"Final Offer" by Mark Slutsky: A down-on-his-luck lawyer awakes in a doorless room to find he's been selected to negotiate on behalf of the human race.

The sombre mien—that’s what stayed with me. On Saturday, Mark Carney looked less like a prime minister briefing media on trade negotiations than a wartime leader telling his country a feared turn had finally arrived and preparing them for a long ordeal. The intense, all-out effort to stop crushing new tariffs had failed, with Carney grimly explaining that the United States insists on “short-term transactions” rather than “long-term partnerships” and that its commitments could no longer be assumed to hold.

American demands reportedly went well beyond tariffs, market access, and sectoral protections. They targeted Canada’s freedom to set domestic cultural policy, interpret agreements it had already signed, and conduct trade relations with third countries. The loss of our sovereignty was too high a price for preserving economic integration. What prime minister would accept Canada becoming a vassal state on his watch? With the collapse of talks, and Carney describing the country as being “attacked,” it’s hard not to feel like we have crossed into a different moment—that we are living in a slightly darker reality.

Throughout the weekend, The Walrus spoke to economists, policy experts, and political observers about what exactly has changed and what this new period might demand of Canada.

Fans of kimchi rejoice, as Western Canada’s largest celebration of the much-loved food and other Korean cuisine is making its return to Burnaby later this month.

Last year’s event saw over 80,ooo visitors, and this year promises to be bigger than ever with 114 different booths available to check out.

There are also eight different experience programs, including kimchi making, a Squid Game-inspired experience, and a K-pop dance competition.

When: Aug. 28 to 29  
Time: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.  
Where: Coquitlam Town Centre Park — 1299 Pinetree Way, Coquitlam  
Admission: Free  

In a few days, Gad Saad, a longtime right-wing Concordia University marketing professor, starts a new position at the University of Mississippi.

His move to the United States has been described as a Jewish professor leaving Canada for his own safety on the front page of the National Post.

Antisemitism has risen in Canada and elsewhere, and there’s no reason to doubt Saad faced death threats and intimidation. The question raised here is whether Saad’s account of his time at Concordia — and his larger narrative about Canada as an authoritarian nation captured by woke ideology — tells the whole story. There is reason for skepticism.

Canada is home to a disproportionate number of hard-right and far-right internet sensations, from Jordan Peterson to Lauren Southern, Ezra Levant and, more recently, Saad himself.

Born in 1964 in Lebanon, educated at McGill and Cornell, Saad has moved from scholarship to a popular writer, polemicist and self-help author on the right with The Parasitic Mind (2020) and The Saad Truth about Happiness (2023).

Saad recently published Suicidal Empathy, a book that became a bestseller, likely in part due to the amplification on X provided by his new friend Elon Musk.

Now a darling of the MAGA right, Saad has significant influence because of his critiques on what he alleges is a “mind virus” of radical feminism, postmodernism and left-wing “woke” and anti-Israel politics.

The amateur rocket soared past 63,000 feet at the 2026 Launch Canada Challenge.

For those unfamiliar, Zotero is a “free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research”. It's very popular in university / academia since it makes it trivial to manage in-text citations and works cited / references sections. There are browser extensions and plugins for popular document processing software (including Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, etc).

It's both open source (AGPLv3), and the most popular choice for that type of software. I recommend it to anyone that I see still doing citations by hand.

From this update, I am looking forward to the following:

Searches are now much more powerful, with support for nested condition groups and automatic mapping of conditions across levels of the hierarchy. It’s now trivial to, say, search for top-level items with a given author AND (a descendant annotation that is either yellow OR red) [...]

It’s now possible to select multiple rows in the collections pane and view items from across all of those views.

For example, you can now select two collections to quickly see all the items from both of those collections, or select a few saved searches to see the combined results from those searches.

You can now easily edit multiple items at once. Simply select multiple items in the items list, click “Edit Multiple Items…” in the item pane, and then make changes, and the changes will be applied to all selected items. Fields that have multiple values will show “Multiple”, and clicking in the field will show the available values (and “Clear all values”).

'warlok' is a browser-based tool for analyzing OpenStreetMap data in a chosen area.

From Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@rphyrin/117116092923077801

In Southeast Asian politics, there's this concept called the mandala political model.

Wikipedia defines it as "a pattern of political organization characterized by overlapping spheres of influence rather than fixed territorial boundaries."

I named this tool "warlok", an abbreviation of the Indonesian phrase "warga lokal", which literally means "local citizen".

In Indonesia, we confer the honorary title "si paling warlok" (the ultimate local citizen) on someone who knows everything about a particular neighborhood.

If you care about privacy, the internet, artificial intelligence, social media, free expression, cybersecurity or government surveillance, you probably want to keep an eye on Ottawa this fall.

Because Parliament comes back from its summer break on September 21st, and waiting for MPs and Senators are three important pieces of legislation.

We have Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, which would create an entirely new regulatory regime for social media, online harms and AI chatbots. Including a social media ban for anyone under 16.

We have Bill C-36, the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act, which would repeal and replace the privacy portions of PIPEDA — Canada's private-sector privacy law for the last quarter-century.

And then we have Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, 2026, which has already made it through the House of Commons and is now sitting in the Senate.

Each one of these bills would be important on its own.

Taken together, this could be one of the most consequential sessions of Parliament for Canadian privacy and digital policy that we've seen in years.

Hi. My name is David Fraser. I'm a privacy, internet and technology lawyer with the Canadian law firm McInnes Cooper. I also teach Internet and Media Law at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University.

I've already done detailed episodes on each of these bills, so I'm not going to go through every clause again. I’ll link to the previous episodes below.

Instead, I want to talk about where these bills stand, what they would actually do, and — most importantly — what we should be watching when Parliament gets back to work this fall.

A bit of a return to the original intent for this community. The audience of this article is intended for policymakers, and the emphasis is mine because I felt that was the core point.

When should we trust the evidence and the experts who interpret it for us?

A new study makes headlines. It shows a diet works, a supplement sharpens memory, a teaching method transforms reading scores or a management practice improves team productivity. So we adjust how we eat, parent or work. We follow the science.

A few months later, another headline overturns the first. Eggs were bad for us, then good again. Red wine protects your heart, or does it? Dark chocolate, low-fat diets, standing desks, masks during a pandemic: Recommendations based on the science keep changing. Eventually, people stop trusting what “studies show.”

But that is how science works: Evidence accumulates; early results get tested and some hold up, others don’t. The problem is that we report and act on evolving evidence as if it is final.

In a new article, I argue that this tendency to treat preliminary results as if they were conclusive leads to overconfident policy claims and contributes to the declining trust in science. I offer a new framework to help policymakers classify evidence maturity.

The insights can guide all of us to interpret scientific evidence in our daily lives.

Kelowna, BC-based game studio Magic Potion Games announced on Thursday that it has secured a Series A round, just as its child-friendly game Imagine Island exited its beta-testing phase.

Magic Potion was founded by veteran Canadian game developers Stephen MacDonald, Karin Johnson, and Sascha Williams, who all met while working on Club Penguin. Imagine Island is meant to be a safe online experience for Gen Alpha children to do quests, decorate digital homes, and socialize, much like Club Penguin was for older generations.

The studio said Imagine Island reached more than one million players during beta testing.

Since the shutdown of Club Penguin in 2017, Roblox has become a game of choice for kids around the world. Despite its popularity with children, Roblox has been scrutinized for its apparent lack of, or weak, safeguards. Magic Potion says its game is specifically designed for children between the ages of six and 13, and uses live moderation and COPPA-compliant privacy protections to create a trusted online environment for kids.

Calgary-based Helcim raised fresh financing and reported more than $150 million CAD in annual revenue as it looks to fill a new vacuum within Canada’s payments infrastructure.

The context: The market shift is part of a changing landscape for payments in Canada, as the Big Five banks have gradually sold off their payment processing divisions. Last year, TD sold part of its merchant solutions business to Fiserv, and this month, BMO- and RBC-owned Moneris announced its sale to a US private equity firm.

Beique said the Moneris sale and related worries about sovereignty coincided with a boost in inbound calls for Helcim. But it was already growing quickly before then: the company said it crossed $150 million in annual recurring revenue last year.

Final thought: Helcim has been banging the drum about “walled-off” payment systems, which is when a platform or ecosystem restricts access to external payment workflows, promoting its built-in services as the only option. With the new funding, Helcim said it will build on its payment extension add-on, which the company says will give merchants more flexibility and, ideally, reduce costs.

Source: https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/the-forest/

FoodNeverComes is one of a growing number of fake online shopping sites where users can place a pretend food order. (CBC)

Rhia Catapano, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who studies consumer behaviour and psychology, says online shopping simulators can activate “the same parts of our brain that doing the actual activity would.”

That's particularly appealing for budget-conscious young people.

“Like playing a video game or dreaming about a vacation that you're never actually going to take, we can imagine a thing,” she said. “In some way, it gives us some of the same psychological benefits.”

The sudden popularity of these sites, says Catapano, shows just how deeply consumerism has become integrated into our everyday lives, with people willing to spend time and effort browsing and “shopping” even when they know nothing will ever arrive.

But she sees a glimmer of resistance, too.

Some people, she says, are realizing through these sites that their shopping habits aren’t serving them — and are looking for ways to consume less and make more intentional choices.

“They recognize that what they're doing is not good for them, so they're trying to make changes.”

There’s a wildfire moving toward your home. It’s blocked your usual highway route out of town. Do you know your back roads well enough to get to safety?

Like many in Western Canada, IntelliMass founders Ryan Gallagher and Chris Stewart don’t have to imagine that stress. They’ve been forced down those back roads before, and even as recently as this month. To them, the biggest issue isn’t that the route could be filled with potholes, debris, and narrow passes; it’s that evacuees simply don’t know what to expect at all.

“We like to say in our organization that an unpaved road is one bad storm and 10 logging trucks away from looking completely different than it did before,” Stewart told BetaKit in a recent interview he andGallagher sat for.

That unpredictability is why they made their first product, BackRoadIntel—a crowdsourced mapping platform that picks up where Google Maps leaves off. Using kinetic sensors in tandem with other vehicle data-collecting devices like dashcams, emergency and local authorities use the platform to catalogue back road conditions to inform evacuation routes.

“You drive a lot of kilometres of back roads; you encounter problems like rock slides, downed trees, a dead animal on the road, washout, or very rough road conditions. And now it’s up to you to do something about it when you get back,” Gallagher said. “That doesn’t always happen, right? And if it does, it’s often uncoordinated.”

With BackRoadIntel, drivers can narrate their back-road journey, commenting on every pothole and dusty area they come across. Once the driver is back in service, the data from the kinetic sensor, dashcam, and their commentary are automatically synced into a fulsome report on the road’s drivability.

“My main focus has been like, ‘this has to be really easy,’” Gallagher said. “This has to be so easy that it just works.”

The Kelowna, BC-based company has been engaged as a consultant to help plan evacuation routes. It also rents its equipment out to municipal and regional governments to do the same. Right now, local officials can request a BackRoadIntel community evacuation route assessment for just under $5,000, according to its website.

The startup is also looking to provide its services to Indigenous communities, getting its start by sponsoring its own pilot project with the Lytton-area First Nations. The area already has a tragic history with wildfires: back in 2021, Lytton almost entirely burned down in one of Canada’s worst wildfires, killing two people. The local First Nations community is made up of 12 bands and, according to Stewart, around a quarter of those bands only have one road out of their homes in the event of a wildfire.

Futurama anyone?

It's not something most people would picture being inside your average delivery package, but scientists say there's a global market online for preserved human remains — a niche hobby they say poses potential health hazards.

In a study published in the International Journal of Cultural Property, lead author Kirsty Squires and her team analyzed 128 web posts from 2015 to 2025 showing off or advertising remains from both humans and animals for sale.

"Mummified heads, hands and feet were very common," said Squires, a bioarchaeology professor at the University of Staffordshire in Stoke-on-Trent, England.

Mummified body parts can harbour dormant microorganisms — such as bacteria, fungi and yeast — that the researchers warn could cause health issues for some people when not properly handled, though some experts say there's not much cause for concern for collectors who know what they're doing.

Please see the article for the longer discussion

WARNING: This article contains details about violence against children and suicide.

The murder trial of Massachusetts mom Lindsay Clancy has forced a spotlight on maternal mental health that some medical experts say may be the only positive outcome in the tragic case.

Clancy's defence doesn't dispute that she strangled and killed her three children in 2023 while her then-husband was running an errand, and then attempted to kill herself. But they argue she isn't criminally responsible because she had bipolar disorder and was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a rare and little-understood mental health condition that can affect a new mom's sense of reality.

Postpartum psychosis — the sudden onset of psychotic symptoms after childbirth — is much more serious than postpartum depression. Researchers estimate that the condition afflicts one to two women per 1,000 after delivery.

The trial has sparked wide-ranging conversations about maternal mental health, and rallies in support of Clancy calling for mental health reform.

These conversations are critical because suicide is still one of the leading causes of maternal mortality in the period of time around giving birth, Dr. Nicholas Leyland, the president of The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC), told CBC News.

However, he says only about one in five patients are ever even asked about their mental health during this perinatal period. And he suggests work needs to be done to help health-care providers and patients differentiate between postpartum depression and psychosis.

"Postpartum psychosis is uncommon, but can be extremely devastating to families and mothers and, of course, the children," Leyland said.

"Unfortunately, with such a tragic case, it does help us get the message across that these are really important areas to deal with."

As journalists are shut out of conflict zones, investigators are using satellite imagery, social media and 3D modelling to document atrocities. But evidence alone cannot deliver accountability.

Earlier this month, an unidentified boat operator sailing through a fjord in northeastern Svalbard spotted a bear resting on land and responded by blasting the ship’s foghorn. The bear woke up and moved. The governor of the territory’s office issued a fine of $5,255 under Section 30a of the Svalbard Environmental Act, which prohibits needlessly disturbing, attracting, or pursuing a polar bear. The operator agreed to pay.

This wasn’t the first time this has happened. In June 2024, two guides with a French shipping company were each fined around $2,100 after steering paying guests in rubber boats toward a polar bear and cub feeding on a whale carcass in northern Svalbard. That incident was at least somewhat understandable, however dumb and misguided. Someone wanting a closer look is a human impulse. Blasting a foghorn at a sleeping bear is just being an a**hole.

The article is long but comprehensive, please see if for the full discussion.

Agencies tout very high success rates, but some experts compare it to “crime control theatre”

On Sunday, March 22 of this year, a large swath of the population in Quebec was woken up at 4:25 a.m. as cellphones lit up and screamed. An Amber alert had been broadcast. Less than four hours later, the two missing children were thankfully found, unharmed, and the alert was cancelled.

Amber alerts cast wide nets in an effort to find abducted children and teenagers, but each time one is transmitted in Canada, we go through a predictable cycle. Many complain that these alerts cannot be turned off or muted, even in sleep mode, and that waking people up in the middle of the night to help them find a specific car that was last spotted 200 kilometres away is unnecessarily disruptive—with some even calling 911 to complain. Meanwhile, law enforcement officials remind us through the media that these alerts are only used when necessary and that they save lives.

Any subject tied to the safety of children is bound to evoke the deepest emotions. In fact, the crime that led to the creation of Amber alerts—and to their name—was monstrous enough that it’s no wonder it rallied influential people into building a system that could potentially prevent this kind of crime.

But warranted emotions aside, do Amber alerts even work? What little data we do have point to a system that has likely been oversold to us.