The former mayor of a township just outside Cornwall, Ont. — who resigned six months after he was charged with sexual assault and child luring in 2021 — died last month.

According to an online obituary, Frank Prevost died of cancer on March 9. He was 56.

In the summer of 2021, Ontario Provincial Police accused Prevost, then 53 and the mayor of South Glengarry, of sexually assaulting a man over several years, as well as three counts of child luring stemming from an undercover police operation.

He was convicted of the sexual assault charge in 2023 and had been in the process of appealing.

The child luring charges were still winding their way through court at the time of his death.

Prevost was also charged in February 2022 with violating a condition of his release order. He had been ordered not to use the internet or similar communication services to access unlawful content, social media, dating sites, chat rooms or forums.

Trials had been scheduled for both outstanding matters, according to court records, but Prevost’s health had been deteriorating.

They “could not proceed because he was unable to attend court or participate in a trial,” his lawyer Mark Ertel said in an email.

All outstanding charges against Prevost were withdrawn at the request of the Crown on April 4.

Prevost’s death was first reported by Cornwall Newswatch.

Notice to abandon appeal

In July 2023, Ontario Court Justice Diane Lahaie found Prevost guilty of sexual assaulting someone between 2018 and 2021 in Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry, according to court records.

In November, Prevost was sentenced to four years in prison, his name was added to the sexual offender registry, and he was ordered to submit his DNA, among other orders.

He and his lawyer launched an appeal that same month. On Nov. 8, the court granted Prevost bail pending a hearing on the matter.

Prevost died before the hearing could take place, the court confirmed.

A notice to abandon the appeal has been submitted and is being processed, a spokesperson for the court wrote in an email Monday.

After the first charges were announced, Prevost took an unpaid six-month leave of absence as mayor of South Glengarry and was removed as warden of the United Counties of Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry.

He announced his resignation after those six months passed.

Lyle Warden was promoted from deputy mayor to interim mayor. Current South Glengarry Mayor Lachlan McDonald was elected in 2022.

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OTTAWA –

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Canadians living in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and all four Atlantic provinces will receive the first of four instalments Monday if they filed their 2023 taxes by March 15.

Those who filed their taxes since March 15 will see their first instalment on May 15, while those who file after Monday will wait until June or July.

The payments are based on household size and for a family of four range from $190 in New Brunswick to $450 in Alberta.

Ottawa also has just launched a new online estimator that shows how much you should get from the rebates.

In a bid to make the rebates more understandable Ottawa renamed them the “Canada Carbon Rebate” this year but is still negotiating with the big banks about changing how the deposits are labelled when they show up in your account.

Ottawa has been battling with banks about how the deposits are labelled since they moved to quarterly payments for the rebates in 2022.

Many Canadians were confused, or didn’t realize they even got the rebate, when payments showed up with vague labels including “EFT deposit from Canada”, “EFT Credit Canada.” or sometimes just “federal payment.”

The federal government asked the banks to help label them with the old moniker — the climate action incentive payment — but some didn’t arguing they had a 15 character limit for deposit description.

The deposits will be labelled different depending on where you bank, with some going with the full Canada Carbon Rebate name, others shortening it “CDACarbonRebate” or “Canada CCR/RCC.”

In French, the labels could be “Carbone RemiseCA” or “Dépôt direct/Remise canadienne sur carbone.”

The rebates are sent to offset what people pay in carbon pricing when they buy fuel so they’re not left worse off as a result.

People who do things to lower their fuel use are even better off because they still get the same rebate but pay less in carbon pricing.

The rebate amounts are set annually based on how much carbon price Ottawa expects to collect in each province.

British Columbia, Quebec and Northwest Territories have their own carbon pricing system for consumers so residents there don’t receive the federal payment. Yukon and Nunavut use the federal system but have an agreement to distribute the proceeds themselves.

The parliamentary budget officer says about 80 per cent of Canadians get back more from the rebates than they pay.

He also says though that the economic impact of carbon pricing could lower wages over time, erasing that benefit for some Canadians. The government however argues that climate change itself can cause economic harm if it is left unchecked.

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Since Meta blocked links to news in Canada last August to avoid paying fees to media companies, right-wing meme producer Jeff Ballingall says he has seen a surge in clicks for his Canada Proud Facebook page.

“Our numbers are growing and we’re reaching more and more people every day,” said Ballingall, who publishes up to 10 posts a day and has some 540,000 followers.

“Media is just going to get more tribal and more niche,” he added. “This is just igniting it further.”

Canada has become ground zero for Facebook’s battle with governments that have enacted or are considering laws that force internet giants — primarily the social media platform’s owner Meta and Alphabet’s Google — to pay media companies for links to news published on their platforms.

Facebook has blocked news sharing in Canada rather than pay, saying news holds no economic value to its business.

It is seen as likely to take a similar step in Australia should Canberra try to enforce its 2021 content licensing law after Facebook said it would not extend the deals it has with news publishers there. Facebook briefly blocked news in Australia ahead of the law.

The blocking of news links has led to profound and disturbing changes in the way Canadian Facebook users engage with information about politics, two unpublished studies shared with Reuters found.

“The news being talked about in political groups is being replaced by memes,” said Taylor Owen, founding director of McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, who worked on one of the studies.

“The ambient presence of journalism and true information in our feeds, the signals of reliability that were there, that’s gone.”

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The lack of news on the platform and increased user engagement with opinion and non-verified content has the potential to undermine political discourse, particularly in election years, the studies’ researchers say. Both Canada and Australia go to the polls in 2025.

Other jurisdictions, including California and Britain, are also considering legislation to force internet giants to pay for news content. Indonesia introduced a similar law this year.

Blocked

In practice, Meta’s decision means that when someone makes a post with a link to a news article, Canadians will see a box with the message: “In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can’t be shared.”

Where once news posts on Facebook garnered between five million and eight million views from Canadians per day, that has disappeared, according to the Media Ecosystem Observatory, a McGill University and University of Toronto project.

Although engagement with political influencer accounts such as partisan commentators, academics and media professionals was unchanged, reactions to image-based posts in Canadian political Facebook groups tripled to match the previous engagement with news posts, the study also found.

The research analyzed some 40,000 posts and compared user activity before and after the blocking of news links on the pages of some 1,000 news publishers, 185 political influencers and 600 political groups.

A Meta spokesperson said the research confirmed the company’s view that people still come “to Facebook and Instagram even without news on the platform.”

Canadians can still access “authoritative information from a range of sources” on Facebook, and the company’s fact-checking process was “committed to stopping the spread of misinformation on our services,” the spokesperson said.

‘Unreliable’ sources

A separate NewsGuard study conducted for Reuters found that likes, comments and shares of what it categorized as “unreliable” sources climbed to 6.9 per cent in Canada in the 90 days after the ban, compared to 2.2 per cent in the 90 days before.

“This is especially troubling,” said Gordon Crovitz, co-chief executive of New York-based NewsGuard, a fact-checking company which scores websites for accuracy.

Crovitz noted the change has come at a time when “we see a sharp uptick in the number of AI-generated news sites publishing false claims and growing numbers of faked audio, images and videos, including from hostile governments … intended to influence elections.”

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Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge in an emailed statement to Reuters called Meta’s blocking of news an “unfortunate and reckless choice” that had left “disinformation and misinformation to spread on their platform … during need-to-know situations like wildfires, emergencies, local elections and other critical times.”

Asked about the studies, Australian Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said via email: “Access to trusted, quality content is important for Australians, and it is in Meta’s own interest to support this content on its platforms.”

Jones, who will decide whether to hire an arbitrator to set Facebook’s media licensing arrangements, said the government had made clear its position to Meta that Australian news media businesses should be “fairly remunerated for news content used on digital platforms.”

Meta declined to comment on future business decisions in Australia but said it would continue engaging with the government.

Facebook remains the most popular social media platform for current affairs content, studies show, even though it has been declining as a news source for years amid an exodus of younger users to rivals and Meta’s strategy of de-prioritizing politics in user feeds.

In Canada, where four-fifths of the population is on Facebook, 51 per cent obtained news on the platform in 2023, the Media Ecosystem Observatory said.

Two-thirds of Australians are on Facebook and 32 per cent used the platform for news last year, the University of Canberra said.

Unlike Facebook, Google has not indicated any changes to its deals with news publishers in Australia and reached a deal with the Canadian government to make payments to a fund that will support media outlets.

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