Paul Drysdale has spent nearly half a century dispelling the foundational myth that a waterbed will improve your love life.
The North York-based salesman says the late Sue Johanson, a client and the iconoclastic host of the Sunday Night Sex Show, agreed with him, which Mr. Drysdale figures is authoritative proof.
© Shannon VanRaes
For decades, candidates for civic elections in British Columbia have held off campaigning until a couple of months before the traditional fall vote.
But this year, with more than 400 days before the scheduled Oct. 27, 2026, municipal elections, Surrey Councillor Linda Annis splashed out Wednesday with a news conference in a major hotel ballroom to announce she would be challenging Mayor Brenda Locke for her job.
An Alberta judge at a fatality inquiry for two men who died of hypothermia says bars need measures like heated outdoor shelters to keep patrons from dying in the cold after they leave.
Provincial court Justice Carol Godfrey, in a report issued Friday, says the deaths of 18-year-old Tyler Emes and 20-year-old Mohamed Munyeabdi near The Ranch Roadhouse in south Edmonton are tragic.
A 12-year-old boy has been charged with attempted murder after his seven-year-old brother was repeatedly stabbed in their home in southern Alberta.
Lethbridge police say the father called 911 last week after coming home to find the younger boy injured.
Prime Minister Mark Carney says his government will introduce legislation next month to tighten Canada’s bail system, making it harder for those accused of serious crimes to be released, after a series of violent incidents including assaults and home invasions.
Mr. Carney, who wrapped up two days of meetings with his cabinet in Toronto this week, said at a press conference Friday in Mississauga that his government is committed to fixing the Criminal Code.
Two Canadian patients with spinal cord injuries have received Neuralink brain implants that have allowed them to control a computer with their thoughts.
They are part of the first clinical trial outside of the United States to test the safety and effectiveness of Elon Musk’s Neuralink wireless brain chip, which he introduced to the public in 2020, and was first implanted in a paralyzed American in 2024.
On Sept. 4, postsecondary education reporter Joe Friesen, online culture reporter Samantha Edwards and psychology professor Dr. Daniel Lametti from Acadia University answered reader questions on the use of AI in schools, what parents and educators should look out for, and how students could harness its potential.
Readers asked about how AI use is changing classrooms, students’ ability to learn, and how they can use it responsibly. Here are some highlights from the Q+A.
A man is shot dead when masked thieves invade his home.
A gunfight breaks out near a high school, wounding a woman who is simply driving by.
A Quebec Superior Court judge has declared insolvent the North American branch of battery maker Northvolt as the provincial government looks to recover $260-million owed to it by the company.
Justice Janet Michelin on Friday placed Northvolt Batteries North America under creditor protection at the request of the Quebec government.
It’s an oft-used cliché with smaller towns, but in Manitoba’s lakeside community of Hollow Water First Nation, everyone knows everyone, says rural band councillor Maurice Williams.
That’s why after a stabbing rampage this week left a woman and the suspect, her brother, dead, along with seven other people seriously injured in the tight-knit area, everyone is now in mourning.
A major transit project in Toronto has been delayed yet again, though officials are hopeful to get it operational by the end of the year.
There are “performance and reliability” issues with trains on the Eglinton Crosstown light rail transit system as they are pushed through their paces, said Metrolinx CEO Michael Lindsay.
Higher education reporter Joe Friesen spoke with The Decibel podcast about the factors driving the gender gap in higher education. Columnist Marsha Lederman also weighed in on what is lost when fewer men go to university.
As classes begin for students at Canadian universities this month, one group will stand out for its relative underrepresentation: young men.
© Fred Lum
A semi-truck on fire has closed the Coquihalla Highway between Hope and Merritt, just hours after the key route to and from British Columbia’s Lower Mainland reopened following a two-day closure due to a wind-fuelled wildfire.
The province’s driver information service, DriveBC, issued an update on social media at 6:10 p.m. Friday saying the southbound lanes of the route were closed, followed by an update at 6:26 p.m. saying it was closed in both directions.
A conciliation meeting is set for Monday in the contract dispute between Halifax’s Dalhousie University and its faculty association with more than 1,000 members.
The Dalhousie Faculty Association and the university both say they welcome the opportunity to get back to the bargaining table.
The Canadian government is providing $3-million in humanitarian assistance to help people directly affected by recent earthquakes in eastern Afghanistan.
Randeep Sarai, the Secretary of State for International Development, made the announcement on Friday, saying the money will be allocated to organizations working within the country.
Prime Minister Mark Carney announced billions of dollars in financial aid and other measures for some of the industries hardest hit by the trade war with the United States, saying it would help Canada adjust to a “rupture” in the global world order.
The range of programs announced Friday includes hitting pause on a mandatory sales target for electric vehicles, a $5-billion Strategic Response Fund targeted at sectors directly affected by U.S. tariffs, financial aid for the agriculture sector, a “Buy Canadian” policy for the federal government, the expansion of employment insurance, and new training programs for workers.
Blandine Daux and André Bergeron were enjoying the penultimate day of their trip to Portugal for his 70th birthday when the funicular they were riding through hilly Lisbon derailed, killing the Quebec City couple and 14 others.
Mr. Bergeron was retired from four decades of restoring and conserving artifacts, and Ms. Daux, still working in that archaeological field, had planned the celebratory trip, according to his younger brother Eric Bergeron.
Good morning. Just as the Toronto International Film Festival has something for everyone, the 11-day event requires the wide-ranging work of many different hands. More on the heroic effort below, plus news updates from the Middle East and Portugal. But first:
© Chris Donovan
Canada had almost 1.6 million people unemployed in August as the economy lost thousands of jobs and its unemployment rate scaled over a nine-year peak barring the pandemic years, data showed on Friday.
Its unemployment rate rose 0.2 percentage points in August to 7.1 per cent, a level last seen in May, 2016, if the COVID-19 years of 2020 and 2021 were excluded, Statscan said
The economy shed 65,500 jobs in August, largely in part-time work, it said, and added that this was fuelled not only by lower hiring but also some layoffs with the layoff rate rising to 1 per cent in August, compared with 0.9 per cent observed 12 months earlier.
© Sean Kilpatrick
As the helicopter turned toward Peyto Glacier, located in the Park Ranges of the Canadian Rockies, John Pomeroy and his team of scientists gasped.
Prof. Pomeroy, a distinguished professor and director of the Global Water Futures Observatories at the University of Saskatchewan, has studied the ice mass in Banff National Park since 2008, visiting several times a year to adjust weather stations and photograph changes.
© Sarah Palmer
The Saskatchewan government said on Thursday it plans to appeal a case it recently lost in the lower courts to the Supreme Court of Canada.
And, if that’s granted, the province added an unusual request: It wants the top court to combine the proposed appeal with a major Supreme Court case already in progress on Quebec’s secularism law.
A day after Romana Didulo, the self-styled Queen of Canada, and 15 of her supporters were arrested in a tiny Saskatchewan town, she and the owner of her group’s compound were both charged.
The RCMP had announced earlier on Thursday that they had to release the group because no charges had been secured in the investigation, but they noted an unidentified man and woman had been taken back into custody.
A Canadian Armed Forces member deployed to Latvia has been reported missing since Tuesday.
A news release from the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces says an investigation and search efforts are ongoing.
The case of a domestic violence survivor from Colombia who was denied entry to Canada and now fears deportation from the United States underscores the need for Ottawa to withdraw from a bilateral treaty limiting asylum claims at the border, critics say.
The Safe Third Country Agreement prohibits most asylum seekers who pass through the U.S. from claiming asylum in Canada, and vice versa. It is premised on both countries offering robust refugee protections.
Mayor Ken Sim has released Vancouver’s final report on outdoor-event safety after this spring’s deadly SUV attack at a Filipino block party, pledging to act quickly on its recommendations while conceding that the most needed fix – better mental-health services – is beyond the city’s control.
Among its eight recommendations, the joint review by city staff and the Vancouver Police Department, released Thursday, urges the city to develop formal plans for both permanent and event-specific measures to mitigate vehicle attacks.
About 84 properties along the Coquihalla Highway in the British Columbia Interior are on alert and one other has been ordered to evacuate due to an intense wildfire that saw drivers go through showers of embers before the highway was shut down.
The Thompson-Nicola Regional District says the evacuation order and alerts are due to the Mine Creek fire, which has reached 1,900 hectares in size and is burning near the highway between Hope and Merritt.
British Columbia’s premier says his government will be fighting a lawsuit by an Aboriginal group based in the United States, saying B.C.’s obligations are to Indigenous people in Canada.
David Eby was responding to litigation brought by the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington state, which says it is being unfairly excluded from B.C.’s consultation with First Nations.
Ontario Provincial Police say human remains discovered in the province’s Algonquin Park in 1980 have been identified as belonging to a man from Ohio, thanks to investigative genetic genealogy.
Police say investigators located human remains, a boot, wallet, clothing and camping gear after a hiker found remains near the Hardwood Lookout Trail on April 19, 1980.
© HO
Ontario’s top doctor is calling for a national immunization schedule and registry to address gaps exposed by the resurgence of measles in Canada – but first, he says his own province needs a centralized digital vaccine system.
Dr. Kieran Moore’s annual report, recently tabled with the provincial legislature, says a co-ordinated approach from all levels of government and the health-care system is needed to keep vaccine-preventable diseases at bay amid a rise in vaccine hesitancy.
The looming closure of an Ontario plant that bottles Crown Royal sparked political blowback this week, but a supply chain expert says the company behind the move faced pressing decisions on how to cut costs amid ongoing financial challenges.
Spirits maker Diageo DEO-N found itself in Doug Ford’s crosshairs on Tuesday when the Ontario Premier capped an unrelated press conference by producing a Crown Royal bottle and proceeding to slowly dump it out on the ground.
A woman has been killed and the suspect, her brother, is dead after multiple stabbings in Hollow Water First Nation, a small Manitoba community on the eastern shore of Lake Winnipeg.
At least seven people remain in hospital with serious injuries, Manitoba RCMP said late Thursday afternoon. The suspect, Tyrone Simard, 26, knew all of the victims. He was killed after allegedly fleeing from the area in a stolen vehicle, succumbing to his injuries from a collision with a police cruiser.
A town in eastern Newfoundland that was running out of water because of a leaking pipe has lifted a state of emergency.
The emergency was declared Tuesday when officials in Conception Bay South discovered the leak had drained most of its water reserves.
Strike action by public service workers from the BC General Employees’ Union entered its third day with pickets in front of a Vancouver building that houses a Ministry of Finance office, and the union president says more strike action will come.
Paul Finch joined striking workers who wore placards and shouted slogans, one with the help of a megaphone, on Thursday.
Michael Sabia, Canada’s top bureaucrat, met with senior American officials this week to try to find common ground with the Trump administration for potential deals on sectors hardest hit by U.S. tariffs, says the federal minister in charge of Canada-U.S. trade.
Dominic LeBlanc told reporters outside of a cabinet meeting Thursday that Canada is pursuing “technical discussions” with the Americans to try to strike deals that would be beneficial to both countries.
A new report says Vancouver and Toronto topped the unaffordability list for renters in Canada last year.
The report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says the cities topped the list based on the rental wage, the hourly wage needed to afford rent while working a 40-hour week and spending 30 per cent of income on housing.
An Alberta government order banning some books from school libraries doesn’t appear to be deterring people from reading them, say managers at several bookstores.
Kelly Dyer with Audreys Books in Edmonton said the store has noticed a jump in sales since July, when the province announced the ban on books with explicit sexual content.
NDP MP Jenny Kwan will be asking Parliament to close a loophole that could allow the U.S. to purchase Canadian weapons for Israel, despite a ban on arms exports to that country.
Kwan will be speaking this morning on Parliament Hill about a private members’ bill she plans to table later this month “to ensure Canadian weapons and military components are not used to fuel human rights abuses abroad,” according to a statement from her office.
Good morning. China paraded its military – and its friends – through Tiananmen Square yesterday in a blunt message to Washington. More on that below, along with the end of Florida’s vaccine mandates for school children and Félix Auger-Aliassime’s comeback win. But first:
© JADE GAO
The self-styled Queen of Canada and 15 of her followers were arrested Wednesday after a firearms complaint prompted a predawn raid on their rural Saskatchewan compound.
Dozens of RCMP officers, some wearing SWAT gear, executed a warrant at 4:30 a.m. on a decommissioned schoolhouse in Richmound, a hamlet of just over a hundred people near Alberta, RCMP Inspector Ashley St. Germaine told a press conference later in the day.
Residents across Western Canada were urged to limit outdoor exposure on Wednesday as hot, dry weather stoked new and growing wildfires, blanketing dozens of communities with smoke from the West Coast to Saskatchewan.
About 3.5 million people in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley are advised to seek time in spaces with air filtration or air conditioning to avoid breathing fine particulate matter.
© Jimmy Jeong
Several Indigenous leaders from Alberta are warning the Assembly of First Nations not to step on individual First Nations’ authority, treaty rights and jurisdiction to determine the outcome of national infrastructure projects.
In a letter dated Tuesday and addressed to chiefs attending the AFN’s national assembly, the Alberta chiefs say resolutions proposed by some of their colleagues present “significant risks” to their jurisdiction.
The Law Society of Alberta has disbarred lawyer John Carpay, a conservative legal activist and president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms who in 2021 helped arrange the undercover surveillance of a top Manitoba judge.
The Calgary-based Justice Centre helps fund an array of legal challenges across Canada, including this year’s Federal Court case against then-prime-minister Justin Trudeau’s prorogation of Parliament. The Justice Centre lost and an appeal is underway at the Federal Court of Appeal.
Terry Holowach knew the fire was coming when dense smoke eclipsed the sunlight. It was an ominous sign of what was to come: Residents would soon battle the Pisew wildfire to save their homes, defying an order to evacuate.
Earlier that day in June, the regional government agency directed residents of Wadin Bay – a small cottage community on Lac La Ronge, around 400 kilometres north of Saskatoon – to leave the area because of the out-of-control wildfire. It was one among dozens of fires burning in the province, forcing evacuations and prompting officials to declare a state of emergency the week before.
Jean Charest says Canada will eventually thank U.S. President Donald Trump for providing the country with a much-needed economic shakeup.
The Quebec premier between 2003 and 2012 told business leaders in Quebec City on Tuesday that Trump is pulling Canada out of its “lethargy” and forcing its leaders to rethink the economy.
André Thibault thought he had left his past behind him. After he was caught carrying cocaine back in 1999, Mr. Thibault pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and spent 16 months in jail.
After his release, he stayed out of trouble. He drove tow trucks for the next two decades, finding refuge in an industry that gave him a stable life, allowing him to support his son and aging mother, who live with him in his Ottawa home.
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