Canada

Canada needs more clean power to meet growing demand, while aiming for net-zero emissions to fight climate change.

Many Canadians want to install rooftop solar panels to help. But while that can lower their electricity bills, they can't actually get paid for it — because many jurisdictions limit the power generation of a rooftop solar system to the amount you consume, and customers can only be compensated in bill credits, not cash.

Hydro-Quebec puts it this way: "The customer's goal must be self-sufficiency and not sales."

Darren Chu, managing director of Calgary-based Utility Network and Partners, says similar rules in Alberta are frustrating.

"We have lots of customers who come to us and say, 'Well, I have all this roof space and I'm only allowed to cover a small portion of it with solar panels because that's all my consumption will allow me to do. How come I'm not allowed to export more?'" he said.

The governments of former Alberta premier Jason Kenney and now Premier Danielle Smith have been vigorously lobbied to support a private company’s high-stakes gamble on a rail line from Calgary to Banff.

With potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of public money at stake, internal government documents obtained by The Tyee raise a question.

Why did Smith personally arrange for her husband to be granted extraordinary access to confidential internal government discussions about the proposed project?

The internal documents, obtained through freedom of information, show Smith’s husband, David Moretta, attended an hour-long confidential government meeting at McDougall Centre, the provincial government’s Calgary office, on Sept. 26, 2023.

The government redacted any information that would show who else attended the meeting and what was discussed.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has written a letter to his NDP counterpart asking Jagmeet Singh to pull his party's support for the Liberal government so Canadians can go to the polls this fall instead of next year as planned.

"Canadians can't afford or even endure another year of this costly coalition. No one voted for you to keep Trudeau in power. You do not have a mandate to drag out his government another year," Poilievre wrote in his letter.

"Pull out of the costly coalition and vote non-confidence in the government this September to trigger a carbon tax election in October of THIS YEAR. Or you will forever be known as 'Sellout Singh,'" Poilievre said.

Poilievre's challenge to Singh comes as the parties square off in a federal byelection in Manitoba, a Sept. 16 vote that is expected to be a competitive two-way race between the Conservative and NDP candidates.

Reactionaries often claim that trade union leaders should "stay in their lane," focus on the wages and benefits of their membership, and keep out of international politics. However, for this author and other militant unionists, fighting for the working class at home is directly linked to the fight abroad for Palestinian liberation. The Palestinians as a nation are oppressed by not only Israel, but also the entire imperialist world order of which Israel is but an extension. In fact, the same Canadian bosses who oppress workers here at home, continue to ship weaponry to the Zionist regime abroad.

The wildfires that ravaged Canada’s boreal forests in 2023 produced more planet-warming carbon emissions than the burning of fossil fuels in all but three countries, research published on Wednesday has found.

Only China, the United States and India produced more emissions from fossil fuels than the Canadian fires, according to the study, which was published in the journal Nature.

The wildfires last year call into question how much carbon the forests will absorb in the future, scientists said. That, in turn, may make it necessary to reconsider calculations of how much more greenhouse gas humans can add to the atmosphere without pushing temperatures beyond current global targets.

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When food safety researcher Tianxi Yang became a mother, she wondered how much microplastic her son would ingest when drinking milk out of widely available plastic containers.

She says microplastic exposure and the effects of the tiny particles on human health have been on researchers' radar for at least a decade.

But testing for microplastics required costly and cumbersome equipment — so Yang set out to create a portable unit that could be used by untrained people at home.

"I think the micro and nanoplastics detection is very meaningful because it allows people to realize how much micro and nanoplastics they're being exposed to, even though they may not notice," said Yang, an assistant professor in the faculty of land and food systems at the University of British Columbia.

(Paper is here).

Whooping cough cases are on the rise in Canada, with some provinces reporting sharp increases compared to pre-pandemic averages.

More than 11,670 cases have been reported in Quebec so far this year, a significant jump from the annual average of 562 cases between 2015 and 2019.

The majority of whooping cough patients are between the ages of 10 and 14, a spokesperson for Quebec's health ministry said in an email to The Canadian Press.

The last peak of whooping cough activity in the province was in 2019, when 1,269 cases were reported, the email said.

As of June, Ontario has seen 470 whooping cough cases, compared to the five-year average of 98, a provincial dashboard shows.

Health Canada told CBC News they'll finish reviewing updated COVID vaccines by "early autumn" on the heels of the U.S. approving two updated vaccines to protect against hospitalizations and deaths.

As COVID looms over the Paralympic Games in Paris that start Wednesday following outbreaks among Olympic athletes, new subvariants of Omicron continue to ebb and flow and make people ill. Doctors and public health experts want people to consider getting immunized as part of their fall plans.

Mandy Cohen, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters on Aug. 22 why officials think the updated vaccines are important.

"While the COVID virus continues to mutate and change faster than the flu virus, our underlying immunity from prior vaccines and prior infections provides some protection," Cohen said. "But we know that protection decreases over time, and certain groups continue to be at higher risk from COVID and other viruses, and we need to continue to protect ourselves and our loved ones."

In Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and other policing agencies, including the Toronto Police Service and the Ontario Provincial Police, have already been called out by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada for using the Clearview AI technology to conduct mass surveillance.

Clearview AI has a database of over three billion images that were collected without consent by scraping the internet. Clearview AI matches faces from the database against other footage. This violates Canadian privacy laws. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has critiqued RCMP use of this technology and the Toronto Police Services suspended use of that product.

Is it weird to be an American interested in Canadian news?

I figured that right to repair is a topic many of us are interested in. The survey below by ISED Canada, a department of the Government of Canada, is open until September 26, 2024.

Canadians can provide their input at the following link: https://ised-isde.survey-sondage.ca/f/s/RTR

Several types of contact lenses have been recalled due to “an isolated quality issue,” Health Canada reported Monday.

The problem was related to a third party solvent used in manufacturing, according to a government notice about Total1 and Total30 lenses. A substance found within that solvent was detected in the finished lenses, triggering the recall.

A full list of affected products can be found here.

So glad tax payers have been paying the salary for this officer for over two years. My read from the article is that we are STILL paying his salary despite him being convicted on 15 counts.

Canada’s government on Monday announced it is imposing a 100% tariff on imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles that matches U.S. tariffs and follows similar plans announced by the European Commission.

The announcement followed encouragement by U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan during a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and cabinet ministers on Sunday. Sullivan is set to make his first visit to Beijing on Tuesday.

Trudeau said Canada also will impose a 25% tariff on Chinese steel and aluminum.

“Actors like China have chosen to give themselves an unfair advantage in the global marketplace,” he said.