Around Canada

The B.C. Wildfire Service has now spent more than $105 million to fight wildfires this year, surpassing recent trends on costs, as the total amount of land burned in the province hits early season highs.  Total budget for 2023 season at $204M, as province transitions B.C. Wildfire Service to year-round …

Catherine Calling Last remembers breathing through her contractions and hoping she would make it, as her husband drove down the highway between Pincher Creek and Lethbridge.  Town’s doctors say they can no longer support labour and delivery in the community. Catherine Calling Last remembers breathing through her contractions and hoping …

The City of Ottawa has revived an anti-rat working group to coordinate its struggle against the pesky rodents.  The move comes as councillors field complaints of rat infestations across the city, with one warning that an “inadequate” response is leaving residents to fend for themselves. “Residents were basically told, ‘Hey, …

Several shoppers have complained about receipt-check signs recently spotted at their Loblaw-owned grocer. Each of those signs has now disappeared, but Loblaw won’t say if it has abandoned receipt checks, which can be unpopular with shoppers and difficult to enforce.  Legal experts say customers generally don’t have to comply with …

Jason Walmsley has been behind bars before. He’s hoping a sentence in the federal Stony Mountain Institution will set him up with the supports he needs to fight addiction, both in custody and once he’s released.  ‘How can federal prison be the best option out of all these other options?’ …

Despite renovations to its dining area, Windsor’s Street Help doesn’t have a free spot for clients to sit — that’s because it’s full of donations.  In March 2022, Street Help added two 40-foot shipping containers behind its building as it said it needed extra storage space for donations. At the …

More than 2,400 wildfires have burnt more than 4.7 million hectares of land in Canada so far this season. This has blanketed much of the country (and parts of the United States) in smoke. Many people, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, laid the blame for this particularly dour spring on …

When Luz Romero heard about a Niagara Falls, Ont. rental property for sale a few years ago, she jumped at the opportunity to be a landlord. But now she says her tenants owe her over $7,000 in unpaid rent and delays at the Landlord and Tenant Board mean she can’t …

Seven women who say a serial imposter posing as a nurse left them in “excruciating” pain, exposed them to infection, injured them or personally insulted them have all filed lawsuits, alleging negligence by the operators of the Vancouver hospital where Brigitte Cleroux worked for a year.  7 new claims filed …

A B.C. family has garnered sympathy online — and international media attention — after sharing what they described as an incident in which a man questioned their nine-year-old daughter’s gender during a sporting event.  ‘The gentleman started insisting that I provide documentation … proving that my daughter was born a …