Article · Sport · 5 min read
When Canada plays a home World Cup match for the first time this June, it does so as the strongest men's team in its history. A decade ago it sat 90th in the world. Measured in Elo, soccer's results-based strength rating, the climb since has carried Canada past the United States and into second place in North America, behind only Mexico.
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Canada is rushing a new payroll system in to replace Phoenix. But its own Auditor General told a committee that most of the remaining pay errors aren't the software's fault at all — which raises an awkward question about what the 4.2 billion dollars is actually buying.
Foodtastic, the Montreal company that just signed an exclusive deal to bring Dunkin' back to Canada with "hundreds of locations," has approved 109 Temporary Foreign Worker positions across its existing portfolio over the past two years. Normalized by workforce, that works out to roughly 5.7 per 1,000 employees — about 85 per cent of Tim Hortons' rate. Tim Hortons got every front page for promising to cut its TFW use. Foodtastic, with a similar per-worker rate, is opening hundreds of new stores under a "Dunkin' is back" headline.
Tim Hortons said this morning it will cut Temporary Foreign Workers and hire 10,000 Canadians instead. The chain's full franchise network — every "12345 Ontario Inc o/a Tim Hortons" plus the two big franchisee groups whose corporate names don't carry the brand — has 747 LMIA-approved positions for 2024-2025. Roll up McDonald's the same way and you get 907. The chain making headlines about foreign-worker cuts isn't even Canada's biggest fast-food user of the program.
Calgary spends roughly a third less per resident on policing than Montréal, and has less violent crime to show for it. Across 29 major Canadian metropolitan areas, the correlation between officers per 100,000 residents and the violent Crime Severity Index is essentially zero. Built from the 2025 Police Administration Survey, released Wednesday.
In 2000 Canada built 2.96 million vehicles and sat fourth in the world. In 2025 it built 1.24 million and slipped to 14th, behind the Czech Republic and Turkey. Mexico now builds 3.3 times as many vehicles as Canada does.
The fieldwork started in May. Statistics Canada hasn't published its 2026 release calendar yet, but the 2021 cycle gives a tight template — first headline counts about nine months after census day, full picture about eighteen. Ten things the new data is set up to settle.
466 women enrolled as Canadian Armed Forces officers in fiscal year 2025/26 — a 94 percent year-over-year jump and the largest single-year shift for any subgroup in 28 years of DND open data. The composition of the 2025 cohort doesn't match the working-class enlistment story most coverage told.
16.3 percent of millennials aged 25 to 39 lived with at least one parent in 2021. Boomers at the same age in 1991 — 8.2 percent. The rate has roughly doubled, and the figure is from the last census, before mortgage rates and rents climbed further.
Canada lists seven federal "priority" categories on its Express Entry page. In 2025, French, CEC, and Healthcare did 86,350 of the 113,998 invitations issued. STEM hasn't drawn since April 2024. Agriculture has never drawn at all.
A French-speaking Express Entry candidate gets accepted at a score 107 points lower than an otherwise-equivalent candidate. The gap is the policy, and almost nobody is talking about it.
New first-time international college entries fell 75 percent in two years. Universities fell 46 percent. The gap is the story.
April was the fourth straight monthly decline in full-time employment. Unemployment hit a six-month high. Wages still grew 4.5 percent year-over-year. The headline number of minus 18,000 hides what is happening underneath it.
Ottawa called the 2026 Provincial Nominee expansion "historic." Provinces had already overshot their 2025 cap by 30,000 admissions. The 2026 plan formalizes it — and cuts family reunification, refugees, and federal merit selection to keep the total flat.
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Ontario as a whole had 2,242 opioid toxicity deaths in 2024 — a rate of 13.9 per 100,000, well below Canada's 17.7 national rate. But the provincial average hides a sharp split: five northern Public Health Units sit between 35 and 54 per 100,000, while Toronto and Peel sit near or below the average.
Honda is shelving its largest-ever North American EV investment, citing 'sluggish U.S. demand.' The Canadian story is sharper — ZEV market share fell from 18% to 9% in one quarter when both major rebates ended within weeks of each other.
500 Dawes Road is the only building both of Toronto's parallel rating systems flag as one of the worst — and that agreement is unusual enough it might be why Mayor Chow went there.
From 5 % of PR admissions in 1990 to a 31.5 % peak in 2021. Holding at 25 % even as the total falls. Four mechanisms explain the shift, including Express Entry's 2015 launch.
Study permits −47 %. PR admissions −24 %. TFW work permits −9 %. The October 2024 cap is hitting its target faster than the announced trajectory required.
4.17 M monthly trips at the peak → 1.97 M by Feb 2026. Fourteenth consecutive month of YoY decline. Overseas travel didn't move. The mechanism: January 2025 tariffs.
1,385 hours lost across 10,087 incidents. Disorderly patrons top the chart by total time but Line 1 carries 56 % of all delay. Built directly from the open-data file.
Black youth 6.3× their population share. Middle Eastern 4.4×. Indigenous 1.7×. The four objections that survive scrutiny, and what the chart can and can't tell you.
17.7 vs 16.4 per 100,000 in 2024 — but the headline depends on whether you count British Columbia. Strip BC out and Canada drops to 14.0, well below the US rate.
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