Council of Canadians - PEI Chapter

Join BCSPEI for a community conversation to help shape how The Bog — Charlottetown’s historic Black community — is honoured and remembered.

The Black Cultural Society of Prince Edward Island (BCSPEI) is hosting a series of community town halls as part of a community-led engagement to shape the commemoration of The Bog at Rochford Square.

This process is primarily for descendants of The Bog and Black Islanders. If your family has roots in The Bog, or if you are a Black Islander, we especially want to hear from you. Your voice matters most here. All Islanders are welcome to attend and to bear witness to this history.

The Bog was a Black community that once stood at the heart of Charlottetown. Families lived there. Children grew up there. A community built itself there—and that history is part of Prince Edward Island’s story, and it has gone too long without proper recognition.

This town hall is an opportunity to:
​- Learn about the history and legacy of The Bog
​- Share memories, family connections, and stories
​- Reflect on what should be remembered and passed to future generations
​- Contribute to shaping how this history is honoured in a way that is honest, meaningful, and community-led.

This will also be an evening of connections. Refreshments will be provided.

RIP Marie.

ACIC extends its condolences to the loved ones and community of Marie Burge, who passed on 10 August 2026 in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

Marie exemplifies everything the not-for-profit sector works and inspires towards: passionate, engaged, dynamic, and above all, caring and fair. Marie’s enthusiasm for her community and her love of justice took her to volunteer and advocacy work in food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, environmental rights, reproductive justice, women’s rights, migrant workers’ rights, universal basic income, proportional representation and democratic structuring, and so much more through her work with the Cooper Institute, the Latin American Mission Program, the Working Group for a Livable Income, the Coalition for the Protection of PEI Lands, Save Our Seas and Shores, Islanders for Proportional Representation, and many others.

She bettered the lives of not just her friends and family, but all who live on PEI. But her scope goes so much further: Marie Burge was one of ACIC’s founding members fifty years ago, and her ground work set our course for the five decades since. The not-for-profit sector of Atlantic Canada wouldn’t be what it is without her work, and all she has done reverberates on the national and international stage.

Marie has been recognized several times over, including the 1998 Medal of Merit from the Order of PEI, the Leo Cheverie Lifetime Achievement Award from the Voluntary Resource Council in 2025, and also received the King Charles III Coronation Medal from the Governor General of Canada in 2025.

We extend our condolences to all of Marie Burge’s loved ones and with the PEI not-for-profit community.

Opinion | Carney’s most consequential decision to date is shrinking Canadians’ dreams
Aug. 6, 2026
By Linda McQuaig Contributing Columnist
Linda McQuaig is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow her on Bluesky: .bsky.social
Mark Carney’s dramatic escalation of military spending will change Canada — far more than has been acknowledged.
Without any clear assessment of our military needs, the prime minister has embarked on a massive military spending spree, which has suddenly immersed us in plans to spend $100 billion on submarines, and billions more on fighter jets.
All this has redrawn the boundaries of our national ambitions, redirecting vast resources into military firepower, forcing us to shrink our dreams of other things we could achieve together as a nation.
Indeed, Carney’s decision to enormously bulk up our military is a true game changer — perhaps the most far-reaching of all the decisions he’s made as PM — and yet it was made with virtually no public consultation.
Strikingly, his plan to triple our annual military spending — so that we’ll be spending an extra $150 billion a year by 2035 — was never presented to Canadians prior to the April 2025 election that delivered Carney a minority government.
His announcement, less than two months later, that military spending would jump from 1.4 per cent to five per cent of GDP came almost completely out of the blue.
There had long been discussion about reaching the NATO target of two per cent of GDP, and there was popular support for that — largely because the media typically made our military spending look woefully inadequate compared to peer nations.
For instance, we were told that, as a percentage of GDP, our military spending ranked almost at the bottom — 25th of 30 NATO countries.
However, we were rarely told that, in terms of actual dollars spent, Canada was already the sixth biggest military spender in NATO.
In addition to this distortion, Canadian media routinely downplay the fact that a bigger defence budget requires significant sacrifices; it typically means reduced social spending, which greatly diminishes the quality of life of ordinary Canadians.
Social spending is generally presented as a luxury, while military spending is presented as a necessity — and a particularly urgent necessity in the Trump era.
It’s true U.S. President Donald Trump has made the world more dangerous, but there’s another new reality which is suddenly throwing doubt on the value of huge military spending. The wars involving Iran and Ukraine are demonstrating that easily-assembled drones have an astonishing capacity to damage the world’s most sophisticated weaponry.
“Even the strongest military on the planet cannot eliminate the threat of cheap drones,” writes U.S. political scientist Robert Pape in the journal Foreign Affairs.
It may be that investing in diplomacy and world development does more to make the world safe.
We should recall that the late U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the danger of the weapons lobby, which he dubbed the “military industrial complex.”
Eisenhower, who served as the top U.S. general in the Second World War, was no peacenik. But he advised skepticism about the demands of this immensely powerful lobby which consistently pushes for ever more armaments, whether needed or not.
Eisenhower highlighted that there was a crucial tradeoff: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed.”
The extra billions Carney is spending to amplify our military means there will be far less money for social programs — programs that are essential in our quest to all lead healthy, well-educated and prosperous lives.
The achievement of those social goals would personally make me much happier and prouder to be Canadian than a new fleet of submarines or fighter jets.
Indeed, if we heed Eisenhower’s warning against being hoodwinked by the military industrial complex, we can start to question whether gigantic military spending is a necessity or rather an enormous expense that leaves us unable to afford other things that really matter in our lives.
The weapons lobby wants us to forget there’s a tradeoff.
Let’s not.

Sign the petition to electrify our energy. Since Trump's war in the Middle East has spiked oil and gas prices Atlantic families are getting hit hard.

Let's keep PEI a Weapons FREE province.

Let's keep our province Weapons FREE.

Ready to use stickers.

The Peace Coalition of PEI s selling these stickers at the Voluntary Resource Centre (VRC) at 81 Prince St. for $10.