National News

Social Development Minister Karina Gould says Service Canada has "virtually eliminated" the massive backlog of passport applications that were delayed this year because of a surge in demand.

Most new passport applications were being processed on time by October, but thousands of people who applied before then still faced excessive delays.

Gould says 98 per cent of those backlogged applications have now been processed.

Canadians across the country and people around the world kicked off the first day of Lunar New Year celebrations Sunday and welcomed the arrival of the Year of the Rabbit.

Here are five things to know about the annual tradition widely celebrated in Asian countries and expatriate communities around the world::

What is the Lunar New Year?

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.

Premier Danielle Smith has struck a committee to investigate how the Alberta government responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, and has appointed former Reform Party leader Preston Manning to chair it.

Smith said Thursday that Manning and the panel are to take feedback virtually from experts and the public, then issue a final report and recommendations by Nov. 15.

Manning is to pick the other panel members subject to approval by Smith.

The budget is $2 million, and Manning is to be paid $253,000.

Quebec's Court of Appeal has ruled that a Montreal hospital can permanently remove a breathing tube from a child who has been in a coma since he fell into the family pool in June.

In the decision dated Tuesday, the province's high court affirmed a November Superior Court ruling that permitted the Sainte-Justine hospital to go ahead with the procedure despite the parents' objections. The boy's parents appealed the Superior Court ruling.

A newborn baby is among three people who died in a highway crash near Castlegar in southeast B.C. on Monday.

RCMP Staff Sgt. Kris Clark says in a news release that police were called to a collision involving a car and a pickup truck on Highway 3a along the Kootenay River just before 4 p.m.

Clark says a 26-year-old man, a 25-year-old woman and an eight-day-old infant were killed in the passenger vehicle, while a two-year-old child survived and is expected to recover from their injuries.

The only person in the pickup was treated for minor injuries at the scene.

Searches for unmarked graves at the site of a former northern Ontario residential school have uncovered 171 “plausible burials," the Wauzhushk Onigum Nation said Tuesday, with other sites still to be investigated. 

Most of them were unmarked, except for five with grave markers, the First Nation said in a news release. 

Federal and provincial ministers were expected to meet with the First Nation Tuesday for discussions, including about resources to continue the investigation. 

Two sisters who have spent nearly 30 years in prison for what they say are wrongful murder convictions hugged and smudged before walking into a courthouse for a bail hearing Tuesday.

Odelia and Nerissa Quewezance were convicted in 1994 of second-degree murder in the death of 70-year-old farmer Anthony Joseph Dolff, near Kamsack, Sask.

After a decade of work tracing DNA back multiple generations, the remains of a Canadian soldier have been identified more than 100 years after he died in France. 

The remains of Cpl. Percy Howarth, a soldier in the First World War, were discovered during a munitions clearing process in Vendin-le-Vieil, France, in 2011, but it would take 10 years of experts digging through his family tree to find a living relative from his maternal line before he could be identified.

Police in India say two men are facing charges in the deaths of a family who froze a year ago while trying to cross from Manitoba into the United States.

Deputy Commissioner Chaitanya Mandlik of the Ahmedabad crime branch in the state of Gujarat says the two men were arrested Sunday and other suspects are also wanted in Canada and the U.S.

He says the two men are accused of acting as immigration agents, supplying the family with paperwork and assisting them in getting to the U.S.