Gradually, then suddenly: Canada’s top general is shutting down a key operation keeping avalanches under control along the Trans-Canada Highway in the Rocky Mountains because of “significant resource pressures,” according to a letter obtained by the Ottawa Citizen.
Keir Starmer’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and Britannia monitors the waves.
Hormuz traffic has collapsed by 90% since conflict began, with fewer than 10 ships a day now transiting the strait.
Royal Navy-led monitors report 40+ incidents, with vessels attacked, damaged, or forced to turn back.
Read more: https://t.co/WifeJgtoQN pic.twitter.com/7zB65pMGxp
— Royal Navy (@RoyalNavy) May 1, 2026
Borrow Some More, Daddy!
Judging by the headline, you’d think that the United States was the only country facing this problem. It would be difficult, in fact, to find a nation that isn’t looking down the barrel of the same gun. Aside from Milei in Argentina, it would be just as difficult to find a government willing to turn down the spending taps in any meaningful way.
As of Tuesday, government debt held by the public is about $31.27 trillion, according to the US Treasury. Meanwhile, the US nominal gross domestic product (GDP) from April 1, 2025, to March 31, 2026, was an estimated $31.22 trillion, according to new Commerce Department data released Thursday.
What’s The Opposite Of Diversity?
Hundreds of universities are at risk of going out of business. Students and parents are voting with their feet.
“There are a large number of institutions that provide zero value”.
“The education is not being rewarded in the labor market”
“If you come out of school with… pic.twitter.com/PfETgZ6bev
— Wall Street Mav (@WallStreetMav) April 29, 2026
Overdue.
Circling The Drain
Two notable takeaways from Newfoundland’s recent budget: this is a record breaking deficit figure from an allegedly conservative government, and health care now eats up nearly half of all spending. We’ll be well on the way to two thirds before long and that will be the case for every province.
The budget forecasts a deficit of $688.5 million and a $20.8 billion net debt by the end of the 2026-27 fiscal year.
The province will spend $5.4 billion on health care — 42 per cent of its entire expenses — including more than $47 million to create 200 new long-term care beds.
Open The Pod Bay Doors, Hal!
I gather there’s still more than a few bugs to be resolved with AI. I’m reminded of a Dilbert cartoon from twenty years ago where the company rolled out a poorly tested backup product called Quik Protect which did nothing but erase your hard drive. Since that was back in the days of modems, it would call up all your friends and erase their hard drives too. And if you had a sound card, it would swear at you.
“Yesterday afternoon, an AI coding agent — Cursor running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6 — deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, our infrastructure provider,” sums up the PocketOS boss. “It took 9 seconds.”
Gradually, Then Suddenly
How are them elbows working out for ya?
Rogers Communications is offering voluntary departure packages to roughly half of its employees, in what is believed to be the largest round of buyout offers in Canada’s telecom sector in recent years.
Rogers said about 50 per cent of its roughly 25,000 employees across numerous business divisions will be offered packages, according to the Globe & Mail.
“We are taking steps to adjust our cost structure to reflect the business realities of the current environment. As part of this, some teams have chosen to offer voluntary departure and retirement programs to give some employees the choice to decide whether they’d like to stay with the company or begin a new chapter,” said Rogers spokesperson Zac Carreiro in the report.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Cubada
Ralph Goodale on Canada-US relations: "A relationship that has lasted for more than 80 yrs has come to an end. And we're now trying to build something to replace it. We need to make sure in building that replacement we are less vulnerable and less dependent than we used to be." pic.twitter.com/FG7shJ14RI
— Scott Robertson (@sarobertsonca) April 24, 2026
Who Kinew?
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose.
CTV News: Manitoba won’t put U.S. liquor on shelves until Trump drops tariffs, releases Epstein files
Google streetview: Manitoba’s primary trade artery with the US.
Update: A photo taken April 21st at the Emerson-Pembina border crossing, for the Manitoba highway deniers.
h/t Mike
New Governor, Same As The Old Governor
All I know about cutting trade ties with the US is how well it worked out for Cuba.
Under Mark Carney, Canada’s posture toward the United States has shifted with surprising speed—less theatrical than Trump’s, but no less consequential. In April 2025, we were promised a renewed economic and security partnership. By the summer, we were told the existing deal was already the best possible outcome. Fast forward to April 2026, and suddenly our reliance on the U.S. is framed as a strategic weakness. All of this, notably, after months without meaningful engagement or negotiation.
That messaging matters. Especially when delivered in a widely viewed address suggesting that CUSMA—the backbone of North American trade—is somehow on life support. It leaves industry asking a basic question: what exactly is the plan?
Circling The Drain
Unaffordable housing creates a lot more problems than declining provincial education funding as families move to cheaper abodes. But then again, the same people bemoaning this problem are likely the same ones who cheered for zero percent interest rates that sparked the housing bubble to begin with.
Families aren’t just moving to a different neighbourhood; they’re leaving the region entirely. Driven by a cost of living that has become unsustainable for many young parents, the “Surrey dream” is being packed into moving trucks and headed further east — out of the valley and, in many cases, out of the province.
Lipstick On Pigs
Who knew that Canada could become a world leader in lipstick package manufacturing?
The federal government is unveiling $25 million to support 14 projects meant to boost advanced manufacturing in Canada.
The new spending adds to $38 million allocated by industry, for projects ranging from more efficient battery production to using artificial intelligence in packaging cosmetics.
Faint Hope
So Canadians rewarded Carney with a majority government so that he can try to backfill a hole previously created by his own party? Note that this is merely a discussion forum as opposed to the implementation of any actual business plans. The mind boggles.
A recent report from RBC says that last year was Canada’s first to attract more than $100 billion in foreign direct investment since 2015.
More than $1 trillion in foreign investment exited the Canadian economy between 2015 and 2024, what the report calls the “largest capital exodus in Canadian history.”
The Canadian Investment Drought
Shocked, I tell you! Shocked! But I’m sure a Liberal majority will make it all better.
Small-business exit rates hit 5.6 per cent in the second quarter of 2025, while the entry rate fell to 4.8 per cent in the fourth quarter. The ratio between business starts and closures is among the worst since the COVID-19 pandemic, CFIB said in a report.
Gradually, Then Suddenly
Related: “Roughly 40% of Canadians whose underlying ability/human capital would place them in the top 1% of Canada’s income distribution if they had stayed — now reside outside Canada.”
Going Bust
For over a decade, Canadian real estate markets and their lenders have acted like the housing price ratchet could only go one way: up. Now they’re finding out that the price ratchet can go the other way too.
The result was a sudden stampede of buyers who triggered an unprecedented run-up that put the average sale price of a traditional, ranch-style, Brantford bungalow close to $900,000 at the market peak in 2022 compared to a mere $300,000 or so in 2016.
Flash forward, and the average home in Brantford in February sold for $625,135, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association, a 30 per cent drop from 2022 that has saddled homeowners there with an unexpected housing crisis that Canadians…are all too familiar with today.
Comedic Governance
When I first saw the headline, I thought maybe my provincial government was finally seeing the bigger picture. But again I was disappointed. We’re still at the “definition” stage of micromanagement.
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew says his government is working on the definition of a grocery store as it considers where to apply a tax cut on food.
“The timing is extraordinary.”
While China was busy shipping missile chemicals to Iran and collecting yuan tolls at Hormuz, someone was inside its most sensitive supercomputer stealing everything.
CNN reports that a hacker group calling itself FlamingChina breached the China National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin and exfiltrated up to 10 petabytes of classified defence data. The samples posted on dark web forums include bomb and missile designs, animated explosion simulations, structural integrity tests, renderings of the J-20 stealth fighter, sixth-generation aircraft concepts, nuclear submarine schematics, hypersonic weapons systems, and target analyses for American assets including HIMARS launchers and carrier strike groups.
Ten petabytes. For context, the entire printed collection of the US Library of Congress is approximately 10 terabytes. This breach is one thousand times that volume. It is being sold for cryptocurrency on Breach Forums. Cybersecurity experts who reviewed the previews told CNN the data appears genuine, matching known output patterns from the NSCC Tianjin facility, which serves over 6,000 clients including defence agencies and aviation firms across China.
Circling The Drain
Nine years to fully end door to door mail delivery? There’s obviously no sense of urgency despite the mounting losses. And no obvious outrage among taxpayers. That’s Canada for you.
Joël Lightbound, minister of Government Transformation, Public Works and Procurement, said last fall that the process to eliminate most door-to-door service would take about nine years, with most of it expected to be completed in the first four.
Canada Post lost $841 million before tax in 2024.