Alex

Canada is facing an existential, geopolitical crisis that only seems to exist when the government needs to pass conservative legislation. When a private corporation stands to make a profit, suddenly everything's fine again and it's business as usual.

Not just you! I work with a structured gap-year program in Canada, and this year's students are blowing us away with their openness and enthusiasm.

That the City is acting on "tree equity" is a good sign. The proven benefits of contact with nature are overwhelming, and access to it is too often split along socioeconomic lines.

Every year, the Government of Canada collects public input to inform its budget priorities.

The survey takes less than 10 minutes, or send in a written submission if you have more to say.

Yesssss

What d'you know, people in Ottawa actually want to use transit when it's affordable! I wonder if the City could take a lesson from that..?

What could possibly go wrong

The CPC gave the Liberals an incredible gift in not turfing Poilievre immediately, but Carney is squandering that with one regressive bill after another. NDP supporters who voted strategically last election won't do it again if this is what the LPC has to offer.

Every flashbang could instead be a meal for a poor kid. Every hotel room for a National Guardsman deployed to fire at our neighbors could house a homeless vet. Every "less-than-lethal" bullet pulled from a journalist's eye could be already needed healthcare for anyone else. All of this is a choice.

Like any tool, GenAI is only useful if you know what it's for how to use it, and how to protect yourself from its hazards. I fear there are too many people who see it as a magic box of knowledge and are going to get badly burned.

Lawyers have screwed up their careers by using the Bullshit Generating Machine to create legal documents and not catching the bullshit before it became hugely consequential. You, a non-lawyer, are even more vulnerable to an LLM's failings.

An LLM doesn't know whether a clause that's commonly used elsewhere is illegal in your jurisdiction, and it doesn't know whether including that clause will cause the clause itself to be severed from the contract or invalidate the enture contract. /

ChatGPT doesn't know the difference between the legal and casual definition of key terms, or the potential devastating consequences of using a term the wrong way. /

Just spoke with someone who proudly announced that they use ChatGPT as their small business's "legal advisor." As a former lawyer I am BEGGING y'all not to do this. LLMs don't know the law; they only know how to string together sentences that sound plausible. 🧵

I don't miss practicing law, but I do miss reading decisions from sassy judges about small-town drama

The cardinal is enthusiastically stripping all the flower heads off my caraway, and I think I'm just going to let him.

I just looked out my window and there's a chipmunk, a cardinal, a robin, a sparrow and a tiny bunny all just hanging out in my backyard

*dystopian

Here are the SpaceX employees who were elected to run Musk's new company town of Starbase, Texas Elon Musk's SpaceX prevailed in an election over the weekend to turn Starbase into a city that's now led by employees.

Funny, the return of company towns was a plot point in Octavia E. Butler's dystopia Parable series (set in 2024 onwards). Ditto for LA burning in 2024 and a Christofascist president getting elected on a promise to "make America great again."

www.cnbc.com/2025/05/05/s...

I used to read @thecoast.ca's print edition religiously, finding out about all the shows my homebody ass was never going to attend, because it felt nice just knowing that I was part of a vibrant community

As a former lawyer who represented IRS survivors during that process - survivors had a very real concern about privacy and gave their testimony on the assurances that their privacy would be protected. It's a hard case but their stories belong to them, not the country that subjected them to horrors.

Directly from Trans Lifeline themselves: translifeline.org/clarifying-m...

Directing Americans to the Canadian number - which is set up for a much smaller population - could end up flooding their capacity and making the service unavailable to trans people in Canada.

I applaud the sentiment behind sharing this, but it's false information. The number shown is the Canadian number for Trans Lifeline, which is also available in the US. translifeline.org

Add @skepchick.org to this list, too!

Ugh, just in case his feud with PP made you feel a tiny bit more warmly towards Ford...this'll cure it.

Please help us correct misinformation!

Our hotline is being incorrectly shared as "Canada's national suicide hotline open toll free for Americans".

We are not a general crisis hotline, we exist exclusively to support the trans community.

Find out more @ translifeline.org

*radicalized

I've seen a trend of previously progressive people getting reladicalized and pushed rightward during the pandemic. There's also a subset of people who are driven by populism rather than traditional right vs left politics. It's like the New Yorkers who voted for both AOC and Trump.

Step 1. Are You Eligible To Be a Candidate? - Becoming a Candidate Tools for Nomination Contestants.

No problem! Here's what Elections Canada has to say: www.elections.ca/content.aspx...