#35: STATE OF THE FEDERATION 🍁

🌮 FOOD - Newfies line up for hours to eat Taco Bell

🇮🇷🇨🇦 FOREIGN AFFAIRS - Iran declares Royal Canadian Navy a terrorist organization

💰️ TAXES - CRA may garnish wages, freeze bank accounts to recover $10 billion+ in COVID handouts given to ineligible recipients

It’s 2026. How fares the Federation? 

Well…

🌮 The Newfies just got their first Taco Bell in years and they’re pigging out.

🇨🇦 The Royal Canadian Navy is a terrorist organization, according to Iran.

💸 And the CRA is trying to claw back over $10 billion in COVID benefits collected by ineligible recipients during the pandemic. They say they might start freezing bank accounts and garnishing wages to if people don’t pay up.

🍾 Happy New Year!

-Peter

⌛️ Today’s read is 2.5 minutes long.

Newfoundlanders are lining up for hours to eat Taco Bell at a new restaurant that opened last Saturday in Mount Peal.

“It’s just something different, something we haven’t had in a long time,” said Newfie Kyle Williams, who told CTV he saved a couple hours by parking his car nearby and ordering his crunch wraps inside the restaurant instead of in the drive-thru.

“It’s nice to have again.”

The city isn’t so thrilled. Since the restaurant opened, they’ve deployed dozens of traffic officers to police the mile-long lineup of hungry drive-thru goers.

The officers had to intervene at one point after the drive-thru lineup refused to let a hearse through so it could access a funeral home nearly half a kilometre away from the Taco Bell.

After 72 hours of chaos, city hall banned left turns in and out of the restaurant. They also encouraged citizens to carpool when using the drive-thru.

“We understand your cravings have caused some traffic delays,” it said. “Please TACO your time, it’s NACHO average traffic delay.”

Online ordering is not yet available at the restaurant, further exacerbating wait times.

“Proceed with caution,” said the city.

The Iranian government has designated the Royal Canadian Navy a terrorist organization.

Tehran says it made the move in response to Ottawa listing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist group back in July 2024.

“Within the framework of reciprocity, [Iran] identifies and declares the Royal Canadian Navy as a terrorist organization,” Tehran said in a statement Tuesday.

Iran did not list any specific grievances against Canada’s Navy, nor did it state any ramifications its members or property could face if found in the country.

Ottawa meanwhile rejects Iran’s claim that Royal Navy members are terrorists, calling it a “baseless political reaction” to Canada’s designation of IRGC members as terrorists.

The IRGC carries out “terrorist activity” in Canada, according to the feds. As such the government can seize any IRGC assets found within the country and it’s a federal crime for anyone in Canada to “knowingly deal with property” belonging to the group.

Canada and Iran have been on poor terms since former Prime Minister Stephen Harper severed diplomatic ties with the country in 2012 because of the country’s alleged ambitions to develop nukes (which it denies) and its alleged imprisonment, torture, and murder of political prisoners in the 2010s (which it also denies).

Canadian tax collectors will be working overtime this year as the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) seeks to claw back over $10 billion in COVID-19 benefits previously collected by ineligible recipients.

Ottawa doled out over $83 billion in COVID benefits during the pandemic, around $15 billion of which were collected by individuals who did not meet all of the eligibility requirements for doing so.

To date, the CRA has reclaimed around $3.3 billion of those debts, but says it’s still owed $10.35 billion.

The CRA says it might withhold tax refunds or even garnish “wages or other sources of income” from people who try to avoid repayment.

Blair Mantin, a licensed insolvency trustee in Vancouver, told CBC that the CRA is already doing these things.

“We're certainly seeing bank account freezes; now we're seeing garnishes [of pay],” Martin said. “That's the most painful thing, because that's when the government's going directly to your employer and saying, 'Hey, before the person gets their wages, take 30 per cent off the top.'"