A joint investigation by Canadian privacy authorities finds TikTok collected sensitive personal data from hundreds of thousands of Canadian children under 13 (Catharine Tunney/CBC News) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

"To create the batteries we need to keep the whole world's lights on when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing, we will need to extract *one seventeenth* of the amount of minerals we burn *every year* in the fossil fuel system" pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/o...

Yes! Tech to help reduce waits. Instead of selling to an investor, this should be publicly owned, nationally. www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic... Now being used in YK, BC, NS and Toronto, a fed investment could build Canada Strong via Canada Infrastructure Bank! canadiansme.ca/peersupport-...

It's impossible to overstate how problematic it is for the White House to demand payouts or company stakes in the course of approving deals, hand-selecting acquirers, demanding corporate compliance or anything else.

🚨New explainer🚨 Levels of Foreign Direct Investment don't actually tell us much about the state of the economy. @iipp-ucl.bsky.social's Sarah Doyle and @jonshell.bsky.social unpack what FDI is, when it is and isn’t beneficial and why these nuances matters. tinyurl.com/2s3p57w7 #CdnPoli #EconSky

The UK’s competition watchdog is rebranding itself as “pro-growth.” But behind the headlines, a deeper shift is underway. 🔗 Read the latest Counterbalance analysis: https://substack.pulse.ly/n2h5dxevho #Antimonopoly #RegulationWatch#BEP #CivilSociety

I looked up the current US visa processing fees: $205 for H1B, $4,500 if a med/large employer has 50%+ temporary foreign workers, $205 for self-sponsored investors with $500k to $1m in capital invest (depending on region). travel.state.gov/content/trav...

Donald Trump is bent on achieving and maintaining “unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance”. We’re just starting to gear up for the race. @noorazrieh.bsky.social with Vass Bednar & Don Lenihan

Woke up thinking about how to halt the slide in Canada and thinking about FDR's warnings that the growth of fascism is made possible by the growth of private power and failure to better the lot of ordinary people. Mamdani's success shows that now is precisely the time to argue for social democracy +

America took a particular path when it comes to TikTok. This week we contrast their legislative approach with Canada's, and ask whether a similar forced divestiture is possible here. Read more in our newsletter, The National Interest: tinyurl.com/3x92up4f #HowCanadaWorks #PolicyWithPurpose

The AI companies are woefully underestimating what it means that an entire generation has grown up listening to "Taylor's Version", and that fans now know what it means to respect an artist's intent & intellectual property. They're not ready for Swifties vs. Big AI. www.anildash.com/2025/09/18/t...

Today's media apocalypse makes it a good day for everyone to watch this 1998 SNL animation that Robert Smigel and Adam McKay managed to get on national TV once, before it was yanked off the air forever. www.cracked.com/article_4100...

Freelance illustration gigs drying up. Ad agencies using Midjourney instead of hiring human artists. Costume design turned over to AI wholesale. Good work vanishing. These are the stories of working visual artists, who describe losing jobs, wages, and hope as their clients and bosses embrace AI.

"Experts warn that reliance on foreign-owned data centres poses risks for sovereignty."

Read the full story. theijf.org/bargaining-c... #BigTechsInvisibleHand #cdnpoli

I remember when the art every month for the TTC metropass was vaguely exciting. Having a private company brand a metropass for public transit feels a bit ridic.

We did this really fun episode of Organized Money this week. It's our 50th episode of the show. It's about two gamer lawyers who got tired of being ripped off by Steam, the app store monopoly for PC gaming. So they built a law firm to take them on. (🧵) www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-gamer-...

See you at Elevate in October! Jennifer and Alison (our COO and Head of Community respectively) will be running a workshop on building a tech stack that runs on Canadian values (and servers). They'll be joined by @vassb.bsky.social from the The Canadian SHIELD Institute.

Great reporting; astounding corruption. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/u...

One year ago, Mario Draghi presented his report on competitiveness. The first act of the new Commission was to translate it into policies and actions. This is the urgency mindset we promised ↓ link.europa.eu/wGV4KX

I appreciated this exploration of how to really think about "Buy Canadian" from the always incredible @jrobson.bsky.social. robsonj.substack.com/p/implementa...

"This class struggle against big capital has the potential to push agroecology and food sovereignty further along at the same time. It’s time for all of us in these movements to engage in and expand this struggle and to take it on where we live." thestruggleforland.substack.com/p/democratic...

A municipal grocery store is opening in downtown Atlanta, specifically to serve a food desert.

How Ottawa Spends was such an incredibly useful annual book series, first published in 1981. It's really sad that Carleton's School of Public Policy and Administration phased it out in 2019. I still use it frequently, but how nice would it be to have editions covering developments since 2019.

Amazon’s new smart glasses put surveillance back on our noses. Hidden cameras, AI, and foreign data pipelines raise urgent privacy and sovereignty concerns. Should Canada regulate at point of sale or let "the market" decide? Read more in the National Interest: app.cyberimpact.com/newsletter-v...

Sovereign Cloud is my new band name.

Carney says the newly created Major Projects Office will also be asked to assist in the development of a "Canadian Sovereign Cloud." The idea is to build data centres and computing capacity "in a way that ensures the country's competitiveness and digital sovereignty."

Hey folks please take a look at this and consider filing it out, because if you don't you can be sure the tax software lobby industry is! The CRAis starting to consult on automatic tax filing in Canada. Let's get this done! cra-arc-survey-sondage.ca/f/s.aspx?s=d...

Excited that @vassb.bsky.social and I have been chosen as 1 of 10 finalists in @thehubcanada.bsky.social Hunter Prize on ideas to improve Canadian's living standards. We proposed a whole-of-government approach, and industrial policy approach, to competition policy. thehub.ca/2025/09/06/h...

That said, my past work with Creig Lamb shows that Canadian employers are also serving weak sauce on training opportunities for employees. So any solution to the hollowing out of the next gen researcher farm teams will probably need some external intervention. fsc-ccf.ca/projects/emp...

What is the best way to make sure that Buying Canadian doesn’t come at the cost of competition?

Pouring one out today in our new little newsletter.

“Canadian industry cannot persuade its boards or banks to make the big investments needed to ramp up production in response to promises or press releases from Ottawa. Only contracts from government will move the production needle, and that is what NATO demands of Canada today.”

"We had actually imposed red tape on ourselves. We had added all sorts of procedures, all sorts of bureaucracies that were not required by law, and those had actually been pushed by corporate interests." Lina Khan suggests abundance and antitrust go together:

Fun Facts: Canada's second oldest company, Molson, merged with the American brewer Coors in 2004 and is headquartered in Chicago. Our oldest company, the Bay, folded this year after decades of American private equity ownership.

The Hatchet is back with a 3-part series on "Canada's Founding Myth." The Hatchet delivers important, original and fascinating journalism about how this country actually works, in a way that no one else can. Here's the first episode. hatchetmedia.substack.com/p/empire-of-...

Google must hand over its search results and some data to rival companies but does not need to break itself up by selling its Chrome web browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday. Here is what this all means for you, as explained by our tech columnist.

New: I wrote about an age of American consumerism that seems to be on its way out. (Also anyone else try to buy a Hobonichi this weekend?) www.theverge.com/analysis/769...

MAGA’s Plan for AI Dominance vs. Canada’s Quest for AI Sovereignty: Is North America Big Enough for Both? Don Lenihan breaks it all down. nationalnewswatch.com/2025/09/02/m... #nationlnewswatch via @natnewswatch

For the evening crowd, my Loonie Politics column: Canada needs a real digital sovereignty strategy #cdnpoli

*This is the program "SoBrief" that we touched on.

We’ve sort of made reading into a bit of a sport: gamified "streaks" and shortcuts through summaries. Fun...until it hollows out our thinking. When we outsource interpretation to AI, we cede cultural + informational sovereignty. Chatted about this on CBC’s Commotion www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQfl...

President Trump’s tariff push is hurting American consumers, disrupting global trade, and straining U.S. alliances—including with Canada. Quoted for LRT, I argue these tariffs are less about economics and more about political leverage. The costs are already adding up. www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-e...

Happy to share this new piece in @foodtank.bsky.social co-authored with my grad student Anastasia Papadopoulos on the need for a new approach to food policies in the face of the current trade wars - highlighting possibilities of cooperative self-reliance @ipes-food.org foodtank.com/news/2025/08...

“Based on what we earn, we see different ads, stand in different lines, eat different food, stay in different hotels, watch the parade from different sections and on and on. What’s profitable today is not unification. It’s segmentation.”

Trump take LEGO www.404media.co/lego-stops-s...

Who watches those who watch our payments? The growing power of credit card giants The latest from the Globe's business commentary, by Vass Bednar: www.theglobeandmail.com/business/com...

Canada is leading the U.K. and France in boycotting American goods due to Trump’s tariffs

Fascinating thread on how tariffs work (or don’t). Country of POUR?