Category: New Governor

Only 43lbs Of Fentanyl

Sam Cooper;

The container arrived carrying twenty industrial rolls of paper, and concealed inside ten of them was 520.6 kilograms of opium — the raw material of the Big Circle Boys’ heroin trade that drove Vancouver’s overdose deaths for decades, before fentanyl exploded in the Downtown Eastside around 2012.

Canada Border Services Agency officers made the find at the Tsawwassen Container Examination Facility, five kilometers from the Deltaport terminal, after intelligence from the agency’s National Targeting Centre and U.S. Customs and Border Protection flagged the shipment in January.

The disclosure came late, as it had before: officers intercepted the container in January but the agency announced it only this week — the same months-long lag that preceded its October disclosure of a May 2025 seizure of 4,300 liters of Chinese precursor chemicals bound for Calgary. The number carries political weight on its own. A single container held more opium than the 329 kilograms of opioids border officers seized across all of British Columbia in 2025.

Related: Just don’t be found in possession of a bouncy castle and you’re free to go.

“Vigilamus pro te”

A CAF juxtapose of sorts.

Brian Lilley: This wasn’t respectful to the troops, don’t think it followed protocol. Problem is, Carney doesn’t know this.

More military mystery…

The officer commanding one of the Canadian Army’s leading regular force battalions and the unit’s top non-commissioned officer have been removed from their position. Lt.-Col. Jason Hudson and Chief Warrant Officer Kim Doerr, of the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, based in Edmonton, were apparently forced to step aside over the weekend, several military sources said Tuesday.

The Department of National Defence, in a written statement, confirmed to CBC News that action had taken place, but refused to explain why.

Reddit reveals: “Beers on a bus”

Circling The Drain

Say goodbye to rate cuts from the Bank Of Canada, at least for the time being.

According to Statistics Canada data, gasoline prices were up by 33.2 per cent year-over-year in May following a 28.6 per cent rise in April. These are the biggest increases since July 2022, officials said.

Food inflation also accelerated in May, rising to 4.3 per cent year-over-year compared with 3.8 per cent in April, driven mainly by higher prices for fresh fruits and vegetables.

 

The Libranos: Call The Bookkeeper

It’s a 3B$ bailout of BC developers, and even the CBC is mad about it.

B.C. is facing a glut of empty condos. Thousands of Metro Vancouver units are sitting empty and some developers are facing insolvency.

Now, some housing experts are questioning a plan by the federal and provincial governments to buy some of those vacant units and turn them into affordable housing.

They say it amounts to a multi-billion dollar bail out for developers who refuse to lower prices to reflect a sluggish real estate market.[…]

Yan has a lot of questions about the plan by Mark Carney and David Eby to spend up to $3 billion to buy vacant condos in “priority growth areas” and turn them into affordable housing.

Recent data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation shows that as of last month, there were 4,376 completed condos sitting empty in Metro Vancouver, a 76 per cent increase from the year before.

Yan has crunched the numbers, with his analysis showing that a third of all condos without owners in Metro Vancouver cost over $1 million.

He questions how deep a discount the governments can get to make those units truly affordable.

Wrong question.

Our Chinese-Installed Government In Ottawa

The Bureau;

A chill is roiling Ottawa’s bureaucracy after the woman who crafted Canada’s policy to defend the North with American allies was fired, she alleges, after criticizing the government’s anti-American rhetoric — and shortly after Mark Carney’s government declared Beijing a strategic partner, The Bureau has been informed.

Raquel Garbers spent 28 years in Canada’s public service and helped write the country’s current defence policy. On October 15, 2025, she published an opinion piece warning that Ottawa’s growing anti-American rhetoric was splitting the Western alliance and handing a gift to the country’s real adversaries, Beijing and Moscow. Two days later, according to the statement of claim in her wrongful-dismissal suit, Canada’s foreign minister stood in Beijing and signaled a shift toward a “strategic partnership” with China — a sharp reversal of Ottawa’s own recent posture toward Beijing. Weeks after that, she was fired.

Garbers, 57, filed her claim this month in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Ottawa, seeking about $2 million from the federal government. She is not a junior official, and her stature, and questions about whether Mark Carney’s government is trying to enforce a silence over the public service as Ottawa pivots closer to Beijing, are topics of conversation in Ottawa, Garbers’s legal team told The Bureau today.

He, Too, Admires Their Basic Dictatorship

An Act to Fortify The Surveillance State;

The Liberals are gearing up to force Bill C-22 through committee and the House of Commons in just days.

This is an insane abuse of parliament to ram through a bill fraught with privacy, security, and civil liberties concerns.

This motion curtails committee scrutiny, limits MPs’ ability to debate and amend the bill, and rushes Bill C-22 through Parliament on the government’s timetable rather than allowing full parliamentary review.

Michael Geist unpacks.

Buried in the second half of Bill C-22 is a provision granting the government the power to require “core providers” to retain categories of metadata, including transmission data, for up to one year. This is mandatory metadata retention that would require telecom and electronic service providers to store information about the communications of all their users, regardless of whether those users are suspected of anything. It is one of the most privacy invasive tools a government can deploy and the international experience suggests that there are major privacy risks.

Related.

Trump Whisperer

Juno News (Video): The Gordie Howe International Bridge opening has been delayed indefinitely.

It is the latest setback in Canada’s bumpy relationship with the United States. The Gordihow International Bridge opening has been delayed indefinitely as the two countries resolve some outstanding issues. Well, at the at the request of the United States, we agreed to uh uh to delay the opening and um take the necessary time uh to resolve outstanding issues. A few issues uh that have been raised and uh this is a collaborative approach. As I said yesterday, there’s there’s not great drama here. We’re going to work through uh some some issues that uh have come up. Um and you know for a bridge Um that is going to be in place and serve Canadians, Americans um others uh for uh decades uh question of a few weeks is time well spent.

The Libranos: Gravy Train

Via Blacklocks (paywalled);

Last July 2025 the Alto regional highspeed rail corporation hired [ Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s] wife as a vice-president. Salary for the role is not publicized but is anywhere between $300-$600k yearly.

Alto managers subsequently obtained concessions on funding and expropriation powers in a High Speed Rail Network Act written into Champagne’s 2025 omnibus budget bill C-15.

The Conflict Of Interest Act states no cabinet member shall use inside information to further the private interests of “relatives or friends,” or “participate in making a decision related to the exercise of an official power, duty or function if the public office holder knows or reasonably should know that, in the making of a decision, he or she would be in a conflict of interest.”

Champagne has maintained he recused himself from all cabinet discussions, votes and other matters relating to Alto.

Critics challenged the claim. “That is simply not true,” said MP Cooper. “You voted at least 13 times on matters related to Alto.” 134 Alto staff received bonuses that totalled $2,758,968.

“Executives at Alto received bonuses,” MP Hardy said. “I am asking whether or not your wife is an Alto executive. That’s the question, because if Canadians know that’s the case, they know your household will benefit.”

“Is your wife an executive at Alto?” asked MP Hardy.

“These are allegations,” replied Champagne.

Small World: How an Alto Executive helped write Champagne’s budget speech.

Art Of The Fail

Reuters;

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has captured global attention by championing the idea of an alliance of mid-level economic powers that would operate beyond President Donald Trump’s increasingly protectionist United States.

Yet Carney’s push to lessen dependence on the U.S. is colliding with a stubborn reality: access to American markets remains a crucial part of Canada’s appeal to prospective trading partners, according to interviews with a dozen government officials and business leaders.

Since winning election in April 2025, Carney’s team has led four trade missions, including two to Asia, seeking foreign investment in mining, engineering and infrastructure projects. A fifth, the largest so far, is headed ​to Japan later this month.

But Canadian officials acknowledge that the main draw for many potential trading partners is the prospect of gaining tariff-free access to the world’s largest market through Canada’s participation in ‌the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade ‌agreement.

Carney regularly touts Canada’s preferential access to the U.S. market, noting that more than 85% of bilateral trade remains tariff-free.

“That (USMCA deal) has been kind ​of a baseline of our investment attraction message,” said a top Canadian government official who requested anonymity to speak frankly.

ICYMI: “I’m not looking to renew it (USMCA).”

Circling The Drain

The problem with the technical recession label is that it obscures the fact that Canada has already been in an effective recession for about ten years.

Whether or not Canada’s quarterly GDP grew or shrank fractionally over the past six months is of trivial importance compared with the inarguable fact that per capita growth has stalled since 2015. Our economy has not just had a bad couple of quarters, it has faltered for a decade, mostly because of persistently weak business investment.

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