The federal government is shaking up its main economic immigration program to facilitate the entry of high-skilled military recruits for the Canadian Armed Forces, part of Ottawa’s renewed focus and spending push on the defence sector.
On Wednesday, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada announced new categories for selecting immigrants via Express Entry, a points-based system that is the main entryway for skilled workers seeking permanent residency.
The thing about “the world stage” is not just that it’s a place for play-acting. It’s also a global venue for wishful thinking, the construction of heroes and villains and imaginary plot twists and sometimes whole-cloth inventions of scenes that sometimes bear almost no relationship at all to events in the real world.
Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC), has called for “justice” to be served to politicians and others responsible for promoting the “dangerous” COVID jabs and and mandating them on the Canadian public.
“The truth about the covid vaccine revealed! For years, they called us ‘anti-vaxxers.’ They called us conspiracy theorists. They ridiculed us and silenced us,” wrote Bernier in a recent post on X.
Two weeks ago, Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre met in the prime minister’s Parliament Hill office in an apparent attempt to find common ground on the government’s legislative agenda.
“My message to him is to work with us,” Poilievre told reporters afterwards.
Perhaps Carney took that message more literally than Poilievre intended.
As Canada looks to diversify its trade partners, it can’t be “naive” in dealing with the Chinese regime, which is a leading perpetrator of transnational repression, researchers behind a new report say.
The Feb. 17 report by the Montreal Institute for Global Security (MIGS) says the issue of transnational repression is a “systemic threat” affecting thousands of people across the country and undermining Canada’s security, democracy, and sovereignty.
The Canadian government’s long-awaited defence industrial strategy formally landed on Tuesday and arrives in the shadow of a push by the Trump administration to further make the United States the arms-maker of choice among allies.
The new strategy has been in the works for more than a year and promises to use defence investment to leverage the Canadian economy and jobs.
It sets out a series of important, high benchmarks for the country to achieve over the next decade, including buying and maintaining most of the military’s equipment domestically.
Mark Carney went to Montreal on Tuesday to announce a new push for defence spending.
The prime minister was announcing Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy a week later than planned after his initial announcement was delayed due to the shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C.
First, some context.
We have half a million asylum claimants in Canada currently…triple from 2022 levels and now accounting for 1 in every 84 people in the country.
— Ben Rabidoux (@BenRabidoux) February 18, 2026
h/t Auntie Polly
OTTAWA — Days after she retired in January, the former top bureaucrat at the Department of National Defence warned that the billions in additional defence spending promised by the Carney government is “nowhere near what we need” and is only serving to “plug in the holes in the wrong way”.
Stefanie Beck, the deputy minister at DND until her retirement on Jan. 23, shared a surprisingly blunt assessment of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s record defence investments during a conference on Feb. 2.
Prime Minister Mark Carney is facing calls to immediately shrink the federal bureaucracy after Tuesday’s report released by the Parliamentary Budget Officer shows costs continue to increase at an alarming rate.
The PBO’s Personnel Expenditure Analysis says the federal bureaucracy cost taxpayers $71.4 billion in 2024-25. In 2015-16, that number stood at $39.6 billion, a rise of 80% in 10 years.
The opposition parties were all trumped, as it were, in last year’s election. They may well face the same fate again this year as talk of an election call in Canada grows. If an election does occur, Donald Trump’s continued raft of threats, insults and incoherent rants is a gift to the Liberals. His behaviour underlines the threat he represents — and the need for a strong and effective Canadian prime minister to challenge him. Barring unforeseeable events, Mark Carney owns that card.
Canada’s defence industry got a $6.6 billion boost Tuesday, as Prime Minister Mark Carney formally unveiled Ottawa’s new Defence Industrial Strategy. The plan promises to create 125,000 new jobs over 10 years and award 70 per cent of defence contracts to Canadian companies, through a “Build-Partner-Buy” framework that prioritizes domestic industry. It is part of the government’s plan to increase Canadian military spending to five per cent of GDP by 2035, in line with NATO targets.
OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney is facing mounting calls to speak out against the United States for widening its restrictions on fuel reaching Cuba, or to send aid to the country.
For more than a year, Global Affairs Canada has warned travellers of “shortages of basic necessities, including food, medicine and fuel” across most of Cuba. In January, the island lost its main source of fuel when the U.S. took control of Venezuela’s oil reserves.
Who’s making these calls? Justin and his brother?
Paying the health-care premiums of refugee claimants will cost Canadians a record $1 billion this year, with some of the beneficiaries continuing to receive free health care despite their claims having already been rejected.
That’s according to a new analysis by the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and it’s just one of several ballooning costs wrought by the unprecedented number of foreign nationals currently living in Canada by virtue of a claim of refugee status.
In November 2025, Canada’s supply management system deliberately destroyed millions of litres of perfectly good milk in Ontario, even as grocery prices remained high and food banks reported record demand.
That destruction was not an accident or a processing failure. It was the predictable outcome of policy.
