Hours after Iran and the U.S. reached a ceasefire deal, Israel launched one of its most devastating attacks on Lebanon to date.

Over a hundred strikes in ten minutes - carnage in Beirut, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people are sheltering.

Hundreds dead, entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. Reports of ethnic cleansing and open discussion of permanent military occupation.

Prime Minister Carney has rightly condemned the invasion as illegal, but words are not enough.

Canada must bring sanctions against Israel, cancel the Canada-Israel free trade agreement, implement a real two-way arms embargo, and use every diplomatic and economic tool at our disposal to rein in Israel.

US-Israeli impunity has shredded the international order: Canada should lead in rebuilding it.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/israel-lebanon-military-campaign-ceasefire-9.7156168

#cdnpoli #lebanon

Bebawi was sentenced in 2020 to eight and a half years in prison for his role in the corruption scheme between the engineering firm and Moammar Gadhafi's Libyan regime. He was released after serving one-sixth of his sentence.

However, as part of his release conditions, he had to repay a fine of approximately $25 million.

To date, he has only repaid around $100,000, citing lack of funds. It's an excuse the judge dismissed out of hand on Tuesday.

"Mr. Bebawi will not be jailed because he is too poor to pay the fine. He will be jailed because he refuses, without reasonable excuse, to pay it," Moore said.

In 2016, Gladu was voted "most collegial" MP in a survey of her colleagues. But in the years since she has made headlines for different reasons.

She was elected four times as a Conservative and briefly ran for the party leadership in 2020. In April of that year she promoted an unproven treatment for COVID-19 [hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc sulphate] and questioned the public health response to the pandemic. In 2021 she was criticized by the then leader of the Conservative Party — Erin O'Toole — for saying COVID-19 was less of a threat than polio (Gladu apologized for her comments).

In June 2021, Gladu voted against Liberal legislation that sought to ban conversion therapy. At the time, Gladu said she opposed the practice, but believed the wording of the legislation was too broad. (In a 2020 interview, she said "it's important that every part of the community is made to feel loved and accepted" and that she'd be willing to march in a Pride parade.)

It was also just three months ago that Gladu said any MP looking to switch parties should have to run in a byelection before doing so — a fact that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre pointed to on Wednesday while criticizing her move.

...

Gladu will no doubt be asked at some point to account for her own views and stances. And Carney may hope that differences of opinion can be minimized — at least publicly. But the prime minister will be poked and prodded now to explain his values.

In June 2024, an Ontario man who was visiting Montreal parked his car, a Honda Accord, on the street in a central neighbourhood. The next day, it was gone.

The man, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals from a criminal organization, filed a police report and received an insurance payment, but he never heard about the car again.

Three weeks later, police officers staking out a warehouse in Montreal’s Saint-Laurent borough saw his car being loaded into a shipping container.

The officers watched from afar as a group of men placed the Accord deep inside the container followed by two older, used cars and then stacks of mattresses.

The warehouse, located at 407 Lebeau Blvd., was home to Albert Logistique, a business registered in Quebec whose legal activities included mattress exports to Africa.

But a police investigation found that the warehouse wasn’t just used for mattress shipments. It was the headquarters of a trans-Atlantic stolen car export network, according to police investigative documents obtained by CBC.

The B.C. government is recommending a fine against those responsible for the deaths of more than a dozen cattle last fall, but the Ministry of Environment and Parks won’t say who, exactly, investigators believe is to blame for poisoning at least 13 cattle in the province’s Interior.

The incident prompted public outcry last October after photos of dead cows began circulating on social media. The cattle, which belonged to a rancher with a grazing tenure in the Quesnel area, were believed to have been poisoned when they consumed nitrogen fertilizer meant to accelerate timber growth.

B.C.’s Ministry of Forests told The Tyee that laboratory analyses of the fertilizer and animal tissues are still being completed.

“Until results are known, we are strengthening cleanup protocols, retraining crews, and reviewing all field handling and safety procedures to prevent any future incidents,” a spokesperson wrote.

Meanwhile, the Environment Ministry said its investigation under the Environmental Management Act has concluded with investigators recommending an administrative penalty — a fine imposed on a person or business alleged to have violated a regulatory requirement.

Several environmental groups have launched a constitutional challenge seeking to kill an Ontario law that allows cabinet to suspend other laws.

Wildlands League, Environmental Defence Canada, Friends of the Earth Canada and Democracy Watch allege Ontario's special economic zone law wrongly abdicates power from the legislature and gives it to cabinet, thereby violating the Constitution.

Doug Ford's Progressive Conservative government passed Bill 5, which included the special economic zone provision, last year.

The provision allows cabinet and the environment minister to suspend any and all provincial and municipal laws within such zones as they see fit.

As Canada lowers its tariffs and imports more electric vehicles from China, an upcoming report from New York-based labour rights researchers is making new allegations of forced labour practices at the world's bestselling EV manufacturer, BYD.

China Labor Watch (CLW) received a complaint last fall from one of the thousands of migrant workers brought to Hungary from China to help build BYD's first European plant in the city of Szeged — a $6-billion investment intended to supply the European market with around 300,000 vehicles per year.

The non-profit organization launched an investigation and provided CBC News with an advance copy of its findings, set for publication later this month.

"It's important that consumers know what's really behind some of these electric vehicles, and the labour conditions that are behind the production of these cars," said project officer Elaine Lu.

"Chinese workers who are being brought in to work on these sites are being employed in quite horrible conditions."

...

The report describes potential violations of Hungarian labour and migration laws, including:

• Seven-day workweeks with no days off to rest, with workers telling CLW they were instructed to lie to inspectors about their working hours if asked.
• Shifts of up to 12 or 14 hours, with only a short meal break and no paid overtime.
• Delayed wage payments of up to three months, with final payments withheld until workers returned to China.
• Steep recruitment fees used as a form of debt bondage, with low-income workers saying they were forced to stay despite poor conditions because they can't afford to default on their contract.
• Workers entering on business visas instead of authorized work permits, leaving them vulnerable to abuse and unable to access services like health care for workplace injuries.

...

Archived link

RT’s Twitter account has published an edited version of a Tucker Carlson video that suggests that the United States should use force to influence Canada a change in Canada’s government, which Carlson claims is oppressing Canadians and that Canada is not a sovereign nation.

The RT post frames Carlson’s remarks under a “51st state” / regime-change banner and leans on two false or misleading hooks — that the Canadian government has killed “nearly 100,000” Canadians and that Canada is not sovereign — to push a corrosive narrative that Canada is illegitimate and in need of outside “liberation.” That is authentic-source amplification in service of a foreign propaganda line.

This appears to be an effort to exploit both the “51st” state narrative and the Alberta separatist movement issue.

THE CLAIM:

RT’s post presents Carlson as effectively “soft-launching” Canada as a U.S. 51st state, amplifying his argument that the U.S. should exert influence over Canada “by force if necessary,” that Canada oppresses its citizens via MAID, that Canadians need “liberation,” and that Canada is not truly sovereign. Carlson made those remarks in a commentary dated April 2, 2026, and RT repackaged them on X the same day.

THE FACTS:

• Carlson’s MAID number is wrong. Health Canada reports 76,475 MAID provisions in Canada since legalization in 2016, with 16,499 in 2024. Health Canada also states MAID is a health service provided under strict legal criteria and not a “cause of death” category, which undercuts the “state killing program” framing.
• Canada is sovereign. Official Canadian sources say the Statute of Westminster in 1931 granted the Dominions full legal autonomy, recognized Canada’s autonomy/virtual independence, and Canada’s Constitution is the supreme law. The Constitution was patriated in 1982, allowing constitutional amendment in Canada. Sharing a monarch with other Commonwealth realms does not erase sovereignty.
• RT is not a neutral amplifier. Canada’s CRTC says RT is a Russian state-controlled network and removed RT/RT France from authorized distribution in Canada in 2022, citing concerns about content that undermines sovereignty and democratic institutions. Global Affairs Canada later said RT uses covert third-party platforms to disseminate content and has likely coordinated with Russian intelligence services; the U.S. Treasury said RT executives covertly recruited American influencers in 2024 as part of Russia’s malign influence efforts. Reuters likewise described RT as Russian state-owned/state-controlled when Canada removed it from Canadian TV.

...

This matches a familiar Kremlin line: depict a democratic ally as broken, abusive, and not fully legitimate; then normalize outside coercion as “rescue.” In Canada’s case, the pressure points are MAID, immigration, sovereignty, and regional alienation. The strategic objective is to corrode trust in Canadian institutions, intensify internal divisions, and make talk of external intervention or annexation feel less fringe. That is the same democratic-undermining pattern Canadian authorities and DisinfoWatch have warned about in RT and aligned Canada-targeting narratives.

...

In a related report, Secession for you, prison in Russia: Moscow’s selective love for self-determination, the European disinformation network EUvsDisinfo provides a deeper analysis, stating that "the Kremlin amplifies separatist causes abroad while jailing those who voice similar ideas inside Russia".

Reports of the Kremlin’s fondness for Western separatist movements go way back. In 2015, a year after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Texan separatists were spotted at a far-right conference in St. Petersburg, prompting an investigation(opens in a new tab) into their ties to Russian officials. Back then, a Russian newspaper interviewed(opens in a new tab) one such activist, and FIMI bots(opens in a new tab) amplified the interview with calls for a ‘Free Texas’. The campaign(opens in a new tab) never quite ended: in early 2024, the conflict between the state of Texas and the Biden administration once again prompted comments from Russian officials – the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev wrote(opens in a new tab) that he would be “rooting for Texas” if it decided to secede, while MP Sergei Mironov supported the calls for “Texit”(opens in a new tab), tweeting that Russia was “ready to help with the independence referendum”. At the same time, an army of bots exploited the crisis by boosting calls for civil war in the U.S. in coordinated campaigns both on Telegram(opens in a new tab) and Twitter/X(opens in a new tab).

...

New poll shows a majority of Canadians want to ban citizens from serving in the U.S. military.

I'm tired of the way things are and am actually excited for BYD. They build really great electric vehicles and I saw one video where it charged up just as fact as refueling gasoline would be

cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/c/vancouver/p/647750/vancouver-parks-to-ask-for-1-43-billion-for-maintenance-and-upgrades

We've put off essential upgrades, to keep doing so will make it either more expensive down the road or mean we close some of our amazing facilities.

This stuff makes the city more awesome, take a look at some of the proposals, like a new 50 Meyer pool, another bike lane through Stanley Park, more park area by the Broadway plan, more biodiversity and reclamation at lost lagoon etc.

In city council, your vote and voice matter like crazy so let 'em know what you think! It takes a couple moments and impacts where we live!

https://vancouver.ca/your-government/contact-council.aspx

Retired colonel Pierre LeBlanc ... says Canada faces an increasing number of risks to its security from Russia, China and even the U.S., but has failed to invest in strategic defence to deter adversaries.

“This is the worst I have seen in terms of the security of Canada given what's going on worldwide,” LeBlanc, who is also an Arctic security consultant, said.

...

It comes as Canada is amping up defence investments in the Arctic due to geopolitical changes: Russia’s and China's growing ambition in the Arctic, Prime Minister Mark Carney's plans to spend tens of billions on defence infrastructure, the push to develop critical minerals in the North, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to Greenland and Canada.

But LeBlanc and other defence experts say while these exercises and investments are crucial, they aren't enough to deter adversaries or defend the nation.

In fact, these experts argue Canada is already in a period of conflict.

...

“Russia and China believe themselves to be in conflict and at war with us. They just think about war and conflict very differently than we do. So if we think we are not in a conflict with China and Russia, we need to wake up and we need to think again,” [says Christian Leuprecht, an expert in security and defence who teaches at the Royal Military College of Canada and Queen’s University].

...

It's currently legal for Canadians to join the Israeli military, as the Foreign Enlistment Act only prohibits citizens from fighting for non-state forces, designated terrorist organizations and militaries of states at war with an ally.

As of March 2025, more than 1,500 Canadian citizens with at least one other nationality were serving in the Israeli military, according to a document from the Israeli government. This figure does not account for Canadian citizens who have yet to acquire Israeli citizenship.

A report from Amnesty International on human rights and the World Cup warned last week about the potential for protests if "the U.S. team is drawn to play in Canada in later rounds and ICE personnel are deployed to provide security."

Must be great to be a high school drop out who wants to see the world and play cops and robbers.