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Calgary Herald
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Calgary Herald
Calgary police designate three protest zones for next month's G7, expect big influx of activists
Article content Also on Wednesday, RCMP Chief Supt. and ISSG Security Director Dave Hall acknowledged some Banff residents weren't happy with initial plans for a designated protest zone in the town's Central Park. Article content He said another one has been found elsewhere in Banff and will be revealed on Thursday. Article content 'Police have learned their lessons from previous events, finding people have a right to be seen and heard and (ensuring) it's done legally,' said Hall. Article content He said protesters won't be tolerated on any roads or highways leading to the Kananaskis venue. Article content Article content Security personnel with earpieces could be seen patrolling the grounds of host venue Rimrock Hotel, a few uniformed were in its hallways and an RCMP sniffer dog has been inspecting journalists' gear prior to press conferences. Article content Article content But law enforcement officials say they expect the contentious presence of U.S. President Donald Trump at the summit, the war in Ukraine and the possibility of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's presence, and the ongoing Israeli attacks and blockade on Gaza will attract demonstrations for the Kananaskis event. Article content Article content A large chunk in the heart of Kananaskis Country will be closed to the unaccredited public from June 10-18, with roadblocks to the north of the Kananaskis Village venue at Mt. Lorette Ponds and one to the south at the Galatea Creek trail head parking lot. The mountain terrain to the east and west of the summit site will also be restricted. Article content An estimated 5,000 Canadian soldiers and up to 1,500 RCMP personnel will guard the closed access area, where even the movements of grizzly bears will be monitored. Article content The Royal Canadian Air Force has begun conducting preparatory security flights over the Kananaskis region, with low-level sorties flown by CF-18 Hornet fighters and, later in the month, CH-147F Chinook and CH-146 Griffon helicopters. Article content The G8 summit that was also held in Kananaskis in 2002 attracted a wide variety of protesters who gathered mostly in Calgary, but the event proceeded without any major violent incidents. Article content 'They were seen and heard but it was done in a way that was lawful,' said the CPS's Brar. Article content
CBC
18-04-2025
- Climate
- CBC
As Jets' playoff run starts, here's what you need to know about Winnipeg's whiteout parties
Social Sharing While temperatures are forecast to rise over the weekend, a whiteout will be blowing through True North Square on Saturday, as the Winnipeg Jets face the St. Louis Blues in Game 1 of their first-round NHL playoffs series. Here's what you need to know if you're heading downtown for the game tomorrow. When does the puck drop? Puck drop for Game 1 is at 5 p.m. CT on Saturday at the Canada Life Centre in downtown Winnipeg, with the sold-out street party near the arena starting two hours before. Tickets for the Game 2 whiteout party, scheduled to start two hours before the 6:30 p.m. contest on Monday, are also sold out. Game 1 and Game 2 tickets for the Party in the Plaza, held in True North Square, are sold out too. The Jets will travel to St. Louis for Game 3 and 4 to face the Blues at the Enterprise Center. Game 3 is on Thursday, with an 8:30 p.m. CT start, and Game 4 goes Sunday, April 27 at noon. If needed, Game 5 will see the series return to Winnipeg on Wednesday, April 30, with a start time TBD. Are any other jets coming out for the party? As the Jets hit the ice on Saturday, jets will also be hitting the skies above Winnipeg. Two Royal Canadian Air Force CF-18 Hornet fighter jets will be flying over the Canada Life Centre and the street party outside shortly after the 5 p.m. puck drop on Saturday, the Canadian Armed Forces says. The RCAF is "proud to share in national sporting events," like the Jets' first playoff home game this year, the Forces said in a news release earlier this week. Which roads and sidewalks will be closed? The City of Winnipeg is closing some roads downtown early Saturday to prepare for the first whiteout party. Some roads will remain closed through the Easter weekend until Tuesday, to allow for cleanup after Monday's whiteout party. Southbound Donald Street between Ellice and St. Mary avenues, will close at 6 a.m. on Saturday and reopen at 7 a.m. Tuesday. The city says the street won't reopen between games on Sunday. Graham Avenue will close in both directions between Hargrave and Smith streets from 6 a.m. Saturday to 7 a.m. Sunday. Graham will be open Sunday, but will close again at 9 a.m. on Monday for Game 2's whiteout party, reopening at 7 a.m. on Tuesday. Sidewalks will also close along these routes starting at noon on Saturday and will reopen early Tuesday morning, the city said. Are there any changes to public transit? Winnipeg Transit buses that run along Graham Avenue will be rerouted between Kennedy and Smith on Saturday starting at 6 a.m. Service will run as usual on Sunday, but Graham buses will be rerouted again on Monday starting at 9 a.m., returning to normal service Tuesday. If your usual stop is along that stretch of Graham, the city suggests hopping on the bus at Graham and Vaughn Street, or Graham and Fort Street. The Winnipeg Transit Plus loading zone on Donald at Graham will be moved temporarily to eastbound Portage Avenue, next to the Radisson Hotel, the city said. The Millennium Library Winnipeg Transit Plus loading zone is temporarily moving to the eastbound front driveway of the Winnipeg Police Service headquarters, and the City Place Winnipeg Transit Plus loading zone is moving to northbound Hargrave on the north side of St. Mary. The Millennium Library Parkade's entrance at Donald Street will close at 6 a.m. on Saturday, and again at 9 a.m. on Monday. Regular hours start up again on Tuesday. The downtown library will be closing early on Saturday, at 3 p.m., and again on Monday, April 21 at 4:30 p.m. It is closed on Easter Sunday. How are local businesses preparing? Dwight Benson, general manager at the nearby Elephant & Castle on St. Mary Avenue, said his restaurant and pub is doubling its staff Saturday, as it expects its usual volume of customers to double. "We're very prepared this year, so we're excited," Benson told Radio-Canada in an interview Friday. Game days are always busy at the bar, but during whiteout season, "it's an all-day party," he said. The pub is throwing its own party to celebrate the Jets' playoff run, starting at 11:30 a.m. Saturday. "The longer they go, the better for us. So hopefully we get through this first round with St. Louis — which I have no doubt on — but the longer we go, the better," said Benson.
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Canada Joining Iron Dome Missile Defense Plan Would Be Welcome: NORAD Boss
U.S. Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, the top American military officer overseeing operations in and around North America, has said he would welcome Canadian participation in expanding continental missile defense efforts, including in space. One of President Donald Trump's first official acts of his second term was to order the U.S. military to move forward with plans for a massively enlarged missile defense architecture, dubbed Iron Dome, which notably includes a call for new space-based anti-missile interceptors. Guillot also lauded Canada's efforts to expand its ability to help safeguard North American airspace through new radars and missiles for its existing CF-18 Hornet fighters and planned purchases of stealthy F-35A Joint Strike Fighters. Gen. Guillot, who is head of U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) and the U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), testified on a wide range of issues before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday. 'I met recently with the Defense Minister from Canada [Bill Blair]. They are very much interested in participating. They have legal obstacles, but they assume they can jump over them. [They are] very much [interested in] participating in the missile defense system. And their best contribution could come in what way?' Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, asked at one point during the hearing. Canadian Defense Minister Blair publicly said that 'an integrated missile defense system for all of North America is the thing that makes sense to everybody' and expressed interest in partnering in some way on Iron Dome during a call with reporters earlier this month. Canada teaming up with the United States on North American missile defense is something that has also been discussed in the past. 'I welcome their participation. I think the first [point] would be to buy into our domain awareness expansion, whether ground-based or space-based,' Guillot said in response to Senator Reed's question. 'Then, further down the line, if they get [missile] defeat mechanisms, see how they would mesh with our existing defense mechanisms, defeat mechanisms, in a similar way that we employ fighter aircraft with NORAD. Perhaps we could do the same with missile defeat systems from the ground.' The 'domain awareness expansion' Guillot referred to here are efforts to grow the available sensor architecture, especially in space, to be able to better spot and track incoming threats, as well as provide high-quality targeting data to attempt intercepts. Work to develop and field new space-based sensor systems to tackle advanced hypersonic weapons with very high degrees of maneuverability and that fly along largely flat atmospheric trajectories, which them difficult to track and defend against, has been a particular area of focus for years already. At yesterday's hearing, Guillot highlighted existing work on new space-based sensor networks, as well as other efforts to improve 'domain awareness,' as some of the most immediate things that could be leveraged to meet the requirements of the new Iron Dome plan. 'The top priority in that, in our efforts to meet the direction of the [Iron Dome] executive order is first and foremost to establish increased domain awareness. As I mentioned in the opening comments, you can't defeat what you can't see, and the adversaries have an increasing capability of reaching us and threatening us from ranges beyond what some of our current systems can detect and track,' Guillot explained. 'So the first layer of any approach to defending the United States or North America, from the NORAD perspective, would be a sensor layer from seabed to space, systems that can detect threats from a further distance.' 'Those are seabed, ground-based, air-based, such as the E-7 [Wedgetail airborne early warning and control aircraft], and then space-based systems for detecting, tracking, and warning,' he continued. 'Inside of that, I think we build on our existing GBI and NGI capabilities, the Ground-Based Interceptors and Next Generation Interceptors, to defeat intercontinental ballistic missiles.' The U.S. Air Force is in the process of acquiring E-7s to replace its aging E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft. A relatively small number of silo-launched GBIs currently form the core of U.S. military capabilities to actually defeat higher-end ballistic threats, and now increasingly novel hypersonic ones. New NGIs are expected to eventually replace the older GBIs. With the exception of surface-to-air missile systems positioned around Washington, D.C., and the greater National Capital Region (NCR), defense against cruise missiles and other aerial threats falls almost exclusively to fighters. The U.S. Air Force, including the Air National Guard, provides the majority of that capacity for both NORTHCOM and NORAD, something we will come back to later. 'Some of those capabilities are right on the edge. Others are probably three to five years out,' the NORTHCOM and NORAD commander added. 'I think within inside of a year, we could have a significant capability that could network those into a single sensing grid.' TWZ has reported extensively on recent U.S. military efforts to develop and field new early warning and intelligence-gathering satellite constellations, in particular. The work looks set to provide American forces with unprecedented persistent surveillance capacity to support strategic missions, such as detecting and tracking incoming threats to the U.S. homeland, as well as more tactical operations. The new constellations will also be distributed in nature with large numbers of smaller satellites, which will help them provide more coverage globally and make them more resistant to enemy attacks. You can read more about these developments in detail here. Beyond satellites, the U.S. military has been working to improve ground-based early warning radar coverage around the U.S. homeland in recent years. The U.S. Navy has also been pursuing new undersea monitoring capabilities with a particular eye toward tracking very quiet and otherwise increasingly more capable Russian and Chinese submarines that present ever-greater threats to the continental United States. Improving the ability of U.S. and Canadian forces to defend the airspace over and around North America more generally has already been a top priority for many years now, as well. The infamous Chinese spy balloon incident in 2023, as well as the downing of three still-unidentified objects in the skies above the United States and Canada that year, put new emphasis on this issue. Drone incursions around U.S. military bases and other critical infrastructure in the United States, as well as facilities that host American forces overseas, including many incidents that TWZ has been the first to report on across years of calling attention to this particular issue, have now become a major factor in these discussions, as well. At the hearing yesterday, Guillot also testified at length about uncrewed aerial threats and efforts to better protect against them, as you can read more about here. As noted earlier, U.S. Air Force fighters currently provide almost all of the more general air defense capacity for North America as a whole. There has been talk about the potential reestablishment of surface-to-air missile sites more broadly within the United States, too. The Canadians 'were very collaborative on defining the NORAD requirements and their NORAD modernization is at the very beginning stages. We are seeing improved F-18 radars and missile capabilities already,' Guillot also said in response to a separate question during yesterday's hearing about Canada's commitments to that command. 'The next step we'll see is the arrival of the F-35 in the next two years. So they're well on the track, but we do have some immediate improvements with their F-18s.' Starting in the 2010s, the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) has been upgrading its fleet of aging CF-18A/B+ Hornet fighters. The most notable component of those efforts has been the integration of new AN/APG-79(V)4 active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars that greatly improve the ability of those aircraft to spot and track targets, even smaller ones, and do so at extended ranges. The RCAF has also been working to acquire new AIM-120D Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM) and AIM-9X Sidewinders to go with those modernized jets. In 2023, Canadian authorities also finalized plans to buy 88 F-35As, with the first expected to arrive in 2026. The twists and turns that led to that decision were an absolute saga that you can read more about here. Canadian authorities are now in the process of refining requirements for a future national ground-based air defense enterprise, something the country does not currently have, as well. Canadian Defense Minister Blair's comments earlier this month notwithstanding, there is certainly a question about how realistic any major new cooperation with the United States on missile defense matters, or anything else, might be given the current relations between the two countries. Though President Donald Trump's administration paused planned tariffs against Canada, a trade war is still simmering and there are concerns that it could escalate. On top of that, Trump has repeatedly suggested that Canada could be absorbed into the United States, which has drawn serious backlash from the Canadian government, as well as politicians and the general public in that country. TWZ previously explored how this spat might threaten to upend Canada's plans to acquire F-35s. With or without Canadian participation, what parts of the new Iron Dome missile defense plan ultimately come to fruition remain to be seen. The costs alone to develop and field new space-based anti-missile interceptors are expected to be in the tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Canada also has a substantially smaller defense budget currently than the United States, raising additional questions about the degree to which it might be able contribute. Regardless, America's top military officer in charge of operations in and around North America, as well as at least some members of Congress, are clearly in favor of stepping up cooperation with Canada to better protect both countries against incoming ballistic and other missiles. Contact the author: joe@
