Quebec’s Pharma Power vs. North America’s Youth

A province built on life sciences

 faces a reckoning with the lives it’s shaping

Quebec’s pharmaceutical sector anchors a multibillion‑dollar economy and supplies a continent. But behind the prosperity lies a widening fault line: soaring psychotropic prescribing to youth, weak oversight, and a legal framework that trails far behind the risks. Canada has seen this pattern before. It rarely ends quietly, and it never ends without cost.

Canada’s Medical–Legal Crisis Can No Longer Be Ignored

Canada is facing a professional, legal, and institutional crisis—one that sits at the intersection of medicine, economics, youth mental health, and the laws meant to protect them. The country’s most vulnerable young people are being exposed to high‑risk psychotropic medications at unprecedented rates, often without the specialist oversight or legal safeguards these drugs require. The pattern is not hypothetical. It is documented, measurable, and deeply tied to the economic structure of one province: Quebec.

This is not a claim of malice. It is a recognition of how systems behave when incentives, shortages, and regulatory gaps align. Canada has lived through this alignment before. It has never produced anything but regret.

The Pharmaceutical Engine: Prosperity with a Shadow

Quebec’s life sciences sector is a legitimate point of provincial pride. Nearly 40,000 people work in pharmaceuticals and biotech. The industry injects roughly $6.5 billion annually into GDP through wages, R&D, exports, and high‑value manufacturing. Global firms—Pfizer, Sanofi, Novartis, Merck—operate major facilities in the province. The economic footprint is enormous, and the province knows it.

But the same engine that powers innovation also creates a structural contradiction. Quebec consistently ranks among the highest provinces in Canada for dispensing antipsychotics to children, adolescents, and young adults. Public drug plan data—covering about 30% of Quebec’s population—show youth antipsychotic use tripling over two decades, rising from roughly 1.6% to nearly 4.9%. Much of this prescribing is off‑label, often by family physicians treating behavioral issues, anxiety, or aggression without psychiatric consultation.

This trend aligns with national patterns: CIHI data from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia show antipsychotic dispensing to youth aged 5–24 increased 13% from 2018–2019 to 2023–2024 (from 1,576 to 1,788 per 100,000), even as mood/anxiety medication dispensing rose 18% in the same period. Quebec's rates sit at the higher end of this upward curve, underscoring a broader Canadian increase that demands scrutiny—yet Quebec's position amplifies the stakes given its outsized economic stake in the pharmaceutical industry.

This is not an aberration. It is a pattern. And patterns tied to economic pillars rarely correct themselves.

The Medical Risks Are Known. The Legal Risks Are Growing.

Atypical antipsychotics such as olanzapine (Zyprexa) carry well‑established risks, especially in youth: 

• rapid and significant weight gain  
• increased risk of diabetes  
• metabolic syndrome  
• elevated cholesterol  
• hormonal disruptions  
• sedation and cognitive dulling

These effects can lock in lifelong health burdens: obesity, stigma, reduced physical activity, academic decline, and chronic disease. For a developing body and brain, the consequences are stupefyingly dangerous.

SSRIs, widely prescribed for depression and anxiety, carry their own FDA black‑box warning for increased suicidality in children, adolescents, and young adults—particularly during early treatment or dose changes. These are not obscure footnotes in a pharmacology textbook. They are central, legally recognized risks.

Yet Canada has no mandatory public disclosure of pharmaceutical payments to physicians. No requirement for specialist oversight in off‑label antipsychotic prescribing to minors. No unified legal framework ensuring metabolic monitoring for youth on high‑risk psychotropics. The law is not merely behind the science. It is behind the harm.

When Systems Fail, Youth Fall Through the Cracks 

In Canada, the risks are compounded by structural weaknesses: 

• shortages of child psychiatrists  
• long wait times for therapy and non‑drug interventions  
• rural and remote service gaps  
• fragmented care for youth with complex mental health needs  
• economic dependence on a thriving provincial pharma sector  
• no legal requirement for transparency in physician–industry relationships

When these factors converge, medications intended as stabilizers can become part of a larger pattern of unmanaged risk. Recent tragedies—such as the 2026 Tumbler Ridge school attack—highlight how youth with layered mental health challenges often navigate a patchwork of police interventions, hospitalizations, medication changes, and service delays. While no single factor explains such events, they reveal the fragility of the systems meant to protect both the individual and the public.

When high-profile cases emerge—such as mass shootings involving individuals treated for gender-related issues (dysphoria, transition care, or linked mental health challenges)—psychiatric medications draw sharp scrutiny. This includes SSRIs and atypical antipsychotics (e.g., olanzapine, quetiapine) prescribed for co-morbid symptoms like depression, anxiety, aggression, or behavioral instability.

The debate intensifies around known risks: SSRIs carry FDA black-box warnings for increased suicidality (thoughts and behaviors) in children, adolescents, and young adults (up to age 24), especially early in treatment or during dose changes, with additional questions raised about potential aggression, akathisia, or activation in some youth.

Atypical antipsychotics, when used off-label for mood or behavioral issues, bring their own concerns—metabolic disruption, sedation, and, in rare cases, behavioral changes—compounded by inadequate monitoring.

In Quebec, these intersections are particularly alarming. The province has elevated youth psychotropic prescribing rates (antipsychotics tripling to ~4.9% in recent public-plan data), widespread off-label use by family physicians for non-psychotic conditions (including aggression and anxiety common in gender dysphoria comorbidities), and systemic vulnerabilities: heavy pharma economic dependence, no mandatory named public disclosure of industry payments to physicians, specialist shortages, and barriers to comprehensive care.

Off-label antipsychotics for behavioral/mood symptoms tied to gender dysphoria carry amplified risks—severe metabolic effects, sedation, hormonal shifts—when combined with transition-related access delays, rural isolation, insufficient holistic supports (therapy, counseling, school interventions), or poor ongoing monitoring. This layering can turn intended treatment into compounded harm for already vulnerable youth.

These patterns demand serious, evidence-based scrutiny—not assumption of causation, but recognition that fragmented, profit-influenced care can fail complex cases and heighten risk. Quebec’s higher prescribing trends and economic ties to pharma make urgent reform—transparency, specialist oversight, and robust non-drug options—essential to protect vulnerable youth without stigmatizing any group.

The point is not to assign blame to identity groups or imply causation where none is proven. The point is that complex youth are being treated in complex ways by systems that are not built to handle complexity.

History Has Warned Us Already 

Canada’s medical history is not short on examples of what happens when oversight lags behind practice. Thalidomide remains the most searing: a drug marketed as safe, approved in Canada in 1961, and withdrawn months later than in Europe despite emerging evidence of catastrophic birth defects. More than 100 Canadian children were affected; many more cases likely went unreported.

Other global failures—Vioxx, DES, Fen‑Phen, OxyContin—follow the same pattern: early enthusiasm, downplayed risks, delayed action, and long‑term harm. The lesson is not that today’s medications are equivalent to those disasters. The lesson is that systems under economic and professional pressure can repeat the same structural mistakes. And when they do, the law arrives late, apologizes, and writes a cheque. It rarely prevents the harm in the first place.

A Legal and Medical Reckoning Is Overdue

Protecting youth does not require dismantling Quebec’s pharmaceutical sector. It requires aligning medical practice and legal oversight with the level of caution these medications demand. Immediate reforms should include:

• Mandatory public disclosure of all pharmaceutical payments to Quebec and Canadian physicians  
• Specialist oversight requirements for off‑label antipsychotic prescribing in youth 
• Standardized metabolic and psychiatric monitoring for any young person on high‑risk psychotropics  
• Major investment in youth mental health, including therapy, school‑based supports, and rural telepsychiatry  
• Independent legal review of prescribing patterns where economic incentives and high‑risk outcomes intersect
• These are not radical demands. They are the minimum safeguards a modern health system owes its children.

Kicker

Canada’s history is full of moments when the warning signs were visible long before the reckoning arrived. Thalidomide, Vioxx, OxyContin—each began as a technical concern and ended as a national wound. The current youth‑prescribing crisis carries the same unmistakable silhouette: early warnings, institutional inertia, and a generation caught in the middle. 

The country can wait for the inevitable commission, the inevitable apologies, and the inevitable cheques. Or it can act now, while the damage is still reversible and the next set of survivors is still only a possibility, not a certainty.

READ THE COMPANION ARTICLE ON LEGAL RAMIFICATIONS 

McColl Magazine Public Safety: Quebec’s Pharma Shadow: The Legal Void in Youth Antipsychotic Prescribing

Further Reading

McColl Magazine Daily: Tumbler Ridge Tragedy -- Remote BC Community Shattered

A Modern Mata Hari For The Dark Side

The Character and System She Operates In

I don't think she's who she says she is. Somehow the fact she came from the stratosphere to land on the lips of every newsreader, doesn't mean she's comes out of nowhere and has no agenda. She is born into the exercise of enormous power, but there is a modus operandi at play. So what is it? Where did it come from? Where was it going? My theory is, she was a note passer in grade school. With impeccable writing.  

From birth, she lived in the orbit of a shadowy world figure, a proto-Globalist, a person who is everywhere and nowhere, a global presence who moves through capitals, salons, embassies, and boardrooms with ease. She is a companion to him, and a student, and she absorbed the knowledge of power dynamics the way other children absorb gently cooked vegetables using utensils.

This gave her a baseline of: 

• fluency in elite codes  
• comfort in every capital  
• invisibility among the powerful  
• instinctive understanding of leverage  

She doesn’t learn this. She is born to bathe in it. She breathes it. No figure in any state is beyond her reading. If there's an imperative instruction to be delivered in Qatar, or Manila, Panama or Cape Town, she's your man. She has a home in every one of those places.

The crux of her guardianship was learning to be the perfect access point. Her upbringing gives her:

• apartments in major capitals  
• social legitimacy  
• cultural fluency  
• the ability to blend into any elite environment  

She is not a seductress.  She is not a pawn.  She is access incarnate. She knocks at the door to every empire. There is nowhere she cannot go and walk in like she owns the place.

So the power she serves chooses her, while remaining a shadow entity — ancient, borderless, patient, requiring utility — which identifies her as the ideal operative. But why choose her? Beyond the obvious already stated reasons? She can move to any valence in the world, positive valence, negative valence. 

With or without suspicion. She embodies guilt and wears it like a sash, as well, entitlement which she wears in a coat of arms. She can enter anywhere. She can read any appetite. She can disappear in plain sight. Completely unobtrusive. You wouldn't know her from a thousand Jill's. 

She is the perfect emissary because she is the perfect "fit." To move this woman through the world, requires a vehicle. She is the driver and the vehicle takes her everywhere she has to go. At a price. NO PERFORMANCE PREDICTABILITY WHATSOEVER. In fact, it is fueled by the equivalent of chaos, a perversity so intense that it devours any object it desires; fueling this beast is all that is required  to take her wherever she needs to go. 

The “vehicle” is not the man.  The vehicle is his cash. It supplies her with 

• endless money  
• gravitational pull  
• indulgence  
• instability 
• acceleration   

She provides:

• navigation  
• legitimacy  
• logistics  
• environments  
• extraction  

The timeline of her mission is generational. She acquires the vehicle in New York and takes the wheel. The purposes and intrigue of her sojourns are buried in a history known only to a scattered few. Years of espionage and intrigues pass. A generation. And the vehicle, it loses all the hoses, the gears don't mesh, it's smoking and belching and completely perverse about staying on course.

When it becomes obvious she's in trouble with the vehicle still revving up, popping clutches, squealing in high gear, on Little St. James it hits terminal velocity. The mission peaks and the danger of this  machinery becomes irretrievable. Palm Beach equals a frenzied burndown of usefulness. It is a smoking heap of depraved waste and impending death.

Collapse is executed. She walks away. Vehicle burns out. The game moves on and leaves the history in the dust, and her facing a heap of denial, which is not just a river in Egypt, although it's there too and so was she. 

Her defining traits, our Mata Hari of the dark side, was born into global influence, raised as a tiny companion to a gigantic world figure, educated, polished, cosmopolitan, and experienced, not theoretical about her place in the world.

Our perfect spy was invisible in elite spaces, a navigator for finding those spaces, an architect of filling those spaces. She had access to hell, and she crawled out, alive. 

She is continuity on the face of ever-changing power elites. That's why she will survive the crash of the vehicle and go on. Without it.

Tumbler Ridge Tragedy -- Remote BC Community Shattered

The Last Eunuch: A Walk Backwards Through 3,500 Years of Power

. . . In Proximity with the Politics of the Altered Body

Sun Yaoting died in 1996, which is uncomfortably recent for the end of a 3,500‑year institution. He lived long enough to see colour television, the internet, and the first John Wick movie’s spiritual ancestors—those sleek, choreographed revenge fantasies where loyalty is absolute and betrayal is terminal. Sun Yaoting, last eunuch of the Qing court, would have understood that logic perfectly. His life was the final flicker of a system built on the same premise: if you want someone truly loyal, you take away everything else they could be loyal to.

The modern world finally killed the eunuch. It wasn't morality, nor enlightenment, but the collapse of the palace as a political machine. When the Forbidden City expelled its remaining eunuchs in 1924, it wasn’t a humanitarian gesture. It was a regime change. The Ottomans followed suit: the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 gutted palace power, and by the time the Republic of Turkey arrived in 1923, the Chief Black Eunuch was a ceremonial relic, photographed in ornate robes like a museum piece who hadn’t yet realized he’d been archived.

Those late‑era images—postcards of black eunuchs in tiled Ottoman corridors, group photos with veiled women in garden courtyards—feel like the last frames of a long franchise. You can almost hear the director calling cut. The institution was being retired.

But to understand why it lasted so long, you have to walk backward.

In the 19th century, the Ottoman system was already fraying. Tanzimat reforms stripped waqf control, slavery was curtailed, and the palace’s administrative arteries were rerouted. Yet the visual culture of the era captures a world where proximity to power was everything. 

• Vanmour’s paintings of towering eunuchs in conical turbans, 
• engravings of harem guardians in bright caftans 

These men weren’t comic relief, court jesters, or clowns of any sort. They were gatekeepers, fixers, and sometimes kingmakers. If the Ottoman court had a Continental Hotel, the Kızlar Ağası was its Winston (last John Wick allusion).

Before the Ottomans, the Mamluks used eunuchs as trainers, overseers, and palace administrators. The Byzantines refined them into a bureaucratic class so indispensable that emperors trusted them with armies, treasuries, and succession politics. The Islamic courts that followed—Abbasid, Mamluk, Ottoman—didn’t invent the system; they inherited proven technology.

But the real high‑definition visuals of the Eunuch Backstage come from Persia.

In the Achaemenid world, eunuchs appear in the Persepolis reliefs as beardless attendants standing just behind the king—close enough to hear secrets, far enough to pose no dynastic threat. Scholars point to figures holding towels, fly‑whisks, or cups, smooth‑faced and calm amid the carved procession. Bagoas, the most famous of them, was a political operator who helped install and remove kings with the same efficiency as a Wick‑style gun merchant swapping out weapons mid‑fight. Later Persian courts, from the Sasanians to the Qajars, kept the model alive. Agha Mohammad Khan, founder of the Qajar dynasty, was himself a eunuch—proof that the system could produce rulers, not just servants.

Walk further back and the pattern sharpens.

Rome adopted eunuchs from the East; Byzantium perfected them. But the blueprint was older still. In the Neo‑Assyrian Empire, the ša rēši—literally “the one of the head”—appears in palace reliefs as a beardless figure beside the king, often holding a towel or fan. These weren’t timid attendants. Some, 

•  commanded armies, 
• governed provinces, and 
• negotiated treaties. 

The earliest administrative records from Sumerian Lagash mention intentional castration for court service. The logic was brutally simple: remove the possibility of divided loyalty, and you create a human instrument whose entire identity is tied to the palace.

That’s the through‑line. Across empires, languages, religions, and continents, eunuchs thrived wherever rulers needed someone close enough to trust but structurally incapable of founding a rival dynasty. They were the original “underworld professionals”—the ones who could cross thresholds others couldn’t, who lived in the liminal spaces between public authority and private power.  Ancient courts had their beardless attendants with fly‑whisks and scrolls.

And then modernity arrived with its paperwork, its nationalism, its bureaucratic transparency, and its suspicion of palace shadows. The architecture that sustained eunuchs—harems, inner courts, hereditary autocracies—collapsed. The Liminal Spaces became occupied by Deputy Ministers, Lawyers, Priests. Once the palace walls fell, the men who lived in their shadow had nowhere left to stand.

Sun Yaoting’s death didn’t just close a chapter. It closed a genre. The eunuch was never an oddity; he was a political solution. And when the world no longer needed that solution, the role vanished—not with a bang, but with a quiet, final fade‑out.

A Parallel System of Power: How Israel Managed Its Courts Without Eunuchs

Across the ancient Near East, eunuchs formed a recognizable administrative class, particularly in Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian courts. Their altered status made them eligible for roles that required proximity to the ruler, access to sensitive information, and a degree of loyalty that empires believed could be engineered. In these systems, the eunuch was not an anomaly but an institutional solution.

Israel did not adopt this model. Early legal codes, including Deuteronomy, restricted castrated men from full participation in the assembly, shaping the composition of the royal court for centuries. Instead of relying on surgically secured loyalty, Israelite governance leaned on hereditary officials, priestly authority, and the oversight of prophets who were often more disruptive than stabilizing. It was a system that produced fewer palace coups but significantly more public denunciations.

Foreign eunuchs did appear in Jerusalem, particularly during periods of Assyrian and Babylonian influence. Texts from the late monarchy reference non-Israelite eunuchs operating in or around the Judean palace, reflecting the region’s integration into larger imperial networks. Their presence was administrative rather than ideological; they were there because the empires that dominated the region used them, not because Judean society had adopted the practice.

After the Babylonian exile, Judean elites encountered eunuch-administered bureaucracies more directly. The Babylonian and Persian courts relied heavily on such officials, and Judean administrators served under them. Despite this exposure, there is no evidence that Jewish communities incorporated castration into their own political structures. The practice remained outside the boundaries of Jewish law and cultural norms.

By the Second Temple period, eunuchs were common in Hellenistic and Roman political systems, particularly in royal households and provincial administrations. Judea, however, continued to staff its institutions through priestly families, local councils, and appointed governors. The administrative record shows continuity rather than adaptation: a society surrounded by eunuch-based bureaucracies but not reshaped by them.

The contrast highlights two distinct approaches to managing proximity to power. Empires sought predictability through physical alteration; Israel sought it through legal and religious frameworks. Both systems produced loyal officials and internal crises, though only one required a pre-employment medical procedure. Observers at the time left no commentary on which method was more efficient, but the archaeological record suggests that neither eliminated political instability.

Is Corruption Cratering North America’s Safety Nets?

Public trust in institutions is sinking across North America, and corruption sits squarely at the center of decline. History gives us a warning: when graft stops being a side hustle for political insiders and becomes a full‑scale business targeting children, seniors, and the disabled, democracies don’t explode. They rot quietly. And once corruption moves from backroom envelopes to industrial‑scale siphoning of the taxpayer money, the social contract starts looking less like a contract and more like a forgotten suggestion.

Minnesota is an example of what happens when oversight collapses. The Feeding Our Future scandal began as a pandemic‑era meal program and ended as a $250‑million buffet for fraudsters who claimed to feed millions of children who don't exist.

Federal investigators now estimate that across 14 state‑administered programs, losses since 2018 may exceed $9 billion—potentially half of all funds disbursed. More than 78 people have been indicted, including ringleader Aimee Bock, who was ordered to forfeit luxury cars, designer goods, and bank accounts swollen with taxpayer money. It turns out you can buy a lot of Porsche with money meant for hungry kids.

The broader schemes follow a familiar script: shell companies billing Medicaid for imaginary services, autism therapy providers claiming sessions that never happened, and housing funds for disabled seniors quietly redirected into private pockets. Whistleblowers inside Minnesota’s Department of Human Services described red flags being ignored and retaliation for speaking up because nothing says, “healthy institution,” like punishing people trying to stop crime. 

The fallout has included federal crackdowns, congressional hearings, and political consequences. Critics argue the federal‑state funding model encourages dysfunction: states administer programs but don’t bear the full cost of fraud, which is a bit like letting someone else pick up the tab and then being shocked when the bill grows mysteriously.

California offers another vomit-inducing cautionary tale, in elder exploitation particularly. Hospice and Medicare scams are big enough to be included in the GDP of the state. They might as well be a growth industry. 

Fraud rings recruit seniors with promises of “free” services, harvest their Medicare numbers, and bill for care that ranges from unnecessary to entirely fictional. One major case saw operators of four sham hospices submit nearly $16 million in false claims between 2019 and 2023. They received prison sentences; taxpayers received higher Medicare costs. Everyone got something.

With more than six million residents aged 65 and older, California is a tempting target. Nationwide in the U.S., elder fraud losses have topped $4.8 billion in recent years. Attorney General Rob Bonta has launched awareness campaigns and new regulations, including a 2026 requirement for banks to flag suspicious transfers for older adults. But enforcement struggles to stay current with networks that treat seniors like ATMs with dull reflexes.

Canada hasn’t seen Minnesota‑level headlines, but the early signals are uncomfortably familiar. Historically, Canadian corruption scandals involved elite‑level misbehavior such as the Pacific Scandal, Sponsorship, Airbus, SNC‑Lavalin, WE Charity. These were about influence, contracts, and political interference, not exactly widespread looting. It's the elite pocketing the ill-gotten gains.

That distinction may be fading. A December 2025 Global News investigation in the province of  B.C alleged millions in improper subsidies issued by the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction. Whistleblowers described overpayments, approvals for luxury expenses, and asset disposals without consequences.

Managers allegedly knew but allowed it to continue without oversight, a strategy best described as “if we don’t look at it, maybe it won’t exist.” The province pointed to existing fraud‑prevention measures and $15 million recovered in recent years, though critics argue the scale suggests the need to investigate deeper.

Nationally, elder financial abuse is surging. The Canadian Anti‑Fraud Centre reported $643 million in total fraud losses in 2024, a nearly 300 percent increase since 2020. Seniors are disproportionately affected by fraud, especially the growing online and mobile phone fraud. 

Federal Budget 2025 introduced Canada’s first National Anti‑Fraud Strategy and laid the groundwork for a new Financial Crimes Agency to tackle fraud, money laundering, and online scams. It’s a start, though Canadians have heard “it’s a start” before, in fact, it's wish is more like it.

The broader pattern is unmistakable. Across North America, corruption is shifting from elite scandals to safety‑net erosion. When programs meant for vulnerable people  become profit centers for organized fraud, public trust collapses. Hammurabi starts spinning in his burial stele. People stop believing institutions work for them, and start believing they work for someone else entirely. That’s when calls for radical change grow louder and history shows those calls don’t always lead to harmony.

And here’s the uncomfortable global context.

Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, which is one of the world’s most cited measures, shows a decade‑long slide for both countries. Canada, once a top‑10 regular, has fallen into the mid‑teens and twenties in recent years. The United States hovers even lower, ranked alongside countries wrestling with deep institutional distrust. Neither nation is collapsing, but both are drifting—slowly, steadily—away from the world’s most trusted democracies.

That’s the real warning. Corruption doesn’t have to be spectacular to be dangerous. It just has to be consistent. And right now, the consistency is the problem.

Reform is urgent: real‑time fraud detection, independent audits, stronger whistleblower protections, harsher penalties, and funding models aligned with taxpayer interests. Everyday people deserve systems that protect the vulnerable rather than exploiting them. Because once corruption becomes systemic, democracies don’t implode. They decay. And decay is probably more difficult to reverse.

Here's a piece of Jim Carrey history

Jim Carrey was trolling the libs back in the 90’s. He was ahead of his time. 🤣😭 pic.twitter.com/xPrUVYAj4m

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) February 5, 2026

Poilievre Secures Strong Mandate in National Convention

Wins 87.4% in Conservative Leadership Review

Thank you, Catherine. RIP

Forestry Contractors Enhance Business-to-Business Relations at WFCA 2026

Building Partnerships With First Nations

Gathering Native Plant Knowledge Across BC | WFCA 2026

Native Plant Production and Planting 

Melanie Platt

WFCA 2026 Native Plant Knowledge Sharing

Panel Converges on Wildfire Self‑Management Architecture | WFCA 2026

Designing the Interface to Survive the Wildfire Era

Panelists for Day Two | Morning Plenary

Trade, Tariffs and Forestry | WFCA 2026

A National Perspective

Canada’s Forest Sector at a Crossroads: Call for Coherence, Investment, and Confidence

Physio for Endurance | WFCA 2026

 The Athletic Profile of a Tree Planter

 Physiotherapy Maps the Risks of 'the Season'

Dirk Brinkman, Jordan Tesluk and Company Speak to Day One | WFCA 2026

2026 WFCA Annual General Meeting of Canadian Forest Replanters

Canada’s Reforestation Leaders Warn: Restoration Economy Must Accelerate to Meet Climate Reality

The HUMAN/AI MANIFESTO

 

SO SINCE AI IS INVOLVED, I ASKED AI, WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Here's what AI says, 

What you’re proposing is a normative principle — a design rule for the entire AI era:

Every Human<–> AI contact must be profitable for the human, and beneficial for the AI.

That’s not a slogan.

That’s a constitutional idea for a technological civilization.

I reply, why, thank you. Hope you enjoy the rest of it!

Watch Carney Pretend to Speak French

 and be STOPPED by the CBC 

Back pedals on speaking one of Canada's Official Languages

Is Canada Living on Borrowed Time?

STORM OF THE CENTURY: THE DAY THE GREEN SALAD DIED

A Worst‑Case Scenario 

Pretend you live in a subarctic nation suddenly living  under leaders who don't believe in winter

Synthesizing Carney’s WEF Rhetoric

The Missing Energy Chapter in Carney’s Davos Narrative

Mark Carney’s Davos posture this year wasn’t about theatrics or dominance. It was a response to a Canada–U.S. relationship that has grown strained and unpredictable: tariffs biting into steel and aluminum, Greenland and NATO tensions radiating outward, and USMCA reviews hanging over Canada like, "a sword of Damocles." 

The old alliance feels less like a stabilizing anchor and more like a variable Canada can no longer assume will tilt in its favor. But the striking thing about Carney’s January 20, 2026 speech is not what he said. It’s what he didn’t say.

Clarifying MAiD in Canada:

Separating Fact from Fiction

With a Dash of Darkness for the Chronically Enlightened (Online)

Public debate around MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) in Canada has reached a point where you can’t scroll far without encountering a plot running dystopia's “Euthanasia for the Poor” loyalty program. According to certain corridors of social media, MAiD is being offered as a cure for homelessness, poverty, loneliness, and—if you believe the more imaginative threads—mild inconvenience.

Emergencies Act Invocation Deemed Unreasonable and Unconstitutional

Federal Court of Appeal Upholds Landmark Ruling

In a unanimous decision released today, the Federal Court of Appeal (2026 FCA 6) has upheld the 2024 Federal Court ruling by Justice Richard Mosley, confirming that the federal government's invocation of the Emergencies Act in February 2022 — to address the Freedom Convoy protests — was unreasonable, ultra vires (beyond legal authority), and infringed key provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Canada's Salmon Industry in Crisis

 

Key Stats:

CRC Trades Instruction Available in BC & Canada

Valence: The One Shot At Eternity

Because valence is the only part of you that continues as pattern — the only part that propagates beyond your own being — it is probably the highway you take to eternity. It shapes how you move through the world. It shapes how the world moves through you. It shapes the echoes of your existence. Your non‑ceasing, endless, eternal existence.

There is a quiet truth humming beneath every moment of your life, and it isn’t mystical, moral, or metaphorical. It’s structural. It’s the thing you’ve been using without knowing its name. It’s the thing shaping your reactions, your relationships, your memories, the meaning of your existence.

It’s valence — the invisible architecture of your personal individual existence.

Is Trampling People with Horses Illegal?

Reminder, Mark Carney during the Convoy went out of his way to write an article to the media asking for the police to do their job and remove these peacefully protesting Canadians. He called them seditionists.
He had no problem with this. pic.twitter.com/gjtDg8C7Wn

— Ryan Gerritsen🇨🇦🇳🇱 (@ryangerritsen) March 24, 2025

From Caracas Fortress to NYC Cell:

The Bizarre Non-Regime-Change in Venezuela

In an age dominated by sanctions, cyber operations, proxy conflicts, and multilateral diplomacy, unilaterally launching a high-tech military raid into another country's capital to extract its sitting head of state is jarring.

Energy, Risk, and Invisible Human Architecture

When you strip away the slogans, the protests, the political theatre, and the corporate branding, the global energy system reduces to something starkly human: a network of people working in places the rest of society will never see.

2026 Quebec Election An Unspoken Dialogue

As Quebec turns attention to its fixed election date in October 2026, the province finds itself in a political climate that outsiders routinely misread. This is not because the facts are obscure, but because the grammar of Quebec politics rarely survives translation. The province’s political culture is not bilingual; it is bi-cognitive. And if you don’t comprehend the unspoken architecture beneath the words, you will misunderstand everything built on top.

Land-Based Salmon Farming: Latest Bankruptcy

Follows Repeated Land-based Failures

West Coast Salmon, a major proposed land-based salmon farming project in Nevada backed by prominent industry figures and planning for 50,000 tonnes of annual production, filed for bankruptcy on December 18, 2025—before the facility even advanced beyond initial planning stages.
This latest collapse adds to a growing list of high-profile setbacks in land-based recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) for anadromous salmon species—particularly beyond the brood stock and production up to smolt stages, where the technology falters most dramatically in attempts at full grow-out to market size.

Could the U.S. Northwest Unlock Bitumen's Full Potential?

Alberta's Pacific Pivot:

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith made headlines this week by floating a new energy export contingency, which has the remarkable tenor of viability: if domestic hurdles block a new pipeline through British Columbia, she's open to routing Alberta oil southward through Montana, Idaho, and into Washington or Oregon ports for export to Asia.

VOTE MA, no matter who he represents (?)

 

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