‘I still feel remorseful’: UWaterloo stabber apologizes at his sentencing hearing

OTTAWA – The federal government is giving Canada Post the ability to store and transport prohibited firearms in new regulations that bring the retail gun buyback program one step closer to beginning.

An order-in-council dated Oct. 16 allows for prohibited assault-style firearms to be removed from safes at firearms retailers, transported and ultimately destroyed.

More than 1,500 models of firearms were banned in May 2020 after a mass shooting in Nova Scotia left 23 people dead, including the gunman.

Since then, retailers that have the weapons have been required to securely keep them in their inventory.

“Once the program launches, the updated shipping regulations will make the affected firearms and devices mailable matter and will temporarily permit businesses taking part in the program to ship firearms or devices via post,” said Gabriel Brunet, spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, in a statement on Friday.

LeBlanc previously said that the long-promised gun buyback would begin this fall.

First, the government will buy banned firearms from retail stores and have them destroyed. An individual buyback program for people who own prohibited weapons begins next year.

In a statement, Canada Post said it is prepared to take part in the first phase of the buyback program, because retailers are already familiar with the strict rules required to safely mail firearms.

The Crown corporation maintains it will not take part in the second phase of the program, involving individual firearm owners, because of concerns with employee safety.

Gun control advocacy group PolySeSouvient, which represents survivors and families of the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre, said it’s good news to see progress made on the buyback but it has doubts about the program’s overall effectiveness.

“Unless the list of prohibited assault weapons is completed, current owners of weapons prohibited in 2020 can simply take the money from the buyback to purchase new ones,” massacre survivor Nathalie Provost said in a statement.

The group is calling on LeBlanc to expand the ban to more than 450 firearms it says should have been included in the May 2020 ban, and similar weapons that have come on the market since then.

“These new models that entered the market remain legal, available and mostly non-restricted from what we can see,” Provost said.

The Criminal Code amnesty for owning prohibited assault-style firearms has been extended twice so far, and is now set to expire on Oct. 30, 2025. The regulations allowing these firearms to be mailed expires on the same date.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 25, 2024

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version stated that the gun buyback program applied to restricted firearms.

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The most far-reaching of Ohio’s laws restricting abortion was struck down on Thursday by a county judge who said last year’s voter-approved amendment enshrining reproductive rights renders the so-called heartbeat law unconstitutional.

Enforcement of the 2019 law banning most abortions once cardiac activity is detected — as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many women know they’re pregnant — had been paused pending the challenge before Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Christian Jenkins.

Jenkins said that when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and returned power over the abortion issue to the states, “Ohio’s Attorney General evidently didn’t get the memo.”

The judge said Republican Attorney General Dave Yost’s request to leave all but one provision of the law untouched even after a majority of Ohio’s voters passed an amendment protecting the right to pre-viability abortion “dispels the myth” that the high court’s decision simply gives states power over the issue.

“Despite the adoption of a broad and strongly worded constitutional amendment, in this case and others, the State of Ohio seeks not to uphold the constituional protection of abortion rights, but to diminish and limit it,” he wrote. Jenkins said his ruling upholds voters’ wishes.

Yost’s office said it was reviewing the order and would decide within 30 days whether to appeal.

“This is a very long, complicated decision covering many issues, many of which are issues of first impression,” the office said in a statement, meaning they have not been decided by a court before.

Jenkins’ decision comes in a lawsuit that the ACLU of Ohio, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the law firm WilmerHale brought on behalf of a group of abortion providers in the state, the second round of litigation filed to challenge the law.

“This is a momentous ruling, showing the power of Ohio’s new Reproductive Freedom Amendment in practice,” Jessie Hill, cooperating attorney for the ACLU of Ohio, said in a statement. “The six-week ban is blatantly unconstitutional and has no place in our law.”

An initial lawsuit was brought in federal court in 2019, where the law was first blocked under the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. It was briefly allowed to go into effect in 2022 after Roe was overturned. Opponents of the law then turned to the state court system, where the ban was again put on hold. They argued the law violated protections in Ohio’s constitution that guarantee individual liberty and equal protection, and that it was unconstitutionally vague.

After his predecessor twice vetoed the measure citing Roe, Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed the 2019 law once appointments by then-President Donald Trump had solidified the Supreme Court’s conservative majority and raised hopes among abortion opponents.

The Ohio litigation has unfolded alongside a national upheaval over abortion rights that followed the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe, including constitutional amendment pushes in Ohio and a host of other states. Issue 1, the amendment Ohio voters passed last year, gives every person in Ohio “the right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions.”

Yost acknowledged in court filings this spring that the amendment rendered the Ohio ban unconstitutional, but sought to maintain other elements of the 2019 law, including certain notification and reporting provisions.

Jenkins said retaining those elements would have meant subjecting doctors who perform abortions to felony criminal charges, fines, license suspensions or revocations, and civil claims of wrongful death — and requiring patients to make two in-person visits to their provider, wait 24 hours for the procedure and have their abortion recorded and reported.

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The District of North Vancouver is getting ready for another bout of rain after an atmospheric river weather system drenched B.C.’s south coast last weekend, triggering a mudslide and localized flooding that killed at least three people.

The North Shore mountains could see another 75 millimetres of rain this weekend, and Lisa Muri, a councillor with the district, said staff were preparing by cleaning up culverts and placing sandbags throughout the community.

Muri said last weekend’s storm was unprecedented, bringing nearly 350 millimetres of rain to North Vancouver over three days.

The downpours caused creeks to swell and pick up wood debris and gravel that blocked culverts and drainage channels, she said, sending torrents of brown water down streets in the waterfront neighbourhood of Deep Cove.

District Mayor Mike Little said on Thursday that his daughter heard about the flooding in Deep Cove last Saturday and they headed to the area.

“We drove down, and within 10 minutes, the entire contents of Gallant Creek was overflowing over the road,” he said, adding they immediately called the fire department to come and block off nearby roadways.

“It was very, very shocking to see how much water was coming down the road.”

Several Deep Cove businesses have taken to social media to share their experiences with the flooding, including Caf/EH, a restaurant that shared a statement saying it is closed until further notice after sustaining extensive damage.

Little said Gallant Creek has seen other “significant rainfalls” in the last decade, and the district has been working to upgrade the catch basin system.

But last weekend’s rainfall was so intense, it overwhelmed the system, he said.

Ken Dosanjh, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, said the rain in the forecast this weekend will be “nothing” compared with the last storm, and it will come in a series of “pulses” rather than forming an atmospheric river.

He said North Vancouver could see up to 75 millimetres of rain in the coming days, but it will fall over multiple days at a lower intensity than it did last weekend.

“With the atmospheric river, we saw precipitation rates on the order of 10, even upwards of 20 millimetres an hour, which is extremely high,” he said Thursday.

“In this case, we’re noticing precipitation rates kind of fall around four to eight millimetres per hour, maybe reaching 10 (in) extreme cases.”

Little said District of North Vancouver crews had been working throughout the week to ensure drainage basins are clear for this weekend’s expected rain.

“We’ve been out scooping up the rock and debris that came down the creeks and rivers out onto the streets all across the district,” he said Thursday.

Little said he’s confident the district’s systems will be able to handle the rain in the forecast for this weekend, though he’s concerned that certain areas are still “vulnerable to a moderate amount of rainfall” after the recent drenching.

He said the Woodlands area of North Vancouver has seen rocks falling into creeks since last weekend, and the channels need to be cleared out.

Little, whose basement was also flooded, said some homes in the district are “seriously damaged,” and it will take residents time to recover.

Muri, too, said the district has been working to mitigate the risks of heavy rains and flooding, but the sheer volume of rain last weekend was difficult to manage.

“It’s not like we’re going to be able to completely stop flooding in the future, because Mother Nature and climate change are very, very fierce,” she said.

“We can’t engineer ourselves out of climate change. We just have to prepare, be proactive and mitigate where we can.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 24, 2024.