National News

Canada's senior public health officials are urging Canadians to get an updated COVID-19 vaccine this fall following the authorization of the first shot targeting the latest variants Tuesday.

Health Canada's regulatory branch approved Moderna's new Spikevax shot, which is formulated for the XBB.1.5 lineage of the Omicron variant. 

Moderna said in a statement the first doses would be shipped to arrive in Canada on Wednesday.

The federal government has tapped a Quebec judge to head a public inquiry into allegations of foreign interference in Canada's affairs.

Democratic Institutions Minister Dominic LeBlanc says the probe will examine meddling by China, Russia and other foreign states and non-state actors.

LeBlanc, who is also the minister of public safety, says Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Marie-Josée Hogue will lead the probe starting Sept. 18.

For Emily Brown, it feels pretty good to be Conservative. 

"It's quite a time to be a part of this, honestly."

Buoyed by successive polls showing the federal party's message on the cost of living and housing resonating among a wider, and younger, swath of Canadians at the governing Liberals' expense, Brown will be among the thousands at the Conservative convention starting today in Quebec City.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh says the federal government needs to review the mandate of the Bank of Canada to put people first.

Singh's comment today comes as the bank holds its key interest rate steady at five per cent after raising it 10 times since March of last year.

Singh says while interest rates won't rise, they're still higher than they have been in the last 20 years.

Tamara Lich and Chris Barber are not on trial for their political beliefs against COVID-19 public health orders, but for the means the two "Freedom Convoy" organizers used in trying to end them, a Crown prosecutor argued Tuesday. 

Tim Radcliffe used his opening remarks at the start of their 16-day trial to paint a picture of Lich and Barber at the heart of the protest that gridlocked downtown Ottawa near Parliament Hill for three weeks in January and February 2022, until police moved in to clear the streets.

As Tamara Lich was led away from supporters in handcuffs on the snowy streets of Ottawa in 2022, she threw a single phrase over her shoulder.

"Hold the line," said the petite figurehead of the "Freedom Convoy" movement as the officers at each of her elbows walked her to the waiting cruiser. 

She was echoing the words shouted by of one of her supporters in a scene that was captured on video and circulated online the eve before hundreds of police moved in.

Officers spent the next two days dislodging protesters from the streets around Parliament Hill. 

Canada's spy agency is leaning on Soviet imagery to help prime the public against disinformation but experts say Moscow is more likely to use images that make readers think the messaging is coming from North American sources.

Last month, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service started posting on social media about its efforts to counteract deliberately misleading information online.

Two different federal infrastructure programs have provided funding for more than 43,000 electric vehicle chargers since 2016, but fewer than one in five of them are actually operational, new data show.

The information provided by Natural Resources Canada came as Energy Minister Jonathan Wilkinson visited Quebec City Wednesday to announce another $25 million to fund 1,500 EV chargers in Quebec.

That announcement is the latest in a constant stream of EV charging announcements in local communities across Canada, as the government aims to help build 84,500 chargers by 2029.

Eddie Head felt a deep pull toward his Saskatchewan First Nation as it was enveloped in devastation. 

He had been a community leader for decades for James Smith Cree Nation and served a term as chief. But as he learned about the horrors of a stabbing rampage over the Labour Day weekend last year, an even more difficult connection became clear — the killer was his nephew. 

"I felt obligated to come back home," Head says from the band office in the community northeast of Saskatoon.

The federal government has put a price tag on how much it would like to see Google and Facebook spend under legislation that requires the tech giants to compensate media companies for Canadian journalism.

Federal officials estimate Google would need to offer $172 million and Facebook $62 million in annual compensation to satisfy criteria they're proposing be used to give exemptions under the Online News Act, a bill passed over the summer that will force tech companies to broker deals with media companies whose work they link to or repurpose.