Joint statement from Canada and the United Kingdom ow.ly/oIV7106HcxM

The riding of Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream is a tossup between OneBC’s Alexandra Wright and BC "Conservative" Pavneet Singh. Vote for Alexandra if you love freedom, prosperity and hiring Canadians citizens.

We gotta keep up the fight for orcas and every British Columbian whose human rights or very existence will be questioned by these cons.

I’m deeply disappointed about this result. I’m worried about what it could mean for health care, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ people, education and Indigenous rights…I don’t believe every person who voted Conservative is hateful or unintelligent. People vote for different reasons. But a win doesn’t make a policy harmless, and we shouldn’t pretend the campaign promises… or the rhetoric surrounding them… don’t matter. The Conservatives platform promises to repeal SOGI 123, an optional set of resources schools use to support students and address bullying related to sexual orientation and gender identity. It also promises to repeal DRIPA… B.C.’s framework for bringing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into provincial law. Those choices put queer and trans students inclusion and reconciliation at risk. In 2024, Conservative candidate Marina Sapozhnikov used a racist slur to describe Indigenous people and made the baseless claim that 90% of Indigenous people use drugs. During this election, Conservative candidate Mike Hicks said First Nations needed to be “conquered.” Both incidents were condemned by Indigenous leaders. These words carry the weight of a violent colonial history, and political parties must be held accountable. On health care, the platform budgets $205 million a year at full cost for its promise to protect universal care and improve access. It also promises publicly funded treatment through another qualified provider if surgical wait benchmarks are exceeded. That raises real questions about how expanded care outside the public system could affect public staffing and access.What’s been hardest to watch is how hatred, scapegoating and misinformation have been pushed into the mainstream as “common sense.” Far right talking points have made it easier to treat our neighbours rights, identities and histories as threats. That should alarm all of us…I’m not saying every Conservative voter is stupid… you can’t judge one person’s intelligence by their vote, and research can’t explain why any one person voted the way they did. But studies do show a pattern, on average, between lower cognitive test scores and stronger socially conservative and authoritarian views. In a climate full of fearmongering and misinformation, critical thinking matters more than ever… question the talking points and check the facts… And to the Conservative supporters all over social media right now, gloating, mocking people and telling them to “cry harder”… your side won. If your first instinct in victory is to become even crueler, that says far more about your character than it does about anyone you defeated…People are genuinely afraid for their health care, their schools, their rights, their families and their safety. Treating that fear like entertainment isn’t strength, patriotism or political debate. It’s a complete failure of basic human decency…You got the result you wanted. Try showing some humility and humanity. Do better. Be better. An election victory is a mandate to govern… it is not permission to strip people of their dignity, erase their history or treat their rights as negotiable…Human rights are not privileges handed out by whichever political party happens to hold power. Indigenous history doesn’t disappear because the truth makes people uncomfortable. Queer and trans kids don’t become less deserving of safety because adults have turned their existence into a culture war. Women’s equality is not settled enough to be taken for granted, and health care and education should never be sacrificed to satisfy an ideology…To everyone who feels frightened, angry or abandoned by this result… you are not alone. There are still people who see you, stand beside you and will fight like hell for you. I refuse to accept cruelty as “common sense.” I refuse to let misinformation become truth simply because it was repeated loudly enough. You won an election. You did not win the right to decide whose humanity matters.

Protecting our coast is not a barrier to economic prosperity – it is the source of it. That’s why we’ve partnered with Coastal First Nations to sign the North Coast Protection Declaration and call on the federal government stand firm in its commitment to uphold the tanker ban.

Brazil votes in a tense Lula vs Bolsonaro runoff with U.S. influence over Latin America at stake ctvnews.ca/world/article/bra…