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The head of the United Nations’ HIV/AIDS program is urging Prime Minister Mark Carney to reverse his government’s planned cuts to foreign aid and global health funding. “My message to Prime Minister Carney, to Canada, and to all the other donors is, stay the course,” UNAIDS executive director Winnie Byanyima told The Canadian Press on the sidelines of last week’s G20 leaders’ summit in Johannesburg.“Without global solidarity, the inequality between countries will continue to widen. We will live in a more dangerous world as these inequalities increase.”Last week, Carney announced Canada’s first-ever cut to funding for the Global Fund, a major program for fighting infectious diseases in the world’s poorest countries.The new funding pledge is 17 per cent lower than Ottawa’s last contribution ...

OTTAWA – Canada maintains a low level of civilian oversight of the military due to Parliament’s rigid party discipline, according to a new book that compares it with fourteen other democracies. That conclusion was arrived at after a 10-year study conducted by a trio of defence experts — academics David Auerswald, Philippe Lagassé and Stephen Saideman — and reported in a new book titled: “Overseen or Overlooked? Legislators, Armed Forces and Democratic Accountability.”“When the military makes mistakes, it can be catastrophic. So you want to have more overseers, not less,” Saideman, an international relations professor at Carleton University, told The Canadian Press.That stark conclusion comes as the federal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney prepares to embark on a massive military...

The future of the oil tanker ban in northern B.C. waters is now in question after the federal and Alberta governments signed an energy agreement Thursday that sets the stage for a pipeline to the West Coast. The memorandum of understanding (MoU) includes a commitment from Ottawa to “enable the export of bitumen from a strategic deep-water port to Asian markets, including if necessary through an appropriate adjustment to the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act.”Alberta and federal Conservatives have long argued the 2019 federal law prevents the building of new pipelines and therefore constrains the oil and gas industry, and have called for the federal government to repeal it.The B.C. government and Coastal First Nations, however, are vowing to do everything in their power to keep the tanker ban in pl...