USA & Canada Intelligence Brief — Friday, September 25, 2026

USA & Canada Intelligence Brief — Friday, 25 September 2026

The Capitol in Washington. The Senate refused by fifty votes to forty-nine to order the fighting in Iran stopped, with four Republicans crossing and one Democrat voting against. Photo: Martin Falbisoner, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The American mood this morning is fatigue with a war nobody can vote away. The Senate was asked on Thursday to order the fighting in Iran stopped, and it declined by a single vote.

What makes the fatigue political is who is complaining now. Republican candidates in Iowa and Michigan spent this week telling shoppers that the war has to end, and blaming the price of fuel.

The cost is counted at the pump before it is counted anywhere else. The American Automobile Association, the motoring club whose daily price report is the national standard, put regular petrol at US$4.48 a gallon on 24 September, against US$3.16 a year earlier.

Two courts spent the same Thursday telling American officials they had gone too far. One ordered a sheriff to hand back more than 650,000 ballots; the other set a permanent limit on crowding in immigration cells.

Canada’s temperament this week is a strange calm about the worst thing imaginable. The Prime Minister told an American newspaper he had studied the risk of an American invasion, and his defence minister said the next day that such work is ordinary.

What steadies the picture is that each of these fights is running through an institution rather than around one. Two courts ruled, a chamber voted, a foreign ministry made an offer, and three provinces are about to put questions to voters.

Worn Down By A War The Senate Would Not Halt

The one thing the Senate decided this week, it decided against itself. Stars and Stripes, the newspaper that serves the American armed forces, and CBS News both record Thursday’s count as 49 in favour and 50 against.

Stars and Stripes describes the measure as non-binding, so it would not have compelled the President even had it passed. It was a war-powers resolution, the instrument by which Congress can instruct a president to withdraw forces, and the House had passed the same resolution in July.

Four Republicans voted with the Democrats and one Democrat voted with the Republicans. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina backed it, and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania opposed it.

The war it concerns began on 28 February, which puts it in its seventh month. Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey told the chamber: “It’s cost us American lives. We’ve lost at least 19 service members, brave men and women, over 750 injured.”

The Pentagon has put a price on it. Stars and Stripes gives its estimate of the war’s cost as about US$42 billion.

The public accounting is not settled. PBS News puts the cost so far at US$43.5 billion, and reports a further US$87.6 billion sought from Congress for the war, American farmers and an Ebola response.

The resolution’s author framed it as a question of who decides. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia said of the President: “We’ve never had a president who talks like this, and we never should again. But it is not his decision; it’s our decision.”

The Republican who runs the chamber read the mood as economic rather than moral. John Thune called it “an economic frustration” and said he hoped the administration was “laser-focused on trying to get the strait open”, CBS News reports.

Two Republican candidates for the Senate spent the week campaigning against their own President’s war. Ashley Hinson, running in Iowa, wrote that Iowans “shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran”, NPR reports.

Her Michigan counterpart made the same case in a supermarket. Mike Rogers said that “Michigan families are struggling with the price of everyday life” and that the war “needs to end and end quickly”, NPR reports.

The drift is measurable in the lower chamber as well. Seven House Republicans now support a resolution to remove American forces from Iran, up from four over the summer, NPR reports.

Voters are telling pollsters that this election is about the President rather than about Congress. The NPR, PBS News and Marist survey of 1,280 registered voters on 14 and 15 September found 45 per cent calling their vote opposition to Trump, and 54 per cent of independents agreeing.

The price those candidates point at is on the motoring club’s own board. The association put regular petrol at US$4.4825 a gallon on 24 September, up from US$4.4386 a week earlier and US$3.1634 a year ago.

The club said as much in its own words, in its price report of 24 September. It stated that “at $4.48 per gallon, this is the highest the national average has ever been for this time of year”, and that the month was on course to set a September record.

Freight feels it harder than families do. The association’s diesel average reached US$6.528 a gallon on 22 September, US$2.84 above a year earlier, FleetOwner, an American trucking trade title, reports.

The White House answer on fuel is about supply rather than about the war, and the conservative Fox Business channel reported it on 4 September. Its spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said the President “remains committed to unleashing American energy dominance, cutting costs, and putting more money back in the pockets of hardworking American families”.

The oil market itself has stopped pointing one way. November Brent settled at US$106.60 a barrel on Thursday and was reading US$105.35 at 13.58 UTC on Friday.

Underneath that, buyers are still paying more for oil now than for oil in December. The gap between the two contracts was US$6.38 on Thursday’s settlements against US$4.96 on Wednesday’s, so the premium for immediate delivery has widened rather than eased.

Tehran has put a timetable in front of Washington. Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, said the Strait of Hormuz would reopen seven days after fighting stops and the United States lifts its naval blockade and oil sanctions, Al Jazeera reports.

The strait is the narrow sea lane at the mouth of the Gulf through which much of the world’s oil is shipped, and Iran’s offer treats it as closed. Washington had not accepted the offer by 14.55 UTC on Friday.

Araghchi presented the terms as old ground, drawn from the Islamabad memorandum that paused the fighting earlier this year. He said Iran’s conditions “are nothing new, nothing more than what was already in the Islamabad MOU, which was signed by the US President”, the Arab Times, a Kuwaiti daily, reports.

The administration’s own reading is cooler than the offer. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the United Nations this week that he did not “want to mischaracterize this as a major breakthrough”, Al-Monitor reports.

He allowed the contact itself some weight. Rubio added that “at the same time, I think it was significant that at least there was a conversation”, Al-Monitor, a Washington-based news site covering the Middle East, reports.

A Sheriff Who Stopped Trusting His County’s Ballots

The week’s most striking American ruling came from a state court. California’s Supreme Court held unanimously on Thursday 24 September that a county sheriff broke state election law by seizing more than 650,000 ballots.

The court ordered him to return them and to stop his investigation. Chad Bianco, the elected sheriff of Riverside County in southern California, had taken the ballots in February and March 2026, KQED and Fox News report, after a special election held in November 2025.

The vote he was investigating had national consequences. Proposition 50 was a redistricting measure Californians approved, redrawing five Republican-held seats in the federal House of Representatives to favour Democrats, CBS Los Angeles reports.

Bianco’s own account of why he took them is plain. Fox News, the conservative American network, reported in March that he had said: “This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes recorded.”

The claim behind the seizure came from outside his office. A group calling itself the Riverside Election Integrity Team said it had found about 45,000 excess votes in the November 2025 count, Fox News reported.

The county’s own election office rejected the claim. Art Tinoco, Riverside County’s registrar of voters, said the group “had misinterpreted how votes are counted on Election Day”, and put the final gap at 103 votes, or 0.16 per cent, Fox News reported.

California’s chief election officer said much the same. Shirley Weber, the Secretary of State, said the sheriff’s office “has taken actions based on allegations that lack credible evidence and risk undermining public confidence in our elections”, Fox News reported.

The court did not weigh that claim at all. Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero wrote that state law “unambiguously prohibits the removal of ballots from an elections official’s custody”, KQED, a public broadcaster in San Francisco, reports.

She gave a second reason that does not rest on the statute. Letting police have unfettered access to ballots, Guerrero wrote, “itself creates a substantial risk to election integrity”, CalMatters, a non-profit news service covering the state government, reports.

The sheriff did not concede the point. In a video statement, CalMatters reports, he said: “We are very disappointed and wholeheartedly disagree with the court’s ruling.”

His written statement went further. Bianco called the inquiry “a lawful and legal investigation into potential election fraud” and the case “an obvious legal attempt to prevent the investigation from occurring that was successful”, CalMatters reports.

He says he will obey it all the same. KQED reports that he would comply with the ruling while exploring options of assistance from the federal courts, and he complained that “Sacramento shut it down”.

He had signalled in August that a ruling would not stop him. CalMatters reports that he said then his office would continue its investigation into the 2025 election, whatever the court decided.

California’s governor treated the ruling as a win for the machinery of the state. Gavin Newsom’s office published a statement on 24 September saying it “affirms that in California we will defend democracy — using every branch of government”.

The attorney general who brought the case was harsher. Rob Bonta said Bianco “willfully defied my direct orders, misused criminal investigative tools and created a constitutional emergency in the process”, KQED reports.

Bianco is not a marginal figure, which is what gives the case its weight. He ran for governor of California this year as a Republican and lost, CalMatters reports, and he remains the county’s elected sheriff.

What happens next is not fully settled, and the ruling closes only this challenge. Bianco has signalled he may turn to the federal courts, and no federal filing had been reported by 14.55 UTC on Friday.

Enforcement That Outran The Rules It Wrote

The second ruling of that Thursday was about rooms rather than ballots. Judge Lewis Kaplan of the federal district court in Manhattan issued a permanent injunction on 24 September over the immigration holding rooms at 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan.

The building is a processing centre rather than a prison, and that is the point. Its holding rooms were designed for stays of twelve hours or less, and Kaplan found that people were kept in them far longer and in far greater numbers, Axios reports.

The agency involved is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which arrests and removes people without legal status. The number of people held in those rooms rose from fewer than ten to upward of a hundred between May and August 2025, Newsweek reports.

The judge’s findings go to intent. Kaplan wrote that the agency “knew, or should have known, that how it was treating detainees was wrong, yet it continued to do it anyway”, Newsweek reports.

He then put a motive on it. It did so, Kaplan wrote, “to inflict punishment on detainees and induce them to self-deport”, Newsweek reports.

One phrase in the ruling is blunter than the rest. Kaplan wrote that the building “essentially was a black site” before his earlier orders, Newsweek reports.

The order is unusually specific about ordinary things. It requires at least fifty square feet of floor space for each person and temperatures kept between 68 and 74 degrees Fahrenheit, Axios reports.

The rest of the list is equally plain. Three meals a day with bottled water, soap and toilet paper, licensed medical staff on site, clean bedding and unmonitored telephone calls to lawyers are all now court-ordered, Axios reports.

The judge also found his own earlier orders ignored. Kaplan wrote that the agency had repeatedly ignored them and that officials had at times “intentionally concealed or recklessly disregarded the truth”, Axios reports.

The department’s standing position is that the place is not a jail. In August 2025 the Department of Homeland Security said that “26 Federal Plaza is not a detention center” but a processing centre for brief holds before transfer.

It rejected the overcrowding account outright at the time. The claims were “categorically false”, the department said, ABC7 New York reported.

The department has not said what it will do next. Axios and Newsweek both asked on Thursday and had no reply, and no statement had been made by 14.55 UTC on Friday.

The agency’s political defence is being made elsewhere, and not about these rooms. Tom Homan, the White House official who directs border policy, told the first Attorney General’s Summit on Victims of Violent Crime on Thursday that enforcement would go on.

His words were aimed at the reporters in the room. “We’re gonna keep pushing. We’re not gonna apologize. The media back there, you can hate us all you want, we’re not going anywhere,” Homan said, The Hill reports.

He also put a number on the agency’s work the day before. “Over 60% of ICE arrests are criminals. That’s just a stone-cold fact,” Homan said on the Fox News programme The Will Cain Show on 23 September, Breitbart, a conservative American news site, reports.

While a district judge narrowed what the agency may do, the government went upstairs. The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court on 24 September to suspend a ruling that requires notice before a person is deported to a country that is not their own, the Associated Press reports.

The ruling it wants lifted is recent and unanimous. The First Circuit appeals court in Boston held on 18 September, by three votes to nothing, that the policy conflicts with the rules governing claims of a fear of torture, the Associated Press reports.

The appeals court put the principle in a single sentence, which the Associated Press quotes. Judge Seth Aframe wrote that the right to contest removal “means little if one does not receive prior notice of the intended removal destination and a meaningful opportunity to contest that destination”.

The government’s case is about volume and speed. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the court had “in the dark of night” robbed the government of “an entirely legal and valuable tool to stem the tide of illegal immigration”, the Associated Press reports.

His solicitor general gave the court a scale. D. John Sauer wrote that the government “has been able to remove thousands of aliens to third countries in recent months, and thousands more are eligible for such removal”, the Associated Press reports.

The case now has a clock on it. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who handles emergency applications from that circuit, asked those challenging the policy to reply by 4 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, and the court had not ruled by 14.55 UTC on Friday.

Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The prime minister has described American military action against Canada as an extreme tail risk that it would be irresponsible not to plan for, and his defence minister called such planning normal.

The Badges Came Back, The Dinner Did Not

Thursday’s unfinished business in Washington has largely been finished. Reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico were readmitted to the White House grounds a little over two hours after the White House was told of Judge Timothy Kelly’s order, PBS News reports.

The delay had a mechanical explanation. Judge Kelly signed it shortly after midnight, and White House staff then had to find, reactivate and return badges the Secret Service had taken when the ban was imposed, PBS News reports.

Two of the three names need explaining. MS NOW is the cable network formerly called MSNBC, and Politico is a Washington political news site.

One dispute survived the order. CNN and MS NOW both said their journalists were kept out of the arrival for the Chinese president’s state dinner, PBS News reports.

The White House set the terms of that exclusion. CNN said it allowed a photographer and an audio technician in and refused entry to a reporter and a producer, PBS News reports.

The President’s account of the same evening is different. He wrote that the networks “refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years”, his capital letters, PBS News reports.

The state visit ended on Friday in a reading room, the Washington Times, a conservative Washington daily, reports. Xi Jinping’s last stop was the National Archives, where the Archivist showed the two couples the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, CBS News reports.

The substance was thinner than the guest list. Xi announced that two pandas from China would soon go to Atlanta’s zoo, and the White House has said little about what the visit achieved, CBS News reports.

One deliverable has been promised rather than delivered, and it would cover a “relatively small subset of goods”. The United States Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer, said on Fox News on Monday that there would be an announcement establishing a United States–China board of trade, CBS News reports.

The sentence worth keeping came from the Chinese president. Xi said artificial intelligence should remain “under human control” and that competition “should be a healthy one, and should be kept within bounds”, CBS News reports.

Trump’s own summary was warmer and vaguer. He said on leaving that the two had had “a great meeting”, CBS News reports, and described a friendship with Xi going back to 2016.

Canada Rehearses The Unthinkable, And Says So Out Loud

Canada spent this week discussing in public the possibility of an American attack on it. Mark Carney told the New York Times, in an interview the paper published on Wednesday 23 September, that he had examined the risk as a matter of risk management.

His words were careful rather than agitated. Carney said a leader has “a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk”, Global News, a Canadian broadcaster, reports.

He then took the drama out of it twice. The exercise was “just risk management” and “not a base case”, he said, but it would be irresponsible not to prepare, Global News reports.

The government spent the next day making that sound routine. Defence Minister David McGuinty said on Thursday that it is normal and that “all militaries in the world spend time analyzing risk scenarios”, CP24, a Toronto news channel, reports.

He would not say what had actually been prepared. The Prime Minister had indicated that was “the kind of detail that we would not get into”, McGuinty said, CP24 reports.

A second minister defended the habit rather than the scenario. Evan Solomon, the minister for artificial intelligence, said running any scenario is prudent and that “that’s the way every government functions”, CP24 reports.

Not everyone in Canada thought saying it aloud was wise. Peter MacKay, a Conservative former defence minister, criticised Carney’s candour as counterproductive during tense negotiations, CP24 reports.

The invasion line was the smallest part of a larger turn. Carney told the paper that Canada would cut both its military and its technological reliance on the United States, CTV News reports.

Two names made that concrete. He included Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service among the dependencies to be reduced, and said Canada would expand economic ties with China, CTV News reports.

The hardest test of that is sitting on a runway in Texas. Canada’s first F-35 fighter made its maiden flight at Fort Worth on 23 September, and the first aircraft are expected in Canada in 2028, CTV News reports.

The aeroplane is not yet a settled purchase. Canada agreed to buy 88 of them in January 2023 and has committed to only 16 under a review ordered in March 2025, 19FortyFive, an American defence publication, reports.

Carney describes the choice as a real one. It is “a real decision because of differing capabilities, because of strategic dependencies, and because of economic return”, he told the paper, CTV News reports.

The turn has an unhappy labour market behind it. Canada’s unemployment rate was 6.4 per cent in August against 4.1 per cent in the United States, CTV News reports, and the economy shed roughly 42,000 jobs that month, BNN Bloomberg reports.

Washington’s answer has been dismissive rather than reassuring. Trump said last week that reports Canada might become an associate member of the European Union were “laughable”, and that a hostile act would bring “very serious tariffs” on Europe, Fox News reports.

Investors in Toronto are not behaving as though any of this were imminent. The S&P/TSX Composite was reading 35,626.52 at 14.07 UTC on Friday, down 79.98 or 0.22 per cent on Thursday’s close, with the session still open.

Quebec Shops For A Government, Alberta For A Message

Quebec votes on 5 October wanting something different, without agreeing what. The polling firm Léger put the Parti Québécois on 29 per cent, the Liberals on 23, the governing Coalition Avenir Québec on 20 and the Conservative Party of Quebec on 17.

The appetite for change is larger than any party’s share of it. Léger found 65 per cent of Quebecers wanting a change of government, up four points, from 1,001 people questioned online between 18 and 21 September.

What they want changed is not the constitution. Cost of living and housing ranked first among the issues likely to decide the vote, named by 53 per cent, Léger reports.

The parties are answering with money rather than with sovereignty. The Parti Québécois leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, has promised to halve Quebec’s sales tax on petrol for at least a year, CP24 reports.

His rivals are bidding in the same currency. The Conservative leader Éric Duhaime would lift the basic personal allowance to C$35,000 (about US$24,749), and the governing party would put C$1,000 (about US$707) into every newborn’s education savings plan, CP24 reports.

Québec Solidaire, a left-wing party, is running on precariousness, CP24 reports. Alexandre Boulerice said young people “need to regain hope for the future, to regain the conviction that it is possible to live well without being in a state of constant precariousness”.

The party in front is nevertheless the one that wants to leave Canada. The Parti Québécois seeks independence for the French-speaking province, and it stood at 37 per cent among French-speaking voters in the same survey.

Alberta votes on 19 October on ten questions, among them whether to stay in Canada. Two pollsters put the stay side well ahead and disagree about by how much.

Research Co, a Canadian polling firm, found 74 per cent of Albertans would vote to remain and 22 per cent to begin a legal separation, from 750 likely voters between 24 and 26 August. The Angus Reid Institute, a Canadian not-for-profit polling foundation, had 61 per cent for staying and 33 per cent for starting the process, from 1,017 Albertans questioned between 10 and 13 August.

Angus Reid does not read the leave vote as a wish to leave. It found that two in five of those choosing to leave described the exercise as sending a message to Ottawa rather than wanting separation.

The premier running that referendum is against leaving. Danielle Smith has said she wants a “sovereign Alberta within a united Canada” and has declined to call separatists fringe extremists, the Lethbridge Herald, a southern Alberta daily, reports.

British Columbia will vote twice in October, which is a statement of its own. Municipal elections fall on 17 October and the provincial election Premier David Eby called early falls on 24 October, Daily Hive, a Canadian news site, reports.

The premier is running on continuity and on the American threat. Eby called it “an existential moment” and said that “at a time when Donald Trump is creating more uncertainty, the last thing we need is to rip up what’s working”, Daily Hive reports.

His opponents are running on sawmills. The British Columbia Conservatives said that “at least 21 B.C. lumber mills have closed since 2023, with roughly 15,000 forestry jobs lost since 2022”, Daily Hive reports.

The Greens object to the election itself. Their leader, Emily Lowan, said the early vote “will be costly, it isn’t wanted” and continues a record of putting the government’s interests first, Daily Hive reports.

American duties on Canadian softwood lumber are the background, and Ottawa is paying to keep mills running. The federal finance department committed a C$30 million loan (about US$21.2 million) on 18 September to Conifex Timber, which supports 260 direct jobs at Mackenzie in northern British Columbia.

The ministers framed it as defence rather than subsidy. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the government is “strengthening the forest sector in the face of U.S. tariffs”.

The department put the industry’s weight beside the loan. It counted nearly 200,000 forest-sector workers, more than 11,000 of them Indigenous, and more than C$20 billion (about US$14.1 billion) of national output.

The American industry calls the same money a subsidy. The U.S. Lumber Coalition, an alliance of American sawmill owners, said on 2 April that Canada had announced C$2.1 billion (about US$1.5 billion) of new forestry subsidies in seven months.

The coalition put the total pledged at C$9.9 billion (about US$7.0 billion), in its own statement of 2 April. Its executive director, Zoltan van Heyningen, said that answering American trade enforcement “by doubling down on Canada’s unfair trade practices is both reprehensible and counterproductive”.

Ontario’s answer to the cost of living arrives on 1 October and is small. The province’s general minimum wage rises from C$17.60 to C$17.95 an hour, about US$12.44 to US$12.69.

The size of the rise is set by formula rather than by argument. It is indexed to a 1.9 per cent movement in provincial consumer prices, the employment law firm Hicks Morley reports, and the student rate goes to C$16.90 (about US$11.95).

A workers’ group called that inadequate on Friday, in a statement carried by BNN Bloomberg. Deena Ladd of the Workers’ Action Centre, a Toronto advocacy group, said the average two-bedroom flat in the province “still costs more than $2,100 a month” (about US$1,485).

She also priced the alternative. Had the C$20 an hour (about US$14.14) her group first demanded in 2021 been adopted then, Ladd said, the rate taking effect on 1 October would be C$24.10 (about US$17.04).

The full USA & Canada Intelligence Dossier is updated daily by the Rio Times Intelligence Desk. It carries the editor’s leader, the deep dive on a war the Senate would not halt, the country health check and the people who matter. Open the dossier · Browse the archive

What This Means From Latin America

The war’s clearest export to this hemisphere is the price of a barrel. November Brent settled at US$106.60 on Thursday and was reading US$105.35 at 13.58 UTC on Friday, dearer fuel for importers such as Chile and Peru and better receipts for Brazil, Colombia and Guyana.

The next move in that price is being decided in New York rather than in a market. If Iran’s seven-day offer is taken up the freight premium has a reason to unwind, and if it is not, buyers keep paying more for oil now than for oil in December.

The removal fight is the item with the most direct regional consequence. The vast majority of people removed to third countries have gone to Mexico, and Guyana is among more than two dozen other destinations, the Associated Press reports.

The ballot case is the sequence a Latin American reader will recognise fastest. An elected county sheriff took more than 650,000 ballots on the strength of an outside fraud claim his own county’s registrar called a misreading, and a unanimous court made him give them back.

Canada’s search for other partners keeps a door open to this hemisphere. A middle power saying out loud that it will reduce its military and technological dependence on Washington is a natural counterpart for governments here making the same calculation.

What We Are Watching

• Replies at the Supreme Court on third-country removals — Monday. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson set 4 p.m. Eastern time for the challengers’ answer, and the court had not ruled by 14.55 UTC on Friday.
• Iran’s seven-day offer on the Strait of Hormuz — from 25 September. Washington had not accepted it by 14.55 UTC on Friday, and Rubio declined to call this week’s contacts a breakthrough.
• The White House request to Congress — no date set. PBS News reports that US$87.6 billion has been sought for the war, American farmers and an Ebola response, and Congress has not voted on it.
• Compliance at 26 Federal Plaza in New York — from 24 September. Judge Kaplan’s permanent injunction sets space, temperature, food and lawyer-access requirements, and the department had said nothing about it by 14.55 UTC on Friday.
• The return of the Riverside County ballots — from 24 September. Bianco says he wholeheartedly disagrees with the ruling but would comply while exploring the federal courts; no federal filing had been reported by 14.55 UTC on Friday.
• The hearing on a longer press-access injunction — by 8 October. Judge Kelly’s restraining order of 24 September runs 14 days, and the badges were handed back that morning.
• Ontario’s minimum wage increase — 1 October. The general rate goes from C$17.60 to C$17.95 an hour, about US$12.44 to US$12.69, by statutory indexation.
• The Quebec general election — 5 October. Léger has the Parti Québécois on 29 per cent and 65 per cent of Quebecers wanting a change of government.
• British Columbia’s municipal elections — 17 October. The province votes twice this month, a week before its provincial election, Daily Hive reports.
• The Alberta referendum on staying in Canada — 19 October. Research Co had 74 per cent for remaining and the Angus Reid Institute 61 per cent, from separate August surveys.
• The British Columbia provincial election — 24 October. Eby called it early and is running on continuity; the Conservatives are running on closed sawmills.
• The second reading of Canada’s building bill — date not set. Bill C-39, which would compress approval of major projects into a decision within a year, has had debate and no vote, and is not law.
• The American midterm elections — 3 November. The NPR, PBS News and Marist survey found 45 per cent of registered voters calling their vote opposition to Trump.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did the Senate vote on, and what did the result change?

It voted on a war-powers resolution. That is the instrument by which the American Congress can instruct a president to withdraw forces from hostilities it has not authorised. Stars and Stripes and CBS News both record the count on Thursday 24 September as 49 in favour and 50 against. Four Republicans crossed to support it — Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul and Thom Tillis — and one Democrat, John Fetterman, crossed the other way. Nothing changed in law, because Stars and Stripes describes the measure as non-binding, and the House had passed the same resolution in July. The signal is what matters. Stars and Stripes records this as the fourteenth such resolution considered since the fighting began on 28 February. NPR reports that seven House Republicans now support withdrawal, up from four over the summer.

How could a sheriff take 650,000 ballots, and what happens to them now?

Chad Bianco is the elected sheriff of Riverside County in southern California. He obtained warrants and seized the ballots from the November 2025 special election, Fox News reported in March. The claim behind it came from a group calling itself the Riverside Election Integrity Team, which said it had found about 45,000 excess votes. The county’s own registrar of voters, Art Tinoco, said the group “had misinterpreted how votes are counted on Election Day” and put the final gap at 103 votes, Fox News reported. California’s Supreme Court held unanimously on 24 September that he had broken state election law. It ordered the ballots returned and the investigation stopped, with Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero writing that the statute “unambiguously prohibits the removal of ballots from an elections official’s custody”, KQED reports. The court did not rule on whether the fraud claim had merit. Bianco said in a video statement that he was “very disappointed and wholeheartedly disagree with the court’s ruling”, CalMatters reports, and called the inquiry “a lawful and legal investigation into potential election fraud”. KQED reports that he would nonetheless comply while exploring options of assistance from the federal courts, and no federal filing had been reported by 14.55 UTC on Friday.

What did the New York judge order, and what does the government say?

Judge Lewis Kaplan of the federal district court in Manhattan issued a permanent injunction on 24 September. It governs the immigration holding rooms at 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan. It requires at least fifty square feet a person, temperatures between 68 and 74 degrees Fahrenheit, and three meals a day with bottled water. It also requires hygiene supplies, clean bedding, medical staff on site and unmonitored calls to lawyers, Axios reports. Kaplan found that the rooms, built for stays of twelve hours or less, had held people far longer. The number of people held rose from fewer than ten to upward of a hundred between May and August 2025. He wrote that the building “essentially was a black site” before his earlier orders, Newsweek reports. The Department of Homeland Security has not said what it will do about this ruling, and had made no statement by 14.55 UTC on Friday. Its position when the first order was made in August 2025 was that “26 Federal Plaza is not a detention center” but a processing centre, ABC7 New York reported. The agency’s political defence has been made elsewhere and not about these rooms. Tom Homan told the first Attorney General’s Summit on Victims of Violent Crime on Thursday, addressing the reporters present: “We’re gonna keep pushing. We’re not gonna apologize. The media back there, you can hate us all you want, we’re not going anywhere,” The Hill reports.

Why is Canada’s Prime Minister talking about an American invasion?

Because he was asked, and chose to answer. The New York Times published the interview on Wednesday 23 September. Mark Carney said a leader has “a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk”. He called the exercise “just risk management” and “not a base case”, and said it would be irresponsible not to prepare, Global News reports. He would not say what had been prepared. His defence minister, David McGuinty, said on Thursday that it is normal and that “all militaries in the world spend time analyzing risk scenarios”, CP24 reports. The remark sits inside a wider turn. Carney told the paper Canada would cut its military and technological reliance on the United States, including Elon Musk’s Starlink service, and expand economic ties with China, CTV News reports. Not all Canadians think the candour helps. Peter MacKay, a Conservative former defence minister, called it counterproductive during tense negotiations.