The union that represents thousands of support staff at Ontario’s colleges says the workers have voted to authorize a strike.
The Ontario Public Service Employees Union says in a news release that members voted 77.3 per cent to authorize a strike, if necessary, to “secure respect at the bargaining table” and secure a contract the workers deserve.
Prime Minister Mark Carney says U.S. President Donald Trump is “creating the opportunity to end Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine.”
Carney is praising the U.S. government’s efforts to end the war in a statement today, after Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday.
A British Columbia legislator said he went from “disappointed” to “enraged” after receiving a pitch from a Republican state senator for Canada’s four western provinces to join the United States.
Brennan Day, with the Opposition B.C. Conservative Party, said his office had to first confirm the authenticity of the “nonsense” letter from Maine Sen. Joseph Martin after receiving it last week.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Saturday welcomed what he said was U.S. openness to providing security guarantees to Ukraine under a peace deal to end Russia’s war against Kyiv.
Zelensky to meet Trump on Monday after U.S.-Russia summit failed to secure ceasefire
“Robust and credible security guarantees are essential to any just and lasting peace. I welcome the openness of the United States to providing security guarantees as part of Coalition of the Willing’s efforts,” Carney said in a statement.
© Blair Gable
The federal government ordered Air Canada and its flights attendants into binding arbitration Saturday in an effort to put an end to a strike that has upended the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of people during the height of summer season.
Federal Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu said she had directed the Canada Industrial Relations Board to order the parties “to resume and continue their operations and duties,” and to extend the terms of the existing collective agreement until a new one is determined by the arbitrator.
© Graham Hughes
Toronto police say an eight-year-old boy was killed by a stray bullet while he was sleeping in bed with his family in the city’s North York neighbourhood early Saturday morning.
The city’s homicide unit says a stray bullet from a shooting outside a building in the Martha Eaton Way and Trethewey Drive area entered the boy’s room at around 12:30 a.m.
The boy was rushed to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
© Spencer Colby
Vancouver’s ambitious plan to develop thousands of market-rate apartments on city land could eventually bring in enough money to cover almost half of the municipal operating budget, Mayor Ken Sim’s chief of staff says.
That’s the long-term goal, said Trevor Ford, who enthusiastically described the plan as the equivalent of what Vienna, Singapore or the University of British Columbia have done by developing their own land. Vancouver’s current operating budget is $2.34-billion.
When Vett Lloyd was bitten by a tick in 2011, it marked the beginning of a painful, years-long battle with Lyme disease. It also abruptly altered the trajectory of her career.
At the time, Dr. Lloyd’s research at New Brunswick’s Mount Allison University was focused on cancer biology but she wondered why people weren’t paying more attention to ticks. So, she converted her cancer lab into a tick lab and reoriented her life’s work around the tiny bloodsucker that nearly ruined her.
On a stretch of the south arm of the Fraser River, in the Vancouver area, the Cowichan Tribes in centuries past had an annual summer fishing village, a place they defended with a warrior ethos against other Indigenous groups.
But in the mid-1800s, the Cowichan – whose home territory is on Vancouver Island – were displaced from that village as the British took control and, after British Columbia joined Canada, the land was sold over the years.
My friend Tom Mautner is the chair of the board of governors at a school in North London. This week, with students out for the summer, he took me for a tour. For a visitor from Toronto, where schools are run from the top down by a vast bureaucracy – a.k.a. the Toronto District School Board – it was an eye-opener.
Laurel Park is a public secondary school with around 600 students. It was built in the 1960s in what is now an area of mixed incomes and backgrounds. Until just a couple of years ago, it was faring poorly. School inspectors gave it low ratings. Ambitious families shunned it. Disciplinary problems were rife.
Brush crunching under his boots, Justin Parsons studied the plumes of smoke rising high over Heart’s Content Barrens through his binoculars.
“I don’t want to look at this fire any more,” he said, shaking his head.
When he received an evacuation order on Thursday, Mike Pasztor of Annapolis County, N.S., grabbed what he could: a photo of his wife’s daughter who had passed away, some bottles of water and some of his documents.
While his wife left toward Bridgetown, he stuck around to douse his house and the surrounding area with water.
Relatives of war veterans gathered at the National War Memorial in Ottawa on Friday to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender and the official end of the Second World War.
Sweat poured down the faces of those assembled in the August midday heat as the Canadian Armed Forces bugler performed the Last Post.
British Columbia says it will be providing $2.5-million in funding that will allow about 75 poultry farms in the Fraser Valley to upgrade their barns to reduce the risk of avian flu.
The Agriculture Ministry says in a news release that the flu can enter barns through airflow, water sources and other means and, despite increased measures, there have been about 200 outbreaks in the Fraser Valley and Lower Mainland since 2022.
A pilot was rescued Friday after a helicopter with Nova Scotia’s Department of Natural Resources crashed in shallow water while helping with firefighting efforts.
Other firefighters in the area quickly reached the downed aircraft in Annapolis County, N.S., and found the pilot conscious, said a news release from the department.
Thomas Mete says he is feeling “great relief” now that he knows he’ll be returning to Harvard University to finish the last year of his degree, after a tumultuous summer of limbo.
“I can’t wait to be back in Cambridge,” the fourth-year economics student said in an interview from Montreal this week.
A First Nation in British Columbia says 41 “additional unmarked graves” have been found as a result of a search with ground-penetrating radar on the site of a former residential school.
The shishalh First Nation, on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast, said in a release Friday that a team has been scanning the area around St. Augustine’s Residential School site for the last 18 months, at locations identified through interviews with survivors.
Long tables line the community hall in Round Hill, weighed down by hundreds of items of baking, flowers, crops, crafts and canned goods, all entered by locals hoping to snag a coveted prize ribbon at the Agricultural Society’s annual Bench Show.
But standing by the woodwork he was judging, self-confessed politics junkie Mathew Banack has the area’s imminent federal by-election on his mind. He’s sure Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre will win the Battle River—Crowfoot by-race when he and other voters head to the polls on Monday in Alberta.
Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux has “no idea” who will be taking over his job when his term ends next month.
Giroux, who took on the job in 2018, will mark his final day on September 2.
The voice of Ashlee Shingoose, discussing her determination to start a new life, echoed in a Manitoba Superior Court Friday, as her family addressed a judge for the first time to express the devastation caused by her murder at the hands of a serial killer.
Ms. Shingoose, then 30, had sent the voice clip to her mother, Theresa, shortly before she went missing in March of 2022. She moved to Winnipeg from her Northern Manitoba home in St. Theresa Point First Nation, hoping for better work, but began to struggle with homelessness and was seeking help for addiction issues.
Montreal police have opened a criminal investigation into reports that people at a music festival last weekend were allegedly poisoned without their knowledge.
Police say six people have reported feeling a “sharp prick” in the back of their body while they were in the crowd at the îLESONIQ music festival at Parc Jean-Drapeau.
Firefighters on Vancouver Island say overnight rain has helped calm an out-of-control wildfire near Port Alberni, B.C.
The BC Wildfire Service says about seven millimetres of rain overnight has lowered the behaviour of the Mount Underwood blaze “to mainly a smouldering ground fire.”
The Pan American Health Organization says Canada has the highest number of measles cases on the continent and more action is needed to address low vaccination rates.
The regional agency within the World Health Organization, which covers North and South America, says there has been an exponential rise in measles this year.
Former chief electoral officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley says an electoral reform protest known as the Longest Ballot Committee is unwarranted and unjustified, and is reiterating his long-standing call for politicians to change election laws to address it.
There are a record 214 candidates running in Monday’s Battle River—Crowfoot by-election, where Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is hoping to win a seat. Of those names, 201 are linked to the committee.
There was a very happy chicken in a suburb of St. John’s, N.L., on Friday after residents who had been forced to leave their homes because of a wildfire were finally cleared to return.
Hazel, a four-year-old red sex-link chicken, belongs to Susan Barrett, who was evacuated from her Paradise, N.L., home on Tuesday. Barrett was staying at her parents with her husband and their two German shepherds; Hazel had to spend her days sequestered in a garage.
Statistics Canada says manufacturing sales edged up June and a smaller share of firms reported an impact from U.S. tariffs.
The agency said Friday that manufacturing sales in June rose 0.3 per cent to $68.5-billion, breaking a streak of four consecutive monthly declines.
A travelling panel collecting public feedback on Alberta’s grievances with Ottawa struggled to keep an emotionally charged crowd on topic at its third summer town hall on Thursday night.
Premier Danielle Smith and members of her Alberta Next panel drew its biggest crowd yet – nearly 750 people – in Edmonton to brainstorm about possible future referendum questions.
For the first time this century, a rocket built and launched in Canada has reached for outer space – an attempt made not by a private company or government agency, but by a group of engineering students at Concordia University in Montreal who spent seven years turning their homegrown dreams of space flight into reality.
The rocket, dubbed Starsailor, lifted off on Friday at 5:34 a.m. from an isolated launch site in the Mistissini region of Northern Quebec.
© Space Concordia
Good morning. If you had to describe a dance to someone who couldn’t see it, what would you say? That idea is the jumping-off point of a new ballet production that explores vision loss, offering a different perspective on performance. More on that below, plus Air Canada interruptions and detained Canadian questions. But first:
© Melissa Tait
A meeting between Canada Post and the union representing 55,000 postal workers has been delayed until next week due to the availability of federal mediators, the company says.
The two sides, which were set to meet Friday, will now meet on Aug. 20.
When a serial killer was convicted last year of murdering four First Nations women in Winnipeg, the family of one of his victims, Ashlee Shingoose, never got the chance to speak about the impact of his crimes because her identity wasn’t known then.
A Manitoba judge is giving them that opportunity Friday in a special hearing, where members of Ms. Shingoose’s family and community will provide statements for the first time in court.
The 300 or so year-round residents of Bamfield, B.C., are no strangers to power outages, often forced to go a day or so in the winter without electricity in their craggy hamlet on southwestern Vancouver Island.
But, on Thursday, many locals were on edge during their third day without power, as they sought out gas for generators to keep upward of a thousand tourists comfortable and hundreds of kilograms of salmon they had just caught from rotting.
A Canadian-led patrol of the North Pacific earlier this year uncovered dozens of alleged fisheries violations, including illegal shark finning and killing of dolphins.
Sean Wheeler, international enforcement chief for the Fisheries Department, said the two-month surveillance mission was the first to include crews from other countries, including the United States, Japan and South Korea, on a single vessel.
The growing number of Canadian citizens detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is disturbing and raises questions about whether Ottawa is doing enough to ensure the well-being of Canadians in custody, experts say, after revelations that Canadian children as young as two years old have been held for weeks in immigration detention this year.
The Globe and Mail on Thursday published extensive analysis of American enforcement data revealing that 149 Canadian citizens have been held at some point in ICE custody since January, when President Donald Trump took office and ordered an expansive immigration crackdown.
An evacuation order in the West Dalhousie area of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley was expanded late Thursday after a lightning strike ignited nearby woodlands the night before and triggered an intense, out-of-control wildfire.
The County of Annapolis expanded the area covered by an evacuation order that was first issued on Thursday morning and covered about 40 homes.
Playing golf in Canada never gets old for Mike Weir.
The Canadian Golf Hall of Famer will tee it up once again in Calgary in the Rogers Charity Classic at Canyon Meadows Golf and Country Club. It’s the fifth straight year that the 55-year-old golfer from Brights Grove, Ont., will play in front of enthusiastic fans from his home country at the three-day PGA Tour Champions event, which runs from Friday to Sunday.
The U.S. State Department is taking aim at Canada’s Online News Act in a human rights report that criticizes press freedom in Canada – which experts characterized Thursday as Orwellian.
The Online News Act, which requires Meta and Google to compensate news publishers for the use of their content, is cited in a section of the report covering freedom of the press.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has set his sights on Canada’s electric vehicle mandate, pledging Thursday that his party will embark on a national campaign to push the Liberal government to scrap the policy he’s dubbed the “Carney tax.”
Poilievre led the charge as the Conservatives relentlessly attacked the consumer carbon price over the last two years, with the Liberals admitting the Tory tactics swayed public opinion and forced them to end the so-called carbon tax earlier this year.
The wildfire that has triggered evacuation orders and alerts on south-central Vancouver Island measured more than 34 square kilometres on Thursday, about 58 per cent larger than what it was the day before.
The Alberni-Clayoquot Regional District’s emergency operations centre confirmed the growth of the fire, saying it was “in line with expectations.”
Wildfire officials in Saskatchewan have lifted a provincial fire ban because the weather has improved, while thousands from displaced communities in Manitoba have begun to return home.
The Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency says the ban was lifted late Wednesday for all Crown lands north of the provincial forest boundary up to the Churchill River.
More than two decades ago, when Lydia Bugden was a rising young lawyer in a Halifax legal firm, an older colleague offered a suggestion: It was time for her to meet Sir Graham Day.
Ms. Bugden was initially puzzled by this proposal. Inside her law firm, Stewart McKelvey, Sir Graham was this towering figure with a huge reputation – legendary corporate director, trusted adviser to Atlantic Canada’s business dynasties, and most famously, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite fixer, who in the 1980s engineered the privatization of British industrial megaliths in the shipbuilding and auto industries.
Health officials in Montreal are still working to tally the total number of people who died from heat-related causes since Sunday, when sweltering temperatures took over the city.
The city’s public health department has so far confirmed three reports of heat-related deaths since then, up from one earlier this week. The agency says it has also received reports of at least two cases of heat stroke.
After swimming with his family at Sandy Beach in the Ontario town of Buckhorn on the weekend, Patrick Porzuczek was driving north when the sky overhead began to rumble.
A plane was targeting a wildfire, named HAL019, near Burnt River in Kawartha Lakes, about two hours north of Toronto in Ontario’s cottage country.
Two of the late actor Joseph Ziegler’s biggest fans were the eminent theatre critic Robert Cushman and his wife, Arlene Gould. Mr. Cushman deemed Mr. Ziegler the kind of actor with so much depth and skill that he could elevate even a less-than-fabulous production. In a tribute, published on his website, Cushman Collected, Mr. Cushman writes of the time when he and Ms. Gould were watching just such a show – a “dismal” revival of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. When Mr. Ziegler exited the stage after his first brief scene, Mr. Cushman overheard his wife murmuring, “please come back.”
That was a sentiment shared by many theatregoers. Mr. Ziegler, who died on July 28 at the age of 71, was an endlessly watchable actor, whose deep reserves of humanity made him captivating in whatever role he played. They ran the gamut from the monumental part of Willy Loman, the tragically deluded anti-hero of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, to that of the blind, wheelchair-confined Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s bleak masterpiece Endgame. Mr. Ziegler could have you roaring with laughter at his gum-chewing prowess in the William Saroyan comedy The Time of Your Life, or quietly squeeze your heart as an all-too-real and pitiable miser in his inimitable take on Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge.
A Quebec court judge has overturned the majority of the sanctions against two Montreal police officers who were suspended for lying about their interactions with an inmate who died in custody in 2017.
Judge Alexandre Henri ruled that police watchdog investigators had not informed the officers of their right to remain silent when questioning them on the circumstances surrounding the death of David Tshiteya Kalubi.
A new survey from the Bank of Canada shows Canadians are keeping more cash in their wallets in an increasingly digital world.
The central bank says its 2024 survey on payment methods show Canadians kept an average of $156 in cash on hand, $16 more than in 2023.
Frustrated fire officials in Newfoundland and Labrador battling multiple blazes are also having to contend with online misinformation and people angry at government-imposed precautions.
The out-of-control fires, which have threatened the provincial capital this week and forced thousands from their homes, are among 214 wildfires in the province so far this season, a more than 100-per-cent increase over last year.
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