Canada

Federal authorities began probing TD's internal controls after agents discovered a Chinese criminal operation bribed employees and brought large bags of cash into branches to launder millions of dollars in fentanyl sales through TD branches in New York and New Jersey, a source confirmed.

Kelsey Gallagher, a researcher with the arms monitoring group Project Ploughshares, said the admission comes as no surprise, since there is no codified definition of “non-lethal” goods in Canadian military export regulations. He noted that all military goods enable lethal operations in some way.

“Given the level of humanitarian harm being witnessed in Gaza and now the wider Middle East, I think it’s entirely inappropriate for the Canadian government to politicize messaging on this issue in such a way that it misleads the public,” he explained.

“If the intention was to mislead Canadians regarding the threat posed by Canada’s continued arming of Israel, then I think that goal was achieved.”

Jennifer Johnson, Lacombe-Ponoka legislature member, has been welcomed back into the United Conservative Party (UCP).

Johnson was banned in 2023 over comments where she compared the issue of transgender students in Alberta's schools to baking cookies with feces inside.

“We can be top three per cent but that little bit of poop is what wrecks it,” Johnson said in audio from a 2022 talk at the Western Unity Group in Stettler.

“This is more than a teaspoon of poop in the cookie batch, right?"

Another beluga whale has died at Marineland and four years into a provincial probe, Ontario's solicitor general is saying little about the investigation's progress.

The latest beluga death is the fourth in the past year, provincial records show. Since 2019, 16 belugas and one killer whale have died at the Niagara Falls, Ont., tourist attraction, the only place in the country that still holds whales in captivity. And three out of five belugas that Marineland sold to Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut have died since being moved there in the spring of 2021.

Ontario's Animal Welfare Services, which is part of the Ministry of the Solicitor General, launched an investigation into Marineland in 2020. The next year, the province declared all marine mammals at Marineland in distress due to poor water quality and ordered the park to fix the issue — the park appealed while denying its animals were in distress, but later dropped that appeal.

A national bird conservation organization says grassland habitat loss on the Prairies has created a "conservation crisis" for dozens of species of birds.

The crisis is illustrated in a new State of Canada's Birds report published Tuesday by Birds Canada in partnership with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

It says that since 1970, when dependable bird count data started being kept, birds living full or part time in Prairie grasslands have declined by 67 per cent.

Birds that live primarily or only in Prairie grassland areas have declined by 90 per cent over that same time period, the report shows.

The young man put it this way to the police officer: Halifax lawyer Billy Sparks had done more for him than even his own mother. He'd taken him golfing and to the casino, paid for food and beer, and let him sleep on the couch when he needed a place to stay.

But in August 2023, the young man shared a secret with the constable, whom he had come to trust. For about two years, he said, Sparks had also been extorting him, requesting explicit photos and videos in exchange for representing him in criminal cases.

Sparks, 52, killed himself earlier this year in the south-end Halifax duplex where he lived, just days after police searched the home, which doubled as a law office, as they investigated allegations he had groomed, extorted and sexually assaulted vulnerable clients with little money.

The roots of this odd struggle can be traced to a motion passed by the House before MPs went on their summer break.

With opposition MPs voting in favour and Liberal MPs voting against, the House adopted a Conservative motion on June 10 that ordered the government to turn over documents related to Sustainable Development Technology Canada, the federal agency that was shut down in June after the auditor general raised serious concerns about its management.

Such production orders are not unheard of, but in this case the Conservatives went a step further. According to the motion, the documents were to be provided to the House's law clerk, who would then turn them over to the RCMP.

(RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme stated) "It is therefore highly unlikely that any information obtained by the RCMP under the Motion where privacy interests exist could be used to support a criminal prosecution or further a criminal investigation."

"The House order solely required the law clerk and parliamentary counsel to transmit the documents," Scheer told the House in September. "It has not obliged the RCMP to open the envelope or insert the USB key into a computer."

But if that's the case, what exactly is the point of this current fight?

...and a fact check of the statements made in the interview.

Scurvy is a disease that likely conjures up images of sickly sailors from hundreds of years ago, but doctors in Canada are being warned to look out for the condition now, as a result of growing food insecurity.

A report published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) details the case study of a 65-year-old woman diagnosed with scurvy at a Toronto hospital last year.

The authors say the case points to the need for physicians to consider the possibility of scurvy, particularly among patients at higher risk for nutrient deficiencies, including people with low socioeconomic status and isolated older adults.

"This isn't the first case of scurvy that I've seen in my career so far," said Dr. Sally Engelhart, the study's lead author and an internal medicine specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

Inflation and higher interest rates have eroded Canadians' purchasing power since 2022, particularly for lower-income households, a new report from the parliamentary budget officer has found.

But wealthier households have seen their purchasing power rise thanks in big part to their investment income.

Over a longer time period — since the last quarter of 2019 — the average purchasing power of Canadian households rose by 21 per cent.

For the lower-income households, "small increases in income were not enough to counteract the effect of inflation on their purchasing power."

As Alberta grapples with the climate crisis and the need to reduce carbon emissions, it may look to replace the role of fossil fuels in its electricity grid with another controversial energy source — nuclear.

Calgary-based company Energy Alberta, which was involved in a previous attempt to bring nuclear power to the province, has been quietly working on a new proposal since late last year, including meeting with Premier Danielle Smith and other officials.

Scott Henuset, president and CEO of Energy Alberta, told CBC News that the project details are still being finalized, but that the company's plan is to build a nuclear power plant with two — and eventually as many as five — Candu reactors in Alberta's Peace Region, about 400 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

A specific site has not yet been chosen, and the company is evaluating multiple locations about 25 kilometres north of the town of Peace River. The reactors would have a lifespan of 60 to 70 years, and the total power plant would be licensed for a maximum output of 4,800 megawatts. (Alberta's largest natural gas-fired power plant, the Genesee Generating Station, can produce about 1,300 megawatts.)

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre marked the one year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by speaking against rising antisemitism in Canada during a ceremony in Ottawa on Monday night.

But while Trudeau spoke about the need to fight rising antisemitism in general, Poilievre largely offered a pointed criticism of the Liberal government.

"This ideology that seeks to divide out people based on race and ethnicity, that has led to these horrifying outbursts of hatred, are not from the bottom up. They are from the top down," Poilievre said.

The Conservative leader pointed to recent controversies — such as the appointment of Birju Dattani as chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the granting of a federal contract to a group who employed a consultant that was accused of posting antisemitic content on X — as examples of the government's failings.

Scientists Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto and John Hopfield of Princeton University were honoured with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning within artificial neural networks, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.

Scientists Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto and John Hopfield of Princeton University were honoured with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning within artificial neural networks, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.