National

National


India among top actors for foreign interference in Canada: national security adviser

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security adviser says India is among the top sources of foreign interference in Canada, a public designation Ottawa has largely limited to authoritarian states. “When I talk about foreign interference and economic security, I’m now talking about a number of state actors and non-state proxies,” Jody Thomas said […]

Read More


Watchdog’s relations with spy community ‘particularly strained’ over last year

OTTAWA — Newly released documents say the intelligence community’s relationship with its key watchdog has been particularly strained over the last year due to a “level of resistance” to scrutiny. The assessment appears in briefing materials prepared for Canada’s top public servant in advance of a late January meeting with the chair of the National […]

Read More


Feds warned about risks of delaying 24 Sussex decision almost a year before it closed

OTTAWA — Almost a year before the closure of 24 Sussex Drive due to disrepair and an infestation of rodents, the chairman of the National Capital Commission’s board of directors warned that further delaying a cabinet decision on the fate of the residence would put the whole structure at risk. The mansion, which sits on […]

Read More


AI guru Yoshua Bengio says regulation too slow, warns of ‘existential’ threats

MONTREAL — Artificial intelligence pioneer Yoshua Bengio says regulation in Canada is on the right path, but progress is far too sluggish. Speaking in Montreal, the Universite de Montreal professor said he backed a bill tabled in the House of Commons last June that adopts a more general, principles-based approach to AI guardrails and leaves […]

Read More


1995 referendum: Parti Quebecois wants ‘No’ campaign investigation documents released

MONTREAL — Nearly 30 years after Quebec’s second sovereignty referendum, the Parti Quebecois says there are secrets about how the victorious No side spent money that the public deserves to know about. On Wednesday, the province’s legislature debated a motion introduced by PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon calling on the province’s chief electoral officer to […]

Read More


Parks Canada plans major rewrite of more than 200 historic site plaques

EDMONTON — They’re affixed to old buildings where someone important used to live. Or they’re mounted on a rock overlooking somewhere where something once happened. Cast in bronze or lettered on a sign, they’re sometimes the only history lesson many of us ever get. And now Parks Canada wants hundreds of them changed. “The way […]

Read More


Death of the password coming as passkey technology on brink of consumer adoption

TORONTO — Anna Pobletts has spent the last few years on a mission to make passwords a thing of the past, but passkeys — the technology that could replace them — have never truly been on the brink of widespread consumer adoption until this year. “We’re seeing some really big-name sites like EBay, Best Buy […]

Read More


‘Systemic difficulties’ hampered review of Canada’s cyberspy service: watchdog

OTTAWA — A culture within Canada’s cyberspy service of “resisting and impeding” independent review has frustrated efforts to ensure it is obeying the law, say newly released documents from the federal intelligence watchdog. The unusually candid National Security and Intelligence Review Agency records from 2021 are the latest evidence of the watchdog’s irritation at trying […]

Read More


Privacy commissioner appeals Federal Court decision in Facebook case

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is appealing a recent decision by the Federal Court, which sided with Facebook in a case tied to the Cambridge Analytica affair. A judge in April dismissed the federal privacy watchdog’s bid for a declaration that the social media giant, now known as Meta, broke the law […]

Read More


Agency struggled to get pharma companies to engage in drug price reform: memo

OTTAWA — Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos was warned that pharmaceutical companies had steadfastly refused to engage on drug-price reforms before he urged an independent federal agency to pause those reforms in favour of more consultation, a 2021 memo shows. The NDP, which obtained the memo through access-to-information law and shared it with The Canadian Press, […]

Read More


Metaverse to contribute at least $45.3B to Canada’s annual GDP by 2035 says Meta

TORONTO — When Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg changed his company’s name to Meta less than two years ago, he placed a multi-billion-dollar bet on a virtual but interactive realm where he believed people would work and play for generations to come. Zuckerberg’s ultimate vision is still far from reality. The Quest headsets the company […]

Read More


Firefighters question Alberta cuts to aerial attack teams as province battles blazes

EDMONTON — Former members of an elite Alberta wildfire-fighting crew say government budget cuts have left the province battling its current blazes short-handed. “We could have been difference-makers,” said Jordan Erlandson, a former member of Alberta’s Rapattack team. Those firefighters were trained to rappel from helicopters to get at wildfires while they still only covered […]

Read More