On August 9th 2021, Canada opened its border to all fully vaccinated Americans allowing tourists from the United States to visit the country once again. The US border remains closed to Canadians, however, and American authorities recently extended the border closure until September 21st citing COVID-19 transmission rates south of the border as well as […]

Most Canadians are now fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Consequently, Canadians are starting to think about international travel again, and are beginning to research possible vacation destinations. This leads to the question, which countries can a fully vaccinated Canadian visit? As of July 2021, Canadian citizens who have received two doses of the Pfizer, Moderna, or […]

Trudeau’s brother Sacha testified today to the Ethics Committee and for a non-politician he did very well — he didn’t “spin a story”, he didn’t punch up a headline or two, he didn’t trade insults with the insulting Con MPs who were trying to goad him….

Here is the Coronation photo where Charles and Camilla really looked happy — they’re on the balcony, it’s over, they made it, and nobody stumbled, collapsed, or dropped the Crown Jewels. Phew!My post title tonight is from the poem written by Brit…

Another day of Republican thoughts and prayers.Its also distressing to note that cartoonist Michael de Adder at the Washington Post posted this cartoon a week ago (following the Cleveland Texas massacre) not yesterday (following the Allen Texas massa…

Just one additional note about the Coronation — here are some of the highlights I gathered about significant moments for Indigenous delegation members in their visit to London.
In the Globe and Mail, Royal expert John Fraser posts an interesting …

In Alberta, residents evacuated from wildfires are being told they must return home and “live with fires” in a clear parallel to covid messaging. Covid infection propaganda has opened the door, enabling dangers formerly considered intolerable to be recast as inescapable https://t.co/xhjnbYgcBW

— Nate Bear (@NateB_Panic) May 11, 2023

WATCH: The decision in one #AB county to send wildfire evacuees back home – and the calculated risks they must take. That is our story for @CBCTheNational: https://t.co/3u2DeFWjx8

— Julia Wong (@JuliaWongCBC) May 11, 2023

And in spite of the irrational anger from this rancher at this meeting in Grande Prairie, I did think he had a point about how he needs better communications from the municipality to show whether livestock is at risk, etc:

Meanwhile, in Grande Prairie…

“You can’t keep us out of the evacuation zone, this is just like COVID and we’re not going to listen, put your efforts into posting pictures (not fighting the fires) or we’re gonna go in, what are you gonna do?”#abpoli #ableg #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/PseFKr4LWT

— The Breakdown (@TheBreakdownAB) May 9, 2023

The more I read about what is happening in the United States, the more I worry about it:

I can’t stop staring at this map.
There’s a 20 year gap in life expectancy between deep red areas of the US, like the southeast, and blue areas like New England. Your lifespan in the US relates directly to where you live and how it’s governed. https://t.co/44nXMocc4o

— Ethan Zuckerman (@EthanZ) May 9, 2023

WELCOMETO THE WEEKEND pic.twitter.com/6kbG3hFBWF— Brittlestar (@brittlestar) May 12, 2023

First up, Amazon delivery drivers!
amazon: your driver just passed the 172 mile marker on 95 northme: stop— the hype (@TheHyyyype) May 12, 2023

Cops everywher…

First, this is such a juvenile response from Poilievre, isn’t it:
This is how important foreign interference is to Pierre Poilievre. pic.twitter.com/XBfCgOe8Gm— Raoul Duke’s Salt Shaker (@RodKahx) May 17, 2023

They do the same thing during election c…

There are too many people these days who get outraged when they say something awful in a national media and then get asked to defend their views or shut up about them. The right wing rails against so-called “cancel culture”  – even though, of cour…

Over at Balloon Juice, national security expert Adam Silverman has written a piece about the war in Ukraine every single day since Russia started their unjust and illegal war.  At Routine Proceedings, Dale Smith also writes a Ukraine Dispatch…

So David Johnston has released his initial report to say a “public inquiry” into China China China would be neither public nor informative:My mandate for my first report is to determine whether any further public process is required. My short answer is…

Just for fun, I have now added “quote of the day” to the right sidebar now. And thanks to Owen Gray’s Northern Reflections, the excellent blog where I first saw this plug-in.

Saw some good comments today on various things – here they are:  First, this is absolutely true:
🧵The thing I like about this Liberal government is that, amidst all the sound and fury signifying nothing, they keep plodding along, each foot in…

 Sad news today — Gordon Lightfoot has passed. I included some tweets and songs of his in a post from September, when he was at the CNE. The CBC has this outstanding compilation of his best songs.  Here is another compilation …

A little nostalgia:
The reason you think things were better when you were younger is that you were too stupid to know how bad things were then.— Dennis Detwiller (@drgonzo123) April 28, 2023
As I contemplate our problems in 2023, I have to keep reme…

We got our semi-annual booster today so Covid is on my mind tonight. It’s still hard to grasp the impact of the Covid pandemic worldwide until you realize how many millions have died, with millions more left to mourn. In Forbes magazine, heal…

After being closed for nearly 19 months due to the COVID-19 pandemic, on November 8th 2021 the United States land border officially opened to all fully vaccinated Canadians. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has announced they will be staffing their border at pre-pandemic levels, but warns that wait times may be longer than in […]

As of April 1st 2022, the Canadian border will no longer require a pre-arrival negative COVID-19 test from fully vaccinated travellers entering or returning to the country. Previously, a rapid antigen test or a PCR test indicating a person does not have COVID was required by border authorities. This rule change should encourage Canadians to […]

On October 1st 2022, the Government of Canada removed all COVID-19 border measures such as required proof of vaccination, random testing, and mandatory isolation for high-risk travelers. For the first time since early 2020, the Canadian border is operating under “normal” conditions. For example: Americans interested in visiting Canada no longer need to download the […]

I’m reading lots of tweets and comments these days about how banana-pants crazy some Republicans are these days, and it worries me that Canada is trending in the same direction. Seems to me our politics has usually been about two years behind the US….

So here is the problem:
My latest article….Canadian troops in Poland not being reimbursed for meals https://t.co/GCKdKM4T84 via @ottawacitizen— David Pugliese (@davidpugliese) April 3, 2023

The Line offers this commentary on the story:

This milita…

I’m seeing a lot of good comments lately on the substacks and on Twitter – here’s a selection:

First up, here’s Scrimshaw on why the NDP and the Liberals need to remain as separate parties:
The left benefits from being able to pitch two visions in two…

Canada continues to watch Poilievre and the CPC shoot themselves in the foot every time they open their mouths. And funny, isn’t it, how hostile they are toward journalists?

In the midst of a flare-up over a 2016 Chinese donation to the Trudeau…

The US media reaction to the news about 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, a National Guard technology support staffer who leaked dozens of secret US documents – such a nice boy! patriotic! a devout Catholic! – reminds me of how Canadian media developed a “fri…

Here are some interesting stories for your weekend.First, this is an absolutely wonderful story:
Last year, a coworker randomly asked me to hand-deliver an antique violin across the country. I said yes, because why not. I had no idea what I was getting…

The first thing people try to do with AI is what it is worst at; using it like Google…

Second, they may try something speculative, using it like Alexa, and asking a question, often about the AI itself. Will AI take my job? What do you like to eat? These answers are also terrible.

If people still stick around, they start to ask more interesting questions, either for fun or based on half-remembered college essay prompts: Write an article on why ducks are the best bird. Why is Catcher in the Rye a good novel? These are better. As a result, people see blocks of text on a topic they don’t care about very much…They usually quit around now, convinced that everyone is going to use this to cheat at school, but not much else.

All of these uses are not what AI is actually good at, and how it can be helpful. They can blind you to the real power of these tools.

…The number of people who aren’t on Twitter who will hear about this is infinitesimally small, because the kinds of people who will actually click a link to this story who aren’t already on Twitter is tiny. If you care about Twitter, you’re on Twitter. So as a direct consequence, there’s no pain to be suffered. Indirectly, though, I’m not sure….

What could matter is whether this incident – that is mostly an irrelevance to the country at large – has a bigger, disproportionate impact on the commentariat, which could change the tenor and tone of the coverage of Poilievre.

… it’s not great that the thing that might cause a change in the press’ tone on Skippy is Twitter drama, but it’s also fair to point out that this Twitter drama is really fucking childish. At some point, the instances of Poilievre being childish and unable to get through a press conference will add up, and while there’s no reason to think that any of these instances in themselves will move votes, every time Poilievre gives the press and the commentariat a chance to focus on him negatively is a day the government isn’t being hit with stories on their sore spots.

If we fast forward to the night of the next election and the Liberals have won a fairly status quo fourth term where them and the NDP have a clear majority together, this won’t be why Poilievre lost. But it might be one of the barnacles that helped move the press and the commentators against him, and those are dangerous. … Poilievre’s whole thing is that he’s focused on delivering for normal/regular/non-elite Canadians while the Liberals are in their ivory towers of elitism, but the problem is if the commentariat starts calling you out for being reactionary, jumpy, and easily baited, it’s not hard to turn Poilievre into the guy focused on nonsense while the Liberals are focusing on delivering child care and dental care….

He needs to re-pitch himself as a slightly calmer, less flappable leader – a change in tone more than focus – and he needs to take the cudgels of dental and child care off the table from the Liberals to use in the next campaign. If he shows any willingness to do that he can win, but if Poilievre continues going down culs-de-sac of shitposting and pissing off the press, he’ll just incur more and more negative coverage that will over time help destroy him.

Poilievre may say he’s running for prime minister, and a wide swath of voters may believe he is, but what he has yet to do is start acting like he is running for prime minister. This distinction does matter, and demonstrates Poilievre may not fully grasp the business that he is in.

…Poilievre may have made a name for himself as a rage farmer and petulant partisan gladiator. It worked, as far as it went. He’s the leader of the opposition and the Conservative party, and neither of those things is easily accomplished. If he wants to be prime minister, though, that cannot continue to be the core principle of his business.

He needs to appear to be the leader of a government-in-waiting. He needs people who don’t hate Justin Trudeau to vote for him. He needs to assure Canadians that faced with a crisis, he is capable of offering more than fundraising memes and hyperbolic rhetoric.

In short, he needs to understand he is selling the idea of Pierre Poilievre as prime minister, and to do that, he ought to start acting like one.

Poilievre’s anti-CBC campaign, and getting a man-child like Musk involved, is making Canadians angry:

Shared via PowerPoint on Android. pic.twitter.com/z66dm6BmqS

— Frank Graves (@VoiceOfFranky) April 18, 2023

When Trudeau is righteously angry, as he is here, he loses the over-careful voice modulation.

He should stay angry. https://t.co/HhLHyYG8gn

— Scribulatora (@Scribulatora) April 17, 2023

The campaign against public broadcasting is happening simultaneously everywhere in the Anglo world. BBC, PBS, NPR, CBC are all live targets of right wing populist politicians. https://t.co/fwglEGCtMD

— Gerald Butts (@gmbutts) April 17, 2023

And then the CBC told Musk that less than 70 percent of its funding comes from the Canadian public, so of course Musk gleefully started using “69” in the CBC twitter label and Poilievre approved – just another Beavis and Butthead moment, I guess:

Madness

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) April 18, 2023

Here’s an example of what the CBC means to Canadians:

There are a thousand reasons why it’s impossible for me to throw rocks at the #CBC #1 reason – a woman I never got to meet -personally. As a child working in my dad’s tiny shop on Queen Mary Ave in Montreal, we were visited nightly on the radio by an elegant eloquent woman.

— Charles Adler (@charlesadler) April 18, 2023

I’m not crying, you’re crying…

So today our hero Elon Musk struck a blow for the working man by taking away those elitist blue verification checks! Sort of.

I’ll never be as rich as this man, but at least I’ll never be as pathetic either pic.twitter.com/g7ulABeWbo— Mike Drucker (@M…

An historian Craig Baird is using AI to generate “steam-punk” versions of Canadian legends. Here’s a couple:

4. Farley MowatOne of Canada’s most beloved writers, his books have been transl5. Rita JoeCalled the Poet Laureate of the Mi’kmaq People, Rita…

 I’m pretty sure it was the reference to “Drag Queens Story Hour” that freaked out the Greater Saskatoon Catholic Schools administration this week. But they’ll never admit now that they flipped out due to prejudice and ignorance. The document…