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CTV News
6 minutes ago
- CTV News
Advance voting underway in provincial riding of Arthabaska
A person votes in Montreal on the first Monday of October 2018, election day in Quebec. (The Canadian Press/Graham Hughes) Advance voting is taking place this weekend in the provincial riding of Arthabaska, in Quebec's Centre-du-Québec region, ahead of the Aug. 11 byelection. Ten candidates are in the running. The race appears to be shaping up as a contest between Quebec Conservative Party leader Éric Duhaime and Parti Québécois candidate Alex Boissonneault. The governing Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) is fielding Keven Brasseur. Other candidates from parties represented in the National Assembly include Chantale Marchand for the Quebec Liberal Party and Pascale Fortin for Québec solidaire. Also running with authorization from Élections Québec are Louis Chandonnet (Équipe autonomiste), Denis Gagné (independent), Trystan Martel (Climat Québec), Arpad Nagy (independent) and Éric Simard (Union nationale). The byelection was triggered by the resignation of CAQ MNA Éric Lefebvre, who left provincial politics mid-mandate to run federally. He was elected April 28 under the Conservative Party of Canada banner in the federal riding of Richmond–Arthabaska. In the last Quebec general election in October 2022, Lefebvre was handily re-elected with 51.75 per cent of the vote — more than 12,200 votes ahead of his closest challenger, Conservative candidate Tarek Henoud. This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Aug. 3, 2025.
CBC
6 minutes ago
- CBC
Advocates say even knowing your neighbour is a step forward for climate action
In the battle against an uncertain climate future, climate activists say strengthening communities is key. In a recent panel discussion on CBC's The Signal, climate advocates reacted to the latest climate news, such as this summer's devastating wildfires in Newfoundland and Labrador and across the country. The tone in climate change conversations has been sombre. Environmentalist David Suzuki has said to media that humanity has lost its fight against climate change. He told CBC News that the focus of the fight now should be on building communities — checking on neighbours and seeing who would " need help in an emergency." For Megs Scott, the importance of a community was clear on the day their hometown of Port aux Basques, N.L., was hit by Hurricane Fiona, a record-breaking storm that pulled entire houses into the ocean. The support was quick to follow. "I think about how literally the entire island came together," Scott said. The town received so much help that it deferred resources to nearby towns, they said. It was following that event that Scott joined the climate activism organization Fridays for Future. They say community work can be as simple as knowing your neighbours, joining a group with like-minded people, sharing knowledge, all so that if a climate disaster does hits, the community is stronger and able to help one another better. "It's not only the community work, but it's also the way in which community melds together in times of emergency," Scott said. An overall systematic change Leah Casey, a biology college student at Memorial University and a climate advocate, says the burden of climate action can't fall entirely on individual people. "I think it's the systems that have been built and structures that people can't get away from," Casey said, like the abundance of plastic products one might encounter while shopping for necessities. The Signal She says the change starts with the local communities people are part of, like her community in Conception Bay South, where her work in the community garden helped with food insecurity and added green spaces. "All of the communities around the world need to work together as one," she said. "There's elections coming up. We all need to work together to make sure that our elected officials are going to support our interests and make sure that there's going to be climate action on a large scale." "We're part of a whole" Richard Whitaker, a long-time climate advocate from Portugal Cove-St. Philips, says the issue lies with selfishness, greed and people's need to "have everything": a wasteful consumerist ideology that fuels climate change. "Two people living in a house that historically would have housed 20," he said. "We are self-centred and we don't realize that we're part of a whole, or don't act as if we're part of a whole, and we have a responsibility to hold." But facts and science knowledge don't often get to people's hearts, says Mary Tee, former director of the Mercy Centre for Ecology and Justice. "There has to be a moral, spiritual way into this because we have to have a change in consciousness, and I don't think rules and regulations will bring that about," she said. "It has to be tapping to our very hearts and our feelings ... we're not just individuals, you know, we're responsible not just for ourselves, but for our community."
CTV News
35 minutes ago
- CTV News
Extremists target gaming platforms for recruitment: report
In this Thursday, Aug. 29, 2019 photo, headphones are placed on top of computer screens in metropolitan Manila, Philippines. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila) A pair of U.K. researchers has identified video games as key targets for recruitment by far-right extremists, in part because they say such platforms are so difficult to police. Published Thursday, a paper from the International Policing and Public Protection Research Institute (IPPPRI) examined the political discourse circulating on video-game streaming platforms and third-party messaging apps. In interviews with 13 content moderators, industry experts and members of anti-extremism organizations, researchers heard that far-right messaging was the most commonly spread, including neo-Nazism, attacks on women, racialized and LGBTQ2S+ communities, and the spread of conspiracy theories like QAnon. 'These gaming-adjacent platforms offer extremists direct access to large, often young and impressionable audiences,' co-author William Allchorn said in a release. 'They have become a key tool for extremist recruitment.' In March of 2024, Canada's federal government announced new funding to research political indoctrination in online gaming, including how communities built out of games can 'create environments conducive to radicalization to violent extremism.' 'There is clear evidence that extremist actors are active in these spaces,' reads a report published later that year by the international Extremism and Gaming Research Network, one of the recipients of the funding. Last August, the RCMP issued a safety advisory to parents about the dangers of online extremists who target children, including in video games and related communities. 'We ask parents, guardians and adults in positions of authority to keep an eye out for indicators that a child or youth is being targeted or exploited,' the release reads. 'Your report could be the missing piece to preventing more harm.' Problems with prevention The IPPPRI researchers note that indoctrination can begin within the games, where opportunities are plentiful for a political agitator in search of recruits. Multiplayer matchmaking offers a steady flow of new contacts, shared interest in the game helps to build rapport quickly and for some titles, including the ever-popular first-person shooters, 'hyper-masculine' themes present a bridge to discussing more radical thinking, the paper notes. Inappropriate content is often filtered out of in-game messages and players can easily get removed from a given match for violating the rules, but those chats are sometimes only used at the beginning of the recruitment process. Once a target has been drawn in, researchers say the conversation is prone to move to third-party chat groups, where extremist propaganda flows more freely — a process known as 'content funnelling.' 'These platforms have largely flown under the radar, while at the same time becoming digital playgrounds for extremists to exploit,' Allchorn said. 'Our research identified a widespread lack of effective detection and reporting tools.' Interviewees said among the far-right messaging were other forms of fringe politics, including Islamist extremism, and what they call 'extremist-adjacent' material, such as the 'glorification' of mass shootings at schools. Though much of this kind of content is often against platforms' terms of service, enforcement may rely on users reporting one another for banned conduct; something Allchorn said some don't even know how to do. Efforts to employ AI to automatically respond to extremist content are complicated, the analysis found. Violent words, for example, might just be used to harmlessly refer to what's happening in the games, and the highly contextual dialect of memes, irony and inside jokes found in online communities can easily confuse automated tools. Even keeping up with the growing list of alternative terms and symbols used to circumvent language filters can be a consistent challenge, interviewees told researchers. 'Strengthening moderation systems, both AI and human, is essential, as is updating platform policies to address content that is harmful but technically lawful,' Allchorn said. 'Decisive action works and platforms can be doing more to help curb the spread of extremism.'
