Canadians are living through two health-care crises: COVID, which dominates the headlines, but also unacceptably long wait times for virtually all medical services. In 2021, Canadians could expect to wait an estimated 25.6 weeks on average — essentially half a year — between referral from a family physician and medically necessary treatment. Though lengthened by COVID, these waits have far more to do with long-standing failures of domestic policy than with the global pandemic.
TORONTO, Dec 16 (Reuters) – Canada’s Supreme Court said on Thursday it will hear an appeal seeking to overturn a pact with the United States under which Canada turns back asylum-seekers at land border crossings coming from the United States.
As a result, refugee advocates will have a chance to make their case against the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement in Canada’s highest court.
Under the agreement, signed in 2002, asylum-seekers presenting at U.S.-Canada border crossings are turned back and told to apply for refugee status in the first country in which they arrived.
OTTAWA — Defence Minister Anita Anand says while the Liberal government’s promise to provide a 200-soldier force to United Nations peacekeeping “is not off the table,” it is being considered alongside Canada’s many other international priorities.
… That is despite the UN having said it needs such forces now, and the U.S. having asked Canada last month to fulfil its commitment.
A thong shortage tops my list of possible reasons for the lack of action.
Citing unreasonable delays in a national-security case, a judge has stayed the eight-year-long criminal prosecution of a man accused by CSIS and the RCMP of trying to leak state secrets to China.
Justice Michael Dambrot of the Ontario Superior Court said he would release his reasoning in the coming days.
Pending an appeal, the decision Wednesday ends Canada’s marathon prosecution of Qing Quentin Huang, an Ontario shipbuilding engineer. In 2013, he was charged under the Security of Information Act (SOIA) after authorities alleged he was caught on tape trying “to communicate to a foreign entity information that the Government of Canada was taking measures to safeguard.”
That’s Canada’s legislated climate goal, in order for the country to do its part in limiting global warming to 1.5 C and avoid the catastrophic impacts of runaway climate change.
Dr. Theresa Tam said there is “great spread potential” with omicron and the situation in Canada is a “few days or maybe a week” behind the U.K. — where British Prime Minister Boris Johnson today said that the country is dealing with a “tidal wave” of new infections, with the caseload doubling every two or three days as the variant takes hold.
The Conservative Party has identified 13 federal ridings where they suspect their candidates were targeted by foreign influence campaigns in the recent federal election, Global News has learned.
Jack Letts’ message to the Canadian government official was simple: “Please get me out of this place.”
In fact, the alleged former ISIL follower and Canadian citizen said in the recorded phone conversation he’d rather be imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Siberia or a Canadian penitentiary than continue to be held by Kurdish forces in northern Syria.
He is not an alleged ISIS member: I volunteered for a suicide bombing, Jihadi Jack admits
Jack Letts has told how he wanted to be a suicide bomber for Islamic State as he admitted fighting with the terrorists.
“I know I was definitely an enemy of Britain,” he told the BBC in an interview recorded in October and released yesterday. “I did what I did. I made a big mistake and that’s what happened. I thought I was leaving something behind and going to something better.”
Despite the Canadian government having awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to North American manufacturers, Parliament Hill has been giving out masks made in China to MPs, their executive assistants and other employees.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he is looking at the issue of decriminalizing hard drugs with the provinces and is open to further action, a departure from his previous resistance to the idea.
OTTAWA – Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland offered few new economic measures in the Liberals’ fiscal update Tuesday, portraying the Canadian economy instead as well on the way to a post-pandemic recovery.
Freeland delivered her speech in Parliament on Tuesday amid growing concerns about the Omicron variant of COVID-19, which appears to be spreading across the country. She said the government was budgeting $1.7 billion to buy more rapid tests and ship them out across the country to provinces.
Wanping Zheng, who was charged last week in what police are calling “a matter of foreign actor interference,” claimed publicly to have overseen a number of major Canadian aerospace projects.
Last week the RCMP charged 61-year-old Wanping Zheng of Brossard, Que. with breach of trust. He’s accused of using his status as an engineer at the Canadian Space Agency to negotiate satellite station installation agreements with Iceland on behalf of a Chinese aerospace company. Documents filed in court show the alleged crime happened back in 2018.
“We do consider this to be a matter of foreign actor interference,” RCMP Inspector David Beaudoin, the officer in charge of operations for the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET) in Quebec, said late last week.
Multiculturalism means never being short of a Fifth Column.
Canada’s top doctor is urging the federal government to transform its public health system so the country is better equipped to handle future and present health threats.
Chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam says the COVID-19 pandemic was a wake-up call on the need for “public health renewal” in Canada.
Part of that involves improving Canada’s public health data collection and surveillance.
The federal government is open to providing additional economic support for Canadians that may need it if the country faces another COVID-19 surge this winter.
CityNews, along with our colleagues from Breakfast Television and OMNI News, got the chance to sit down with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to look back at some of the biggest stories from 2021, including the government’s overall pandemic response and the vaccine rollout in Canada.
Nova Scotians have made many sacrifices for the COVID-19 pandemic, but environmental experts say it is now time for them to make sacrifices for the climate crisis as well.
