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BC WILDFIRES

Canada reaches 10 million hectares burned, 571 fires are out of control. Fires continue to increase, thanks to dry and hot weather in the north of the country.

The mobilized teams are unable to contain them.

Canadian forests are far from being taken from trouble: from east to west, they continue to be trapped by fires, and the fire season is increasing in intensity on the Pacific coast. Across the country, the figures are panicking, since 13 million hectares, an area comparable to that of Greece, have already burned since the beginning of the year. This is twice as much as the previous record of 7.3 million hectares, established in 1989. And the carbon emissions associated with these Canadian fires have also far exceeded those of previous years: according to the European climate monitoring service Copernicus, they have already reached 290 megatonnes of CO2 (when the previous record in 2014 was 138 megatonnes).

On the west coast, the fire regime is expected to increase further by the end of the month in British Columbia. In this province, where 353 households are still burning, 154 of which are out of control, one in three hectares of charred is attributable to the Donnie Creek megafire. This blaze of almost 6,000 km2 calcine the foot of the Rocky Mountains." A fire of this type can continue to burn despite rain and snow, stay awake under the ground all winter and resume in the spring, "says Professor Michael Flannigan, a forest fire specialist at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia.

CULTURE  MUSIC

Robbie Robertson, Canadian guitarist of The Band, died at the age of 80

Robertson wrote the best-known songs of his group The Band during the 1960s and 1970s: "The Weight", "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Up On Cripple Creek".

Canadian guitarist Robbie Robertson, founder of the American-Canadian folk and rock band The Band, passed away on Wednesday at the age of 80, his manager told Variety magazine. A collaborator of Bob Dylan, Robertson wrote the best-known songs of his group The Band, active from the late 1960s to the middle of the following decade: The Weight, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and Up On Cripple Creek.

According to his agent, quoted by Variety, Robertson died surrounded by his family, without knowing the precise cause of his death. He was born on July 5, 1943 in Toronto, Canada, to an Amerindian mother.
A teenager, he went on the roads of itinerant music festivals, before joining many small music groups. "I've been playing the guitar for so long that I don't remember when I started," he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1968. "I imagine I entered rock like everyone else," he said with humility.

First guitarist and composer then founded, in the 1960s, a group, which he eventually baptized The Band, with Levon Helm on vocals and drums, Garth Hudson on keyboards and saxophone, Richard Manuel on piano, drums and vocals and Rick Danko on bass.

From Woodstock to the cinema

Hudson is the last survivor of the group, who collaborated strongly with Dylan in particular on the album Blonde on Blonde. A typical folk and rock group in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, The Band leaves anthology pieces such as The Weight, a mixture of folk, country and gospel, evoking the great wild spaces and the south of the country. The group was also part of the mythical Woodstock festival in 1969 and produced the albums Music from Big Pink, The Band and Cahoots.

The Band's farewell concert in San Francisco in 1976 was immortalized two years later on screen by a documentary by filmmaker Martin Scorsese, The Last Waltz, a film that paved the way for feature films on rock. Robertson then became a close friend of Martin Scorsese, who hired him as a musician in his films Casino and Gangs of New York.

The guitarist no longer went on tour, but he then released several solo albums and cultivated a character appreciated by the rock and folk public and the small milieu of American poetry. "I was thinking of a few words that led me to others," he told Rolling Stone about his masterpiece The Weight.

In Canada, every cigarette will now have an anti-smoking warning on the filter

The regulation, which came into force on Tuesday, is intended to reduce tobacco consumption, which kills about 48,000 people per year in the country, according to the authorities.

"Poison in every puff", "Cigarette causes cancer"... Cigarettes and small cigars sold in Canada will soon carry a printed warning on each unit, a world first.

The new regulations, announced in May, came into force on Tuesday^, August 1.Manufacturers now have until July 2024 to bring their packaging of King Size cigarettes into conformity and until April 2025 for other cigarettes and small cigars.

Located at the base of the cigarette, at the filter level, these warnings "will be virtually inevitable and will be a striking reminder of the health consequences of smoking," Carolyn Bennett, then Minister of Addictions, said in May.

The objective is to reduce tobacco consumption, which causes about 48,000 deaths per year in the country, according to the authorities. The Canadian government says it has noticed that some young people, particularly prone to tobacco addiction, start smoking after receiving a single cigarette rather than a package with health warnings.

Canada already a forerunner in tobacco control

In 2000, Canada was the first country to order the affixing of pictorial warnings on packages, including macabre representations of sick hearts and lungs, in order to raise awareness of the health risks associated with smoking.

Since then, smoking has been declining, but Ottawa wants to go further and wants to reduce the number of smokers in the country to 5% of the population, or about two million people, by 2035, compared to about 13% currently.

In December 2022, New Zealand introduced an almost total and gradual ban on tobacco by introducing an annual increase in the legal age for smoking.

According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report published on Monday, 5.6 billion people - or 71% of the world's population - are now protected by at least one tobacco control measure, five times more than in 2007. But only four countries - Brazil, Turkey, Mauritius and the Netherlands - have adopted all the anti-smoking measures recommended by the WHO. In fifteen years, the global smoking rate has increased from 22.8% in 2007 to 17% in 2021.

Meta officially starts blocking Canadian media on Facebook and Instagram

A recent law in Canada requires digital giants to enter into fair trade agreements with the media for the distribution of their content. On Tuesday, content shared by Radio-Canada on one of its Facebook pages was blocked a few minutes after its publication.

Meta began on Tuesday^, August 1 to block Canadians' access to media content on Facebook and Instagram in response to a new law requiring digital giants to pay publishers.

The links and content displayed by Canadian but also foreign media "will no longer be visible to the population in Canada," said Meta, stressing that the measure must be fully implemented in the "coming weeks".

On social media, several Canadians shared screenshots on Tuesday showing inaccessible media accounts. Content shared by Radio-Canada on one of its Facebook pages was blocked a few minutes after its publication, said the public broadcaster.

Adopted in June, the C-18 Online Information Act is based on a measure introduced in Australia in 2021 and aims to support the struggling Canadian media sector. It requires digital giants to enter into fair trade agreements with local media for content broadcast on their platforms, otherwise they will have to resort to binding arbitration.

"Responsible" decision

According to a parliamentary report published in October 2022, the legislation could allow Canadian newspapers to receive about 330 million Canadian dollars (226 million euros) per year.

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram maintains that the law "is based on the erroneous idea that Meta unfairly benefits from news content shared on its platforms, when it is quite the opposite".

According to this American giant, the media voluntarily use Facebook and Instagram to "increase their readership and increase their profits", knowing that "it is not news that pushes people to use our platforms".

The new Minister of Heritage, Pascale St-Onge, described this decision as "irresponsible", noting that 80% of all online advertising revenues in Canada go to Meta and Google. "A free and independent press is fundamental to our democracy," added the Minister, stressing that other countries are considering imposing similar laws "to meet the same challenges".

Google also plans to adopt such a measure when the law "takes effect", i.e. within a few months, when several countries are carefully observing the tugging between Ottawa and the Silicon Valley giants.

Montreal hit hard by the destructive consumption of fentanyl

Marked by an explosion in the number of overdoses due to this opioid, the city has been sinking, since the Covid-19 pandemic, into a public health crisis.

"In twenty-five years of heroin, I have never had a single overdose. In three months of fentanyl, I have already done three.Leaning on the lid of a garbage can in downtown Montreal, Eric Talon takes a box out of his pocket. Inside, a crumbly blue pebble, the most common form of fentanyl sold on Canadian streets.

Like hundreds of other Montreal consumers, the fifty-year-old with a waxy complexion has become accustomed to this synthetic drug, and its danger. "Every day, someone I know dies," mutters, looking lost, the one whose companion died of an overdose, in the spring. Fentanyl, mixed with other narcotics, has been responsible for fourteen deaths per month in Montreal since January 1. The number of non-fatal overdoses recorded in recent weeks has doubled compared to 2022.

Forty to fifty times more powerful than heroin, opioid is wreaking havoc in North America, from Vancouver, on the Canadian Pacific coast, to Philadelphia, on the East Coast of the United States. Montreal, where cocaine was still recently in a dominant position because of its local quality, is the last of the major Canadian metropolises to see fentanyl consumption skyrocket. The first waves of overdoses were observed in 2014, in the working-class district of Hochelaga.

Canada: four people, including two children, missing in floods in Nova Scotia

The province of Eastern Canada received some 250 millimeters of rain in less than twenty-four hours, the equivalent of three months of precipitation.

Streets and houses flooded, even displaced by the waves, roads cut off... The torrential rains that have hit Nova Scotia, Canada, since the evening of Friday, July 21, have caused considerable damage. Four people, including two children, were missing on Saturday in this eastern Canadian province, the police announced.

The two children were traveling in a vehicle that was submerged and from which three other occupants managed to escape, according to a spokesperson for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Searches were underway to find them.

Two other people are missing in similar circumstances, the spokesperson added. Two of the passengers of this second vehicle were saved. Nova Scotia had already been hit hard, at the end of May, by violent fires that also ravaged the forests of several other Canadian provinces.

The Prime Minister of the province, Tim Houston, stressed at a press briefing that Nova Scotia had received some 250 millimeters of rain in less than twenty-four hours, the equivalent of three months of precipitation. M. Houston declared a state of emergency in several parts of the province and called on residents not to join the search to find the missing, because "conditions remain dangerous". He estimated that it would take several days for the water to withdraw.

Streets turned into torrents

Images from television and social networks showed many abandoned cars, roads, avenues transformed into torrents and sometimes real rivers.
Residents of the Windsor area, about sixty kilometers northwest of Halifax, the provincial capital, received an evacuation order on the night of Friday to Saturday because of the risk of breaking the dam. Valves of the structure could be opened on Saturday morning to reduce pressure. The situation being "under control", according to the mayor of Windsor, Abraham Zebian, the evacuation order was cancelled.

In a mid-afternoon update, Environment Canada's weather services announced that significant rains were still expected until the end of the day in the eastern province, especially in the Cape Breton region.

Environment Canada notes that rain "tropical in nature has had significant repercussions in parts of the province" and that precipitation "at 25 millimeters per hour has been reported in some areas affected by torrential rains".

The inhabitants of the province were invited to stay at home, many roads being impassable. Some 70,000 customers of the electricity supplier Nova Scotia Power were without power in the early morning of Saturday, but their number had fallen to 6,000 in the afternoon.
The strike in Western Canada ports declared illegal and postponed

The salary agreement reached last week after thirteen days of work stoppage having been rejected by the Vancouver dockers, the strike was scheduled to resume on Wednesday, but it was finally postponed to Saturday.

The strike in Western Canada ports declared illegal and postponed

The salary agreement reached last week after thirteen days of work stoppage having been rejected by the Vancouver dockers, the strike was scheduled to resume on Wednesday, but it was finally postponed to Saturday.

The main union representing dockworkers in Western Canada said on Wednesday, July 19, that it had postponed the strike, considered illegal in the absence of notice, and planned a new divehock on Saturday in ports critical to trade and the economy.

After thirteen days of strike at the beginning of the month, workers at the port of Vancouver had stopped their social movement last week, before resuming it on Tuesday, finally rejecting the wage agreement found. On Wednesday, the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CCRI) considered that "seventy-two hours' notice was required" before the International Union of Longshoremen and Storekeepers of Canada (ILWUC) could resume its action.

The ILWUC, which represents more than 7,000 workers in the thirty ports of Western Canada, then said that it would appeal the decision, but that in the meantime, it would "respect it and return notice" of strike."Government interference, like the CCRI's decision, will only lengthen the strike," said the union, saying, however, "regret the economic consequences of this labour dispute".

The day before, the union's negotiators had rejected the agreement reached after the first thirteen days of the strike, doubting that it could protect "the jobs of today or tomorrow". Subcontracting, port automation and the cost of living are the main reasons for this social conflict.

"My patience has reached its limits"

On the employers' side, the British Columbia Maritime Employers Association (BCMEA) described the resumption of the strike by ILWUC as "useless and thoughtless". The strike "deposed immense damage to Canada's commercial reputation and disrupted the transport of Canadian goods worth at least $10 billion," the BCMEA said in a statement, citing an estimate from the Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce. She called on the federal government to "actively participate in the search for a solution to reopen our ports".

"My patience has reached its limits," said Federal Transport Minister Omar Alghabra at a press conference on Wednesday. Contacted by Agence France-Presse (AFP), his ministry did not specify its intentions, stressing that it was examining "all options".Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also announced on Wednesday the convening of the incident response group, an emergency committee usually mobilized to respond to major crises.

According to Gilles LeVasseur, professor of law and management at the University of Ottawa, the Canadian government still has recourse to end the strike. "He could try to pass a special bill by the House of Commons to impose a return to work and put in place a negotiation mechanism," he detailed to AFP.

In this case, dockers would be forced to work at the same time as they negotiate with the employer, and in the event of disagreement an agreement could be imposed by an external mediator. The resumption of the strike will have strong repercussions on the North American market, but also global due to the important trade with Asia and the United States.