Politics

Descrease article font size Increase article font size Unifor said on Sunday that its members at Canadian National Railway CNR.TO have ratified a new four-year collective agreement, averting a potential strike action. Unifor, which represents more than 3,000 members at the railroad’s Council 4000 and Local 100 committees, said the agreement includes improvements to wages and benefits as well as job protections for members working in CN terminals and headquarters across Canada.The railroad earlier this month had reached a new tentative four-year collective agreement with the union.“This agreement secures important gains that reflect the critical contributions of Unifor members to CN’s operations,” Unifor National President Lana Payne said in a ...

Pressure is mounting on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to step down, with a growing number of Liberal MPs joining calls for his resignation after a chaotic week for his party. More than 50 of the 75 Liberal MPs from Ontario held a one-hour meeting on Saturday to talk about their party’s leadership, Global News has learned.At the caucus meeting, few MPs spoke in favour of Trudeau’s continued leadership but many spoke about the desirability that he leaves, saying his brand has now become “toxic”.Details of the Ontario caucus meeting were first reported by The Toronto Star and CBC News and those details have largely been confirmed by Global News who also spoke to MPs who were present.Michael Coteau, the Ontario Liberal caucus chair, was charged with communicating the contents of the meeting to...

Steps to make Canadian sports safer were made in 2024, but to what end? A national commission began cross-country public consultations, an online registry of people sanctioned or under investigation for maltreatment in sport went live and a seismic shift in handling future complaints was announced.Canada was said to be a long way from the culture change identified as key to draining sport of toxic behaviour.“The progress is definitely slow and a bumpy ride,” said Erin Willson, an Olympic artistic swimmer and past president of AthletesCan, which provides a unified voice for national-team athletes.“The big question that I’ve wrestled with probably for the last seven or eight years is how do we change the culture of sport? It all comes down to the values of sport, what are we valuing and what...

A Liberal MP who has called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resign says the “vast majority” of caucus colleagues he’s spoken to feel the same way. Trudeau’s leadership has been on shaky ground for months, but it became more unstable Monday after his longtime ally Chrystia Freeland resigned from cabinet, throwing the government into chaos.A growing number of Liberal MPs have since publicly called on Trudeau to step aside and make way for a new Liberal leader ahead of a likely early election.One of those MPs is Anthony Housefather, who says there’s “a number of reasons” why he feels Trudeau’s time is up.“The top one is that Canadians have clearly lost confidence in him, and Canadians want him to go,” Housefather told Mercedes Stephenson in an interview that aired Sunday on The West Block...

In the wake of recent shootings at Jewish schools, the federal government is planning to hold a national forum to combat antisemitism in the country. The forum will be held in Ottawa in February of 2025 to “discuss the growing public safety threat of antisemitism,” the Department of Justice Canada announced on Friday.“Canada has seen a troubling rise in antisemitic incidents, threats, and hate crimes,” the department said.“The Government of Canada recognizes the urgent need for national leadership to ensure Jewish Canadians feel safe in their synagogues, schools, and communities.”The justice minister, attorney general, and the minister and associate minister of public safety will co-chair the forum next year.Federal, provincial, and municipal leadership, along with law enforcement and pros...

After a month-long strike, Canada Post is continuing to ramp up its operations and the postal service expects that most of its backlog of deliveries will be cleared before Christmas. Canada Post workers returned to the job on Tuesday after they were ordered by the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) to end the countrywide strike.The Crown corporation said its network became fully operational on Wednesday afternoon.“Canada Post has processed the parcels held in the postal system during the strike, with all these items now flowing through our network or delivered,” the national mail carrier said in an update on Friday.“We expect a significant portion of these items to be delivered before Christmas.”Postal workers will be making deliveries this weekend in some select cities, the company ...

An “overheated” immigration system that admitted record numbers of newcomers to the country has harmed Canada’s decades-old consensus on the benefits of immigration, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said, as he reflected on the changes in his department in a year-end interview. The system, he said, needed some discipline to get the country back on track.Over the course of 2024, Miller moved to cap the number of student visas, reduced the number of permanent residents it plans to admit, made it harder to get a working visa and paused most private refugee sponsorship applications.All of that came as record immigration levels pushed population growth up over three per cent in 2023, twice what it has averaged over the previous decade.“There’s no shying away from the fact that there’s some stuf...

Facing a government shutdown deadline, the Senate rushed through final passage early Saturday of a bipartisan plan that would temporarily fund federal operations and disaster aid, dropping President-elect Donald Trump’s demands for a debt limit increase into the new year. House Speaker Mike Johnson had insisted Congress would “meet our obligations” and not allow federal operations to shutter ahead of the Christmas holiday season. But the day’s outcome was uncertain after Trump doubled down on his insistence that a debt ceiling increase be included in any deal — if not, he said in an early morning post, let the closures “start now.”The House approved Johnson’s new bill overwhelmingly, 366-34. The Senate worked into the night to pass it, 85-11, just after the deadline. At midnight, the White...

Canada’s former ambassador to the United States says he’s confident Ottawa can avoid the worst of the tariff threats proposed by U.S. president-elect Donald Trump, but that Canada won’t be completely unscathed. Frank McKenna, who is now deputy chair at TD Securities, said he believes the incoming president is looking to use money from tariffs to lower American taxes but that Trump’s 25 per cent tariff is likely “a throwaway number” meant to act as a bargaining tactic ahead of his inauguration.“If he were to actually put 25 per cent tariffs against all Canadian goods and all Mexican goods, that would be enough to precipitate inflation in the United States of America and probably cause a spike in the dollar, which would undermine what he’s trying to do,” McKenna told Global News.“There is a ...

As the Liberal government grapples with political upheaval following the exit of Chrystia Freeland from the federal cabinet, a new Ipsos poll shows most Canadians now want an early election. That comes as support for Conservatives is surging and support for the Liberals is at a near-historic low this week — putting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just one point above the record-low support seen by former Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff in 2011.​Ignatieff led the party to its worst defeat in history in 2011, which  saw the Liberals reduced to third-party status behind the NDP as official opposition and the Conservatives winning a majority government.Ipsos polling done exclusively for Global News and released Friday shows over half of Canadians (53 per cent) believe opposition parties should ...