The News Rundown

Alberta municipal elections 2025

The municipal elections across Alberta have concluded and both Edmonton and Calgary have new mayors.
Andrew Knack secured the 4 year mayoral term with just under 38% of the vote while Tim Cartmell trailed by about 17,000 votes.
In Edmonton 4 wards saw new councillors. Incumbent councillor Jennifer Rice was defeated, stories emerged that Rice bullied employees in her office and created a toxic working environment.
The other new councillors came from ward sipiwiyiniwak where councillor Sarah Hamilton did not run for re-election, Andrew Knack’s ward, and Tim Cartmell’s ward.
We’ll get back to sipiwiyiniwak later.
Calgary saw the tentative election of Jeromy Farkas who narrowly beat Sonya Sharp by 581 votes. Sonya Sharp has since requested a recount.
Incumbent mayor Jyoti Gondek lost with 20.5% of the vote.
The discontent around mayor Gondek has been a sore point over the last 4 years with the mayor facing a recall campaign over zoning changes and general discontent.
Calgary council saw 10 of 14 wards receive new councillors with 2 incumbents going down in defeat. Landon Johnston who started the Gondek recall campaign won in ward 14.
Calgary had their full results in by about 4am on Tuesday. Edmonton’s results were another story.
Full results for Edmonton were not in until late on Tuesday.
The City of Edmonton blamed the problem on staff shortages with, “election workers who were hired, trained and assigned to voting stations, but unfortunately, their circumstances changed and they were not able to join us today.”
There were also concerns about long line ups that the city pointed to new provincial requirements that voters fill out a voter identification form.
The process involved electors filling out a Statement of Eligibility and then voter information being looked up on a computer before receiving 3 ballots.
In the provincial and federal elections there is one station per poll and each poll has a list of every person who can vote at that polling station.
The rules for these elections were put in place in early 2024 and Minister of Municipal Affairs Dan Williams said the government will be conducting an after action report following long lineups, slow counting, and missing ballots.
Williams said, “I expect all provincial laws to be followed and every single ballot to be counted. We always do an after-action report, and there’s the possibility of recounts. I’m open to all of these conversations, and I want to make sure that we have confidence in it.”
The cities have been opposed to all the changes including mandatory voter ID checks (which happen provincially and federally), hand counting, and political parties.
There is a definite blame the province campaign at play but not one media outlet this week pointed out that the province and country can count all their ballots by hand one night.
At a Thursday news conference Tim Cartmell outlined concerns about the election process after the need for a recount in ward sipiwiyiniwak.
Initially the count showed that Better Edmonton candidate Darrel Friesen won by 6 votes.
A recount was ordered by the city on Wednesday and it led to a more than 600 vote shift, ordinarily recounts shift votes by single digits or no more than a dozen.
The city said that through ballot accounting, the process used to confirm accuracy of preliminary results, there was an administrative error.
Effectively there are counting sheets for each table, consolidated tally sheets, and the final statement of results, then the final entry into the voter view results system.
The error occurred with the transposition of the tally sheets.
While counting the advance vote ballots at the Edmonton EXPO centre, the counting teams found one candidate, Roger Kotch, was missing from the first tally sheet and manually added it.
The counting results were correctly recorded on that tally sheet. But when the votes were transposed the results were copied over incorrectly as the names were not in the correct order.
This saw Thu Parmar gain more than 600 votes and come out ahead. Though the very interesting thing about this process is that in the recount the counters somehow counted 203 fewer votes total across all candidates.
All candidates including Friesen and Cartmell have faith in the final election results.
But with that being said, there will be a push amongst those in administration at the city to use this as a reason to move back to machine counted votes.
There’d also been a lot of talk in Edmonton particular about whether or not the issues heard on the campaign trail materialized with almost all incumbents being re-elected.
But one thing that is clear if you look at the mayoral race and a good portion of the wards, there was a definite split on the anti-incumbent, centre right side of the vote spectrum.
This is something that parties should consider come 2029.
Knack in Edmonton said that, “Edmontonians spoke loud and clear, choosing optimism and hope over big money and party politics.”
But did they? The Working Families Edmonton coalition that has support from groups like unions and the NDP endorsed a slate of candidates. But since they were not a party or slate, they did not have their name appear on the ballots.
Of those elected in Edmonton, 8 including Andrew Knack were endorsed by Working Families.
While the media is happy to say that parties did not play a role, endorsements that are party lite, like 2021 played a major role in this election.
As part of the after action report it would be wise for the province to look into the actions of groups like Working Families and encourage more proactive disclosure for next time.
Meanwhile the media shallowness of their coverage was on full display despite two new mayors being elected and two major recounts.
Municipal elections are often overlooked, candidates often overshoot what their role is, and people get antsy when the provincial government puts their foot down despite that being their job.
Supplementals:

An ongoing news story that we haven't talked about yet in BC is the case of Universal Ostrich Farm in Edgewood BC, a small town located east of Kelowna. The ostrich farm is currently home to around 300 ostriches, and for much of 2025 has been the subject of an intense legal battle between the farm's owners and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) over a detected H5N1 bird flu outbreak in December 2024.
The CFIA has ordered the flock culled according to its standard "stamping out" policy, as their protocol follows a World Organization for Animal Health policy that requires all animals in a flock to be destroyed if H5N1 shows up in one bird. The CFIA maintains that even healthy-looking birds can spread the virus and that the "stamping out" policy is necessary to control the disease.
CFIA said that its policy “aims to protect both public and animal health, as well as minimize impacts on the $6.8 billion domestic poultry industry, and the Canadian economy. This supports Canadian families and poultry farmers whose livelihoods depend on maintaining international market access for $1.75 billion in exports,” it concluded.
Meanwhile, the farm, co-owned by David Bilinski and Karen Espersen, has been fighting the cull order in court, and has gathered a large body of supporters, including many who see the order as government overreach. The owners claim the surviving ostriches are healthy and should not be destroyed, as they are important for research and the farm's own survival. The farm claims the ostriches are not actually used for food products, just research and studying the “robust” immune systems of ostriches, according to the farm itself.
The website says: “The farmers believe their farm has the potential to provide critical insights into managing and controlling diseases in wild populations, such as migratory ducks and other wildlife species.”
According to the farm’s website, on Dec. 10, 2024, a three-year-old ostrich exhibited symptoms similar to pneumonia. Despite recovering, the farm says, some younger ostriches fell ill, resulting in 69 deaths among the 468 ostriches — or 15 per cent of the original herd — over a 36-day period.
It claims that only birds that arrived at the farm after 2020 became ill and that ostriches previously exposed to a bacterial infection in 2020 showed no new symptoms or deaths, suggesting the birds had achieved “herd immunity.”
Currently, The Supreme Court of Canada has issued a temporary stay of the cull order while it considers the farm's appeal.
The situation has garnered significant public attention, and the RCMP has been involved at the request of the CFIA for operational support, especially as the farm's supporters have been continually trying to breach the quarantine zone the CFIA has set up. The clash with federal agencies has drawn hundreds of people to the farm. Their interest is founded in residual post-pandemic mistrust of the government, doubts over the efficacy of vaccines and calls for more evidence that the birds were ill in the first place.
On Friday, Oct. 17, social media personality Jim Kerr was arrested after allegedly crossing a quarantine line. RCMP say Kerr was taken into custody under the Health of Animals Act for obstructing federal agents. Kerr identified himself in social media posts, where he actively advocates for animal rights. He was later released on the condition he does not return to the property. This is not the first arrest at the farm. On Sept. 23, two others were detained for obstructing CFIA officers.
While the fate of the ostriches remains undecided, the outcome of the case could set a precedent for how animal disease outbreaks are handled on farms across Canada, and also how much power the federal government has when it thinks outbreaks have occurred. While many might see this story and see it as being just about ostriches, it could actually have far reaching consequences for how the Canadian government conducts future pandemic responses, and we know there will be another pandemic sometime in the future.
The mainstream legacy media in Canada has tended to just look at the surface level situation at the farm, and has not delved into these further wide reaching implications.
Supplementals:

GM to end electric van production at CAMI plant in Ingersoll, Ont.

General Motors Canada has made the decision to end production of its BrightDrop electric delivery vans at the CAMI Assembly Plant in Ingersoll, Ontario.
Production was paused in May when GM cited slowing demand for the EVs and they were not able to sell the existing stock they had.
The retooling investment needed to allow the CAMI plant to produce these vans cost about $2b with $259m each from both the federal government and Ontario provincial government.
The Ford government is said to have been looking at options to see what leverage they may have against the company.
Ontario Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy said, "We're gonna fight for every dollar that we're giving to protect those jobs and have assembly here in Ontario. You know, the auto sector, the manufacturing sector, is a core part of our economy. So we acted early on providing supports; we're continuing to roll that money out, working with the federal government on tariffs and programs. We're not going to give up. We're going to fight back.”
The vans launched in 2021 with the hope that GM could go all electric but as the economics have shown the commercial uptake of electric vehicles has been slow.
The plant itself has been in operation since 1989 and has produced a variety of vehicles from the Chevrolet Equinox to the Pontiac Firefly.
The question is, will GM have the desire to build anything at this plant?
Greig Mordue, a member of the Booth school of engineering practice and technology at McMaster University said, “General Motors is going to say the right things, that we’re going to look for a new product for that facility, but they’re not going to look too hard for a product because they have to see what’s going to happen in the current context of trade discussions between Canada and the U.S.”
Given that the plant was just producing electric delivery vehicles it would cost a similar amount, likely hundreds of millions of dollars to retool it to produce something else.
Mordue is the former general manager with Toyota’s Canada division and has seen similar retoolings under Toyota.
He says that these sorts of investments happen every 5-10 years and it’s difficult to see how that can happen given the current trade relationship with the United States.
Mordue provided a tough pill to swallow: “the safe decision is always going to be to build where you sell, and 90 percent of General Motors’ North American sales are in the U.S.”
To add insult to injury GM also announced that the on-site battery plant would also remain closed affecting 200 workers.
Given all the movement that’s happening towards closure, if somebody decided to retool or even open a new plant, it would be nine months minimum before the jobs started moving upward again in a positive direction.
These announcements by GM come also after Stellantis announced that the Jeep Compass would be moving from Brampton to Illinois.
This again was a case where both the federal and Ontario governments provided up to $15b in performance incentives.
But in both cases, the companies just left. They left for the US, tariffs aside, provides a much better investment climate than Canada.
Media coverage this week has looked primarily at the reaction from both the federal and Ontario governments.
What has been lacking is any introspection: what ultimately caused these companies to shutter the plants?
If we assume for a moment that the Biden administration continued on, it would not be sunshine and roses since even under the Biden administration, there were strains in the trading relationship.
We instead must ask is there a demand for electric commercial vehicles? If not, why not and what are those stumbling blocks?
Once identified if they’re able to be worked around in present economic climate that provides a roadmap for the federal government.
But it the electric vans were not viable even under the most friendly administration to the south, we have to ask if both the federal and Ontario governments were pursuing policy by ideology rather than what was practical.
That discussion and the reality of EVs in Canada today is something that is seldom talked about because it provides much more energy to simply talk about Donald Trump causing pains in our industry.
Supplementals:

Firing Line

Trump calls off trade talks with Canada over Ontario's anti-tariff ad

The Ontario government of Doug Ford was wanting to get the American's attention with its ad featuring the late Republican president Ronald Reagan, which aired during Game 1 of baseball's World Series final between the Toronto Blue Jays and the LA Dodgers. It served its purpose, and certainly got the attention of Americans, and the US administration. However, it definitely had some unintended consequences that perhaps Ontario didn't intend.
U.S. President Donald Trump has announced on social media he will be increasing “the Tariff on Canada” by 10 per cent “over and above what they are paying now" because of an advertisement by the Ontario government.
Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social on Saturday afternoon: “Canada was caught, red handed, putting up a fraudulent advertisement on Ronald Reagan’s Speech on Tariffs. Their Advertisement was to be taken down, IMMEDIATELY, but they let it run last night during the World Series, knowing it was a FRAUD,” the U.S. president added.
It’s unclear at the moment which tariff, or tariffs, the U.S. president is referring to.
Trump said as he left the White House for a trip to this weekend's Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit in Malaysia said: "They could have pulled it tonight. Well, that's dirty play — but I can play dirtier than they can, you know."
He also told reporters he had no plans to speak or meet with Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is also en route to Kuala Lumpur for the meeting. Just two weeks ago, after Carney visited the White House, Trump directed two senior members of his cabinet to get a deal with Canada on steel, aluminum and energy. Now it appears that those meetings are cancelled.
Carney and Trump have not communicated since the U.S. president declared on Truth Social the U.S. was “terminating” trade negotiations with Canada. Carney commented briefly on the president's remarks as he boarded a flight to Asia on Friday. He said Canadian officials have been having "constructive" negotiations with their American counterparts and Canada "stands ready to pick up on that progress and build on that progress when the Americans are ready to have those discussions."
So why was the ad so inflammatory for the Americans and Trump in particular? It contains a minute-long excerpt from then-president Reagan's April 1987 radio address about free trade.
Reagan, a beloved figure among free-market Republicans, says in the voice-over used in the ad: "When someone says let's impose tariffs on foreign imports, it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. Then the worst happens. Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industry shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs," the ad continues.
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute has criticized the ad for using selective audio and video from 1987 to imply Reagan opposed tariffs in general, when he backed them in specific contexts.
On Friday afternoon, Ford said he will pull the ad effective Monday — but not before it's seen by millions more Americans over the weekend as it airs during the World Series games.
Ford said he made the decision to "pause" the campaign after "speaking with Prime Minister Carney" so that trade talks between the two countries "can resume."
Ford said: "Our intention was always to initiate a conversation about the kind of economy that Americans want to build and the impact of tariffs on workers and businesses. We've achieved our goal, having reached U.S. audiences at the highest levels."
Ontario is spending $75 million on the campaign, with plans to air the ads on such networks as Fox News, Fox Sports, Newsmax, Bloomberg, NBC, CBS and ABC. The ad has already been spotted on stations in the Washington, D.C., area, including during Game 7 of the American League Championship Series, which was won by the Toronto Blue Jays.
In his social media post, Trump claimed the anti-tariff ad campaign is designed to "interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court."
The court is scheduled to hear arguments next month into Trump's use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose broad-based tariffs on Canada, Mexico and dozens of other countries around the world.
Trump said: “I heard they were pulling the ad, I didn’t know they were putting it on a little bit more. They could have pulled it tonight. Well, that’s dirty playing — but I can play dirtier than they can, you know? Really, very dishonest. I'm very disappointed in Canada. They lied. I mean, it was a fraud what they did.”
This is not the first time that one of Ford's tactics in the trade war with the U.S. has drawn the ire of the Trump administration.
Ford's move to slap a surcharge on Ontario's electricity exports to U.S. states in March prompted Trump to threaten to double tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum exports to 50 per cent.
Ontario withdrew its surcharge a day later and Trump backed off on his threat, keeping the tariffs at 25 per cent. He ultimately boosted them to 50 per cent in June.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says she’s pleased to see Ontario’s ad campaign suspended: “I remain convinced that the path to a positive resolution with our U.S. partners lies in strong, consistent diplomacy and a commitment to working in good faith toward shared priorities such as North American energy dominance.”
On the contrary, BC Premier David Eby says “truth will win” after announcing the province will also air anti-tariff ads, calling it 'absurd' that Canada’s wood industry faces higher tariffs from the U.S. than Russia: “Americans need to hear how tariffs raise prices. We’re making ads to defend British Columbia and Canada’s forestry workers.”
Trump has also ended Canada access at the shared border library in Stanstead Quebec, where For more than a century Canadians could walk through a door in the Haskell Free Library into Derby Line, Vermont, without passing through customs.
Canadian access to the library has been restricted before, including when tighter controls were imposed following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and again during the Covid-19 pandemic.
But the Trump administration’s announcement marks the first definitive end to an arrangement that signaled enduring U.S.-Canada unity for many in Stanstead, a town dotted with large Victorian houses about a 90-minute drive from Montreal.
Both Trump and Carney will attend the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) summit in Kuala Lumpur and then the APEC summit in South Korea. Trump has ruled out a meeting but there will be anticipation over whether the trade spat between the neighbors can be mended.
In the meantime, Canada and its citizens will likely face more threats and trade woes, all due to Ontario interfering in trade negotiations and overstepping its boundaries.
Supplementals:

Quote of the Week

"Our intention was always to initiate a conversation about the kind of economy that Americans want to build and the impact of tariffs on workers and businesses. We've achieved our goal, having reached U.S. audiences at the highest levels." - Ontario Premier Doug Ford on the ‘success’ of his government’s US ad campaign.

Word of the Week

Cull - a selective slaughter of wild animals.

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Show Data

Episode Title: Playing Dirty
Teaser: Alberta conducts its municipal elections, a BC ostrich farm fights a cull order, and GM is ending electric van production in Ontario. Also, Doug Ford’s anti-tariff ad elicits a strong US response.
Production Code: WC-441-2025-10-25
Recorded Date: October 25, 2025
Release Date: October 26, 2025
Duration: 1:01:48
Edit Notes: None

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:XX