Weird and wacky crime and police-related incidents in 2022 include a naked car thief, a dog startling a smuggler trying to retrieve handguns from a drone, and a woman bee-buzzing police.
In addition, police successfully pursued an accused boat thief trying to escape on a riding lawnmower, a casket was battered during a family funeral brawl, climate protesters tossed potatoes and tomato soup at paintings, and an author who wrote about murder did just that.
On Tuesday, a nobody named Randall McKenzie became somebody in the chilling fashion that seems bountiful in the third decade of the century.
The 25-year-old, of Hamilton, Kingston, Six Nations and points in between, stands charged with first-degree murder in connection with the “ambush” slaying of OPP Const. Grzegorz “Greg” Pierzchala, 28.
A woman named Brandi Stewart-Sperry, 30, of Hamilton and the system, is also charged with first-degree murder.
Both suspects had been wanted by cops: Him for skipping a court appearance for assaulting a Hamilton police officer and getting pinched with a gun (he has two-lifetime firearms bans). She for breaching conditions.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford were on hand as GM’s Brightdrop division rolled out an electric delivery van and announced a major order from courier company DHL. Getting GM to make the van in Ingersoll, and keeping the 400 jobs there came at a cost of over $500 million split between Ontario and the federal government.
It’s part of at least $2 billion and likely much, much more spent to ensure electric vehicle manufacturing stays in Canada. Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said he has absolutely no problem justifying the taxpayer dollars pumped into multi-national companies like GM, Honda and Stelantis, Chrysler’s parent company.
“Governments have to be part of the equation and I would say the return on investments is some of the best you can find in the market,” Champagne said in an interview with the National Post.
Second, why co-operate with a repressive regime? Apple had the standard answer with which the Desmarais family’s Power Corp. dominated Canada’s China policy for decades: There is a lot of money to be made there, and that money and more foreign contacts will lead to political liberalization and human rights.
No one believes that anymore. China was moving in a more repressive direction before the pandemic, and the variegated mischief in Wuhan only confirmed it. Even the Trudeau-Mulroney-Chrétien-Martin-Trudeau bastion of support for China did not survive the kidnapping of the “Two Michaels.”
So it was in November 2022 when Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled a China-only update for the iPhone. It made it more difficult for Chinese customers to use the “AirDrop” feature, which permits iPhone users to transfer information between them when close by, thereby avoiding the internet censorship of the Chinese communist regime. That feature is most helpful in arranging protests in authoritarian China. The CCP doesn’t like that, and what the CCP doesn’t like, Cook doesn’t like, and so Apple took action that assisted the communist regime.
OTTAWA — Canadians who were caught violating federal COVID-19 quarantine rules racked up at least $15 million in fines this year, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada, but it’s not clear how much of that will actually be paid.
This year saw the widespread lifting of Canada’s COVID-19 health restrictions. Until October, travellers were required to follow testing and quarantine rules, depending on their vaccination status, and upload their public health information through the ArriveCan app.
Most of the fines were levied in Ontario, which is not only the largest province by population, it’s also home to the country’s busiest airport and land border crossing with the United States. In all, 2,672 tickets were handed out during the eight-month period.
But the Public Health Agency of Canada doesn’t track whether those fines are actually paid.
Harry Bond is blunt in his assessment of the RCMP’s role on the night his mother and father died in the Nova Scotia mass shooting — and of the force’s potential to reform in the future.
“My trust for the RCMP is gone,” he said during a recent telephone interview from his home near Mahone Bay, N.S., where he’s been going over the hundreds of hours of testimony heard at a public inquiry into the April 18-19, 2020 rampage.
During the public inquiry, Bond heard senior Mounties testify they didn’t send out an emergency alert that night due to lack of protocols; that just four officers were available to enter Portapique because of chronic staff shortages; that no RCMP air support was available; and that basic smartphone apps to let police officers track one another in the dark also weren’t available.
TORONTO — Ontario is staring down an electricity supply crunch and amid a rush to secure more power, it is plunging into the world of energy storage — a relatively unknown solution for the grid that experts say could also change energy use at home.
Beyond the sprawling nuclear plants and waterfalls that generate most of the province’s electricity sit the batteries, the underground caverns storing compressed air to generate electricity, and the spinning flywheels waiting to store energy at times of low demand and inject it back into the system when needed.
The province's energy needs are quickly rising, with the proliferation of electric vehicles and increasing manufacturing demand for electricity on the horizon just as a large nuclear plant that supplies 14 per cent of Ontario's electricity is set to be retired and other units are being refurbished.
OTTAWA — After a Quebec Conservative MP refused to help migrants in his riding avoid deportation and characterized them as "illegal refugees," a member of their family is calling the comments "offensive" and "ignorant."
Leticia Cruz and her son arrived in Canada via Roxham Road, an unofficial border crossing south of Montreal, in 2018 to join their relatives, said her brother-in-law José Nicola Lopez.
In an interview with The Canadian Press in French, Lopez said Cruz travelled from the U.S. to join family in Canada because she feared being expelled due to policies under the administration of then-president Donald Trump. She also feared a return to El Salvador, he said, where she could have been a target for street gangs.
Canada has been experiencing a nationwide shortage of children's pain medications for months, leaving parents scrambling to manage their children's fever and pain as rates of respiratory syncytial virus and influenza skyrocket.
As Canada faces an ongoing shortage of children's medications, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he doesn't know if ramping up domestic production of pharmaceuticals is the right approach to addressing the problem.
"If we had a big orange shortage in Canada, people might be shouting, 'Okay, we need to make them more greenhouses so we can grow more oranges in Canada,'" the prime minister said.
Canada's experience with the pandemic and vaccine procurement has raised questions about how much the country should rely on global supply chains for essential goods.
Jillian Kohler, a professor at the University of Toronto's Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy said the shortage of children's pain medication speaks to the country's "very problematic" dependence on sources outside Canada's borders and on the private sector.
BARTIROMO: I know you have a lot of important work that you are focused on. What does this latest tranche of the Twitter exposé mean to you?
COMER: Well, it means a lot more evidence of wrongdoing. You know, in the beginning, I thought that there were probably two or three rogue employees who were orchestrating this cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story. But now we know the FBI had a division of at least 80 agents. We also know that the FBI paid Twitter over $3 million for their time, all the time they took over the past couple of years in telling them who to suppress, who to ban. You know, it’s just things that the government has no role in. The FBI was never granted the authority to create any type of disinformation task force that policed the social media sites.
Some of the older students at Pinecrest roamed the halls during class time, bullied other students, intimidated staff, and ignored requests to follow basic rules like not using their cell phones, said Sternberg in an interview with this newspaper.
Meanwhile, teachers were thwarted in their attempts to deal with the situation by an administration that promoted the laudable goal of giving students a voice, Sternberg said, only it went too far and allowed disruptive, disrespectful and dangerous behaviour.
“The student voice was all that mattered, and basically they silenced the teachers’ voice,” said Sternberg. “We were always questioned, we were always undermined, we were always told (the bad behaviour) must be our bias, or our classroom management, or it must be because we’re not listening to the students.”
QUEBEC — An official with Quebec’s farmers union says it took a covert operation and the help of fresh snow to round up four cows from a herd of cattle that have been on the loose for months in central Quebec.
Martin Marcouiller, president of the regional chapter of the Union des producteurs agricoles, says the four runaways were reunited with their owner in St-Severe, Que., about 130 kilometres northeast of Montreal.
Marcouiller says the farmers union kept Saturday’s operation quiet so that curious onlookers wouldn’t compromise the plan, adding that not even the owner of the animals was in the loop.
WASHINGTON — The FBI sounded the alarm Monday about an explosive increase in teenage boys being targeted online and extorted for money after being tricked into sending sexually explicit pictures.
At least 3,000 children, mostly teenage boys, have been victims of the schemes that are connected to more than a dozen suicides this year, a scale that U.S. authorities have not seen before, Justice Department officials said. Many think they are chatting online with kids around their own age but are quickly manipulated into sending explicit pictures and then blackmailed for money with threats to release the images, the FBI said.
“My efforts fell short of my own high personal standard for transparency and accountability.” — International Trade Minister Mary Ng.
Rex Murphy: This is an interesting phrase. The standard was personal. And it was high.
What then was that “high personal standard?”
Did it include a strict determination not to award thousands of dollars in contracts to a close friend in the lobby business who happens to be a panelist on afternoon political TV shows, especially a close friend who appears on those shows playing defense for the government of which you are a part?
OTTAWA — Treasury Board President Mona Fortier announced Thursday that federal public servants will soon have to return to in-person office work two to three days per week — a move that a major public union is calling "absolutely disrespectful."
Fortier told reporters Thursday that after the government shifted to a necessary hybrid model during the pandemic, there began to be "inconsistencies in the system" on how employees were treated.
She didn't directly answer a question about whether she had seen any data suggesting a drop in productivity due to remote work.
OTTAWA — Whispers of an impending return-to-office mandate have some federal public servants voicing their disapproval.
To date, government departments have been making their own decisions about remote and hybrid work, with several opting for a remote work model.
However, musings about a potential back-to-office order, which could mean two to three days of in-person work a week, are sparking debate..
Several public servants who have adjusted to working remotely due to COVID-19 said it is a contentious issue, in part because the pandemic is still ongoing.
OTTAWA — In a surprise move, a Senate committee has amended the Liberal government’s controversial online streaming bill to prohibit the CBC from making sponsored content.
The amendment to Bill C-11, proposed by Sen. Percy Downe, says the CBC cannot broadcast or develop “an advertisement or announcement on behalf of an advertiser that is designed to resemble journalistic programming.”
He said if a private business wants to get into sponsored content, “that’s literally their business, but the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is a different entity with a mandate that goes beyond the bottom line and should act accordingly.”
LONDON (AP) — U.S. and Scottish authorities said Sunday that the Libyan man suspected of making the bomb that destroyed a passenger plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 is in U.S. custody.
Scotland’s Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service said in a statement that “the families of those killed in the Lockerbie bombing have been told that the suspect Abu Agela Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi is in U.S. custody.”
The U.S. Justice Department confirmed the information, adding that “he is expected to make his initial appearance in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.” It gave no information on how Mas’ud came to be in U.S. custody.
Pan Am flight 103, traveling from London to New York, exploded over Lockerbie on Dec. 21, 1988, killing all 259 people aboard the plane and another 11 on the ground. It remains the deadliest terror attack on British soil.
Canada will need to speed up regulatory decisions on critical mineral projects if it wants to become a global leader in battery manufacturing, electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels, says a new national strategy released today.
"[The government of Canada] recognizes that to meet our ambitious climate and economic objectives to transition to a net-zero economy, additional mechanisms must be in place to expedite and facilitate strategic critical mineral projects from investment and funding opportunities, through regulatory approvals and development, to production.
Minerals like lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt and copper are critical ingredients for electric vehicle, computer chip and weapons manufacturing. With demand for low- and no-emissions technology expected to skyrocket as the world moves to a post-carbon economy, Friday's strategy foreshadows shortages of these critical materials — or what it calls "non-like-minded countries" weaponizing access to precious minerals.
GATINEAU, Que. — A Quebec civilian judge has acquitted a central figure in Canada's COVID-19 vaccine rollout, Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, of sexual assault over an allegation that dates back to 1988.
Judge Richard Meredith said he believes the complainant was sexually assaulted, but said the Crown did not establish beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Fortin who had assaulted her.
Fortin was the military officer in charge of the federal government's COVID-19 vaccine rollout until May 2021, but he was removed from that position after the allegation came to light.
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The Group of Seven price cap on Russian seaborne oil came into force on Monday as the West tries to limit Moscow's ability to finance its war in Ukraine, but Russia has said it will not abide by the measure even if it has to cut production.
The price cap, to be enforced by the G7, the European Union and Australia, comes on top of the EU's embargo on imports of Russian crude by sea and similar pledges by the United States, Canada, Japan and Britain.
It allows Russian oil to be shipped to third-party countries using G7 and EU tankers, insurance companies and credit institutions, only if the cargo is bought at or below the price cap.
