Canada's parliament has passed a bill that that will cover the full cost of contraception and diabetes drugs for Canadians.

The Liberal government said it is the initial phase of a plan that would expand to become a publicly funded national pharmacare programme.

But two provinces - Alberta and Quebec - have indicated they may opt-out of the programme, accusing Ottawa of interfering in provincial matters.

Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, whose party is ahead in national polls by a wide margin, does not support the legislation.

Cindy Ali, the Toronto mother who was acquitted in the 2011 death of her 16-year-old daughter Cynara after serving more than four years in prison, is suing Toronto police and the city for more than $10 million.

“Officers took little care to secure the scene in the hours following the event, and the forensic team neglected to take fingerprint or DNA samples from several surfaces that Cindy said the home invaders touched,” (Cindy's) claim reads.

The claim stats that despite the investigation’s failure to produce “any incriminating evidence,” Ali was arrested on March 8, 2012 and charged with manslaughter. The charge was later upgraded to first-degree murder on Oct. 17, 2012.

The suit is seeking damages in the amount of $8 million from the Toronto Police Services Board and Frank Skubic, $2 million from the City of Toronto and Bujokas, and an additional $500,000 from all defendants.

The Office of the Provincial Veterinarian Animal Welfare informed the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS) about the videos and images in August 2024.

Police note the content was posted on the dark web, and approximately 10 cats were believed to be involved. Some of the animals were acquired through social media selling platforms.

A 55-year-old woman and 40-year-old man have been charged with killing or injuring animals; causing unnecessary suffering to an animal; failing to provide adequate medical attention to an animal when it was ill or wounded; and inflicting upon an animal acute suffering, serious injury or harm, or extreme anxiety or distress that significantly impairs its health or well-being.

Income inequality in Canada has hit the highest level ever recorded as wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, says Canada's statistics agency.

The gap in the share of disposable income between the richest two-fifths of Canadians and the bottom two-fifths grew to 47 percentage points in the second quarter of 2024, Statistics Canada reported Thursday.

That's the widest gap recorded since 1999, when Statistics Canada first started collecting such data.

The gap was driven by the top 20 per cent of income earners, who saw the largest increase in their share of disposable income, the report said. That increase was driven largely by investment gains, which the statistics agency attributed to high interest rates.

The system for testing truck drivers in Ontario has been compromised by bribes, forged documents and rigged testing, says a memo leaked to CBC's Marketplace by an industry insider.

Ontario's DriveTest centres are managed by a company called Serco, which oversees operations and logistics for a variety of organizations, ranging from air traffic control for the Canadian Armed Forces to employment services for the federal government.

The leaked internal memo, which was shared with Marketplace following an investigation into driving schools, was addressed to all driving examiners in Ontario. It reveals "a number of employees have either resigned or been terminated this past year due to investigations that we have completed involving allegations of inappropriate and illegal behaviour."

This behaviour ranges from examiners "accepting bribes for issuing road test passes, to manipulation of automatic versus manual transmission certificates, to false driver experience being added to driver records," according to the memo.

But as the community prospered, trouble grew. According to B.C. Emergency Health Services, overdose calls in the community exploded almost five-fold, from 48 in 2016 to 234 in 2023. Since 2021, 44 people in the region have died from an overdose.

The biggest killer, by far, is fentanyl. Seventy-nine per cent of the northern health region’s drug overdoses were caused by the synthetic opioid in 2023.

In 2021, a man was found dead on a rural road, south of Dawson Creek. His car had been set on fire. In January 2023, there was the double killing in Mile Zero Trailer Park. In April 2023, a body was found under a historic trestle bridge west of Dawson Creek.

Then, following in quick succession, several more killings and mysterious disappearances, including cousins Renee Didier and Daralyn Supernant and a young man passing through town.

Eleven missing or killed in total. All of them unsolved to this day.

Taking away people's family doctors: How to make sure you lose the next election.

Federal authorities began probing TD's internal controls after agents discovered a Chinese criminal operation bribed employees and brought large bags of cash into branches to launder millions of dollars in fentanyl sales through TD branches in New York and New Jersey, a source confirmed.

Kelsey Gallagher, a researcher with the arms monitoring group Project Ploughshares, said the admission comes as no surprise, since there is no codified definition of “non-lethal” goods in Canadian military export regulations. He noted that all military goods enable lethal operations in some way.

“Given the level of humanitarian harm being witnessed in Gaza and now the wider Middle East, I think it’s entirely inappropriate for the Canadian government to politicize messaging on this issue in such a way that it misleads the public,” he explained.

“If the intention was to mislead Canadians regarding the threat posed by Canada’s continued arming of Israel, then I think that goal was achieved.”

Jennifer Johnson, Lacombe-Ponoka legislature member, has been welcomed back into the United Conservative Party (UCP).

Johnson was banned in 2023 over comments where she compared the issue of transgender students in Alberta's schools to baking cookies with feces inside.

“We can be top three per cent but that little bit of poop is what wrecks it,” Johnson said in audio from a 2022 talk at the Western Unity Group in Stettler.

“This is more than a teaspoon of poop in the cookie batch, right?"

Another beluga whale has died at Marineland and four years into a provincial probe, Ontario's solicitor general is saying little about the investigation's progress.

The latest beluga death is the fourth in the past year, provincial records show. Since 2019, 16 belugas and one killer whale have died at the Niagara Falls, Ont., tourist attraction, the only place in the country that still holds whales in captivity. And three out of five belugas that Marineland sold to Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut have died since being moved there in the spring of 2021.

Ontario's Animal Welfare Services, which is part of the Ministry of the Solicitor General, launched an investigation into Marineland in 2020. The next year, the province declared all marine mammals at Marineland in distress due to poor water quality and ordered the park to fix the issue — the park appealed while denying its animals were in distress, but later dropped that appeal.

A national bird conservation organization says grassland habitat loss on the Prairies has created a "conservation crisis" for dozens of species of birds.

The crisis is illustrated in a new State of Canada's Birds report published Tuesday by Birds Canada in partnership with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

It says that since 1970, when dependable bird count data started being kept, birds living full or part time in Prairie grasslands have declined by 67 per cent.

Birds that live primarily or only in Prairie grassland areas have declined by 90 per cent over that same time period, the report shows.

The young man put it this way to the police officer: Halifax lawyer Billy Sparks had done more for him than even his own mother. He'd taken him golfing and to the casino, paid for food and beer, and let him sleep on the couch when he needed a place to stay.

But in August 2023, the young man shared a secret with the constable, whom he had come to trust. For about two years, he said, Sparks had also been extorting him, requesting explicit photos and videos in exchange for representing him in criminal cases.

Sparks, 52, killed himself earlier this year in the south-end Halifax duplex where he lived, just days after police searched the home, which doubled as a law office, as they investigated allegations he had groomed, extorted and sexually assaulted vulnerable clients with little money.

The roots of this odd struggle can be traced to a motion passed by the House before MPs went on their summer break.

With opposition MPs voting in favour and Liberal MPs voting against, the House adopted a Conservative motion on June 10 that ordered the government to turn over documents related to Sustainable Development Technology Canada, the federal agency that was shut down in June after the auditor general raised serious concerns about its management.

Such production orders are not unheard of, but in this case the Conservatives went a step further. According to the motion, the documents were to be provided to the House's law clerk, who would then turn them over to the RCMP.

(RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme stated) "It is therefore highly unlikely that any information obtained by the RCMP under the Motion where privacy interests exist could be used to support a criminal prosecution or further a criminal investigation."

"The House order solely required the law clerk and parliamentary counsel to transmit the documents," Scheer told the House in September. "It has not obliged the RCMP to open the envelope or insert the USB key into a computer."

But if that's the case, what exactly is the point of this current fight?