Nanaimo, B.C.'s downtown drug experiment has failed to stabilize its overdose rate. It has managed, however, to line the city’s oldest streets with feces, garbage, hit-and-runs, doorway fires and damaged property — a situation so bad that city council, just last week, considered fortifying its parking lot with a 1.8-metre fence. Read More

Seven years ago, Quebec Premier François Legault made a very unfortunate comment, calling oil from Alberta’s oil sands "dirty energy." “I am not embarrassed to refuse dirty energy while we are offering clean energy at a competitive price,” Legault said, rejecting the idea of a pipeline crossing Quebec’s territory to reach the port of Saint John, New Brunswick. Albertans were incensed, and rightfully so, considering that Quebec receives billions in equalization payments thanks, in part, to Alberta’s prosperity. Consider also that Quebecers consume millions of barrels of gas from the oil sands each year. Read More

Let’s stop pretending the Middle East is complicated. Read More

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney will be offering his update on trade talks with the White House when he sits down with the premiers Tuesday, while discussing their concerns as an Aug. 1 deadline for more tariffs rapidly approaches. Read More

The Trump administration has released records of the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., despite opposition from the slain Nobel laureate’s family and the civil rights group that he led until his 1968 assassination. Read More

Canadians avoiding travel to the United States and banning American alcohol are among the reasons U.S. President Donald Trump thinks they are “nasty” to deal with, the U.S. ambassador to Canada said Monday. Read More

OTTAWA -- Several Conservative MPs are criticizing the Crown's approach to prosecuting two key organizers of the Freedom Convoy protests, with the party's deputy leader calling it an act of "political vengeance." Read More

The step-grandmother of two young children who vanished from a rural Nova Scotia home almost three months ago is pleading with the public to stop spreading rumours about the children's disappearance. Read More

In 2021, crops withered as Western Canadian farmers faced the worst drought in 19 years. Wheat stocks dropped 38.7 per cent year over year in its wake. By April 2022, food manufacturers were paying more than double what they were in 2020, and that cost had trickled down to consumers. According to Statistics Canada, shoppers spent more on bread (+12.2 per cent), pasta (+19.6 per cent) and cereals (+13.9 per cent) than they had the year prior. Read More

HUNTSVILLE, Ont. — Canada’s premiers pledged economic reconciliation with Indigenous people through major infrastructure and resource projects at their semi-annual meeting that began Monday, though several First Nation leaders said afterward they were disappointed with the discussion. Read More

Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who as teenage son Theo Huxtable on “The Cosby Show” was central to a cultural phenomenon that helped define the 1980s, died at 54 in an accidental drowning in Costa Rica, authorities there said Monday. Read More

Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand and 24 of her counterparts abroad have signed a joint statement saying “the war in Gaza must end now,” while calling on Israel to stop displacing Palestinians. Read More

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney heard from a bipartisan delegation of U.S. senators on Monday that he should seek to “reinvigorate” discussions about the Canada-U.S.-Mexico (CUSMA) trade agreement as he faces pressure to close a deal with the White House by Aug. 1. Read More

OTTAWA — Efforts by an activist group to swamp the byelection ballot where Pierre Poilievre is trying to win a seat are angering some opponents who were hoping to spoil the race for the Conservative leader. Read More

Drop Commanders and “immediately” revert the name of Washington’s NFL team to Redskins or face holdups in a bid to build a new stadium in D.C., U.S. President Donald Trump threatened the team’s ownership on Sunday. Read More

Health Canada has issued a recall notice for more than 260,000 above-ground swimming pools sold in Canada since the early 2000s after nine kids drowned in the United States. Read More

It is to be hoped that the judge in the case of Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, key organizers of the notorious Freedom Convoy, has more common sense and respect for justice than the prosecution, which seems intent on nothing more than revenge and retribution. Read More

Between President Donald Trump claiming there’s a flood of fentanyl from Canada to the U.S., and people here insisting there’s almost none, the truth is elusive. A new American report gets to the bottom of what’s really going on, and its author, Jonathan Caulkins, talks to Brian about what he found. Specializing in crime systems, the professor from Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College breaks down how global supply chains run by criminal organizations moving from Mexico to China to Australia feed Canadian labs with precursor chemicals. And how much of the final made-in-Canada product actually ends up on America’s streets — including, unexpectedly, in Alaska. Read More

A leaked audio recording of an internal CBC disciplinary meeting for a national news anchor reveals the public broadcaster’s tension over its policies on journalistic standards and freedom clashing with protecting its corporate image. Read More

A Bangladesh Air Force training aircraft crashed into a school campus in the capital, Dhaka, shortly after takeoff on Monday, killing at least 18 people including the pilot and injuring 164 others, the military said. Read More

A Montreal father is facing a murder charge after the body of his nine-year daughter was found over the weekend in New York state. Read More

Unionized workers at Canada Post begin voting on the Crown corporation’s latest contract offer on Monday. Read More

What happened to those “short-term” price increases from the pandemic?   Read More

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here. Read More