Canada

Hey everyone!

So I'm finally moving to Canada very soon (yayy). I'm moving to Calgary specifically. I asked this question in the Calgary community too, but I'll ask it here too for a Canada wide answer.

Are there any good cooperatives that I can support and purchase from? Sayyy large home furniture coops or phone co-operatives and so on... Are there any good news cooperatives? Maybe some nice clothing cooperatives? I know that credit unions are more province specific, but still... Any good credit unions that have a good Canada wide presence? Maybe little artisan shops in say some small town in Ontario that make good stuff n ship it across Canada?

Any name drops would be appreciated!

PS: I've heard about Calgary Coop, so yeah... Anything more than this?

Danielle Smith, a white supremacist supported christofascist who has talked about putting progressive politicians, "in the cross hairs" can choke on a fucking horse dick.

The inquest is where Jeremy first watched security video from Oct. 5, 2019 — the night of John Ettawakapow's arrest — which shows his father dragged into the cell by two RCMP officers and left on the floor with two other inmates, just after 7 p.m.

The video shows about an hour later, another inmate later rolled over and accidentally placed his leg on his father's neck, where it remained for 40 minutes.

John Ettawakapow struggled to remove it himself, the video shows, but no one entered the cell until hours later.

RCMP policy says a person in custody must be physically checked on every 15 minutes — which several RCMP officers admitted at the inquest they didn't know.

While the federal government doesn't have the authority to make RCMP policy changes, (Brenna Dixon, counsel for the federal Department of Justice) said her department's "ears are open" to what the judge ultimately recommends.

ALMOST EVERY DAY, I hear someone talk about how terrible things are right now. Whether it’s the crushing cost of housing, the escalating climate crisis, misinformation and rabid disinformation, the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, or the humanitarian crisis in Gaza—the list is endless. Older family members on both sides of the Canada–US border shake their heads and make comments about how terrifying and screwed up their country is. My ninety-two-year-old great aunt has said she’s glad she won’t be around much longer, while others in their seventies have put it more bluntly: it’s a good time to die. These are off-the-cuff statements, but they always leave me with a sinking feeling.

These days, what’s considered terrible is often a point of contention. What I think is terrible about our current situation isn’t necessarily what others think, nor do we agree on who or what can rectify it. And yet, across the political spectrum, across demographics and borders, there’s a palpable sense that things are broken and we need real change—fast. It’s as if critical aspects of the world we thought we lived in have finally started to crumble. Chronic instability is at the heart of it, the recognition that we’re living through a turbulent time in history.

This desire for change is one reason why calls for US president Joe Biden and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau to not seek re-election feel so similar, though there are major differences between the two. Biden’s biggest liability is his age. At eighty-one, he’s part of the so-called Silent Generation, while Trudeau is quintessentially Gen X. Biden’s only been president since 2021, but he was vice president from 2009 to 2017, under Barack Obama. Trudeau’s been leading this country since 2015.

But both Biden and Trudeau embody an ethos and vision that are in stark contrast to the reality we’re facing. Both display a breathtaking confidence in their political prospects that borders on entitlement, as well as an inability to meaningfully address the severity of our current polycrisis. In Biden’s interview with ABC News on July 5, an interview that was supposed to calm nerves after his catastrophic appearance in the first presidential debate, Biden rejected any claims of pessimism. The New York Times called it “an exercise not just in damage control but in reality control.” Trudeau and his inner circle have similarly dismissed the storm brewing, especially after the recent by-election loss to the Conservatives in Toronto-St. Paul’s, previously a safe Liberal riding. As investigative journalist Justin Ling put it in an article for this publication, “if this government hopes to heal itself, Trudeau himself will need to appreciate—not explain away, or deflect, or tamp down—the anger that people are feeling.”

The province is in the midst of shifting the cost burden of trash away from municipalities (and municipal taxpayers), onto companies that make and sell products that generate waste.  

For material that fills up blue boxes — including non-alcoholic drink containers — industry began paying an increased share of the costs last year and is to cover all of the costs from 2026.

How it works: companies pay fees, based on the amount of waste material they create, to organizations that manage their sector's recycling programs. 

The theory of the system — known as extended producer responsibility — is that it gives companies an incentive to reduce their packaging waste and increase recycling rates. Otherwise companies have to absorb the fees as a cost of doing business or pass them on to consumers. 

When the government kick-started work on the deposit-return system last year, Piccini said it would "enable consumers to receive a refund for returning used beverage containers."

For more than a year, momentum was building toward a key shift to try to improve things. Premier Doug Ford's government was seriously considering creating a deposit-return system for soft drink containers, a system that's already in place in eight other provinces and that already exists for beer, wine and spirits in Ontario.

Then suddenly, with zero advance notice and no public announcement — and with a potential LCBO strike dominating the news — senior government officials scrapped plans for the deposit-return system.

What follows is the inside story of how, in a battle with big financial implications for companies and big environmental implications for Ontario, Doug Ford's government sided with Big Grocery over Big Beverage.

By abandoning deposit-return, the government bowed to pressure from the supermarket chains, said Wallis of Environmental Defence.

"It's frustrating the amount of power that they seem to have and the amount of influence that they seem to have over policy," Wallis said.

"These are companies that make money, lots of money from selling these drinks to us," she said. "Them refusing to participate in the kind of program that would actually keep these containers out of our environment is honestly shameful."

The notion that consumers could face added costs under the deposit system is now the government's key justification for scrapping it.

David Parkins, Editorial Cartoons, Globe and Mail, July 12, 2024

The darker the blue the more supportive the Jurisdiction is.

The darker the red the more unfriendly the Jurisdiction is.

Historically in Ontario, when the Liberals are in power in Ottawa, voters elect a Conservative provincial government. [...] One explanation for this seesaw is that voters aim for balance: a more progressive party at one level of government, and a more conservative party at the other level.

Regardless of the dynamics of electoral swings, the quandary for Ford is that if Trudeau is re-elected in the fall of 2025, Ford can be fairly certain of victory a few months later. But if Trudeau and the Liberals falter, and a Conservative government under Pierre Poilievre takes power in Ottawa, Ontario voters are less likely to grant a third consecutive term to the provincial Conservatives.

In other words, Ford worries that a pivot to the Conservatives in Ottawa will compromise, or doom, his re-election bid in Ontario.

As such, Ford has an incentive to hold the provincial election a year early, in the spring of 2025, when the Liberals will likely still be in power in Ottawa.

Or will they?Trudeau would undoubtedly prefer that Conservatives were running the show in Ontario during the next federal election campaign. The many seats in the province, and especially in the Greater Toronto region, are essential for a federal Liberal victory. With Ford still ruling, the federal Liberals hope to once again capture these ridings.

The mayor of Merritt, B.C., has sent the province a bill for more than $100,000 over the repeated closure of the emergency room at the Nicola Valley Hospital.

Mike Goetz says the ER has been closed 24 times in 2023 and 2024, and every time it happens, costs are downloaded onto the municipality.

When B.C. Emergency Health Services paramedics have to transport someone to neighbouring Kamloops for care, that takes them out of the community for at least two hours, according to Goetz.

That means Merritt firefighters, the majority of whom are on-call volunteers, have to cover any medical calls.

For years, medical experts have warned a rising number of Canadians are being exposed to ticks carrying an array of dangerous pathogens. Lyme disease is the most familiar — and by far the most common — but there's growing concern about lesser-known threats as well, from various bacterial infections, to the rare Powassan virus that claimed Harris's life earlier this year.

Case counts are rising, yet data remains thin, all while climate change is helping tick populations spread further north, putting even more of the population at risk. The question now, experts say, is whether awareness and surveillance efforts are keeping up with a growing threat.

"There's probably still more of [these infections] than what's being diagnosed … because the general public is probably not that aware of it, and healthcare providers aren't aware of it," said Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist with the University Health Network in Toronto.

"The more you look, the more you find."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/24920069

"These are not 'drug dens,' they are health centres," said Philpott, now the dean of health sciences at Queen's University, in a post on X.

Manitoba has fallen behind neighbouring provinces in taking steps to safeguard against environmental risks relating to the oil and gas industry, despite numerous calls at both the national and provincial levels for better oversight practices.

Those provinces previously relied heavily on the industry regulating itself, a practice that is still followed in Manitoba, and one that raises alarm bells among experts.

“Effective regulatory oversight … is important to reducing the risk of company non-compliance, and to protecting the safety of Canadians and the environment,” Canada’s auditor general wrote in a 2015 review of federal pipeline management.

In the wake of a major Imperial Oil fuel pipeline shutdown for preventative repairs in March — coupled with dwindling staffing numbers and inspections — Manitoba’s government said it’s aware of gaps in how it monitors provincially regulated oil and gas pipelines.