Deeply honoured to be have inducted into the Kanai Chieftanship as an Honourary Chief of the Blood Nation of the Blackfoot Confederacy.
A truly meaningful recognition of the work I did with First Nations to create economic opportunity in the spirit of “reconciliaction!”
When Notre-Dame burned in 2019, the world stopped.
Today, Russia damages Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a monastery nearly 1,000 years old and older than Notre-Dame itself.
A thousand years of history deserves the same attention, the same sympathy, and the same protection.
New oil sands site just dropped! Blackrod is the first new project since Suncor Fort Hills started production in 2018.
It’s not big - ramping up to 30,000 barrels a day of oil by late 2027 - but it’s great to see.
Almost every single person on Earth lives with rats. Only 5 million people out of 8 billion live rat free. They are the Albertans.
Alberta is the only significantly human-inhabited place on Earth that is rat free. It achieved this in the 1950s as rats invaded from the East, by introducing a rodent surveillance state, obliging every citizen of the province to report them and terminating any sightings with extreme prejudice. They laid 63,000 kg of arsenic across a 600-kilometre-long, 29-kilometre-wide Rat Control Zone along the province's Eastern border.
Back then, rats were so unfamiliar in Alberta that officials distributed preserved rat corpses to teach people what the enemy looked like. One pest-control officer held public meetings at which he ate warfarin-soaked oatmeal to show it was safe.
And it worked! They held rats off and numbers remained so low that the surveillance and eradication system could keep numbers at essentially zero for years, at extremely low costs – Alberta spends about 11 cents per resident on rat control measures, much less than neighbouring provinces that are infested.
Today, Albertans have grown so unfamiliar with rats that they frequently mistake squirrels, gophers, and other small animals for them: of 875 reported sightings in 2025, only 47 turned out to be actual rats. Pet rats are banned, vehicles entering Alberta are checked, and sightings are responded to with overwhelming force.
Could the rest of the world manage it? Probably not. The secret was to stop them before they could establish themselves. For the rest of us, we probably need gene drives. Read the story of how Alberta won the war on rats at Works in Progress now.
https://t.co/RZVjOXE2wz
It's odd that many of the same people who refer to an inanimate legal document as a "living tree" also describe a country full of living and breathing people as an inanimate "mosaic".
The "living tree" actually works for Canadian society as a whole (and is closer to the analogy's original meaning). A grafted prunus features a beautiful variety of different fruits that retain their distinct appearance, flavours and textures; but the fruits are only able to flourish because they are sustained by the same thick trunk, healthy roots and fertile soil.
Terrible scenes here as the majestic Kyiv Pechersk Lavra- the Monastery of the Caves - burns, deliberately struck by missiles sent by Russia under Putin who presents himself as the leader of a Christian Civilisation and Russian World.
The attack is a sign of desperation - a nihilistic attempt to destroy Ukraine's own history culture and religion, the ugly rage that if Russia cannot have it then nor can Ukraine. The Caves are older than Russia, much older since Russia was in part invented by Peter the Great but even a century older than the earliest foundation of Moscow as a minor fortress. Indeed it is not just ironic but revealing that the founder of Moscow itself, the Rurikid Prince Yuri I Vladimirovich known as Yuri the Long-Armed, Dolgorukiy, is buried there. Founded when Russia did not exist, when Moscow was a forest, it was initially ruled by the fissiparous Rurikid princes of Kievan Rus and built by priests from Mount Athos around the 1050s. It was sacked several times by Mongol invaders and the Mongol rulers of Russia the Genghizid khans of the Golden Horde - echoes of today - and later ruled by a succession of realms including the huge Grand Duchy of Lithuania.... And then swallwed into the Principality of Muscovy by Peter the Great's father Alexei.
In 1787, when Catherine the Great progressed down towards the newly conquered Crimea, she rendez-voused with her co-ruler Prince Potemkin in Kyiv. He was half sybarite half coenobite and while he was waiting for her, he moved into the Caves and lived there for months, holding court for ambassadors and adventuresses - in between spasms of prayer and scourging. Putin identifies with Catherine and Potemkin who conquered Crimea and south Ukraine and he stole the body of Potemkin during this war. But Potemkin loved the Lavra... As the Red Army retreated in 1941, the Soviets blew up parts of the Lavra and it was rebuilt after the war.... Now its destruction is heartbreaking - it semaphores the barbarism and bankruptcy and nihilism of the Russian war - it may just mark a new low in a bloodcurdled spiral of brutality that is this unnecessary imperial conflict but one can only hope that the vandal madness of this attack marks another stage in the road to the realization that Putin's war has failed ....
https://t.co/gwYWdaMtt0
The removal of Samuel de Champlain from Orillia was yet another salvo in the effort to strip Canadians of their history and heritage.
There is no grand, overarching conspiracy here; rather, it is a patchwork of activists and political interests who profit from the cultural erasure of Canada and Canadians.
It is a matter of power above all else, and those who dismiss the battle over symbols as a mere 'culture war' are often the very ones who have prosecuted it with the most energy.
Orillia, and the whole of Simcoe County, is as politically blue as it gets. Where are the Conservative MPs and PC MPPs as their constituents are humiliated?
My latest for @WDiminishment.
https://t.co/ThweG9uMn0
Right now, as Russians continue to strike #Kyiv with over a dozen of ballistic missiles, the Dormition Cathedral of Kyiv‑Pechersk Lavra — a UNESCO World Heritage site and priceless cultural landmark — has been struck and is burning.
A brutal assault on our people and our heritage. This is the true face of Russia’s Orthodox values.
This is Sumela Monastery, one of the oldest in the Christian world. Carved into a cliff in northern Turkey in AD 386, it has clung to this rock face for more than 1,600 years.
It’s older than the fall of the Roman Empire.
Some people suggest that while green is expensive, the benefits are much greater
Well, no:
The benefit of net-zero is $4.5 trillion/year, but the cost $27 trillion
(much larger costs and benefits, because we're currently only doing a bit of net-zero currently)
https://t.co/j4wG0vrxJB
You can see all the references in my Twitter thread:
https://t.co/HfBtBL2mlK
There are over 5 million Canadians of Irish origin.
It’s one of our founding nations: see the royal Harp of Tara on our coat of arms, and the harp & shamrocks represented all over Parliament Hill & our national institutions.
Irish & Canadian history are closely intertwined, from Canada being the primary refugee of Great Famine emigres, to the troubles spilling over in the Fenian Raids, the central role of Thomas Darcy McGee in Confederation, and so much more.
Canada played a large role in the Irish Peace Process.
Ireland has gone from being the poorest to the richest country in Europe (after micro state Luxembourg) in three decades.
Ireland is the 8th largest source of investment in Canada, with a stock of investment at ~$25 billion.
It was one of the strongest and earliest supporters of the Canada-Europe Trade Agreement. Irish leadership is importantnin efforts to get final ratification of CETA.
But sure, go ahead and sneer.
You don't care about Canada. You literally think Canada is a “colonial mistake.”
You forced DRIPA onto British Columbians and threatened the security of private property.
You have Land Back ministers eager to tear apart British Columbia.
You are the extreme activists
This whole episode is an example of what @reihan calls “punitive egalitarianism.”
We let it persist because we don’t see its costs—or we’re weirdly proud of them.
As @tylercowen has observed, one of the main reasons why Canada has less inequality than the U.S. is because we export inequality there.
If Musk had stayed and created his companies in Canada, our Gini co-efficient would be higher. But so would our employment, incomes and national wealth.
Richard Wagner has spent his time as Chief Justice turning himself into the self-appointed guardian of Canadian democracy: annual press conferences, speeches about the rule of law, warnings about democratic backsliding.
The old convention was that judges speak through their rulings and otherwise keep quiet. Wagner seems to find that beneath him. He wants to be a public figure, not just a judge.
The irony is that every time he steps up to the microphone to defend the court’s legitimacy, he’s the one politicizing it. A judiciary that lets its work speak for itself doesn’t need a spokesman. Wagner has made himself one anyway, and the institution is worse off for it.
These are the exact same people who made “countering hate” their entire identity.
They were the first to plant “Hate Has No Place Here” signs on their lawns.
They insist “hate speech isn’t free speech.”
They proudly fund groups like Hope Not Hate and Stop AAPI Hate
They still chant “Love Trumps Hate” like it’s scripture.
Yet here they are, in the pages of The Globe and Mail, publishing a guide on “how to properly hate” Elon Musk for the crime of building SpaceX into a company that could make him the world’s first trillionaire.
Proof positive that their “anti-hate” crusade was never about hate.
They are, in reality, full of hate. It was always about who they’re allowed to hate
Elon Musk is about to become a trillionaire
If he agreed to pay just 80% of that as a wealth tax to the EU, the EU government could use its efficient operating experience to fund bicycles with solar panels attached to them for over 40 residents of the Netherlands
Elon is being selfish by not paying the wealth tax
This reads like a screed by a Marxist undergrad in a campus paper.
There is no way the editors of the Globe thought it was a meritorious piece.
Was it run because the “eat the rich” tag line would max engagement? Is the Globe now trolling us with clickbait?
Or do the Globe’s editors also want to incite hatred of their massively wealthy proprietors?
Cameco is a great Canadian champion in so many ways, including its early leadership in economic partnerships and employment with indigenous Canadians.
A true Canadian success story! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Great milestone from Cameco who have just surpassed $5 billion in spending on northern and Indigenous businesses in SK.
As a young researcher, I went on my first mine tour to Rabbit Lake in 2005 and saw first hand what good industry-community relations could look like. No one had ever taught me at university it was even possible. Cameco was a front runner and continues to be an industry leader in Indigenous/local relations 👏
https://t.co/gOgexFdirN
The most envious, Marxist, redistributive person in the world isn't the guy busting his hump to frame a house, or the guy grinding out DoorDash...it's the smug guy worth 7 or 8 figures staring at a trillionaire he considers socially beneath him.