Canada

Saints-Michel-des-Saints is a small village where snowmobiles roam on the edge of Quebec’s vast forests. Its critical mineral deposits could now put it on the map of a new world order the Canadian government is vying to build, one in which Canada is more self-reliant.

One Quebec-based company, coincidentally called Nouveau Monde Graphite, which translates to New World Graphite in English, is planning to open both a mine and plant to produce the mineral used in sectors like battery manufacturing for electric vehicles (EVs), as well as and defence.

“The benefits of our project to Canada, and all the G7 countries, is to have a stable source of this critical mineral, but also at the right price point,” said CEO and founder Eric Desaulniers. “Here in Canada – in Quebec specifically – we can be very competitive in that market.”

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For now, Asia dominates the market. To go full steam ahead, the mine must finalize its financing, and that is taking up a lot of Desaulniers’ time now.

Antoine Cloutier is a project geologist with Nouveau Monde Graphite. He says the eureka moment for this project came more than a decade ago during exploration.

“That was pretty much the moment when our metal detectors and all the equipment started beeping through a fairly large area,” he said. “That was the moment when we saw there was truly potential for this to be big.”

Cloutier say graphite is a versatile mineral which has a “thousand and one uses.”

“It is used in lithium-ion batteries, as well as in defence, in aerospace and in manufacturing,” he said.

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A new and possibly more environmentally friendly way to mine lithium could make it easier to extract the critical mineral from deposits in Western Canada, as companies move closer to demonstrating that the technology works at scale.

Such lithium is found in very salty water underground known as lithium brines and has not been easily accessible with conventional methods. Now, a technology called direct lithium extraction (DLE) could allow companies to mine those resources, at a possibly lower cost to the environment than other methods.

Alberta is particularly attractive to at least one such company because its long history of oil and gas extraction has “left behind an incredible amount of infrastructure that we are trying to repurpose,” said Kevin Piepgrass, chief operating officer of LithiumBank, a mining company that’s trying to develop lithium resources in the province.

It holds licences for two lithium projects in Alberta, about 200 to 300 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, and is using wells that were built decades ago to extract oil and gas, to instead access the underground brines that contain lithium — an essential ingredient in the batteries that are powering the clean energy transition.

"It's an incredible opportunity to produce lithium from an area that has all these things that you need,” Piepgrass said, referring to Alberta’s favourable regulations and the availability of water and power for the mining sector.

Something similar has happened in Alberta before: its oilsands only became financially successful in the 1970s when prices went up and the technology to extract the oil improved.

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[Intelligence adviser Nathalie] Drouin said officials did see some attempts to interfere during the last election, such as an attempt by China to affect a Conservative candidate's campaign, attempts by Russia to engage in foreign interference activities online and attempts to use the names of politicians to promote cryptocurrency and financial activities.

However, Drouin said the attempts officials detected did not reach a level that would have affected election results.

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However, Conservative MP Michael Cooper challenged Drouin and Morrison on that conclusion — pointing to the experience of Toronto-area candidate Joe Tay. Tay, a supporter of democracy in Hong Kong, has been targeted by Hong Kong authorities, who have put a bounty on his head.

Cooper said Tay and his supporters received threats during the campaign and Tay was advised not to campaign door-to-door for his own safety. Cooper said there was a drop in voter turnout in the riding and some of Tay's supporters were summoned to the Chinese consulate.

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While much of the focus on potential foreign interference in Canadian elections has centred on countries like China and Russia, Liberal MP Elisabeth Brière asked whether attempts to interfere in Canada's next election could come from the United States.

Drouin said officials will be watching for potential interference, regardless of where it comes from.

"Canada has expectations regarding all countries, including the United States, that there is … no damage to our domestic affairs including our elections," she said.

"We will monitor the situation in an agnostic way — regardless of which country tries to engage in foreign interference."

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Authorities have long struggled to estimate the prevalence of labour trafficking. Data from Statistics Canada and non-profit groups usually identify only a few dozen cases each year.

But The Tyee and the IJF have obtained a 2023 report from Canada’s financial intelligence agency that identified thousands of suspicious transactions related to labour trafficking, suggesting authorities understand the true scope of the problem is many times greater than what available data says.

The report, obtained through access-to-information legislation, also found signs labour trafficking was happening in a huge range of industries that rely heavily on migrant workers, including agriculture, fishing, hospitality, construction and manufacturing.

James McLean, the policy and research director for the Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking, said authorities have persistently failed to stop labour trafficking.

And with well over one million people on work permits in the country — many of them about to lose status — McLean said the risk is as great as ever.

A forest advisory council has recommended shifting B.C.’s forest regime towards more local decision-making.

The plan has received applause from forestry groups, the BC Greens and the head of the BC First Nations Forestry Council. But some experts warn the plan lacks teeth and risks putting fragile forest ecosystems at risk.

The advisory council was created last year as part of the BC Greens’ confidence agreement with the NDP, with a mandate to diagnose the turmoil in B.C.’s forests and pitch a new path forward. Its members include representatives from industry, labour and academia.

The release of the council’s report comes as more mills close across the province and ecosystems struggle from over a century of intensive old-growth logging.

Conservative MP Jamil Jivani, a longtime friend of U.S Vice-President JD Vance, is in Washington this week to advocate for Canada-U.S. relations after multiple unsuccessful emails to members of the Liberal front bench.

The Bowmanville-Oshawa North MP says he plans to meet with General Motors representatives and other automotive and manufacturing heavyweights. He will also attend the National Prayer Breakfast in the U.S. capital on Thursday — an annual gathering of thousands of politicians and power brokers.

"I'm reaching out to everyone I know," Jivani said, adding that he is still confirming meetings with political contacts throughout the week.

Canadian politicians across the spectrum have attended the prayer breakfast in previous years. But Jivani is offering his unique experience as a friend of Vance. The pair met at Yale Law School and have maintained a friendship.

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Federal and provincial governments will partner with Indigenous leaders and environmental groups to assess whether Manitoba’s biodiverse expanse of the Hudson Bay coast is a good candidate for conservation amid the province’s push to expand the Port of Churchill.

During a news conference in Churchill on Tuesday, Premier Wab Kinew announced Manitoba will contribute $250,000 to study the feasibility of a national marine conservation area in Western Hudson Bay.

Oceans North, a national conservation organization, will invest a further $1 million over the next year to support research, training and education initiatives in and around Churchill, Chris Debicki, the organization’s vice-president of policy and counsel, announced.

The feasibility study, led by Parks Canada, marks the first step toward protecting what Manitoba Environment Minister Mike Moyes called “one of the most ecologically significant marine environments on the planet.” It will coincide with a previously announced $750,000 feasibility study to improve ice-breaking capacity in the northern waters.

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A large crowd of 150,000 demonstrators shut down a swath of the downtown Toronto in solidarity with protesters in Iran, who are fighting against the country’s financial collapse and the regime that led to it.

Nationwide protests in Iran started Dec. 28 in response to soaring prices, then turned into wider anti-government protests against the clerical rulers who have governed the country for nearly 50 years.

At the same time, tens of thousands of pro-government demonstrators have taken to the streets in a show of power, in response to protesters challenging the country’s theocracy.

Pooria Shafia, a Toronto-based engineer who attended Sunday's protest, says he's concerned about his relatives that still live in Iran.

“Every time I try to ask my cousin to see if he was able to contact them, I couldn't bring myself to [do] it because I was just afraid of what the response would be,” he told CBC Toronto Sunday.

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About 15,000 protesters also met at the Vancouver Art Gallery plaza to demand the fall of the Islamic regime.

They marched in the streets across parts of downtown, many waving the lion-and-sun flag of Iran, which is now banned in the Islamic Republic. Others chanted for freedom and held up photos of missing and deceased relatives. Their goal, they said, is to keep international attention focused on the humanitarian crisis.

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Among them was Sahand Jamshidi, who said his cousin, Mohammad-Hossein Jamshidi, died during a protest in Iran.

“People were out protesting peacefully [in Iran] and totally out of the blue shots were fired,” said Jamshidi who is currently based in Surrey, B.C. “Lots of teenagers, lots of dads, lots of moms were killed.”

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I never expected to see this in my lifetime.

DEEP IN THE FORESTS of Algonquin Provincial Park, a few hours north of Toronto, sits a metal monster. Like the iron giant of British poet Ted Hughes’s fable, it, too, has come back to life, reassembled. Hughes’s creation saves the planet. What’s this one’s mission?

Our iron giant is a deep space radio telescope, with an antenna dish measuring forty-six metres across, the largest instrument of its kind in Canada. Starting in the 1960s, the Algonquin Radio Observatory performed a number of cutting-edge scientific projects, including joining the search for extraterrestrial intelligence’s early efforts, in the 1970s and 1980s, to find signatures of alien life—spectrum emissions from water molecules, artificial transmitter signals. No luck.

Then the ARO fell on hard times—budget cutbacks, advances in telescope technology, aged and failing equipment. Canada’s iron giant was mothballed by its operator, the National Research Council, in 1987. There it sat, silent, rusting, for two decades.

The radio telescope was leased to a scientist and entrepreneur, Brendan Quine, in 2007. Quine had come to Canada after his PhD at Oxford and helped establish a space engineering program at Toronto’s York University. To pursue more experimental and commercially ambitious projects, he co-founded Thoth Technology in 2001 and later spun off an affiliate, ThothX.

But first he had to resurrect the iron giant. He fixed the broken windows of the control station, installed new electronics, and secured the perimeter against bears. Then he had to give the instrument a new purpose. What Quine ultimately hit on speaks to our threatened times, severe geopolitical tensions, and our accelerating dependence on space platforms for critical services, including telecommunications and navigation.

Using ARO, ThothX can detect one-metre-long objects in orbit at a distance of 100,000 kilometres—about a quarter of the way to the moon. And it can do it in any weather, day or night, at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems. In military nomenclature, the objective is “space domain awareness.” SDA goes beyond tracking satellites; it’s the work of figuring out what’s out there, what it’s for, and whether it poses a threat. The threats are many: space debris, potential collisions between satellites, or deliberate attacks by hostile nations. As long ago as 2011, the Pentagon and the United States director of national intelligence laid down a warning. “Space,” they said, “is becoming increasingly congested, contested and competitive.” Fifteen years later, the alarm has grown.

People aged 14 to 20 are more often being diagnosed with psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia, compared with those born earlier, a large Ontario study examining 30 years of data suggests.

To conduct the study, published in Monday's issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), researchers looked at health administrative data from more than 12 million Ontario residents born between 1960 and 2009 to look for cases of a psychotic disorder.

In the Ontario study, those diagnosed with psychotic disorders not linked to mood disorders, such as schizophrenia, were more likely to be male, live in low-income neighbourhoods, be a long-standing resident of Canada and have received care for mental health disorders and substance use.

Why isn't known. Myran and his co-authors suggest several possible reasons for the increases: older parental age, socioeconomic- and migration-associated stress and an increase in some negative childhood experiences like abuse in more recent decades.

Myran said there likely isn't a single explanation, but he called substance use — including cannabis, stimulants, hallucinogens and synthetic drugs — a leading possibility contributing to the rising rates over 20 years.