One dead, three injured after shots fired at parked vehicle in Brampton, Ont.: police

EDMONTON – Alberta has announced new regulations that will once again allow corporate and union donations in local elections.

The move by the United Conservative Party government reverses a ban brought in under the NDP.

Municipal Affairs Minister Ric McIver said Friday the changes will boost transparency, accountability and trust in local elections.

“(They) are good for municipalities, good for voters, good for Albertans,” he said.

McIver has long contended that corporate and union donations are already influencing municipal elections and the new rules enforce needed boundaries.

They come under a bill that makes sweeping changes, including allowing Premier Danielle Smith’s cabinet to initiate ousting locally elected officials by ordering a recall vote and to overturn bylaws that go against provincial policy.

The bill passed debate in the legislature earlier this year and largely comes into effect at the end of this month, just over a year before the next municipal elections.

Alberta Municipalities, which represents municipalities in which more than 85 per cent of Albertans live, has criticized the changes.President Tyler Gandam has said opening the door to big donors puts local governments “up for sale to the highest bidder.”

The legislation allows local political parties and slates on the ballot beginning in 2025, but only in the province’s two largest cities, Edmonton and Calgary.

Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek called the new rules “the kiss of death to local representation and local democracy.”

“Getting a candidate who’s doing this for the right reasons is no longer the priority,” she said. “Running candidates who have more money — that seems to be the priority of this province.”

Edmonton Mayor Amarjeet Sohi also raised concerns.

“We know that political parties in local elections are deeply unpopular, but the province is tilting the playing field against anyone who doesn’t want to participate in their system.”

Local parties would be limited to spending $1 per person in a municipality’s population, based on the number of wards in which they have endorsed candidates, during an election year. Third-party advertisers would be able to spend at half that rate.

Likewise, candidates would be limited to spending $100,000 on a municipal campaign where the population is 100,000 people.

“Because you’re able to fundraise for the party as well as the candidate, I think it just gives it an unfair advantage for those who align or have joined a political party versus an independent,” said Gandam.

McIver said the aim is to mirror existing provincial election laws.

“There’s a certain element of what’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” he said.

Individuals, corporations and unions are capped at contributing $5,000 to all local parties per jurisdiction per year.

Kyle Kasawski, NDP municipal affairs critic, said in a statement Friday the bill is another attempt by the United Conservatives to keep their thumb on the scale of municipal matters.

“With Bill 20, the UCP are trying to bully local elected officials and ensure that they install people friendlier to their agenda,” said Kasawski.

Another contentious change is a provincial ban on electronic tabulators.

On Friday, McIver dismissed concerns municipalities have aired about having to shoulder the added costs.

He said it’s worth it to increase confidence in election results, pointing to a survey that suggests 36 per cent of Albertans support banning tabulators.

“Municipalities are responsible to pay for the cost of municipal elections. That’s always been the case, and that has not changed,” he said.

Sohi reiterated in a statement that tabulators are safer, more secure and more reliable, and switching to hand-counted ballots would cost Edmonton taxpayers over $2.5 million in 2025.

Calgary has estimated it would cost $1.3 million to implement the new rules in the next election, including hand counting ballots.

“It’s probably our job to dispel the myths around tabulators, more so than try to appease people who have a conspiracy theory,” said Gondek.

Paul McLauchlin, Rural Municipalities of Alberta president and Ponoka County Reeve, said the UCP isn’t listening to the concerns of rural leaders either, and it’s letting a small number of party members drive policy.

He said that includes a tabulator ban that will push election results by three to five days in some areas.

“We didn’t ask for this,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 18, 2024.

Voters in New Brunswick are scheduled to go to the polls on Oct. 21. Here’s a look at some of the promises announced by the three major parties:

Progressive Conservatives:

— Cut the harmonized sales tax by two points, from 15 per cent to 13 per cent.

— Expand the scope of practice for nurse practitioners, registered nurses, registered psychiatric nurses, paramedics and pharmacists by working with medical professionals and governing bodies to “evaluate all scopes of practice.”

— Reject all new applications for supervised drug-consumption sites anywhere in the province.

— Make financial literacy part of the school curriculum, with lessons on subjects such as budgeting, bank accounts, interest rates, inflation, mortgages, leases, loans and RRSPs.

— Renew legal challenge against the federal carbon pricing scheme.

— Introduce the Compassionate Intervention Act, which would force people into drug treatment if authorities deem they “pose a threat to themselves or others.”

— Allow non-profits, including synagogues, mosques and churches, to apply to the Community Investment Fund for such things as security cameras and stronger locks on building doors.

— Launch working group on improving working conditions for nurses; pay 50 per cent of registered nurses’ long-term disability premiums for two years.

Liberals:

— Open 30 community health clinics across the province by 2028.

— Give $10,000 retention bonuses in Year 1 and $5,000 in Year 2 to all nurse practitioners, registered nurses, and licensed practical nurses employed by Vitalité and Horizon health networks.

— Recruit more health professionals by changing the compensation model for doctors, increasing the number of residency spaces for medical students and streamlining the process for recognizing the credentials of foreign health professionals.

— Overhaul mental health services by adding community outreach workers to deliver front-line support.

— Offer $250 a month to unpaid and informal caregivers who are looking after aging family members.

— Increase access to fertility treatment by fully funding one round of IVF.

— Implement a three per cent cap on rent increases by 2025, to be reviewed annually based on inflation and vacancy rates.

— Construct 30,000 housing units by 2030, and eliminate the 10 per cent provincial sales tax on new multi-unit housing builds.

— Eliminate the provincial sales tax on electricity bills for residential customers.

— Recruit and retain teachers, educational assistants, support staff and bus drivers by improving school working conditions.

— Install high-speed internet access and improve cellphone service for 10,000 rural households, including by building or upgrading telecom towers.

— Implement changes recommended in a report released last year by the province’s child and youth advocate, who said children in Grade 6, who are around the age of 12, and older, should be allowed to choose their preferred names and pronouns at school without parental consent.

Greens:

— Invest $380 million annually to fix the primary health-care system.

— Implement a guaranteed livable income to end deep poverty by the end of a four-year mandate, in partnership with the federal government.

— Restore and improve rural services, including by launching a year-round ferry service to connect Campobello Island to the mainland, and building a “safe modern bridge” to link the islands of Lamèque and Miscou with the mainland at Shippagan.

— Give households with after-tax incomes of less than $70,000 an average of $25 per month to offset electricity rates.

— Impose a 2.5 per cent cap on rent increases.

— Make forestry more sustainable by halting clearcuts, ending herbicide spraying and working with First Nations to make shared decisions.

— Guarantee cellphone and internet coverage across New Brunswick.

— Establish a climate fund to help municipalities pay for adaptation measures; create a new agency to help communities protect their coastlines; launch a youth corps to train people aged 17-30 in climate action.

— Reduce the small business tax rate from 2.5 per cent to one per cent.

— Launch a school food program offering students breakfast and lunch with no out-of-pocket cost.

— Reverse the Tories’ policy on gender identity in schools by no longer requiring teachers to obtain parental consent before they can use the preferred first names and pronouns of transgender students under 16.

— Launch a public inquiry into the high rates of neurodegenerative disease among New Brunswickers.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 18, 2024.

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. – A Newfoundland biologist with a specialty in mystery blobs that wash up on the island’s shores is hoping to get his hands on a specimen from the latest gooey arrivals.

Steven Carr, a biology professor at Memorial University in St. John’s, N.L., is fascinated by the strange, white globs appearing recently on the shores around Placentia Bay, along Newfoundland’s southern coast.

He said they may be mounds of fat or oil that somehow wound up in the water and were preserved by the North Atlantic’s icy brine — a process he called “adventitious pickling.”

“I don’t think it’s any kind of a vertebrate animal. I don’t think it’s any kind of plant material. The obvious candidates for an invertebrate, they’re simply not there,” he mused in an interview Friday.

“The longer I stare at it, the more it looks like my mother-in-law’s really excellent Polish pierogi.”

It’s not clear when the gummy masses first arrived on Newfoundland beaches. Philip Grace first shared a picture of the globules last month in a Facebook group of local beachcombers, asking if anyone knew what they were.

Some were as small as toonies, others as a big as dinner plates, he wrote.

People had many suggestions, some more helpful than others: slime moulds, whale boogers, invertebrates known as sea pork, or toutons, referring to a fried bread dough popular in Newfoundland breakfasts.

One commenter said they’d seen the blobs floating in the water all over the bay.

Officials with the federal Environment Department have been out to investigate and collect samples of the “mystery substance” three times since Sept. 7, said a spokesperson. Neither the substance nor its source has been identified yet, but preliminary tests suggest it may be “plant-based,” the department said in an email.

“Additional analysis is required before a final determination can be made on the substance and its potential impacts,” the email said.

This is not the first time the North Atlantic has pushed a bizarre substance onto Newfoundland shores. In 2001, a 5.6-metre-long gelatinous, stinking mass was found languishing in the August sunlight on the shores of Fortune Bay. Local residents nicknamed it the “blobster.”

Carr was able to use a DNA process to determine it was actually the remnants of a badly decomposed sperm whale.

“I don’t think this is a whale. The pieces are not at all similar to what we found,” he said Friday. “I’m imagining a crate of something, some sort of food stuff, that fell overboard.”

Sea-hardened palm oil has long been washing up on beaches in the United Kingdom, prompting warnings from officials that the white globs are harmful, even fatal, for dogs.

A government website in the northern England district of Wyre notes there have been several “cargo incidents” in recent decades off the coast, “and it is estimated that tonnes of palm oil remains in the wreckages.” Ships bringing palm oil to the United Kingdom are also allowed to dump a limited amount of the substance into the sea while cleaning their tanks, the site said.

“Any kind of carbohydrate, any kind of fat, any kind of oil could show up like this,” Carr agreed.

He has so far only seen photos of the Placentia Bay blobs, but he has written to federal officials to ask for a sample. Carr hopes his past success in sea blob sleuthing will secure him a specimen.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 18, 2024.

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