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At a news conference on Thursday, police shared the podium with Indigenous leaders and frontline service providers — signalling a new approach in which the service will continue enforcement but work more closely with outreach workers who are helping people access health care, shelter and other supports.

“The marked difference you’re going to see will be the addition of the community outreach teams working with uniform officers to provide connections to resources and services or to assist those in need right there, right at the time,” Winnipeg Police Chief Gene Bowers said at the news conference at the Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre.

Winnipeg police originally launched the controversial 10-day crackdown on the open use and trafficking of illegal drugs on June 24, assigning roughly 12 to 15 additional officers to areas where they said open drug use was most prevalent — primarily downtown.

The operation caught frontline workers by surprise.

Jackie Anderson, executive director of Ka Ni Kanichihk, said a community coalition of urban Indigenous organizations and non-Indigenous allied organizations formed as a direct result of the first police sweep. Now, the coalition will work alongside the police using an Indigenous model of care.

“This model recognizes that many of our relatives remain on the streets because of trauma, complex needs and a lack of accessible resources. And it’s not because they want to be there,” Anderson said.

The goal, she said. is to connect people with the services they need, including emergency shelter, help navigating systems, detox and treatment and, where appropriate, reunification with family or home communities.

Anderson said the approach will be guided by people with lived experience, saying those she calls “our relatives” are the experts on what they need.

“A key strength of this partnership is the shared commitment between the Winnipeg Police Service and Indigenous organizations to work together in a way that recognizes and builds on each partner’s strengths. Indigenous organizations lead the engagement through their trusted relationships, cultural knowledge and lived experience, while police provide support and resources where appropriate,” Anderson said.

Police said the 10-day crackdown operation resulted in 106 arrests, including 93 people arrested on warrants or for breaching conditions. Officers also laid five drug-possession charges and three drug-trafficking charges and transported seven people to the new Protective Care Centre.

They added that property crime fell 11 per cent , violent crime 17 per cent and emergency calls 6 per cent in the target area, while cautioning the 10-day operation was too short to prove a lasting effect.

“Police listened to community partners, community partners spoke, and here we have people, agencies and police coming together, which I think is a powerful message to our community and a powerful message to those who are in need,” Winnipeg Mayor Scott Gillingham said.

Police faced backlash over June enforcement

Police admitted today that they faced backlash over the controversial 10-day crackdown.

At the time, police and Gillingham said public complaints and safety concerns drove the operation, which aimed to stop open drug use in public spaces and target drug trafficking.

“While there was a great deal of support for the enforcement actions we undertook to address public safety issues, there was also criticism about the lack of collaboration. At that time, I acknowledged that community organizations should have been part of our efforts,” said Bowers.

Within two days of the crackdown, frontline workers began hearing concerns from clients, particularly along Main St., outside the access centre.

Outreach workers said they saw police detaining people experiencing homelessness, while clients reported officers confiscating and, in some cases, destroying harm-reduction supplies.

Police denied this. They said officers only seized items that contained illegal drugs, not unused needles or other harm-reduction equipment.

Read the full article here for free at APTN News : https://www.aptnnews.ca?p=292760

“Garden Hill is not asking to be rescued. We are asking to be resourced,” said Councillor Harvey Little from Garden Hill Anisininew Nation.

The chiefs were in Winnipeg to declare a regional public health emergency and call on the provincial and federal governments to enter a sustained, treaty-based partnership with the Anisininew Okimawin Grand Council.

The declaration was supported by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, Four Arrows Regional Health Authority and the Manitoba Anisininew Mobile Addictions Network, known as MAMAN.

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The First Nations are asking for a commitment to build a treatment and healing centre in their territory, immediate detox and stabilization capacity for the Island Lake region, housing investments to address and overcrowding. They’re also calling for a meeting within 30 days with Premier Kinew, the federal government and the nation at one table.

“These are not failures of our people. These are failures of access to testing, to medication, and to the follow-up that keeps people in care. Behind every unsuppressed viral load is a person who could not get to a clinic, could not keep a medication routine or could not be reached for blood work that tells us whether treatment is working,” said Little.

“Garden Hill is not asking to be rescued. We are asking to be resourced,” said Little.

The crisis is impacting all four northern communities, and the statistics are alarming.

Since 2017, leaders said 93 HIV diagnoses have been recorded across the four nations. St. Theresa Point has had an active HIV outbreak since December 2021, while Garden Hill had an outbreak formally declared in January 2026.

The opioid and toxic drug supply crisis is also changing, with stimulant-related deaths exceeding opioid-related deaths in Manitoba in 2025, health professionals said at the conference.

Stimulants include drugs such as methamphetamine or cocaine that speed up the body and brain. Health officials say the toxic drug supply is becoming harder to predict because deaths may involve stimulants, opioids or combinations of both.

As the unregulated drug supply becomes unpredictable, it has become more difficult for remote communities and the clinics trying to respond.

Read more for Free at APTNnews: https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/first-nations-declare-regional-public-health-emergency-in-manitoba-over-toxic-drug-supply-hiv-and-housing-crisis/

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Remember Black Mirror? The Twilight Zone-style show that imagined what happens when technology takes one more perfectly sensible step forward, only to shatter everyday life into something darker, more invasive, and weirder.

In Season 6’s “Joan Is Awful,” Joan has a normal, messy day — fires someone at work, sees her therapist, meets her ex — then comes home to find it has all been secretly recorded, and her life has been packaged into a show on Streamberry, a popular video service.

Only “TV Joan” is meaner, bitchier, crueller than real-life Joan, whose every decision is rewritten for the made-for-TV villain version of herself.

Joan becomes someone the public feels entitled to hate. Her fiancé leaves her. Her boss fires her over something TV Joan did.

Joan sees a lawyer to ask how this can possibly be legal.

Surprise: turning her life into a TV show was in the terms and conditions of her Streamberry subscription. She checked the ‘I agree ’ box, without reading them, as most of us do.

The reason none of us reads the long pages of small-print legalese before clicking is that we don’t really feel we have a choice if we want the service, especially when no viable alternative has popped up. And even if there is an alternative, they most likely have the same terms anyway.

It’s been a rare occasion when people have held the line and forced an app or platform to change anything. One of the few was Uber, which removed the iPhone setting that let riders share their location “only while using the app” in 2016. Uber restored that option only after people objected. It was a young and more vulnerable company at the time.

For the most part, we have accepted that the price of modern life is some loss of privacy: they know where we are, what we buy, who we talk to, and probably which ex we looked up at 1:17 am.

That is not great, but it feels like the deal.

The Mars Clause

But I never expected to see a requirement in a service agreement about how to govern a future settlement on Mars.

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Forgive me if you have already dug into this, but I only saw it recently.

I presumed the alleged ‘Mars clause’ in the Starlink agreement was just an internet meme or one of those disinformation myths that survives because Elon Musk is plausibly weird enough and Mars-obsessed enough that nobody bothered to check.

Then, I checked.

It is real.

In fact, I read and checked the Starlink site three times before I hit publish, still thinking it was a fake. I am still waiting for someone to say it’s just a Starlink prank, and I have fallen for it, because it is just so bizarre.

On Starlink’s webpage, the user agreement says that, for services on Mars or en route, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activity.

Apparently, we now have to read satellite-internet contracts to make sure someone has not quietly written a constitution for Mars.

Fortunately, Cristian van Eijk, a doctoral researcher at Newcastle Law School who writes about international space law, is reassuring everyone, although we probably already knew, that the clause is not enforceable.

A company cannot declare a planet free of every Earth government, or appoint itself the government of Mars.

In fact, the United States signed a treaty stating that Mars cannot be claimed by any country, and that it remains responsible for supervising American companies operating in space.

The Mars clause is funny because it is so completely Elon Musk: a small, insane declaration from a man who has made colonizing Mars part of his personal mythology.

The less funny part of this is that we all know the companies have become so powerful - socially and politically.

The people running them are as powerful as governments, but not publicly elected and they answer first to investors, boards, and the market.

We started out using Facebook to keep up with cousins and find out who from high school had gotten divorced. The reality of X is a long, long way from the wonder-filled days when we imagined how Netscape and email would change our world for the better.

We’ve all seen platforms shape political debate, fuel harassment, reward outrage, and keep children scrolling long after any sensible adult would have told them to go outside.

And while we are critical of the ethics of the CEOs who run the companies, the reality is that any one of these companies could be sold, merged, or handed over to someone much worse tomorrow. The CEOs have enough money and power to influence election outcomes if they want to.

We are living on the edge of a Black Mirror episode, where the tech we created, hoping to democratize speech and connect family, friends and even strangers around the world, could take a much darker turn any minute.

We have already handed over our locations, contacts, faces, voices, searches, shopping habits and private messages, often without really knowing where that information goes, how long it stays there or what power it gives the companies collecting it.

Without getting too deep into it, I am happy to see governments draw a red line by insisting on age restrictions on certain platforms, like Australia has done, and Britain and Canada are planning to do.

I recognize the arguments against it.

Enforcing an age limit means all of us must provide proof of identity to some gatekeeper, whether that’s a social media company, a government agency, or a crown corporation.

It will kill the perfect anonymity we enjoy on some platforms.

There are also real privacy questions about connecting real-life identity to online social media. On the bright side, maybe it will have a happy side effect of reducing anonymous libel, trolling, harassment, threats of violence and hate speech.

In the arguments against age restrictions, companies like Meta argue such laws are useless because kids will find a way around them.

And I agree, they will. Much like kids do with age restrictions on pot, alcohol, vaping and smoking.

But I don't think we should make the leakage the point.

The point is, we have to push back on something, and we should start before we move further into the new AI era, in which companies are operating without guardrails.

I know the Mars clause is not serious. It is just a bit of Elon Musk’s grandiose conceit tucked into a satellite-internet contract. And I know nobody is actually being asked to anoint Musk president of Mars by clicking “agree” to Starlink’s terms — even in my current nervous state about all things political in the United States.

But it does throw into sharp relief how much of our lives we have become conditioned into handing over to companies for their benefit, when all we really wanted to do was read some news, poke a friend on Facebook, and scroll through endless pictures of kittens.

A few excellent free podcasts on Musk

• Elon’s Spies

• The making of Elon Musk

Sources:

Australia’s social media ban for children has left big tech scrambling

Are teen social media bans a silver bullet?

Britain to introduce legislation to ban under-16s on social media, Starmer says

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act

Britain to use legislation to ban under-16s from social media Starmer says

Elon Musk Postpones Mars Plans in Favor of Building “Moon City”

Sorry, Elon: Mars is not a legal vacuum – and it’s not yours, either

Starlink Terms of Service

First: My sympathy to the police officers killed and wounded, the families of the deceased, and to the community of Côte-des-Neiges shaken by these events.

In the bad old days, we published everything.

The public had a right to know, and that was more or less the end of the discussion.

We knew attention could feed these people. We knew murder could become spectacle.

We published it anyway.

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As early as the 1970s, “copycat crime” was already familiar to journalists and in popular culture.

You could see it in cop shows and murder movies, but also in newsrooms, where reporters took deep dives into the minds of killers, armed with pop psychology and the hope that enough detail might make the unthinkable intelligible.

It rarely did.

When A Clockwork Orange came out in 1971, British tabloids blamed a series of alleged copycat attacks on the film. The evidence was thin. The panic was not.

What it exposed was a question nobody could neatly settle: can a violent work become part of a violent person’s story, giving shape to something already forming? Or are we, afterward, simply desperate to find a cause that makes sense?

Then came books like Helter Skelter, the 1974 bestseller about the Manson murders. It made murder a mass-market story. The trial became part of the culture. So did Manson.

That is how it happens. The killer expands. Everyone else begins to recede.

And that brings us to the more important question.

Whose story are you telling?

And therein lies the debate: Publishing a killer’s manifesto gives them the attention they wanted. It is also bad journalism to make the killer the centre of the story. These post-mortem dives into someone’s mind rarely provide accurate insight. Finally, there is now stronger evidence that focusing on the killer and their ideas leads to copycat violence and make people less safe.

What is the public interest in covering the killer over the victim?

I would argue there is none.

We saw where the old approach led with missing and murdered women.

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Most Canadians know the name of the serial killer in B.C. who primarily targeted Indigenous women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Far fewer could name the women whose lives and deaths became part of the case where multiple women were murdered on a pig farm: Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Georgina Faith Papin, Marnie Frey and Brenda Ann Wolfe—the six women he was convicted of killing—or the more than 20 other victims whose cases never went to trial.

There is a great deal written about the killer’s mind. His farm. His family. His childhood. The attempts to explain him.

But journalists are meant to report in the public interest. And the public interest was never in trying to diagnose one man’s mental state, or untangling whatever private logic allows a killer to make violence make sense to himself.

The questions that mattered in every case are larger than the killer. In the B.C. Case we should have asked: Why were women disappearing from the Downtown Eastside without a serious response? Why were families’ concerns dismissed? Why did warnings go nowhere? Why did so many women’s cases never see a courtroom?

Those questions lead somewhere.

They lead to the police failures: the delays, the refusals to investigate, the assumptions made about women whose lives were already treated as less valuable, or even disposable.

They lead to the politics around whose safety counted, and whose disappearance could be explained away.

They lead to the families who kept pushing when few others were listening, and to the changes that were eventually forced inside the police force, and even inside the media because the families would not stop.

That is journalism in the public interest. You report the facts that matter. You show people what failed, who was harmed, and what has led to, or can lead to, change.

Meanwhile, a deep dive into the killer’s inner life or mental health does little to protect people.

By 2022, things had changed, and we saw that in Winnipeg.

The question of whether to search the Prairie Green landfill for the remains of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran became a major issue in Manitoba’s 2023 election. Their families had spent months asking governments to bring them home.

The debate was about cost and risk. But in the end, the initial decision was made based on whether two First Nations women were worth the cost and effort of a search.

I know of no other election won or lost on the treatment of Indigenous women.

In Winnipeg, the coverage stayed with the investigation as it unfolded. Not in real time. Police do not show their work while they are building a case.

But as the evidence emerged, reporters traced the pattern, the work that led police to the killer, and the careful construction of a case strong enough to carry four murders into court.

That is public-interest reporting. How were these women failed? How did police finally find the person responsible?

And the story did not end with the conviction. It raised questions about the protection of vulnerable women and the issue of racism in the province’s highest institutions.

Journalists can report the facts that establish motive, where those facts are known.

Because most often the rest—the unhappy childhood, the loneliness, the neighbour who thought he seemed fine—rarely explains very much. There is no reliable pattern in those details. No clue how to prevent the next mental breakdown.

The public interest and public safety actually lie in examining where protection broke down: whether police saw a pattern, whether families were heard, whether courts and governments did their jobs, and what left women vulnerable in the first place.

It may matter if the individual is linked to a group that seeks to perpetuate violence.

Those are the things we can look at. Those are the things we can change.

What newsrooms have known for a long time, but only recently began to reconcile, is that in-depth coverage of serial killers’ or mass killers’ motives actually makes the public less safe.

The ‘copycat’ risk is real

Police have been saying it. Families have been saying it. And, in many cases, the people who commit these attacks have been saying it themselves.

A public manifesto is usually meant to do more than explain an attack.

As Kupper explains in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin article, “Preventing Attacks Using Targeted Violence Manifestos, a manifesto is often a recruitment document, created for public consumption:

“These narratives are often created for and accessible by a public audience in furtherance of inspiring its like-minded members and opposing groups to commit similar attacks (i.e., copycats),” she writes.

It lets the author frame their own motives, justify violence through personal grievances or extremist beliefs, and present themselves as acting for a larger political, religious or social cause.

In some cases, the writer is trying to cast themselves as a soldier or warrior and encourage others to see violence as part of that cause.

That matters before an attack, when a post or recording may be a warning sign. It matters afterward, when it may help establish motive.

However, while police may need the whole document, it does not mean the public does.

A 2015 study of mass killings and school shootings in the United States found that the larger, more high-profile events sometimes clustered in time. After one, another similar event was more likely in the days that followed. The authors said they found evidence of contagion.

This does not always mean that newsrooms are spreading the contagion.

A manifesto no longer needs a newsroom.

It can be posted on social media, passed around in group chats, copied onto forums and screenshotted into a hundred different places.

So editors hear the same argument they hear about graphic videos - like the recent one from Montreal that shows two people being shot: it is already online. People have already seen it. Why should we pretend our decision makes any difference?

The answer: because it does.

A newsroom gives it a larger audience. It gives it authority. It makes it easier to find, easier to share, and easier to come back to. It can turn something that should have disappeared into the usual online sludge into part of the public record.

And there is the other question. What does repeated exposure do to the rest of us?

How many times do people need to watch someone die before that begins to feel normal? How many times do we need to republish a killer’s words before we become part of the audience he was trying to reach?

Just because something is already moving through social media does not mean journalism has to help it travel farther.

Christchurch made that impossible to ignore.

In 2019, the attacker put his own manifesto and video into the world.

He did not need a broadcaster to distribute them.

But broadcasters and news sites still had to decide whether they would become another link in the chain.

New Zealand authorities moved to stop the material from spreading, and the attack helped lead to the Christchurch Call, an international effort, joined by Canada, to limit terrorist and violent extremist content online.

Families had been making a version of this argument long before.

After the Aurora theatre shooting, parents of victims launched No Notoriety.

They were not asking journalists to hide the facts, or stop naming a suspect when it was necessary. They were asking newsrooms to stop making the killer famous. To stop turning his face, his name and his own self-serving material into the centre of the story.

More journalists are finally getting this through our thick skulls.

The Radio Television Digital News Association advises against broadcasting a killer’s full rant or publishing an entire manifesto:

“Avoid sensational reporting and focus on contextual coverage. We recommend not broadcasting full audio or video of the killer’s ranting or publishing the full comments in a written manifesto. Summarizing the important material is far more useful than broadcasting the full versions, which may serve to propagate a killer’s bid for glory.”

That does not mean reporting nothing.

It is reporting what matters: that the document exists; what can be verified about motive or ideology; whether there were warning signs; whether police, courts or other institutions missed something; and what may need to change to protect people.

It means being careful and transparent.

That takes time.

It means reporting facts rather than speculation, working out what is actually in the public interest instead of running around waving our hands and shouting fire the instant a manifesto is put in our hands.

Keeping people informed and keeping them safe in a responsible way is more time-consuming than hitting a panic button.

For Montreal, that can mean reporting on the manifesto without hosting it, linking to it, or handing it a bigger platform than it already has.

What is the “right to know”?

The public has a right to know. That does not mean journalists should hit the panic button the moment raw information lands in front of us and throw it onto social media without thought.

Publishing the whole thing is not journalism. Its distribution.

Anyone can do that.

Of course, some journalists will always say: publish it all. Let the public decide.

But the public cannot decide what we put in front of them until after we have decided to put it there, along with any unknown risks that go with it.

Withholding the manifesto was not, as some people on social media claimed, a conspiracy by mainstream media to hide some kernel of truth from the public. Now that a few online outlets have published it, we can see how little more is there — and how little sense can be made of it. What we can’t measure yet is the risk to the public.

That is where public interest comes in.

The real work of journalism is deciding what it means, what can be verified, what serves the public interest, and what may cause harm if passed along wholesale.

Newsrooms make those decisions every day. We do not publish every graphic image. We do not repeat every racist slur. We do not pass along every allegation simply because someone made it.

Journalists should strive to keep people informed without making them less safe.

And we should take the time to find out what happened, rather than adding to the noise around it.

Journalistic codes increasingly pair the duty to seek and report the truth with a duty to minimize harm.

That is the thought that goes into the work.

And that is why so few media organizations decided to publish the manifesto.

Sources:

Core sources for the manifesto/copycat section

• FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Preventing Attacks Using Targeted Violence Manifestos
  https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/preventing-attacks-using-targeted-violence-manifestos

• Towers et al., Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings — PLOS One
  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0117259

• Radio Television Digital News Association, Mass Shootings guidance
  https://www.rtdna.org/mass-shootings

• Global Center for Journalism & Trauma, Covering Mass Killings
  https://gcjt.org/content/covering-mass-killings

• No Notoriety, founders’ Q&A and media protocol
  https://nonotoriety.com/about/

Christchurch / online distribution

https://www.christchurchcall.org/

• New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs, response to the 2019 Christchurch attack
  https://www.dia.govt.nz/Countering-Violent-Extremism-Governments-response-to-the-2019-Christchurch-terrorist-attack

• Government of Canada, Combatting online terrorist and violent extremist content
  https://www.canada.ca/en/public-safety-canada/news/2022/09/combatting-online-terrorist-and-violent-extremist-content.html

• Ethical Journalism Network, Ethical Lessons for Media in Coverage of the Terror Attacks in Christchurch
  https://ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/ethical-lessons-media-coverage-terror-attacks-christchurch

Journalism ethics / public-interest framing

• Canadian Association of Journalists, Ethics Guidelines
  https://caj.ca/wp-content/uploads/Ethics-Guidelines-v2023.pdf

• Society of Professional Journalists, Code of Ethics
  https://www.spj.org/spj-code-of-ethics/

Useful background on changing newsroom practice

• Nieman Journalism Lab, The news media seems to be heeding the call to limit naming perpetrators in mass shootings
  https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/the-news-media-seems-to-be-heeding-the-call-to-limit-naming-perpetrators-in-mass-shootings/

He could not have known then it would lead him here — trying to help First Nations get ahead of Canada’s next energy buildout, before decisions are made about the lines crossing their lands.

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The story about his mother goes that, 20 years ago, Port Alberni was looking for industry. There was talk of a smelter plant — the kind of heavy industry that promised jobs and economic diversification, but came with environmental costs Hupacasath First Nation did not want in its territory.

His mother, Judith Sayers, then chief of the Hupacasath First Nation, was not interested in simply opposing development. She wanted another answer.

Clean energy became that answer.

Sayers says his mother saw renewable energy as an industry that could align with Hupacasath values — something that could generate revenue and build relationships with other First Nations, the City of Port Alberni, private industry, and the province, without bringing the same environmental harms into their territory.

“ I really got to see my mom and my community get behind this project and saying, ‘This is what we want to do. We’re going go out and learn how to do it,’” he recalls.

It was not an easy sell back then.

At an industry conference, Sayers says, one man — who “will remain unnamed ” — told his mother First Nations would never build renewable energy projects because they were too complex.

His mom took that as a challenge. She dug into the process and learned how run-of-river hydro projects are built. She found suppliers, funders and pulled together partners.

Sayers remembers being a kid, sitting in their favourite local Chinese restaurant, Beijing, while his mother ordered food and made business deals across the table.

That was where he saw it happen.

Legwork. Paperwork. Dinner conversations and persistence.

The result was a small six-and-a-half megawatt project near Port Alberni.

Small by today’s standards, maybe, but big in its implications.

”Being able to build it on our terms and go out and to do it, and really show other nations that it can be done, and that’s what I really appreciate. What my mom did was that she showed other nations that it’s possible to go out and build a project on your own.”

These days, Sayers runs the Indigenous Power Coalition (IPC), a not-for-profit agency that consults with First Nations on transmission lines.

With Canada about to embark on a national electrification plan that will double energy output and infrastructure by 2050, some lines and towers will need to run through Indigenous lands.

Sayer says First Nations leaders should not wait to be consulted.

Instead, they should – like his mom – flip the script and develop their plans first, and present them to the government and industry.

The big build

The governments of B.C. and Alberta were already in talks about linking their electrical grids, building new steel towers, called interties, to connect them.

For just over a year, Sayers and the IPC had been meeting with chiefs to help them develop their own plans for the potential rollout.

It’s a complicated process.

What lands should be protected; what services, jobs, businesses, energy sources should they develop, and do they want to own a piece of the grid? What demands do they have to clean up for legacy infrastructure that was put on their lands in the past without consultation and how to navigate all the regulatory red tape around them?

It is in early stages, but if Sayer’s idea works, chiefs will form coalitions, develop their plan first, and non-Indigenous governments and businesses will then become the consultees.

IPC’s role is just to provide neutral information about the options available and how they work, says Sayers nothing is “pre-baked.”

IPC is Indigenous-led and Sayers is the founder. It’s funded by foundations and not connected to any government.

“ We want to flip that on its head and tell these utilities that First Nations want to have greater control on how these potential lines are designed, built, and governed. And that also includes having First Nations being able to have a say in what type of generation will be connecting to the grid, and the type of electrons will be moving along,” he said.

Read the rest free at APTN https://www.aptnnews.ca?p=288704

I know. Dark joke. First Nations and journalists are both known for gallows humour, and I have double jeopardy here. It’s a coping mechanism, and cheaper than therapy, which is good, because neither group is especially famous for being properly funded

.

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So my real news is this: I’m deeply grateful to the Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Journalism Foundation, which granted me significant funding through a fellowship to spend the next year reporting on the opioid crisis in First Nations. Deep gratitude also to APTN, my publishing partner.

I have been shopping for the idea for a deep dive into this topic for two years.

I have watched First Nations across Canada declare states of emergency. I have watched communities bury people. Meanwhile, politicians far away, who do not have to sit in the community hall after another death, turn treatment, harm reduction and enforcement into ideological arguments to feed their base. It makes it hard to get funding for programs, or even to know what programs to fund.

The question I keep coming back to is simple and also not simple at all.

How do we fix this?

A lot of reporting these days, in cash-strapped newsrooms, happens over the phone or on Zoom. But some things cannot be understood from a desk, in one interview, or on one trip. You cannot fly in, collect fragmented pieces of people’s worst days, fly back out, and pretend you have answers to anything.

It is a gift to have a year to do that, and the money to travel and get to know people face-to-face.

And I know exactly what a responsibility it is.

Just over two years ago, my own community, Pikwàkanagàn, declared a state of emergency over opioids and fentanyl.

This was my pitch for the fellowship.

Pikwakanagan is my community. It sits on Golden Lake in the Ottawa Valley, about 40 kilometres from Pembroke and roughly 150 kilometres northwest of Ottawa, or a little more than an hour’s drive, where you’ll see a lot of cows and barns.

In other words, it is rural, but not remote. Close enough to the city to be counted, far enough away to be overlooked.

Everybody knows everybody. Addiction lives quietly here. It used to be alcohol and soft drugs. It wasn’t out in the open, making it easy to not know how bad it was.

The thing is, Pikwakanagan is a well-governed community.

The books are tight, and there are rows of pretty homes. It has a daycare, volunteer firefighters, a craft museum, a gas station, a restaurant, and a youth centre. It’s pretty, quiet, and laid-back.

People know who is struggling, but they don’t say much about it. Shame hovers over you in a small place.

As it turns out, so does fear.

When opioids arrived, they showed up slowly and then, it seems, all at once. Funerals became more frequent.

In 2023, there was a murder here. Rumours said it was opioid related. Strange for this small community, where no one is a stranger, there are no police, and no one locks their doors.

Not long after, Pikwakanagan declared a state of emergency.

A packed community meeting followed, where two arguments surfaced. One group wanted the drug users banished, calling them criminals, saying the community was no longer safe. Another group stood up and said, “That’s my family you’re talking about. My mother, my child, my uncle.”

The state of emergency brought attention, naloxone kits, and short-term resources. It did not bring treatment beds. It did not bring long-term recovery options.

It did not stop the funerals.

Before the pandemic, Renfrew County averaged about five opioid-related deaths a year. Between 2020 and 2022, that number doubled. In the first six months of 2023 alone, there were 17 suspected opioid-related deaths.

Community health workers in Pikwakanagan are exhausted. Addiction is still hidden in a place where everyone knows your name.

Pikwakanagan is not alone. Across the country, First Nations have been declaring states of emergency tied to opioids and opioid-related mental health crises for years.

There appear to be three paths open to communities scrambling to get their people to existing services (as Pikwakanagan is doing), including implementing their own culture-based programming (treatment such as bringing people back to the land), and involuntary treatment models being advanced in Manitoba, British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.

A note on involuntary treatment. In desperation, some First Nations leaders and parents say they think involuntary models may be the only option. Is it effective? It is shocking to hear that from communities so harmed by residential schools, the child welfare system, and medical coercion.

There are also questions around how it is being provided, considering the U.S. experiments in involuntary programs for teenagers, which led to abuses very similar to residential schools. Where is the data that supports this kind of treatment?

I am proposing to look closely, deeply and honestly at what communities themselves say is working, where harm is being reduced, and where people are staying alive. I’m proposing a series of stories that profile at least three First Nation communities - one looking for access to western-style healing, one looking at traditional programs, particularly land-based programs, and the other looking at involuntary programs.

This work is grounded in the understanding that it is reporting first and foremost to Indigenous communities affected by the opioid crisis.

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The grant comes with an incredible travel budget and the ability to hire a part-time journalist. If you know a young Indigenous journalist who wants to take a deep dive for 6 months, it is about to be posted. My publishing partner is APTN, and the job will be posted there. The work will include a written series, television elements and, eventually, a podcast. Again, deep, deep gratitude to CMA, CJF and APTN for making this possible.

At broadcasters like CTV, CBC, Global, and APTN, or anywhere else where the news department is arm’s length from entertainment, marketing, and advertising. So much so that we could pass our colleagues on the street without knowing they work for the same outlet.

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Occasionally, when a broadcaster is just about to launch a new show, someone from communications will ask the news if we want to cover it.

Sometimes we do. Mostly, curmudgeons that we are, we don’t.

It depends on whether anything is genuinely newsworthy: an actor making a comeback, a final season, a controversy. News is not a promo department, after all.

So this evening, I was at my desk, typing madly over a story from a press conference, trying to get my scripts done for Nation to Nation — already running late — already knowing I was late for dinner with my newly adopted cat and she was going to be furiously hangry… when a friend messaged me.

“What is this show?”

She sent tweets and said APTN was involved.

It is from the entertainment side, so everything I know at the moment is from social media posts, and what I have been able to late-night-fact-check.

Frances Widdowson, set-up by fake company called "Forge Media"

It starts with Frances Widdowson posting a live video on X yesterday.

Frances Widdowson is a former tenured associate professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, where she taught in the Department of Economics, Justice and Policy Studies from 2008 until December 2021.

The video, streamed from her cellphone, opens with a shot of a coffee table covered in shoes. Running shoes. Uggs. Sandals. Rubber boots. Like someone dumped a sales bin onto the table.

She pans to a man seated to her right, an oddly dressed man in a purplish suit and a yellow shirt. They are sitting on what appears to be a talk show set. There is a TV screen with a maple leaf logo and the words “Wake Up Canada.”

Widdowson begins narrating.

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According to Widdowson, she thought she was part of a talk show that challenged wokeness, to discuss Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations, when two Indigenous people walked in, “glared” at her and dumped the shoes on the table.

If you follow Indigenous people at all, you know worn shoes have become symbolic of deceased or missing women and children.

And for more context, in case you don't know, Widdowson has not been popular with Indigenous people since she wrote Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation in 2008.

Debating the content of the book is a whole other blog post, but I think I could sum up my own opinion by saying it doesn't include all the sources I think it should, and if it did, I believe the facts would lead to a different conclusion.

More recently, Widdowson has been questioning whether or not the graves found near residential schools are really graves. Last year, she, rather provocatively, decided to try to make her point at a gathering of Indigenous residential school survivors and their families in Winnipeg, on September 30, Orange Shirt Day — at an event specifically meant to remember those lost and honour the survivors.

Fair to say she wasn’t being sensitive, nor was it even a remotely effective plan to make her point.

So, back to the video, Widdowson describes the production as an outfit doing a reality television show that wants to paint her, she says, “I guess as some kind of a racist or something, that they’re gonna post on social media.”

Then she points her phone at the host and starts questioning him.

He says his name is “Mike Smith,” he is from Missouri, and he works for the two Indigenous people who dumped the shoes.

“You’ve got it exactly right,” he tells her. “You’ve defined it precisely. Well, I wouldn’t say exactly right. This is a social experiment. And it’s on video, and I’m on YouTube,” he says, noting Widdowson's live stream, “So we’re on video together.”

When Widdowson asks if she is “a target,” he insists she is not. He repeats that she is participating in a “social experiment.”

When she asks what the social experiment is, he tells her, “You just experienced it.”

That is about as much clarity as she gets.

Widdowson keeps talking, partly to him, partly to the phone camera.

She says she thought the show she was invited to, called Wake Up, was supposed to be a “woke exposé.” She says she wishes she had done more research before falling for the setup.

“I’m an honest academic who is trying to understand Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations,” she says. But then she adds that it doesn't really matter if it was a setup, since she spoke honestly about her views.

“I thought it was a pretty good interview, actually,” she says, and laughs.

“Yeah, I agree,” the host says. “I think you did get to say a lot of things that you’ve been saying.”

“I’m happy for you to publish it widely and whatever,” she says. “But I don’t understand what the context is. Like, what is the program? Where is it gonna be released?”

The host does not give a clear answer. He tells her they can continue the conversation later, and says he is happy to call and talk to her.

Widdowson muses that she thought she was going to be an “honoured guest.” Then she adds, “I guess I sort of was.. It’s just a different context.”

Widdowson continues filming for a few more minutes, panning the studio and pointing out the large crew and expensive set, and the host walks her to her car.

Widdowson did not say how, but she later posted that she discovered the host is actually Igor Vamos.

The ‘host’ in the video does bear a striking resemblance to Vamos, an associate professor of media arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who is also one of the key members The Yes Men, performance activists who use parody and stunts to draw attention to social and political issues in videos.

Lindsay Shepherd: “..a setup in order to demonize Sir John A and smear me”

Today, Lindsay Shepherd, the Director of Communications and Engagement at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a right-wing think tank, posted on X that she had been punked too.

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“I found out recently that I was deceived by social activists in an elaborate scheme dating back to January. A production group with what I now know has a fake name and fake identities gave me a friendly interview about my book A Day with Sir John A, and about Sir John A Macdonald, back in Feb.,” she wrote.

”They connected me with a fake company called Heritage Figures Canada with a fake website and "hired" me to perform consulting work for them. We had what I now know were fake meetings, fake documents, fake commercial shoot, fake prototype of a Sir John A collectible. Then, in a second filmed interview last week, they turned on me, and it was revealed to have all been a setup in order to demonize Sir John A and smear me.”

Sheppard also posted that she had traced the production to CBC and APTN, posting a screenshot of what she says is an email from CBC’s Director of PR, Katherine Wolfgang.

The mail indicated the production was in the early stages and was not being made in-house, but was being created by independent producers. Most TV entertainment is contracted out.

UPDATE: It seems the production is a project called COUNTING COUP by Northland tales. The phrase Counting Coup is an old one I haven’t heard in a while. It refers to warriors demonstrating bravery in battle by risking their lives to get close enough to a live enemy to touch them, and live to tell about it.

I don’t know about CBC, but APTN has done a social-experiment reality show before. Called First Contact, it was based on a similar Australian series and took six white participants who held stereotypes about Indigenous people — lazy, alcoholic, hopeless welfare cheats — into real Indigenous communities.

When it was first being filmed, I remember thinking: Well, this could go badly.

It didn’t. Or at least, not in the way I feared. I have since used clips from it while teaching reconciliation.

So, now, it seems I have been induced into writing a damn promo- and for a show I haven’t seen, and I don’t know if I will like, but it is likely I will watch, if it makes it to air.

For now, it sounds like the jig is up. I don't think they will catch anyone else unsuspecting. And it seems the public part of ‘this social experiment’ has already begun on X.

Karyn S. Pugliese - How I Managed

NYT reporter used a hallucinated AI quote attributed to Pierre Poilievre

On April 14, the New York Times’ Canadian bureau chief published a story explaining how Carney won over a majority of voters, and why the opposition — especially Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre — felt salty about it, despite the whole thing being constitutionally valid…

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4 months ago · 34 likes · 11 comments · Karyn Pugliese

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All freelancers in the NYT received the following email and link this morning. The NYT appears to be trying to ensure no further use of AI in writing, as per its policy. There has been no public update on the previous incident where an AI-generated hallucination was attributed to Pierre Poilievre.

TO: ALL TIMES FREELANCERS

Hello,

This is a periodic reminder about The Times's newsroom ethics policies, including our policy on freelancers’ use of generative A.I. tools. We want to ensure you’re aware of the formalized Newsroom and Opinion Policy on Freelancers’ Use of Generative A.I. Tools.

To be clear on A.I.: All writing and visuals that freelancers submit to The Times must be the product of human creativity and craft, and all submissions must consist solely of their original reporting, writing and other work. Freelance contributors must not submit any material for publication that contains content generated, modified or enhanced by gen-A.I. tools, or that has been input into these tools.

Freelancers also should not enter any materials intended for use in connection with their work for The Times, or any other copyright-protected material, whether in draft or published form, into gen-A.I. tools. Freelancers may use gen-A.I. tools in limited ways, including for high-level brainstorming without inputting such materials, and, with prior written approval from The Times, when reporting on the tools themselves.

This description does not cover all the elements of the Newsroom and Opinion Policy on Freelancers’ Use of Generative A.I. Tools; we expect freelancers to read it in its entirety and to adhere to all of its provisions.

As always, we expect all our journalists — staff members and outside contributors — to protect the integrity and credibility of Times journalism. That means avoiding conflicts of interest, maintaining high standards of accuracy and quality, and safeguarding The Times’s reputation for independence.

Your freelance contract requires you to comply with the provisions of The Times’s policy on Ethical Journalism and to take care to avoid conflicts or the appearance of a conflict. The provisions pertaining specifically to outside contributors are in Chapter 7 of the guidelines, but you should review the entire document. Readers do not distinguish between freelancers and staff journalists at The Times, so as far as possible we expect outside contributors to adhere to the same standards as Times staff members.

The ethics rules outline specific requirements while you are on assignment for The Times. But because of The Times’s high profile, our freelance contributors are often viewed as “Times journalists” even when they are not specifically working for us. That is especially true when a freelancer’s social-media bio mentions a Times affiliation.

Freelancers — reporters, photographers, audio and video journalists, and other outside contributors — should take care to avoid activities on social media that would damage the credibility of the journalism they do for The Times. Strident partisan advocacy or offensive personal attacks risk undercutting a journalist’s credibility. Times editors may decide not to offer future assignments if they believe a journalist’s online presence shows poor judgment or could undermine The Times’s reputation. (For your information, The Times’s social-media guidance for newsroom staff members is here.)

Regarding conflicts of interest, please note that our rules on free travel and other free or discounted products and services are stricter than those of many publications. Even if such a benefit is not directly connected to a Times assignment, it can create an appearance that undermines the credibility of The Times or its contributors. Any questions involving such benefits should be discussed with the Times editor you are working with.

Other potential ethical concerns include these:

— Work for companies or organizations that The Times may cover.
— Undisclosed ties between the journalist and people or institutions mentioned in an article.
— Lobbying, advocacy or political activities or contributions related to the area of coverage.

Our written guidelines are detailed, but they cannot anticipate every situation. The best rule of thumb is the simplest: If you have any questions or doubts about our policies, ask the Times editor, art director or producer you are working with before proceeding.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

Susan Wessling
Standards Editor
The New York Times

When they sent the memo they included a link to their google drive document on Newsroom policy for generative AI for freelances. The document is converted it into a non-selectable format, so I can’t copy and paste the text. But I can screenshot it.

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The problem was not the premise. The problem was the quote.

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The original copy had Poilievre saying: “If these turncoats have any shred of integrity left, they should resign their seats tonight and run in a by-election tomorrow,” in a March speech. “Let the people decide if they want a Liberal representing them, because they sure didn’t vote for one in the general election.”

Except he didn’t say that. Not like that. Not in those words.

What Poilievre actually said was: “My personal opinion is that when a member of Parliament goes back on the word they made to their constituents and switches parties, constituents should be able to petition to throw them out. That would put the people back in charge of our democracy rather than having dirty backroom Liberal deals by Mark Carney determine our destiny.”

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The bad quote sat there for weeks. The Times did not correct it until May 1.

The correction raised new questions because it admitted more than an error. The reporters had used AI. And the AI hallucinated a quote Poilievre never said. Somehow, the quote made it into the paper anyway.

Michelle Cyca — a journalist whose work has appeared in The Narwhal and The Walrus, and a visiting professor at UBC’s School of Journalism, Writing and Media — noted on her Bluesky thread about the incident are that one of the highest-paid reporters in Canada apparently violated the NYT’s own journalism policy on AI, and has survived an error of judgment that would land most Journalism students in the Office of Academic Integrity.

I actually don’t know what an NYT bureau chief makes, but they did just post a Western Canada reporter role with a salary range of $158,000— $235,000 CAD. Most Canadian reporters earn between $52,000 to $62,000 per year, according to the Canadian Journalism Fund, although seasoned or specialized reporters can hit more than $100,000.

But the more important point Cyca made was about a reporter using AI without bothering to fact-check it.

Anyone who has used AI knows what it does. It invents links, sources, quotes, even whole theories that sound real. Then, when pressed, it swears on its little algorithmic heart that the lie is true.

No one should dump data, speeches, reporting notes or other material into AI and trust it to replace their own thinking. Especially not a highly paid reporter.

And as Cyca pointed out, the Times’ own explanatory article, “How The New York Times Uses A.I. for Journalism,” says in the subhead: “We don’t use A.I. to write articles, and journalists are ultimately responsible for everything that we publish.”

It goes on to explain how the NYT does use AI: automated voice translation, scanning large amounts of video, or scanning satellite imagery. Then humans review the work.

That is the point. The Times’ policy emphasizes human review.

I am not against AI. I use it. But AI should be treated like a sloppy assistant you cannot quite bring yourself to fire because it saves time, even though it inevitably fucks up the assignment.

There’s a story I’ve heard about an AI system trained to identify cancer. Programmers fed it hundreds of X-rays from patients with the disease so it could find patterns and learn what cancer looked like.

At first, it seemed to work.

Then it started diagnosing some patients who did not have cancer as if they did. The programmers tried to figure out what the machine was seeing.

It turned out that many of the images where patients were positive for cancer came from the same hospital. Those scans had the hospital’s logo on them.

The AI had not learned to recognize cancer. It had learned to recognize the logo.

Which is why the NYT’s AI policy does not allow AI to be treated as a journalist,a d requires “human oversight and review.”

We are going to see more of this.

Reporters use AI. So do editors. So do you. It is already everywhere.

It takes spam out of our inboxes. It transcribes interviews. It sorts, summarizes, scans and searches.

On days when I have time, I like loading a document into NotebookLM and listening to it as a podcast before I read it. I know it gets things wrong. I know I still have to read the document myself. But a mostly-right audio summary is useful when I am trying to get my head around a dense file.

I am dyslexic, so I use ‘read-aloud tools’ to catch more typos than I would catch on my own. And you should thank me for that use of AI. You would have a hard time reading my copy without them.

I also use AI as a search engine, with a number of rules, including: give me the links to the original documents so I can read them myself.

I am also not above vibe-coding. I never mastered Python, and a gal’s gotta scrape a website sometimes.

We are all trying to learn how to use AI as ethically as possible, without letting it turn us into idiots.

I dread the day I make an error and have to admit AI was involved. It will probably happen, and it will certainly be embarrassing.

But to avoid a career-ending mistake, there are two things I do not do.

First thing: I do not let it write for me.

Actually, no one should.

I kind of hate AI’s prose. The over-explaining. The tidy little opposites. The mixed metaphors and clichés. Those naggy wrap-ups at the end of paragraphs, telling you one more time what you were already smart enough to understand.

Second thing: I do not let AI think for me.

Being someone who uses AI, I am not going to ride in on the high horse, pointing fingers and screaming, “How dare you use AI?”

The issue is that the NYT seems to have a solid policy, but I can't tell from the thin explanation on the correction page what actually happened.

Did the reporter feed AI a transcript and let it pick clips (Why would anyone do that, knowing AI hallucinates? Besides, pulling a quote from a transcript is not exactly heavy lifting.) How did a hallucinated quote make it past the reporter and the editor’s fact check? What changes will be put in place to prevent this from happening again?

Because this is not a small thing.

It was a quote from a national political leader. That is not filler text. Careers change over what people are believed to have said. So can a country’s history.

This hallucinated error was bad. It changed the tone. It made Poilievre sound more volatile in his anger.

It could have been worse.

It could have been more inflammatory, more damaging, or further from what he actually said.

Maybe the next hallucinated quote will be worse.

Maybe it will not be about Canadian floor-crossing.

Maybe it will be about Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, or something the U.S. president is believed to have said in the middle of a crisis. We cannot afford invented words in moments like that.

And as public trust in media and institutions keeps falling, transparency is the only way you can stop one mistake from becoming proof of every suspicion and fear people already have about you.

Before AI, fabricating a quote was generally understood to be intentional and grounds for dismissal. With AI, fabrication is unintentional, but it is still a catastrophic mistake.

A mistake that serious should not vanish into a correction note while the byline carries on untouched and unexplained.

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The new Liberal majority, clinched after five MPs crossed the floor to join the government and a sweep of three byelections, could go either way for First Nations.

The party can now push through legislation, whether anyone else likes it or not, or, as Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak hopes, the government can finally move quickly on the laws, protections and infrastructure First Nations have been demanding for years.

“ I think that there’s no more excuses,” Woodhouse Nepinak told Nation to Nation, “You know, we have to get to work, we have to roll up our sleeves and work on some of these issues to make sure that we’re not football kicking things back and forth between the provinces and the feds.”

What that relationship looks like will become clear in the fall, likely in October, when Prime Minister Mark Carney makes good on his promise to host a federal-provincial-territorial First Ministers meeting, the first of its kind, where First Nations leaders were promised they could set the agenda.

But before that happens, there are two bellwether tests: Bill S-2, which amends the Indian Act to end the second-generation cut-off, and long-awaited clean water legislation.

Read the rest here for Free!

It’s worrisome stuff in a post-truth era. I’m still listening for anything genuinely new before I take a crack at reporting it for the journalism nerds who follow me. So hold that thought.

For today, just a lighter bit of Hill theatre you may have missed.

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On Thursday, along with other witnesses, Sheila Gunn Reid, editor-in-chief of Rebel News, appeared representing the independent press gallery (it was created in part so the Rebel could access the Alberta legislature because the existing press gallery refused to issue them passes)

The committee was having problems with translation.

When people spoke in English, members using the French interpretation heard both the original English speaker and the interpreter simultaneously.

This disrupted the Canadian Media Guild’s testimony; they were cut off and had to restart, and Gunn Reid as well. The committee ultimately decided to change rooms.

CMG president is cut off temporarily because of audio issues

Translation glitches have become common in some rooms on the West Block. But this was not a tech issue, according to Rebel publisher Ezra Levant, who was in the room. This was funny business, and dammit, he saw through it. So he took it to X.

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“I’m starting to think that complaints about the translation are a way to stop Sheila from testifying, I’m serious. It’s so over the top.”

“Seriously, this couldn’t be more transparent. They’re doing exactly what Sheila just accused them of doing: silencing alternative voices. They’re outraged that Sheila is even in the building, so they have “audio issues” — but just when she talks, I guess,” tweeted Levant.

The committee paused, tweaked the equipment, and Gunn Reid continued her testimony.

Although Gunn Reid was there in her press gallery role, much of her testimony lamented that Rebel News is not recognized by the Parliamentary Press Gallery and cannot access spaces available to other media outlets.

In fact, she recalled the dustup last year, when the debates commission cancelled questions for leaders because of a scuffle in the media room, where, according to Gunn Reid, independent journalists at the Rebel were subject to “workplace harassment.”

A brief history of selective outrage

The background to this issue is that the debates commission twice tried to deny Rebel Media accreditation to the leadership debates, in 2019 and again in 2021, because it questioned whether Rebel Media’s work constitutes journalism.

Rebel Media took the commission to court and won both times.

So the commission made no more fuss and gave Rebel Media passes to the debates last spring.

And at the same time that they were covering the debates, Rebel News Network Ltd. and a group known as ‘ForCanada’ had both registered as third parties in the election under Levant’s name, according to Elections Canada’s registry.

A third party is a group that isn’t a candidate or political party but still tries to influence who gets elected. Third-party status means they can run political ads, among other things.

On the eve of the debate, the CBC television interviewed Michel Cormier, executive director of the Leaders’ Debates Commission, asking how Rebel Media could run political ads while also being registered as a media outlet.

Cormier told CBC he’d raised the issue of Rebel News' political advocacy in prior court cases, and the court decided that political advocacy didn’t make Rebel News any less of a media organization.

Meanwhile, Levant, realizing CBC was reporting on his shop, sauntered over to the CBC set with his own camera crew. He waited until they switched out a guest and cut to tape. During this pause, Levant asked for a chance to respond to those accusations. The host asked him to go away, because they were live.

Later in his own video, Levant stated CBC erred; the ads were clearly marked and were not Rebel News ads. (Levant’s video shows they say "ForCanada.ca")

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Levant didn’t address his own role in founding "ForCanada,” but he argued that this sort of advocacy is no different from other journalists being represented by unions.

For the record, the Canadian Media Guild (CMG) represents most workers in Canadian newsrooms, including CBC, APTN and CP. CMG is non-partisan, does not tell people how to vote and has never registered as a third-party.

Most newsrooms would consider reporting while also being registered as a third-party a conflict of interest.

There is a range of ethics in journalism, and, personally, journalists are not supposed to endorse a party, but as Ezra has pointed out, some newspapers whose editorial boards still endorse candidates.

We reap what we sow, and in this age of journalism with all the blurry lines, suum cuique.

Anyway, the whole thing led to an embarrassing mess: there was a behind-the-scenes altercation in the debate night media room, and the Leaders’ Debates Commission abruptly cancelled all scrums with party leaders, which was the point of being there in the first place.

The only thing everyone agreed on in the end was that voters were not served well by the media that night.

Now back to last week’s heritage committee.

X , ‘Lies, ‘ and Audiotape

Reid told the committee: “Rebel News journalists were at the heart of that. The CBC went on air and accused our journalists of misinformation. And then denied us the right of reply. In fact, instead of offering us the right of reply, they called the SPVM (Service de police de la Ville de Montréal) on us. That’s not appropriate journalism.”

At that point, Bloc MP Martin Champoux raised the issue of audio translation again.

Champoux said he had waited so as not to interrupt the testimony, but told the chair it was impossible to continue. He asked that it be fixed, and if that failed, could the committee move to another room?

Levant tweeted that “The Bloc Québécois demands that the proceedings be cancelled because of audio issues. And the chair agrees.”

Perhaps what Champoux said was lost in translation, because I have replayed the tape several times and can’t find any suggestion by Champoux or anyone that the meeting be cancelled.

Levant added that his translation was fine, and the technical issue was “made up” and “a lie.”

Levant was likely listening to the English feed, and as the committee discussed the issue ad nauseam, it became clear it was specific to the French translation.

The committee eventually moved to another room and was up and running 15 minutes later.

Meanwhile, about 2,000 people saw Levant’s tweets — including an irate Champoux, who pointed that out when his turn came to ask questions.

“I will put my first question to Ms. Gunn Reid. I hope her interpretation is working well, because the question will be in French,” said Champoux. “You describe Rebel News as a rigorous media outlet, Ms. Gunn Reid? You do rigorous, high-quality journalism?

Gunn Reid nodded, answering in English: “ I would say I am a rigorous journalist. I think that our journalists are committed to following the facts wherever they lead.”

“This morning, we had technical issues here in committee,” Champoux continued in French. “Your boss, who is here in the room following the committee, tweeted that we had deliberately suspended the committee to prevent you from speaking. Do you consider that to be what happened? Do you support that assertion from your boss, who posted that on X? “

There was a short pause.

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“You witnessed what happened,” Champoux pressed. “Do you support that? Do you agree with that assertion?”

Gunn Reid started to answer, but her microphone was off.

“Microphone, please,” directed Champoux.

“I cannot make any assertions about what caused the technical difficulties, if there were any technical difficulties,” and patting her earpiece through which she heard translation, she added, “Mine was fine.”

Champoux continued, “So, to claim that it was deliberate, that the Bloc Québécois asked to cancel the meeting because we wanted to prevent you from testifying, without having further verified the facts — do you consider that good journalism?”

“I didn’t say that,” answered Gunn Reid.

“Okay. But Rebel News, through the voice of its boss, stated that on X. I simply wanted to raise that point, Ms. Gunn Reid, because I think we are here precisely for that — and you said so yourself — you speak about the diversity of voices, the rigour of journalism, and so on, and so on. I thought it was important to point out that what happened this morning was a technical issue and that the Bloc Québécois did not try to stop the proceedings this morning,” continued Champoux.

“On the contrary, we tried to solve a problem so that everyone could express themselves properly in both official languages, and so that those interested in the subject could follow our debates and listen to what each of you — the voices, often divergent voices even, that represent journalism today — has to say, and could be heard and express themselves. I simply wanted to raise that point.”

Then Champoux moved on to question the next witness.

(I do have some empathy, by the way, for editors-in-chief whose bosses can’t resist the dopamine rush of collecting little hearts on X, less so for tu quoque moments.)

Levant, unabashed, continued tweeting, turning to the question of why Champoux was reading tweets instead of listening to the testimony, immediately earning himself 24 hearts.

In fairness, Champoux may have read the tweets while the committee was changing rooms. I didn't bother to call Champoux; instead, I chose to keep the mystery of when he read tweets alive.

And that, as they say, is a part of our heritage.

Apart from this mini Ottawa operetta, the committee is actually hearing serious, substantive debate about journalism as an essential service, the defence against disinformation, public trust, and a business model that is still starving and desperately wondering where its next meal will come from.

I’ve decided to listen to all of the hearings first, then take a crack at solving the Canadian media problem here, myself. Why not? I can’t do worse than anyone else. Until then, there are still three weeks of testimony ahead. I’ll keep you posted.

Both attempts sought to identify who was behind online accounts, but they differed in how they were carried out. And even though these operations are decades apart, they still raise ethical and legal questions for journalists.

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Bill C-30 and a minister’s divorce papers

In 2012, Bill C-30 sparked national controversy. It would have allowed police to access Canadians’ private internet data without a warrant.

The government said it was needed to fight crime, especially child exploitation. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews (in)famously told critics they could “stand with the government” or “with child pornographers.”

People weren’t particularly concerned about breaching a criminal’s privacy, but about their own.

In 2012, online privacy was relatively new, allowing anyone to share hot takes, sexual fetishes, or mental health concerns publicly, yet anonymously, and not worry about their day jobs.

What would it mean to have police mucking around in all that, without a warrant, or even a heads up?

Critics called it the “online snooping bill.”

As privacy lawyer David Fraser explained at the time: “Not only will the police, national security folks and the competition cops be able to get customer names, addresses, IP addresses and e-mail addresses without a warrant, there’s a gag order that means you’ll likely never find out you’ve been the subject of such an inquiry even if you ask your ISP.”

The public backlash against C-30 was immediate.

Two campaigns rolled out on Twitter.

One response was the #TellVicEverything campaign, started by Prince Edward Island resident Robert Jensen in February 2012. (He identified himself to the media.)

People flooded Vic Toews’ Twitter account with absurd disclosures and mock confessions: what they ate for lunch, that they lied to their boss, that their milk was two days past its expiration date, but, dammit all to hell, they were going to drink it anyway.

The idea was: if the government wanted to know everything about you, why not just proactively overshare?

#TellVicEverything trended for days—it was a work-distracting, time-wasting, fun protest. And annoying and embarrassing for Toews. But he took it in stride.

Then came another Twitter protest: @Vikileaks30, an anonymous account that began posting details from Toews’ messy divorce. The records were public, but not online—someone went to court to get the hard copy, then curated the information in Tweets for maximum embarrassment.

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Supporters of @Vikileaks30 argued that a politician who advanced legislation eroding their privacy had this coming.

Critics said that even if the documents were technically public, @Vikileaks30 was tastelessly shifting the debate from policy to a personal attack and pulling innocent family members into the spotlight.

For people in public life, @Vikileaks30 changed the rules.

No legacy media would ever publish divorce records to critique legislation, but on new platforms, anyone could publish, retweet, like, and share information based on their personal values and whims.

We’re used to that now, but it was new then. And context matters for what happened when the Ottawa Citizen decided to snare the person behind @Vikileaks30 on Feb. 16, 2012.

The Ottawa Citizen’s @Vikileaks30 Sting

The Ottawa Citizen sent a link to the @Vikileaks30 account holder in a private email.

The link led to an unlisted webpage. About 15 minutes after the email was sent, someone clicked it.

The IP address traced back to the House of Commons.

An important detail is that the House of Commons (like most government and many corporate entities) uses a static IP address—a fixed internet address that doesn’t change.

Most people have dynamic IPs that do change. They give only a rough location and a server like “bell.ca” or “comcast.net”.

The static IP pointed to a Government of Canada domain.

Tracing the IP address online allowed the Ottawa Citizen to connect the activity to a person.

From there, the paper conducted further checks and reported its findings.

But they did not name the individual they believed was running the account.

The Speaker of the House opened an investigation, but ultimately the person unmasked themselves. Liberal staffer Adam Carroll confessed.

The Citizen didn’t get universal applause for this unmasking.

Remember, the whole Twitter protest began about Bill C-30, a bill that threatened online privacy.

Canadians were already arguing about anonymity and surveillance, and here was a newsroom using tracking techniques to unmask a Twitter account.

What were the ethics of unmasking @Vikileaks30?

The investigation sparked public debate.

Many were as uncomfortable with a newspaper unmasking them as they were with the police doing so.

The investigation had also been carried out surreptitiously, using deception and a phishing-style tactic.

Is my account next, people wondered?

The Citizen staff realized their investigation had come at a cost—raising public skepticism, undermining public trust, and drawing scrutiny to their methods.

They responded in an editorial titled "The Public and the Personal," published Feb. 18, 2012.

They argued that undercover journalism has always existed; the question was whether or not the investigation was ethical.

So, when is it ethical for a journalist to hide their identity to get information?

According to the Ottawa Citizen, there were three principles:

The first principle: the information cannot be obtained any other way.

The second: the investigation serves the public interest. They argued that the account was influencing public policy.

As they put it, “whether you’re a fan of Vikileaks or not, it’s undeniable that the Twitter account significantly changed the discussion about Toews, about the proposed legislation and about politics in Canada generally.”

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When they discovered the source was a government IP address, they said the public interest increased because it suggested possible wrongdoing. Not a crime, per se, but a possible breach of professional ethics.

The third principle: transparency. The methods of the investigation were disclosed publicly and open to scrutiny.

The editorial also pointed out what the Citizen did not do. They did not name the individual, even though they could connect the activity to a person.

They only published that the account belonged to a House of Commons IP, leaving it to the system to let the cards fall where they may.

After all, @Vikileaks30 may not have reflected everyone’s ethics, but what it had done was not illegal. If there was a breach of professional responsibility, that was up to the Speaker and the House to investigate and make public in due time.

Full Disclosure: The Canadaland Reddit story, and me

I occasionally—rarely—post on Reddit under Pabàmàdiz (an Indigenous name meaning to wander without purpose). The name is unique to me and also used on my Bluesky account, so it is not anonymous.

Mostly, I promoted and fan-girled the Hatchet (though I did make a critical post about Canadaland a few weeks ago, which was, admittedly, unnecessary). Nothing has been deleted—search and read if you like. I mention this for transparency.

I was caught up in this week’s Canadaland-related events, along with others.

I received four links through Bluesky, then a ProtonMail account, both called “CL Tipster,” and I clicked all of them, as did a dozen or more people who received the links on various social media platforms.

The links led to a two-year-old internal draft of a journalistic policy, with my name on it, that had been posted multiple times. (It is archived here, on Wayback Machine)

The draft was written by three union members and me in 2024, and shared on Canadaland’s Google Drive. This version appears to have been reformatted for posting, with Jesse Brown’s Google Docs comments pasted in and italicized, but the wording itself does not appear to have changed.

It is an innocuous document.

My first thought was that the links had been sent to me by an employee inside Canadaland.

The union is currently in negotiations. In their first agreement, ratified in January 2022, staff asked for the “establishment of a joint committee to draft an editorial standards document that will provide guidance for Canadaland’s editorial work.”

Canada had a patchwork of policies, but no in-depth journalistic policy like NPR’s, CBC’s, the Narwhal’s, or the National Observer's, for that matter. The staff wanted one.

This had not been done when I arrived in July 2023, so I committed to it. A committee of three union members and I spent a year of Fridays poring over JSPs and assembling a document suited to Canadaland.

So the page, now public, is from that draft JSP.

When I received the links, I thought that the Canadaland Union was giving me a quiet heads-up that the document was about to be made public, possibly as part of a negotiation tactic.

Of course, that guess now seems to be entirely wrong.

It quickly became public knowledge that several people had received the same links by email and DMs.

I immediately thought of the Ottawa Citizen investigation I just described and wondered whether this was an attempt to capture IP addresses.

Shortly after, a friend pointed out a visible IP tracker on the pages.

While we were discovering this, it came to our attention that author Mark Bourrie had posted on Substack about a late-night call from Jesse, who accused him of running sock-puppet accounts on Reddit.

Simultaneously, Reddit was blowing up.

Most of what I know is from Bourrie - corroborated by reporting and posts from Press Progress’ Luke LeBrun and citizen journalist Edward Rowe. I know a bit more from Reddit Posts and a confession from a Reddit moderator.

It looks like this was an attempt to grab IPs.

The Canadaland Reddit story: what we know so far.

Canadaland doesn’t have a comments section, so years ago, someone created a Reddit page where people who love or hate the podcast can praise or criticize it. I only became aware of it after I started working at Canadaland.

It can be pleasant, a great source of stories, sometimes witty, and, yes, sometimes mean. It is Reddit, after all. That’s the vibe.

According to the stats, it’s very active: 13K weekly visitors, 1.3K weekly contributions.

A moderator, or mod, is a volunteer who runs the page. On this Reddit, it's someone with the handle “Notian.” Mods set the rules, and if a post is offensive, defamatory, or racist, it’s their job to delete it. They’re also the person you report issues to.

Jesse Brown does have some kind of relationship with Notian. Jesse has done “Ask Me Anything” Q&As on the Reddit page before.

According to Notian, Jesse asked them to add one of the Canadaland staff as a moderator (I don’t know when this happened, I can’t say who).

Notian says this employee was looking for sock-puppet accounts.

The employee then asked for access to the moderator’s mail function. This allowed them to private message people on Reddit — not as themselves or under an account name, but as the moderator. Essentially, people thought they were talking to Notian.

This is one of the messages a person on Reddit says they received from the account:

The link is to a page with a tracking device. One of the same links that I and dozens of others received in DMs and emails.

This is the moderator’s explanation.

Some accounts came forward to say they had also received links from burner accounts on Reddit.

To understand the other half of this, we have to turn to Mark Bourrie’s story.

Mark Bourrie’s story

According to Bourrie, Jesse Brown messaged him on Thursday, March 19, for an interview.

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They connected by phone on Thursday night at 11 PM.

According to Bourrie: “Canadaland podcaster Jesse Brown called me at 11 p.m. Thursday night to ask for comment for a story accusing me of posting on Canadaland’s subreddit. I don’t know what the posts say, and I didn’t ask. Brown listed several Reddit names that I have never heard of.”

Bourrie denies having any Reddit accounts.

For context, Bourrie has previously published critiques of Jesse Brown and Canadaland on his site, Fair Press. It’s not clear why he would need an anonymous Reddit account—or why it would matter if he did have one, or two. Canadaland’s Reddit page has 13k people on it, after all.

After Jesse made the accusations, Bourrie said that Jesse sent him a link.

“He did send a link to a picture of me. It is from my high school yearbook. That’s pretty creepy,” wrote Bourrie.

Bourrie posted about the encounter on Substack and on X.

On X today, Bourrie says he has learned there was a tracker on that page, the one with the picture, and that Canadaland probably captured his IP address.

It seems that Jesse is trying to connect Bourrie’s IP address to the ones Canadaland gathered from Reddit for comparison.

I haven’t heard of Jesse reaching out to others who received the links.

So far, it appears to be mostly dozens of anonymous Reddit users, along with reporters he has clashed with - Rachel Gilmore, someone at the Maple, and Nora Loreto, and maybe a dozen others? I don’t know the complete list.

But the working theory is that Jesse is trying to link those others (perhaps including me) to anonymous Reddit accounts as well.

I have not spoken to Jesse, but other reporters have reached out. I am waiting to see what they discover.

At this point, the only thing that seems 100% confirmed is that a Canadaland staff member was sending tracking links via Reddit DMs while undercover as a mod on the platform, at Jesse’s direction.

Who was behind the CLTipster email or the social media burner accounts spreading the tracking link is not proven. Who else besides Canadaland would have done it? I can’t speculate.

Canadaland vs. Ottawa Citizen: Technical Differences

If this is an attempt to match Reddit accounts to IP addresses, the approach is similar, but Canadaland is being much messier than the Ottawa Citizen’s investigation.

The Ottawa Citizen sent a single link privately to a single account. It checked the IP address using several devices. The account was on a government server and had a fixed IP address.

Canadaland appears to have sent several links to different people, across various platforms, all directing them to what appear to be five pages on Canadaland—making matching far more difficult and less reliable.

They appear to be using only one tracker, whereas the Ottawa Citizen used several to corroborate the data.

Unless those users are on a government or corporate network (like the @Vikileaks30 account was), their IP addresses will be dynamic—meaning they change over time and aren’t fixed to a single device or location. They may also be using a VPN that disguises their location.

Another issue—and an important difference.

The page the Citizen used was unlisted. That means it wouldn’t show up in Google search results.

The pages Canadaland used were unlinked—meaning there was no way to navigate to them from the website. But not all of them were unlisted. Some appear to be indexed by Google and show up in search results.

That matters.

It means someone searching for Canadaland’s ethics policy or JSP could have landed on those pages and had their IP captured—not just the people who were sent the links.

That makes tracking messy because anyone could have landed on those pages, not just the individuals Canadaland was trying to track.

Some thoughts on ethics

I’ll be honest—I’m a little pisssed personally.

I dislike that Jesse posted an internal document with my name on it.

As I said before, the document is fairly innocuous.

But people did click and see my name, and once it became clear to me what was happening, I worried they might think I was somehow involved in this project.

Fortunately, enough people know how my working relationship with Jesse ended that it never crossed anyone’s mind that I was involved.

Putting myself and human resource policies aside, there’s the bigger question of journalism ethics.

That 2024 draft JSP—the one written by the Canadaland committee and now used as a baiting page—was not fully made public. That was just one page.

There were many sections, among them a section on clandestine news reporting.

The draft’s JSP’s approach was similar to the Ottawa Citizen’s approach: the default our team came up with was to always identify yourself.

The exception applies only if you can’t obtain the information any other way, and if there was a compelling-enough public interest service that warranted going undercover. And even then, always, obeying the laws that protect people’s legal rights. Journalism is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.

I suspect the draft JSP was never adapted, so I don’t know what ethical or legal lens Canadaland applied to this work.

For example, it is unclear what public interest Canadaland believed was served by this. We’ll find out when they publish.

In terms of legal rights, especially privacy rights, have evolved since the Ottawa Citizens’ investigation. There’s a lot of speculation about where they stand now, and I don’t fully know the answer in a case like this.

I’ve done open-source investigations that chase server addresses, etc., but what I do relies on publicly available information. IP addresses carry an expectation of privacy, but I don’t know how far that expectation extends. It may be a test case if someone decides to pursue it.

Again, I have not personally reached out to Jesse, but I know several reporters and listeners have. I expect Jesse will address what he was trying to do on the show this week.

I’m waiting to hear.

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I was introduced to Bruce Campbell because I was dating a guy who was absolutely determined to make me watch horror movies.

I had been raised in a household where horror movies were basically banned. My mom said they would give me nightmares, and I believed her. I avoided them completely.

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But this guy kept insisting I had to see one particular movie. He said it was the scariest, wildest film he had ever seen. He would not let it go. Every time we talked about movies, he came back to it.

You have to watch this.

I had no idea why he was so determined to traumatize me. I told him I didn’t want to watch horror movies. I told him they weren’t my thing. He kept insisting anyway.

Finally, I gave in.

We sat down and watched Evil Dead.

And about 30 minutes in, I burst out laughing.

Because the movie wasn’t just horror. It was outrageous. The camera flew through the forest like it had lost its mind. Bucket loads of blood sprayed everywhere. Campbell’s hand got possessed, so he cut it off, only to have it chase him around an abandoned cabin in the woods like an archenemy.

As it turns out, the first time my boyfriend had seen the movie, he had been extremely high on acid.

So when he watched it, he thought it was the most terrifying thing ever filmed.

When I watched it, stone sober, I realized it was something much better.

It was a new genre of horror-comedy.

And not the neat, tidy kind built by studio committees trying to hit a target demographic. This was messy, inventive, unhinged filmmaking by a bunch of young guys experimenting with cameras and storylines, pushing the boundaries of the absurd.

It was funny, but also not for the faint of heart - so gory and controversial that it was banned and censored in several countries, including Finland, Germany, Ireland, and the UK.

That night didn’t just introduce me to Campbell.

It introduced me to Sam Raimi.

And Raimi has stayed in my top five directors ever since.

Not because his movies are polished. The opposite.

They’re alive.

There’s a difference between Hollywood movies manufactured to reach the widest possible audience and movies built by a few weird friends trying to see if something wild will work on screen. One becomes vanilla. The other becomes cult.

Raimi and Campbell built cult.

You can feel it in Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, but by the time you reach Army of Darkness, the whole thing has tipped fully into chaos—chainsaws, skeleton armies— if you know the movie “ Klaatu, barada, (cough).”

(If you’re not nerdy enough to know this, allow me: the phrase “Klaatu barada nikto” is a wink to The Day the Earth Stood Still, where it is a command in an alien language to stop the Earth from being destroyed by a robot.)

Campbell understands something most actors don’t. The joke works better if he’s in on it.

That’s the magic.

He plays heroes who are slightly ridiculous. Tough guys who know they’re ridiculous. A man with a chainsaw for a hand who delivers Shakespearean levels of confidence while everything around him falls apart.

It’s the same energy that made him perfect for the weirder corners of television.

Xena: Warrior Princess.

A fantasy adventure, comedy, allegedly a children’s show, but one that winked at adults. Campbell shows up as a side character, Autolycus, the so-called “King of Thieves,” stealing scenes and occasionally stealing entire episodes.

And then there are the smaller things that fans love.

The spin-off, Jack of all Trades, which has the most creative title sequences I’ve ever seen.

A cameo in Spider-Man (the good version, directed by Raimi) where Campbell plays the ring master.

The cult movie where Campbell plays Elvis Presley fighting a mummy in a nursing home. (Bubba Ho-Tep, a sentence that should not exist but does.)

The cowboy series Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. I never knew existed until recently, and I just started watching.

Or my personal favourite: My Name Is Bruce, where he plays a washed-up version of himself kidnapped by fans who hope the actor from Evil Dead can fight real monsters - zombies, a dragon.

Hollywood spends enormous effort trying to sand the edges off, weird people.

But Campbell belongs to another tradition entirely.

The B-movie tradition, for those of us who love the weird.

Low budgets. Strange ideas. Directors improvising. Films where actors sleep on the floor between scenes because there’s no money for hotels.

They are low-budget experimental films, and when they work, genius.

Which is why, for years, every New Year’s Eve, my friends and I watched the same trilogy. Evil Dead. Evil Dead 2. Army of Darkness. Three films that feel less like a franchise and more like watching a group of friends slowly realize what they can get away with.

Campbell, across all these movies, is fully aware that they are absurd. And yet he takes the acting seriously and makes it work.

Anyway, Campbell just recently announced he has cancer, a type that is “treatable but not curable.”

And I’ve found myself rewatching everything he ever made.

Just wanted to share.

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Full disclosure: I testified in this case as an expert witness. My role was simply to explain how journalism works — how newsroom decisions are made and how journalists identify themselves and operate in the field. Much of my testimony focused on two questions that seem obvious within the industry but can be confusing outside it: what journalism is and who counts as a journalist. And this is definitely more complicated in a world of cell phones and citizen journalists. For many of us in the industry, the rules on what constitutes a journalist's privilege in an injunction area were set by the Justice Green test in Brake, which reflects my testimony and is explained in detail in the Ricochet/Independent article.

Because I was a witness, I wasn’t allowed to watch the trial before testifying. I was only present in court for my own testimony and for a few hours of Amber Bracken’s, after I testified. That was weeks ago, and since then, I’ve had very little visibility into how the case unfolded.

That’s why this reporting caught my attention.

It includes testimony from RCMP Assistant Commissioner John Brewer, who oversaw the RCMP’s Community-Industry Response Group — the special unit created to police Indigenous land-defence actions and the unit active during the Wet’suwet’en operation. One detail that surprised me: Brewer testified that he is a member of the Lower Similkameen Indian Band, something I hadn’t known, despite his high profile, and when I Google it, I can see it is part of his bio.

The report offers a detailed background on the case and the legal issues at play before describing a few interesting details of police testimony.

First, briefings were given to between 70 and 100 officers before the operation began. Officers were instructed on how to deal with journalists and tested on their knowledge of the Brake Case, which outlines media rights and how the media should behave during the enforcement of injunctions.

During the briefings, officers were told not to take notes, but one did anyway. One officer’s notes entered as evidence read: “All parties to be arrested for contempt. No options.” The notes also suggest officers were told to arrest any media and bring them back so a liaison team could verify their credentials.

The articles also recount the arrest of documentary filmmaker Melissa Cox the day before Bracken’s arrest. Video entered into evidence shows Cox identifying herself as a member of the media. She mentions two legal cases, the Brake case and the Fairy Creek case, which have outlined media rights and the requirements for media to behave when covering an injunction. The arresting officer responds that journalists do not have the right to break the law or be wherever they want. RCMP later apologized for that arrest, and Cox was released after establishing that she was a member of the media.

Another point raised in testimony involves advance notice that Bracken was on site. Emails show that The Narwhal informed the RCMP the day before the operation that Bracken was present at Coyote Camp. Those emails were forwarded to Brewer and other commanders. Brewer testified he could not recall whether he had read them.

I was present for part of Bracken’s cross-examination, during which she was repeatedly asked why she did not identify herself to the police during the operation while she was in the tiny house, i.e., whether she could have opened a window, passed a note, or otherwise alerted officers before police entered.

Bracken testified that she believed she had already done what was necessary by informing police of her presence through her editor. She also said she saw her role as documenting events rather than interfering with the operation.

But that becomes a point of contention in this trial. Brewer argues he has six factors he considers, based on the Brake case, about whether or not a journalist’s behaviour matches the Justice Green test. He argues that Backen had many opportunities to identify herself while the operation was in progress and she was in the tiny house, but she did not do so.

When officers entered the tiny house, both Bracken and documentary filmmaker Michael Toledano identified themselves as journalists. Bracken also had her assignment letter and press identification with her.

The arresting officer testified that his understanding was that everyone inside the structure was to be arrested, with any claims of media status sorted out afterward.

According to the report, that was one of six factors Brewer evaluated in keeping Bracken’s detention for two days following the initial arrest.

The rest of Brewer’s testimony is complex and outlined in the article under the subheading Brewer’s Six Factors.

Whatever the court ultimately decides here will not change the existing legal framework governing media access at injunction sites. This is a civil case, not a criminal one, and it does not test or overturn previous law.

What the court is being asked to determine is narrower: whether Bracken’s arrest and detention were reasonable under the existing law, and whether police should be held accountable.

What happens in the case, however, will clarify some issues for journalists and the police that we have not been able to work out through conversations or negotiations. For example, the key point in this case is how and when a journalist gives notice of their presence to the police. Is a note in advance enough? Should a journalist disrupt an active police action to (re-)identify themselves? What are the limits to a journalist's embedding?

For those of us who were only present for small parts of the trial, this reporting offers a rare window into what happened in court. I just wish there were more of it.

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The bill was originally intended to address a court order and restore status to approximately 6,000 people, but the Senate made amendments to the bill, aiming to end discrimination in the act, known commonly as the second-generation cutoff.

Idlout supported ending the second-generation cut-off and sponsored a parliamentary petition in support of the bill.

Her decision to leave the NDP and join the Liberals puts that support in question.

All four opposition parties back the amendments ending the second-generation cut-off, but the governing Liberals do not.

 ”Obviously, with Lori crossing the floor, I think that unfortunately brings the liberals much closer to their majority, and this would obviously all be a lot easier and better if the liberals, just accepted that this was the time and it was right and it was far overdue, but clearly we’re not quite there yet, and we have more convincing to do,” said Zoe Craig-Sparrow, vice president of Justice for Girls.

APTN News reached out to the Liberal Party to interview Idlout but did not hear back. She granted the Canadian Press an interview, but the subject was not raised.

The amendments senators made to the bill would end discrimination against people like  Craig-Sparrow.

 Craig-Sparrow, a member of  the Musqueam Indian Band, has legal status under the Indian Act, but it is a limited status commonly known as 6(2).

She is set to marry a non-status person next October, and under the current law, she will not be able to pass legal status — which comes with recognition of a number of rights — to her future children, an issue that is known as the second-generation cut-off.

If Bill S-2 remains intact with the amendments and passes,  Craig-Sparrow, her children, and her grandchildren will have status regardless of whom they marry.

But that is less likely to happen now that Idlout has joined the liberals.

Read the rest here, for free!

After his opening remarks (transcribed here), Travis Dhanraj spoke three times during the committee meeting. If you want background on what we knew about Travis’ complaint prior to this meeting, read here.

In the first round, he was questioned by MP Rachel Thomas. During that exchange, Dhanraj moved away from the specific question. It seemed clear to me that he wanted to tell his story, and he wasn’t there to be a pawn. He started by reading statements from current and former CBC employees (no names given), given to him in private, into the record. The statements described workplace concerns and experiences inside the organization.

The allegations he referenced have not been proven in court.

Full Disclosure: Some of the hosts, managers, and senior managers mentioned are people I know, a few of whom I also consider friends. I left the CBC on very good terms, but I am aware of other people who have struggled there; by no means do I think it is perfect. I will stay away from remarking on areas where I clearly have a conflict of interest and have only heard one side of the story. I had some observations on the NDA and guest booking protocols during the second round of questioning.

Points raised during the first round:

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1. Statements from employees – Dhanraj read statements from current and former CBC staff describing concerns about workplace culture.

2. Allegations of racism, favouritism, and nepotism – One current employee alleged racism, favouritism, and nepotism within parts of the organization.

3. Toxic workplace claim – A former employee who worked at CBC for about 10 years said she experienced a toxic workplace environment.

4. Interview incident involving Catherine Tait – The former employee described preparing to interview CBC president Catherine Tait and said Tait told her: “I didn’t know I would be interviewed by someone who looked 13 years old.” The employee said the comment felt disparaging and humiliating.

5. Complaint about David Cochrane – Another former employee alleged that while Power & Politics host David Cochrane spoke publicly about diversity, he was dismissive of diverse employees behind the scenes.

6. Allegation about an anchor removed from a role – Dhanraj said one anchor was told they did not fit the organization’s diversity goals because they were white.

7. Diversity survey concerns – He also referenced complaints about CBC surveys asking staff to record the race and gender of guests after shows, with one employee questioning whether checking boxes meaningfully addressed diversity.

8. Management response – Dhanraj said the main concern raised in the statements was that management was not adequately addressing workplace culture issues.

9. Claims about blocked conservative voices – In response to a question, he said there were repeated episodes where conservatives were blocked from appearing.

10. Alleged “do not book” list – Dhanraj said there was a list of people who were not to be interviewed, and said it included Toronto Star Queen’s Park bureau chief Robert Benzie.

Further discussion about the alleged list came up in later rounds of questioning.

Points raised during the second round:

1. Non-disclosure agreement – Dhanraj read portions of a legal agreement he signed with CBC. The document appears to include language stating he would not pursue a complaint at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) and that he agreed his rights had not been breached. The circumstances under which the agreement was signed were not explained.

2. Allegations about booking Conservative guests – Dhanraj said CBC prevented him from pursuing interviews with certain Conservative figures, including Pierre Poilievre. He read a message from a producer stating I am told we cannot chase anybody from the entire party. The chase is with PNP (Power and Politics),” and when Travis pushed back, he was told, “I’m sure there is a myriad of interesting guests you can chase outside of the Conservatives.”

3. Allegation from current co-host – Dhanraj also said his current YouTube co-host told him she experienced disparaging remarks while working at CBC, including being called “brown Barbie.”

I have a few observations on these points.

On the NDA: This seemed to be more than a non-disclosure or non-disparagement agreement; the first asks for silence, and the second asks that you not publicly criticize your former employer. But from what Travis read of this agreement, it specifically asked him to agree he had no basis for a human rights complaint, and would not pursue one. Any of the above agreements, like this, are often part of a settlement when an employee is leaving a workplace, and they typically include language stating that the payment resolves any potential legal or human rights claims.

If you want compensation, and you do not want to sign one, you have to lawyer up and be prepared to go to court or, as Travis is to the CHRT, depending on the nature of your complaint.

Without the full document or the circumstances around it, it is difficult to know whether this was signed while he was still employed, during a leave period, or as part of an exit negotiation. I would suspect that Travis’ leave toward the end of his time at CBC was actually him lawyering up, because that fits the usual pattern of how these things go, but I can’t say for sure- that is merely a guess. The details will likely become clearer if the matter proceeds before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

On refusing to allow Travis to book Pierre Poilievre and other conservatives: Generally in newrooms, anyone who can book a guest gets a guest, and good for you if you get access to people no one else can. But there is a caveat.

Political parties often try to steer interviews toward hosts or programs they consider more favourable, sometimes bypassing tougher interviewers or flagship political shows. In response, editors will sometimes centralize bookings so that major political interviews stay with the main political program rather than being distributed across multiple shows. The aim is usually to prevent guests from forum-shopping for a softer interview (I am not saying Travis is a soft interview, but having watched his show, it was a different style, more open-ended)

Whether that approach is fair or effective is often debated inside newsrooms. All political parties play those games, and so do lobby groups - everyone who is media savvy does.

I was long gone from the CBC before Travis got his show, but from the testimony, it sounded to me as if management saw it more as a late-night variety show, while Travis wanted it to be more politically oriented.

Points raised during the third round:

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1. Alleged blacklist and booking protocol – Dhanraj was asked about his claim about a list of 45 people not to be interviewed by CBC. He said he would table a copy of the list with the committee. He was also asked about an internal protocol restricting certain guests and said he would table that document as well.

2. Allegations involving the PMO – Asked about rumours that the Prime Minister’s Office under Justin Trudeau pressured CBC on the framing of stories, Dhanraj said he had seen documents raising concerns about influence over Power & Politics. He said he was not certain the allegations were true, but believed they should have been investigated.

3. Claims of bias inside CBC – Dhanraj said CBC has a bias and that concerns about imbalance are not imagined. He referenced being criticized internally for showing “an appearance of bias” after posting a tweet calling it “unfortunate” that CBC president Catherine Tait would not give him an interview about the broadcaster’s budget. He contrasted that with remarks he said he heard internally about other figures, including a comment about convoy figure Tamara Lich living in a trailer, which he said reflected a broader culture that was not addressed.

4. Proposal to overhaul management – Dhanraj said he supports public broadcasting but believes CBC has lost its way. He told the committee he is submitting an 11-point plan to overhaul the organization’s management.

At several points, Dhanraj read from tweets, emails, chat messages and other documents that he said support his claims.

This whole thing did seem a little out of place, even though it was obviously the most interesting testimony at the committee today. I say ‘out of place’ because the study is supposed to examine the state of Canada’s media industry: why outlets are closing, how close the country is to losing more local and regional news, the wave of layoffs in the business, and what policies or programs are helping or hurting. And that did come up, and is a very nerdy, much drier, and more far-reaching story for another day.

Statements made before Parliament are protected by parliamentary privilege. That means witnesses can speak without fear of lawsuits, and journalists can report what is said in committee even if the statements themselves could otherwise be defamatory.

Each witness appearing before the committee was given five minutes to make opening remarks.

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The committee began later than scheduled, starting at noon after a vote delayed proceedings.

The allegations raised by Travis Dhanraj have not been proven. However, this is the first time he has spoken on the record in detail about concerns he previously raised in a resignation letter that was later leaked publicly.

What follows is a transcript of the first five minutes of his testimony.

Check against delivery; there may be slight errors.

I have thoughts, but I will listen to the full hearing and post later. For now I’ll just note: As someone who worked in a toxic place, and was also asked to sign an NDA, and also refused - you know where I am talking about- it’s interesting to know, as I was just told, that Travis will be interviewing my former boss. The irony in this business.

As a kid, growing up in Alberta, I wasn’t like most of my friends, every night I watched the National with Nolton Nash, he represented a public broadcaster that belonged to Canadians, not to power not to party but to the public, and that is the CBC that I believed in. Now, many Canadians know the story about one of my tweets in April, 2024.

I publicly stated that Canada Tonight had requested an interview with then CBC, president Catherine Tait, and the request was declined. Facts. Shortly after I was removed from the air. Now on May 7th, 2024, Tait told this very committee, she was quote, not aware of any repercussions yet 24 hours earlier ATIP records show her vice president Barb Williams briefed her directly about my situation and that matters because trust matters.

The tweet was not the beginning. It was the breaking point. For months prior, tensions had been building, not over performance, but over control while I was publicly held up as a bold, diverse host, my ability to lead the very program carrying my face and name was quietly being stripped away. CBC’s stated, commitment to diversity contrasted with realities of tokenism.

Still, I pushed forward creating a nightly panel to showcase real diversity, including of thought. I questioned unequal pay, why? For example, one contributor who was Indigenous always needed to be paid while others weren’t. When a prominent black journalist requested compensation after appearing doing the exact same job, I was told to reconsider booking him.

Moving forward, I attempted to end this discriminatory practice. Instead, the panel was canceled. When it came to politics, interviews were blocked under guardrails, governed by an internal document, never made public, titled: Parameters for Political Guests. Political access was centralized, booking decisions controlled elsewhere.

It did not happen once. It became a pattern, it became the standard. Power and Politics hosted by David Cochrane was given gatekeeping authority over which politicians could appear on Canada Tonight. When I questioned that control, and who was in control, I was viewed as disruptive. Now, at the same time, I raised concerns about a toxic environment after I sat down with Speaker Greg Fergus for a conversation on Black History Month.

Chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton, circulated internal communications, questioning my program, copying senior leadership, insinuating she or Mr. Cochrane should have done the interview. It was an intimidation tactic which management ignored. I and others raised concerns about bullying behaviour by senior figures, including Mr. Cochrane. But while he remained on air, I faced discipline and marginalization. Now, the transcripts of these meetings show the issue was not about my journalism. But about reputational risk to the corporation. I received a written warning carrying the threat of termination. I was placed under confidentiality restrictions that prevented me from correcting public and internal narratives.

CBC silenced and intimidated me simply for trying to do my job and fulfill my public service role to Canadians. Now, this is not about left or right, it’s not about one tweet. Or one career. It’s about systemic control, tokenism, selective enforcement, and a toxic culture where intimidation went unchecked.

When I refused to waive my rights under the Canadian Human Rights Act in a proposed confidentiality agreement right here, and a gag order, essentially, my role was not renewed. My union tasked with protecting my rights as an employee told me explicitly, quote, it’s very much a normal thing that we use.

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After 25 years in journalism, my career ended that dream I had as a kid of working at CBC shattered, along with my trust in it. Now inside the newsroom, the message was unmistakable and did not need to be spoken.

I raised concerns. I challenge centralized control and bias. I fought for real diversity and equal standards. I tried to do my job as a journalist. Within months, I was pulled off the air, disciplined, restricted from speaking, stripped of my primetime program, and eventually out altogether. Now, if you were still working there, would you feel safe raising similar concerns?

This is how silence becomes culture. It’s how whistleblowers are intimidated. Public institutions do not weaken from scrutiny. They weaken when they avoid it. The CBC that I believed in was strong enough to withstand accountability. If it is to endure as a public broadcaster worthy of Canadians’ trust and over $1.4 billion of their money, it [00:05:00] must be strong enough to withstand it.

Again, accountability is not destruction; it is survival. Thank you for your time. Thank you.

Today could be one of those rare days when the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage becomes unexpectedly interesting.

And by “interesting,” I mean the deeply nerdy kind of media drama that has journalists hiding the livestream behind their Word docs while pretending to work.

The committee is starting a study on ‘the state of the media,’ and there is no shortage of real issues to discuss.

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Layoffs are still coming. There will be cuts to CBC. Local media outlets continue to close faster than fake AI videos can be made. Heritage Canada made a mess out of the Local Journalism Initiative — a program that used to fund paid, full-time reporters covering news deserts. There’s also the unresolved question of whether Google’s money and government bailouts have done more harm than good.

But if any of that even gets discussed, nobody will be paying attention.

Instead, expect a few complaints to be elevated to a national crisis, in a sharp demonstration of how the Heritage Committee can turn serious issues into political theatre and taxpayer-funded YouTube clips for a CBC-hating base.

Now, criticizing the CBC is our third-favourite national sport after hockey and lacrosse, and every parliamentary committee is an exercise in political theatre. There are, for example, leading questions for witnesses, and sharp cutoffs when someone rudely tells the truth instead of supporting a party line.

But if you’ve watched these hearings, you know the Heritage Committee has a habit of turning anything regarding the CBC into something of a cage match.

The temptation to run up the cheap-points-o-meter will be positively irresistible as former Canada Tonight host Travis Dhanraj appears before the Heritage Committee, along with representatives from Honest Reporting.

So while I’m pretending to work, eating popcorn, and DMing my friends between 11 and 1 as this all unfolds, I’ll try to send along some Coles Notes.

But first, a primer on what to expect — because I, who sadly spend too much time doomwatching these committee hearings, already have a sense of how these tend to go.

Act 1: As Travis Dhanraj breaks his Silence, Conservatives crack their knuckles

Before we get into the theatrics, a quick caveat: I’m not on the inside of whatever dispute is unfolding here. This is just what’s publicly known.

Travis Dhanraj started his career at CBC in Edmonton and Toronto, then moved to CP24, Global News, and CTV, and returned to CBC in 2021 as a senior parliamentary reporter. He later hosted Canada Tonight.

The first public flashpoint came in April 2024, when Dhanraj posted on X that he had asked then-CBC president Catherine Tait for an interview about new government funding for the broadcaster, and she declined.

It is always delightful when an employee surreptitiously tapes and leaks an HR meeting, and I presume that is how the National Post got this tape, which frankly, does not look great for CBC. (Full disclosure: Lest you forget, I worked at CBC thrice, as an intern, as a contract associate producer and as the Managing Editor of Investigations. Let’s say my third round was very decent. I still have friends there.)

Essentially, the tape features a confident, polite, and baffled Dhanraj explaining that he and the team on the show decided to ask CBC president Catherine Tait for an interview about the budget.

When I read Dhanraj’s tweet, it struck me as pretty mild. In the leaked discussion (I presume with Human Resources, and which is not the full tape), Dhanraj’s alleged wrongdoing is first presented as an inappropriate use of insider information about budget matters. So the first thing we hear is Dhanraj explaining that the budget was widely reported and is in the public domain.

My personal read of the tweet is that no insider information is being leaked.

As the conversation progresses, the issue is reframed as a violation of the Journalistic Policy.

“Um, do you understand the concern with this post as it relates to the principle of integrity?” asks a female voice.

“No, I really don’t. I don’t. And again, Andre, like, I find it problematic that we are in a meeting where we are discussing something that is in the interests of the corporation. So I’m not seeing the separation right now between the journalism and the interest of the corporation,” replies Dhanraj. “I see how it would be in the interest of the corporation for this tweak not to be out, but I don’t see how journalistically it’s not sound.”

In his resignation letter, Dhanraj wrote about the ‘investigation’ into his Twitter post.

“I was presented with an NDA tied to an investigation into a tweet about then-CBC President Catherine Tait. It was designed not to protect privacy, but to sign away my voice.”

As a free speech advocate myself, who was asked to sign an (even more ridiculous) NDA by an employer, I am sympathetic.

But there’s more. Dhanraj makes two other allegations that we know less about, in a leaked resignation letter, published by the Toronto Sun (also covered by CBC, by the way).

First, he was not allowed to book people who expressed conservative views.

“Performative diversity, tokenism, a system designed to elevate certain voices and diminish others. I was repeatedly denied access to key newsmakers. Internal booking and editorial protocols were weaponized to create structural barriers for some while empowering others,” he wrote.

Second, he was punished for pushing back.

“When I questioned these imbalances, I was met with silence, resistance, and eventually, retaliation. I was fighting for balance and accused of being on a ‘crusade.’ ”

On point one: There are plenty of conservatives on CBC, and I am frankly jealous, because Conservatives do play favourites with the media. (I have to chase them all over god’s green earth and take whatever scrum crumbs I can get.) So I wonder what ‘conservative’ voices were being shut out.

Were these fringe voices? In 2020, Sandy Hudson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto, said she was cut from a segment on CBC Radio's The Current after she raised the topic of defunding the police, which was a radical left-wing notion at the time, during a pre-interview with a producer.

Former CBCer Tara Henley tried to explain what she felt was a left-wing bias at the CBC, but didn’t seem able to express herself very well. Henley talked about ‘groupthink’, which led to stories about non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack of LGBT terms in Tagalog being prioritized, or how producers had “to fill out racial profile forms for every guest you book.”

These things don’t bother me about the CBC. Not because I am ‘left’ but because for years I was invisible in the media. My friends and I used to call CBC’s Power and Politics ‘White Power and Politics’ with the peak being the panel of all white pundits discussing the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 (not that long ago) with straight faces.

But I don’t understand what Henley was getting at; I don’t know any more about what voices Dhanraj feels were unwelcome. But I am open to hearing it.

Dhanraj has said virtually nothing else about the allegations of mistreatment, which are still before the Human Rights Tribunal. But he recently posted on his new YouTube Channel, Can’t Be Censored (which is doing well, with more than 19K subscribers): “Tuesday, I will testify before a parliamentary committee studying fairness and media. Now, I won’t be able to say everything because my ongoing human rights case is before the commission, but I will be able to name names, describe decisions, and paint a better picture about what happened inside the CBC.”

The thing is, Dhanraj has already been a hot topic at the committee.

In October last year, when the newly minted CBC president, Marie-Philippe Bouchard, appeared before the committee, Rachael Thomas grilled her - not too gently— on CBC's ‘toxic’ culture and whether Bouchard had personally looked into Dhanraj’s complaint.

Thomas, then, quickly moved the conversation to asking why conservatives “are not welcome” at the CBC, and challenged Bouchard (whose job has nothing to do with journalism) to name the last five conservatives who appeared on any show. Bouchard promised to find out and get back to them.

Liberal Zoe Royer suggested, “in the spirit of fairness,” that the list should include Conservatives who were offered interviews and declined, particularly in the lead-up to the election. And Liberal David Myles - one of the MPs who actually watches Power & Politics said he’d seen Larry Brock, Scott Aitchison, Andrew Scheer, Melissa Lantsman and Michelle Rempel Garner on the show if the Conservatives were still looking for five names.

The point is, the conversation quickly shifted from a serious discussion of the committee’s mandate to a debate about Dhanraj and the usual partisan hostility toward the CBC.

Dhanraj has leaned into his CBC edgelord origin story, which helped him land interviews with some big conservative figures for his YouTube Channel — including Pierre Poilievre — while clearly aware he was also being ponged.

“Now, I know this story has become partisan. Some want the CBC dismantled, others defend it wholeheartedly. I’m a hero to some, a villain to others. But my mission has never been to destroy the CBC. It’s about whether a $ 1.5 billion public broadcaster plays by the rules it lectures everyone else about.”

So let’s see if he keeps on track.

Act 2: Honest Reporting

I’d never heard of Honest Reporting until I worked at a podcast company and we did an episode about Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2023.

A day or two later, host Jonathan Goldsbie came to me and said he’d heard that Honest Reporting had posted about the show. I checked it out. It was, to put it politely, a wildly creative interpretation of what had actually been said.

Goldsbie asked me to let him know if any complaints came in.

They did. About 400 of them.

The idea, I think, was to flood the inbox and make life miserable. Unfortunately for the flooders, because the complaints are all identical form letters, Gmail simply stacks them into one neat, easily deleted thread.

Goldsbie did a wry follow-up on the show about the “campaign.” Our publisher was not amused with us and suggested we should probably be taking those complaints seriously, which honestly surprised me. I’ve never had much patience for campaigns designed to bully journalists into shutting up.

I won’t get too deep into Honest Reporting here — there was recently an excellent J-Source article about them that’s worth reading.

But I will share my favourite thing they’ve done.

Mike Fegelman, the executive director of Honest Reporting Canada, once complained to the CBC Ombudsman about a story published on April 22, 2022. The article was about wine bottles from Taybeh Winery, a Palestinian producer, being sold in Ontario with stickers covering the words “Product of Palestine.”

Fegelman objected to the article and to the reporter's involvement, arguing that CBC’s coverage was “not newsworthy, nor was it time sensitive,” adding, “We view this as advocacy/activist journalism, pure and simple.”

There’s also a 2024 complaint from Honest Reporting about a CBC story on hummus.

No, I didn’t misspell that.

This isn’t to downplay the very real rise in antisemitism we’re seeing right now. But a story about wine labels — or hummus — is not that.

In any case, Honest Reporting should make for an interesting watch — and, almost certainly, another one that divides neatly along partisan politics.

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ISC Minister Mandy Gull-Masty, seen here at the 2025 AFN assembly in Ottawa, announced $1.5 billion for Jordan’s Principle. Photo: Karyn Pugliese/APTN.

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The money announced by the federal government for the Jordan’s Principle program will leave the program millions of dollars short of what it has been spending, according to departmental records obtained by APTN News.

Jordan’s Principle is a legally mandated program that pays for health services for First Nations children.

On Feb. 26, Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty announced $1.55 billion in funding for the program through March 31, 2027.

Planned spending for Jordan’s Principle was set to expire in 2026.

The funding announcement was meant to reassure families and create stability for the next year, so communities can to continue delivering services while ISC reevaluates the program, Gull-Masty said at the announcement.

But the department’s internal case management records show the program cost $1.64 billion in 2024–25 alone.

That means the minister’s funding announcement is about $90 million less than what the program spent in 2024-25.

It is also $174 million less than the program needed in the previous fiscal year ending in 2024.

The federal government’s fiscal year runs from April 1 to March 31 of the next year. For example, the money announced by Gull-Masty is for April 1, 2026 to March 31, 2027.

The chart below shows the rise in spending on Jordan’s Principle over the years, and the shortfall of last week’s announcement.

Why did the program spend less in 2025 than in previous years?

Read more here - For free - at APTN

Canada didn’t linger on that point. Prime Minister Mark Carney endorsed the strikes. Full stop.

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In a six-paragraph statement issued under the names of Carney and Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand, there’s a line the prime minister is going to have to own:

“Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security.”

There is no visible hedging there. No acknowledgment that the legal basis for the strikes is contested.

We’ve been in a similar situation before. In 2003, Washington urged Canada to back the invasion of Iraq on the assurance that weapons of mass destruction justified urgent action. Canada declined. The weapons, as we all know now, did not exist.

So before you even get to the morality of all this, there’s the predicate.

Whether Trump’s claim about imminent Iranian nuclear capability is even real is one question.

Trump is already rewriting yesterday’s history, as is his habit, now also claiming Iran was behind his own assassination attempt in 2024 — and says that was a factor in ordering the joint U.S.–Israeli operation that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“I got him before he got me,” Trump said Sunday night in an interview with ABC News. “I got him first.”

And as always with Trump, the line between national security rationale and personal vendetta is… negotiable. And he has ushered in the post-Truth era, where fact-checkers can’t keep up with the ever-changing talking points.

Against that backdrop, the morality of the operation takes on added significance. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruled Iran for 36 years with a mixture of defiance and repression. For many Iranians, he will not be revered.

Trump may have cast the strikes as the Iranian people’s “greatest chance” to reclaim their country. Let’s remember, however, was not the rationale for the military action.

The hard question is whether the strikes prevented further violence or simply widened an already volatile conflict and whether they constituted lawful self-defence, an assassination, or even retaliation.

According to the NYT and others, the CIA helped pinpoint a gathering of Iranians and shared the intelligence with Israel, which then used it to strike.

Media outlets like CNN point out that for decades, the U.S. officially steered clear of killing foreign leaders — partly because of past CIA fiascos, partly because there’s technically still a ban on assassinations sitting on the books.

Now, after years of inching closer under the banner of counterterrorism, Washington has crossed a line it once treated as radioactive — and is trying very hard not to use the word for it.r

Killing anyone without a trial — including a foreign leader — involves a moral choice, writes Tim Naftali in The Alantic.

In a cooler, more clinical assessment, The New York Times dives into the knotty legal question of whether Ayatollah Khamenei— not a uniformed member of the military but the commander-in-chief of Iran’s armed forces — counts as a lawful target in a conflict, and if passing along information about a target to a military force rather than conducting the strike yourself counts.

Around the world, governments have responded with calculation, leaving the moral implications largely unexamined: the staid comments of UK leaders, the forceful language, and understandable anxiety of Gulf states, who are warning of retaliation while still trying to avoid being drawn into a widening conflict.

The rhetorical support of China.

Imagine Russian President Vladimir Putin, keeping a straight face as he called the death of the leader a “cynical murder” that violated “all norms of human morality and international law.”

Read More: I asked Russian Journalist Pavel Kanygin if Trump’s erosion of democracy looks familiar to him.

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Which brings us, inevitably, to own our stage at our own modest northern outpost.

The Carney government has backed the strikes, while declining to say whether they comply with international law — a detail some might consider relevant.

Alex Ballingall at The Toronto Star captures the crux: six days into Carney’s Indo-Pacific trip:

“Carney has avoided all questions from the Canadian media six days into his swing through the Indo-Pacific, Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand refused to say Monday before departing New Delhi whether she believes the strikes that sparked the conflict are consistent with international law.”

This is the same Carney who, weeks ago at Davos, delivered a polished sermon on the “rules-based order,” cautioning middle powers not to “go along to get along.”

A speech that, within minutes, was being hailed as “historic” among the political class — and promptly enshrined on Wikipedia, our modern gold standard for canonization.

“I also submit to you that other countries, particularly middle powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that embodies our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of states. The power of the less powerful begins with honesty,” Carney told the room.

That was then.

Now it has been six short weeks since that Davos speech — six weeks since the call for honesty, consistency and a rules-based order that middle powers must defend rather than merely accommodate.

Already, those words are beginning to look aspirational rather than operational.

Carney has long had a gift for elevating the conversation — setting high moral standards, articulating principled frameworks, urging courage and clarity.

The difficulty has never been the rhetoric. It’s the translation.

Governing, unlike speaking at Davos, requires choosing allies in imperfect circumstances and defending those choices in real time.

The standard he set was not impossibly high.

It was his own.

Here’s the thing: I liked Carney’s speech.

But in those six weeks, the world became a lot more complicated than anyone predicted. With tensions rising across the Middle East, all signs point to worse to come.

The next decisions will be more consequential — and less forgiving.

The question now cannot be whether the world is too complicated for principle.

It’s whether principle survives contact with politics — and whether Carney, the banker-turned-politician, intends to try to meet the standard he so recently set, or if he merely relished the moment of setting it.

Correction: There was a typo in the year of the assassination attempt on Trump; this has been corrected.

Clarification: The line: ‘Trump is already rewriting yesterday’s history, as is his habit, now also claiming Iran was behind his own assassination attempt in 2024.” leaned heavily on the word ‘claiming’ to convey that there is absolutely no evidence from authorities or other sources that the assassination attempt was linked to Iran.