Canada

Over the past two decades, bilingualism declined in Canada despite spending billions in grants to promote French outside of Quebec, according to a department of Canadian Heritage report.

“The viability of francophone official language minority communities remains fragile,” said the report Evaluation of the Official Languages Support Programs 2004-2021.

I like Habitant pea soup.

While Canadians are often holding their breath as they approach their grocery store cash register these days, it appears our grocers’ C-Suite chains are just getting richer.

Galen Weston, President and CEO of Loblaw will get a hefty raise this year, $32 million in salaries and bonuses, up 52% from 2022. Even though these past 12 months have been marked by historical food price inflation for consumers, the Loblaw Board felt Mr. Weston was underpaid.

When I was a middle schooler growing up in Montreal four decades ago, I was taught almost nothing about Indigenous Canadian history. “Real history” supposedly began when Europeans showed up in boats to build settlements, spread Christianity, catch fish, and make money. Indigenous civilization, on the other hand, was compressed into a few pages, or even paragraphs—these being largely devoted to Indigenous practices that Europeans found instructive (often life-savingly so) in relation to hunting, foraging, and weathering the elements.