Canada
'If there is a Conservative government, I will root for them:' Veteran broadcaster Charles Adler appointed to Senate
So what does Adler think about working alongside a possible Poilievre-led government? “Some current Conservatives, especially those on social media, might be surprised, but if there is a Conservative government, I will root for them to succeed,” he said Saturday.
Green party insider resigns amid ‘plenty of drama’
When Miranda Woodland stepped down from the board of the Green Party of Canada Fund earlier this month, she accused the party in a letter obtained by the Star of being too wrapped up in internal debates and having a “systemic issue” of bullying, gossiping and scapegoating.
Explaining immigration casework in federal Members of Parliament's district offices in Canada
This analysis shows that in the case of immigration files, constituency demography is the most important factor, while the MP's political affiliation plays a very limited role. These results shed new light on the factors involved in the processing of immigration cases at constituency level, and add nuance to previous, mainly qualitative analyses.
The Provinces
2 arrests made at Ontario PC party's Ford Fest event in Milton
Police arrested two people at a "Ford Fest" event organized by the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party in Milton after dozens of protesters gathered outside the venue on Friday.
Newcomers cushion Metro Vancouver from slowing regional economy
Record immigration has helped make up for the slowdown of consumer spending, which has been pinched by inflation and high interest rates.
Elsewhere
Harris Energizes Democrats in Transformed Presidential Race
The share of voters who strongly support Kamala Harris is nearly 20 points higher than the share who felt this way about Joe Biden in July.
Trump escalates gendered personal insults against Harris, defying GOP pressure
“I’m entitled to personal attacks,” he told reporters on Thursday. “I have to do it my way.” In Saturday’s speech, Trump veered from one topic to the next over almost two hours, dwelling on the June 27 presidential debate against Biden, illegal immigration, and a story about negotiations with French President Emmanuel Macron during which Trump imitated Macron’s French accent.
Labour MPs begin quitting X over ‘hate and disinformation’
MPs leaving platform or scaling back use over its ‘deterioration’ under Elon Musk’s ownership,
New Tool Tracks What Members of Congress Say and Do
Updated daily, the dashboard tracks, analyzes, and catalogs all public statements in real-time by members of Congress, including Twitter/X posts, newsletters, press releases, and floor speeches, using artificial intelligence models. More than 1.5 million data points dating back to Aug. 31, 2022, have been analyzed to date. Public statements are classified into five categories: personal attacks, policy discussion, constructive debate, accomplishments, and bipartisanship/compromise. Users can run searches by category, legislator, or state, and filter results by party, as well.”
Could the United States and China really go to war? Who would win?
Michael E O'Hanlon: The two countries are the world’s top two economic and military powers, both armed with nuclear weapons, each contributing 15% to 20% to world gross domestic product, and each dependent on the other for its prosperity given the depth and breadth of their economic relationships. Were they to go to war, however, global prosperity might soon become the least of our concerns; World War III could not be ruled out, and the survival of the human race might even be on the line.
Media
Reporting after removal: the effects of journalist expulsion on foreign news coverage
Using China as a case study, we evaluate these competing theories by collecting a novel dataset of foreign news stories about China and applying time-series causal inference methods to measure the effects of expulsion on information origination, composition, and reach after March 2020, when the Chinese government expelled a large number of foreign correspondents. Results show that expelled media organizations did not experience a chilling effect or backlash on reporting and may have changed their production processes to account for expulsion. These findings suggest that news organizations can remain resilient to the impact of extraordinary events which target the organization and disrupt internal production processes.
Reader Notes
Ever since taking office, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre rarely releases his itinerary ahead of time to the Parliamentary Press Gallery (of which i'm a member) of the broader public. As a result, we have to find out about his activities after the fact. Increasingly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is now doing something that has a similar effect: Releasing his itinerary as an event happens, after the event is over, or not at all.
Tracking the whereabouts of politicians is a key part, in my view, of a political reporter's job. Why, for example, is Jagmeet Singh spending two days in Halifax starting today? (Answer: Great chance his party steals that seat from the LIberals) Why was Poilievre in Stratford, PE yesterday? (Answer: It's in the riding of Cardigan which, again, his party may win with a star candidate there who happens to be a former provincial PC cabinet minister)
So, starting with today's Calendar below, if I become aware after the fact of the itineraries of Trudeau and Poilievre, I'll post them in a new Yesterday section.
Any other innovations or features you'd like to see in this newsletter? Please write and let me know..
Science and tech
Google’s upgraded AI image generator is now available
Google has released the latest version of Imagen 3, its AI text-to-image generator, to users in the US, as spotted by VentureBeat. The tool, which you can access on Google’s AI Test Kitchen, is supposed to generate images with “better detail, richer lighting, and fewer distracting artifacts” compared to Google’s previous models. I played around a bit with this tool. Here's one of the text prompts I gave it: "A senator in Canada Parliament" and asked it to generate a "35mm" camera photographic image. The hilarious results are posted above. All white guys. One even wearing a wig. And those robes! Where the heck did they come from? (Note for those not familiar with Canada's senate - no one wears a robe or a wig and while Canada's senators do include a lot of older white men, the group is becoming increasingly diverse.
OpenAI shuts down election influence operation that used ChatGPT
OpenAI has banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts linked to an Iranian influence operation that was generating content about the U.S. presidential election,
What AI is doing to campaigns
... the evolution of AI — not powerful new large language models like ChatGPT, but good old-fashioned machine learning — as a tool for political microtargeting means the field is slowly getting more sophisticated in what it can do.
