Canada

Increasing demand for food assistance this year, coupled with a regular spike in users during the holiday season, has strained Canadian food banks this month, the directors of multiple Canadian food bank associations say.

“Christmas is always a busy time for our food banks but particularly when you add Christmas … plus the regular need throughout the month of December has been increased, it just puts even more pressure on the food banks,” said Shawna Bissell, executive director of Food Banks Alberta, a network of over 100 local organizations in the province.

Organizations across the country have reported an increase in users this year. National network Food Banks Canada counted 1,935,911 visits to food banks in March — the latest data available — a 32.1 per cent increase from March 2022 and a 78.5 per cent jump from March 2019.

Sarah Jama is a diversity-equity-inclusionist fully versed in the lexicon of the post-worker New Democratic Party: she condemns “stolen land” and believes in liberation “from the river to the sea.” She was, at one point, a star candidate for the provincial party in Ontario. But since October, she’s been kicked out of the caucus and silenced in the provincial legislature, and there’s no end in sight. It’s less a victory for us on the outside than a lose-lose situation.

OTTAWA — Alexandre Boulerice can picture his campaign pamphlets already.

Although the New Democrat MP might not be on the stump until 2025, he and his party will be able to campaign not just on fights had in Parliament, but on fights won.

Among the many things that marked politics in 2023, it was the year of the Liberal-NDP deal.

Jaggies deal with Junior cost working folk bigly. I bet the lose seats.

The ballooning number of people dying while waiting for medical treatment is just one of the many symptoms of Canada’s current health-care crisis.

Surgical waitlist deaths have increased 64 percent nationwide since 2018, according to the think tank SecondStreet.org, which gathered health-care data through access-to-information requests.

The public policy think tank has also found that more than 3 million Canadians are currently on waitlists for surgery, diagnostic scans, or an appointment to see a specialist. That’s some 140,000 more than in 2022. The number could be upwards of 5.1 million, as some provinces did not report all of the requested data.

Canada may have record population growth but what happens if immigrants see the mass exodus of citizens? Statistics Canada (Stat Can) data shows Q3 2023 emigration, or reverse immigration, surged to an unusually high level. Canadians fled the country for a new home in such a large number, a 3 month outflow has only been larger 3 times in the past century. Yikes.

Sometimes, policymakers and analysts see the world as they wish it was, rather than as it is. This can lead to bad decisions. In politics, it can lead to defeat at the polls.

Earlier this year, a team led by David Gordon, an urban studies professor at Queen’s University, released the latest version of the Canada Suburbs Atlas.

Using census data, satellite and street images and information from local experts, the team plotted growth patterns for 41 Canadian cities between 2016 and 2021.

Russia, China and the West are scrambling for control over the frozen tundra.

The Arctic Circle runs for nearly 10,000 miles. Inside it, just four million people live on this vast, desolate expanse of land, sea and ice. Comprising four per cent of the Earth’s surface, the Arctic is fiercely inhospitable and mostly still untouched.

Much of the Arctic consists of the northern reaches of eight sovereign states. Norway borders Russia in the Arctic, but only at its easternmost tip in the north. Finland has a much longer, 830-mile border with Russia, the northern part of which lies inside the Arctic Circle. Russia itself boasts half of the Arctic Ocean’s coastline and half of the Arctic’s population. Then there is Sweden, Denmark (which owns Greenland), Iceland, Canada and the US, whose Alaskan territory is separated from Russia by the 55-mile-wide Bering Strait.