National News

Premier Danielle Smith’s wood-panelled third-floor legislature office is bereft of bric-a-brac. 

There are no pictures, mementoes or books — only a small stack of Alberta sovereignty act bills perched on her desk. 

The décor is less by design and more by default.

“If I was spending a lot of time in the office, I wouldn’t be doing my job. I’ve got to meet a lot of people offsite and do a lot of work out there,” Smith said in a year-end interview. 

She laughed when recalling her attempts at personal touches.

Utility crews in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick are still working to restore electricity to thousands of customers who have been in the dark for days after last week's fierce winter storms knocked out their power.

As of Tuesday morning, power is still out for nearly 33,000 Hydro-Québec customers and more than 13,000 Hydro One customers.

New Brunswick Power has restored electricity to a majority of customers who were impacted by the storm, which it has said was one of the largest provincewide outage events of the last 25 years.

Canadian Blood Services says it's in need of blood and plasma donors after the winter storm disrupted donations over the holidays. 

Severe wind, snowfall and icy conditions that hit many parts of the country meant that about 10 per cent of expected blood and plasma donations did not happen. 

There's a critical need for platelets for patients undergoing cancer treatments and O-negative blood for newborns and emergencies. 

Canadian Blood Services says it has lost thousands of regular donors since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Four people died and dozens of others were injured when the bus they were travelling on rolled over on an icy highway in the British Columbia Interior on Christmas Eve, provincial RCMP said Sunday.

The Mounties said they received multiple calls on Saturday shortly after 6 p.m. regarding the crash on the Highway 97C Okanagan Connector east of Merritt near the Loon Lake exit.

The force confirmed on Sunday afternoon that four people were found dead at the scene, but provided no details about the victims' ages or identities.

A highway in the British Columbia Interior has reopened after a passenger bus crash sent more than 50 people to hospital.

Few details have been released about the Saturday evening incident, but Interior Health tweeted that 53 people are being treated at three hospitals in Kelowna, Penticton and Merritt.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is asking Canadians to remind themselves how fortunate they are "to live in a country of peace."

Trudeau says in his annual Christmas address that it's the season when life slows down and "Christmas movies, including Die Hard, are on repeat."

But he says that 2022 was a challenging year and acknowledges that for some, the holidays won't be easy.

This holiday season marks a return to more normalcy for millions of Canadians who no longer have to navigate holiday travel and family gatherings under COVID-19 health restrictions. 

Thousands of Canadians woke up in the dark on Christmas Day as power outages caused by ferocious winter conditions persisted across Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.

A state of emergency continued in southern Ontario's Niagara Region as crews grappled with impassable roads and wildly blowing snow.

Phil Lambert said his community of Port Colborne, Ont., was a sea of abandoned cars Sunday. He and his daughter, Gracyn Burse, said they were heading into their second straight day without power, and they didn't anticipate it being restored until Monday.

Hundreds of Canadians are stranded in Cancún, Mexico and don't know how they'll get home after their Sunwing flights were cancelled last week.

Passengers said they've been shuffled from hotel to hotel after sleeping on floors at the airport and in lobbies, saying there's no end in sight to their ordeal.

There is a complex, counterintuitive relationship between rising global temperatures and the likelihood of increasingly intense snowstorms across Canada.

Winters are becoming on average milder and warmer than they used to be, but there has also been a noted rise across the country in extreme weather events, such as intense snowstorms, said John Clague, a professor of geosciences at Simon Fraser University, in Burnaby, B.C. 

Weather warnings remain in place across the country as major storms continue to dump snow and freezing rain on Quebec, Ontario and B.C., and batter the Atlantic provinces with heavy rain and powerful winds.

Hundreds of thousands of customers have been left without power in the final hours before Christmas, with hydro crews working around the clock to get the lights back on.

A Hydro-Quebec spokesman said about 1,000 workers were repairing power lines to restore electricity to approximately 355,256 customers as of early Saturday morning.