Canada

The federal government announced new gun control measures Thursday, adding several hundred models and variants to its list of banned weapons.

"These firearms can no longer be legally used, sold or imported in Canada," Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc told reporters.

The announcement comes one day before the 35th anniversary of the massacre at École Polytechnique de Montréal. Radio-Canada first reported the news earlier Thursday.

The new measures, which are effective immediately, list more than 300 makes and models of assault-style firearms as prohibited weapons.

There will be an amnesty period until Oct. 30 of next year for current owners to comply with the ban. The new models will be part of the government's planned buy-back program — the program still has not collected a single gun.

Edit: According to Minister of Public Safety Dominic LeBlanc, the list of newly banned guns is currently unavailable and its exact date of release is undefined.

The RCMP stated that the list of banned guns would be available "very shortly". Exactly where the list of banned guns would be available to read was not disclosed.

Edit 2: List of banned guns is at this link

The strike by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers—of which I’ve been a member for more than two years—is now the third-longest non-rotating strike in the history of the Canadian post office. It’s shorter only than the strike in 1975, which won job security, and the strike in 1981, in which CUPW won a maternity leave policy that later formed the basis of public maternity leave for the entire country.

Overall, there is a sense that management has grown out of touch with its workforce. This was clear enough when Canada Post spokesperson John Hamilton told The Globe and Mail that “many young people are not looking for full-time, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. jobs. They want flexibility. They could work for Canada Post part-time and have other part-time jobs during the week.” [...] His line was clearly a justification for the increasing trend of the corporation relying on casual workers, who now constitute around 20 per cent of CUPW’s total membership, myself included.

Despite its importance to postal workers and the future of this postal service, the strike is poorly understood from the outside. It has mostly been seen as a dispute over wages. And it’s true, the wages are part of the disagreement: the union is seeking to keep them in line with inflation, something in the ballpark of 22 to 24 per cent. The corporation has offered just shy of 12 per cent over that same period. But my sense from the picket line is that while wages are still on the bargaining table, they are far from the defining factor that motivates workers to walk the picket line day after day. Instead, workers are driven by attacks to the pension fund and an even more aggressive push toward casual work.

Beyond a few details—a guarantee of only eight hours per week, with up to 30 hours of availability expected if the corporation requires it—little is known about the type of positions management wants to create, and employees have not been consulted on potential changes.

The media has seemed more interested in the public power struggle between Canada Post and CUPW than any of the actual issues that underlie it. A national union fighting the casualization of labour that has infected the entire Canadian economy ought to be a big story, but the coverage so far has largely focused on existential questions about the post office, set against the all-too-convenient backdrop of the corporation’s latest financial results.

The cracks in the COP climate conference system are so gaping and obvious that there is now a cacophony of voices calling for changes. In particular, the “Club of Rome” suggests reforms that would substantially improve negotiations. The historical approach to the Big Tobacco lobby which includes banning advertising, eliminating lobbying and taxing products (or at least removing subsidies, in the case of fossil fuels) can transform our approach.

The fossil fuel industry's presence at climate talks is as inappropriate as tobacco companies at a lung cancer conference. There were 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists identified there with at least 28 from Canada alone. Prominent fossil fuel lobby organizations had pavilions, including OPEC, the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) and Canada’s own Clean Resource Innovation Network (awkwardly named to avoid the words “Canada” and “oil and gas”.)

Meanwhile, authoritarian petrostates have hosted the conference three years in a row, further disrupting the negotiations.

I am so sick of seeing BS ads on the streets in Toronto like:
"As Long as the World Needs Oil & Gas, It Should Be Canadian"
https://www.canadaaction.ca/it-should-be-canadian

Common tactics: 1) Delay action, 2) discount the scale of the problem, 3) focus on any possible minutiae to make your product appear positively, 4) make a false appeal to patriotism.
Reality check: We have pretty much the dirtiest oil in the world (80% more emissions than the cleanest oil). The world should be getting off tarsands oil as quickly as possible.

US documents say the organization helps fund a terrorist group. But lawyers warn of chilling legitimate protest.

The moment Jada-Gabrielle Pape saw an online National Post report calling her “one of Samidoun’s most active organizers,” she was gripped with fear.

The Canadian government had declared the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network a terrorist entity less than a month earlier. Samidoun has been an active presence at many protests in Vancouver.

“As an Indigenous person, we’re targeted by the state at a disproportionate rate,” said Pape, who is Coast Salish from the Saanich and Snuneymuxw nations. “I’m afraid to be targeted by the police and by the state and afraid of what it will do to my family. My family is very afraid for me.”

Pape immediately reached out to the National Post to demand a correction. The columnist hadn’t contacted her before claiming, without evidence, she was a member of a terrorist organization, she noted.

Editors quickly removed any reference to her from the article. The National Post did not respond to The Tyee’s request for comment.

Anti-whistleblower laws are being successfully pushed by Canada’s farm lobby.

Mainstream commercial animal agriculture is conducted in an intensive way in often cramped and unhygienic environments. These conditions are ideal for new viruses to jump from animals to humans.

Beyond potentially lethal pathogens, the conditions in factory farms also raise concerns about air and water contamination and greenhouse gas pollution that exacerbates climate change.

Meanwhile, dangerous conditions for workers and considerable animal suffering add compounding concerns for an already controversial industry.

Often, the only light shed on these shadowy, dirty and densely populated spaces comes from hidden-camera investigations by journalists, activists and whistleblower employees. But new laws in Canada — often referred to as “agriculture-gag” laws — are making such investigations illegal.

These laws do a disservice to all Canadians.

~

In our research we found that Canadian governments chiefly cite biosecurity as the justification for ag-gag laws. They claim that whistleblowers and animal activists could spread diseases. To our knowledge, there is no evidence that whistleblowers or animal activists have ever spread animal-borne diseases in this way.

Meanwhile, modern animal agriculture is itself a hotbed for diseases like avian influenza — including H5N1. Viruses spread and mutate easily in concentrated populations of chickens, dairy cows and pigs.

Industry and government officials have also painted animal activists as “domestic terrorists” who pose a threat to farmers and their children. Likewise, such claims appear to be baseless.

Another thing is that the motivations to raise 'livestock' as quickly and cheaply on the largest scale as possible mean that they have practically no immunity to pathogens. Livestock workers are in PPE like surgeons because of how precarious the situations are, perfect for outbreaks

From telecoms to groceries to pharmacies to the resource sector, Canada is a playground for a handful of supremely powerful men from dynastic families, who have bought their way to dominance, consuming small businesses by the hundreds and periodically merging with one another.

Canada's Competition Bureau is underfunded and underpowered. In its entire history, the agency has never prevented a merger – not even once. This set the stage for Canada's dominant businesses to become many-tentacled conglomerates, like Canadian Tire, which owns Mark's Work Warehouse, Helly Hansen, SportChek, Nevada Bob's Golf, The Fitness Source, Party City, and, of course, a bank.

A surprising number of Canadian conglomerates end up turning into banks: Loblaw has a bank. So does Rogers. Why do these corrupt, price-gouging companies all go into "financial services?" As Hearn and Bednar explain, owning a bank is the key to financialization, with the company's finances disappearing into a black box that absorbs taxation attempts and liabilities like a black hole eating a solar system.

Moscow’s disinformation is often shared unwittingly by Canadians who don’t know its origin or purpose. Canada needs to fight it with stronger actions.

Her research reveals that the region’s early inhabitants moved hazelnuts long distances and managed the shrubby plants, creating and maintaining “large-scale ecosystems and sometimes entire watersheds through prescribed burning and forest clearing, transplanting [and] rock wall constructions” to foster perennial plant species.

“To have this hazelnut study come out and learn that it’s around 7,000 years that the First Nations brought hazelnuts and planted them here was insane,” he said, noting that it meant First Nations were growing food “before ancient Egyptians were planting their wheat fields.”

The research could have big implications for Indigenous land claims, Armstrong added, by challenging existing narratives that First Nations lived passively on the landscape rather than actively tending it.

Last year, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published an article on a case of scurvy diagnosed in an elderly woman in Toronto. It deserved attention because scurvy, a condition resulting from lack of vitamin C, is virtually never reported in advanced countries like Canada.

This year we have learned of 27 more cases, all diagnosed last year or this year, in the Lac La Ronge Indian Band in northern Saskatchewan.

Live without vitamin C for three or four months and you will begin to feel bad. You’ll be exhausted and irritable, and your arms and legs will hurt. Your gums will swell and start to bleed easily. Your teeth will loosen in their sockets, and you’ll have bad breath. Your skin will be rough and dry and will bruise easily. Wounds won’t heal quickly; in severe cases, old scars will open again. Left untreated, scurvy can result in internal bleeding, convulsions, organ failure and jaundice.

According to Food Banks Canada’s HungerCount 2024 report, food banks had two million visits last March — six per cent higher than in March 2023, and 90 per cent higher than in 2019.

A third of food bank users are children. Forty per cent of users are on social assistance or disability supports, and 18 per cent are currently employed — the highest percentage ever recorded.

President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to introduce 25% tariffs on all imports from Mexico and Canada is getting reaction, not surprisingly, in both countries.

A report commissioned by the Legault government presents a demanding but plausible roadmap for a more autonomous Quebec in a decentralized Canada.

Hey all,

Recently I've been trying to work on purchasing more products made here in Canada as opposed to down south or overseas, reason being to help decrease my environmental footprint, as well as to keep my money supporting businesses based in Canada, especially with the tariffs that might be coming in the near future.

I was curious if there were some good tips to help find products made within our borders. Some stuff has been easy, like swapping from Silk to Earth's Own for example due to labeling on the package that states where the product was manufactured, but other stuff is a bit of a pain since it doesn't seem to indicate where the product is manufactured or at the very least if it was imported, just where the company's head office is located.

While my main concern is with groceries since I've been trying to purchase more second-hand as of late, I was curious as to what some good all-around tips are for finding Canadian products. I'm willing to spend a little more if needed, I prefer to bank my money in my morals and not in convenience.