Bob Weber, The Canadian Press

Fresh research suggests western Canada's once-dwindling caribou numbers are finally growing.

But the same paper concludes the biggest reason for the rebound is the slaughter of hundreds of wolves, a policy that will likely have to go on for decades.  

"If we don't shoot wolves, given the state of the habitat that industry and government have allowed, we will lose caribou," said Clayton Lamb, one of 34 co-authors of a newly published study in the journal Ecological Applications.

"It's not the wolves' fault."

Qapik Attagutsiak was already a young woman in 1940, a mother at ease on the land and a skilled midwife, when she heard about a conflict occurring among many people in faraway lands. 

Qapik, who preferred using that name in the Inuit tradition, was hunting walrus with her family near Foxe Basin when the local Catholic priest told her about battles being fought by men jumping from planes.

"Inuit are afraid to kill other people," Qapik told a Parks Canada interviewer in 2018.

Some legal experts say a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that found much of Ottawa's environmental assessment law unconstitutional will have no impact on other federal moves such as clean electricity regulations or oilsands emissions caps. 

"It will be an uphill fight for Alberta to challenge new greenhouse gas emission law, and Friday's decision doesn't change that," said Stewart Elgie, a professor of law and economics at the University of Ottawa. 

Government websites in four provinces and territories were shut down Thursday, with at least two jurisdictions blaming cyberattacks for their outages.

Websites for Yukon, Manitoba, Prince Edward Island and Nunavut were all inaccessible. P.E.I. and Yukon said cyberattacks were behind their shutdowns.

"At midnight on Sept.14, Yukon.ca experienced a cyberattack that shut down the website and other public-facing Yukon government websites," said a statement from the territory.

Earlier this summer, two Canadians walked into a party in rural Germany.

"Canadians?" joked the host. "I thought you'd smell more like smoke."

It's been that kind of season. Floods, drought, warm waters lapping three coasts — but mostly wildfire smoke from sea to sea and overseas. Yes, this is climate change, scientists say, and expect more weather weirdness to come. 

"It's been a wild ride," said Danny Blair, co-director of the Prairie Climate Centre at the University of Winnipeg. "It's been a season and a year of extremes."

Former members of an elite Alberta wildfire-fighting crew say government budget cuts have left the province battling its current blazes short-handed. 

"We could have been difference-makers," said Jordan Erlandson, a former member of Alberta's Rapattack team.

Those firefighters were trained to rappel from helicopters to get at wildfires while they still only covered a few hectares. When one storm sparked several fires, they could extinguish them before they merged. They also cleared landing spaces for other helicopters to bring in crews and gear. 

New research using advanced technology suggests heavy oil facilities in Alberta and Saskatchewan are releasing almost four times the amount of a powerful greenhouse gas than they report to government. 

The research, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, pioneers new methods of measuring methane emissions that question current industry practice, said author Matthew Johnson, an engineering professor at Carleton University in Ottawa.

"A lot of these (reports) are done on ... estimates," said Johnson. "Clearly, they're not very accurate."

Eleven metres below the surface of the Northwest Passage, deep within the wreck of one of Capt. John Franklin's doomed ships, something caught the eye of diver Ryan Harris.

Harris was in the middle of the 2022 field season on the wreck of HMS Erebus. The team had been hauling dozens of artifacts to the surface -- elaborate table settings, a lieutenant's epaulets still in their case, a lens from someone's eyeglasses. 

But this, sitting within the steward's pantry, was something else.

It's as if they were using a telescope not just to peer into space, but also into time. 

Canadian scientists are already using spectacular data and images from the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope to look backward into some of the oldest stars ever studied and forward into how new stars and planets are born. 

The piercing yellow eyes and deadly hunting skills of the snowy owl awe bird-lovers in the U.S. Midwest every winter. 

Now, thanks to what has been heralded as the most comprehensive summary of migration patterns ever assembled, those birders can see where those raptors migrated from: the Seal River watershed in northern Manitoba.