Canada

Canada has already begun talks with members of Donald Trump's circle about avoiding new trade tariffs if he's elected U.S. president this fall.

If it happens, the Canadians have warned of retaliation.

The public line from Canada for months has been that Trump's proposed 10 per cent tariff should not apply on this continent because of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade deal.

But CBC News has learned that a deeper conversation is already underway: Trump's allies aren't promising any relief, and the sides are discussing what a negotiation might look like to maintain tariff-free trade.

The bottom line: within months, Canada could find itself in trade negotiations again with Trump if he wins this election.

In March, Saini says he twice drove a company rig to California, with a co-worker, spending more than 10 days on the road and covering over 16,000 kilometres. But the promised paycheque never came.

"I'm owed like $3,000 from them," he said, noting the lack of a paycheque meant he was struggling to make payments for his car and rent. "I even had to borrow money from my friends."

Trucking is big business in this country. The industry employs close to 350,000 people, according to Transport Canada, with new firms starting up on a regular basis. But as the industry grows, so do issues surrounding payments for drivers, who often find themselves fighting for what they're owed.

"It is a huge problem," says Navi Aujla, director of the Labour Community Services of Peel, a non-profit that has taken up the cases of more than 250 truckers over the last two years. "The majority of people that call us for help, it's related to wage theft. They've already had to leave the job because they haven't been getting paid."

Vandertop, a co-founder of Don't Mess with the Don, says the restaurant chain Tim Hortons has a big problem when it comes to litter. The registered charity, run by volunteers, cleans up trash from ravines in the Don Valley and says it has picked up about 136,078 kilograms of garbage in the past six years.

The number one brand it finds in its garbage cleanups is Tim Hortons, Vandertop said.

"Imagine — Tim Hortons has more than 4,000 stores across Canada now and that would be millions and millions of cups and lids all strewn out throughout our parks, streets, wild spaces. And this is only cups and lids. There's also food wrappers, containers and other beverage containers," she said.

"I think Tim Hortons, as a flagship Canadian company, has a tremendous opportunity here to do something good for the world and for the environment that we live in. This is not in line with the times."

Karen Wirsig, senior program manager for plastics at Environmental Defence, an environmental advocacy organization, said it's important to hold corporations accountable for the waste they produce. Wirsig said Tim Hortons is a major generator of single-use plastic waste when it comes to its takeout packaging.

The investment preserves about 1,800 jobs in Oakville, plus Ford will add 150 workers at a Windsor, Ontario, engine plant and about 70 positions at some U.S. component factories.

IMF Reports predicts Canada to have the largest growth in G7 for 2025:

“[Carbon capture] is a dangerous distraction driven by the same big polluters who have caused the climate emergency,” Julia Levin, associate director of national climate for Environmental Defence, told Canada’s National Observer in a phone interview.

This situation is “especially frustrating because Strathcona has no intention of paying a single dime between getting 50 per cent of their capital costs covered by the investment tax credit and 50 per cent covered by the Canada Growth Fund,” Levin said.

“Why are taxpayers covering the full cost of one of the country's largest oil producers to continue to extract more oil?”

Tell me we don't live in a plutocracy, ffs.

The federal government wants to restrict farmers' ability to save seeds and other reproductive plant materials like tree grafts for some crops – and is asking farmers to comment on the changes during the height of the growing season.

Last month, the government announced it is considering amendments to Canada's seed laws that would force farmers to pay seed companies royalties for decades after their original purchase of seeds from protected varieties of plants. Even if farmers grow that plant variety in later years with seed they produced themselves from earlier crops, instead of buying new seed, they must pay the royalties for over 20 years.

If passed, the changes will apply to horticultural crops like vegetables, fruit trees and ornamental plants. They will also restrict farmers’ ability to save and use hybrid seeds, which combine the desirable traits of several genetically different varieties. Public consultations on the proposed changes opened May 29, 2024 and ends on July 12, 2024.

Critics say the move will further exacerbate a crisis in Canadian seed diversity, supply and resilience to climate change. Over the past 100 years, 75 per cent of agricultural biodiversity has declined globally, and only 10 per cent of remaining crop varieties are commercially available in the country.

Public transit advocates are criticizing a $30-billion plan to improve public transportation unveiled by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday. [...] Trudeau called the investment the “largest public transit investment in Canadian history.” But for Nate Wallace, Environmental Defence’s clean transportation program manager, the announcement misses the mark almost entirely.

The Canada Public Transit Fund will invest approximately $3 billion per year, over 10 years, in public transit by providing “baseline funding” that can be used to upgrade and replace things like buses and trains, as well as specific project-based funding for things like electrification and transportation in Indigenous communities. The money won’t start flowing until 2026 –– after the next federal election. None of it is going to cover day-to-day operations, which observers note is the major gap transit systems are dealing with right now. [bold is mine]

Transit is expensive to operate, and in the pandemic years, municipalities were stretched thin as workers stayed home, exacerbating a ridership crisis years in the making. Cities began hiking fares and cutting service to make up for budget shortfalls, which saved money in the short term but discouraged use.

Due to these year-over-year budget shortfalls, totalling over $1 billion since the pandemic began, the TTC is now facing a potential “death spiral” of declining revenues and ensuing service cuts, according to The Globe and Mail. In Vancouver, TransLink expects a funding gap of $600 million in 2026, while Montreal’s transit authority, the Société de transport de Montréal (STM), anticipates a budget shortfall of $560 million next year, growing to nearly $700 million by 2028.

“It feels like this program is being announced in a separate universe. A universe where transit systems aren't facing massive operating deficits,” Wallace said. “Transit systems can't plan for the future if they're struggling to figure out how to keep the lights on today.”

The former CEO of Shared Health saw his pay exceed $600,000 last year — a nearly 83 per cent increase from the prior year — despite only working for four months before his unexpected departure from the provincial health-care organization.

Adam Topp earned $603,604 in 2023, according to recent compensation disclosures.

The same documents reveal some executives also claimed in the range of $30,000 to $60,000 in extra compensation, attributed at least partially to them collecting retroactive pay increases to match the raises of unionized health-care staff.

Topp led Shared Health for less than four months in 2023 before the organization described his departure as a "resignation" in a brief, two-sentence statement to media near the end of April. The announcement of his replacement — Lanette Siragusa, one of the public faces of Manitoba's COVID-19 response — was made the next day.

Federal Labour Minister Seamus O'Regan is resigning from cabinet, CBC News has learned.

O'Regan, 53, is stepping down for family reasons, sources said. The Newfoundland and Labrador MP is planning to stay on as a member of Parliament until the next federal election but won't seek re-election, the sources added.

The government is expected to announce his replacement in cabinet on Friday.

O'Regan was elected to Parliament in 2015 as the MP for St. John's South-Mount Pearl. He has been in cabinet since 2017 and has also held the natural resources, Indigenous services and veterans affairs portfolios. He took over as labour minister in 2021.

Before entering politics, O'Regan was a host of the CTV morning show Canada AM and a national correspondent for the network.

Faye Dzikewich waited in a Guelph, Ont., courtroom all day for her son's bail hearing before learning he had died four hours earlier.

Now, she's searching for answers.

Nathaniel Schofield, 36, went into medical distress while in custody at an Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) facility in Rockwood. The case now involves the province's Special Investigations Unit (SIU) — the civilian law enforcement agency investigates circumstances involving police that result in serious injury, death or allegations of sexual assault.

The SIU release said first-aid was administered before Schofield was rushed to the Guelph hospital. He was pronounced dead at 11:20 a.m., five hours before his mother got the call.

But before Dzikewich could do anything else, she was told by SIU that they needed to interview her.

Canada's prime minister announced Wednesday the appointment of Lieutenant-General Jennie Carignan as the first woman to lead the G7 and NATO member nation's military.

Last month, Alberta didn’t just announce it had transitioned entirely off coal as an energy source; the province kicked the fossil fuel six years ahead of a wildly ambitious schedule. The scale of achievement this represents defies exaggeration—and contains a warning for oil fans everywhere. [...] what happened to coal is coming for oil next.

Virtually every major analyst that isn’t an oil company (and even some of them, like BP) now expects global demand for oil to peak around 2030, if not sooner; McKinsey, Rystad Energy, DNV, and the International Energy Agency all agree. This places Canada in a uniquely vulnerable position. Oil is Canada’s biggest export by a mile, a vital organ of our economy: we sold $123 billion worth of it in 2022 (cars came in second, at just under $30 billion). Three quarters of that oil is exported as bitumen—the most expensive, emissions-heavy form of petroleum in the market and therefore the hardest to sell. That makes us incredibly sensitive to fluctuations in global demand. Think of coal as the canary in our oil patch.

Canada's 13 premiers sat shoulder-to-shoulder Wednesday to both call on the federal government for help and to tell it to step away from their jurisdiction.

During the three days the premiers met for the annual Council of the Federation conference in Halifax, they described tensions in their relationship with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government. But the provincial and territorial leaders didn't leave the sunny port city without first issuing a list of requests.

The premiers attacked what they see as Ottawa's habit of intervening in areas of provincial responsibility ranging from dental care to the cod fishery.

As the meetings wrapped up Wednesday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford took aim at the federal government's billion-dollar national school food program, which promises to deliver meals to an additional 400,000 children per year.

The Department of National Defence is actively considering whether to retire some older ships, planes and other items of equipment that have become difficult and costly to maintain — including the aircraft belonging to the iconic Snowbird demonstration squadron.

Children in the care of a for-profit private foster home provider were given cannabis daily, allowed to go to homes where they were sexually exploited, and taken to see known drug dealers by staff, according to newly unsealed search warrant documents obtained by CBC News.

Spirit Rising House has been under police investigation since February, after a social media post raised allegations the company was providing marijuana to youth in its care as a form of harm reduction.

Sources told CBC several people connected with Spirit Rising House have been arrested, but charges have not yet been laid.

In a sworn affidavit, Winnipeg police said the evidence they collected shows that people who were involved in Spirit Rising House were "criminally negligent" and caused numerous children in care to suffer bodily harm.

New text messages unearthed by Conservative MPs on the Commons ethics committee show Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault's former business partner Stephen Anderson citing the name "Randy" in multiple text messages — a year after he claims he stopped working with the minister.

The opposition parties are looking into whether Boissonnault was continuing to do business with his previous company after being sworn into cabinet.

Cabinet ministers are forbidden from managing or operating a business or commercial activity.

Text messages brought forward at Wednesday's ethics committee show nine text messages in which Anderson mentions a "Randy" in correspondence with Malvina Ghaoui, a businesswoman who has since sued Global Health Imports (GHI), the company co-founded by Boissonnault and Anderson.