Elections Canada is ordering millions of ballot box seals in case of a 2026 general election, a spokesperson said. It would be the fourth national campaign in seven years: "Is it time to go?" READ MORE
Petition Says Face The Voters
Parliamentary floor-crossers would face a mandatory byelection under a Commons petition sponsored by Conservative MP Lianne Rood (Middlesex-London, Ont.). Floor-crossing in the aftermath of the last general election was “raising concerns of opportunism over principle,” wrote petitioners. READ MORE
NDP Blames Costly Mistakes
New Democrats in a final report on the 2025 election campaign conclude the Party was “too closely linked” to Justin Trudeau and out of touch with taxpayers. The report did not single out then-leader Jagmeet Singh for specific criticism, but stated: “It is indisputable that Conservative messaging on jobs and identity is resonating with many workers.” READ MORE
Gov’t Bending On Plastic Ban
Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin on Saturday served legal notice that cabinet will again allow the manufacture of straws and other plastic goods in Canada, but only for export to the United States: "A prohibition on export would result in economic harms." READ MORE
Border Land Claim Untested
A federal judge has dismissed a bid by a U.S. Indigenous group to delay expansion of the Port of Vancouver, largest in the nation. However the Federal Court sidestepped a larger issue of whether Indigenous Americans from border states have rights in Canada: 'These are questions for another day.' READ MORE
A Sunday Poem: “Greta”
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom, writes: "She is the Swedish teenager who crossed the Atlantic in a zero-emission voyage. Making a statement about the carbon footprint of planes..." READ MORE
Review – The Last Stop In Vancouver
The Depression, not the war, left the deepest scars on an entire generation of Canadians. Survivors carried indelible memories of the collapse of capitalism. My mother, raised on a Manitoba farmstead, years afterward could not bear to throw out tin foil pie plates: “That’s wasteful,” she warned. My father-in-law cursed TV episodes of The Waltons that depicted poor but cheerful townsfolk who had love, if not money: “It wasn’t anything like that,” he muttered. “I was there and it wasn’t like that.” The broad strokes of the Depression years are part of the nation’s memory, preserved in schoolbook texts and grainy newsreels: hobos on freight cars, police on horseback, dust storms and factory closures. Yet it’s the fine details that paint the most vivid picture of whole communities brought to their knees by an economic calamity unmatched in its cruelty. Historian Todd McCallum of Dalhousie University has written a startling book. Hobohemia documents the Dustbowl Years in British Columbia, a “homeland for beggars,” he calls it, where thousands of jobless settled in shantytowns at the railways' last stop. “Everywhere I turned, archives offered me dusty examples of a multitude of ways of seeing the hobo jungle as an island unto itself, something simultaneously connected to and separate from ‘society,’ whatever one took that to mean.” READ MORE
Guest Commentary
I went to Canadian Tire for some Christmas shopping. On my way out of the store a hot dog vendor said, “Did you see the police lights? There must have been an accident.” And I replied, “Isn’t that a shame, just before Christmas.” The police called the house later that evening. Maybe they were excited school was over for the holidays. Maybe the music was a little too loud. They made a bad left turn at a busy intersection and collided with a fuel truck. The impact blasted the car apart.
