Canada’s ultra-wealthy elite — and the politicians who push for policies to keep them that way — were lavishing praise on the world’s richest man and attacking anyone who dared utter the words “wealth inequality” or “tax the rich.”

Before I go any further, I want you to understand what kind of money $1 trillion actually is. We all know that it’s a really, really big number. But let me put it in perspective.

Let’s say you made a dollar every second. I want you to really imagine it. Imagine living it, how you’d spend this money, what house you’d buy, how you’d help your family and friends.

Because in five minutes, you’re already up $300. In just eleven days, you’d be a millionaire. Before the month is up, you’d be able to buy a fancy home in an expensive neighbourhood — outright. No mortgage. And the money just keeps coming.

Even in this scenario, it would still take you just under 32 years of getting paid at that rate to become a billionaire. That’s just one billion, by the way. Think about how easy your life would be if you got $86,400 every single day — and it would still take you 32 years to have ONE billion dollars.

Would you even be able to spend it all?

Well, to have $1 trillion in this scenario, you’d have to have started making your one-dollar-per-second pay 31,709 years ago. Yeah, that’s the Upper Paleolithic era. In this scenario, to have $1 trillion today, you’d have to start making a dollar per second at a time 1700 years before the appearances of the first ground stone tools that humans used in Japan.

To make a trillion dollars in a year, you’d have to make $31,709 every. Single. Second.

How is it justifiable, in a world with so much suffering — where people die because they can’t afford medical treatment, or cry at the grocery check out trying to buy enough food to feed their families — for one man to have that kind of money?

It’s not. It’s reflective of an utter societal failure that this has happened.

The ultra-rich (and their allies) defend Musk

Despite the egregiousness of this display of financial gluttony, some Canadians lined up to defend Musk’s relentless wealth hoarding.

Many of these sycophants honed in on a Globe and Mail op-ed. The piece was titled: “SpaceX IPO makes Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate him.”

The Globe later updated their headline, noting that “the previous headline on this article did not meet The Globe’s editorial standard. It has been replaced.” The new, updated headline read: “SpaceX is set to make Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Is that a bad look for capitalism?”

Still, the Globe’s capitulation to those who think it’s wrong to hate people who hate the rest of us enough to hoard such ungodly levels of wealth did little to protect them from the internet’s outrage.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, who has previously shared called for Canada to get its own “DOGE” — the very tool Musk wielded to make cuts that will ultimately lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people — said the Globe had “disgraced (it)self publishing this.”

“We all clearly don’t hate the media enough,” he added.

Lutke then wrote a tirade about how “entrepreneurs are load bearing for human thriving,” suggesting the political left are only interested in redistributing wealth — not making it.

These posts were (partially) screenshotted and shared by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who called Lutke a “national treasure.” Poilievre did cut out the part where Lutke referred to Musk as “the best entrepreneur that ever was.”

Mark Mulroney, son of a former Canadian prime minister, called the Globe headline a “terrible take.” he added that “You don’t have to agree with (Elon Musk)’s politics to recognize what he has accomplished.” Former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney wrote that the piece “reads like a screed by a Marxist undergrad in a campus paper.”

Lucy Hargreaves, the CEO of the tech-bro driven effort to influence Canadian politics known as “Build Canada,” called the Globe op-ed “tall poppy syndrome.”

Kaz Nejatian, a former Shopify executive who is now CEO of Opendoor Technologies and has an estimated net worth of around $360 million, called the piece “petty and stupid” as well as “dangerous.”

Nejatian, who along with his wife Candice Malcolm helped fund True North — a right-wing website that recently rebranded as Juno News — also added that “the Globe and Mail is a rag of lies that would go bankrupt without perpetual subsidies.”

Perhaps someone should tell him that Elon Musk, too, would struggle without government money — given “virtually all of” Musk’s wealth “comes from government help,” according to reporting from CNN.

I can’t believe I have to say this: yes, billionaires are bad.

But do they have a point? Are we all just jealous of Elon Musk? Should we listen to them when men like Shopify’s Tobi Lutke tell us to “hate the media” because the a columnist had the audacity to suggest we should hate the ultra-wealthy Elon Musk?

Let’s consider it. Maybe the guys hoarding wealth (even as wealth inequality is the worst it’s been in recorded history) are the good guys, and we’re all just jealous.

To that, I’d say: am I jealous of the person who stole my bike? Or am I pissed off that they took something that isn’t theirs?

See, according to a report from Oxfam, the perception that extreme wealth comes from extreme talent is “not rooted in reality.”

More than one third of billionaires got rich because they inherited the money. Not because they earned it. Oh, and inherited wealth is largely untaxed. Meanwhile, almost one in five of these billionaires made their money with the help of monopoly power — meaning they don’t even have to compete against anyone as they rake in the profits, with little to no regard for the people who might have to buy these competition-less products.

If you add on the number of billionaires who got there through crony connections and corruption, you land on about 60 per cent of billionaires who got rich through one of three ways: inheritance, cronyism and corruption, or monopoly power.

So, okay — most billionaires didn’t earn it. But what about the ones that did?

Well, there are plenty of legal but shady tricks people use to hoard more and more wealth at the expense of others.

Workers can be paid a legal but unliveable wage as they make the actual item that creates a big chunk of the value the billionaires steal. The ultra-wealthy buy up the houses and financialize the housing market, treating it as a way to make even more money, skyrocketing rent and housing costs that these poverty-wage workers then have to pay.

Oh, then if that worker gets home to that place they can’t afford on their poverty wages and wants to make, say, a sandwich? Well, you have to go to the grocery store, where — in Canada — we have a oligopoly where only a few companies have to compete with one another. This means they can, for example, fix the price of bread so they make more money off a basic staple.

Then there are layoffs often provide a temporary boost to a stock price — and so what if that comes at the expense of people’s livelihoods and the quality of — say — our media, where fewer and fewer journalist make less and less money as they report what’s going on in our world?

If we look outside our borders, we can see the worst impulses of the ultra-wealthy with even fewer safeguards, where people die because they can’t afford medical treatment and pharmaceutical CEOs and insurance industry pocket the profits.

The ultra wealthy can also buy newspapers — like Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post. They can buy our TV news and even entertainment, like the Trump-aligned Ellisons, who now own CBS, CNN, HBO, TikTok U.S., and much more.

Then there’s democracy itself.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2010 Citizens United decision ruled that corporations and other outside groups can effectively spend unlimited money on elections. This meant billionaire-backed super pacs, like the one Elon Musk funded for Trump in 2024, can give their preferred candidate a huge leg up in elections — not just by running ads, but also doing voter outreach.

In fact, one study found that economic inequality is “one of the strongest predictors of where and when democracy erodes.”

That’s without even getting into the stuff that goes underfunded as billionaires fail to pay their fair share, such as healthcare, where hospital wait times are skyrocketing, and education, where teachers are underpaid and overworked.

So yeah, billionaires are bad. They’re bad for everyday people. They’re bad for society. They’re bad for democracy.

But what do I know? Apparently, I’m just jealous.

Watching the racist violence coming out of Northern Ireland, I feel a lot of different emotions. Horror. Anger. Sadness.

Children have had to flee their burning homes, set alight by a crush of angry racists who sparked the fire because they believed migrants lived in the buildings. Business and cars also went up in flames. People driving down roads were stopped in their cars as angry mobs searched for migrants. Zeteo UK’s Owen Jones described the violence, rightfully, as a pogrom.

There are specific, local elements to the racist tinderbox that was lit on June 9. I won’t spend time trying to explain them when others are eminently more qualified to break down the dynamics of Loyalism and Unionism that are specific to Northern Ireland.

But those local factors aren’t the only one. There are also some elements here that are reflective of the forces making the world more hateful, more angry.

First, their rage is based on utter lies. This latest bout of far-right aggression came after a Sudanese man stabbed another man in Northern Ireland. Tommy Robinson, a British far-right activist, was just one of many who took to Twitter in the wake of the attack. He tried to urge people into the streets, decrying the “yet another invader attack on our people.”

Elon Musk amplified the post, calling on the public to protest “repeatedly and loudly.”

But here’s the thing — this wasn’t some kind of violent pattern as a result of immigration, as Robinson’s wording implies. Repeated studies show that there’s no correlation between immigration and violent crime, whether in the U.K. or here in Canada.

In short, the thing they’re so angry about is utter bullshit.

That’s why it’s so important that we do something about the internet’s ability to spread lies, hate and incite violence.

Canada is moving to deal with online harms — will it deal with hate?

A major announcement from the government this week dealt with exactly this topic: regulating social media.

The big, splashy headline out of Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, was that the government plans to restrict kids under 16 from using social media platforms — that is, unless those platforms implement yet-to-be-defined “adequate safeguards” to protect children.

But the legislation also has another aspect that largely slid under the radar. In a backgrounder, the government describes the Safe Social Media Act as targeting seven categories of harmful content. Two of those categories are “content that incites violence” and “content that foments hatred.”

As currently drafted, the bill tells us very little about how it will address those two issues. It leaves a lot up to a yet-to-be-established regulator.

That’s got some watchers worried.

“Our reading is that, as far as online hate is concerned, it’s business as usual, unless the regulator makes it a priority to address,” said Evan Balgord, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.

On top of that, a key concern Balgord highlighted was a clause in the bill that read: “proactive search of content not required”

“Nothing in this Act requires an operator to proactively search content on a regulated service that it operates in order to identify harmful content,” the clause explained.

According to Balgord, this puts the onus on the victims of hate to “argue against an uncaring tech giant that they’ve been hurt.”

Still, what’s drafted is better than nothing — and it addresses a few concerns that lingered during Canada’s previous attempt to deal with online harms, according to Amarnath Amarasingham, a professor of religion and political studies at Queen’s University who has extensive expertise researching extremism.

“I think the good news is that Canada finally has an online harms bill,” he said.

The last attempt to regulate online harms, which died on the order paper and never became law, had a too-narrow focus on content that incited violence, he explained.

“Most extremist content on the internet and social media does not incite violence. The vast majority of content is just shit content that is hateful, harmful, and polarizing. The new bill seems to at least acknowledge this with some mention of content that foments hatred.”

While Amarasingam said he was really hoping for some regulation of gaming platforms like Roblox, considering how march harm — from exploitation to extortion — happens on these platforms, the government “kicked it down the road to be potentially addressed later,” which was “irritating.”

“But, at the end of the day, we have something! And if it passes without being completely diluted, the online space could be less of a swamp. And that’s a good thing,” he said.

Would regulation help Canada avoid Northern Ireland-style riots?

As I already mentioned, there are a lot of factors that go into sparking racist riots. But it’s undeniable that social media plays a role in fuelling this anger — and social media doesn’t generally respect borders.

“What’s happening on the ground (in Northern Ireland) is being used to incite violence in the U.S. and Canada. Like ‘why can’t our racists be more like their racists?’ So they feed off each other,” explained Amarasingam.

“Regulation would ideally put a stop to this kind of open incitement.”

That’s why it’s so important for the government to get this bill right.

And sure, regulating the internet — actually forcing these monstrously rich tech giants to take a shred of ownership over the trash that swarms their platforms — won’t deal with all the local factors that fuel racist violence, nor will it end the ever widening wealth inequality that has left people feeling so desperate and powerless.

In fact, on that note, a report out in January warned that economic inequality is worsening in Northern Ireland — much like Canada’s wealth gap is the widest it’s been in recorded history.

I wonder if there’s a reason the billionaires who own these tech platforms are so happy to keep us angry with one another, rather than working together to fix that problem?

But I digress.

This regulation, done right, would be a step.

And when you’re running a marathon against rising tides of hate, each step matters.

So too was an increasingly notorious “Canadian nationalist” who advocates for the mass deportation of those he deems “foreigners” — which includes permanent residents and birthright citizens — from the country: Daniel Tyrie.

This is the focus of my latest piece for The Tyee, which you can head to their website to read in full.

• CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL PIECE

For Tyrie, attending the conference was part of “an important strategy”: one of humanizing his organization — and its ideas — in the eyes of some of the most powerful right-wingers in Canada.

Tyrie is the executive director of the Dominion Society of Canada, a group that advocates for a far-right policy known as “remigration.” The Dominion Society is proposing to remove up to nine million people — as much as 21 per cent of Canada’s current population — by deporting immigrants as well as revoking birthright citizenship.

The racist idea has become increasingly mainstream around the world in recent years, thanks to far-right European politicians and U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House. The concept has gained enough international support that its far-right proponents gathered in Porto, Portugal, in late May for a “Remigration Summit.”

Hundreds, including Tyrie, attended.

Researchers have called the remigration movement a form of ethnic cleansing, a parallel Tyrie denies. He’s also denied being a white nationalist. Despite his protestations, however, Tyrie has said in interviews that he’s “very clear about what a Canadian is.”

“All these groups that established Canada, this ethnic continuity that we’re talking about, these people can be called white people,” he said in a February interview with Candice Malcolm of Juno News.

Now, Tyrie says he’s hoping to use events like the Canada Strong and Free Network conference to normalize his ideas in Canadian politics.

“I’m just going to take a chance to get to talk to these people, to humanize the organization, because so many of these people, they think we’re, like, radical, unreasonable,” he told supporters on a May 7 livestream, the day he saw Poilievre speak at the conference.

Tyrie grinned as he acknowledged some of his online followers can be “feral,” which has led some to be “apprehensive” of him in these rooms.

“But it’s good to show up and be there in person, show face, have conversations with people and show them that we’re serious, we’re professional, we’re reasonable, we’re not going to back down on our ideas but we can actually work collaboratively with people, that we’re not just hateful, radical bigots,” he said.

“That we understand how the process works and our role in the greater system.”

According to Tyrie’s telling of the conference, some conservatives were buying what he was selling.

“But there have been some interesting people — some interesting, very nice people in and around political parties and other groups, media and so on — that have taken some time to talk with me, get to know me, get to know our ideas,” Tyrie boasted.

“In that sense, I think it’s been rather productive.”

That’s exactly why researchers who study the far right are voicing their concern that Tyrie was allowed to be in such a powerful room.

“The inclusion of remigration activists such as Daniel Tyrie into mainstream conservative spaces is unacceptable,” said Wendy Via, CEO and co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

To read the full article, head over to thetyee.ca.

But this time, something was different. Alongside real clips from actual news broadcasts, this ad also used generative AI.

Rather than finding real Canadians concerned about the cost of living, the ad — which aims to highlight the fact that preliminary figures suggest Canada is in a “technical recession” — features eerily smooth, slightly cartoonish faces lamenting their financial woes.

Maybe the party was feeling lazy. Maybe they wanted to save money rather than hiring Canadian actors. Maybe they did it because they knew we’d talk about the generative AI-use, but unavoidably also mention the ad’s core message.

Whatever the motivation, the Conservative Party went ahead and published the ad — and with that, exemplified a new, riskier era of politics.

“I think we should be expecting more AI-generated content in our politics. This is something that parties are going to be experimenting with,” said Elizabeth Dubois, a University of Ottawa professor and Canada Research Chair in politics, communication and technology.

“I think the big risk is when we don’t actually know what’s generative AI, what isn’t.”

The risks of generative AI in political ads

Just two years ago, top risk forecasters had a warning for the world: AI-generated content could fuel disinformation in our politics.

The Eurasia Group listed “ungoverned AI” as one of its top risks, noting that “generative AI will be used by domestic and foreign actors—notably Russia—to influence electoral campaigns, stoke division, undermine trust in democracy, and sow political chaos on an unprecedented scale.”

In the years since, generative AI has muscled its way into U.S. politics. Between November and March of this year, at least 15 American campaign ads ran that used AI-generated content, according to reporting from NBC News.

In multiple cases, the U.S. ads featured AI-generated footage of the advertiser’s political opponent saying things they hadn’t actually said.

The Conservative ad doesn’t stoop to that level — though it still manufactures words we don’t know any Canadians have actually ever said. Riffing off the fact that Canadian is in a “technical” recession, the ad features Canadians reassuring one another that they’re only “technically” hungry, “technically” unemployed, and “technically” homeless.

A technical recession refers to two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, which some preliminary data from Statistics Canada suggests just happened — though that second consecutive quarter saw our GDP contract by just 0.1 per cent, and future adjustments to these early numbers could determine no GDP decline happened at all.

While pundits and politicians debate whether this matters, the “unofficial authority on recession calls in Canada,” the C.D. Howe Institute’s Business Cycle Council, say it’s “too early” to use the word “recession” to describe the economy.

Still, regardless of whether Canadians care or believe it matters that we might be in a “technical recession,” AI-generated Canadians will care about or believe whatever a prompt tells them they should.

Those AI-generated Canadians combined with real-life news clips is a recipe for confusion, Dubois said.

“Something we saw in this most recent video is this kind of meshing between actual news content, and then AI-generated content, and kind of going back and forth, which makes it really hard for the viewer to evaluate what they’re actually seeing and to contextualize it properly,” she explained.

Others I spoke with expressed concern the technology was being used at all.

Sharing “AI slop to try to drive a cheap political wedge” is a “new low” for the Conservatives, according to author, tech critic and host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, Paris Marx.

“It’s an insult to Canadians for a political party to add to the wave of AI-generated garbage people are already running into in their daily lives, and shows another practice of the political right in the United States being adopted by the Conservative Party,” he told me over text.

“Potentially even worse, it shows a disregard for the harms of generative AI, at time when communities across the country are fighting to stop the hyperscale data centres needed to power the very technology needed for the Conservatives to make their slopaganda.”

My thoughts? This is dangerous

While AI-generated content has been floating around for a while now — just scroll down your facebook home page or check replies on Twitter if you’d like to accost your eyeballs — I’d argue it’s significant that a political party is using it to portray grievances Canadians may or may not actually hold.

Sure, it’s relatively safe to assume Canadians care about the cost of living. There are many polls to support this. But how many of them are specifically stressed about the idea of a technical recession, rather than, say the ever-widening wealth gap?

Parties could already hire actors to pretend to care about something in their ads. But generative AI is also much faster and cheaper than hiring actors and filming an ad, which means it turbocharges the capacity for political parties to spread their message — for better or for worse.

All the while, Canadians who miss the small “AI-generated content” disclaimer in the bottom corner might think these are real conversations people are having. Dubois told me that given this technology is set to become a part of our political conversations, it’s imperative to have clear standards.

“If we’re going to be seeing generative AI tools being used, we absolutely need to have a high level of transparency, a high level of accountability,” she said.

“They need to be used in ways that are appropriate, and that doesn’t mean just a little label that says generated with AI. It also means using the content in a way that people are able to evaluate it well.”

Personally, I’m deeply concerned about the precedent this sets. In the United States, as I already mentioned, this technology is being used not just to put words into voters’ mouths, but also into the mouths of political opponents. In that context, a small caveat in the corner of the screen is not enough.

What does a future full of deepfaked political ads look like? I’m not sure I want to know — but if this new ad from the Conservative Party is any indication, we might all be forced to find out.

But questions are lingering — serious questions — about how this aggressive ramp up of AI adoption will play out in a world where data centres are sucking up water and gulping down electricity to power these new technologies.

“They’re rolling back environmental laws at the same time as they’re pushing for more data centres,” Anna Johnston, a Staff Lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law, told me in an interview.

“It just seems like there’s like a crazily minimal desire to have any kind of environmental oversight of these projects that we know have massive environmental effects.”

The new AI strategy announcement comes just one day after several of Canada’s largest environmental groups took to Parliament Hill to warn that Carney’s government has “gone too far with their rollbacks of environmental protections and climate policies.”

Folks who care about the environment were horrified when Carney’s government launched two discussion papers on potential changes to how it approves major projects, which have eight days of consultation left before the government moves “quickly” towards legislation.

Some of the proposed changes include: cabinet giving itself the power to allow companies to drive entire species to extinction; pre-approvals of pipelines; and making it so that fewer projects will have to get authorization to use up or pollute our water.

That last one is pretty terrifying when you consider how little oversight these water-guzzling hyperscale data centres currently face.

“There have been a number of AI data centres that should have triggered a federal impact assessment, but were exempted from the assessment process just because the federal government wants to fast track them through. So they’re not going through environmental reviews,” Johnston explained.

“Some of them in Alberta have been exempted from provincial assessments, and then none of them are subject to regulation under the Canadian Navigable Waters Act, so they use a ton of water that’s going to drain out of lakes and rivers.”

Without regulating the use of that water under the navigable waters act, there’s “no way to know” whether a particular data centre — combined with other water withdrawal for things like agriculture — “(is) going to deplete our waters to an unsustainable level.”

AI strategy barely mentions the environment, relies on sketchy claims

The bulk of the government’s new AI strategy reads like a sprint towards greater AI adoption with little regard for the environmental harms the technology poses.

In fact, in the document, the word “climate” only appears three times. All those uses of the term, however, discuss the cost advantage of building data centres within our chilly borders.

Climate change is never mentioned.

When the strategy does briefly touch on environmental concerns, it hand-waves them away with claims that Canada “is uniquely positioned to lead in building this infrastructure responsibly and sustainably.”

“More than 83 percent of the country’s electricity grid comes from renewable and low-emission sources, primarily hydro, nuclear, and wind – enabling our data centres to operate on some of the cleanest power in the world,” the strategy says. “Data centres that rely on renewable and low-emissions sources reduce their total operating emissions by up to 90 percent.”

While Canada’s electricity grid can boast those numbers on nationwide scale, the claims become sketchier in the context of where these AI data centres are largely being built: in Alberta.

“Alberta is insisting that the clean electricity regulations don’t apply to it, has put a moratorium on wind energy, like Alberta’s doubling down on gas-fired, fossil fuel-fired electricity sources, so it seems like even the claims that (the data centres are) largely going to be electrified with renewable energy are spurious at best,” Johnston said.

Paris Marx, an author and tech critic who hosts the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us shared Johnston’s skepticism.

“(Hyperscale data centres) require massive quantities of electricity — in some cases enough to power the homes of an entire city — and since more then 90% of the data centres being planned are slated to be built in Alberta, that means they’ll be powered by fossil gas, making our climate targets even harder to reach after Carney’s gutting of environmental policy,” he told me in a texted statement.

“But that’s not all of it: many demand a lot of water to cool all the chips and computers under their roofs, which can affect the water quality of people living nearby, and all the air conditioning units they require can cause noise pollution in the surrounding area.”

New research, Marx added, raises further concerns about the environmental impact.

“Recently research even suggests major data centres have a heat island effect: making the surrounding region warmer, which isn’t welcome news when climate change is making heat waves even more common in Alberta and across Canada,
he said.

“The government’s AI strategy is a disaster in the making.”

Carney: a climate con artist?

The AI announcement comes amid broader concerns about Carney’s track record when it comes to the climate — even within his own caucus.

The Trudeau-era environment minister Steven Guilbeault announced his intention to resign as a Liberal MP following a pipeline deal with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, and amid his concerns about Carney’s proposed rollback of environmental protections — which he agreed would “go further than (former Conservative) Prime Minister (Stephen) Harper.”

In April, 14 Liberal MPs wrote to Carney about their concerns with his government’s approach to fighting climate change. As for whether he’s listening to this feedback, new reporting published Wednesday by the Toronto Star’s Althia Raj alleged Carney “punches down at caucus,” “yells,” and doesn’t like to hear “criticism.”

Meanwhile, environmental groups are getting increasingly vocal with their concerns. Leadership from sixteen environmental organizations gathered on Parliament Hill on Wednesday to draw a “line in the sand” with respect to Carney’s rollbacks to environmental protections.

In an accompanying press release, the advocates didn’t mince their words.

“Canada needs to build — we agree. But this isn’t building. It’s the worst destruction of environmental law in Canadian history, dressed up as progress,” Tim Gray, executive director of Environmental Defence Canada, said in a statement.

“This government’s mistakes will ensure Canada is left behind in the energy transition. Canadians will pay the price, and the damages will last for generations”

Speaking on Parliament Hill in a press conference on Wednesday, flotilla participants detailed the horrors they faced when Israeli forces intercepted their vessels in international waters — and the utter apathy of the Canadian government in response.

Israeli forces fired gunshots within centimetres of their bodies, destroyed their sailboat communications before setting their boat’s autopilot on a deadly course, and subjected the activists to beatings, stress positions, stabbings and strip searches.

Despite one activist contacting the Canadian consulate in between the acts of Israeli aggression, no help came.

Letters to Carney and Anand left unanswered

The flotilla participants and their loved ones have since tried to contact the prime minister and foreign affairs minister for a meeting.

“These letters (dated May 16 and May 26) were from the loved ones of the Canadian participants, and subsequently by all the Canadian participants and their loved ones, all demanding accountability and action by the Canadian government,” said Yipeng Ge, who previously sailed as part of the flotilla movement and hand-delivered the letters.

“They were delivered by hand, by mail, and electronically by email.”

The first letter, dated May 16, received a response — one that glossed over the actual request the letter contained.

“I would like to acknowledge receipt of your correspondence, sent on behalf of the families and loved ones of the Canadians participating in the Global Sumud Flotilla and the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, expressing an interest in meeting with the Right Honourable Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada,” the nameless respondent on behalf of the prime minister’s office wrote in an emailed reply.

“Please know that the offer was received and is appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to write.”

The second letter, which reiterated the request for a meeting, has not received a response.

“They absolutely know what has taken place - the illegal kidnapping of Canadians at sea, and their torture and threats to kill and leave them stranded at sea to die. And Canada has yet to take any meaningful action to pressure Israel and its military to cease these kinds of violations against international law upon Canadians and most importantly against Palestinians in occupied Palestine,” Ge said.

Now, the flotilla participants are speaking out.

Activists describe beatings, gunshots and being left for dead

Luiza Ravalli, a primary care nurse, had spent days packing the Global Sumud Flotilla sailboats with provisions in the hopes of delivering them to Palestinians. The boats were loaded with food, milk, formula, diapers, school supplies, backpacks, medicine, menstrual products and other supplies to help support Palestinians living through Israel’s genocide.

After setting sail to bring this aid to Gaza, a group of heavily armed perpetrators intercepted Ravalli’s boat.

“During the first assault, their verbal threats were immediately followed by three shots fired directly from close range above our heads. The sight of laser scopes forming clusters of red dots on our bodies is one I will never forget,” Luiza Ravalli, a flotilla participant described.

“After this assault, they sped away — only to return shortly afterward, this time clearly identifying themselves as Israeli military, and letting us know ‘we have weapons and we will use them.’ They fired one additional shot, this time directly at us, which landed between myself and my crewmate to my left, missing our flanks by centimetres.”

Ravalli described how Israeli soldiers — using wire cutters — destroyed her boat’s engine, electricity, internet connection and all communications “so that no one would be able to hear us or respond to a distress call.”

“Then they programmed our autopilot into the path of an incoming storm, which had been building off the western coast of Greece. They told us, ‘these are your new coordinates, and if you change course, we will return. And you don’t want that.’” Ravalli explained.

“They left us with nothing but a destroyed cabin, a flashlight, and a paper map. Please let me be clear, the intentions of the Israeli military was to kill ,us and the crews of two other boats sailing alongside us passively by kneecapping our vessels and setting us on a path to certain death. “

Worst still, Ravalli described the utter apathy from the Canadian government.

“Between the two assaults that night, while I still had my mobile phone, I reached out to the Canadian Consular Support Line to tell them what was happening, and to implore them to please act to ensure my safety, so that I could return intact to my 11 year old son,” Luiza Ravalli, a flotilla participant described.

“I was met with a response that thanked me for letting them know.”

She later added, “I received no response, not even a word of support from anyone at any level of our government.”

Ultimately, after being left adrift for 12 hours without the ability to communicate, Ravalli and her crew were rescued — not by the Canadian government, however. The Spanish NGO Open Arms broke away from their fleet to find and rescue the activists, saving their lives.

Other activists describe beatings, strip searches, stabbings

This story of Canada’s antipathy towards their survival was a common refrain from the activists.

Ehab Lotayef, a founding member of the Canadian Boat to Gaza, said his boat was attacked in the middle of the night in international waters. They were boarded and commandeered to a prison ship, where they were horrifically abused.

“We endured strip searches, heavy beatings, put in uncomfortable positions, fed only bottles of water and loaves of bread that were thrown to us like dogs, sleeping 50 people plus in a 40 foot container, only with one layer of clothes, because any other layers were taken from us and thrown in the sea. Stabbed, myself, in the hand for helping other other detainees,” Lotayef said.

As he spoke during Wednesday’s press conference, he coughed. Lotayef said he was still feeling short of breath from the beatings to his chest and ribs.

After being taken into Israel, he said they were once again placed in stress positions and continued to face beatings.

“(There was) no medical treatment offered to anybody until that point. People with broken ribs, people with internal bleeding, people with stab wounds,” he said.

“It was really a situation where we felt that we were let down by Canada before anybody else, to be honest.”

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had shared videos showcasing the abuse of flotilla participants before Lotayef had even arrived in Israel, he explained.

“The whole world knew what was happening to us. Yet no diplomatic movement by Canada helped us in this captivity. The captivity that was very clear: the idea behind it was to torture us and to punish us, not to imprison us,” he said.

This is Canada’s shame

So far, the government has done little to address Israel’s abuse of Canadians and its genocide in Gaza. When given the opportunity, through NDP MP Jenny Kwan’s private member’s bill, to close loopholes that have allowed Canadian weapons to flow to Israel, the government voted against it.

The government has also ignored repeated asks to consider sanctions against Israel, opting instead to sanction specific politicians and settlers.

Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand, in the wake of public outcry over the abuse of Canadian activists, summoned the Israeli ambassador. She also issued a tweet.

“Canada unequivocally condemns the grave mistreatment of Canadians in Israel. Those responsible for this egregious abuse must be held accountable. We will continue to provide additional information as it becomes available,” she wrote.

I reached out to Anand’s office for comment on this story, but did not immediately receive a response.

Carney, meanwhile, spoke to Israeli President Isaac Herzog. During that call, he said he “reiterated that the appalling treatment of civilians aboard the Gaza-bound flotilla was unacceptable, and that respect for human dignity must be upheld everywhere, at all times.”

Beyond that, nothing appears to have been done. Requests for a meeting between these activists and the government have gone unanswered.

And while the detained Canadians knew their abuse at the hands of Israel would end, Palestinians continue to live these horrors without that same knowledge.

“Palestinians are living this day in and day out with no end in sight, and this is a responsibility for the whole world to act upon,” Lotayef said.

““So we call on the Canadian government first to stand behind us, to meet with us, to talk to us, to take real actions — beyond words of condemnation.”

Someone should probably find out if there was a gas leak at the Globe and Mail over the weekend.

Because short of that, it’s hard to fathom why their editorial board thought it was a good idea to publish their opinion piece on potential unmarked graves at residential schools.

The piece was a public self-flagellation over initial reporting on the 2021 news that the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation had, using ground penetrating radar, made preliminary findings of the remains of 215 children on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

“The media, including The Globe and Mail, did not initially scrutinize, much less challenge, that assertion,” the piece read.

Here’s the thing. Normal people, off of Twitter, were not talking about this.

Whether or not the media erred in using the term “mass graves” or “unmarked graves” or “possible unmarked graves” pales in importance relative to the main facts: at least 4,000 Indigenous children died in residential schools.

Survivors have detailed rampant abuse of every kind. They were mistreated, neglected, and had their culture violently stripped away.

Despite this reality, the Globe Editorial Board had to navel-gaze. They had to show the world their brains appear to be, at least to this outside observer, cooked by online racists leveraging denialism for clout.

The people most aggressively debating the language used to report on unmarked graves will never be appeased with this kind of acknowledgement — because many of them, I’d argue, don’t actually care about the specific language for reasons of journalistic accuracy.

They want to downplay the harms of residential schools.

For evidence of that, just look at the racist fire that the Globe’s “admission” fuelled.

Red meat for the worst people on Twitter

The uproar in response to the piece was immediate and wide-reaching. Some of the worst accounts on Twitter immediately began frothing at the mouth, demanding fired individuals who have been repeatedly described as residential school deniers get their jobs back.

They used the Globe headline to call the reporting on the unmarked graves “entirely fake.”

They used it to balk at declarations of genocide and deride displays for “pretend-murdered children.” They described the outcry over residential school deaths as a “social panic.”

Even the U.S. Undersecretary of State got in on the action, saying that “in 2021, Canadian media and institutions basically hallucinated the discovery of 215 children’s bodies in a mass grave near a former Catholic residential school.”

One prominent residential school denier wrote, in response to the Globe op-ed, that Indigenous people “owe Canada a debt for educating their children.”

Was the initial error in reporting so egregious that attempting to rectify it warranted all of this? While the Globe Editorial Board appears to believe so, I would vehemently reject that claim.

A report from the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Human Rights research dug into what they called a “foundational claim” of the “mass grave hoax” narrative.” Authors Reid Gerbrandt and Sean Carleton analyzed 386 articles covering the discovery of the potential unmarked graves.

They found that a minority — 35% — contained some level of inaccurate reporting, but that “many of the detected inaccuracies were corrected over time.”

On top of that, just 6.5% of the articles they analyzed referred to the discoveries as “mass graves.”

“We thus conclude that the “mass grave hoax” narrative hinges on a misrepresentation of how Canadian journalists actually reported on the identification of potential unmarked graves at former residential school sites during the spring, summer, and fall of 2021,” the report explains.

Despite the fact that 93.5% of the articles analyzed did not use the term “mass graves,” the Globes’s Editorial Board claimed in their piece that “many of those early stories, including in this newspaper, made reference to “mass graves.””

On top of this, devastatingly, remains have been found at residential school sites. A fragment of a child’s jawbone was found at a site in Saskatchewan. Child-sized skeletal human remains, buried without caskets, have been unintentionally excavated over the years at a site in Alberta. The remains of a child under five were found at a former residential school near Edmonton.

Not to mention the testimonies of thousands of witnesses, people who were forced to attend these schools, who described loved ones never coming home, classmates disappearing and never being seen again.

“There have always been racists and hateful people in the world. They are often closed-minded, ignorant, and don’t care about facts,” Pam Palmater, a Mi'kmaw lawyer and member of Eel River Bar First Nation told me over text.

“But when the mainstream media platforms their hate, they help normalize racism against Indigenous peoples which inevitably increases our risk of being targets of hate-based violence.”

The epitome of caving to bad-faith outrage online

This story epitomizes a concern I’ve long held when it comes to mainstream media’s desperate need to both sides everything.

As I mentioned before, beyond fringe politicians in B.C. and a bunch of gross accounts on Twitter, there was no genuine, good-faith debate happening about the potential graves at residential school sites.

But because the Globe and Mail still believes it can attain the impossible goal of objectivity, they fell for a bad-faith outrage machine that has learned to prey on the media’s naiveté.

There are far too many subjective decisions that pile up over the course of a single piece of reporting. The choice of which experts are interviewed. The order of quotes. The decision about what’s “newsworthy” and what gets cut from the broadcast. It all requires some level of subjective decisionmaking. The best we can strive for, in reality, is fairness.

Despite this, some newsrooms have genuinely deluded themselves into believing they can be objective. In reality, the best they can achieve is a perception of objectivity. When you’re chasing a perception, you’ll always be vulnerable to the loudest voice telling you that you’ve failed.

In the age of social media, bad-faith outrage rules the day. The algorithm amplifies the worst trash racism on Twitter, and there are people who have made their careers out of gaming that system. The loudest voice telling media it has failed is rarely an honest reflection of that failure.

The Globe fell for it. They got played. They only have themselves to blame.

But the result is far more wide reaching.

In their slavish devotion to being perceived as objective in this world that’s anything but, the Globe sacrificed Indigenous people’s right to respect, dignity and acknowledgement of the horrors Canada committed against them.

What will they sacrifice next?

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The Indian Residential School Survivors Society’s 24/7 Crisis Support line: 1-800-721-0066

The 24-hour National Indian Residential School Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419

The image prompted outcry from Canadian cabinet ministers, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, several MPs, the Montreal mayor, and the local police are investigating the incident.

The Montreal mayor is using this incident as justification for the consideration of a “more aggressive approach to demonstrations linked to Israel and Gaza,” according to reporting from the Montreal Gazette.

But the truth tells another story — one that makes the outcry itself offensively obtuse.

Rebel News posted footage to Twitter showing a careful angle of the effigy, obscuring key identifying details of who activists were portraying.

In reality, the effigies in the video show two figures: far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben Gvir and U.S. President Donald Trump. The latter is not Jewish. In other angles, the same protesters can be seen with a third effigy: one showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"The effigies displayed during the demonstration were directed specifically at political figures: Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben Gvir, and Donald Trump,” Montreal4Palestine, the organizer of the protest, said in a statement.

“This symbolic and non-violent act of expression was aimed at the political architects and supporters of policies against Palestinians…at no point were these depictions intended to represent Judaism, Jewish people, or any religious, ethnic, or identifiable community.”

Protesting war criminals, not a religious group

The effigies were used as a symbol at a protest against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has also extended atrocities into Lebanon and Iran in recent months. Despite the so-called “ceasefire” in Gaza, at least 906 Palestinians have been killed since the deal took effect in October. As Eid celebrations began in the Gaza Strip yesterday, Israeli fighter jets launched air strikes on a residential building, killing seven people — including three women and a child.

In Lebanon, Israel has been bombing residential areas, roads and civilian infrastructure, displacing 1.6 million people and killing at least 3,213 people, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. In Iran, the Iranian Red Crescent has confirmed Israeli and U.S. strikes hit 67,414 civilian sites, including 498 schools and 236 health facilities.

Meanwhile, Ben Gvir — who regularly affixes a noose to his lapel — celebrated with champagne recently after the Israeli Parliament passed a law making the death penalty by hanging the default punishment for Palestinians convicted of murdering Israelis. These courts have a 96% conviction rate.

Ben Gvir also personally participated in the abuse of international activists who attempted to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, posting the imagery of flotilla participants in stress positions and being beaten on Twitter.

This is what protesters were opposing with these effigies. They were protesting war criminals, two of whom happened to be Jewish. They were not protesting Jewish people who happened to be war criminals.

“The outrage coming from politicians regarding the effigies of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald Trump when they were silent following the state of israel’s legalization of the death penalty by noose in a law that will almost exclusively be applied to Palestinians, shows us the deeply ingrained and systemic anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab hate not just in Montreal, but across all of so-called Canada,” Zev Saltiel, a member of Independent Jewish Voices Montreal, said in a statement shared with me over text.

“Attempting to spin what is a clear critique of government officials complicit in genocide, including the noose pin on the Ben-Gvir effigy, into antisemitism dilutes the very real antisemitism that exists in the world.”

Despite this, the chorus of outcry from some of the most prominent politicians in Canada was unabated in its effort to mislead — and outright lie to — the public.

Politicians lie to Canadians about the effigies

AI minister Evan Solomon called the effigy a “display of a Jewish person” and referred to it as “vile” and a “clear act of hate.”

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre wrote that “masked cowards paraded an effigy of a Jew being hanged, in downtown Montreal, in broad daylight.”

Conservative MP Roman Baber said “they’re hanging an effigy of a jew in Montreal now.”

Liberal MP Anthony Housefather shared that he reached out to the police about the effigy, stating that “hanging an image of a Jew with a kippah in effigy is disgusting, antisemitic and clear incitement to hatred.”

Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada told reporters that this was a “clear act of antisemitism” and said she’d consult police about “what the limit is in terms of intervention.”

In all of this outcry, all these politicians accepted Rebel News’ framing — and not one mentioned that the figure depicted in the kippah was the very same man who just recently lauded the abuse of Canadian activists and celebrated the new apartheid law mandating death by hanging for Palestinians.

A man who celebrated his birthday with a noose-themed cake.

The Palestine exception

It’s enough to make you feel a bit crazy. If we as a society wish to reject effigies as a legitimate form of protest (despite their several hundred-year history), that’s one thing. But we haven’t done that.

In Toronto a few months back, pro-Israel, pro-monarchist protesters supporting the strikes on Iran carried an effigy that depicted the Ayatollah hanging from a noose. These was no outcry that this was a display of Islamophobia.

Three years ago, when someone opposing Putin’s war on Ukraine strung up an effigy of the Russian President in Toronto, there was no institutional outcry either. No one claimed this was an anti-Orthodox christian hate crime.

But when Palestinians protest the men directly responsible for the mass slaughter of their families, the abuse of activists trying to bring aid to starving children, the razing of their hometowns and the mass, illegal annexation of their lands, they face sweeping condemnations that they’re engaged in antisemitism.

Palestinians, apparently, must tolerate the worst horrors imaginable without access to the same symbolic representations that hundreds of years of protesters have used before them.

But these are horrors that Canada, through weapons loopholes and the failure to sanction Israel, is complicit in.

Therein lies the rub.

When people who are otherwise political opponents all agree on a demonstrable lie to falsely vilify protesters, they inadvertently expose a truth: that the protesters are exposing an institutionally-supported source of what should be a national shame.

In this case, that truth is Canada’s deeply-rooted acceptance of anti-Palestinian racism and the shared, national shame of our country’s complicity in their genocide.

Shame.

Guilbeault’s departure, first reported by CTV News, comes amid increased concern from environmental groups and some Liberal MPs alike about Carney’s recent moves that impact the environment and climate change.

In a set of discussion papers launched two weeks ago, The prime minister proposed several measures that, should they become law, Guilbeault agreed would be going further than what Stephen Harper did during his tenure.

Anna Johnston, a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law, has called Carney’s proposals “the single biggest evisceration of environmental laws in Canadian history.”

At the time, Guilbeault told me in an interview that he plans to watch upcoming decisions closely as he determines whether he’ll remain in Liberal caucus. Just days after we spoke, Carney announced a new pipeline deal with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.

Guilbeault is expected to speak with his caucus colleagues about his decision when they meet in Ottawa tomorrow.

In today’s video, I’ll tell you what we know.

I’m finding myself increasingly horrified at how low some politicians are willing to go.

They’re willing to mislead the public despite being clearly fact-checked, they’re willing to downplay the accusations of residential school denialism, and they’re willing to lend their credibility to an increasingly worrying cast of characters.

But there’s something that makes this topic difficult to talk about, as a journalist: it’s an issue that is almost unique to the Conservative Party.

That’s not to say that Liberals or other politicians don’t ever lie, mislead or amplify a bad source. But the bulk of this problem — and the constant refusal to course correct — is really dominated by Conservatives.

Because of that reality, it’s near-impossible to report on this dangerous trend without being smeared as partisan, or anti-Conservative.

I actually think this was part of what made me so unpopular with the right wing starting years ago: I was debunking dogwhistles and conspiracies. It was just a fact that both were more commonly deployed by the political right, so I tended to have more of those fact-checking pieces focused on conservative politicians. Then folks would scream about my critical reporting on conservatives, as if I should manufacture a false balance to pretend this is happening equally across the political spectrum — when it isn’t.

But it’s an issue that hasn’t improved in recent years. If anything, it’s worsened.

We have a political leadership hopeful in B.C. touting the work of Mario Zelaya in “explaining how policy decisions affect all of us in very real ways.”

That’s the same Mario Zelaya who AFP has repeatedly fact-checked as he spread misleading claims. Zelaya also got a personal call from Pierre Poilievre thanking him for his work.

Conservatives have freaked out over a media industry representative who works in entertainment — fictional entertainment — saying he has Carney’s back. This clip was used to discredit news media as partisan, despite the man having no ties to the news industry. MPs refused to correct this lie, instead repeating the claim several times over.

Many of the same Conservative MPs are now attacking CBC and APTN over a parody show. They’re accusing the show (which isn’t affiliated with the news arm of either organization) of “targeting conservatives” — but it targeted individuals accused of downplaying the horrors of residential schools. Perhaps, to those MPs, those groups are one and the same.

I could list more examples, and in today’s video, I will. But the overarching question I ask in today’s piece is this: where are ethics going in Canadian politics? How low are we willing to go?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Then I saw something I couldn’t ignore.

Israeli cabinet minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a video to social media showing himself revelling in the abuse of detained activists who were attempting to bring aid to Gaza through the flotilla movement.

Twelve of these activists are Canadian.

In the face of this, our government has sprung into action. Um, sort of.

They’ve decided to summon the Israeli ambassador for a verbal slap on the wrist. No new sanctions, no commitment to address the loophole allowing Canadian weapons parts to flow to Israel.

Just a verbal spanking. One that, as of this morning, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand confirmed the Israeli ambassador hadn’t even bothered responding to.

Meanwhile, family members of the detained activists are requesting a meeting with government representatives and demanding an investigation into any abuse of their loved ones. I’ve obtained a copy of that letter, which Canadian physician Yipeng Ge hand-delivered to the prime minister’s office yesterday.

In today’s video, I’ll share that letter with you. We’ll also talk about Israel’s actions, our government’s inaction, and what all of this means for our collective conscience.

At first, I thought I was going to report a story today about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office being caught in what was, arguably, a lie. But now, it’s turned into a story of a potentially hallucinated claim that led to a politician getting widely dunked on.

On top of that, criticism of this erroneous reporting led to the female columnist behind one of those critiques getting a column cancelled.

Yeah. It’s messy.

See, yesterday, the Toronto Star reported something that seemed to be pretty embarrassing for outgoing Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith.

Nate, for context, is the same guy who is now exposing some pretty huge alleged voting issues in the nomination race he ran in and lost over the weekend.

But the day before people voted in that race, Nate’s team dropped a video of him and Carney — a video that anyone with two eyes could interpret as supportive of Nate’s Ontario Liberal Party nomination race bid.

But here’s where it gets weird. Last night, the Toronto Star reported quote:

“The Star has learned the prime minister posed for a farewell photograph with Erskine-Smith at the Fairmont Royal York hotel Friday before an event with former U.S. president Barack Obama.

But a smartphone video of their brief exchange was posted online by Erskine-Smith’s campaign. The prime minister’s office said it was not an endorsement”

This makes it sound like they just posed for a photo, and that Nate’s campaign then filmed what was just a “brief exchange” and posted it online. Naturally, people started clowning on Nate and his campaign.

But here’s what’s absolutely wild.

In contradiction to what the Star reported, there was a conversation between Mark Carney and Nate Erskine-Smith in which options for the video were discussed. Carney not only explicitly agreed to make a video with Nate Erskine-Smith, but was also explicitly told it would be saying how “great” Nate would be in Scarborough Southwest..

This was the point when I thought: holy. Did Carney’s team just totally throw Nate under the bus?

But then I saw the correction on the Toronto Star’s story.

“This article has been updated. A previous version incorrectly stated that the PMO said the exchange between Carney and Erskine-Smith was not an endorsement. In fact, the PMO made no such statement and would not comment Thursday on whether the exchange constituted an endorsement,” it read.

What? If the PMO “made no such statement,” why did the Star publish that they did?

Then, things got even weirder.

In today’s video, I’ll explain it all.

A Liberal nomination race in the province of Ontario is being rocked by allegations of serious irregularities in voting — and it’s exposing a flaw in Canadian democracy that politicians of all stripes are now speaking out about.

See, nomination races determine who gets to be on the ballot for a given party when Canadians head the polls for an election. But unlike elections, nomination races are run by the party.

The result? Nomination races are where some of the shadiest stuff in politics can happen.

Federal Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith and his team are alleging that this is what happened in his recent nomination race. Nate was running to represent the Ontario Liberal Party in the upcoming Scarborough Southwest byelection.

He lost by 19 votes. But according to his team’s allegations, there were 34 more ballots counted than there were recorded voters.

Now, Nate is appealing the result — though he says that even if his appeal is successful, he won’t want his name on the ballot. Instead, he wants reform to how these races are run.

The appeal is shining a light on what several former politicians have now come out to agree is a major blind spot in Canadian democracy: the wild west of nomination races.

In an electoral system where some ridings are so “safe” for a given party that hell would have to freeze over for them to lose, nomination races can be where the real democratic debate happens.

That’s why some are now calling for change.

In today’s video, we’ll talk about it all.

You might remember him from when he quit his post in Mark Carney’s cabinet after Carney signed an MOU with Alberta that paved a path toward a new pipeline.

Speaking to me while riding his bike — so uh, sorry about the audio quality — Guilbeault doubled down on what he told the Toronto Star’s Althia Raj on Friday: that he agrees Mark Carney is worse than Harper in his latest environmental proposals.

Yes, Harper.

Not only that, but I asked Guilbeault about his future as a Liberal MP and whether other MPs have shared concerns about the direction Carney is taking the party.

His answers were very interesting.

But Guilbeault is far from the only one raising the alarm over what Carney has planned for speeding up approvals of major projects.

In addition to speaking to Guilbeault, I’ve been in touch with environmental advocates all day long. Let’s just say: anyone who was convinced, as many were, that Carney takes climate change and the environment seriously? Yeah, it’s looking like you were hoodwinked by a man who really does seem to be worse than Harper.

See, on Friday, the government launched two discussion papers to engage Canadians over a 30-day period on proposed reforms to laws that try to reform how we build major projects — including pipelines — in Canada

I know. Sounds boring as shit. But stuff that sounds boring as shit is often exactly where you find little important nuggets hidden in the fine print.

See, the government is looking for feedback on proposals they are actively hoping to enact. They’re going to consult for 30 days, then they plan to move “quickly” to introduce legislation.

So now is the time to speak out, before the stuff listed in this discussion paper becomes the law of the land.

And oh boy, are folks speaking out.

I spoke with Anna Johnston, a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law. She told me that what Carney’s government has been doing on the environmental file and is proposing to do in this discussion paper is “outrageous.”

In fact, she called it “the single biggest evisceration of environmental laws in Canadian history” adding that “it is worse than what Harper did in 2012 when he shredded our environmental safety net”

So what, exactly, is happening here?

In today’s video, I’ll break it all down — including exclusive audio from my interview with Steven Guilbeault.

Well, according to a new report from Pew Research Centre, you’re not alone.

They just dropped a huge study analyzing more than 12,000 social media accounts from nearly 7,000 health and wellness influencers, all of whom had at least one account with more than 100,000 on either YouTube, Instagram or TikTok. They also conducted two separate surveys, each canvassing over 5000 U.S. adults

What they found was really interesting — and a bit worrying.

It turns out a lot of people are getting health and wellness information from social media influencers and podcasts. Specifically, about 40 per cent of U.S adults, and about half of U.S. adults under 50.

That doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Social media is just another tool for communication, so as long as it’s communicated well, and the evidence and due diligence is there, what’s the issue?

But that’s the question, right — who are these influencers, and are they staying in their lane?

Well, according to the research from Pew, less than half of these health and wellness influencers, 41 per cent, describe themselves as any kind of actual healthcare professional in their bio.

That’s also a pretty broad category. Like, Pew included chiropractors and naturopaths under that umbrella. Just 17 per cent of these influencers are in conventional medicine.

Meanwhile, 31 per cent say they’re coaches while another 28 per cent say they’re entrepreneurs. 16 per cent have no credentials listed at all.

In today’s video, we’ll break down the rest of these findings and discuss what they mean for who gets to access safe, reliable health information — and which communities appear to be underserved.

According to the press release from the ACLU, the Department of Homeland Security “issued an administrative demand for these records shortly after the plaintiff posted online criticism of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis.”

The ACLU is arguing that DHS is “exceeding its legal power by demanding vast swaths of information about the critic’s life.”

And they are asking for a LOT of information.

See, this Canadian twitter user — who is given the title “John Doe” in the complaint — posts extensively about politics on both Twitter and other social media platforms

And to “protect himself and his family from harassment,” he “posts under a pseudonym.”

“This has given him greater comfort in criticizing a powerful public figure: the President of the United States,” the complaint states.

“Mr. Doe strongly opposes President Trump’s policies and has said so on multiple platforms, condemning the President’s actions and those of his administration in posts that are passionate and even sometimes off-color but never contain threats or incite violence. Mr. Doe’s posts collectively have received well over 100,000 views.”

But that account on Twitter is linked to his email — specifically, his Gmail.

According to the complaint, on February 4, DHS issued an administrative summons to Google.

That summons, which Google sent to our John Doe on February 9, requested that Google produce not just any “associated accounts” with his Gmail, but also any associated “names, residential addresses, telephone numbers, and credit card numbers or bank account numbers.”

The complaint notes that Google “has the capacity to collect all information sought under the first information request and often does.”

The summons also seeks John Doe’s “location information,” which the complaint argues could provide “a detailed picture of Mr. Doe’s physical movements, identifying where he eats, sleeps, prays, or protests.”

It doesn’t stop there.

In today’s video, I’ll tell you all about this case — and I’ll tell you what the ACLU told me in a statement about the threat this poses for Canadians.

I have to say, the depth of human cruelty required to put on this kind of conference is pretty incredible.

See, on Friday, I was in Ottawa to host a conversation with Yasuko Thanh, in which we discussed Hassan Kanafani’s book: Pizza Before We Die.

The book is a collection of eyewitness accounts written by a man living in Gaza during Israel’s genocide. It documents the very human, day-to-day reality of living through some of the worst horrors of our lifetime.

It breaks through all the noise and reminds you of a simple fact: what Israel is doing in Gaza is indefensible on every level.

In today’s video, I plan to read you an excerpt from this book.

Then, we’re going to contrast the words you hear against this effort — soon to arrive in Toronto-area conference room — that seeks to demonize people who oppose those horrors.

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Holy fucking shit.

For context, the population of Alberta is just over 5 million people. Like, including babies and stuff. So this is the personal information over more than half of all of the people who live in Alberta!

This is a very very very big deal!

Before I say anything else, the most important thing to know is that a judge has already granted an injunction forcing this group, which is called the Centurion Project, to pull down the information.

The counsel for Elections Alberta, Joey Redman, told a judge this morning that the electoral list contains “incredibly confidential” information.

I got my hands on the audio of that court hearing, and while I can’t play it for you, I can tell you all about it.

Independent journalist Jeremy Appel first broke this story for his publication, the Orchard.

• READ JEREMY’S STORY HERE

He witnessed an Elections Alberta official show up to the launch of the Centurion Project, where the official told the group they’re under investigation for allegedly accessing the province’s list of electors.

As Jeremy wrote, only official political parties, MLAs, constituency associations and candidates are permitted to obtain the list of electors.

That’s for a very good reason.

The list contains some seriously private information, including voters’ names, addresses, phone numbers and voter registration numbers — so there are some very strict rules about how you can use that information.

But these guys allegedly turned that information into a searchable database for the purposes of recruiting people into the separatist cause.

Clearly, they didn’t stop to consider whether any of those three million Albertans is hiding from an abusive partner, or being stalked, or otherwise has safety concerns that make them vulnerable if their address is available to anyone who signed up for this project!!!

So yeah. This story is absolutely wild.

But how did this happen? Well, the court audio helps to paint that picture — and in today’s video, I’ll tell you all about that and more.

See, at a time when the gap between Canada’s richest and poorest residents is wider than it’s been in Statistics Canada’s entire recorded history, you’d think that would be one of the most pressing economic indicators to deal with.

But a senior economist with the Canadian Labour Congress, DT Cochrane, told me when I reached out that “Carney’s policies will only make inequality even worse.”

There have been a lot of headlines related to yesterday’s Spring Economic Update.

There’s been a drop to the deficit, which now sits at $67 billion, there’s a new program to train up 100,000 skilled trades workers, there’s also money to expand access to sports, a CPP premium cut, a streamlining of the disability tax credit application process, a jump in federal debt servicing costs, as well as a ban on crypto ATMs.

Are you asleep? Yeah, I don’t blame you. Because there’s not a ton for the average worker to get excited about in here.

But beyond being pretty uninspiring, there are also some genuinely worrying aspects. For example, it seems the government is going to privatize more publicly owned assets, including airports.

In today’s video, with the help of DT Cochrane, we’ll talk about Canada’s economic vision under Mark Carney.

Spoiler: it doesn’t look like that wealth gap is going to be fixed anytime soon.

It started when I noticed a familiar name showing up on my Twitter timeline: Harrison Faulkner. He had worked for Juno “News” when it was still True North, and I had previously exposed in 2024 that he had been seen “hanging out” with members of Diagolon.

He had also, among other things, been liking posts with racial slurs for South Asian people, all while covering South Asian immigration a ton for True North.

That’s just a taste of that dude’s behaviour.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Anita Anand, sharing a clip Harrison had posted. She deleted after I posted context about whose clip she was sharing.

But I don’t blame her for not realizing who had curated the clip she amplified.

In fact, I was suddenly seeing his clips all over my timeline, shared by some folks who I doubt would have been cool with amplifying his account, had they known who he was.

Because Harrison was posting clips, straight up, with no editorialization. As a result, his clips — and therefore his account — were getting thousands of shares. This gave him access to greater reach and, arguably, trust — both of which he could capitalize on.

He’s not the only one doing this. Another is an account for a “non-partisan” website whose editor was, up until she started this latest gig, a staffer for Pierre Poilievre’s office.

In today’s video, I’ll tell you why I think we shouldn’t just pay attention to what we’re sharing online — but also who we’re sharing.