Controversial B.C. ‘fast-track' bills headed for vote
Vancouver Watch
MLAs are set to vote on a pair of bills that have drawn widespread condemnation from First Nations leaders.
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CTV News
19 minutes ago
- CTV News
Trump says China has ‘totally violated' agreement with U.S. on tariffs
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, May 23, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File) U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said China had violated an agreement on tariffs with the United States. 'China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!,' Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform. U.S. trade talks with China were 'a bit stalled' and getting a deal over the finish line will likely need the direct involvement of President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News on Thursday. Two weeks after breakthrough negotiations that resulted in a temporary truce in the trade war between the world's two biggest economies, Bessent said progress since then has been slow, but said he expects more talks in the next few weeks. The U.S.-China agreement to dial back triple-digit tariffs for 90 days prompted a massive relief rally in global stocks. But it did nothing to address the underlying reasons for Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods, mainly longstanding U.S. complaints about China's state-dominated, export-driven economic model, leaving those issues for future talks. Reporting by Susan Heavey, Katharine Jackson; Editing by Sharon Singleton Reuters
Globe and Mail
20 minutes ago
- Globe and Mail
Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead: Succession's successor sharply satirizes a new class of billionaire
Before he transformed the idea into a hit HBO television series, the British screenwriter Jesse Armstrong first wrote Succession as a film. I've always been curious what kind of movie Armstrong's original screenplay – which landed on the so-called 'Black List' of best unproduced screenplays of 2010 – would have resulted in. Armstrong's new HBO film that premieres in Canada on Saturday night on Crave (8 p.m. ET) may be the closest we'll ever get to seeing what that would have looked like. While not a Succession spin-off per se, Mountainhead certainly seems to exist in an expansion of its universe – where the characters and the satire are both extremely rich. The film begins with a bit of exposition, efficient if not all that elegant, that sets up the background of the story through news footage. Traam, a social media site used by billions around the world, has introduced a new suite of artificial intelligence features. Without any moderation, they have led to bad actors to create real-time deepfakes that have quickly sparked violent and even genocidal conflict all around the globe. Despite this worldwide chaos he's created, Traam's cocky owner Venis (Cory Michael Smith) – the richest man in the world and, from a brief glimpse of his parenting style, at least partly modelled on Elon Musk – is headed off on a weekend retreat with his tech-bro besties. An oversized SUV, private jet and helicopter ride away is a new mountaintop mansion in the Canadian Rockies that has been built by Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), who, with a net worth of merely $500-million, is considered the poorest of his billionaire pals. Indeed, he's nicknamed Soupy, short for Soup Kitchen, for that reason. (Yes, Hugo has named his retreat Mountainhead in an apparently non-ironic homage to objectivist novelist Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.) Also joining on this jaunt are Randall (Steve Carrell), described as a 'Dark Money Gandalf' and unwilling to admit that all the wealth in the world cannot cure the type of cancer he has; and Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who has a modicum of ethics compared to the others and a rival AI platform that quickly could undo all the damage that Traam is doing – but only if Venis names the right price. Full of poetically garbled tech jargon and inventively profane put-downs, Armstrong's screwball dialogue in this film is as enjoyable – and unquotable in this newspaper – as Succession's at its most absurd. His satire is sharpest in the ways he parodies tech-bro libertarian stances. In self-serving denial of the effect of Traam is having, Venis recalls that when the Lumière Brothers showed their first movie of a train, the audience jumped for cover. 'The answer to that was not stop the movies,' he says, with the type of specious argument one normally has to pay big bucks to hear at a Munk Debate. 'The answer was show more movies.' Randall follows up with his own risible reasoning to ignore the suffering of others, delivered in a sarcastic tone: 'There will be eight to 10 cardiac arrests during the Super Bowl. Stop the Super Bowl!' For all its line-by-line dark pleasures, Mountainhead would quickly grow tiring were it not for the fact that Armstrong's plotting of shifting power dynamics among these four is pretty clever as well. Venis has to dance around how to get Jeff's AI without compromising his pride, while Randall goes deeper and deeper into dangerous delusion as he imagines that perhaps Traam's 'creative destruction' might speed up the eventuality of transhumanism and the ability for his consciousness to be uploaded to the mainframe. Then, there's insecure Hugo who will go along with any plan as long as someone invests in his meditation app that he hopes might finally push him over a billion in net worth. There is, however, an unresolved tension at the heart of Mountainhead, as there was in Succession, between how much the audience hates these characters and also enjoys spending time laughing at (with?) them – and how to balance the fact that the ultra-rich are beyond the reach of consequences, while satisfying the desire to punish them. Unable to really have his characters develop or truly grapple with the implications of their actions without humanizing them, Armstrong returns to his old underwhelming stand-by – scenes in which his monsters stare into the distance miserably, or look at themselves in the mirror as if try to the find shreds of humanity behind their mask. Ultimately, with so much of Mountainhead's action taking place in a single location, you see how Armstrong's style of writing is suited for a TV screen over a big one – and why it's for the best Succession didn't happen as a movie. Indeed, you could even see Mountainhead dropped on a stage, with minimal edits to the script. Finally, male actors who wanted to explore the depths of toxic masculinity and American capitalism would have a more up-to-date work than David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (incidentally, now on in New York starring Kieran Culkin).
Globe and Mail
20 minutes ago
- Globe and Mail
B.C. Housing Minister expresses concern after Vancouver abandons controversial supportive-housing project
British Columbia's housing minister says he is concerned about the future of supportive-housing projects in Vancouver after the city quashed construction plans in a west-side neighbourhood amid a legal battle with residents over the rezoning changes. The rezoning for the 129-unit, 13-storey project in Kitsilano was rescinded April 30, after a consent order between a local residents' group and the city essentially overturned a 2022 approval. In an interview with The Globe and Mail, B.C. Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon said he was surprised by the city's decision to abandon fighting a lawsuit the Kitsilano Coalition for Children and Family Safety Society had brought claiming the city's public-hearing process for the rezoning was flawed. 'If you don't want concentrations of supportive housing, but then you don't want them in Kits, where do you put people?' he said. Vancouver abandons controversial supportive-housing project in Kitsilano Earlier this week, Mayor Ken Sim told The Globe that the city is trying to work with the province on finding alternative sites, where two 40- to 60-unit projects could be built that fit in better with the neighbourhoods. Supportive housing provides units to low-income people the way social housing does, but also helps with drug addiction, mental-health counselling, medical visits, lifeskills training and more. Mr. Kahlon said the province is willing to work with the city but hasn't seen any 'credible' alternatives so far. 'It is frustrating but we're going back to the drawing board to find alternative sites,' he said, though he added that the province isn't about to buy out any private-rental development currently on offer as city officials have suggested. It's also unfair for some neighbourhoods to declare they're only interested in housing for seniors or other groups they have decided are less problematic, Mr. Kahlon said. The city's move has generated significant reaction, with many supporters saying the site was problematic because it was across the street from a private Catholic elementary school, too close to a women's rehab centre and would have resulted in too many troubled people in one place. Supporters have also criticized the province for trying to force disruptive new housing that they claim would be dominated by drug users into every community. 'This housing, in this location, was not appropriate and the community spoke,' said David Fine, a filmmaker who is a frequent commenter on Kitsilano housing issues on X. 'No one is against some form of social or supportive housing there, just not what was being proposed. In this case, Sim made the right decision.' However, several housing advocates, non-profit housing providers and city councillors are appalled by the move. 'It's a very scary, telling direction that this council is going. We definitely recognize this is going in the wrong direction,' said Donna-Lynn Rosa, CEO of Atira Women's Resources Society, which runs multiple supportive-housing buildings in the city. 'Less housing, less options is not the solution. We're just concerned about these motions that seem reckless.' BC Housing applied to the city four years ago for a rezoning for the building, saying it would provide accessible supportive housing for the many homeless people living in Kitsilano's parks, on its beaches, or near storefronts. But thousands of residents expressed concerns that it would draw new drug users and crime to the area and allow for open drug use right across from the school. OneCity Vancouver Councillor Lucy Maloney said she is going to do whatever she can to support work at city hall to approve supportive housing, after hearing during her recent election campaign that improving the situation for homeless people was one of voters' top three priorities. 'I have to assess the best way to address the problem that Vancouverites said was their top concern,' she said. Ms. Maloney said she was surprised that she learned the news through the Kitsilano residents' newsletter instead of from the city itself. The decision to abandon the legal fight was made during an in-camera vote earlier this year before new councillors Ms. Maloney and COPE's Sean Orr were sworn in. Prominent drug-policy advocate Guy Felicella, a former drug user who champions better treatment and harm reduction, called the move 'NIMBYism at is finest,' noting that city residents are constantly calling on the province for more resources to get people off the streets but then reject providing housing for them.
