will determine whether this new approach to China will strengthen Canada’s strategic autonomy or expose it to new risks of strategic dependence.

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The first challenge is managing the risk of economic retaliation from Washington ... If Washington (and Mexico] uses the upcoming 2026 review of the Canada–US–Mexico Agreement to push for deeper economic security alignment and tighten rules around technology controls, investment screening, procurement and supply chains, Canada’s flexibility with China could narrow significantly.

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The arguably more difficult challenge lies at home. Declaring that engagement with China will be selective and subject to guardrails is straightforward. Enforcing those guardrails, especially in sensitive sectors like AI, advanced technologies or critical supply chains where economic opportunity and security concerns overlap, will be much harder.

While China accounts for only about 5 per cent of Canada’s total exports, exposure is uneven and highly sectoral. For example, more than 60 per cent of canola seed exports depend on access to the Chinese market, making the sector highly vulnerable to disruption or coercive trade measures.

Deeper engagement in some sectors will need to proceed alongside deliberate de-risking in others. This also applies to clean energy and green technology investment, areas where Ottawa has signalled interest in deepening cooperation while remaining cautious about exposure to critical infrastructure.

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The third challenge is establishing strategic clarity with allies in the Indo-Pacific and Europe. Partners like Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines and Taiwan will judge Canada less by the language of its partnership with Beijing than by whether Ottawa continues to deepen cooperation on maritime security, deterrence and resilience, including in the defence of international law in the South China Sea. They will also watch closely for any sign that engagement with Taiwan is being narrowed in the name of improved relations with Beijing.

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Carney’s trip to India, Australia and possibly Japan, planned for March 2026, will be an opportunity to demonstrate that stabilising relations with China is simply one track within a broader strategy centred on middle-power diplomacy and coalition-building. The visit will also offer a chance to reinforce that Canada’s engagement with Beijing sits alongside — not at the expense of — deeper partnerships with like-minded countries, shared approaches to security and resilience and wider efforts to anchor strategic autonomy in a dense network of trusted relationships.

WHILE CANADIANS WORRY about climate risk and the political direction of the United States, their retirement savings are quietly riding a very different bet. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) is financing—and profiting from—Donald Trump’s renewed push to expand fossil fuels and accelerate artificial intelligence development in the US. It has partnered with private equity firms to acquire American oil and gas producers and financed AI companies like Elon Musk’s xAI.

The CPPIB is an independent investment-management organization responsible for managing the Canada Pension Plan (CPP), Canada’s largest public pension. It was created by an act of Parliament, in 1997, and is accountable to Canada’s Parliament. The CPPIB’s primary responsibility is to ensure the CPP maximizes its long-term revenues with minimal risk.

The CPPIB has a policy on sustainable investing, updated in May 2025, that recognizes climate change as a serious risk and encourages adapting its investment strategy to evolving decarbonization pathways and investing “for a whole economy transition required by climate change.” However, the same policy indicates the CPPIB’s belief “that accelerating the global energy transition requires a sophisticated, long-term approach rather than blanket divestment.”

In response to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s pledges to fast-track major infrastructure projects, CPPIB chief executive officer John Graham stated, in September 2025, that the CPPIB was keen to invest in major projects, particularly in the energy sector. As reported by the Financial Post, Graham singled out fossil fuel pipelines, saying, “Here in Canada, we like pipelines. We like oil and gas pipelines.”

Its recent investments in the US fossil fuel and AI sectors are a growing concern to pension fund watchdogs, which argue that, at a time when the US is actively waging a trade war against Canada and destabilizing the climate, the CPPIB is providing capital to allow it to happen.

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has said it considered alerting Canadian police last year about the activities of a person who months later committed one of the worst school shootings in the country’s history.

OpenAI said last June the company identified the account of Jesse Van Rootselaar via abuse detection efforts for “furtherance of violent activities”.

The San Francisco tech company said on Friday it considered whether to refer the account to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) but determined at the time that the account activity did not meet a threshold for referral to law enforcement.

OpenAI banned the account in June 2025 for violating its usage policy.

Alberta is two and a half years removed from hearing Premier Danielle Smith declare her government looked forward optimistically to doubling the province’s population to 10 million people by 2050.

She also spent part of 2024 repeatedly musing that Red Deer, with its 106,000 residents, ought to swell to one million.

But that was then. Times have changed.

Certainly, the public mood toward immigration has changed, all over Canada, as a recent surge in newcomers (though not quite as aggressive as Smith had fancied) strained housing and some public services.

Alberta’s budget picture has changed, too — lower than expected oil prices jerking the province from an $8.3 billion surplus in Smith’s more-bullish-on-immigration days to a big deficit this year, and another bath of red ink the premier has forewarned will come in next Thursday’s budget.

It's lemmy.ca after all, eh!

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34370909

After years of protests and blockades, a group of Atikamekw elders and chiefs have filed a lawsuit seeking to cancel forestry permits across a vast stretch of northern Quebec.

I recommend you read/skim through the article, but these paragraphs felt especially important:

Grief at this magnitude is crushing anywhere, but especially in a place so little. The numbers of dead leave a different-sized hole in the social architecture of a place where everyone knows where everyone lives. The people of Tumbler Ridge will see their streets differently now—which road has a house that is home to someone who has died or was injured or at school that day. “I will know every victim,” Mayor Darryl Krakowka told the CBC in those early hours when Tumbler Ridge waited to find out the names of the casualties.

But the way that a community responds to tragedy is a key part of their story. In La Loche, the lasting effect of the 2016 massacre is not stigma but something greater. It’s a complicated legacy: layers of sadness and anger but also love and resilience. People have “a lot of pride in their community and in the strength that it did have, even in the face of these incredibly hard things,” said Dungavell.

That’s why it matters that the mayors and residents of places like La Loche and Portapique send words of support to Tumbler Ridge. And that’s why it matters that the outpouring of support from Canadians persists long after the cameras have left. New schools will need building, and stable health care supports will be needed for years, Dungavell said.

“Right now, we’re talking about survival, but the hard work of figuring out ‘how this fits into our life story’ is going to happen in the next months and years,” she said.

Love and beauty exist after horror. That’s part of the story here, and in La Loche, Portapique, and Humboldt. In the years to come, there will still be mining and bears, a geopark, dinosaur fossils, and mountain vistas in Tumbler Ridge. But they will always look a little different.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/941053

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Unbelievably damning results. I don't see how the CPC can continue to function as a party.

As U.S. President Donald Trump looks to expand his use of tariffs to pressure Europe over Greenland, the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down previously imposed tariffs. The Supreme Court found Trump overstepped his authority when he invoked emergency powers to bring the tariffs into effect.

Amid increasing scrutiny on the use of Canada’s temporary foreign worker program, the total dollar amount of fines imposed on employers who are found to violate the terms of the program has risen dramatically. 

However, some observers think changes to monitoring and enforcement of the program are still required.

Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand says the final flights operated by Canadian airlines have left Cuba.

“Thank you to all Canadian airline workers who helped bring more than 27,900 travellers safely back to Canada,” a statement posted Thursday evening on X said. “If you are still in Cuba, some commercial flights remain available through international airlines.”