Billed as “Canada’s leading defence, security and emerging technology event,” the annual two-day meet-up hosted by the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries may pitch itself to prospective participants as an opportunity to “get a piece of the action, engage with the right audience, and set your business up for success,” but seems to be markedly more reluctant to extend a similarly open invitation to everyone.

Just one day before CANSEC 2026was set to get underway, The Maple’s Alex Cosh reported that the organizers had nixed the progressive-left outlet’s bid to cover the confab from the inside — and they weren’t the only ones to be rebuffed.

“Canada’s largest arms fair has refused media accreditation for multiple independent journalists and media outlets, including The Maple,” which “received an email from CADSI’s press team explaining that: ‘We have reviewed your application and have declined it for the following reasons […] Your media organization does not meet the CADSI Eligibility Requirements,’” he revealed.

“CADSI did not respond to questions from The Maple asking for details about its eligibility requirements and why it believes The Maple did not meet them. The Maple requested the decision to be reviewed, but heard nothing further from CADSI.

“Another independent journalist, Christy Somos, was also denied accreditation for this year’s CANSEC event,” he noted.

“Somos told The Maple that she was commissioned to write a story for The Walrus, but had missed CANSEC’s formal registration deadline. CADSI told Somos that the event was at capacity for media. However, Somos was told by colleagues and former CADSI employees that the deadline was ‘flexible’ in the past and that last minute registrations had been approved previously,” which prompted her to wonder whether “it was more to do with my coverage being critical of the Ottawa military establishment, especially as I had a former high-ranking member of the CAF agree to vouch for me,” she told The Maple.

“This year’s CANSEC is seen as particularly important given the Mark Carney government’s massive hikes in military spending and its pledge to hit NATO’s 5 per cent GDP military spending target by 2035, as demanded by U.S. President Donald Trump,” Cosh pointed out.

Also denied a press pass: Richochet contributor Sophia De Guzman, who “applied for status on assignment for Ricochet Media … Just hours after the portal for media accreditation opened,”she reports.

“After following up, we received the following response by email. ‘Thank you for registering for CANSEC 2026. We have reviewed your application and have declined it for the following reasons: Your media organization does not meet the CADSI Eligibility Requirements.’”

In 2023, The Breach revealed that CANSEC had “denied them press access because of their ‘aggressively critical anti-war journalism,’” De Guzman notes.

“According to The Breach, a CADSI representative then offered conditional access to the outlet, on the condition that it would result in positive coverage on CANSEC.”

Elsewhere on the site, Simon Spichak offers a peek “inside the black box reshaping Canada’s benefit system” — and, more specifically, the “secretive AI oversight software” that the government has deployed as part of the overhaul “raising fears about automated denials, bias and disappearing accountability,” he wants.

“Canada’s government is putting its faith — and $3.3 million — in software designed to assess which AI chatbots are trustworthy for the benefits system, which supports almost 16 million Canadians,” he revealed, citing documents obtained via the federal access to information law.

“Part of the modernization efforts includes integrating generative AI, like AI chatbots, to boost efficiency. Employment and Social Development Canada is working with a little-known Ottawa-based company called NuEnergy.ai to do this,” and although “obtained a training manual, presentations, and a final report pertaining to the contract through an access to information request, (ESDC) fully withheld 232 out of 251 pages,” citing the provisions of the law that “protect financial, commercial, scientific or technical information,” as well as “information that could lead to material financial loss, gain or prejudice if released,” he notes.

“The withheld information and heavy redactions make it impossible to tell whether the software actually works, or what precisely the ministry paid for.”

Over at Rabble, Paul Kahnert explores Carney’s “disturbing hard right turn” since the election.

“Since coming to power Carney … has been concentrating power in the prime minister’s office, bypassing democratically elected individual ministers and traditional cabinet authority,” he contends.

“(He) has also made major changes to immigration and refugee asylum policy (and) is executing the fastest rate of deportations in over a decade totaling a record 22,500, of failed refugee claimants, including temporary foreign workers and international students,” and passed a bill “giving the government the right to suspend environmental, labor laws and regulations to fast-track projects of national interest.”

In fact, “perhaps the worst action Carney has taken is a complete reversal on the climate crisis, putting corporate profits before people and the planet,” he argues.

“Carney is on bended knee to Danielle Smith’s oil oligarchs who run that province. Carney has scrapped the carbon tax, EV mandates and dropped the emissions cap on oil and gas. Carney is committing to new pipelines to the environmentally sensitive west coast as well as supporting the carbon capture and storage scheme.”

Fellow Rabble contributor Karl Nerenberg offers a similarly scathing assessment of the 24th prime minister’s first year in office.

“(Carney) continues to achieve high scores in public opinion polls,” he notes.

“Environmentalists believe he has betrayed them. Indigenous leaders wonder what happened to the PM who appointed three Indigenous women to his cabinet. Canadians who believe defending our sovereignty must include an adequately-resourced CBC wonder what happened to the Carney government’s oft-delayed plans for the public broadcaster.”

Also disappointed, as per Nerenberg: The “international development community, here and abroad,” as well as Canadians concerned with poverty, inequality, and social services, including child care and health” — and, of course, the “fourteen Liberal MPs (who) have written to Carney to warn him against weakening this country’s hard-earned environmental protections, as the PM pursues Canada becoming an ‘energy super-power.’”

And yet, despite “growing disappointment and alarm in the land, from east to west, with Carney’s continued dance to the Right … little of it seems to have any impact on public opinion, not yet in any case,” he notes.

Meanwhile, Canadian Dimension contributor — and, as per his bio, Osgoode Hall Law School professor emeritus — Harry Glasbeek makes the case that the Carney government’s “embrace of deregulation and extraction shows how deeply profit-driven assumptions shape public life,” and “exposes the usually hidden fangs of capitalism.”

Carney “was sold to the public as the ideal leader in a moment of crisis,” he argues.

“The Trump administration was threatening Canada economically and, thereby, its political sovereignty. Who better to withstand this pressure than a banker? e knows what is what and who is who. More, he claims to have progressive views. He talks of the need to ensure that non-wealth owners have some real countervailing power to offset the economic and political power of captains of industry and their bankers. He demonstrates a concern for the degradation of our environment and stresses the need for a carbon tax and the market-based solution of carbon trading. And then he won office.”

Rounding out the progressive-left circuit, The Breach’s Nessie Nankivell takes a closer look at how, even as Carney “touts his plans to protect Canada’s economic sovereignty, the country’s critical minerals are making their way into U.S. weapons,” she explains.

“According to legal experts, the U.S. is taking ‘possibly unprecedented’ measures to secure ownership over Canadian mines, turning Canada—and the First Nations from whose lands the minerals are sourced—into a U.S. mining territory. All the while, the Canadian government is helping fund and fast-track these projects. But when Canadian minerals are being earmarked for foreign military manufacturing, is that really in Canada’s national interest?”

Trending on the right-of-centre side of the Canadian activist mediaverse:

• Rebel News commander Ezra Levant calls out Tim Hortons’ latest public relations campaign, in which the company is “telling the media they’ve changed” even as it is “actively recruiting overseas and shutting Canadians out.”
• After dropping by a pro-Alberta independence rally in Airdrie, Alta., Alberta-based Rebel Sydney Fizzard reports that the “growing separatist movement is gaining momentum following a controversial court ruling that temporarily blocked a citizen-led referendum on independence.”
• West Coast Rebel Drea Humphrey filed a full report on Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s recent appearance at a Vancouver town hall “focused on an issue increasingly rattling landowners across British Columbia: private property rights,” during which he “pledged to push back against legal and political developments critics say are undermining fee simple ownership in British Columbia,” while noting that “members of the Conservative leader’s team prevented Rebel News from posing a question” during a back-and-forth with the audience.
• The Post Millennial’s David Krayden talks to Alberta Prosperity Project lawyer Jeffrey Rath about his claim that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith “absolutely promised Mark Carney that there would not be a referendum this year on independence,” according to an unnamed source who was allegedly “in the room” with the premier and the prime minister.