Category Archives: News

France riots 2026 infographic featuring the French flag, protesters, riot police, Arc de Triomphe, government response, economic impacts and implications for Canadians.

France’s Riots: What Set Them Off, Why the State Can’t Stop Them, and Who Pays

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Paris spent Sunday sweeping up. Windows were smashed around Place de la Republique, a newspaper kiosk had burned down to a frame, and in Limoges the 19th-century town hall was torched and largely destroyed. Saturday’s national day of protest against the cost of living drew about 550,000 marchers by the Interior Ministry’s count, and most of them were peaceful. By nightfall it was something else.

This post sorts what’s known from what’s being claimed, explains why the French state is struggling to stop the violence, and who ends up paying for it.

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Alberta separation referendum featuring the Alberta flag, provincial legislature, referendum ballot, voting results and questions about Alberta’s future within Canada.

Alberta Voted to Stay in Canada: What the Separation Referendum Actually Told Us

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Albertans voted on Monday, and the answer wasn’t close. In the province’s first-ever referendum touching on separation, roughly three out of four voters chose to remain a province of Canada. The count is still unofficial and final results are expected October 29, but the margin is far too large for the remaining ballots to change the story.

This post covers what was actually on the ballot, why the question existed at all, who was pushing on it from inside and outside the country, and what the numbers do and don’t tell us.

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Canadian Thanksgiving celebration featuring autumn colours, a traditional turkey dinner, Canadian flag and lakeside sunset, highlighting Thanksgiving history and traditions.

Canadian Thanksgiving: Finding Gratitude in an Uncertain World

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Every October, Canadians gather around tables filled with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, and, hopefully, good company.

Thanksgiving is one of our quieter holidays. No fireworks, elaborate decorations, or weeks of shopping promotions. Just a long weekend, a family dinner, and perhaps one last opportunity to enjoy the autumn colours before winter arrives.

But where did Canadian Thanksgiving come from, and what should we be thankful for in 2026?

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Will AI kill us all infographic separating demonstrated AI risks and loss-of-control warning signs from unproven power-seeking, strategic dominance and extinction scenarios

Will AI Kill Us All?

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Will AI kill us all? Come on.

That was my honest first reaction, and I suspect it is yours. Anyone who has spent an afternoon with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini knows the texture of these tools: astonishingly useful one minute, confidently wrong the next, occasionally unable to follow an instruction a competent teenager would handle without thinking. The distance between a chatbot that invents a court case and a technology that ends the human species looks, from where most of us sit, roughly the distance between a calculator and a Death Star.

What makes the question harder to wave away is who is now willing to entertain it. In 2023 the Center for AI Safety published a single sentence: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The names at the top of the signature list include Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, and Ilya Sutskever appears on the page as well. These are not science-fiction novelists or anonymous accounts on X. They are, respectively, a Nobel laureate who helped invent modern neural networks, another Turing Award winner, and the chief executives of Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic.

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Canada Investment Summit infographic showing a proposed $1 trillion investment boom in critical minerals, energy infrastructure, transportation and clean energy

Canada’s $1 Trillion Investment Boom: What the Investment Summit Actually Means for Canadians

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Canada just held its first national investment summit, and if you read the headlines coming out of Toronto, the numbers are extraordinary.

Nearly $500 billion in new investment commitments. More than $100 trillion of assets represented in the room. A $50 billion Canadian infrastructure fund. A $52.5 billion AI infrastructure project in Saskatchewan. Hundreds of billions of dollars of bank financing. And behind all of it, the federal government’s much larger ambition to catalyse $1 trillion of investment in Canada over five years.

Those are numbers large enough to make almost anything sound transformational.

They are also numbers that require some unpacking.

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Canada and European Union relationship infographic covering trade, security, critical minerals, talent, innovation and Canadian economic independence

Canada and the European Union: What Would a Much Closer Relationship Actually Mean for Canadians?

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For a few days in September 2026, Canada joining the European Union became a surprisingly serious-sounding idea.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Canada was exploring some form of “associate membership” in the EU. Prime Minister Mark Carney was preparing to address the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Canada had become the first non-European country to participate in a major European defence procurement program. Trade tensions with the United States were getting worse, not better. And suddenly it was possible to imagine Canada doing something that would have sounded absurd not long ago: deliberately moving part of its economic and strategic centre of gravity across the Atlantic.

There is just one problem with the headline. Canada is not joining the European Union.

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Phil Robertson suspended from Duck Dynasty

Phil Robertson booted from his own show?!?

“LOS ANGELES, Calif. – “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson — suspended from the series indefinitely after making disparaging remarks about gays — is getting some support from key followers.

Sarah Palin posted a picture on her Facebook page of her with the reality show clan with the message, “Free Speech is an endangered species.” And Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal also lamented the suspension on free speech terms.

“It’s a messed-up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended,” said the governor in a statement Thursday the show is filmed in his state.”

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In the News: US Government Shutdown

Today we are all reading about the US government shutdown.

Should we in Canada care?  Does it affect us?

Well yes and no.  It doesn’t really affect you (unless you’re travelling to a national park) – but it is good to pay a bit of attention to it.

But in reality it is interesting to see how this is playing out, the causes, and the effects.  It is really coming off as a bit of a child’s game.

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In The News: RCMP Gun Seizure in High RIver

The flood may be old news, but the RCMP gun seizure in high river is still an ongoing concern.

Essentially, the story is that police were going door-to-door during the High River, Alberta floods in June of 2013.  They say it was to search for possible victims, injured people, elderly, and other people requiring help.  However, when they were in the houses, any firearms they saw improperly stored (their interpretation) they seized for “safe keeping”.

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