streetfestival

Pierre Poilievre speaks with conviction. “We are Conservatives,” he says. “We don’t believe in big fat government programs. We don’t believe in giving money.”

At first, that might sound like ordinary political talk. But these words are more than slogans. They are signals. They draw lines between who is deserving of support, and who is not. Between who counts, and who is left behind.

This is not about fiscal restraint. It’s about stripping away the systems that many of us rely on to survive and thrive. It’s about making life harder for people navigating poverty, housing precarity, chronic illness, disability, single parenthood, systemic racism, colonial legacies, gender-based violence. And then telling them it’s their fault.

Poilievre received a government pension at the age of 31. Later, he tried to target other MPs over their pensions in a public stunt. The reality? His own pension is roughly three times larger, projected to be around $230,000 annually by the time he turns 65. That number will only grow if he becomes Prime Minister. Soon after securing his pension, he voted to raise the retirement age for others to 67. He speaks of independence and “the value of hard work,” but only applies those values to communities who’ve been denied fair access to opportunities for generations. In 2008, he questioned whether survivors of residential schools should receive compensation, arguing instead that Indigenous peoples just need to “work harder.” In 2023, he addressed a group that claimed the harms of residential schools were a “myth.”

This is not just a political position. It’s an erasure of truth. It’s a refusal to reckon with Canada’s history and its ongoing impacts.

Duggan said the province doesn’t have a high enough vaccination rate to prevent measles from circulating - a rate that is ideally above 95 per cent. She said even in urban centres like Edmonton and Calgary the rate is only at around 70 per cent, and there are pockets of the province that are at 50 per cent or lower.

“(If) someone has been in a room who is infectious, that room is still infectious for two hours right after they leave. So even if you’re a mathematician and have no medical training, those numbers should frighten you,” said Duggan.

She noted that those who suffer most are children under the age of five.

"We are seeing an increase in immunizations for measles – for example, between the weeks of March 16 and April 13, 27,094 vaccines have been administered, an increase of almost 66 per cent from the previous time period last year."

tl;dr: toronto sun and national post lying and hate-mongering

Publicly traded companies could have been forced to disclose how climate change would disrupt their business plans, but those efforts were recently brought to a halt by Canadian financial regulators.

This means that, for the foreseeable future, investors and the public will be armed with less information when determining whether these companies have a real plan to deal with the climate crisis — or are relying on environmentally disastrous business-as-usual scenarios.

The move is a win for some of Canada’s largest oil and gas companies that are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and have spent years fighting some of the transparency proposals financial regulators have put forward.

The Canadian Association of Professional Employees (CAPE) is calling for public pension funds to divest from Tesla. To show solidarity with American workers facing attacks from Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the union says it’s time for the Canadian Public Sector Pension Investment Board (CPSIB) to dump its Tesla shares.

Despite holding no elected position in United States President Donald Trump’s administration, Musk and his DOGE are firing public servants with reckless abandon, placing the entire American federal public sector in jeopardy. Essential workers at the departments of education, health and human services, energy, veterans affairs and defense, as well as the Internal Revenue Service, the National Park Service, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have been summarily fired, furloughed, or pressured to accept dubious buyouts.

In response, CAPE, which represents more than 27,000 Canadian federal public servants, is leading the charge to pull Canadian public pension investments from the controversial electric automobile maker.

Many Canadian institutions use cloud servers run by American companies to store health data, experts say. That, combined with President Donald Trump's stated objective to make the U.S. a world leader in AI and his desire to make Canada a 51st state, means it's possible that his administration could come after our data — perhaps citing national security concerns as he has with tariff executive orders, experts say.

On Tuesday, with six days to go before election day, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party released its platform. It’s a thin offering with fewer than two dozen pages of ideas, fewer still if you cut the many photos that fill out the page below or beside the text. The platform fails to meet the moment.

You can tell why Poilievre waited so long to share it, or may wonder why he bothered to release it at all — it’s thin gruel, costed by way of magical thinking and full of more than one questionable proposal. And while there is plenty to criticize about the Tory plan, one promise stood out as so egregiously foolish and gimmicky that it ought to be disqualifying on its own, calling into doubt if the Conservatives really want to govern at all.

If elected, the Conservatives are promising to cut taxes, “never” raise them again and pass a “Taxpayer Protection Act” that would “ban new or higher federal taxes without asking taxpayers first in a referendum.”

The rest of the article provides many reasons why this is a dumb idea. "Unserious" is a great word to describe PP and his CPC

The Conservative Party will end public funding for university research that addresses "woke" topics, according to the Quebec section of the party platform. The platform doesn't define the term "woke," and Poilievre hasn't given a clear answer when asked by reporters.

However, in recent years, the party has increasingly used the term “woke” in speeches, petitions and policy statements to attack the Canadian government’s climate policy.

The right uses the threat of "wokeism" to invoke fear that liberal elites are "remaking the world" and will curtail people's liberties and status, said Imre Szeman, director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability at the University of Toronto.

One of the most worrisome parts of the Conservatives' pledge is that "woke" is a category that it can fill with whatever it wants, he said. "This is why "woke" is an adjective that is able to link up all kinds of unrelated practices, beliefs, opinions, and outlooks. What’s 'woke’ is, in the end, anything and everything that bothers them."

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