Wikipedia plagiarism + the crazy fringe = Grokipedia

Austerity budgets are always about short-term gains, and long term losses. Vancouver's City Council is voting on a budget that will save little and cost the city much. stewartprest.substack.com/p/vancouver-...

Removing a monument honoring Black US soldiers has nothing to do with DEI. It’s erasure of history and it’s straight-up racism.

Austerity budgets are always about short-term gains, and long term losses. Vancouver's City Council is voting on a budget that will save little and cost the city much. stewartprest.substack.com/p/vancouver-...

TL; DR: Vancouver is creating long term problems with a short-sighted turn to austerity. Cutting valuable long-standing programs like sustainability and support for social housing will cost the city more in the long run.

As the debate over Vancouver's proposed budget unfolds, I wrote out some ideas related to the city's apparent turn to austerity. open.substack.com/pub/stewartp...

As the debate over Vancouver's proposed budget unfolds, I wrote out some ideas related to the city's apparent turn to austerity. open.substack.com/pub/stewartp...

Did Underage Girls Ruin Politics? Tomorrow in the @nytimes.com

Great that top Canadian universities are hiring top scholars (why wouldn't they?) but the Ontario Progressive Conservative government has starved the post-secondary sector and the province has the lowest per-student funding of any Canadian province. www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/educa...

In 2021 I asked the Canadian government how much it was spending fighting First Nations in court - one access-to-info request specifying four cases. Today they got back to me.

I feel seen.

"Life and peace are fragile." www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Vancouver has spent decades building up a now well-earned reputation for leadership on environmental sustainability. Apparently, the mayor and ABC majority don't see the value in it. Hard to imagine a better way to damage the city's brand.

My ACA current plan is going from $385/mo to $821/mo.

When my cartoons become reality. #chicago

It says much about a society that is willing to profit from a group's labour, but unwilling provide them same dignity and support accorded to others.

It remains wild to me that there aren't a) more pathways to permanent residency for *all* temporary foreign workers b) enforced minimum wages equal to those of the province they're in. What does it say about us that we are happy to have a permanent underclass whose labour isn't fully valued?

The legend lives on.

This skeet is in a discussion about Canadian policy, but the sentiment is something we need to wrestle with in the US as well.

👇👇👇

This is Canada's temporary foreign worker system in a nutshell. But making temporary residents pay more for health care really drives the sentiment home.

Lots to unpack here, but one general point to make concerns the way in which creating categories of "temporary" residents leads to just this sort of thinking: people who live, work and study among us, contributing to the country, but are nonetheless excluded from the social contract.

“People should care about this thing more” and “the media never reported on this thing” are two different ideas that people often use interchangeably, but framing matters! One incentivizes curiousity and passion about a subject, the other incentivizes getting angry at “the media” on a false premise

Went back to the history of the Sicilian Mafia to illustrate something obvious but worth stating explicitly: The Trump administration behaves like an organized crime syndicate running a protection racket, not a representative government www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

The US is the world's largest oil and gas producer. Yet, "China is now making more money from exporting green technology than America makes from exporting fossil fuels."

Y'all forgot about May.

"Racial integration is the new communism" is very much saying the quiet part out loud.

This is America.

Savvy by the Carney snd Liberals to be openly poaching. Going to make life more difficult for Poilievre. "Mr. Carney welcomed the former Conservative to the government caucus and made a pitch for more opposition MPs to cross the floor." www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/art...

On a small personal level, I spent a significant chunk of my years as a columnist learning about Canada's intl spending priorities and writing about it in major newspapers, won an award for it. 10 years after leaving that job, hard not to feel I wasted my time and others' (see also climate policy).

Roberts now going at the solicitor general like a cat with a wounded mouse. Keeps telling him that tariffs are taxes on the American people. "Who pays the tariffs??" Says Trump's argument would neutralize separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches. Incredible stuff.

Chief Justice Roberts is out. Says the major questions doctrine pretty clearly applies here; the tariffs simply can't survive that. Looks like five pretty clear votes against Trump. And we STILL haven't gotten to Gorsuch...

Universal swing in action: "What we saw last night was a directional shift toward Democrats in 99.8% of counties that held partisan elections." www.gelliottmorris.com/p/seven-data...

It is obviously not sustainable for a city to have no tax increase, a significant increase in police budget (again), and cuts to services everywhere else. It doesn't work to add police funding and cut support for mental health and everything else. ABC circa 2022 would be the first to tell you that.

In hindsight (was also clear at the time) might have been a good idea for the NDP to let a city council take the lead on reigning in police spending when Vancouver had a mayor keen to try.

Police Board manage to put both ABC and NDP in a bind here—ABC wants to look pro police, but also will have a hard time supporting police and their budget without wildly unpopular cuts. NDP will either be seen as allowing austerity in Van, or meddling in local politics and not supporting police.

Why would you expect them to be able to? They're pattern matching algorithms... and quite frankly, that's how a lot of beliefs work. Spurious pattern matching... www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt...

we had to BEG the city to keep the bathrooms open www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Police Board manage to put both ABC and NDP in a bind here—ABC wants to look pro police, but also will have a hard time supporting police and their budget without wildly unpopular cuts. NDP will either be seen as allowing austerity in Van, or meddling in local politics and not supporting police.

thank you for all the support; the statement from our union is now live here with some more reporting. now that this is public I can confirm that the majority of today’s layoffs were women of color. there are no longer any Black women working at Teen Vogue.

Hear, hear

This is how a republic of laws ends.

An essential read from Carol Leonnig: “If it was anybody else, we'd arrest him tomorrow.” That’s what an experienced Justice Department official said about Donald Trump after the FBI discovered hundreds of classified documents concealed from investigators. And it’s indisputable.

There are lessons aplenty to be learned here for BC with regard to its planned digital ad buy. vancouversun.com/news/local-n...

Tell me you haven't read the piece without telling me you haven't read the piece.

New piece up @ca.theconversation.com: TL;DR, Canada needs to be strategic and diplomatic, but it cannot keep caving to a bully's version of the truth. theconversation.com/mark-carneys...

"A diplomatic reprimand is not only justified, it is necessary to signal that Canada will not look kindly on overt disrespect toward its officials, regardless of whether they serve Ottawa or the provinces."

Sometimes your best was good enough, but it wasn't your day anyways. A broken bat, a wall, a launch angle, a foot on or off home plate—the team did enough to win, but they didn't, and we all got to experience the agony of that.

New piece up @ca.theconversation.com: TL;DR, Canada needs to be strategic and diplomatic, but it cannot keep caving to a bully's version of the truth. theconversation.com/mark-carneys...