Canada

Kraft Heinz has just committed another $250 million to its Montreal facility – one of the largest food manufacturing plants in North America.

In today’s uncertain environment for consumer packaged goods, this is not just another capital announcement, it’s a signal.

And frankly, an unexpected one.

Since 2019, a secularism law in Quebec has barred some public sector workers, like judges, police officers and teachers, from wearing religious attire at work. Now, the country’s highest court is preparing to consider its future.

Lisa Robicheau describes her life as “stuck between a rock and a hard place”.

The 41-year-old single mother of two, who wears a hijab, works in Montreal’s English-language school system as a contract support worker for students with disabilities – a job she loves and where she is exempt from the current law.

Twenty years ago this month, the Supreme Court of Canada cracked open a new fault line between Quebec and rest of the country, one that would put the French-speaking province on a trajectory diametrically at odds with the multicultural values Canada had come to embody and disrupt Quebec politics for years to come.

In quashing a Quebec Court of Appeal decision that had prohibited a Sikh boy from wearing a kirpan, or ceremonial dagger, at school, the country’s top court came down squarely on the side of religious freedom as guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and against Quebec’s vision of la laïcité, then an emerging doctrine of separation of church and state in a province that had gone to great pains since the Quiet Revolution to replace its dominant Catholic institutions with unsparingly secular ones.

The Conservatives knew what they were doing – well, sort of – when they announced a petition to nominate former hockey commentator Don Cherry to the Order of Canada.

It’s a great cultural wedge issue: one that pits the millions of Canadians with fond memories of Coach’s Corner against the ostensibly smaller cohort of Canadians who still begrudge Mr. Cherry for his tactless comments that led to the segment’s cancellation in 2019. The Conservatives know that the Order of Canada, which was created back in 1967, has become something of a participation medal for a certain type of prominent Canadian – the kind who satisfies the palette of oyster-shucking Laurentian elites. Mr. Cherry, infamous for his rants about, for example, female reporters in locker rooms and immigrants not wearing poppies, upsets their stomachs. So by pushing them to accept Mr. Cherry into their club, the Conservatives put the elites on their back foot.

Canada’s population declined by more than 100,000 people in 2025, marking the first annual decline in records that date back to the 1940s, as the federal government tries to rein in the number of temporary residents in the country.

The population decreased by 103,504 people, or 0.25 per cent, between Oct. 1, 2025, and Jan. 1, 2026, according to new estimates from Statistics Canada. This followed a decline of roughly 76,000 in the third quarter.

No matter the question the answer is always More 3rd World Migrants!