Don Monahan has officially entered the race for leader of the New Brunswick Progressive Conservatives.

The MLA for Arcadia-Butternut Valley-Maple Hills launched his leadership bid Saturday in Fredericton.

The first-term MLA is now the second confirmed candidate in the race for Tory leader.

Get daily National news

Get the day’s top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.

Daniel Allain announced his candidacy in October.

Allain had served as MLA for Moncton East from 2020 to 2024, and was part of former premier Blaine Higgs’s cabinet in 2023 as minister of local government.

Trending Now

• Bodies found in area in Mexico where search is on for 10 missing workers from Canadian mine

• Canadian Tire ordered to pay nearly $1.3 million for false advertising

Higgs stepped down as party leader after the 2024 election, and was replaced by Glen Savoie as interim leader.

PC members will vote on their new leader at the party’s convention in October.

More on Politics
More videos

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff resigned Sunday over the furor surrounding the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the U.K. ambassador to the U.S. despite his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Morgan McSweeney said he took responsibility for advising Starmer to appoint Mandelson, 72, to Britain’s most important diplomatic post in 2024.

“The decision to appoint Peter Mandelson was wrong. He has damaged our party, our country and trust in politics itself,” McSweeney said in a statement. “When asked, I advised the Prime Minister to make that appointment and I take full responsibility for that advice.”

Starmer is facing a political storm and questions about his judgement after newly published documents, part of a huge trove of Epstein files made public in the United States, suggested that Mandelson sent market-sensitive information to the convicted sex offender when he was the U.K. government’s business secretary during the 2008 financial crisis.

Starmer’s government has promised to release its own emails and other documentation related to Mandelson’s appointment, which it says will show that Mandelson misled officials.

The prime minister apologized this week for “having believed Mandelson’s lies.” He said “none of us knew the depth of the darkness” of the relationship between Mandelson and Epstein when the former was vetted for the diplomat job.

But a number of lawmakers have called for Starmer to resign.

“Keir Starmer has to take responsibility for his own terrible decisions,” said Kemi Badenoch, leader of the opposition Conservative Party.

Mandelson, a former Cabinet minister, ambassador and elder statesman of the governing Labour Party, has not been arrested or charged.

Trending Now

• Israel team, JD Vance booed at Olympics opening ceremony

• Canadian Tire ordered to pay nearly $1.3 million for false advertising

Metropolitan Police officers searched Mandelson’s London home and another property linked to him on Friday. Police said the investigation is complex and will require “a significant amount of further evidence gathering and analysis.”

The U.K. police investigation centers on potential misconduct in public office, and Mandelson is not accused of any sexual offenses.

Starmer had fired Mandelson in September from his ambassadorial job over earlier revelations about his Epstein ties. But critics say the emails recently published by the U.S. Justice Department have brought serious concerns about Starmer’s judgment to the fore. They argue that he should have known better than to appoint Mandelson in the first place.

The new revelations include documents suggesting Mandelson shared sensitive government information with Epstein after the 2008 global financial crisis. They also include records of payments totaling $75,000 in 2003 and 2004 from Epstein to accounts linked to Mandelson or his husband Reinaldo Avila da Silva.

Aside from his association with Epstein, Mandelson previously had to resign twice from senior government posts because of scandals over money or ethics.

&copy 2026 The Canadian Press

More than 5,000 days after construction began in Toronto, the Crosstown LRT will finally begin carrying passengers along Eglinton Avenue.

Around 7:30 a.m. Sunday, the first train will start its journey westward from Kennedy Station in Scarborough, past connections to the Yonge/University subway line, to terminate at Mount Dennis Station in the west.

The train will leave the station without pomp or ceremony as part of a phased opening to the line, Toronto’s transit agency is trying to play down as a soft launch, managing expectations for the six-year delayed project.

The Eglinton Crosstown LRT was first pitched by former mayor David Miller as part of his Transit City vision in 2007 and, after being briefly dashed by his successor, Rob Ford, began construction in November 2011.

Construction on the line was led by provincial transit agency Metrolinx in a public-private partnership with a construction consortium. The two parties presided over a myriad of delays, legal cases and cost overruns.

By 2023, Metrolinx had given up on providing the public with an opening date, promising only that the public would get three months’ notice before the line opened. Ultimately, that didn’t happen.

Metrolinx instead announced in December 2025 that it finally believed the project was complete and accepted it from the construction consortium, handing it to the TTC, which will run its timetables and operations.

Behind the scenes, the provincial transit agency aggressively campaigned to open the Crosstown before the end of 2025, but a more restrained approach from the TTC won out.

Its CEO privately pushed to open the line on Feb. 8, during a December meeting, but publicly refused to confirm the date. CEO Mandeep Lali finally announced the same opening date at a meeting on Tuesday, after Premier Doug Ford had told reporters that was when he expected the line to open.

Until the eleventh hour, Lali would not confirm Sunday’s opening date, complaining that unexplained activations of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT’s emergency brakes left him concerned the system was not ready.

Sometime in the week leading up to the opening, he said he was given a satisfactory explanation for the emergency brake incidents, and said he was ready to open the line.

Still, the TTC is framing the opening almost as a pilot. The agency said trains will initiate and terminate service earlier than intended and travel at slower speeds during a phased opening.

The line will operate from roughly 5:30 a.m. on weekdays and 7:30 a.m. on weekends. It will close at 11 p.m. daily.

“As part of the phased opening of Line 5, the TTC is advising customers that there will be no grand opening ceremony, formal event, or commemorative merchandise on Sunday at any location,” the transit agency wrote in a statement.

Despite the low-key nature of the launch, the TTC admitted it expected crowds to ride the line all day Sunday.

Premier Ford chided journalists for being “negative” about the long-delayed Crosstown ahead of its launch on Friday and urged Torontonians to celebrate the fact it has finally opened.

“You’re beating a dead horse here; we’ve been going through this for years, the same old questions,” he said. “Let’s celebrate a new line.”

&copy 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

Rob Lantz will become the next premier of Prince Edward Island after winning the Conservative party leadership at its convention Saturday.

Lantz ran against Mark Ledwell for the top role and won by over 300 votes, eking out 53 per cent with 2,895 votes. Ledwell, considered an underdog for much of the campaign, managed 2,542 votes, or 46 per cent.

Get daily National news

Get the day’s top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.

There were 5,437 votes cast out of 6,132 eligible voters, or 87 per cent, a record high number for the party.

Lantz had been named the party’s interim leader and interim premier in February 2025, following the resignation of Dennis King after nearly six years in power.

Trending Now

• Why Canadian beer cans are ‘almost impossible’ as tariffs near 1-year mark

• Jivani’s trip to Washington has some Conservative MPs scratching their heads

Lantz stepped down in December to run for permanent party leader and was replaced by Bloyce Thompson, who was sworn into office that month.

Story continues below advertisement

Ledwell, who is a lawyer and business leader, has been a longtime party member and announced his intention to run for the leadership in May.

The party’s convention is being held at the Eastlink Centre in Charlottetown.

More on Politics
More videos

The Ontario Liberal Party says it will select a new leader on Nov. 21, an announcement that kicks off its third leadership race since 2020.

Several politicians, both provincially and federally, have been weighing bids and assembling teams in the background but have been waiting for the date and rules of the upcoming leadership race before making any official announcements.

Party president Kathryn McGarry said in a statement that the race is an opportunity for the party to build momentum and bring Liberals together

The winner of the leadership contest will replace Bonnie Crombie, who officially resigned earlier this year following lukewarm support in a vote at the party’s annual general meeting in the fall.

Get daily National news

Get the day’s top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.

Crombie led the provincial Liberals back to official party status and increased their seat count in last year’s snap election, but she failed to win her own seat and the party did not form the Official Opposition despite receiving nearly 600,000 more votes than the NDP.

Story continues below advertisement

Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith, who finished second to Crombie in the 2023 leadership race, has strongly suggested he will give it another go, and has said he will seek the provincial party’s nomination for an upcoming byelection in the Toronto riding of Scarborough Southwest.

Trending Now

• Jivani’s trip to Washington has some Conservative MPs scratching their heads

• Mark McMorris crash overshadows Canada’s opening curling win at Olympics

Ontario Liberal caucus members Lee Fairclough, Adil Shamji and Rob Cerjanec have also said they are seriously considering jumping into the leadership race when it is called.

Former Liberal party president Mike Crawley is said to be weighing a run, as is housing advocate Eric Lombardi.

Ontario Liberal leader hopefuls have until July 31 at 5 p.m. to submit their nomination papers.

Party members will cast their votes electronically between Nov. 9 and Nov. 20 using a ranked ballot system.

More on Politics
More videos

Less than two years ago, a federal government report warned Canada should prepare for a future where, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is “almost impossible to know what is fake or real.”

Now, researchers are warning that moment may already be here, and senior officials in Ottawa this week said the government is “very concerned” about increasingly sophisticated AI-generated content like deepfakes impacting elections.

“We are approaching that place very quickly,” said Brian McQuinn, an associate professor at the University of Regina and co-director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Data and Conflict.

He added the United States could quickly become a top source of such content — a threat that could accelerate amid future independence battles in Quebec and particularly Alberta, which has already been seized on by some U.S. government and media figures.

“We are 100 per cent guaranteed to be getting deepfakes originating from the U.S. administration and its proxies, without question,” said McQuinn. “We already have, and it’s just the question of the volume that’s coming.”

During a House of Commons committee hearing on foreign election interference on Tuesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s national security and intelligence advisor Nathalie Drouin said Canada expects the U.S., like all other foreign nations, to stay out of its domestic political affairs.

That came in response to the lone question from MPs about the possibility of the U.S. becoming a foreign interference threat on par with Russia, China or India.

The rest of the two-hour hearing focused on the previous federal election and whether Ottawa is prepared for future threats, including AI and disinformation.

“I do know that the government is very concerned about AI and the potentially pernicious effects,” said deputy foreign affairs minister David Morrison, who, like Drouin, is a member of the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol Panel tasked with warning Canadians about interference.

Asked if Canada should seek to label AI-generated content online, Morrison said: “I don’t know whether there’s an appetite for labelling specifically,” noting that’s a decision for platforms to make.

“It is not easy to put the government in the position of saying what is true and what is not true,” he added.

Ottawa is currently considering legislation that will address online harms and privacy concerns related to AI, but it’s not yet clear if the bill will seek to crack down on disinformation.

“Canada is working on the safety of that new technology. We’re developing standards for AI,” said Drouin, who also serves as deputy clerk of the Privy Council.

She noted that Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, who led the public inquiry into foreign interference, concluded in her final report last year that disinformation is the greatest threat to Canadian democracy — thanks in part to the rise of generative AI.

Addressing and combating that threat is “an endless, ongoing job,” Drouin said. “It never ends.”

The Privy Council Office told Global News it provided an “initial information session relating to deepfakes” to MPs on Wednesday, and would offer additional sessions to “all interested parliamentarians as well as to political parties over the coming weeks.”

Experts like McQuinn say such a briefing is long overdue, and that government, academia and media must also step up educating an already-skeptical Canadian public on how to discern truth from fiction.

“There should be annual training (for politicians and their staffs), not just on deepfakes and disinformation, but foreign interference altogether,” said Marcus Kolga, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and founder of DisinfoWatch.

“This needs leadership. Right now, I’m not seeing that leadership, but we desperately need it because all of us can see what is coming.”

Kolga also agreed there is “no doubt” that official U.S. government channels, and U.S. President Donald Trump himself, are becoming a major source of that content.

“The trajectory is rather clear,” he said. “So I think that we need to anticipate that that’s going to happen. Reacting to it after it happens isn’t all that helpful — we need to be preparing at this time.”

Morrison noted Tuesday that the elections panel, as well as the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) task force, did not observe any significant use of AI to interfere in last year’s federal election.

However, he added that “our adversaries in this space are continually evolving their tactics, so it’s only a matter of time, and we do need to be very vigilant.”

The Communications Security Establishment and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security have issued similar warnings recently about hostile foreign actors further harnessing AI over the next two years against “voters, politicians, public figures, and electoral institutions.”

Researchers now say the U.S. is quickly becoming a part of that threat landscape.

McQuinn said part of the issue is the online disinformation that Canadians see is being spread primarily on American-owned social media platforms like X and Facebook, with TikTok now under U.S. ownership as well.

That has posed challenges to foreign countries trying to regulate content on those platforms, with European and British laws facing resistance and hostility by the companies and the Trump administration, which has promised severe penalties, including tariffs and even sanctions.

Digital services taxes that sought to claw back revenues for operating in foreign countries have been identified by the U.S. as trade irritants, with Canada’s tax nearly scuttling negotiations last year before it was revoked.

Trending Now

• Jivani’s trip to Washington has some Conservative MPs scratching their heads

• Why Canadian beer cans are ‘almost impossible’ as tariffs near 1-year mark

Kolga noted the spread of disinformation by U.S. content creators and platforms is not new, whether it originates from America or from elsewhere in the world. Other countries, including Russia, India and China, are known to use disinformation campaigns and have been identified in Canadian security reports as significant sources of foreign interference efforts.

Russia has also been accused of covertly funding right-wing influencers in the U.S. and Canada to push pro-Russian talking points and disrupt domestic affairs.

What is new, McQuinn said, is the involvement of Trump and his administration in pushing that disinformation, including AI deepfakes.

While much of the content is clearly fake or designed to illicit a reaction — a White House image showing Trump and a penguin walking through an Arctic landscape suggested to be Greenland, or Trump sharing third-party AI content depicting him flying a feces-spraying fighter jet over protesters — there have been more subtle examples.

The White House was accused last month of using AI to alter a photo of a protester arrested in Minnesota during a federal immigration crackdown in the state to make the woman appear as though she were crying.

In response to criticism over the altered image, White House deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr wrote on X, “The memes will continue.” The image remains online.

“The present U.S. administration is the only western country that we know of (that) on a regular basis is publishing or sharing or promoting obvious fakes and deepfakes, at a level that has never been seen by a western government before,” McQuinn said.

He said the online strategy and behaviour matches that of common state disinformation actors like Russia and China, as well as armed groups like the Taliban, which don’t have “any respect” for the truth.

“If you don’t (have that respect), then you will always have an asymmetrical advantage against any actor, whether it’s state or non-state, who wants to in some way adhere to the truth,” he said.

“(This) U.S. administration will always have an advantage over Canadian actors because they no longer have any controls on them or restraints, because truth is no longer a factor in their communication.”

McQuinn added his own research suggests 83 per cent of disinformation is passed along by average Canadians who don’t immediately realize the content they’re sharing is fake.

“It’s not that they necessarily believe in the disinformation,” he said. “Something looks kind of catchy or aligns with their ideas of the world, and they will pass it on without reading in the second or third paragraph that the idea that they agreed with now morphs into something else.

“The good news is that Canadians are learning very quickly” how to spot things like deepfakes, he added, which is creating “a certain amount of skepticism that is naturally cropping up in the population.”

Yet Trump’s repeated sharing of AI content online that imagines U.S. control of Canada — an homage to his “51st state” threats — as well as tacit support between U.S. administration figures and the Alberta independence movement has researchers increasingly worried.

“My real concern is that when Donald Trump does order the U.S. government to start supporting some of those narratives and starts actually engaging in state disinformation, in terms of Canada’s unity — when that happens, then we’re in real trouble,” Kolga said.

Reform UK is facing an investigation after distributing a leaflet from a ‘concerned neighbour’ to households in Gorton and Denton.

Letters were sent to voters in the Manchester seat from local pensioner Patricia Clegg endorsing the party’s candidate Matt Goodwin in the upcoming by-election.

Mrs Clegg’s note says she ‘did not want Keir Starmer to be prime minister anymore’ citing tax rises among reasons for her dismay at the current government.

The letter concludes: ‘After a lifetime of voting loyally, I feel I have no choice but to vote for Reform UK on Thursday, 26th February. Please think about doing the same.’

However the letter contained no indication as to who had funded it or arranged it to be printed.

Under election rules, campaign literature does not have to be branded, but an imprint indicating the party behind it is required to be included on all papers.

While many so-called ‘newsletters’ and pamphlets often contain only a small line indicating their allegiance, there was no such notice on the neighbour’s letter.

Mrs Clegg, 74, told the Guardian she was a Reform member and had been asked by the party to put her name to the letter.

However the letter’s printer, Hardings, said in a statement that the legally required imprint had been taken off due to a production error.

The Electoral Commission said that enforcement of campaigning rules was a matter for police.

Greater Manchester Police has since confirmed it will be investigating the case.

A spokesperson for Reform said: ‘The campaign commissioned a letter from a local constituent which was supplied to our print contractor with the full and correct legal imprint, fully compliant with election law.

‘Print ready proofs were provided by the supplier and approved by the campaign.

‘Those proofs clearly included the legal imprint in the correct form.

‘It has since become clear that an error occurred during the printing process. Due to a production failure by a third party print supplier outside of Reform’s control, the legal imprint was inadvertently removed at the point of printing without our knowledge.

‘At no stage did the campaign know about, authorise or intend the distribution of material without a legal imprint. The omission arose solely from a supplier error after compliant materials had been submitted and approved.’

A spokesman for Hardings Print Solutions Ltd said: ‘Hardings Printers has identified an error in the production of election leaflets printed and distributed on behalf of Reform UK for the Gorton & Denton by-election. We take our responsibilities in relation to election material very seriously and take full responsibility for this error occurring.

‘Reform UK did not request or authorise the removal of the imprint. The omission arose from Hardings Printers’ production process.

‘The party supplied artwork which correctly included the legally required imprint, and a compliant proof was produced and approved.

‘During the final trimming stage of production, the imprint was inadvertently removed due to an internal error at Hardings Printers, which was not identified before distribution.

‘We apologise to Reform UK and the voters of Gorton & Denton for this error.’

The contest in Gorton and Denton was triggered after Labour MP Andrew Gwynne stepped down due to ill health.

Labour is facing competition from both the Greens and Reform in the seat, with the by-election seen as an early indicator of the party’s support ahead of local elections in May.

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, had indicated his interest in standing in the seat, but his bid to return to Westminster was blocked by the party’s National Executive Committee.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

Comments


Add as preferred source