It is a letter. A five-page letter.
You could call it THE letter. Whatever happens with this letter will play a big, big part in Alberta’s place in Canada going forward.
It is dated May 16, signed by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and addressed to Prime Minister Mark Carney.
On Friday, Elon Musk held a news conference with Donald Trump in the Oval Office to mark his last day heading up DOGE. I wonder if we could convince Musk to come north to establish the Canadian Department of Government Efficiency. It’s clear we need it.
WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump said he will double the tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to 50 per cent next Wednesday.
Trump initially announced the boosted duties on steel during a rally at U.S. Steel’s Mon Valley Works–Irvin Plant near Pittsburgh Friday evening. He told a cheering crowd of steelworkers that the increased levies will “further secure the steel industry in the United States.”
… Canada is the largest steel supplier to the United States, accounting for nearly 25 per cent of all imports in 2023. About a quarter of all steel used in America is imported.
TRUMP PROTECTS AMERICAN STEEL
"We are going to be imposing a 25% increase. We're going to bring it from 25% to 50%—the tariffs on steel into the United States of America—which will even further secure the steel industry in the United States." –President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/ASaAjXxLDE
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 30, 2025
Visiting a grocery store these days can feel like walking into a Canada Day parade. With shelves draped in maple leaf imagery and displays featuring provincial flags, grocers have leaned into nationalism as a marketing strategy.
From a public sentiment perspective, it’s been fascinating. But from an economic standpoint, the real question is: Has it worked?
Prime Minister Carney has deep ties to Europe and friends in high places.
Europe has serious problems that it acknowledges but fails to address.
Ergo, Mark Carney risks going down in history as Canada’s most disastrous prime minister.
The Rainbow Bridge, which crosses the Niagara River between the United States and Canada, has for decades been a symbol of peace connecting two countries.
But for Araceli, a Salvadorian migrant, and her family, the bridge represented a seemingly insurmountable hurdle.
Along with her partner and two daughters, aged four and 14, the family first attempted to cross the bridge on 17 March.
OTTAWA — A “secret” memo from the Department of National Defence last year said Canada’s 2005 decision not to join the U.S. ballistic missile defence system harmed the country’s reputation as a security partner and could make it harder to participate in the AUKUS military collaboration between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The memo also raised Canada’s long-standing failure to meet its defence spending commitments with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as “the elephant in the room” that has raised doubts about whether Canada is willing to pull its weight for international security.
Members of Parliament accepted more than $230,000 in flights, hotels and gifts from foreign governments, advocacy groups and private companies last year according to an annual report from the conflict of interest and ethics commissioner.
Konrad von Finckenstein’s report on the sponsored travel accepted by MPs for 2024 reveals that 30 MPs accepted trips to locations around the world including Colombia, the Ivory Coast, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, France and Germany.
But more than half of the $230,000 in travel accepted by federal legislators was paid for by Taiwan, which spent just over $126,000 bringing MPs to their country.
Canada’s boycott of all things American has caused the US measurable pain. Airline bookings from Canada to its southern neighbor have dipped significantly from last year, and the Federal Reserve’s latest snapshot of the US economy noted widespread declines in Canadian spending.
But few places in the US are hurting more than the border towns of Washington state, where local economies are almost entirely dependent on the other side. “We do not survive without Canada. We just don’t,” Ali Hayton, owner of the main grocery store in Point Roberts, Washington, said at a roundtable meeting about the crisis on April 24.
A federal watchdog agency says an active overseas clandestine spy service operation was abruptly halted by a top adviser to former prime minister Justin Trudeau, a decision it says needlessly put CSIS officers in danger.
In a report released Thursday, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, or NSIRA, said it had investigated a 2022 Canadian Security Intelligence Service operation that was suspended before later being authorized to proceed.
I’m guessing Beijing or some other ne’er do well nation got in touch with Junior.
A 13-year-old boy is in custody and a shelter-in-place has been lifted in north Pickering after what police believe was a “sadistic and cowardly” random slaying of an elderly woman.
The Durham Regional Police tactical support unit made the arrest Thursday evening “without incident” and cops said charges are pending after an hours-long manhunt in the Fairport Rd.-Lynn Heights Dr. area, north of Finch Ave., where officers had been called at about 3 p.m. to respond to an unknown trouble call.
Note the perp’s identity is unsubstantiated at this time, the “internet” is saying he has been peer identified on social media.
I suspect this whole episode will be hushed up, just like the authorities denied the Danforth shooter’s motive was Islamist Jihad.
That’s CBC reporter Andrew Chang’s assessment of Trump’s “bully strategy” to gain economic advantages using tariffs.
Through contiguous episodes of a streaming program Chang hosts called About That, the CBC has launched a veritable propaganda war against the US government, coated in a veneer of experts and tricked out with a speckling of science.
Sir John A. Macdonald has been in a box, literally and figuratively, for years.
A statue of Canada’s first prime minister on the lawn of the Ontario legislature was encased with hoarding after it was vandalized in 2020, and it has remained like that for the past five years. Everyone knew what was in the box but we pretended not to see it: the same type of fiction we abet when a child playing hide-and-seek believes that he disappears when he covers his own eyes. It was a timorous half-measure by those clearly wary of running afoul of one group or another, and so we boxed up our history and left it there, assuming that the hoarding would be less ugly than the public’s reaction to an actual decision.
Trust me. Canada’s weasel politicians are proud of “Boxing Macdonald” and all it’s variants.
Treasury Board President Shafqat Ali accepted more than $3,100 in sponsored travel from a Muslim advocacy group for a visit to Jerusalem, where he was photographed praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and voiced criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza, according to new disclosures filed with the federal Ethics Commissioner.
Blacklock’s Reporter says the January 2024 trip, valued at $3,148, was paid for by Canadian Muslim Vote, a group that also sponsored Liberal MP Salma Zahid and New Democrat MP Heather McPherson.
Remember when car thefts were all the rage? News story after news story told us that this form of crime was skyrocketing in Canada: almost doubling in Ontario and Quebec, up by a third in Alberta, and a fifth in Atlantic Canada in 2022. People were flocking to buy newfangled locking mechanisms, and some owners even put retractable steel or concrete bollards in their driveways!
This scourge was indeed worrisome and received significant media coverage, but it has been superseded by another, much more dangerous one that has not been given nearly enough attention: terrorism arrests in Canada.
The government and media play down the threat with the subtext being that you’re a racist for daring to discuss it out loud.
