City of Toronto spending $9M to rescue boring machine trapped underground in west end

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

More details emerge about fatal border crossing

The trial of two men accused of human smuggling is expected to soon hear from a migrant who survived a long walk across the Canada-U. S. border in a blizzard.

Steve Shand and Harshkumar Patel are charged with organizing several illegal crossings, from Manitoba to Minnesota, of people from India.

They have pleaded not guilty and their trial is set to run until Friday.

One of the crossings they are accused of organizing saw a family of four freeze to death as they struggled to walk in blowing snow and wind chills below -30 in January 2022.

Border officials caught seven others that day, one of whom is scheduled to take the witness stand as early as today.

Here’s what else we’re watching…

Canadians favour intervention in post strike: poll

A new poll suggests Canadians are supportive of government intervention in the labour disputes at ports and at Canada Post.

Polling firm Leger found 63 per cent of respondents to a new survey were in favour of the Liberal government’s move to step in and ask the Canada Industrial Relations Board to order a resumption of port operations and move negotiations into binding arbitration. Nineteen per cent were opposed, and another 19 per cent said they didn’t know.

Just over half of respondents, 57 per cent, said they would be in favour of the government doing the same in the ongoing Canada Post strike. Twenty-one per cent were opposed, and 22 per cent said they didn’t know.

About 55,000 employees represented by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers have been on strike since Friday, shutting down operations and halting deliveries. The federal government has appointed its top mediator to help reach a new agreement.

On Friday, Labour Minister Steve MacKinnon ruled out early intervention in that strike.

Refugee increase leads to new temporary housing

A significant increase in the number of refugees and asylum seekers in Canada has prompted some cities to start building temporary housing for new arrivals.

The city of Ottawa is working to establish what’s known as a sprung structure that serves as both a temporary shelter and a centre to provide settlement services such as language training and employment assistance. 

These centres are meant to house refugees only for their first few weeks in the city before they move on to more suitable housing in Ottawa’s settlement infrastructure. 

The city has identified two potential locations for these centres, both in the city’s west end. Planning documents describe them as “modular tension fabric buildings.”

The planned locations for these structures have been a point of tension in the affected neighbourhoods. The city’s first proposed location was cancelled following significant resident pushback. It then came up with two new options, and rallies were held in both spots last weekend both for and against the idea of putting the structures there.

Yukon council refuses to take oath to King Charles

Governance in Yukon’s second-largest municipality has been at a standstill since its newly elected mayor and council refused to pledge allegiance to King Charles during their swearing-in ceremony.

Stephen Johnson, the mayor-elect of Dawson City, said he and the four-member council refused to take Canada’s official oath to the monarch on Nov. 5 because of the Crown’s history with Indigenous populations.

He said council hasn’t been able to proceed with municipal duties and is eagerly waiting for the territory’s Department of Community Services to respond to its request to take an alternative to the Oath of Allegiance.

Johnson said under the Yukon’s Municipal Act, elected officials are required to take the Oath of Allegiance and an oath of office.

The Oath of Allegiance requires newly elected councillors to swear or affirm they “will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles III” and his “heirs and successors according to law.”

Trans Remembrance Day to highlight Alberta bills

Adebayo Chris Katiiti, jailed for being a transgender man in Uganda, was brutally beaten as a child for wearing his brothers’ clothes.

But in October, and for the first time since he arrived in Canada, Katiiti said he began to feel like his safety is in jeopardy again.

That’s when Alberta’s United Conservative Party government introduced three bills that would affect transgender people.

On Wednesday, when Transgender Day of Remembrance is recognized around the world, harmful effects of Alberta’s proposed legislation are set to be highlighted during an evening event in Edmonton.

Katiiti is helping to organize the memorial.

If enacted, the bills would restrict transgender athletes from competing in female amateur sports, prohibit doctors from treating those under 16 seeking gender-affirming surgeries, and require children under 16 to have parental consent if they want to change their names or pronouns at school.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 20, 2024.

BURNABY, B.C. – The metallic screech of a train rolling by. The constant hum of traffic on the nearby Trans-Canada Highway.

These are the sounds of the Brunette River in the fall, as it cuts through the suburbs of Burnaby, B.C.

And rising above the din of Metro Vancouver, the splashing of chum salmon as they push upstream to spawn. 

The salmon in the river are looking haggard by mid-November, their skin patchy and worn as they near the end of their lives. But they continue the timeless cycle to produce the next generation of their keystone species.

Jason Hwang, vice-president of the Pacific Salmon Foundation, recalled growing up in Delta, south of Vancouver, and thinking “salmon were something that came into the Fraser River but swam on by the Lower Mainland to better habitat” farther inland.

Then, as a child, Hwang saw salmon spawning in Surrey’s Bear Creek.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “You might look out at the city and Vancouver and say, ‘Well, it’s a big city now and maybe the time to have salmon in our proximity is long passed.’ But that’s not true.”

Efforts to rehabilitate urban waterways have helped bring spawning salmon back to parts of Metro Vancouver, including unlikely-looking streams surrounded by industrial and residential development.

While it’s doubtful that city salmon will recover to their original numbers, those involved in restoration work say it has a host of side benefits, from boosting resilience to flooding to inspiring community connection and stewardship.

Hwang said “an amazing thing happens” when people realize there are important natural assets in their communities, including spawning salmon.

“There’s a pride of stewardship that exists that you see all over the Lower Mainland … in the communities that are aware they’ve got salmon in their neighbourhoods.”

Salmon are a keystone species, supporting the broader ecosystem, and they serve as a barometer for the state of their environment, Hwang said.

“If you look at salmon, it’s one way to get a pretty good picture, and they’re showing us that we can do better, and we need to do better.”

Francisca Olaya Nieto, a biologist with the Vancouver Park Board, said a century of urban development had altered the landscape to the point that aiming for healthy, sustainable salmon populations across the city is probably not realistic.

About 100 kilometres of stream were covered up as Vancouver grew, she said, and just a handful of salmon-bearing waterways continue to flow naturally.

Some of those original streams were diverted into pipes and connected to the city’s water system, while others were filled in, buried and paved over.

Nieto said salmon in urban waterways must contend with pollution, sediment, warming waters, and infrastructure blocking their passage.

Still, they have been returning to streams where the City of Vancouver and its park board have undertaken restoration work, said Nieto, who has been involved in efforts to recover or “daylight” sections of once-buried or degraded waterways.

“The main goal is to find those opportunities where we can improve the water quality, and if salmon can return, that will be a win, but also we can benefit many other species,” she said. “We’re working more toward creating healthy habitat across the city, working toward connectivity and improving our biodiversity.”

Amir Taleghani, a senior engineer with the City of Vancouver, said restoring salmon habitat may have started with naturalization and beautification in mind, but the work also provided an opportunity to tap into the broader benefits of natural assets.

He pointed to Still Creek, flowing from the east side of Vancouver into Burnaby.

The creek has been the site of restoration efforts over several decades, and Taleghani recently captured a video showing salmon spawning in the stream surrounded by parking lots, train tracks, big-box stores and industrial buildings.

But Still Creek plays a role beyond providing salmon habitat, said Taleghani, whose work is focused on floodplains and watercourses in Vancouver.

“Increasingly, we’re seeing the creek as a natural drainage asset, important to … adapting to climate change and managing flood risk,” he said.

“You need room for water to safely be stored in a flood. So, by widening the creek and lowering the surface where we can, we provide the space that in an extreme rainfall event can be flooded in a safe way, but the rest of the year, it can be habitat.”

Taleghani said the city was incorporating Still Creek in its draft land-use plan for the area, which includes two SkyTrain stations, and looking at how the waterway can help manage run-off and flood risk as more housing and infrastructure is built.

Hwang, too, said it was crucial to include natural assets in city and regional planning given the population increases expected for the Lower Mainland.

“As a salmon biologist, I would advocate for all of the reasons that (restoration) can be helpful for salmon, but it’s also helpful for your community,” he said, pointing to flood mitigation as well as recreational opportunities in naturalized areas.

While salmon will likely never return to streams in Metro Vancouver as they once did, Hwang said the target should be to restore as much habitat as possible.

He recalled attending the British Columbia Institute of Technology as a post-secondary student, where there is an ongoing effort to restore a creek that runs through the Burnaby campus and eventually flows into Still Creek.

“Maybe Guichon Creek used to produce thousands of salmon, and now it produces a couple of dozen … but isn’t that still awesome? Isn’t it awesome that in the (school’s) parking lot area, you can make salmon, still, in a stream?”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 20, 2024.

FREDERICTON – When people pass by the white-pillared Beaverbrook Art Gallery starting this weekend, they will be greeted by one of Fredericton’s most famous sculptures.

Called “The Beavers,” the artwork is a 1,400-kilogram grey limestone carving of a mother and baby beaver, both hunched over logs. Sitting in the entranceway of the museum, the sculpture is visible from the outside through the building’s glass doors. The piece was commissioned by the province in 1959 as a gift to William Maxwell Aitken, known as Lord Beaverbrook, for his 80th birthday. 

First installed in Officers’ Square in 1959, the sculpture spent decades braving the elements — and generations of children who climbed atop the carving or sat on the beavers’ stone backs. But it was removed from the downtown park in 2016 after city workers noticed how badly it was damaged. Following a two-week restoration over the summer, it will be presented to the public in its new home on Saturday.

“I mean, it’s just the quintessential Canadian symbol,” John Leroux, manager of collections and exhibitions at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, said in a recent interview. Beavers, he said, are intelligent, and “make things just like Lord Beaverbrook did …. They’re very high-functioning animals.”

Beaverbrook was from Newcastle, which is now part of Miramichi, and went on to become a newspaper publisher, businessman, politician — serving as a British cabinet minister during the two world wars — and University of New Brunswick chancellor. He was also a philanthropist, and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery is one of the many projects he funded.

Acadian artist Claude Roussel carved the piece in his basement in Edmundston, Leroux said.

Roussel is considered a pioneer of modern art in Acadia. A recipient of the Order of Canada and the Order of New Brunswick, he founded and became the first director of the visual arts department and art gallery at Université de Moncton in 1963. He has presented more than 200 exhibitions and created 60 sculptures.

Angela Watson, cultural development officer for Fredericton, said the installation of the carving at Officers’ Square in 1959 included a circular wading pool with the animals sitting on the edge of the water. 

The wading pool was removed in the early 1990s, and the sculpture sat on a concrete pedestal for the next 30 years, she said, adding that it was a popular and endearing piece on which children climbed or sat.

Leroux said he remembers playing in the wading pool as a kid.

After city workers and officials noticed a few cracks in the sculpture in 2016, Watson said they moved the carving into storage and began exploring how it could be restored. The city hired an art conservator in the summer of 2023 to assess how to preserve it. Watson said the conservator advised officials to clean and restore the beavers, and get the cracks filled in before they got worse.

“She recommended that (the sculpture) be moved inside, because otherwise the cracks would just continue to get larger and larger and (the piece would) eventually crumble.”

Cleaning out the lichen and other dirt in the cracks and restoring the sculpture took about two weeks over the summer, and in late fall, the piece was moved to its new home, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. The city does not yet have the final amount it took to clean and restore the statue, Watson said.

Moving the 1,400-kilogram structure from storage in city hall to the art gallery, about a kilometre away, was the confluence of physics and art. Leroux said movers designed a metal structure on wheels, similar to a bed frame, which had a cradle made of straps that securely held the piece in place as it was moved.

People are still welcome to touch the artwork, he said.

“It was a gift to the public. You’re meant to kind of really touch it and engage with it. We’re keeping that legacy going.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 20, 2024.