Canada is “not trying to sabotage” the Los Angeles Dodgers, the baseball team’s manager said after he implied that he was not certain if there was “intent” behind a delay that occurred while he was travelling from Toronto to the U.S.

Dave Roberts made his original remarks on Sunday evening, as his team prepared for Game 3 of the World Series.

A reporter said his own connecting flight was delayed and asked if Roberts had his own “travel story.” The manager was late to the team’s workout at Dodger Stadium that night, the Associated Press reported.

“You know, I don’t want to get too far into it. I just arrived about 30 minutes ago. There were some delays. I don’t know if there was intent or not…the international stuff was a bear,” he said. “But we made it.”

“There were some delays. I don’t know if there was intent or not…the international stuff was a bear.”

Dave Roberts on returning to L.A. from Toronto.

(🎥: @MLBNetwork) pic.twitter.com/WaefADUHjq

— TSN (@TSN_Sports) October 27, 2025

Roberts has since walked back his comments. “Canada is not trying to sabotage the Dodgers. I know that. It was just a long day,” he said,

The Athletic reported

.

He elaborated further, saying that he knew the prime minister was not “worried about calling airline security or the FAA to make sure that they delay us.” He said it had been a long process at the airport and “a lot of it had to do with our big,

huge, four-plane travel party.”

“It’s just a part of international travel. And passports. Airline security. That’s part of it,” he said.

There were around 400 people who made up the Dodgers travel party, according to The Athletic. They were split up into groups on different aircrafts, with the players staying together. The players left for Los Angeles after Saturday’s game in Toronto. Roberts did not leave Toronto until Sunday morning, the publication said.

The Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays are currently tied at 1-1. The video clip of Roberts posted online by TSN has been viewed nearly 95,000 times on X as of Monday afternoon.

Game 3 of the 2025 World Series takes place in Los Angeles on Monday night.

• Drake dons Rob Ford tribute jacket at Jays-Dodgers game in Toronto
• Raymond J. de Souza: Jays go to bat for national unity

Drake was among the 44,000-plus fans at Rogers Centre to witness the Toronto Blue Jays’ decisive Game 1 World Series win Friday night and he did so while paying homage to late former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford.

While watching the series opener against the Los Angeles Dodgers from a private box in right field, Drake, celebrating his 39th birthday, was photographed sporting a green and yellow letterman jacket for the Don Bosco Eagles high school football team.

Embroidered on the right side was the name R. Ford.

The jacket, while similar, is not the same one worn by Ford during his tenure as the school’s volunteer head coach throughout the 2000s and during his time in office as a councillor and later as a mayor, based on National Post archived images.

The rapper and hip-hop artist’s jacket has decorative embroidery on the sleeves, whereas Ford’s had a patch reading “Coach” on the right and the “02” on the left.

Drake’s also has a shorter collar and uses a more modern font for the name.

Some Facebook users wondered by Drake wasn’t wearing something to support the team on the field.

“What’s with that bloody jacket? It’s the Blue Jays game. You should have worn a Blue Jay shirt instead,”

Jude Aure wrote.

“Where’s your Blue Jays Jacket Drake… aren’t you a Canadian cheering for a Canadian Team,” Laura Hunter asked in reply to a Toronto Blue Jays post. 

On X, Barstool Sports host

Kevin Clandy wrote

, “No matter what you think of Drake, rocking the Rob Ford varsity jacket in Toronto for the WS is a legendary move.”

Drake is in the building 🇨🇦 #WANTITALL pic.twitter.com/6ZkKGPz5vP

— Toronto Blue Jays (@BlueJays) October 25, 2025

Ford coached the Eagles to a Toronto District Catholic Athletic Association title in 2012, but lost in the subsequent Metro Bowl final to decide GTA high school football supremacy.

His time at the Eagles’ helm ended unceremoniously the following year when he was fired by the board over allegations of egregiously improper behaviour, some of which was detailed in 300 pages of documents disclosed through a freedom of information request.

As reported by

National Post

at the time, Ford allegedly ordered teenage players to roll in goose scat, called them derogatory terms, challenged a co-coach to a fight and arrived at a practice for the 2012 Metro Bowl Championship Game while inebriated.

The allegations came at a fraught time in Ford’s personal and political life, brought on by substance abuse, to which he would later admit and begin treatment to resolve. He abandoned another run for mayor in 2014 after a stomach cancer diagnosis and won a seat on council instead.

Ford died on March 22, 2016, after chemotherapy was ineffective.

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It’s the stuff HR nightmares are made of. A trio of international researchers — based in British Columbia, California and Finland — has co-authored a paper that examines the links between romantic relationships with the boss and salary.

The bottom line: entering a relationship with a manager increases the subordinate’s earnings by an average of six per cent, while breaking up triggers an “abrupt” 18 per cent earnings decline. Breaking up isn’t just hard to do; it’s expensive.

What’s more, retention of other workers falls when romantic relationships take hold, and the more the subordinate gains in wages, the greater the effect on others.

The paper,

“The Impacts of Romantic Relationships With the Boss,”

was published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is based in Cambridge, Mass.

The researchers used data from Statistics Finland to analyze the employment administration statistics of Finnish office workers across a variety of sectors over 30 years, from 1988 to 2018. They studied salary information for 1,010 manager-subordinate workplace couples, as well as 728 instances of breakups.

It’s messy work, as the researchers freely admit. They identified the end of a relationship as the moment when the workplace couple stopped living together. But determining the beginning was more difficult.

Since most couples start dating before moving in together, they wrote, “we specify the two years before cohabitation as the ‘dating period’ and define the first year of this period as the event year of interest when estimating the impact of forming a relationship with a coworker.”

They also noted that they didn’t study colleagues who start a relationship but never move in together, nor those who were asked out by a coworker but declined. “Understanding the economic impact of these interactions would be interesting, but it is beyond the scope of our data,” they admitted.

The study looked mostly at female subordinates dating male managers, and found that these women saw a raw earnings growth of 22 per cent between the year before the dating period began and the year after, compared to 16 per cent growth over the same period among women in a control group.

On the flip side, the study found a “clear and stark pattern” for women who broke up with a workplace manager; their earnings fall by 18 per cent the year after the breakup. (In contrast, women broke up with a manager from a different workplace saw a slowdown in earnings growth but no drop in earnings.)

In terms of actual dollars — or in this case euros, since the couples were drawn from data in Finland — the boost in pay from dating a manager amounted to about 4,000 euros (about $6,500) while the hit from breaking up came to 6,000 euros (about $9,700). “These negative effects persist for at least four years after the breakup,” the researchers wrote.

They also tried to tease out whether the salary bump was due to favouritism or merit, the second possible if the subordinate was learning new skills or receiving mentoring from the new partner.

“While it is challenging to distinguish between the two, we provide some suggestive evidence,” they concluded. Among the findings — salary increases dropped dramatically if either partner moved to a new workplace while the relationship continued.

“Regardless of the cause,” they wrote, “higher earnings gains for those in relationships with a workplace manager could lead to resentment among coworkers who might (rightly or wrongly) view this as preferential treatment.”

Sure enough, workplaces that were home to manager/subordinate relationships saw a higher number of departing workers of both sexes. On average, a workplace with 71 employees would see an additional four departures.

“A potentially useful firm-level intervention based on our results is to prevent managers from having a direct influence on the career trajectories of their subordinate partners,” they wrote. “Our findings suggest that other employees dislike these relationships, particularly when they are associated with higher earnings for the subordinate partner. This means that regardless of whether the earnings gains obtained by subordinate partners are due to favouritism, the appearance of favouritism should be curtailed, as it can lead other workers to leave the firm.”

A more direct intervention is to ban such relationships altogether, as is the case with McDonald’s. The restaurant chain fired CEO Stephen Easterbrook in 2019 for a consensual relationship with a subordinate.

“Yet such bans come with their own costs,” they wrote. “If similar rules had existed at Microsoft or Sidley Austin Law Firm, Bill and Melinda Gates and Barack and Michelle Obama would have been barred from dating.”

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Mayer Lawee, an 86-year-old Montreal man, remembers a childhood in his family’s elegant mansion, built by his father and uncle in the heart of Baghdad, Iraq’s quixotic capital, especially family weddings in the walled gardens with its tiered fountains, palm trees and statues.

The outdoor nuptials for his three sisters were like something from old Hollywood movies, but Mayer, the baby of the family, was always sent to bed early, which during the summer meant sleeping on the roof where the night air was cooler. It was hard to sleep knowing what he was missing.

“There’d be the wedding parties underneath me and I’d be throwing things on the party,” he says. “I was a bit mischievous.”

The family now has only Mayer Lawee’s memories, old photographs, and documents pulled from archives to show for the grand house built in the 1930s by two brothers, Ezra Lawee and Khedouri Lawee.

The family’s mansion is now at the heart of a contentious international dispute shining light on a dark past.

It currently houses the embassy of France in Iraq, for which Paris pays rent only to the Iraqi government, despite the property having been plucked from the Lawee family by Iraqi officials after they fled anti-Jewish pogroms in the 1950s, the family says.

After decades of quietly campaigning for compensation from France, descendants of the Lawee brothers, who resettled in Canada, have turned in frustration to the courts, filing a lawsuit in Paris against the French government.

“It’s really a very odd story,” said Philip Khazzam, a Montreal businessman who is the grandson of Ezra Lawee, and nephew of Mayer.

If not for contemporary history, the location of the house would sound magical. It stands near the bank of the winding Tigris River in the historically crucial region once called Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. Recent decades have reduced Baghdad to a synonym for conflict and chaos.

Before Iraq’s authoritarianism and pogroms, before Saddam Hussein’s wars, before the coalition bombings, insurgency, and civil war, there was a time of tranquility, including for the Jewish minority in the majority Muslim country.

Ezra Lawee, Mayer’s father, and Khedouri Lawee, both now dead, were born into a Jewish family in Iraq. As adults the brothers owned the General Motors distribution rights for much of the oil-rich region, making them wealthy enough to jointly buy neighbouring parcels of land in central Baghdad in 1935 and 1937.

There they erected a large mansion to house both of their growing families. It has a stately entrance of stone steps curving to a rounded portico of four columns topped by an ornate balcony.

Mayer, the youngest of the Lawee children — and the last family member to have lived in the home — was born in 1939, a year that also brought trouble. “We were a big family,” he said. “We used to play in the yard. The war was on so most of my activities were in the yard or inside the house.”

During the Second World War, pro-Nazi sentiment in Iraq brought trouble for the long-standing Jewish community, including a period of mass violence targeting Jews. Post-war, Iraq joined the Arab military coalition against Israel in 1948 after it was established as a Jewish homeland, making life harder for Iraqi Jews. There were discriminatory laws, public violence, executions, looting and religious repression.

There was a mass exodus of Jews from Iraq to Israel from 1951 to 1952 in an international airlift operation, but the Lawees’s wealth gave them other options. They left Iraq on their own. One brother travelled to Egypt and the other to England before they reunited in New York and then resettled in Montreal in 1954. Trying to replicate their former life, they bought two adjacent houses and a GM dealership, Barnabe Motors.

The brothers became Canadian citizens in 1969, and their families flourished, some in Canada, others in the United States.

After the brothers left Baghdad, a caretaker watched over their property, Khazzam said. In 1964, the brothers leased it to the French government for use as a diplomatic post, according to old documents filed in court. The deal included the mansion, the caretaker’s home, two garages, and a walled garden with a greenhouse.

It was a suitably prestigious address for France, which had a significant presence, investment and influence in Iraq.

For a time, France paid rent to the Lawee brothers, documents show. The payments suddenly stopped in the 1970s. The family later learned that rather than paying the Lawees, France had agreed in 1978 to pay only the Iraqi government. That was the year Saddam Hussein became prime minister and was consolidating his authoritarian stranglehold on the country.

The Lawee brothers sent letters to government officials in Paris about the rent without any resolution, Khazzam said. Even after Hussein was defeated and executed, France continued to pay the Iraqi governments while ignoring the family.

In 2004, when France reopened its embassy after years of war, the tricolour flag of France was once again raised over the house the Lawees built. It caught the family’s attention.

They hired Lucien Bouchard, a lawyer and former premier of Quebec, to renew their campaign for answers. Bouchard wrote a letter to Dominique de Villepin, France’s minister of foreign affairs under president Jacques Chirac. At the time, de Villepin was best known for his speech to the United Nations opposing the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Bouchard’s intervention went nowhere.

“We all thought that it was lost, that we would never get it back,” said Khazzam. However, the family later learned the Lawee brothers were still listed in Iraqi records as the property’s owners.

As a new generation of his family looked at their history, they realized it was not only an issue of an old asset, he said.

“I realized that this is not just about a house, it’s about human rights. That was my motivating factor. It is hugely unfair. They are occupying our house,” Khazzam said. He thought of it in the context of works of art looted by the Nazis during the war, often from Jewish families, that are periodically repatriated.

“If you have art that’s stolen or a house that’s stolen, it’s the same thing,” Khazzam said. “It wasn’t a person or a company who stole it, it’s a country. And France was taking advantage of our misfortune and that’s not right. They’re a G7 country and they also stand up for human rights. So how are they doing this? It doesn’t make sense.”

The family tried again, this time hiring a lawyer in Paris.

Jean-Pierre Mignard is not just any lawyer. He is an establishment figure who was close to François Hollande, president of France for years until 2017. After Hollande stepped down, Mignard was an early supporter of Emmanuel Macron, who went on to become France’s president.

Mignard wrote to his government in 2021 with the flowing grace of a diplomatic entreaty, presenting France’s foreign affairs minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, with details of the “very painful case,” the letter says, translated from French.

A month later, Le Drian wrote back. It sounded promising.

“The facts you have exposed caught my attention,” says Le Drian’s reply. His office researched the family’s claims and found the embassy had indeed rented the building from the Lawee family in 1964 and later had a replacement lease with the Iraqi government. He asked for documentation.

The family replied with copies of 22 documents, from the architectural drawings for the house when it was being built, photos from the 1930s, title deeds, lease contracts, birth certificates, the brothers’ Iraqi passports and their wills.

Two months later, however, a new foreign affairs minister was appointed. Mignard started again, congratulating Catherine Colonna on her appointment and outlining the “quite sensitive dossier.”

The Lawee family “were robbed of their property,” he wrote, “when the regime of Mr. Saddam Hussein ordered the confiscation of all the property of Iraqi nationals of the Jewish faith.”

Iraq’s claim to the Lawee’s house, he wrote, had no legal basis and was “purely and simply a plunder.” He said an Iraqi law for “the dispossession of Jewish people from their properties in Iraq when they returned to Israel,” didn’t apply here; not only does it abuse international human rights but because the Lawees didn’t leave in the airlift program and didn’t settle in Israel.

“It creates a very difficult situation for France, which occupies Jewish property seized in violation of rules, values of our Republic, and international law,” he wrote.

Once again there seemed to be interest in settling the matter. The family figured they were owed about US$13 million in rent. They asked for repayment of their loss and then the family would sell the property to France.

Momentum, though, seemed only in words. Mignard’s further letters dropped the language of diplomats, sounding more like a debt collector.

“Apparently we did not understand each other well,” Mignard wrote in 2023. “This property is not the property of France. This property is also not the property of Iraq because it has been plundered and stolen. This building is the property of my clients and of them alone.”

He threatened that he and his clients might show up at the door of the Baghdad embassy and try to enter their house.

It is now a court battle. Friday was the deadline for both sides to submit their documentation to the administrative court in Paris.

Mignard told National Post they turned to the courts because decades of informal appeals have failed. He had even written to Macron about it.

“France refuses to acknowledge any responsibility, claiming that it is a decision made by the Iraqi government. This is false. France could at least continue to pay the rent, which would indicate that it is not complicit in the spoliation of Iraq,” Mignard said this week.

“We want France to be condemned, and we feel ashamed and sad because we are French lawyers and this is our country.”

A spokesman for France’s foreign affairs ministry wouldn’t answer questions about the Baghdad mansion, saying only: “We do not comment on ongoing legal proceedings.”

Macron’s office declined to say whether the president has stayed at the embassy in the past, but his director of communications, Edouard Lafourcade, said “no visit to the site by the President of the Republic is currently scheduled.”

Estimates of the value of the house and property fluctuate from a low of US$10 million to more than US$20 million.

Mayer Lawee said he would like to see money from his childhood home distributed among the brothers’ descendants. “They should all benefit.”

If Khazzam felt it was safe, he would love to see his ancestral home in person.

“If I could go tomorrow, I’d drop everything and go. That’s how bad I want to see and feel what it was like to walk the streets and be at the parks where my grandparents and parents lived.”

A trial is expected next year.

• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | X: AD_Humphreys

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The modern digital era, a “new era of human commodification,” violates fundamental human rights, warned BlackBerry founder Jim Balsillie in a speech on Sunday evening.

“The data generated by our experiences, choices, and even our thoughts, are captured, processed, and traded as raw material for manipulative algorithms deployed for profit and power, all with catastrophic costs to society, including mental health crisis, democratic erosion, societal polarization, lost economic dynamism and misinformation to name a few,” said Balsillie, according to notes of Balsillie’s speech, obtained by National Post in advance of his talk.

In his remarks, made to the Ditchley Foundation’s conference in Ottawa, the Canadian tech entrepreneur argued that we’re now living in a new economy where “wealth, power and security” are obtained via soft assets — intellectual property and data/artificial intelligence — rather than hard, tangible assets.

“With the shift to a knowledge-based economy 35 years ago, companies and countries focused on strategically generating valuable IP assets, and more recently, to strategically controlling valuable data assets,” Balsillie’s notes say. “Wealth accrues to the owners who amass these two rent-generating assets.”

Balsillie warned that Canada has no national data strategy and that there are only limited programs to build Canada’s IP assets, something, he said, which costs the country around $100 billion per year.

He argued that Canada needs to shift the way it thinks about innovation and make “a pivot to deliberate strategies that drive productivity, prosperity, and sovereignty in the 21st-century economy,” as Canada’s GDP is growing slowly compared to other countries, especially the United States.

“Because Canada missed the shift, we are seeing Canada’s standard of living in steady decline,” he warned, according to the notes.

Balsillie argued that Canada is spending $7.5 billion on research annually, but without a strategy to own and commercialize outcomes. One potential solution, he argued, is legislation to help Canada own its intellectual property. As one example, Balsillie says that Canada’s publicly funded research built the foundations of the artificial intelligence boom, but Canada is not on the list of top 100 patent holders globally.

“AI is transforming industries at scale in ways we haven’t seen since the rise of the internet,” Balsillie’s notes say.

There are structural forces that reshape the labour market. Globalization and offshoring or a data-driven economy that inspired gig work or the knowledge economy comprised of intangible assets, for example. But this also includes machine knowledge, which Balsillie identifies as a new “factor of production.”

In order to tackle the problems of rights violations and the languishing Canadian economy, Balsillie proposes a four-point plan, which he first articulated in a speech to the International Monetary Fund in 2018. Canada must protect national security in the digital era; ensure there’s fair access to the new means of production in the economy; enhance citizen welfare in the areas of “privacy, democracy, mental health, human rights”; and comply with all international agreements.

“Helping shape this in an integrated fashion is technically complex but also an opportunity and imperative for Canada,” said Balsillie on Sunday.

Balsillie, 64, was co-CEO of Waterloo-based Research in Motion, later renamed after its BlackBerry device. He founded the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the Centre for Canadian Innovation.

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There could be drastically fewer retired Canadians flocking south to southern U.S. states like Florida and Arizona to escape the winter this year, according to a new survey.

In its 2025 winter smart travellers survey insights, the Travel Health Insurance Association (THIA) of Canada found that people age 61 and over — typically seen as the “snowbird” generation due to their long-term trips south — lead the way in boycotting travel to the U.S. this winter.

The survey, conducted by The Harris Poll in late September, asked respondents how likely they were to travel to the U.S. between October of this year and March 2026, typically Canada’s coldest months.

Just over a quarter of respondents (26 per cent) said such a trip was likely, a decline of 37 per cent over the percentage of people who said they’d go in the winter of 2024-25 (41 per cent).

Across age groups, the drop was most precipitous among Boomers, with only 10 per cent anticipating a trip to the U.S. in the months ahead, a 66 per cent plunge over the share of people who said they would have last year (31 per cent).

“Meanwhile, younger Canadians are keeping the tradition alive,” The Harris Poll wrote, noting that 45 per cent of those aged 18-34 — including 44 per cent of Generation Z — “still plan to travel to the U.S., down only 18 per cent, showcasing a significant generational divide.”

In April, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) introduced the

Alien Registration Form

, which requires most non-citizens staying in the U.S. for 30 days or longer to register their presence and provide a photograph and fingerprints. Anyone crossing via land border would also be required to pay a $30 fee for a separate arrival-and-departure record.

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced new regulations requiring all non-residents, including Canadians visiting for any amount of time, to be

photographed when entering the U.S

. for facial recognition purposes.

When they come into effect on Dec. 26, the new rules will apply to minors under 14 and seniors over 79, groups that were previously exempt from some biometric requirements, and could also require the submission of other biometrics, such as fingerprints or DNA.

The THIA survey also found that Canadians’ winter-destination appetites are changing and veering away from their nearest neighbour.

Of the 53 per cent who plan to leave their home province this winter, only 12 per cent said their primary destination would be in the U.S., down by 23 per cent year over year from the 2024-25 proportion.

Instead, an increasing number of people — 11 per cent more than the previous year — say they’re first headed to another Canadian province, and more still (27 per cent) listed the Caribbean.

“It’s clear that Canadians’ primary vacation spots during the winter months are in flux,” the pollster wrote.

As for those committed to a U.S. trip in the next six months, 13 per cent are doing so for leisurely reasons, while another 13 per cent are visiting family or friends. Escaping the cold, taking advantage of cheap destinations and ease of travel to the U.S. came in at seven per cent, respectively.

Asked what potential barriers factor into their decision about travelling at this time of year, without being prompted, 40 per cent of respondents said political tensions with the U.S., compared to 24 per cent who cited global uncertainties.

Cost was the top barrier at 41 per cent, and 29 per cent listed exchange rates. Rounding out the list were personal safety (20 per cent) and potential travel disruptions (13 per cent).

The random survey was conducted Sept. 24-26 and has an estimated margin of error for the poll was plus/minus 2.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

• Canadians travelling to the U.S. may be affected by new registration requirements
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Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry made it officially official on Saturday night, stepping out for date night in Paris.

Video published by TMZ showed the former Canadian prime minister and the pop star hand in hand as they exited a cabaret show at the Crazy Horse in the French capital.

Waiting for them outside was a throng of paparazzi and fans, some of whom started singing the Happy Birthday song to Perry, who celebrated her 41st birthday Saturday.

Another video shared with the outlet showed a woman presenting Perry with a rose, garnering a “Thank you” from the musician.

Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau took their romance public Saturday night … the lovebirds went out on a date in Paris, France, to celebrate Katy’s 45th birthday.

🎥 Best Image pic.twitter.com/aKx3ULkKn0

— TMZ (@TMZ) October 26, 2025

Within a few seconds and without saying anything else, the duo were ushered into the back seat of a waiting SUV and left.

It was the first confirmed public appearance together since a dog walk and dinner date in Montreal in late July.

Perry was in town on tour and Trudeau, along with his 15-year-old daughter Ella Grace, were seen attending the Bell Centre show a couple of nights later.

Entertainment news, all citing individuals who claimed to be in the know, reported on the rumoured romance throughout the summer

Things remained that way until Oct. 11, when the Daily Mail published photos of Perry and a man reported to be Trudeau embracing and kissing atop the pop star’s yacht while it was docked in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Eye-popping pictures that prove Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau ARE a couple: Passionate kisses. Roaming hands. After Orlando Bloom split, friends tell us exactly what’s going on…. https://t.co/AV32LMcifF

— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) October 11, 2025

The images were captured by a tourist in a passing boat who said they recognized Trudeau’s distinctive Haida tattoo on his left shoulder.

Perry seemed to hint at a new romance in her life during a show in London, England, two nights later, when a fan extended a marriage proposal on stage, prompting her to reply, “You really should have asked me about 48 hours ago.”

• Jimmy Kimmel, Montreal chefs and Katy Perry herself: What people are saying about Justin Trudeau’s new romance
• Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau spotted kissing on yacht: report