Alberta asks federal government, Red Cross for field hospitals as COVID spreads – CBC.ca

Here is a roundup of stories from The Canadian Press designed to bring you up to speed…

Bloc wins Montreal Liberal stronghold, NDP holds on to seat in Winnipeg byelection

The Bloc Québécois has won the Montreal Liberal stronghold riding of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun after an extremely tight three-way race with the NDP.

The resounding celebrations are another blow to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who faced calls to resign after losing another longtime Liberal seat in Toronto to the Conservatives in June.

Elections Canada reported all 187 polls showing the Bloc won the seat 248 votes ahead of the Liberals.

Further west in Winnipeg, the NDP maintained its stronghold in the riding of Elmwood — Transcona in a tight byelection race with the Conservatives.

Elections Canada reported the results of all 191 polls in the Winnipeg riding, showing NDP candidate Leila Dance won the race with 48.1 per cent of the vote.

Here’s what else we’re watching…

Inquiry to hear from MPs, elections commissioner

Liberal John McKay and Conservative Garnett Genuis are slated to appear today at a federal inquiry into foreign interference.

Both members of Parliament serve with the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a group that brings together representatives of various countries to demand accountability from Beijing.

The federal inquiry, led by commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue, is also scheduled to hear from representatives of the Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections, which carries out investigations.

The latest round of public hearings is focusing on the capacity of federal agencies to detect, deter and counter foreign interference.

The hearings, scheduled to continue through Oct. 16, will be relatively broad in scope, examining democratic institutions and the experiences of diaspora communities.

Calgary council facing fallout of Green Line spat

Calgary city council is set to face the fallout Tuesday of losing Alberta government funding for its Green Line light rail transit project, as Mayor Jyoti Gondek says it’s clear the province isn’t willing to budge on its rerouting demands.

Council is set to hear recommendations on how it could pay for the cost of abandoning the project and will mull over how it might transfer responsibility to the province.

While the city has already spent $1.4 billion on land acquisition, utility work and new rail vehicles, the full cost of killing the project in its current form is expected to become more clear.

Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen penned a letter to Gondek in early September saying the province would pull its $1.53 billion in funding from the $6.2-billion project if the city doesn’t rejig the line’s route and extend it farther south.

Jasper council to discuss provincial funding ask

The town council of Jasper, Alta., is set to discuss today if it will ask for funding from the provincial government to offset reduced property tax revenues for the next three years.

The potential request comes as town administration proposes property tax relief for residents affected by a devastating wildfire in July.

One-third of the town’s buildings were destroyed, and the municipality estimates it has lost access to $1.25 million in annual property tax revenue.

Under the town’s proposal, all property owners would be given a one-month tax break for when a mandatory evacuation order was in place.

Property owners whose homes or businesses were destroyed would have their remaining or outstanding 2024 bill nullified.

The proposal means Jasper would forgo over $1.9 million in municipal property tax revenue this year, or roughly 17 per cent of its overall budget.

Smith to announce supports for squeezed classrooms

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is set to announce a plan to help school classrooms being squeezed by an influx of new families.

Smith has scheduled a televised address to air on Global and CTV and to stream online at 6:50 p.m. local time.

Smith says her government was taken by surprise at the number of people who moved to Alberta last year.

The province’s population grew by more than 200,000 people in 2023-24, and Smith says every single school is facing capacity issues.

The province’s two largest divisions, Edmonton Public Schools and the Calgary Board of Education, say their schools are expected to have a utilization rate of well over 90 per cent this school year.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published September 17, 2024.

LOYALIST TOWNSHIP, ONTARIO, CANADA – The plant was expected to produce batteries for a million electric vehicles a year. Once up and running, it was supposed to create hundreds of permanent jobs in a small southeastern Ontario municipality.

It was, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at the time, “big news” that Belgium-based Umicore chose Loyalist Township for its battery component production facility — evidence, the federal and provincial governments said, of success in the quest to make Canada a global electric-vehicle productionhotspot.

But two years later, spending on the construction of the Umicore plant has been delayed in what the company calls a “significant worsening of the EV market context.”

It’s not the only EV project facing delays, despite billions in public subsidies on offer. Trudeau’s Liberal government, which promised to end the sale of gas vehicles by 2035, is getting long in the tooth, and consumer demand is slowing amid political uncertainty.

Experts suggest these are the growing pains of an industry that needs more time to develop. But that’s not much comfort to the mayor of Loyalist Township, home to some 18,000 people near Kingston, Ont.

“It was a very concerning announcement for the entire community,” Jim Hegadorn said in an interview at the local town hall, after Umicore said in late Julyit would delay spending on the construction of its facility.

The plant was previously expected to begin production in 2026 and create around 600 jobs. Some construction work, such as pouring concrete and installing pipes, has already been done, Hegadorn said, and the company has made promises to fulfil existing construction contracts.

The mayor said he hopes Umicore factors in Canadians’ “strong desire” to shift toward EVs as it decides on the plant’s future.

“Real decisions need to be made on the prediction of(what will be needed)five years from now, 10 years and 20 years from now,” he said.

In a recent statement, Umicore said customers’ demand projections for its battery materials “have steeply declined recently,” and the future of the plant will be informed by a comprehensive review of company operations in Asia, Europe and North America.

Hegadorn called the review a “positive” step, hoping the outcome would revitalize the project in his home town.

Ottawa and the provinces have been betting big that shoring up Canadian supply chains is important to the country’s economic future.

Since October 2020, 13 companies have announced a combined investment of $46.1 billion in EV-related projects in Canada, with governments pledging to provide $52.5 billion worth of support via construction and production subsidies, and tax credits, according to an estimate by the parliamentary budget officer.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has regularly touted his province’s plan to create an “end-to-end” EV supply chain that also prioritizes mining critical minerals crucial to battery production.

But Umicore is not the only firm to hit the brakes, even though nearly $1 billion worth of its own subsidies are on the line.

Ford Motors Co. has opted to delay its production of electric SUVs at an Oakville, Ont., assembly plant from next year to 2027. The American automaker now says it will produce 100,000 gas-powered Super Duty trucks at the plant, starting in 2026.

Spokesperson Said Deep explained that the decision means Canadian employees will return to work at the plant earlier than expected and help meet demand for the pickup trucks. He said the company is still committed to EVs.

The production of zero-emission vehicles, tied to a $1.8-billion investment at the Oakville plant, could net the company some $590 million in subsidies.

Greig Mordue, an associate professor of engineering and the chair of advanced manufacturing policy at McMaster University, said he expects the Canadian industry to start being productive, but much later than was originally advertised.

“The one good thing,” he said, is that most of the public spending is attached to production.

Many Canadian consumers aren’t yet ready to transition to electric vehicles due to concerns that include range anxiety, lack of charging infrastructure and affordability, he said.

He added that manufacturers outside China have struggled to build electric vehicles for prices people can pay.

“Consumers aren’t as interested as the most optimistic prognosticators forecast two, three, five years ago,” he said.

A study published by J.D. Power, a company tracking consumer data, reported in May that significantly fewer Canadians said they were considering buying an electric vehicle.

Only 11 per cent of just under 3,000 Canadian shoppers said they were strongly considering buying an electric vehicle, which was less than half of the 24 per cent of U.S. respondents who expressed strong interest.

More Canadians said they are very or somewhat unlikely to consider an EV for their next purchase, the study suggests. The percentage went from 53 of respondents in 2022 to 67 per cent last year and 72 per cent this year.

“We’re still selling more,” said Robert Karwel, the director of J.D. Power’s customer success and data analytics division. “The rate of growth in the curve for EVs as they penetrate the marketplace has slowed down, but it is still growing.”

But Brendan Sweeney, the managing director of the Trillium Network for Advanced Manufacturing, said there’s still a long way to go before the Canadian market can meet Ottawa’s goal of ending the sale of gas guzzlers by 2035.

“This is part of our 10-, 15- and 20-year transition that we’re, like, two years and three years into now,” he said.

In the global race for EV supremacy, he said, “doing nothing was not a very good option.” Still, Sweeney speculated that many companies are stalling their projects for political reasons.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who is polling far ahead of Trudeau, has not specified his approach to EV subsidies. A federal election is slated to happen by October 2025.

Trudeau has dubbed the investments a “strategic decision” on a “nascent industry.”

“We are making the right bet on the future,” he said at a news conference in Napanee, Ont., this summer.

Loyalist resident Scotty Schembri said he needs that gamble to start paying off soon.

He said his father, an electrician, works about a seven-hour drive away in Windsor, Ont., and is only able to visit his family once every two weeks. Those jobs at Umicore could bring his dad home, Schembri said, but he is not holding his breath.

“I feel like most (of the) time they delay it,” he said of the promise that an electric-vehicle boom could bring more jobs to the community. “It is a lot longer than what they say.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.

MONTREAL – Family members of patients allegedly brainwashed decades ago at a Montreal psychiatric hospital are afraid they’re running out of time to get compensation because the federal government and McGill University have filed motions to dismiss their lawsuit.

Glenn Landry’s mother, Catherine Elizabeth Harter, was among the hundreds of people to receive experimental treatments under the MK-ULTRA program, funded by the Canadian government and the CIA between the 1940s and 1960s at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute, which was affiliated with McGill University.

Landry was born after his mother’s 1959 stay in the hospital, and had to be raised by a foster family because she couldn’t care for him.

While he says early traumas she experienced prior to seeking treatment undoubtedly played a role in her mental health issues, he believes the shock treatments and drug therapy she received during her months-long stay under the care of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron and his colleagues robbed him of a relationship with her.

“She was no longer the person that she would have been, because there was no way that I could ever ask her about any kind of memories,” he said of his mother, who he saw about once a year until her death in the 1980s.

“She spent time with me because I was her son, but there was nothing about herself as a person that I can glean. It was not there.”

Landry is one of about 60 families participating in a lawsuit against the Canadian government, the McGill University Health Centre and the Royal Victoria Hospital over the MK-ULTRA program. The plaintiffs allege their family members were subjected to psychiatric experimentation that included powerful drugs, repeated audio messages, induced comas and shock treatment that reduced them in some cases to a childlike state.

Lawyer Alan Stein, who represents the group, said he had been hopeful the government and hospitals would agree to start talks around compensation for his clients — many of whom are elderly. Instead, the opposing parties filed motions in Quebec Superior Court last week to dismiss, arguing the lawsuit is “unfounded in law and constitutes an abuse of procedure.”

The government and hospitals argue the claims are prescribed — that they should have been filed years or even decades ago when the facts surrounding the case first came to light.

“In addition to being prescribed, the originating application is an abuse of process in that it seeks to re-litigate determinative questions of fact and law that the courts of Quebec adjudicated over two decades ago,” one of the motions read.

In an email, a spokesperson for Canada’s Department of Justice says the government “acknowledges the hurt and pain inflicted on those impacted by these historical treatments,” but believes the claims are unfounded.

The departmentsaid a 1986 report into Cameron’s work found that the Canadian government did not hold legal liability or moral responsibility for the treatments but nevertheless decided to provide victims with assistance in the 1990s for “humanitarian reasons.” The McGill University Health Centre declined to comment.

Stein, in a phone interview, says the motion to dismiss is a delaying tactic from government lawyers. “They feel that my clients will not proceed further, that they’ll lose confidence and just not agree to continue further with the proceedings,” he said.

He says his clients should still have the right to sue because they didn’t know earlier that it was an option available to them. And while some victims were compensated, the money for the most part did not extend to family members, he added.

The lawsuit is asking for close to $1 million per family, for what Stein calls a “total miscarriage of justice.”

Landry, who compares the victims’ ordeal to the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, says that victims also want an apology.

Because another group of Cameron’s alleged victims, and a different lawyer, had previously filed a class-action request, Stein chose instead to file a direct action, which allows plaintiffs to be mandated by others in similar circumstances to sue on their behalf. Quebec Superior Court set the stage for a trial in 2022 when it rejected an application by the government and the hospitals to partially dismiss the lawsuit, but the process was dragged out by an appeal, which also failed.

The proposed class-action lawsuit representing the other victims had tried to include the United States government as a defendant, but Quebec’s Court of Appeal ruled earlier this year that the U.S. state cannot be sued in Canada for its alleged role in the experiments; the Supreme Court of Canada refused to review the case.

While the two lawsuits are separate, Stein believes a victory by the government and hospitals in his lawsuit would make it very hard for the other effort to move forward since it would likely be targeted with a similar motion.

One of the two named plaintiffs in Stein’s suit has already dropped out. Marilyn Rappaport said in an interview that she withdrew after her husband died. That devastating loss, combined with her ongoing need to support her siblings who were victims of the experiments, made it too hard to contemplate the prospect of reliving her terrible childhood memories in court, she said.

Rappaport says her once beautiful and artistic sister Evelyn has experienced what she describes as a “living death” in the decades since she went to the hospital for treatments including being put to sleep for “months at a time” and subjected to audio messages on repeat. Now in her 80s, her sister is institutionalized and her memory is “totally gone,” Rappaport says.

While she’s no longer part of the lawsuit, Rappaport is still hoping for a victory and upset that the government is still fighting.

“I cannot understand why it’s taking so long,” she said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17, 2024.