The disquiet among Canadians is palpable. Disdain for their news media is unmistakable. It is the end result of ownership control so tight that it squeaks. So powerful have the media become in Canada that they extracted federal subsidies in 2018 worth $595 million over five years. Those will soon be running out, however, so they are now asking Ottawa to force Google and Facebook to pay them instead.

The progressive Colombian government of Gustavo Petro is drafting legislation that, if enacted, will require mining companies to obtain environmental licenses for mineral exploration. Currently, Colombia only requires environmental licenses for the extraction and production phases of mining. Petro won the Colombian presidential election in a runoff on June 19.

The fossil fuel industry’s decades long campaign to discredit climate science and block climate action hasn’t come to an end, it’s just reached a new phase. The industry, with its army of public relations firms, is painting itself as an ally in the fight against climate change. Governments like Canada’s are helping them do it, gaslighting us at every opportunity.

While there is no direct Canadian involvement in the Marikana massacre, Canadian mining companies and the Canadian state played a sizeable role in ensuring that the post-apartheid ANC government did not radically restructure the economy for the benefit of the Indigenous black majority, and that they retained a favourable investment climate for foreign companies.

The 2022 national protests in Ecuador were a powerful statement in opposition to the socioeconomic status quo that is favoured by Ecuador’s conservative elite and the Canadian state. While the protestors achieved some important gains, Lasso’s continued embrace of foreign mining investment at the expense of Indigenous peoples may be doomed to incite another uprising.

Canadian mining companies extract tens of billions of dollars from Latin America, Africa, and Asia while poverty rates in these regions remain crushingly high. An industry ad campaign aimed at the Canadian public changes nothing about the realities of Canadian mining practices domestically and especially in the Global South—practices which enabled $143 billion in revenues in 2021.

Trudeau’s statement totally omits Canada’s diplomatic support for Amin’s 1971 coup against his predecessor, the left-leaning Milton Obote, or the fact that the Canadian government collaborated with Amin on business investment, notably mining, especially during the early part of his reign. This collaboration continued following Amin’s expulsion of Uganda’s South Asian population.

Bill C-11 is the first in a sequence of legislation designed to bring the Internet under Ottawa’s oversight. Next up will be Bill C-18, which would force Google and Facebook to pay Canadian news media for supposedly “stealing” their content. The objectives of most of this legislation are noble, but some of the measures it proposes risk infringing on fundamental freedoms.

President of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is currently embroiled in an international dispute that has pitted his government against two of its largest trading partners, the United States and Canada. At the centre of this dispute is energy—always a fraught geopolitical domain, but even moreso in today’s worldwide energy crisis.

Last week, the Liberal government took the first steps toward actualizing the emissions cap they promised during the last election for the oil and gas sector. In response, the Globe and Mail published a flurry of articles culminating in an editorial in which the paper’s board argued that climate policy aiming to cut total oil and gas production in Canada “is not an option.”