Archive: [ https://archive.is/p8x6G ]

The Canadian government is spending money to attack rigorous journalists who partially dissent with Canadian foreign policy (e.g., Israel and Co's genocide) and to call them Chinese state-affiliated news outlets.

I already had strong suspicions the Canadian government was employing associations with China as pretext to disparage and censor dissenting ideas, people, and platforms. This is strong evidence.

I wish our government focused more on governing based on public wants and needs and less on covering up governance that goes against or that is morally bankrupt or corrupt

Several million spread across a handful of projects may seem like small potatoes compared to other federal financing worth hundreds of millions, but Alex Cool-Fergus, Climate Action Network Canada’s national policy manager, is frustrated to see the federal government pump any money into the hydrogen sector. In an interview with Canada’s National Observer she called hydrogen an improbable “techno-fix” that has been effectively marketed by the fossil fuel industry.

The possible end uses for hydrogen are dwindling, which is eroding its forecasted demand. To put in perspective just how significant this is, four years ago Natural Resources Canada expected the global market could be worth up to $11.7 trillion, but now says it could be worth up to $1.9 trillion — an 84 per cent drop.

“It's disappointing to see that the federal government continues to invest in this false solution, and that disappointment is amplified by the fact that some of this money is going to massive companies that don't need any more money,” she said, calling it a “slap in the face.”

“If [fossil fuel companies are] going to be investing in this at all, they should be using their own profits.” Last year, Enbridge posted $5.8 billion in profit and greenlit $10 billion worth of new projects.

Export Development Canada (EDC) and other national crown corporations have provided $7.6 to $13.5 billion a year between 2020 and 2022 to support the domestic fossil fuel industry, as compared with just $147 million for in-country renewable energy production, number-crunching by the IISD revealed in June.

Canada was criticized in the new report for a “lack of transparency in reporting” that made it hard to ascertain whether finance was going to domestic or international markets. EDC data shows it has provided $88 billion to the oil and gas sector since 2016.

The protest took place outside a Liberal Party fundraiser in downtown Halifax on Tuesday attended by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“The message to the government is that they have violated our members’ Charters rights,” Christopher Monette, director of public affairs for Teamsters Canada, told the NB Media Co-op.

He said the Minister’s decision shows private industry that “government will swoop in and save them” in a conflict with labour. CN and CPKC didn’t make anyone available for an interview.

This is an aspect of the carbon capture greenwashing initiative I wasn't aware of. It will need another pipeline network that can be very costly to human and environmental health (and operated by an industry that our government is willfully blind to).

Carbon capture is becoming a linchpin of Canada’s plan to reduce emissions from its oil and gas sector, but to pull this plan off would require massive investments in necessary infrastructure: pipelines, pressurization stations, equipping carbon capture to bitumen upgraders and more, all of which could fail. In a carbon management strategy, released in 2023, the federal government says to support the country’s emission reduction efforts, carbon capture capacity must grow 270 per cent from current levels by 2030, with “significant further scaling required” to reach net-zero by 2050.

when carbon dioxide pipelines fail, they can fail catastrophically.

According to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, there have been at least 76 reported safety incidents related to CO2 pipelines since 2010 in the United States. Some incidents are minor and others are disastrous, but all point to the risks of transporting and storing carbon dioxide as a way to manage greenhouse gas emissions.

Dodging a full assessment

By far the largest project would be the Pathways Alliance’s $16.5-billion flagship carbon capture project, which would include a carbon dioxide pipeline stretching 400 kilometres from the oilsands in northern Alberta to a storage hub about 300 kilometres east of Edmonton.

The Pathways Alliance is splitting its megaproject into 126 smaller segments, with multiple applications for various licences with the AER. As previously reported by Canada’s National Observer, that means the project won’t be subject to a full environmental assessment that examines what the impact of the project in its entirety would be. “The impacts are never being articulated to the public, and that includes impacts on the environment, the climate and Indigenous rights,” said Matt Hulse, a lawyer with Ecojustice collaborating with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation to call for an impact assessment.

New research finds that access to the surgery has increased since an Ontario government funding change — “but only for one group”

A new study adds weight to such suspicions. Analyzing six years of patient data, it has found that a disproportionate number of surgeries performed by private clinics since the province’s new funding allocation have gone to the wealthiest Ontarians.

“You can’t actually charge patients for cataract surgery, because of OHIP,” says Campbell. “But [these clinics] would have OHIP pay for the cataract surgeries and charge patients for other services in a way that would cover their costs and left a profit.”

“What we did is divide people into five different strata by socioeconomic status and compare their rates of surgery before and after this policy change,” Campbell says. “To put it bluntly, access did go up, but only for one group — and that was the group that could afford to pay extra.” In fact, the team found that surgeries for those in the highest socioeconomic strata went up by nearly 25 per cent in private clinics. For those in the lowest, however, they fell by 8.5 per cent.

While it is difficult to say what precisely is driving this change, Campbell says it likely comes down to two major factors. “The first is the continued request for payment from patients who are seeking care in private centres … The second is these clinics keeping separate wait-lists for people who are willing to pay extra versus those who aren’t,” he says. “That allows them to sell, essentially, the ability to jump the line. Extra lenses and whatnot might have some value to them, but the real value is in jumping what is perceived as a really long queue.”

“The whole thing was equal parts unnerving and a miracle,” he says. “The most terrifying thing was seeing them interacting with 80-year-olds who were confused, worried, and just wanted their vision back so they could see their grandkids. These people were accepting those fees left and right.”

Reporting on the evacuations and wildfires while also being an evacuee myself was a unique experience, one I am both grateful for and never want to repeat. It’s also something I hope both myself and others can learn from.

In many ways, I was very privileged. I was able to drive out of town in my own car and took my cat with me. I avoided the long line ups and unsafe driving conditions that many other evacuees faced. I had a safe and comfortable place to stay in the N.W.T. I didn’t have to endure weeks without pay while the bills kept coming. My home didn’t burn down.

I was deeply disappointed with how little both the city and N.W.T. government had prepared for Yellowknife’s evacuation as well as their subsequent response.

While a citywide evacuation may have been unprecedented, it was not completely unforeseen and governments did have time to plan. It was nearly a decade after the N.W.T’s infamous summer of smoke, the territory’s previous worst wildfire season on record in 2014. It was more than three years after governments were forced to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic. And it was three months after Hay River and Kátł’odeeche First Nation were evacuated for the first time that summer. Governments could have learned from those experiences and chosen to be proactive rather than reactive.

The salmon run this year is low. Still, Wet’suwe’ten people continue fishing in the hopes of catching a few to process, smoke, and can — a tradition integral to their way of life. However, Wet’suwet’en Likts’amisyu Clan Wing Chief Dsta’hyl, also known as Adam Gagnon, wasn’t able to partake this year.

Perched on a hill overlooking the canyon, he watches things unfold from his home, where he’s been held captive for most of his days since July 3 as he completes a sentence of 60 days house arrest.

“It was a blessing in disguise,” said Dsta’hyl, about not having to serve his time behind bars. Yet he remains defiant, and plans to appeal. “All of us have to start standing up. We must raise our children to start taking control of their own territories.”

In late July, Amnesty International took the extraordinary step in naming Dsta’hyl Canada’s first ever designated prisoner of conscience, and now demanding his immediate and unconditional release.

Last year Wanda Nanibush, then the curator of Indigenous art for the Art Gallery of Ontario, was in New York City, serving on the jury for the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice. She was doing events associated with the prize when, on October 7, Hamas-led militants breached the fence separating Gaza from Israel, some 1,200 Israelis were killed, and more than 200 were taken to Gaza as hostages.

Nanibush stayed in New York a while longer and, in the wake of Israel’s counterattack, watched the protests that began there. In the days and weeks that followed, she posted about Gaza on her private Instagram account. One post mentioned the 1,000 children who had, by that point, been killed. (That number is now over 10,000, per latest reports.) Another defined settler colonialism—whereby colonizers displace and replace an indigenous population—and argued that “all violent resistance to settler colonialism is met with far worse and technologically destructive violence that is seen as justified as self-protection.”

Then, in early November, Nanibush disappeared from public view. Her Instagram account went dark, and her name was scrubbed from the AGO’s website. Shows that she had planned for months were cancelled. The AGO, which had formerly touted Nanibush’s work during her seven years at the museum, issued no public statement.

It soon emerged that Nanibush had abruptly, completely, left the AGO. In statements the museum and its director, Stephan Jost, would eventually release, her departure was described as a mutual decision. But in conversations with me, others would use stronger language—“squeezed out” or “obliged to leave.” While the precise nature of what transpired between Nanibush and the AGO senior leadership remains hazy, a clarifying narrative soon took shape.

From the beginning of her tenure at the museum, Nanibush’s public views on Palestinian justice, expressed on her social media and elsewhere, had irritated powerful members of the board of trustees. She’d been reprimanded before. Three years ago, the museum adopted a new social media policy that, while vague, effectively said anything staffers posted was an extension of the AGO. Nanibush felt the policy was directed expressly at her and was furious. No other staffers, she felt, were being policed as she was. But in the fractious, emotionally charged time after October 7, any advocacy for Palestine risked being interpreted as antisemitic. Those same influential trustees—just two or three out of a board of twenty-seven—could now use Nanibush’s posts as an excuse to remove her from the museum.

Quebec is the only province where consumers can freeze their credit — an easy way to protect against identity fraud by blocking access to your credit report, so fraudsters can't open credit card accounts or take out loans.

Credit freezes are "very useful and effective" says anti-fraud consultant Vanessa Iafolla, especially in the wake of a growing number of data breaches, like the recent Ticketmaster incident which exposed customers' credit card information.

"When you have this much access to personal data, identifiable information, fraudsters can very easily get at the necessary information to secure credit products. So a credit freeze basically puts up a moat," said Iafolla, from Anti-Fraud Intelligence Consulting, based in Halifax.

"And the reason why that is so deeply important when it comes to preventing fraud is that, by the time people usually figure out that their credit has been accessed, it's too late."

Premier Danielle Smith’s efforts to revive a contentious open-pit coal mining project owned by the litigious Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart have met a major legal hurdle.

Alberta’s Court of Appeal ruled this week that the Alberta Energy Regulator’s decision to turn a dead mining project — one rejected by regulators and the courts — into an “advanced coal project” is highly questionable and possibly an error in law.

As a consequence Justice Kevin Feth granted the Municipal District of Ranchland permission to appeal AER’s decision to let Northback Holdings apply for several licenses for renewed exploratory drilling on Grassy Mountain in the Crowsnest Pass.

Ranchland is a neighbouring area of wild fescue grasses and cattle ranchers that would be directly damaged by the mine.

A successful appeal would kill those exploratory licenses which are currently set for a public hearing in early 2025.

Danielle Larivee, a vice-president at the United Nurses of Alberta, said nurses are “very alarmed” by hospital transfers she said could negatively affect care and drive critical health-care workers from the province.

Like Parks, Larivee said the worry is the restructuring will lead to more bureaucracy and less co-ordination across the system.

“We're not seeing any evidence at all to support the idea that this is about improving access to care, about improving services or even about saving money,” said Larivee in an interview.

"If we're not saving money and not making care better, why are we doing it?"

Unless policies or technologies change, the ownership cost of electric vehicles (EVs) needs to decrease by 31 per cent if Canada to wants to reach its sales target of 60 per cent EVs by 2030, according to a new report released Thursday by Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux.

Last December, the federal government unveiled its Electric Vehicle Availability Standard that outlined zero-emission vehicle sales targets for automakers. The standard requires all new light-duty sales in Canada to be electric or plug-in hybrid by 2035. There are also interim targets of at least 20 per cent of all sales being EVs by 2026 and 60 per cent by 2030.

Those federal government targets come as growth forecasts for auto companies have plateaued and concerns about charging infrastructure persist. The price of EVs has also pushed the cars out of reach for many consumers. According to the Canadian Black Book, the average cost of an EV was $73,000 in 2023.

A doctor who was found guilty of sexually assaulting some of his patients over several years was sentenced in a Manitoba court on Thursday.

Arcel Bissonnette was sentenced to 12 years in prison by Justice Sadie Bond in the Manitoba Court of King's Bench. He was found guilty of five charges of sexual assault following a trial last year.

The assaults took place between 2001 and 2017 when Bissonnette was working as a family doctor at the Ste. Anne Hospital and the Seine Medical Centre.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say your have scarred your victims perhaps for life,” Bond said.

Canada needs more clean power to meet growing demand, while aiming for net-zero emissions to fight climate change.

Many Canadians want to install rooftop solar panels to help. But while that can lower their electricity bills, they can't actually get paid for it — because many jurisdictions limit the power generation of a rooftop solar system to the amount you consume, and customers can only be compensated in bill credits, not cash.

Hydro-Quebec puts it this way: "The customer's goal must be self-sufficiency and not sales."

Darren Chu, managing director of Calgary-based Utility Network and Partners, says similar rules in Alberta are frustrating.

"We have lots of customers who come to us and say, 'Well, I have all this roof space and I'm only allowed to cover a small portion of it with solar panels because that's all my consumption will allow me to do. How come I'm not allowed to export more?'" he said.

The governments of former Alberta premier Jason Kenney and now Premier Danielle Smith have been vigorously lobbied to support a private company’s high-stakes gamble on a rail line from Calgary to Banff.

With potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of public money at stake, internal government documents obtained by The Tyee raise a question.

Why did Smith personally arrange for her husband to be granted extraordinary access to confidential internal government discussions about the proposed project?

The internal documents, obtained through freedom of information, show Smith’s husband, David Moretta, attended an hour-long confidential government meeting at McDougall Centre, the provincial government’s Calgary office, on Sept. 26, 2023.

The government redacted any information that would show who else attended the meeting and what was discussed.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has written a letter to his NDP counterpart asking Jagmeet Singh to pull his party's support for the Liberal government so Canadians can go to the polls this fall instead of next year as planned.

"Canadians can't afford or even endure another year of this costly coalition. No one voted for you to keep Trudeau in power. You do not have a mandate to drag out his government another year," Poilievre wrote in his letter.

"Pull out of the costly coalition and vote non-confidence in the government this September to trigger a carbon tax election in October of THIS YEAR. Or you will forever be known as 'Sellout Singh,'" Poilievre said.

Poilievre's challenge to Singh comes as the parties square off in a federal byelection in Manitoba, a Sept. 16 vote that is expected to be a competitive two-way race between the Conservative and NDP candidates.