Canada

Canadian Conservatives are discussing how to emulate Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency north of the border should they win the upcoming federal election — and they think they can make cuts even more quickly than the Trump administration has.

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney said that China is one of the largest threats with respect to foreign interference in Canada and is an emerging threat in the Arctic.

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Asked to elaborate at a news conference in Niagara Falls on Friday, Carney said Canada has to counter Chinese foreign interference threats. He also criticized China for being a partner with Russia in the war with Ukraine and said it is a threat to broader Asia and Taiwan in particular.

Carney said China is the biggest threat "from a geopolitical sense." "We're taking action to address," he added.

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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."

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.

the plight of young people has faded into the background, as the trade war with the U.S. takes centre stage in Canada’s federal election. Meanwhile, political parties have said more about protecting seniors’ retirements than helping young Canadians get a head start.

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New polling conducted by Nanos Research for The Globe and Mail and CTV News suggests that while the trade war is the top issue for Canadians 55 years and older, the cost of living is the priority for younger Canadians. Only one in 10 Canadians polled under the age of 35 said the trade was their main issue.

Canadians under the age of 35 are also more likely to trust Mr. Poilievre (38 per cent) – who has made the cost of living a central focus of his campaign – than Mr. Carney (26 per cent) to help young people.

The trade war has “taken the oxygen out of the room,” said Mike Moffatt, founding director of the Missing Middle Initiative, a project housed in the University of Ottawa’s Institute for the Environment with the stated goal of reviving Canada’s urban middle class.

“Other than housing, there has been a real absence of any policy to help struggling young people.”

From: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/federal-election/article-federal-election-2025-young-voters-housing-affordability-economy/

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

Platform published Tuesday didn't include commitment made earlier in the campaign

The Canadian Union of Public Employees says it learned April 7 that the Progressive Conservative government was cutting its service agreement with the Community Justice Society, the non-profit that employs the six caseworkers.

CUPE members say they were told they have 90 days to wrap up current cases and vacate their offices.

Nova Scotia’s restorative justice program creates opportunities for people accused of crimes and victims of crime to work together to come to resolutions, permitting suspects to avoid criminal records.

Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake is another close LPC-CPC race that could use any help from non-LPC voters. It used to be a CPC seat.

This page shows a nice visualization of the closest races.

The Conservatives are using the final week of the election campaign to run advertisements where older men are telling other older men to vote for the party — a closing argument that would have been unthinkable only months ago, political advertising experts say.

In new television ads that are airing regularly during the heavily watched NHL playoffs, the Conservatives are playing one spot in which two seniors are golfing and discussing how tough life is for their children, and another where former prime minister Stephen Harper endorses Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.

Neither commercial shows images of Poilievre.

"We're living in an upside-down world this campaign. Voters that were bedrock Conservative voters in the Harper era now need to be won over. And these are the boomers, 50-plus males," said Dennis Matthews, president of Creative Currency and a former advertising adviser to Harper.