The assets of Silicon Valley Bank’s Canadian branch have been temporarily seized by Canada’s banking regulator after the bank\’s collapse last week. US banking regulators were forced to close the bank after large sums were withdrawn by worried depositors, which has raised concerns about other banks that cater to the technology sector companies. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) said on Sunday that Silicon Valley Bank’s Toronto branch primarily lends to corporate clients, and does not hold any commercial or individual deposits in Canada. Chris Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, released a statement saying that after speaking with Canada\’s financial sector leaders and the Bank of Canada, she believed that the country’s “well-regulated banking system is sound and resilient\”. Silicon Valley Bank is seen as one of the biggest bank failures in US history. Meanwhile, regulators moved swiftly to shut the New York-based Signature Bank over the weekend, while smaller banks remained under pressure.
The European Union is seeking to secure its supply lines of critical raw materials, including lithium and rare earths, amidst concerns over its dependence on China. Lithium is classified by the EU as a \”critical raw material\” necessary for the transition to cleaner energy, as it is a key component of rechargeable batteries for electric cars and energy grid storage facilities. The EU estimates its demand for lithium will be 57 times what it is today by 2050. Despite the EU securing a new agreement with Chile in December, which has the most abundant supply of high-quality lithium in the world, Europe lacks a reliable home-grown supply of the metal, with China currently dominating raw material supply chains. The EU\’s Critical Raw Materials Act, due to be published this month, will aim to give EU countries a roadmap for navigating the international power struggle over minerals, as well as to ramp up the EU\’s own extraction and refining capacity. The act will also put international alliances front and centre of efforts to cut dependence on China.
امریکی صدر جو بائیڈن کا آب و ہوا کا بل صرف چھ ماہ پرانا ہے، لیکن دنیا بھر میں توانائی کی صنعت پر اس کے اثرات مسلسل بڑھتے جا رہے ہیں کیونکہ ممالک پر سبز توانائی کے لیے اسی طرح کی سبسڈی کی پیشکش کرنے یا قیمتی سرمایہ کاری کے ڈالر سے محروم ہونے کا خطرہ بڑھتا جا رہا ہے۔
افراط زر میں کمی کا ایکٹ (IRA) ایک اربوں ڈالر کا پروگرام ہے جو کم کاربن توانائی کی ترقی کے لیے حکومتی ڈالر کا وعدہ کرتا ہے۔ اس پالیسی کا مقصد ملک کے مینوفیکچرنگ سیکٹر کو فروغ دینا ہے اور اس کا مقصد کلین انرجی ٹیکنالوجی سپلائی چین میں چین کی غالب پوزیشن پر ہے۔
اس قانون سازی کو امریکہ میں منظور ہونے والا اب تک کا سب سے پرجوش آب و ہوا کا بل سمجھا جاتا ہے پھر بھی، IRA کینیڈا سمیت دنیا بھر کی حکومتوں کو مجبور کر سکتا ہے کہ متعارف کروائیں…
امریکی صدر جو بائیڈن کا آب و ہوا کا بل صرف چھ ماہ پرانا ہے، لیکن دنیا بھر میں توانائی کی صنعت پر اس کے اثرات مسلسل بڑھتے جا رہے ہیں کیونکہ ممالک پر سبز توانائی کے لیے اسی طرح کی سبسڈی کی پیشکش کرنے یا قیمتی سرمایہ کاری کے ڈالر سے محروم ہونے کا خطرہ بڑھتا جا رہا ہے۔
افراط زر میں کمی کا ایکٹ (IRA) ایک اربوں ڈالر کا پروگرام ہے جو کم کاربن توانائی کی ترقی کے لیے حکومتی ڈالر کا وعدہ کرتا ہے۔ اس پالیسی کا مقصد ملک کے مینوفیکچرنگ سیکٹر کو فروغ دینا ہے اور اس کا مقصد کلین انرجی ٹیکنالوجی سپلائی چین میں چین کی غالب پوزیشن پر ہے۔
اس قانون سازی کو امریکہ میں منظور ہونے والا اب تک کا سب سے پرجوش آب و ہوا کا بل سمجھا جاتا ہے پھر بھی، IRA کینیڈا سمیت دنیا بھر کی حکومتوں کو مجبور کر سکتا ہے کہ متعارف کروائیں…
یورپی کمیشن کے صدر ارسولا وان ڈیر لیین ایک مختصر دورے کے لیے کینیڈا میں ہے جس کا مقصد ٹرانس اٹلانٹک تعلقات کو فروغ دینا ہے۔
وزیر اعظم جسٹن ٹروڈو وہ منگل کی صبح CFB کنگسٹن میں وون ڈیر لیین میں شامل ہوں گے اور کینیڈا کی مسلح افواج کے اہلکاروں سے ملاقات کریں گے جو یوکرائنی مہاجرین کی مدد کے لیے پولینڈ میں تعینات ہیں۔
دونوں ایک کلین ٹیکنالوجی کمپنی کے دورے کے دوران خالص صفر معیشت میں اہم معدنیات پر تعاون کے حوالے سے ایک تقریب بھی منعقد کریں گے۔
اس وقت مقبول ہے
ٹروڈو کے دفتر کے مطابق، جوڑا موسمیاتی تبدیلی، صنفی مساوات اور تجارت اور سرمایہ کاری کو وسیع کرنے کے طریقوں پر تبادلہ خیال کرے گا۔
منگل کی شام، وان ڈیر لیین یورپ کے ساتھ کینیڈا کے تعلقات کے بارے میں ہاؤس آف کامنز سے خطاب کریں گی اور بین الاقوامی خواتین کے…
The power of peat: Canada’s secret weapon against climate change
Hiking in the Hudson Bay Lowlands is like a game of hopscotch — in a swamp. A tapestry of colourful mosses indicates where it’s safe to step: the green and white spots are drier, while the rich red and copper patches can swallow you whole.
Aside from the stunted black spruce trees that dot the watery landscape, it doesn’t look like there’s much here. It’s quiet, except for the constant buzzing of mosquitoes and black flies. But Michelle Kalamandeen didn’t come all this way for what’s on the surface.
Standing only about five feet tall, she uses her entire body to shove a long metal instrument into the spongy ground. Using a sledgehammer, another team member thumps the pole downward inch-by-inch. Until, eventually, it stops.
“The blade is going to cut the soil and then we’ll pull it up,” Kalamandeen says, turning the handle on top of the pole 180 degrees.
What emerges is a perfectly cylindrical soil sample.
Except this isn’t your average soil, it’s peat.
The research team examines the peat core. This sample was taken more than two metres below the surface.
Marc Doucette / Global News
“We know it’s very old because we’re going so far down into the ground,” Kalamandeen says.
This sample, also called a peat core, is likely around 2,000 years old judging by its depth, which means it could have been forming at the same time as the Roman Empire. And all that time, it’s been storing carbon.
“The darker the peat is, the more carbon it tends to have,” she says.
Peatlands are ancient ecosystems that cool the planet by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and trapping it deep underground. But despite its natural ability to stall further climate warming, Canada’s peatlands are often overlooked.
“They are always seen as desolate wastelands: full of bugs, wet, you can’t access them, nothing of value in them,” says Lorna Harris, a peatland scientist working for Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. “And I think we need to change that.”
The Hudson Bay Lowland peatlands are a “global treasure,” says peatland scientists Lorna Harris.
Marc Doucette / Global News
A search for any praise of peatlands in government policy papers yields few results. This is surprising when you consider that Canada has one-quarter of the world’s peatlands. Together, they store more carbon than the Amazon rainforest and amount to the largest land carbon stock in the world. The latest research estimates Canada is responsible for 150 billion tonnes of carbon sequestered underground — the equivalent to 11 years of current global greenhouse gas emissions.
These carbon sinks can be found across the country, from the Taiga Plains in the Northwest Territories to the north shores of the St. Lawrence River. But there’s one peatland complex that stands out among the rest: the Hudson Bay Lowlands.
Stretching from Manitoba, across northern Ontario, and into Quebec, it is the largest peatland expanse in North America and the second largest in the world. Largely undisturbed by human development, this unique ecosystem has been accumulating for thousands of years and is thought to store more than 35 billion tonnes of carbon.
“It is essentially our equivalent to the Amazon rainforest,” Harris says.
Like the Amazon Rainforest, its existence is being threatened by human activity.
Kalamandeen’s work has taken her to peatlands in Peru, Brazil, England, and across her home country of Guyana. But none quite compare to the Hudson Bay Lowlands.
“I was blown away by the extent of it,” she says. “And as a scientist, you think, ‘Oh wow, this can store a lot of carbon.’”
She’s part of McMaster University’s Remote Sensing Lab. In partnership with World Wildlife Fund Canada and the Mushkegowuk Council, the scientists are combining satellite data with field samples to map the density of carbon across the Hudson Bay Lowlands.
A local guide hammers the peat borer into the ground while Kalamandeen holds it still.
The region is so large and so remote that the research done up to today just scratches the surface. There are only two ways to get to these peatlands: getting a helicopter to drop you off in the middle of the wilderness, or boating up river, then hiking several kilometres inland. The research collective chose the latter. On this leg of the trip, the researchers are using the small Cree community of Peawanuck as their home base.
“It’s very exhausting work,” Kalamandeen says on the morning of the second day of fieldwork. The team has four more days in Peawanuck before flying to its next location, Attawapiskat First Nation, located a few hours south by plane. Locals from each of the First Nations the researchers visit have been trained as sampling technicians in the hopes they can carry on the work in the years to come.
There’s a palpable sense of urgency. The collective is trying to keep pace with a well-funded and extremely motivated foe: mining companies. Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s dogged support of mineral extraction has led to a boom in exploration activity in an area deemed “the Ring of Fire.” As of last year, more than 26,000 mining claims cover 5,000 square kilometres of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, an area roughly the size of Prince Edward Island.
The goal of the mapping project is two-fold: by identifying the most carbon-rich areas, groups can better advocate for their protection and other scientists and government agencies can use the data to assess the carbon cost of any future resource development.
“Conservation action increasingly needs to be looking not only at the biodiversity values — and there are tremendous biodiversity values in the region — but also the role of carbon,” says James Snider, a conservation biologist who leads WWF Canada’s science and innovation team.
As mining companies work to put a value on the minerals underground, scientists and conservationists are using carbon to show the value of the Hudson Bay Lowland peatlands.
But the stakes are highest for the tens of thousands of Indigenous people who live in this region. Struggling to adapt to a rapidly warming climate, the vital infrastructure they need comes tied to an industry that threatens their traditional way of life.
Peatlands are ancient ecosystems, forming over the course of hundreds or thousands of years.
Here’s how they work.
Sphagnum mosses and other vegetation on the surface take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through the process of photosynthesis. Typically when plants die and decompose, that carbon gets released back into the atmosphere.
But the waterlogged conditions of peatlands slow down plant decomposition to such an extent that the dead plant matter gets pushed down by new vegetation growth, trapping the carbon absorbed underground with it. The accumulation of this partially decayed plant matter is what forms peatlands.
Globally, peatlands store more carbon, and for longer than any other terrestrial ecosystem. Despite only covering three per cent of the earth’s surface, they store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined.
“That’s the power of peatlands,” Harris says.
But this unique ecosystem is more than a carbon sink.
Scientist Michelle Kalamandeen holds peat in her hands.
Marc Doucette / Global News
During the winter months, Sam Hunter will gather a small group together to hunt caribou in the frozen peatlands. The muskeg, as it’s called by locals, is a critical habitat for the eastern migratory caribou. They come to this region to fill up on the white crunchy lichen that blankets the muskeg.
“The caribou are never in one place,” he says. “But we find them.”
Hunter’s grandson, who’s about to turn eight, often joins him on his hunting trips, which can involve days of travel inland. He’s been tagging along on hunting and fishing excursions since he was two years old.
“He’s seen everything — caribou, moose. He loves to fish,” Hunter says.
More and more, families are bringing the youth out on the land and teaching them about harvesting, he says. In the spring, many community members travel downriver to Hudson Bay to hunt geese. The area serves as the breeding ground for millions of birds that migrate between South America and the Arctic every year. Come fall, it’s the moose hunt inland that everyone looks forward to. The rivers are their highways, and the muskeg is their hunting grounds.
“We need to teach the kids how to live off the land,” Hunter says.
Sam Hunter monitors changes in the environment around Peawanuck – from the water quality of the rivers to the flight path of migratory birds.
Marc Doucette / Global News
Due to the high cost of food up north, seasonal harvesting is not only culturally significant but necessary.
“If we couldn’t do that, living up here wouldn’t be affordable,” Hunter says. At the Northern store in Peawanuck, a package of cold cuts sets you back at least $15 and fresh fruits and vegetables are sparse.
Luckily, the rivers are brimming with fish, and herds of caribou still frequent the area. The muskeg is also where community members harvest traditional medicines and “tundra tea,” says Matthew Gull, a resident of Peawanuck.
Peatlands also act as a natural water filter, improving the quality of water that feeds into the vast network of streams and rivers that lead to Hudson and James Bay. Many people in Peawanuck still drink directly from the Winisk river that flows alongside the community, Gull says.
“We tell the youth, ‘Drink the water from the river while you still can,’” he says.
The Winisk river is a vital source of drinking water and food for the community of Peawanuck.
Across the Hudson Bay Lowlands, people have been noticing changes: inland ponds are disappearing. So are the geese. Peatlands are collapsing due to permafrost thaw. The river levels are too low. The winters are wetter and shorter. The trees are getting taller. New species like cougars and even grizzly bears are appearing.
Hunter has been keeping a record of these changes as the Peawanuck’s Natural Resource Monitor.
“What used to take a thousand years to change, it’s happening in decades now,” he says.
Northern regions of Canada are warming faster than the rest of the country. These changes in the environment are making it more challenging — and potentially dangerous — to travel across the land.
The Cree community of Peawanuck in the wintertime.
The winter ice road that’s used to haul housing material, fuel, and other heavy essentials to northern communities has become “unsustainable,” as one chief put it. Peawanuck has yet to complete its ice road this year. Clendon Patrick, a resident, says the community will maybe get two weeks of use before it becomes unsafe. Weather permitting.
“Our muskeg, it’s not frozen,” Patrick says. “We’re trying to adapt with Mother Nature. We’re trying to teach our youth our knowledge of survival skills and how to be safe on the land.”
Mining activity in the Ring of Fire is just one more issue the 280 people that live here must contend with, he says.
“Everything is tumbling towards us like an avalanche.”
Because peatlands are typically thought of as useless swampland, they’re often drained and degraded for farmland and other development. When this happens, the carbon that’s been sequestered for thousands of years gets released into the atmosphere in the form of greenhouse gases.
These carbon sinks become carbon emitters: every year, at least two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide are released from damaged peatlands around the world, which amounts to roughly five per cent of all human-caused emissions.
Despite a growing global consensus that these ecosystems should be left alone, peat harvesting remains a major industry in Canada. Each summer, large swathes of peatlands are dried out and vacuumed up by huge harvesters. The product is then sold and exported as peat moss, a popular ingredient in potting soil.
But the larger threat to Canada’s peatlands, conservationists say, is mining in the Ring of Fire.
The area was named after the vaguely crescent shape of the deposits and the fact that the people who made the discovery were Johnny Cash fans, or so the story goes.
Mineral deposits of chromite and nickel were discovered in 2007, leading to politicians proclaiming northern Ontario as Canada’s “next oil sands.” In the years since, dozens of mining companies have made the trek 540 kilometres north of Thunder Bay in search of great wealth. But so far, the area has not lived up to the hype.
Two successive provincial governments have tried and failed to open the region to mining. But that hasn’t discouraged Ford, who famously says he’ll hop on a bulldozer himself to get it done.
A mining camp in the Ring of Fire in the summer of 2022.
Courtesy: Wildlands League
Today, interest in the Ring of Fire is the highest its been in a decade, partly due to Ford’s rhetoric, but also because of a looming global shortage of nickel.
“The rush happened in the early part of the decade and now we’re concerned it’s happening again,” says Anna Baggio, the conservation director of Wildlands League, a not-for-profit group that has been monitoring mining exploration in the region for the past 14 years.
Every few years, the group flies over the Ring of Fire to see what the level of activity is.
“The camps have gotten a bit bigger,” Baggio says. “But the bigger change to me is just how sprawling the activities are emanating from the camps outwards.”
Large drills are used to obtain information about mineral deposits deep underground. The impact of maneuvering this heavy machinery in the soft, spongy landscape can be seen from the sky. The clear-cutting of forests for camps and exploratory drilling happens prior to any environmental review process.
The Ring of Fire in the Winter of 2010. The impact of exploratory drilling can be seen from the sky.
Courtesy: Wildlands League
“These impacts look like they’re going to be permanent,” Baggio says. “And [the mining companies] are not required to restore the land afterward.”
There are likely unaccounted-for greenhouse gas emissions resulting from this activity too, Harris says.
Ironically, the Ring of Fire is central to the Ford government’s plans to make Ontario a manufacturing hub for green tech, like electric vehicle batteries. In an interview with Global News, Ontario Mines Minister George Pirie claimed the mineral deposits in the Ring of Fire are worth $1,000,000,000,000.
“Anecdotally, mining people are saying this is a trillion-dollar project based on the acreage, (and) the value of critical minerals that are already established in the ground,” Pirie says.
Pirie could not provide any evidence to support that statement, so we contacted Wyloo Metals, the Australian mining company with the largest deposit holdings in the region. CEO Luca Giacovazzi laughed when he heard the trillion-dollar figure.
“I don’t mean to laugh, but there is a lot of myth around the Ring of Fire. A number like that is way exaggerated,” Giacovazzi told Global News. “The Ring of Fire is a special area. … But numbers like that are a little bit silly.”
Wyloo Metal’s Esker Camp in the Ring of Fire. Giacovazzi says it currently houses about 50 employees.
Ring of Fire Metals / Facebook
Giacovazzi wouldn’t speculate about the value of the minerals in today’s market. He says the company is in the early stages of figuring that out. Wyloo just launched Ring of Fire Metals, a new subsidiary focused on the region. The team is currently working on refreshing the decade-old feasibility studies for the company’s planned nickel mine, the Eagles Nest.
“We’re really going the extra mile to make sure that we do put the environment right up front,” Giacovazzi says. “We’re taking every possible measure to make the footprint of the mine as small as possible.”
Plans for the Eagles Nest currently only encompass one-square kilometre, and Giacovazzi says only a small part of that area is peatlands.
“As a miner, you don’t want to be constructing in a wetland, so you avoid it as much as possible,” he says.
Wyloo is just one mining company, albeit with a sizable stake in the region. But where one goes, others will follow.
If only half the area covered by mining claims is developed, it would result in the release of roughly 800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide — doubling Canada’s annual reported greenhouse gas emissions.
“Anything we do here is going to impact the global climate,” Harris says.
The road to the Ring of Fire
The Ring of Fire remains largely inaccessible. Three roads need to get there; two are under environmental review and one is still in the planning stages. The estimated cost of building the road network, which will cut through dense boreal forest and peatlands, has jumped to $2 billion. That tab is to be split between the provincial and federal governments, and the latter has not yet committed the funds.
Vern Cheechoo sees the roads as a doorway to the region. Once it opens, anyone can walk through. Miners, hunters, fishers, energy companies. “Who’s going to control those?” he asks. Once that door is open, can it be shut?
Cheechoo is the director of lands and resources for the Mushkegowuk Council, which represents seven Cree First Nations along James Bay. He says member nations are most concerned about how mining and other development will impact the rivers and the muskeg.
“We know that mining is a boom and bust industry,” he says, referring to the De Beers’ diamond mine west of Attawapiskat First Nation that closed in 2019.
“A rich diamond mine in the backyard of Attawapiskat. It doesn’t look like it’s helped the community at all,” Cheechoo says.
Instead, it may have damaged a critical river system. Conservation groups, including Wildlands League, found elevated levels of mercury in the water and fish in the Attawapiskat river which they allege was caused by mining activity. De Beers pleaded guilty to failing to provide mercury monitoring data, but maintains it did not pollute the river.
Vern Cheechoo says the region has been ignored by policymakers for too long. “It sequesters all this carbon,” he says “Why is it not a priority to be protected?”.
Brent Rose / Global News
This time, Cheechoo’s not leaving anything to chance. For the last six years, he’s been leading an initiative to gather baseline samples from all the major river systems that are downstream from the Ring of Fire.
“We’re not only downstream, we are down muskeg,” he says. “It’s the breathing lands of Mother Earth.”
Of the dozen First Nations in the region, only two formally support the development. Marten Falls First Nation and Webequie First Nation are working with the province on the proposed road network that would connect their communities, and any future mines, to existing highway networks.
“Our members, especially our young people, want to actually have the things that are available to most Canadians,” Marten Falls Chief Bruce Achneepineskum says. “Health care, education, a chance at training and job opportunities.”
Marten Falls has wanted an all-season road for two decades to bring down the cost of living. But Achneepineskum says it’s always lacked the support and funding to get past the feasibility stage. After the discovery of the Ring of Fire, that’s no longer been an issue.
Minister Pirie rejected the idea that this is just a mining road, saying the roads are “all about developing the communities.”
“[The Chiefs] want an opportunity for their kids to have a better life than they had. And quite frankly, so do I,” Pirie says.
Ontario Mines Minister George Pirie says the footprint of the Ring of Fire is “very, very small.” Mining claims currently cover 5,000 square kilometres, an area the size of PEI.
Jory Lyons / Global News
But when asked what plans the province has to build high schools or improve health services in the communities getting the road access, he couldn’t say.
“I think that they’re getting well-served with the clinics that are in those communities right now,” Pirie says.
Both Achneepineskum and Webequie Chief Cornelius Wabasse don’t think so. Wabasse says Webequie’s health clinic has only one or two nurses living there full-time. A doctor flies in every month or so.
“The doctor has limited time while in the community and is not able to see most of the community members that seek medical help,” Wabasse says.
It’s the same in Marten Falls. Achneepineskum says the health care services are “very inadequate.”
“We struggle to see a doctor. We’re struggling to transport our sick people. We don’t even have an ambulance in the community,” he says.
Remote First Nations desperately need better services. Boil-water advisories, housing shortages, suicide crises, and addiction issues stem from Canada’s colonial legacy and decades of neglect from people in power. Speaking to both Chiefs, you get the sense they saw this path as the only option to improve the quality of life in their communities.
“We have a big say in what happens in those areas now,” Achneepineskum says. “So that industry and government doesn’t strip First Nations of their resources and leave us in continued poverty.”
The Chiefs also understand it involves risk. But with few options and climate change making life up north more difficult and expensive, it’s a gamble they’re willing to make.
Environment Minister Stephen Guilbeault has never been to Ontario’s far north to see the peatlands firsthand, but as a self-confessed former environmental activist — he calls them “critically important.”
He knows about their carbon sequestering power and importance to Indigenous people. He also knows about the critical minerals that are buried underground and what could happen if the peatlands are disturbed.
“Would we allow for mining in very ecologically sensitive areas where hundreds of millions, eventually billions, of tonnes of carbon would be released? That wouldn’t make sense from an environmental perspective,” Guilbeault says in an interview with Global News.
But he wants critical minerals too. Therein lies the federal government’s Ring of Fire-sized conundrum.
Guilbeault is placing his faith in his government’s regional assessment, which is designed to anticipate the cumulative impacts of any future development in the region. When it was announced in 2020, there were high hopes that it would address the concerns people have about the potential contamination of watersheds, the release of carbon emissions, and impacts on seasonal harvesting.
Minister Guilbeault says his government could halt the Ring of Fire development. “If we came to the conclusion that all projects would have too much impact, I guess we could theoretically.“.
David de la Harpe / Global News
But when the draft terms of reference for the assessment were made public at the end of 2021, it was met with disappointment and anger. First Nations were sidelined. It didn’t mention carbon. And it was hardly regional in scope.
“They drew a box around the Ring of Fire and said, ‘This is going to be our focus,’” says Baggio of Wildlands League. “It was kind of like the worst-case scenario.”
A coalition of First Nations wrote a scathing letter to Guilbeault demanding the terms be thrown out and reworked to include them as equal partners. He listened and has agreed to most of the key requirements put forward by Chiefs in recent meetings, says Kate Klempton, a lawyer who represents several First Nations in the region.
The first demand: that the assessment cover the entire Hudson Bay Lowland peatlands.
“It is critically important that we get it right, because the consequences of getting it wrong are likely to be catastrophic,” Klempton says.
Guilbeault touts this as “a new way of doing things.”
“Indigenous peoples and nations want to make sure that they are part of this as real partners.”
The new terms of reference haven’t been announced yet, so it is an open question if the process will be co-led, and if the peatlands, and the carbon they store, will be given any special consideration.
After being overlooked for years, the Hudson Bay Lowlands are poised to become the most hotly contested region of Canada. Now, everyone sees value in them. But what that value is — carbon or minerals — depends on where you sit.
Clendon Patrick is a resident of Peawanuck. On his last hunt, he harvested a caribou and moose. He says that will feed him and his extended family for about a month.
Marc Doucette / Global News
Back in Peawanuck, it’s still -20 C but starting to warm up. Clendon Patrick is looking forward to taking his 13-year-old daughter out for the spring hunt.
“Being out on the land, you rejuvenate yourself, recharge yourself,” he says.
Out on the rivers, he’s no longer thinking of hardships or what’s to come in the future.
“You stop and say a little prayer. Thank you for bringing me on this land. I’m here now.”
When ChatGPT was released late last year, people around the world suddenly awoke to the major advancements going on in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). For many, what once seemed like a science fiction fantasy was now reality.
In truth, the technology behind the groundbreaking chatbot had been brewing behind the scenes in research labs and major tech companies for years. But refined and released in its most accessible form yet, ChatGPT stands to herald in a transformational age of AI adoption.
ChatGPT, and other generative AIs like DALL-E, which can create original text and images from a simple prompt, won’t just transform education. It will reshape the way people conduct business, create art and do research.
Commentators have likened what’s coming to the next Industrial Revolution: one in which the role of humans may radically change.
While ChatGPT and DALL-E are both products of OpenAI, an American research company, other Silicon Valley giants have been moving quickly to show they’re capable of similar technology.
With names like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta and even Baidu capturing international headlines for their generative AI offerings, it’s easy to forget that the foundational principles upon which these technologies rest were developed in large part by Canadian scientists.
OpenAI is not a Canadian company, but perhaps it should have been.
Three men are lauded as the godfathers of AI, and their work has almost certainly touched your life. Two of them are Canadian: Yoshua Bengio of the Université de Montréal and Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto. The third, Yann LeCun, is French, but some of his most groundbreaking research was done at Bell Labs and U of T.
In fact, the chief science officer and co-founder of Open AI, Ilya Sutskever, was educated at U of T and was a PhD student of Hinton’s.
As for Bengio, he’s the most cited computer scientist in the world. When asked if he could draw a direct line from his work to ChatGPT he said, point-blank, “Yeah, definitely.”
File – Computer science professor Yoshua Bengio poses at his home in Montreal, Saturday, Nov. 19, 2016.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes
It’s clear that Canada has some of the best AI minds in the world, and yet we lag behind in commercializing our greatest research achievements. Global News sat down with Bengio and leaders in the AI industry to understand why, and what’s in store for Canada’s future.
Putting economic considerations aside, how will AI more broadly impact the social and political fabric of Canada and the world? The best minds agree this is only the beginning. For Bengio, it’s not a matter of if computers will reach human-level intelligence, but rather when. And when such a technology is released, will it serve the collective good?
When it comes to modern advancements in AI, particularly what is known as “deep learning,” Canada’s fingerprints are everywhere. The story of how began decades ago, and the story of why begins with the human mind.
Bengio told Global News he was inspired to research AI and neural networks to understand the machine of the human brain, based on the belief that the principles underlying human intelligence could be relatively simple, like the laws of physics, and ultimately, reproducible.
“When the whole idea of neural network research was very marginal, I got excited about this idea that we could both understand our own intelligence and build machines that take advantage of these principles,” Bengio said.
And the field of deep learning does just that — it uses principles we know about our own cognition to develop smarter, more efficient AIs. This cutting-edge research uses neural networks, a series of algorithms, to mimic the learning process of humans.
In a neural network, there are many computing “nodes,” loosely modelled on the brain’s own neurons, that influence each other through weighted connections. As input data passes through the nodes, those weights and biases determine what the final output value should be, and can be used to fine-tune the model to get more optimal answers.
Deep learning refers to when there are many layers of nodes in a neural network; the more layers, the more complex the model, and the more internal “learning” that’s going on. Training a simple machine learning model requires a good deal of human intervention, but deep learning systems are increasingly able to learn on their own.
As such, the applications of deep learning could be virtually endless and aren’t necessarily constrained by the limits of human creativity and knowledge. Already, deep learning methods are being used to answer open-ended questions that humans struggle with, like what songs to recommend to a music listener and how best to efficiently run a city’s power grid.
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For their contributions to deep learning, Bengio, Hinton and LeCun were awarded the Turing Award, popularly known as the Nobel Prize of computing. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which bestows the award, noted that the trio’s foundational research is used by billions today, essentially anyone who uses a smartphone.
“I think over the next many years when people write books about the history of neural networks, which will be the history of AI, there will be huge sections dedicated to the people in Canada and what they were doing,” said Nick Frosst, co-founder of Cohere, a natural language processing company (NLP) based in Toronto that is quickly drawing comparisons to OpenAI.
NLP is a subsection of AI that works to allow computers to understand, analyze and generate language. While ChatGPT uses NLP methods to interact conversationally with users, Cohere offers its language model to enterprises to tackle business problems.
The co-founders of Cohere. From left to right, Ivan Zhang, Nick Frosst and Aidan Gomez, the CEO.
Cohere
Frosst says Canada’s research contributions to developing AI have been “outsized.”
“I mean, having Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton here alone emphasizes our impact on the world.”
These researchers had to be attracted to Canada as a place to do their work, however. Bengio was born in Paris to Moroccan immigrants. Meanwhile, Hinton immigrated to Canada from the U.K., where he comes from a family of intellectuals, including mathematician George Boole and surveyor George Everest (yes, of Mount Everest fame).
For this, we can thank early collaboration between the Canadian government and academia to put AI research on the national agenda and lay the groundwork for our current research landscape.
When the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) was founded in 1982, the first research program it ever undertook was in AI and robotics. With ongoing support from CIFAR, Canadian universities were some of the first to invest in machine learning research.
Hinton was hired by U of T in 1987, a year after he garnered fame for his work on backpropagation, an algorithm that is now standard in most neural networks today, which radically improved their efficiency.
Say a neural network was asked to identify an image of a dog but it predicted a cat instead. Backpropagation allows machine learning developers to calculate how much of the computer’s prediction was off so they can adjust the weights and biases of the network to get a better output the next time.
In 1993, Bengio was hired by the Université de Montréal. A few years later, he authored a landmark paper that introduced word embeddings to neural networks, which had huge impacts on NLP. A word embedding is a learned representation for a word whereby words with similar meanings have similar representations. More simply put, he revolutionized a method to help computers understand the complex meanings behind words.
In 2010, Bengio helped pioneer generative adversarial networks (GANs), a breakthrough method through which computers can generate original images, videos, music and other types of data by mimicking the data set it was trained on. The technique has drawn comparisons to evolutionary biology.
As Bengio and Hinton gained renown as leaders in deep learning, computer science students and researchers became more attracted to work in Canada. It’s no surprise, then, that many of the world’s leading AI researchers have worked in Canada or studied under one of these men.
Regardless, deep learning was still seen as a speculative and unproven science for much of the history of the field — and the ACM actually credits Bengio, Hinton and LeCun for helping revive interest in it.
But really, these men were researching neural networks at the exact right time. Computer and graphics processing capabilities had been steadily growing for decades, and the widespread adoption of the internet meant researchers had both the means and the data to conduct experiments at an unprecedented scale.
According to Avi Goldfarb, chief data scientist at U of T’s Creative Destruction Lab, an incubator that has helped propel numerous AI startups, the turning point for the popularity of neural networks came in 2012.
That’s when Hinton, along with students Alex Krizhevsky and Sutskever (now Open AI’s chief science officer, as mentioned above), entered the ImageNet competition, an annual contest to see which AI model could correctly identify the most images from a vast database.
“They didn’t just win, but they blew the competition away” using deep learning methods, Goldfarb said. “And they did so much better than everybody else, that next year, almost everybody had adopted a version of their technology for their own algorithms.”
As the world began to wake up to the benefits of deep learning in AI, Canada instituted a Pan-Canadian AI Strategy in 2017 to take advantage of our leading status. The national program, coordinated by CIFAR, funded the creation of three new national AI institutes: the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, the Vector Institute in Toronto and the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms.
“Given these AI systems will soon be foundational to all aspects of our society and economy, it would be a risk to our national security and economic competitiveness to become entirely dependent on external providers,” the report argues.
While Canada is in a much better position than the U.K. to commercialize machine learning — Frosst told Global News that Cohere would be able to create a chatbot like ChatGPT — the fears underlying the U.K. report are just as salient in Canada.
Our research is renowned globally, but on the business side, Canada has failed to use our talent and massive head start to create tangible economic benefits for Canadians.
As companies like Microsoft, Google and Meta scoop up market share, will there be any place left for competition from Canadian companies? And what is at stake if generative AI tools are mostly owned by foreign entities?
In Cohere, Canada has a real shot at competing with the Silicon Valley giants. In early February, the company reported it was in talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in its next funding round, which could value the startup at more than US$6 billion. Interest in the company has been booming since the release of ChatGPT, Frosst said.
In previous years, to attract that kind of funding and attention, Canadian AI startups had to move to the U.S. There wasn’t enough venture capital to keep them here.
“When we started the Creative Destruction Lab, our most successful AI company had to move to California to get investment,” Goldfarb said. “And that’s no longer the case. Our successful AI companies are able to stay here. That’s been an incredible change over the last 10 years.”
But even when Canadian AI ventures do stay in Canada, “they’re mostly getting funded by Americans,” Bengio observes.
“My impression is that the culture of innovation — and risk-taking that goes with it — isn’t nearly as developed here as it is in the U.S.,” Bengio said. “Venture capitalists here in Canada are not willing to take as much risk, to invest as much money, to look over a horizon that is this long.
“So in fact, many of the Canadian companies that succeed to raise capital are doing it because they’re, in a way, selling part of their ownership to American investors. In the past, it was worse, because then those companies had to move to the U.S. So at least things have been better.”
Bengio warns that if Canada continues to lag in commercializing AI, we may squander our current advantage.
“We need to do a better job at convincing Canadian industry to take this seriously. Because otherwise, what’s going to happen is our industry is going to lag so much in a few years that we’re going to lose our market shares.
“Companies that are being more innovative are going to be selling those products that we should be the ones building.”
Is Canada keeping up with automation?
Goldfarb says that compared with other countries, Canada has not been effective at converting our research into economic benefits for citizens.
“And that’s not an AI-specific problem. That’s Canada in general. We have great research but commercialization has been historically quite low,” Goldfarb said.
Canada has been the worst-performing advanced economy in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for decades. Last year, an OECD report projected that Canada’s slow growth could keep us in last place until 2060.
AI presents a huge opportunity for Canada to inject some vitality into our stagnating economy, and we have a lot of the ingredients needed to build a robust industry.
Canadian companies have a large pool of workers they can tap into with machine learning training, especially graduates coming from the University of Waterloo, U of T, McGill and the University of Alberta.
“It’s a great place for AI, there’s a lot of AI talent here,” Frosst said. “The majority of our employees are in Canada, although we’re spread around the world.”
Goldfarb also notes that Canada’s reputation as a place for AI innovation has attracted international investors to come here and fund startups.
Frosst said that while the initial seed investment for Cohere came from a Canadian firm, its subsequent rounds of funding have all been led by American investors.
“That’s just a function of the fact that America has 10 times the population of Canada. And so, if you’re looking at large entities and businesses for funding, you’re often going to end up speaking to American venture capital firms,” Frosst said. “But they’re not the only ones we speak to.”
Attracting foreign investors to Canada is preferable to having our most promising startups leave for another country, but questions remain about who will benefit most from our homegrown AI talent. With Hinton primarily working for Google and Sutskever at OpenAI, the argument could be made that it’s the U.S.
Still, Frosst and Goldfarb are optimistic that Canada can build a strong AI industry to compete with Silicon Valley.
Already, Toronto has the highest density of AI startups in the world. Canada as a whole is home to just under 1,000 AI startups, and in 2021, those companies raised a combined $1.5 billion in venture funding, CIFAR reported.
More than 200 master’s and PhD students graduate annually from Canada’s National AI Institutes, and data from Global Advantage Consulting Group found that Canada has produced the most AI patents per capita among G7 nations and China.
And it seems that, increasingly, Canadians and Canadian-trained tech workers are making the decision to stay and work in the country.
Frosst recalls of his time in university that “there was really a dream of California or bust, you know? Like, got to go down to the valley and make it.”
“I think that dream is less enticing to students as the years go on,” Frosst said. “In part, it’s because Canada is getting better. There’s more opportunity here, there’s more companies, wages are going up — it’s a better place to be a developer.”
When it comes to ChatGPT, one thing that many computer scientists will say is that it’s remarkable, for sure, but the model isn’t introducing anything we didn’t already know about deep learning.
While ChatGPT isn’t necessarily pushing boundaries, researchers like Bengio working on fundamental problems certainly are. He says the evolution of AI is far from over.
“So ChatGPT, it’s very, very impressive. But it doesn’t reason the way humans do. It makes mistakes sometimes that a five-year-old wouldn’t make,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean that we can’t one day create an AI that is capable of reasoning. For Bengio, it’s just a matter of time.
“Human brains are machines,” he said. “There’s no reason to think we can’t build comparable machines.”
The idea of an artificial general intelligence (AGI), an AI system that can understand any intellectual task as well as a human, may seem like science fiction. But Bengio says we are already on the path to getting there.
“We’re going towards human-level intelligence and these large language models (like ChatGPT) are one of the elements on that path,” he said. “Now, they are missing a lot of ingredients, in particular, reasoning … including things like causal reasoning, understanding cause and effect and discovering causal relationships, but also reasoning the way humans do, by combining pieces of knowledge in a way that we can then explain.”
“Currently these models can’t do that,” Bengio said. “So my own research is about a next generation of deep learning system that would reason in a way that’s inspired by human reasoning and high-level cognition.”
With such technology on the horizon, Bengio is calling on the Canadian government to be prepared for how an AGI will impact not just the economy, but also the social and political landscapes of the worl
d.
Currently, no AGI exists, but even with the AI technology we have now, people are understandably concerned about the future of work. White-collar workers like copywriters and business analysts could see their jobs radically reshaped in the coming years to accommodate AI tools.
Goldfarb sees us as living in the “between times”: after the discovery of AI’s potential and before its widespread adoption.
“With electricity, it took about 40 years from the patent of the lightbulb until half of American households were electrified,” he said. “For computing, similarly, from the first computers to the time it began really impacting the way people worked was, again, several decades.”
The reason is that it takes time to apply transformational technologies to their fullest extent. When the first computers were introduced, people couldn’t have predicted that it would one day lead to the creation of the internet, which would in turn propel unprecedented new industries on its back.
“And so when we say we’re in between times now, it feels like the 1890s with electricity. We can see the technology is amazing. But we haven’t figured out how to make it useful at scale.”
As we go about applying AI in novel formats, we risk leaving humans in the lurch.
“I think you shouldn’t worry too much in the short term,” Bengio says, “but I think eventually, this is something that we all need to think about, in particular governments. Because there may be social transformations that are happening too fast, that are going to leave people jobless and in turmoil.”
“We need to change our education system, our social welfare system, and make sure people can shift easily to other jobs.
“I think our whole social fabric is threatened in some way. We can’t just think it’s going to be business as usual, we have to think ahead. Maybe we need to rethink completely the way our societies are organized to face those challenges.”
The idea that AI could lead to huge job losses that require government intervention to solve isn’t new. In 2020, Andrew Yang campaigned for the U.S. presidency on a promise to institute a universal basic income payment of US$1,000 per month, asserting that technological advancements in AI would leave a third of Americans without a job in the next decade.
But Bengio’s concerns about an AGI don’t just end with the job market and people’s livelihoods.
“What about the abuse of these powerful technologies? Can they be used, for example, by governments with ill intentions to control their people, to make sure they get re-elected? Can they be used as weapons, weapons of persuasion, or even weapons, period, on the battlefield?” he asks.
“The problem is, we live in a divided world. It’s not enough for the Canadian government to pass a law saying we can’t do this or we can’t do that with AI,” Bengio warns. “There is no world government that can legislate this kind of thing. And the economic system in which we are encourages companies, as we’re starting to see, to take more risk just to stay ahead. So how do we protect ourselves?”
After Bengio and Hinton won the Turing Award, they publicly called for an international agreement to regulate the use of AI in warfare, warning of the dangers of lethal, autonomous weapons.
But with technology this enticing and international politics as fractured as ever, who knows if even the traditional protocols of multilateral treaties will be enough to stop AI from being used for unethical purposes?
Risk analysts have identified AI as one of the largest threats facing humans today. The Top Risk Report for 2023 called these technologies “weapons of mass disruption,” and warned they will “erode social trust, empower demagogues and authoritarians, and disrupt businesses and markets.”
Bengio says he knows even better AIs are coming, and there’s no doubt they can be applied to solve some of humanity’s biggest problems, but we can’t ignore how easy it would be for a country, rebel group or even an individual to leverage AI for evil.
“We should not also forget that this technology could be extremely useful and can help in the next decades to discover cures for major diseases. It may help us find important technological solutions to fight climate change,” Bengio said. “It’s a very difficult dilemma.”
“What’s inevitable is that the scientific progress will get there. What is not is what we decide to do with it.”
ملک کے ٹریژری بورڈ نے کینیڈا میں حکومت کے جاری کردہ موبائل ڈیوائسز پر TikTok پر پابندی لگا دی ہے اعلان کیا پیر. 28 فروری کو لاگو ہونے والا، یہ بلاک اسی طرح کی کارروائیوں کی پیروی کرتا ہے۔ یورپی کمیشن اور کچھ ریاستی حکومتوں میں US.
یورپی کمیشن نے سرکاری آلات سے TikTok کو ہٹانے کی ہدایت جاری کی ہے۔ گزشتہ ہفتے کے آخر میں. اسی دن، چار کینیڈا کے پرائیویسی ریگولیٹرز نے اعلان کیا کہ وہ کریں گے۔ مشترکہ تحقیقات ٹک ٹاک۔ پہلے ہی، کینیڈا کے چیف انفارمیشن آفیسر نے اس بات کا تعین کیا ہے کہ TikTok \”رازداری اور سلامتی کے لیے ایک ناقابل قبول سطح کا خطرہ ہے۔\” کینیڈین حکام کو اس بات کا کوئی ثبوت نہیں ملا کہ حکومتی ڈیٹا سے سمجھوتہ کیا گیا ہے، اس لیے اسے احتیاطی اقدام سمجھا جاتا ہے۔
ٹریژری نے کہا، \”حکومتی موبائل ڈیوائسز سے TikTok کو ہٹانے اور بلاک کرنے کا فیصلہ احتیاط کے طور پر لیا جا رہا ہے، خاص طور پر اس قانونی نظام کے بارے میں خدشات کے پیش نظر جو موبائل ڈیوائسز سے جمع کی گئی معلومات کو کنٹرول کرتی ہے، اور یہ ہمارے بین الاقوامی شراکت داروں کے نقطہ نظر کے مطابق ہے۔\” بورڈ کی صدر مونا فورٹیر ایک میں بیان. \”ایک موبائل ڈیوائس پر، TikTok کے ڈیٹا اکٹھا کرنے کے طریقے فون کے مواد تک کافی رسائی فراہم کرتے ہیں۔\”
TikTok کا دعویٰ ہے کہ کینیڈا کی حکومت ایپ کے بارے میں خدشات پر بات کرنے کے لیے نہیں پہنچی۔
\”یہ دلچسپ بات ہے کہ کینیڈا کی حکومت نے حکومت کی طرف سے جاری کردہ ڈیوائسز پر TikTok کو بلاک کرنے کا اقدام کیا ہے – بغیر کسی خاص سیکورٹی تشویش کا حوالہ دیئے یا سوالات کے ساتھ ہم سے رابطہ کیے – صرف اس کے بعد جب EU اور US میں اسی طرح کی پابندیاں متعارف کرائی گئیں،\” TikTok کے ترجمان نے کہا۔ TechCrunch کو ایک ای میل۔ \”ہم اپنے سرکاری عہدیداروں سے اس بات پر بات کرنے کے لیے ہمیشہ دستیاب رہتے ہیں کہ ہم کینیڈینوں کی پرائیویسی اور سیکیورٹی کی حفاظت کیسے کرتے ہیں، لیکن اس طرح سے TikTok کو اکٹھا کرنا اس مشترکہ مقصد کو حاصل کرنے کے لیے کچھ نہیں کرتا۔\”
دسمبر میں، امریکی ایوان نمائندگان TikTok کے استعمال پر پابندی لگا دی۔ کسی بھی سرکاری آلات پر۔ کانگریس کے کچھ اراکین کے پاس اب بھی TikTok اکاؤنٹس ہیں، جو غالباً الگ الگ ڈیوائسز پر چلائے جاتے ہیں۔ ریاستی حکومتوں جیسے ٹیکساس، جارجیا، میری لینڈ، جنوبی کیرولائنا اور ایک درجن سے زیادہ دیگر نے بھی اسی طرح کی پابندیاں نافذ کی ہیں۔ بعض صورتوں میں، یہ پابندیاں ریاست کی مالی اعانت سے کم ہو جاتی ہیں۔ کالج کیمپس، جہاں یونیورسٹی آف ٹیکساس، اوبرن یونیورسٹی اور اوکلاہوما یونیورسٹی جیسے اسکولوں نے کیمپس وائی فائی یا اسکول کی ملکیت والے آلات پر TikTok کے استعمال پر پابندی لگا دی ہے۔
ان سرکاری اداروں کو تشویش ہے کہ چینی ٹیک کمپنی بائٹ ڈانس کی ملکیت TikTok کو چینی حکومت سیاسی حکام سے حساس معلومات اکٹھی کرنے کے لیے استعمال کر سکتی ہے۔ اگرچہ TikTok نے امریکی صارفین کو بارہا یقین دہانی کرائی ہے کہ ان کا ڈیٹا امریکہ میں محفوظ ہے۔ تحقیقات پچھلے سال انکشاف ہوا تھا کہ چین میں انجینئرز کو جنوری 2022 تک امریکی ٹک ٹاک ڈیٹا تک رسائی حاصل تھی۔ پھر TikTok نے کہا کہ وہ امریکی صارفین کا ڈیٹا منتقل کرے گا۔ اوریکل سرورز ریاست ہائے متحدہ امریکہ میں ذخیرہ. ایک اور تحقیقات، تصدیق شدہ ByteDance کے ذریعے، پتہ چلا کہ انجینئرز کے ایک چھوٹے سے گروپ نے دو امریکی صحافیوں کے ڈیٹا تک نامناسب طریقے سے رسائی حاصل کی۔ انہوں نے ان صحافیوں کے مقام کا ڈیٹا استعمال کرنے کا منصوبہ بنایا تاکہ یہ معلوم کیا جا سکے کہ آیا انہوں نے بائٹ ڈانس کے کسی ایسے ملازمین کے ساتھ راستہ عبور کیا جس نے ان رپورٹرز کو معلومات لیک کی ہوں۔
Mercedes Stephenson: Explosive allegations about how and who China used to interfere in Canada’s federal elections. Is it time for a public inquiry?
I’m Mercedes Stephenson. Welcome to The West Block.
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Canada is sending more military aid to Ukraine as the country marks one year since Russia’s invasion. But is the government doing enough to boost the capabilities of the Canadian Armed Forces here at home? We’ll ask the minister.
Intelligence sources allege that a sitting Liberal member of parliament is a witting affiliate of the Chinese government’s attempts to interfere in Canadian elections. It’s the latest bombshell in a series of top secret leaks, renewing concerns over interference in Canada’s democracy and elections in 2019 and 2021.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says foreign interference is a real threat, but dismissed some of the criticisms as partisan. He also called the intelligence leaks inaccurate.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: “Foreign countries are trying to undermine people’s confidence in our democracies and destabilize those democracies. And when we lean in on partisanship around this, we’re actually helping them in doing their work of sowing confusion and mistrust.”
Mercedes Stephenson: Joining me now to talk about this is Global News investigative reporter Sam Cooper; former CSIS director and national security and intelligence advisor to the prime minister, Dick Fadden; and former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu. Thank you all for joining us.
Sam, a really explosive story that you’ve broken here, alleging, you know, things that are remarkable about a sitting member of parliament, who by the way, vehemently denies that any of this is true. He says it’s all false. What are your sources telling you about this member of parliament? Who is it? And does the Prime Minister’s Office know.
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Sam Cooper, Global News: We’ve reported that three weeks before the 2019 federal election, the prime minister’s top aides were warned by CSIS in a classified briefing that this candidate, Han Dan, was part of a Chinese foreign interference network. Furthermore, he was associated to another alleged suspect, Michael Chan, a former Ontario Liberal minister. So this is a very serious classified brief to the prime minister’s top aides, and CSIS was asking the Prime Minister’s Office to rescind Dan’s nomination, a very serious warning. They’re telling the prime minister essentially, you have a candidate that is working for China. The allegations, our sources say, is that Mr. Dan is a willing affiliate of this Chinese network that we’ve reported on interference in 2019 and 2021. So does the prime minister know what our sources say, is that the prime minister’s top aides were warned? They ignored the warning, allegedly. Mr. Dan won in 2019. He’s re-elected in 2021. Meanwhile, we have CSIS sourcing saying this is a concern and he’s not the only one.
Mercedes Stephenson: Obviously that’s very concerning. I know Kenny to you a lot of this doesn’t come as a surprise. You have long alleged that the reason why you lost the election was due to Chinese interference in your riding. What was your experience with that?
Kenny Chiu, Former Conservative MP: Well Mercedes, I just want to have a minor correction of what you said. I’ve been saying that the Chinese interference, it’s a contributing factor to my loss. Now it—you know, you can never decide whether there’s an exclusive reason or not. What I’ve experienced here locally is that within a very short period of time, less than two years. Supporters of mine all of a sudden turn… becomes very angry and emotional to me, personally. And they will shut the door behind… in front of my face and they would… used to plant lawn signs supporting me and they would tell me that they don’t even want to vote for me. And all the difference is just within 22 months of time and it’s all because of information that is being circulated among them in WeChat and also WhatsApp that somehow convince them that I’m anti-Chinese, that I’m a racist, that I’m anti-China.
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Mercedes Stephenson: And why do you believe that those rumours and those untrue stories came from Beijing?
Kenny Chiu, Former Conservative MP: Well there are sanctioned articles that are being published in WeChat that we know only sanctioned information can be published… publicised in WeChat and get circulated there. And these… this information article, you know, would portray Conservatives as anti-Chinese, that Erin O’Toole, it’s going to ban, of all things, WeChat, that Kenny Chiu is going to put Canadians of Chinese descent into jeopardy, that they are risking $400 thousand penalty because of my private member bill to have a foreign interference registry created.
Mercedes Stephenson: You know I want to go to you on this Dick because I get asked this question a lot by viewers, by people who are reading the articles. They want to know, is the government legitimate? Was the election affected on a grand scale? Do we know that information? Is there a way to find that out?
Dick Fadden, Former CSIS Director: Well I think to be practical about it; we have to admit that Chinese interference efforts in Canada are targeted. They’re not targeting every constituency in Canada. Everything that I’ve seen or read suggests that it’s less than two dozen, and they may or may not have been successful in influencing those two dozen, so all of the remainder of those numbers would have determined in the end, the final outcome. So I think fundamentally, the overall outcome, as the prime minister says, absolutely legitimate. Individual constituencies, different issue.
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Mercedes Stephenson: Sam, I think one of the questions has been why politicians have not been willing to do something about this, that the foreign agent’s registry is an example of that. It exists in other countries. It doesn’t exist here yet. The government is committed to sort of holding a public look into whether or not they should have one. What do your sources allege the holdup is on the government being willing to take action to stamp out—I mean as much as you can, it’s tough with China—but to take some actions to at least make it harder for foreign governments to interfere.
Sam Cooper, Global News: I think two main points. One of them connects to what Kenny said about being attacked. Look, a major bombshell in our report from several days ago is that CSIS reporting, according to our sources, says that Michael Chan, a former member of parliament, legislature in Ontario, promised to attack critics of the Chinese regime and was a friend of the consulate. So if we see politicians getting targeted for any statement about China, it just raises huge questions about other politicians in Canada who may be tasked to attack them. Furthermore, what Canadian politician wants to go into an election with negative information about them. So could this explain why the Liberal government, or other governments, don’t want a registry? They don’t want to go into the next election facing the real concern that when they knock on doors, people will not be receptive because they will be called anti-Asian or racist. Of course, there’s fundraising issues that we believe…or that is, our sources say, Mr. Chan the subject of our story, is a huge fundraiser for the Liberal Party. Does it raise questions why they may not want to look too seriously at allegations against him?
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Mercedes Stephenson: And Mr. Chan as well has denied these allegations. He says that they are uncatogorically untrue.
Dick, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, former chief electoral commissioner for Canada has said that we probably need a public inquiry to look into this to determine whether or not it’s the case. As a former national security and intelligence advisor, do you think that a public inquiry is needed to sort this out and to get to the bottom or what we do and didn’t know and what happened?
Dick Fadden, Former CSIS Director: Well I come to this conclusion somewhat reluctantly because there’s a history in Canada of a lot public inquiries that have gone nowhere. Having said that, a number of them have been very, very useful. I think in this case, the allegations are so serious they need to be looked into. So the question is: If you don’t do a public inquiry, who does it? I think the logical place would be parliament, but it has become so partisan that I think that this particular kind of topic would be almost impossible for them to look at objectively. So I think the public inquiry is really the route to go. It should be given a limited mandate so that they report, you know, well before the next election. There should be an inquiry under the Inquiries Act so that they can call, subpoena people and documents, if need be. And I can’t see any compelling reason not to do it in the public interest, except some partisan considerations that Sam has raised.
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Mercedes Stephenson: And Kenny, I want to ask you about some of those partisan considerations because I’ve noticed a lot of Conservative sources publicly criticizing Justin Trudeau, but privately they seem a little bit concerned about talking about China as well now, too. Is this something that potentially affects both parties willingness to take action or to take bipartisan action, which would take the politics out of it, if both parties are on the same page? Then I’m not sure how China the same way favours one or the other. I’m really curious, your thoughts on that and how the Conservative Party and the opposition should deal with this.
Kenny Chiu, Former Conservative MP: Well Mercedes, I think it’s probably not an exactly fair portrayed of the Conservative Party position on this because I mean, ever since Hussein [00:09:53 Shaalayo] and then Julia and Kevin Garratt’s, and the two Michaels, I mean the government… the current government have seen evidence after evidence that who we’re dealing with and yet, you know, after what the Conservatives have tried to push the government… the current government to establish… to renew a new strategy to do with China, they have since… ever since we pushed back on that, and they refuse to conduct and update our national strategy. Conservatives have spoken up a lot in the past. The problem, the matter of fact is, Canada, it’s in a dire situation not just to do with foreign interference. Yes, it’s of particular concern to us. It’s of particular concern to me. But we are facing a weakened economy. Many Canadians believe that we are not heading in the right directions. Many things are broken. So Conservatives are putting their priorities, many things that Canadians care about and one of them, certainly, is how to assert our sovereignty, how to protect ourselves, how to protect our democratic institute, elections, etc.
Mercedes Stephenson: We just have a few seconds left, Dick, but what needs to change in the law?
Dick Fadden, Former CSIS Director: Well I think we need the registry and I think we need to make it very clear that political parties have a responsibility for ensuring that the Canada Elections Act is complied with. I think it’s dangerous to have the government try and regulate this too directly: partisan activities, political activities. But if you have a law, a change in the Elections Act that says very clearly: political parties have an obligation to do a, b, c, d about the receipt of money, how it’s accountable for, probably increase the resources allocated to the chief electoral officer. But I think we need to recognize, though, that there’s no silver bullet. This is going to take some effort dealing with social media and some of the ethnic press is going to take time. But I think the first thing we need to do is to talk about this seriously. And given the general environment Canada, I don’t think it’s going to work unless we have a public inquiry.
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Mercedes Stephenson: Well, certainly a remarkable story, Sam. It certainly seems the national security community is concerned and will continue to talk about this. Thank you to all three of you, for joining us today.
Sam Cooper, Global News: Thank you.
Dick Fadden, Former CSIS Director: My pleasure.
Mercedes Stephenson: Up next, Defence Minister Anita Anand reflects on one year since the war in Ukraine and the spotlight that it shone on the state of the Canadian Armed Forces.
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Mercedes Stephenson: Canada is sending four more Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine, bringing the total number of tanks that we will be sharing with the Ukrainians to eight.
Since Russia’s invasion a year ago, Ottawa has committed $1 billion in military aid to Ukraine. The military spending comes at a time when the Canadian Armed Forces are being stretched to the limit here at home.
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For more on this, I’m joined by Defence Minister Anita Anand. Welcome back, minister. Nice to see you.
Anita Anand, Defence Minister: Hi Mercedes, great to be here with you.
Mercedes Stephenson: Obviously, a very welcome announcement for Ukraine today. They’re receiving four more tanks. They have talked about the importance of that, but we’ve also heard about the constraints here at home. We only have 82 main battle tanks or had. That number is now down by eight, which means we’re contributing 10 per cent of the overall fleet. But I hear from military sources this is closer 20 per cent of Canada’s operational tanks that are going. Do you have any concerns about the Canadian military being able to train and do their jobs effectively when we are sending this much to the Ukrainians?
Anita Anand, Defence Minister: Just to be clear, we are sending more Leopard 2A4 battle tanks. That’s in addition to the four that we have already sent, bringing our total to eight. We are also sending a recovery vehicle, which is a type of tow truck for tanks, as well as 5 thousand rounds of 155 mm ammunition, spare parts and training as well. So this is a second package for Ukraine relating to the Leopard 2A4 tanks and we are at the forefront with our allies in terms of countries that have tanks on the ground in Poland, training on those tanks to be sent to Ukraine.
Now in terms of your question relating to the capitalisation of the Canadian Armed Forces, I am always concerned to make sure that the Canadian Armed Forces have what they need to serve and protect this incredible country. What that means is we’re going to be purchasing additional tanks for the Canadian Armed Forces. We are going to also undertake the defence policy update so that we can have an across the board look at what other capabilities the Canadian Armed Forces need. At the same time, we are increasing our defence spending by 70 per cent under strong, secure, engaged. We’re purchasing other capabilities such as the 88 F-35s and continuing to make sure that we do what is necessary to capitalize the Canadian Armed Forces. But certainly, it is a concern and Wayne Eyre and I are very much on top of it.
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Mercedes Stephenson: What concrete steps has your government taken to start the contracts, for example, to replace these tanks? Is there a timeline? Have you initiated that process? I think that’s what a lot of the soldiers are anxious to hear reassurance on that it’s not just words but there’s actual steps being taken. Is that what’s happening?
Anita Anand, Defence Minister: Well to begin, in my conversations relating to tanks, I, myself, want to be assured that we have capabilities for the Canadian Armed Forces. It’s important for them in terms of their training, in terms of their development to have these and other capabilities. We also want to make sure that we have the most innovative and modern solutions. So it’s not necessarily the case that the Leopard 2A4 tank is going to be the replacement vehicle. We have to make sure that we are recapitalizing with the most up to date technology that is interoperable with our allies as we have done in the past, as were doing with the F-35s.
Mercedes Stephenson: So that sounds like it could be a while and I certainly understand the value of wanting to make sure you’re buying the right equipment, but it sounds then like contracts won’t be in place until after the defence policy review is completed and the government has had a chance to review it?
Anita Anand, Defence Minister: Well I think, Mercedes, what you have to look at is the global supply chain for items like tanks, for items like heavy artillery, for items like ammunition. All things that we want to ensure we have capitalizing the Canadian Armed Forces, but all things that other countries are also looking for. So one of the reasons I have been reaching out and meeting with suppliers recently is to ensure Canada’s priority placement in the supply chain and to make sure that we are doing whatever is necessary from a domestic innovation perspective also, to build up Canadian industry at the same time as procuring rapidly. So we’re working very quickly in terms of the Canadian supply chain, in terms of international procurements, as well as capitalizing Ukraine with the equipment that it needs to fight and win this war. And I’ll tell you that that is also a priority that we should be thinking about seriously, Mercedes, on this one anniversary of the illegal and unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin.
Mercedes Stephenson: And obviously, the Ukrainians are an extremely urgent situation. They’re actually in a war right now and there’s the balance between supplying that and maintaining our own capabilities.
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One question I wanted to ask you about in terms of things Ukraine has been asking for. We all know UABs have been a huge part of the war effort there in terms of reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities. Canada manufactured the cameras that were on some. I have here, three letters that were sent to you and your government by the Ukrainian government, including the minister of national defence, asking for a Canadian made drone, called the SkyRanger R70. And it is actually capable of doing things like picking up cell phone signals, which has helped identify Russian positions for strikes in the past, for example, or monitoring for things like chemical and biological agents that are in the air. It looks to me, based on the dates off these letters, like the Ukrainians have been asking for these for over a year. Will your government supply the Sky Ranger drones to Ukraine as they’ve been asking for?
Anita Anand, Defence Minister: Well I like the question, Mercedes, because it does point to the fact that we have been in close conversation with the Ukrainian government about the equipment that it needs to fight and win this war. And indeed, I was in touch with Oleksii Reznikov today on the fact that we’re making an additional donation of four Leopard 2A4 tanks, to bring our total to eight.
In terms of the specific item that you mentioned, the drones, of course, we are looking at whatever aid we can put on the table for Ukraine. That’s why we are listed as among the top five of contributors of military equipment to Ukraine by an independent panel that has looked at this issue. So by all means, we are keeping all options on the table. That is my role as defence minister and our very close relationship with Ukraine demands no less.
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Mercedes Stephenson: One last question for you, minister. The last time I spoke to the chief of the defence staff on the show, a few weeks back, I asked him whether Canada’s military is ready for the challenges ahead. And I was kind of stunned when his answer was essentially one word: No. He went on to say that it would be a challenge for Canada to meet it’s NATO requirements if Russia were to expand the war into a country like Latvia or Lithuania, and that we would be very, very hard pressed to be able to respond to that. Do you share that analysis of the state of the Canadian Armed Forces?
Anita Anand, Defence Minister: I actually think that what we need to keep doing is to ensure that we are procuring the capabilities that the Canadian Armed Forces need in the short and the long term. But I sleep at night, sometimes, knowing that the Canadian Armed Forces are doing whatever they can to protect and defend this country and that they are effective. Remember NORAD just few weeks ago, shooting down a suspected balloon over Central Yukon. That is NORAD doing what NORAD does: protecting and defending our skies. And Canadian Armed Forces members with their American counterparts have been working together side by side for 40 years in defending our country and defending our air space. And so I believe there’s more work to do, but I also believe that the Canadian Armed Forces are an extremely effective and dedicated organization and I, as minister, will do whatever is necessary to support the important work that they play in our country.
Mercedes Stephenson: So, would that be a yes or no to sharing General Eyre’s assessment?
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Anita Anand, Defence Minister: That is an ongoing commitment to making sure that the Canadian Armed Forces have what they need, to execute on their most serious and significant responsibility for our country. And as General Eyre himself said, we need to keep purchasing capabilities not only for use here at home, but as we move to brigade level in Latvia, to help defend NATO’s eastern flank, for example, we also need to capitalize to fulfill those obligations. So we have multiple obligations domestically and internationally, and my job is to make sure that we execute on those.
Mercedes Stephenson: Not a yes or a no. Okay. Minister Anand, thank you so much for joining us today.
Anita Anand, Defence Minister: Thank you so much, Mercedes. Take good care.
Mercedes Stephenson: Up next, questions about what the government knew and when, when it comes to allegations of China’s election interference here in Canada and how that’s going to play out in the coming days.
[Break]
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Mercedes Stephenson: Now for one last thing, the Liberal government has come under increasing pressure on the China election interference file. Now a former CSIS director and a former chief electoral officer are calling for an independent inquiry.
The prime minister and those around him have continued to dismiss media reports about the PMOs knowledge, including a refusal to acknowledge whether senior staff were briefed about a Liberal MP who was allegedly a witting associate of Beijing’s interference network.
There has been little transparency other than politician say so that everything is fine. And with a minority government, we never know how far off the next election is.
Until politicians on all sides are willing to put aside partisanship and get to the bottom of Beijing’s medalling, Canadians and the media will have serious questions.
That’s our show for today. Thanks for hanging out with us, and we’ll see you next week.
میلان فیشن ویک، جو دنیا کے اہم ترین فیشن ایونٹس میں سے ایک ہے، ایک ایسا وقت ہے جب فیشن ڈیزائنرز اور برانڈز اپنے تازہ ترین مجموعوں کی نمائش کرتے ہیں، اور فلمی اور موسیقی کے ستارے، فیشنسٹ اور اثرورسوخ شمالی اطالوی شہر میں نظر آتے ہیں۔
اب، پہلی بار، منظر کے ایک حصے میں کینیڈا کے مقامی ڈیزائنرز کا ایک گروپ شامل ہے – جس میں کری کے سلیبکس سے لے کر ایک غلط فر کوٹ اور مستقبل کے موتیوں والے ویزرز سے لے کر پنکھوں کے پھولوں میں ڈھانپنے والے شام کے لباس تک ہر چیز کی نمائش ہوتی ہے۔
دیسی شو، جو نئے آنے والے ڈیزائنرز کے لیے وائٹ/میلان فیشن ویک سیکشن کا حصہ ہے، ایک چنچل، گہرا اور خیالی آغاز کرتا ہے۔ لا سیٹا ڈیلا موڈا، فیشن کا شہر۔
\”یہاں بہت سی خاص خوبیاں ہیں، بہت سا جادو ہے جو ہمارے لباس میں داخل ہوتا ہے،\” رابن میکلوڈ نے کہا، جو شمال مغربی علاقوں کے ڈیہچو ریجن میں دیہ گاہ گوتِع فرسٹ نیشن کے ایک رکن ہیں جن کا کام مقامی مستقبل سے متاثر ہے۔
\”جب میں چیزیں تخلیق کرتا ہوں تو یہ پرجوش محسوس ہوتا ہے، روایتی فن اور ٹیکنالوجی، عصری اشیاء اور ٹیکسٹائل کے ساتھ رہنے کے طریقوں سے بننا کچھ منفرد بنانا۔ ایسا لگتا ہے کہ میرا جوش وہ لوگ محسوس کرتے ہیں جو میرا لباس پہنتے ہیں۔\”
میلان فیشن ویک میں میکلوڈ کے کچھ ڈیزائن میز پر رکھے گئے ہیں۔ ایک بزرگ نے اسے چھ سال کی عمر میں سلائی کرنا سکھایا۔ (میگن ولیمز/سی بی سی)
ایک بزرگ نے چھ سال کی عمر میں میکلوڈ کو سلائی کرنا سکھایا، لیکن اس نے صرف پانچ سال قبل خود کو پورا وقت کپڑوں کی ڈیزائننگ کے لیے وقف کر دیا، اس کے پاس جلد شروع کرنے کے لیے پیسے اور سرپرستوں کی کمی تھی۔
اس کے مجموعے کی جھلکیاں ایک گلیم راک کڑھائی شدہ کیریبو ہائیڈ اور سفید فر کوٹ اور سیاہ اور ایک سفید دھاری دار لباس ہیں جو ربن اور کھال سے گھرے ہوئے ہیں – میٹیس ربن اسکرٹ کا ایک جدید میش اپ۔
معاشی، سماجی، جغرافیائی چیلنجز
صرف ہنر اور محنت ہی آپ کو میلان تک نہیں پہنچائے گی، اور میکلوڈ اور دیگر پانچ ڈیزائنرز کے یہاں آنے کی بڑی وجہ سیج پال کی انتھک پروموشنل ہلچل کی بدولت ہے، جو ایک شہری ڈینیسولین ٹسکوے، جو انگلش ریور کے ایک رکن ہیں۔ فرسٹ نیشن اور اپنے طور پر ایک ایوارڈ یافتہ ڈیزائنر۔
غیر منافع بخش انڈیجینس فیشن آرٹس (IFA) کے ایگزیکٹو اور آرٹسٹک ڈائریکٹر کے طور پر، پال ہر دو سال بعد ایک فیشن شو کا اہتمام کرتا ہے۔ IFA سخت محنت کرتی ہے، اس نے کہا، ڈیزائنرز کے کاروبار کی بنیاد کو سپورٹ کرنے کے لیے — مقامی کمیونٹیز میں فرد سے فرد کی فروخت — جبکہ عالمی فیشن کے شعبے میں اپنی رسائی کو تیز کرنے اور اسے بڑھانے کے طریقے بھی تیار کرتی ہے۔
میلان فیشن ویک میں دکھائے جانے والے سیج پال، غیر منافع بخش دیسی فیشن آرٹس کے ایگزیکٹو اور آرٹسٹک ڈائریکٹر ہیں۔ ایوارڈ یافتہ ڈیزائنر، جو ایک شہری Denesuliné tskwe ہے، ہر دو سال بعد ایک فیشن شو منعقد کرتا ہے اور مقامی ڈیزائنرز کو فروغ دینے کے لیے کام کرتا ہے۔ (میگن ولیمز/سی بی سی)
پال نے کہا کہ بہت سے دیسی ڈیزائنرز کو نہ صرف گھر پر معاشی اور سماجی چیلنجوں کا سامنا کرنا پڑتا ہے — اگر آپ کی کمیونٹی میں صاف پانی نہ ہو تو تخ
لیقی ہونا مشکل ہے — بلکہ جغرافیائی بھی: شہری فیشن کے مراکز سے دور رہنا، ناقابل بھروسہ انٹرنیٹ کنکشن اور شپنگ کے لیے بھاری اخراجات۔ مواد اور سفر کے لیے۔
انہوں نے کہا کہ خطرناک طور پر آلودہ کرنے والی فاسٹ فیشن انڈسٹری میں مقامی ڈیزائنرز کے پائیدار طریقوں میں دلچسپی بڑھ رہی ہے، لیکن غلط فہمیوں پر قابو پانا ایک رکاوٹ بنی ہوئی ہے۔
پال نے کہا، \”براہ راست بالوں، پنکھوں، ہیڈ ڈریس کے ساتھ پریری انڈین کا خیال ہے،\” پال نے کہا۔
\”لہذا ہم واقعی اس کو آگے بڑھانے کی کوشش کر رہے ہیں اور جو کچھ آج ہماری ثقافت میں ہو رہا ہے اسے شیئر کرنے کی کوشش کر رہے ہیں۔ یہاں بہت سی روایت ہے، لیکن سینکڑوں مقامی قوموں کے ساتھ بہت سے مختلف اثرات اور تجربات ہیں۔ یہ بہت متحرک ہے۔\”
فنکارانہ مہارتیں خاندانوں کے ذریعے منتقل ہوئیں
کینیڈا کونسل برائے آرٹس اور اٹلی میں کینیڈا کے سفارت خانے نے گروپ کو میلان لانے اور وائٹ/میلان کے منتظمین کو گزشتہ مئی میں ٹورنٹو میں مقامی فیشن ویک میں بھیجنے میں مدد کی۔ وہاں انہوں نے پہلے ہاتھ سے دیکھا کہ ڈیزائنرز کیا پیش کرتے ہیں اور اندازہ کیا کہ آیا ان کے پاس وائٹ/میلان میں دکھانے کے لیے چپس موجود ہیں۔
اٹلی میں کینیڈا کی سفیر ایلیسا گولبرگ نے کہا کہ ’’وہ اڑا دیے گئے۔
پیر کو ختم ہونے والے میلان فیشن ویک کے دوران، ڈیزائنرز کو ایک پینل ڈسکشن میں کہانیاں سنانے کا موقع بھی ملا – جو کہ یورپی فیشن کے خریداروں کو مفاہمت کے تناظر اور پس منظر کو بہتر طور پر سمجھنے میں مدد کرنے کا ایک طریقہ ہے۔
کینیڈا کونسل برائے آرٹس اور اٹلی میں کینیڈا کے سفارت خانے نے گروپ کو میلان لانے اور وائٹ/میلان کے منتظمین کو ان کے کام کا جائزہ لینے کے لیے گزشتہ مئی میں ٹورنٹو میں مقامی فیشن ویک میں بھیجنے میں مدد کی۔ میلان فیشن ویک پیر کو ختم ہو رہا ہے۔ (میگن ولیمز/سی بی سی)
پینل میں وینکوور میں مقیم مقامی اسٹریٹ ویئر برانڈ سیکشن 35 کے تخلیقی ڈائریکٹر جسٹن لوئس تھے۔ سیمسن کری نیشن کے رکن نے سات سال قبل اپنی کارپوریٹ ملازمت چھوڑ دی تھی تاکہ اپنے ریزرو سے پرانے ہاکی ٹیم کے لوگو والی ٹی شرٹس کے بعد اپنا پہلا مجموعہ لانچ کیا جا سکے۔ چھین لیا گیا.
انہوں نے کہا، \”میں نے ایک کال محسوس کی، کہ اس طرح کی چیز کے لیے جگہ ہے، اور ہمارے لوگوں کو اپنے کپڑوں کی ضرورت ہے۔\”
فیشن لائن، کینیڈا کے آئین کے سیکشن 35 کا حوالہ ہے جو ملک میں معاہدوں کے حقوق کو تسلیم کرتا ہے اور ان کا تحفظ کرتا ہے، عصری شہری اور کھیلوں کے لباس میں ہوشیار دیسی چمکوں کو شامل کرتا ہے: اس کی کری پاور ریگالیا سے متاثر جیومیٹرکس کے ساتھ سوتی بننا؛ کیموفلاج پرنٹ کے ساتھ پارکس جو قریب سے دیکھنے میں اصل میں کری حروف ہیں؛ اور \”حقیقی درخت کیمو\” پرنٹ کے ساتھ ہنٹنگ اسٹریٹ ویئر کراس اوور لباس۔
اس مجموعے کا ستارہ ایک بیس بال جیکٹ ہے جس میں بڑے سائز کا \”S\” (سیکشن 35 کا ایک اور حوالہ) سلائی ہوا ہے، اور پیچھے، ایک چنچل پولکا ڈاٹ گھوڑا \”چوری کی زمین پر بنایا گیا\” کے الفاظ کے اوپر چھلانگ لگا رہا ہے۔
جسٹن لوئس،
مقامی اسٹریٹ ویئر برانڈ SECTION 35 کے تخلیقی ڈائریکٹر، میلان میں اپنی ایک جیکٹ پہنتے ہیں۔ سیمسن کری نیشن کے رکن نے سات سال قبل اپنی کارپوریٹ نوکری چھوڑ دی تھی جب اس کے ریزرو سے ہاکی ٹیم کے پرانے لوگو کے ساتھ اس کی ٹی شرٹس چھین لی گئی تھیں۔ (میگن ولیمز/سی بی سی)
لوئس – جسے کینیڈین آرٹس اینڈ فیشن ایوارڈز کے ذریعہ 2022 کے مینس ویئر ڈیزائنر آف دی ایئر ایوارڈ کے لیے نامزد کیا گیا تھا – نے کہا کہ اس کی بنیادی شناخت اور اس کے لوگوں کے ماضی کی سچائی کو اس کے تمام ڈیزائنوں میں ملانا مشکل ہوسکتا ہے۔
انہوں نے کہا کہ بعض اوقات جو لوگوں کو بے چین کرتے ہیں، ان کے لیے مشکل وقت ہوتا ہے شاید یہ ان کے لیے بہت زیادہ سیاسی ہو۔ \”لیکن دوسرے لوگ، ایک بار جب انہیں احساس ہو جاتا ہے کہ اس کا کوئی مطلب ہے، تو وہ ایسے ہیں، \’واہ، یہ واقعی بہت اچھا ہے۔\’ لیکن میرے لیے، یہ میرے ہر کام کی جڑ ہے۔ یہ مجھے تخلیق کرنے کی ترغیب دیتا ہے۔\”
کئی ڈیزائنرز کا کہنا ہے کہ ان کے کام نے انہیں لت سے نجات دلانے میں مدد کی ہے۔ سبھی کہتے ہیں کہ وہ ایسے خاندانوں سے آئے ہیں جہاں ماؤں، خالہوں یا بزرگوں نے جوش و خروش سے سلائی، لحاف، موتیوں کی مالا اور دیگر فنکارانہ مہارتیں حاصل کیں۔
فطرت سے متاثر ڈیزائن
ڈیزائنر Niio Perkins آرٹ کے زیورات تخلیق کرتا ہے جو زمین سے متعلق Haudenosaunee (لونگ ہاؤس کے لوگ) کے لباس کے ڈیزائن کی شکلوں کو زیورات میں ترجمہ کرتا ہے، شاندار سہ جہتی ڈیزائن بنانے کے لیے تہوں میں شیشے کے موتیوں کو سلائی کرنے کی اٹھائی ہوئی بیڈ ورک تکنیک کو استعمال کرتا ہے۔
\”کپڑوں کی علامت میں بہت زیادہ اہمیت رکھی گئی ہے،\” پرکنز نے کہا، اکویساسنے، نیو یارک، موہاک کے علاقے سے جو سینٹ لارنس دریا کے پار کارن وال، اونٹ کے قریب پھیلا ہوا ہے، جہاں اس کا ایک اسٹوڈیو ہے۔
Niio Perkins Akwesasne, NY سے ہے، ایک Mohawk علاقہ جو دریائے سینٹ لارنس کے پار کارن وال، اونٹ کے قریب پھیلا ہوا ہے، جہاں اس کا ایک اسٹوڈیو ہے۔ وہ کہتی ہیں کہ میلان آنے سے انہیں فیشن ہاؤس کے ساتھ تعاون کرنے کا خواب پورا کرنے کا موقع ملتا ہے۔ (میگن ولیمز/سی بی سی)
\”اس قدر کہ ہمیں یقین ہے کہ اسے پہن کر آپ اپنے جسم کی مدد کر رہے ہیں۔ یہ فراہم کردہ چیزوں کے لیے شکریہ ادا کرنے کا ایک طریقہ ہے۔\”
پرکنز نے کہا کہ انڈیجینس فیشن آرٹس کا حصہ بننا ان کے لیے کسی سرپرست یا معاون کے بغیر کام کرنے کے بعد ایک گیم چینجر ثابت ہوا ہے، اور میلان آنے سے انھیں فیشن ہاؤس کے ساتھ تعاون کرنے کا خواب پورا کرنے کا موقع ملتا ہے۔
ایریکا ڈونووین، ٹکٹویاکٹک، NWT کی ایک انوویالک آرٹسٹ، شی واز اے فری اسپرٹ برانڈ کے تحت موز کی چھپائی، مہر کی کھال اور پالش شدہ کستوری کے سینگ کے لہجے کے ساتھ موتیوں کی بالیاں بناتی ہے۔
ایریکا ڈونووین، ٹکٹویاکٹک، NWT کی ایک Inuvialuk آرٹسٹ، نے Tuktoyaktuk غروب آفتاب سے متاثر ہوکر پیچیدہ ہیرے کی شکل کی بالیاں ڈیزائن کیں، جس نے اسے 2022 میں Fabrique 1840 Indigenous Design کا ایوارڈ جیتا تھا۔ (میگن ولیمز/سی بی سی)
\”میں آرکٹک آسمان اور اس سرزمین سے بہت زیادہ متاثر ہوں جس پر میرے آباؤ اجداد چلے،\” انہوں نے ٹوکٹویاکٹک غروب آفتاب سے متاثر ہیرے کی شکل کی پیچیدہ بالیوں کی طرف اشارہ کرتے ہوئے کہا، جس نے اسے 2022 میں Fabrique 1840 Indigenous D
esign کا ایوارڈ جیتا تھا۔
انیشینابے ڈیزائنر لیسلے ہیمپٹن، جو میلان میں بھی ہیں، کو ووگ میگزین نے 2021 میں دیکھنے کے لیے نمبر 1 کینیڈین ڈیزائنر نامزد کیا تھا۔
اس نے پہلے ہی اپنا مشہور شوٹ آؤٹ حاصل کر لیا ہے — گلوکارہ لیزو سے اس کے سائز میں شامل لباس کے لیے جو آرام اور خود کو منانے کے لیے ڈیزائن کیا گیا ہے۔
ہیمپٹن کا نیا مجموعہ، بووینٹ، COVID-19 وبائی مرض کے بعد لوگوں کو بہتر محسوس کرنے میں مدد کرنے کے بارے میں ہے، جو بہت سے لوگوں کے لیے ایک تکلیف دہ تجربہ تھا۔
انیشینابے ڈیزائنر لیسلی ہیمپٹن کے تیار کردہ سراسر گاؤن میلان میں آویزاں ہیں۔ ہیمپٹن کو ووگ میگزین نے 2021 میں دیکھنے کے لیے نمبر 1 کینیڈین ڈیزائنر کا نام دیا تھا۔ (میگن ولیمز/سی بی سی)
اس نے کہا، \”میں واقعی میں چاہتی تھی کہ یہ مجموعہ یاد رہے کہ آپ اس سے پہلے کون تھے۔\” \”لباس رکھنے سے آپ جو بھی نئے جسم ہیں اس کا تجربہ کرنے کی اجازت دیتے ہیں … ایسے ٹکڑے جو آپ کو بااختیار بناتے ہیں اور آپ کو خوش کرتے ہیں۔\”
ہیمپٹن کے پیسٹل نٹ ویئر کے مجموعہ (اینٹی بیکٹیریل یارن کے ساتھ بنایا گیا ہے تاکہ آپ اسے کم دھو سکیں)، ایکوامیرین پنکھوں کے پھولوں والے سراسر گاؤن اور 1970 کی دہائی سے متاثر بیلون آستین والے لباس کے ذریعے تفریحی بلبلے۔
میلان میں تجربہ \’انمول\’ ہے
میلان میں ایک اور آنے والا مینیٹوبا (معاہدہ 1 علاقہ) سے تعلق رکھنے والا ایون ڈوچارم ہے، جس کے ڈیزائن میٹیس کی تاریخ، بچپن کے پاپ ریفرینس، نرالا پن اور ماحولیاتی ذمہ داری کا ایک شرارتی میلان ہے۔
اس کے مجموعے کے ایک سرے پر فلونگ میش اور موئر ڈریسز ہیں اور میٹس سیش سے متاثر ہاتھ سے کڑھائی والا میش ٹاپ؛ دوسری طرف، پریری بیج کے شیڈز میں کم سے کم جیکٹس اور جمپسوٹ۔
Evan Ducharme، مینیٹوبا کے ایک نئے آنے والے ڈیزائنر کا کہنا ہے کہ میلان میں اپنا کام دکھانا وہ سب کچھ ہے جس کا وہ خود تصور بھی کر سکتے تھے۔ (میگن ولیمز/سی بی سی)
\”میں واقعی میں سراسر اور سیال اور ظاہری طور پر نسائی کے درمیان اس تناؤ سے لطف اندوز ہوتا ہوں، اور زیادہ سخت اور سخت اور یکساں جیسا،\” اس نے کہا۔
\”یہ وہی ہے جو میرے خاندان نے پہنا تھا، زمین کی دیکھ بھال کے لیے سر سے پاؤں تک کا کام کا سوٹ۔ لیکن میرے خاندان میں ایسی خواتین بھی تھیں جو انتہائی نسوانی تھیں، اور ان کے گھٹنوں تک بڑے اے لائن اسکرٹس اور کپڑے تھے۔\”
Ducharme نے کہا کہ میلان میں دکھانا وہ سب کچھ ہے جس کا وہ اپنے لیے تصور کر سکتا تھا۔
انہوں نے کہا، \”میرا نوجوان ورژن جس نے 18 سال کی عمر میں دو ہاکی بیگز اور ایک امید اور ایک خواب کے ساتھ سینٹ امبروز کو چھوڑا، وہ پرجوش ہیں۔\” \”لیکن۔۔۔ [being here] یہ بہت محنت کا نتیجہ بھی ہے…. لہٰذا، نہ صرف میرا کام ہونا، بلکہ میرے ساتھیوں کا کام جو میلان میں دکھایا جائے، انمول ہے۔\”
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