Economy
Leaders of the nation’s labour federations yesterday warned the Prime Minister not to invoke any emergency legislation to end a British Columbia port strike now in its 12th day. Cabinet enforced a back-to-work order to end an earlier strike at the Port of Montréal after five days.
“Legislation would be a serious misstep and would be met with strong resistance from the entire labour movement,” said the petition jointly signed by Canadian Labour Congress President Bea Bruske and her provincial and territorial counterparts. Back-to-work legislation “tramples on every Canadians’ Charter right to freedom of association,” the petition added.
“The union is still at the table and remains committed to the federal mediation process, ready to get a deal done,” said the petition. “We urge your government to allow the parties to finish bargaining the outstanding issues in good faith.”
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Read MoreCabinet must address “housing injustice” with new laws and policies, says the Federal Housing Advocate. Marie-Josée Houle in a report to Parliament faulted current programs as a “sorry disappointment.”
“There has been housing injustice in Canada,” Houle wrote in her first Annual Report. The Advocate complained of seeing tent cities in city parks surrounded by urban wealth.
“In Vancouver the disparity was staggering,” wrote Houle. “The tent encampment where people are living in Crab Park was silhouetted against a luxury cruise ship in the distance. In Montréal I visited a 24-hour shelter space that serves unhoused and precariously housed people each day which is located not far from a sparkling new luxury condo building.”
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Read MoreAirlines cannot blame factors they “should have known about” to deny passengers compensation for poor service, federal regulators said yesterday. The Canadian Transportation Agency itemized excuses it would no longer accept under Air Passenger Protection Regulations.
Compensation for flight delays must be paid “except in exceptional circumstances which regulations will identify,” the Agency wrote in a consultation paper. Exceptions must be spelled out for the benefit of travelers, it said.
“Circumstances that would not be considered exceptional: flight crew or cabin crew unavailability, staff shortages at the airline, technical problems that are an inherent part of normal airline operations, any situation the airline knew about or should have known about when it sold the ticket to the passenger, and any action or failure to act by the airline or others with which the airline has a contractual relationship,” wrote the Agency.
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Read MoreAlberta’s government is investing over $60 million into a suite of technologies aimed at reducing emissions across industries, as part of the province’s Emissions Reduction and Energy Development Plan. The plan supports both job growth and emission reductions in Alberta.
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Read MoreThe Department of Finance says its budget forecasts “should not be viewed as a prediction of the future,” according to a letter to the Parliamentary Budget Office. The admission follows cabinet’s raising of its debt to GDP ratio in what Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland had called “a line we will not cross.”
“The long term debt to GDP ratio projection presented in this budget is subject to a high degree of uncertainty and is sensitive to assumptions,” Assistant Deputy Finance Minister Julie Turcotte wrote the Budget Office. “As such it should not be viewed as a prediction of the future.”
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Read MoreAlberta’s Minister of Transportation Devin Dreeshen called for Canada’s national leaders to step up and build strategic ports in the Northwest Passage.
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Read MoreJason Nelson, president and CEO of Whole Cows based in Waco, Texas, makes no beef about there being a global war against the cattle industry.
“I would say there is a war not only against beef, there is a war against Americans being healthy,” he said.
As a physically disabled and highly decorated combat veteran who served in two branches of the U.S. military, Mr. Nelson sees the war is being waged by globalists in the name of fighting climate change.
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Read MoreCold, vast, and remote – few words better capture the image Canadians have of the Arctic. Although the inhospitable nature of Canada’s North may have contributed to the broader apathy to the region, from a development perspective, remoteness is the real challenge. Costs are higher for services, goods, and infrastructure than in the rest of Canada; there are also persistent gaps in quality-of-life indicators. The prevailing strategy has been to secure more transfers to prop up standards of living, without meaningfully improving them.
In this new MLI paper, Overcoming remoteness: Innovations to Support Economic Development, Critical Minerals, and Security in the Arctic, Senior Fellow and Energy Program Director Heather Exner-Pirot considers new and better ways to address the Arctic’s remoteness.
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Read MoreAt least one investment house isn’t afraid of fossil fuels. And it happens to be one of the biggest in the world.
That’s because Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has doubled down on liquified natural gas (LNG) by taking an additional 50% stake in a US export terminal for a cool $3.3 billion in cash
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Read MoreGermany has thrown out 83 million doses of coronavirus vaccines at a rough cost of €1.6 billion and has 120 million more doses sitting unused in stock, even as it is set to receive more jabs at a time when vaccination has flatlined.
According to data provided by the country’s health ministry, Germany scrapped 54 million COVID-19 vaccine doses by the end of 2022 and another 29 million in the first quarter of 2023.
However, the real tally is likely to be higher. The ministry didn’t provide waste figures for the second quarter of this year and also stressed that federal states and health care providers aren’t required to report vaccine waste. “Accordingly, a total volume of total disposed COVID-19 vaccine doses acquired by the Federal Republic of Germany cannot be quantified,” it said in an email to POLITICO.
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