Members at several unions are demanding that their pension fund divest from firms tied to Israel’s illegal occupation.

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The International Monetary Fund [IMF] has positioned Canada as the fiscal leader among G7 nations, highlighting its capacity to invest in key areas like infrastructure and energy while maintaining a relatively low debt burden. With a net debt-to-GDP ratio of 43%, far below the near-100% levels of many peers, Canada stands out as a rare bright spot in advanced economies.

Nigel Chalk, director of the IMF’s Western Hemisphere Department, emphasized the opportunity for Ottawa to leverage this fiscal space. “In the current circumstances, if you have fiscal space, it’s the time to use it,” he said. The comments come as Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne prepares to unveil a mini-budget on April 28, with the government projecting a $65.4 billion deficit for the current fiscal year under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s administration.

Carney’s plans focus on heavy spending in defence and infrastructure, paired with tax cuts, a strategy that has drawn domestic scrutiny. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has accused the government of stoking inflation through its deficits, while a parliamentary budget watchdog criticized the decision to abandon a prior commitment to a declining debt-to-GDP ratio. Despite these concerns, the IMF maintains that Canada’s debt path remains under control, with Chalk noting a “very strong focus” on managing it responsibly over the medium term.

...

Regional debt levels, however, present a nuanced challenge. While Canada’s federal debt holds a AAA rating, provinces and territories are borrowing more, with British Columbia recently facing a credit downgrade. Chalk downplayed immediate risks but urged greater transparency and discipline in provincial budgeting to mitigate future pressures.

...

The fiscal metrics also received a boost from a late-2025 revision by Statistics Canada, which raised the nominal GDP figure. This adjustment is expected to improve key ratios like debt-to-GDP and deficit-to-GDP, reinforcing Canada’s strong credit standing with rating agencies, according to Desjardins Group’s deputy chief economist Randall Bartlett. Champagne, in a statement, affirmed the government’s focus on affordability, investment, and building the strongest economy in the G7.

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For all of my adult life, I’ve been a Liberal believing in the defence of rights, the constraining of power, an equitable society, and an independent foreign policy. It’s been a narrative that many Canadians have strongly believed and supported.

Since 1982, the Charter gave us a core liberal centre that wasn’t really about party; it was about courts that could check governments, refugee protection as something we owed people, reconciliation as a shared obligation, gender equality, tackling poverty international law, building an activist role to counter Realpolitik.

These weren’t just policies. They were identity. That story is being rewritten.

The language hasn’t changed. Ministers still invoke the Charter, the “rules-based order,” Canada’s role as a constructive middle power. But watch what’s actually happening, and a different picture emerges: human rights moving steadily from the centre of public policy toward its edges, increasingly; poverty and homelessness being ignored.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/50803841

Canada helped build local government capacity in Ukraine before the war. The Council of Europe’s Congress has now called on the world to do so again. Canada should answer that call.

Op-ed by Tamara Krawchenko, Associate Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Victoria, Canada.

[...]

The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe recently called for local and national authorities to work together to help Ukraine recover and rebuild four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country.

The message is clear: cities and regions must lead, and their counterparts around the world should help them do it. The congress also calls on Russia to pay for the damage it has caused, pointing to frozen Russian assets worldwide as one source for those funds — an acknowledgment that recovery cannot wait for the war to end, since communities are already rebuilding under fire.

[...]

Behind every statistic is a community struggling to survive — a mayor trying to keep schools open under missile attacks; a municipal council managing hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons with dwindling resources; a city engineer repairing the same water system for the third time after it was bombed yet again.

[...]

Local and regional authorities across Ukraine face these situations every day. And it is precisely because the challenges are so local — tied to specific communities and capacities — that the response must also be local.

Ukrainian decentralization reforms since 2014 have expanded the fiscal capacity of the country’s municipalities, enabling them to respond to the unprecedented shocks of war far more effectively than before. In fact, local budget revenues quintupled between 2014 and 2021.

Russia’s [full-scale] invasion disrupted these reforms.

[...]

The call to action by the congress asks local and regional authorities in Council of Europe member states to use “existing co-operation platforms and bilateral partnerships to offer practical support to their Ukrainian counterparts.”

It’s an appeal for cities that have solved difficult problems — managing mass displacement, rebuilding after disaster, reforming service delivery — to share what they know with Ukrainian cities doing the same under fire.

City-to-city partnerships are fundamentally different from top-down aid. They are peer relationships built on what scholars call horizontal assistance — the exchange of practical knowledge and structural social capital between cities navigating similar challenges.

[...]

History offers clear guidance on what works. Comparative analysis of post-war and post-disaster reconstruction experiences identifies local community engagement and bottom-up leadership as the single most consistent factor separating successful from failed reconstruction.

[...]

Canada has been here before. Beginning in 2010, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), financed by the Canadian government through Global Affairs Canada, built exactly this kind of peer network in Ukraine through the Partnership for Local Economic Development and Democratic Governance.

The $19.5-million, six-year initiative worked directly with 16 Ukrainian cities to strengthen local democracy, support small and medium-sized businesses and advance decentralization.

FCM’s municipal experts worked alongside counterparts in cities like Lviv and Dnipro, co-publishing Ukraine’s first municipal guide to local economic development and helping local governments design collaborative regional projects. A key partner throughout was the Association of Ukrainian Cities, a key municipal advocacy organization.

That program ended, but the relationships it built did not. And the decentralization reforms it supported are now widely credited — by the congress’s call to action itself, the OECD and scholars of Ukrainian resilience — with giving Ukrainian local authorities the capacity to respond as effectively as they have to the shocks of war.

[...]

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a video address released Sunday that Canada’s strong economic ties to the United States were once a strength but are now a weakness that must be corrected.

In the 10-minute address, Carney spoke about his government’s efforts to strengthen the Canadian economy by attracting new investments and signing trade deals with other countries.

“The world is more dangerous and divided,” Carney said. “The U.S. has fundamentally changed its approach to trade, raising its tariffs to levels last seen during the Great Depression.

“Many of our former strengths, based on our close ties to America, have become weaknesses. Weaknesses that we must correct.”

The B.C. government won't be tabling controversial amendments that would suspend key portions of the province’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) during this legislative session.

The Premier's Office provided the update on Sunday evening, hours after a coalition of First Nations leaders published an open letter to B.C. lawmakers stating the changes would be introduced this week, and urged MLAs to reject them.

Premier David Eby is instead slated to hold a press conference on Monday outlining his government's next steps.

In its letter, the First Nations Leadership Council (FNLC), said Eby had signalled plans to “suspend critical provisions” of the act, “despite overwhelming opposition from First Nations.”

Ford 'felt the heat' after purchase publicized, now 'scrambling' to sell, says interim Ontario Liberal leader

Montreal’s largest school board has lost more than 100 support staff because they refused to remove religious symbols to comply with the province’s new secularism law.

The law, known as Bill 94, expanded a ban on wearing religious symbols, like crosses and hijabs, to include support staff workers in schools — lunchroom monitors and special education technicians, for example.

Several school service centres told Radio-Canada in February that dozens of staff had already been fired, suspended or decided to resign because of Bill 94.

Now, the Centre de services scolaire de Montréal (CSSDM), says it, too, has had to let staff go.

Nearly 200 people gathered at the provincial legislature in Regina Saturday to protest Bell Canada's planned AI data centre and the lack of community consultation for the project.

"If this is truly a wonderful opportunity for our area, then there's nothing to lose by slowing things down," said Regina Ward 8 Coun. Shanon Zachidniak.

Zachidniak said she attended the rally because it was her opportunity to share her concerns around the planned 300MW facility on the outskirts of Regina, in the rural municipality of Sherwood.

The development agreement for the project, which is set to be Canada's largest AI data centre, will be considered by the RM of Sherwood's seven-member council on Monday.

Mari Justo just can't make a mistake in the morning.

If she misses the 7 a.m. GO train from St. Catharines, she'll miss an hour of work at her job in Toronto.

The next train she can take leaves from the Burlington GO Station, a long drive from her home in Port Colborne, Ont.

When Metrolinx announced it suspended GO train services between Niagara Falls GO and Confederation GO for a little over a week due to the March 30th freight train derailment in St. Catharines, her commute was a long and arduous journey every day.

Her next option isn't any better: the Fairview Mall GO bus in St. Catharines takes about three hours, arriving after 10 a.m. She's says she’s even worried about leaving her car at the mall where, according to the GO website, “free customer parking is not available.”

And the last weekday trains home leave Toronto at 5 p.m. or 10 p.m., either too early to work a full eight-hour shift or way too late.