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Mark Carney Calls for Canada-EU Associate Membership in Address to European Parliament

Emily Roy
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Mark Carney Calls for Canada-EU Associate Membership in Address to European Parliament

Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a sweeping address to the European Parliament on Thursday, proposing a fundamental deepening of Canada’s relationship with the European Union — up to and including associate membership. The speech arrived under the shadow of explicit warnings from U.S. President Donald Trump, who threatened steep tariffs or outright trade bans against any EU move to bring Canada closer into its orbit. Carney did not flinch.

The core of the speech was a concrete, multi-sector proposal for what Carney called an “alliance for the future.” He framed it not as a geopolitical manoeuvre against any rival power, but as a deliberate act of collective resilience — nations choosing each other because of shared values and complementary strengths. The argument was structural as much as rhetorical.

Carney anchored the speech in a striking historical image: a Canadian lieutenant named Leslie Miller, who gathered acorns from the shattered landscape of Vimy Ridge in 1917 and planted them in Ontario soil. A century later, grafts from those Canadian oaks were replanted on the same French ridge. The story carried the weight of the speech’s argument — that what Canada and Europe have built together across generations is not incidental, but chosen and renewable.

The address comes at a moment of genuine institutional stress. Carney acknowledged that multilateral frameworks have been weakened, that trade is being weaponized, and that technology platforms increasingly behave as sovereign actors — spreading misinformation, harvesting data, and evading regulation. His answer was not nostalgia for the old order. It was a call to build something more durable in its place. Whether the EU’s member states, and their parliaments, move quickly enough to match that ambition remains the open question.

Trump Threatens EU With Tariffs After Bloc Proposes Canada Associate Membership

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Trump Threatens EU With Tariffs After Bloc Proposes Canada Associate Membership

Trump Lashes Out at EU-Canada Rapprochement

U.S. President Donald Trump threatened on Wednesday to sever trade with the European Union or impose what he called “very serious tariffs” after the bloc proposed making Canada its first-ever associate member — a move he dismissed as “laughable” and a sign of “bad intention” toward the United States. The threat came in direct response to a landmark announcement by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who unveiled an “Alliance for the Future” between the EU and Canada during her annual State of the European Union address in Strasbourg, France. The proposal, which builds on the existing Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), would create what von der Leyen described as “a common prosperity and economic security space.” Trump’s reaction was swift and blunt: “If it’s a bad intention, we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe.”

The announcement reflects a deepening strategic realignment between Ottawa and Brussels, driven in large part by the turbulence of Trump’s presidency. Canada currently sends roughly 70 percent of its exports to the United States, a dependence that Prime Minister Mark Carney has publicly identified as a structural vulnerability requiring urgent correction. Carney received a standing ovation from members of the European Parliament on Wednesday and was scheduled to address the chamber directly on Thursday — a symbolically charged moment that underscored the seriousness of the diplomatic pivot underway.

A Partnership Rooted in Shared Democratic Values

Von der Leyen framed the deepened Canada-EU relationship in explicitly political terms, not merely economic ones. “Above all, dear Mark, Europe and Canada believe in democracy,” she told Carney from the Parliament floor — a pointed contrast, widely understood as a rebuke of Washington’s increasingly transactional approach to its allies. The proposed associate membership would cover an ambitious range of sectors, including advanced manufacturing, technology, defence production, the Arctic, energy, critical minerals, batteries, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, cybersecurity, and economic security. That breadth signals that both parties intend this to be a genuinely comprehensive strategic partnership, not a narrow trade arrangement dressed up in diplomatic language.

Canada’s ambassador-designate to the EU, Jonathan Wilkinson, confirmed Wednesday that Ottawa had discussed the associate membership concept with European officials before von der Leyen’s speech and “knew that that was something that was on the table.” Wilkinson was careful to draw a distinction between associate and full membership, noting that full EU membership would require Canada to surrender elements of its sovereignty — something Ottawa is not prepared to do. The goal, he said, is to get “as close as we possibly can” to the bloc in a way that reinforces rather than diminishes Canadian sovereignty. Carney’s office echoed that framing, stating that Canada was deepening EU ties specifically “to strengthen our sovereignty.”

Canada’s Turn Toward Europe Was Already in Motion

The shift away from U.S. dependence did not begin this week. As far back as January, Carney used his appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos to argue that middle powers must work collectively to avoid negotiating from a position of weakness against dominant states. “When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered,” Carney said — a remark that resonated well beyond Davos and has since become a touchstone of his government’s foreign economic policy. Canada has already joined the EU’s defence procurement program, a concrete step that preceded Wednesday’s announcement and signals the depth of the emerging relationship.

Trump’s tariffs and his repeated public suggestions that Canada should become the 51st American state have fundamentally altered the political atmosphere between the two neighbours, galvanizing Canadian public opinion in favour of diversification. Ottawa has responded to U.S. tariffs with retaliatory measures of its own and has rejected trade terms that Carney argues would compromise Canadian sovereignty. On Wednesday, Trump escalated further by signing a memorandum directing the U.S. federal government to remove Canadian goods from its procurement system — framed by the White House as retaliation for Canada’s “Buy Canadian” policy. The White House claimed that policy constituted “unreasonable and discriminatory treatment of U.S. goods” that had “burdened and disadvantaged hard-working Americans.”

The EU Has Taken a Different Tack With Washington

While Canada and the United States remain locked in a tit-for-tat trade confrontation, the European Union has pursued a separate and more conciliatory path with Washington, reaching an agreement that caps tariffs on the vast majority of EU exports at 15 percent while Europe eliminated tariffs on American industrial goods. That deal has given Brussels somewhat more diplomatic room to manoeuvre than Ottawa currently enjoys, though the Trump administration’s threat of new tariffs in response to the Canada associate membership proposal suggests that room may be narrowing. Von der Leyen was direct in insisting the new Canada partnership carries no anti-American intent. “This is a partnership not against anyone else, but for our common strength,” she said. Whether Washington accepts that framing remains, for now, an open question.

After the Canada Investment Summit: What Mark Carney Does Next Will Define His Government

Kevin Martin
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After the Canada Investment Summit: What Mark Carney Does Next Will Define His Government

A Successful Party Is Only the Beginning

The Canada Investment Summit delivered something rare in this era of political fatigue and economic anxiety: genuine momentum. By any immediate measure, it was an unqualified success. Capital sought Canada out. Entrepreneurs found a room worth speaking into. Frank McKenna — Chair of Brookfield and Deputy Chair of TD Securities, a man not given to easy enthusiasm — called it the most interesting event he had been part of in decades. That is not nothing. But a summit is a moment, and moments pass. The harder question, the one that will actually determine whether this week matters in five years, is what Mark Carney’s government does the morning after.

The thesis here is straightforward and demands honest examination: Canada’s federal and provincial governments have spent the better part of a decade squandering investment opportunities, and a well-attended summit, however impressive, does not reverse that pattern on its own. What reverses it is disciplined, sustained follow-through — the unglamorous work of converting goodwill into regulatory clarity, into infrastructure commitments, into the kind of institutional reliability that serious capital actually requires before it moves.

The Gap Between Symbolism and Substance

Investment summits are, by their nature, exercises in brand-building as much as deal-making. Raising capital requires shots on goal, and a forum like this one gives Canadian entrepreneurs a genuinely rare chance to tell their story to a concentrated, high-calibre audience. That is real value. The presence of major international investors signals that Canada remains legible to global capital — that it is, at minimum, a place worth the conversation. In a period when Canada’s economic relationship with the United States has grown complicated and uncertain, that signal carries more weight than it might have in calmer times.

But brand-building and deal-making are not the same thing, and conflating them is precisely the mistake that has tripped up Canadian governments before. The departure of Invest in Canada CEO Laurel Broten fewer than three weeks before a summit she was helping organize is a small but telling detail. We do not know what transpired internally, and it would be unfair to read too much into a single personnel change. What it does illuminate, though, is the persistent tension between the public face of investment promotion and the institutional machinery that has to sustain it — a machinery that has, too often, been treated as an afterthought.

A Decade of Missed Openings

The structural critique of Canadian investment policy is not new, and it does not belong to any single party or government. Federal and provincial administrations across the political spectrum have struggled to translate resource wealth, technological capacity, and a highly educated workforce into the kind of sustained productivity growth that comparable economies have managed. Regulatory timelines for major projects have stretched into absurdity. Interprovincial trade barriers — an embarrassment for a federation of this size — have proven stubbornly resistant to reform despite years of first ministers’ meetings and polite communiqués. The result is a country that repeatedly finds itself explaining its potential rather than demonstrating its performance.

This is the context into which the Canada Investment Summit arrived, and it is the context that gives Carney’s next moves their real significance. The Prime Minister came to office with a credibility that few Canadian politicians carry into the job: a track record at the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, a reputation built on managing systemic risk rather than managing optics. That credibility opened the room this week. It will not keep it open indefinitely if the policy environment does not change.

What Follow-Through Actually Requires

Serious investors — the kind who filled the Canada Investment Summit — do not move capital on the strength of a good conversation alone. They move it when they can model a regulatory environment with reasonable confidence, when they trust that approvals will arrive on a predictable timeline, and when they believe the political commitment behind an investment framework will outlast a single electoral cycle. These are institutional questions, not rhetorical ones, and they require answers that go well beyond the summit floor.

For Carney, that means making difficult choices that his predecessors deferred. It means working with provinces — respecting their constitutional jurisdiction over natural resources and economic development while pressing hard on the interprovincial barriers that fragment the national market. It means treating Indigenous economic partnership not as a box to check in an environmental assessment but as a genuine constitutional and economic priority, one that, handled seriously, actually strengthens investment cases rather than complicating them. And it means resisting the temptation, familiar to every government that hosts a successful event, to mistake the applause for the outcome.

The Federation as an Asset, Not an Obstacle

One thing the Summit may have clarified for international observers is that Canada’s federal structure, often portrayed abroad as a source of gridlock, can function as a genuine asset when governments coordinate rather than compete. Regional diversity — Alberta’s energy sector, Ontario’s financial and manufacturing base, Quebec’s aerospace and clean technology capacity, British Columbia’s Pacific gateway position — represents a portfolio that few countries can match. The challenge has never been the absence of something to offer. The challenge has been building the institutional coherence to offer it consistently and credibly.

Carney’s government has a window. It is not unlimited. The global appetite for stable, rule-of-law investment destinations is real and present, partly because alternatives have grown less predictable. Canada can meet that appetite, but only if the morning after the party looks meaningfully different from the mornings that followed previous summits, previous announcements, and previous rounds of optimism that dissolved into the familiar pattern of deferred decisions and missed targets. The summit was the easy part. Governing is what comes next.

Scientists Replace Mouse Brain Cells with Human Neurons in Breakthrough for Neurological Research

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Scientists Replace Mouse Brain Cells with Human Neurons in Breakthrough for Neurological Research

A team of researchers has found a new way to implant millions of human brain cells into living mice — a development that could meaningfully advance how scientists study neurodegenerative diseases and early brain development.

The technique combines genetic engineering and stem-cell technology to produce what researchers are calling xenocortical mice: animals whose cerebral cortex is largely composed of lab-grown human neurons. The cerebral cortex governs reasoning, memory, and consciousness, making it a critical target for understanding conditions such as Alzheimer’s and other degenerative brain diseases. The process involves breeding mice that are genetically engineered to lack most of their own cortical cells, then repopulating that region with approximately four million human cortical neurons — while removing around 14 million native mouse neurons in the process.

Several findings from the study stand out as particularly significant.

The researchers are careful to frame this as a targeted scientific tool rather than anything approaching a full brain transplant. The mice still lack several important cell types that were deliberately excluded from the experiment, and the resulting structure does not replicate a normal human cortex. What it does offer, Pașca argues, is a more biologically faithful model for studying how human brain tissue behaves in a living system — something that neither cell cultures nor conventional animal models can fully provide.

The broader field is moving quickly. Human brain organoids are already being tested as interfaces with computers, and some researchers have proposed their eventual use as therapeutic tissue for stroke recovery. This latest study adds to that momentum, demonstrating how far the combined tools of genetic engineering and stem-cell biology have come in their ability to reshape living systems — and raising questions about the ethical and regulatory frameworks that will need to keep pace.

Point Lepreau Nuclear Station Goes Dark Again, Just Three Days After Returning to the Grid

Emily Roy
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Point Lepreau Nuclear Station Goes Dark Again, Just Three Days After Returning to the Grid

There is something quietly unsettling about a power station that supplies roughly one-third of a province’s electricity flickering on and off like a faulty light switch. That is the situation New Brunswick finds itself in this September, as NB Power took the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station offline again on September 11 — only three days after reconnecting it to the grid.

The latest shutdown stems from a small instrumentation line inside the reactor building. The problem itself may be modest in scale, but its location makes it impossible to address safely while the station is running. “The location of the line cannot be accessed safely while the station is operating and must be taken offline to complete the repair,” NB Power stated in a news release. Specialized teams are now conducting detailed assessments to determine a repair timeline.

NB Power has been clear that there is no risk to the public, employees, or the environment. That assurance matters, and it deserves to be taken seriously. Nuclear safety culture in Canada operates under rigorous federal oversight through the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and Point Lepreau’s operators have consistently prioritized caution over convenience — a discipline that, while frustrating for ratepayers, reflects exactly the kind of institutional care that nuclear infrastructure demands.

Still, the sequence of events this year tells a story of compounding setbacks. Point Lepreau underwent a planned four-month maintenance outage from April to August, during which crews completed more than 20,000 tasks. It returned to service on August 19. Then, on August 31, it went dark again for gasket work in the turbine system. It came back on September 8. It went dark again on September 11. For a province-owned utility serving a relatively small provincial grid, each interruption carries real weight.

New Brunswick’s electricity system is not large. When a single generating station accounts for a third of provincial supply, its reliability is not merely a technical matter — it is a public policy question with direct consequences for households, businesses, and the province’s ability to manage energy costs. NB Power has not yet provided a timeline for this most recent repair, leaving that uncertainty unresolved for the moment.

What this episode illustrates, more broadly, is the complexity of operating aging nuclear infrastructure within a public utility model. Point Lepreau has served New Brunswick for decades, and its continued operation remains central to the province’s energy mix and its low-carbon electricity profile. The station’s struggles this year are a reminder that keeping that infrastructure running is neither simple nor cheap — and that the people of New Brunswick have a legitimate interest in understanding how NB Power plans to ensure its long-term reliability.

Toronto’s Mayoral Race: Why Olivia Chow May Be in More Trouble Than the Polls Suggest

Emily Roy
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Toronto’s Mayoral Race: Why Olivia Chow May Be in More Trouble Than the Polls Suggest

Picture the scene at the Daily Bread Food Bank on a Monday evening in late summer: three candidates standing at their podiums, Toronto’s municipal future nominally at stake, while most of the city’s residents are busy thinking about trade tariffs, film festival lineups, and whether the Raptors will ever find another Kawhi Leonard. The debate begins. And something quietly unsettling becomes visible — not in the candidate who is struggling most obviously, but in the one who is supposed to be winning.

By almost every conventional measure, Mayor Olivia Chow should be gliding toward re-election on October 26th. She is a personally popular first-term incumbent. She carries strong name recognition across the city. She holds a consistent lead in the polls. Her principal opponent, two-term city councillor Brad Bradford, trails her by a meaningful margin and has spent much of this campaign generating questions even among his own supporters about his readiness for the job. And history, for what it’s worth, is firmly on her side: no first-term incumbent mayor has ever lost at the ballot box in Toronto’s megacity era.

So why does something feel off?

Bradford’s weaknesses are real and they were on full display Monday night. He almost visibly quivers with ambition. On stage, he resembled a human mousetrap — coiled, tense, waiting to spring — gripping the podium with both hands and staring straight ahead when he wasn’t speaking, radiating the kind of intensity that makes rooms uncomfortable rather than energized. He has all the easy manner of a tightly clenched jaw. In his public appearances, he consistently projects the persona of someone who will corner you at a work function with a 75-point productivity plan when all you want is to use your last drink ticket. That manner is a genuine liability. Even his most effective attacks — and he landed several Monday, targeting Chow on tax increases and public safety — risk turning off as many voters as they attract. His unsettling affect raises the real possibility that anti-Chow voters who agree with his message simply refuse to vote for him, drifting instead toward third candidate Chris Alexander, the former federal cabinet minister, or staying home entirely.

And yet Bradford is not out of this race. His messenger may be flawed. His message, however, may be landing.

The defining question of this campaign is deceptively simple: do you actually feel, as a Torontonian, like things are going well in this city? Most evidence suggests the answer is no. There is a persistent, grinding funk in Toronto that has settled over neighbourhoods well beyond the usual pockets of discontent. Housing costs remain punishing. Inflation has eroded household budgets across income levels. Even in progressive communities, residents express frustration with traffic gridlock, visible public drug use, overcrowded and underfunded schools, and a general, wearying sense that daily life is becoming harder for everyone who doesn’t happen to live in Rosedale or Forest Hill. The vast majority of these pressures are not Chow’s fault — they reflect provincial underfunding, federal policy failures, and structural forces that predate her administration by decades.

But political accountability rarely distributes itself according to what is strictly fair.

Chow’s performance Monday suggested she may not yet be reading the room with the precision this moment demands. She arrived on stage as the deliberate anti-Bradford — joyful, warm, relentlessly forward-looking — and proceeded to tout her accomplishments with such consistency that she sometimes appeared to be answering a different set of questions than the ones being asked. That quality is authentic to who she is, and it is a genuine source of her political appeal. The concern is that relentless positivity, when deployed in a city where many residents feel unheard and worn down, can start to sound less like leadership and more like deflection.

Chow remains the odds-on favourite. Bradford’s path to victory is narrow and depends heavily on his ability to broaden his coalition beyond voters who already distrust the mayor — a coalition that, so far, has not proven large enough. But the gap between “favourite” and “safe” is wider than the current polling might suggest, and the debate at the Daily Bread Food Bank offered a glimpse of why. The mayor is running a campaign calibrated for a city that feels reasonably well. The city she is actually governing does not.

That is a tension worth watching as October 26th approaches.

Calgary Man Charged With Threatening Prime Minister Carney’s Life Remains in Custody

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Calgary Man Charged With Threatening Prime Minister Carney’s Life Remains in Custody

What happened?

A 31-year-old Calgary man, Jamie Da Costa, is facing a criminal charge of uttering a threat to cause the death of Prime Minister Mark Carney, following the posting of a video to YouTube. The RCMP confirmed on Tuesday morning that on July 28 they “received information that a YouTube account had posted threats to kill Prime Minister Mark Carney.” Court documents indicate the alleged incident occurred between July 25 and 26, and a video dated July 25 remains publicly accessible on a YouTube channel registered to a Jamie Da Costa. CTV News, which first reported the story, chose not to repost the video in full given its content.

The video in question appears to encourage Canadians to travel to Ottawa and commit an act of violence against Canada’s head of government. It also appears to encourage violence against members of the Prime Minister’s immediate family. The specific charge Da Costa faces is laid under Section 264.1(1)(a) of the Criminal Code, the provision that governs uttering threats to cause death or bodily harm. He was ordered detained earlier this month and, as of Tuesday morning, remained in custody at the Calgary Remand Centre.

Is this an isolated charge?

No. Da Costa faces a substantial list of additional charges that are unrelated to the alleged threats against Carney but are moving through the courts at the same time. Those charges include extortion, criminal harassment, uttering threats to cause death, mischief involving damage over $5,000, and being disguised with intent. The first three of those charges stem from alleged incidents occurring between October 12, 2025, and July 28 of this year. The mischief and disguise-related charges arise from alleged incidents on July 10. Together, they paint a picture of a legal file that is both complex and serious.

Why is Special Prosecution involved?

The involvement of the Special Prosecution Service — an independent office that handles cases where a conflict of interest or exceptional public interest is at stake — reflects the unusual nature of a sitting Prime Minister being the named complainant in a criminal matter. Defence lawyer Adriano Iovinelli explained the situation plainly during Tuesday’s court appearance: “One information, special prosecution has conduct of that, just because the complainant is the prime minister, Mark Carney.” He added that there had been an indication Special Prosecution may also assume conduct of Da Costa’s other outstanding matters, though that had not yet been formally confirmed.

The distinction matters for how the case proceeds. When Special Prosecution takes conduct of a file, it signals that the Crown has determined the matter requires an additional layer of independence from the regular prosecutorial process — a safeguard built into the system precisely to protect public confidence in the administration of justice. Whether Special Prosecution will formally absorb all of Da Costa’s charges into a single file remained an open question as of Tuesday.

What happens next?

All of Da Costa’s matters before the court were adjourned to Friday. He remains in custody in the interim, with no bail having been granted since his detention order was issued earlier this month. The case will continue to develop as the court determines how the various charges will be managed — whether together under Special Prosecution’s oversight or on separate tracks. Given the gravity of the allegations and the identity of the complainant, the proceedings are likely to attract continued public attention as they move forward.

Trump’s Tariffs Reveal Canada’s Structural Vulnerability — and What Ottawa Could Do About It

Kevin Martin
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There are two ways to read a tariff list: one line at a time, which is how it gets reported, or all at once, which is how it was written. Read the American list all at once, and a pattern emerges that no single line makes visible on its own.

Canadian aluminum extrusions appear on that list. So does Canadian structural steel. As of one minute past midnight on the day the measures came into force, both now carry a second American duty stacked on the first. On extrusions, that pushes the combined rate past 90 per cent — up from 40 per cent before. Unwrought aluminum, the raw metal itself, is nowhere on that list and has never been. Canada supplies nearly 60 per cent of what the United States imports. The policy, reduced to its essentials, is this: the metal is taxed once; the thing made from the metal is taxed twice.

Once you see that logic, you see it applied consistently across sector after sector. Bulk whisky crosses the border freely. The bottle is taxed — and banned outright after a certain date — with the dividing line drawn at four litres, the precise threshold between a tanker and a retail container. Wood in the rough crosses free; Canadian furniture and lighting face duties across seventy tariff classifications. Ore crosses free; nothing made from ore does. Rod parts cross free; finished rods are taxed. Every one of those lines is drawn at the same point: the moment a Canadian export stops being an input and becomes a finished product.

What the Exemptions Reveal

The exemptions are at least as instructive as the duties themselves. Road salt and Portland cement were quietly removed from the tariff list after Senator Susan Collins of Maine raised concerns that a single cement company in her state would face costs of $150,000 a month. She made the case; she got the result. In their place came new duties on all-terrain vehicles, cheese, and motorboats. Switchgear was also pulled from the list — because American data centres, it turns out, cannot be built without it. Potash was never listed at all. Neither was uranium, crude oil, natural gas, nor ore.

Taken together, those carve-outs constitute something governments rarely produce in writing: a signed, published inventory of the Canadian goods the United States cannot do without. When President Trump said in Dublin on Saturday that America does not need Canadian products and that a deal could come fairly soon, his own proclamations — signed four days earlier — contained the exceptions that contradict the first claim while lending some credibility to the second.

Two Capitals, One Division of Labour

On the same morning those measures came into force, Canada was presenting 167 investment projects to 250 of the world’s largest investors at a Yorkville hotel in Toronto. The pitch book is an honest account of what the country has to offer. Almost all of the projects are mines, ports, and pipelines — the infrastructure of extraction and transport. It says a great deal about what Canada possesses and very little about what Canada intends to keep.

Set that document beside the American tariff list and the two describe the same arrangement from opposite ends: Ottawa marketing the input side of the production chain while Washington taxes everything past it. Two capitals, opposite purposes, one implicit division of labour — Canada supplies, and somebody else finishes. That is not a conspiracy; it is the cumulative result of choices made over decades, and it is a vulnerability that a trade deal, however welcome, would leave structurally intact.

A country becomes what it does. Perform the input end of the chain long enough, and the input end is what you are — whatever the ore underneath is worth. Economic resilience lives in the functions a country still performs when a trading partner would prefer it did not. A deal that lifts the tariff rates without altering the underlying shape of the relationship would provide relief without providing security.

The president has named his price: supply management, a domestic agricultural policy and not a border measure. Canada has made that kind of trade before — a domestic regulation exchanged for tariff relief — without fully accounting for the long-term cost. The question is whether it is prepared to do so again, and what it would receive in return for a concession that goes to the heart of how the country governs its own food system.

There is a more durable answer, and it lies in ownership. Ottawa spends close to ten billion dollars a year on research and development and currently attaches no condition about who owns the results. Over two decades, Canadians retained roughly 60 per cent of the artificial intelligence patents they invented — the lowest retention rate of any country measured. South Korea owns more intellectual property than it invents. Ottawa has the authority to attach ownership conditions to public research funding on its own, this autumn, without negotiating anyone’s permission. It is also the only answer that survives a trade deal, because no agreement can substitute for the decision to keep what you create.

In Sudbury, workers take critical minerals out of the ground. In Kitchener-Waterloo, researchers write the software and design the processes that determine what those minerals become. On the morning the new tariffs took effect, the second activity became more expensive to conduct in Canada — and at that hotel in Yorkville, the country was spending two days selling the world on the first.

Canada to Co-Host Toronto Conference on Returning Ukrainian Children and Detainees from Russian Captivity

Kevin Martin
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Canada to Co-Host Toronto Conference on Returning Ukrainian Children and Detainees from Russian Captivity

Canada, Ukraine and Norway will co-host a two-day international conference in Toronto on September 28 and 29, bringing together foreign ministers and senior government officials to press for the return of Ukrainian children forcibly transferred by Russia, unlawfully detained civilians and prisoners of war.

Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand announced the gathering on Saturday. Formally titled Pathways to Peace: Second International Conference on Returning Ukrainian Children, Detained Civilians, and Prisoners of War, the event will also include representatives from international organizations working on humanitarian and reintegration issues.

The Scale of the Crisis

The numbers underlying the conference are stark. Ukrainian authorities have documented 20,651 cases of possible unlawful deportation or forcible transfer of Ukrainian children by Russia. Of those, only 2,573 children have so far been returned from deportation, forcible transfer or temporarily occupied territories.

The situation for detained civilians is similarly troubling. As of June, Ukraine’s parliamentary commissioner for human rights had confirmed 1,878 civilians unlawfully held by Russia — though Global Affairs Canada cautioned that the true figure could be significantly higher. Some civil society organizations estimate that as many as 20,000 civilians may be detained.

Ukraine does not publicly disclose the exact number of its prisoners of war held by Russia. As of August, however, 9,529 Ukrainian military personnel and civilians had been returned from Russian captivity, according to Global Affairs Canada.

What the Conference Will Address

“Canada, Ukraine and Norway are convening the conference to strengthen international support for efforts to bring people home, protect those who remain under Russian control and ensure that those who return can access rehabilitation and reintegration services,” Global Affairs Canada said in a statement.

Participants in Toronto are expected to focus on several concrete areas:

A Conference Amid Escalating Violence

The announcement comes as Russia intensifies its air campaign against Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. On Saturday alone, Russian strikes killed eight civilians and wounded dozens more across the country, according to local officials.

Two people were killed when Russian drones struck a residential area in Zaporizhzhia. Another person died in Kryvyi Rih. In Odesa and the surrounding region, 35 people were wounded in what regional officials described as a “massive attack.” Three more people died when drones struck vehicles in Kramatorsk, and two others were killed in a Russian attack on a grocery store in the Zhytomyr region.

The strikes followed a warning from Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, delivered during a BRICS summit in India, that the deployment of European troops to Ukraine would constitute direct conflict with Russia. “Now they’re talking about how they’re considering sending troops into Ukraine. That means a war with Russia,” Putin said.

Some European leaders have pledged support for a potential peacekeeping force in Ukraine as part of a future peace settlement — a proposal Moscow has consistently rejected. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for his part, said in an interview published Saturday that he would be willing to meet Putin if both leaders were invited to the G20 summit in Miami in December.

Canada’s Broader Commitment

Canada has committed more than $26 billion in multifaceted support to Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, including more than $750 million directed specifically toward recovery and reconstruction, according to the federal government.

The Toronto conference represents the second international gathering of its kind focused on the return of Ukrainian nationals from Russian control, building on earlier diplomatic efforts to internationalize accountability for what Ukrainian and Western governments characterize as systematic violations of international humanitarian law.

— With files from The Canadian Press

Ottawa Commits $1.5 Million to Combat Gang Violence in Cape Breton

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Ottawa Commits $1.5 Million to Combat Gang Violence in Cape Breton

The federal government is directing up to $1.5 million toward gun and gang violence prevention in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, channelling the funds through the Building Safer Communities Fund to steer children and young people away from criminal pathways.

Reaching Youth Before the Damage Is Done

The investment aims to provide young people with safe spaces, mentorship and concrete opportunities — the kinds of early interventions that research consistently links to lower rates of youth involvement in gang activity. Mike Kelloway, the Liberal MP for Sydney–Glace Bay, framed the spending in straightforward terms. “Every young person deserves the chance to make good choices, feel supported, and see a positive path ahead,” he said in a news release. “This funding is about reaching youth early — before they start heading down the wrong path.”

Cape Breton has faced persistent socioeconomic pressures over decades, including high unemployment and outmigration, conditions that community advocates have long identified as risk factors for youth vulnerability to gang recruitment. The new funding acknowledges those realities directly.

Part of a Broader National Commitment

The Cape Breton allocation is not a stand-alone measure. Last March, Ottawa announced a $157.5 million top-up to the Building Safer Communities Fund spread over three years — a national envelope designed to support community-led prevention efforts from coast to coast. The Cape Breton disbursement flows from that commitment.

The Building Safer Communities Fund was established to complement law-enforcement approaches with upstream, community-based programming. It funds local organizations rather than police services, reflecting a public-health model of violence reduction. Whether the Cape Breton investment will be administered through municipal bodies, non-profits, or a combination of both has not yet been specified in the government’s announcement.

What Comes Next

Details on which specific programs or organizations will receive the money remain to be confirmed. The federal government has not yet published a breakdown of how the funds will be distributed locally. Community groups and municipal officials in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality are expected to be involved in implementation as plans develop.

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