Canada

From Dec. 16, 2024, until May 16, 2025, Interpol led an operation across 90 countries, Operation Pangea XVII, that resulted in the seizure of 50.4 million doses of illicit pharmaceuticals worth more than $88 million, with 769 suspects arrested and 123 criminal groups dismantled worldwide, the largest seizures and arrests in the organization’s history.

“Fake and unapproved medications are a serious risk to public health. They can include dangerous or illegal ingredients potentially resulting in severe illness, or even death,” said David Caunter, director pro tempore of organized and emerging crime at Interpol.

In Canada’s case, Health Canada inspected 19,193 packages coming into the country, stopping 7,096 from entering and seizing another 539 at the border suspected of containing counterfeit or otherwise unauthorized health products worth an estimated $378,000.

About 69 per cent of the seized products were sexual enhancement medications, and another 10 per cent were supplements, including herbal and dietary forms.

About four per cent were veterinary and antiparasitic drugs, two per cent were hormones, two per cent were antibiotics and one per cent were weight loss drugs.

ON MAY 26, Alberta announced that it was entering the book-banning business. “Multiple books found in some school libraries show extremely graphic and age-inappropriate content,” warned a government press release. To save Alberta’s children from this material, the government promised to act: first, by inviting Albertans to provide feedback on what is “acceptable for school library collections,” and second, by setting province-wide standards that every school board will be required to implement before classes resume in the fall.

When The Tyee pointed out that three of the four targeted books featured LGBTQ+ narratives, Minister of Education and Childcare Demetrios Nicolaides shot back: “The fact that our actions of protecting young students from seeing porn, child molestation, self-harm and other sexual material in school libraries are being labelled as anti-LGBTQ is frankly irresponsible.”

Book banners can always be counted upon to deny that label while simultaneously invoking children’s innocence to justify the very censorship they disavow. “This isn’t about banning books,” Premier Danielle Smith posted on X. “It’s about protecting kids from graphic, sexually explicit content that has no place in a classroom.” (None of the books appear to have been part of any classroom curriculum, nor were students compelled to read them.)

For decades, successive conservative governments in Alberta have promised that technology will address the massive environmental threat posed by toxic oilsands mine wastewater stored in tailings ponds near Fort McMurray, now so large they are more than twice the size of Vancouver.

On June 12, Alberta’s Environment Ministry released a report by its government-appointed Oilsands Mine Water Steering Committee. One of the committee’s five major policy recommendations was to consider allowing companies to inject untreated wastewater deep underground, “once all other options have been fully explored.”

This recommendation would have come as no surprise to Calgary-based Aqua Solutions Inc. The oilsands infrastructure company wants to use its deep-well injection technology to store billions of litres of mine wastewater underground.

Nor would it surprise environmentalists, academics and others who have long complained about the intertwined, conflict-laden relationship between the oilsands industry and the Alberta government.

Premier Doug Ford says Ontario will try to hit its climate change targets by 2030, despite internal documents suggesting the province is not on track to meet the emissions reduction goals.

Ford was responding to a report from CBC News that shows the province is projected to miss a key climate change target by three megatonnes of emissions in 2030. The premier said Ontario is working hard to hit the mark and committing to nuclear energy as a way to help green the province's electricity grid.

"Our goal is always to hit 100 per cent and we'll do it as quickly as possible," Ford said on Friday. "That's our goal, and that's what we're going to do. We're going to do our very best to achieve it."

We just threw $7 billion onto Trump’s poker table—the expected five-year haul from the DST —simply to keep playing a rigged game with no clear end. What was gained here?

The money these companies earn from online ad revenues—and by selling our personal data (including our search habits)—is virtually untaxed. This is because, like many multinational companies, Google, Meta, Amazon, Airbnb and other online platforms can register their global profits in low-tax jurisdictions.

While U.S. officials in the Democratic and Republican parties accuse the DST of discriminating against U.S. firms—“to stifle American innovation,” according to Commerce Secretary Lutnick today—the tax would have applied to firms of any nationality, and only on revenues above $20 million.

Trade watchers have always suspected Canada was holding on to the DST mainly for negotiating purposes. It was something generally positive for Canada that could nonetheless plausibly be negotiated away for some meaningful purpose, perhaps in the planned six-year review of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) that replaced NAFTA under the first Trump presidency. Prime Minister Carney admitted this was the plan in a press scrum today (June 30).

The Canadian government, in playing that card early, has depleted Canada’s digital sovereignty and federal revenues, for no apparent reason other than to keep Trump sweet. In doing so, we will undermine efforts in Europe and elsewhere to develop national digital services taxes in the absence of a viable international alternative.

Worse than that, the Canadian government has legitimated Trump’s pointless and highly destructive trade warfare at a possible turning point.

Their demands:

• Eliminating the oil and gas emissions cap
• Repealing or Overhauling Environmental Impact Assessment when it comes to natural ressources (mines, pipelines, fracking).
• Getting rid of clean electricity regulations
• Abandoning the electric vehicles mandate
• Lifting the oil tanker ban off the pacific coast
• Stop regulations preventing commercial free speech (“greenwashing”)
• Repeal any federal regulation against plastics

Source: https://www.saskatchewan.ca/government/news-and-media/2025/june/18/united-in-call-for-change-joint-statement

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/47246359

Quoting from the page:

The B.C. Government commits to open ways of working to transform into a Digital Government. We leverage GitHub to achieve our objective. Our open practices let us to share source code and non-sensitive data with our government developer community and partners.

Within the Ministry of Citizens’ Services, the Developer Experience team’s purpose is offering the best support possible to developer teams. We centralize, streamline and innovate developer resources so we can contribute towards quick project starts, and facilitate continuous improvement.

Although developers work deeper in the government ecosystems, their deliverables are crucial to building public trust. Whether top-down or collaborative, developers finalize a vision by building products that both government workers and public can interact with. Joining our community

We look forward to working with you! Our team manages the centralized resource for government developers called DevHub. It has instructions for joining the bcgov organization.

If you have any questions or concerns, please submit a support request.

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It has been an absolute pleasure and honor to be able to spend the last three months up here! Truly wonderful country.

Today in addition to Canada Day is also Inundation Day, where a controlled explosion destroyed the homes of 12 communities along the St Lawrence Seaway in 1958. The villages disappeared into St Lawrence Lake. This project captures stories of survivors and has aerial photos of what remains.

Feel free to share updates from how you're spending the day, either in this thread or as a separate post. Thank you all for being here :)

Image Credits: Crisco 1492, Wikimedia Commons