As Canada boosts immigration, skills mismatch ‘discouraging’ newcomers

Story by Saba Aziz • NOV 16,2022

Immigrants make up nearly a quarter all people in Canada, and the majority are coming from India, according to the latest 2021 census data.© Getty Images

Canada announces new immigration target of 500K per year by 2025

When Tanya Raizada immigrated to Canada as a permanent resident this summer, she was hoping that her resume with over a decade of work experience would be good enough to help land her a job in her field.

Before moving to Toronto in June, the 34-year-old Indian professional quit her job as a senior human resources manager in Mumbai, in hopes of taking her career to the next level and gaining international exposure.

Read More
Canadians worried about housing as Ottawa raises immigration targets: poll

Over a span of three and half months, Raizada applied for 600 positions, out of which she got 20 interview calls, but wasn’t given a single job offer.

She was living alone with no family around for support, while the rent and daily expenses were eating up her savings.

It was a “heartbreaking” and discouraging experience, she said, that made Raizada decide to move back to India in September.

“I was personally feeling like a failure there,” Raizada told Global News.

“It demotivated a professional like me to … have second thoughts about my experience and to actually understand whether I was capable enough or whether I was competent enough …. that anybody would hire me.”

Immigrants make up nearly a quarter of all people in Canada, and the majority are coming from India, according to the latest 2021 census data.

But as the federal government plans to boost immigration to fill critical labour gaps and offset Canada’s aging workforce, experts point to an underlying issue of skills mismatch that could dissuade newcomers.

“The mismatch that's happening is when immigrants come here, they're traditionally underemployed and so we end up devaluing the same skills that we appreciated and considered,” said Nita Chhinzer, a human resources management expert at the University of Guelph.

Read more:
Canada lifts work limit for international students to help with labour shortages

The problem, according to Chhinzer, arises because employers have “biases” that discount foreign education and international work experience and make assumptions about language skills.

“I think this completely discourages immigrants from feeling that their skills are valued and we see this consistently when they're applying for jobs,” she said.

Ottawa pressured to act against online hate after hiring immigration consultant with antisemitic tweets

Sherri Rabinovitch, an HR expert in Montreal, said she has also noticed a similar trend where employers are not prepared to pay immigrants as they would someone with local experience.

She says it’s not reasonable to “devalue” candidates because they don’t have “Canadian experience.”

“Experience is experience,” Rabinovitch said.

“It's because we know where they're coming from that we tend to have these biases, unfortunately.”

Immigration accounts for 90 per cent of Canada’s labour force growth and approximately 75 per cent of population growth, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

On Nov. 1, the federal government announced its 2023-25 immigration plan, with the target of welcoming 1.45 million new immigrants over the next three years.

Out of these, 848,595 people will come under different economic streams for skilled workers to help industries struggling with acute labour shortages, according to the government.

Read more:
Ottawa raises immigration targets with new goal of 500K per year by 2025

The aim is to tap into talent required in key sectors, such as health, skilled trades, manufacturing and technology, IRCC said in its announcement.

The move has been widely welcomed by industry experts who say this will benefit the economy, but a more strategic and skills-based approach is needed to better integrate newcomers into the Canadian job market.

“We need to have more targeted approaches based on our needs across provinces and across trades to get more of these folks into Canada,” said Sean Strickland, executive director of Canada’s Building Trades Union (CBTU).

Strickland said the construction sector, which comprises 20 per cent new immigrants, is working with the government and unions to find out exactly which trades are needed and where to address the “misalignment.”

Over the past six months, the manufacturing sector employed an average of 1.76 million workers, out of which nearly one-third were immigrants, according to Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters (CME).

Dennis Darby, president and CEO of CME, said there are about 80,000 vacancies in the manufacturing sector, mostly in Ontario and Quebec, and an increased influx of immigrants will be crucial in filling those jobs.

The sector is looking for workers over a wide range of skills, including general labour, factory work, engineering, maintenance, repair, automation and robotics, he said.

“We need to make sure that the federal government and the provincial governments work together to make sure that we're bringing in the people that we need,” Darby said.

Canada’s health-care system is in crisis with staffing shortages, long emergency room wait times and surgical backlogs.

The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) said the recruitment of internationally educated health professionals can “play an important role in addressing the workforce challenges” but Canada cannot solely rely on foreign nurses and doctors.

Read more:
Immigration could be needed relief for businesses stuck in labour shortage, experts say

A comprehensive approach to mitigating health worker shortages should also include retaining the existing workforce and increasing the capacity to train new health workers within Canada, said CMA president Dr. Alika Lafontaine.

“We cannot merely recruit away other countries’ health workforces,” he told Global News.

Video: International students allowed to work more hours to help with labour shortage

As for the technology sector, 34 per cent of people working in scientific research and development services across Canada are foreign-born, according to the IRCC.

Benjamin Bergen, president of the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI), said besides the classic IT jobs of developers, designers and coders, there are also some real gaps in senior leadership and management positions in Canada.

Immigration programs allow a niche focus on specific foreign individuals that can help these companies rise, he told Global News.

“Often, you actually need to bring in highly skilled workers who have that unique skill set to be, let's say, a CFO or a CTO, from another jurisdiction,” he said.

Video: The immigration experience in Canada

Currently unemployed and living in Chandigarh, India, Raizada is continuing to apply for jobs in Canada so she can come back next year and settle in the country.

She wants to see more opportunities for immigrants in senior-level positions and free training programs.

Despite being discouraged by her last visit, Raizada told Global News she is hopeful.

“I still haven't given up and I really want to try out and stay there and I'm hoping that it will be good.”

-- with files from The Canadian Press

Canadians divided on Ottawa's plan to admit more immigrants: poll

OTTAWA — A new poll suggests the vast majority of Canadians are worried about how the federal Liberal government's plan to dramatically increase immigration levels over the next few years will affect housing and government services.


Canadians divided on Ottawa's plan to admit more immigrants: poll© Provided by The Canadian Press

The poll, conducted by Leger and the Association of Canadian Studies, also found many respondents hesitant about the use of the notwithstanding clause, which lets legislatures override parts of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms for five years.

Based on an online survey of 1,537 Canadians polled between Nov. 11 and 13, the results come about two weeks after Ottawa unveiled plans to admit 500,000 immigrants per year starting in 2025 to address a critical labour shortage across the country.

The government and industry have described the new targets, which represent a significant increase over the 405,000 immigrants admitted last year, as critical for filling about a million job vacancies across the country and to offset Canada's aging workforce.

Yet 75 per cent of poll respondents agreed that they were very or somewhat concerned that the plan would result in excessive demand for housing as well as health and social services.

That is despite Immigration Minister Sean Fraser having suggested that the new workers could actually enable the construction of more homes by addressing a shortage of tradespeople, along with an increase in federal support and settlement services.

Leger executive vice president Christian Bourque suggested that the poll results reflect the pressures many Canadians are feeling because of a lack of affordable housing and inflation rates driving up prices.

"There's a heightened sense of concern over stretching our tax dollar and stretching our dollar," he said.

"In good, positive economic times before the pandemic hit, these numbers might have been different. But now I think there's a growing concern of how far and how much we can afford."

The government might need to do a better job explaining the benefits of immigration to average Canadians, Bourque suggested.

Opinions were more divided over the number of immigrants the government plans to admit, with 49 per cent saying it was too many versus 31 per cent who felt it was the right number. Five per cent said it was not enough, while the rest didn’t know.

While opinions were largely the same across different parts of the country, respondents who identified as Conservative, Bloc Quebecois and People’s Party of Canada supporters were more likely to say the target was too high.

"I was not surprised to see a left-right, cleavage on this issue, it's the same in the United States and the same in Europe," Bourque said. "Slowly but surely, the issue of immigration levels is becoming political."

The poll, whose results cannot be assigned a margin of error because internet-based polls are not considered random samples, also asked Canadians about their views on the notwithstanding clause.

The question followed the Ontario government's decision to include the notwithstanding clause in legislation that imposed a new contract on 55,000 education workers. The province later rescinded the law, which had effectively banned workers from striking.

It found that 48 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that it was a bad idea for Ottawa or the provinces to shield some of their laws from the Charter, while 19 per cent said it was a good idea. The remaining 33 per cent did not know.

While Quebec has a long history of debate over the notwithstanding clause, and recent events in Ontario have awoken some people to it as well, Bourque said that many Canadians remain unaware of its existence.

"It basically says this is not really a hot button, politically," he said. "Even with the recent events in Ontario, they don't really seem to care. Or not that they don't care, but it's something that's a bit beyond what their primary concerns are in national politics."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 16, 2022.

Lee Berthiaume, The Canadian Press

Newfoundland's fishing towns were built to survive, but Fiona changed the game

ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — For generations, Cory Munden's family has been building and living on the same piece of oceanside land in the southwestern Newfoundland town of Port aux Basques.


Newfoundland's fishing towns were built to survive, but Fiona changed the game© Provided by The Canadian Press

The town is a former fishing village, and like many of the houses destroyed by post-tropical storm Fiona on the morning of Sept. 24, the Munden family home was built by fishers. The land on which it stood was bought by Munden's fisherman grandfather because it was close to where he worked, and it was protected by an offshore island.

For 70 years, the houses on that land withstood the worst weather Newfoundland had to offer. Then Fiona hit.

Munden is now among those who worry storms like Fiona — forecast to become more frequent as the climate changes — will change the face of Newfoundland for good, wiping away its historic, weather-hardened fishing communities one by one.

"All of the traditional living-near-the-ocean spots, those are all old properties that dated back since the dawn of time, right?" Munden said in a recent interview. "That's where all the fishermen settled."

The island of Newfoundland is rocky, rough and unforgiving. Most of its communities are former fishing villages, tucked away into coves, bights and bays along the coastline.

"They settled in these secluded places because they were aware of the power of the ocean," said Andrea O'Brien, the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador's provincial registrar. "They built their homes far enough back from the high tide and from any kind of storm surges so their homes will be protected."

Fiona upended centuries of that wisdom in a single morning, she said. Looking to the future, O'Brien said she's particularly concerned about the fishing stages that often dot the waterside in these communities. A fishing stage is a shed-like building often sitting atop a platform that reaches out over the water, held up by wooden posts. Fishermen would unload their catches there, splitting their fish on sturdy wooden tables.

Colourful fishing sheds have come to define the province's historic allure; they're easy to spot in tourism ads. O'Brien said she doesn't know how they'll ever withstand storms like Fiona.

"I think with those buildings gone, it really does change the face of how this place has been for centuries," she said, adding that she's not sure what, if anything, could be done about it.


Munden points to the dormant fishing community of Petites, which is about 40 kilometres east of Port aux Basques along Newfoundland's remote southern shore.

Petites was resettled by the provincial government nearly two decades ago. Before then — and before the 1992 cod moratorium that put an end to many of these communities' local economies — the town had been home to fishers since the mid-1800s.

Fiona destroyed buildings and stages in Petites that had withstood over 100 years of ferocious Newfoundland storms, Munden said. "That was a sheltered harbour," he said. "And this Fiona storm came in and levelled it."

Port aux Basques was settled year-round in the 1700s, and it was a thriving fishing town until the 1992 moratorium. The community is now home to about 3,500 people, down from about 4,000 people five years ago. Before Fiona plunged it into the headlines, it was perhaps best known as the place to catch the ferry to Nova Scotia.

A narrow island sits just offshore from the town's most densely populated area. Until Fiona hit, the island shielded those homes from the sea for centuries.

Munden said he worries for those whose homes are still standing but could be hit by the next big storm. Like many whose homes were destroyed by storm surge, his family was denied any insurance coverage for their loss. Storm surge coverage isn't an option with most insurers.

"I mean, what are we going to do, we're going to move every property that's on coastal water? That's impossible," he said. "People need protection from these type of events. We can't leave them high and dry like this."

Amanda Dean, the Insurance Bureau of Canada's Atlantic vice-president, says insurance providers want to partner with the federal government on a program to cover those whose homes are now in harm's way as the climate changes.

That should happen alongside discussions about where people should build in the future, Dean said in an interview.

"Just because we've been building in a certain way for several hundreds of years doesn't mean that that's necessarily the way we should be building going forward," she said. "It's an awfully tough conversation to have."

Meanwhile, the Newfoundland and Labrador government announced plans Tuesday night to help those on the southwest coast denied by their insurance companies. The aid includes compensation for the land on which destroyed houses stood, or help finding a new lot to rebuild on.

Munden said some are simply moving away.

"It's changed the community, it's changed the landscape, and it's going to change the dynamics," he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 17, 2022.

Sarah Smellie, The Canadian Press

Climate Changed: Limited transportation infrastructure facing threats in the North

YELLOWKNIFE — Andrew Arreak says travelling on the ice — the main highway in Canada's Arctic — provides access to the land and food, connects communities and is part of Inuit identity.


Climate Changed: Limited transportation infrastructure facing threats in the North

© Provided by The Canadian Press

But climate change is making ice travel less predictable.

"I'm noticing that the ice is forming a little later each year and breaking off a little earlier each year," said Arreak of Pond Inlet, Nvt.

Arreak is one of many Indigenous northerners finding ways to adapt. He works with SmartICE, an organization that integrates Inuit traditional knowledge with modern technology to better inform decisions on ice travel in several northern communities.

When he's on the ice, he tows a "smart qamutiik," an Inuit sled with a sensor measuring ice thickness. A "smart buoy"inserted into the ice measures the temperatures of air, snow, ice and water.

SmartICE has also begun looking at satellite imagery to produce ice hazard maps as part of a pilot project started last winter in the Nunavut communities of Pond Inlet and Gjoa Haven and in Nain, the northernmost permanent settlement in Newfoundland and Labrador.

"People here in the community have been really excited about it and have been asking when the next map will be available," Arreak said.

Across the North, already underdeveloped transportation networks needed for access to resources, medical care and travel face increasing threats due toclimate warming happening nearly three times faster than the global average.

Many northern communities and mining operations rely on winter roads for annual supplies of fuel, construction materials and other goods too expensive to transport by air. Climate change is reducing the amount of time these roads can remain open.

A report published by the Canadian Climate Change Institute in June says more than half of northern winter roads could become unstable in the next 30 years. It predicts the cost of road damage from climate change could exceed $70 million annually in Yukon and $50 million in the Northwest Territories if adaptation measures aren’t taken.

Northern Canada has long had a significant infrastructure gap compared tothe southern part of the country.Permafrost degradation, landslides, flooding and wildfires, among other climate change impacts, are only exacerbating the problem.

"Infrastructure across the North has been severely underfunded for decades," said Dylan Clark, lead author of the report. "It's that kind of gap that is making, in part, communities across Northern Canada much more vulnerable."

The report examines adaptation measures, includingreinforcing the base layers of roads and runways, cooling embankments, excavating permafrost, relocating roads and building gravel rather than paved runways.

Related video: WION Climate Tracker | Climate change threatens Canada's forests

Duration 4:33

View on Watch

Clark said there are huge cost savings associated with climate mitigation and adaptation measures.

"More resources and funding are clearly needed here. We are talking about a large investment up front, but it's actually the more cost-effective approach here than doing nothing."

The Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road is one of the world's longest heavy-haul ice roads, stretching roughly 400 kilometres and servicing three N.W.T. diamond mines.

"If there was no winter road, there would be no diamond mines," said Barry Henkel, director of the winter road.

The ice must be at least 73 centimetres thick before it can open and 99 centimetres for full load capacity.

A 2021 study from the American Meteorological Society says global warming of 2 C could tip the road into needing costly adaptation measures. Thatcould meanreplacing river crossings with structural bridges, building all-weather road segments in problem areas, relocating over-ice segments to land, improved ice monitoring and spraying ice to increase thickness.

Climate change can affect all-season roads, too, with serious consequences for northern communities with only one road in and out.

Whitehorse Mayor Laura Cabbott said a heavy snowpack led to significant landslides this year, which caused road closures. The city had to increase its snow removal budget by $450,000.

"We need to do our effort in reducing greenhouse gas emissions but also being able to adapt and be resilient," she said.

Fabrice Calmels, research chair in permafrost and geoscience at Yukon University, has been involved with several projects monitoring sections of the Alaska and Dempster Highways vulnerable to climate change. Thermosiphons, which are gas-filled tubes that allow heat to escape the ground and keep permafrost cold, were installed on a section of the Alaska Highway outside Beaver Creek.

"It's all kinds of issues, all kinds of what we call geohazards that are impacting the highway, and there is no single solution," he said.

Permafrost thaw and extreme weather are also warping and cracking runways. Many northern communities rely heavily on air travel and in some cases it is the only year-round mode of transportation.

The N.W.T. and federal governments are spending $22 million to protect Inuvik's airport from climate change and reduce ground settlements from permafrost thaw. That includes widening the runway and taxi embankments, repairing the surface and improving drainage.

A new $300 million airport opened in Iqaluit in August 2017, with upgrades including extensive repairs due to permafrost thaw.

Nunavut is also developing proposals to fix severe cracking on the runway at Rankin Inlet's airport, said assistant deputy transportation minister John Hawkins.

A spokesperson for Transport Canada said the department recognizes the critical role northern transportation corridors play in "Canada's economic lifeline" and is working to improve understanding of the risks posed by climate change.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 17, 2022.

___

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

Emily Blake, The Canadian Press

Biodiversity needs same protection as climate, say scientists, activists at COP27

Story by Sarah Lawrynuik • Thursday, Nov 17,2022

Civil society groups, Indigenous activists and scientists are standing together at the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and demanding firm action be taken next month at the UN Biodiversity Conference that will be hosted in Montreal.

The conference aims to get governments to agree on a framework to "bring about a transformation in society's relationship with biodiversity," which is in rapid decline worldwide due to climate change and other factors.

The moment is seen as critical for biodiversity loss, as the world warms to a level that could soon trigger tipping points in the natural world that could have cascading and catastrophic effects not yet fully understood, but which experts say would be, in all likelihood, irreversible.

"The climate and biodiversity crises are deeply interconnected and must be addressed simultaneously," said Lucy Almond, chair of the Nature 4 Climate Coalition, a united group of 20 organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund and World Resources Institute, dedicated to elevating nature as a climate solution.

"In three weeks' time, ministers will arrive in Montreal for the Convention on Biological Diversity, COP15, with the aim of giving biodiversity and ecosystems the same international protection as climate," Almond said.

She called it a once-in-a-decade opportunity to create an international agreement that will actually set out to tackle both crises together.

The key architects of the 2015 Paris Agreement — Christiana Figueres, Laurence Tubiana, Laurent Fabius and Manuel Pulgar-Vidal — have added their voices to the calls for the Montreal-based conference to create a sister agreement to that document to address biodiversity losses.

Currently, the planet is seen to be on the brink of the sixth mass extinction event, the first one triggered by humans, with approximately one million species already at risk of extinction.

Tipping past the point of being saved

Biodiversity loss is happening because of habitat destruction, pollution, over-exploitation and other reasons — and is forecast to accelerate because of the destabilizing effects climate change is having on planetary systems.

Research published this year in the journal Science found that if the planet exceeds 1.5 C of warming above pre-industrial levels, that could begin triggering irreversible effects around the planet, called tipping points.

As the name suggestions, a tipping point isn't a gradual change as the temperature increases, like a slowly melting glacier. Rather, the researchers forecast that at certain thresholds, the Greenland ice sheet is likely to collapse, coral reefs will rapidly die off, and so on. Scientists have identified 16 of these systems that are responsible for maintaining the planet's natural equilibrium, but those systems are destabilizing as the planet warms.

"The risk of tipping points — the science has highlighted that for a long time — but sometimes in COP negotiations, people don't talk much about the risks," said Carlos Nobre, an Earth system scientist from Brazil's University of São Paulo.

As examples, he noted how loss of tropical forests would trigger the release of enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, warming the planet further and setting off a nasty feedback loop. A similar dynamic exists as permafrost thaws in the Arctic, he added.

"So we have to avoid those tipping points. Otherwise, in the 22nd century, the temperature will be without control," Nobre said Wednesday.

From the Arctic to the heat dome

Among the 16 critical tipping points is the potential collapse of Arctic sea ice, which would have a devastating impact on plants, animals and the entire Arctic ecosystem, said Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research.

He also underlined just how close to home this could hit for all Canadians, noting it's possible to draw a line from sea ice melt to the town of Lytton, B.C., burning in the summer of 2021.

"The ground zero for the most rapid changes on planet Earth is in the Arctic. The Arctic is where things are happening three times faster, on average, sometimes four times faster than the average temperature rise," Rockstrom said.

Melting sea ice is impacting all Arctic species, he said, but it's also connected into other tipping point systems in different parts of the world, specifically shifting the polar jet stream from its normal equilibrium.

"It's driven by the gradient of warm air in the equator and cold air in the Arctic," he said. "Which keeps the whole jet stream in a very stable circular form, pushing all the weather systems across the North Atlantic."

As the Arctic warms, that gradient weakens, and the jet stream stops flowing as quickly and the pattern loses its shape forming lobes, Rockstrom said. These lobes are responsible for the blocking weather patterns that result in heat waves, stalled out rainstorms and so on.

"The terrible summer in British Columbia last year — 49.6 C and the burning down of the town of Lytton — that was an omega blockage of the jet stream, related to the Arctic melting," said Rockstrom.



Lytton, B.C., burned down in 2021 when a wildfire ignited and tore through the community. In the days leading up to the fire, Lytton had set heat records for the entire country, reaching as high as 49.6 C.© Benoit Ferradini/CBC Radio-Canada

Since the last Ice Age, the world has existed in a way that has been ideal for human, plant and animal life on this planet, he said, but what we're seeing now is the potential for the dominoes to start falling.

"The purpose of the planetary boundaries is to prevent humanity from crossing tipping points. Because when you cross a tipping point, things get irreversible and irreversibility means that we drift off toward a less and less livable planet."

Indigenous leadership and solutions

In Canada's Arctic and elsewhere, Indigenous people are on the front lines of climate impacts — including in the Amazon rainforest.

Helena Gualinga, an Indigenous activist from Ecuador, spoke Wednesday in Egypt of the need for governments to take responsibility for their role in ecosystem destruction and allow for Indigenous voices to help heal the damage.

Gualinga also pointed out that 80 per cent of the world's biodiversity is held on land controlled by Indigenous people, who only represent five per cent of the world's population.

In her community, she said, there are only 1,200 people but they've taken on a stewardship role protecting 144,000 hectares of the Amazon.

"There is a reason for that, and it's the philosophy and mindset and culture and relationship that Indigenous people have to nature."

Scientists and activists were clear: the summit and Montreal must be taken seriously. The conference is held every 10 years — with this iteration delayed two years by the pandemic — and has a lower profile.

But Almond said this moment cannot be understated: It will be a defining moment for how we as a society will address that challenge.

"The science is definitive, we're losing biodiversity at the fastest rate in human history."

Saskatchewan RCMP commanding officer questions value of new marshals service

Thursday 11/17/22

SASKATOON — The commanding officer of the Saskatchewan RCMP says she is uncertain about the value of a new marshals service that the provincial government promised in the latest throne speech.


Saskatchewan RCMP commanding officer questions value of new marshals service© Provided by The Canadian Press

Assistant Commissioner Rhonda Blackmore said she has questions about the purpose of funding a new police service instead of injecting that money into the RCMP.

“Our one question is: 'What is the focus of putting new equipment on the street with a new police service and why is there an advantage to that as opposed to giving those resources to the RCMP?'" Blackmore said Thursday during a panel on rural crime at a Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities convention in Saskatoon.

Blackmore said Mounties are already established — the force has buildings, vehicles and equipment — and an increase in funding could help put more officers on the roads.

The governing Saskatchewan Party said it would commit $20 million annually to the new marshals service. It is expected to be operational by 2026 and include 70 officers.

Public Safety Minister Christine Tell said she expects to receive more feedback about the new police force, including more detailed conversations with policing partners, rural municipalities and First Nations in the future.

"We are very, very early on in this process," she said in Regina.

Tell said the service will not be for front-line policing, but is intended to tackle more complex policing issuesthat currently aren't being addressed.

The province has said the marshals service would have police authority throughout the province and its duties would include responding to areas with high crime rates, apprehending offenders with outstanding warrants and investigating farming-related offences.

The marshals service would support RCMP operations where appropriate, the province has said.


"It’s not an either/or here," Tell said.

Saskatchewan currently spends $211 million a year on RCMP, Tell said. The province is responsible for 70 per cent of operating costs and the federal government covers the remainder.

Opposition NDP justice critic Nicole Sarauer said other provinces that brought in provincial police forces found the implementation to be costly and ineffective.

There arealso concerns the service would compete with RCMP and municipal police for recruits, Sarauer said.

"It is unclear why the government is creating an entirely new force instead of working with the RCMP and existing municipal police forces to improve services in rural communities," Sarauer said in an email.

The province has seen a 25 per cent increase in violent crime in recent years and there has been a smaller increase in rural property crime, Blackmore said.

She said policing in Saskatchewan is complex due to the size of the province.

“You can’t put a police officer on every corner."

She said the Mounties asked for extra funds from the province earlier this year.

It would be used, among other things, to help increase funding for administrative personnel at detachments whose work has increased significantly, Blackmore said. She said it has resulted in some front-line officers being stuck at desks doing administrative work.

"(The funding would) put police officers back on the street doing the work that they should be doing," Blackmore said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 17, 2022.

— With files from Mickey Djuric in Regina

Kelly Geraldine Malone, The Canadian Press

Russia's Shivulech volcano extremely active, threatens eruption - scientists

Story by By REUTERS • Sunday 11/20/22

The Shiveluch volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East has become extremely active, threatening a powerful eruption, the Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team said on Sunday.

Shivulech volcano in Russia© (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

"A growth of the lava dome continues, a strong fumaroles activity, an incandescence of the lava dome, explosions, and hot avalanches accompanies this process," the observatory said on its website.

"Ash explosions up to 10-15 kilometers (9.32 miles) ... could occur at any time. Ongoing activity could affect international and low-flying aircraft."

This volcano is ready for action

Russia's state RIA news agency cited Alexei Ozerov, the director of the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology of the Far East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as saying that the dome of the volcano is very hot.

"At night, the dome glows almost over its entire surface. Hot avalanches with a temperature of 1000 degrees Celsius (1,832°F) roll down the slopes, pyroclastic flows descend. This state of the dome is observed, as a rule, before a powerful paroxysmal eruption."


Shivulech volcano in Russia (credit: Wikimedia Commons)© Provided by The Jerusalem PostShivulech volcano in Russia (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Shiveluch, one of Kamchatka's largest volcanoes with a summit reaching 3,283 meters (10,771 feet) is also one of the peninsula's most active ones, with an estimated 60 substantial eruptions in the past 10,000 years.

The volcano's last most powerful eruption took place in 2007, according to NASA.

Is Earth a self-regulating organism? New study suggests our planet has a built-in climate control

Story by Troy Farah • Yesterday -  SALON

Earth, sun and stars© Provided by Salon

Planet Earth, sun and stars Getty images/NASA/egal

The Permian–Triassic extinction event, also called The Great Dying, has certainly earned its nickname. It was the largest mass extinction in the geological record, wiping out between 83 and 97 percent of all species living on Earth. Although the exact cause is debated, extreme volcanic activity that perhaps cooked the planet has been fingered as the main culprit.

But somehow, despite being pummeled by asteroids and space radiation, life on this planet has kept on keeping on for almost four billion years. As our planet enters a Sixth Mass Extinction, driven by a wave of human activity that has wiped out thousands of species, the question of how this works — particularly, how the Earth seems to bounce back from large-scale disasters, or extreme changes in atmosphere or climate — becomes even more pressing.

It turns out the answer may, in part, be even stranger than anyone imagined. New research in the journal Science Advances suggests that Earth can self-regulate its temperature over hundreds of thousands of years. In other words, there are large-scale geologic processes that seem to absorb carbon dioxide over huge time scales. However, the time scales involved are far, far too long to correct for the sudden spike in carbon dioxide caused by fossil fuel combustion, meaning that the mechanism won't save us from climate change.

"You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time?"

Constantin Arnscheidt and Daniel Rothman, two researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, crunched the data from multiple datasets documenting the global temperature for the last 66 million years. These paleoclimate records include ice cores from Antarctica and the chemical makeup of prehistoric marine fossils, which can tell us a lot about what Earth's atmosphere was like in the distant past.

"This whole study is only possible because there have been great advances in improving the resolution of these deep-sea temperature records," Arnscheidt said in a statement. "Now we have data going back 66 million years, with data points at most thousands of years apart."

Related
Ocean spray may have created conditions for life to form on Earth, new study suggests

The two MIT scientists found a strong pattern suggesting that Earth employs feedback loops to keep its temperatures within a range where life can thrive. However, this happens on a timescale over hundreds of thousands of years, so while it implies our planet will bounce back from anthropogenic climate change, it won't happen soon enough to save us

"One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life," Arnscheidt said. "But it's never been demonstrated from data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth's climate."

The finding has big implications for our understanding of the past, but also how global heating is shaping the future of our homeworld. It even helps us better understand the evolution of planetary temperatures that can make the search for alien-inhabited exoplanets more fruitful.

"You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time? One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life," Arnscheidt said. "But it's never been demonstrated from data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth's climate."

Many scientists have proposed that Earth has self-regulated its temperature throughout history, but this has been difficult to prove. In the 1960s, the late inventor and environmentalist James Lovelock applied Darwinian processes to the entire planet, rather than a single organism, to explain how such a complex system evolved. He called this the Gaia hypothesis, which explains how Earth and its biological systems formed feedback loops that keeps our planet favorable for living organisms.

It also helped explain the Faint-Sun Paradox, first proposed by astronomers Carl Sagan and George Mullen in 1972. Essentially, our Sun used to be a lot smaller and colder 4.5 billion years ago. Back then, based on our current understanding of the life cycle of stars, the Sun would have been about 30 percent dimmer than it is today. This in turn would have made Earth too cold for liquid water, preventing life from forming — yet obviously this happened. So how did our rocky world pull this off?

The answer seems to lie in how carbon is cycled through the planet. A prominent theory is that when our planet first formed, it had an atmosphere chock full of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, that allowed it to absorb heat, even though the Sun was colder.


"On the one hand, it's good because we know that today's global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback. But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues."

A complex process known as silicate weathering then removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and buries it at the bottom of the ocean. Over time, this cools the planet. Then, something like major volcanic eruptions or humans driving cars, pumps more carbon dioxide in the air, warming the planet again. Over the eons, Earth seems to be balancing between too cold and too hot, explaining why some call Earth a Goldilocks Planet.

The MIT study helps match existing data with this long-held theory, which helps us better understand our past and the consequences of unchecked climate change. And it would make sense that if these feedback loops exist on our planet, they may also exist in other galaxies, informing the hunt for extraterrestrial life.

"On the one hand, it's good because we know that today's global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback," Arnscheidt said. "But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues."

However, Arnscheidt's model was unable to account for this balance on timescales longer than one million years, so random chance may have also played an outsized role in life's success on this rock.

"There are two camps: Some say random chance is a good enough explanation, and others say there must be a stabilizing feedback," Arnscheidt said. "We're able to show, directly from data, that the answer is probably somewhere in between. In other words, there was some stabilization, but pure luck likely also played a role in keeping Earth continuously habitable."

It may have been a mix of randomness and feedback loops like silicate weathering that influenced Earth's temperature in the past. But in humanity's future, it will be free will —our policy, our consumption, our choices — that determines the temperature of the planet going forward. And we may just overwhelm these natural systems so much that they won't be able to balance out, similar to prominent theories about potential life on Mars.

"The heating of the Sun has been slow enough to allow life to evolve, a process which takes millions of years. Unfortunately, the Sun is now too hot for the further development of organic life on Earth," Lovelock wrote in his 2019 book "Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence." "The output of heat from our star is too great for life to start again as it did from the simple chemicals of the Archean Period between 4 billion and 2.5 billion years ago. If life on Earth is wiped out, it will not start again."

How a U.S. Hydrogen Bomb Accidentally Turned a Pacific Island into Jello

An American hydrogen bomb test in 1954 threw up an estimated "two hundred billion pounds of coral reef and the sea floor," after the weapons yield turned out to be nearly three times what U.S. scientists had expected.

The detonation of the atomic bomb nicknamed "Smokey," as part of Operation PLUMBBOB in the Nevada desert, 1957. Several Pacific islands had to be evacuated after the test of another nuclear bomb in 1954, which turned out to be more powerful than expected.© CORBIS/GETTY


The test, called 'Castle Bravo,' took place on the Bikini Atoll, a coral reef that forms part of the Marshall Islands, on March 1, 1954.

Story by James Bickerton • Sunday, 20/11/22

Following the explosion radiation spread across 15 separate islands and atolls, causing many to be evacuated, with locals later suffering from cancerous tumors and birth defects.

By 1995 the U.S. Government had paid out $43.2 million in compensation to 1,196 claimants, according to the National Claims Tribunal.

Eric Schlosser wrote about the test, then the largest artificial explosion in history, in his 2013 book Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety.

Bernard O'Keefe, the lead scientist in the firing bunker when the explosion took place, described how the building felt like it was moved by nuclear detonation.

According to Schlosser, another scientist in the bunker commented: "Is this building moving or am I getting dizzy?"

O'Keefe replied: "Oh my God it is, it's moving."

He later described how, during the explosion, the bunker felt like it was "resting on a bowl of jelly."

Describing the aftermath, Schlosser wrote: "A light rain of ash white that looked like snowflakes began to fall. Then pebbles and rocks began dropping from the sky.

"The men ran back into the bunker, slammed the door shut, detected high levels of radioactivity within the bunker, and after a few moments of confusion, turned off the air conditioning unit."

Whilst this did cause radiation levels to fall within the bunker, they continued to increase outside of it.

The bomb's bigger than expected yield, along with a shift in wind direction, resulted in a larger fallout zone than had been anticipated.

After 48 hours the inhabited islands of Rongelap and Rongerik were evacuated due to radiation.

In 1957 residents were allowed to move back to Rongelap, but discovered the food they used to eat had either disappeared or made them ill, leading to a second evacuation.

The disaster took place during the early stages of the Cold War, with the U.S. locked in competition with the Soviet Union which carried out its first nuclear test in 1949. The only other nuclear armed power at the time was Britain, which successfully tested its first atomic bomb in 1952.

In late October this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw nuclear drills, which were described on state TV as mock attacks on the U.S. and U.K.

The same month saw President Biden warn Russia that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, where the Kremlin's forces had suffered a number of reverses, would be "a serious, serious mistake."

In the event of a nuclear strike on the U.S. President Biden could board one of four 'Doomsday planes,' modified Boeing 747-200s designed to act as mobile command posts during a nuclear conflict.

Turkish air strikes target Kurdish militants in Syria, Iraq after bomb attack

Story by Reuters • Sunday, Nov 20,2022
By Ali Kucukgocmen and Suleiman Al-Khalidi


Aftermath of airstrikes Turkey's defence ministry says it carried out, in Derik© Thomson Reuters

ISTANBUL (Reuters) -Turkish warplanes carried out air strikes on Kurdish militant bases in northern Syria and northern Iraq on Sunday, destroying 89 targets, Turkey's defence ministry said, in retaliation for a bomb attack in Istanbul that killed six people one week ago.



Aftermath of airstrikes Turkey's defence ministry says it carried out, in Derik© Thomson Reuters

The strikes targeted bases of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which Turkey says is a wing of the PKK, the ministry added in a statement.

Ankara has blamed Kurdish militants for the blast on Istanbul's Istiklal Avenue on Nov. 13 that killed six people and injured more than 80. No group has claimed responsibility for on the explosion on the busy pedestrian avenue, and the PKK and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have denied involvement.



Aftermath of airstrikes Turkey's defence ministry says it carried out, in Derik© Thomson Reuters

"It is time to give account for Istiklal," Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin wrote on Twitter on Sunday.

The Turkish air strikes were carried out in Qandil, Asos and Hakurk in Iraq and Kobani, Tal Rifat, Cizire and Derik in Syria, the ministry said.

The 89 targets destroyed included shelters, tunnels and ammunition depots, it said, adding that "many terrorists were neutralised" including "so-called directors of the terrorist organisation."

A spokesman for the SDF said that the Turkish strikes had destroyed infrastructure including grain silos, a power station and a hospital. Eleven civilians, an SDF fighter and two guards were killed, said Farhad Shami, head of the SDF media centre on Twitter.

Related video: Turkey launches airstrikes over northern Syria

Duration 1:10   View on Watch

 

The SDF said in a statement they would retaliate for the strikes. "These attacks by the Turkish occupied forces will not go without a response," it said.

Eight security personnel, including 7 police, were wounded as a result of a rocket attack by the YPG from Syria's Tal Rifat on a police post near a border gate in Turkey's Kilis province, the Interior Ministry said.

Separately, a Syrian military source told state media SANA that a number of servicemen had been killed in "Turkish aggression on Syrian land" on Sunday morning, in the countryside near northern Aleppo and Hasaka.

"CLAW SWORD"

Turkey's Defence Minister Hulusi Akar said in a statement Sunday morning that all necessary measures were taken to avoid damage to innocent people and the surroundings, adding that "only and only terrorists and structures belonging to terrorists were targeted."

"The claw of our Turkish Armed Forces was once again on top of terrorists," he added, dubbing the operation "Claw Sword."

The defence ministry said it was the first time it had launched an air strike on Kobani.

Regarding the air strikes, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov told TASS news agency that Moscow favours "negotiated solutions."

Moscow has supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the country's 11-year war, while Ankara has backed rebels fighting to topple him.

Turkey has conducted three incursions so far into northern Syria against the YPG militia. President Tayyip Erdogan has previously said Turkey could conduct another operation against the YPG. Ankara has also escalated drone strikes in Syria in recent months, killing a number of key SDF officials.

Ankara regularly carries out air strikes in northern Iraq and has sent commandos to support its offensives against the PKK.

The PKK has led an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984. It is considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

Washington has allied with the YPG in the fight against Islamic State in Syria, causing a rift with NATO ally Turkey.

Anadolu reported a Turkish court formally arrested two more people on Sunday over last week's bomb attack, after 17 were arrested this week. Bulgarian prosecutors have charged five people for aiding the attack.

(Reporting by Ali Kucukgocmen in Istanbul, Suleiman Al-Khalidi in Amman;Additional reporting by Mahmoud Mourad, Nafisa Eltahir, Yasmin Hussein in Cairo, Kinda Makieh in Damascus, Caleb Davis in Gdansk;Editing by Chris Reese and Raissa Kasolowsky)

China's Xi Jinping just got a taste of democracy and he didn't like it

Opinion by Brett Bruen • Saturday Nov 19, 2022

We have seen more than a few awkward moments lately for the world’s more ambitious autocrats. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared large swaths of Eastern Ukraine annexed during an elaborate ceremony in Moscow. Days later his troops were roundly routed and forced into a long retreat. The prime minister of Vietnam got comically caught on a live feed, provided by none other than the U.S. Department of State, making disparaging remarks about the American president and his team. Then there were the reported leaks about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau taking China’s President Xi Jinping to task for alleged malicious meddling in his country’s elections.


China’s President Xi scolds Justin Trudeau over G-20 media leaks
Duration 0:54   View on Watch

That episode exploded into the public arena on Thursday when the media pool captured Xi upbraiding Trudeau at the Group of 20 summit in Indonesia for allegedly leaking to the press details of that private exchange, held on Tuesday. “Everything we discussed has been leaked to the paper. That’s not appropriate,” a smiling Xi said through a translator, according to the footage. “And that’s not the way the conversation was conducted.”

To his credit, Trudeau responded: “In Canada, we believe in free and open and frank dialogue, and that is what we will continue to have. We will continue to look to work constructively together, but there will be things we will disagree on.” Indeed, it’s standard operating procedure for democratic leaders to leak elements favorable to themselves to the press after meeting with foreign government officials.

Stepping out of their tightly controlled environments can be tough for these leaders. They cannot simply toss the journalists in jail, and their threats against Western nations are looking even more pathetically pyrrhic than usual. Leaders like Xi and Putin are starting to realize their limits, along with the liabilities that come with surrounding themselves with sycophants. Welcome to the free world.

What these leaders most detest, as evidenced by Xi’s videotaped temper tantrum with Trudeau, is transparency. We should be working hard to ensure they have to publicly face more of those inconvenient truths. Unfortunately and inexcusably, the Biden administration has underperformed on overexposure.

I remember when President Barack Obama went to Beijing. My colleagues in the press advance team, led by Johanna Maska, actually got Chinese officials to accept questions to their leaders from American reporters after their meeting. It made for a really remarkable moment, where The New York Times could publicly question the very same Xi Jinping about why his government was kicking the paper out of the country.

Ironically, for all his bluster, President Donald Trump’s team wasn’t that tough on Beijing when it came to basic things like this. Instead, they reverted back to the old, bad habit of not taking questions from reporters. Sadly, Biden hasn’t done much better. Obama held three times as many joint press conferences with world leaders at this point in his presidency.

The Biden administration came in claiming it would have the highest standards of transparency and would place human rights at the center of American foreign policy. It has not quite worked out that way. While they have great affinity for superficially strong statements and tweets, their actions belie a much more troubling trend. The State Department recently celebrated with numerous principled posts the importance of the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists. But it still provided Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman with precisely that kind of impunity for ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

This is an ideal time for the Biden administration to expand press access. Xi is facing growing domestic pressure. The Vietnamese leader caught on camera was bragging about how easy it was to brush off American pressure to take a harder line on Russia. Let’s arrange to ask him a few more questions at the next global gathering.

American, but also European and other democratically elected leaders, need to push for more moments. Let journalists stay in the room longer. Provide more extensive briefings afterward. Go on the record instead of insisting on being referred to as an anonymous “official source.”

Autocrats are certainly not going to autocorrect. We need to see American and other officials modeling good behavior. Giving more interviews will put added pressure on a wide range of presidents, prime ministers and other heads of state to get themselves out more in front of the microphones. Advance teams need to insist on more press friendly setups and schedules.

Finally, the White House and State Department can give more honest readouts of meetings with foreign officials. Let us once and for all end comically vague language like, “We discussed important bilateral issues.” I can confess as a recovering diplomat that these are just a bunch of meaningless words we put out to fill space. Instead, write that we did tell the Chinese to stop killing Uyghurs and arresting protestors. Sure, just like Xi showed in Indonesia, it will temporarily ruffle some feathers.

But during my time at the White House, I saw how most of the time autocrats want these calls and meetings more than the United States does. They desperately seek the limelight and legitimacy only conferred by meeting with democratic leaders. It’s time we used our considerable leverage to make dictators and despots feel a little less comfortable when they deal with the world.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com