Competition Bureau to investigate industry claims of sustainable forestry management – Canada News

The Canadian Press – Feb 1, 2023 / 9:39 am | Story: 409282

The Canadian Press – Feb 1, 2023 / 9:18 am | Story: 409276

Researchers say improved fisheries management and conservation are turning the tide on shark and ray population declines in the Northwest Atlantic.

The study published last week in PNAS journal, titled “Conservation successes and challenges for wide-ranging sharks and rays,” says the results show how well-enforced governance coupled with science-based fishing limits can help aquatic life recover.

Lead author Nathan Pacoureau from Simon Fraser University says declines have been halted in three species and that six species out of 11 are rebuilding their numbers.

He attributes the population increase to the implementation of the 1993 U.S. Fishery Management Plan for Sharks of the Atlantic Ocean.

Pacoureau says those regulations include catch reporting requirements, aggregate- and species-specific quotas, and catch prohibitions for some species.

Shark and ray populations have plummeted by as much as 71 per cent over the past 50 years with nearly one-third of these animals threatened with extinction.

The Canadian Press – Feb 1, 2023 / 6:42 am | Story: 409251

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says he hopes the provinces can reach a health-care deal with the federal government shortly after their meeting next week with the prime minister.

Ford echoed recent comments from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that a deal will not be signed at the meeting set for Feb. 7.

But Ford says they should be striking a deal on the Canada Health Transfer “shortly thereafter,” because talks can’t drag on when all jurisdictions are feeling health-care pressures.

The premiers want to see Ottawa cover 35 per cent of health-care costs across the country, up from the current 22 per cent.

Trudeau has said the funding will come with strings attached, including sharing health data and outcomes for a national database.

Ford has said he wants to use increased federal funding to hire more nurses and doctors, as well as help tackle the surgical backlog.

The Canadian Press – Feb 1, 2023 / 6:27 am | Story: 409244

A parliamentary committee voted Tuesday to examine a recent ethics ruling against International Trade Minister Mary Ng.

Conservative ethics critic Michael Barrett presented a motion proposing a study at the House of Commons ethics committee, saying Canadians deserve a full accounting of what transpired.

The motion passed by consensus, with the study to take place over two meetings.

It follows a ruling by the federal ethics commissioner in December that Ng violated the Conflict of Interest Act when her office awarded a $17,000 contract to a friend.

The Opposition Conservatives lodged the initial complaint and pounced on the finding against Ng as an example of the Liberals doling out deals to party insiders — a suggestion Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government rebuffs.

“Canadians need to know that the expenditures that the government is undertaking is done on their behalf and not to the benefit of any individual,” Barrett said at the committee meeting Tuesday.

In his report, ethics commissioner Mario Dion concluded Ng’s relationship with Amanda Alvaro, a co-founder of public relations firm Pomp & Circumstance, constitutes a friendship under the act.

Ng apologized after Dion published his report, saying she should have recused herself from the process that led to her office awarding Alvaro’s firm a contract in spring 2020.

The ethics committee plans to call Ng and Alvaro to appear as witnesses, and will seek documents about the work that was done.

The Canadian Press – Feb 1, 2023 / 6:24 am | Story: 409243

An international charity that helps people with intellectual disabilities said it has been making changes as it attempts to grapple with revelations about its Canadian co-founder’s sexual abuse of women.

Lori Vaanholt, a vice-executive director of L’Arche Canada, said the organization introduced measures to ensure that staff, volunteers and people with intellectual disabilities were protected from abuse in 2020, when a first report commissioned by the charity’s international office concluded Jean Vanier had manipulative sexual relationships with at least six women in France between 1975 and 1990.

A second report, released Monday, identified at least 25 women abused by Vanier between 1952 and his death in 2019, including in Canada and India. The report said the relationships between Vanier and the women were “part of a continuum of confusion, control and abuse.”

“When I first heard the information, one of the first things that I was trying to just wrap my head around was, how could this have happened within this organization and we didn’t know and, in fact, we failed the women who were abused,” Vaanholt said in an interview Monday. “We didn’t see it, we didn’t stop it, it happened and we are deeply, deeply sorry for that.”

She said the organization proactively sought to uncover what happened and how it could improve its structures and practices.

Among the steps that have been taken since 2020 were audits of the 157 L’Arche communities in 37 countries — where people with intellectual disabilities live and work alongside people without intellectual disabilities — to evaluate the practices in place to prevent abuse. Another audit will be done this year, with future audits scheduled every three years.

“This is an important part of our growth as an organization and it’s ongoing and evolving and we’re committed to that,” she said.

The international organization and L’Arche’s Canadian branch have taken steps to improve whistle-blowing and reporting procedures, she said.

While the report didn’t find evidence that Vanier abused people with intellectual disabilities, Vaanholt said abuse education is now mandatory for people with disabilities in order to give them “the language … the understanding that they have choice, autonomy and rights around how they are treated.”

But she admits it is difficult to reconcile the good work the organization has done with the disintegration of its founding myth. Vanier had said a “revelation” during a visit to a psychiatric facility led him to found the charity when in fact the new report concludes he used the charity as a screen for his sexual abuse.

“The real mission of L’Arche, which is when people come together, across difference, into relationships of friendship, where each person is valued and each person is able to be equal in those relationships — that’s real, and literally hundreds and thousands of people across the world have experienced that,” she said.

L’Arche continues to operate 28 communities across Canada and has two “projects” — potential communities that are being evaluated.

Madeline Burghardt, who teaches disability studies at Western University in London, Ont., and York University, said the founding story and Vanier’s subsequent decision to invite two men with intellectual disabilities to live with him played a big role at L’Arche, particularly in the organization’s early decades.

“Jean was important. His teachings were important. His writings were important,” said Burghardt, who lived in a L’Arche community in Toronto for two years in the mid-1990s and held a number of roles at the organization in the following decade. “When he came to visit communities, this was a big deal … and yet this founding story that we thought we knew is different than we thought, and it’s a terrible story.”

Burghardt, who has not worked for L’Arche since 2008, said Monday’s report shows the organization needs to look at practices that date back to its early days, including its lines of authority and trust in its hierarchy.

At times, she said, people within the organization have talked about being “called” to positions — using a religious term that can lead people to stop thinking critically.

While the organization has been removing references to Vanier from its website on its library bookshelves, she said “there’s that second layer of where are the imprints of his model of authority that linger, that we need to really address in a deeper way, and this report has made that painfully obvious.”

It’s not just people involved in L’Arche who are affected, she added. At least 10 schools in Yukon, Alberta, Ontario and Saskatchewan that were named for Vanier have changed their names since 2020.

“I think a lot of Canadians held Jean Vanier in very high regard, so it’s a reckoning for a lot of people on this legacy,” Burghardt said.

The Canadian Press – Feb 1, 2023 / 6:21 am | Story: 409242

A precedent-setting ruling in Ontario could place pressure on cities to address the crisis of homelessness with better shelters and housing, experts say, while giving encampment residents more defined protections against evictions.

In the first decision of its kind in the province, a judge in Kitchener, Ont., ruled last week that there is a constitutional right to shelter outside when there are no accessible and available indoor spaces.

The decision makes Toronto “extremely vulnerable” to a legal challenge, said Estair Van Wagner, an associate professor at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School.

There are more people in the city who are homeless than at any time in the past five years and record numbers of people are entering the shelter system compared to those leaving, according to city data dating back to 2018. 

Violent evictions have been carried out by police, shelter hotels have closed, and the shelter system routinely runs at capacity most nights.

Kaitlin Schwan, executive director of the Women’s National Housing and Homelessness Network, said that while encampment residents in Toronto unsuccessfully challenged an eviction in a 2020 case, the circumstances since that decision combined with this precedent-ruling have created a different set of circumstances.

“There will be, I suspect significant pressure… to ensure that precedent informs how the city moves forward in its engagement with encampments. And future challenges in court will rely on this ruling and it’s quite pervasive,” said Schwan, who is also a senior researcher at the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness.

The city has long maintained that encampments are unsafe and that it works to help those living at the sites into shelters or other housing.

Until now, Ontario courts have been slow to follow the lead of courts in British Columbia, where judges have recognized a constitutional right to shelter themselves when a jurisdiction fails to provide sufficient spaces.

More than previous Ontario decisions, the Kitchener decision affirmed it’s not just about how many spaces are available in the city, but also about whether those spaces truly accommodate the needs of people experiencing homelessness, Van Wagner said. 

“We see the judge turn their mind to things like whether there are proper supports around addiction, mental health, whether there are spaces for couples,” Van Wagner said. 

Justice Michael Valente denied the Region of Waterloo’s request to evict roughly 50 people from a homeless encampment on a half-acre empty gravel lot finding the region’s trespassing bylaw violated the Charter rights of the residents in the absence of sufficient shelter spaces. 

The Kitchener case also represents a “really significant” departure from Ontario case law around what it means to “choose” to live outside, Van Wagner said. 

Cities have often argued encampment residents are choosing to live outside when there’s available shelter options. But in the Kitchener decision, the judge said that choice, in this context, must account for circumstances such as poverty, disability, addiction, and insufficient shelter alternatives. 

“The courts have tended to adopt the idea of choice as a kind of black and white thing,” Van Wagner said. “We see the decision here give us a much more nuanced understanding of the fact that this ‘choice’ is happening in a really constrained context.” 

Couples in the Kitchener case testified about being separated from one another when they stayed at shelters, people who use drugs noted the harm of abstinence-based policies, and others talked about the “weight of uncertainty” around available shelter space on any given night.

The case is a “critical first step,” but falls well short of placing any positive obligations on municipalities to provide any shelter or housing, said Kaitlin Schwan, executive director of the Women’s National Housing and Homelessness Network. 

As a result, she called it a “complicated victory” for encampment residents and their allies.

“It says we’re very, very far away from actually realizing the right to housing in Canada. We have so far to go,” said Schwan, who acted as an expert witness in the Kitchener case. 

The court has moved in the direction, evidenced by the Kitchener case, because encampment residents continue to organize and speak about the realities of what it looks like to live outside, said Sima Atri, a lawyer with the Community Justice Collective who has represented encampment residents. 

Atri said the ruling could place pressure on cities to address the crisis of homelessness and encampments by building housing and accessible, permanent shelter spots. At the same time, she said she hopes it will mean residents will not face threats of violent eviction.

But she said the solutions to the housing crisis will not come from the court. 

“It’s going to come from people standing up together to organize around that issue and actually take on a much broader housing crisis problem in our cities,” she said. 

The Canadian Press – Feb 1, 2023 / 6:18 am | Story: 409240

A Mi’kmaw member of Parliament said Tuesday that proposed changes to the boundaries of federal ridings in Nova Scotia would remove two Indigenous communities from the area he represents, including his home of Eskasoni First Nation.

The proposed change for Sydney-Victoria was done without the consultation of its Indigenous constituents, said Jaime Battiste, who lives on the reserve. He said that does nothing to help foster inclusion in politics.

“We’re seeing that these boundaries are currently working to give Mi’kmaw people voices where they never had them before, for the first time in our history,” Battiste said in an interview, referring to the existing electoral map.

“And the fact that they’re changing things around, to me, it’s very much looking at trying to reconstruct that glass ceiling that I broke when I was elected.”

An independent commission tasked with redrawing the boundaries had focused on making Nova Scotia’s 11 ridings more similar in population size, but critics say their method discounted Indigenous and racialized groups and the province’s history.

The Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act says about 88,000 people should live in each Nova Scotia riding, but the commission can depart from that target by 25 per cent to account for community interest, identity or history.

That means each riding could have no fewer than 66,095 people, and no more than 110,158 people.

Battiste lives in a riding that saw one of the largest population declines in Nova Scotia since the lines were last redrawn, but its current population would still fit within the rules.

He questioned the decision to remove two of the three Mi’kmaw First Nations that are within his riding, including his own large community.

“It seems rather strange, and rather peculiar, that out of an entire riding, the only place that is removed is the largest Mi’kmaw community,” he said.

Other Liberal MPs from Nova Scotia, including Immigration Minister Sean Fraser and Lena Metlege Diab, raised concerns that the new boundaries could also divide other communities of racialized Nova Scotians.

The three testified on Tuesday at the House of Commons procedure and House affairs committee, which is studying the proposed new electoral boundaries.

Another proposed change for Halifax West would see a diverse part of the community removed from the urban riding, Diab said.

In its report, the commission acknowledged the concerns, saying it received “a significant volume of telephone and email inquires” about their proposals, but that “people don’t like change” and there’s “a strong sense of history in the province.”

“There is a clear desire, especially in rural areas, to have particular counties remain together in the same electoral districts ‘as they have since Confederation’,” the report says.

The report also pointed out that residents were confused about the consultation process, but it left out any mention of Indigenous Peoples.

Last year, the commission held nine hearings, including some in French and one held virtually, to hear from Nova Scotians.

However, the three Liberal MPs raised concerns that they didn’t accommodate Indigenous people, immigrants, newcomers and other racialized groups.

Battiste said that most Mi’kmaq people live about 40 minutes away from where consultations were being held, many of them don’t speak English and many didn’t have transportation to get there.

He said the commission failed in their duty to consult, and that First Nation chiefs in Nova Scotia are considering escalating the issue to Federal Court.

“There’s a reason why there’s systemic racism embedded into the system, because (it’s) not meant to accommodate Indigenous Peoples,” Battiste told MPs during the committee meeting.

The MPs’ objections are to be sent back to the commission for review.

Fraser said after the hearing that he wants the commission to re-engage with First Nations, Black communities and municipalities.

He said the commission’s initial consultations were done in small rooms that couldn’t fit everyone who wanted to attend, and on one occasion, the location was changed at the last minute.

“A clarity in process to allow people to fairly participate is really important. I hope they take the opportunity to re-engage impacted communities who raised objections so they can end up with a better result at the end of the day,” Fraser said.

Despite the airing of objections, the final decision-making on redrawing federal ridings in each province lays solely with the provincial commission, whose members are appointed by the House of Commons Speaker.

In Nova Scotia, the commissioners include Louise Carbert and David Johnson, who are political science professors at Dalhousie University and Cape Breton University respectively.

A third commissioner for the province is Justice Cindy Bourgeois, who sits on the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal.

Any approved changes will take effect during a general election held after April 1, 2024, at the earliest.

The Canadian Press – Jan 31, 2023 / 3:05 pm | Story: 409172

The Conservative party has set a fundraising record for a non-election year under the new leadership of Pierre Poilievre, and it is outpacing other federal parties.

Elections Canada data show that during the last three months of 2022, the Conservatives brought in over $9.7 million from more than 66,000 donors.

That compares to the Liberals’ $5.8 million and the NDP’s $2.5 million, with the Bloc Québécois bringing in a little less than $900,000 and the Greens a little more than $800,000.

It was the first full quarter since Poilievre became Tory leader in September, and Elections Canada shows he’s outperformed his predecessors.

In the first full quarter after Erin O’Toole took the mantle in 2020, the party brought in $7.6 million from some 46,000 donors.

Andrew Scheer, who became party leader in 2017, brought in even less with $3.6 million from 32,000 contributors in the first full quarter after his win.

The Canadian Press – Jan 31, 2023 / 2:52 pm | Story: 409168

The Alberta government says changes are coming to further protect free speech on campuses as a former professor speaking out on so-called “woke” policies prepares for a showdown with the University of Lethbridge.

Advanced Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides says in a statement he will be announcing the changes in the coming days but did not give further details.

He says he was responding to the case of Frances Widdowson, a former tenured professor at Calgary’s Mount Royal University invited by a University of Lethbridge professor to speak this week about her concerns that a mob mentality and “woke policies” increasingly threaten academic freedom.

Widdowson was fired from Mount Royal in late 2021 amid controversy over her comments lauding the educational benefits of Canada’s residential school system while questioning whether the abuses of the schools against Indigenous children could be called genocide.

The University of Lethbridge granted Widdowson space for the event but cancelled it this week after deciding her views would not advance the residential schools debate and would cause harm by minimizing the pain and suffering inflicted on First Nations children and families.

Widdowson says she plans deliver the speech on campus Wednesday afternoon anyway and has challenged school security to toss her out.

Opposition NDP Leader Rachel Notley says Nicolaides needs to reconsider his statements, adding he is being distressingly tone-deaf to students — particularly Indigenous ones — who would otherwise have to host a guest lecturer espousing the virtues of schools stained by the legacy of horrific abuse.

The Canadian Press – Jan 31, 2023 / 1:19 pm | Story: 409149

The commission investigating the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act to quell the trucker protests last winter in Ottawa has asked for more time to complete its report.

A government source, who was granted anonymity to discuss matters not yet public, says the order-in-council establishing the Public Order Emergency Commission will be modified to change the Feb. 6 deadline to submit its report to the government.

The source, however, says the commission will abide by the deadline imposed by the Emergencies Act, which requires the report to be submitted to Parliament — and released to the public — within 360 days of the emergency declaration being revoked.

That deadline is Feb. 20.

Headed by Justice Paul Rouleau, the commission is investigating the federal Liberal government’s use of the Emergencies Act last winter to end the “Freedom Convoy” protests that gridlocked downtown Ottawa for more than three weeks.

The government invoked the law on Feb. 14, 2022, which granted extraordinary powers to police and governments to limit the protesters’ right to assembly and freeze their bank accounts in the hopes of clearing the demonstrations and preventing protesters from returning.

The Canadian Press – Jan 31, 2023 / 1:16 pm | Story: 409147

The NDP is accusing the Liberals of basing their sanctions regime on “political theatre” as data suggest few funds have been frozen and none have been seized.

The federal government has been announcing sanctions almost weekly that bar people associated with authoritarian regimes from having financial dealings in Canada and from entering the country.

Yet publicly released RCMP data show barely any change in the amount of money frozen in Canadian bank accounts between June and December of last year, despite hundreds of people being added to sanctions lists.

Ottawa passed legislation in July that allows the government to take possession of funds from sanctioned people and divert them to victims of wrongdoing, but it has not moved to do so.

The government issued an order for the restraint of property in December to start the process of forfeiting US$26 million held by a firm owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, but it has yet to file an application in court.

NDP MP Heather McPherson argues that Canada is using sanctions as a symbolic tool, without taking the steps to actually disincentivize support for autocracies.

 

The Canadian Press – Jan 31, 2023 / 12:08 pm | Story: 409134

The Trudeau government is facing fresh calls to eliminate the backlog of disability claims from ill and injured veterans amid revelations Veterans Affairs Canada failed to spend nearly $1 billion of its budget last year.

Veterans Affairs Minister Lawrence MacAulay’s office says the backlog of thousands of unprocessed applications for financial and medical benefits did not have an impact on the unspent funds.

But veterans’ groups and others are expressing skepticism, saying at least a portion of the money would have been used to help more ill and injured ex-soldiers if their claims had been processed in a timely manner.

Instead, many continue to wait months and sometimes years to find out if they qualify for health and financial assistance from the federal government for injuries and illnesses sustained in uniform.

The Royal Canadian Legion says the unspent funds should be used to immediately clear up the backlog.

The Legion and the National Council of Veteran Associations are also reiterating past calls for the government to start automatically approving claims by veterans, which the Liberals have repeatedly refused to do.