Steven Guilbeault was never going to last in Mark Carney’s cabinet

The news that Steven Guilbeault quit Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet shouldn’t shock anyone who has followed the Quebec environmentalist’s long, combustible relationship with realpolitik. If anything, the only surprise is that the ending wasn’t scripted months ago.

During the last federal campaign, I noticed two posters standing only a few feet apart in the Montreal riding of Laurier–Sainte-Marie. One belonged to Guilbeault. The other to the local Green Party hopeful, Dylan Perceval-Maxwell. His sign carried an unusual footnote: “P.S. Voting for Steven Guilbeault is also voting green.”

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London’s demographic change is unprecedented in peacetime

Most of the population has been replaced within a couple of generations

As a grizzled travel writer, I’ve picked up a few tips over the years. And one of them is this: if you want to understand a country quickly, take an urban food tour. You get to sample delicious scran, you learn how locals eat, drink and socialise and – crucially – as the chat flows, you hear the sort of throwaway facts that make you sit back in surprise.

So it was last night, for me, in Phnom Penh, the increasingly seductive, hedonistic capital of Cambodia. I was eating buffalo beef jerky with a spry fifty-something guy called Vannak, right outside the monastery where the young Pol Pot, the future communist tyrant then known as Saloth Sar, was a trainee monk.


The GTA is our London a 3rd World dumpster that will never recover.

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Trump threatens Biden with ‘charges of perjury’ — says auto-penned orders ‘terminated’

President Trump claimed Friday that he was repealing all documents signed by former President Joe Biden using an autopen — and threatened to have his predecessor “brought up on charges of perjury” if he asserts that staffers were acting on his orders when using the mechanical.

Trump, 79, has for months characterized Biden, 83, as AWOL during his four-year term and claimed that unelected aides were running the country without authorization.

h/t XC

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The Carney-Smith agreement surely won’t make pipelines ‘boring again’

Shortly after Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith formally signed their memorandum of understanding on Thursday, Smith joked to reporters in Calgary that she would love for “pipelines to be boring again.”

It’s not clear that pipelines have ever been boring — they have been associated with political tumult in Canada for at least 70 years. And given the great questions that are still tied up in both the idea and the reality of an interprovincial pipe — the unresolved work of reconciliation, the lack of a complete answer to the present and future threat of climate change, the fear for national unity — it is difficult to imagine that a pipeline could easily be made boring in this moment.

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Teenager dies after being ‘tied up and thrown into swamp in honour killing because her “Western behaviour” shamed the family – before father fled to Syria’

A teenager died after she was tied up and thrown into a swamp to drown in an honour killing because her Western behaviour shamed her family, according to prosecutors in the Netherlands.

Ryan Al Najjar’s brothers have now been put on trial for her murder, while her father, who is accused of ordering the killing, fled the country to return to Syria.

Mohamed, 23, and Muhanad Al Najjar, 25, are charged with taking part in the horrific crime against their 18-year-old sister, whose body was found gagged with her hands bound behind her back, ankles taped together, and submerged in a swamp six days after she vanished from the family home in Joure.

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Derek Finkle: Toronto’s South Riverdale injection site was infested with drug dealers

Dr. Ahmed Bayoumi, a prominent harm reduction researcher known as the godfather of Toronto’s injection sites, provided testimony in a court hearing early this year that asserted there is “no evidence” that such sites “lead to increased drug selling.”

Bayoumi’s testimony was contained in an affidavit he provided as an expert witness in litigation initiated by an injection site in Toronto’s Kensington neighbourhood that argued a new Ontario law prohibiting such sites within 200 meters of schools and daycares violates the Charter rights of drug users.

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Galleons, gold and greed: the quest to claim an $18bn shipwreck

The San José was no ordinary galleon. When the Spanish ship was sunk by the British off the coast of Colombia in 1708, it was carrying one of the richest cargos ever assembled in the Americas.

Its loss set in motion a three-century hunt for the “holy grail” of shipwrecks.

It returned to global attention this week after the Colombian government announced it had retrieved the first artefacts from a vessel experts say could be worth $18 billion (£13.6 billion).
Gold coins, porcelain cups and a cannon were brought to the surface: tantalising hints of what may still lie on the sea bed.

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Failing to Expel Chinese Spies Tells China, US That Canada Is ‘Open Territory’ for Chinese Infiltration: Scholar

When Canada does not expel Chinese spies operating within the country, it signals to China and the United States that Canada is “open territory” for Chinese infiltration, says Charles Burton, a China scholar and senior fellow of the Sinopsis think tank.

“We’re not expelling people that I believe CSIS knows are espionage agents,” Burton told MPs as he testified before the House of Commons procedure and house affairs committee on Nov. 27.

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Trump hands Putin Ukraine’s occupied territories

The United States is poised to recognise Russia’s control over Crimea and other occupied Ukrainian territories to secure a deal to end the war.

The Telegraph understands that Donald Trump has sent his peace envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner to make the direct offer to Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

The plan to recognise territory, which breaks US diplomatic convention, is likely to go ahead despite concerns among Ukraine’s European allies.

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Quebec to ban public prayer in sweeping new secularism law

Quebec says it will intensify its crackdown on public displays of religion in a sweeping new law that critics say pushes Canadian provinces into private spaces and disproportionately affects Muslims.

Bill 9, introduced by the governing Coalition Avenir Québec on Thursday, bans prayer in public institutions, including in colleges and universities. It also bans communal prayer on public roads and in parks, with the threat of fines of C$1,125 for groups in contravention of the prohibition. Short public events with prior approval are exempt.

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