Canada should consider hiking GST, other taxes to pay for defence-spending boost: analysts
A steep new military spending commitment for Canada – the biggest increase in more than 70 years – has handed Mark Carney’s government a fresh challenge: how to pay for it.
At the June, 2025, NATO leaders’ summit, the Prime Minister pledged that Canada will spend as much as $150-billion annually on defence within a decade: equivalent to 5 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).
France has sent officers into the water to slash and deflate boats as it weighs up new approaches to stem the tide of migrant crossings
Nicolas Laroye, a veteran of France’s border police, spent more than a decade patrolling the coast around Dunkirk in search of migrants. Now he shares the frustration of colleagues who have taken over what has become a near impossible task.
“Of course we want to stop the migrants,” he said, as we sat in a cafe. “But we know that they will keep trying and trying and that in the end they will all get through.”
I doubt they care much that the migrants are leaving France.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s three-month pause on his sweeping global tariffs is set to expire in just a few days. Ahead of the deadline, some trade experts say Canada still faces big risks, despite avoiding that round of levies back in April.
After the Austrian center-left coalition government became the first European country to deport a Syrian criminal earlier this week as part of a tighter asylum policy, Germany has now worked up the courage to do the same.
The German Interior Ministry announced on Saturday that it had instructed the federal migration office (BAMF) to take action against “dangerous Syrian individuals and delinquents,” a spokesman told AFP.
The Ukrainian Canadian Congress sent repeated letters to federal officials urging them to withhold the names of suspected Nazi collaborators who entered Canada after 1945, according to newly released Access To Information records.
Blacklock’s Reporter says despite growing public pressure, the government continues to keep the names secret.
It’s not always the unexpected that gets governments in trouble — often enough it’s their own bad judgement, poor timing or general clumsiness that gets in the way. But the unanticipated does happen a lot.
Parties and politicians put time and effort into concocting a set of policies aimed at winning votes by proposing remedies to problems identified as occupying top rungs of current voter concern. If they’re lucky they get elected, presumably intending to put those policies into effect at the earliest opportunity. Then the world shifts and pulls the rug from under them.
A network of Kremlin-backed influencers seek to portray Russia as a bastion of traditional values in an attempt to attract those who deplore Western “liberalism.”
In a brightly lit conference room of a Moscow police department, a smiling officer flanked by Russian flags and gilded double-headed eagles handed over small blue booklets to an American family of five — asylum certificates granting them the right to live and work in Russia after fleeing Texas because they felt their way of life was under threat.
“I feel like I’ve been put on an ark of safety for my family,” 61-year-old Leo Hare said at the time. “I want to thank President [Vladimir] Putin for allowing Russia to become a good place for families in this world climate.”
The object of this piece is to take a small scale phenomenon and tar MAGA, conservatives and the religious as Putinesque.
“This is not a farmer-herder clash. It is a genocidal campaign. Our communities are being wiped out methodically. The international community must not remain silent.” — Dr. Joshua Riti, a local administrator, persecution.org, May 25, 2025 – Nigeria
It was easy to miss a minor blip in the cacophonous “great give-away” during this year’s federal election: the Liberal Party’s promise to expand financial support for in vitro fertilization (IVF) under the umbrella of its “Pathways to Parenthood” plan, which earmarked $400 million to ease access to the service. The monies will be disbursed through a series of payments (up to $20,000 per person) for a single round of treatment. The goal is, in part, to make IVF equally accessible across the nation.
But the government is also responding to the increasingly well-documented disparity between people’s desire for children and their ability to fulfill these aspirations. In an economic context often cited as hostile to childbearing, relieving any financial barriers to family life is as good a place to start as any when it comes to framing family-forward policy.
It’s unlikely that the question of how large the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy was will ever be resolved to everybody’s satisfaction.
Was there no conspiracy at all? Did the Soviets or the Cubans order the hit? Was it the CIA, or Johnson, or the Mob? We all have our theories, and at least most of us intuitively understand that at least some of the fog obscuring a clear view is artificially generated by people and institutions intentionally hiding things.
Some were awoken in their beds in kibbutzim by shooting. Others were dancing at dawn at a music festival in the Negev desert. Among the approximately 1,200 people slaughtered in the most brutal attack on Israel in its history were found the bodies of young women stripped and tied to trees and poles, shot through their genitals and in the head.
Sexual violence was “widespread and systematic” during the October 7 attack, rape and gang rape occurring in at least six different locations, according to a report using testimony never heard before now. But most victims were “permanently silenced”, either murdered during the assaults or left too traumatised to talk. About 1,200 people were killed in the attack.
It’s what devout Muslims do.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s tight-lipped approach to climate change is causing some environmental groups to question his leadership, while others say it’s too early to judge the new PM whom they say has room to live up to election pledges addressing Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Since entering the Prime Minister’s Office, Carney (Nepean, Ont.) has rarely spoken about the climate. Instead, the former banker has continued to focus on economic development, sticking to what secured his ticket to office as voters flocked behind the new Liberal leader’s message of securing Canada’s future and diversifying trade relationships in response to American tariff threats. But Carney’s silence on the subject isn’t alarming to all environmental advocates—some say Carney’s record on climate prior to taking public office, coupled with “welcome” campaign commitments, suggest strong policies could be advanced when the House returns this fall.
Fellow Eco-Nutz seem happy enough with Carney so far. Not a good sign for the real world.
The women of Nagyrev were desperate. In this small Hungarian farming village, around the time of the First World War, many of them were struggling to survive. They were suffering at the hands of their violent husbands, some of whom were war veterans, some traumatised or unable to work due to injury, and often addicted to alcohol.
These were mostly poor farming families and the women saw no way out. On top of looking after children, elderly relatives and their homes, the women had also taken over managing the farms. The community was used to violence: it was generally condoned as a way for men to keep women “in their place” — “A wife is good when beaten,” went a local proverb. But their patience and tolerance was at breaking point.
Ultimate diversity has finally been achieved. London is now home to a school where not one of the pupils’ first languages is English. Welcome to Kobi Nazrul Primary School—named after the national poet of Bangladesh, but which curiously you find situated in London’s East End, just a stone’s throw from the East London Mosque (one of Europe’s largest), which comfortably accommodates 7,000 Muslims.
Anyone familiar with the English Monopoly board might be shocked to learn that, according to the 2021 Census, Whitechapel (the school’s locale) is home to a 51.3% Asian population. Of the school’s 243 pupils, 92.5% are Bangladeshi who speak Bengali as their first language. Ofsted apparently gave the school a ‘glowing’ report, coupled with a ‘good’ rating. But then, at least the school wasn’t ‘too white’—something to which Ofsted has previously objected.
