A year after the “Buy Canadian” movement started sweeping the country, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) is cracking down on grocery stores that promote imported food as Canadian.

So far this year, the federal food regulator has issued two fines to Loblaw-owned grocery stores for this type of violation. The CFIA is also investigating Canadian labelling and advertising practices at grocer Sobeys’ head office, CBC News has learned.

“Canadians have been clear that they want to support Canadian businesses and buy Canadian products,” said the agency in an email. “The CFIA will take the appropriate action to protect Canadians from misleading claims.”

When he was 22 years old, he moved from Japan to Toronto to study English, but he says he wound up in rural Nova Scotia working excessive hours at a campground for a total of $300 for nearly a year’s work.

“It's really, really sad. And I was crying sometimes because I don't know who I can trust,” the man, now 24, said in an interview.

CBC News is not revealing the man's name or showing his face to protect his privacy.

The RCMP say he is a victim of labour trafficking, a form of human trafficking that they say is of growing concern across Canada. Labour trafficking calls to the Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline held steady for an average of 24 cases a year from 2020 to 2022, jumping to 57 calls in 2023, and 100 in 2024, according to a report produced by the Canadian Association to End Human Trafficking.

Police and experts agree the number of cases is likely much higher than the data suggests, because labour trafficking is a significantly underreported crime.

In relation to the latest case, Nova Scotia RCMP have charged Trevor Annon, 65, of southern Ontario with trafficking in persons, receiving financial or material benefit, false pretense and extortion. He’s also facing a fraud charge in relation to another victim.

National homes sales edged down in February from the previous month, and the benchmark home price fell 4.8 per cent compared to the same time last year, the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) said on Tuesday.

CREA chief economist Shaun Cathcart said February's data showed a "continuation of the quieter levels of activity" seen in January, but he said the association expects "pent-up" demand to boil over during the spring season.

New listings were down 3.9 per cent in February compared to January, and the sales-to-new-listings ratio also narrowed. CREA said price declines in British Columbia, Ontario and Alberta offset gains made in other provinces.

The MLS Home Price Index showed that the national benchmark home price was $661,100 last month, close to the prices seen in the spring of 2021.

The race to lead the New Democrat Party is officially underway.

Voting opened on March 9 and ends March 29, when the party will gather in Winnipeg for the NDP convention.

Five leadership contestants are in the race to replace former NDP leader Jagmeet Singh: Edmonton Strathcona MP Heather McPherson, labour leader Rob Ashton, activist and documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis, social worker and Campbell River Coun. Tanille Johnston and organic farmer Tony McQuail.

Sanjay Jeram, a political science lecturer at Simon Fraser University, said Ashton, McPherson and Lewis have emerged as the race’s three front-runners.

Lewis has been able to fundraise more than twice as much money as the next candidate, with nearly three times as many people contributing to his campaign.

Generally avoid posting idiotic things this guy says, but as most people know as offensive as this guy is he's been sure not to offend anyone powerful and it seems like he's finally picked a side. Hopefully this will the straw that break the camel back for the Conservatives.

The Conservative leader called for a ban on Chinese software, matching the US.

“We will protect the North American supply chains by keeping the 75% rule in place, harmonise the North American cybersecurity rules by banning Chinese software, and align with our partners on the tariff against China to counter unfair trade and increase our negotiating leverage,” he stated.

19% would be the complacent middle class 🤮

Weeks after it was delivered, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech is still generating ripples—quoted in think tanks, parsed in Ottawa, and invoked as shorthand for a world tilting away from frictionless globalization.

“We knew,” Carney told that room of elites, high in the Alps in January, “the story of the international rules-based order was partially false.” Just because Canada benefited from it, Carney said, didn’t hide the fact that it was unfair. The rules didn’t apply equally to everyone. “The strongest would exempt themselves when convenient,” he said. Power, not principle, set the terms.

Carney’s argument rested on two ideas that sat—still sit—uneasily together. On the one hand, he spoke of sovereignty, of the need for Canada to secure its supply chains, deepen its industrial capacity, and reduce its exposure to geopolitical shock. On the other, he reaffirmed a faith in the very global systems whose unravelling has made sovereignty newly urgent: open capital flows, integrated markets, and rules-based co-operation led by familiar powers.

The contradiction was not rhetorical; it was structural. Davos itself is built on the promise that global integration can be managed, even as the world that gathers there is busily preparing for its limits. Carney’s speech captured that paradox perfectly. He offered a vision of Canadian independence that still depends, in many ways, on a global system stable enough to respect independence—the very thing he said is eroding.

Archive link: https://archive.is/dgZYL

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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has reaffirmed that Canada will continue its sanctions against Russia, including restrictions on Russian oil, even as the United States temporarily eases part of its sanction regime amid rising global oil prices.

Carney made the statement on March 13 during a visit to Norway, where he met with NATO troops participating in a cold-weather military exercise. Speaking alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, the Canadian leader stressed that Ottawa has no intention of relaxing its pressure on Moscow.

The issue was also discussed during a virtual meeting of the Group of Seven (G7) leaders on March 11. According to Chancellor Merz, most of the member countries opposed the U.S. decision to allow limited transactions involving Russian oil for a short period.

“Six out of seven countries believed sanctions on Russia should remain firmly in place,” Merz said, adding that several leaders were surprised to learn that Washington had chosen a different approach.

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A pair of Ontario family doctors say they'll have to go back to sending patient prescriptions to pharmacies by fax because a federally funded agency is doing away with an efficient electronic system, with no clear plans for its replacement.

The software allows doctors to instantly send drug prescriptions to pharmacies and approve prescription renewal requests with a click of a mouse. The system brings up the renewal request in an electronic prompt attached to each patient's health record.

It's a crucial tool because Bolzon said he receives up to 35 prescription renewal requests in a typical day while also handling about 30 daily in-person appointments.

So if PrescribeIT is helping doctors manage their patient loads and there's no clear replacement in place, why pull the plug?

In a statement to CBC News, Canada Health Infoway said they worked with governments and system providers to keep PrescribeIT operating. However, the statement said there was no shared funding model and "no viable model emerged that would support the continued operation of a single national service over the long term."

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/36914725

Oscar Best animation picture. Made in Montreal

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An Ontario judge has thrown out a lawsuit launched against The Globe and Mail by a former Ontario provincial Liberal cabinet minister, ruling there is an important public interest in protecting an investigative journalist’s use of confidential sources.

Michael Chan was claiming $10-million in punitive and personal damages after Globe journalist Robert Fife and Sam Cooper, a former investigative journalist with Global News who now publishes independently, reported extensively on China’s alleged foreign interference efforts in the 2021 federal election.

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Justice Loretta Merritt of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Wednesday found Mr. Chan failed to provide evidence of a conspiracy and concluded that his lawsuit didn’t seriously challenge The Globe or others’ reporting.

She also found the suit was an effort to obtain the identities of the reporters’ confidential sources.

“Mr. Chan’s lawsuit is what the Supreme Court has recognized as a SLAPP lawsuit: a tactical action that seeks to suppress expression on matters of public interest,” Justice Merritt wrote.

SLAPP stands for strategic lawsuit against public participation.

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Mr. Chan complained in his suit that The Globe was provided “unfounded and inaccurate” information by the confidential sources when they said segments of CSIS were of the view that he was improperly associating with people who might be intelligence actors on behalf of the Chinese government on matters that were election-related.

In February, 2023, The Globe reported that then prime minister Justin Trudeau and senior aides had been warned that government MPs should be cautious in their dealings with Mr. Chan because of alleged ties to China’s consulate in Toronto. The Globe cited confidential sources who risked prosecution under the Security of Information Act.

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Mr. Chan has been of interest to CSIS before. The Globe reported in 2015 that Mr. Chan had been the subject of CSIS security briefings in Ontario over fears he was too close to the Chinese consulate. He was a cabinet minister for former Ontario Liberal premiers Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne from 2007 to 2018.

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Even if Canada mines lithium and builds battery plants, electric vehicles still need a lot of graphite for the anode, and most battery-grade processing is concentrated in China, which refines 90 per cent of the world’s supply.

Now, there is a concrete Canadian move to bring the refining process home.

Canadian mineral exploration company Nouveau Monde Graphite is backed by government funding and has supply deals with major buyers.

“We cannot just once again repeat the model that’s been used in the past, where we extract the resource, send it elsewhere to be refined and then purchase it back,” said Julie Paquet, a spokesperson for Nouveau Monde Graphite (NMG).

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Last month, the company secured a binding offtake agreement and a US$25 million investment from Panasonic Energy to support its Phase-2 Matawinie Mine and Battery Material Plant in Bécancour, Que.

Panasonic agreed to buy 13,000 tonnes of active anode material per year.

NMG also signed a deal to supply 18,000 tonnes per year of battery-ready anode material to General Motors.

Canada has the world’s 10th-largest graphite reserves, according to Natural Resources Canada.

Those deals matter because they help Canada move faster to build out its own supply chain, says Max Yerrill, a critical minerals analyst at BMO Capital Markets.

He says by increasing its graphite capacity and suppressing global prices, China has kept competitors out. It also used its leverage in the critical minerals markets, specifically graphite, and put export restrictions on it, creating a significant strategic vulnerability for Canada’s green energy goals.

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This court case could decide the future of press freedom — and police oversight — in Canada

In Canada, it's thought those serious (maternal) cases happen at a rate of less than 18 out of every 1,000 deliveries. But that estimate is based specifically on labour and delivery, the relatively short period of time spanning from the onset of regular contractions to the moment the placenta is expelled after childbirth.

New Canadian research suggests close to a third of life-threatening complications also happen to women after that period, during the early weeks following the delivery — a time when mothers typically experience far less medical tracking and support than they did during pregnancy.

From sepsis to severe hemorrhage, nearly 30 per cent of cases of severe maternal morbidity happened within the first six weeks postpartum, according to findings based on a cohort of more than a million births in Ontario between 2012 and 2021.

More than half of those serious cases were during labour and delivery itself, while another 16 per cent occurred earlier during pregnancy.

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Canada’s only primary antimony operation, the Beaver Brook mine in Newfoundland and Labrador, remains on care and maintenance under China Minmetals’ ownership, despite nameplate capacity of about 6,000 tonnes of concentrate per year—roughly 5% of global supply. The shutdown follows Beijing’s 2024 export restrictions on antimony, which drove prices sharply higher and exposed Western dependence on Chinese mining, refining and processing. Policymakers now fear the asset could be used to “flood the market” and suppress rival projects, even as the US funds domestic players such as United States Antimony and Perpetua Resources’ Stibnite project.

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China Minmetals’ 15-year control of Beaver Brook mirrors a pattern in our critical minerals coverage where Chinese state-linked entities hold key upstream positions in North America and Europe, giving them optionality to constrain or release supply without needing to divest assets.

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Policy debate [in Canada] now centres on whether foreign-controlled critical mineral assets should face security reviews similar to defence infrastructure.

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