When Lady Fantasia LaPremiere and Mz Molly Poppinz—or, to use the names by which they are known outside of Thunder Bay’s drag circles, John Forget and Felicia Crichton—first started getting messages about a hateful post circulating on Facebook in 2022, they thought the mature thing would be to ignore it. The post was on a page called “Real Thunder Bay Courthouse—Inside Edition” and featured headshots of Lady Fantasia and Mz Molly from a poster for a drag queen storytime event at the public library. “Apparently, our City Council is completely unaware of local drag queens who have been criminally charged with child pornography,” the post read. “Don’t ask yourself why drag queens need an audience of children. The answer might involve the word ‘GROOMING.’” The page featured an image of the city’s imposing courthouse, suggesting official status, and it had 6,500 followers.

Thunder Bay is a mid-sized city of just over 100,000 people, but it can feel like a small town. The Thunder Bay region is also considered an area of news poverty. Its one daily newspaper, the Chronicle-Journal, currently has four reporters tasked with bringing local news to sixty communities over 1,200 square kilometres. The small local CBC station and Dougall Media, one of Canada’s few remaining independent media companies, cover an area that’s larger than France: from White River in the northeast to the Manitoba border, and from the northern shore of Lake Superior all the way up to Hudson Bay. Social media ends up being an important source of local news; Crichton’s son came home from kindergarten asking what “grooming” meant. Crichton and Forget decided to sue the owner of “Real Thunder Bay Courthouse—Inside Edition” for libel.

Douglas Judson, the lawyer who represented them, had been concerned about the Facebook page for years. Its administrator saw himself as a citizen journalist and excoriated local media for “refusing” to report on arrests. The account posted the names of people brought up on charges at the Thunder Bay courthouse, often using belittling or derogatory language (“WANTED JUNKIE FOUND LYING ON THE ROAD BY TBPS OFFICERS”). The anonymous posts also broadcast photos dug up on social media and sometimes published the names and home addresses of sureties. The comment section swelled with rage, with special venom reserved for Indigenous and racialized people.

As the case made its way through court proceedings, a court order forced Meta to disclose that “Real Thunder Bay Courthouse—Inside Edition” was registered to a man named Brian Webster, who admitted to authoring the post. In 2025, a judge found Webster liable, calling his conduct “high-handed, spiteful, malicious, and oppressive.” She ordered Webster to pay $380,000 in damages to Crichton and Forget, as well as Caitlin Hartlen, also a drag performer, and the Rainbow Alliance of Dryden and to reimburse their legal fees. Webster appealed the decision, and the case is still in litigation.

Thunder Bay is hardly alone in its paucity of news outlets. A 2025 update to a joint research project by Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of British Columbia found that Canada has lost 566 local news outlets in less than twenty years. The Canadian government currently counts only about 3,650 people working as journalists in Ontario, a number that sits somewhere between fishmongers and veterinarians. Research by Public Policy Forum found that between 2008 and 2017, coverage of court in particular dropped by 30 percent nationally. Some jurists may be tempted to quiet celebration; journalists can be a nuisance, and careless reporting can result in prejudicing prospective jury members or revealing the identities of anonymous witnesses.

But courts need us. They depend on the media to fulfill their institutional raison d’être: “Justice should not only be done,” Lord Hewart, chief justice of England said in 1923, “but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.” The secret trial is a mark of authoritarian regimes, and in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, everyone is guaranteed a public trial. The scrutiny of the public gaze protects us from the enormous power of the state. This publicity is upheld by the open court principle, which allows anyone to walk into a courtroom and take a seat to watch the justice system at work. Anyone, that is, in theory; in practice, most people have neither time nor inclination to sit through slow legal processes and depend on reporters to fill them in.

At its best, responsible journalism about court cases serves to uphold due process and the presumption of innocence. As traditional media outlets fold or retreat from assigning full-time reporters to the court beat, it’s this function of the open court principle that is under threat.

Thunder Bay’s modern courthouse stands in the hollowed-out historic shell of Fort William’s downtown, surrounded by boarded-up businesses and nostalgic murals (one, a stone’s throw away, shows the red brick gables of the old Times Journal building). I’m here to meet Chronicle-Journal writer Doug Diaczuk, who arrives wearing, without apparent irony, a newsboy cap. The security guards greet him familiarly; where once there was a gaggle of reporters from different outlets assigned to the court beat, very few are now there consistently. “It’s basically just Jodi and me,” Diaczuk tells me. Jodi Lundmark is the assistant editor at TBnewswatch (a Dougall Media property), and neither of them is assigned to the courthouse full time; at the time, Diaczuk was the Chronicle-Journal’s only general assignment reporter, and tomorrow, he’ll need to cover the opening of a new medical clinic and the announcement of the blues festival lineup.

We walk over to the docket, a bulletin board hung with paper printouts of the day’s cases, with courtroom numbers scribbled in pen. The online version, which Diaczuk checks every morning, is of limited usefulness because while it lists defendant names, case numbers, and (theoretical) start times, it doesn’t say what the charges are. Diaczuk scans the printouts, which often cut off the words halfway through: dangerous operatio, assault with weapo, possession of weap. Diaczuk was here for a sentencing, which he heard about from Lundmark (with so many cases to cover, it’s easier if the two of them sometimes compare notes on the docket). I had seen the resulting story in that morning’s paper between a storm warning and a teddy bear drive: two men had pleaded guilty to manslaughter for beating twenty-one-year-old Ivan Achneepineskum to death in a motel room in 2022. All three were Indigenous: the perpetrators from Webequie First Nation and Kasabonika Lake First Nation, respectively, and the victim from Marten Falls First Nation. Diaczuk reported that one defence lawyer had argued for a reduced sentence for his client due to “significant Gladue factors.”

“I don’t know if people read that far down into the story,” Diaczuk says ruefully, when I ask if he thinks his readers know what this reference means. Since the 1999 Supreme Court case R. v. Gladue, judges at sentencing have been legally obligated to consider Indigenous offenders’ exposure to intergenerational trauma related to residential schooling, discrimination, and poverty. “People will think like, oh, Indigenous offenders get off easy, right?” Diaczuk has thought about sitting down to write a longer piece—an explainer—to help the public understand what Gladue reports are and why courts use them, but there’s no time.

In 2020, funding from the federal Local Journalism Initiative allowed Dougall Media to hire Karen Edwards as a full-time court reporter for a year. Usually, in the courtrooms, “it was just me and Brian Webster.” Journalism school hadn’t provided much training for covering court: she says her three-year diploma at Durham College only offered one day in a courtroom. (Edwards is now a second-year law student.) Matt Prokopchuk, who worked at CBC Thunder Bay for a decade before leaving in 2019 and sometimes covered court, told me the same. In his four years in Carleton’s journalism program, he had only one court assignment. “We were taught that court is open,” he told me, “but I do remember feeling pretty self-conscious, like, ‘Should I be here?’”

On the paper docket, Diaczuk points out to me several cases next to which the word “ban” appears, meaning a publication ban is in effect. However, the sheet doesn’t specify the type of ban—there are different code numbers for different purposes. Some judges, Diaczuk tells me, make an effort to explain at the start of a proceeding the type of ban in place. Still, it’s unclear exactly what would or wouldn’t be covered by a ban, and it isn’t easy for him to call his paper’s lawyer and ask.

The stress of potentially running afoul of bans—an infraction that can carry a fine of up to $5,000 or two years less a day of jail time—might dissuade journalists from taking on court stories. Then there’s the potential emotional toll. Diaczuk rubs his knuckles across his eyes when I ask what he’s seen that has stayed with him. He was in a courtroom where police played the arrest video of a mother screaming for forty-five minutes, covered in the blood of her eleven-year-old son whom she had stabbed to death. In another case, a girl went missing, and her family searched for her for years before two men finally admitted to helping dispose of her body. At the sentencing, the judge teared up. Diaczuk tried, for a while, to humanize homicide victims by using their first names, a practice he read about in Tamara Cherry’s The Trauma Beat: A Case for Re-thinking the Business of Bad News. But it didn’t fly with his editors.

While both Diaczuk and Webster try to be the eyes and ears of the public, neither the professional distance of traditional media nor the vitriol of social media could truly tell me what court in Thunder Bay is like. I spend a week visiting the courthouse’s eerily quiet chambers. What strikes me is the moral complexity of what we call justice.

I watch an autistic child in a tie-dyed sweatshirt with a happy face on it testify that the foster mother she had been placed with, on a First Nation territory, a few hours from Thunder Bay, had hit her with a hairbrush and a light blue flip-flop. The Crown needs the girl to give clear and consistent answers to her questions, but the child answers in loops and non-sequiturs. “How did she hit you?” the Crown, a young blond woman, asks. “Because I wasn’t listening,” the child replies. After forty-five minutes, the child asks if she can take a break, and I find myself nodding emphatically as if it were up to me. When she returns, the defence lawyer tells her that his own son is autistic, too, and just a bit younger than she is. Were you unhappy about leaving your previous foster family? Silence. Did other foster kids at school tell you that, if you want to leave a foster home, you can make up a story? “Yeah,” she says. It’s hardly a smoking gun. But the Crown hasn’t produced any physical evidence of injury. I walk out of the courtroom grateful not to be the one who has to decide, beyond a reasonable doubt, whether the woman sitting quietly to the defence lawyer’s right is guilty of assault.

In another bland room, I watch a woman caress the back of a man’s head before he gets up to give a tear-choked statement of apology for a decade of viewing thousands of online images of child pornography. “There really are no words to express the depth of shame I feel,” he says. The judge, who has a Bernadoodle cap of fizzy, light brown curls, accepts his apology. But the man has an addiction. The search terms police found on his devices include “eleven-year-old” and “eight-year-old daddy’s girl.” There were images of penetration; children were abused to produce these materials, the judge reminds us. The man, in his mid-fifties, hugs the people there with him, two women and a teenage boy before being led away in handcuffs to serve eighteen months in prison. Besides this group, I’m the only person sitting in the body of the court. It feels like a funeral, and I don’t know the bereaved well enough to share openly in their grief.

The pandemic initially worked wonders for the open court principle. After March of 2020, courts rushed to move proceedings to virtual platforms. Observers could attend much more easily, and trial judges commented that some civil cases had drawn as many as eighty people—more than many physical courtrooms could fit. It can also be easier to understand what’s going on at a virtual hearing, because everyone speaks into a microphone, looks into a camera, and has a screen name (in Canadian courtrooms IRL, neither judges nor lawyers have nameplates). But with virtual court came a noticeable change in decorum; defendants and witnesses zoomed in from showers or barbershop chairs or ordered double-doubles on speaker. “We aren’t all on one big telephone soiree,” a Nova Scotia judge is quoted as saying in a 2022 report.

Then, last spring and summer, southern Ontario’s virtual courts were hit with a rash of Zoombombings. The target was mostly remand court, a scheduling court where, Windsor defence lawyer Patricia Brown told me, there might be a thousand cases on the docket for triage on a given day and dozens of people at a time in the Zoom. Suddenly, the entire video screen would be taken over by a screaming wall of pornography and racial slurs. It started happening to Brown at least once a week, and she heard from other lawyers who were being Zoombombed every other day. There have been other problems with virtual access by the public: in April 2023, three Toronto-area men were convicted of recording and sharing videos on Instagram of witness testimony in a murder trial. In July of 2025, the attorney general’s office in Ontario sent out a memo to court staff: the public were henceforth banned from virtual proceedings in the lower court. If people wanted to observe the workings of the justice system, they could do it where they had to show their faces.

The limits of the open court principle are constantly being tested. Publication bans and sealing orders are themselves open to legal challenge; in 2021, lawyers for the Toronto Star won a precedent-setting Supreme Court victory against the heirs of Honey and Barry Sherman, the Toronto billionaires whose 2017 murder remains unsolved. The family wanted the details of the estate transfer to be sealed due to, as the decision carefully put it, “what they saw as the public’s morbid interest.” But there’s the rub: the public’s interest doesn’t have to be classy. The decision underlined that “discomfort or embarrassment” are not enough to override the presumption of openness; instead, public knowledge of the details of a proceeding must threaten the dignity of a person’s “biographical core.” This description is perhaps intentionally vague, and courts largely interpret it to confer anonymity on victims of sexual assault as well as to allow stigmatized medical conditions to remain private.

Tess Layton, an Edmonton-based lawyer, told me that since she began practising ten years ago, she has seen a significant drop in both the number of challenges to publication bans and the diversity of challengers. Small and large outlets used to mount challenges; now, the only venues with the resources are heavy-hitters, like the CBC or CTV. Layton has also noticed a worrying upward trend in the number of bans and sealing orders that courts issue. Judson told me that, as courts grapple with the dangerous ease with which information spreads online, “the legislative and judicial response has been to become a little bit obsessed with secrecy.” In Thunder Bay in particular, he believes, the presence of citizen journalists in the courts has caused “a knee jerk reaction of routinely invoking publication bans.”

Even information that isn’t under ban can be tricky to access: obtaining audio recordings, transcripts, or other documents related to court proceedings involves filling out complicated paperwork and, often, paying a fee. An open secret of the open court principle is the system’s reliance on “practical obscurity”—the fact that finding information theoretically available to the public is, in practice, a pain in the neck. As Osgoode Hall Law School researcher Jon Khan and associate professor Sean Rehaag write: “Practical obscurity is premised on the idea that individuals are ultimately lazy; that they will lack the time or money to follow through with an onerous access process; or that they will not even discover the access process.” The idea is to keep bad actors from accessing sensitive information, but time and money are in increasingly short supply for media outlets too.

Criminal courts tend to monopolize public attention, but the open court principle applies to many tribunals. Over a couple of months, I tour virtual hearings at the Federal Court, the Immigration and Refugee Board, and the Social Security Tribunal of Canada. In Federal Court, I am at first predictably bored: I’ve dropped into a land claim by Alberta’s Louis Bull Band in medias res, and most of my laptop screen is taken up by columns of numbers, accompanied by a long-winded exegesis by a valuation adviser with a plummy British accent. As with any slow-moving television show, however, I get sucked in as the story takes shape: If the band had not sold parcels of land in the early twentieth century, how much would they have gained from it over the years?

When I log on to the SST hearing, I’m surprised to find myself in a tête-à-tête with the adjudicator. A ginger-mustached man with the conscientious air of a high school vice principal, he wants to make sure I understand that I can’t report any identifying details. He also asks if he should introduce me to the appellant, when they come on, as media or simply as an observer. He tells me he’s never had a journalist attend before. Taken aback, I venture that since, in open court, people walk in and sit down without explanation, maybe describing me as an observer would be the closest parallel? The appellant, a woman wrangling a toddler and a barking dog, accepts my presence without question. As she and the adjudicator work through the problem—the woman has been denied six weeks of unemployment benefits because Mitch (not his real name) at the hair salon (not her real job) was, by his own admission, new to payroll and confused about which code to punch in—I feel like I’m eavesdropping on a brunch conversation or, perhaps, a telephone soirée. Watching the woman have her day in court, I experience a rare surge of faith and optimism in the state of our democracy.

On my last day in Thunder Bay’s courthouse, I attend a sentencing in a homicide. Two small groups—the family of the defendant and the family of the victim—sit in their parkas on either side of the gallery. The defendant, a young man with a brown ponytail sitting in the dock in a button-down, has already pleaded guilty to manslaughter. The Crown and the defence go over the facts. Two young men got to chatting at a bus stop and ended up smoking weed in the basement of the one who lived nearby with his mother. There was a question of payment, and while the man whose house it was went out to pick up a few quick bucks by shovelling a neighbour’s driveway, the other man stole a Playstation, an Xbox, and two knives from a collection. The first man saw the other man making off down the street and pursued him, wrestling him to the ground in a snowbank. The second man stabbed the first man in the arm. The first man stabbed the second man in the chest, and he died. The event was captured on the dashcam of someone driving by, and the Crown plays the footage of dark shapes moving against a white background.

Sitting behind me in the gallery are Diaczuk and a reporter from TBnewswatch. During breaks, they chat quietly, comparing notes about other upcoming hearings—and about the hamburger reviews their publications have been running this month in a city-wide charity burger battle. The Chronicle-Journal and TBnewswatch both run stories about the hearing within a few days, but they are not the first. An X account called Thunder Bay Courthouse posts the details of the robbery, the chase, and the death in the street. “The entire incident was captured on video, but local media refuse to show the video,” the post reads. “LOCAL MEDIA WAS PRESENT IN THE COURTROOM, BUT ARE NOTORIOUSLY SLOW & LAZY WHEN IT COMES TO REPORTING THE NEWS.”

China's armed forces secretly trained about 200 Russian military personnel in China late last year and some have since returned to fight in Ukraine, according to three European intelligence agencies and documents seen by Reuters.

While China and Russia have held a number of joint military exercises since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Beijing has repeatedly stated that it is neutral ​in the conflict and presents itself as a peace mediator.

The covert training sessions, which predominantly focused on the use of drones, were outlined in a dual-language Russian-Chinese agreement signed by senior Russian and Chinese officers in Beijing on July 2, 2025.

The agreement, ‌reviewed by Reuters, said about 200 Russian troops would be trained at military facilities in locations including Beijing and the eastern city of Nanjing. The sources said around this number subsequently trained in China.

The agreement also said hundreds of Chinese troops would undergo training at military facilities in Russia.

By training Russian military personnel at an operational and tactical level who then participate in Ukraine, China is far more directly involved in the war on the European continent than previously known, one intelligence official said.

The Russian and Chinese defence ministries did not respond to requests for comment on the details outlined in this article.

"On the Ukraine crisis, China has consistently maintained an objective and impartial stance and ​worked to promote peace talks, this is consistent and clear and is witnessed by the international community," China's foreign ministry said in a statement to Reuters. "Relevant parties should not deliberately stoke confrontation or shift blame."

The intelligence agencies spoke on condition they not be identified in ​order to discuss sensitive information.

European powers, which see Russia as a major security threat, have watched warily at increasingly close relations between Russia and China, the world's second largest economy and an important European Union trade ⁠partner.

The two nations announced a "no limits" strategic partnership days before Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and pledged to conduct military exercises to rehearse coordination between their armed forces. As the West tried to isolate Russia, China provided a lifeline by buying its oil, gas and coal.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping ​is due to host Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and Wednesday, less than a week after U.S. President Donald Trump's high-profile visit.

China and Russia have cast Putin's trip - his 25th visit to China - as further evidence of their "all-weather" partnership, even as the West urges Beijing to pressure Moscow into ending ​its war in Ukraine.

DRONE WARFARE

Drones have proved to be a vital weapon in Ukraine.

Both sides use long-range models to attack targets hundreds of miles away, while on the battlefield, smaller drones remote controlled by pilots using first person view equipment (FPV) and armed with explosives dominate the sky, making it hazardous for armoured vehicles or infantry to move.

In September, Reuters reported that experts from private Chinese companies had conducted technical development work on military drones for a Russian attack drone manufacturer, according to European officials. China's foreign ministry said then it was unaware of the collaboration.

The two companies identified in the article were sanctioned by the EU last month.

According to the training agreement reviewed by Reuters, ​the Russians would be schooled in disciplines such as drones, electronic warfare, army aviation and armoured infantry. The agreement prohibited any media coverage of the visits in either country and said no third parties should be informed.

Visits by Chinese troops to Russia for training have been taking place since ​at least 2024, but Russian personnel training in China is new, two of the intelligence agencies said.

While Russia has extensive combat experience in Ukraine, China's vast drone industry offers technological know-how and advanced training methods such as flight simulators, they said.

China's People's Liberation Army has not fought a major war for decades, but it ‌has expanded quickly in ⁠the past 20 years and now rivals U.S. military might in some areas.

A significant number of Russian personnel who received training in China were ranking military instructors in a position to pass knowledge down the chain of command, the two intelligence agencies said.

One of the agencies said they had confirmed the identities of a handful of Russian military personnel who trained in China and had since been directly involved in combat operations with drones in Ukraine's occupied Crimea and Zaporizhzhia regions.

The rank of those people ranged from junior sergeant to lieutenant colonel, the agency said.

The names of the individuals appeared in a Russian military document seen by Reuters that listed the servicemen going to China. Reuters was unable to independently confirm the subsequent involvement of those individuals in the Ukraine war.

The same intelligence agency said it was highly probable that many of those who trained in China had gone to Ukraine.

MORTARS AND ​FLIGHT SIMULATORS

Internal Russian military reports reviewed by Reuters described four of the ​training sessions for Russian troops in China after they had taken ⁠place.

One report dated December 2025 described a training course on combined arms warfare for about 50 Russian military personnel at the PLA's Ground Forces Army Infantry Academy branch in Shijiazhuang.

The report said the course involved training soldiers to fire 82mm mortars while using unmanned aerial vehicles to identify their targets.

A second report described air defence training at a military facility, including with electronic warfare rifles, net-throwing devices and drones to counter incoming drones. Two officials ​said the facility was located in Zhengzhou.

All of these types of equipment are relevant to the war in Ukraine. Electronic warfare rifles are aimed at incoming drones to interfere and disrupt their signals, while nets ​can be thrown around drones to ensnare ⁠them as they get close.

Both sides use fibre-optic aerial drones connected to their pilots by fine thread which cannot be jammed electronically. Fibre-optic drones typically operate with a range of 10 km to 20 km, but some can go as far as 40 km (25 miles).

A third report, dated December 2025 and written by a Russian major, described drone training for Russian personnel at Yibin's PLA Training Centre for Military Aviation, first brigade. The course centred around multimedia presentations and involved the use of flight simulators, training to use several types of FPV drone and two other types of drone, it said.

A fourth report described a course ⁠in November, 2025 at ​the Nanjing University of Military Engineering of the PLA Infantry. The training covered explosives technology, mine construction, demining as well as the removal of unexploded ordnance and improvised explosive ​devices.

This report included photographs of Russian soldiers in uniform being taught by Chinese instructors in military uniform. The images also showed Russian soldiers being shown engineering equipment and how to sweep for mines.

The world is changing rapidly. In response, Canada’s new government is focused on what we can control: building an affordable, competitive, and sustainable Canadian economy.

To that end, we must build our strength at home and diversify our export markets abroad. To advance these shared missions, in November, Canada and Alberta signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that unlocks the full potential of Alberta’s energy resources, drives massive new investments in renewable energy, and effectively reduces emissions. The MOU shifts energy and climate policy from rigid regulations to a pragmatic, responsible, and cooperative approach. The MOU is built on practical solutions: stronger, more effective industrial carbon pricing, major private sector investments in clean technologies, and expanded, responsible energy development for the workers and communities who rely on it. It will provide certainty to investors, advance meaningful reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, and maintain a path to net-zero by 2050.

Delivering on these shared commitments, the Prime Minister, Mark Carney, and the Premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, today announced that Canada and Alberta have reached a landmark Implementation Agreement to diversify our exports, lower emissions, and build a stronger, more sustainable economy for all. Working together, Canada and Alberta will build:

Carbon markets that work

Canada’s carbon credit markets are not working. An oversupply of low-priced credits has weakened incentives and failed to substantially drive down emissions. Establishing a stronger carbon pricing system in high-emitting economies like Alberta also lays the foundation for a credible, scalable national carbon credit market. To achieve this:

• Canada and Alberta have agreed to an effective carbon price of $130 per tonne by 2040.
  • This will be achieved by agreed upon annual benchmarks for the headline carbon price, including $115 by 2030 and $130 by 2035.
  • The headline carbon price will increase to $140 per tonne by 2040.
  • Canada and Alberta have also agreed to annual tightening, or “stringency” rates under the Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) system. These tightening rates will gradually strengthen emissions benchmarks over time.
• Alberta has committed to enforcing a minimum floor price for TIER credits beginning in 2030. This is a critical “insurance policy” that will prevent carbon markets from collapsing and will provide a binding price for investment certainty.
• Canada and Alberta will jointly issue 75 million tonnes of Carbon Contracts for Difference (CFDs) to support emissions-reduction projects, with costs shared equally between Canada and Alberta.

This is a landmark agreement that provides long-term certainty rooted in consistent, effective increases to the price of carbon emissions in Alberta. With reinforcing carbon market measures such as CFDs, carbon prices will be predictable over time and catalyse investment. Together, these measures will help create the long-term certainty needed to advance major projects, grow Canada’s energy sector, and reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

This agreement creates the potential to expand credible, effective carbon markets across Canada, in close collaboration with provinces and territories.

Affordable, reliable, clean electricity 

Further to Canada’s proposed National Electricity Strategy, the federal government will support upgrades to electricity systems across Canada and increase generation – including adding major high-voltage intra-provincial transmission to the Clean Electricity Investment Tax Credit.

In addition, Canada and Alberta agree to:

• Work towards doubling the grid by 2050, including by expanding nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, and lower-carbon forms of generation – while maintaining the overall stability of Alberta’s grid.
• Launch a joint Electricity Working Group to identify the projects, technologies, and investments needed to achieve net-zero emissions in Alberta by 2050. This includes measures to support grid stability, modernisation, and services for baseload and intermittent power sources, including renewables, storage, interties, intra-provincial transmission, nuclear, and geothermal.
• Better enable investment for renewables and expand supply of electricity for AI and data centre projects.

Electricity is central to Canada’s future and our sustainability. It powers everything we do. By doubling our grid and increasing electrification, Canada’s Electricity Strategy will help ensure Canadians have access to affordable, reliable, and clean electricity as demand continues to grow across the economy.

Diversifying access to global markets

To transport at least one million barrels of low-emission Alberta bitumen a day, increase access to Asian markets, and bolster Canada’s independence and prosperity, the leaders agreed that: 

• Alberta will submit a comprehensive proposal for a bitumen pipeline to Asian markets to the Major Projects Office by July 1, 2026.
• Canada will pursue its designation as a project of national interest, for approval under the Building Canada Act by October 1, 2026, while ensuring that all steps and decisions are fully consistent with its duty to consult Indigenous Peoples and informed by the outcomes of that consultation.
• Canada and Alberta agree to continue engaging with British Columbia on the application and any future development and construction, on interties with Alberta, and on other projects of national interest within British Columbia’s jurisdiction.

The pipeline will be dependent on the Pathways Project, the largest carbon capture, utilisation, and storage project in the world. Canada and Alberta reaffirmed their commitment that the project would achieve 16 million tonnes of annual emissions reductions – the equivalent to taking 90% of vehicles off the road in Alberta – while generating $16.5 billion in GDP, $12.2 billion in labour income, and up to 43,000 jobs annually.

Today’s Implementation Agreement delivers on key commitments under the Canada-Alberta MOU and builds on the agreement-in-principle on methane equivalency and the Co-operation Agreement on Environmental and Impact Assessment reached earlier this spring. A methane equivalency agreement, targeting the end of 2026, will lower emissions of methane in the oil and gas sector in Alberta by 75% below 2014 levels by 2035.

Together, we are strengthening carbon markets, building affordable, reliable, and clean electricity, and getting Canada’s energy exports out to global markets. Rooted in cooperative federalism, this is a pragmatic, united approach to achieve our shared ambitions and create greater prosperity for all Albertans and Canadians.

With opposition to Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, mounting, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree has turned to social media with a video defending the bill as one that “respects Canadian privacy and Charter rights.” The video signals that the government has noticed the growing public concern. But the case against the bill, which I argued in committee testimony last week and in a series of earlier posts, raises at least four issues on which the government has not engaged: mandated metadata retention (which is ignored in its Charter Statement), a lower threshold for access to subscriber information that hurts privacy, security risks now alarming Canada’s closest allies, and an oversight architecture the oversight body itself says is incomplete.

The mandatory metadata retention obligation in the bill would compel providers to retain transmission data, including the date, time, duration, and type of communication, the identifiers of the devices involved, and information identifying device location, on virtually every Canadian for up to a year, without any individualized suspicion. As I set out in this post, the government’s own Charter Statement on the bill remarkably says nothing about this provision. That silence is striking given the Spencer and Bykovets decisions that recognize the informational privacy interest in data that links online activity to identity, and given that the Court of Justice of the European Union struck down precisely this kind of regime in Digital Rights Ireland and extended that reasoning to mandated private-sector retention in Tele2 Sverige. Robert Diab has reached the same conclusion on the Charter Statement’s silence on metadata retention. The refusal to address the most Charter-vulnerable element of its own bill leaves the government unable to credibly insist that the bill respects the Charter.

Further, claims that the bill respects privacy ring hollow in light of the reduced threshold for access to subscriber information. Bill C-22 creates a new, dedicated production order for subscriber information, but sets the standard at “reasonable grounds to suspect”. This is the lowest evidentiary threshold in Canadian criminal law and below the “reasonable grounds to believe” standard that has governed subscriber data production orders for more than a decade. Law enforcement has used the production order hundreds of thousands of times, yet now wants to reduce the standard, thereby undermining the privacy balance.

Meanwhile, the government’s position on encryption and systemic vulnerability is facing criticism from a wide range of groups. Despite insisting that the bill brings Canada into line with its Five Eyes partners, Apple, Meta, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, and even the chairs of the U.S. House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees have all warned that Bill C-22’s technical capability requirements would create systemic vulnerabilities that adversaries could exploit. When the U.S. Congress writes to Canada’s Public Safety Minister to say a Canadian bill threatens U.S. national security and the integrity of cross-border data flows, the government’s defence that the bill is needed to catch-up to allies no longer holds water.

Finally, even established oversight committees are sounding the alarm. In a letter to the SECU committee studying Bill C-22, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency wrote that the bill creates oversight at the front end of a Ministerial order, through Intelligence Commissioner approval, but provides no mechanism for NSIRA to review the activities conducted under that order afterward. It proposed targeted amendments to require the same level of notification and information sharing that its counterpart receives under Australia’s lawful access regime. Insisting that the bill includes meaningful independent review is on shaky ground when the body responsible for independent review tells Parliament it does not have the necessary level of access for effective review.

These issues have been raised by virtually every expert submission on Bill C-22, yet the government implausibly argues that its bill respects privacy and Charter rights. Rather than another video, it should commit to extending the committee hearings to ensure proper expert scrutiny, address the Charter issues the Charter Statement has thus far avoided, and open the door to the real amendments to the bill.

Brussels seeks to replicate air travel bookings for trains, ferries and coaches

The EU will seek to force train ticket providers to display rivals’ offers and give greater protection to passengers in the event of cancellations.

Unveiling a set of proposals dubbed a “game changer” for rail travel, European commissioner for cohesion Raffaele Fitto said: “One thing air travel does well is it is simple. You search, you compare, you book in a matter of minutes. Rail passengers deserve the same experience.”

Passengers will be able to combine rail services purchased from different operators into a single ticket, purchased via one transaction. Services across different means of transport — from ferries to coaches — would also be included in the package.

The measure was first reported by the FT last week, when transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas said the rules would address the “nightmare” of long-distance travel.

The European Commission seeks to make it easier for passengers to purchase tickets online, addressing a “significant structural weakness”, the regulation states. Railway operators with half or more of market share in national railway services will be obliged to open their online ticketing services to any other operator.

This will impact operators such as France’s SNCF, Spain’s Renfe and Germany’s Deutsche Bahn in their national markets, forcing them to offer rivals’ services on their online platforms.

Catriona Meehan, from online booking service Omio, called it a “welcome step towards making rail easier to access and use for passengers across Europe”.

She added: “Too often, fragmented data and ticketing still make it harder than it should be to search, compare and book journeys, even where good services exist.”

She said the new rules must focus on allowing data access for all providers, including independent retailers, to avoid the measures “entrenching nationally concentrated models that limit choice”.

But Jon Worth, an independent European railways analyst, said the proposals were “both radical and far-reaching, but also unworkable”.

It places a “heavy burden on the shoulders of railway companies” by requiring them to offer tickets months in advance, while also harming season ticket holders, who may lose their discounts if they buy a newer, unified ticket that better protects their rights in the event of disruption.

Georgia Whitaker, from green research group Transport & Environment, said the rules were a “huge leap forward”, but added the EU needed to “increase the geographical scope of this commitment to ensure that the most frequently flown and driven routes are easily accessible for passengers to book by rail”.

Officials have dismissed concerns about opposition to the plans from national rail operators, noting that operators such as Renfe and SNCF were seeking to break into neighbouring national markets.

The proposal could benefit private companies such as new challengers in France like Kevin Speed and Velvet, and those offering specialised services like European Sleeper.

The measures will also ensure that passengers booking journeys with multiple legs across different providers have the same rights throughout the trip. Currently, passengers who miss connections due to delays can face “unequal treatment” across member states and operators and be left without the right to take the next available train in some cases.

The commission has drawn on studies showing that a third of citizens are unwilling to book journeys with several different modes of transport or operators, in part because of booking difficulties. The problem is most pronounced with rail tickets but also challenging with other forms of transport, the proposals state.

In Quebec cities, schools are now in open competition. Public and private institutions vie with each other to attract the most economically and academically advantaged students, leaving the regular public school classroom in a precarious state.

Research now shows that the deterioration of teaching and learning conditions in the "regular" system, combined with academic selection processes, contributes to a host of social problems, such as academic failure, unequal access to higher education, overdiagnosis and overtreatment of ADHD, poor mental health among students and teachers, as well as stigma and violence in schools.

Although all children suffer directly or indirectly from the negative effects of school segregation, it is boys, particularly those from less privileged backgrounds, who are the first victims.

The disparities in academic achievement between boys and girls are well-documented and are frequently the subject of articles and open letters in the media. Last fall, Marwah Rizqy produced a widely discussed documentary on the topic entitled L’écart silencieux. She highlighted, among other things, the vast achievement gap between boys and girls in Quebec compared to Ontario and suggested that different strategies for developing reading skills might be a contributing factor.

The various participants in the documentary also addressed sex differences in the pace of neurocognitive development, but remained silent on a major difference between the Quebec and Ontario school systems: the "three-tiered" school system. Due to competition between schools, the Quebec school system is indeed the most segregated in Canada. This means that in Quebec, privileged and disadvantaged students have the least interaction at school and do not receive the same quality of education.

The white paper entitled Ceux qu’on échappe : l’impact de l’école à trois vitesses sur la réussite des garçons, published this week by Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, offers essential additional analysis for understanding this phenomenon. In this important work, which he himself describes as “the last major project of his political career,” Mr. Nadeau-Dubois draws on scientific research and shows that the achievement gap between boys and girls, a phenomenon observable worldwide, is significantly exacerbated in Quebec:

“The available research and statistics tell the same story. The high level of school segregation in the Quebec education system is more detrimental to boys, both directly and indirectly. Indirectly, because single-sex education always harms weaker students more than stronger ones, and there are more weak-achieving boys than weak-achieving girls.” Directly, because boys are more sensitive than girls to the composition of their class. Their success is therefore more affected by the difficult learning conditions of regular classes in the public school system.

Gradual fragmentation

On April 2nd, during his final address to the National Assembly, the outgoing premier stated that education had always been his priority. He spoke with emotion about his humble origins and the crucial role school played in his personal journey. François Legault is indeed among those who greatly benefited from the democratization of education led by reformers in the 1960s. Thanks to school, many children of French-Canadian origin, like himself, experienced upward social mobility. However, successive governments over the past few decades have allowed the education system to fragment into a three-tiered system that has gradually distanced us from the principle of equal opportunity we inherited from the Quiet Revolution. In other words, today's "little François Legaults" no longer have the same chances of success.

The Quebec school system, once a symbol of pride and a true engine of the economic and cultural development of the Quebec nation, has gradually transformed into a system of social segregation that today hinders the development of the full potential of all children in Quebec.

Sociologist Guy Rocher, who witnessed the deterioration of the education system he helped create alongside colleagues like Paul Gérin-Lajoie and Jeanne Lapointe, did not hesitate, at the very end of his life, to call this state of affairs a true national betrayal.

Last summer, a petition sponsored by Pascal Bérubé, Member of the National Assembly for Matane-Matapédia, garnered over 160,000 signatures. It denounced the budget cuts imposed on school service centres and acknowledged that such cuts had tangible impacts on the well-being of the most vulnerable children, typically those in the regular public school system.

On the eve of the elections scheduled for this fall, we urge the parties that seriously aspire to govern Quebec to recognize this issue and to take a clear stand against school segregation. Our future depends on it.

The leader of the separatist organization accused of misusing Alberta’s list of electors by providing hundreds of supporters with access to private information belonging to 2.9 million residents is refusing to co-operate with investigators.

David Parker, the political organizer behind the Centurion Project, is stonewalling Elections Alberta, according to a statement from the head of the agency.

“I can confirm David Parker is not cooperating with the investigation and he has refused to sign a statutory declaration confirming that he will comply with my direction to cease and desist with respect to the list of electors,” Gordon McClure, Alberta’s chief electoral officer, said in a statement to The Globe and Mail.

Mr. Parker did not respond to messages late Monday afternoon. He previously stated he would co-operate with investigators, including those at Elections Alberta.

The separatist has a combative history with the provincial agency, which he argues oversteps its authority to the detriment of citizens.

“Elections Alberta is an evil institution that is used to suppress democracy,” he wrote on X on April 18, before the agency alleged the Centurion Project violated election laws. “I will not rest until everyone responsible for the lawfare being waged out of that den of evil are brought to justice.”

Elections Alberta at the end of April alleged the Centurion Project had unauthorized access to the province’s list of electors. The agency alleged Centurion improperly accessed a list issued to the Republican Party of Alberta, a separatist political party that had lawful access to the data.

The RCMP in April announced a separate investigation. The affair heightened tensions within separatist ranks, sparked fear the data could be misused by domestic and foreign players, and prompted concerns about the integrity of a potential referendum on Alberta separation in October.

Cam Davies, the leader of the Republican Party of Alberta, is taking a different approach than Mr. Parker, his friend and political ally.

“We are assisting [Elections Alberta] with the investigation,” he said in a statement Monday.

Premier Danielle Smith’s government earlier this year scheduled a referendum, largely centred on questions around immigration, for Oct. 19. Alberta’s separatists last week handed in a petition with roughly 301,000 names in support of adding a secession question to the ballot.

The Centurion Project used a tool that allowed volunteers to look up electors by partial name or address and then record how those residents felt about Alberta separating from the rest of Canada. While registered political parties are permitted access to electoral lists, which they use to identify supporters, third parties such as the Centurion Project are not.

Elections Alberta obtained an injunction on April 30 requiring the Centurion Project to stop distributing information derived from the list. But court documents reveal the agency received a previously undisclosed tip that a separatist group may have had access to the province’s highly guarded list and determined it did not have grounds to launch an investigation.

The documents, obtained by The Globe and Mail, reveal that someone who wished to remain anonymous left Elections Alberta a voicemail on April 21, “regarding concerns” the Centurion Project had the list of electors and was using the data to support its push for secession. This newly disclosed tip is in addition to one provided by journalist Jen Gerson on March 31, which came to light at the end of last month.

In both cases, Election Commissioner Paula Hale determined the tips did not provide enough evidence to trigger an investigation. This allowed the Centurion Project to leave its database online, available to approved users, until Elections Alberta obtained its injunction.

Ms. Smith’s government in 2025 pushed through changes that Elections Alberta argues limited the agency’s ability to investigate potential wrongdoing and issue sanctions. The government, for example, amended legislation so the agency must now have “reasonable grounds” to launch investigations, compared with the lower hurdle of “grounds to warrant.”

Elections Alberta claims the new standard prohibited it from investigating the Centurion Project prior to April 29; the government disputes this argument.

Ryan Tebb, an investigator with Elections Alberta, in an affidavit said an administrative support employee in the agency’s compliance and enforcement division sent him an e-mail on April 24 containing a video demonstrating how to use the Centurion Project’s app.

He compared information displayed in the video, including electoral divisions and polling subdivisions, against the agency’s database of electors, which led him to believe the Centurion Project “was likely in possession of at least a partial provincial list of electors or potentially a combination of lists of electors,” his affidavit says.

Ms. Hale wrote that the inclusion of electoral divisions and polling subdivisions was “compelling evidence that this data base was created using one or more lists of electors,” according to court documents.

On April 29, Abdullah Bin Naeem, Elections Alberta’s director of technology platforms and innovation, compiled a list of 2,587 fake names that the agency sprinkles throughout the list of electors provided to eligible recipients, in order to trace leaks. He created a digital tool that found 87 fake entries, which corresponded to the list of electors Elections Alberta provided to the Republican Party of Alberta, according to his affidavit.

Mr. Bin Naeem’s affidavit does not indicate whether Elections Alberta accessed the app’s root database. The agency declined to answer, stating that information is related to the investigation.

The Globe’s own analysis determined the root database contained unique elector identification numbers, middle names and 2,083,175 phone numbers – much more information than what was accessible with a simple search on the app.

THIS YEAR’S Victory Day parade in Moscow on May 9th involved nothing triumphal. For the first time in two decades tanks and other military vehicles did not rumble through Red Square in celebration of the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany. Russia’s authorities deemed it too great a risk to cram armoured vehicles and missile-carriers into nearby staging areas—they would have made far too juicy a target for Ukraine's increasingly effective drones. In the run-up to the big day, mobile internet services in Moscow and St Petersburg were cut off for security reasons. Large numbers of air-defence systems were redeployed from remote parts of the country.

Rubbing in the insult Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, issued a decree to “permit” the parade to proceed, saying that Red Square would not be attacked. This came shortly after Ukraine and Russia agreed to a three-day ceasefire brokered by America, though by May 10th both sides were accusing the other of having violated it. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, speaking after the parade, said he thought the war was “coming to an end”.

The symbolism of the diminished parade is hard to overstate. A day that was meant to epitomise the military might of Mr Putin’s Russia instead signalled its vulnerability and weakness. In this, at least, it was an accurate reflection of Russia’s battlefield setbacks, and of Russia’s fear of the growing effectiveness of Ukraine’s long-range strikes. For the first time in nearly three years the initiative in the war appears to have shifted in favour of Ukraine. Having got through a harsh winter, when its cities and energy grid were pummelled almost nightly by massed Russian drones and missiles, Ukraine is now turning the tide. It is imposing increasing costs on Russia by almost every measure.

Not only has Russia’s expected spring offensive been a flop, but in April Russian forces suffered a net loss of territory for the first time since August 2024 (when Ukraine seized territory in Russia’s Kursk oblast). The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a think-tank in Washington, recently listed contributing factors to Ukraine’s successes: ground counter-attacks and mid-range strikes by Ukraine’s forces; the end of Russia’s illicit use of Starlink terminals in Ukraine; and the Kremlin’s paranoid throttling of the Telegram messaging app at home. By our calculations, based on ISW maps, Russia has lost control of 113 square kilometres over the past 30 days.

“Overall, it feels like an inflection point in the war,” says Sir Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London. “If the Russians have nothing to show for their efforts I would not be surprised if in some places things start crumbling.” Losses of soldiers, running at 35,000 a month, exceed the pace at which Russia can recruit replacements. And behind the raw numbers—nearly 1.4m killed and seriously wounded since Russia’s invasion—is a grimmer new development. Until last year, the ratio of killed to wounded Russian soldiers may have been between 1:2 and 1:3, poor by modern standards but roughly in line with past conflicts. In March Mr Zelensky said that Russia was suffering almost two dead soldiers for every one wounded. “The stoicism and fatalism of Russian soldiers must be wearing thin,” says Sir Lawrence.

The dead-to-wounded ratio appears to be rising because so many casualties—perhaps as many as 80%—are now caused by so-called first-person view (FPV) drones. Loaded with explosives, these drones hunt enemy soldiers and imperil attempts at medical evacuation, which in any case has never been a high priority for the Russians. “They simply leave their wounded on the battlefield,” says Seth Jones, a senior military analyst at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Russian soldiers complain that Ukraine’s new autonomous drones are inaudible until they dive. They use artificial intelligence and are controlled with fibre-optic cables to thwart jammers. Alexy Chadayev, the director of a drone-development and testing facility in the Russian city of Veliky Novgorod, wrote on April 7th that Russia had “lost leadership” over the past six months to Ukraine and was struggling to move units close to the front. “We have enormous problems with last-mile logistics,” he said. “Up to 90% of our [drone-team] losses are currently occurring there.” Russia has been forced to impose restrictions on the size of convoys in Donetsk to make them harder to detect. Only two lorries are allowed to move together.

A drone “kill zone” of some 20km between the front lines is being extended far to the Russian rear, Sir Lawrence argues. This has a greater impact on Russian operations than Ukrainian ones because the Russians are trying to advance. For Ukraine it is far more effective to take out the supporting infrastructure for an offensive than it is to kill the few troops who now lead attacks.

The Ukrainians face similar problems in the drone-saturated killing zone, but they place a much higher value on the lives of their soldiers, and so make greater use of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) for evacuation and carrying supplies close to the front. And in most places they are not trying to advance.

Farther back from the front line, Russia is suffering mounting losses to Ukraine’s mid-range drones (with ranges of 50km to 300km). Mr Zelensky recently claimed that procurement of such systems so far this year is five times greater than in all of 2025. Targets include ammunition depots, drone warehouses, command-and-control posts, surface-to-air-missile launchers, radars and deployment points where armoured vehicles and troops are concentrated.

Added to the battlefield setbacks is the increase in the scale, range and intensity of Ukraine’s deep-strike operations in Russia. In March, for the first time, Ukraine surpassed Russia in the number of long-range drone attacks it launched. Economic and military targets almost 2,000km from the Ukrainian border are regularly being hit. That brings 70% of Russia’s population within range of Ukrainian drones. “The attacks have caused psychological damage to Russia,” says Mr Jones.

On April 25th four of Russia’s best combat aircraft were damaged in a strike on Shagol airfield deep in the southern Urals. An oil refinery and pumping station at Perm, in the Urals, was set ablaze in early May. Oil infrastructure across multiple regions and oil-export hubs are being hit with increasing frequency. In April attacks on ports and refineries forced Russia to cut production by as much as 400,000 barrels a day, Reuters reports. On April 29th Mr Zelensky claimed that internal Russian reports indicated that the ports of Novorossiysk and Ust-Luga were operating at respectively 38% and 43% below capacity. However, overall Russian oil exports only fell by 7% in April and its revenues nearly doubled thanks to the Iran war.

Russia’s size and the systematic year-long Ukrainian campaign to degrade its air-defence systems makes protecting even valuable assets almost impossible. “They can’t defend against drone attacks with area defence,” says Mr Jones. “And they don’t have point defence at many of the locations where they need it.” Whereas Ukraine has developed several types of interceptor-drones that are now shooting down about 95% of Russia’s Shahed-type attack drones, Russia has been slow to produce its own versions.

The crucial question is whether Russia’s various setbacks—on the battlefield or through the destruction of economic infrastructure—are indicators that Mr Putin’s opportunities in Ukraine are shrinking. Sir Lawrence says much depends on the next few months, and in particular on whether Russia can counter Ukraine’s advances in drones. Another concern is whether Russia is husbanding its forces for a big offensive in the summer. “The reality is that they are struggling at the front and not much is going right for them,” he says. Mr Jones agrees: “It’s hard to see how things can improve for Russia. If you’re briefing Putin, it’s a pretty bleak picture.”

Warsaw has recorded an unprecedented number of hybrid attacks on its territory since 2024, Poland’s internal security service (ABW) said in a report published this week. Amateur spies once used by Russian intelligence services have laid the groundwork for more complex operations, according to a researcher following the emergence of these “single-use agents”.

Last year and the year before saw a rise in espionage activity in Poland, “primarily on the part of Russian and closely allied Belarusian special services as well as China”, the Internal Security Agency (ABW) said in a report published on May 6. 

As a result, Poland conducted as many counter-intelligence investigations in 2024 and 2025 as it had in the previous three decades.  

European law enforcement and intelligence officials began noticing these efforts back in 2022, The New Yorker reported in February. Job offers began appearing in online chat groups, usually on Telegram, directed at Russian-speaking populations – Russians, but also Belarusians and Ukrainians.

Polish intelligence services came up with a name for these isolated agents recruited by Russian intelligence – jednorazowi agenci – or “single-use agents”.

The ABW report said Russian intelligence services were gradually shifting from single-use agents to more “professional” networks to carry out sabotage and other campaigns across Europe.

“’Disposable spies’ are very useful for generating chaos, radicalising public opinion, strengthening intergroup antagonisms, distracting attention and testing the resilience of the state apparatus,” said Arkadiusz Nyzio, a Polish researcher and author of a report on Russia’s use of middlemen to create chaos in Europe.

They have also laid out the groundwork for more complex operations on the continent, Nyzio stated.  

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Russia has been using such middlemen to create both social unrest and physically destroy targets in Europe. “It’s very cheap, offers a veneer of deniability, and the spread can be huge,” said a Polish official interviewed by The New Yorker.

Russian sabotage efforts have targeted not only Polish military facilities and vital infrastructure but also soft targets like shopping malls and other public venues.

In one of the more dramatic incidents, a fire on May 12, 2024, destroyed one of Warsaw’s largest shopping centres, Marywilska 44. Nearly 1,200 boutiques went up in flames, leaving behind a charred landscape although no one was killed. Nearly two years later, the remains of the shopping centre have been razed.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in a post on X that Poland knows "for sure" that an arson attack ordered by Russian special services was behind the blaze.

Increasing complexity

From 2024 to 2025, Russia began shifting towards creating complex “sabotage cells” that relied more on “closed structures” like those found in organised crime, the ABW wrote. “Russians prefer individuals with experience in law enforcement,” the report said, citing in particular former soldiers, police officers or mercenaries from paramilitary organisations like the Wagner Group.

But the use of single-use spies will not disappear, Nyzio says. From the start, he says, these campaigns have been about “intelligence operations at different levels: employing various methods and tools to achieve various outcomes”.

“We should think of these as complementary cogs in a machine, not as replacements. Disposable spies have arguably helped map out the situation in Europe. The speed and way they were neutralised, as well as the public’s reaction, provided valuable insights into the resilience of the state and society.”  

Different actors and various methods are used for separate tasks. “While disposable spies spread anti-Ukrainian propaganda” – like putting up posters with anti-Ukrainian or anti-NATO messages – “the ‘professionals’ sabotage railway infrastructure and intelligence officers, operating under particularly deep cover, infiltrate state institutions”, Nyzio says.

Last November, an explosion damaged a major Polish railway line in what Prime Minister Tusk called an “unprecedented act of sabotage”. The incident could have caused mass casualties if a train driver hadn’t noticed an issue with the track and warned others in time.

The fear and paranoia such sabotage can spread is the objective.

“If you say every day, ‘Russia is attacking us,’ then they don’t really have to attack us anymore,” a European intelligence official told The New Yorker.

Russia, working with its close ally Belarus, hopes to influence Poland’s upcoming parliamentary elections in Poland, according to Nyzio. “There is a strong possibility that next year’s elections will result in the formation of a far-right government, featuring prominent anti-Ukrainian and anti-European politicians who propagate every conceivable conspiracy theory. The establishment of such a government would signify a geopolitical realignment of Poland, including the abandonment or significant weakening of Poland’s support for the Ukrainian cause. This represents a dream scenario for Russia.”

In the long term, Russia’s objective remains the same as always: to destabilise Poland and create divisions between Western allies, Nyzio says.

“The weaker, more internally conflicted and more at odds with the West Poland is, the better.”

Executive Summary

The 2025 American Neighbor Survey explores the various ways in which Americans are—and are not—interacting with the people in their immediate communities. In the past decade, the frequency of neighborly interactions has plummeted. This withdrawal has been particularly prevalent among young adults, while seniors have remained more consistently in touch with their neighbors. College-educated Americans also experience stronger neighborhood ties. Compared with Americans who have a high school degree or less, college graduates are more trusting of their neighbors, socialize with them more frequently, and are quicker to rely on them for help in times of need. The report also examines the association between attending religious services and the health of neighborhood ties, finding that more frequent attendees are more engaged neighbors.

Introduction

As Americans spend more of their time online, the neighborhood—once a primary physical location for real-world socialization—is playing less of a central role than ever before. Since the pandemic increased opportunities for remote work and flexible schedules, social interactions among neighbors have fallen. Whether because of social media distractions, travel sports commitments, or the rising use of freelance service providers like Taskrabbit, Americans rely far less on close neighbors and venture out less often into their communities. As Marc Dunkelman contends in The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community, less routine interaction with neighbors and others in the “middle ring” of social connections allows us far fewer opportunities to practice constructive debate.^(1)

Neighborhoods vary in size, shape, and character, but one aspect that affects degrees of interpersonal engagement is the educational and class background of the people who live there. Americans with college degrees have a considerable advantage in maintaining close neighborhood connections. College graduates are more trusting of their neighbors—and more likely to socialize with them and work together to solve community problems. Americans with college degrees also express more comfort with leaning on their neighbors for support. For instance, most parents with a college degree say they would feel comfortable asking a neighbor to watch their children in an emergency, while fewer than four in 10 parents without a degree say the same.

It’s not only a class divide. The new American Neighbor Survey reveals evidence of a religious gap as well. Those who attend religious services frequently are much more socially active in their neighborhoods than are those who seldom or never participate in religious services. Americans who regularly attend religious services have stronger social connections with their neighbors and are more inclined to work with them to address community problems and concerns. Religious Americans interact with their communities differently, and their views about what it means to be a good neighbor are distinct. They are more likely to believe that good neighbors should seek opportunities to help those who live around them, even if their neighbors did not ask for help.

The American neighborhood was once a primary place for socialization. It included the critical social and civic infrastructure that educated new generations, taught them values, and provided a testing ground for their emerging sense of themselves and the wider world they were joining. The neighborhood is still important, but it occupies a less central place than it once did. Young adults have experienced one of the most rapid declines in neighborly interaction—only one in four say they talk with their neighbors regularly, a drop of more than half in just over a decade.

The State of American Neighborliness

The rise of telework and flexible work schedules created by the pandemic dramatically increased the amount of time Americans spent at home. Even though many Americans returned to the office after pandemic protocols eased, many still spend considerably more time in and around their immediate homes. Comparisons to a 2012 study by Pew Research Center show that Americans are engaging less with their neighbors than they did just over a decade ago.^(2)

Although Americans have been spending more and more time in their own neighborhoods, there is little evidence that they are engaging more frequently with the people who live next door. Only 40 percent of Americans report talking to their neighbors regularly (at least a few times a week). This marks a considerable decline in social interaction between neighbors; in 2012, nearly six in 10 Americans (59 percent) said they talked to their neighbors at least a few times a week. In 2025, most Americans interacted with their neighbors sparingly. More than four in 10 (41 percent) Americans talked with their neighbors no more than a few times a month, while 17 percent report that they did not talk to their neighbors at all. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1

Although the decline in neighborly interactions has occurred among Americans from all backgrounds, the collapse has been far more pronounced among certain groups. Social exchanges between neighbors are much more common among older Americans than among young adults. A majority (56 percent) of seniors report chatting with their neighbors at least a few times a week, demonstrating only a modest seven-point drop from 2012. In contrast, patterns of socializing with neighbors have changed dramatically among young adults over the past decade. Only one in four young adults now report regularly engaging with their neighbors, but in 2012, more than half (51 percent) of young adults said they conversed with neighbors a few times a week or more.

What explains the generational divergence? Older Americans tend to be more settled in their communities than do young adults, having lived in the same neighborhood for a longer period. Homeownership may, for example, provide greater incentives and opportunities for older Americans to develop and maintain social connections with their neighbors.

However, there is no indication that homeownership is associated with more frequent interactions with neighbors. Americans who rent their homes report engaging with their neighbors about as often as do those who own their homes. Similarly, Americans who live in apartments talk to their neighbors at roughly the same rate as those who occupy stand-alone dwellings. The age gap may have more to do with shifting personal priorities and social habits than with a difference in economic circumstances.

That said, marriage may facilitate more frequent neighborly interactions. Married Americans report talking to their neighbors more frequently and experienced a smaller overall decline in these interactions over the past decade. Forty-five percent of married Americans report having talked to their neighbors at least a few times per week in 2025. Among those who have never been married, only 30 percent say the same. Marriage has not always been a reliable indicator for neighborly interactions, however. In 2012, the regularity of social interactions with neighbors looked similar between married and unmarried adults (60 percent vs. 53 percent).

How Do Neighbors Engage?

Beyond striking up a casual conversation, how do Americans engage with their neighbors, and why do they initiate these interactions? Socializing is one of the most common activities reported. Roughly half (51 percent) of Americans say they spent an evening socializing with someone who lives in their neighborhood in the past year. Roughly the same share (53 percent) report they communicated with neighbors via email or text message at some point in the past year. Four in 10 Americans report having worked with people in their neighborhood to fix a problem or improve the condition of their community in the past 12 months.

The Class Divide in Neighborhood Engagement

Class defines our physical existence, influencing where we live, the types of places we call home, and the places we work. It also structures our social lives, from basic interactions with the people in our immediate communities to the trust we have in them. Whether they are socializing with neighbors or taking a walk around the neighborhood, Americans from different educational backgrounds have remarkably distinct experiences.

Americans without a college degree are less engaged in various activities in their neighborhoods. These activities include working with people from their neighborhood to solve problems, spending social time with neighbors, exchanging texts or emails, and walking or running in their neighborhood. Nearly six in 10 (58 percent) college graduates report that they spent an evening with someone in their neighborhood at least once in the past year. Fewer than half (46 percent) of Americans with a high school education or less say the same. Moreover, 46 percent of Americans with a college degree say they have worked with their neighbors to address a problem or improve their neighborhood, compared with only about one in three (34 percent) of those without any college education. (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2

There is an even larger class divide in communication with neighbors. Roughly two-thirds (65 percent) of Americans with a college degree report having sent emails or text messages to their neighbors at some point in the past year. Fewer than half (45 percent) of those without a college degree participate in this activity as often.

Notably, the education divide in neighborly engagement remains consistent across neighborhood types. Americans without a college degree are about as likely to socialize and work with neighbors whether they live in an urban, rural, or suburban neighborhood. In this way, class has become a more robust indicator of Americans’ community experience than has the type of community.

How Helpful Are Neighbors?

Although Americans at large interact with their neighbors less often than they once did, plenty of them remain at least somewhat comfortable relying on their neighbors for support. A majority say they are comfortable asking a neighbor to help them move a piece of furniture (64 percent) or hold on to a set of spare keys (56 percent). Fewer say they would be comfortable relying on neighbors to take care of their pet or watch their child. About half (49 percent) of Americans are comfortable with having a neighbor watch their child for a few hours in an emergency and asking a neighbor to pet sit for a few days.

College graduates are generally more comfortable asking for help from neighbors than are those without degrees. For instance, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of college graduates report feeling comfortable asking a neighbor to keep a set of house keys, while fewer than half (47 percent) of those without a degree say the same. College-educated parents would sooner rely on their neighbors for childcare in an emergency. A majority (56 percent) report that they would feel comfortable leaving their kids with a neighbor, while fewer than four in 10 (39 percent) parents without degrees said the same.

There is a notable wrinkle in this pattern, with fathers reporting greater comfort than mothers across the education divide. About half (51 percent) of college-educated mothers—and more than six in 10 (62 percent) college-educated fathers—say they would feel comfortable asking a neighbor to watch their children for an hour or so in an emergency. Mothers without a college degree are far less comfortable relying on neighbors for this type of help: Fewer than one in three (32 percent) report feeling comfortable asking a neighbor to watch their child for a short time. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3

Housing type may not affect how frequently neighbors interact, but it is associated with how comfortable Americans are leaning on their neighbors for help. Americans living in detached single-family houses express the most comfort with asking neighbors for help, while apartment dwellers are among the least comfortable doing so. For instance, more than six in 10 (63 percent) Americans living in a stand-alone house say they would be comfortable having a neighbor hold on to a set of their spare keys, while only 41 percent of Americans living in an apartment say the same. Americans who reside in single-family homes also report being more comfortable than those in apartments asking a neighbor to look after their pet (55 percent vs. 39 percent).

There are also pronounced generational divisions in asking—and therefore receiving—help from neighbors. Younger Americans express greater hesitancy when it comes to relying on their neighbors. Nearly half of Americans say they would be comfortable asking a neighbor for child or pet care. Most young adults, in comparison, say they would be uncomfortable asking this of their neighbors. Sixty-four percent of all adults say they would be comfortable asking a neighbor for help moving furniture; Americans over age 30 are 10 percentage points more likely than young adults to say they are open to this.

The largest gap appears in Americans’ comfort in sharing a set of keys with their neighbors. Six in 10 adults over age 30 say they would be comfortable with this, while only 36 percent of young adults say the same. This pattern holds across housing types; older homeowners are significantly more comfortable having a neighbor hold their keys than are younger homeowners.

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Navigating Neighborhood Politics

Americans demonstrate varying degrees of comfort when faced with the possibility of different neighbors. Most Americans prefer to have neighbors whose values and views align with their own, although the strength of these preferences varies among groups. For example, most Americans say they would be comfortable having someone who is transgender move next door. Not surprisingly, liberals are more likely than conservatives to exhibit comfort with having a transgender neighbor (88 percent vs. 41 percent). Meanwhile, 57 percent of conservatives say they would be uncomfortable if someone who is transgender moved in next door.

Similarly, most Americans (57 percent) say they would be comfortable having a neighbor who strongly supports Donald Trump, while 40 percent say they would be uncomfortable if an ardent Trump supporter moved next door. As expected, conservatives report being much more comfortable with this possibility, with over eight in 10 (83 percent) saying they would have no problem with it. A slightly smaller share of liberals (74 percent) say they would be uncomfortable having a next-door neighbor who was an avid Trump supporter. Notably, liberals report being much less comfortable living next to a Trump supporter than conservatives say they would be about having a neighbor who strongly opposes the president (52 percent). Clearly, tolerance toward their neighbors is the default for a slim majority of Americans. Ideological divisions remained pronounced, however, with liberals expressing somewhat more social aversion toward neighbors with whom they disagree politically.

Personal politics is not the only factor that may influence Americans’ degree of comfort with certain types of neighbors. The broader community’s political landscape may play a role as well. Liberals who live in communities where most people or nearly everyone voted for Trump are more comfortable with having a next-door neighbor who strongly supports the president. One in three (33 percent) liberals who live in a community with many Trump supporters say they would be comfortable if a Trump supporter moved in next door. In contrast, only 14 percent of liberals in communities where many if not most people supported Kamala Harris in 2024 say they would be comfortable with a next-door neighbor who supports Trump.

The same pattern is evident among conservatives in their relative comfort with a transgender person moving in next door. Conservatives in communities with many Harris supporters are significantly more comfortable having a transgender neighbor than are those who live around mostly Trump supporters (50 percent vs. 36 percent).

Notably, a neighborhood’s political character does not seem to predict conflict between neighbors or influence how trusting Americans are of the people who live next door. Liberals who live in communities with many Trump supporters are not any more likely to report having a dispute with their neighbor than are liberals who live in places with mostly Harris supporters. The pattern among conservatives is nearly identical.

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Conclusion

The decline in social engagement among neighbors is not an anomalous trend; it is likely connected to the larger deterioration of American social life. Americans have fewer close friends than they once did and spend fewer hours socializing. This same trend is showing up in the American neighborhood. Over the past decade, the frequency of neighborly interactions has plummeted. Relatively few Americans report socializing with their neighbors, although the drop has had a larger effect on some communities than on others.

The American Neighbor Survey reveals a pronounced class divide in social engagement. Americans with less formal education have experienced the sharpest decline in neighborhood social experiences. They have fewer social outlets and are less able to rely on their neighbors for critical support. Only about one in three noncollege mothers feels comfortable relying on a neighbor to watch their children in an emergency.

One reason for the disparity may be a lack of access to many of the social infrastructures that foster conversation and community with our neighbors. Access to neighborhood amenities, such as coffee shops, public parks, and community centers, provides more opportunities to meet with neighbors and cultivate a sense of belonging. College-educated Americans are more likely to live in neighborhoods with easy access to these critical social spaces.

Social disparities in neighborly interactions are attributable not only to class differences. Regular involvement in a place of worship is associated with much more frequent social interactions with neighbors. It’s not only about getting out more often into the community; religious Americans have different expectations about the relationships we should have with the people who live next door. When being a neighbor is about more than respecting the others’ privacy, being part of a neighborhood takes on another meaning as well.

Prime Minister Mark Carney faced near-daily threats over his first 100 days in office, according to newly released government documents that show how a wave of threats against top political leaders carried over from the Justin Trudeau era.

Prime Minister Mark Carney faced near-daily threats over his first 100 days in office, according to newly released government documents that show how a wave of threats against top political leaders carried over from the Justin Trudeau era. 

Obtained under the federal Access to Information system, the documents list hundreds of “direct” and “indirect” threats recorded against the prime minister and members of the federal cabinet from 2022 to June 2025. Descriptions of each threat are blacked-out, leaving only the date and the “affected” figure for each one. 

The documents show that Carney and his family became targets almost as soon as he took over from Trudeau as Liberal leader and prime minister in March 2025.

Several of the threats recorded against Carney also targeted other cabinet ministers, including Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly, Justice Minister Sean Fraser and former transport minister Chrystia Freeland. 

In total, Carney is listed as a target of 79 threats over the 106 days after he became Liberal leader and prime minister. Twelve of those threats are listed as “direct,” while the rest are labelled “indirect.” 

The documents also show that Trudeau faced a barrage of threats over his final three years as prime minister. During that time, protests regularly featured “F—- Trudeau” flags and sometimes included public calls for his execution. 

The Prime Minister’s Office — which has stopped releasing the addresses of Carney’s public events in advance over security concerns — declined to comment when asked this week about the threats. 

Representatives of the RCMP and Privy Council Office — the government department that supports the prime minister and produced the new documents — did not immediately respond to questions from the Star on Friday. 

Stephanie Carvin, a national security expert and associate professor at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, said it is now an “unfortunate reality” that threats — even if they’re indirect or spread online — are a feature of modern political culture. Examples include assassination attempts against U.S. President Donald Trump, and the killings of politicians in the U.S., United Kingdom and Japan. 

Carvin attributed this to a “breakdown” in how policies and public decisions are seen less as legitimate disagreements and more as shifts that fundamentally risk the way people see themselves or their economic security. 

“We’ve seen politics being portrayed as … life and death struggle,” she said. “It is hard to put that level of political violence — direct or indirect — back in the bottle.”

In recent years, several MPs have expressed fear for their own safety or that of their families. Death threats have become a repeated occurrence for some, and the Star has reported how some politicians have obtained “panic buttons” to call authorities if they’re in trouble, and increased security systems at their homes and offices.

In 2024, Trudeau’s national security adviser warned that the RCMP’s personal protective service faced “unsustainable pressure” amid a surge of threats against public figures. The internal briefing note which included that warning noted that the top security official on Parliament Hill had recorded a spike in “threat-related contacts” against MPs from 29 in 2019 to 231 in 2023. 

That year, two people were charged with threatened Thornhill MP Melissa Lantsman, the deputy Conservative leader. Former Liberal cabinet minister Marco Mendicino — who faced threats alongside Carney, according to the recently released list — said in 2024 that he had faced multiple death threats. In an incident captured on video, Mendicino was confronted by a group of people in downtown Ottawa that included a man who spat in his face.

Other incidents have included the arrest of a man after a fire was deliberately set at the office of Mississauga Liberal MP Peter Fonseca, and allegations that somebody set Yukon MP Brendan Hanley’s garage on fire. Ahead of the last federal election, Oakville MP Pam Damoff said she would not seek re-election because politics had become so “toxic” and “hyperpartisan” that she was afraid to appear in public. 

During last year’s general election campaign, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh revealed that a credible death threat meant that he required personal security to guard him and his family, even at a hospital while his wife was giving birth to their second child. 

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has also spoken about threats against his family. In 2022, government officials discussed the need for security upgrades at Stornoway, the publicly owned residence for Canada’s official opposition leader.