Justin Trudeau on the cover of the Rolling Stone. Feature writer Stephen Rodrick teased a piece about “the leader of a North American country not named Trump." And soon enough, he confirmed he didn’t mean Raúl Castro. (Meanwhile, the 50-year-old magazine gets ready for its own Trudeau-esque transference from father to son.) But as the Conservatives use American media to gripe about the Omar Khadr payout, PMJT recorded his second U.S. podcast, playing the same game in his way:

The courting of social conservatives by the NDP. NDP leadership candidate Charlie Angus visited Muslim groups in Brampton and Mississauga to secure endorsements on Jagmeet Singh’s constituency turf. Meanwhile, the idea that Quebecers would never vote for a turban-wearing Sikh is raising concern among NDP partisans. And then there's this thing about Singh’s campaign maybe being undermined by India.

Lauren Southern continues to have a kooky 2017. From writing an Amazon best-seller, to abruptly fleeing The Rebel, to crashing the White House, she's gotten quite a bit done for a 22-year-old. Her coverage of an anti-immigration group called Defend Europe, though, got her kicked off Patreon. (Southern is now trashing them for doing so.)

“Bye bye Becky! Bye bye Becky!” Becca Brennan, the Toronto native whose Brooklyn bar, Summerhill, is named after the neighbourhood where she grew up, has been pilloried as a gentrifier for boasting of bullet holes in the place's walls. Crown Heights neighbours subsequently came out to shout about her. Brennan acknowledged her spin was “insensitive." She now hopes to meet protestors “to have a conversation and open a dialogue.”

An actual campaign to de-fund CBC Comedy. The public broadcaster’s bad joke portal has been the subject of media Twitter thrashing from day one. But the backlash never crossed over to genuine outcry—at least, not until this story: “John McCain back to ‘his old self’ after surgery, unfortunately.” Questions about why the CBC was publishing lame leftist American political agitprop aside, the piece was taken off the website a day later, when it was revealed that McCain had been diagnosed with brain cancer. J.J. McCullough’s argument that the mockery was beyond the pale met with some sorry:

Guelph as a glimpse into a future without newspapers. Torstar killed the Guelph Mercury in 2016 as part of its ongoing effort to try and boost its ever-sinking business. The next to go will be Star Touch, just in time for new CEO John Boynton’s first full quarterly earnings report, which he hopes will herald some eventual growth. For now, what's taken over are scrappy startups, which are so far failing to offset fears that local democracy is screwed.

Sears boycotter doesn’t seem to know what she’s protesting. Tracy Brown, a 54-year-old painter from Stratford, is central to a Canadian Press story about calls to #BoycottSearsCanada over how it jilted former employees like Mike Myers’ brother. The foaming dissent includes Brown declaring a halt to a lifelong tradition of travelling to downtown Toronto to see the store's Christmas displays, even though there hasn’t been a Sears there since 2014, and even though that Eaton Centre location had only been there for a dozen years before it closed.