Candidates for St. Thomas city councillor seats and the mayor’s office alike pitched their platforms to the public at an all-candidates meeting on Wednesday, Sept. 16. The meeting, hosted by the St. Thomas Kinsmen, was moderated by Matt Sharpe and was livestreamed.  Council candidates had two minutes each to speak from a podium and share […]

Jim Ross, a man who helped Mat Siscoe get elected mayor of St. Catharines, went on to receive approximately $65,000 in municipal contracts to host tele-town hall and other virtual consultation sessions for the City since 2022 without following the proper procurement safeguards, an investigation by The Pointer has found. Since 2022, Mayor Siscoe has […]

Editor’s Note: Reporter Ed Smith is a former member of the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority board who joined in 2019, and as a private citizen participated in public efforts to hold David Barrick accountable, before Smith joined The Pointer as an investigative reporter covering Niagara Region.  How does David Barrick continue to find work? Among […]

This year, Ottawa parents Crystal Mask and Garrett Hansen had to have an unsettling conversation with their two kids as they went back to school: “do not drink from the water fountains”. “It was hard,” Mask told The Pointer. “They’re four and five, they see their friends doing it, they think it’s okay.”  In March, […]

Foster children without placements are no longer sleeping in government offices or hotels thanks in part to a new residential program launched by the Department of Human Services last month to help temporarily house and rehabilitate the most difficult-to-place youth. The issue of kids sleeping in offices and hotels has plagued the department for years […]

CHICAGO (AP) — A third beluga has died at a Chicago aquarium after being rescued this summer from a shuttered Canadian marine park in a complex international operation that moved 30 whales to aquariums in the U.S. and Spain. Osiris, a 26-year-old female whale, died on Monday, Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium said in a statement. The […]

Parliamentarians are taking a hard look at Canada’s overseas intelligence gathering capabilities as debate simmers over the need for a new foreign spy agency. The MPs and senators who make up the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians are examining the effectiveness of Canada’s foreign intelligence collection. The secretariat of the highly secretive committee […]

With students back in classrooms, Peel Region is urging parents to update children’s vaccination records as officials work to restore pre-pandemic immunization levels. On Sept.16, the region issued a release notifying community members that Peel Public Health will review the vaccination records of roughly 27,500 students, focusing on kindergarten through Grade 3, and Grades 11 […]

The Community Energy Association has recognized the City of New Westminster’s “people-centred” approach to dealing with extreme heat. At this year’s Union of B.C. Municipalities (UBCM) convention in Vancouver, the Community Energy Association presented New Westminster with a Climate and Energy Action Award for its response to the threat extreme heat events pose to residents’ […]

Newly obtained data on the unprecedented surge of border crossings over the past decade is shedding light on who entered the U.S. and where they went. Here is some information on the crossings, the data on 4.5 million migrants, and how The Associated Press obtained and analyzed it. Millions of migrants crossed the border from […]

An unprecedented surge in border crossings over the past decade reshaped America: Millions of people from more than 150 countries arrived, bringing the U.S. immigrant population to its highest levels ever. Now, data obtained exclusively by The Associated Press paints a picture of who these migrants are, where they went, and what happened after the […]

When Kristel Fleuren-Hunter was growing up in Antigonish, she remembers the bookmobile – a library on wheels – coming to the school and her and the other children picking out books for the classroom. As she got older, she borrowed Nancy Drew books from her small local library. Trecia Schell remembers singing “skinnamarinky dinky dink” […]