Concern raised over use of gopher poison in Ogden
Concern raised over use of gopher poison in Ogden
The use of gopher poison in the southeast neighbourhood of Ogden, has an area resident speaking out, concerned about the second-hand danger it poses.
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CTV News
2 hours ago
- CTV News
How to keep your home bug-free this summer
How to keep your home bug-free in the summer. Summer has officially arrived and that means it's an important time to stay protected from ticks and mosquitoes. While it's important to protect yourself from bugs while hiking or camping in the woods, they could also be lurking in your backyard. Ticks and mosquitoes are the most common critters that bring not only bites, but illnesses and viruses as well. CTV Morning Live spoke with Dr. Paul Roumeliotis to talk about ways to protect your backyard from bugs this season. Ticks Roumeliotis says personal protection is key when preventing ticks, including long sleeves and insect repellent, but knowing how they move and breed is equally important in keeping them away. Lyme disease can be transmitted by ticks, an infection that is spread to humans from bites. Ticks can also carry other diseases. 'There's a lot of things we need to do to understand where ticks live. Ticks like to live in the dark, foresty, grassy areas,' he said. Homeowners living by a forest or grassland are most at risk of being affected by ticks on their property. Roumeliotis recommends building a barrier of mulch or gravel to surround your property. 'You can prevent the ticks from entering your property because they don't fly,' he said. 'If there's a lot of shrubbery, old branches, get rid of them too because they like to hide in there.' Ticks How to keep ticks off your property from Dr. Paul Roumeliotis. (CTV Morning Live) The higher the grass, the more likely they will lurk in that area, he says. Making sure your grass is mowed properly is also important. 'If you have picnic tables, you can put gravel or sand or keep the grass as low as possible,' he said. Roumeliotis says reports of tick bites are increasing in the summer months. He says it doesn't just impact kids, but those working in shrubbery and landscaping as well. 'The amount of ticks that we see in the area has risen. Right now, we see them across eastern Ontario, Ottawa, between the St. Lawrence River and the Ottawa River.' Mosquitoes Outside of an itchy and painful bite, mosquitoes can also carry diseases such as West Nile virus, making it even more important to prevent them from growing near your home. Roumeliotis says knowing their habits and where they thrive is important in learning how to prevent them. 'When we talk about personal protection, it's great, but you need to be aware of these mosquitoes and ticks and where they breed and then we can actually diminish the amount of them in our backyard,' he said. Roumelitois says mosquitoes like to lay their eggs in pooled water. He recommends checking your property to limit areas that collected water, including pales and tires. 'Similarly, pots, wheelbarrows, recycle bins, all those things left out in the rain that create a puddle or a pool, can actually promote mosquito growth in your area,' he said. Roumeliotis says some may have noticed an increase in mosquitoes this year, linked to higher amounts of rain in the region this year.
CBC
2 hours ago
- CBC
Confessions of a gun smuggler: How I brought weapons into Canada
Social Sharing Everyone knows guns used by Canadian criminals are often smuggled from the U.S. Not everyone knows how — not like Naomi Haynes does. That's because she did the smuggling. A native Montrealer who's been living in the U.S. for decades, she helped traffic dozens of weapons into Canada, some linked directly to drug gangs. "I wasn't thinking about the havoc I was causing in my birth land," she told CBC News last week. "I've got my kids, I've got bills. The only thing I [was] thinking about is monetary gains. I wasn't thinking about the people who are going to be affected." CBC News established contact with Haynes while she was in prison — at first communicating by email, then with a glitchy prison video app and then in a lengthy interview following her release last year. Her story helps shed light on the thousands of guns a year in Canada that police trace to the U.S. She described, in detail, tricks of the smuggling trade. And how she managed to move drugs, cash and, eventually, guns, for many years, depending on the product — either into the U.S., between U.S. states or into Canada. Rule No. 1: Only one person per car. If the vehicle gets stopped at the border, you don't want two partners tripping over each other's story during secondary questioning. "There's only one story this way," said Haynes, 45. "If you have two drivers, there's conflicting stories and that's when you have problems. … 'Oh, you're coming from Virginia, but your friend says [she's] coming from Baltimore.'" "So just one driver, so they can stick with their one lie." I wasn't thinking about the people who are going to be affected. - Naomi Haynes Rule No. 2: Find a good hiding spot. She would stash items in hidden compartments under seats; in door panels; in the trunk. She'd also move drugs in a gas tank — in triple-sealed, vacuumed bags. Rule No. 3: Get drivers who won't arouse suspicion. Haynes didn't transport guns herself; she got pulled over too often. She'd ride in a separate vehicle. "I started paying white girls and guys to move stuff for me," she said. Especially white women. They never got pulled over, she said. Until one did. Haynes was arrested in 2019, charged with smuggling, and with conspiracy to make false statements; she pleaded guilty, was sentenced, and served just under five years in prison. Hers is an unusual story. She's a vegan, millennial, Jamaican Canadian political science grad in South Florida who supports Donald Trump, became a grandma and wound up in an international conspiracy. Then again, her life story was atypical from the start. Escaping Montreal "At the end of the day, you become what you know," Haynes said. She grew up around drug dealers. Her late father dealt crack, then smoked it. In a book she's writing about her life story, Haynes describes a period when he became meaner, zoned out and indifferent, his eyes bloodshot. Her book describes one sister jailed for selling ecstasy. Another sibling, her brother, led a local street gang, according to the Montreal Gazette. She grew up in the area just south of the old Montreal Forum; her grandmother worked in the hallowed hockey shrine. From childhood, Haynes earned money in unconventional ways. Her half-complete memoir, entitled The Runner: Tripped by the Feds, begins with the words: "For as long as I can remember I have had a hustle." She ran store errands for adults and got to keep the change; collected beer bottles from their parties and returned them for cash; and, later, resold contraband cigarettes. "I made my first $1,000 in the seventh grade," she writes. She was desperate to escape the scene, to flee the bad influences. Haynes harboured a childhood dream of living in the States, and in 1997, she made it happen. She enrolled in college. She got a bachelor's degree from Florida Atlantic University, according to court documents, and also studied criminal science. She started smuggling to pay for school. And she made poor choices, she says, about whom she surrounded herself with. The man who became her husband made a $5,000 down payment on a Jeep Cherokee for her; she used that vehicle and received thousands of dollars more to move hashish, hash oil and marijuana into Canada. Over the years, she shipped contraband countless times: ecstasy, cocaine, marijuana, hash and cash, occasionally driving on her own, but usually hiring someone. She'd move products from buyer to seller, often across international lines, but also domestically, say, from Florida to Chicago. It was only many years later that she started selling guns. Around 2016, Haynes was desperately low on cash — she was divorced, with a baby, not working and with an older boy playing intercity baseball. "Everybody that I always did business with always said, 'No guns, no guns, no guns,' because there's a trail," she told CBC News. But it was great cash, about $4,000 Cdn per gun. On a nine-millimetre handgun that costs a couple of hundred bucks in South Florida, it's an astronomical profit. She'd ship about 20 at a time, and there were multiple shipments. She admits to two of them, which she figures generated about $160,000. Subtracting the cost of the purchase, the driver and her partner's share, she estimates she kept about $30,000, which helped her live comfortably for a few months. And then it cost her everything. WATCH | Major Toronto gang busts connected to Hayes's network: Law enforcement closes in Police started closing in on Haynes from different angles — arresting associates, seizing phones, recording conversations and catching her in lies. It started after she purchased 20 weapons from different Florida gun stores in February 2018. On March 1, a day after her last purchase, she crossed into Canada through New York. She was stopped re-entering the U.S. two weeks later at Champlain, N.Y., carrying $4,300 in cash, and multiple cell phones. Border officers seized her phones and downloaded the contents. According to court filings, they found fraudulent or counterfeit IDs for several associates and shared that with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. On the morning of April 27, two ATF agents arrived at her home in Boca Raton, Fla. She lied to them, insisting she'd been buying and selling guns to friends with legal permits. She insisted she had a storage unit. She took them to a CubeSmart facility and professed to be shocked when she found her unit empty. "You remember Martha Stewart?" ATF agent Tim Trenschel asked her, according to court documents. "The lady on TV that does fancy crafts. Do you remember that she spent some time in prison? Do you remember why?" Haynes replied: "Because she lied." The agent said: "Exactly." Haynes added: "About insider trading." The agent said: "You're way ahead of most people I talk to." Majority of firearms coming into Canada are from the U.S., data shows 4 months ago Duration 3:22 Donald Trump is targeting Canada with punishing tariffs over concerns about border security. But as CBC's Talia Ricci reports, data from GTA police shows Canada has to worry about what's coming in from the U.S, too. Haynes insisted upon her truthfulness. "Listen, I get it, and I respect the law… I am being a thousand per cent honest." She was not, in fact, being 1,000 per cent honest. Far from it. The agent's observation about the risks of lying to a federal officer proved prescient. A couple of weeks later, guns she'd bought started turning up in police investigations in the Toronto area, identified despite attempts to deface the serial number. 'I knew I was cooked' One loaded Taurus 9mm was found hidden in the panel of a car, alongside approximately $300,000 worth of cocaine. Days later, a Ruger .380 was found in another drug bust. The suspect tossed it aside while attempting to flee police. In September of that year, a friend she'd hired was stopped while crossing into Canada from New York state, carrying 20 hidden guns. Haynes was recorded following right behind her — crossing the border 62 minutes later. A number of the seized guns traced back to her circle. By this point, police had gained an informant. They were secretly recording conversations within her circle, even one involving Haynes's daughter. On Feb. 27, 2019, her daughter's boyfriend, Mackenzie Delmas, was caught. The informant delivered guns to him and Delmas was arrested immediately. Agents searched his home — and Haynes's. That's when Haynes knew she was done for. She was visiting her parents' home in the Montreal area. Her daughter called from Florida in the middle of the night with the news, and Haynes collapsed on the family couch. "I've never experienced a panic attack before in my life, but at that point, I started shaking. I couldn't talk, I couldn't breathe," Haynes said. "I was trying to gasp for air." Her mother tried calming her down, rubbing her back. She recalled her mother asking: "What's going on?" Haynes confessed what she'd been up to. The whole story. "My mother was so disappointed." At that point, Haynes made a decision: To give herself up. "I knew I was cooked," she said. "[I thought], I'm not gonna live on the run. I've got to face it. My time has come." Court documents confirm what happened next: She called the ATF in the wee hours of Feb. 28, and promised to return to the U.S. and speak with investigators. In subsequent recorded interviews on March 13 and April 3, she confessed everything: the fake identities, the illegal gun purchases, the shipments to Canada, the sales to known Canadian gangsters, her own trips north to collect cash and, crucially, her lies to police. She was arrested, and spent four years, nine months in prison, serving time in a low-security prison in Alabama. It was predictably miserable. She recalled guards treating inmates cruelly and arbitrarily — being decent to some of the meanest inmates, and mean to decent ones, people who got mixed up, in some cases accidentally, in bad situations. The worst was during COVID-19. After testing positive, she was sent to solitary confinement. "I was in the shoe for 13 days," she said. "I felt like a dog in a kennel. … The room was filthy. It was disgusting. The sinks — the water was brown. The toilet, it was disgusting." Her main diet in prison consisted of peanut butter. She gave up meat and dairy years ago, grossed out by it. Given the choice between baloney and peanut butter, she'd take the latter. She recalls paying $7 for a cauliflower once and air-frying it with a blow-dryer. Is there a sense of guilt? But the absolute worst thing about prison? Her parents dying, and being unable to see them or attend their funeral. Her beloved mom slowly died of cancer while Haynes was in jail. By the time her father died, she was out, but she had to attend the funeral on Zoom. Haynes can't leave and re-enter the U.S. because she's fighting deportation. A Canadian citizen, she's a green-card holder in the U.S., and of her three kids, they're either living there or hoping to live there with her. She now works an office job at a landscaping company. "My mom was sick with cancer and I failed," Haynes said. "My choices and the things I was doing caused me to not be there for the person that was always there for me." What about potential gun victims: does her sense of guilt extend to them? As a vegan who avoids hurting animals, does she ever wonder whether any humans were harmed by those chunks of steel she trafficked? Initially, no, she said. As she got into the business, the only thing on her mind was money — paying the bills. Then she had four years, nine months in prison to think. And she started thinking about other people's pain, about other families and whether her guns killed any young kids in a drive-by. She now prays that those guns are confiscated.
CBC
2 hours ago
- CBC
What charging for COVID-19 vaccines means for Albertans going forward
When the province announced that most Albertans will have to pay for COVID-19 vaccines themselves going forward, the phones at Mohamed Elfishawi's two Edmonton pharmacies started ringing. "People are scared," Elfishawi said during an interview at his south Edmonton location, describing the calls he's had from clients – especially seniors. Earlier this month, the province announced it would only cover vaccines for particular high-risk groups: people living in care homes and group settings, those receiving home care, people on social programs such as AISH, and immunocompromised individuals. Everyone else will have to pay an estimated $110 if they want the vaccine. Accessing the shot will also be more limited: in the near future, pharmacists like Elfishawi will no longer be allowed to administer them, they will only be available at health clinics. Alberta's new path makes it an outlier in Canada, prompting questions about why the province has diverged from national recommendations on vaccines, what the timeline is for rolling out the new distribution system and whether or not the vaccine can be added to group health benefit plans. Will group benefits offer coverage? The United Nurses of Alberta (UNA) is already in talks with employers, seeking to get COVID immunization coverage added to group health benefits. "But even if they do, what that means is that it will fall onto the insurance companies, which will mean increased premiums both for employees and employers," said Heather Smith, UNA's president. UNA is also looking into benefits covering the cost for its staff. If it can't get sorted out in time for the fall rollout of vaccines, Smith said they plan to offer reimbursement for employees who pay to get immunized. Jason Schilling, president of the Alberta Teachers' Association, said they are exploring options through insurance, but he has also written to ministers asking them to reverse the decision. "We have policy around this that teachers should get vaccinations provided to them because they're working in congregated settings with students," Schilling said. "We know we have overcrowded classrooms." Alberta Union of Public Employees vice-president Bonnie Gostola calls the plan to charge for the shots a "slap in the face" to members working in roles like hospital porters, housekeeping, and other service roles. "Workers that barely make above minimum wage — $110 is one day pay for those members – it's excessive, especially when they are also responsible for looking after other people," she said. Gostola said AUPE has been telling workers this is an occupational health and safety issue, and that it believes the employer needs to take on the responsibility of covering the cost of vaccines. Some employers are suggesting other avenues for staff. The Canadian Air Transport Security Authority said in a statement that its workers will be able to use their employee health care spending account to pay for the shot. A complex change For people who do have health benefits, getting COVID vaccines added to group benefit coverage won't be simple. Alberta Blue Cross – a non-profit insurance provider that runs government coverage programs as well as private plans – has been getting inquiries from both employers and plan members about covering the vaccines. "We are waiting for more information on the COVID vaccines — including the cost and specific details on the way Albertans will access and be charged for the COVID vaccine — before we can make a decision regarding private plan coverage," said Blue Cross spokesperson Sharmin Nault Hislop in a statement. "The change is complex and there are a lot of factors at play." Hislop explained that it's not a simple internal decision as private plans have many different designs, some including vaccine coverage and some that don't. The organization also has an internal drug review process that needs to be done to determine if and how it can add COVID-19 vaccines to its roster of covered medications. U.S. comparison There is variability in the types of health care and medications publicly covered province-to-province. For example, shingles vaccines are free for older adults in some jurisdictions but not others. But changing access to COVID-19 shots, which were freely available across the country for so long, creates a compelling case study, said Jamie Daw, an assistant professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. "I think it's not something that anyone expected access would be taken away," Daw said. "I think that's sort of part of this broader conversation about sort of privatization in the Canadian health-care system more generally, and how we should grapple with it and what policies and regulations might be needed in cases like this." Daw said that in the United States, about 90 per cent of Americans can still get COVID vaccines for free — covered by private insurance, and Medicare and Medicaid programs. Unlike Canada where following the isn't required, the U.S. has federal regulations requiring that certain vaccines be fully covered by public and private coverage. Diverging from NACI's recommendations The province said in the 2023-2024 respiratory virus season, 135 million worth of doses went to waste. For the upcoming season, Alberta has ordered 500,000 doses – some of which will be given for free to the identified high-risk groups, and the rest available for purchase to help Alberta recoup the coast. Most Albertans will soon pay about $110 for a COVID shot 1 day ago Duration 2:43 With Alberta soon to end free COVID-19 vaccines for most residents, there's growing concern about cost, coverage and access — especially for vulnerable seniors. When provincial funding ends, most Albertans will have to pay an estimated $110 per dose. A statement from Minister of Primary and Preventive Health Services Adriana LaGrange's office this week said the decision still offers protection to vulnerable Albertans, and takes low uptake of the vaccine by the general population into account. And while Lagrange's office said the province was informed by NACI's recommendations on vaccines, it decided not to offer free vaccines to a number of high risk, priority groups that NACI identifies because of "Alberta's specific needs," such as uptake trends. Those high-risk groups not being offered free vaccines include all people over 65, pregnant people, Indigenous people, members of racialized and other equity-denied communities, and health-care workers and other care providers in community settings. The exclusion of people over 65 is particularly concerning to Dr. Lynora Saxinger, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Alberta. She said it's a major deviation from NACI's recommendations, which do take cost to provinces into consideration. "It doesn't really endorse using the vaccine very strongly from a public health perspective if they're not covering it," Saxinger said.
