Jan Timmers

As of April 2024 BC has the most doctors per capita of any province in Canada, and the number of doctors here has only gone up since then: businesscouncilab.com/insights-categ…

37 years ago, the world lost Gilda Radner I often think of the sketch. Hours after she died, Steve Martin hosted SNL and scrapped his monologue. With tears in his eyes, and a joke, the show paid tribute to her with their classic: Dancing in the Dark.

@sarobertson_ Haha. There's a saying we have in the west for wingnuts like this guy - all hat, no cattle...

Jeff Rath: "I'm sure that the First Nations, because they're being funded by the Tides Foundation and funded by George Soros and funded by foreign money, will fight every single step of the way because they have billionaires backing them."

In 1943, Canada erased a hospital room from existence to save a royal baby — and Europe's oldest monarchy thanked them with flowers that still bloom 80 years later. The Nazis had taken Holland. Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands had fled across the Atlantic with her daughters, finding refuge in Ottawa while her homeland burned. Now she was pregnant — and that pregnancy had triggered a constitutional crisis no government had ever faced. The problem was brutally simple: If this baby was born on Canadian soil, Canadian law would grant automatic citizenship. And the ancient laws governing Dutch royal succession were unforgiving. Any hint of foreign citizenship could disqualify this child from ever ascending to the throne. Sending her home wasn't an option. German U-boats prowled the waters. The royal palace in The Hague had swastikas hanging from its windows. So Canada's lawyers did something that belongs in a novel, not a history book. On January 19, 1943, the Canadian government issued an Order in Council that rewrote reality. The maternity suite at Ottawa Civic Hospital was declared extraterritorial. Not Canadian. Not Dutch. Not part of any nation on Earth. For the span of a birth, that room existed in a legal void — a pocket of nowhere wrapped in hospital walls. Princess Margriet was born into that impossible space. The moment she drew breath, she was Dutch — purely, legally, unquestionably Dutch. No competing allegiance. No threat to her royal destiny. The lawyers closed their books. The doctors smiled. And then, as quietly as it had vanished, the room became Canadian again. The war ended. Holland was liberated. And the Dutch Royal Family didn't just say thank you — they said it in a language that would outlive everyone who spoke it. In 1945, 100,000 tulip bulbs arrived in Ottawa. Not as decoration. As gratitude made tangible. But one shipment wasn't enough to express what Canada had done. So they kept sending them. Every single year since 1945, the Dutch Royal Family sends 20,000 more bulbs to the Canadian capital. Today, if you walk through Ottawa every May, you'll find over three million tulips blazing along the Rideau Canal, flooding through Commissioners Park, turning the city into rivers of crimson, gold, and violet. Most people who stop to take photos have no idea they're standing in the middle of a thank-you note that's been growing for eight decades. Princess Margriet is 83 now. She still makes the journey to Ottawa during tulip season, walking through gardens that exist because she was once born in a room that legally didn't. Some acts of kindness become gardens. Some thank-yous outlive everyone who gave them. And some flowers bloom forever.

This is the most deeply researched piece on the state of First Nation land claims in BC (including the land thefts that sparked them) I've seen yet. Focuses on metro Vancouver, but is emblematic of the province: 25 FN's here have filed title claims, but none are pursuing court action. All are negotiating instead. Remember when everyone thought the feds handed the whole city of Vancouver over to Musqueam? Yeah, no. Hats off to @Gordon_Hoekstra

Less that 1% A solid reminder that the BC Conservatives are farming the issue of land acknowledgements for political gain. Their time would be much better spent on health care, climate change and improving supports for teachers.

They never do. Read The Morning After, by Chantal Hebert and Jean Lapierre. Twenty years after the 95 referendum, the major players *still* hadn’t figured out what they would have done in the event of a yes vote. It was all just bluff and improv. But anyone who does try to game the thing out with any rigour pretty quickly comes to the conclusion that it can’t be done: not unilaterally/illegally, and not by negotiation/constitutionally. That needs to be communicated to people. But what needs to be communicated even more is that the whole enterprise is illegitimate; that there is not, and cannot be, any such thing as a right to secede from a democratic country (which is why virtually no democratic country recognizes such a right); that threatening to do so to blackmail your fellow Canadians is as morally bankrupt as it is practically futile; that the attempt to invoke democratic principle in its defence is bogus — you cannot vote to help yourself to something that isn’t yours, namely the territory of Canada — while the right of self determination simply folds in on itself: if Albertans or Quebecers have a right to self determination, do Edmontonians or Montrealers? For that matter, do Canadians? Or is the proposition that the vast majority of Canadians must simply stand mute while their country, which tens of millions have built over several centuries, is blown apart by a single vote on a single day by a small fraction of the population? Even if either Alberta or Quebec had been sovereign states prior to entering the federation, that would not hold water: once you’ve dissolved your sovereignty in the larger entity, you can’t reconstitute it. It no longer exists. There’s nothing to reconstitute it with. But it’s just gaga to make such claims with regard to a province that, like Alberta, was itself the creation of an Act of the Parliament of Canada, or like Quebec, of the Parliament of Great Britain — and then only the relatively minor rump that was carved out of the pre-existing Province of Canada at Confederation. Two thirds of the present-day territory of the province of Quebec was added after Confederation — again, by acts of the Parliament of Canada. So there’s no actual likelihood of Canada breaking up, even if there is a referendum in either or both provinces, and even in the vanishingly unlikely event that either or both of them managed to win a “clear majority” on a “clear question.” What is possible is that either or both of them might land themselves in a ruinous, divisive, and possibly violent mess, whose costs would mostly be borne by their own citizens. But we do not make that prospect more likely by rushing to make offers to dissuade them from leaving or going to great lengths to show “the federation works.” The committed hardliners regard such offers with contempt while the cynical blackmailers regard them as a baseline from which to make further demands. Neither is anything achieved by saying “fine, go.” Acquiescing in the theft of Canadian territory and the destruction of the federation hardy counts as a “tough” position. No, the proper stance is to advertise, well in advance, that neither exercise will be regarded as conferring any right to secede of any kind; that whatever we might be willing to talk about afterward, it would not be secession. It might not even be as advantageous as the status quo.

a scene from the crumbling marriage of two auctioneers

@mehdirhasan NACHO - Not A Chance Hormuz Opens

One day we will figure out how the Iranian theocratic government became so good at trolling the US, and that too using US-style pop culture memes and lines.

Here's what happens when you put a German Shepherd in charge of babysitting Doberman Pinscher pups.. 😅

Dutch people celebrating Canada liberating their country 81 years ago this week during World War II. 🇨🇦

Swan River, Manitoba (1956)

KING CHARLES III: "There was one particular AUKUS predecessor, launched from a UK shipyard in 1944 that served for the majority of her life attached to the 4th Submarine Squadron in Australia playing a critical role during the war in the Pacific. Her name? HMS Trump — so tonight, Mr. President, I am delighted to present to you, as a personal gift, the original bell which hung on the conning tower of your valiant namesake. May it stand as a testimony to our nation's shared history and shining future." 🇺🇸🇬🇧

The Hooded Merganser is the #Canadian duck with the energy of a shark. It hunts with saw‑like bills, sharp underwater vision and dives that mean business. From minnows to crayfish, nothing is safe. Using emojis, drop your reaction below! We’ll go first: 💫🙈 📷 _mattparish/IG

Buying snowmobile clothes in Quebec in 1970. credit: nfb/cold-rodders

No one should ever be allowed to stand in the BC Legislature to use Nazi rhetoric to argue a point. This a line that should never be crossed. Every party should immediately denounce this abhorrent comment.

“With cigarettes, my wife and I, we made a deal. We only smoke after sex. I've got the same pack now since 1975. What bothers me is my wife. She's up to three packs a day.” The late great RODNEY DANGERFIELD on The Tonight Show.

CARNEY: "When I get into the office, I always look at this statue on my desk. It was given to me by Mike Myers just over a year ago, and this is General Isaac Brock. Faced with the threat of an American invasion, Brock built alliances across our land and inspired what would eventually become Canada."

DRIPA does not do what they told you it does. Every claim on this site is sourced. dripafacts.ca

When I was a kid, I started following politics, glued to the TV set watching Pierre Trudeau sparring with Quebec separatist Premier Rene Levesque on the one hand and the Conservatives on the other as his government brought our Constitution home and created our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is what inspired me to become a Liberal. I was a child of Dutch immigrants and I was excited about a Prime Minister who fought against nationalism in Quebec and for a Canada that was more independent of Britain, so that people who were neither English nor French would be considered just as Canadian as everyone else. I heard from my parents and in school about what a much more dangerous nationalism did in Europe. It was the reason why our families immigrated after World War II. And I saw Conservatives against all of this, fighting against the Charter and nit-picking against this patriation, just like they were originally against our own Canadian flag. So I am really happy to celebrate today as the 44th anniversary of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Cheers to Pierre Trudeau!

Normal vs Pro✨