Canada

Without informed input, the ban could worsen life for workers and undermine powerful worker-led strategies that can improve poor conditions.

A "bomb cyclone" that brought wind gusts of up to 160 km/h to parts of the B.C. South Coast led to highway closures and power outages affecting thousands of people Tuesday night, and forced a group of school children on Vancouver Island to shelter in a school for hours.

At around 8 p.m. PT, the weather station on Sartine Island — just off the coast of northern Vancouver Island — recorded wind gusts of 159 km/h.

The bomb cyclone, which formed in the Pacific Ocean 400 kilometres west of Tofino, B.C., could see a pressure drop of 60 millibars over a 24-hour stretch at the centre of the storm — which forecasters say is highly unusual for B.C.

Mahdavi says U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration measurements are showing waves taller than 10 metres on the open ocean west of Vancouver Island, and waves are expected to grow considerably into Tuesday night.

The Agenda: Is Monopoly Power Undermining the Canadian Food System?

19 Nov 2024

A new report from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project argues Canada's food system is being undermined by monopoly. And while grocery stores have become an easy target for consumer anger over the cost of food, this report says consolidation has occurred at all levels of the supply chain. The Agenda looks at the implications of the report.

NATO increases pressure on Canada to devote public resources to war rather than pressing security and social needs. In July the Liberals committed to reaching NATO’s target of spending two per cent of GDP on the military by 2032. Recently the Parliamentary Budget Officer calculated Canada would need to spend $41 billion more per year on warfare to reach NATO’s target. Already, Canadian military spending has doubled from $20 billion to $41 billion over the past decade partly in a bid to reach the NATO target. And now Ottawa plans to double it again to $82 billion. This starves society of resources to overcome far more pressing social needs like building hundreds of thousands of units of public housing.

Environment Canada is warning that a "bomb cyclone" is expected to bring powerful winds to most of Vancouver Island and the B.C. coast, with hurricane-force gusts of 120 km/h predicted for some areas this week.

The weather agency has issued more than a dozen warnings for coastal areas, saying the peak wind speeds are expected Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

Areas expected to be hit hardest include northern Vancouver Island and the north and central coasts, but gusts of up to 100 km/h are also forecast for heavily populated centres including Victoria and the Sunshine Coast.

As we watch negotiations at the COP29 climate change conference and mark the one-year anniversary of Canada’s pledge to triple its nuclear capacity by 2050, the reality would appear to be clear: there is no feasible net-zero future without the deployment of new nuclear power.

This pledge signals a shift for a country that just three years ago excluded nuclear from its clean energy funding programs. Nuclear power, historically controversial, is increasingly viewed by leaders across the political spectrum as key to helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

cross-posted from: /c/britishcolumbia

"Our hands are outstretched to any MLA that wants to work with us on [our] key priorities with just one bright line exception: we will not tolerate hate, discrimination, conspiracy theory garbage."

Halifax police say the death of a 19-year-old woman found dead last month inside a large oven at a Walmart in the city's west end is not suspicious and there is no evidence of foul play.

Halifax Regional Police offered a short update in a news release on the case Monday, but did not say how Kaur died, only that the death was not suspicious.

Walmart said last week the bakery oven was being removed from the store. Removing the oven had always been part of a standard remodel program being implemented across the country, the company said.

Doctors called out for being biased, faulty or careless expert witnesses in court are being hired by insurance companies looking to deny injury claims for people hurt in car crashes.

Medical experts have a duty to help the court by offering independent, objective and unbiased evidence in cases where opposing sides often clash on what the facts are.

Despite that, doctors and other health professionals who are called out for shoddy testimony face no consequences and there's nothing stopping them from appearing in court again, according to accident victim advocate Rhona DesRoches.

Despite a snubbing by government officials unlike any she has seen, Francesca Albanese says she was “uplifted” by her visit to Canada.

Over the course of a week, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories attended several community events, and did not hold back from scathing criticisms of Israel’s 13-month assault on Gaza.

Albanese, an Italian academic and lawyer who has held the voluntary UN position since 2022, had been invited to meet with government officials, as well as make a scheduled appearance at a parliamentary foreign affairs committee. Both events were cancelled a week before her arrival.

But Albanese still spoke to large gatherings of workers, academics, and students in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto. She identified Canada as part of a small group of countries who have “continued to allow and nurture the arrogance that is at the origins of Israeli behaviour today.”

As the gambling industry continues to grow globally with the rise of online gambling, a recent report from the medical journal The Lancet's commission on gambling calls is calling on governments to approach gambling as a public health issue.

Malcolm Sparrow, one of the authors of the report, says this will put gambling in the same category as alcohol and tobacco, which are identified by the World Health Organization as issues of the public interest.

Statistics Canada estimates that in 2018, nearly two-thirds of Canadians gambled in the past year. The data estimates that about 300,000 Canadians were at moderate-to-severe risk of developing a gambling problem, where gambling starts to negatively affect a person's life.

So, if more lanes and bigger roads don't alleviate traffic, why doesn't the province invest in more robust public transit? The government has already expanded GO train services by 15% on existing lines in the greater Golden Horseshoe. If the goal was to alleviate traffic in this region, would it not make more sense to create more GO Transit lines and provide alternatives to being stuck in traffic?

As is the trend in Canadian politics, the goal is not to solve public issues, but rather to enrich private coffers. A 2021 National Observer investigation highlighted that eight of Ontario's biggest real estate developers own land near the proposed route of Highway 413.

The developers listed in the report are: Cortellucci, De Gasperis, Guglietti and De Meneghi families, John Di Poce, Benny Marotta, Argo Development and Fieldgate Homes. The De Gasperis family was implicated in the Greenbelt Scandal, having used seven of their companies to buy protected land that Doug Ford would have opened for development.

All the developers listed above have been prolific donators to the Ontario PCs, having donated money in the tens of thousands either to the party directly or to the Conservative third-party foundation Ontario Proud.

I'm a rural emergency room doctor — and I feel the need to publicly apologize.

I'm sorry that many of you are often not receiving the health care you need, in the right place or at the right time. And I'm sorry that many of you don't have a primary care provider, that wait times are so long and that I sometimes see you in the hallway where you have little privacy. While this happening in our rural hospital in Kenora, Ont., I've seen similar experiences reflected in emergency rooms across the country.

So, I need you to believe me when I say that my colleagues and I cannot fix these problems ourselves. In fact, trying to fix the problem has pushed some of us to the point of leaving the profession — and the effort to look after ourselves may worsen services.