America's latest World Cup affront

God, the current American administration really knows how to manufacture a public relations disaster out of thin air!

After multiple reports of incidents like the Iranian World Cup soccer team's support squad being denied entry, and even the players being forced to jump through all sorts of hoops just to play the games they have already earned and deserve - why are they even scheduled to play in the US? With games also being played in Mexico and Canada, surely that could have been avoided - now we have a lone Somali referee being denied entry at the last minute.

Omar Artan is an experienced FIFA -approved international referee, and has all his papers in order. He was named referee of the year last year by the Confederation of African Football, and he would have been the first referee from his country to officiate at such a prestigious event, the honour of his lifetime.

Instead, he was pulled over at Miami airport, subjected to hours of interrogation, and denied entry "due to vetting concerns" by US Customs and Border Protection.

There has been understandable outrage across most of the world. As a former England player put it: "Every few hours its another story - another story about fans denied, players denied, officials denied, journalists denied, now refs. Is this how the hosts behave really for the greatest game, the greatest tournament in the world?"

So much for Gianni Infantino promising "Everyone will be welcome in Canada, Mexico and the United States".

Canadian politicians have also weighed in, saying that Mr. Artan would be welcome to officiate in Canada. But apparently even that would not be an acceptable solution because all the referees are required to attend a training hub in Florida before the games begin. Ridiculous!

Donald Trump and the rest of his merry band of crooks and thugs have their dirty fingerprints all over this. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the order for this latest indignity came right from the top. How can it possibly be in America's interests to have the rest of the world hate them so?

What to do when you get a rick bite (Ontario edution)

I guess it was only a matter of time before I or my wife got bitten by a tick. It happened to my wife this last weekend on an otherwise beautiful walk in the Rouge Valley. Except, we didn't realize it until two days later (it was on her stomach for one thing!)

I knew I had to take it off as soon as possible with tweezers (pull straight out, no twisting or smearing!) But I had no idea what to do next. Well, now I do!

First, I took a photo of it and identified the tick through eTick.ca - some kind of AI application, I guess. We received a positive identification within just a couple of hours and, sure enough, it was a black-legged tick, or deer tick, the kind that potentially carries Lyme Disease. Not all of them carry the disease, so all was not lost at this point. But that was a  pretty impressive service, I thought.

My next stop was the Public Health Ontario webpage on  Lyme Disease. This resource has a flowchart you can follow to decide whether or not you need to get a prophylactic antibiotic shot. The first question is: do you have the tell-tale bulls-eye rash and/or flu-like symptoms (fever, chills, headache, stiff neck, fatigue, decreased appetite, muscle and joint pains, joint swelling, swollen lymph nodes, etc). If so, go straight to see a doctor or nurse practitioner. In our case, though, the answer was no, so go to Question 2.

Question 2 assesses the level of risk of Lyme Disease, and asks if all four of these risk factors apply: the tick has been removed in the last 72 hours; the bite occurred in a high-risk area (Google it); the tick was likely attached for at least 24 hours; and you have no allergy to the antibiotic doxycycline. In our case, we "ticked" all of these, so a dose of doxycycline was recommended (that seems to be the ONLY antibiotic that is recommended). If we had not been able to tick off all four, then the advice is just to monitor the bite and see if any symptoms occur.

So, we went to our local pharmacy - pharmacists innOntario are now authorized to treat this kind of thing, no need for a doctor's appointment - bought 2 tablets of doxycycline (after the pharmacist briefly went over all of the above), and Bob's your proverbial uncle. Actually, he even waived the $2.99 cost, so the whole thing cost us ... nothing!

What a good system!

Why air conditioning might not be the best solution to hot weather

We do have air conditioning in our Toronto lakefront house (well, it's a heat pump - same idea, just cheaper and more efficient). But cool breezes off the lake and a certain attitude conspire against us using it very often.

American family and friends despair of us, but it's always seemed counter-intuitive to me to respond to climate change-induced exteme heat events by firing up a power-hogging electrical device which will only make climate change worse. It's also horribly expensive, as electricity rates creep up. 

But we do use it a few times a year, mainly on very hot nights where sleep would otherwise be impossible. During the day, even when it's hot, we tend not to use it - hot is just how it is in the summer. You can maybe see why visiting American family members shake their heads.

Turns out, though, I'm probably right. Certainly about the climate change piece, but also the half-formed idea I have always had that air conditioning is just not particularly healthy, and maybe even dangerous.

It's a fact that extreme heat events kill more people in the affluent West than in the wilds of Africa, where the heat is typically so much more intense and air conditioning is all but unheard of. Over millennia, Africans have adapted to the heat, physiologically and in their habits and conditions: houses maximize air flow, the workday is arranged around the hottest parts of the day, clothing is loose and cool, hydration is a regular feature of life.

But also, there's evidence that chronic use of air conditioning can reduce such resilience. Although air conditioning in offices can improve labour productivity, fans and proper air circulation can achieve the same benefits, at least up to around 30°C. In residential homes, though, AC can prove downright dangerous. In increasingly common "compound climate events" - where a heat wave induces a power failure, for example - the rapid change in temperature can result in more heat stress than the high temperatures alone. As one recent American study puts it, "high AC prevalence may have the unintended effect of amplifying heat vulnerability during grid failure events". You only have to walk out of an over-air-conditioned store into the hot street to understand the logic of that.

Now, I'm not saying that air conditioning should be banned. Nearly a third of the deaths during heat waves occur among the elderly over 80 years of age, and more Europeans than North Americans tend to die from heat exposure (air conditioning is much more prevalent in North America). It's essential that seniors homes nursing homes and hospitals are air-conditioned, and even residential apartment blocks where a high proportion of senior citizens live. 

I just think we overuse it. We don't need frigid conditions in our houses and stores during the few months of the year when the weather is actually nice and warm; that is just perversity. Maybe a fan works well most of the time, maybe just opening the windows would be sufficient. Take a cold shower, have a cold drink. Don't just automatically hit the AC button, and if you do, don't set the temperature unnecessarily low.

FIFA may have miscalculated in Canada

Not only is the upcoming World Cup not going to work out as beneficial to host cities Toronto and Vancouver as advertised, it might not even work out as well for FIFA as they had hoped.

The way these things usually work is: FIFA does pretty much whatever it wants and makes all its big money up front, while the host cities and their citizens carry all the risk and the expense. That's still how it works this time, except that FIFA's policy of charging top dollar for ticket prices may not be quite as effective as usual. While Canada was hugely excited by the prospect of holding World Cup games at first, the bloom is off the rose somewhat of late. Less than a week before the first games, hundreds of tickets remain unsold for events that were once expected to be oversold many times over.

Unlike many another country, soccer here is popular but a distant third or even fourth love, after hockey, baseball and basketball. Both Vancouver and Toronto are overwhelmingly cities of immigrants, most of whom have brought their idolization of soccer with them to Canada. But, as a nation, our national pride is invested much more in hockey, even in baseball and basketball, than it is in soccer. Football is not a core part of our national psyche, as it is for so many other countries.

So, there is a certain subset of the population that is socccer-mad, and will pay whatever it takes to watch a world-class display of football, even if that might be Ghana v Panama or Senegal v Iraq. But, past that, the delirium starts to fade, and there has been push-back against what many perceive as FIFA's greed and insensitivity. Even bona fide fans feel they are being charged exorbitant ticket prices. Even local hotels are only at about 80% capacity, which is about the same as usual during summer months. So, did FIFA miscalculate?

Embattled FIFA president Gianni Infantino claims that demand for tickets has been ten times that of the last two World Cups added together, but that doesn't seem to have played out here in Canada. Infantino claims that, "there are expensive tickets, yes, but there are also affordable tickets". The face value of the cheapest tickets to the opening game in Canada (the home team versus Bosnia & Herzegovina) starts at over C$1,000, which most Canadian fans (particularly recent immigrants) will find far from affordable. It feels to many residents like they are paying for the games, but still can't attend them.

One Toronto fan summed it up well: "I've given up, and at this point, I don't want to give my money to FIFA. I'm done with them. I get that, while they can control pricing, it feels like an affront to what makes football great: it's a sport for everyone. Accessibility ought to make it easier for fans - especially those living in the host cities - to see the games."

A "sports economist" from Concordia University explains that FIFA is in the business of maximizing its revenues, not of filling stadiums (and certainly not of providing a memorable experience for local fans). Sometimes it makes more commercial sense to sell high-priced tickets than to fill lower-priced seats. The practice from previous World Cup tournaments of making more tickets accessible to local residents has been supplanted this year by the more lucrative strategy of real-time variable pricing models, which it says "aligns with industry trends across various sports and entertainment sectors". As the sports economics prof puts it, "There is no competition, so they can behave in whatever immoral, unethical, improper way they want - unless fans are prepared to walk away." Well, it seems some fans at least have walked away. 

It's thought that, as the date of the first games approaches, the prices of the remaining tickets may drop drastically. But don't bet on on it. This is FIFA at the controls, after all. 

One other wild card in all this is that Ontario recently passed a law, just in time for the World Cup, that bans the resale of tickets at prices above the original face value. So, in theory at least, we shouldn't be seeing resales on StubHub or on FIFA's own resale platform at the kinds of ridiculous prices seen in some other jurisdictions. But ... FIFA is still in charge of those original face values. And regulation and policing of the new law is almost impossible, according to experts.

Meanwhile, FIFA continues to make PR mistakes, further alienating local people. It has banned reusable water containers at the eleventh hour, ostensibly for safety reasons, and only allows fans to bring in one small factory-sealed soft plastic disposable bottle of water. (This was a climb-down after the initial announcement that NO water bottles could be brought in.) After that, they can of course buy FIFA's own high-priced disposable bottled of water to deal with the high temperatures expected during the tournament. Toronto's environmentally-conscious council has complained loudly. 

There's even a "Reboot FIFA" campaign underway, looking to deliver "the largest single complaint FIFA will ever have received about the conduct of its senior officials", covering a range of issues including exorbitant ticket prices and the semi-official offering of a peace prize to a notorious war-monger.

For what it's worth, the venerable Sports Illustrated magazine has voted Vancouver the best of the 16 host cities, mainly for the stadium's central situation and accessibility, the good public transportation, the city's walkability, and it's mild weather. Surprisingly enough, Toronto came in at No.3, separated from Vancouver only by Seattle.

Hobson's Choice for the Armenian people

With all this talk about "great powers" and "middle powers", spare a thought for some of the "small powers".

Take little Armenia, for example: population about 3 million, area about half the size of Nova Scotia or a bit bigger than Wales, GDP in the same range as Burkina Faso and Mongolia? Armenia is about to hold a general election on June 7th, and the run-up to it has brought home just what a balancing act a small land-locked country like that has to maintain.

Armenia has been a life-line for Iran, on its southern flank, providing thousands of truckloads of agricultural produce, cargo and fuel. But it must be painfully aware that Iran can turn on its allies in a heartbeat.

It maintains a fragile peace with next-door neighbour, historic rival and perennial bugbear Azerbaijan, particularly in the aftermath of yet another skirmish over Nagorno-Karabakh, in which many thousands of ethnic Armenians were expelled, and some Armenian POWs remain in custody.

Its relationship with Turkey (sorry, Türkiye) on its western border is in constant state of fracture, especially under the iron rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Notwithstanding the ongoing debate over the 1915 Armenian Genocide by the Turkish Ottoman Empire - well, only debated in Turkey and Azerbaijan, really; accepted fact everywhere else - there are many other points of contention with Turkey, some going back centuries. For example, Mount Ararat, with all its historical and cultural significance, sits firmly within the legal borders of Turkey, but Armenians still see it as the mythical birthplace of the Armenian people, and the recent removal of its image from Armenia's passport entry/exit stamps was highly controversial.

And, overshadowing everything, is the looming presence of Russia, Armenia's one-time overlord back in the Soviet Union days. There is still a Russian air base near the Armenian capital Yerevan, and Russian FSB officer can still seen patrolling Armenia's southern border. Vladimir Putin still considers Armenia to be within Russia's sphere of influence despite its many years of independence, and he has warned Armenia in no uncertain terms against pursuing closer links with the European Union. Russia has exerted pressure in many ways, some subtle, some not so much, from a ban on seafood, mineral water, fresh fruit and vegetables and flowers(!), to the withdrawal of its ambassador, to veiled threats over the functioning of Armenia's (poorly) Russian-run railway system. Putin also warned Armenia in a not-so-veiled reference that "the crisis in Ukraine began with efforts to move toward EU accession".

Into this volatile mix, then, come the candidates standing for the position of President: former president Robert Kocharyan, staunchly pro-Russia and running on a nationalist platform but also aiming to distance Armenia from the pro-Europe stance of the current President Nicol Pashinyan; the almost equally pro-Russia billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, Moscow's preferred candidate, technically still under house arrest for plotting to overthrow the government, who is promising a "strategic re-alignment" with Russia; and the sole pro-European candidate, the unpopular incumbent Pashinyan (unpopular mainly because of making concessions in favour of peace with Azerbaijan).

If the two pro-Russian candidates were to work together they would handily beat Pashinyan. But, as things stand, Pashinyan may just squeak out a victory, Russian pressure notwithstanding. But a lot of Armenians are going to be a bit frustrated with the choice of potential presidents they are being presented with. Hobson's choice? (Look it up!)

UPDATE

In the end, it wasn't even close. 

Paashinyan's Civil Contract Party won the election with 49.8% of the popular vote. Karapetyan's Strong Armenia Alliance polled just 23.2%, while Kocharyan's Armenia Alliance came in a distant third with 9.9%.

Putin is understandably pissed. There are reports that the Kremlin has instructed the Russian press to downplay the pro-Europe vote. 

America hijacks D-Day memorial to score what they see as political points

The arrogance! The disdain! The pompousness! The insensitivity! Yes, I could be talking about almost any member of the Trump administration on almost any day, but this time it's the turn of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth was giving a speech in Normandy, 82 years after the joint D-Day operation to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944. Under the codenames Operation Overlord and Operation Neptune, D-Day remains the largest amphibious invasion in military history, and marked a crucial turning point in World War II.

I guess the Europeans felt they had to invite an American to speak, as the USA did provide the largest contingent of troops in the operation and was directly responsible for two of the five beach landings. But they must have had some misgivings at handing Hegseth the mike. And they would have been so right.

Hegseth thought it was appropriate to turn a solemn memorial event into a tub-thumping political diatribe and a pointed critique of European immigration policy from a (totally inapposite) American perspective.

"Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece, and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?"

"The men who fought and died here restored freedom to Europe. That freedom must be maintained by this generation of leaders and war-fighters, or what they fought for was merely temporary."

I don't know whether Hegseth thought up the (spurious) link between these "invasions" himself, or had a speech-writer do it. But I'm sure he felt himself very clever for it. 

And clearly it never even occurred to him that the callous politicization of a such a sombre and reflective event might not be, well, appropriate. European speakers could have drawn parallels between the "dangerous ideologies" of the Nazis and what is happening in the USA today, but they realized that that would have been inappropriate. Or they could have pointed out modern America's penchant for invading other countries, but that would have been cheap political point-scoring, wouldn't it?

Hegseth - and the whole Trump administration for that matter - has no such qualms, no such subtlety or delicacy. They feel emboldened to say whatever they want in whatever arena at whatever time. They are boors and churls (and much worse).

Canada pledges to accelerate AI development just as others advise caution

It sometimes seems like half of all articles in the newspaper are something to do with artificial intelligence, sometimes something good, often something bad.

Canadian news outlets are all reporting and commenting on Prime Minister Mark Carney's big reveal of Canada's AI strategy yesterday, outlining the government's approach to what he calls "the defining technology of our era". Under the banner "AI For All", Carney's upbeat, if somewhat vague, presentation promises: protections for Canadians, young and old, from the risks and potential online harms of AI (through modernizing consumer privacy legislation, introducing online safety laws, watermarking AI-generated content, creating a Canada trusted AI certification program, protecting elections from interference, etc); access to free AI literacy training (an area where Canada particularly lags), including for post-secondary students; up to 90,000 AI-related job opportunities for young Canadians, plus another 250,000 new jobs through increased AI adoption by 2031; boosting business adoption of AI from 12% today to 60% by 2034; building a world-leading supercomputer by 2031; building up a multilateral alliance giving Canada "sovereign autonomy" in key AI capabilities; and $2 billion in direct investment to achieve these strategic aims.

It all sounds very forward-thinking, ambitious, even Panglossian, although what it is really is Canada trying to make up some lost ground on everyone else. Some Canadian tech companies like Cohere are extremely positive about the new policies, calling it "an incredible step forward", "a defining moment of opportunity", and "the beginning of the next chapter", particularly since Canadian researchers were at the forefront of AI's early development.

Critics of the strategy, though, have questioned how AI is supposed to create so many thousands of jobs rather than cost jobs, as many are predicting (Signal 49, for example, warns that AI and automation could lead to 550,000 Canadian job losses by 2030 as businesses restructure.) Others have complained that the government strategy is vague on timelines and specific safety measures. 

Be that as it may, the Canadian government had to make some kind of an announcement about how it is pursuing and dealing with AI, if only because everyone else is.  

It's interesting, though, that it comes hard on the heels of Pope Leo XIV's papal encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which warns about the urgent need tor an ethical framework for AI to prevent it from becoming an instrument of domination and an agent of lethal autonomous warfare, to avoid the manipulation of reality (e.g. deepfakes), and to protect the rights of workers, the marginalized and the vulnerable.

It also comes just as major AI developer Anthropic warns that maybe there should be a coordinated and verifiable pause in all AI development, because AI systems are approaching the point where they can improve themselves, without human intervention, faster than society can manage the risks.

This, then, is the environment in which Canada is, somewhat belatedly, committing itself to accelerating AI development and adoption.

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 0.1% and  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.