Tag: Region Canada

TORONTO – A few hundred members of Canada’s Sikh community demonstrated outside the Indian Consulate in Toronto on Saturday to protest the unsolved killing of one of their leaders last month in the Vancouver, British Columbia, area. They accused the Indian government of being responsible for the gunning down of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, president of a Sikh temple and campaigner for the creation of an independent Sikh state that supporters hope to call Khalistan. “When an Indian agency and system…

National Defence News release July 3, 2023 – Ottawa – National Defence / Canadian Armed Forces Today, the ships’ companies of His Majesty’s Canadian Ships (HMCS) Shawinigan and Summerside depart their homeport of Halifax, N.S., to join Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group 1 (SNMCMG1) on Operation REASSURANCE. The contribution of two Kingston-class Maritime Coastal Defence Vessels (MCDV) to SNMCMG1 demonstrates Canada’s ongoing commitment to NATO’s high readiness continuous at-sea presence, and the Royal Canadian Navy’s leadership on the world stage…

Canada’s banking regulator is cautioning that lenders and borrowers are overly reliant on lengthening mortgage amortizations to help the latter cope with higher interest rates and surging costs. In an exclusive interview with The Globe and Mail on Friday, Peter Routledge, the head of the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI), said that borrowers with mortgages in which payments are not high enough to cover the interest portion of the loan could experience a “shock” in significantly higher…

Petro-Canada gas stations across Canada are impacted by technical problems preventing customers from paying with credit card or rewards points as its parent company, Suncor Energy, discloses they suffered a cyberattack. Suncor Energy is the 48th-largest public company in the world, and one of Canada’s largest synthetic crude producers, having an annual revenue of $31 billion. The company says it has taken measures to mitigate the attack and informed the authorities of the situation. At the same time, it expects…

The Canadian Senate passed Bill C-18 Thursday, the second part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s three-phase censorship legislation. In the process, the Conservative Party’s chief critic of the legislation was censured on Wednesday and was unable to attack the bill from the floor of the House of Commons. C-18 will force social media companies to pay Canadian media to post news stories. In protest of the bill, Meta has already put Canada on notice that it will cease providing Canadian…

Earlier in the day, the Democracy Watch watchdog group said the RCMP had confirmed in a letter that it is investigating Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and some Cabinet officials over their alleged obstruction of the SNC-Lavalin probe. In 2021 and 2022, Democracy Watch said it made requests under the Access to Information Act (AITA) to access records on the proceedings regarding investigations into Trudeau’s and several ministers’ involvement in pressing then-Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould to stop the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin….

Canada is freezing ties with the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, or AIIB, while it probes allegations it is dominated by the Chinese Communist Party, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Wednesday. Freeland said she did not rule out any outcome of the investigation, a clear hint that Ottawa could pull out of a bank it officially joined in March 2018. The bank’s global communications director, a Canadian, said on Wednesday he had resigned and criticized the bank as “dominated…

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are investigating allegations China tried to intimidate a federal legislator, one of more than 100 inquiries into foreign meddling, the RCMP commander said on Tuesday. Canada has accused China of trying to interfere in its affairs through various schemes, including illegal police stations and the targeting of lawmakers. Beijing has strongly denied all such allegations. Ottawa expelled a Chinese diplomat last month for allegedly seeking to target opposition lawmaker Michael Chong’s family in Hong Kong…

The top US securities regulator sued cryptocurrency platform Coinbase on Tuesday, the second lawsuit in two days against a major crypto exchange, in a dramatic escalation of a crackdown on the industry and one that could dramatically transform a market that has largely operated outside regulation. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday took aim at Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. The SEC accuses Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao of operating a “web of deception”. If…

Hundreds of uncontrolled forest fires blazed across Canada on Wednesday, threatening critical infrastructure, forcing evacuations and sending a blanket of smoky air wafting over U.S. cities. Wildfires are common in Canada’s western provinces, but this year flames have mushroomed rapidly in the country’s east, making it the worst-ever start to the season. About 3.8 million hectares have burned, 15 times the 10-year average, Federal Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair said. “Across the country as of today, there are 414…

SINGAPORE — Canada is pledging to step up its military posture in the Indo-Pacific, with its defense minister announcing the nation will annually commit to the region an additional warship. This will boost the size of the Royal Canadian Navy’s annual deployment to the Indo-Pacific from two to three ships, according to defense minister Anita Anand, who added that the deployment would grow Canada’s regional presence, particularly in the Indian Ocean. Anand was speaking here at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue,…

We’ve written a few times about California’s “Journalism Protection Act” (CJPA) from state Rep. Buffy Wicks, and many times about the terrible concept of such link taxes. Unfortunately, it looks like California’s bill is moving forward, with buy-in from the big media orgs and their journalists that will get the free pay offs from such an unconstitutional link tax. In response, Meta has now announced (as it has done elsewhere) that if California passes the CJPA it will simply stop…

WASHINGTON — More than 1 million F-35 spare parts worth at least $85 million have gone missing over at least the last five years, according to a new Government Accountability Office report criticizing the program’s supply tracking. Auditors said that because the government doesn’t have its own system tracking those parts, officials may not truly know how many spare parts are actually in the global spares pool, where they are, or their total value. As a result, “the full quantity…

When then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull called for heads to roll after the 2016 census was pulled offline – amid fears IBM’s data servers hosting the survey had been infiltrated – the American enterprise technology giant made an important decision. IBM ran most of the big mainframe systems that had powered core government functions for several decades, earning it billions of dollars a year in fees and making the Australian government one of its top global clients. No census data was…

Last year’s techwide reckoning continues. In 2023, layoffs have yet again cost tens of thousands of tech workers their jobs; this time, the workforce reductions have been driven by the biggest names in tech like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, Meta and Zoom. Startups, too, have announced cuts across all sectors, from crypto to enterprise SaaS.  The reasoning behind these workforce reductions follows a common script, citing the macroeconomic environment and a need to find discipline on a tumultuous path to…

Russia has intercepted two US Air Force strategic bombers flying over the Baltic Sea. The Russian defense ministry said on Tuesday Russia had scrambled a Su-27 fighter jet to “prevent violations of the state border” by the American bombers, AFP reported. “After removing the foreign military aircraft from the Russian state border, the Russian fighter went back to its air base,” the ministry added. The statement said that “the flight of the Russian fighter was carried out in strict accordance with international…