Michèle Champagne
Graphic artist, M.Des. Studies mandatory positivity and its effects on freedom of expression, architecture media, and “smart” cities. Invited to Harvard, MICA, McGill, and UQAM.
- David A. Ross to Jeffrey Epstein: “It is depressing to see how you are once again being dragged through the mud. I’m still proud to call you a friend.”
- Proud is the word: “It is depressing to see how you are once again being dragged through the mud. I’m still proud to call you a friend.” — David A. Ross, chair of the MFA art practice program at New York’s School of Visual Arts and former director of the Whitney, writing to Jeffrey Epstein.
- Reposted by Michèle Champagne“Mr. Ross responded supportively when Mr. Epstein told him he was contemplating funding an art exhibition, tentatively titled “Statutory,” that would showcase underage models dressed to look older than they were.” www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/n...
- The government’s own Institut de la statistique du Québec.
- Je suis fan de cette émission @radiofrance.fr avec la présidente @meredithmeredith.bsky.social de @signal.org. Elle mérite vraiment d'être écoutée.
- C'est un fait : “L’IA n’est qu’un slogan marketing.” Je l'ai répété à maintes reprises ces cinq dernières années, ce qui m'a valu l'impopularité, tant auprès de mes collègues que de mes proches. Merci @meredithmeredith.bsky.social :
- This is Derek Burney, former Canadian ambassador to the States.
- Leave the Google ecosystem if you can and instead consider @proton.me. It took me a month to make the transition and I’m glad I did. I still have a Gmail account but only to edit the odd Doc that my colleagues insist on working with, which is fine. The major switch was needed and is now done.
- C'est un fait : “L’IA n’est qu’un slogan marketing.” Je l'ai répété à maintes reprises ces cinq dernières années, ce qui m'a valu l'impopularité, tant auprès de mes collègues que de mes proches. Merci @meredithmeredith.bsky.social :
- Reposted by Michèle Champagne‘Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition… We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average.’ arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245
- Remember this when prime minister Mark Carney, minister Evan Solomon, and the Tony Blair Institute call for more AI literacy: “Using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz ... participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand.”
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneUnlike Canada, Europe is actually taking steps to secure its digital autonomy. This one stood out: “The Austrian military said it has also switched to LibreOffice, a software package with word processor, spreadsheet and presentation programs that mirrors Microsoft 365’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint.”
- Bon matin.
- DSR Bank is looking for a home.
- She is in charge. She is the mayor now and can’t blame everything on bikes and Valérie Plante.
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneAnita Aarons was their in house critic. Fun writing. Will look for more of her stuff. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_A...
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneOn a long pandemic walk in Scarborough we came across the very cool & mod Timberbank school. And here was an early plan.
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneI had never seen a price put on the statue of King Edward currently in queens park - it was imported from Delhi by some biz men when India was going post colonial & Toronto was still full Queen City.
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneCouple more things from last night’s procrastination (that actually was worthwhile - library time never a waste). Copies of Architecture Canada, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s mag.
- The speeches are great and the policies are weak, but regardless: Carneymania is real.
- 📊Preferred PM, Nanos Research tracker (Jan. 9-30, 2026) 🔴54% Mark Carney (+5) 🔵25% Pierre Poilievre (-1) (Comparison with Nanos' previous 4-week wave) 338canada.com/20260130-nan...
- When Google’s sister firm Sidewalk Labs came to Toronto, it wanted to govern Quayside: to set its regulation for urbanism, property taxation, housing, data, and commercial exploitation. And it was an uphill battle to oppose it because the Liberal Party of Canada had openly welcomed the capture.
- I just remembered how welcome Sidewalk and Google really were. On October 17, 2017, Justin Trudeau himself helped launch the pitch on Facebook Live – alongside Dan Doctoroff, chief executive of Sidewalk Labs, and Eric Schmidt, former chief of Google then Alphabet.
- Not mentioned in this piece: For decades, Canada’s trade strategy has welcomed the American tech sector and – in exchange – given up its ability to regulate it, to be sovereign over it. Canada itself welcomed “regulatory capture”. Supriya Dwivedi is a smart lady. She should know this already.
- More snow please.
- This man is the housing crisis.
- "Maybe the city's full" says the man living in a 2.7 million dollar house on Palmerston, while sipping $170 scotch after defeating a multiplex proposal across the street. www.pressreader.com/canada/toron...
- The last time I read about Summerhill Market in the Annex: “Brad McMullen, the president of Summerhill Market, which opened an outpost on Bathurst in 2019, says he doesn’t know anything about the campaign’s use of AI.”
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneThe glow up for these devices is campaigns like this, which is an attempt to obscure the fact of them building a surveillance network for an authoritarian state.
- The ongoing shift away from American big tech.
- Stripping a building down to its steel structure is not a renovation. This sounds like a demotion. A building’s “demolition” crew can reuse steel, marble, and other materials to save on new material costs. Crews can even preserve entire façades or elements of heritage-protected floors or staircases.
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneSex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein partnered with former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito to make a 2014 investment in the Montreal-founded Bitcoin firm Blockstream. thelogic.co/news/epstein...
- Shawinigan representing.
- Chrétien: “Anyway, we are having fun.”
- These two.
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneBuilding on the comments I offered to the CBC, here's my recent Substack on Canadian national policy after Carney's Davos speech. Trade diversification is underway, but I remain unsure that our security ties to the US are being reconsidered. philippelagasse.substack.com/p/defence-in...
- “After the Davos speech, I expect to see a change in defence policy. Otherwise, I wonder if the PM really believes what he is saying, or if it's rather a way to put pressure on the United States ... It's easy to give a speech. It's another thing to change policies.” – @plagasse.bsky.social
- Art and film, radio and tv, fashion and architecture. They are key value-adds in a growing domestic economy. And despite Carney’s latest “cultural” moment praising Canadian talent—like he did for Heated Rivalry—he has yet to reform or invest in cultural infrastructure because: he has a blind spot.
- This is an old adage. And as @hertzbarry.bsky.social noted, Carney also performed it at TIFF: Look great on stage, praise Canadian culture and capture the spotlight, then fail to reform or revitalize it.
- When Keith Abell presents himself as head of N4XT and producer of New York Fashion Week, Carney shows his cultural blind spot: “Wow!” he reponds. “Am I in the right session?” As if art, media, and fashion culture didn’t belong in a conversation about foreign policy or economic development.
- In Canada, there’s a small but growing understanding that Carney’s speeches—in campaign mode, in Davos—are not like his policies. There is hope in this knowledge. The obstacle to this becoming common knowledge is that Poilievre will likely stick to cosplaying Trump, thus buttressing Carneymania.
- Carney’s F-35 decision will tell us a lot about his actual US policy. But for now, @plagasse.bsky.social is 100% correct: "We are rebuilding the Canadian Forces that are still almost completely integrated with American forces. … It's easy to give a speech. It's another thing to change policies."
- “After the Davos speech, I expect to see a change in defence policy. Otherwise, I wonder if the PM really believes what he is saying, or if it's rather a way to put pressure on the United States ... It's easy to give a speech. It's another thing to change policies.” – @plagasse.bsky.social
- Reposted by Michèle Champagne“You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.” This week’s newsletter asks: if that’s true, what is Canada’s trade strategy now? Read it here: app.cyberimpact.com/newsletter-v...
- Reposted by Michèle Champagne“After the Davos speech, I expect to see a change in defence policy. Otherwise, I wonder if the prime minister really believes what he is saying, or if it's rather a way to put pressure on the United States.” @plagasse.bsky.social lays it out precisely. www.cbc.ca/news/politic...
- Tout ce qu’il touche meurt.
- Sur la migration québécoise.
- I’d love to read a piece of journalism on why Chrystia Freeland has been so enamoured with Larry Summers—and for decades. Even in 2011, it was already known that Summers was a sexist bully and dangerous financial advisor whose hands-off take on derivatives helped trigger a global financial crisis.
- “As I was getting ready to ask Larry [Summers] questions, I called up Mark Carney and said, ‘What do you talk to Larry about?’ And he said: ‘I don’t really talk to Larry about things. I just listen to Larry because he’s so smart ... I want to hear what he has to say.” – Chrystia Freeland, 2011
- Unethical things are Larry Summers’ things—from silencing Brooksley Born in her attempt to regulate derivatives to prevent an economic crisis, to his exchanges with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein asking for advice on how to manipulate his female mentee at Harvard University.
- The first time I heard the name “Larry Summers” was when I found out what he, Robert Rubin, and Alan Greenspan did to Brooksley Born at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC.
- More on that from @frontlinepbs.bsky.social in the documentary film “The Warning", originally aired in 2009:
- In the film, Brooksley Born speaks for the first time about her attempt to regulate the derivatives black market whose crash helped trigger the global financial crisis of 2008. It also shows how Summers, Rubin, and Greenspan tried to silence and discredit her.
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View full threadAnd this has been duly noted:
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneFelt timely
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneAs these teens describe, AI can diminish human relationships; devalue art; threaten the environment; lead to laziness; give unreliable results; pose privacy concerns; and be misused. So, please, stop with the narratives of inevitability and let's embrace a pedagogy and politics of refusal.
- “‘Putting in a prompt and saying “Draw me this” doesn’t feel right to me,’ said Leo, who is studying esports management. ‘It takes the joy out of listening to a song if I learn it was made by AI, no matter how good it sounds’.”
- Inaugurée en 1926.
- La première phrase.
- Great. I’m glad the Prime Minister is keen on Canadian culture. I’d therefore like to know why all of the “nation building” projects that were re-announced were focused on mining, port, and energy infrastructure, and not a single one focused on cultural infrastructure.
- This will be popular.
- At last an AI tool I can get behind “Upload an architectural render. Get back what it'll actually look like on a random Tuesday in November.” antirender.com
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneCarney's Davos speech called for middle powers to build institutions. That's going to be pretty difficult w/ Carney's gutting of scientific experts in public health, agriculture, & environment, & with the loss of diplomatic & trade experts. www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/artic...
- Wishful thinking.
- Why I’ve always supported the idea of photography directors in newsrooms. I know dozens of photojournalists around the world—many in war zones—and one thing that helps in pointed situations like this is: institutional heft (company lawyers, mass comms, public awareness, etc).
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneAmber Bracken is one of Canada’s greatest photojournalists, and for the RCMP to mistake observers for participants, arrest her and prevent her from doing her vital work is a deeply dangerous precedent. This case is important for all of us.
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneWow, someone was allowed to mention the Network State in the New York Times opinion section. I believe this is a first. Trump Is Not a Nationalist. He’s Something Worse. gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/o...
- Reposted by Michèle Champagne"Regardless of the rhetoric in Davos, Carney’s cuts will leave Canada less equipped to deal with the reality the prime minister himself so eloquently described."
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneSuper glad Mark Carney laid off 1,400 food inspectors today.
- La trajectoire étonnante de ces femmes d’influence.
- Une semaine après avoir inauguré la ligne.
- Reposted by Michèle ChampagneIf I were a PM who had delivered a seminal speech on the global rupture and the need for new relations with the world, I probably wouldn’t send hundreds of layoff notices to my foreign affairs department the next day www.hilltimes.com/story/2026/0...
