Steve Colwill

Used to do the radio thing, alumni CKCU, then CHEZ 106 Ottawa. Played rock and roll records. Nature, animals, history, politics, great photos, media, my city.

[Guitar Gods Unleashed @gguworld]

This is Mary Clayton's vocal on “Gimme Shelter” stripped completely naked. No music. Just her.

That crack in her voice was not planned. It was real. The Stones kept it.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Pete Hoekstra is the United States Ambassador to Canada. A man appointed specifically to understand Canada. Whose entire job, when distilled to its essence, is to comprehend why Canadians feel the way they do about the country directly to their south – the country that just slapped tariffs on their exports, questioned their sovereignty, and suggested they might want to consider becoming the 51st state.

And when a journalist asks him, with admirable patience, whether he understands where that frustration is coming from, he doesn’t say “it’s complicated.” He doesn’t say “we have work to do.” He says, with the serene confidence of a man who has never once been troubled by self-awareness: “Absolutely, no.”

Absolutely. No.

Not just no. He reached into the English language and found the one adverb that makes the answer worse.

This is a diplomat. This is America’s official representative to a nation of 40 million people who are currently being economically strong-armed by his boss. His job – his only job – is to understand Canadians. And he has looked that job squarely in the face and said: not today.

You genuinely could not find a better summary of current American foreign policy if you wrote it yourself.

[Blair Crawford @GetBAC]

Go Peace Tower!

[Kristin Raworth 🇨🇦 @KristinRaworth]

Unemployment in today’s Canada.

My experience.

It’s a big read but please read it through.

For three years, I helped care for my father while continuing to work full-time.

I even moved next door to him so I could better support him as his health declined.
I cared for him until he died.

Later, while still employed, I went through six months of breast cancer treatment myself.

Pretending those experiences didn’t affect my career would be dishonest.

What nobody tells you about employment instability is how cumulative it becomes.

Caregiving impacts careers even when you stay employed.

Illness impacts careers even when you keep showing up.

You can still be working while slowly losing professional momentum underneath you.

During unemployment, I applied for 65 jobs.

Government. Communications. Non-profit. Administrative. Retail. Hospitality.

Not one offer.

At one point, after years in senior advisory and executive communications roles, I applied at Starbucks.

I didn’t get the job.

That experience stayed with me.

Not because service work is beneath me — some of the hardest jobs I ever had were in restaurants and hospitality when I was younger.

But because the economy had somehow decided I was simultaneously overqualified and unemployable.

At 44 years old, after years spent working in government and public affairs, there were moments I genuinely started wondering whether I had anything left to contribute professionally.

That’s what prolonged unemployment does to people psychologically.

The hardest part of unemployment wasn’t only financial.

It was psychological.

Watching previous accomplishments stop mattering.

Trying to explain résumé gaps without sounding damaged.

Feeling your professional identity slowly erode in real time.

In April 2026, Canada’s unemployment rate climbed to 6.9%.

Behind those numbers are people whose lives became complicated.

Caregivers.

People managing chronic illness.

Cancer survivors.

People navigating grief, burnout, disability, aging parents, or health crises while trying to maintain careers at the same time.

Governments still talk about unemployment mostly through statistics.
But people experience the economy emotionally.

Through rejection emails.

Through grocery bills.

Through rent increases.

Through the quiet panic of realizing there’s very little room left in modern life for interruption.

The labour market increasingly rewards uninterrupted stability.

Perfect timelines.

Continuous productivity.

No visible complications.

But real life does not work that way anymore.

Parents age.

People get sick.

Caregiving responsibilities consume years
.
Disabilities emerge.

Mental health deteriorates.

And increasingly Canadians are expected to absorb those pressures privately while continuing to perform professionally as though nothing has changed.

There’s a growing class of Canadians who did everything they were told to do. I certainly did.

Built careers

Paid taxes.

Earned degrees.

Contributed to institutions.

Then life interrupted the plan.

And the system suddenly became much less patient with them.

This is why affordability and unemployment cannot be separated politically.

When the cost of living keeps climbing, employment instability becomes terrifying.
One interruption can destabilize everything.

I have a job again now and I am grateful for that.

But the experience changed how I see work, government, and the economy.
A lot more Canadians are hanging on by a thread than our politics currently acknowledges.

[Stuart Benson @LeftHandStu]

Canada's very own space man, Jeremy Hansen, will be at the National Arts Centre next Wednesday afternoon, alongside his Artemis II crewmates Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, plus Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jenni Gibbons, for Beyond Earth, a free, public discussion "exploring humanity’s next chapter in lunar exploration."

You can register on a first-come, first-served basis at https://t.co/wo68LNOMMP.

[David Coletto 🇨🇦 @DavidColetto]

Four forces are converging on Ottawa simultaneously. Each one is documented. Each one is underway.

Together they could fundamentally alter the character, vitality, and future of Canada’s capital over the next four years.

I’m not convinced most people in this city see it yet.

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

Only one chance in this lifetime…

Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him.

I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

[Steve Colwill @stephencolwill]

@StuntmanStu Agree. My Kenmore washing machine and fridge are both 20 years old. Both very analog.

[David Coletto 🇨🇦 @DavidColetto]

While flying home this afternoon, I've been thinking more about the Ford government's decision to purchase a private jet for government use.

I've thought about this through a lens of public opinion.

First, this story is going to have legs, and not for the reasons most people think.

Forget the money. This is about what the purchase does to one of the most carefully constructed political brands in Canadian provincial politics. #onpoli

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

Officially one of my fave cat videos of all time now

[Judy Trinh @judyatrinh]

Canadian living in Florida detained by ICE, sent to infamous ‘Alligator Alcatraz’
After 65 days in detention- Douglas Dixon will be deported today. He has never been on a plane.
He has been living in the U.S. for 21 years- and will be banned for life
https://t.co/vY8KycqaHB

[Steve Colwill @stephencolwill]

@susan_p_riley Ottawa west. Heard fireplace door rattling. Thought it was a helicopter flying over. Same time.

[CHOM 97 7 Montreal @CHOM977]

Legendary Montreal record producer and concert promoter Donald K. Tarlton (better known as Donald K. Donald) has died. Our thoughts are with his family, friends and colleagues.

#CHOM977 #Montreal #DonaldKDonald #DKD

[Steve Colwill @stephencolwill]

"The ink on Leary’s new business cards isn’t even dry and already the LRT has delivered yet another reminder of how difficult it is to make lemonade when the lemons you’ve bought are really bad."

[Ottawa Citizen @OttawaCitizen]

Deachman: Well, we'll remember Rick Leary's name now https://t.co/NTGH9eFlgY

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

I showed a Trump post to my psychologist friend and asked her to do a proper profile. This was, in retrospect, like asking a vet to look at a particularly diseased badger.

She put down her coffee, read it twice, and said: “Right. Where do you want me to start?”

The all-caps, she explained, isn’t emphasis. It’s dysregulation. A regulated adult uses punctuation to signal importance. Trump uses volume, because volume is what worked in the room he grew up in. Fred Trump’s household rewarded dominance and punished weakness. Donald learned early that the loudest person wins. He never updated that software. He never updates anything. The man is essentially Windows Vista with a spray tan.

“NATO HAS DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.” The word absolutely is doing a lot of work there. Psychologists call this black-and-white thinking, a cognitive pattern strongly associated with narcissistic personality structures. The world is either total loyalty or total betrayal. No middle ground. No nuance. No evidence of a functioning cerebral cortex.

“MILITARILY DECIMATED.” She paused on this one. Self-glorification dressed as fact, she said. He has no military background, never served, and has a well-documented terror of illness and physical danger. Bone spurs, famously. Four of them. One per deferment. So he compensates verbally, hard and consistently, because words are his only battlefield and even there he fights like a man wearing oven mitts.

“THE U.S.A. NEEDS NOTHING FROM NATO.” The people who most loudly declare their independence, she said, are almost always the most terrified of abandonment. Classic counterdependence. The kid who announces he doesn’t need friends. In the playground. Alone. Eating his lunch next to a bin.

The threat with no content, “NEVER FORGET THIS VERY IMPORTANT POINT IN TIME,” she found genuinely fascinating. It has the grammatical structure of consequence without any actual consequence attached. It’s what you say when you want to punish someone but lack both the means and the attention span to follow through.
And then the signature. His own name. On his own platform. As if the man might otherwise forget who he is halfway through a sentence, which, to be fair, seems increasingly plausible.

She sat back and said: “This is a man who has been pretending to be formidable for so long he can no longer locate the frightened little boy underneath. But he’s still there. He’s always there. TACO is always there. Screaming in capital letters at people who stopped listening years ago.”

I paid for the coffee. It was the least I could do. She’s going to need therapy after this.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Deb @DontCallMeDebby]

I’m an attorney and these are my clients. They are both innocent.

[Miranda Gray @mirgray]

Ottawa's OCTranspo is a double pendulum system. The interactions are not at all what you expect. #OttPoli

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

Scientist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine's Light and Health Research Center says that the new headlight bulbs being used in America are dangerous and causing accidents

“He says, older headlights use halogen bulbs which have a softer orange color, but newer ones are bluish white. You're creating a lot of glare for those other drivers”

I agree, the new headlights are awful and blind you. They should have never been allowed on the market

[Old Canada Series @oldcanadaseries]

The Fred Herzog Vancouver photo, "Man with Bandage" in 1968

[The Internet Remains Undefeated @WebUndefeated]

Okay but this is officially the best hiring story ever. A company in Mexico rescued an orange stray cat and decided not only to keep him… but to hire him.

They named him Engineer Miauricio and gave him the title of Emotional Support Director. His responsibilities include smiling at coworkers, gently meowing, and walking around the office making everyone’s day better.