Excerpt:

Nisku, Alberta, is a long way from the ocean, but that hasn’t stopped Confined Space Robotics (CSR) from contributing to Canada’s national shipbuilding strategy, thanks to a partnership with British Columbia’s Seaspan Shipyards.

On Feb. 12, CSR, which rents, sells, leases, and trains semiautonomous robots designed to replace human labour in confined or dangerous areas, was awarded a $1.5-million contract to develop and deploy abrasive blasting and painting systems at Seaspan’s Vancouver shipyard.

The $1.5 million is part of Seaspan’s commitment as a partner with the federal government’s national shipbuilding strategy, a long-term, multi-billion-dollar program to revitalize Canada’s domestic marine industry. Under the partnership, Seaspan has invested more than $35 million to support research and skills development in the marine industry. Seaspan has so far delivered four ships under the national shipbuilding strategy, with plans to deliver 23.

While incomes in Canada have risen 76 per cent since 2004, the price of a new home at the lower end of the market has risen by 265 per cent, the analysis said.

“Brand-new family-sized starter homes are over twice as expensive relative to income as they were 20 years ago. And unless governments get serious about bringing down the cost of homebuilding, it will take another 20 years to fix,” economist Mike Moffat said in the report.

The report added that even if home prices stopped rising entirely, it would take 25 years for the price-to-income ratio to reach the levels they were at in 2004.

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/60912080

A new surge of American nurses, doctors, and other health care workers moving to Canada, and specifically British Columbia, where more than 1,000 U.S.-trained nurses have been approved to work since April.

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Brett Drozd was a straight-A student who’d never been to his family’s homeland. Then the invasion happened.

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Drozd was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Canada was home, but so was Ukraine. Although he had never visited before 2022, never even travelled to Europe, he grew up in a household with generations-deep Ukrainian roots. His great-grandparents had fled the Russian Revolution more than a century ago, settling on the Prairies. He grew up in a household in which many extended family members spoke Ukrainian as their first language, where eating borscht, varenyky (pierogies), and holubtsi (cabbage rolls) was a regular occurrence.

At thirty, Drozd was a straight-A university student working on the prerequisites required to enter a doctor of pharmacy program. He was less than a year from starting when news broke that Russia had invaded Ukraine. Watching columns of tanks roll toward Kyiv was a distraction too hard to ignore. “It became obvious very quickly that this isn’t good for me,” he recalled while navigating the highway, “to try to churn through the motions back at home when my mind and my heart were with Ukraine.” He needed to do something.

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smart move imo

Nova Scotia RCMP have formally charged two teen boys with sexual assault in connection with an alleged hazing incident involving members of a youth hockey team in the Truro area.

Both of the teens were 14 years old at the time of the alleged offences, which police say occurred last October.

Both of the teens are charged with sexual assault and sexual assault with a weapon. According to court documents which were sworn on Tuesday of this week, the weapon was a miniature hockey stick.

One of the teens is also charged with assault.

Both accused are free on conditions and have been ordered to stay away from three youths. They have also been banned from public locker rooms, unless accompanied by an adult.

(BRETT) DROZD WAS BORN IN Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Canada was home, but so was Ukraine. Although he had never visited before 2022, never even travelled to Europe, he grew up in a household with generations-deep Ukrainian roots. His great-grandparents had fled the Russian Revolution more than a century ago, settling on the Prairies. He grew up in a household in which many extended family members spoke Ukrainian as their first language, where eating borscht, varenyky (pierogies), and holubtsi (cabbage rolls) was a regular occurrence.

At thirty, Drozd was a straight-A university student working on the prerequisites for a doctor of pharmacy program. He was less than a year from starting when news broke that Russia had invaded Ukraine. Watching columns of tanks roll toward Kyiv was a distraction too hard to ignore. “It became obvious very quickly that this isn’t good for me,” he recalled while navigating the highway, “to try to churn through the motions back at home when my mind and my heart were with Ukraine.” He needed to do something.

The decision, in the end, was easy. Drozd finished the semester, and on Mother’s Day 2022, he and his family gathered on his grandmother’s front lawn and said their goodbyes. In a short time, the diligent student with no experience in war zones found himself in Ukraine with one goal: to be useful. What he lacked in hard, related skills, he either learned by watching YouTube videos or made up for in determination and resourcefulness.

The ragtag nature of volunteering in Ukraine often runs counter to the commonly held belief that aid organizations are giant, well-oiled machines that go into the most dangerous areas, ensuring critical supplies reach those who need them most. The reality is that, although there are big organizations like the United Nations on the ground, they’re understandably doing their best to minimize the risks they take, said Drozd. As a result, smaller villages closer to the front lines are often inaccessible for aid deliveries and evacuations. So, a relatively small number of independent volunteers, alongside smaller non-governmental organizations (NGOs), put themselves in harm’s way to connect the critical dots that the bigger organizations can’t—or won’t. Drozd became one of them.

‘We actually have a worse dark money problem in Canada than they do in the US’

Months after Canada’s federal election, the funding sources for some prominent third-party advertisers remain a mystery. Experts say the political influencers are increasingly finding ways to sidestep election advertising regulations, and in some cases strategically choosing non-compliance.

“Between the comparatively low penalties, the lengthiness of the process, it doesn’t necessarily encourage compliance, especially if you’re a third party that is already antagonistic to this approach that we have to regulating third party finance,” said Andrea Lawlor, an associate professor in the political science department at McMaster University.

. . .

Canada Strong and Proud spent up to $581,044 on political ads placed on Meta platforms in 2025. Only about $290,000 was spent during the official federal campaign period and is subject to reporting requirements. To date, the sources of just $750 in contributions have been disclosed to Elections Canada. Elections Canada told the IJF that Canada Strong and Proud was granted an extension for its final campaign return, but the return was not received by the Sept. 29 due date.

Archive

The Olympic gold medal-winning U.S. men's hockey team visited President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday afternoon and later received about a two-minute bipartisan standing ovation during his State of the Union address that night.

Men's players entered the House chamber through two sets of doors and walked down the rows of the press gallery. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle not only stood and cheered but chanted "USA!" several times, many even pumping fists.

Rep. Lisa McClain, the Republican House Conference Chair, shouted "Love you!" to the players.

Trump also said goalie Connor Hellebuyck, who stopped 41 shots in the gold medal game, will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honour. Hellebuyck, who plays for the NHL's Winnipeg Jets, tapped his heart as those in the chamber applauded.

Closing British Columbia’s independent Office of the Merit Commissioner will undo a significant change the NDP government made in 2018 in response to “wrong and unjust” firings from the Health Ministry.

Following a recommendation in Ombudsperson Jay Chalke’s report “Misfire: The 2012 Ministry of Health Employment Terminations and Related Matters,” the NDP gave the merit commissioner oversight of dismissal practices and responsibility to assess “whether government has complied with its legal... requirements and policy requirements.”

But in last week’s budget, Finance Minister Brenda Bailey quietly scrapped the merit commissioner, an office that for more than two decades has been responsible for making sure B.C. public service hirings were based on merit.

Bailey said the Health Ministry firings were made “quite some time ago” and the merit commissioner’s oversight of the BC Public Service Agency, or PSA, is no longer needed.

archive article: https://archive.is/P2YQo

Enbridge’s CEO doesn’t think investors should take on the risk of developing new fossil fuel infrastructure — that, instead, governments should do so for them.

Premier Danielle Smith wielded a striking figure earlier this month to make her case for giving her province more say in how the federal government picks upper court judges for Alberta.

“Especially since 80 per cent of the judges or so have been demonstrated to have Liberal party donations, I don’t know why anyone would think that the process we have right now is free of politics,” she told reporters.

Eighty per cent? Four in five?

If that were true, it would paint a picture of a judicial appointment system rife with partisanship, at levels previously unseen in other analyses of judges’ donation records, either academic or journalistic.

It is not true. The single media source Smith got that fact from has since corrected it.

Indigenous-owned or co-owned renewable energy projects have a role to play in helping Canada come closer to reaching its climate targets, says one advocate.

James Jenkins, executive director of Indigenous Clean Energy, a not-for-profit that supports Indigenous-led clean energy projects at the community level, said Indigenous-owned or co-owned renewable energy projects increased over the last decade.

“Every project that's not emitting does help Canada reach that target,” said Jenkins.

Data released from Environment and Climate Change Canada in December suggests Canada will fall well short of its 2030 climate goal — just halfway to its target of a 40 to 45 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels.

Jenkins, a member of Walpole Island First Nation in southwestern Ontario, said among the growing list of operations are hydroelectric, wind and solar projects, and battery storage. Renewable generation can generate revenue which is then reinvested into community, he said.

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Ross Linden-Fraser, research lead of 440 Megatonnes, a data project at the Canadian Climate Institute tracking climate policy, said Indigenous nations have been "at the forefront of some of the really encouraging developments in clean electricity.”

He co-authored a recent Canadian Climate Institute report assessing the federal government’s report on progress toward the 2030 emissions reduction target that suggests Canada has moved further away from its climate targets since 2023 because the federal and provincial governments have removed or weakened climate policies.

"If Canada, a wealthy, high emitting country, is not contributing to global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that global effort is going to be weaker and we're going to have a harder time as a world trying to avoid these climate impacts,” he said.

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