Canada

Through naïveté and mindless belief in the universal benefits of academic exchange, some of Canada’s leading universities have contributed to the militarization of the Far East.

From the start of academic exchanges with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the early 1970s, the government of Canada has watched and largely approved of Chinese students focusing almost exclusively on science and technology faculties at Canadian universities. Meanwhile, Canadians going to study in China have engrossed themselves in Chinese language and culture and Maoism. For most of the past fifty years, Canadian universities and authorities were satisfied with this exchange. They saw giving Chinese students the benefits of Canadian knowledge and experience in science and technology as a gift toward the economic and industrial development of China.

Around the year 2000, however, Beijing and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) realized that here was an opportunity to grab or develop technology for their program of rapid military modernization that had begun a decade before. The PLA calls the program “picking flowers in foreign lands to make honey in China,” and it is not at all as innocent as it sounds. It involves PLA engineers and scientists from the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and six other armed-forces universities disguising their military links and presenting themselves as simple scholars in order to engage in postgraduate research at Canadian universities.

Few people drive into Richmound, Saskatchewan, without purpose. The town, with a population of just over 100, lies around seventy-five kilometres from the Trans-Canada Highway, near the Alberta border. So when a caravan of RVs and motorhomes drove into town one day last September, it caused quite a stir. The vehicles were adorned with purple and white flags featuring a white maple leaf and golden sword, portraits of a woman’s face, and signs referring to her as the “Queen of Canada.” Residents watched as the convoy turned off the main road, past the sole church and community centre, and into the driveway of the former school building. The group wasn’t just passing through.

The woman pictured on the side of the vehicles was Romana Didulo, believed to be one of the most active conspiracy figures in North America. She and her followers had been wreaking havoc across Canada and online for years—propagating fictions about COVID-19 vaccines, sparking sometimes violent protests, and spreading conspiracies popular with QAnon, an umbrella term for the pro–Donald Trump theory that the world is run by a cabal of pedophiles who worship Satan. Didulo saw herself as Canada’s true leader, issuing bizarre “royal decrees” for her subjects, whom she refers to, cribbing from the United States Constitution, as “We the People.” Her tens of thousands of followers believe she holds authority over everything from law enforcement to income taxes. But to extremism experts and former followers, Didulo is a dangerous cult leader and a con artist.

A high-profile Canadian employment lawyer is to be disciplined this morning over his hardball tactics against some of his firm's dissatisfied clients, after two of them posted critical reviews online and a third refused to pay her bill.

The Law Society of Ontario alleges that Lior Samfiru was "abusive, offensive or otherwise inconsistent" with professional standards when he threatened to sue, or did sue, three former clients of his firm.

He's expected to be formally reprimanded and ordered to pay $5,000 in costs. Records filed ahead of the hearing show Samfiru acknowledges he committed professional misconduct and has apologized.

He did not reply to CBC News's request for comment sent Monday evening.

Auditor General Karen Hogan's audit couldn't determine if contracts delivered value for money

The parliamentary ethics commissioner has reversed course and said he will examine the business dealings of federal cabinet minister Randy Boissonnault.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland says Liberals will conduct an 'internal followup' on meddling claims

Open and transparent, ladies and gentlemen.

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has awarded damages to nearly 80 ICBC customers whose personal data was leaked in a privacy breach linked to a series of attacks in the Lower Mainland....

I saw a convoy of about 30 cars on the highway back in October. I looked it up and found nothing. Then I see a Reddit post in /r/vexillollogy with the same flag and no useful answers.

It's so weird that people bought like 100 of these flags and there is no info on them at all!

I flipped the picture to make the flag the right way.

A new parliamentary report paints a stark picture of foreign interference in Canadian politics, characterizing the government's response as a 'serious failure' that could impact the country for years to come.

Link to the report (pdf)

Former Alberta UCP MLA Derek Fildebrandt faces criminal charges, accused of threatening a group of teenagers, CBC News has learned.

Fildebrandt, 38, who is now the publisher of the Western Standard news website, faces four charges of uttering threats to cause death or bodily harm, according to court documents.

According to police, just before 9 p.m. on April 13, 2024, four teens ages 13 and 14 were walking to a nearby convenience store.

They stopped outside Fildebrandt's southwest Calgary home to wait for a friend.

Fildebrandt then approached the teens.

"He believed they were responsible for vandalizing his property," according to a statement from the Calgary Police Service.

"When confronted, the boys fled and the man allegedly chased them in his vehicle and threatened them."

A neighbour intervened and Fildebrandt returned to his home, police said.

Wildfires forced thousands of Albertans to temporarily leave their homes this spring, but hundreds of residents are still grappling with the effects of last year's fires, having no homes yet to return to.

The northern Alberta community of Fox Lake was the hardest hit during last year's wildfire season, losing more than 200 structures, including 100 homes, a grocery store, an RCMP detachment and a water treatment plant.

Fox Lake is a remote community that lies on the south side of the Peace River, about 550 kilometres north of Edmonton.

It's home to the majority of members of the Little Red River Cree Nation. About 4,000 residents fled Fox Lake in early May of last year as the Paskwa fire approached.

Five years after a national inquiry delivered more than 200 recommendations aimed at protecting Indigenous women and girls from going missing or being murdered, former commissioners say there's been too little systemic change across the country.

Former chief commissioner of the inquiry Marion Buller and fellow commissioner Michèle Audette, who now sits as a Quebec senator, told CBC News they aren't seeing evidence of the political will needed to deliver the paradigm shift in Canada's relationship with Indigenous women and girls they called for in 2019.

"We're frustrated, disappointed," Audette said.

"We lost faith in what [governments and public institutions] said they would do."

When asked if young, aspiring farmers ever inquired about buying his farm, Marcus Collinson just laughs.

"No young farmers are buying farms," he said, adding it's why he sold his four properties southwest of London, Ont., to an investor in May and June 2020.

The Toronto-based company that bought them is Bonnefield, Canada's first and largest farm real estate investment corporation. It holds more than $1.4 billion in assets across seven provinces, representing 140,000 acres (nearly 56,656 hectares) of farmland, according to its website.

According to Ontario land registry records, Bonnefield shows up as the owner in 464 premises identification numbers (PIDs), from northern to southern Ontario. Each PID is linked to a specific parcel of land rather than a business or a person.

As a general rule, I hate opinion pieces as I feel that they are a major contributor to our slide towards 'facts don't matter' US style political rhetoric. That said, I thought this was an interesting and fact driven piece that if anything was too easy on the RCMP. Sharing a journalist's request for information with the union, without permission, definitely struck me as a serious lapse in judgment.

Beyond his job as a freelance process server in Toronto, thirty-five-year-old Josh Chernofsky didn’t have much going on in the spring of 2019. But over time, he’d developed a rapport with one of the security guards at the University Avenue courthouses. They’d chat about this and that, often about security work; Chernofsky had once been in the industry himself. One day in May, the guard said there were going to be some protests in the neighbourhood on the weekend. Of what nature, he didn’t know. Chernofsky decided to take a look.

As he made his way to the protest on the Saturday, Chernofsky cut down a side street. The first thing he noticed as he drew near: there were a lot of police vehicles. He then saw people wearing matching black and yellow Fred Perry polo shirts. He vaguely recognized it as the Proud Boys uniform. I thought that was just an American thing, he said to himself. Beyond the group’s US origins and some sense that it was ideologically conservative, he didn’t know much about it. He just thought it was a “men’s group.”

At the rallying point, two crowds were facing off across the street from one another. “On one side, there were all these people in black, covered up, masked, yelling, shouting, swearing—just sounding very obnoxious,” he remembers. On the other, he saw people with Canadian flags and no masks. “They all seemed very happy,” he says. “I guess that’s what attracted me to that side.”