Sarah Ritchie, The Canadian Press

A new poll suggests nearly half of Canadians are living paycheque to paycheque as the cost of living crisis continues to squeeze household budgets, and young people are more likely to say their finances are in poor shape. 

It also suggests the Conservatives, who are hammering home a message about affordability, are gaining popularity, with 38 per cent of respondents saying they'd vote for the Tories if an election were held today.

And support for the Liberals, who focused their recent cabinet retreat on the housing crisis, is slipping. 

It’s not clear how they did it: was it a clandestine operation, carried out under the cloak of darkness? An elaborate ruse, designed to fool onlookers? Or something else?

However it happened, it’s clear those who stole a world-famous portrait of Sir Winston Churchill from the Château Laurier planned the heist meticulously.

It took more than eight months for anyone to realize the photo hanging from the wood-panelled walls of the Reading Lounge was a fake.

The Château Laurier says it's been able to narrow down a time frame of when it believes a famous portrait of Sir Winston Churchill was stolen from its walls: sometime between Christmas Day last year and Jan. 6.

The hotel appealed for help from the public yesterday after a staff member noticed the photo wasn't hung correctly over the weekend, and an inspection revealed that the portrait was a copy, not an original. 

It sounds like a caper from a movie: a thief seems to have swapped out the famous portrait of a scowling Sir Winston Churchill, photographed by Yousuf Karsh in 1941, with a signed copy.

A staff member at Ottawa's Château Laurier noticed on Friday that the frame in the Reading Lounge wasn't hanging properly and didn't look the same as the others in the collection. An inspection revealed the photo in the frame was not the original, but it is not clear how long the copy has been hanging.

On July 16, 1980, Dale Nancy Wyman left her Ottawa-area home with a suitcase full of her belongings, took a taxi to a Greyhound bus station and vanished. She didn't say where she was going and her family had no idea where to look. 

More than four decades later, a woman from Ohio contacted Wyman's siblings, who had never stopped looking for her. She had seen a video of Wyman's younger sister, Brenda Larche, asking for information to help the family find peace and closure, and realized the woman Larche was looking for was her mother. 

A parliamentary committee will begin exploring the RCMP’s use of spyware on Monday, diving deeper into an issue that's sounded alarms for privacy and civil liberties groups across the country.

The House of Commons ethics and privacy committee called for a summer study after the RCMP revealed its use of tools that covertly obtain data from devices like phones and computers. 

Canada has become the first country to ratify Sweden and Finland's request to join NATO, bringing the two countries closer to full membership.

The Prime Minister's Office says Justin Trudeau met with Finland's president, Sauli Niinistö, and Sweden's prime minister, Magdalena Andersson, at the NATO Summit last week. 

In a statement, Trudeau says Canada champions the alliance's open door policy for any European country in a position to "advance the commitments and obligations of membership."

The federal government has signed a $20-billion final settlement agreement to compensate First Nations children and families harmed by chronic underfunding of child welfare on reserve, which Indigenous Services Canada said Monday was the largest such deal in Canadian history.

“First Nations children deserve to be surrounded by love and live free of discriminatory government policy," Cindy Woodhouse, the Manitoba regional chief at the Assembly of First Nations, said in a statement Monday.