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By Christopher Reynolds The Canadian Press Posted October 22, 2024 2:45 pm 1 min read Descrease article font size Increase article font size Canada’s labour tribunal says the federal government’s directive to end the countrywide rail shutdown in August marked an “unprecedented” move. In a new document explaining its decision, the Canada Industrial Relations Board said Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon’s instruction that the quasi-judicial body halt work stoppages and start binding arbitration amounted to an order.The tribunal says MacKinnon effectively directed the board to end the strikes and lockouts at Canadian National Railw...

The Trudeau government is threatening to bypass Queen’s Park on funding to address encampments in municipalities, Global News has learned, potentially cutting the province out of decisions on how the money should be spent. In mid-September, Canada’s Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Minister Sean Fraser sent a letter to provinces with an offer of $250 million to help find shelter for people living in encampments.Fraser said while the federal government was initially looking for cost-matching agreements with provinces, the Ontario government didn’t respond to the offer forcing Ottawa to go directly to municipalities.“We will no longer wait for them to muster the political will to act as winter gets closer and lives are put at risk,” Fraser said in a statement shared with Global News.A...

Mark Carney said he is thinking about running for elected office in Canada, but remained guarded about when or where, in a conversation with Liberal MP Nate Erskine-Smith. The conversation was the clearest signal yet from the former governor of the Bank of Canada that he is eyeing a more political future, and comes weeks after he was tapped to chair an economic advisory task force for the Liberal Party and the prime minister.Carney joined Erskine-Smith on his podcast in an episode published on Friday.The MP for Beaches—East York, who has already announced he will not run in the next federal election, talked about the difference between “giving advice and being a decision maker” before asking Carney, “Are you going to put your name on a ballot at some point?”“I’m taking steps that support t...

A U.S. Republican congressman is calling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “threat” to NATO’s stability and success, saying Canada’s defence spending and military contributions aren’t enough. U.S. Rep. Mike Turner made the comments in an op-ed in Newsweek suggesting “Trudeau, not (Donald) Trump, is a threat to the stability and success of NATO” because of the country’s long-standing lag on a plan to hit the agreed upon target for members to spend two per cent of their GDP on defence.This past summer, Defence Minister Bill Blair and Trudeau announced Canada expected to invest at least two per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) in defence by 2032, calling it a “credible, responsible, and achievable target date.”Until then, Trudeau had not offered a concrete timeline to hit the two-per-ce...