Canada

A woman from Maidstone, Sask., has been fined and suspended from hunting after pleading guilty to trafficking and illegally transporting bear parts.

The trafficking involved black bear paws and gall bladders, according a news release from the provincial government. Those items are commonly sold on the black market and are often used in traditional Asian medicine.

The investigation began in March 2022 after the general investigations section of the Ministry of Community Safety (previously called corrections, policing and public safety) received a tip about suspected trafficking of bear gall bladders.

Conservation officers launched their investigation in Maidstone, about 50 kilometres east of Lloydminster, before expanding into British Columbia.

A New Brunswick tenant says he’s being pushed out of his rented bungalow as retribution for complaining about his landlord, but his landlord says she’s the victim of an unfair tenancy tribunal ruling that is preventing her from using the unit to house family.

Jonathan King and his landlord, Ashmin Goolab, have been embroiled in a bitter year-long dispute involving a notice of a 65 per cent rent increase, a failed eviction attempt, and claims that the unit is needed to house Goolab's mother-in-law.

King, who lives in Chipman, said Goolab is trying to force him and his wife out of their affordably priced bungalow in an effort to circumvent New Brunswick's rent cap, and as retribution for a complaint he made about being given improper notice to alter their lease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festivus

"a Festivus for the rest of us"

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/57367009

Dolphins have often been considered “pesky critters” who steal fish from the orcas, according to Sarah Fortune, assistant professor of oceanography at Dalhousie University in Halifax and Canadian Wildlife Federation chair of large whale conservation.

But that’s not what was happening — on deep, deep dives below, the dolphins and orcas were communicating.

On a sunny afternoon in August, Trans Mountain CEO Mark Maki donned a black jumpsuit to stroll atop a giant loading dock in Burnaby. Below, his company’s new pipeline pumped oil into tankers bound for the open ocean.

“We’re returning money now to the owner,” Maki said in a Global News segment. “Canadian taxpayers who are the shareholders of the system are reaping those benefits.”

What Maki didn’t mention was that the operating pipeline’s profit streak was relatively new, appearing after a sudden change had turned its months-long losses into gains.

Little had changed on the ground. The amount of oil travelling through the pipe had remained mostly stable, as had its fees. Instead, the boon came on the company’s balance sheets, where millions in monthly interest payments vanished overnight.

“The only reason Trans Mountain looks like it’s making a profit is that most of the debt has been moved off their books,” said Thomas Gunton, a professor and director in resource and environmental planning at Simon Fraser University.

“It’s a misrepresentation of finances on this project.”

An internal review of technical outages that caused significant delays at airports and international land borders this fall has exposed critical flaws with the Canada Border Services Agency's IT services.

The review found neither the CBSA nor Shared Services Canada (SSC) is prioritizing solutions to dated technology that should be declared "a top government risk."

The outages happened after two separate, planned IT changes: a database upgrade and a firewall patch.

A person with SSC did not apply the necessary patch to CBSA databases ahead of a routine upgrade Sept. 28 that caused "significant corruption of live traveller and commercial data."

That led to "cascading system failures and service outages" at inspection points inside international airports and land borders, the report says.

This will mark Canada's demise. An ex Blackrock executive for US-CA relations, he will sell our lives for a quick buck and a place near his mates.

The most dramatic decrease came in U.S. spirits exports to Canada, which fell 85% in the April-through-June quarter

please go.

Eight weeks after adding a GM BrightDrop van to the fleet of his plumbing and heating business, Marty Salliss has no complaints, only praise.

Well, maybe only one complaint: That he may not be able to get another one.

"It's an easy vehicle to drive, and actually it's a really fun vehicle," said Salliss, whose company is about to celebrate 25 years doing business in London. "As a service truck, it's been phenomenal."

Salliss leased a BrightDrop 400 in October, the same month General Motors announced they would no longer produce the electric delivery vehicle at the CAMI Assembly plant in Ingersoll, Ont.

Every year hundreds of seniors pass through the doors of Vancouver’s Union Gospel Mission (UGM) in the Downtown Eastside.

But since the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of seniors accessing the shelter’s services has been steadily increasing.

Pre-pandemic, roughly one-quarter of people staying at the shelter were over the age of 55, according to UGM. Post-pandemic, that’s grown to one-third.

In November, for the first time in the organization's history, home-care aid workers started making weekly visits to the shelter to help seniors with basic tasks like taking a shower.

Nasr Ahmed, staff organizer at Communications Workers of America (CWA) Canada, was part of a small solidarity march outside Rockstar Toronto's offices earlier in December. He called Rockstar's claims of the fired workers leaking confidential information "patently false."

"They have not provided any proof for those claims, either for the Canadian workers or the U.K. workers," he said.

He corroborated an account from the IWGB that all 34 workers were part of an online discussion group on the app Discord, where industry workers interested in unionizing or learning about unions in the U.K. could talk about working conditions.

The fired employee told CBC News that the workers were from different departments and had different seniorities across the company, both in Canada and the U.K., and that "the only common link among us" was they were all part of the Discord group. CBC News has not viewed chat messages from the Discord group and could not verify their contents.

Tazmamart was a secret detention center in Morocco that operated for years in complete isolation. Prisoners were held in inhumane conditions—total darkness, extreme heat and cold, starvation, and absolute silence. Many did not survive.

Today, Tazmamart stands as a painful reminder of a dark chapter in Moroccan history and a symbol of the importance of accountability, truth, and human rights. Remembering such places is essential so that these abuses are never repeated

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