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BUDGET 2026 ✅ Lowest deficit in Canada. 🇨🇦 GOOD JOBS. LOWER COSTS. BETTER HEALTH CARE. From Churchill to communities across Manitoba, we’re growing the economy and making life more affordable. A lot done. A lot more to do! 🦬

May 16, 1963. Gordon Cooper was orbiting Earth alone inside a capsule barely big enough to turn around in, moving at 17,500 miles per hour. He had been up there for over a day. Then the warnings started. First a faulty sensor screaming that the ship was falling — it wasn't. He switched it off. Then something far worse: a short circuit knocked out the entire automated guidance system. The one that kept the capsule steady. The one that was supposed to bring him home. Without it, reentry was nearly impossible. Too shallow an angle and the capsule would bounce off the atmosphere back into space. Too steep and it would incinerate. The margin for error was razor thin — and every computer that was supposed to hit that margin was dead. Down on the ground, NASA engineers watched the telemetry in silence. They could see everything going wrong. They could fix nothing. Cooper didn't panic. He uncapped a grease pencil and drew lines directly on the inside of his window to track the horizon. He looked up at the stars he had spent months memorizing and used their positions to orient the ship by eye. Then he set his wristwatch. Because when you have no computers left, you become the computer. At exactly the right moment — calculated in his head, confirmed by the stars outside — he fired the retrorockets. The capsule shook. The sky turned to fire. For several minutes, no one on Earth could reach him as plasma swallowed the ship whole. Then the parachutes opened. Faith 7 hit the water just four miles from the recovery ship — the single most accurate splashdown in the entire Mercury program. The man with a wristwatch and a few pencil marks on a window had outperformed every automated system NASA had. We talk a lot about technology saving us. And it often does. But Cooper's story is a quiet reminder that behind every machine, there still has to be a human being who can look out the window, think clearly under pressure, and decide what to do next. The final backup was never the software. It was him.

🌳 Forest restoration is about more than planting trees. For #IntlForestDay, check out our latest paper exploring key challenges & approaches to delivering high quality restoration. Forests are crucial for people, nature & climate. @WWF @wwf_uk @FAO bit.ly/4dtAEH6

Looking forward to this year's edition. Planning to lead my first Jane's Walk

JUST IN: The most irreversible consequence of this war is not happening in Tehran. It is happening in a barn in Iowa. A farmer is standing over a kitchen table looking at two seed catalogues. One is corn. One is soybeans. Corn needs 180 pounds of nitrogen per acre. Nitrogen costs $610 per ton on the CBOT March futures settlement as of yesterday, up 35 percent in a month. Soybeans fix their own nitrogen from the atmosphere through root bacteria called rhizobia. They need nothing from the Strait of Hormuz. The farmer is choosing soybeans. Millions of acres are choosing soybeans. And once the planter rolls into the field, the choice cannot be reversed until next year. USDA projected corn at roughly 94 million acres for 2026, down from 98.8 million. Soybeans at 85 million, up from 81.2 million. Those projections were published February 19, before urea surged past $683 at New Orleans. The actual shift will be larger. USDA Prospective Plantings reports March 31. By then the seeds will be in the ground. This is the transmission channel the world is not watching. A 21-mile strait enforced by provincial commanders with sealed radio orders just rewrote the planting economics of 90 million acres of the most productive farmland on Earth. Not through sanctions. Not through diplomacy. Through the price of a single molecule that corn cannot grow without and soybeans do not need. Now follow the cascade. The Renewable Fuel Standard mandates 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually. That consumes roughly 43 percent of the entire US corn crop. The mandate is set by the EPA. It does not flex when corn acres shrink. It is inelastic demand consuming a fixed share of a declining supply. When supply tightens against a fixed mandate, the remaining corn reprices upward. Corn above $5 per bushel compresses every margin downstream. The US cattle herd stands at 86.2 million head, a 75-year low per USDA NASS. Poultry and pork operations face compression from higher corn prices. Feed is the single largest cost in livestock production. When feed reprices, protein reprices. When protein reprices, every grocery shelf in America absorbs the increase. This is the protein cascade. Corn to feed to meat to eggs to dairy to the checkout counter. Each link tightens because the link before it tightened. The originating cause is a urea molecule that cannot transit a strait because a provincial commander’s sealed orders say it cannot. The farmer did not start this war. The farmer cannot end it. The farmer responds to the price on the screen and the biology of the two crops in front of him. Corn needs the molecule. Soybeans do not. At $610 the arithmetic is settled. The planter rolls. The season is locked. Israel just authorised the assassination of every Iranian official on sight. The US has spent $16.5 billion. South Pars is burning. The Fed is holding rates because oil inflation will not break. Gold touched $5,000. Bitcoin is bleeding. China is running exercises near Taiwan. Sri Lanka shut down on Wednesdays. And underneath all of it, a man in a barn is making the decision that determines whether four billion people pay more for food this year. He has never heard of the Mosaic Doctrine. He does not know what a sealed contingency packet is. He knows what nitrogen costs. And he is planting soybeans. Full analysis - open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

🌎 Good news: One of the most biodiverse marine ecosystems on Earth, the Great Bear Sea, is Canada’s first - and the world's second largest - marine protected area network, co-governed by 17 First Nations. ⚠️ Not-so-good news: A new The Nature Conservancy Science study finds that 35% of the world already lives in areas where extreme heat limits safe outdoor activity for part of the year. 🌱 What you can do: Even small actions like planting native species or supporting community gardens can cool cities, reduce flooding, and support biodiversity. And when we talk about climate solutions, anger and worry decreases: and hope rises! When we make climate action visible, it becomes contagious. talkingclimate.ca/p/indigenous-l…

(However empires would still fight for control over other resources)

I think that is the best advertisement I’ve ever seen.

@g_meslin Do you think there is room down by the lake for Kennedy Station too?

Apparently somebody thinks it would be a great idea to fly commercial jets here.

Hope isn’t something we wait for: it's something we create. This week's Talking Climate news illustrates why it matters so much, and how innovation and courage can help! 💧 Good news: A solar-powered system can pull drinking water directly from the air—up to 1,000 liters of clean water a day, even in dry areas where billions of people already face water scarcity. 🧠 Not-so-good news: Climate change is increasingly affecting people's mental health, from Madagascar to Appalachia. In the U.S. alone, rising heat could lead to hundreds of millions additional days of anxiety and depression each year by end of century. 🚶 Inspiration: Three members of New Mexico Interfaith Power and Light recently completed a 320-mile pilgrimage from the oil-producing Permian Basin to the state capitol in Santa Fe to call for climate action. Read more in this week’s edition, and don't forget to share! talkingclimate.ca/p/pulling-clea…

Be Hired! 🌼 Native Plants in Claremont is looking for an Indigenous Growing Native Plant Species for Environmental Enhancement Trainee!! jobs.miziwebiik.com

We can all feel it. The world is dying. Death is all around us now. Silence where once there were buzzing insects, chirping frogs, or singing birds. Desert has replaced forest. Democracy has become tyranny. Rot is all around us. But even as we sit in the middle of a Great Dying, it is possible to choose life. Cultivate soils. Plant a tree. Establish a pollinator garden. Raise a child. Hell, we could even choose to bring native forests back and rewild our landscapes. We could choose to restore local water cycles and transform deserts into grasslands or forests once more. A new world might still be born — yet we do not know for sure if it is too late. Read more: substack.com/home/post/p-19…

Using Toronto Open Data, check the data here open.toronto.ca/dataset/ttc-lr…

Honoured to join the Mayor’s Iftar yesterday evening. This was a wonderful gathering that brings our community together in the spirit of reflection, generosity, and unity during Ramadan. 🌙 Thank you to everyone who helped make this special evening possible. #Ramadan #Iftar #Toronto

Numerous posts across various social media platforms are actively suggesting to us as humans that we should remain divided and harbour hatred toward one another. Recent wars and conflicts happening around the world are unfortunately reinforcing and amplifying this troubling idea. However, we should never forget or lose sight of the fundamental truth that we belong to each other and are deeply related. All these divides, whether they are religious, racial, political, or based on other categories, are deliberately created and maintained by those in positions of power as a strategic means to rise to power or to maintain and strengthen their existing power, because they are fully aware that dividing people and setting them against each other is one of the most effective ways to gain support and control. But we as humans need to come together in solidarity and should not forget or abandon our fundamental interconnectedness and shared humanity. We are one world, one human family. On this small planet we call home in this huge universe, no land is truly foreign, we are all citizens of Earth, bound together by our shared existence. ***** This winter, I brought to life something that has lived in my imagination for years—the first annual print edition of The Gurdeep Magazine. It features writing from other contributors alongside my own work. If you feel called to hold this warmth of printed words in your hands, visit Gurdeep.ca/magazine.

The Ontario Science Centre was intentionally designed to provide families and school groups with a series of experiences. Arrival, cross the bridge, through the Great Hall, down the escalators, terrace, down again, galleries… And it started with gathering your group right here.

Well that was a fun read.

Who could disagree?