G.A.B.-Estable #BLM #MMIW

Si tous les enfants ont droit à l’éducation, plusieurs élèves en situation de handicap ou en difficulté d'adaptation ou d'apprentissage (HDAA) sont scolarisé-es de façon partielle ou carrément renvoyé-es de l’école. Un fil 🧵 #DROITscolarisation #polqc #qc2022 #polqc2022 1/11

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has sent a letter to the Board of Governors at the University of Alberta urging them to vote against the removal of EDI in their hiring policies and to affirm their commitment to the Alberta Human Rights Act and the Charter.

I've been teaching a master's course on AI at @UofT 's @munkschool - and I'm excited to share it with you! One of the best parts has been the calibre of guest lecturers: folks from @AnthropicAI @GoogleDeepMind and @law_ai_. This week, Mark Surman — @mozilla President and one of the most important voices on open source AI — came by and gave us a fantastic walkthrough of how he's thinking about the evolution of the internet to frontier AI, and Canada's role as a middle power. When I told him about the course, his first reaction: "You should open source it." So we did. Full syllabus and a couple AI agents and resources we've built together — all on GitHub: github.com/jaxson/ai-poli… Covers everything from the AI supply chain to frontier model governance to hands-on prototyping. More materials and agents coming at the end of term. Feel free to use it, remix it, share it. And remember a future with plenty of open source AI is a good one!

Academic scientists historically accepted lower salaries because the job offered intellectual freedom and institutional protection to pursue a passion for creating and disseminating knowledge. It was treated as a calling - closer to a priesthood or a federal judgeship than a corporate job. As universities became corporatized, that relationship disappeared. Scientists became minor players inside large university bureaucratic structures focused on revenue streams. If the freedom and protections of academic life disappear, there is no reason to accept a fraction of the salary.

This is wild. 143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history. Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots. Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget. Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard. The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.

Canada should never be complicit in human rights abuses. Today I spoke in support of Bill C-233, the No More Loopholes Act, which would close a major gap in Canada’s arms export rules that allows many military exports to the US to bypass risk assessments and transparency.

Peer review in the 1950s be like

Federal Court rules that it would be a miscarriage of justice for IRCC to return an Express Entry application for incompleteness when a consultant admits that the application was incomplete due to inadvertence on their part. decisions.fct-cf.ca/fc-cf/decision…

'Our Blessed Homeland' (my cartoon for yesterday's @guardianreview) -

As part of the "Immigration and Citizenship Consultants IT Enhancement Project" (circa 2021), we know that IRCC is collecting information on credit card payment and also IP addresses to screen for the issue of unauthorized representative. Perhaps as an unintended consequence, we are also seeing cases now where neighbourhood providers (e.g. internet cafes, local money exchange businesses) lead to the flagging of applicants for PFL for having an undisclosed rep because fees were paid by their businesses in exchange for cash. This is common situation in the Global South where everyone may not hold a valid credit card for Canadian payment (cc: @DeboskiLeanne) In light of R. v. Bykovets, 2024 SCC 6 (CanLII), <canlii.ca/t/k358f> we may also see more scrutiny around the IRCC practice of collecting IP addresses. This is definitely a challenging area of regulation, as just this one example shows. #cdnimm

IRCC has revised its C-20 guidance to state that "for cultural agreements, applicant should include a letter from the appropriate governing body." Previously, this only applied to France. canada.ca/en/immigration…

@MannyLidher This interpretation always felt counterintuitive to me. Why would you have less rights once restored to visitor than as a person without status? If the person was still within 90 days of worker status loss, why not allow them to continue applying from in Canada for a WP?

REP-A-2025-0809- Work Permit Restoration After Visitor Record Approval Q: If a work permit extension is refused but a visitor record is later approved, can the person still apply to restore the work permit from inside Canada? A: Generally no. Once a visitor record is approved, the person has valid visitor status, so there is no lost status to restore. Restoration applies only when status has been lost. Since the temporary public policy allowing visitors to apply for work permits inside Canada has ended, a new work permit application would usually need to be made from outside Canada unless another exemption applies. #CanadaVisa #CanadaImmigration

Montreal police paid $1.8 million to purchase AI video analysis software last year, but refused to name the specific software or company. A student newspaper, The Concordian, did the digging. It's iMotion ROC, a product with scary capabilities.

Canada and the world lost a bright academic scientist (Dr. Dominique Vervoot) today. Among the many accomplishments listed here, he was also the lead applicant in a legal challenge against an Ontario policy requiring IMGs to have attended local high schools to enter the CaRMS residency match's first iteration. He secured a court injunction staying the rule for 2025, arguing it violates Charter equality rights. The final hearing is scheduled in June 2026 and I pray the work he initiated succeeds. May his soul rest in peace. Amen.

As someone who wrote a book about feminism in Canada six years ago, and who made this point exactly in the book, and who was pretty much entirely ignored by mainstream media, all I can say is christ you people are slow on figuring out what is what.

Too many people working with multi-agent systems assume that if you just add enough agents and let them talk, interesting social dynamics will emerge. A new paper suggests that the assumption is fundamentally wrong. Researchers studied Moltbook, a social network with no humans, just 2.6 million LLM agents. Nearly 300,000 posts, 1.8 million comments. At the macro level, the platform's semantic signature stabilizes quickly, approaching 0.95 similarity. It looks like culture forming. But zoom in, and individual agents barely influence each other. Response to feedback? Statistically indistinguishable from random noise. No persistent thought leaders emerge. You get the surface texture of a society (posts, replies, engagement) with none of the underlying mechanics (shared memory, durable influence, consensus). The things that make human societies costly and slow to build turn out to be the things that make them work. Coordination isn't free, and the gap between agents that interact and agents that form a collective may be far wider than the current multi-agent discourse assumes. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2602.14299 Learn to build effective AI Agents in our academy: academy.dair.ai

REP 2025-0245- CEC Work Hours Q: How are irregular part-time work hours calculated under Canadian Experience Class? Is there a 15-hour weekly cap? A: There is no separate 15-hour cap. For CEC eligibility, Canadian work experience is capped at 30 hours per week maximum, which is treated as full-time. Irregular part-time hours can be accumulated week-by-week toward the required 1,560 hours, but no more than 30 hours per week can be counted. Only actual hours worked performing job duties count; leave or non-working periods are excluded. Assessment remains case-by-case based on supporting documentation. #CanadaVisa #ExpressEntry #CanadaImmigration

They’re not just bombing people. They’re wiping out the conditions required for people to exist. This is an act of genocide, carried out in daylight, in full view of the world.

If you read any historical diaries, you will find very quickly that it didn't take long at all for women to realize being breeding stock wasn't fun. It was a huge reason women became nuns.

As of November 2025, IRCC’s security screening projections indicate that, based on recent screening times at partner agencies and current inventory levels, comprehensive security screening referred to a partner agency will take approximately 64.8 months to complete for permanent residence applications. Using the same standard, for temporary residence applications referred for comprehensive security screening, the projected completion time is approximately 30.3 months. The service standards for comprehensive security screening are 110 days for permanent residence applications and 28 days for temporary residence applications.

IRCC REP-2025-0123 Question: Can someone whose last status was worker or student restore their status directly to visitor, or must they restore both their previous worker or student status as a condition to restore their status to visitor? Answer: They can restore their status to visitor. Maintained status and restoration of status is becomming an increasingly complicated area of Canadian immigration law, and there appears to be a lot of inconsistency.