As the federal election campaign picks up steam, federal officials should be ready to counter possible Russian disinformation campaigns targeting Canadians, says a Russian expert. Sergey Sukhankin, a senior fellow with the Jamestown Foundation, a U.S. think-tank, who is teaching at the Concordia University of Edmonton, says Russian and Canadian interests collide in the Arctic, in Ukraine and in the Baltic states, making Canada a likely target for Russian disinformation...

In 1986, Jennie Carignan was a bored teenager looking to do something challenging with her life. So she decided to join the Canadian Armed Forces and enroll at the Royal Military College of Canada. She was among the first women to enter the Combat Engineer trade after all military occupations were opened to women in 1989. Today, Maj.-Gen. Carignan is one of the highest-ranking women in the Canadian military and is the first and only woman from a combat arms trade to rise to the rank of...

A female Royal Canadian Navy officer has made NATO maritime history by becoming the first woman to command a multinational naval task force in one of the alliance’s most sensitive areas of maritime operations. Commodore Josée Kurtz has assumed the command of Standing NATO Maritime Group Two (SNMG2), one of the alliance’s four maritime groups, whose primary area of operations extends to the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The eastern Mediterranean off the coast of Syria and the Black...

Heavily armed police officers are combing through the bush and swamps surrounding the remote Indigenous community of York Landing in northern Manitoba, following a reported sighting of two teenage murder suspects who have been on the run for nearly two weeks. Officers with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Canada’s national police force, are responding to a tip that two men fitting the descriptions of Bryer Schmegelsky, 18, and Kam McLeod, 19 were spotted Sunday afternoon around 5...

Canada has become the latest country to ratify a UN treaty that seeks to combat the global illegal fishing industry by denying port access to fishing vessels engaged in the multibillion illicit trade, federal officials announced Friday. The Agreement on Port State Measures to Prevent, Deter and Eliminate Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing, known as PSMA, enters into force in Canada as of July 20, Fisheries Minister Jonathan Wilkinson and his parliamentary secretary, Sean Casey,...

While NATO allies have beefed up their cyber defences, the best guaranty of safeguarding Canada’s upcoming federal elections against possible Russian interference is the country’s free and independent press, the alliance’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday. Speaking to reporters at a Canadian military base near Ottawa, Stoltenberg said NATO has created a centre of excellence in Estonia where in April it conducted the world’s largest cyber security exercise designed to not only...

The Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has added two international neo-Nazi groups to Canada's list of outlawed terrorist organizations as part of new measures to combat online hate, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale announced Wednesday. Blood & Honour and Combat 18, which have a presence in Canada, are the first far-right extremism groups to be included on Ottawa's terror list, Goodale said. “This is an important step in Canada’s efforts to combat violent...

Washington and Tehran have reached a dangerous impasse as U.S. President Donald Trump threatened on Tuesday to obliterate parts of Iran if it attacked “anything American,” with Iranian officials calling White House actions “mentally retarded,” says a Canadian expert on Middle East politics. Trump on Monday signed an executive order imposing sanctions against Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior figures, with punitive measures against Foreign Minister Mohammad...

Human rights activists in Canada say they welcome new guidelines for Canadian diplomats working abroad aimed at enabling the work of human rights defenders around the world by ensuring their safety and security. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, announced Monday the launch of Voices at Risk: Canada’s Guidelines on Supporting Human Rights Defenders. The guidelines offer practical advice for Canadian diplomats working around the world, and in Canada, to support human rights...

When faced with an existential threat, the humanity will rally together despite geopolitical rivalries and political tensions between superpowers. That’s the main lesson of a comparative study published in the journal Polar Record, by Michael Byers, Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. The article, titled Cold, dark, and dangerous: international cooperation in the Arctic and space, compares Russian–Western cooperation in...

The world’s oceans could lose nearly one-sixth of their fish and other marine life by the end of the century if global warming continues on its current path, a new study says. Every degree Celsius that the world’s oceans warm, the total mass of sea animals is projected to drop by five per cent, according to a comprehensive computer-based study by an international team of marine biologists published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And that does not include...

Human rights groups are sounding the alarm over the world’s “most neglected displacement crisis” unfolding in western Cameroon, where government forces and pro-government militias are locked in a deadly spiral of violence targeting the West African country’s anglophone minority. "The international community is asleep at the wheel when it comes to the crisis in Cameroon," the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), Jan Egeland, said in a report issued on...

The Liberal government accepts the finding of a national commission of inquiry that the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women and girls across Canada in recent decades amount to an act of "genocide," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday. But Trudeau also urged Canadians to focus on solutions to the ongoing crisis rather than dwell on the past or spend their energy on debates over the definition of genocide. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women...

A Canadian entrepreneur who claims he has been framed in a multimillion fraud case in Dubai asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Wednesday to personally intervene on his behalf with the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates. “It’s very important for Mr Trudeau to maybe put some pressure on the ruling family of the U.A.E., and specifically in Dubai,” André Gauthier said in a short cellphone video shot in what appears to be some kind of a detention facility on the border between Oman and...

Polar deserts in Canada’s High Arctic are undergoing rapid changes as increases in summer air temperatures lead to permafrost thaw, leaving giant horseshoe-shaped pockmarks on the barren terrain, according to a new study. The study by McGill University researchers, published recently in Environmental Research Letters, presents close to 30 years of aerial surveys and extensive ground mapping of the Eureka Sound Lowlands area of Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg Islands, Canada’s northernmost...

It took the federal government 134 years but on Thursday Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finally exonerated a Saskatchewan chief of treason and apologized for the conviction of the Indigenous leader who “made his indelible mark” on Canada’s history. The exoneration of Chief Poundmaker, also known under his Cree name as Pihtokahanapiwiyin , was announced at the reserve that bears his name -- Poundmaker Cree Nation -- about 200 kilometres northwest of Saskatoon. Following prayers and...

While much of the world attention has been focused on rapid sea ice reduction in the Arctic, the changes underneath the receding ice in parts of the Arctic Ocean have been no less dramatic, according to a Canadian researcher. Karen Filbee-Dexter, a research fellow in Marine Biology at Laval University in Quebec City, says while climate change is decimating underwater kelp forests off the coast of western Australia, eastern North America, southern Europe and northern California, the lush...

As the Democratic Republic of Congo grapples with the second largest ever Ebola outbreak, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) is appealing to Canada and other donors to step up their contributions to help efforts to stop the deadly virus from spreading within DRC and to neighbouring countries. While the World Health Organization (WHO) is the lead UN agency helping Congolese authorities in containing Ebola, WFP plays a critical role by providing food to people potentially carrying the virus,...

An overwhelming majority of Canadians supports the federal government’s commitment to set aside at least 17 per cent of Canada’s lands and inland waters as protected conservation areas by 2020, according to a new poll. Almost nine out of 10 Canadians either strongly support or support the government’s 2010 conservation commitment as part of the Convention on Biological Diversity, according to the poll conducted by Abacus Data for the International Boreal Conservation Campaign...

Alberta premier-designate Jason Kenney says he’ll move fast to repeal the carbon tax legislation adopted by the previous centre-left New Democratic Party government and jump-start stalled pipeline projects, setting the stage for a confrontation with the federal government, neighbouring British Columbia and Quebec. Kenney, 50, who will be sworn as premier of the oil-rich Western Canadian province on Apr. 30, after his United Conservative Party secured a landslide victory in Tuesday’s...

Alberta woke up to a new centre-right government today after voters in the oil-rich Western Canadian province that has fallen on hard times recently delivered a landslide victory to the United Conservative Party led by Jason Kenney. Tuesday’s election turned a page on Alberta’s brief experiment with left-of-centre politics as the New Democratic Party led by outgoing premier Rachel Notley suffered a resounding defeat and moved to the opposition benches. The UCP elected in 63 of 87 seats...

A hardy yeast infection has researchers in Canada and around the world worried about the rise of a new generation of drug resistant superbugs. There are fewer than 20 documented cases in Canada so far but the fungus known as Candida auris has epidemiologists and public health officials concerned. “The reason that we’re concerned about it is because these organisms seem to be able to transmit between patients very efficiently within hospitals and because they have intrinsic resistance to...

A coalition of Canadian humanitarian groups is urging Canadians to show their generousity and donate to a federal matching fund for relief efforts in three southern African countries hit by Tropical Cyclone Idai last month. Ottawa pledges to match donations made by individual Canadians to Canada’s Humanitarian Coalition and its members between March 15 and April 14, 2019, up to a maximum total of $2 million for relief efforts in flood-hit Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. Melanie Murphy,...

Canadians jihadists who left the country to fight for ISIS or Al-Qaeda and its offshoots in the Middle East are distinct from other radical Islamists and may be more amenable to rehabilitation and reintegration back into the Canadian society, according to a new report. Alex Wilner, a terrorism expert at Carleton University in Ottawa and the lead author of the report published this week, by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, said it examines the phenomenon of Canadians joining and supporting...

A Canadian conservation group says more research into the impact of vessel traffic on narwhal and other marine life is needed before a regulator in the Arctic territory of Nunavut allows a mining company to expand its production at one of the world’s northernmost iron ore mines. The Baffinland Iron Mines Corp., which operates the Mary River mine site on Baffin Island, is looking at expanding its production from nearly six million tonnes of iron ore a year currently to 12 million tonnes a...