So, are we in a recession or not?

Why is it so hard to get a straight answer? Well, that's because it depends on who you ask, and what particular axe they have to grind.

The news that Canada is now in a "technical recession" has set political birds a-twitter, with Conservative opposition leader Pierre Poilievre squawking about the "Liberal recession" and the dire need for an immediate emergency debate in parliament. Mr. Poilievre, of course, is hysterical-complainer-in-chief, and will probably never amount to anything more than that. His whole job, as he sees it, is to expostulate that the sky is falling and that it is all the Liberals' fault, leaving Conservatives to hopefully conclude that it would all have been quite different had he been in charge. It's only a matter of time until Conservatives tire of his smarmy Grinch-like smile and his negativity.

But I digress...

Most non-conservatives and most economists of any (or no) political stripe have treated the news with much more nuance, cautioning that the idea of a "technical recession" (two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth) is not actually that helpful, and not even an official label. Many economic institutes, including he widely-recognized traditional arbiters of recession-calling, the National Bureau of Economic Research in the USA, and the CD Howe Institute's Business Cycle Council in Canada, do not use that definition. Most economists are cautioning that the weakness in Canada's economy is not yet widespread or persistent enough to warrant the recession label. Even the Bank of Canada, which issued the news, warned against overreacting to the announcement.

In the current case, real GDP by expenditure was actually pretty much flat over the last two quarters (Q4 2025 and Q1 2026). StatsCan produces many different variants of national growth statistics, but the one usually used for these purposes shows a 0.036% decline in Q1 2026, and 0.246% decline in Q4 2026. Annualizing the figures magnifies the quarterly changes somewhat to about a 1% fall for both quarters, but these are all tiny percentages, well within the margin of error for a stat that often gets adjusted or revised in retrospect, as often happens.

Getting still more granular, it turns out that it was really only October 2025 and March 2026 that showed actual decreases in real GDP - growth was either flat or modestly positive for the four months in between. Early estimates for April 2026 also suggest quite a sharp rebound to 0.4% growth.

And pulling out for a slightly different view of things, real GDP per capita, which some say is a better measure of economic growth and productivity, actually expanded 0.2% in Q1 2026, after a tiny dip in Q4 2025, as the country's overall population shrank slightly. Tellingly, a year or so ago, Mr. Poilievre and other critics were focussed much more on GDP per capita; now, when it doesn't serve their purposes quite so well, they are downplaying it.

Recession is, to some extent at least, in the eye of the beholder. Remember the great non-recession of 2015? Towards the end of Stephen Harper's Conservative administration, Canada's GDP fell by 0.5% and then 0.8%. But the Conservatives of the day, with an election looming, "declined" to call it a recession, even of a technical nature - one euphemism was a "discrete sectoral downturn" - while the opposition Liberals of course insisted that it was most definitely a full-blown recession. After much deliberation, the CD Howe Institute ultimately ruled that that technical recession didn't qualify as a real recession because its impact was not broad enough.

According to CD Howe, the last real recession was 2008/9, often referred to as the "Banking Crisis" (although Canada did not experience any major bank failures, and it weathered the downturn much better than other G7 nations), with a deep but very short one - which I would have thought ruled it out as a recession, by their own rules) in March-April 2020, at the start of the COVID pandemic. Before that, we are talking about the early 1990s and then the early 1980s. Recessions are not very common, particularly in Canada.

So, what are we to conclude? You can berate statistics and damned statistics all you like, but the fact is that they can usually be manipulated to prove a point, any point. While it's clear that, in very general terms, Canada's economy is not particularly healthy - how could it be, with all the external pressures on it? - most economists and financial institutions (including, let it be said, the Business Cycle Council) are urging extreme caution on the use of the R-word. 

Sorry, Pierre.

Trump tries some new tariffs - well, why not?

The Trump administration is at it again with tariffs, this time against almost all of America's major trading partners, with the pretext being that they are not pulling their weight on preventing the importation of goods manufactured using forced labour, which unfairly disadvantages the USA.

After the US Supreme Court struck down Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs (levied, illegally as it turned out, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act), he needed to find another way to impose tariffs, because that seems to be the sum total of his economic policy. What his highly-paid lawyers and policy wonks came up with this time was to use Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act to impose tariffs of 10%-12.5% on 60 countries (including Canada) that they say are not doing enought to enforce the import ban on goods produced using forced/slave labour. Canada, however, should be largely protected from the tariffs due to its participation in the USMCA/CUSMA ageeement.

It's a bit of a stretch, and it's hard to see the current US regime taking the moral high ground on ANYTHING. But, to some extent, in this area, they are probably right. 

Canada does have laws around forced labour imports, and there are specific provisions built into USMCA/CUSMA which prohibit the importation of goods produced wholly or partly by forced labour. But enforcement does seem to be lax. While Canada has intercepted 50 shipments on suspicion of forced labour conteventions since 2020, just 2 were ultimately turned away. The Coalition Against Forced Labour has called Canada out on this, and auditors from PwC agree that enforcement has been far from perfect. This will all no doubt also come up in some detail at the USMCA renegotiations later this year.

I confess, the first thing that occurred to me after I heard the news about the new tariffs was, "I bet America doesn't enforce their forced labour rules any better than we do!" Former Liberal MP John McKay, who was involved in the original implementation of the Canadian laws around it, notes that the US still allows private American firms to use exports with prison labour, and it does not adequately enforce its own laws on forced labour imports, such as the Biden-era Uyghur Forced labour Prevention Act.

Actually, though, the US does seem to be enforcing that specifc law quite well, as well as the terms of the Tariff Act of 1930 insofar as they relate to the products of forced labour. Some 6,300 shipments were denied entry in 2024 alone (although that was pre-Trump; figures for 2025 do not seem to be available).

That said, most people seem pretty sure that the Trump regime is not doing this out of moral outrage. They are doing it as "an excuse to impose the tariffs that they wanted to do anyway", as one European diplomat put it, adding that it's completely implausible that all these US trading partners are equally guilty - all 60 major trading partners appear to have failed to meet the bar the US has arbitrarily set - and there seems to be little or no proof being offered. Human rights groups also caution that, while the problem of forced labour does exist, the US tariffs are not the way to deal with it. 

I have looked previously at the whole issue of forced labour in Xinjiang, China - because that is essentially what we are talking about here -  and it is not as black-and-white an issue as it might appear. But the bottom line is, Trump is effectively using any justification he can to impose tariffs (because he's a "tariff guy", don't you know?), and if he can also engineer a hit on China at the same time, then all well and good.

These new tariffs cannot be imposed immediately, but must go through a period of public comment and review, starting with hearings in July. Given how many legal set-backs Trump has experienced in recent months, the tariffs are not the slam dunk they may have been a year ago.

Wait, so now we need to worry about AI worms?

As if viruses, malware, phishing threats and all were not enough, now cybersecurity experts are warning about AI-powered worms.

While viruses require a user to execute a file or open a link, worms can slither their way into a network or operating system to exploit vulnerabilities, move from device to device and replicate themselves across computer networks, all without human intervention. Once in, worms can carry out any number of cyberthreats, from network overload to denial of service attacks to spam distribution to ransomware delivery to data theft. Any device connected to the Internet - whether it be computers, cameras, printers - are potentially at risk. 

Remember the ILOVEYOU bug back in 2000, and WannaCry in 2017, and all the chaos and fear they engendered? Well, they were worms. But now, the addition of artificial intelligence into the mix has made everything that much more dangerous and harder to fix. While most cybersecurity concerns have centred around large language models like OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber and Anthopic's Claude Mythos Preview, AI worms are a much cheaper and more accessible way for hackers to wreak havoc on the Internet.

Back in the day, worms used to follow scripts generated by humans and, when they hit a defence they weren't designed to crack, they failed and died. AI has upped the ante and can create worms that modify their tactics as they spread from one device to another, tailoring attack strategies to each machine they interact with.

So potentially destuctive is their impact that researchers actually debated whether or not to publish their findings at all, worried that they would give bad actors a ready-made blueprint for how to conduct such an attack. Eventually, they decided to publish and just omit certain operational details, judging that the call to action - particularly at a governmental level - is a much higher priority.

Why do people smash things when their sports team wins?

Can someone please explain to me what burning cars and e-bikes and smashing and looting stores has to do with celebrating a sports victory?

After Paris St-Germain beat Arsenal in soccer's Champions League final this weekend, PSG fans went on a rampage in Paris and clashed with police, 219 fans were injured, eight of them seriously. Bus, train and rail services were severely disrupted, and one person was reported dead after an accident on the Paris ring road.(which may or may not have been connected). Some 6,000 police officers were mobilized this year after similar celebrations turned violent last year, and 57 of those police officers were injured. In all, 780 people were arrested, with over 450 of them still in custody. 

So, this then is what the French do when their team wins? What is the psychology behind that? Or is it just a function of the amount of alcohol imbibed? I could almost understand it if they had lost and they were frustrated, although it still wouldn't be justified.

Well, it turns out that psychology and sociology do have something to say about these violent revellers. 

For one thing, there is something called the "group contagion effect", whereby the anonymity of being part of a large group makes people feel they can get away with something illegal or dangerous, and generally let loose their aggresssive side. After a particularly intense game, people may search for a release from the tension through destructive behaviour. This can quickly spiral out of control in a large crowd of other like-minded people, and soon the usual rules and norms get overridden.

There's also an aspect of crowd behaviour called "excitation transfer", where extreme happiness can turn into extreme aggression as one part of the brain gets over-stimulated and over-excited. A state of high physical excitation (increased heart rate, adrenaline production, etc) can continue even after the initial arousal, and the body's leftover energy can become misattributed or transfered to a different emotional stimulus.

Well, maybe there are perfectly good psychological explanations for this stuff, but it still doesn't make any sense to me!

How Spain became so successful: immigrants

Remember back in the late 2000s/2010s, Spain, along with southern European neighbours Portugal, Italy and Greece were disaparagingly referred to as "PIGS", and mercilessly berated by more successful European countries like Germany and France?

Well, not any longer. Since the 2020 pandemic, Spain's economy has boomed while the likes of Germany, France and the UK have struggled. Disposable income in Spain has risen three times as fast as in France and eight times as fast as in Germany. Unemployment, poverty and inequality have all fallen to their lowest levels in nearly 20 years. The Economist ranked Spain as the No. 1 economy in the world in 2024.

All this has happened under the progressive centre-left government of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, which has now been in power for eight years. It has welcomed record numbers of immigrants, hiked the minimum wage, implemented energy price controls, fast-tracked renewable energy projects, and even implemented a kind of guarantees income system. Just about the only negative arising from all this is a burgeoning housing crisis, which the government will need to address if it wants to retain voter popularity.

When the initial COVID lockdowns started to fade in 2021, and tourists started to flock back to Spain (the country has always been in the top three of global tourist destinations), Spain, with one of the fastest-ageing populations in all of Europe, just didn't have enough workers to keep up. Increased immigration was the obvious solution, but that also had political ramifications, and the country's surging hard-right faction was ever active on that file, as always.

Spain's solution was elegant. It visibly cracked down on the most controversial form of immigration: African migrants entering the country illegally by boats across the Mediterranean. This was actually just a tiny proportion of its overall immigration, but it was the one most often targeted by the populist right wing and by the Spanish public in general. At the same time, they substantially ramped up the least controversial form of immigration: legal Latin American migrants. Given that they share a language and certain cultural affinities, Latinos have always been reasonably well-tolerated in Spain, especially if they do the least -popular and poorly-paid manual jobs.

They fast-tracked work authorizations for immigrants willing to work in those sectors with labour shortages, streamlined the foreign work visa process, and encouraged workers to settle in areas where the local workforce had dried up. Government representatives would even recruit individuals from the migrant refugee camps on the US-Mexico border. 

It was a very successful strategy even if it wasn't particularly progressive in some respects (this is not quite on a par with Donald Trump declaring that only white South African Afrikaners are welcome to immigrate into the USA, but it does sniff of duscrimination). In just two years from 2021-3, Spain added 3 million workers to its 48 million population. They injected new life into Spanish economy, allowed businesses to expand, and some of the more ambitious immigrants even went on to open up new businesses themselves. By some estimates, a quarter of the rise in Spain's GDP over the last few years can be attributed directly to immigrants.

Kamloops residential school burials investigation is proceeding, just very slowly

Can you believe that it's been 5 years since the announcement in May 2021 of the discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous residential school students - some as young as three years old, we were told - at an apple orchard near Kamloops, British Columbia, once the site of a notorious residential school for First Nations kids.

The news marked a watershed moment in Indigenous relations for Canada. Huge sums of money were allocated by the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau towards further investigations. There was an unprecedented period of national mourning and heart-searching. National flags were maintained at half-mast for nearly five months. A National Day For Truth and Reconciliation was established, and people held vigils and tied orange ribbons to poles and fence-posts. Pope Francis made an official apology on behalf of the Catholic Church for its role in Canada's residential school system as a direct response to the discovery.

The hundreds of "anomalies" identified by ground-penetrating radar were initially described as "the remains of 215 children" in a "mass grave". The press repeated this description avidly and unquestioningly, e.g. "Remains of 215 children found buried at former BC residential school", "Canada mourns as remains of 215 children found at Indigenous school", etc. 

Gradually, as cooler heads prevailed, they were reframed as "probable burials" or just "anomalies", and they were said to be "consistent with" the size, depth and layout of human burials. The number of suspected graves was reduced to around 200. But it was still a shocking and humbling discovery that merited further investigation, and it set off a frantic search in many other parts of Canada for more evidence of hidden burial sites and residential school atrocities.

Five years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, though, and there is still no hard evidence of what actually lies beneath the apple orchard. The Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc leadership are still resisting actually digging up the "probable" dead, and some people are starting to become suspicious that something is being hidden. Chief Rosanne Casimir has equivocated with unsatisfactory statement like, "While the investigation has been more complex than we initially thought, we are making progress and will continue adapting our methodologies.snd information as it advances". 

Interpreting ground-penetrating radar readings is an imprecise science, to put it mildly. Rocks, water and roots can appear as indistinct radar blips requiring interpretation. A ground-penetrating radar investigation of a potential mass grave in the US some years ago ultimately turned up nothing more than construction debris, artifacts and dirt, but no bodies. Other confimatory technologies exist - human remains detection dogs, LiDAR (a remote sensing method using laser pulses), and soil spectroscopy - and it seems that some of these are being used in BC.

Nevertheless, five years is a long time, and it's not clear what "advances" have been made. The ongoing uncertainty has given rise to skeptics and even denialists. One theory, based on historical blueprints of the residential school, is that the "anomalies" are actually part of a defunct septic system. Some denialists (or were they skeptics) have tried to break into the orchard in the middle of the night with shovels. Some have gone so far as to call it a big hoax, and one ex-MLA called it "the greatest lie in Canadian history". There are hashtags and slogans in some corners of the Internet like #StopTheGrift, "Every Hoax Matters" and "Dig Up or Shut Up". Some critics have called for the millions of dollars of taxpayers' money to be returned to Ottawa with interest.

These are the words of a small minority of mavericks and outliers, of course, but the media blackout and the cult of silence around Indigenous investigations are not helping their case from a PR perspective. One poll found that 63% of Canadians won't accept that children are buried at the Tk'emlúps site until excavation provides further evidence. Some Indigenous leaders believe that there is a risk that the secretive, closed-door policy might lead to further divide between Canadians and Indigenous people.

In fact, it does seem that investigations are proceeding, under federal guidance and according to a detailed plan to dig the site by 2027 (pending consent from around 120 First Nations communities throughout Western Canada that sent children to the school). DNA samples from First Nations are being collected to help with potential identification. Iron-clad legal protections against misuse are required. So the work is proceeding This is a mammoth undertaking of great complexity, but the Tk'emlúps leadership is playing it very close to their chest, and the precise timeline remains very uncertain.

And if the area is eventually excavated, and no children's bodies are found? Well, we'll cross that bridge if and when we get to it.

Israel denies allegations of sexual violence in conflict zones

The UN has accused both Israel and Russia of engaging in "patterns of rape or other forms of sexual violence" in conflict zones, and added them to a blacklist of countries suspected of such proscribed tactics.

Israel, predictably enough, back-accused the UN, and Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in particular, of downright lies and slander, and severed all ties with Guterres (although what "ties" they really have is hard to know). Israel's UN ambassador pulled no punches in his public response: "Given that Antonio Guterres has chosen to violate every standard of honesty, integrity and professionalism, Israel has decided to sever all ties with the Secretary-General's Office and will wait until a new UN Secretary-General is appointed". Well!

Of course, no such thing has happened. Mr. Guterres was merely articulating the results of a detailed report by the United Nations in which multiple specific instances of conflict-related sexual violence on Israel's part are well documented, covering the years 2023, 2024 and 2025. It had put the two countries "on notice" last year that they were likely to be added to the blacklist; this was not, then, unexpected. (Hamas, by the way, was already on the list.)

So, the UN was just doing its job, as was Mr Guterres. The violation of honesty, integrity and professionalism seems to be all on the side of Israel.

Russia, for its part, does not seem to have commented on the allegations, and presumably just doesn't care.

What's in a name? Where laws are concerned , quite a lot, it seems

Some of Vladimir Putin's most outspoken opponents are engaging in a full court press in Canada. And what they are campaigning for might surprise you.

The two activists are: Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian activist who has survived two poisoning attempts and a stint in a Russian jail; and Bill Browder, an American financier, who has led a high-profile (and dangerous) global campaign for targeted human rights sanctions, ever since his Russian tax advisor Sergei Magnitsky was beaten and killed in captivity for uncovering a massive fraud scheme administered by Putin officials.

The two men are currently campaigning in Canada, and their main demand is merely to rename one of Canada's laws. The Special Economic Measures Act (SEMA) has been Canada's main economic sanctions tool since it was first brought in back in 1992. Kara-Murza and Browder are arguing that the law should be renamed to include the name Magnitsky. They argue that the name is now globally synonymous with holding governments to account for human rights abuses, and that including the Magnitsky name would add "clarity" and give the law "a statement of moral purpose". 

There is currently a private member's bill, C-219, going through Parliament to exactly that effect, as well as to expand the current law to include transnational repression (where foreign states harass or harm vocal critics in order to silence or stifle their activism).

Now, I don't have a major problem with the proposed legislation, except that we already have a Sergei Magnitsky Law on the statutes, also known as the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act, and things could get confusing.

But mainly, I was surprised at just how important these two world-renowned activists consider the name of the law to be, that they would contemplate travelling here to specifically campaign for it.