Tamara Ugolini 🇨🇦

Ottawa won't say who got more than $1 billion in Ukraine defence funds. National Defence withheld eight recipients' names, ignored an access request for two years, then called the names a Cabinet confidence. REPORT by @TamaraUgo: FULL REPORT: rebelne.ws/4iAmfLu

🇨🇦 Health Canada called Pfizer's SV40 sequence unnecessary — then kept its own review secret for three years A former government advisor calls Canada's COVID rollout a historic failure, potentially a crime against humanity, as Health Canada buried findings on Pfizer's undisclosed SV40 sequence for three years. When the general public learned that Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine was contaminated with an undisclosed SV40 DNA sequence, @GOVCanHealth sought to have it removed. Pfizer refused, and Health Canada approved the next boosters anyway. Behind closed doors, Health Canada's own reviewers were flagging that the SV40 sequence in Pfizer's COVID-19 shot was undisclosed, unexpected and unnecessary — and the one number that would settle the safety argument is still sealed. In August 2023, Health Canada asked Pfizer to remove a genetic sequence from its COVID-19 shot. An internal note recorded the result: "as expected, Pfizer didn't commit," reviewers wrote. Weeks later, the regulator approved Pfizer's updated XBB booster anyway, with the size data on the leftover DNA not due until December, and the contamination issue persisting. It took three years, two Information Commissioner files and a Federal Court application to pry that record out of Ottawa. The sequence is the SV40 promoter-enhancer, a genetic regulatory element that acts as an on-switch for gene expression. Genomics researcher Kevin McKernan first identified it in his sequencing analysis of Pfizer and Moderna vaccine vials in 2023, a finding I exclusively reported at the time. These shots are made by growing DNA blueprints, called plasmids, in bacteria and using those blueprints as templates to manufacture mRNA. The DNA is supposed to be cleaned out. What's left behind is supposed to be capped at 10 nanograms per dose — a limit written for the animal cell lines used to make older vaccines, not for bacterial plasmid DNA wrapped in a lipid nanoparticle designed to carry genetic material into cells, as is the case with these shots. Publicly, Canadians were told the shot does not contain simian virus 40, which is technically true. In Parliament, the government called the fragment inactive with no functional role. To the Epoch Times, Health Canada said sponsors are expected to identify biologically functional sequences such as an SV40 enhancer. So which is it? The internal review answers part of that. Released only after the Information Commissioner ordered it in May 2026 and independent researcher Scoops McGoo took Health Canada to Federal Court, it confirms the sequence was not previously disclosed by Pfizer, its presence was not known or expected, and it was unnecessary. On October 6, the court recorded that Health Canada's July release had not included everything the order covered, but they weren't hit with costs and there was no penalty for their failure to comply. The section of Pfizer's report titled Characterization of Residual DNA Size Distribution remains blacked out entirely, ruled confidential business information in April 2025. Although Australia's regulator tested 28 batches and found them all under the limit, and no one has shown this DNA integrating into a human genome, there is an independent Ontario Vial Study that found lots substantially over the regulatory limit(s). While Pfizer's Canadian product monograph makes no mention of SV40 or residual DNA, it explicitly acknowledges that genotoxic and carcinogenic potential was never assessed. In other words, the monograph offers no evidence that these risks were ruled out — only that they were never evaluated. More than eight in ten Canadians took at least one shot, many from Pfizer and not necessarily out of free choice, but under the pressure of sweeping federal mandates and threats to their financial security and economic freedom. That's what Irvin Studin, a former government advisor, called the "Biggest health policy mistake in Canadian history at best, or crime against humanity at worst." Rebel News put on-the-record questions to Health Canada, the Health Minister's office, NACI, Pfizer Canada, the Privy Council Office and Justice Canada — including whether its Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes program has received or assessed any complaint about the rollout. Justice Canada could have said no, but it didn't. Instead it hid behind a policy of never disclosing what its war crimes program does with any allegation, and the independence of prosecutors — then pointed to Health Canada as the department "best placed" to answer. The Privy Council Office pointed to the same door. Behind it: two automatic acknowledgements and silence ever since. @PfizerCA and NACI never responded at all. Eight in ten Canadians rolled up their sleeves on the promise of "safe and effective," and three years later they're still waiting to be shown the one number that would back it up

🚨 Mother of four diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer after hospital failed to inform her Recovering from an emergency C-section, a Cobourg mother of four was never told a Peterborough hospital scan had flagged a breast mass. Fourteen months later, she discovered it herself, at stage 4. Ericka Stapleton was hypertensive, short of breath and concerned for her premature baby in the NICU when a CT scan at Peterborough Regional Health Centre (PRHC) picked up a node and a mass in her breast in January 2025. Fast forward 14 months, and she was only finding out about it in March 2026, after discovering a painful mass in her breast herself. By then it was metastatic stage 4 breast cancer, and it had already spread to her lungs. Stapleton says that her fourth pregnancy had been trouble from early on. She was flagging fatigue and other symptoms to her family doctor in Port Hope, who chalked it up to a “geriatric pregnancy,” defined as a pregnancy at age 35 or older. Now, at age 39, she recounts how at 27 weeks her file moved to a Cobourg obstetrician who saw her high blood pressure and baby measuring small, flagging the early signs of preeclampsia. Ericka was transferred to Peterborough for an emergency C-section at 33 weeks gestation and afterward, fluid built up in her lungs. Nurses told her that her oxygen numbers were fine, but she kept saying she couldn’t get a full breath, until finally an obstetrician ordered a CT. She was wheeled down a back route to the emergency department, where the ER doctor wondered aloud why she was there. This was the first time, she says, that it seemed information was not being adequately shared between hospital staff. The scan confirmed fluid in Ericka’s lungs, and when she was told about an inflamed node, she was told not to worry, that it was common after childbirth. The breast finding, however, was never relayed by the ER physician, the obstetrician or her then-family doctor, despite being flagged by the radiologist. Stapleton thinks she knows how it happened. “There’s two doctors that maybe were relying on one another or thinking each one would tell me.” Fourteen months later, as she was putting on her bra one morning, her arm brushed her breast, and it hurt. She felt a large lump, and when she called her new family doctor, Dr. Usman in Cobourg, he moved immediately, ordering imaging and labs. At Blue Water Imaging in Port Hope, her breast scan came back BI-RADS 5, highly suspicious for cancer. The ultrasound and biopsy at Northumberland Hills followed, and that is where someone finally read the January 2025 report out loud to her. A staffer at Northumberland Hills Hospital read her chart and asked a question nobody else had. “She says to me, this was found in January 2025. Were you aware?” Stapleton told me. “And I said, no, no, I wasn’t aware. Nobody said anything to me.” It’s since been found that Ericka is BRCA1-positive, meaning she carries an increased genetic risk for cancers such as breast and ovarian. Due to the cancer’s advanced stage and severity, surgery and radiation are no longer options for Ericka. After 18 rounds of chemotherapy, she is now receiving immunotherapy in hopes of prolonging her life. She believes that if the cancer had been caught in January 2025, a mastectomy and radiation could have offered a chance to stop its spread. Whether earlier treatment could have changed the outcome remains unknown, she says, since the medical professionals she has encountered along the way won’t give her a clear answer. Rebel News asked PRHC about its policies for suspicious scans, who is responsible for notifying patients, and what safeguards ensure follow-up. It also asked who is accountable when a radiologist flags a serious finding, whether the alleged breakdown in Stapleton’s case had been investigated, and whether any findings would be made public. Communications director Michelle Oh cited patient privacy, emphasized that patient safety is the hospital’s highest priority, and outlined general reporting processes. But the hospital did not address who was accountable, whether a review had been conducted, or what — if any — steps had been taken in response. Privacy obligations do not stop a hospital from explaining its safeguards, despite the assurance that “Patient safety is [their] highest priority.” Stapleton has considered a lawsuit and ruled it out. “From what the doctors are saying, I don’t have years and years to give,” she explained, opting to spend what time she has left enjoying her family and living life to the fullest. Ericka Stapleton’s message is simple: patients should not have to discover potentially life-threatening findings in their own medical records more than a year after they were first flagged. “It was there the whole time,” she said. Now, as she fights stage 4 cancer, Stapleton is urging others to check their own results — because she knows what it can cost when no one tells you what they’ve found.

Two-thirds of Ontario is voting on a server nobody can audit and ballots are already going to the wrong people In 87 Ontario towns, a person with a pencil counts your vote while scrutineers watch, but in the other 272, a company does it on a server, with no paper trail and no way to check the result. Roughly 66% of municipalities voting this month are going online, up from 217 (or just 52%) four years ago. As internet voting expands, mail-in ballots are declining, increasingly pushed aside by the shift to digital voting. Yet in some municipalities, the problems started as early voting began. In North Bay, Linda Fuller received four voter letters: her husband’s, three for strangers, and none for herself. Carol Couture got four, including one for a relative who had died. Kevin Ferris was mailed a PIN for the man who sold him his house 17 years ago. “If somebody wanted to use somebody else’s ballot,” Ferris said, “it doesn’t seem very complicated.” There is no provincial standard preventing any of this because there is no provincial rule at all. A peer-reviewed study by researchers James Burnett and Alexander Essex found Ontario’s municipal elections carry some of the highest concentrations of online voting in the world, with no federal or provincial requirements for certification, testing or auditing. Cities adopt and procure the technology on their own, through deliberations that are largely non-public. Ottawa read the same literature as other municipalities and opted out of voting online, continuing with mail-in ballots. Its own staff told council that internet voting remains a significant and ongoing security concern, that no provincial certification standards exist, and that since none of the current systems produce a paper ballot, a recount would be impossible. Despite this, certain jurisdictions like Uxbridge went the other way. In April 2025, council voted to make the 2026 election an internet-only pilot project with a PIN that arrives in the mail. Voters enter it alongside their birthday and voila, done. When Councillor Pam Beach asked what happens to rural residents whose internet services drop, or to a senior who hits the wrong key and votes for the wrong person, she was promised a communication plan and “really good how-to guides.” At the September all-candidates forum, an Uxbridge resident named Henry put it more plainly: his bank and his CRA account warn him about online fraud every time he logs in, yet council handed 10 days of voting to software contractors with no feasible way for residents to audit the data. With Mayor Barton having delegated strong-mayor powers to the unelected CAO, he asked, who is actually running Uxbridge? “Is it election contractors? Is it the unelected CAO?,” he asked. The contractor Uxbridge is using is Intellivote Systems Inc. of Dartmouth, N.S. In 2015 it told the federal agency ACOA it was shutting down, then bid on and won Halifax’s election contract weeks later. In July 2022, three months before running internet voting in dozens of Ontario towns, it entered creditor protection in the Nova Scotia Supreme Court owing $1.7 million to the federal government and $5.4 million to Nova Scotia taxpayers. Under the court-approved plan, creditors were left to recover just pennies on the dollar, leaving taxpayers to absorb the bulk of the unpaid debt. That is the company Uxbridge’s deputy clerk assured council was “continually battle-testing” its software. Ontario has been here before. On election night in 2018, the Dominion Voting digital system used by 51 municipalities slowed to a crawl after a subcontracted internet provider throttled capacity to one-tenth of design. Towns from Sudbury to Kingston extended voting by an hour while places like Collingwood and Kawartha Lakes ended up adding a full day to make up for voters being unable to cast their ballots as scheduled. Eight years and two election cycles later, the number of towns going online has only grown, while the number of rules governing them is still zero. Towns argue that paper ballots cost more, and on a municipality-by-municipality basis, they often do, but a recount that cannot be meaningfully conducted comes at a cost, too. REPORT by @TamaraUgo: