The News Rundown

8 arrests, 29 charges laid at downtown demonstrations

A protest on immigration in Toronto last Saturday turned violent when counter protestors clashed with police and the media framing the story was very light on details, almost deliberately obfuscating what happened.
Toronto police say they arrested eight people and 29 charges were laid at a demonstration downtown Saturday.
In a news release Sunday, the Toronto Police Service said its officers attended a demonstration at Nathan Phillips Square, located in the area of Queen Street W. and Bay Street, at around 2 p.m.
Dozens gathered at Nathan Phillips Square Saturday to protest mass immigration, prompting a counter-protest and a news conference with city councillors and opposing groups.
Ahead of the anti-immigration rally, Coun. Neethan Shan joined groups such as the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the Urban Alliance on Race Relations to denounce racism and xenophobia, the Toronto & York Region Labour Council said in a news release.
The anti-immigration rally also prompted a counter-protest by Community Solidarity Toronto, which focused on reducing hate in the city.
Toronto police said officers provided direction to attendees in an effort to keep the peace, but attendees caused disturbances, assaulted other participants, became combative and ultimately assaulted police officers.
In a post to social media Saturday afternoon, Toronto police originally said a total of 11 arrests were made at a demonstration at Queen Street W. and Bay Street. In an update to social media, Toronto police said a total of nine arrests were made.
In a post to social media, the Toronto Police Association (TPA), which represents approximately 8000 civilians and uniform officers, said the situation was “volatile” and the behaviour of some demonstrators was “unacceptable” and “disgusting.”
“While trying to keep the situation safe for everyone, our members were pelted with eggs, used toilet paper, and plastic bags filled with what appeared to be urine,” the TPA said. “One police officer was punched.”
Now, the question is: Which set of protestors was it that threw stuff at the cops, and got charged? The news articles don't really say. Based on the videos shown it was the counter protesters getting arrested for being violent against the “Canada First” protesters and police.
The writer of the CBC article really went out of his/her way to conceal it then. The whole thing was super vague, and likely deliberately so. And people say that the CBC isn't biased.
The Sun goes a bit further, suggesting that a source indicated that "most of the unruly behaviour came from the counter-protesters", but even it stops short of speculating on who was actually arrested.
The reason none of these outlets have come out and said more is that, as the National Post article notes, TPS didn't announce the affiliations of those arrested. There are indeed videos of what appear to be counter-protesters being arrested, but we don't have conclusive video of every person that was arrested.
Lawyer and journalist Caryma Sa’d said Toronto Police were able to keep it well organized and reasonably peaceful while everybody was on Nathan Phillips Square, but it became out of control when things moved to Bay St.
Sa'd said: “Police ultimately kept the groups separated for the most part and did not allow Antifa to prevent Canada First from marching.”
“Our members will always facilitate peaceful and lawful demonstrations but this violence cannot and will not be tolerated. We are so proud of our members and we will continue to support them,” TPA said.
Who knows what’s next, but Canada First founder and president Joe Anidjar hinted there could be more demonstrations to come. He posted to X: “Until next time! Canada First. Canadians First! Stay solid crew. Well done today. Let keep er moving.”
Regardless of what actually happened, it's important that the media reports on these sorts of situations accurately, and the fact that so much of the story was left out of the mainstream articles from the CBC really shows that they didn't actually want people to get the full picture.
Supplementals:

Calgary’s water woes returned over the new years period.
The Bearspaw feeder main ruptured again. The reason I say again is because this is the same stretch of pipe that broke in 2024 and caused a summer of water restrictions.
The pipe has since been patched and the pumps turned back on as of this Friday.
That means water restrictions are over.
New mayor Jeromy Farkas has been on point during this break and providing regular updates online as to the progress made.
Farkas said, “Thank you for saving water. Thank you for adjusting your routines. Thank you for your patience because we know that this has been incredibly disruptive and frustrating.”
The story of this pipe has raised eyebrows as to how things got to this point.
Following council meetings and reports surfacing, new mayor Farkas and the new council has said they will fix the entire pipe.
The goal is to do what would normally take 4 years in 1.
The report exposed the dire state of the entire feeder main.
The simple overview is that over the last 20 years the city neglected its water assets.
The report was led by retired ATCO executive Sigfried Kiefer.
The systemic gaps go back to external pressures, risk asset integrity processes, ineffective management, and a lack of effective governance oversight.
The water utility and its processes were not robust enough to manage a complex system that was facing external pressures.
The Bearspaw South feeder main was constructed in 1975 and carried nearly 60% of Calgary’s treated water and the risks were first identified in 2004 after a feeder main burst under McKnight Boulevard.
The city deferred or redirected on recommended inspections in 2017, 2020, and 2022.
Inspections were deprioritized due to perceived low likelihood of failure.
The way municipalities are managed in Alberta also likely played a role.
The report said the city’s governance structure and accountability were not conducive to bringing to light shortcomings in either its asset management strategies or its risk identification methods when it came to deferring infrastructural investment.
Kiefer said, “The city was growing at a remarkable pace and, quite often, growth investments overtook some of the resilience and redundancy investments that should have been undertaken at the time. As a result of that management structure, that information and that clarity of the implications was not well understood all the way up the decision tree within the city.”
He also says that as a result the information did not get to the various mayors and councils allowing them to understand the risk to the feeder main.
The management of the city administration does bear questioning because we see exactly what caused this in action this week.
Shortly before the report went public chief city administrator David Duckworth offered mental health support to city employees.
According to Don Braid in the Calgary Herald he thought that their psyches would be shattered by the criticism of the city’s failure to prevent water main ruptures on the Bearspaw South Feeder line.
In an email sent to all staff he wrote, “As you read the report, you may have questions. I encourage you to speak to your leader. There are also wellness services and support available. If you feel you may need additional resources, there is helpful information on managing stressful events.”
Postmedia saw and verified the email.
The email illustrates the no blame culture of city hall.
Duckworth exemplifies this when he said, “this feeder main rupture represents a systemic, critical issue that developed over decades, and with no singular cause. It is neither about a singular moment or time period, nor any one role, team or individual. We are committed to learning candidly from what went wrong‚ not to assign blame but to embrace courageous ideas that strengthen how we deliver public services, just as we are guided by our corporate vision — ‘Employees Thrive, Courageous Ideas Come to Life, and Public Service Opens Possibilities.’”
While the report doesn’t pin blame on one specific person, it does blame “consensus decision-making” which required agreement from everybody before anything could be done.
This led to project deferrals and no water pipe backups.
The report called for a stand-alone water authority led by a boss who can get things done. Edmonton has this and has for decades.
Duckworth is city council’s sole employee and makes over $400,000 a year.
Council could fire him but as of this past Tuesday has decided to keep him on. A 12-3 vote saw approval for his quarterly performance check in.
Farkas as mayor has not been afraid to make changes and depending on how this project goes it’s still entirely possible that David Duckworth could get the axe.
The through line though is that municipalities are often hamstrung by their administrative departments regardless of what their council want to do.
Calgary is now paying the price for this and this is emoting that most cities should realize.
Supplementals:

B.C. officially ends decriminalization pilot project after concerns about public drug use

The BC NDP government announced Wednesday that the province’s decriminalization pilot project will come to an end, three years after it was introduced with much fanfare as a measure meant to reduce stigma toward drug users and keep them alive until they could receive treatment.
The pilot had been put in place in January 2023 following an exemption issued by Health Canada and it is due to expire on Jan. 31 of this year.
B.C.’s health minister Josie Osborne told reporters in Victoria that it is clear the pilot project — which allowed drug users to carry up to 2.5 grams of substances such as cocaine and heroin without having it confiscated by police — wasn’t working, and that the province is shifting its focus toward building up voluntary and involuntary treatment options.
Osborne described the pilot program as having good intentions, and despite the province's 'hard work', it had not delivered the results the NDP hoped for. That's certainly an understatement. Of all the ways to describe B.C.’s messy, unpopular and divisive experiment with decriminalizing hard drugs, there’s one word you’d never Osborne to use: proud.
“I would say there's probably never a perfect time or a perfect set of conditions to undertake a pilot like this. I'm proud of the fact that we did try.”
Proud of a program the government had to effectively reverse before it even reached the halfway point? Proud of an experiment police say worsened street disorder and municipalities say made their streets less safe? Proud of a policy the premier himself now calls wrong? If that’s what makes the minister proud, you shudder to think what an actual failure looks like.
At the time of its announcement, then mental health and addictions minister Jennifer Whiteside said that “by decriminalizing people who use drugs, we will break down the stigma that stops people from accessing life-saving support and services.” Shortly after it started, however, anecdotes began to emerge of used needles being found in places like school playgrounds and public beaches.
Advocates argued that the program was effective in reducing police interactions with drug users, but a growing perception of increased drug use in public spaces as well as public disorder impacting businesses around the province led to the government restricting the pilot to homes and overdose prevention sites in May 2024.
Since then, drug seizures have crept back up to an average of 403 a month from 165 per month immediately after decriminalization was put in place. Prior to the pilot, the average number of drug seizures was 509 per month.
What’s most striking about Osborne’s defence is not so much that the pilot project fell short, but that three years in, the government can’t explain what success would have looked like, let alone whether it occurred.
Osborne gave every impression Wednesday that the BC NDP was only ending its efforts to decriminalize personal possession of hard drugs like heroin, meth and cocaine, very, very reluctantly.
She did not repeat any of the language of the premier about it being a mistake. And she called the decision to recriminalize drugs, following public pushback in 2024, a mere “course correction.”
At various points, Osborne said the pilot project “hasn’t delivered the results that we’ve hoped for,” while also arguing there were few concrete results to point to at all, because “at the end of the three-year pilot it is difficult if not even [impossible] to attribute certain changes or increases directly to decriminalization.”
Osborne was also unable to say how many people decriminalization helped get into drug treatment. “It's a great question, and it's a very challenging one to answer because there are many different programs available for people,” she said.
And she was unable to say if the project reduced “stigma” amongst drug users, thereby helping them feel less shame and judgement to enter treatment. “It is very difficult to measure social disorder, for example, and a sense of public safety,” Osborne said.
Yet measuring these things was a specific requirement of Ottawa when it granted B.C. the first-of-its-kind exemption to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act in 2023. That the province can’t point to meaningful data three years later raises the obvious question about what oversight, if any, Ottawa applied to a pilot project it explicitly said would be guided by science.
B.C. police chiefs, who pulled their support in late 2024 due to street disorder concerns, welcomed the end of decriminalization. As did the Opposition Conservatives, and independent MLA Elenore Sturko, who led criticism on the file for much of the project’s lifespan.
Sturko called the lack of data to conclude the project “quite stunning.” She said it’s incumbent on both the Health Ministry and the Ministry of Public Safety to report out on the impacts of the experiment.
The B.C. Greens attempted to defend decriminalization, saying it was “set up to fail” by an NDP government that never built enough addictions treatment beds or other supports to complement the proposal. The Greens have a point. Decriminalization was always meant to be paired with expanded treatment, wrap-around care and incentives to seek help. None of that ever materialized.
Green MLA Jeremy Valeriote said: “You can’t say decriminalization failed if you never actually tried to make it work. It’s like the government installing one solar panel and claiming clean energy can’t power our province.”
When the pilot ends Jan. 31, B.C. will slide back into the same grey zone it occupied before, with police exercising discretion on arrests and Crown prosecutors mostly declining to proceed on minor possession cases, as the court system remains overwhelmed with an absence of change on repeat offenders.
Until that changes, or B.C. crafts a program of incentives to, say, avoid charges by entering treatment, then the public drug use problem will remain, said Independent MLA Elenore Sturko, who led criticism on the file for much of the project’s lifespan.
“We had de facto decriminalization before the pilot and my feeling is, and the truth will be, even on February 1, without new directives for prosecutors, it will still be the same,” she said. So, basically, the same death and disorder. That may be politically safer. But it is not progress. And it is nothing to be proud of, no matter how the minister spins it.
Supplymentals:

https://www.biv.com/news/commentary/rob-shaw-minister-prioritizes-pride-over-proof-as-bc-ends-drug-decriminalization-11743969

Firing Line

Canada, China reach initial trade deal on electric vehicles, canola

Mark Carney’s much hailed successful trip to China has concluded. The goal being to start the process towards normalizing relations after a deep thaw.
That deep thaw of course was caused by some of the things we have been talking about here at Western Context since the beginning.
Chinese foreign interference in Canada, the kidnapping and jailing of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, the failed 2017 Trudeau trip to China, and various hostile efforts by the Chinese communist party’s united front department to sow influence in Canada all contributed to that thaw.
Now Canadians are expecting and broadly looking forward to a renewal of Canada-China relations.
Recent polling done for Global News by Ipsos shows that just more than 50% of Canadians are happy to see increased ties with China due to the issues we face with the Americans.
Following the trip Canada will allow around 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles to Canada at a tariff rate of 7.1%.
A 100% tariff on Chinese EV’s was put in place by the Trudeau administration following the Biden administration’s request to do so.
The decision to relax Chinese EV tariffs is not sitting nicely with Ontario Premier Doug Ford and the auto industry.
Ford points to the deal allowing the option of enabling China to “flood the market” with no guarantee of equal or immediate investment in the Canadian market by China.
He concluded by asking for more support from the federal government for the auto industry in Ontario.
He also said that this deal “risks closing the door on Canadian automakers to the American market.”
This is quite the turn of events given the Reagan-ad that Ford ran late last year that ended negotiations between Canada and the US.
For this move on the EV tariffs China will lower canola tariffs to about 15%.
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe was in attendance on this trip and praised the deal as “a great day for Canadians.”
The name of this podcast, Western Context, tells us to look at what a deal or news story means for western Canada. The letting up on canola tariffs is a good thing.
Moe said, “Notwithstanding some discussions that I’m sure we’ll have in the next number of days and weeks, but all in all, it is going to be a net positive for the Canadian economy and (it’s) going to provide us some opportunities to really engage on what our future looks like over the next five, 10 and 15 years.”
The Canola Council of Canada estimated that canola exports to China dropped by more than 50% in 2025.
Alberta and Manitoba are also pleased with the result since those provincial governments have been pushing for the federal government to pursue a path that would see the tariffs on canola reduced.
Comparing the reaction between Doug Ford and Scott Moe speaks volumes and shows the two differing economies that different sides of the country have to balance.
The number of EVs that will come into Canada is the same amount that would have been allowed pre-tariff. So while there will be an increase, it won’t be a huge increase, yet.
Canada and Mark Carney see China as an option for an investment partner is more predictable and is seeking investment into Canada.
Carney said, "In terms of the way our relationship has progressed in recent months with China, it is more predictable, and you see results coming from that.” When asked for clarification he said China was a more predictable and reliable partner than the US.
The visit saw meetings between both delegations and in one of the public televised meetings Carney said referring to the last visit, “the world has changed much since that last visit. I believe that the progress we have made and the partnership sets us up for the new world order.”
This is our quote of the week as it highlights the way Carney sees China as the partner going forward for Canada.
Carney has chosen what he feels will be an easier path instead of returning to closer relations with the United States.
It’s also our quote of the week because in the election campaign he was outright asked what the greatest security threat to Canada was, he mentioned China. That has all seemingly gone out the window to curry favour with his base and the growing number of those in Canada increasingly hypnotized by the media.
In just under a year the Canadian public has been first turned against the US with anti-Trump and anti-America news coverage to the point that they are amicable to a relationship with China.
Carney, the government, and his supporters are no doubt happy with what took place this week but it underscores the blindspot of the media and now Canadian society as a whole to focus so much on ways to stand up against the US that they are so willing to stand next to a country with horrible human rights records, a country that interferes in Canada, and one that will stop at nothing to own Canada once we let them in.
Many will of course point to the Harper government’s panda-diplomacy era but at that point in time we went to China without media coercion or brainwashing and China’s international influence policy wasn’t nearly as strong or outright focused as it is today.
It wasn’t reported outright in the stories but it is overheard in one of the media pieces that journalists were questioning economic development agency minister melanie joly telling her that the journalists on the trip were using “burner phones”, phones that are disposable and not linked to the person, because China spies on journalists.
Joly continued talking about importing car autoparts into Canada ignoring this point.
There was a small amount of discussion about the reality of the Chinese regime but it was all set aside because of what Canada needs to stand up to the US.
Canadians who want to experience China will also be able to go there as part of the deal will also secure visa-free travel to China.
Canadians can go and decide whether they are part of Doug Ford’s world view or Scott Moe’s or Mark Carney’s. Though each of those 3 represents their own issue and Canadians would be wise choosing another option.
Though it may be difficult to do so.
Canadian media has spent the better part of the last year priming Canadians to look for anyone who will stand up to Donald Trump’s administration no matter who that may be and what policies they may bring forward and who they associate with doesn’t matter as long as it sticks a finger in the eye of the Americans.
Supplementals:

Quote of the Week

“The world has changed much since that last visit. I believe that the progress we have made and the partnership sets us up for the new world order” - Prime Minister Mark Carney on the need for a relationship with China.

Word of the Week

realpolitik - a system of politics or principles based on practical rather than moral or ideological considerations

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Show Data

Episode Title: Canola Diplomacy
Teaser: The CBC leaves out important information on the Toronto protests, Calgary sees infrastructure problems with its water pipes, and BC ends its failed decriminalization pilot. Also, Mark Carney makes a deal with China on canola and EVs.
Production Code: WC-452-2026-01-17
Recorded Date: January 17, 2026
Release Date: January 18, 2026
Duration: 1:11:52
Edit Notes: None

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:XX