Canada

Federal cabinet ministers are being asked to find ... ways to reduce program spending by 7.5 per cent in the fiscal year that begins April 1, 2026, followed by 10 per cent in savings the next year and 15 per cent in the 2028-29 fiscal year.

I'm getting 90s vibes. Government cutbacks, threats of separation, climate change. It's all here.

But there's a modern twist: we're talking about 3C change in 2100, there's a housing crisis, our media landscape is dominated by tech bros, and the US is lost in the culture wars.

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It’s official: Premier Danielle Smith can now call herself Queen of Measles.

And not just in Alberta. Try North America.

That’s right. Alberta now leads the continent in a preventable childhood disease that leaves at least two of every 1,000 infections with severe intellectual disabilities, pneumonia or hearing loss. Or dead.

Stunningly, Alberta has already recorded nearly half a dozen cases of measles present at birth in the province.

And every measles infection leaves a child with a disabled immune system, stripped of memory about how to fight other routine infections. As a result, any unvaccinated child who battles measles will probably be sicklier, possibly for years afterwards. Brazilian researchers recently found a high correlation between having measles and later dying of another infectious disease.

For a decade, Vancouver city managers knew an employee in the building inspection department was part owner of a private company that did work frequently checked by city inspectors.

That employee and the city staff he managed often inspected the company’s work, and a conflict-of-interest investigation found the employee, “in their capacity as a city inspector, personally made decisions about the private sector business they owned in four instances.” None of those decisions were “unfavourable” to the business, the report said.

The employee also said he’d been offered, but refused, a bribe from another contractor. An analysis by the city’s Office of the Auditor General, or OAG, found the contractor had appeared to receive preferential treatment from the employee.

On the day a month-long trial for a man accused of "significant" human trafficking was set to begin, the Crown's case fell apart over a technicality.

Christian Vitela, 37, and his defence lawyer had not received all disclosure or evidence related to the case in the years leading up to the criminal trial, assistant Crown attorney Heather Palin said on April 23.

Vitela hadn't accessed all phone records of the migrant workers he was charged with trafficking — the phones had been seized by the RCMP and were "typically core disclosure in human trafficking prosecutions," said Vitela's lawyer, Tobias Okada-Phillips.

The RCMP, which initially laid nine human trafficking charges against Vitela in 2019, have a different version of events. It includes that they notified Vitela on several occasions that the information was available, and set up a room and computer for him to view the materials, but he never showed up.

Canada seems to be headed toward a two party system. I think it's extremely important that we as Canadians push for electoral reform as quickly as possible.

On Thursday Registered Nurses’ Union President Yvette Coffey took aim at [Newfoundland and Labrador] Premier John Hogan, who has yet to publicly address the healthcare scandal, which [Auditor General] Hanrahan says has resulted in the province paying upward of $400,000 on average per agency nurse over the past couple of years.

NL Health Services, the province’s health authority, spent $241-million on agency nurses between 2022 and 2024, according to the auditor general. That’s up to four times the salary of local registered nurses, PC leader Tony Wakeham has argued. “Public nurses were denied benefits, pushed into arbitration over overtime, and treated as an afterthought,” Wakeham said last week. “The Premier, who once served as both Minister of Health and Attorney General, has remained absent and silent, even as the AG pointed to potential criminality and conflict of interest.”

Six months.

That's all it took for the Trump regime to make the move from kidnapping people on the street, to threatening to strip political enemies of citizenship, to selling swag celebrating the construction of an American concentration camp.

Six months.

And Republicans say that merch promoting the newly built Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp is "going like hot cakes."

Some detractors have called the camp Alligator Auschwitz, but this may not be the most accurate comparison. Not yet anyway. Because the death camps didn’t just appear; it took years of increasing brutality and degradation before they got to Auschwitz.

It began at Dachau.