TSG_Asmodeus

The governments of former Alberta premier Jason Kenney and now Premier Danielle Smith have been vigorously lobbied to support a private company’s high-stakes gamble on a rail line from Calgary to Banff.

With potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of public money at stake, internal government documents obtained by The Tyee raise a question.

Why did Smith personally arrange for her husband to be granted extraordinary access to confidential internal government discussions about the proposed project?

The internal documents, obtained through freedom of information, show Smith’s husband, David Moretta, attended an hour-long confidential government meeting at McDougall Centre, the provincial government’s Calgary office, on Sept. 26, 2023.

The government redacted any information that would show who else attended the meeting and what was discussed.

A lesbian couple in Halifax, Canada was assaulted by a group of men who were shouting homophobic slurs at them.

Emma MacLean and her girlfriend, Tori, were walking down the street celebrating one of their birthdays when a group of men made a rude comment at MacLean, CTV News reports.

“A group of men walking in the other direction and they made a comment to me,” said Emma MacLean. “My girlfriend, Tori, said, ‘Hey that’s my girlfriend.’”

This response led to the men making explicitly homophobic remarks at the two, taunting them both.

“They continued walking and then Tori followed them to basically verbally be like, ‘That is not okay,’” MacLean said.

That’s when the men started attacking Tori.

“I see Tori being pushed on the stairs right in front of the BMO Centre and they are cement stairs and she’s on her back, that’s when all the men started punching and kicking her,” she continued.

MacLean said that she yelled for them to stop before she got involved in the fight to protect her girlfriend.

“The fight or flight came in. Basically jumped on one of their backs and put them in a chokehold, trying to restrain them.”

A bystander alerted police shortly after the fight ended. They spoke with one of the men involved in the incident, and he told them that it was the two women who had initiated the fight. The rest of the men refused to cooperate and give IDs, however.

There are currently no charges as police are investigating the situation.

Both MacLean and Tori suffered injuries. Tori had bruises covering her body, while MacLean had a chipped tooth, a broken nose, and many bruises as well.

MacLean said, “I felt punches and kicks and then I felt it on my nose and there was blood. I just thought this needs to stop now. I went to emerge the night of and they basically said it was too swollen for surgery.”

“I’m terrified to go downtown again in Halifax. I just feel like it’s so out of your control on what could happen. It’s overwhelming. I didn’t expect something like this to happen, especially with it happening during Pride Month as well.”

Hurried pursuit of a liquefied natural gas windfall in B.C. and Alberta will squander a key component of Canada’s long-term energy security while causing environmental devastation, according to a new report.

Scaling up LNG exports from fracking in the Montney basin that straddles the two provinces almost certainly will jeopardize local water resources, species habitat and the country’s struggling effort to meet climate targets.

And there could be another cost down the road: “The current policy of exploiting the Montney as fast as possible for LNG exports may create risks that gas will be unavailable for other uses in the future.”

This, according to energy analyst David Hughes, author of a comprehensive report called “Drilling into the Montney,” released June 24 by the David Suzuki Foundation.

“The Montney represents Canada’s largest remaining accessible gas resource and is forecast to provide a significant portion of future gas production with or without LNG,” Hughes told The Tyee. “Conventional production from mature gas fields in Canada has declined sharply over the past couple of decades.”

“Production has been made up by unconventional plays like the Montney which can only be accessed with the technology of hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling. And those technologies come with significant environmental impacts in terms of climate change, water consumption, biodiversity loss and land disturbance.”

The Montney basin is an oval-shaped, 96,000-square-kilometre geological formation that stretches on a southeast diagonal from Fort Nelson, B.C., at its top and includes the territories of Treaty 8 First Nations. The Montney currently produces 10 billion cubic feet of methane per day or roughly half of Canada’s total.

Donald Sutherland, the prolific film and television actor whose long career stretched from “M.A.S.H.” to “The Hunger Games,” has died. He was 88.

Kiefer Sutherland, the actor’s son, confirmed his father’s death Thursday. No further details were immediately available.

“I personally think one of the most important actors in the history of film,” Kiefer Sutherland said on X. “Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and one can never ask for more than that.”

The tall and gaunt Canadian actor with a grin that could be sweet or diabolical was known for offbeat characters like Hawkeye Piece in Robert Altman’s “M.A.S.H.,” the hippie tank commander in “Kelly’s Heroes” and the stoned professor in “Animal House.”

Before transitioning into a long career as a respected character actor, Sutherland epitomized the unpredictable, antiestablishment cinema of the 1970s .

Over the decades, Sutherland showed his range in more buttoned-down — but still eccentric — parts in Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People” and Oliver Stone’s “JFK.”

More, recently, he starred in the “Hunger Games” films and the HBO limited series “The Undoing.” He never retired and worked regularly up until his death.

“I love to work. I passionately love to work,” Sutherland told Charlie Rose in 1998. “I love to feel my hand fit into the glove of some other character. I feel a huge freedom — time stops for me. I’m not as crazy as I used to be, but I’m still a little crazy.”

“Someone is coming up behind you,” species-at-risk biologist Scott Gillingwater says. We lower our voices and change the subject. The two of us look conspicuous; we’re wearing chest waders and sun hats and are standing on the edge of a potholed road beside a grassy path near a marshy wetland. I turn to see a man with binoculars and a large camera approaching. He is either a birder or a turtle poacher posing as a birder. “Anything good?” Gillingwater asks him, gesturing skyward. “No, not yet,” he replies.

We wait for the man to disappear down the road and step onto the path to begin our clandestine operation. Gillingwater, who works for the Upper Thames River Conservation Authority in southwestern Ontario, has agreed to show me the top-secret area where he studies spotted turtles. It is one of Canada’s last natural strongholds for the endangered reptile, he says, home to “an exceptionally important population.”

On Aug. 3, 2023, the Alberta government announced a surprise seven-month moratorium on all new renewable energy projects, much to the surprise of the industry.

The government initially said its announcement was a response to requests from independent agencies that oversee the electricity system in Alberta, but successive revelations have proved that is untrue.

“The Alberta Electric System Operator asked for us to do a pause, to make sure that we could address issues of stability of the grid,” Smith said in August 2023 when pressed by reporters asking why the government made the decision. Smith added that the grid’s regulator, the Alberta Utilities Commission, also asked for the pause.

But behind the scenes, the government had spent months considering the moratorium and a related inquiry into renewable energy regulations in the province.

Hundreds of pages of documents, obtained by The Narwhal through freedom of information requests, show the government expressed its desire to halt projects only one month into its mandate. They show the government was behind the push, and not independent agencies as Premier Danielle Smith repeatedly claimed.

Internal emails obtained by The Narwhal also revealed that the top official at the Alberta Electric System Operator found the pause “very troubling” and was “not comfortable” with the decision. He was told to “support the minister without reservation.”

Here, then, is a timeline of what we know happened and when.

In late summer 2023, the RCMP made headlines with the arrests of two men in Ottawa and Kingsey Falls, Quebec, on terrorism and hate propaganda charges. The arrests marked a significant victory in a three-year investigation by the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team targeting the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division.

This Indigenous History Month, Read Local BC is showcasing nine new books and an educational board game to touch your heart and engage your mind.

One of the men arrested was Patrick Gordon Macdonald, 26, on charges of participating in and facilitating terrorist activities and the wilful promotion of hatred tied to his alleged involvement with the Atomwaffen Division. His apprehension followed the previous year’s arrest of a teenager in Windsor, Ontario, similarly charged with terrorism for his involvement with the same extremist group.

Macdonald is out on bail after his parents posted $40,000 in sureties and must stay at their home under strict conditions.

The case against Macdonald is unprecedented in Canada, marking the first time an alleged far-right extremist was prosecuted for both terrorism and hate propaganda.

After a major feeder water main break plunged Calgary's water supply into a critical state, city officials are now asking Calgarians to use 25 per cent less than they did yesterday, sounding the alarm that the city is at risk of running out.

The Bearspaw south water main — which is 11 kilometres long and as wide as two metres in parts — suffered a break Wednesday night that left hundreds of homes and businesses in the city's northwest without water.

Just before 7 p.m. Wednesday, the break caused streets to suddenly flood in the Montgomery area around Home Road, forcing the closure of several roads and intersections, including 16th Avenue in both directions.

It’s been almost two months since the federal budget, and anguished cries about the horror of capital gains tax changes are still coming.

Other measures in the $535-billion budget are forgotten. But a change that would increase taxes on a small number of mostly very well-off people is still in the news.

The capital gains tax debate is the latest front in the battle to keep taxes low — especially taxes on the wealthy, who have the greatest ability to wage public and political campaigns to protect their interests.

This demonstrates, again, one of the reasons we can’t have nice things such as a comprehensive health-care system or an effective climate response.

And how decades of anti-tax rhetoric — from politicians, interest groups and lobbyists, often amplified by media — have made it almost impossible to have a rational debate on a topic that’s critical to society.

The budget failed to do much to increase tax fairness. But it took one notable step by increasing capital gains taxes. Those are paid when someone — or some company — sells assets that have increased in value since they bought them.

If your childhood collection of hockey cards happens to include a mint Gretzky rookie card, valued at some $3 million, and you sell it, you’ll pay more tax on the profits. If you’re lucky enough to have a cottage and you decide it’s time to sell, you’ll be taxed on more of the gain.

The change is significant, and long overdue. Formerly, individuals had to include 50 per cent of capital gains over $250,000 on their tax returns. The budget increased that to 66.7 per cent. (The capital gains tax does not apply to the sale of your principal residence.)

So if you bought $500,000 worth of shares in the Misplaced Trust Company and sold them for $1 million, before the change you would have declared $125,000 in income and paid tax on that amount. Now you’ll declare $166,750.

That change does not seem punitive — especially as most of us do not make $250,000 in capital gains in a year.

The federal budget documents say about one in 1,000 individual tax filers will be affected by the change, and the average income of those tax filers is $1.4 million.

A mother in Winnipeg says a confrontation with police has left her and her family shaken.

Charity Tom, who is Sayisi Dene, says on May 21 at around 4:00 a.m., she awoke to the sound of banging on her door. It was the Winnipeg police.

An officer told her they received a call about an unsupervised child roaming outside. Tom told officers they had the wrong house and that her children were sleeping inside.

Tom said a few minutes later, police officers knocked again and then entered the house.

Now multiple police are entering the house. One is struggling with Tom.

Charity: What’s the badge number?

Police: Get up. What’s your name?

Charity: Charity

Police: You wanna get the cuffs?

Charity: No, I just told you

Police: So then stop acting like a c*nt

Three London, Ont. women were among 62 victims of femicide in Ontario over the past year, something a local abused women's shelter said is further evidence that gender-based violence needs to be treated as the epidemic that it is.

The list, released by the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH) and the University of Guelph, includes women, children, and gender-diverse individuals who were the victims of a gender-related killing by a man.

Polydoros, 27, says he feels safer in Canada. But nationwide protests in September over LGBTQ-inclusive school policies disturbed him.

Many demonstrations were held under the same name, "1 Million March 4 Kids." Organizers say children should not be taught about LGBTQ identities in school, which they say amounts to the "indoctrination and sexualization" of children.