Since Stephen Harper became Prime Minister in 2006, his government has emphasized a “tough on crime” agenda. It’s a counterintuitive approach for a country whose crime rate has been steadily falling since 1972, but it’s also a classic oldie for conservatives.
In the latest instalment of his hilarious and uncomfortable web series “Between Two Ferns,” Zach Galifianakis took Canada’s national treasure/embarrassment Justin Bieber to task for being an idiot. Among other things, he questioned Bieber’s statement that Anne Frank would have been a Belieber, his proclivity for peeing in buckets, and his penchant for driving too fast.
After revamping the rules on licensing for legal marijuana distribution, Health Canada awarded the first two new licenses to a Saskatoon firm called Prairie Plant Systems Inc., which sounds exactly like the covert name for a drug-running operation.
As every Canadian with an internet connection knows by now, Toronto mayor Rob Ford has had an eventful summer. Since mid-May Ford has been dealing with accusations that he has smoked crack and that his brother, city councillor Doug, was a teenaged drug kingpin in Etobicoke, among other things.
Underemployed and not seeing anything better coming along, struggling coffee shop employees in Halifax, N.S., have begun unionization efforts. After a struggle that may have caused workers to lose their jobs, the Just Us! chain successfully joined Local 2 of the Service Employees’ International Union.
Like so many events in the adult world, a fundraiser at the NDP’s convention in April was a messy, alcohol-soaked evening. Supervisors left early without telling their underlings, other managers refused to help out said underlings because it wasn’t “their event,” a young staffer was harassed by an older, more politically connected man and the staffer was later reprimanded for being harassed.
Just last month, Sobeys announced a brutal takeover of Safeway’s Canadian stores in a bid to unseat the only larger Canadian greengrocer, Loblaw/Superstore. The Globe and Mail reported at the time that Loblaw has “struggled to make gains over the past several years.” Loblaw struggles no more, apparently.
When asked about Australian environmentalists opposing population growth and immigration, Suzuki responds: “I believe Canada is full as well!”
A recent report studying Canadians’ political engagement came to the unsurprising conclusion that our country’s youth have no patience for things like joining political parties and contacting their elected officials. In today’s fast-food, self-serve, 3G-WiFi-LTE world, there’s no time to attend political conventions and stump for MPs.
Miles Howe, who has been writing for Media Co-op about “the struggle against seismic testing related to shale gas exploration in New Brunswick” for several weeks, was arrested earlier today as he attempted to enter a testing site with APTN reporter Jorge Barrera.
Canadians of all shapes and sizes celebrated our nation’s 146th anniversary yesterday. In typical local fashion, many Winnipeggers chose to do so with extreme inebriation and bizarre outbursts of reckless violence.
Canada’s economy fared much better than some in the 2008 global financial meltdown, but like most other countries it did not emerge completely unscathed. The labour analysis of the 2011 National Household Survey was released on June 26, and it does not paint a particularly pleasant picture of the Canadian labour force.
Once a scrappy upstart in the bloody, dog-eat-dog world of grocery sales, Canada’s own Sobeys, Inc. is now a force to reckon with. It is adding 213 stores to its already 1,300-strong army of fresh produce-slinging locations with yesterday’s announcement that Sobeys bought Safeway’s Canadian division.
In addition to the CSEC program we still know next to nothing about, there are an unknown number of other programs we actually know nothing about.
According to the Dawson Creek Daily News, “a video depicting what appears to be a deer set on fire and dragged behind a car is being shown on a Dawson Creek social media site.” The wildest part about this story is that this is only the most recent incident of disturbing animal cruelty to hit the national news from the small town.
