More on The Decibel
Higher education reporter Joe Friesen spoke with our daily news podcast about the factors driving the gender gap in higher education.
As classes begin for students at Canadian universities this month, one group will stand out for its relative underrepresentation: young men.
© Fred Lum
Three British Columbia wildfires, including a blaze that forced this week’s closing of the Coquihalla Highway, have prompted local officials to issue new evacuation orders.
The Fraser Valley Regional District says it has declared a state of local emergency and issued an evacuation order for the Coquihalla Lakes Lodge and the Coquihalla Summit Snowmobile Club site due to the Mine Creek fire that shut the highway on Wednesday.
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.
The Liberal government is delaying mandatory sales targets for electric vehicles as one of a series of new measures aimed at supporting sectors badly hit by the continuing trade disputes with the United States.
Prime Minister Mark Carney also announced a new “strategic response fund” with $5-billion to assist affected companies, expand existing loan programs for small- and medium-sized businesses, increase cash advances available to the canola sector and a new biofuel production incentive.
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand has confirmed two Canadians are among the 16 people killed in a funicular railway crash on Wednesday in Lisbon, confirming an earlier report from local police.
“I am saddened to confirm that two Canadians have been confirmed to be among those who died in the Lisbon streetcar crash,” she said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
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.
RCMP say 16 people, including self-proclaimed “Queen of Canada” Romana Didulo, were arrested Wednesday in southwestern Saskatchewan.
Followers of Didulo, who has promoted various conspiracy theories, set up a “Kingdom of Canada” compound in an old school in Richmound, west of Regina, in 2023.
Ottawa music impresario Harvey Glatt, who died on Aug. 20, at age 91, played an oversized role in turning the country’s sleepy capital city from a cultural desert into a musically vibrant place.
The son of scrap metal merchants, he was a music fanatic who began reading music trade journals as a 13-year-old. In 1957, he co-founded the Treble Clef record store, a retail outlet devoted solely to music at a time when vinyl was typically sold in department stores or distributed by mail through record clubs. The initial shop grew to a chain of 15 locations, earning Mr. Glatt the unofficial title of Sam The Record Man of the Ottawa Valley.
A suspected arson at a home in Richmond Hill, Ont., that left an 11-year-old girl dead and four others critically injured is now being investigated as a homicide, York Region police said Wednesday.
Police said they were called to the scene on Skywood Drive just before 3 a.m. on Monday after a report of a house fire. Four unconscious residents were found inside the home while a fifth was found outside, and all of them were taken to hospital in critical condition.
The Metro Vancouver Regional District has issued an air-quality warning for the Lower Mainland as a dense shroud of wildfire smoke descends over large parts of British Columbia.
Environment Canada has expanded air-quality advisories to more than 30 locations including the Vancouver area and Fraser Valley, as well as most of the B.C. Interior and the northeast.
The range of British Columbia public service staff that could potentially be impacted by job action that began this week is wide, from scientists and social workers to liquor and cannabis distribution and retail staff.
But a labour expert says the BC General Employees’ Union’s actions have so far been limited to allow for an “escalating strategy” to force the government’s hand in negotiations.
Ontario’s information and privacy commissioner has ordered a Windsor doctor and his private clinic to pay thousands of dollars in fines for privacy breaches in a case she calls a “cautionary tale” for other health startups.
Commissioner Patricia Kosseim wrote in a recent decision that a doctor with privileges at Windsor Regional Hospital used his electronic health record access there to look for parents of newborn boys and contact them to offer circumcisions at a clinic he partly owns.
The brother of a man who was fatally shot in his Vaughan, Ont., home during a home invasion described him as “a hero who died defending his family,” as he and the city’s mayor called for changes to Canada’s criminal justice system.
Police said Wednesday that Abdul Aleem Farooqi, 46, died from gunshot wounds after at least three male suspects broke into his home around 1 a.m. on Aug. 31.
Claudia Ensuncho Martinez’s right forearm is tattooed with a feather, its spine formed by the white scar stretching from her wrist to elbow.
On a sweltering day last August, Ms. Ensuncho Martinez arrived at the Canadian border, fleeing the man who inflicted that scar. After the journey from Colombia by boat, by foot, by bus and by train, the Rainbow Bridge was a portal to a new life.
© Sara Stathas
The Quebec government wants a judge to declare insolvent the North American branch of Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt, as the province attempts to recoup some of its losses on a failed electric-vehicle battery project.
Documents filed in Quebec Superior Court on Tuesday say that Northvolt Batteries North America owes more than $260 million on a government loan that allowed the company to buy land near Montreal to build a $7-billion battery plant.
The countrywide push for major projects won’t happen without First Nations at the table, the Assembly of First Nations warned government and industry Wednesday, as its annual summer gathering began in Winnipeg.
“We can all agree on this: that progress cannot come at the cost of our rights, our treaties or our responsibilities to the land,” Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Kyra Wilson told those gathered in Winnipeg.
Heat warnings and air-quality advisories are persisting in parts of British Columbia after daily high temperature records fell in a dozen communities, and the mercury rose to 40 degrees in the Fraser Canyon.
Environment Canada says Lytton, B.C., reached that mark on Tuesday, breaking a record of 39.6 degrees set in 2022.
IndyCar is coming to Markham, Ont.
The open-wheel auto racing series announced on Wednesday that it’s moving the Grand Prix of Toronto from Exhibition Place in the city’s downtown core to its northeastern suburb and that it will now be held later in the summer. Neil Lumsden, Ontario’s Minister of Sport, said he was happy that the multiyear deal will keep the race – now dubbed the Ontario Honda Dealers Indy at Markham – in the province.
© Arlyn McAdorey
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is calling on the Liberals to scrap the temporary foreign worker program and stop issuing visas under the program, arguing it has caused an employment crisis among young Canadians.
“The Liberals have to answer why is it that they’re shutting our own youth out of jobs and replacing them with low-wage, temporary foreign workers from poor countries who are ultimately being exploited,” Poilievre told a news conference Wednesday morning in Mississauga, Ont.
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