Canada

Save for a few security guards at the Hindu temple, it would be hard to tell that this quiet residential neighbourhood was recently the site of violent clashes between Sikh activists and nationalist counterprotesters.

The confrontation drew condemnation from the city’s mayor, the premier of Ontario and Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau – and also from India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, who described the incident as an attack on the Hindu temple.

So far, local police have made five arrests and say more may come.

But as the dust settles, members of the local community say they fear further violence between Sikh separatist activists and Modi supporters, some of whom espouse Hindu nationalist ideologies.

MBFC
Archive

Despite a snubbing by government officials unlike any she has seen, Francesca Albanese says she was “uplifted” by her visit to Canada.

Over the course of a week, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories attended several community events, and did not hold back from scathing criticisms of Israel’s 13-month assault on Gaza.

Albanese, an Italian academic and lawyer who has held the voluntary UN position since 2022, had been invited to meet with government officials, as well as make a scheduled appearance at a parliamentary foreign affairs committee. Both events were cancelled a week before her arrival.

But Albanese still spoke to large gatherings of workers, academics, and students in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto. She identified Canada as part of a small group of countries who have “continued to allow and nurture the arrogance that is at the origins of Israeli behaviour today.”

So, if more lanes and bigger roads don't alleviate traffic, why doesn't the province invest in more robust public transit? The government has already expanded GO train services by 15% on existing lines in the greater Golden Horseshoe. If the goal was to alleviate traffic in this region, would it not make more sense to create more GO Transit lines and provide alternatives to being stuck in traffic?

As is the trend in Canadian politics, the goal is not to solve public issues, but rather to enrich private coffers. A 2021 National Observer investigation highlighted that eight of Ontario's biggest real estate developers own land near the proposed route of Highway 413.

The developers listed in the report are: Cortellucci, De Gasperis, Guglietti and De Meneghi families, John Di Poce, Benny Marotta, Argo Development and Fieldgate Homes. The De Gasperis family was implicated in the Greenbelt Scandal, having used seven of their companies to buy protected land that Doug Ford would have opened for development.

All the developers listed above have been prolific donators to the Ontario PCs, having donated money in the tens of thousands either to the party directly or to the Conservative third-party foundation Ontario Proud.

As the gambling industry continues to grow globally with the rise of online gambling, a recent report from the medical journal The Lancet's commission on gambling calls is calling on governments to approach gambling as a public health issue.

Malcolm Sparrow, one of the authors of the report, says this will put gambling in the same category as alcohol and tobacco, which are identified by the World Health Organization as issues of the public interest.

Statistics Canada estimates that in 2018, nearly two-thirds of Canadians gambled in the past year. The data estimates that about 300,000 Canadians were at moderate-to-severe risk of developing a gambling problem, where gambling starts to negatively affect a person's life.

I'm a rural emergency room doctor — and I feel the need to publicly apologize.

I'm sorry that many of you are often not receiving the health care you need, in the right place or at the right time. And I'm sorry that many of you don't have a primary care provider, that wait times are so long and that I sometimes see you in the hallway where you have little privacy. While this happening in our rural hospital in Kenora, Ont., I've seen similar experiences reflected in emergency rooms across the country.

So, I need you to believe me when I say that my colleagues and I cannot fix these problems ourselves. In fact, trying to fix the problem has pushed some of us to the point of leaving the profession — and the effort to look after ourselves may worsen services.

The discovery of 27 cases of scurvy in a northern Saskatchewan community is raising concerns about grocery prices and access to fresh food as income inequality worsens.

Earlier this year, a doctor in La Ronge had a hunch that a patient was suffering from scurvy, a disease caused by vitamin C deficiency. The test came back positive and it raised questions about the prevalence of scurvy in the community.

The Lac La Ronge Indian Band partnered with Dr. Jeff Irvine and the Northern Inter-Tribal Health Authority to investigate. Irvine is a physician in La Ronge and works with Northern Medical Services, an off-shoot of the University of Saskatchewan college of medicine.

They tested 51 blood samples — all but one taken in 2023 or 2024 — and found 27 cases of low or undetectable levels of vitamin C. These results were followed with a physical exam, which confirmed a scurvy diagnosis in all 27 cases. Patient ages range from 20-80, and 79 per cent are Indigenous.

When Meredith Moore moved from Toronto to New York, she was astonished by the amount of home renovation happening in the city — and by the full construction waste bins.

"I would see these dumpsters just filled with wood and trim and doors and all these things that I knew were not waste," said Moore, who has always looked for ways things could be reused in her previous work as an interior designer.

Deconstruction may seem slow, inefficient and potentially costly compared to just knocking something down. But there's growing interest from building owners and the construction industry alike in taking a more careful approach, which cuts waste and emissions by giving new life to old materials.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/26396776

“This is a [board] captured by an incumbent industry,” Drew Yewchuk, a lawyer who works with the University of Calgary’s public interest law clinic, said. “Their board is stacked with people who are in favour of the gas industry and are very familiar with the gas industry, and it has a competing industry in renewables. That is a problem for the fairness of the [operator].”

Experts generally agree it is good to have industry experience on boards since it gives them more insight and background, but not necessarily when that experience is coming from a single corporation.

“It’s not unusual for there to be appointments from the relevant sectors. To have three people from the same company who have a direct interest in the matters dealt by the board, does start to look a little bit funny,” Mark Winfield, a professor of environmental and urban change at York University said in an interview. “The whole thing is just bizarre.”

Radio-Canada contacted the 17 named MPs several times; none of them responded to interview requests. Those whom Radio-Canada tried to approach in person refused to comment.

Canadian homeless encampments have become increasingly visible in recent years, and those residing within them have faced a fair bit of variation in how local governments react to their presence. Today, let's look at a remarkable legal case that may change the game regarding how homeless encampments are considered under Canadian law and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Canada Revenue Agency is on a "witch hunt" to find whistleblowers who may have spoken to the media and exposed how it has been repeatedly duped into paying out millions in bogus refunds to scammers, according to sources.

"The consensus is that management is nervous," one source said. "Any media contacts [they're saying]: 'Don't talk to them at all, don't talk to journalists.' I think they're very much trying to control the narrative."

According to multiple sources, the CRA's senior leadership is anxious, looking for ways to silence employees and to limit media coverage.

Last month, an investigation by CBC's The Fifth Estate and Radio-Canada revealed the tax collector has been keeping Canadians largely in the dark about how many hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds it has wrongly paid out, as well as the extent to which taxpayers have had their CRA accounts hacked by fraudsters.