British Columbia is creating a provincial police unit to crack down on the wide-scale extortion of South Asian businesspeople, including a wave of shootings in recent months that echoes similar violence seen across Alberta and Ontario.

Assistant Commissioner John Brewer, with the British Columbia RCMP, and provincial Solicitor-General Nina Krieger announced the new 40-member team at a news conference Wednesday flanked by police leaders from around Metro Vancouver. They said this unit will lead new investigations as well as help local RCMP detachments and other municipal forces with their open cases.

British Columbia’s second-largest city has created a $250,000 fund to dole out rewards to people with evidence that helps stop the continuing extortion of South Asian businesspeople.

Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke and the city’s police chief announced the fund Monday as they detailed the latest effort to stop the extortions, which she characterized as “frightening and unacceptable.”

The Surrey Police Service said it is investigating 44 extortion cases, including 27 that involved shootings of businesses, homes and vehicles. The agency didn’t specify the time period for these crimes, but noted they peaked in June.

Media outlets will not be able to report on the mental-health history of the man accused in the Lapu-Lapu Day street festival attack before his eventual trial on 11 counts of second-degree murder and 31 counts of attempted murder, a judge has ruled.

On Thursday, B.C. Provincial Court Judge Reginald Harris dismissed an attempt by a media consortium, which includes The Globe and Mail, to lift a publication ban on details of this summer’s hearing into the mental fitness of Kai-Ji Adam Lo.

The man accused of ramming his SUV through a busy Vancouver street festival this spring is mentally fit to stand trial for 11 counts of murder and 31 of attempted murder, a judge ruled Wednesday.

B.C. Provincial Court Judge Reginald Harris made the assessment of Kai-Ji Adam Lo’s fitness after weeks of interviews by a psychiatrist in the hospital where he is being held.

The RCMP say a B.C. man and two men from Ottawa have been charged in the 2022 jailbreak of one of Canada’s most wanted gangsters.

At a Monday news conference in their British Columbia headquarters, Mounties said Ottawa’s Edward Ayoub and John Potvin, both nearly 50, had been charged along with Ryan Van Gool, from the small Fraser Valley community of Harrison Hot Springs, east of Vancouver, with prison breach and conspiracy.

The trio are accused of facilitating the brazen breakout of Rabih Alkhalil from a jail in Port Coquitlam, B.C., three years ago while he was on trial for the first-degree murder of a rival.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

The RCMP have arrested a Montreal boy on terrorism-related charges, alleging he had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and was planning at least one attack.

The Mounties said Wednesday that they arrested the boy without incident in the city’s Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough, and police were still searching a four-storey apartment there Wednesday afternoon. Authorities did not release the minor’s name or age.

Corporal Érique Gasse said the public was never in danger and that police began their investigation in April. The RCMP found the boy allegedly intended to acquire weapons, such as AK-47s, for the attack.