National News

The country's largest federal public service union says if a deal isn't reached with the federal government by 9 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, it will launch a strike this Wednesday.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada says some 155,000 employees are prepared to walk off the job, including 35,000 workers from the Canada Revenue Agency.

Mediated contract negotiations between the union and the Treasury Board continued over the weekend in what the union described as the government's final chance to reach a deal.

More than 35,000 federal workers who assess and approve tax returns will be in a legal strike position by April 14, just two weeks before the annual deadline for Canadians to file their taxes.

The strike vote comes after more than a year of haggling between the Canada Revenue Agency and workers represented by the Union of Taxation Employees within the Public Service Alliance of Canada.

A conciliator appointed last fall to help with the talks reported in January that the two sides were at an impasse.

Canada's Parliamentary budget officer said he is troubled by what he describes as the selective use of facts from his new financial analysis of carbon pricing. 

Yves Giroux said the report has to be put into context alongside the costs of all other climate policies, including doing nothing.

"There will be costs no matter what we do," Giroux said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

A decade before a Nova Scotia man used smuggled guns to murder 22 people in the province in 2020, police information systems had labelled him as a firearms risk.

Yet those records never found their way to the Canada Border Services Agency, and they didn't prevent the mass shooter from obtaining a Nexus card — granting him status as a low-risk traveller.

Church bells are to ring today in Humboldt at the same time as the deadly bus crash brought unimaginable tragedy to the small Saskatchewan city five years ago.

The bells at St. Augustine Church are to toll 29 times — one for each person who was on the bus carrying the Humboldt Broncos on April 6, 2018. Sixteen people died and 13 were injured after a transport truck went through a stop sign and into the path of a bus carrying the Saskatchewan junior hockey team.

A Romanian family who had hoped to build a life near Toronto with their two Canadian-born children saw their dreams end tragically in the frigid waters off Akwesasne, Que., after fleeing a deportation order.

Florin Iordache, his wife Cristina (Monalisa) Zenaida Iordache, their two-year-old daughter Evelin and one-year-old son Elyen were among eight people found dead in a river near the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory last week.

Donald Trump has reportedly pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. 

Media reports say the ex-president entered the plea today in a heavily guarded New York courtroom — the first former commander-in-chief in U.S. history ever to do so. 

Live television coverage showed a stone-faced Trump, clad in his trademark dark suit and red tie, follow his legal team into the courtroom for his arraignment. 

He was equally stoic — and uncharacteristically silent — as he left the courtroom about an hour later.

Jeremy Hansen, a colonel and CF-18 pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, has been selected to become the first Canadian to venture further into space and orbit the moon.

NASA and the Canadian Space Agency made the long-awaited announcement Monday, introducing the four astronauts who will steer the next stage of an ambitious plan to establish a long-term presence on the moon.

Saskatchewan politicians are raising concerns after a report recommended RCMP’s Depot police training academy in Regina be phased out for a new degree-style system.

A report released Thursday into the 2020 shooting rampage in Nova Scotia that left 22 people dead recommended the phaseout by 2032, and that provinces instead establish three-year policing degree programs.

The RCMP has been training recruits at the Depot for the past 140 years. It has strong ties to Regina and has been a source of heritage, employment and tourism in the province.

Kevin Garinger says it feels like the passage of time is inexplicable. The five years since a deadly bus crash changed his city, his hockey team and his life sometimes feel like a lifetime. Other times it feels like yesterday. 

"I don't know if anyone ever heals from significant loss or tragedy,” Garinger says after a moment of deep thought in his Humboldt, Sask., office. 

“You eventually just learn to live with this."