Health Canada’s witness in the Drug User Liberation Front’s (DULF) judicial review trial frustrated the judge and highlighted how opaque and frustrating Canadian drug policy can be.

On Monday Eric Costen, who was associate deputy minister for Health Canada from June 2023 to September 2025, was questioned by DULF’s lawyers, Tim Dickson and Stephanie Dickson. Costen had worked for Health Canada since 2002 and had worked as an executive since 2006.

He told the court his role as associate deputy minister made him “No. 2” at Health Canada on the public service side.

Despite his role and tenure at Health Canada, Costen replied to almost every one of Tim Dickson’s questions with a hedging response, such as “I’m not sure I remember” or “That was outside of my department.”

Justice Catherine Murray chastised Costen several times while he was on the stand.

When asked how pharmaceutical-grade heroin could have been approved for non-medical safer supply programs, Costen said he wasn’t familiar with the process for changing regulations because he wasn’t involved in the regulatory side of Health Canada.

Murray spoke up. “You were one of the head people in the country dealing with drug regulations and the toxic drug crisis,” she said. “So if an issue goes strictly outside of your box into another bureaucrat’s, you just stop paying attention?”

“Is the whole time you are being asked about vague, or just the questions you’ve been asked so far?” Murray said, referring to Costen’s responses. “Did you refresh your memory in order to testify meaningfully today?”

Murray also said he seemed to be “seeing [evidence] for the first time and guessing” in his responses, and provided responses of “very little value” despite being asked to talk about emails he had sent and meetings he had been in during his time at Health Canada.

The term Zionist will be treated as hate speech, a policy articulated by the newly appointed CEO, Adam Presser, while allowing its continued use in political contexts or self-identification.

In a year-old video by the World Jewish Congress (WJC) that recently resurfaced on social media, Presser outlines how the platform classifies the term Zionist within its moderation framework, saying, “We made a change to designate the use of the term Zionist as a proxy for a protected attribute as hate speech.”

He specified that use of the term Zionist in a positive context, such as identifying as a “proud Zionist,” remains permitted, but that using it as a “dirty name” will be classified as hate speech and subject to censorship.

He goes on to describe enforcement levels and outside coordination, saying that “we tripled the amount of accounts that we were banning for hateful activity,” adding that “over two dozen Jewish organizations” are “constantly feeding us intelligence and information when they spot violative trends.”

Presser further frames the push for political censorship as an open-ended process, saying “There’s no finish line to moderating hate speech, identifying hateful trends, trying to keep the platform safe.”

He concluded, “There’s no such thing as an endgame.”

I manage a handful of small websites and have recently switched from Windows to Mint. I was using PortableApps to keep the sites separated, and for the moment want to do the same. I've set up VirtualBox with a cut down Windows 10 installation, and added the root folder of the websites as a shared folder, so Websites/Site1, Websites/Site2 etc. The root folder is still on an NTFS drive.

So far, everything works, except I can't run the PortableApps suite from the shared folder in VirtualBox. PortableApps runs and updates, but the apps don't work properly. Thunderbird is ok but has random glitches, Firefox launches but sites don't load, and Chrome instantly closes. If I copy the folder for the individual site into the virtual machine though, it works perfectly.

I'm assuming that it's a permissions problem, as the NTFS drive is owned by me but is in the root group, but copying the files to the virtual machine copies them to the vboxuser group, which I'm a member of. The fstab entry for the drive is:

UUID=BAB4BFE2B4BF9EF7 /mnt/Storage ntfs defaults,uid=tippon 0 2

but from what I can gather, it should have my UID and GID instead. The examples and questions I've found online have some extra details at the end with no explanation though, like dmask=022, fmask=133, and I don't want to risk editing my fstab without understanding them.

So, to finally get to the question, if I replace uid=tippon with uid=1000,gid=1000 (my user and group), would that let me access the files from within VirtualBox, as well as whichever other programs I might want to use, and would it break anything?