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Natural gas, electricity costs to spike in Canada this winter

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Most Canadians who pay for natural gas or electricity can expect their bills to rise by between 50 and 100 per cent on average this winter, according to one energy analyst.

Some consumers could see their bills rise by as much as 300 per cent while others could see minimal increases, but the overall trend is clear, says EnergyRates.ca founder Joel MacDonald.

“In general, Canadians join the global community in seeing exceptionally high electricity and natural gas bills,” MacDonald told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview on Friday. “There are a few provinces where some of those increases are muted by the structure of the marketplace, but in general the answer is very high energy bills.”

Most of what will drive up the cost of home energy this winter is the rising price of natural gas, which generates 8.5 per cent of Canada’s electricity.

According to Statistics Canada, most Canadians – 61 per cent – use traditionally gas-powered systems, such as furnaces and boilers, to heat their homes. A smaller proportion – 29 per cent – use electric baseboard and radiant heating systems. The rest use heat pumps, stoves and other heating systems.

Right now, MacDonald said, natural gas prices are being driven upward by a combination of geopolitical strife in Europe, the global transition to renewable energy, seasonal demand, the federal carbon tax and the cyclical fluctuation of gas prices over roughly 20-year periods as supply and demand try to meet and overcorrect.

Some of these factors are predictable. Some, like the war in Ukraine, are not. The war reduced the global supply of natural gas, generally driving prices up. It has also reduced Europe’s access to the resource. As a result, the U.S. has increased its natural gas exports to Europe, and Canada has increased its exports to the U.S., further reducing Canada’s supply. Natural gas is currently five times more expensive in Europe than in Canada, MacDonald said, but as our supply drops, that will change.

“We’re sending more and we’re going to start to see the Canadian marketplace and the price of natural gas in Canada trend closer to the global price than it has done historically,” he said.

Further driving Europe’s demand for natural gas is a gap in its energy supply generated by the continent’s transition to renewable energy. It’s in a phase, MacDonald said, where neither its slowing fossil-fuel sector nor its burgeoning renewable sector can meet its energy needs.

So international demand for natural gas is rising. As the days become shorter and colder heading into the winter months, domestic demand is rising, too. Heftier energy bills are something Canadians expect each winter, but some years are costlier than others. This winter is shaping up to be a costly one, explains Michelle Leslie, senior manager of infrastructure and capital projects at Deloitte Canada.

“Forecasts indicate it’s going to be cold and snowy, especially for the central parts of the country and in the maritime provinces,” Leslie told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview on Friday. “If the forecast pans out…that will drive demand on heating systems. When you look at supply and demand, as the demand goes up, depending on what your supplies look like, you could be looking at increased prices.”

Then there’s the federal carbon tax, which applies to both natural gas and electricity generated using combustible fuel. Putting a price on carbon pollution is widely recognized as the most efficient method to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and drive innovation, but it can translate to heftier home heating and electrical bills.

Finally, MacDonald explained, natural gas prices tend to rise and fall over years-long cycles as the market overcorrects gaps between supply and demand. For example, the cost of natural gas in Alberta this July was $5.44 per gigajoule (GJ). In mid-2008, it peaked at $9.84 before falling again. In late 2005 and early 2001 it temporarily surpassed $11.

“Natural gas from 2000 to 2010 regularly traded around $6 per GJ,” MacDonald said. “Then we had a period of extreme lows from 2015 to 2020, and we’ve been seeing over the last year a return to the $6-per-gigajoule mark.”

All of these factors – domestic, international, predictable and unpredictable – spell increasing energy costs.

How much and how quickly residents’ home energy bills reflect these increases will depend on which province or territory they live in. This is because marketplace mechanisms within some provinces and territories act to mitigate or delay increases. Provincial energy retail marketplaces are either regulated or unregulated. Unregulated marketplaces tend to be more volatile, while price changes in regulated retail marketplaces tend to be more controlled.

“Everyone’s prices will be going up with time,” MacDonald said. “I think one of the biggest regional differences right now is the speed at which they are going up, and the regulated marketplaces are a little slower than the unregulated.”

Ontario’s marketplace is technically deregulated, but most consumers purchase from entities whose rates are regulated by the province, like Enbridge Gas and EPCOR Natural Gas Limited Partnership. The Ontario Energy Board announced in June it would allow Enbridge to increase natural gas prices by 20 per cent, but MacDonald said that increase actually reflects debt Enbridge was asked to absorb when the market price of natural gas rose during the pandemic, to avoid passing the increase to consumers at a time when many people were unable to work.

“Ontario asked Enbridge to take on $527 million in debt to cover the increases, so up until recently, the bills weren’t increasing,” he explained. “But now they have to start to recapture (that) debt.”

Regional nuances aside, MacDonald and Leslie both agree that Canadians aren’t likely to see home energy prices fall again soon.

“As of right now, there’s not a lot of reason to think prices will be going down in the next two to three years,” MacDonald said.

Leslie elaborated, adding that all signs point to domestic and global demand for natural gas continuing to rise for the foreseeable future, driving up prices if supply can’t keep up.

“With the forecast that’s in the cards for Canada and North America this winter, with everything that’s going on with Russia and Ukraine and Europe’s energy woes, I don’t expect the demand for natural gas to decrease,” she said. “In fact I expect it to increase.”

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As sports betting addiction takes hold in Brazil, the government moves to crack down

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SAO PAULO (AP) — “King” doesn’t disclose his real name. Even clients of his Sao Paulo newsstand have to call him by his moniker. The Brazilian online sports gambling addict lowered his profile after a loan shark threatened to put bullets in his head if he didn’t pay up.

Broke and embarrassed, King sought treatment and support earlier this year.

“I was once addicted to slot machines, but then sports betting was so easy that I changed. I got carried away all the time,” he told The Associated Press.

King’s story is that of many vulnerable Brazilians in recent years. The country has become the third-biggest market in the world for sports betting, following the U.S. and the U.K., a report by data analysis company Comscore said last year. But unlike those countries, rampant advertising and sponsorship have been coupled with an unregulated market. The government is now — belatedly, some say — striving to get a handle on the epidemic.

On a recent evening, King’s Gamblers Anonymous meeting took place in an improvised classroom inside a church, with coffee and cookies to keep everyone awake, and supportive messages scrawled onto the blackboard. One that’s become ubiquitous in Brazil and beyond: “Only for today I will avoid the first bet.”

King and other attendees, all Christian, started a prayer and the meeting began.

King said his financial problems arose from his addiction to online sports betting, chiefly on soccer.

“I miss the adrenaline rush when I don’t bet,” he said before the gathering. “I have managed to stop for a couple of months, but I know that if I do it once again, even a small bet, it will all come back.”

Driven by the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic was a key driver for Brazilians embracing sports betting. King said he transformed almost every sale during that time into a bet. His hook was the non-stop advertising on TV, radio, social media as well as sponsorship of local soccer teams’ jerseys. He asked for bank loans to pay his gambling debts and then, to cover those, went to the moneylender. His total debt now amounts to 85,000 reais ($15,000) — impossible to pay off with his monthly income of 8,000 reais.

Digging oneself out of debt in Brazil is especially daunting with its sky-high interest rates. Loans from Brazilian banks could add interest of almost 8% per month to the borrowed sum, and from loan sharks could be even more.

Four Gamblers Anonymous meetings attended by the AP in October featured discussions about difficulties paying down debts, forcing working-class members to postpone housing payments and cancel family vacations.

Some members of impoverished Brazilian families have used welfare money for betting instead of paying for groceries and housing, official data suggests. In August, beneficiaries of Brazil’s flagship program Bolsa Familia spent 3 billion reais ($530 million) on sports betting, according to a report from the central bank. That was more than 20% of the program’s total outlay in the month.

A host of gambling related problems

Sports betting was made legal in 2018 in a bill signed by former President Michel Temer. The subsequent turmoil has recently been setting off alarm bells, with addicts venting on social media and media reports of people losing huge sums.

On Oct. 1, the economy ministry prevented more than 2,000 betting companies from operating in Brazil for having failed to provide all the required documents. Soccer-loving President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said in an interview on Oct. 17 that he will shut down the entire market in Brazil if his administration’s new regulations — presented at the end of July— fail to work. And Brazil’s Senate on Oct. 25 opened an investigation into betting companies, focusing on crime and addiction.

“There’s tax evasion, money laundering of organized crime, the use of influencers to trick people into betting. These companies need to be audited,” Sen. Soraya Thronicke, who proposed the inquiry, told journalists in Brasilia.

Sérgio Peixoto, a ride-sharing app driver in Rio, is one of many lower-middle-income Brazilians who have reduced their spending due to sports betting debt. Peixoto’s debt currently amounts to 25,000 reais ($4,400). His monthly income is four times less than that.

“It stopped being a game, it wasn’t fun. I just wanted to get the money back, so I lost even more,” said Peixoto, 26. “I could have invested that money. It would surely have given me more benefits.

Pressure to bet

Pressure on people to gamble is everywhere. Current and former soccer players, including Vinicius Júnior, Ronaldo Nazário and Roberto Rivellino, are among the poster boys for local and foreign brands. All but one of the top-tier soccer clubs have betting companies among their main sponsors, with their name and logo emblazoned on their kits. There have been cases of kids and teenagers setting up accounts using their parents’ personal information and money, multiple local media outlets have reported.

Brazil’s economy ministry estimates that Brazil’s sports betting market had $21 billion in transactions last year, a 71% increase compared with the first year of the pandemic, 2020.

The ministry’s newly presented regulations include facial recognition systems for gamblers to bet, the identification of a single bank account for transactions involving sports betting, new protections against hackers and the government-authorized domain, bet.br, which will host all betting sites that are legal in Brazil. Once they are in place, come January, between 100 and 150 betting companies will continue to operate in the South American nation.

The changes in Brazil have prompted some companies to take preemptive action. A report by Yield Sec, a technical intelligence platform for online marketplaces, said several betting companies voluntarily restricted their operations in different places after the latest editions of the European Championships and Copa America in the hopes of presenting “the best possible license application face to the Brazilian authorities.”

Magnho José Santos de Sousa, the president of the Legal Gambling Institute, a betting think tank, said Brazil is currently “invaded by illegal websites that have licenses in Malta, Curação, Gibraltar and the United Kingdom.”

De Sousa expressed hope that the new regulations for advertising, responsible gambling and qualification of sports betting companies will transform the country’s deregulated arena into a more serious one that doesn’t exploit the vulnerable.

“The whole operation could turn from water into wine,” he said.

Gamblers Anonymous in high demand

Meantime, the demand for Gamblers Anonymous meetings in Sao Paulo has grown so much in recent years that the weekly gathering, in place since the 1990s, was no longer enough. Many groups have added a second day in the week to help new people recover, mostly sports bettors.

Earlier in October, a group on Sao Paulo’s northern edge admitted a man who was struggling with sports betting and card games. The 13 other people in the room stressed that he wasn’t alone.

“Welcome,” one long-time attendee said, in a greeting that has become a regular for the group. “Today, you are the most important person here.”

___

Dumphreys reported from Rio de Janeiro.



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Saskatchewan’s Jason Ackerman improves to 6-0 at mixed curling nationals

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SAINT CATHARINES, Ont. – Saskatchewan’s Jason Ackerman remained undefeated on Wednesday with a 7-4 win over Newfoundland and Labrador’s Trent Skanes at the Canadian mixed curling championship.

After going down 3-1 through four ends, Ackerman (6-0) outscored Skanes (3-3) 6-1 the rest of the way, including three points in the seventh end.

Alberta’s Kurt Alan Balderston also earned a win, defeating New Brunswick’s Charlie Sullivan 9-2 in another matchup in the final draw.

The win improved Balderston’s record to 4-2 and sits in third in Pool B.

The top four teams from each pool will play four more games against the survivors from the other pool. The remaining three teams from the pool will play three more seeding games to help set the rankings for next year’s event.

The championship final is scheduled for Saturday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 6, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.



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Oilers fall 4-2 to Golden Knights in McDavid’s return from injury

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EDMONTON – Noah Hanifin had a pair of goals as the Vegas Golden Knights won their first road game of the season, coming from behind to shock the Edmonton Oilers 4-2 on Wednesday.

Jack Eichel had a goal and two assists and Mark Stone also scored for the Golden Knights (9-3-1), who have won two in a row and six of their last seven. The Knights entered the game 0-3-1 on the road this year.

Brett Kulak and Zach Hyman replied for the Oilers (6-7-1), who have lost two straight despite getting captain Connor McDavid back from injury earlier than expected for the game.

Adin Hill made 27 saves for Vegas, while Stuart Skinner managed 31 stops for Edmonton.

Takeaways

Golden Knights: With an assist on the Knights’ second goal, William Karlsson has recorded at least a point in all five games he has played this season (two goals, four assists).

Oilers: McDavid was a surprise starter for the Oilers, coming back just nine days after suffering an ankle injury in Columbus and initially being expected to miss two to three weeks. The star forward came into the contest with 11 points (three goals, eight assists) during a six-game point streak versus the Golden Knights, but was held pointless on the night.

Key moment

With just 48.4 seconds left to play, the Golden Knights won a race to the corner and Ivan Barbashev was able to send it out to a hard-charging Hanifin, who sent a shot glove-side that beat Skinner for his second goal of the third period and third of the season.

Key stat

It was Hyman’s third goal in the last four games after the veteran forward went scoreless in his first 10 games this season following a 54-goal campaign last year. Hyman now has five goals in his last six games against Vegas.

Up next

Golden Knights: Head to Seattle to face the Kraken on Friday.

Oilers: Travel to Vancouver on a quick one-game trip to clash with the Canucks on Saturday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 6, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.



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