Canada

And yet they are braying for Trump Lite who is playing directly from the US christofascist playbook of grievance and identity politics while making impossible promises without ever telling us how he plans to deliver. But, he's"not Trudeau" amiright?

A grieving mother says her daughter is one of dozens of bodies being stored in Newfoundland and Labrador's largest hospital, lying unclaimed and prolonging the pain her family is going through.

Janice Strickland said the high cost of funerals and government inaction is what's keeping her daughter in a freezer unit and not buried.

In March, CBC News reported 28 bodies were being stored in freezer units outside the Health Sciences Centre due to a lack of space in the morgue, which doubles as the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Newfoundland and Labrador families on income support can apply for provincial government assistance for up to $2,338 to help with cremation or burial costs, but that figure hasn't changed in nearly two decades.

An encroaching wildfire that forced thousands of people to flee the community of Jasper overnight is now burning 12 kilometres south of the Alberta mountain town as shifting winds threaten to fan the flames.

Government officials say at least 10,000 residents and visitors were forced to evacuate from Jasper National Park after a wildfire roared into the area late Monday night.

With little notice, people were forced to flee west over mountain roads into British Columbia, through darkness, soot and ash.

"One fire is approximately 12 kilometres south of Jasper on both sides of the river and wind may exacerbate the situation," Mike Ellis, Alberta's minister of public safety and emergency services, said during a news conference Tuesday.

In 2023, the cost of policing to Canadian taxpayers closed in on $20 billion for the first time. While annual police budgets continue to grow, there is little debate in the media about its cost to taxpayers and the value for money in relation to crime reduction.

This 50 per cent increase over inflation in the cost of policing from 20 years ago is now coinciding with disturbing increases in violent crime. Homicides are up, stoking public fear. Violent crime has returned to levels seen 20 years ago. Canada’s homicide rate is second only to the United States among G7 countries, and is rising as the American rate drops.

The rate of homicide involving Indigenous victims is six times that of non-Indigenous people, and it’s three times higher for Black men.

With one in three women experiencing some form of violence in their lifetimes, intimate partner and sexual violence is now recognized as being at epidemic levels.

The majority of policing costs are paid from municipal taxes and have risen faster than expenditures on transit or social services. The cost of policing at the municipal level per capita varies considerably from a high of $496 annually for Vancouver to a low of $217 in Québec City.

Though much of the rhetoric for justifying increasing police budgets is about crime, an analysis of trends over the last 20 years in Canada could not find any correlation between increases in municipal police budgets and a reduction in crime rates.

Our review of studies in the United Kingdom and the United States shows that investments in programs tackling risk factors give better returns than innovations like problem-oriented policing.

Canada provided up to $200 million to pipeline company Coastal Gaslink, recently updated financial data reveals — an apparent violation of a commitment to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.

According to Export Development Canada (EDC), a Crown corporation that provides loans and grants to help businesses reach the market, Coastal Gaslink was given between $100 million and $200 million worth of project financing to help it export gas. The publicly-disclosed financing is thin on details, but was signed on June 27.

Coastal GasLink, owned by Calgary-based TC Energy, snakes through several Indigenous territories, including the Wet’suwet’en Nation. Wet’suwet’en hereditary leadership, who maintains jurisdiction over the land in question, opposes the pipeline. Hereditary Chief Namoks (also known as John Ridsdale), told Canada’s National Observer he was disappointed to see hundreds of millions of dollars provided to a company violating his nation’s rights.

Any government funding “that goes against human rights, Indigenous rights and [the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] simply should not be allowed,” he said.

“So it clearly shows the oil and gas industry is steering the government.”

Five years ago, Kim Gavine, general manager of Conservation Ontario, warned that the province was already “experiencing stronger and more frequent flood events as a result of climate change impacts."

Instead of taking this threat seriously, Doug Ford slashed Ontario’s funding for flood management programs and has recklessly tried to pave the Greenbelt, a crucial network of protected waterways and wetlands that help prevent flooding. By prioritizing the interests of his corporate developer buddies and expanding gas power plants when we desperately need to be transitioning to a green grid and investing in proactive resilience measures, Ford is making communities across the province more vulnerable to climate disasters like what I just experienced.

This isn’t just a Toronto or Ontario problem either. David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, described last week’s massive urban flooding as our new reality. Our governments, at every level, need to do what it takes to better prepare for these escalating climate impacts everywhere.

We don’t yet know the full extent of the damage from last week’s storms, but Global News' Chief Meteorologist reported that the flooding was likely to be “worse and more widespread than the recent benchmark event in July 2013 and that was a billion-dollar disaster.” A billion dollars that our already strapped municipal government doesn’t have, money that we desperately need for housing, transit, and social services.

After nine years of waiting for a decision in a human rights complaint, a Winnipeg woman has been offered $175,000 in compensation, minus some deductions, by her former employer after she complained about a sexist atmosphere in the workplace.

The complaint was filed by Gwen Jaques against her former employer, Price Industries, a large multinational manufacturing company based in Winnipeg.

Jaques filed a complaint with the Manitoba Human Rights Commission in 2015 after she was dismissed in June that year from her sales job at the company, which makes products such as air purification equipment.

The complaint alleges that in violation of the Manitoba Human Rights Code, Jaques was discriminated against on the basis of her sex and her age at the time (53), and that she was subjected to harassment.

Environment Canada is warning of heavy thunderstorms and high winds in parts of the province already dealing with out-of-control wildfires.

The weather agency says the Fraser Canyon, including Lytton, could see winds of up to 70 km/h, but the gusts were expected to ease by Monday evening.

Severe thunderstorm warnings for the Interior and north. including in the Cariboo where wildfires are threatening the communities of Wells, the historic town of Barkerville and parts of Williams Lake.

The warnings also apply to the Peace River region from Mackenzie to Tumbler Ridge, the Williston and McGregor areas and the Lakes District.

I'm sorry to see Canada getting hit by yet another big fire and smoke season. Hang in there, friends. We're burning down here in the northwest US, too.

This image was taken from NASA's daily satellite view with hot spots highlighted in red.

And, for anyone curious, here's an interactive USA/Canada wildfire map.

Along the banks of Hunt Lake in the south of Whiteshell Provincial Park, the largemouth bass stalks in the water, threatening the survival of other fish in the ecosystem.

But this competitive, aggressive predator wasn't always part of Hunt Lake. Anglers first spotted the freshwater fish there in 2023 — and unlike other species, the largemouth bass was neither native to the ecosystem nor brought to the lake through provincial fish farming programs.

Instead, it's there because people have put it into the lake illegally, said Eric Mullen, a provincial regional fisheries manager responsible for eastern Manitoba.

Those kinds of illegally introduced species have had what Mullen calls an "adverse impact" on native fish populations, which have since declined in numbers and become less healthy.

https://www.goldstreamgazette.com/national-news/trudeau-and-family-head-to-bc-for-vacation-in-unnamed-location-7450389

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