Doug Ford apologizes for comments on First Nations
Doug Ford apologizes for comments on First Nations
Ontario Premiere Doug Ford apologized for comments some First Nation leaders deemed racist ahead of meeting about mining development.
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CTV News
43 minutes ago
- CTV News
Date determined for first public information session of NB Power review
The first public information session for the review of NB Power has been scheduled. The session will be held on Wednesday via Zoom and can accommodate up to 5,000 participants, on a first-come, first-served basis. First announced in April, the review will be led by energy infrastructure and investment executive Michael Bernstein, lawyer and former privacy commissioner Anne E. Bertrand and utility expert Duncan Hawthorne. The trio will be responsible for gathering and analyzing data, speaking with members of the public, and developing recommendations for the utility moving forward based on their findings. 'This comprehensive review is a great opportunity to truly learn a great deal more about NB Power and, specifically, how well it is positioning itself for the future,' said Bertrand in a news release from the New Brunswick government. The province says the session will be recorded and made available on the review website. 'While participants will not have access to audio comments or video during the sessions, people are welcome to ask questions via the chat feature. Simultaneous translation will be provided,' reads the release. Details about future sessions will be shared in the weeks ahead, according to the government. The call for the review comes as utility bills continue to rise steeply across New Brunswick. The team leads say any recommendations made following the review will be heavily influenced by the voices and opinions of NB Power customers. New Brunswickers can share questions or concerns related to the review by emailing NBPReview-ExamenENB@ Final recommendations and any decisions related to the review aren't expected until March 2026. With files from CTV Atlantic's Avery MacRae. For more New Brunswick news, visit our dedicated provincial page.
National Post
an hour ago
- National Post
Raymond J. de Souza: Reconciling with history on National Indigenous Peoples Day
Article content Thirty years ago, the Sacred Assembly, a national meeting on Indigenous affairs organized by Elijah Harper, called for a 'National First Peoples Day,' the first of which was observed the following year on June 21, 1996. It coincides with the summer solstice, highlighting the importance of the sun in various Indigenous religious beliefs. It has been observed ever since, now using ' Indigenous Peoples ' rather than 'First Peoples.' Article content Four hundred years ago, in June 1625, French Jesuit missionaries — Jean de Brébeuf amongst them — arrived in Quebec, whence they would launch their religious and cultural work in Huronia, northwest of what is now Toronto, amongst the Wendat (Huron) people. Article content Article content Exactly a century ago, on June 21, 1925, Brébeuf and his martyred Jesuit companions were beatified in Rome, with a contemporary celebration at what is now the Martyrs' Shrine in Midland, Ont. They were canonized five years later, in 1930. Article content Ten years ago this month, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its executive summary and 94 'calls to action.' Justin Trudeau, then the leader of the third party, announced that he would accept the TRC report and all its claims without exception. By December 2015, when the entire six-volume report was released, he was prime minister. Article content The TRC was massively influential. Eighteen months after its full release, the 2017 celebrations of the sesquicentennial of Confederation were relatively muted. The TRC recasting of four centuries of history through the singular prism of the residential schools made the entire Canadian project out to be an unrelenting campaign of genocidal brutality, a massive criminal enterprise. What then to celebrate at Canada 150? Article content In 2021, the apparent discovery of 'mass graves' in Kamloops set off a global firestorm, the flames of which were fanned by the prime minister himself. Statues of his first predecessor, Sir John A. Macdonald, were splattered, shattered, scrapped and shuttered. Article content A new statutory holiday was rushed through in a matter of weeks, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, observed for the first time on Sept. 30, 2021. Article content That was the TRC's impact. In the 1990s, Indigenous leaders had called for a day to celebrate Canada's aboriginal heritage. It is a day of commemoration, but not a statutory holiday. The TRC statutory holiday, in contrast, says, in effect, that the residential schools are the most important thing in Indigenous history. Article content Just four years ago, the future of Canada's history seemed to be definitively different from its past. And then much changed. Article content In 2022, the exaggerated false claims about Kamloops were exposed — not least by journalist Terry Glavin in these pages — but not as a whitewash of Canadian history, and certainly not as exculpatory of the residential school policy. Quite the contrary in fact. Article content That summer Pope Francis visited Canada on a 'penitential pilgrimage' and offered apologies, but he also said things that had not been said for a long time, praising the good work that the European missionaries did, not least in preserving Indigenous languages and defending them against the depredations of colonial authorities. Article content The upshot is that now, four hundred years after the Jesuits' arrival in New France, three hundred years after their beatification, 30 years after the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 10 years after the TRC, a more truthful — and thus more reconciling — history is now being told. Article content A significant step came last year with the publication of Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie, who writes meticulous history in bracing style. (He recently published a biography of Pierre Poilievre.) Article content Attempting the 'first secular' biography of Brébeuf, Bourrie is not writing hagiography. It's not obvious that a 'secular' telling can capture the lives of saints, who are, almost by definition, outside the usual historical categories. His assessment of Brébeuf would offend many pious ears, even as he insists that we ought not 'judge the people of these worlds through a 21st-century lens.' Article content It is a worthy project, history seeking truth, rather than today's politics shaping history. The truth can be difficult to read. Bourrie shows how the Huron and Iroquois were war-making peoples, and that the gruesome martyrdom of Brébeuf by the latter followed their usual practise of torture. The 17th-century was like that; Brébeuf left Europe in the midst of the bloodletting of the Thirty Years War. The Europeans were war-making peoples with their own tastes in torture. Article content Would Biblioasis, the impressive new publisher in Windsor, Ont., have published Crosses in the Sky just five years ago? Perhaps, as they seem a doughty band. Would it have been received to critical acclaim then? Unlikely. Article content Earlier this year, the Jesuits from Martyrs' Shrine took the Jesuit relics across Canada on a tour to commemorate their anniversaries. The relics were received with honour by Indigenous leaders at the Seven Chiefs Sportsplex near Calgary. A more complex, more accurate, history is now being told, 10 years after the TRC buried its own research under a political agenda. Article content Article content
Globe and Mail
an hour ago
- Globe and Mail
Mark Carney is walking a high-stakes foreign-policy tightrope between Canada's values and interests
Mark Carney leads the first Canadian government in decades to have been elected almost entirely on the basis of a foreign-policy agenda. And the last weeks have been dominated by his urgent efforts to turn that agenda into reality. But which foreign policy? On one hand, Mr. Carney has a mandate to pursue a policy of Canadian values and ideals. He owes his party's re-election to the powerful mood of defensive nationalism that swept Canada after Donald Trump began his attacks on Canada's economy and sovereignty. Voters overwhelmingly wanted the new PM to realign Canada away from the United States and into a new set of alliances with countries that share our democratic and egalitarian principles. The economist who entered politics with a book titled Values seemed ideally positioned to do this. In fact, his campaign platform mentioned Canadian values more than 20 times, and national interests only once. On the other hand, Mr. Carney was expected to return Canada to the cold hard realism of protecting our core national interests. Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau were both foreign-policy idealists (albeit with different ideals) whose approach to the world often involved the largely symbolic projection of Canadian values. With Mr. Trump's re-election, things got real. His policies threatened our trade, defence and governance interests, a large part of which are inextricably tied to the United States. Experts observed that in order to prevent economic catastrophe, Mr. Carney would have to hold his nose and make a deal with Mr. Trump – 'a plan that identifies where our national interests converge and where we can deepen the relationship,' as Edward Greenspon, Janice Gross Stein and Drew Fagan wrote in The Globe, even if that meant trading away some of our ideals. Opinion: Carney takes the elbows down – and it may pay off Some success for Carney, not a win for the G7 Those two approaches, on their face, are mutually incompatible. Yet what we've seen, most visibly during the G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alta., is a Prime Minister pretty actively pursuing both of them at once. Mr. Carney is walking along a razor-thin ridge, balanced precariously between one chasm that could destroy our standard of living and another that threatens our fundamental principles. He is very much pursuing a policy to realign Canada with countries closer to its values. This is most visible in military affairs, where he has made major spending commitments to join the European-led effort to replace lost U.S. support for Ukraine and to forge a new collective-defence alliance in the event of a U.S. departure from, or the collapse of, NATO. On the trade file, his fast-paced resumption of economic-integration talks with Britain is meant to supplement the successful Canada-European Union agreement. In the diplomatic space, Canada's decision to break with its neutral Mideast policy and join France and Britain in censuring Israel's denial of Gaza aid and their plan to recognize Palestinian statehood was clearly an effort to shift our foreign policy toward countries more aligned to our values. But Mr. Carney is also pursuing a deal with Mr. Trump that would protect our interests, at almost any cost. This has meant flattering rather than confronting the far-right President, and avoiding the sort of mildly critical remarks that scuppered Mr. Trudeau's previously good relationship with Mr. Trump at the 2018 G7 summit in Quebec. More substantially, roughly half of Mr. Carney's immigration and border bill consists of policies designed to take a load off federal bureaucracies by shifting migrants into more manageable categories, while the other half is comprised of border-security theatre transparently intended to meet Mr. Trump's absurd demands. As G7 wraps, Carney vague on aims of 30-day time frame for U.S. talks Likewise, Mr. Carney is discussing the notion of Canadian participation in Mr. Trump's 'golden dome' missile-defence megaproject just as the renegotiation of our crucial free-trade agreement is beginning. There has been little public effort to shift defence procurement away from the U.S., at least not before a trade deal is complete. The potential political and thus economic cost of jeopardizing our trade relationship would be unbearable. At some point, these twin foreign policies are going to collide. But luckily for Mr. Carney, a number of his policy initiatives involve what the military would call 'dual-use' technology. His big arms-spending commitments satisfy Mr. Trump's obsession with arbitrary NATO targets, but a good chunk serve the more urgent purpose of buying weapons for Ukraine to compensate for Mr. Trump's abandonment. Mr. Carney can truthfully claim to be cracking down on illegal immigrants, and while Mr. Trump might imagine this is similar to his mass-deportation agenda, Ottawa is actually taking the more sensible and Canadian approach of turning them into legal immigrants. So far, this Janus-faced statecraft appears to be succeeding. The risk is that this juggling of interests and values could result in damage to both, probably at the hands of Mr. Trump. But it's also quite likely the only way to emerge from this dark era with both somewhat intact.
