OTTAWA — The young Russian seaman who turned up exhausted and bleeding on the British Columbia shore struck a Canadian intelligence official as well mannered, sincere and athletic, built like Tarzan of the movies. Less than two years later, defector Sergei Kourdakov would die in a California motel room — apparently by accidentally shooting himself — after […]

OTTAWA — The federal government says departments will focus on making the access-to-information system work better amid calls for fundamental changes to the transparency law. The Access to Information Act allows people to request government documents, from internal emails to expense reports for a $5 fee, but it is widely considered to be outdated and poorly administered. The law […]

OTTAWA — The RCMP confirmed Tuesday that documents sent to the Muslim Association of Canada that appeared to be internal records of the Canada Revenue Agency and the Mounties are forgeries. The Globe and Mail reported last week that the association had been sent records, which the newspaper determined to be fake, that implied both […]

OTTAWA — Canadian taxpayers spent at least $1 million hosting King Charles III, who was the Prince of Wales at the time, when he visited Canada earlier this year. The RCMP provided a breakdown of the nearly $450,000 in costs it incurred for his three-day visit in May, accompanied by Queen Consort Camilla, who was then the […]

YELLOWKNIFE — A privacy breach affecting people who stayed at a COVID-19 isolation centre is the latest in a long line of cases of health information being mishandled in the Northwest Territories. Late last week, the N.W.T. Department of Health and Social Services issued notice of the “low-risk” breach involving about 2,000 COVID-19 isolation forms, […]

Sobeys parent company Empire Co. Ltd. has shared new details on a cyberattack that shut down its pharmacy services and other in-store functions last month. The security breach in early November left customers unable to fill prescriptions for four days, while other in-store functions like self-checkout machines, gift card use and the redemption of loyalty […]

Msit No’kmaq, Wahkohtawin, Nindinawemaganidog — all loosely translate into the phrase “all my relations,” which is defined by a kinship between beings in the natural world and Mother Earth. It’s a phrase that asserts the symbiotic relationship between Indigenous nations and their lands. Now, as the world prepares to converge on Montreal for the United […]

MPs recently moved to delay proposed changes to the Lobbyists’ Code of Conduct that include reduced cooling-off periods for lobbyists doing political work and more stringent rules for gift-giving. “I felt that the process was unnecessarily rushed by the commissioner… the two weeks’ notice that we were given in the kind of dying weeks of […]

OTTAWA — Reporters are abandoning the federal Access to Information Act as a research tool because turnaround times are terrible and getting worse, veteran journalist Dean Beeby told MPs studying the federal law. Beeby was among the media members and researchers who painted a sorry picture of the state of Canada’s access system Wednesday for a House […]

OTTAWA — The federal prison needle exchange program is failing because of a poor rollout by the Correctional Service of Canada and a lack of improvement since it was introduced four years ago, health advocates say. Inmates at nine of the 43 federal prisons have had access to sterile equipment for drug use since the […]

HALIFAX — Transcripts of calls between the RCMP and search and rescue officials in Halifax show an overall lack of understanding of what was required to have a military aircraft assist during the search for a gunman who killed 22 people in April 2020. Log and audio transcripts obtained by The Canadian Press under an access to information request […]

What is the BC Services Card? It’s an ID card that combines both the drivers license and the provincial health care card.   Is that all it does? Doesn’t sound too scary to me. Right now that is all it does. However, it is a key part of the ‘Government 2.0’ plan, which will link […]