The Canadian Returnee Podcast

Trump’s late message to Quebec On the morning of Tuesday, October 27, Trump posted a one-line congratulation to Paul St-Pierre Plamondon on Truth Social. Quebec voted on October 5, so he took 22 days to say it. He attached an Irish Times piece from October 6 that calls the separatist win a blow to Mark Carney and says it could make it harder for the prime minister to keep the country united agains...

If you want one takeaway from Chrystia Freeland’s new memoir, “Unreliable Boyfriend”, it’s this: she thinks conceding to Donald Trump gets Canada more demands, not goodwill. She says Trump reads every concession as submission. So she backs Mark Carney’s decision to walk away from the trade talks, because in her telling, the U.S. asked too much and offered too little. She also says Canada has to re...

If you want one number from Alberta’s October 19 referendum, it’s 87%. That’s the share of Albertans who told Abacus Data the cost of living was a top concern. Only 6% put independence first. Question 10 asked whether Alberta should stay in Canada or start a legal process toward a binding separation vote. About 75% to 76% chose to remain, and 24% to 25% chose the separation process. Premier Daniel...

A Bill Stuck in Committee About 29% of status Indians could lose the legal ability to pass status to their children. The cause is the Indian Act’s second-generation cut-off, which blocks status when one parent is non-status and the other only got status through a single status parent. The Senate voted unanimously in December 2025 to pass Bill S-2. It would end that cut-off and the 1985 one, and go...

Ottawa is Planning for the Worst Prime Minister Mark Carney has Ottawa planning for “extreme tail risk,” meaning a scenario that’s very unlikely but would be severe if it happened. That now includes U.S. military action. President Trump keeps calling Canada the 51st state and has pointed to our water, oil and gas, and rare earth minerals. He’s said he’d use economic force, not the military, on Can...

Russians took 31.5 million trips abroad in 2025. That’s up 8% from the year before, and outbound travel spending hit $49.7 billion, the second-highest total since 2001. Sounds strange for a country under heavy Western sanctions consisting of trade and financial restrictions meant to cut off money and goods, doesn’t it? Analysts are calling it the “war middle class”: high government spending tied t...

Ottawa’s Immigration Backlog Due to Staffing Right now, newcomers from Hong Kong, Ukraine and Sudan all sit in the same queue: the Humanitarian and Compassionate program, or H&C , the category for people who don’t fit Canada’s normal immigration streams but have a strong enough case to stay. As of January 2026, those three groups made up 48% of the entire H&C waitlist. The 2026-2028 Immigration Le...

RBC and BMO are selling Moneris, the payment processing company they’ve jointly owned for 25 years, to Francisco Partners . That’s an American private equity firm based out of San Francisco. The price tag: $2 billion cash. Split evenly, so $1 billion each. RBC says it’ll book an after-tax gain of about $475 million on the deal. Moneris handles one in three business transactions in Canada. Over 5 b...

For nearly a century, every generation has scored a little better on IQ tests and school assessments than the one before it. Scientists call it the Flynn Effect, and it’s been one of those reliable facts about human progress . Well, Gen Z is the first generation where that trend has flipped. Researchers out of Norway and Denmark tracked hundreds of thousands of military conscripts and found IQ sco...

One in four Canadians says they’ve faced racial or ethnic discrimination, regularly or from time to time. Black and Indigenous folks are getting hit hardest, with two-thirds of Black Canadians saying they’ve been treated like they’re “not smart” or viewed with suspicion just for existing. There’s “edugration” where international students get treated like cash cows by universities, paying triple th...

In August 2026, activist Zhang Xinyan touches down at Vancouver airport, and it’s a huge relief. She’s a Falun Gong practitioner who fled China back in 2014, ended up as a UN-recognized refugee in Thailand, and then Hong Kong police slapped a HK$200,000 bounty on her head over “subversion” charges tied to her activism. Then Thai authorities scoop her up in May 2026 for an alleged visa overstay, an...

Hong Kong just tightened the screws even further with new national security rules that came into effect this year. We’re talking warrantless searches, cops demanding your passwords and encryption keys, and if you say no? You’re looking at fines and jail time. This isn’t just a “Hong Kong problem” despite popular stereotypes; it’s hitting Canadian banks and businesses operating there too. Seven Can...

Since the war started back in 2022, Canada’s contributed over $25.5 billion in total assistance and $8.5 billion in military aid. PM Mark Carney just announced a fresh $900 million package at the NATO Summit in Ankara; we’re talking ammo, armoured vehicles, and air defence systems that President Zelenskyy says have already landed. Canada’s not just writing cheques anymore. A Hamilton, Ontario comp...

Hong Kong rolled out some seriously sweeping new security laws. As of July 1st, there’s a new law pushing Communist Party ideology into schools, and it’s written broadly enough that human rights groups say it could be used to go after people and organizations anywhere in the world . Not exactly reassuring if you’ve got family or friends who’ve left Hong Kong for Canada. New rules mean police can n...

A 32-year-old Canadian named Biwei Zhang, a systems engineer who also went by “Claire Zhang,” was arrested in Belgium on July 24th . The charges? Working for an unnamed “third country” and being part of a criminal organization. She was doing an internship at SHAPE, which is basically NATO’s military command headquarters. Security at SHAPE noticed she was too curious about her coworkers, kept tryin...

Northern Ontario is on fire, and it’s worse than anything we’ve seen before. We’re talking over 7,250 square kilometres burned already . Some of these fires are ripping through 40 kilometres of forest in a single day. That’s the kind of speed you’d expect out in BC or Alberta, not northern Ontario. 13 communities have had to evacuate, and 12 of them are First Nations. We’re talking somewhere betwe...

As of mid-July 2026, the region is dealing with what’s being called an out-of-control, dynamic, and terrifying wildfire season. The big one, Thunder Bay 36, is now the largest fire in the region’s history, and it’s already blown past 350,000 hectares. Over 180 fires are burning across the north right now, and dozens of them are completely out of control. Namaygoosisagagun First Nation has been des...

American and Canadian cops just wrapped up something called Operation Hard Ball. We’re talking 37 people charged, over 1,000 kilos of cocaine seized, and a direct line drawn to one of the most explosive stories in recent Canadian history: the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Three crime groups, one massive network. The FBI, RCMP, LAPD, and border officials went after three interconnected Indian-ba...

On July 1st, the U.S. officially said “not so fast” to a 16-year extension of CUSMA (that’s the Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade deal, formerly NAFTA). Instead, we’re now locked into a decade of annual reviews. Every single year, all three countries have to sit down and hash things out. Just a rolling ten-year countdown to 2036, when the whole deal could expire if nobody agrees on something more permanent...

Prime Minister Mark Carney and B.C. Premier David Eby unveiled a 10-year, $5-billion deal on June 18th covering transit, health care, wastewater, and housing . The headline-grabber? A plan to buy up over 2,200 unsold condo units sitting empty across Metro Vancouver and convert them into “attainable” housing for middle-income British Columbians. The federal government says it’s the fastest way to g...

Remember Bill C-3? That’s the law that came into effect back in December that finally let “Lost Canadians” people born abroad to a Canadian parent , no matter how many generations back, claim citizenship. Big win for a lot of families who’d been shut out for years. Well, IRCC just sent out letters demanding that some of these brand-new citizens hand their certificates back. We’re talking anywhere...

On June 8, 2026, Louise Arbour was officially sworn in as Canada’s 31st Governor General in a ceremony at the Senate. The 79-year-old Montreal-born lawyer and former Supreme Court justice takes over from Mary Simon, who made history as the first Indigenous person to hold the role. Arbour prosecuted war criminals at the international tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, including being t...

Toronto police have made a series of arrests in two separate hate crime investigations, and both are deeply troubling. The first involves a group of people who drove around North York in a blue Lexus SUV, shooting gel-blaster guns at Jewish residents once near Bathurst and Lawrence, and again outside a synagogue near the 401. Seven people have been charged so far, including two teens, with two mor...

The 2025 U.S. News Best Countries ranking dropped Canada from 2nd place all the way down to 19th, sitting one spot behind the United States. Now, part of that is a big change in how they’re measuring things. They ditched the old reputation-based surveys and switched to 100 hard data points across eight categories. So it’s less about how the world feels about us, and more about what’s actually happ...

The US just hit pause on one of the longest-running defence partnerships in North American history, and it’s a pretty big deal. On May 18th, the Pentagon announced it’s suspending its participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, a body that’s been running since 1940 . That’s 86 years of continuous Canada-U.S. military cooperation gone quiet overnight. U.S. Undersecretary Elbridge Colby p...