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Aug 4 2025

The Roundup: Byelection security. Gun culture. Ukrainian hackers.

MON AUG 4 2025
David Akin's Roundup
Byelection security. Gun culture. Ukrainian hackers.
Canada
Elections Canada adds security ahead of Alberta byelection amid reported threats
Elections Canada has hired security guards in advance of this month's byelection in Battle River-Crowfoot, candidates were told Friday. [CBC]

Canada’s new trade minister aims to boost deals in South America, Asia, and Africa, and urges firms to use existing trade pacts more effectively. [Global]
Brigitte Pellerin: Some excitable corners of conservative twitter have already started demanding Prime Minister Mark Carney resign over his failure to achieve a deal, which most Canadians who haven’t drunk any bleach at all this week agree is an impossible goal.  Canadians on April 28 voted for the leader they thought was best suited to deal with this menace and from where I sit there is no clear indication that they’ve changed their minds about who that leader is. [Substack]
Scott Anderson: This is a powerful essay by the same person, Dr. Parrish, who was with me over the past two weeks in Ukraine, travelling the front line and meeting various people (yes I paid for the trip myself, and yes, as a member of the National Defence Committee I have a reason for being there). This is the second time I've been over there... [Facebook]
I'm including this post from MP Calkins to make this observation: Guns are the "happy place" for both Conservatives and Liberals. When one party or the other needs a fundraising hot button, they roll out "guns". For the Conservatives, it's memes like this -- that celebrate "gun culture" with a warning that Liberals will take away guns from law-abiding gun owners. It's been one of the Conservatives greatest fundraising hits for two decades. Conservatives love posts like this.

For Liberals, commitments to "tighten gun control" is just as much of a fundraising hit among that party's supporters. And when the party is in political trouble -- the first call in the Liberal playbook is to trot out some kind of gun control announcement. Indeed, the day after Justin Trudeau was confronted in Winnipeg with his "blackface/brownface" history during the 2019 campaign, he flew to Toronto to stand with gun violence victims on the Danforth and commit to tighter gun control. It was the channel changer Liberals at the time apparently needed.

The party that gets squeezed on the gun issue though is the NDP. New Democrats have had success in rural northern Ontario, rural northern Saskatchewan; rural northern BC, the Arctic -- and constituents in those ridings don't like long gun registries and other "tight gun control measures". But urban New Democrats -- in downtown Toronto and Vancouver -- like the Liberal line on guns. So the NDP can be a bit conflicted on guns and, if the LIberals or Conservatives want to use guns as a wedge issue, well, that works great for both Liberals and Conservatives -- not so much for New Democrats. - DA.
The Provinces
As premiers push for more immigration power, experts call for a fact-based debate
"Most of the existing policies have been formulated on the fly without any evidence or serious impact evaluations of what the various classes of immigrants are, how they're performing economically and otherwise," said Michael Trebilcock, a retired academic and co-author of two books on immigration policy. "So it's basically research-free." [CP]
The main fight seems to pit the leader of the Conservative Party of Quebec, Éric Duhaime, and Parti Québécois candidate Alex Boissonneault. The Coalition is running Keven Brasseur in attempt to hold the riding, while the Opposition Quebec Liberals and Québec solidaire are also running candidates. [CP]
Aurora
Elsewhere

The two-day joint military deployment that kicked off on Sunday is likely to anger China, which claims nearly the entire key waterway and has separate territorial disputes with the two Asian countries. [Al Jazeera]

Two pro-Ukrainian hacker groups, meanwhile, took credit for the attack. Silent Crow, one of the groups, said on Telegram that its members copied the airline's entire database of flight history, audio recordings, internal calls, and surveillance data. “Restoration will likely require tens of millions of dollars,” the group claimed. “The damage is strategic.” [Ars Technica]
The Yale Budget Lab estimated last week that the average cost of Trump's tariffs to the American household would be $2,400 this year, with clothes and textiles likely to see the biggest effects. [NPR]
Media
Curate your own newspaper with RSS
Escape newsletter inbox chaos and algorithmic surveillance by building your own enshittification-proof newspaper from the writers you already read. [Citation Needed]
Dan Balz: By the time you read this, I will have retired from full-time work at The Washington Post after 47 years. From here forward, my esteemed colleague and good friend, Karen Tumulty, will take over this space. I couldn’t be happier. There are no surer hands than hers. [WaPo] (🎁 link)
Science and Technology
“Reddit knows that it has valuable data from actual people — it’s already reached deals with big AI companies like OpenAI and Google to share its data with them. But Reddit is also investing in improving its own search capabilities, and in its latest note to investors, CEO Steve Huffman says that the company is ‘concentrating our resources on the areas that will drive results for our most pressing needs,’ including ‘making Reddit a go-to search engine.'” [The Verge]
The Calendar
  • 1615 ET : Nanaimo, BC - PM Carney tours the Canadian Forces Maritime Experimental and Test Ranges.
Issued this day ...
… in 1982. Sc 968. Royal Canadian Henley Regatta. Design: Bernard N.J. Reilander. Illustration: Tom McNeely.
This year's regatta is underway all this week in St. Catharines, ON. 

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