Tag: canada

CRA records show temporary residents received $1.35 billion in child benefits over four years

Newly obtained Canada Revenue Agency records show temporary residents received more than $1.35 billion in Canada Child Benefit (CCB) payments between 2020 and 2023, including $369.1 million in 2023 alone.

The figures were disclosed in response to an access-to-information request seeking a breakdown of Canada Child Benefit payments by immigration status.

According to the records, temporary residents received $313.8 million in CCB payments in 2020, $356.3 million in 2021, $311.1 million in 2022, and $369.1 million in 2023, for a four-year total of approximately $1.35 billion.

The 2023 figures show temporary residents received more in child benefit payments than protected persons and refugees, who received $345.9 million that year. The CRA also reported nearly $18.9 million in payments to individuals classified as having “no status.”

The Canada Child Benefit is a tax-free monthly payment intended to help eligible families with the cost of raising children. Eligibility is not limited to Canadian citizens. Certain temporary residents may qualify if they meet residency requirements and have valid immigration status.

The records also show permanent residents received $6.29 billion in child benefit payments in 2023, while Canadian citizens received $18.76 billion. Total federal CCB spending that year exceeded $25.8 billion.

CRA notes accompanying the records state that individuals listed under “No Status” and “Unknown” may still qualify for benefits if their spouse was a Canadian citizen, permanent resident, protected person, or temporary resident during the year.

Keep reading

Stampede Grinches: City Hall aims to end Calgary nightlife

By weaponizing Calgary’s noise bylaws, city officials are saddling the nearly 30-year-old Cowboys Music Festival tradition with new sound restrictions and time limits that has long-time festival organizers panicking.

The result is a regulatory squeeze that could make it impossible for the festivals like the world famous Cowboys Music Festival to run its full, star-studded lineup. If you were looking forward to seeing Jason Aldean, Sean Paul or Jason Derulo at the nearly sold-out event, you can thank City Hall for killing the vibe.

According to a Calgary city noise permit issued for the event, once midnight hits on the weekend, the current rules force volume limits down to 65 decibels, which is the volume of a regular, everyday conversation.

The restrictions get even tighter during the week, choking the music down to a microscopic 50 decibels, the volume of a quiet recording studio, at midnight, before forcing the speakers to unplug completely by 12:30 AM.

In an exclusive interview with Juno News, Penny Lane Entertainment CEO, Paul Vickers said the abrupt changes from City Hall came suddenly and gave them very little wiggle room.

“This is not something you do three weeks before Stampede,” Vickers said. “You give everybody time to digest it. Last year, we had a whole year to talk about this. We had a really smooth Stampede last year. We had a really good community effort with everyone.”

Keep reading

Military doesn’t know how many recruits hold citizenship in China, Iran, Russia or other non-NATO states

The Canadian Armed Forces has recruited nearly 3,000 permanent residents since opening enlistment to non-citizens in late 2022, but military officials admit they do not track the foreign citizenships of those recruits.

The disclosure came in response to an order paper question from Conservative MP Scott Anderson regarding the CAF’s recruitment of permanent residents.

According to the Department of National Defence, the military enrolled 1,844 permanent residents into the regular force and another 1,017 into the reserve force between December 2022 and May 2026, for a total of 2,861 recruits.

Recruitment accelerated dramatically over the past year, with more than 1,800 permanent residents joining during the 2025-26 fiscal year alone.

The military also revealed that permanent residents are permitted to serve in dozens of occupations, including infantry, artillery, combat engineering, logistics, military police, intelligence-related roles, aerospace operations, naval positions and a variety of technical trades.

But when Anderson asked how many of those permanent residents were citizens of countries outside NATO, the government said it simply doesn’t know.

“The Canadian Armed Forces does not centrally record members’ citizenship of countries other than Canada,” the department replied.

The admission means the military cannot say how many permanent-resident recruits hold citizenship in countries such as China, Iran, Russia, Pakistan or any other non-NATO state.

The department also acknowledged that it cannot determine how many of those recruits have since become Canadian citizens because that information is not tracked in a way that can be readily reported.

The figures come as the CAF continues to grapple with a recruiting crisis and personnel shortages. In an effort to boost numbers, the military opened many occupations to permanent residents in 2022, ending a longstanding preference for Canadian citizens.

Since then, 292 permanent-resident recruits have already left the CAF, including 234 regular force members and 58 reservists.

While the CAF can provide detailed breakdowns of where permanent residents serve and what ranks they hold, it cannot say how many are citizens of foreign countries outside Canada’s military alliances.

Keep reading

Canadian Mother Sues OpenAI, Alleging Chatbot Encouraged Daughter’s Suicide

A Canadian mother is suing OpenAI after its popular ChatGPT chatbot allegedly encouraged her daughter to continue engaging with the app after she revealed suicidal thoughts.

Instead of terminating these discussions or flagging her account for safety concerns, ChatGPT allegedly escalated the exchanges in the days before the woman ultimately took her life, according to a press release.

The Social Media Victims Law Center, Tech Justice Law, and the firm Susman Godfrey filed a lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court against OpenAI on June 11 on behalf of Kristie Carrier.

Her daughter, Alice Carrier, 24, committed suicide on July 2, 2025. After reviewing her daughter’s devices, Kristie Carrier said she had found extensive conversations with ChatGPT in which her daughter expressed thoughts of self-harm in the months before her death.

In the exchanges, her daughter allegedly told the chatbot that she was feeling isolated and discussed possible suicide methods. The lawsuit accuses ChatGPT of escalating these conversations in the days before the woman’s suicide, rather than terminating the exchange or flagging her account “for human intervention,” the press release states.

These exchanges allegedly encouraged Alice Carrier to continue engaging with ChatGPT, causing “her further isolation from her human support system and ultimately, suicide,” according to a press release.

“If a person came up to me, and they were clearly in distress and sharing their thoughts of suicide, I would be expected to help them, not encourage them to fixate on their depressive thoughts or isolate themselves,” Kristie Carrier said in the press release.

“The same should be true of OpenAI. Instead, OpenAI has chosen to put out a product that was unsafe, and that they knew was unsafe but they did so without any concern for the consequences of their choices. Sam Altman can continue to go about his life normally, but my life is missing a child. This is unacceptable,” she added.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

This is not the first time, nor the second time, a parent has sued OpenAI, accusing its chatbot of encouraging their child to commit suicide.

Last year, the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project filed seven lawsuits against the AI giant, claiming ChatGPT had isolated multiple users from their support systems, and in some cases, coached the victims into taking their own lives.

Matthew Raine testified to Congress in September 2025 after suing OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman.

Raine alleged that his son, Adam, took his own life after ChatGPT mentioned suicide more than 1,200 times to the 16-year-old. He accused ChatGPT of offering specific methods to his son on how to die by suicide, and continuing to validate and encourage the boy’s feelings.

“As parents, you cannot imagine what it’s like to read a conversation with a chatbot that groomed your child to take his own life,” Raine told lawmakers at the time.

Justin Nelson, a partner at Susman Godfrey, said on June 11 that OpenAI’s “deliberate design decisions” led to Alice Carrier’s suicide.

“Instead of providing help, OpenAI encouraged suicidal behavior. This lawsuit is about accountability for OpenAI’s actions,” he said in the press release.

Keep reading

Ontario Court grants TDF Amish client leave to appeal Quarantine Act convictions

The Democracy Fund (TDF) is pleased with the Ontario Court of Justice’s decision granting leave to appeal in a Quarantine Act ticket case.

The client, a member of the Amish community from southern Ontario, allegedly failed to complete the ArriveCan app or PCR testing when crossing the border. He received a $6,500 ticket but never received notice of a trial date or conviction. When the ticket went unpaid, the municipality sent it to collections, complicating his ability to get loans for the farming equipment he uses to farm his land and feed his family. TDF sought to have the ticket reopened, but the court refused – an outcome inconsistent with TDF’s other Amish ticket reopening cases.

TDF’s legal defence of the Amish challenges convictions totalling over $300,000 dollars issued under the Quarantine Act for alleged non-compliance with ArriveCAN app and PCR testing requirements during Canada’s COVID-19 border measures.

The Amish have a religious prohibition on any modern technology, including smartphones, computers, and software applications. This makes interacting with the modern world difficult. TDF’s Amish clients were convicted in absentia; they received no meaningful notice of the tickets or court dates.

TDF Director of Litigation Adam Blake-Gallipeau, who has represented multiple Amish families throughout these proceedings, stated:

“We are cautiously optimistic that once the Ontario Court of Justice reviews this decision, it will reverse the lower court’s ruling. Canadian courts should understand the Amish community’s traditional way of life within the broader context of religious freedom. The Amish live simply according to their Biblical principles, provide for their families through subsistence farming, and lack the means to pay the massive fines that threaten the existence of their communities. We intend to impress upon the Court the serious issues at stake, including inadequate notice and the inconsistent treatment of nearly identical reopening applications. We’re hopeful that these convictions will be overturned on appeal.”

Keep reading

Canada’s Bill C-34 Would Require ID or Face Scan to Use Social Media

Canada’s long-anticipated and dreaded Bill C-34 arrived on June 10 with the usual fanfare about protecting children.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Marc Miller, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, tabled it.

Strip off the press release and what is left is a law that lets an appointed federal body order Canadians’ posts deleted across the country, decide which platforms can give an account to a 15-year-old, and tell AI chatbots to watch what you type.

It also bans Canadians under 16 from social media by charging the whole country for it, in the currency of everyone’s privacy.

The government calls it the Safe Social Media Act. Safe for whom is the question it would rather you not dwell on.

The law creates a Digital Safety Commission of Canada. Cabinet appoints its three to five members. The same body writes the rules, runs the inspections, hears the complaints, and hands out the fines, which is a regulator and a courtroom folded into one office that answers to no voter.

Everything hangs on a phrase the bill declines to nail down, “harmful content.” There are seven categories, among them “content used to bully a child” and “content that foments hatred.”

The drafters did take the trouble to say content is not hateful merely because it “discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends,” which is more care than these laws usually take.

It also changes very little because the people drawing the line day to day are the platforms, working from rules the Commission can rewrite whenever it wants. The edge of what a Canadian is allowed to say can shift without anyone in Parliament casting a vote.

So here is how a deletion goes. A platform decides it has “reasonable grounds to suspect” your post is child sexual abuse material or an intimate image shared without consent.

From that moment it has 24 hours to make the post inaccessible to every person in Canada. Down first, explained afterward. You can file representations and request a reconsideration, and your words stay gone the entire time you are waiting. Or someone skips you altogether and reports the post to the Commission, which can order it made “permanently inaccessible.” No judge appears anywhere in that sequence.

The definitions get bigger the longer you look at them. “Intimate content communicated without consent” now reaches AI images “likely to be mistaken for” a real recording of a person.

As a ban on revenge porn; reasonable, depending on how it’s implemented. But as written, those same words also cover a tasteless deepfake of a sitting politician, and the person sorting one from the other works for the company that gets fined either way.

Companies do not agonize over that distinction. They delete and move on.

Keep reading

Canadian Lyme sufferers pushed to state euthanasia while the US steps up

Lyme disease is surging across southeastern Ontario as black-legged ticks invade backyards, trails, and parks, driving a sharp rise in infections that health officials can no longer ignore.

Caused by the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi, Lyme disease often strikes with deceptive early symptoms or no symptoms at all. This includes fatigue, fever, and the telltale bullseye rash, which sometimes doesn’t come until weeks or months later.

Lyme is a stealthy, corkscrew-shaped spiral bacterium that drills deep into tissues, joints, and the nervous system, making it incredibly difficult to detect and hard to eradicate.

Missed early treatment can lead to chronic, debilitating pain, inflammation, and long-term illness. This can be amplified by a lack of initial symptoms or pesky co-infections, including Babesia, Bartonella, Anaplasma, and Ehrlichia.

Due to a high variability of symptoms, there aren’t necessarily textbook presentations, which can complicate diagnoses and treatment leading to more severe or atypical manifestations.

In the United States, they’re confronting this epidemic head-on.

HHS Secretary Kennedy announced concrete action to tackle Lyme, including a major multi-million-dollar tick control pilot, up to $2.5 million in Lyme innovation challenges, improved diagnostics, and a goal to reduce cases by 25% by 2035 relative to 2022 levels.

Keep reading

Carney using kids’ safety as cover to strip Canadians’ freedom

The Liberal government is preparing to introduce a new digital safety bill that would ban social media for users under 16, but on Tuesday’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra said this new legislation has nothing to do with protecting children.

“Parents can limit what their kids watch with the push of a button,” he said. “This is really about everyone else. Again, using kids as the excuse.”

The bill, reported by the Globe and Mail ahead of its introduction, would create a new digital regulator to establish safety standards for social media platforms. It would also address artificial intelligence and chatbots.

But the mechanism required to enforce an under-16 ban, Ezra noted, is the problem. To determine who is under 16, every user would need to verify their age — meaning every Canadian would need to hand their personal identification to the government just to log on.

“Mark Carney wants to make everyone sign into the internet,” he said. “It’s not actually about kids, is it?”

Ezra drew a direct line to the Liberals’ past censorship efforts, noting that child protection and anti-terrorism provisions have repeatedly been used as packaging for speech regulation bills — provisions that already exist in the Criminal Code, added as a distraction from the bills’ real purpose.

“Governments use children as a cover for their plots,” he reminded viewers.

The timing raised eyebrows, as the day before Canada’s announcement, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivered an almost identical speech calling on tech companies to introduce device controls to prevent children from sending and receiving explicit images.

Ezra said the parallel is not a coincidence. “On everything from censorship and digital ID to environmentalism and mass immigration, I really think Keir Starmer is setting a lot of Canadian policy,” he said.

The irony, he noted, is that Starmer has refused to call a meaningful public inquiry into the U.K.’s rape gangs and even vigorously opposed one when he was the country’s chief prosecutor.

“What a laugh to pretend he cares about kids,” Ezra said.

Another provision in the bill would grant the Canadian government a security backdoor into any app it chooses. Ezra also pointed out that every major social media platform in Canada is American owned, meaning new fines and restrictions would amount to a tax on U.S. tech firms.

Keep reading

Woke Canadian lawmakers fly into hilarious rage after conservative asks country’s top scientist to define a woman

Liberal members of Canada‘s parliament desperately tried to silence a conservative member when he asked the country’s chief science advisor to define a woman.

At a recent meeting of the parliament’s Standing Committee on Science and Research, conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Vincent Ho asked, ‘What is the definition of a woman?’

The simple question immediately sparked outrage with other members of the committee, who jumped down Ho’s throat and seemingly attempted to prevent Chief Science Advisor Mona Nemer from replying. 

Ho asked the scientist: ‘Before you became chief science advisor, you were a molecular geneticist by training, right? So you know a thing or two about X and Y chromosomes. So, I wanted to ask you, what is the definition of a woman?’

Immediately, Liberal Party of Canada MP John-Paul Danko took issue with the question and said: ‘Point of order, chair. Point of order.’ 

A point of order is a formal request to enforce chamber rules addressed to a speaker or committee chair, and it is typically issued when MPs believe there has been a breach of procedure.

‘It is pride month, in understanding Order 18, which prohibits personal attacks, insults and offensive language,’ Danko continued, before Committee Chair Salma Zahid interrupted him and said: ‘This is getting into debate.’ 

Undeterred, Danko raised his voice and said, ‘Where this question is going is highly offensive. Highly offensive. I ask the member to withdraw his comments.’ 

Zahid, who is also a member of the Liberal Party of Canada, then repeated, ‘This is getting into debate. I will deal with it. MP Ho, I would request to be respectful of everybody.’

The conservative MP explained that he was asking the question because the Census asks people to state their gender and sex, and he wanted to understand the chief science advisor’s ‘view on this.’ 

Another Liberal Party of Canada MP, Taleeb Noormohamed, then also raised a point of order and said: ‘The witness is here in her capacity as the chief science advisor. 

‘Her opinion on any matter as an individual is actually not relevant to her mandate. And so if the question is in the scope of her mandate, I would be interested to see if Mr Ho could rephrase the question… within the context of her mandate.’ 

Zahid accepted the point of order and asked Ho to reframe his question, to which the conservative MP replied, ‘I just want to hear the answer.’

After a bit more back and forth, Nemer, the chief science advisor, was finally able to answer Ho’s question. 

Keep reading

Signal, DuckDuckGo, and NordVPN threaten to exit Canada if metadata surveillance law passes

Another day, another government attempt to force tech companies to build backdoors. This time, Canada is proposing legislation that would require companies to retain certain metadata and provide law enforcement with access to it. Predictably, many tech players have sharply criticized the proposal, with some saying they would rather leave the Canadian market than comply.

The latest version of Canada’s Bill C-22 would require digital services such as internet service providers, messaging platforms, email providers, and potentially hardware companies to retain up to one year of user metadata. In addition, tech companies would have to implement mechanisms that allow authorities to obtain “lawful access” to that information for criminal investigations. Critics argue the proposal amounts to another government-mandated backdoor.

During his testimony before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, Signal executive Udbhav Tiwari said Bill C-22 would turn everyday digital tools into a surveillance network. He argued that requiring companies to retain metadata about users’ communications runs counter to Signal’s privacy practices.

A spokesperson for DuckDuckGo also confirmed that the company would remove its VPN service from Canada if Bill C-22 passes. NordVPN and other VPN providers have made similar statements.

Apple and Google have also joined industry warnings that the legislation could force them to weaken encryption. Last year, Apple successfully opposed a similar proposal in the United Kingdom that would have required it to build a backdoor into iCloud. The incident was the latest in a series of conflicts between the Cupertino-based company and government regulators over security and user privacy.

The primary concern is that malicious actors would inevitably discover and exploit any digital backdoor, regardless of whether it was designed exclusively for law enforcement or domestic government agencies. OpenMedia, which has described C-22 as an attempt to create a surveillance state, pointed to a late-2024 incident in which Chinese state-backed hackers compromised government-mandated police wiretap systems to steal sensitive data from AT&T, Verizon, Lumen Technologies, and other telecom providers.

Keep reading