Building up Canada’s industrial capacity to build things is exactly the kind of “return on investment” I had in mind. There are better ways to do that than buying loads of military hardware that will sit in warehouses while it goes slowly (or perhaps quickly) obsolete. You know, unless we’re aiming to gain any possible advantage no matter the cost in a war that’s going to start next year or something.

Ottawa pledging to send one-third of Canadian-made drones to Kyiv

One third? It ought to be more like nine tenths. Producing a lot of drones is a pointless waste of resources unless they’re going to be sent where they’re needed. When it comes to national defence of Canada itself, research and development of better drones might provide a much better return on investment compared to actually producing them in quantity.

Only a politician looking for a way to end her career would commit to that.

Normally I’d avoid a VPN provider that has no presence in Canada because I like a nearby server for low latency, but if the good ones are forced to leave then nothing based in Canada will be secure.

It’s a weak minority government, the second and third place parties which hold the balance of power are firmly federalist, and if they did somehow manage to have a referendum they’d certainly lose it. There are other reasons to dislike the PQ but that they’re sovereigntist barely matters in the immediate future.

Congratulations Québec on finally getting rid of the CAQ. It was overdue.

Quebec’s park management agency, the Société des établissements de plein air du Québec, operates its own system

Is Québec really the only government in Canada that made the right choice? Maybe they should offer to run things for Parks Canada too, if the federal government has fallen so far into neoliberal neglect that it’s incapable of doing it on their own.

Seems like a promising strategy. If we really must spend money on the military, there aren’t many better ways to do it than by getting good at drones. Our government may not have too many good ideas of its own, but at least they’re able to recognize one when it comes from Zelenskyy.

Well that’s a couple days old I guess. It’s since been confirmed that they do plan to sell off some airports. No doubt it will suck for users of Canadian airports. I hate airports, so kind of have mixed feelings on this one.

Given that we don’t know exactly what they’re building, how it will be financed, or who will own it, I guess we’re all free to imagine that it will involve something other than just giving lots of money to the Canadian telecom cartel.

And three years ago, after the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission said it would require some large telecom companies to share access to their fibre networks with competitors …

Three years! How much progress have they made since then in restoring competition to the market for home Internet service? Any at all? At a glance it looks like the rate for TPIA is still prohibitively high, leading to retail prices from Teksavvy — the only independent ISP I know of which still exists — which are roughly double what I’m currently paying through Bell’s flanker brand. It’s looking like the promised repair of the once-great system will never happen. Not under a Liberal government, anyway. It will continue to be left to rot. Go on Carney, prove me wrong.

Edit to add: Here is Teksavvy once again pointing out that the wholesale rates set by the CRTC, like the ones Bell was complaining about 3 years ago, are still higher than the retail prices charged by the dominant providers.

Actually, it’s a “trade special operation.”

By “vertical” I suppose they mean that the portrait is sideways.

Traditionally in my family it’s called the Excited States of Hysteria.

People need to understand how data is used

No. People need to learn to refuse to have their ID scanned at bars and restaurants and every other place that has no business scanning their ID.

There should be a public consensus that having your ID scanned on demand for no reason is unacceptable. It would’ve been obvious to the people of thirty years ago. There ought to be public service announcements telling people why it’s wrong, if for some reason the practice can’t simply be prohibited completely.

We’ve long been in need of a new—or freshly revitalized—brand for people interested in making things better to organize around, and it seems like we’ve finally got one democratic socialism.

Or is he one of those rare politicians who listens to the people of the country

Ha! Unless he’s been replaced by the pod people in the past couple of weeks I do not think that is likely. I would be betting on Trump doing what he always does rather than Carney doing what he always doesn’t.

$800,000 to install cooling measures in parks during stretches of extreme heat

I know the idea is to generate talking points to make it sound as if you’re doing something about climate change, not to actually do anything about climate change but if it’s literally installing sprinklers in city parks to cool people down on hot days — although that’s nice — I wonder if it might be just a little too obvious that it’s not really accomplishing much relative to the size of the problem of climate change.

Poilievre did a great job keeping the Conservatives out of power for a while. It was just bad luck for Canada that he did such a good job of it that the Liberals got a majority.

I guess when you’ve preemptively announced that you’re not going to retaliate against the illegal tariffs in any way that would get their attention, such as putting export duties on petroleum products, you end up with little choice other than to give them whatever they want.

He wasn’t exactly sphynx-like in the speech I was thinking of. He spoke with eloquence, but directly and plainly. It did indeed seem clear that he sincerely believes that the existing banking system — which he had a hand in running for so long — operates in service of the public good.

When it was announced that Mr. Carney would run for office, the first thing I did to find out about him was to watch a video of one of his recent speeches to a big business audience. There is no way he would think of MMT as acceptable. He’s a huge fan of the way things are, so we will keep spending a significant percentage of the government budget directly on satisfying the greed of the rentiers.