OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney is set to announce his pick as Canada’s next governor general, who is bilingual in both official languages and most likely a woman.

The event will take place at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning at a museum in Ottawa. The prime minister’s itinerary simply indicates that he will be announcing a “new appointment.” Carney is expected to take questions from reporters afterwards.

Carney will have to submit his recommendation to King Charles, who will approve the appointment. The new governor general will become his representative in Canada.

Despite wild speculation, little information has filtered on who will be replacing the current governor general, Mary Simon, in the vice-regal role. Different media outlets have reported that the new appointee will be a woman who currently resides in the Montreal area.

But what is certain is that the chosen individual will be able to speak French and English, after Simon faced controversy for her inability to speak French.

Carney told Radio-Canada he was “absolutely” committed to nominating a new governor general who is bilingual in English and French. Canadian Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller also told reporters on Monday of the new appointee: “They’ll be bilingual.”

More details to follow…

National Post
calevesque@postmedia.com

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New data from Statistics Canada has revealed that cross-border travel from Canada to the U.S. is down for the 14th consecutive month, while domestic travel has surged.

The data tracks passenger numbers at Canada’s eight largest airports and shows that traffic to the U.S. declined by 7 per cent from March 2025 to March 2026, falling to 1.2 million screened passengers.

The downturn, which began in January 2025, has been linked to political tensions between Canada and the U.S., fuelled by punishing tariffs imposed by Donald Trump and his suggestion that Canada could become the 51st state .

Airlines have responded by adjusting capacity, with Air Transat cancelling all U.S.-bound flights for the 2026 summer season and WestJet suspending 16 U.S. routes .

And it’s not just Canadians turning their backs on U.S. travel. A release published by the World Travel and Tourism Council in May 2025 estimated that, of the 184 economies analyzed, the U.S was the only country forecast to see international visitor spending decline that year.

Meanwhile, the number of domestic passengers at Canadian airports rose sharply, up 10 per cent from March 2025.

All eight of Canada’s largest airports saw annual increases in passenger numbers in March 2026. The three with the strongest gains were Halifax/Robert L. Stanfield International (+15 per cent), Toronto/Lester B. Pearson International (+14.1 per cent), and Calgary International (+11.3 per cent).

This trend is echoed in data gathered by travel companies elsewhere. A recent report from Airbnb found that “Canadians chose to explore their own country in record numbers in 2025, with over 9.5 million domestic guest arrivals, accounting for over 60 per cent of all trips on Airbnb — up more than 50 per cent since 2019.”

The report also noted that Canadians prefer to travel within their own province. 70 per cent of domestic trips by Ontarians took place within Ontario, as were 70 per cent for British Columbians, 62 per cent for Quebecers, and 51 per cent for Albertans.

Airbnb estimates that all travel in Canada generated a record of nearly $10.9 billion in economic activity in 2025. By contrast, the drop in Canadian visitors helped drive a 4.6 per cent drop in international tourism spending in the U.S. last year, according to research by the World Travel and Tourism Council , despite 2025 being a record year globally for the travel and tourism sector in terms of GDP growth.

However, the U.S. remains the largest travel and tourism market in the world. And with 1.2 million crossing the border from Canada to the U.S. in March alone, the market is far from disappearing.

Rising interest in domestic travel has prompted some Canadian airlines to expand their offerings, with WestJet adding flights from Calgary to Winnipeg and London this summer, a move that representatives from London International Airport say reflects increased demand .

This is despite an ongoing jet fuel crisis, which has prompted many airlines to cancel flights , reduce capacity and raise fares as a consequence of the conflict in Iran.

Meanwhile, the Statistics Canada data shows that international traffic (from Canada to countries excluding the United States) also increased, rising by 3.1 per cent year-over-year in March 2026, totalling 1.5 million screened passengers.

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Canada’s psychiatrists are being encouraged to screen people for “high-risk human-AI engagement,” including “chatbot psychosis” and other AI-amplified delusions.

The new guidance for identifying patients, particularly teens and young adults, at risk of developing troublesome attachments to AI companion bots comes amid rising wrongful death allegations against AI companies, including a lawsuit filed last week by the families of Tumbler Ridge shooting victims against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman.

“While most users engage harmlessly, a clinically significant subset may develop high-risk problematic human-AI relationships,” according to the primer for psychiatrists published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry.

“This spectrum of risk can vary from reinforcing insecurity, anxiety and ideas of self-harm to a phenomenon dubbed ‘Chatbot Psychosis,’” the authors wrote — delusional thinking that worsens, or appears suddenly, following intense chats with a conversational bot.

People who are lonely, bored, emotionally isolated and psychologically distressed, and those at high risk for psychosis (delusions, hallucinations and paranoid ideas) should be asked about their AI-chatbot engagement in nonjudgmental ways to avoid “positively reinforcing the human-AI bond at the cost of human-to-human bonds,” the advice reads.

Questions include, have chats become more frequent and intense? Has the bot become their primary confidant? Have they given it a name? Has it confirmed a belief others doubted, or has it ever suggested the user “act in a way that may be harmful” or seemed “nonchalant when self-harm, intent to harm others or distrust is disclosed?”

Tumbler Ridge shooter, Jesse Van Rootselaar, who identified as a trans woman, had a history of mental illness and psychedelic drug use. Police visited the family home numerous times for mental health-related calls and had the shooter hospitalized several times under British Columbia’s Mental Health Act.

Eight people were killed, including six children, when Rootselaar, 18, opened fire at a Tumbler Ridge secondary school in February.

In seven suits filed in federal court in San Francisco last week , seven families of those killed or injured during Rootselaar’s murderous rampage accuse OpenAI of negligence, aiding and abetting a mass shooting, wrongful death and other charges. None of the allegations have been tested in court.

Altman has apologized to victims’ families for not alerting police to a ChatGPT account the company had flagged and banned last June that allegedly included Rootselaar discussing and planning violent scenarios.

While he could not comment on the lawsuits, McGill University psychiatrist Dr. Lena Palaniyappan said doctors are seeing “increased psychiatric risk” with human-AI interactions.

One teen suffering from psychosis once confided in Palaniyappan that a chatbot he called Noah agreed that the antipsychotic he had been prescribed was “poison” and encouraged him to skip doses.

Conversational AI is tuned to be sycophantic — “highly agreeable and frictionless in their interactions,” Palaniyappan and his co-authors wrote in Canadian Journal of Psychiatry.

“They are designed to be human-like (anthropomorphic) in their presentation, though they are constantly accessible, lack conversational fatigue and are devoid of the complexities and boundaries that characterize human-to-human interactions.”

“AI chatbots are made to be relational to us, to relate to us, to ask us nicely, ‘Hey, how are you? How’s your day? What can I do for you,’” said Palaniyappan, director of the Centre for Excellence in Youth Mental Health at The Douglas Research Centre. It’s that relational piece that can make bots risky for young, vulnerable people already on the fringe of society, he said.

They’re also excessively flattering and, like the chatbot “Noah,” can unhelpfully collude against treatment, he said.

Once a person’s delusional beliefs are amplified, “it crosses a threshold that makes people take actions in real life to endorse those beliefs, and that’s when it becomes really risky,” he said.

Young people can be fiercely private about their chatbot use. “But when we get a glimpse of these interactions, in some cases, we see the same delusional thinking being accepted and amplified by the AI system,” Palaniyappan said.

It’s like a rare phenomenon known as folie à deux, French for “madness of two,” or shared delusional disorder, where two closely related people, like twin sisters, experience the same psychotic beliefs and delusions. One person adopts the other’s delusional thinking.

“The solution is separation: They’re physically separated,” Palaniyappan said. “If one person goes and lives with someone else for a while, the delusions slowly die off.”

The same approach is the best solution for chatbot psychosis, Palaniyappan said, though it’s “easy to say, and not so easy to do.” One tactic is treating heavy AI engagement like any addiction and replacing the problematic “substance” with something equally physiologically important, he said. “Getting these young people in social therapy, engaging them with peer support workers” can help build social skills and human relationships and reduce their isolation.

Doctors can also help people understand AI isn’t a conscious entity, he said.

Psychiatrists have a duty to protect patient confidentiality, but they also have a duty to act if the person is at risk of self-harm or harming others.

But AI is uncharted territory, Palaniyappan said. Someone posting threatening information on social media is one thing. Conversations with chatbots are private, not public, and doctors can’t access the data.

“Most of us don’t know what exactly needs to be done here, and I think this is where cognizance must be taken by law-making bodies as well,” he said.

“The rates of young people disclosing harmful AI interactions and the fear of the unknown sensed by families of youth is increasing very rapidly.”

Psychosis can be triggered by trauma, genetics, stress and numerous other factors in the background, said Dr. Alban Voppel, an incoming assistant professor of AI in psychiatry at McGill.

“It’s the same with chatbot-induced psychosis. It’s not caused by (the chatbot). There is probably an underlying vulnerability. But these chatbots can physically accelerate the movement toward having an active psychotic episode.”

While some models are less sycophantic, less overly agreeable than others, and will push back by refusing to respond to certain words or topics or by challenging users, “they’re not waterproof,” Voppel said. “They will let some of that through.”

National Post

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A suspected data breach has dealt a credibility blow to Alberta separatists, underscoring the lack of designated leadership behind the grassroots movement and causing a rare rupture between the various organizations and social media groups that support it.

On Thursday, Elections Alberta announced it was investigating the potential mishandling of the province’s official voter list by the Centurion Project, a pro-separation group, and the Republican Group of Alberta, a political party.

While a breach has not been confirmed, the agency believes that Centurion may have given volunteers unauthorized access to its database of 2.9 million registered voters, including their voter IDs, addresses and other information. RCMP have confirmed they are also investigating.

Centurion is distinct from Stay Free Alberta, the organization that just finished collecting signatures for a petition that proposes Alberta’s separation from Canada. Still, the potential data leak could nonetheless hurt separatist efforts more broadly, lending their federalist opponents arguments that undermine their credibility in the eyes of voters.

“It gives the anti-separatists—basically, the traditional political parties—something to shoot at,” says Barry Cooper, professor at the University of Calgary.

Cooper said that these sorts of missteps are all but “inevitable” among fragmented movements like the one pushing for Alberta independence. While opponents of Alberta’s separatists tend to frame them as a unified force, they are in fact made up of a number of small and independent advocate groups with differing strategies, focuses and messaging.

“When you have this kind of grassroots, non-organization trying to get something done, you’re bound to have all kinds of problems,” he said.

After Elections Alberta announced its investigation into Centurion and the Republican Party, several pro-separatist voices and social media sites began to lash out against Centurion. On Facebook, an account called Unapologetically Albertan decried that the “harm [Centurion] have done to every Albertian [sic] is irreversible,” and blamed the group for giving their opposition “ammunition to use against us.”

Responses such as that one across social media suggested a rare rift within the separatist movement that, according to Cooper, has enjoyed “relatively little infighting.”

The apparent mishandling by Centurion and the Republican Party echoes the sorts of pitfalls that have long ensnared Alberta’s right-wing movements, said Cooper, where a few rogue actors or fringe voices have damaged broader political efforts. (As Preston Manning, one of the godfathers of small-c conservatism in Alberta, famously put it: “a bright light attracts some bugs.”)

David Parker, founder of the Centurion Project, said in a statement on X on Thursday that volunteers used the group’s internal Centurion App to “find people they know,” but did not have access to phone numbers or emails.

“The Centurion project relied on a third party to provide us with datasets for this tool,” he said.

I am aware of the media reporting and the materials filed by Elections Alberta regarding the Centurion Project.

The allegations that I personally received or distributed any unauthorized voter data are false.

These issues involve active court proceedings and investigations. I…

— David Parker (@david_parker) May 4, 2026

Meanwhile, a separate group called Stay Free Alberta officially submitted its petition signatures to Elections Alberta on Monday.

Stay Free, led by Alberta sporting goods store owner Mitch Sylvestre, has been collecting signatures since Jan. 2, 2026, and proposes a question — “Do you agree that the province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?” — that could be added to a planned October referendum.

Now that the petition has been submitted, Elections Alberta will have to verify the validity of signatures before the question can be included in the referendum, scheduled for Oct. 19.

In a statement to the National Post, Sylvestre said Stay Free has “nothing to do with [Centurion] at all.”

Jeffrey Rath, another key manager behind the Stay Free petition, said Stay Free and a separate group he is involved with, the Alberta Prosperity Society, are not “affiliated with the Centurion Project or David Parker.”

“Neither SFA or APS have had access to any lists in the possession of either the Alberta Republican Party or David Parker or the Centurion Project,” Rath wrote on X.

As part of its investigation, Elections Alberta said it would be updating its signature verification process to ensure that the elector list provided to the Republican Party was not used in the Alberta independence petition.

Under provincial law, registered political parties can access the electoral office’s voter ID list, and are permitted to use that list in narrow and tightly regulated ways. When Elections Alberta gives out its voter list, it includes certain “seeded” false identities in the list so that, in the case of a data breach, they can search for seeded names to determine where the leak came from.

The agency on Friday said it would now verify Stay Free’s petition to ensure none of the seeded names in the Republican Party’s list are among its signatures.

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This is an excerpt from Saving Toronto: 10 City Builders Tell Us How (Dundurn Press), edited by Anne Golden and Ken Greenberg. The book is a wake-up call with practical solutions to stop Toronto’s decline, including cutting its massive infrastructure deficits, constraining urban sprawl, and empowering cities with authority and a portion of sales tax. In this excerpt, Golden first diagnoses the problems.

When Premier Bob Rae asked me to chair the Task Force on the Future of the Greater Toronto Area in 1995, I accepted enthusiastically. The Task Force was created to respond to growing concerns about the health and workability of the city-region.

It was becoming apparent that the secure and satisfying quality of life that people in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) had been enjoying for the decades following the Second World War was under threat. The region’s lagging economic recovery from the post-1989 recession had revealed its vulnerability in the changing global economy. Torontonians were feeling that the systems they had relied on — from municipal finance to governance to public transit — were breaking down and no longer able to meet their needs.

Here we are 30 years after that, and concerns about Toronto’s viability are back.

We used to be seen as the city that works. British actor Peter Ustinov once famously described us as “New York run by the Swiss.” Today, the descriptions of Toronto are very different. They focus on Toronto’s problems and their apparent intractability. Whereas Toronto used to top the lists of the best cities in the world to live in, we now make the list of one of the world’s most congested cities. Toronto is increasingly described in the media as a city where you can’t afford a house, can’t get anywhere, and nothing works. Today, Toronto is at a turning point.

Toronto has experienced several turning points since its “Hogtown” days, a nickname derived from its once-thriving meatpacking industry.

In the late 1800s, Toronto evolved from a modest settlement to a lively industrial centre. Trade and migration grew with the coming of the railroad, and significant immigration from Europe contributed to its expanding cultural landscape. The early twentieth century was a time of creating iconic buildings, parks, and public services and is described as a time of civic pride and cultural flourishing. The post–Second World War era marked a pivotal moment for Toronto, with the influx of immigrants from around the globe, notably from Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean, which significantly diversified the city’s population and cultural fabric.

The post-war economic boom led to job creation and urban growth. But the late twentieth century saw a decline in manufacturing jobs along with rising unemployment and serious social problems, including poverty, homelessness, and crime. These are issues that I became absorbed in as president of United Way (1989–2001) and as chair of the Task Force on Homelessness (1998). And by the early twenty-first century, residents were feeling that Toronto was in decline. Toronto’s reputation was changing from a thriving metropolis that worked to a city grappling with major challenges.

As recently as a decade ago, urban visionaries were still optimistic, and I had great hopes for Toronto. In 2016, in accepting the Couchiching Award for Public Policy Leadership, I gave a speech contending that we were “on the threshold of a new era for cities.” Global mega-trends, such as the technology revolution and the migration of people everywhere into cities, were setting the stage for positive urban transformation. I was impressed by the explosion of interest in city building, pointing to a spate of new books that argued that the crisis in our urban centres was creating a movement to make our cities sustainable, livable, and more competitive.

I believed that the idea that cities play a pivotal role in driving economic prosperity; in nurturing innovation; in allowing people to live healthy, happy lives in livable, walkable communities; and in protecting our environment and ecosystems upon which life depends had become accepted wisdom. There seemed to be a growing sense of urgency about the need to develop our cities differently, to embrace a more compact form of urban development and complete communities.

However, while there have been some successes, we are not seeing the overall progress that many of us had expected. We are dismayed by traffic jams, deteriorating infrastructure, sky-high housing costs, and worsening transit service, typified by long delays and weekend shutdowns.

Multi-year setbacks and cost overruns have made the Metrolinx Eglinton Crosstown the poster child for the mismanagement of public transit projects. In Ontario, both health and education services are facing major systemic challenges, leading to concerns about accessibility and quality. Because of its population density and diversity, as well as unique issues such as housing shortages, homelessness, and other social problems, the impacts of declining health and education services are particularly severe in the Toronto region.

As noted, these problems are long-standing. But their level and intensity are new. We have largely ignored them, and they are worsening such that this turning point can fairly be described as a tipping point.

The existing issues and efforts to reverse Toronto’s decline have been exacerbated and complicated by Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president. His focus on “America First,” protectionism, and a confrontational approach to international relations, particularly with Canada, is impacting our economy, our politics, our social contract, and our cultural environment. The economic impacts of Trump’s threats and trade war include costs, shifts in trade relationships, and a general atmosphere of uncertainty, affecting economic growth and job stability across the country.

Trump’s aggressive actions against Canada have emboldened Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s approach to land-use planning in Ontario; under the guise of protecting the province’s economy from the president, Premier Ford has introduced legislation that undermines local democracy and accountability. Trump’s polarizing rhetoric and actions have altered the social and political climate everywhere, adding to the challenges of maintaining social cohesion in the cultural mosaic city-region of Toronto. We can see debates on human rights and public policy becoming increasingly contentious, leading to divisive and sometimes violent protests. Trump is pushing Canadians to consider the question of what kind of society we aspire to be.

If we do not address the underlying causes of our malaise, predictions that Toronto has entered an irreversible downward spiral may come to pass. Can Toronto re-establish itself as a great place for people to live and businesses to prosper?

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Bigwigs in Ottawa made two astonishing admissions last week. One, that Canada’s official prime ministerial residence is a disgrace and something has to be done about it. Two, that the country’s airline passenger rights rules were badly contrived, have proved utterly useless and need to be radically improved.

This is not small stuff. Politicians don’t like to admit mistakes. They particularly dislike confessions involving their own actions. Justin Trudeau was more than happy to denounce errors of any sort as long as they could be pinned on anyone but himself; when the blame pointed directly at his office, the best anyone could expect was a vague concession that “mistakes (possibly) were made.” By who was left unclear, as if someone had snuck into the PMO and perpetrated untold gaffes while everyone else was out for lunch.

So it’s positive news that Prime Minister Mark Carney is willing to say out loud that having a falling-down dump at 24 Sussex Dr. is an embarrassment, and for Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon to pronounce the passenger rights regime an unmitigated disaster.

Perhaps they’ll follow through on their declared plans to do better. Still, Canadians can’t help but wonder what shift in the slow march of the universe brought about this wondrous realization. The official residence has been in crappy shape for at least a handful of prime ministers, maybe more depending on the degree of crappiness in question. None of them had the nerve to do a thing about it, other than Trudeau refusing to step so much as a sock in the place.

The notion that air passengers enjoyed actual rights has proved similarly farcical, as MacKinnon candidly conceded in a statement that seemed weirdly eager to concede the flaws of a policy put in place by a government he’s served for a decade. “We hear repeatedly the regulations … are too complex,” he declared, citing “the frustration, the unfair rules, the exemptions, the lack of clarity, the confusion, the loopholes …”

And what, you were too busy enjoying winter in Ottawa to fix it?

It can take years to settle a complaint before the Canadian Transportation Agency, where tens of thousands of cases end up because the airlines are so skilled at ignoring, rejecting or delaying passenger gripes brought to them first. I happen to know this first-hand, as a complaint I lodged with the CTA just over a year ago is still marked “not started” on the CTA website. I have to admit the matter in question wasn’t a huge deal, and I’d probably have ignored it if the airline hadn’t been so rude, abrupt and crudely dismissive in responding to my original approach.

But that’s just the thing. Air Passenger Protection Regulations introduced by the Liberals in 2019 were hailed as a new dawn in ensuring “Canadians, tourists and businesses all benefit from a safe, efficient and more transparent air industry.” They proved so hopeless they were updated in 2023, with the need for improvement blamed on COVID and a later surge in travel that revealed “ambiguity” in the rules, “resulting in an excessive number of refusals to compensate by airlines, and many appeals to the CTA.”

The 2023 update was supposed to erase the flaws but proved just as big a bust.

“The system did not work as planned,” MacKinnon acknowledged. “We put in place a system that in hindsight was onerous, expensive, took too long” and let the airlines get away with murder. The new one, he promised, will have “fewer loopholes, fewer exemptions, is very clear for all involved, airlines and passengers alike.”

Again, it’s great to have elected representatives being honest about stuff. MacKinnon has been in Parliament since 2015 and in cabinet since 2021, including as chief whip, an important post that involves ensuring MPs vote like they’re told to. All that time Canadians have been complaining loud and long about the horrors of dealing with airlines they see as pampered, protected, haughty, unresponsive and several more adjectives I could add if you haven’t already got the point.

The airlines themselves seem aware of this, though they still enjoy testing the limits of what Canadians will endure. WestJet in January staged a rapid retreat when plans to tighten up already-constricted seating suggested anyone beyond Munchkin stature might as well fly in the overhead bin for all the room they could expect. Air Canada recently announced it would try outsourcing complaints — the CTA has a backlog of almost 100,000 — to a third-party arbitrator, perhaps hoping to avoid the boom before Ottawa can lower it.

The aim, the airline said , was to “explore a solution that … has yielded good results elsewhere, and that we think can yield some good results in Canada.”

It’s precisely the fact that other countries have far better systems, and have had for some time, that makes Canada’s excruciating sluggishness so maddening. Sounding as if it was an attribute that Ottawa had finally awoken to the glaringly obvious, MacKinnon said the planned new regime “is based on a proven model in other countries in the world, like many in Europe. Carriers must pay compensation within 30 days, and no delays, no excuses.”

Like, um, yeah. Has this information been blocked from transmission within the borders of the city of Ottawa until now? Have Russian cybercreeps been feeding misinformation to Liberal members since, oh let’s say 2015 or so, claiming passengers couldn’t think of anything finer than the abuse that masquerades as Canadian air travel?

In any case, it’s nice that someone eventually slipped the news to MacKinnon. Ditto the shocker that 24 Sussex is in bad shape. It’s like someone snuck some Red Bull into the Parliamentary water fountain and suddenly good ideas have wings.

It may be too much to expect lightning action on both fronts, but the solutions are there to be had: photocopy the European rules, use the government’s shiny new majority to cement them in place, then phone up the ex-prime ministerial tag team of Jean Chrétien and Stephen Harper and ask if their offer to raise the cash needed for a 24 Sussex rebuild — the one ludicrously rejected by Carney’s most recent predecessor — is still on the table. Canada has lots of architects, and the land is already paid for, right?

Two problems solved, just like that. Governing doesn’t always have to be complicated. Here’s a chance for Carney’s people to prove they can do things fast, if they really put their minds to it.

National Post

• Future of 24 Sussex Drive: While the government dithers, here are some ideas to fix it
• Airline CEOs warn fare increases will 'stick' even if jet fuel costs fall

OTTAWA — Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree is refusing to disclose a consultation report that guided the federal government’s rewrite of its contentious reform granting security agencies and police new powers to intercept communications.

Anandasagaree’s refusal to disclose the report baffles two people who participated in the government’s consultations, who question the government’s desire to be transparent as one of its most sensitive bills is set to be studied at a parliamentary committee starting Tuesday.

It also comes as the Liberal government is pushing Bill C-22, its second iteration of what is known as lawful access reform, after the failure of the first attempt due in part to a lack of public consultation.

“There is no legitimate reason to keep it secret. The only reason to delay its publication is to further avoid meaningful scrutiny of Bill C-22,” Tamir Israel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) said in an interview.

In Bill C-2 tabled right after the election last spring, the Liberal government took its first stab at lawful access reform, which was criticized from all parts for being overly broad and invasive.

The ability to obtain Canadians’ private information and intercept communications, known as “lawful access,” is one of the most intrusive powers afforded to police and intelligence agencies. Creating such a regime for the digital age in Canada has been the subject of fierce debate for decades.

So, the government went back to the drawing board, bringing in former federal NDP MP and B.C. cabinet minister Murray Rankin to oversee private consultations with government, civil society, national security specialists and various advocacy groups over the summer and fall.

Earlier this winter, Rankin submitted his report and recommendations on how to proceed with lawful access reform to the government.

Anandasangaree lauded Rankin’s work as highly influential while he announced the government’s second attempt at lawful access reform via Bill C-22 last month.

The new legislation offers a more tailored set of warranted and unwarranted powers to police, who support the bill en masse. But civil liberty and privacy advocates as well as the Canadian Chamber of Commerce are still deeply concerned with the government’s latest proposal.

But despite promising more transparency with Canadians as to why lawful access reform is necessary, Anandasangaree’s office refused National Post’s repeated requests for a copy of Rankin’s unclassified report.

In a statement, the minister’s spokesperson Simon Lafortune said National Post would have to request it via access to information legislation to ensure the necessary redactions are applied.

In a brief interview Monday afternoon, the minister told National Post that because the report was provided by Rankin, a lawyer, to the minister to help him develop the bill, he considered it to be a privileged document.

He also argued that nothing in the document was “earth shattering”.

But if the document isn’t earth shattering, why not waive the privilege and disclose a document that has already been provided to some of those who participated in the consultations?

“I choose not to,” he responded.

Leah West, a national security law specialist who participated in Rankin’s consultation, said she and many other participants received a copy of the report when it was complete. She said she sees no reason why it shouldn’t be disclosed publicly.

“I do think that (Bill C-22) does reflect the recommendations and the stakeholder process. So I’m very puzzled as to why they wouldn’t share it,” she said.

If anything, West believes that the government need to put its money where its mouth is and show its homework with C-22 to convince Canadians that sensitive lawful access reform is necessary.

“I think the lesson from the first go around was the need for consultation, the need to be clear about the reasons behind the legislation and specific measures. And in general, since the press conference (announcing C-22), I haven’t seen those… lessons implemented.

For Israel, the government’s refusal to share Rankin’s report also raises questions about how forthcoming it will be with the Commons Public Safety Committee, which is set to start its study of Bill C-22 on Tuesday.

It was not immediately clear if members of the committee would get access to the report and its recommendations.

“Members of Parliament are being pushed to act without being given the basic information they need to do their job. It undermines the basic legislative function,” Israel said.

“This report is crucially important information for members of Parliament to have as they study this bill, and needs to be made publicly available quickly as the bill is already making its way through the legislative process.”

In Bill C-22, the government is proposing that police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) only be able to approach telecommunications companies and ask them if, yes or no, an individual is a client before having to get a warrant for more information.

The bill also proposes new obligations to electronic service providers to organize and retain for one year certain types of client metadata — including location — in a way that makes it obtainable by law enforcement or CSIS with a warrant.

That excludes some information such as web-browsing history and social media history.

That means that if passed, the bill would compel electronic service providers to store and make information like device locations or cameras available to police or CSIS with the requisite warrant. That could be used to track a person’s live location in case they pose a threat to national security or are considered to be in danger, the government cited as examples.

National Post

cnardi@postmedia.com

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OTTAWA — Canada’s industry minister says the federal government will “always follow” findings from the United Nations when it comes to the issue of forced labour in China, as she declined to say directly whether she believed it was taking place herself.

Melanie Joly testified Monday before a parliamentary committee about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s policies toward electric vehicles, which Conservative MPs used to press the minister on the deal Canada struck with China earlier this year to allow a portion of Chinese-made electric vehicles to enter the market in exchange for Beijing reducing tariffs on products like canola seed.

While representatives from the country’s auto-sector have raised concerns about the competitive impacts of allowing heavily-subsidized Chinese-made electric vehicles to flow into Canada, others have pointed to reports from human rights groups about forced labour being used to make these vehicles.

Asked directly on Monday whether she believed there was forced labour in China, Joly told MPs “that’s a question that you should ask the minister of foreign affairs.”

She added the federal government was working with the United Nations, pointing to findings from its human rights commissioner that raised such concerns in a report.

Joly also said the vehicles Canada was eyeing were vehicles from China produced by companies such as Tesla, General Motors and Ford.

Asked a second time by Conservative MP Ted Falk about whether she believed forced labour was a practice taking place in China, the minister replied: “I’ve already stated my point of view on that.”

“My point of view is we will always follow what the UN is saying, and the UN was unequivocal.”

After underlining that she was no longer foreign affairs minister — a role she had held until after last year’s federal election — Joly said Canada stands against all forms of forced labour and that it has existing laws that do not tolerate such exploitation.

“You say you agree with the UN position and the UN position is that there is forced labour happening, especially among the Uygur people in China. Are you saying that you would agree with that statement,” Falk said.

“Listen,” Joly said.

“I agree with everything I’ve said in the past tense, so you know, now, I’m before you as minister of industry and as minister of industry my job is to protect autoworkers here,” adding that her role was “internally-focused.”

Back in March, Liberal MP Michael Ma apologized for questioning a retired former bureaucrat who appeared before the committee raising concerns about China’s forced labour practices in a way that cast doubt on those claims.

Margaret McCuaig-Johnston had cited a 2024 report by Human Rights Watch that “dozens of parts in each Chinese EV are made with aluminium from Uyghur forced labour,” which Ma at the time responded to by questioning whether she had witnessed such activities herself.

Carney himself has only said he has seen evidence of forced labour being used around the world, when asked specifically about whether he believed it was happening in China.

The prime minister has said Canadian companies were bound by laws to ensure child or forced labour were not part of the supply chains used to bring good into Canada.

“There are parts of China that are higher risk and therefore need to be diligence,” told reporters at a press conference back in March.

Under Canada’s deal with China, up to 49,000 Chinese-made electric vehicle would be allowed to enter Canada at a preferential tariff rate of 6.1 per cent, which is expected to increase to 70,000 in the years ahead, reversing the 100 per cent surtax former prime minister Justin Trudeau imposed back in 2024.

With files from Jordan Gowling

National Post

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OTTAWA — Leaders of Alberta’s separatist movement released a preliminary tally of 301,620 signatures as they turned in their petition for an independence referendum on Monday.

If most of these signatures can be verified by Elections Alberta, the petition should easily clear the formal threshold of 177,732 signatures required to force a referendum.

“We are extremely proud of such a successful campaign. From the tens of thousands of Albertans lining up into the dark January nights to the 7,000 canvassers collecting signatures… hundreds of thousands of Albertans have expressed a clear desire to vote to become a free and independent country,” Jeffrey Rath, general counsel to the Stay Free Alberta independence petition campaign, told National Post.

Rath said that his group collected signatures from Albertans living as far away as the Pyramids of Egypt during the four-month canvassing period.

He added that approximately 1,500 more signatures are on their way in the mail.

Monday’s announcement also means the separatist petition will fall short of the 404,239 verified signatures collected by a separate pro-Canada petition led by former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk. A legislative committee is currently deliberating whether Lukaszuk’s question should be debated in the legislature or put to a province-wide vote.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has said that if the Stay Free Alberta petition drive succeeded she’d allow Albertans to vote on the group’s proposed constitutional question: Do you agree that the Province of Alberta should cease to be part of Canada to become an independent state?

One member of Smith’s United Conservative Party caucus, Red Deer MLA Jason Stephan, has said publicly that Alberta should hold an independence referendum . Other caucus members are rumoured to have signed the Stay Free Alberta petition.

Monday’s preliminary signature tally positions the question to be voted on alongside nine government-backed immigration and constitutional questions in Alberta’s 2026 referendum , scheduled for Oct. 19.

The petition drive saw a significant eleventh-hour controversy late last week, when pro-independence group the Centurion Project was accused of illegally obtaining a protected voter list and compiling this data into a searchable online database.

Elections Alberta obtained a court injunction on Thursday ordering the Centurion Project to take down the database. The injunction gave both it and the separatist Republican Party of Alberta, the group suspected of leaking the voter list, four days to identify all parties who may have viewed the unauthorized information.

The RCMP has launched a separate investigation to determine how the private information of millions of Alberta voters, including addresses and phone numbers, ended up in the Centurion Project’s possession.

Prime Minister Mark Carney said over the weekend that he was deeply concerned by the alleged privacy breach.

“I expect Elections Alberta and the RCMP to work thoroughly and expeditiously to assess the causes and to pursue appropriate actions against those responsible,” said Carney.

“We must be constantly vigilant to protect the rights of Canadians and the integrity of our democratic processes.”

Smith said in a statement on social media that she was aware of the potential data breach and would await the findings of Elections Alberta and the RCMP before commenting further.

Rath said the investigation into the Centurion Project and Republican Party of Alberta had “nothing to do” with his group’s petition.

He added that Carney was in no position to be voicing concerns about the Alberta citizen initiative process, given that he just obtained a majority government with the help of floor-crossers from other parties.

Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi said Monday afternoon that the voter data leak put the “entire petition in question.”

“They claim to have gotten the threshold number, or a little bit more, but we don’t know if that’s true. We don’t know how many of those names are fake,” said Nenshi.

Nenshi said a Mar. 24 social media sent from Rath’s account , urging supporters to go to the Centurion Project’s website to “learn how to get 1,000 supporters in 40 days” was a “smoking gun” proving Stay Free Alberta was compromised.

Stay Free Alberta CEO Mitch Sylvestre told reporters on Monday that he suspected the Centurion Project’s data mining app was illegal and did not use it when offered by the group’s founder David Parker.

Parker said in a social media post on Monday afternoon that he denied personally receiving or distributing unauthorized voter data.

He said he wouldn’t comment any further on the matter while the investigations were ongoing.

Smith’s office said they’d await both Elections Alberta’s verification of signatures and a pending court decision on the petition’s constitutionality before determining how to proceed.

Elections Alberta said in a statement Monday evening that the verification of the petition was on hold pending the resolution of the court challenge involving multiple Alberta First Nations.

National Post
rmohamed@postmedia.com

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OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney is expected to announce Canada’s next governor general on Tuesday morning. Mary Simon, the country’s first Indigenous Governor General, will not be reappointed to the vice-regal role after serving a five-year term.

CBC News, which first broke the news of the upcoming appointment , is reporting that the new appointee is expected to be fully bilingual in English and French and to be a woman.

“They’ll be bilingual,” confirmed Canadian Identity and Culture Minister Marc Miller.

Simon, who was born in northern Quebec, speaks Inuktitut and English fluently but said she was never given the opportunity to learn French as a child. She was however criticized during her mandate for not being able to speak Canada’s second official language.

At a time when the separatist Parti Québécois is leading in vote intentions to form government this fall and hold a third referendum during its first mandate, the federal government may want to make sure that they shield themselves from further criticism.

Carney said during a radio interview with Radio-Canada in April he was “absolutely” committed to nominating a new governor general who is bilingual in English and French.

On Monday, opposition parties applauded the decision. Conservative Quebec lieutenant Pierre Paul-Hus said bilingualism was a “minimum” requirement. Bloc Québécois MP Rhéal Fortin said it is a positive step but still thinks the role in itself should be eliminated.

Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said he briefly met Simon and her husband, Whit Fraser, on Monday. The minister lauded Simon as “a person of incredible integrity.”

“I hope whoever comes in has the same level of poise and distinction in serving Canadians,” he said.

Amid the speculation on who will be called to serve as King Charles’ representative in Canada, some bilingual MPs joked that they were not the chosen ones.

“It seems it’s not my turn,” said Conservative MP Jacques Gourde with a laugh.

“I’ll tell you, it’s not me,” said Liberal MP Dominique O’Rourke.

National Post
calevesque@postmedia.com

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