Canada

Beyond his job as a freelance process server in Toronto, thirty-five-year-old Josh Chernofsky didn’t have much going on in the spring of 2019. But over time, he’d developed a rapport with one of the security guards at the University Avenue courthouses. They’d chat about this and that, often about security work; Chernofsky had once been in the industry himself. One day in May, the guard said there were going to be some protests in the neighbourhood on the weekend. Of what nature, he didn’t know. Chernofsky decided to take a look.

As he made his way to the protest on the Saturday, Chernofsky cut down a side street. The first thing he noticed as he drew near: there were a lot of police vehicles. He then saw people wearing matching black and yellow Fred Perry polo shirts. He vaguely recognized it as the Proud Boys uniform. I thought that was just an American thing, he said to himself. Beyond the group’s US origins and some sense that it was ideologically conservative, he didn’t know much about it. He just thought it was a “men’s group.”

At the rallying point, two crowds were facing off across the street from one another. “On one side, there were all these people in black, covered up, masked, yelling, shouting, swearing—just sounding very obnoxious,” he remembers. On the other, he saw people with Canadian flags and no masks. “They all seemed very happy,” he says. “I guess that’s what attracted me to that side.”

Imagine walking into a store, picking out all your groceries for the week and not having to worry about facing an expensive bill at the checkout.

For clients of the Regina Food Bank, that will soon be a reality.

Since the pandemic, there has been a spike in food bank users across the country, up 25 per cent in Regina alone. One in eight families — and one in four children — are now food insecure in the city. Of the 16,000 monthly clients, 44 per cent are kids.

The new Regina Food Bank Community Food Hub, modelled after a traditional grocery store, is set to open this summer in the former government liquor store location downtown.

The federal Liberals and NDP say conservative politicians are displaying a pattern of attacks against Speakers' independence, an allegation the Conservatives in Ottawa strongly deny.

The accusation comes a day after the federal Conservatives tried and failed for the third time to get House of Commons Speaker Greg Fergus to resign over claims he is too partisan for the role.

Their attempts are designed to intimidate and delay House work, government House leader Steven MacKinnon said.

"The fact is that this culture of intimidating the chair is something we have seen in other legislatures and I think Canadians are rightly horrified by it," he said.

Two and a half years after Norman Tate's son was killed in a car accident, he's still struggling to come to terms with how the justice system handled the aftermath.

"If you step forward inside that place, you're flipping a coin — whether you're going to get justice that day or not," he said on April 30, standing outside the Ontario Court of Justice in Brantford, Ont.

Norman Tate Junior was killed in a head-on collision a week before Christmas in 2021. The driver in the other car eventually was charged with impaired driving causing death and bodily harm. But the case crawled through the court system and was stayed after it breached the time limits for trials set in a 2016 Supreme Court decision.

That decision in R. v. Jordan established that criminal cases that go beyond those time limits — 18 months for provincial courts and 30 months for superior courts — can be stayed for unreasonable delay.

Live Nation Entertainment said on Friday it was investigating a data breach at its Ticketmaster unit that it discovered on May 20, the latest in a string of high-profile corporate hacks in the past year.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Live Nation said it found "unauthorized activity" in a third-party cloud database that mainly contained Ticketmaster data, and was working with forensic investigators.

Last week, a hacking group named ShinyHunters said it had stolen user data of over 500 million Ticketmaster customers, according to various media reports.

Some media reports quote the group as saying it's in possession of names, addresses, phone numbers — and in some cases, partial credit card information — of Ticketmaster users around the world.

A 51-year-old Calgary man who suffers debilitating cluster headaches has won a Federal Court battle forcing Health Canada to reconsider his bid for legal access to psilocybin to treat his extreme pain.

Ottawa Federal Court Judge Simon Fothergill, on May 24, granted an application for judicial review of Health Canada's denial of Jody Lance's bid for legal access to medical grade psilocybin — the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms — to manage pain associated with the headaches, which is so bad they have earned the nickname "suicide headaches."

That decision — which also highlighted the need to consider a patient's Charter rights — is being hailed by others fighting to access psilocybin for medical reasons.

Requests to access controlled substances in special medical circumstances are filed through Health Canada's Special Access Program (SAP). In their July 12, 2023, SAP application Lance and his Calgary neurologist, William Jeptha Davenport, requested legal access psilocybin to help treat pain. Health Canada denied the request due to lack of research into the efficacy of the drug to treat cluster headaches.

Reclusive Quebec billionaire Robert G. Miller, who allegedly paid several young girls in exchange for sexual favours, was arrested Thursday afternoon and faces 21 charges, including sexual assault, obtaining sexual services for consideration and several counts of sexual exploitation of minors.

The former owner of Future Electronics was arrested at his home in the Montreal neighbourhood of Westmount.

Miller is alleged to have committed the offences against 10 women and girls — eight of them minors — between 1994 and 2016, Montreal police said at a news conference Thursday afternoon. One of the alleged victims was under 14 years old at the time of alleged offences.

Last year, Radio-Canada's Enquête and CBC's The Fifth Estate revealed allegations from several women who said Miller had paid them for sexual services while they were minors, some as young as 14.

The charges are the culmination of a year-long police investigation, which was triggered by a CBC/Radio-Canada investigation that aired in February 2023.

The three of them once stood side-by-side as road captains of a historic protest.

Now, more than two years after thousands of honking vehicles rolled through Ottawa in what became known as the Freedom Convoy, two narratives are emerging in court — potentially splitting the fates of Pat King, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber.

Factually, they are separate cases. King is being tried alone, whereas Lich and Barber are co-accused in their trial.

Whereas the joint trial of Lich and Barber drags on, punctuated by starts and stops that have forced the duo to make multiple trips back to Ottawa, the case involving King is more or less running smoothly and on schedule.

Key to both trials is less about what Lich, Barber and King did. The evidence, particularly the statements they made in early 2022, were well-documented on social media and are largely self-explanatory.

At issue instead is the legality of each of their actions. And in both trials, the Crown argues they crossed the line.

Natalie Sansone and her family are "not usually bug people" but the family has welcomed a rare pink grasshopper into their northeast London, Ont., home after finding it hopping across their driveway.

Sansone and her husband, Ryan Seed, were walking home from school with their 3-year-old and 5-year-old on Tuesday afternoon when Seed spotted the pink grasshopper in front of the house.

"We all kind of dropped our stuff and got down to the ground to look and sure enough, there it was just hopping across the driveway," said Sansone.

When Sansone ran inside to grab her camera for a picture, Seed began researching the creature. The family decided to put the insect in a box their kids used to view insects after Seed read online that pink grasshoppers are rare and likely to be eaten.

Reading up on One Big Union. The Wikipedia article mentions that at the end of its days it was generating income via a lottery in its bulletin. This gave me an idea.

In the interest of diversifying news media, strengthening journalistic practices and integrity, creating non-partisan news coverage, and giving Canadian works a national outlet for publishing, I would like to start an online newspaper. However, I would like to limit ads since I find them distasteful at best and compromising at worst. This leaves subscription income and one-off purchases as the main revenue sources.

The issue with this is that people don't purchase news media anymore. They either look at an ad-supported website or they wait for someone else to buy a paywalled article and copypaste it somewhere. So the issue with a non-ad-supported model is that there's no incentive to buy. Hence, a lottery a la a 50/50 draw or some such. This would give people incentive to buy, increasing the circulation of the newspaper. So I'm hoping someone might be able to provide some insight into the matter.

• "Supreme Court won't hear appeal in Montreal MK-ULTRA brainwashing case". The Canadian Press. 2024-05-30T16:39Z. CBC News (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/mk-ultra-supreme-court-of-canada-class-action-1.7219478).
• Archive Link

I feel like we skipped over the 'truth' bit in Truth and Reconcilliation here.

In 2023, a shocking one out of every five people in Canada were food insecure — defined as having a lack of access to food, or concern over lack of food access. Severe food insecurity — when people miss meals and sometimes go days without food — rose by 50 per cent.

The Globe and Mail reported that Per Bank, the new CEO of Loblaw Companies Ltd., made $22 million from two months of work in 2023 — including an $18 million signing bonus. That’s 500 times more than the yearly median income in Canada.

Galen Weston Jr., Loblaw’s president, blamed suppliers, who forced “unjustified” price increases on the company. Others, like the Conservatives, blame the carbon tax for raising prices. In a report, the Centre for Future Work found that there is an infinitesimally small correlation between carbon pricing and inflation — just 0.15 per cent.

When prices spike, corporations take advantage. According to Statistics Canada, food prices were twice as high as the overall inflation rate — which was at its highest level in almost 40 years. Meanwhile, since 2020, Canadian food retailers have nearly tripled profit margins and doubled profits — making $6 billion per year. It’s not difficult to do the math. This is called “greedflation” — companies taking advantage of inflation to raise prices even higher.

Meanwhile, Canada’s top three food retailers (Loblaw, Sobey’s and Metro) control 57 per cent of food sales. Loblaw alone takes home 27 per cent. Costco and Walmart are next in line at 11 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively, according to 2022 statistics.

The boycott has focused the country on the affordability crisis and the role of corporate profiteering. However, the responsibility for change does not fall on the consumer, but rather those in government, who are ultimately the ones with the tools to curtail corporate greed. Reigning in corporate profiteering, curtailing oligopolies, building holistic approaches to food provisioning and supporting incomes to match the cost of living are the real changes we need. On May 30 at 1 p.m. EST, Food Secure Canada is hosting a webinar titled "Greedflation: The role of large corporations in food price inflation and what can be done about it." You can register here.

If an election were held tomorrow, all signs point to a resounding Conservative victory. The latest projections from 338Canada show the Conservatives with a commanding lead and a projected 220 seats in the Commons, well past the 170 required to form a majority government.

One Tyee reader will receive four compelling works from McClelland & Stewart that collectively trace Indigenous legacies of the past, present and future.

If their party’s messaging is to be believed, the first order of business in a Pierre Poilievre government will be to “axe the tax” and end the Liberal government’s carbon pricing program.

However, their victory may be short-lived.

The debate over the carbon tax has focused so far on domestic politics. However, this misses the importance of the international context. Increasingly, our trading partners take the threat of climate change seriously and use carbon tariffs to punish other countries they see as free riders.

Any government that wants to protect Canada from these tariffs will need a credible plan to reduce emissions. The result is that a future Conservative government may have to bring back the carbon tax, whether it likes it or not.

The Speaker of Alberta’s legislature is refusing to explain how a former Edmonton Police Service officer with a history of violent domestic assault and several other officers with serious disciplinary records came to be hired as part-time security officers at the legislature.

Speaker Nathan Cooper, a United Conservative Party MLA, is ultimately responsible for legislature security. But Cooper refused to respond to three interview requests during the past week.

The Tyee wanted to know if former EPS officer Scott Mugford, and several other former EPS officers, were vetted before they were hired as legislature security officers.

“There is absolutely no way someone with this pattern of behaviour should have anything to do with any law enforcement agency or anything directly related to security,” said former West Vancouver police chief and former British Columbia solicitor general Kash Heed, referring to Mugford.

Having been an MLA, and knowing the security personnel at B.C.’s legislature in Victoria, Heed said that “someone with [Mugford’s] background would never be within their ranks.”

Heed said there would be an “outcry” from MLAs to the sergeant-at-arms and the Speaker “if it became known that they had someone like this within the ranks of that security detail in the legislature in Victoria.” The sergeant-at-arms is responsible for legislature security.

It's Delaney Mack’s first time pulling crab traps and she is unsure what to do. Mack, the newest member of the Nuxalk Guardian Watchmen, has had months of training for the multifaceted job, which might on any given day include rescuing a kayaker, taking ocean samples or monitoring a logging operation. But winching crabs up 100ft from the sea floor was not in the manual.

Soon, however, the four-person operation is humming along. The crab survey is a vital part of their work as guardians of this Indigenous territory in the Canadian province of British Columbia. It was started more than 15 years ago in response to heavy commercial crab fishing in an area where the federal government had done little independent monitoring to determine if a fishery was sustainable.

It is the quintessential guardian assignment: remote monitoring work of immediate importance to a small community, far beyond the gaze of administrators at understaffed government agencies.

The watchmen are the eyes and ears of their First Nation community on the lands and water of their territory, which spans about 18,000 sq km (7,000 sq miles, roughly the size of Kuwait) on the central coast of British Columbia around the town of Bella Coola, 430 mountainous kilometres northwest of Vancouver.

Try it and give feedback here:

https://beta-performance.cira.ca/

Relevant details about the tool (some from the link above, others from their newsletter):

Key Features

• Improved design: experience a more user-friendly and intuitive interface.
• Responsive and touch-screen friendly: easier to take tests with tablets and phones.
• Powerful testing capabilities: test your internet and access over 60 key performance metrics.

What is being done with the data

The data you create from each test will be anonymously aggregated with all the other performance tests done throughout Canada. These results help researchers understand and build a better internet for Canada. All the data is made available so researchers, governments and policy makers all have access to the information to base analysis and decisions on.

Help contribute to changing Canada’s internet for the better by running regular tests and providing valuable feedback at the end of each test.

What CIRA is:

the organization that manages the .ca country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Canada. [...] CIRA sets the policies and agendas that support Canada's internet community and Canada's involvement in international internet governance

A new study by Léger has assessed Canadians’ perceptions on the Loblaws boycott, which is currently underway over claims of greedflation.