Hina Alam, The Canadian Press

Canada's unofficial national colours will be on full display Monday as Canadians don patriotic T-shirts, wave hand-held flags and hang bunting to celebrate their country. But while the red-and-white flag for the most part unites Canadians, the colours' meaning is open to interpretation.

Xavier Gélinas, a curator at the Canadian Museum of History, said there is no authoritative source that explains why the country drapes itself in red and white.

Two New Brunswick men who were acquitted Thursday of a 1983 murder for which they served lengthy prison sentences said they were worried they wouldn't live to see their names cleared.

Robert Mailman, 76, and Walter Gillespie, 81, were convicted in 1984 of second-degree murder and received life sentences in the killing of George Gilman Leeman in Saint John, N.B. An appeal was dismissed in 1988.

Christi Friesen remembers her husband saying he knew that the cloud of depression over her was finally lifting when he saw her smile at the end of the gruelling 2016 harvest season.

That October had been brutal, with three storms dumping about 20 centimetres of snow on the couple's Peace River, Alta., grain farm. On the morning of the third snowstorm, Friesen felt the wind knocked out of her when she looked out the window to see a blanket of white covering crops she had hoped they would harvest that day.

Canada's current wildfire season is devastating evidence of the effects of climate change, scientists say, but for some conspiracy theorists, the thousands of square kilometres of burnt ground isn't enough to convince them.

Instead, space lasers, arsonists and government plots to restrict people's movement are some of the causes of the fires, according to fringe online circles. But despite being fringe, these theories are widely circulated and boosted by social media algorithms.

An unusually high number of great white sharks found dead on Canadian beaches over the past year is a sign the population is growing, says a shark biologist.

Four great white sharks were found washed up along beaches in Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the past 12 months, said John Chisholm from the New England Aquarium, in Boston, Mass. That number is higher than previous years, he said in an interview Thursday.

"The other part of this is how many go unreported as well," he said.

As wildfires from coast to coast scorch large swaths of forest, sometimes changing it irreversibly, experts have zeroed in on an often overlooked casualty of the blazes: wildlife.

Spring fires, such as the ones now burning across the country, are unusual and will possibly affect several species, said Karen Hodges, a biology professor at the University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus.

Indian authorities have started the process to have two Canadians extradited to face charges after four members of the same family froze to death in southern Manitoba while trying to cross into the United States, says a police officer.

Chaitanya Mandlik, deputy commissioner of police for Ahmedabad's crime branch in the state of Gujarat, said authorities are looking to send Vancouver residents Fenil Patel and Bitta Singh, who also goes by Bittu Paji, to face charges in India. 

Police in India say a third man has been charged in the deaths of four members of a family who froze in southern Manitoba while trying to cross into the United States.

They say the man allegedly acted as a scout for potential immigrants to the U.S. and helped the family get documents for the U.S. leg of its planned journey.

Dashrath Chaudhary faces the same charges as two others arrested Saturday, who are accused of acting as immigration agents and supplying the family with paperwork.

Baldev Patel cannot remember much of the last conversation he had with his son and, while the memories are fast fading, the hurt remains.  

Patel's son, 39-year-old Jagdish Baldevbhai Patel, was found dead along with his wife and two children on Jan. 19, 2022, near a border crossing between Manitoba and the United States.

The RCMP has said the family was trying to get into the U.S. during severe winter weather and died from exposure. Investigators also believe the deaths were linked to a human smuggling operation.

There is a complex, counterintuitive relationship between rising global temperatures and the likelihood of increasingly intense snowstorms across Canada.

Winters are becoming on average milder and warmer than they used to be, but there has also been a noted rise across the country in extreme weather events, such as intense snowstorms, said John Clague, a professor of geosciences at Simon Fraser University, in Burnaby, B.C.