Last night I stood in the kind of hip club space I haven't visited since my 20s, jammed with nominees for the annual Canadian Online Publishing Awards. That spirit of course imbues our own upstart site here at HuffPost Canada, which was nominated for no fewer than eight awards. You can imagine how proud I was, as the former Managing Editor of Blogs here, to see our talented writers walk away with both the Gold and Silver awards for Best Blog in the daily and weekly newspapers, and broadcasters category.

I expect most people wouldn't send donations if they knew what the Humane Society of the United States actually was. It doesn't run any shelters. It has no veterinary clinics. A good deal of their funding comes from people who don't have the slightest idea of their real agenda.

I admire Wikipedia -- always have -- but how do the official gardeners at Wikipedia respond when they have a snake in their grass? In my case, a biased commenter is still an editor in good standing, but the people who pointed out his fraudulence have been mostly banned.

Nathan Winograd is the leader of the No Kill movement, a genuine revolution in animal welfare. Over three million healthy and adoptable pets will be killed next year in America's shelters. Not, however, if Winograd and his growing army have any say. I caught up with him a few weeks after the No Kill Advocacy Centre's annual conference in Washington D.C.

When the no-kill shelter in Shelby County, Kentucky recently announced that they had run out of space -- and were hence going to have to start killing healthy dogs and cats -- officials received a nice basket of gourmet cookies, with a note signed from PETA: "Thank you for doing the right thing."

People naturally assume that the animal rights movement is simply an extension of the human rights movement. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), however, is a political movement primarily focused on the right to determine when and how an animal should die. Those who donate to PETA are almost never aware of this.

Why is a so-called animal rights group willing to go to war over its right to kill healthy pets unnecessarily? "No Kill" -- defined as a euthanasia rate of not more than 10 per cent of a given shelter's pets -- has been achieved wherever it has been strictly implemented. Perhaps the most sickening aspect of PETA's assault on the No Kill movement is that it blocks groups from rescuing animals in high-kill shelters.

PETA may soon lose the right to kill healthy pets. Currently, the headquarters of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Norfolk, Virginia kills 97 per cent of the animals delivered into its care. Norfolk, however, may soon pass legislation to make the city a "No Kill" zone.

Over the past eight months, I have had the pleasure of being one of Conrad Black's editors. His blogs have arrived weekly from prison like clockwork. Often I wondered how he wrote these from prison. I don't just mean the mechanics (because those were obviously an issue: How do you get access to a computer? Do you have Internet?). But how did he manage to keep up on everything? Reading his highly informed and topical blogs you would never know this was a man almost entirely cut off from the information sources we take for granted. Here's the bottom line: The key to Conrad's survival has been his mind.

Bill Maher is pretty much the last person you'd expect to get sucked in by PETA, Ingrid Newkirk's cult of euthanasia. For Maher to uncritically cheerlead for one of the ugliest cults in America is truly disheartening. And, unlike most of the celebrity cults, PETA does real damage, on a gruesome scale.

Happy Earth Day! I hope to spend today, ideally, puttering about my garden. Yes, we can all aspire to do something more high-minded, but even just beautifying your own patch of soil contributes to the pleasure of everyone around you (including even something as simple as a window box).

Relaxing, too, will help me recover from what was truly an amazing week here at HuffPost -- and what promises to be another in the coming week. In home news, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney joined our editorial team on Wednesday for dinner -- and a no-holds-barred question session, including questions from our readers. You'll be impressed by his frankness.

While Rick Santorum was dropping out of the GOP political race for personal reasons, and Hilary Rosen was making personal attacks on Anne Romney for political reasons, AOL/HuffingtonPost office politics became big personal news (at least for those of us working here): Microsoft agreed to buy $1.06 billion worth of AOL patents. (Yes, Dr. Evil, that's one. billion. dollars -- or $999,440,106.20 CDN).I can't claim any insider information as to what this means to AOL/Huffpost in general, or AOL/Huffpost Canada in specific. At minimum, I'm hoping for a new stapler.

Two major government budgets were released this week, by Ontario and the Feds respectively; as widely anticipated, both will balance spending and eliminate debt by the end of the year with no cuts to any social services. Critics from the left and right applauded the leaders for showing such fiscal responsibility while managing to balance the needs of all Canadian citizens. Asked how he expected to deal with the looming crisis with old age pensions, Prime Minister Harper noted that the budget called for the phasing out of seniors beginning in 2016... Okay, now that I've got my April Fool's joke out of the way, let's look back upon the messy conflagration of human events that constitutes last week's news highlights here at Huffpost.

We should all be upset by animal homelessness, but for the right reasons -- not to take the spotlight off abuses in the meat, fur, and circus industries, but so that we can come together to end it.

It's not often you get an environment minister sitting down with a bunch of reporters and editorial staff to a no-holds-barred question-and-answer session, let alone a minister who has become as controversial as Peter Kent.

Yet that's what happened on Thursday at HuffPost, as we initiated our series of monthly lunches with Very Important People You Need to Hear From. When we informed the minister going in that he was our guinea pig, he wondered aloud if he was not in fact our sacrificial lamb? Not quite.

PETA advertises itself as the largest animal rights organization in the world, with over three million members and supporters. PETA stages "rescue" operations of abused animals, and can serve a useful purpose, which it is exceedingly adept at publicizing. What PETA does not publicize, however, it euthanizes -- kills -- some 85% of the animals it rescues.

World-renowned Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac confronted PETA protesters in downtown Windsor, Ont., on Friday afternoon. ...