Canada

Alberta recently reached the highest oil production in history.

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2175213/albertas-oilsands-to-hit-record-production-high-in-2025

Why are Albertan oil communities so angry? If oil production boomed under Justin Trudeau, why do they claim he hurt Alberta?

This Reuters article explains what's really going on. It's not for workers. It's for rich investors. Yet there is plenty of interesting content.

Basically, Alberta oil executives brag they engaged in massive labor cost-cutting (firing people) and they replaced unionized workers by robots and automation

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-canadas-oil-sands-transformed-into-one-north-americas-lowest-cost-plays-2025-07-16/

This explains the amount of anger coming out from Alberta.

The Alberta oil economy is thriving. It's the people who aren't.

Many Alberta oil communities lost their well paying jobs. But they (wrongly) believe it's because environmental laws / Justin Trudeau reduced Alberta oil production.

Danielle Smith and the separatists perfectly understand this.

I fell down this wormhole while I was home sick a few months ago. Pretty incredible to see footage of these search-and-rescue operations.

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Those include a new 25 per cent tariff on all steel products that contain metal melted and poured in China by the end of the month.

Canada will also impose import quotas based on how much steel was imported from each country in 2024, with countries that don't have a free-trade agreement with Canada already in place impacted more than those that do.

Imports that exceed these quotas will be charged a 50 per cent tariff rate.

Carney said Canada's steel industry will be among the most impacted by the ongoing global rearrangement of markets because it is one of the most open in the world for steel and the industry must be protected.

"Imports supply almost two-thirds of current Canadian consumption of steel, compared to less than one-third for the United States and less than one-sixth for the European Union," Carney said.

[...]

The prime minister said Canada must rely more on "Canadian steel, for Canadian projects."

[...]

Don't come back!

I had a gut reaction when reading this headline. The covid conspiracy crowd has often abused injury program forms and statistics to create disinformation, and that is a part of this story, but there's more to this story than just that.

Summary:

A five-month-long Global News investigation of the Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP), involving more than 30 interviews with current and former Oxaro employees, injured claimants and their attorneys, uncovered allegations that the company was unequipped to deliver fully on the program’s mission, questions about why the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) chose this company over others, and internal documents that suggest poor planning from the start.

Other excerpts are copied below, please see the original article in case I introduced any biases while picking out excerpts:

The federal government has launched a compliance audit to determine if an Ottawa consulting company is mismanaging the Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP), and Public Health Agency of Canada officials made a surprise visit to the firm’s offices in mid-June, Global News reported on July 3.

There have been 11,702 reports of serious adverse events following a COVID-19 vaccination, according to Health Canada.

That’s equal to 0.011 per cent of the 105,015,456 doses administered as of December 2023.

Note the "per cent". So that is 11702/105015456 = 0.0001114...

“The government stepped in and gave Canadians an assurance that any injuries or death, as a matter of fact, that were caused by the vaccines would be fully compensated by a program that was accessible. I would say that the program that the Liberal government did finally implement is failing Canadians utterly,” said interim NDP Leader Don Davies.

Then-prime minister Justin Trudeau announced the Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) in December 2020.

The effort, which began six months later, aimed to support people who have been seriously and permanently injured by any Health Canada-authorized vaccine administered in the country on or after Dec. 8, 2020.

Approved claimants could receive lump sum injury or death payouts, ongoing income replacement, and reimbursement of medical expenses.

But instead of the government operating VISP, as is done with similar programs in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, Canada elected to outsource the work.

In March 2021, the government hired Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton Consulting Inc. — now called Oxaro Inc. — to administer the program.

The challenges began soon after it launched.

In response to a 15-page list of questions, the company said, “The VISP is a new and demand-based program with an unknown and fluctuating number of applications and appeals submitted by claimants.”

“The program processes, procedures and staffing were adapted to face the challenges linked to receiving substantially more applications than originally planned,” Oxaro added.

“Timelines for a determination of eligibility and support will depend on the nature and complexity of the claim. All claims will be individually assessed by medical experts. The process will include a review of all required and relevant medical documentation, as well as current medical evidence, to determine if there is a probable link between the injury and the vaccine.”

[Kerry] Bowman [(bioethicist at the University of Toronto)] said the situation would only make vaccine hesitancy worse.

“The public will see, not only are some people pushing back on vaccines, but even if something goes wrong, you’re not going to get support I would argue that it’s going to feed into growing trends of vaccine hesitancy. That’s very problematic for all of us,” he said.

Both Strauss and Davies drew comparisons to the ArriveCan app program, which has faced scrutiny over the costs and contracting for the pandemic-era app.

Davies also cited the ArriveCan app as an example of what he described as a larger problem.

“I think this is part of a much broader problem that we’ve seen with the Liberal government over the last decade, really, which is an explosion in the use of outside consultants,” he said.

“I’d like to see the ministry take over this program. They’re at least accountable directly to the minister and to taxpayers. If the outside consultants can’t do it properly, it should be done by public servants who are in the ministry of health.”

Trump-aligned congresspeople aren’t spreading wildfire disinformation in a vacuum; American social media giants are enabling a haze of conspiracy theories and misinformation about the wildfires ravaging Canadian forests, and are disguising the fossil fuel industry's role in the crisis, researchers have found.

Link above is to CAAD's (Climate Action Against Disinformation) - Briefing: Canadian Wildfire Disinformation June 2025

ALT text: There's a figure in the post body taken from the Angus Reid poll link. It's a clustered bar graph outlining Canadians' preference for the government to take a "soft" versus "hard" approach in trade negotiations with Trump, given their vote in the 2025 federal election. Amongst Liberal, NDP, and Bloc voters 76-78% favour a "hard" approach with Trump, compared to only 46% of Conservative voters

The agency in charge of Montreal's parking meters is warning of potentially fraudulent QR codes posted on its signs.

The Agence de mobilité durable de Montréal said in a media release on Tuesday that it was aware that some of its signs had been vandalized with a QR code that wasn't supposed to be there.

The agency hung the signs on parking metres across the city to encourage people to download their new parking app, Mobicité. The signs have no QR code, but some users have reported seeing one posted on them.

Do not scan the QR code, the agency said, it may direct you to a fraudulent or malicious website.

"Our team is working hard to identify and remove them as quickly as possible," the media release said. "Thank you for your vigilance and for reporting any suspicious signs to us."

The agency changed its parking app from P$ Service mobile, which allowed users to pay for parking, to the new app, Mobicité, to allow additional features in the coming years.

For now, the Mobicité app will allow users to only pay for parking, like the old app did. But down the line, Laurent Chevrot, the general manager of the agency, says the app will add other functionalities over the next few years, such as the ability to provide parking information and customer service.

"With the other application, that wasn't possible," he said.

Mobicité rolled out at the beginning of June. It cost $719,000 and took 10 months to produce.