National News

Canada's largest federal public-service union has left the bargaining table but says it is standing by to resume negotiations when the federal government comes back with a new offer. 

Federal workers were hitting the picket lines across the country on Wednesday after Canada's largest federal public-service union and the government failed to reach a deal by a Tuesday evening deadline.

On Wednesday morning, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said negotiations had paused. 

Nine people were detained and one was missing after trying to walk across the Canada-United States border in the early hours of Tuesday morning, a Minnesota sheriff says.

The group made their illicit crossing in woods near Sprague in southeastern Manitoba and called 911 at approximately 4 a.m. as they were suffering from hypothermia, Steve Gust, the sheriff of Roseau County, said Tuesday. 

"Some were transferred to hospital but the majority of them were pretty good," Gust said. "They were wet and had frozen clothing."

A new report says hundreds of thousands of Canadians may have missed out on government money intended to help with the rising cost of living because the housing and dental benefits rolled out last year have had "atrocious" take-up. 

The analysis by David Macdonald, senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, assesses both benefits, as well as how much the federal government has actually spent on the measures. 

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.