Canada's population drop, Michael Ma's floor crossing and Doug Ford skipping Florida...

The Sunshine State continues to hit tourism records despite many Canadians boycotting.

Statistics Canada says our population dropped by more than 76,000 between July and October, but I’m not sure whether to believe them. If you missed it, National Post reported a few weeks ago that StatsCan missed 38% of the non-permanent residents in the country during the 2021 census.

That’s a massive mistake, a major flaw in their work.

So, now they tell us that we saw 176,479 non-permanent residents leave the country over the past several months decreasing our population 41,575,585. That’s still a massive growth in Canada’s population considering that in October 2020 StatsCan estimated 38,008,005 people were living here.

Between October 2020 and October 2025, Canada’s population grew by more than 9%. The slight drop that we are seeing now isn’t enough to undo the harms.

By bringing people in faster than we could absorb them, fast than the housing supply could catch up has caused serious damage to Canada. We need to ensure that we don’t continue to grow, we need a pause at the least.

Michael Ma, floor crossing and national unity...

If you haven’t checked out the video featuring myself and Sam Cooper discussing Michael Ma’s floor crossing, give it a view now. While I’ve been reporting how Tim Hodgson played a major rolein recruiting Ma, Sam has been looking at claims of foreign intelligence from China.

As we discuss in the video, both things can be true.

For those of you who believe we should ban floor crossing and make MPs who change party to sit as independents or resign and face a by-election – read my piece on this from the weekendwhere I look at what has happened in the past.

Today though, my column in the Sun looks at what Carney getting a majority from floor crossings would mean for national unity. Suffice to say, I don’t think it would be good for keeping Alberta and Saskatchewan inside confederation.

Boycotting Florida isn’t working...

I know plenty of friends and family members who are boycotting all travel to the United States over Donald Trump. Between his 51^st state comments, tariffs and general demeanor, they have decided they won’t visit the United States, not even Florida in the winter.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is one of them, he says he’s not heading to Florida this winter, something he normally does. When asked if he was going to Florida over Christmas, Ford said no and then said they are really hurting down there.

That saw Florida Governor Ron DeSantis pipe up to point out that Florida is hitting tourism records.

I looked at the data and found that DeSantis is right. Canadian travel is down, but they are more than making up for it with visitors from elsewhere. I wrote about that in my Sun column yesterday, you can read that here.

Other parts of the American tourism sector might be hurting due to Canadians boycotting travel to the states, but Florida isn’t hurting.

What did hurt were his Stanley Cup comments.