The News Rundown

French mandate for Edmonton businesses despite fewer than 2,200 French-only speakers in Calgary and Edmonton

The Use of French in Federally Regulated Private Businesses Act was passed in June 2023 under Bill C-13. Earlier this April Canadian Identity and Culture and Heritage Minister Marc Miller announced the government would be drafting regulations on where this Bill would be used.
Those regulations were not specified by the Bill and were to be set by the ministry at a later date. That later date is now.
The regulations now state that businesses in Quebec with 25 employees or more must use French. But across Canada businesses with 100 or more employees in “regions with a strong Francophone presence”.
This includes all of New Brunswick, 3 census divisions in Nova Scotia, 8 in Ontario, 22 census tracts in two census metropolitan areas including Winnipeg and Edmonton.
What this means is that any federally regulated business in Edmonton with more than 100 employees would have to provide services in French and give employees the right to work in French.
Federally regulated services include sectors such as banks, airlines, airports, railways, interprovincial trucking, telecommunications companies, broadcasters, and ports.
According to the 2021 census there were approximately 1,280 residents in Edmonton that speak only French as their official language while about 67,000 know French.
This story was nowhere in the media but it’s worth taking a moment to backtrack to April and before to understand what these regulations are trying to do.
The “regulations aim to create work environments that reflect and respect Canada’s cultural and linguistic diversity” and to effectively protect French as a minority language.
The Bill also set out to ensure the equality of French and English in specific regions.
The language of what has been split out, specifically for Edmonton and Winnipeg, specifies that “census tracts” are effectively neighbourhoods. So while it’s not the blanket CMA of Edmonton or Winnipeg certain neighbourhoods in both cities will fall under this guidance.
Former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and minister of many things federally said that this regulation in general “undermines public support for bilingualism.”
He also said, “Trucking firms in Edmonton have a hard enough time finding English speaking drivers / staff. How are they supposed to hire French workers in a city where 1% of the population are francophones, all to provide french service where there is no demand?”
Looking purely at the neighbourhood list there are 22 neighbourhoods in Winnipeg that fall under the regulations and one in Edmonton, specifically the neighbourhood around the UofA’s Campus Saint Jean.
For this specific area of Edmonton, according to the 2021 census, 740 people said that French was the first language spoken and 5,500 said English.
Looking at it from this perspective means that the comments from Kenney, specifically on Alberta, may not spell disaster as this is a small portion of Edmonton - yet hardly anyone knows that these regulatory changes are happening but the government is making changes for a tiny tiny slice of the population.
Meanwhile in Ontario the census divisions of Stormont, Dundas, Glengarry, Prescott, Russel, Ottawa, Nipissing, Sudbury, Greater Sudbury, Timiskaming, and Cochrane fall under the regulations.
What is perhaps more concerning though is that there is zero media coverage of these regulations coming in to suggest that a 100 person business, bank, or other federally regulated establishment will need to provide French services in Edmonton.
Moreover, we have to go back and look at how Bill C-13 passed. When it came to third and final reading of the legislation back in May 2023, only 1 MP voted against it: Anthony Housefather, Liberal MP for Mount Royal in Quebec.
That means the Conservative opposition, the NDP, and the Bloc Quebécois all voted for this legislation - a piece of legislation that allowed the government to set French language rules for at the time unknown regions of the country.
And now, a neighbourhood in Edmonton, 22 in Winnipeg, and a handful of cities across the country are subject to regulations to provide French services.
Moreso than the regulations for the cities or neighborhoods, it’s the House of Commons willingness to rubber stamp legislation that could have an impact on Canadians for whom they did not know where they would reside.
Supplementals:

BC Conservative Leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay was quick out of the gate this week to trumpet the end of the NDP government’s SOGI program in schools.
“I am very proud of this victory against radical gender ideology. The B.C. Conservatives refused to back down in the fight against SOGI, and parents from all around the province made it clear that this program was unacceptable, and now our efforts have paid off.”
The new leader’s media release was accompanied by a quote from Conservative education critic Lynne Block, who called it “the end of SOGI” in classrooms. Block said schools could now get back to focusing on students instead of “indoctrination.”
So what is SOGI and why were the BC Conservatives so up in arms about it? SOGI stands for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, and it was conceived by a non-profit organization called the ARC Foundation, who officially calls it SOGI 123. It's an ideology based on two parts: sexual orientation, which ARC defines as "Who a person is physically or emotionally attracted to (such as heterosexual, gay, lesbian, or bisexual)" and gender identity: Which ARC says is A person's deeply felt internal sense of being male, female, both, or neither.
In essence, it's a broad definition that is inclusive of sexual and gender minorities rather than the default male/female and straight definitions, and because of this, the Conservatives in BC have called it a "radical gender ideology" that shouldn't have any place in our schools.
Now the BC Conservatives were called out in the media for telling a lie, because the NDP had not removed SOGI from classrooms. Education Minister Lisa Beare said the BC Conservative party “continues to spread misinformation about what these resources do.” On X, she put it more bluntly: “This is yet another BC Conservative lie about SOGI. It is not defunded. This is why I always encourage parents to get their information from teachers. You can’t trust the BC Conservatives on this.”
You can’t trust the BC NDP either, though, it would turn out. As the day of back-and-forth on SOGI played out Monday, it revealed both sides playing fast and loose with the truth over a program the NDP says protects LGBTQ kids from bullying, but the Conservatives say indoctrinates children into radical gender ideology.
On the government side, it took three tries to squeeze an honest answer out of the education ministry. First, it replied: “SOGI 123 has not been defunded.” Instead, it argued, the SOGI resources continued to exist for schools to use, even as government had adjusted funding for ARC.
“As a part of government’s commitment to responsible expenditure management, operating funding to the ARC Foundation, the organization that first created the resource, was reduced over time,” the ministry said.
A second request was required to get the ministry to reveal the exact funding adjustments.
“For the 2023/24 and 2024/25 fiscal years, ARC received $350,000,” it said. “For 2025/26, ARC received $200,000. ARC provides a breadth of tools and resources for educators on the SOGI 123 website and will continue to be available to educators for direct support,” it added.
The ministry left the impression ARC still got some money by not offering the current 2026-27 figures. Online, Sitka News reporter Jaryd Jager posted an internal notice from ARC.
Executive director Aditi Loveridge wrote: “Due to provincial budget cuts in various sectors, the BC Ministry of Education has made the decision to discontinue funding for SOGI 123 as of this year.”
So the question was, was funding actually cut to zero for this year? Back to the ministry a third time. Only then did it belatedly admit the NDP government had in fact reduced funding down to zero in February’s 2026-27 budget. Yet, the government argued, the SOGI resources live on and are available for school districts to use even after the funding cut. ARC hadn’t written new material for the last two years, it was simply helping keep the information current as a resource.
So what actually happened is far less dramatic and far more revealing. The ARC Foundation, the non-profit that built SOGI 123 and has supported it since 2016, received $350,000 a year from the province through 2023 to 2025. That dropped to $200,000 for 2025/26, and for 2026/27, it dropped to nothing, a genuine loss of operating revenue for ARC, which has resulted in staff job losses for the non-profit. But a funding cut to one organization’s operating budget is not the same as a government cancelling a program, and it took BC’s Ministry of Education three separate attempts before it would admit the funding for ARC was now zero, regardless of how much they still support the program.
Under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the ⁠B.C. Human Rights Code, school boards are legally obligated to protect sexual orientation and gender identity, meaning inclusive policies cannot simply be dissolved.
ARC continues to receive funding from the B.C. Teachers’ Federation and CUPE. In 2025, it received a $1 million grant from the federal government to combat misinformation and promote SOGI-inclusive education.
Here is the part that should bother people more about this story. Ask the BC government to explain, in plain terms, what SOGI 123 actually contains and how it functions in a classroom, and you get almost nothing. The ministry’s public statements this week ran to “every child has a right to feel safe and included” and “these are anti-bullying resources.” True, but thin.
Go looking for the SOGI page on the province’s own website and you will find a banner saying it has moved, redirecting instead to a new “Diversity and inclusion” page. The ministry has quietly folded its dedicated SOGI content into broader branding on its own site, even as it is publicly insisting nothing has changed. Nowhere in three rounds of ministry responses to reporters this week was there a substantive account of what SOGI 123 does, who uses it, or what specifically changes for a district when ARC’s provincial contract disappears.
This has led to teachers and advocates who have had to do the work of explaining the difference between SOGI as an acronym, SOGI-inclusive education as a legal obligation set forth by the NDP, and SOGI 123 as one set of resources provided by the ARC Foundation among several, because the province that funds public education apparently could not be bothered to make that distinction itself while this resource package was being publicly declared dead.
That leaves teachers, district SOGI leads, and community organizations absorbing the disinformation on their own, which is not new. A 2024 UBC evaluation of SOGI 123 interviewed district and school leads and found this exact complaint already on the record. One district lead told researchers it would help enormously to have “some contradiction of misinformation and malinformation” coming from a centralized source, rather than leaving individual schools to fend off political pressure district by district. That was two years before this week’s poster put forth by the BC Conservatives, and nothing has changed, even as school boards have had to alter meeting protocols to deal with in-person protests and anti-SOGI campaigns, and with individual trustees pushing an anti-SOGI narrative of their own.
So in summary: Yes, the government cut funding for the organization that created the SOGI materials, but no, it doesn’t mean the “end” of SOGI teaching in classrooms. And yes, the Conservatives were a bit dishonest in overstating it. But the NDP was lying too in its response and has mishandled the topic, failing to clear up disinformation and misinformation about the subject so badly that this is now one of the biggest social topics in the province right now.
Keep in mind that this is what BC media was talking about this week, in the middle of summer where we've had more trade disruptions, forest fires that have forced evacuations in the Interior, notably in the town of Clinton, BC, and Premier David Eby's approval rating has plummeted to 27 per cent. And yet, this is what our politicians, both the governing NDP and the opposition Conservatives were focusing on this week.
Supplementals:

Canadian conservatives have a patriotism problem

Coming from the Globe and Mail, sometimes called Canada’s “newspaper of record” an article asserts: “Canadian conservatives have a patriotism problem”
The premise is that the Canadian Conservative Party feels a greater loyalty to the ideology rather than the country and that leads them to side with Donald Trump and the United States against Canada.
To entertain an idea of whether or not Canada should exist as its own country, to maybe favour the separatist side in the Alberta referendums, and whether the country should even exist in its current form is what the article suggests.
The author, Andrew Coyne, suggests that the conservatives are so “embittered” by a century of Liberal dominance that they equate the country with “Liberaldom”.
Coyne says though it’s not himself asking the questions! It is apparently fellow Conservatives who have seen, in their eyes, commenters taking the American side in the Trump administration’s attacks on the country.
Coyne cites Matt Spoke, a board member of the Canada Strong and Free Network who said, “Remember that you owe your loyalty first to other Canadians (even those you disagree with), before giving it to conservatives in other countries – no matter how much you might share ideology.”
The other was Geoff Russ, a commentator for the National Post, The Hub, and Macdonald-Laurier institute among others who said, “It should not be a challenge for the right to balance genuine admiration for American civilization with opposition to the often outrageous treatment Canada receives from the current U.S. administration”
The legacy media in general sees themselves as the arbiters of truth and what they see must be the vision that everyone else sees in the country. The fact though is that in the modern media landscape and view of reality, two people can witness the same event, read the same news, or watch the same video, and see absolutely different outcomes and believe that as truth.
The legacy media, these columnists cited, and Coyne himself are of the view that everything being done presently by the United States and its administration must be the primary and only thing that is countered in this country by both the government and opposition.
The article asserts that the Conservatives are having a moment that the left did when the Soviet Union was around and seen by some as a beacon of progress and that everything Trump and the MAGA movement extolls is modern conservatism. The counter to that is that Coyne says that nothing the Trump administration does is conservative.
He’s right but for the wrong reason, Trump isn’t the modern form of conservatism. What the article and Coyne fails to realize is that in the United States the discussion has moved away from conservatism vs. progressivism. It’s become one of populism vs. something else, right now that something else is the establishment. Later it could be neo-bolshevikism.
The article takes jabs at the conservatives criticisms against the Carney government citing that the American perspective is the right one and from that pivots into a discussion about supply management.
The tone that Coyne writes is that “the tone of these comments is that Canada is necessarily in the wrong on any issue, more or less by definition.” Unfortunately, the reason the Conservatives have to take this path when it comes to supply management is that virtually no one elected to the House of Commons is willing to even discuss that issue in Canada and that’s why any opposition to it looks like siding with the Americans.
This fact is conveniently left out but we need to get to the point of this article.
Normally here at Western Context we don’t do political inside baseball. Coyne himself is a progressive conservative. The Conservative Party of Canada has been run by leaders hailing from the Canadian Alliance side since its founding.
The article is also an open article on the Globe and Mail while everything else is normally pay walled. There has been a concerted push by the mainstream media over the recent months to highlight internal division, raise questions about Poilievre’s leadership, and suggest that the party isn’t Canadian enough.
Doing this in a public article on a normally paywalled website speaks volumes.
The article suggests something even more asinine: “In virtually every other democratic country, patriotism is the province of the right. Only in Canada has it been the monopoly of the left.”
He goes as far to call it a “conservative insecurity.”
The reality is that it was successive Liberal governments that let our military decay and collapse to the point soldiers didn’t have the resources for their own rucksacks.
Liberal patriotism is effectively painting Canada as better and the definition of Canadian for many big-L Liberals is that we are simply not American and that’s enough.
Canadian Patriotism is what you see in the streets after a national moment such as the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, Canadians coming together in the face of war such as over the highway of heroes during the Afghanistan deployment or the bravery shown in the Korean War, World War II, and World War I which effectively made us a country.
Meanwhile the Liberal government in Ottawa sought to put Canadian against Canadian during the pandemic in the eyes of patriotism when Westerners questioned mandates and restrictions, removed John A. MacDonald from institutions and our money, changed the anthem lyrics, said we committed indigenous genocide, massively devalued Canadian citizenship, and ultimately ran on a fake elbows up campaign to garner votes.
Fake because nothing as of yet has happened in over a year to put Canada in a better position versus the US. That’s why Conservatives question the government and why the Conservatives have preferred to focus on issues closer to home and the pocket book for many Canadians.

Firing Line

Liberals want CBC to fight misinformation. That should worry every Canadian

There’s been a lot of excitement after Blacklock’s Reporter published a story this week headlined “CBC To Be Fed Fact Checker.” The story includes a leaked internal memo revealing the federal government's plans to structurally rewrite the mandate of Canada's public broadcaster This document has triggered intense political backlash over media independence and state-sponsored censorship.
The report cited an April 13 memo titled Reinforcing CBC that stated, “The government is exploring options to modernize CBC’s mandate,” including making “combating misinformation” part of CBC’s responsibilities. The idea is laughable for many reasons, but it shouldn’t be surprising. The Liberals proposed exactly this in their 2025 election platform.
Part of the section of the Liberal platform devoted to CBC says: “Fully equipping them to combat disinformation so that Canadians have a news source they know and trust.”
It also called for giving the state broadcaster piles of new money. The Liberal platform promised to “Provide an initial $150-million boost in annual funding while directing CBC/Radio-Canada to develop a strategic plan consistent with this new mandate. We will work towards bringing CBC/Radio-Canada’s long-term funding levels in line with the average funding of other national public broadcasters over time.”
Bringing CBC up to the average funding level of other national public broadcasters would be incredibly expensive. While CBC’s per-capita funding amounts to about $35 per person a year, in Britain the BBC receives roughly $100 per person. Are Canadians really willing to triple the budget of CBC, a broadcaster that fewer people are watching each year?
Department of Heritage briefing notes confirm that broadcast executives have declined to specify to the public or the Parliamentary Budget Office what exact compliance measures or data monitoring tools they intend to implement. Instead, the document notes only that the federal government is currently "exploring options."
Media watchdogs point back to previous federal elections where tech platforms appointed the CBC as an official fact-checker to monitor competitor coverage. Under the new mandate, critics fear the network will use its $150M injection to suppress independent rival outlets while boosting its own narratives via search and social algorithms.
Independent outlet ⁠The Hub highlighted recent Pollara data showing a historic trust gap: the CBC holds a +78 net trust score among Liberal voters, but just +9 among Conservative voters. Forcing a heavily polarized outlet into the role of a national truth arbiter is seen as a move that will widen societal divisions rather than "promote social cohesion" as the Heritage Department claims.
There is a disconnect in the minds of older Canadians between bad Liberal policy and our societal decay. It’s obvious where it comes from: citizens should expect our national broadcaster to engage in nonpartisan news reporting. In years long past, the CBC arguably did (or at least did a marginally better job at it). These days, the CBC frames Prime Minister Carney’s failures as successes, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre as an angry parliamentary jester.
For example, take the latest trade woes with the US. Carney’s utter failure to negotiate with U.S. President Trump — on any matter — was craftily turned into this recent CBC headline, for instance: “Carney says Trump agreed to ‘intensify’ trade talks after 50% tariff threat.” The headline implies that Carney has gotten Trump to agree to, well, something. Never mind that Carney would be incapable of getting Trump to agree to try a new cupcake flavour, let alone to “intensify” trade negotiations, a truth self-evident to any Canadian who hasn’t yet been expunged of their instinctual propaganda-detecting abilities.
Meanwhile, the CBC has described Poilievre as having “lashed out” at Carney for an alleged — alleged! — failure to negotiate with Trump, in a news article titled: “Poilievre says Carney has been ‘losing, losing, losing’ on U.S. trade war.” The CBC article has a tone defensive of the Liberal government, insisting that “Canada is pushing for Trump to drop his punishing tariffs.” Carney has in fact been failing, and losing, and in spectacular fashion. That’s not a matter of Poilievre’s opinion. Trump is now blaming Carney for the weather and wind patterns, a reflection of what little respect he holds for the prime minister.
Not only that, the CBC remains utterly uninterested in exploring why it continues to fail at connecting with conservative-minded Canadians—some 37 percent of the electorate. A recent Senate report, lasting two years and calling 60 witnesses, concluded: “allegations of [CBC] bias are serious and undermine trust in the public broadcaster.” This was after some testified the CBC was “very Liberal in their views, promoting Liberal politicians,” and did not cover “moderate conservative views.” It recommended the CBC submit to periodic independent news audits tracking fairness and balance. The CBC’s response to The Hub as to whether it would consider this oversight? No comment.
There were some bright spots. A new five-year strategic plan alluded to focusing on “non-users or dissatisfied users.” There would be more money spent covering Western Canada and rural areas; a push to include a “more diverse set of points of view.” They would air a single documentary decrying the growth of progressive illiberalism on university campuses.
But when asked whether the organization planned to reach out to Conservatives to overcome an audience deficit, new CBC CEO Marie-Philippe Bouchard said this was not something she considered to be an issue. So when it comes to the CBC, the news organization and the Liberal government has the same opinion for people asking questions: keep your heads down, there's nothing to see here.
Supplementals:

Quote of the Week

“In virtually every other democratic country, patriotism is the province of the right. Only in Canada has it been the monopoly of the left.” - Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne on the sources of patriotism in Canada.

Word of the Week

embittered - very angry about unfair things that have happened to you

How to Find Us

Westerncontext.ca

westerncontext.ca/subscribe

westerncontext.ca/support

x.com/westerncontext

facebook.com/westerncontext

Show Data

Episode Title: Trust and Truth
Teaser: A 2023 law requires a French mandate for some businesses in Edmonton, the BC NDP and Conservatives quibble over SOGI funding, and Andrew Coyne believes that we have a patriotism problem. Also the CBC might become the official fact checker of the country.
Production Code: WC-478-2026-07-25
Recorded Date: July 25, 2026
Release Date: July 26, 2026
Duration: 1:13:38
Edit Notes: None

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:XX