Canada

Ontario's test is scheduled for next week

The risk assessments border officers have used for years to decide whether vessels entering Canadian waters should be searched have been based on outdated and inaccurate data, increasing the risk of high-risk goods and inadmissible people slipping into the country, a recently released audit says.

"Due to system limitations, the [Canada Border Services Agency] may not have a complete record of all individuals entering the country via marine ports," says the audit, posted online last week.

The review examined how the CBSA's national targeting centre identified people and goods bound for Canada that might have posed a threat between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2022.

According to the audit, the national targeting centre relies on risk assessments to determine if vessels that could be used for illegal activities, such as smuggling or illegal migration, need to be flagged for examination.

Immigration consultants and lawyers say they fear the scams may get worse with international students searching for other ways to stay and work in Canada

In the U.S., the growing role of private equity firms in health care is coming under heightened scrutiny, with Senate committee hearings and a cross-government public inquiry launched earlier this year.

In the U.S., companies backed by private equity firms manage emergency rooms and anesthesiology practices. Private equity firms are even buying whole hospitals in the U.S.

That's not happening in Canada, but private equity investment firms have bought up facilities outside of hospitals, starting about 25 years ago with long-term care homes. That arrangement didn't show up on the public radar until the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, which hit care homes exceptionally hard.

Canadian researchers have found a disproportionate number of deaths in long-term care residences owned by private equity firms and large chains.

As some provinces welcome private equity in public health care, the firms are increasingly involved in nursing homes and surgery clinics.

A former Hamilton police officer will not go to jail for sexually assaulting the woman he was mentoring as she pursued her own career in policing.

Michael LaCombe, 54, will instead serve 12 months of house arrest followed by 12 months of probation after Justice Cameron Watson found him guilty of two counts of sexual assault in January, following a trial.

Watson sentenced LaCombe on Monday at the Ontario Court of Justice in St. Catharines, Ont., describing his crimes and the aftermath as "a spectacular and cataclysmic fall from grace" in his written decision.

"His life has taken an irreparable downward spiral. He is no longer the man he once was," Watson wrote.

Watson also described how LaCombe's conduct "devastated" the victim, who has felt isolated and suffers from panic attacks, among other impacts, in recent years.

The Canadian military could have modern satellite coverage in the Arctic a decade earlier than envisioned if the federal government is willing to follow the example of other countries and embrace commercial options in space, a House of Commons committee heard Monday.

Mike Greenley, chief executive officer of MDA Canada, told committee members Canada has fallen behind the rest of the globe from "a military space capability perspective" and is not effectively working with companies in the aerospace sector.

"As a result, our relevance in a rapidly changing geopolitical world is declining, and along with it, our ability to protect and defend Canadians," said Greenley, whose company is the largest in the country in the space sector, with over $1 billion in sales annually.

I’m going to be blunt in this piece. As a resident of Alberta and someone trained to recognize threats to democracy, I have an obligation to be.

The United Conservative Party is an authoritarian force in Alberta. Full stop.

I don’t come by this argument lightly. It’s based on extensive evidence that I present below, followed by some concrete actions Albertans can take to push back against creeping authoritarianism.

There’s no hard-and-fast line between democracy and authoritarianism. Just ask people from autocracies: you don’t simply wake up one day under arbitrary rule.

They’re more like opposite sides of a spectrum, ranging from full participation by all citizens in policy-making at one end (democracy) to full control by a leader and their cadre on the other (authoritarianism).

Clearly, Alberta politics sit somewhere between these two poles. It is neither an ideal Greek city-state nor a totalitarian hellscape.

The question is: How much of a shift toward authoritarianism are we willing to accept? Where do we draw the line between politics as usual and anti-democratic activities?

At a bare minimum, we should expect our leaders to respect the rule of law, constitutional checks and balances, electoral integrity and the distribution of power.

Unfortunately, the United Conservative Party has shown disregard for these principles. They’ve breached them so many times that citizens can be forgiven for being desensitized. But it is important to take stock so we can determine how far we’ve slid.

Here’s a breakdown of those principles.

A patchwork of colourful tarps covered dozens of tents at a pro-Palestinian encampment at McGill University's downtown campus on Sunday, shielding protesters from both the heavy rain and prying eyes.

More than a week after the first Canadian pro-Palestinian campus encampment began in Montreal, organizers at McGill said they've become better prepared for the days to follow, thanks to donated materials and community support.

Protester Ari Nahman said Sunday that the Montreal encampment has become a "tiny city" complete with dozens of rainproof tents, a library, a stockpile of donated supplies and makeshift wooden sidewalks to keep the mud at bay.

Nahman, a student at Concordia University, said morale is high at the camp, despite several days of rain that have turned McGill's lower field into a slippery mess at times.

"I think we're much more equipped and prepared today for the various weathers that exist," said Nahman. "We're positive, the morale is good."

With five million square feet of available space across 47 office towers, downtown Toronto is becoming a tenant’s paradise - and an investor’s potential nightmare

Ottawa went years without single after-the-fact review of businesses that benefited from practice

Nunavummiut from several communities say they're reeling from suddenly losing access to free Amazon shipping after Canada Post put an end to a loophole customers utilized to access the service.

For years, residents of small Nunavut communities shipped their Amazon orders to fake postal codes as a way to save hundreds of dollars a year on food and supplies. While these products are available at local grocery stores, their prices are significantly higher due to the cost of Northern transportation.

Iqaluit is the only community in Nunavut which qualifies for free shipping with Amazon Prime.

But last month, Canada Post began enforcing its long-held return-to-sender policy for any misaddressed mail. Because those Amazon shipments were addressed to incorrect and fake postal codes, dozens of Amazon orders have been sent back to the company — even after being flown in to local post offices.

As frustrations for Canadians grow along with grocery store bills, some say Canadians are ready to think outside the big box store when heading out for groceries.

India's Foreign Affairs Minister says Canada is his country's “biggest problem” when it comes to Sikh separatism.

Archive: [ https://archive.is/IpDEp ]

When Premier Danielle Smith put forth the ambition of building a multi-city passenger train network to link Banff, Calgary, Edmonton, and many other points, the questions came quick: Are you setting up Alberta taxpayers for a multibillion-dollar boondoggle or two?

Her answer wasn't typical fare from a conservative politician, let alone one with a libertarian symbol tattooed on her arm. Smith replied with a strong defence of government intervention.

"This is why people elect governments: To do the things that they can't do in the private sector, and that includes building massive new infrastructure that connects cities and requires this kind of major investment," Smith told reporters.

Never mind that Canada's founding passenger rail service was privately run, or that the construction consortium that pitched an Edmonton-Calgary high-speed line said they'd do it as a private-sector investment.

Smith has a vision to master-plan all future intercity lines, and mused this week about managing her provincial train network with a local version of Metrolinx, the provincial Crown agency created in 2006 by an Ontario Liberal government to run Toronto-region transit.

That would, of course, be on top of the Crown corporation Smith created this spring to research drug addiction recovery, or when Smith proposed potentially Crown-run natural gas plants as a "generator of last resort."

Add in her ambitions to potentially wrest more provincial management for pension and police from Ottawa, and plans for stricter control over the affairs of municipalities and post-secondary schools, and you might wonder what happened to the Danielle Smith who had long believed in shrinking the size of government.

Major industrial resource projects under provincial jurisdiction that spew massive amounts of carbon emissions will no longer trigger federal environmental assessments — a move that's angering environmental groups.

The Liberal government walked back the requirement in amendments to its controversial 2019 Impact Assessment Act, parts of which the Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional in the fall.

Environmental groups are raising the alarm and expressing their "disappointment" in a recent letter about the amendments introduced in Parliament on Tuesday.

"We are concerned that the government is not fully living up to its responsibility to protect Canadians and the environment from the climate impacts of major projects across Canada," says the letter, which was signed by various environmental groups, including the environmental law group Ecojustice.

For years, cable TV has bled viewers and subscribers to streaming giants like Netflix, Apple and Amazon. Now, those same companies are vying to stream live sports, one of the last lines of defence when it comes to audiences paying big bucks for traditional cable packages.

AppleTV+ has a 10 year, multibillion-dollar deal to stream MLS soccer matches and also streams some MLB games. Netflix has paid to secure the rights to WWE wrestling.

But Amazon was among the first streamers to aggressively bid on broadcast rights for a range of sports, and just this week, it added Monday night NHL games to its offerings.

"We're committed to driving more innovation for fans as we bring the NHL into more Canadian homes and across more devices on Monday nights than ever before," said Magda Grace, head of Prime Video, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in a news release.

About a week after Canadian doctor Yipeng Ge returned from Gaza, he got several surprise emails: legal and human rights groups were getting in touch to take his witness testimony.

There was a reason they wanted to get information from him that they could have gotten from doctors still in Gaza, he told The Breach in an exclusive interview—doctors are afraid of being killed if they speak out.

“There’s a safety and security risk for any healthcare worker within the Gaza Strip,” he said. “You essentially have a target on your back simply for wearing scrubs.”

After returning from separate trips to Gaza in February and March, Ge and another Ontario-based doctor Ben Thomson, told The Breach they were contacted by lawyers and interviewers from UK-based groups, the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians, and Forensic Architecture.

Both had witnessed the impact of a collapsing healthcare system, as Thomson had seen an example of a patient’s wounds that indicated they had been tortured.

Made this video a couple of years back, now it’s on PeerTube.