
Sask. RCMP tickets group for Canada Day highway blockade
The RCMP says the local detachment responded to the protest around 3 p.m. on July 1 after receiving six 911 calls from the public about the blockade of a bridge about 20 kilometres north of Prince Albert.
Five RCMP officers were dispatched to meet the group of seven protesters, two women and five men.
When they refused to get off the roadway, police say each person received a ticket for unlawfully walking on a highway.
One woman in the group was arrested after refusing to leave the roadway, for safety reasons, the RCMP says. No charges have been laid.
The RCMP hasn't provided any details about the protest itself, and CTV News has yet been unable to find any details on social media.
If you saw the protest, or know more about what happened, let us know at SaskatoonNews@BellMedia.ca.

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Globe and Mail
40 minutes ago
- Globe and Mail
Competition Bureau issues warning on rental price fixing
Canada's federal competition watchdog has sent a warning on price collusion to landlords and property managers, provoking both condemnation and questions about how price-fixing might arise. 'The Competition Bureau is aware that some landlords and property managers may be engaging with their competitors, including through discussion groups on social media. While some discussions between competitors may be justified, others could be illegal,' warned the bulletin from the Competition Bureau of Canada issued on June 25. It noted that some agreements to fix prices are criminal offences with the potential for prison sentences. While the agency doesn't comment on the specifics of investigations, it was able to share that tips and other information it has received make it clear that potentially illegal conspiring is happening on online messaging services such as WhatsApp, Signal and Snapchat. 'These are very private groups of people, that's the modus operandi. If there are very secretive price-fixing agreements, these actors try to mask their dealings,' said Pierre-Yves Guay, deputy commissioner of the cartels directorate for the Bureau. 'I can tell you we are looking very seriously into certain markets in Canada. The warning is to make sure people understand this is high risk. Eventually, we will detect it.' Mr. Guay couldn't recall a time when the Bureau has filed criminal charges over a rental pricing scheme, though it has brought cases and prosecutions in the real estate space around everything from digital services access by The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board to price-fixing among condominium renovation companies. Growing number of renters are waiting for home prices to decline further before buying, report says Some in the industry said they found the warning baffling, saying they've never seen attempts to illegally fix rental prices. 'We don't participate in any industry pricing discussions or forums, and frankly, we have no need to,' said Nathan Levinson, founder and chief executive officer of Royal York Property Management, which manages more than 25,000 rental units in the Toronto region and beyond. He said that his company provides pricing data to clients, who set the asking rents themselves. 'What we do provide is powerful proprietary software and data tools: These tools help pull all the data from MLS listings, internal rental history, and thousands of private listings not publicly available. These tools allow landlords to make smart pricing decisions based on real-time market evidence, so they don't overprice and sit vacant, or underprice and leave money on the table.' Data tools that use artificially intelligence algorithms to compare private rental data from competitors to build pricing models for clients have become a source of anti-competitive prosecutions in the United States. Mr. Guay said Canada's regulators are closely monitoring the U.S. Department of Justice's case against RealPage Inc. and several landlord co-defendants. Smelling a bargain, investors look to bulk-buy leftover GTA condos In Canada, tenant advocates say they haven't seen much of the kind of price-fixing chat room collusion the Bureau referenced, but online forums of small landlords sharing industry tips is all too familiar. 'During COVID – during the eviction moratorium and rent freezes – we started hearing from tenants and other clinics about landlords going onto these chats about how to break the law and circumvent the law, for example illegally locking tenants out,' said Dania Majid, staff lawyer for Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO) and director of its tenant duty counsel program that provides free legal advice to tenants at Ontario's Landlord Tenant Board. 'It doesn't surprise us. We know investors have conversations among one another: Landlords counselling how to charge illegal fees – cleaning fees and security fees, and others not contemplated under the Act – this type of bad advice is a type of collusion.' Many in the industry believe price-fixing is most likely to take root or be most effective outside of the biggest cities with the most rental stock. 'I think in the Canadian context this applies much more to the landlords and property managers of high-rise buildings especially outside of large urban centres' where they hold a greater share of the rental market units in a given area. said Brandon Sage, real estate investment adviser at LandLord Property & Rental Management Inc. 'In Toronto, most rentals … hundreds of thousands of condos and multiplexes … [are] owned by almost as many landlords.' Mr. Guay concurred: 'If you have landlords or property managers that have a lot of market power … the more power you have and the more likely you'll be able to make it stick,' he said. This engaged expat couple seeks a starter home in Toronto under $950,000 – with room to grow While the general rental picture across Canada has been one of falling rental rates, there are places that perform above expectations. According to asking rents in Toronto for one-bedroom apartments fell 0.7 per cent from April to May, but were down 7 per cent year over year; two-bedroom units bumped up a bit in May (0.3 per cent) but were down by 10.7 per cent from the same period in 2024. Meanwhile, in nearby Ajax, Ont., asking rents saw robust growth in the same period with one-bedrooms rising 3.4 per cent month over month and leaping up 7.8 per cent year over year. 'From a Toronto lens, it is hard to believe that there are enough willing participants with enough units to truly have an impact on the market,' said Ben Myers, president of Bullpen Research and Consulting Inc. 'Rental developers face immense competition from the 'shadow' inventory of rental supply, hundreds of thousands of individual investors, which would be very difficult to imagine them collectively colluding on anything.' Another factor that could inhibit the ability of landlords attempting to collude on a rent-fixing scheme are the other participants in the transaction: the tenants. 'Tenants are very well educated; there's so much information and resources for them. From what I've seen if you're not competitively priced, tenants are so good at jumping to the building next door,' said Sabine Ghali, managing director of Buttonwood Property Management.


CBC
an hour ago
- CBC
Alberta romance fraudster declared a dangerous offender, locked up indefinitely
Social Sharing A serial romance fraudster with a decades-long pattern of using relationships with women as a ruse to con them out of money has been labelled a dangerous offender. Jeffrey Paul Kent, 55, was given the label intended for Canada's most violent criminals and sexual offenders last week in Edmonton. Court of King's Bench Justice Melanie Hayes-Richards handed him an indeterminate sentence, concluding it's the only way to manage the risk he poses. Kent was arrested on his most recent charges in 2018, and he's been in custody ever since. He pleaded guilty in 2022 to defrauding five women in Edmonton, admitting to using fake names and personas to lure them into relationships. He then concocted phoney investment schemes or made-up scenarios where he needed money to convince them to hand over cash. In total, he scammed the five women out of more than $175,000. "[Kent] is a predator who targeted vulnerable single women, some of whom were recently separated, and some of whom had young children," Hayes-Richards said in her decision. "Using lie upon lie, he inserted himself into his victims' lives, promising a bright and secure future. Instead, he wreaked havoc. He destroyed their finances and left some financially destitute. He shattered their confidence, self-worth and ability to trust others." Kent has other fraud and theft convictions under similar circumstances that date back more than three decades. Beginning in B.C., in 1990, he gained women's trust, then stole their money, typically spending it on gambling. Some lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kent, and two became so deeply involved that they had a child with him, learning only after they were pregnant about the extent of his deception. Dangerous offender status can be considered only if someone is convicted of a "serious personal injury offence," and fraud isn't typically in that category. But Hayes-Richards found that even in the absence of physical violence, Kent's elaborate romance frauds inflicted "severe psychological damage" on his victims, and the dangerous offender scheme applies. "At the core of the pattern is the deep deception Mr. Kent uses to get what he wants: a place to live, vehicles and cellphones for his exclusive use, access to the victims' finances," Hayes-Richards said. "It is Mr. Kent's deep deception that causes severe psychological damage to the victims, not the victims' economic loss alone." Retired lawyer Gary Botting, who co-authored a 2021 book on dangerous offender law in Canada, said it's extremely unusual to see the framework applied to a fraud case. "Usually it's reserved for … repeat offending of a more serious personal nature in terms of assault or attempted murder, or sometimes drug offences that have resulted in people dying — that sort of thing." Botting said he expects the decision will be appealed. Fake identities, investment scams The names of the five women Kent victimized most recently are under a publication ban. Each of them met Kent in 2016 or 2017 through a dating website. Using the name "Jeff Sheridan" or "Jeff Sheenan," he told the women he was a criminal defence lawyer, or a retired Crown prosecutor from B.C., or a law professor with special training in legal ethics. He added embellishments about being a successful real estate investor who owned hotels and mobile homes, which would come up later when he told them he urgently needed money to finalize a deal or get in on a good investment opportunity. Nearly everything Kent told each woman, the judge's decision notes, was a lie. He already had numerous fraud convictions on his record, and had spent time in prison — the fraud against the first woman he targeted began shortly after the end of his sentence. Kent went to significant lengths to make his stories appear real: dressing in suits, staging fake business meetings or calls about "legal cases," and bringing some of his partners to the racetrack or casino, where he appeared well-known and successful. He also made dramatic displays of love and devotion very early in the relationships. He told one woman about his plan to buy her an engagement ring within a month of meeting her, and took her to shop for homes priced at up to $6 million. Each time, Kent's behaviour changed as the relationship progressed, sometimes after the women questioned parts of his story or became more insistent that he repay money he owed them. He told two women he had brain cancer and began faking seizures in front of them. He made efforts to cut off another woman from her friends and family and deleted her social media accounts. He sometimes became demeaning and volatile, threatening one woman with legal action if she kept pushing for her money back, and saying he would kill himself if she left him. Each described a lasting impact from discovering how deep Kent's lies had gone, and each testified during the dangerous offender hearing about struggling with their mental state, feeling unable to trust people and withdrawing from their social lives. One woman, Hayes-Richards wrote in her decision, "went through a cycle of hating herself for being duped and putting so much faith in someone she barely knew. "She was eventually able to acknowledge that she was not alone, other intelligent women like her had been scammed, and anyone could be duped. She still doubts her ability to read people and believes she needs to toughen up." 'Effective pathological liar' The decision describes nine other victims of Kent's romance frauds that came before his latest convictions. One woman was left with $300,000 of debt in the wake of Kent's time with her. Kent went to prison in 2010 for fraud offences against three women and two credit card companies. Six days after he was released on day parole during that sentence, he began speaking to another woman on a dating site, eventually taking more than $10,000 from her and spending it on gambling. After she found out what was happening and reported Kent to police, his day parole was revoked in 2011, and he was convicted of an additional count of fraud, which added more time to his sentence. Forensic psychologist Dr. Bruce Monkhouse, who treated Kent in prison from 2012 to 2014, testified that he believed at the time that Kent was genuinely remorseful and motivated to engage in treatment. But Kent reverted to the same behaviour with new victims shortly after getting out of prison. Another expert, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Alberto Choy, assessed Kent in detail for the dangerous offender hearing. Choy concluded Kent has antisocial personality disorder with a high degree of psychopathy, as well as a gambling disorder, and any benefit from past treatment hasn't lasted. Choy said gambling is part of Kent's motivation for his behaviour, but he also lies for "the thrill of manipulating others to extract resources from them. Choy concluded Kent would have to achieve "monumental changes" to his personality in order to lower his risk, but that will take "decades, not years," if it's possible at all. Without intensive community supervision that goes beyond his past parole conditions, Kent poses a high risk of reoffending, Choy told the court. Hayes-Richards concluded Kent's risk is evident even in his expression of remorse during the court hearing. "Mr. Kent's carefully crafted expressions of responsibility and understanding came after he heard Dr. Choy's evidence about the significance of his regressions," she said. "I do not believe the sincerity of Mr. Kent's expressions to me. They simply corroborate the expert evidence that Mr. Kent is a pathological liar who will say whatever he believes is necessary to manipulate a situation." Calling him an "intelligent, manipulative and effective pathological liar," Hayes-Richards said there's no way to address Kent's behaviour other than an indeterminate sentence. Because he's already been in custody for years, a sentence on his five most recent fraud convictions would have put him in a position to be released based on time already served. "Mr. Kent appears to have an intentional disregard for how his criminal behaviour affects his victims," Hayes-Richards said. "He knows his behaviour inflicts psychological harm on his victims, yet that fact does not deter him from engaging in the same behaviour over and over again."


CTV News
2 hours ago
- CTV News
Northern Ont. woman charged with drug trafficking twice in one day
A 40-year-old woman was charged with drug trafficking in Dryden, Ont., twice in one day last weekend. (File) A 40-year-old woman was charged with drug trafficking in Dryden, Ont., twice in one day last weekend. In the first instance, Dryden Ontario Provincial Police arrested her at 4 a.m. June 28, after receiving reports of a suspicious vehicle at a business on Government Street. 'The investigation resulted in the arrest of one individual and the seizure of suspected illicit drugs, including cocaine and crack cocaine, as well as further evidence of drug trafficking,' the OPP said in a news release Wednesday. The resident of Wabigoon, Ont., was charged with drug trafficking and was released from custody with a court date of Aug. 25 in the Ontario Court of Justice in Dryden. 'Later that same day, just before 9 p.m., a traffic stop was conducted on Highway 17 in the Municipality of Machin,' police said. The same woman was arrested, drugs were seized and she was again charged with trafficking cocaine. This time, she was remanded into custody and is scheduled to appear in the Ontario Court of Justice in Dryden today (July 2). Anyone with information about the trafficking of illicit drugs is urged to call the OPP at 1-888-310-1122. To remain anonymous, call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS).