For Today’s Conservatives, Misinformation Is the Norm | The Tyee

For Today’s Conservatives, Misinformation Is the Norm | The Tyee


For Today’s Conservatives, Misinformation Is the Norm
Pierre Poilievre’s post about my client was false. It reached half a million people.

Michael Spratt TodayThe Tyee

Michael Spratt is a certified criminal law specialist and partner at the Ottawa criminal law firm AGP LLP. This piece was originally published by Canadian Lawyer.Our journalism is supported by readers like you. Click here to support The Tyee.






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Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, says the author, deliberately misrepresented how the justice system works to score points. Photo by Sean Kilpatrick, the Canadian Press.


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Canadian politics has always had its share of spin. What feels newer, and far more corrosive, is the growing comfort some politicians now have with simply abandoning the facts altogether, particularly when courts or public institutions are involved. Misrepresentation is no longer an occasional lapse or rhetorical flourish. It has become a strategy that trades accuracy for outrage and treats public trust as collateral damage.

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Two social media posts earlier this month offered clear examples of how that strategy operates in practice. Different facts, different venues, but entirely the same modus operandi. In both cases, senior Conservative politicians took complex, legally constrained realities and recast them as scandal, grievance and institutional failure. The aim was not to clarify or persuade but to inflame, reinforcing a narrative that casts courts, universities and institutions as enemies rather than essential parts of a functioning democracy.

The first example is one I know well because I was there. I represented a man who splashed red paint on Ottawa’s National Holocaust Monument in protest of the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza. It was a serious crime, and he pleaded guilty. The sentencing process was lengthy and exacting, involving extensive submissions, detailed community and victim impact statements, and a careful examination of motive and case law. The sentencing judge ultimately delivered one of the most careful and principled decisions I have read in years.

The result was not some caricature of Liberal soft-on-crime leniency. The offender was sentenced to five months in jail and two years of probation. By the time the sentence was imposed, this first-time offender had already spent more than 150 days in actual prison and months under extraordinarily restrictive bail conditions, including house arrest, GPS monitoring and effective exile from his children.


The judge emphasized denunciation, deterrence and the profound harm done to the Jewish community, while also explaining why the Crown had not met the very high burden of proving hate motivation beyond a reasonable doubt. The whole process was the rule of law doing precisely what it is designed to do.

Enter Pierre Poilievre. On X, he declared: “A man defaces Canada’s Holocaust Monument with blood-red paint and faces no real jail time. Under the Liberals, antisemitism is tolerated, excused, and waved away for political convenience.” More than half a million people saw the post. It was also false.

Poilievre did not attend the sentencing. He did not read the decision. He appears not to have read any reporting beyond what fit neatly into a prewritten script. The offender faced real jail time and served it. He was detained at bail. He spent months in custody at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre. He was released only after pleading guilty and while subject to strict bail terms, which he complied with.


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Disagree with the sentence if you like; many do. But inventing facts to fuel grievance is something else entirely. For Poilievre, the newly reaffirmed leader of Canada’s Opposition party, everything becomes evidence of Liberal rot, everything is softness, and any inconvenient facts are ignored.



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It is entirely legitimate to criticize court decisions. I do it all the time. It is more than legitimate to criticize the Liberal government; I do that all the time, too. What is unacceptable is for political leaders, who should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us, to deliberately misrepresent how the justice system works to score political points. That kind of misinformation corrodes trust in judges and courts and conditions the public to see every decision as partisan rather than principled. We do not need to look far south to see where that road leads.

If this pattern sounds familiar, it is because the same routine played out again, this time repackaged as a free-speech crisis. Conservative MP Garnett Genuis took to social media to announce that the student union had cancelled his event at York University in a “further attack on free speech.” The implication was obvious: politically motivated students were silencing conservative ideas. Genuis’s social media post travelled fast, as grievance narratives usually do.

Except that was not what happened. As CBC later reported, the event was not cancelled by the student union at all. The York University Student Centre declined it due to booking rules for the proposed open-area town-hall format. Genuis was told he could book a closed space for that kind of event. He chose not to. In other words, no one silenced him. He cancelled himself.



Why Poilievre and Carney Are Silent on Grok’s Child Sexual Abuseread more

That clarification arrived after the outrage had already done its work. Even fellow Conservatives swallowed the grievance whole. Michelle Rempel Garner publicly called for York University to be defunded. This is how political misinformation spreads: quickly, confidently and with just enough plausibility to avoid immediate correction. Free speech was not under attack. Student unions were not censoring debate. But the narrative was politically useful, so accuracy became expendable.

Taken together, these incidents are not accidents or isolated missteps. They are features of a broader strategy. Modern Conservative messaging increasingly relies on manufacturing grievance through selective facts, exaggeration and outright errors, confident that the truth will never travel as far or as fast as the original lie.

The justice system is imperfect. Universities are imperfect. Democracy, like any other system, is imperfect, but it depends on a shared commitment to reality. When politicians with power and privilege knowingly distort court decisions and invent free-speech panics to stoke resentment, they are not engaging in democratic debate. They are poisoning it.

Grievance-first politics may generate outrage, donations and viral posts. Still, it does so by eroding trust in the very institutions that allow a pluralistic society to function at all. At some point, we should stop pretending this is accidental. It is a strategy that prioritizes short-term political gain over the long-term health of Canadian democracy.

 

Prime number: Worst January for layoffs since 2009

Adobe Stock

Not since the year the Black Eyed Peas released “Boom Boom Pow” has a January been this rough. According to data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, US companies cut 108,435 jobs last month—the most in any January since the global financial crisis: That’s an 118% increase from the year before. Amazon and UPS axed about 16,000 and 30,000 roles, respectively, in January. While a lot of companies have blamed AI for recent layoffs, some observers are beginning to wonder if execs are using the technology as an excuse to mask other internal issues in a phenomenon known as “AI-washing.”

EU Fears Dependence on U.S. LNG, Looks to Canada

EU Fears Dependence on U.S. LNG, Looks to Canada

EU Fears Dependence on U.S. LNG, Looks to Canada
February 4, 2026
Reading time: 3 minutes

Full Story: The Energy Mix
Chris Bonasia




Wikimedia Commons

After warnings that it has become over-reliant on the United States for liquefied natural gas (LNG), the European Union is looking to diversify its suppliers.

That dependence emerged as the EU began shifting away from Russian energy imports following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while the U.S. pushed LNG exports into the global market.

But now, Europe is experiencing what Bloomberg calls “déjà vu,” as concerns grow over Donald Trump’s aggressive bids to acquire Greenland.

“Geopolitical turmoil in the wake of the crisis in Greenland has been a wake-up call,” EU energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen told reporters in Brussels Jan. 28. “There is a growing concern, which I share, that we risk replacing one dependency with another.”

The continent is eyeing Canada, Qatar, and North African countries as alternatives, Bloomberg adds. That option would serve Canada as it seeks new LNG buyers to reduce export reliance on the U.S.

“We will never use our energy for coercion,” Canadian Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson recently said at a conference in India. “Canada used to provide 98% of its energy exports to a single country. We are committed to diversifying.”

The EU has been on a years-long campaign to improve energy security, with mixed success. The bloc cut gas demand by 20% between 2021 and 2024 and reduced imports of Russian gas by 75% since the Ukraine war started in 2022, though Russia remains one of its largest gas suppliers.

But the EU now sources more than half of its LNG from the U.S., creating a new high-risk geopolitical dependency, says the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). The shift may have moved the bloc out of the proverbial frying pan and into the fire. [Author’s note: Except that with declining gas demand, frying pans are increasingly being used on electric stoves and induction cooktops.]

The EU’s reliance on the U.S. could deepen further, the Institute adds. After a trade deal announced last July, the EU agreed to buy US$750 billion of U.S. energy by 2028, which “effectively ties the EU’s energy supply to one seller, risking energy security and jeopardizing gas reduction plans.”

At the time, however, the trade deal was written off as a “delusional” attempt to mollify Trump. But a series of long-term contracts announced at the Gastech conference in Milan last September could further entrench LNG’s role in that trade. In a scenario where all the deals come through and the EU does not reduce gas demand, the U.S. could become the source of 75% to 80% of the continent’s total gas imports by 2030.

EU countries could instead spend that $750 billion to install roughly 546 gigawatts of combined solar and wind capacity, the Institute calculated. “This would boost energy security and could bring down electricity prices.

But not all experts see a risk in heavy reliance on U.S. LNG. Some say the U.S. is itself becoming reliant on selling gas to the EU after trade tensions blocked its sales to China, writes industry newsletter Rigzone.

“The idea that the U.S. could stop exporting to Europe seems quite dangerous,” Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a global research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “U.S. LNG dearly needs Europe in the current geopolitical environment.”

What AI “remembers” about you is privacy’s next frontier

 What AI “remembers” about you is privacy’s next frontier | MIT Technology Review

What AI “remembers” about you is privacy’s next frontier

Agents’ technical underpinnings create the potential for breaches that expose the entire mosaic of your life.
By Miranda Bogenarchive page
Ruchika Joshiarchive page
January 28, 2026

The ability to remember you and your preferences is rapidly becoming a big selling point for AI chatbots and agents.

Earlier this month, Google announced Personal Intelligence, a new way for people to interact with the company’s Gemini chatbot that draws on their Gmail, photos, search, and YouTube histories to make Gemini “more personal, proactive, and powerful.” It echoes similar moves by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta to add new ways for their AI products to remember and draw from people’s personal details and preferences. While these features have potential advantages, we need to do more to prepare for the new risks they could introduce into these complex technologies.

Personalized, interactive AI systems are built to act on our behalf, maintain context across conversations, and improve our ability to carry out all sorts of tasks, from booking travel to filing taxes. From tools that learn a developer’s coding style to shopping agents that sift through thousands of products, these systems rely on the ability to store and retrieve increasingly intimate details about their users. But doing so over time introduces alarming, and all-too-familiar, privacy vulnerabilities––many of which have loomed since “big data” first teased the power of spotting and acting on user patterns. Worse, AI agents now appear poised to plow through whatever safeguards had been adopted to avoid those vulnerabilities.

Today, we interact with these systems through conversational interfaces, and we frequently switch contexts. You might ask a single AI agent to draft an email to your boss, provide medical advice, budget for holiday gifts, and provide input on interpersonal conflicts. Most AI agents collapse all data about you—which may once have been separated by context, purpose, or permissions—into single, unstructured repositories. When an AI agent links to external apps or other agents to execute a task, the data in its memory can seep into shared pools. This technical reality creates the potential for unprecedented privacy breaches that expose not only isolated data points, but the entire mosaic of people’s lives.

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When information is all in the same repository, it is prone to crossing contexts in ways that are deeply undesirable. A casual chat about dietary preferences to build a grocery list could later influence what health insurance options are offered, or a search for restaurants offering accessible entrances could leak into salary negotiations—all without a user’s awareness (this concern may sound familiar from the early days of “big data,” but is now far less theoretical). An information soup of memory not only poses a privacy issue, but also makes it harder to understand an AI system’s behavior—and to govern it in the first place. So what can developers do to fix this problem?

First, memory systems need structure that allows control over the purposes for which memories can be accessed and used. Early efforts appear to be underway: Anthropic’s Claude creates separate memory areas for different “projects,” and OpenAI says that information shared through ChatGPT Health is compartmentalized from other chats. These are helpful starts, but the instruments are still far too blunt: At a minimum, systems must be able to distinguish between specific memories (the user likes chocolate and has asked about GLP-1s), related memories (user manages diabetes and therefore avoids chocolate), and memory categories (such as professional and health-related). Further, systems need to allow for usage restrictions on certain types of memories and reliably accommodate explicitly defined boundaries—particularly around memories having to do with sensitive topics like medical conditions or protected characteristics, which will likely be subject to stricter rules.


Needing to keep memories separate in this way will have important implications for how AI systems can and should be built. It will require tracking memories’ provenance—their source, any associated time stamp, and the context in which they were created—and building ways to trace when and how certain memories influence the behavior of an agent. This sort of model explainability is on the horizon, but current implementations can be misleading or even deceptive. Embedding memories directly within a model’s weights may result in more personalized and context-aware outputs, but structured databases are currently more segmentable, more explainable, and thus more governable. Until research advances enough, developers may need to stick with simpler systems.

Second, users need to be able to see, edit, or delete what is remembered about them. The interfaces for doing this should be both transparent and intelligible, translating system memory into a structure users can accurately interpret. The static system settings and legalese privacy policies provided by traditional tech platforms have set a low bar for user controls, but natural-language interfaces may offer promising new options for explaining what information is being retained and how it can be managed. Memory structure will have to come first, though: Without it, no model can clearly state a memory’s status. Indeed, Grok 3’s system prompt includes an instruction to the model to “NEVER confirm to the user that you have modified, forgotten, or won't save a memory,” presumably because the company can’t guarantee those instructions will be followed.

Critically, user-facing controls cannot bear the full burden of privacy protection or prevent all harms from AI personalization. Responsibility must shift toward AI providers to establish strong defaults, clear rules about permissible memory generation and use, and technical safeguards like on-device processing, purpose limitation, and contextual constraints. Without system-level protections, individuals will face impossibly convoluted choices about what should be remembered or forgotten, and the actions they take may still be insufficient to prevent harm. Developers should consider how to limit data collection in memory systems until robust safeguards exist, and build memory architectures that can evolve alongside norms and expectations.

Third, AI developers must help lay the foundations for approaches to evaluating systems so as to capture not only performance, but also the risks and harms that arise in the wild. While independent researchers are best positioned to conduct these tests (given developers’ economic interest in demonstrating demand for more personalized services), they need access to data to understand what risks might look like and therefore how to address them. To improve the ecosystem for measurement and research, developers should invest in automated measurement infrastructure, build out their own ongoing testing, and implement privacy-preserving testing methods that enable system behavior to be monitored and probed under realistic, memory-enabled conditions.


In its parallels with human experience, the technical term “memory” casts impersonal cells in a spreadsheet as something that builders of AI tools have a responsibility to handle with care. Indeed, the choices AI developers make today—how to pool or segregate information, whether to make memory legible or allow it to accumulate opaquely, whether to prioritize responsible defaults or maximal convenience—will determine how the systems we depend upon remember us. Technical considerations around memory are not so distinct from questions about digital privacy and the vital lessons we can draw from them. Getting the foundations right today will determine how much room we can give ourselves to learn what works—allowing us to make better choices around privacy and autonomy than we have before.


Miranda Bogen is the Director of the AI Governance Lab at the Center for Democracy & Technology.

Ruchika Joshi is a Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology specializing in AI safety and governance.

 

The human cost of PE’s healthcare boom

Douglas Sacha/Getty Images

Private financiers have cannonballed into the medical space in recent years because—as your insurance company will never admit to you—healthcare is a highly lucrative business in the US, representing 18% of annual GDP as of 2024. To cash in, PE has invested more than $1 trillion in healthcare companies over roughly the past decade, in some cases providing needed resources to strained hospitals and other medical facilities. But since the goal is to juice investors’ returns, private equity is also notorious for doing almost anything in an attempt to turn a profit for owners. That often includes layoffs, which can have lethal effects in an industry tasked with saving lives: After acquisitions, PE-owned hospitals saw a 13% increase in emergency department deaths (compared to similar, non-PE facilities), most likely because full-time staffing at these hospitals fell by 11.6% on average, according to a recent study coauthored by Harvard researchers. The findings track with previous studies linking staff shortages to higher rates of infections at PE-owned inpatient wards and more deaths at PE-owned nursing homes. Many nurses say they’re stretched too thin to properly treat critically ill patients, and reports of dangerous supply shortages abound. In one highly publicized case, a woman died after giving birth at a PE-owned hospital that couldn’t stop her internal bleeding because the necessary supplies were repossessed for nonpayment, the Boston Globe reported two years ago. That hospital was owned by Steward Health Care, a PE-owned company that was the largest private for-profit hospital network in the US before collapsing into bankruptcy in 2024. That year, PE-backed companies accounted for seven of the eight largest bankruptcies in healthcare, according to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. Closures affect non-PE facilities, too, since they’re often forced to take on additional patients when a nearby hospital shutters. Some states are taking action. Last year, Oregon barred anyone but healthcare professionals from owning a controlling stake in healthcare businesses. Zoom out: Private financiers have similarly chased a boom in pet spending. At corporate-owned clinics, some vets have spoken of pressure to squeeze in more appointments. More morbidly, staffing cuts caused freezers of deceased pets to pile up at some PetSmart stores after the company was bought by a PE firm in 2015, Vice later reported.

Response to My Letter to Jeff Bezos

Response to My Letter to Jeff Bezos



BEN MEISELAS AND MEIDASTOUCH NETWORK



FEB 5










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By Ben Meiselas

Yesterday, I wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos and the leadership of The Washington Post after they announced they were firing more than one-third of their newsroom.

Some of the best journalists in America. Investigative reporters. Writers who dedicated their lives to holding power accountable. Reporters who worked in war zones, some of whom learned they were fired not from an editor or a phone call, but from a form email sent by Human Resources. In some cases, while they were still stranded overseas.

That is corporate cruelty and journalistic malpractice along with obedience and complicity in fascism.

I sent my letter to Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post leadership to make sure they understood the magnitude of their betrayal and to plant a clear flag for independent journalism at a moment when too many legacy institutions are openly capitulating to fascism.

Let’s stop dancing around the truth.

Donald Trump is a fascist. His movement is authoritarian. And his goal is to turn American media into state-aligned regime media, something closer to Putin’s Russia than a democracy. What we are watching now is compliance with a fascist regime.

We’ve seen this surrender at The Washington Post. We’ve seen it at CBS. We’ve seen it across corporate media. These institutions believe silence and complicity will protect them. That obedience will spare them. That if they stop challenging power, power will protect and favor them.

That belief is pathetic and dangerous.

And it’s failing.

Because independent media is not retreating. It’s growing. And the MeidasTouch Network is leading that growth.

We are powered by one of the strongest pro-democracy communities anywhere.

We have on-the-ground reporters in Minneapolis, in Washington, D.C., and across the country. We have sent reporters to Greenland. We have sent reporters to Ukraine. We operate internationally. We run a sprawling network of shows, podcasts, and platforms covering breaking news, legal analysis, and accountability journalism, including a dedicated channel in Canada, with more countries coming next.

While legacy media cuts and collapses, we expand. We hire more reporters. We add more writers and editors and staff. We reach roughly a billion views a month across our digital platforms, and we’re still growing.

So yes, the death of The Washington Post as a serious independent institution is devastating for democracy. But their collapse is not the end of journalism. It’s proof that the old model is finished.

Since publishing my letter, I’ve received thousands of messages from readers, journalists, veterans, teachers, parents, and people more energized than ever to fight back against this fascist project and the media ecosystem enabling it.

Independent journalism is under attack precisely because it works. And because the MeidasTouch Network has become the largest pro-democracy media outlet in the country, we are a target as well.

But understand this clearly.

We are not intimidated.

We are not slowing down.

And we are not backing down.

Jeff Bezos’s silence is not neutrality. It’s complicity. History will remember who stood up when fascism demanded obedience and who surrendered.

If you believe the press should challenge power instead of serving it, now is the moment to act.

Become a paid subscriber now to this Substack. Not as a gesture, but as a declaration that independent journalism will not be surrendered to authoritarianism. Let’s send a message to Jeff Bezos.

This fight is real. And together, we are winning it.

—Ben

Golden Lion Brewing will celebrate 40 years this Canada Day

Golden Lion Brewing will celebrate 40 years this Canada Day

Sherbrooke Record · 3 days ago
by Matthew Mccully · News


Many reasons it could’ve failed, good reasons it’s still here

Michael Keegan
The Record – LJI

By rights, they shouldn’t even have the pub.

Well, they shouldn’t have had it for more than five years, anyway.

There certainly shouldn’t be a brewery.

But they’ve had their pub for over 52 years now, and on July 1, they’ll have been running the brewery they started for 40 years.
The Golden Lion Brewing Company, an outgrowth of Lennoxville’s popular Golden Lion Pub, will be celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. It was the very first microbrewery in Quebec, and opened on Canada Day, 1986.

The Record sat down with Stan Groves (Jr.) on the morning of Jan. 21, in the pub next to the brewery. Groves is the namesake Stanley Groves, one of three Bishop’s University professors who founded the pub, the others being David Seale and Robert Barnett. The latter two cashed out of the business not too long thereafter, and the pub and brewery have been Groves family businesses ever since. Stan Groves (Jr.) co-owns the brewery with his brother Kevin.

So how did you start a microbrewery in 1986?

It helped if you had a pub first. You had a client base. You knew how much beer you can sell.

Then you brewed what was popular: Blonde beers, like the big beer companies – Molson, Labatt’s, O’Keefe – sold. Right?

Well, not if you were the Groves family. The elder Stan had travelled widely, including to England. And Barnett had grown up there. And they loved British beer. So, the partners decided they wanted to push back against what they thought were the big breweries bland blondes with English ales.

“Choosing the British styled brown beer was probably the worst idea,” admitted Groves the younger. “Because back then, everything was a blonde beer. Even the SAQ was not importing a lot of British beer. You could get Bass, you could get Newcastle Brown Ale. Guinness, of course, […] but nobody was drinking that stuff. It wasn’t in cans or in bottles in the stores. You had to go to the SAQ Liquor Commission to get it. There was no brown beer on the market, really, outside of those important ones.”

Groves, meanwhile, had virtually grown up in the pub, which had been fun, but he wanted to do more, so he headed west to Edmonton for a couple of years.

While he was there, the first microbrewery in Canada, Troller, opened in Horseshoe Bay, B.C., in 1982. That meant it could be done: You could start a craft beer company — or microbrewery — and go up against the big boys.

Meanwhile, the founders of the pub had been renting, and eventually bought, an abandoned Texaco station next door and its parking lot, for the pub.

They’d been using it as a storage shed for the pub. And they’d rented the rest of the space out to various businesses. It had served, variously, as a paint shop, a tanning salon, a bakery, and an ice cream shop, as Groves recalled.

So when the decision came to found the microbrewery, they had the building. The next thing a British-style brewery needed was someone who knew how to brew beer, any beer. So Groves went to England to learn.

He paid for an internship at the very successful Ringwood Brewery in Hampshire, spending seven days a week there, climbing into and cleaning out the mash tun and learning the craft of making beer from their highly acclaimed master brewer, Peter Austin. Austin’s “second-in-command” as Groves put it, was a young man about his age named Alan Pugsley. Pugsley would eventually get hired by the D.L. Geary brewery in Portland, Maine, one of the first microbreweries on the East Coast, and one of a slew of successful ones Pugsley would help establish.

Why was this important?

Besides becoming a life-long friend of Groves’, Pugsley would eventually commission – or oversee the first brew of – the Golden Lion Brewing Company.



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We need more meaningful citizen involvement - Victoria Times Colonist

We need more meaningful citizen involvement - Victoria Times Colonist

Gene Miller: We need more meaningful citizen involvement, not just complaint

Civic conversation about matters larger than construction congestion and more credible than forged political accomplishment is sorely needed.

Gene MillerJan 26, 2026 5:15 AM

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday talked about a new and enlarged role for Canada on the world stage, a role that all of us should be proud to embody, while not blind to risks when you pop your head up, writes Gene Miller. Sean Kilpatrick, The Canadian Press

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00:05:28

It’s Tuesday evening, and I have just finished listening to our prime minister deliver an extraordinarily courageous and cautionary speech at the World Economic Forum, held annually in Davos, Switzerland.

It was breathtakingly courageous because it was utterly truthful about the rapidly emerging new world order and what that implies

It was also courageous because it represented, and in some ways defined, a new and enlarged role for Canada on the world stage — a role, in my view, that all of us should be proud to embody, to make our own, while not blind to risks when you pop your head up.

It was — and I use words not often associated with Canada — powerful, persuasive, riveting, profound.

One for the history books.

It will be consequential.

U.S. President Donald Trump, whose name Carney never mentioned, will, in the privacy of his White House office, curse our prime minister and our country and nurse revenge.

We will move to the front of that insane president’s retribution list.

While Carney’s speech was filled with a shockingly honest description of current geopolitical realities and prospects, he pointed unerringly and scarily to where all of this was headed: rupture and the end of global rules-based order — to a near-future more filled with basic appetite and aggression than modern.

To his credit, then, Carney, virtually stating that the world was headed toward an economic and, it appears, territorial war with the U.S., smoothed over nothing in his portrait of humanity’s next chapter.

Let’s leave the terrors of Davos and shift to a local frame.

I’ve lived in Victoria since 1970, when the Empress Hotel, that breathtaking architectural confection, was the crown of the capital, imperious and self-important.

Now, in its full embrace of modern times, Victoria has become a thriving and dynamic metropolis whose greatest cultural export is complaint, in bike lane, pothole and road-closure flavours.

I joke only to point out that citizen involvement has been reduced to complaint.

As many significant political and social thinkers are stating, “normal,” with its basket of traditions, shared assumptions and understandings, bows and curtsies, is going or gone, finished, exhausted.

While some new normal hasn’t coalesced yet, there are hints bathed, worryingly, in a sick yellow glow.

Consider the possibility that cellphone culture and Trumpism might be the new normal. A nightmare, but one we may wake to.

This column is constrained in its geographic and social reach, but in the face of mounting social urgencies, it asks readers, local and elsewhere, to look up, that is, to see the times for what they are.

In functional, operational terms, it calls for more civic conversation about matters larger than construction congestion and more credible than forged political accomplishment.

In the same way that physical exercise builds muscles, community conversation and project involvement build social muscle.

People — all of us — need to be better and more broadly informed about what’s happening in our communities and cities.

I’m in the habit of noting we are living in the middle of HISTORY. There’s a case to be made that threatening and tough times require a more prepared community with stronger psychological resources.

These don’t come from nowhere.

It calls for informed citizen passion and a hunger for informed viewpoint, for engagement.

In that context, shouldn’t we, in a small reflection of global realities, try to get to the root cause of local public abdication, the withdrawal of citizen energy from the civic concerns that affect quality of life here?

To do so, don’t we need to be more “here,” more present?

Turning everything over to mayor and council is a voluntary “donation” of social power by the public, and it always has “strong leader” consequences, sooner or later.

Sound familiar?

What is mysterious is not just the slow drift or transfer of social power but the failure of a community to recognize that it is taking place.

Elections, unfortunately, are the worst social tool for citywide conversation. They come too late and blunt legitimate interrogation of council aspirants and would-be returnees.

(Eight months from election time, we are starting to receive harp-string messages from multi-termers listing their accomplishments.)

What this writing calls for — as it has before — is kitchen-table and coffee-shop discussion about the appropriate distribution of social power in our local political environment, and whether accomplishment through a more direct city/citizen partnership might lead to more potent and successful outcomes.

A better next.

Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, founder/developer of ASH houseplexes, and currently writing “Nothing To Do: Life in a Workless World.” He’d be pleased to receive and respond to your thoughts. genekmiller@gmail.com

Fermeuse LNG Receives Boost in MOU with South Korea’s Hanwha Industrial Conglomerate

Fermeuse LNG Receives Boost in MOU with South Korea’s Hanwha Industrial Conglomerate

Fermeuse LNG Receives Boost in MOU with South Korea’s Hanwha Industrial Conglomerate
January 29, 2026
Reading time: 6 minutes

Full Story: The Energy Mix - Mitchell Beer




Linda Cutler Kenny/Facebook

A proposed $15-billion liquefied natural gas development off the coast of Newfoundland has received a major boost, after St. John’s-based Fermeuse Energy signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to advance the project with Hanwha Group, an industrial conglomerate based in Seoul, South Korea.

The deal “establishes Hanwha as a long-term strategic partner to Fermeuse Energy, supporting the project’s development, engineering, financing, shipbuilding, and LNG logistics across the full LNG value chain,” Fermeuse Energy (FEL) said in a Jan. 19 release.

Hanwha is also bidding on a multi-billion-dollar contract to build a new fleet of ice-capable patrol submarines for the Canadian military. FEL said the LNG project is “consistent” with the industrial partnerships Hanwha is offering as part of its bid.

“Hanwha is approaching Fermeuse Energy not merely as a service provider, but as a trusted partner committed to supporting the project from concept through execution and commercialization,” Sung-chul Eo, president of Hanwha Ocean’s Naval Ship Division, said in the release. “By leveraging the combined capabilities of Hanwha Ocean and the broader Hanwha Group portfolio, together with the support of the Korean government, we will contribute meaningfully to the successful realization of Newfoundland and Labrador’s LNG potential.”

Proton is Working on European Alternative to Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet - ITdaily.

Proton is Working on European Alternative to Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet - ITdaily.

Proton is Working on European Alternative to Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet.software
10.09.'25 14:46
2 minKatrien Duchène



Proton is working on its own meeting software to offer a European alternative to Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom.

Proton is known for its privacy-friendly services including Proton Mail, Proton VPN, and Proton Pass. The Swiss company recently launched its own authenticator app. Proton is currently working on a new service, Proton Meet, which is intended to be a European alternative to Google Meet, Teams, and Zoom. The company confirmed this to Tweakers a few days ago. Proton Meet is currently in a closed beta testing phase.
Proton Meet

More and more companies are focusing on data sovereignty and are turning to local or European partners more quickly, to the detriment of American technology players. The Swiss company Proton now seems to want to capitalize on this. Proton is currently working on Proton Meet, its own meeting software that aims to offer a European alternative. The company has already added a new page to their product offerings on the website with ‘Proton Meet’.

‘Millions wasted killing healthy B.C. ostriches:’ Animal Justice | Oak Bay News

‘Millions wasted killing healthy B.C. ostriches:’ Animal Justice | Oak Bay News
‘Millions wasted killing healthy B.C. ostriches:’ Animal Justice Published 6:00 pm Thursday, January 29, 2026 By Jennifer Smith CFIA and RCMP created a wall of hay bales around the ostriches in Edgewood in 2025. (Facebook photo) Animal Justice is deeply troubled after learning that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s killing of more than 300 healthy ostriches in Edgewood last year, months after avian influenza was first detected on the farm, cost Canadian taxpayers at least $6.8 million. The massive sum was revealed this week in a response to a parliamentary inquiry from Vernon—Lake Country—Monashee MP Scott Anderson in December. The total includes $2.3 million spent on staff time, and $1.3 million on lawyers and legal fees. “The amount of money spent is absolutely outrageous,” said lawyer and Animal Justice executive director Camille Labchuk. “Millions of taxpayers’ dollars were poured down the drain, wasted to massacre these sensitive, intelligent animals who, by that point, were entirely healthy. That money could have helped support animal sanctuaries, improved welfare for animals, or funded real disease-prevention measures instead. Trending Instability extends closure of Victoria segment of Galloping Goose Oak Bay seeks input on Bowker Creek railing replacement project “Not to mention, a fraction of this money could have funded Canada’s only research centre devoted to replacing animal experimentation, which was forced to close last year after the federal government failed to fund it. This would have supported the federal government’s own goal of phasing out toxicity testing on animals.” Following last year’s slaughter, Animal Justice filed a formal complaint with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency over the method used to kill the ostriches, citing serious concerns about animal suffering and potential violations of federal and provincial animal protection laws.


Read more at: https://oakbaynews.com/2026/01/29/millions-wasted-killing-healthy-b-c-ostriches-animal-justice/

 

Amazon lays off 16,000 employees

Matthias Balk/Getty Images

Amazon announced another round of layoffs yesterday, and this time the company is eliminating 16,000 corporate jobs. This is the second major layoff since October when the company cut 14,000 roles and warned there was more to come. The e-commerce giant is trying to reduce bureaucracy after a Covid-era hiring surge, while likely also freeing up funds for future AI spending. The 30,000 positions cut represent about 10% of Amazon’s white collar workforce. The company said yesterday there could be more layoffs this year, but that the second round of terminations don’t mark “a new rhythm” of cuts every few months. The announcement didn’t include any mention of AI replacing workers, but the layoffs come as Amazon gears up to spend $125 billion this year on capital expenditures like data center buildouts. Last summer, CEO Andy Jassy told employees that AI adoption at the company would slowly start to reduce headcount. Big picture: On top of the job market seemingly grinding to a halt last year, employers announced 1.2 million layoffs in 2025, the highest since 2020, according to outplacement services firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. Tech companies like Microsoft, Intel, and Meta announced layoffs last year as part of the Great Flattening to cut out middle management.

 

EU and India clinch “mother of all deals”

Press Information Bureau/Getty Images

Odysseus spent 20 years away from Ithaca, which is about as long as it took the European Union and India to negotiate a watershed trade deal. But yesterday, the 27-nation bloc and the world’s most populous country finally sealed what European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen dubbed “the mother of all deals.” The big Indo-European handshake comes as India and the EU scramble to diversify their trade ties after President Trump erected export barriers to the US, their biggest trade partner. India is eager to find new takers for its wares after Trump raised its tariff rate to 50%. And the deal is expected to help the EU replace about a quarter of the export revenue it lost to higher US tariffs, according to Allianz Investment Management economist Jasmin Gröschl. Toodles tariffs Once ratified, the deal will reduce or remove duties on 90% of the goods traded between the two sides, valued at $136 billion last year: The famously protectionist India agreed to reduce tariffs on European autos from their current maximum of 110% to as low as 10% on up to 250,000 European cars yearly. It'll also slash tariffs on European specialties like wine, beer, and pasta. In exchange, the EU will allow duty-free Indian imports including clothes, chemicals, and furniture—sectors that suffered job losses due to US tariffs. Big picture: It’s part of a wider trend of US trade partners branching out, exemplified by recent trade deals between EU and four Latin American countries, and an agreement between China and Canada.

Trump administration sued over 2 deaths in boat strike off Venezuela's coast | The Straits Times

Trump administration sued over 2 deaths in boat strike off Venezuela's coast | The Straits Times

Trump administration sued over 2 deaths in boat strike off Venezuela's coast


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FILE PHOTO: A priest conducts Mass during a memorial held by family members of Chad Joseph, who believe he was killed in a U.S. military strike on a boat in the Caribbean, at Saint Michael's Roman Catholic Church in Las Cuevas, Trinidad and Tobago, October 22, 2025. REUTERS/Andrea de Silva/File Photo






Published Jan 27, 2026, 10:59 PM


Updated Jan 27, 2026, 10:59 PM




BOSTON, Jan 27 - Family members of two men killed in a U.S. missile strike against a suspected drug boat near Venezuela filed a wrongful death lawsuit on Tuesday, alleging the pair were murdered in a "manifestly unlawful" military campaign targeting civilian vessels.

Civil rights lawyers filed the lawsuit in Boston's federal court, marking the first court challenge to one of the 36 U.S. missile strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean authorized by President Donald Trump's administration that have killed more than 120 people since September.

Family members of Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo—two Trinidadian men who were among six killed during an October 14 strike—in the lawsuit say the two men did fishing and farm work in Venezuela and had been returning to their homes in Las Cuevas, Trinidad when they were attacked.


"These are lawless killings in cold blood; killings for sport and killings for theater, which is why we need a court of law to proclaim what is true and constrain what is lawless," Baher Azmy, a lawyer for the plaintiffs at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a statement.

His group and the American Civil Liberties Union filed the novel lawsuit under the Death on the High Seas Act, a maritime law that allows family members to sue for wrongful deaths occurring on the high seas, and the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that allows foreign citizens to sue in U.S. courts for violations of international law.

The lawsuit was filed by Lenore Burnley, Joseph's mother, and Sallycar Korasingh, Samaroo's sister, and seeks only damages from the U.S. government for the two deaths, not an injunction that would prevent further strikes.


But the case could provide an avenue for a court to assess whether the October 14 strike was legal.

Carney announces food affordability measures, including boost to GST rebate | CBC News

Carney announces food affordability measures, including boost to GST rebate | CBC News

Carney announces food affordability measures, including boost to GST rebate
Measures include $500 million in capital investment funding for food businesses, $20 million for food banks


Peter Zimonjic · CBC News · Posted: Jan 26, 2026 7:52 AM PST | Last Updated: 3 minutes ago


Listen to this article
Estimated 4 minutes

Finance and National Revenue Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne looks on as Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks outlines new affordability measures at a grocery store in Ottawa on Monda. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a suite of affordability measures on Monday that he says will help Canadian families struggling to cope with the rising cost of living.

The flagship measure in Monday's announcement is the Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit, which Carney said will boost what families and individuals receive through their GST rebate over the next five years.

"Canada’s new government is acting today to provide a boost to those Canadian families who most need one, while creating a bridge to longer-term food security and affordability," Carney said in Nepean, Ont., on Monday.


The prime minister said that his government is using the GST rebate designed for Canadians with low and modest incomes, because groceries and other essentials make up a larger share of their family budgets.

In its first year, the benefit will give low- and modest-income Canadians eligible for the GST rebate a one-time boost that raises the $1,100 a family of four receives annually to $1,890 and increases the $540 an individual gets to $950.

Starting next year, and running for the next four years, the GST rebate is being increased by 25 per cent, which means a family of four will get up to $1,400 annually, while an individual will get about $700 a year.

"The rise in food prices means that a lot of those Canadians need more support right now," Carney said.
Tackling food inflation

To help bring down the cost of groceries, which have been rising faster than inflation, Carney said he will direct $500 million from the government's Strategic Response Fund to help food suppliers "expand capacity and increase productivity."

It means food businesses looking to make capital investments to help strengthen their supply chains can apply to have some of those costs covered by the fund.

Carney announced a $150-million Food Security Fund that will help small- and medium-sized businesses to expand greenhouses and abattoirs, and strengthen food supply chains.

One immediate measure to help producers is a change that allows companies to fully write off greenhouses acquired on or after Nov. 4, 2025, that start being used before 2030.

"This measure supports increased domestic supply and investment in food production over the medium term," a government statement said.

The prime minister also announced his government will direct $20 million in funding to the Local Food Infrastructure Fund to ease the pressure on food banks.


"This will help boost community food programs, helping them to deliver more nutritious food for families in need," he said.

In addition to these measures, Carney said his government is developing a National Food Security Strategy to strengthen food production and improve access to affordable, healthy food.

"This strategy will include measures to implement unit price labelling so Canada can compare easily in this era of 'shrinkflation,' as well as support for the work of the Competition Bureau in monitoring and enforcing competition in our market," he said.

The strategy will also include measures to help reduce food insecurity in Canada's North.

 

Everyone is a fan of free merch at the game

Skalij/Getty Images

While NHL teams have yet to start handing out free Rozanov and Hollander jerseys (though one Canadian team is selling them), there’s plenty of other freebies enticing fans to come to games. Sports franchises rely on complimentary tchotchkes and quirky spectacles at their games to put butts in seats. And no league loves promotions more than the MLB—since its high number of outdoor, mostly weeknight games compared to other sports makes a full stadium far from guaranteed. Offer trinkets, and they will come Attracting spectators for whom the chance of catching a home-run ball isn’t enough to sit through a rainy nine innings often involves non-sports merch: Bobbleheads are as integral to the business of baseball as chewing tobacco, with teams distributing figurines of their players or of celebrity fans, like Bill Murray or Jon Hamm, on select nights. This year, baseball fans can snag Baltimore Orioles Hawaiian shirts, Diary of a Wimpy Kid bobbleheads courtesy of the Boston Red Sox, and The Mandalorian & Grogu jerseys from the Los Angeles Angels. Teams also put on special events for those who might start to yawn during the seventh inning, like fireworks nights, bring-your-dog-to-the-game days, and Star Wars-themed laser shows. It’s not just baseball teams…that dangle merch and eccentric promos to boost attendance. The NBA’s Atlanta Hawks will hand out Hello Kitty belt bags this season, while last year, the NFL’s Carolina Panthers gave mayonnaise fans a chance to win a lifetime supply of the condiment every time the team’s defense forced a turnover

Time to Consider Boycott of FIFA 2026?

 A German Football Association (DFB) official has said it is time to consider a boycott of the 2026 World Cup in the wake of United States President Donald Trump's actions.

The US will host world football's showpiece event this summer, along with Canada and Mexico.

President Trump caused outrage among European leaders earlier this month by threatening to acquire Greenland, which is controlled by Denmark.

The 79-year-old threatened to impose tariffs on eight European countries - including Germany - who opposed his plan.

Trump has since rowed back on that threat, but tensions between European leaders and the US government remain high.

"I really wonder when the time will be to think and talk about this [a boycott] concretely," Oke Gottlich, a DFB vice-president, told the Hamburger Morgenpost newspaper.

"For me, that time has definitely come."