Took my first good look at The Maple yesterday. They feature some fabulous journalists (Emma Paling, for one) but I gotta say: not a fan of their framing in general.

effortpost tl;dr: sus

TIL:

The Maple started in 2017 as North99, “a political advocacy group founded by former Liberal Party staffers.” 2 years later they were caught linking to data mining petitions:

People who sign a petition from North99 may think they’re advocating on an issue — such as backing abortion rights or universal health care — but some of these petitions never get delivered to anyone. Instead, they’re used solely to gather information about the people who signed them, including their email address and postal code, ahead of the 2019 election — something that’s not clearly communicated on the site.
For instance, issue pages say “10,000 signatures needed” or “sign the petition,” but elsewhere use more ambiguous language, such as “Show your support … by adding your name below.”
…
In the last few months, North99 has purchased hundreds of Facebook ads, many of which drove people to the petitions or surveys. Scollon said the group has spent about $6,500 on advertising this year.
CBC News was able to analyze 687 ads purchased by North99 in Facebook’s political ad archive. About 65 per cent of those ads, or 445 in all, were purchased in the month of June, just ahead of new spending rules that limit the amount of money third-party groups can spend on advertising in the weeks leading up to the election. - cbc 2019

After the CBC report, North99 created Passage to publish opinions/analysis and later renamed North99 The Maple to publish news/investigations. Passage and The Maple continued to be funded by the nonprofit formerly known as North99. 2 years later, “it became clear that The Maple and Passage shared similar values” so they "merged.” - About Us

3 sample headlines to compare:

1 - Rabba, a Palestinian-Owned Chain is Selling Israeli Produce (- yesterday)
irl: Jack Rabba’s family moved to Canada in 1966, so that’s “Palestinian-Canadian” tyvm and it was 1 bunch of grapefruit at 1 store.
Looking into it: No, the Maple hasn’t published any stories regarding any other grocer and the BDS movement. Just one that’s likely to get a Palestinian-Canadian business owner harassed by well-intentioned activists who don’t rtfa.

2 - NDP Officials No Longer Welcome At The Maple (- 2023)

The NDP has shown that it is willing to stand by as genocide unfolds, saving its harshest actions for those fighting back […] as editors of The Maple we will no longer seek or be open to any sort of pitches, articles, appearances, features or requests from elected NDP officials, those who run for the party going forward, those employed by the party, and others with more formal ties.

irl: Just a few months earlier, Singh was horribly harassed and demonized as a “Danger to Jews” because he sent an email to a few dippers with “13 demands of the Liberal government on Palestinian rights” -2022, springmag & IJV. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs - the group that fomented the harassment campaign against him - invited him to speak at a conference and he did, making statements condemning anti-semitism. In their denunciation, The Maple chose not to mention the very relevant context of CIJA’s harassment of Singh, nor the fact that he’s had to deal with racists trying to rip the turban off his head since he was a kid, .

Another beef they had was with Olivia Chow, who tweeted in 2023 that the Chief of Police would let her know if there were any reports of hate “incidents” at what she was informed was a pro-Hamas rally. She acknowledged Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization in Canada. That one (1) tweet was listed in The Maple as a reason she’s obviously pro-genocide.

Looking into it: There were plenty of reasons to be pissed at the NDP regarding Israel-Palestine in 2022-23, and the editorial statement lists some entirely relevant points. Importantly, there are no similar denunciations of any other political party in Canada on their website. Though looking at their Content from the same time period, I found their Guide To Pierre Poilievre — Canada’s Next Prime Minister? ctrl+f Palestine and Israel show nothing. ctrl+f for NDP acknowledges the Broadbent Institute was named for Ed.

3 - The Left Has Failed To Confront Canada’s Resurgent Right
Quite the headline, no? I personally know many, many people “on The Left” who’ve been aggressively confronting regressives for decades, so that headline pisses me off and makes me want to defend their tenacity (and my own goddamnit). From a different perspective, where The Left clearly indicates folk working within the Establishment, I agree, because shit’s all fucked up, Project2025, etc.

“The Left Has Failed” alone could produce a mountain of online commentary.

irl: That “Left Has Failed” headline links to an excellent interview with the editor of Confronting The Resurgent Right and 2 of its contributors. The book focuses on “How to account for the rise of the right in Canada, and what can we do collectively in our communities to resist the right’s resurgence?”

There’s a tone decidedly more hopeful than its headline would suggest.

Again, work worth reading, buried beneath a ragebait accellerationist headline guaranteed to Generate Content amplifying The Failure of Canada and The Left discourse instead of the content of the article.

Now this illogical piece about HIMARS.

Given their organizational history and obsession with aggressively purity-testing “allies,” The Maple’s too sus for me to trust with so much information warfare flying about. Luckily it looks like the good journalists working for them also work with The Breach and others, so no great loss.

A Palestinian-Canadian owned chain.

Jack Rabba, the founder of Rabba […] described moving to Canada as winning the “lottery of life,” and referred to Canadians as the “greatest people in the world.”

In 2021, Canada Convenience Store News reported, “[Rabba president Rick Rabba’s] family were Palestinian immigrants who came to Canada in 1966 with little money. His mother worked at the University of Toronto library and his father [Jack Rabba] got a job at a restaurant, then a hotel and a convenience store.”

Over 1 batch of grapefruit in 1 store (and rumours of tangerines), this journalist confronted floor staff, the location manager, the head office, Jack, the Palestinian BDS National Committee and the Canadian BDS Coalition. Just to ask questions, of course.

Dude could use his platform to go after Pattison, a Weston, Metro or Empire for the same. Instead we get this misleading headline.

tl;dr - Davide found some grapefruit from Israel-Palestine in one (1) store. He went searching for more Israeli produce in other Rabba locations and couldn’t find any. No one would return his JAQ phone calls. Useful info here.

Ethiopia generates more than 96% of its electricity from renewable hydropower…

TIL

For many in Ethiopia, where salaries are often less than €1000 a year, the starting price of a new electric car — €17,000 ($19,700/3.2 million Ethiopian birr) — is steep. But taxi driver Abdurahman Ali is happy he made the switch. […] “Before switching […] every month I would spend 40,000-50,000 birr on fuel. Since switching to electric and charging at home, my monthly costs have dropped to about 5,000 birr, at most. That’s a huge difference.”

That’s massive! Roughly, from €250 to €25 a month? Fuck, that’s some fabulous news right there. Go on, Mr. Ali!

To anyone scrolling by wanting to take an intro to Indigenous history crash course, Indigenous Canada is offered free through coursera and the University of Alberta. 12 modules over 2 weeks (flexible). Can recommend.

Your generous donation will empower others to leave MAGA and tell their stories; foster reconciliation with their friends and family; and develop movement leaders to help others leave.

What was that about the next grift?

Neat trivia: if you go to their joint “leaving maga” testimonial page, Chrissey admits to having been an illegal migrant worker in 2001 and 2003. Went to China as a Christian missionary under the guise of “teaching English,” which absolutely violated the terms of her VISA, which makes her an illegal migrant worker. Not that they’d ever see it that way. Just no self awareness…

For all their claims of ignorant innocence (“We were lied to,” “I was clueless,” “It’s not the end of the world,” “It’s okay to be wrong”), Evangelists are always right.

We’re very upset about the mass deportation campaign, too. Speaking as a Christian, I’ve researched Christian Nationalism, and that really woke me up. These people getting picked up and deported to countries they’re not from, that’s not what a Christian stands for.

… then again, maybe there’s hope for them too. They just desperately need to decentre themselves. Like this guy has:

As someone who left MAGA, a main focus for me is trying to take as much accountability for my beliefs and actions as possible. I can’t just say, “Oh, I was lied to.” It’s my fault, because I let myself become that way. […]

Trump is not the ultimate cause of this. There are underlying issues, like poor education. People aren’t taught enough about women’s issues and minority issues, for example. And people are having trouble pulling together the bare necessities. Once that happens, it’s really easy to become angry and want to blame the system. And when you feel the system isn’t going to change, it’s easy to say, “Let’s try the lunatic. Put the bull in the china shop and let it loose.” - Jay, a former homeschooled Gamergator All-Lives-Matter incel, who seems to be actively working on becoming a better neighbour

Having worked in the homes of very wealthy folk, I can confirm that “move fast and break things” was always missing the part where the rich bastard’s nanny/gardener/housekeeper/etc takes the blame for shit being broken and gets their pay docked, while the Baby Elon-Zuck-Altmans of the world get an ice cream and a snuggle. Same shit happens when they grow up to be Big Boys.

I just assume it’s an ad for Honda.

Yay for more generic meds to treat Type 2 Diabetes!

On the downside, doctors all over Canada are already being inundated by people with eating disorders who’ve been seeing ads for Ozempic/Wegovy/etc for a decade now, but couldn’t justify the expense. To all my fellow 1990s “nothing feels as good as skinny tastes!” extreme dieting survivors - wishing you mental clarity and self care in these crazy days.

In the first 24 hours of generics coming online, Felix Health, a Canadian virtual care platform, had 14 times the number of people requesting a weight-loss visit with a doctor

Eating disorders and substance abuse are already very good buddies, and then there’s the nausea, diarrhea, vomiting and constipation side effects both Ozempic users and extreme dieters are already so familiar with. So many diabetes researchers have given the heads-up about the self-image problems, drug dependency and mental side effects (like depression and suicidal ideation) prediabetes drug treatments seemed to exacerbate. But even in the early 2000s the topic was so dominated by lobbying and hyperbole their concerns couldn’t make a dent.

Today it’s a gazillion times worse. We’ve all seen posts about these drugs get smothered by all those culty ED buzzwords (like “food noise”), evangelical testimonials and thousands of updoots within hours. Then mainstream media reports What People Are Saying along with whatever the latest pharma-funded study says the new wonder drug can do, and it snowballs.

Lately I’ve noticed an uptick in online doctors Creating Content about how Ozempic MIGHT BE a great treatment for all your other addictions and bad thoughts too. Which makes the Ozempic user’s story in the linked cbc article even more chilling imo:

[When she quit taking Ozempic] it was like a tap had been turned on in her head. Suddenly, all her thoughts the drug had suppressed about food and eating came flooding back. “It’s relentless and it’s constant,” said the 50-year-old Powell River, B.C., resident.

Ditto dropping the Be Nice training. Making myself talk with my neighbours - and getting to know the well-intentioned from the assholes again - I aim for kind and realistic instead of Nice and Positive.

Met some decent peeps and now we share harvests and perennials, which is something I lost when my old Nice neighbours went full-throttle Covidiot.

Anyway, that was a lovely wee post. Thanks.

Skippy pretending to care about worker’s rights. That’ll be… fun. I imagine the Manning Centre’s PR machine working overtime on another makeover right now. Brainstorming, “what do workers look like” and next time he steps out it’ll be in overalls and a big straw hat, or an old school rail porter’s uniform. It’ll be up there with Harper’s weird cowboy leather daddy moment.

It is depressing. Thinking about Carney’s Davos speech where he referenced Havel’s Power of the Powerless, taking the “workers of the world unite” sign out of the window. I didn’t think he meant it literally.

Good link. Everyone involved with that project is an angel. So grateful they swim in the shit so I don’t have to.

Until 2020, I still had the heart to pay attention to white supremacists and other accellerationists on the internet and off: keep track of the slimy shell game renaming they do, where they organized, all that crap. Now it just makes me nuts, so I check in monthly with antihate, mainly looking for any new flags, symbols, group names, locations and so on, so I can recognise them irl.

It’s SO similar. Same klepto-maniacial imperialist twits were inventing laws/policies for your country and mine: “free land” if you can clear it, white christian men are people and everyone else are uncivilized things, etc.

We call upon federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments to repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and lands, such as the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius, and to reform those laws, government policies, and litigation strategies that continue to rely on such concepts. - Call to Action 47 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

Thanks for the link, OP. Very worth the read.

These moments of hostility are more than personal insults; they represent a fracturing of the Canadian sanctuary I once knew, signaling a shift from a culture of mutual support to tribalism that now threatens, at various levels, the very multicultural fabric of our nation. In this delicate moment for both Canada and the world, it is time to confront the rise of these harmful ideologies and make a better country for all who live here. […]

This situation demands that we look beyond immigration laws and address the social sickness spreading within our communities, where everyone identifies as “Canadian” only to label the next person as the “alien.”

This reality is agonizing because when I first arrived in Canada, I felt I had reached the safest place in the world for social rights and harmony. Now, I feel that arguments are no longer arguments; they are one-dimensional screams. No one is looking for a calm, shared logic to solve our communal responsibilities. Instead, we are following egos and deceptive rhetoric that only seek an audience. This is the breeding ground for extremist ideological demagoguery.

There are 8.3 Billion people on the planet and there were 7.5 ten years ago. We have enough people. We have enough resources for everyone to live comfortably and be well in their communities. We have more than enough money and other valuable things to trade.

The main thing getting in our way isn’t a low birth rate.

Anyone genuinely concerned with the depopulation of humans in 2026 is probably some flavour of breeder cult weirdo, and the only ones constantly banging on about it in politics, academia, the news, etc are imperialists, industrialists and racist patriarchs. IME.

Truth. Best part of this story is the people who showed up to support Britt. Contrast the pictures: one is of Bubba, the sewage-brain psycho hepped up on hate, grinning about threatening a dying man alone in a hospital because teh gheys, and the other is a wall of no-nonsense good folk who might’ve been helping someone move into their new apartment that day if they weren’t so busy fighting fascism.

One thing the “alt right” did is get so many of us to see the difference between a patriot and a nationalist. They might claim the p-word, but they also claim to be pro-choice when it suits them so their definitions mean dick all. They’re flags-on-clothes “MY country, not yours, right or wrong” nationalists.

From what I’ve seen, a patriot wants to work to fix what’s hurtful in their country and to protect social and legal advancements already accomplished for the common good.

But absolutely, they’ve fouled that word up with how often and loudly they claim it.

The capsule has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is illegal in the country, but assisted dying has been allowed for decades as long as the person takes their life with no “external assistance” and those who help the person die do not do so for “any self-serving motive,” according to a government website.

That sounds so frigging complicated. Like, you can have a milky coffee, but you can’t physically combine the milk and coffee.

Good on the folk who risked 5 years in jail to help that 65 y/o bite it.