A cabinet minister who serves as the federal Liberals' national campaign co-chair told MPs at the party's recent caucus retreat that they need to "change their attitudes" if they want to turn around their dismal polling numbers, sources tell CBC News.

Three (MPs) said Tourism Minister Soraya Martinez Ferrada, national campaign co-chair, told them during her presentation that if they "want something to change" in their political prospects, they should change their "attitudes" first.

Two of those three MPs said the comment was poorly received by caucus members in the room. One said the statement was particularly galling because backbench MPs have been bearing the brunt of voters' dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government.

In 2013, Reynolds and Alcoa agreed to pay nearly US$20 million to tribal, state and federal authorities to help remediate the damage. The Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe independently pursued settlements from Monsanto and its corporate successors — including Bayer, which bought the company in 2018 — alleging that polychlorinated biphenyls exposure led to increased risks of cancer and other diseases among tribal members.

David Carpenter, 87, is a physician and director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, in New York state.

Over the years, Carpenter witnessed an increasingly wide range of serious harms linked to polychlorinated biphenyls — including heart disease, infertility and diabetes. According to the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, the rate of diabetes in the community is 30 per cent, more than three times the Canadian prevalence of nine per cent. On the American side of the border, the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe and Health Services reports that diabetes affects 16 per cent of Mohawks living in Akwesasne, compared to eight per cent of the state population.

“Everybody thinks that diabetes is a function of being obese. I don’t think it is. It’s much more related to [polychlorinated biphenyls] and other environmental exposures than it is to obesity,” Carpenter says, pointing out the high rate of diabetes in Akwesasne affects both the young and the old.

Canada is looking for a bigger security role in Asia and has made forging deeper ties with Japan and South Korea a priority. As its defence commitments expand at home and overseas the country is expanding military spending.

"Next year, my defence budget will rise by 27% over this year, and, frankly, in the next three or four years, our defence spending will triple," Blair said.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has firmly stated that Ukraine should be allowed to conduct long-range strikes inside Russian territory, despite threats from Moscow.

This stance comes in the wake of Ukrainian forces occupying parts of Russian territory for the first time since World War II, and Ukrainian officialls asking Western partners to remove restrictions on the use of Western long-range weapons so that Ukraine can degrade Russia’s logistics and airfields in the rear and bring the war to an end faster.

“Canada fully supports Ukraine using long-range weaponry to prevent and interdict Russia’s continued ability to degrade Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure, and mostly to kill innocent civilians in their unjust war,” Trudeau declared at a news conference in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec.

MBFC

Ellie’s home, like most in Six Nations, isn’t connected to municipal water. On the sprawling reserve in Southwestern Ontario, roughly 70 per cent of households, or about 8,500 people, are without piped, reliable drinking water.

The Six Nations reserve is a 1 hour 20 minute drive West from Niagara

Despite the defence department spending more than $34.8 million on new sleeping bags, the Canadian Army asked late last year that hundreds of soldiers headed to a joint northern exercise in Alaska with the Americans be issued with old, 1960s-vintage bedrolls.

Troops who had used the recently issued General Purpose Sleeping Bag System (GPSBS) late last fall in a preparatory exercise found "several critical issues," according to an internal briefing note obtained by CBC News.

The "critical issues" discovered by the soldiers "related to lack of warmth with the new GPSBS," said the briefing note, written on Dec. 5, 2023.

In its statement, DND said it sought feedback from soldiers — but the department did not answer directly when asked what sort of cold weather testing was done before it chose to purchase the sleeping bags.

But Salem said elected officials have an obligation to engage with their constituents. He said Plante could deal with online harassment by blocking individual accounts or reporting them to the police. "When we decide to be public figures, that goes with the position," he said. "When we want to be representative of the population, we have to be representative of the whole population."

Anaïs Bussières McNicoll, director of the fundamental freedoms program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said a "blanket prohibition on comment" is an unreasonable limitation of people's freedom of expression. Instead, she said, elected officials should evaluate inappropriate comments on a case-by-case basis.

"I would say that elected officials with significant resources shouldn't have their cake and eat it too," she said. "In that if they choose to have access to and to use social media platforms in the context of their public work, they should also accept that their constituents might want to comment on their work on that very public platform."

But researchers say focusing on the environmental impacts and potential health harms of the finished products alone hides their actual environmental impact. Manufacturing Teflon and other fluoropolymers uses other, more dangerous PFAS chemicals. These compounds are known to contaminate the environment surrounding manufacturing facilities, said Rainer Lohmann, a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.

"Basically, anywhere where there's a major fluoropolymer producer, they seem to have succeeded in contaminating the entire region with their production process," he said.

The ministry's move to remove fluoropolymers from its proposed rules suggests those industry lobbying efforts have worked, MacDonald said. Using a study with self-declared ties to the chemical industry to back up the ministry's decision to exclude fluoropolymers "just kind of shows a little bit of what's happening behind the scenes in terms of where the government is taking the industry's word," she said.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/air-canada-labour-dispute-1.7321527

Obligatory fuck the CEOs and Shareholders

"We are bargaining. We are committed to reaching a deal. But we are saying that if that fails, the government should be ready to intervene and avoid the disruption," - Christophe Hennebelle (Air Canada’s vice-president of corporate communications)

this is not what a company that's negotiating in good faith does

NDP won't support interference

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said Thursday morning the party would not support efforts to force pilots back to work.

"We're going to send a clear message again that we are opposed to Justin Trudeau and the Liberals, or any government, interfering with workers," said Singh.

At the international level, housing was recognized as part of the right to an adequate standard of living in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Canada agreed to.

At the national level, the National Housing Strategy Act was enacted in 2019, recognizing housing as a human right.

Meanwhile, judges have ruled that Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights of Freedoms, which protects the right to life, liberty and security of the person, includes housing rights, even if that "housing" is in an encampment.

In Winnipeg, the city only evicts encampments that are on private property or are causing an immediate risk to safety.

That has many Winnipeggers complaining the encampments keep them from visiting parks.

Standing by the docks in downtown Nanaimo, B.C., on Monday morning, Liberal MP Alexandre Mendes told Radio-Canada she came to this week's Liberal caucus retreat with a message from her constituents: "dozens and dozens" of them were "adamant" the Liberal Party needed a new leader.

Speaking later to CBC's Power & Politics, Mendes said it was hard to pinpoint a specific reason or issue to explain her constituents' feelings for the prime minister.

"It's a very generalized ... 'we're tired of his face' kind of thing," she explained.

Wendy Washik was at a neighbourhood barbecue on Sept. 1 when she joined a playful water gun fight with one of her neighbour’s children. As the 58-year-old educational assistant was chasing the child to the front of the home, she said she accidentally sprayed another neighbour with water.

Washik said the neighbour called police and officers arrived at the scene a short time later and charged her with assault with a weapon. She claims police spoke to the neighbour who made the call but asked no one else questions about the incident.

(Monte MacGregor, a Toronto-based criminal defense lawyer, said) “Am I surprised that the charge has been laid? No. But do I recognize that it's an unfortunate and almost meaningless waste of resources? Yes, because they didn't interview her, right?” he said.

An Ontario Provincial Police finding that there was no "serious" officer misconduct after a police car struck and killed a pedestrian has been rejected in court.

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled this week that the decision was "unreasonable" and the OPP failed to justify why it did not consider the conduct serious.

A police vehicle struck and killed Tyler Dorzyk late at night in September 2020 near Midland, Ont., and his spouse filed a complaint with the Office of the Independent Police Review Director over the conduct of the driver and another officer who attended the scene.

The review body determined that both engaged in discreditable conduct. It concluded that Const. Jaimee McBain, who was on a coffee run, did not operate her vehicle safely, and that the attending officer made insensitive comments that lacked impartiality.

According to Barbara Bedont, Alkhdour's lawyer, the charges come from a protest that took place last Thursday in front of the Liberal campaign office, with Miller nearby. Bedont said Alkhdour was packing her belongings after the protest, when Miller showed up in a vehicle. She said Alkhdour approached the vehicle and "expressed her feelings about his policies." "They said 'shame on you' and 'you're a child killer.' Things like that — political speech," the lawyer said, adding that Miller was in the vehicle the whole time before it drove off. She said the interaction lasted about five seconds, with Alkhdour standing about a metre away from the vehicle, and the other two people charged standing further back. "At no time was he ever threatened," Bedont said. "There was no violence. It was a purely peaceful expression of her political views."

Alkhdour's protests began shortly after the death of her 13-year-old daughter, Jana Elkahlout, who was born with cerebral palsy. Alkhdour, her husband and two of her children moved to Quebec in 2019, and started the process of bringing Jana to Canada, after she was forced to stay in Gaza due to the unavailability of safe ambulance travel between there and Egypt. After years of trying to get her daughter to come to Canada, the family finally received the green light from the federal government in January, but Jana was already dead.