Canada sends diplomatic mission to Haiti over gang violence

(Reuters) - Foreign affairs officials from Canada began a three-day diplomatic mission to Haiti on Wednesday in a bid to address a gang-related humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Caribbean country, the office of Global Affairs Canada said.


People displaced by gang war violence in Cite Soleil on the streets of 

Delmas neighborhood in Port-au-Prince© Thomson Reuters

Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, Bob Rae, is leading the mission and will consult with high-level political figures, local groups and key Haitian officials to determine Canada's potential role in the international response, the office said in a statement.

Related video: Gangs in Haiti battle for control amid unrest 
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Haitian gangs in September created a humanitarian crisis by blocking the entrance to a fuel terminal, leading to shortages of gasoline and diesel that halted most economic activity just as the country reported a renewed outbreak of cholera.

Some 200 gangs of varying size have become de facto authorities in large parts of the capital Port-au-Prince and are involved in illegal activities including extortion and drug trafficking.

Over the last five weeks, Canada has imposed sanctions on 11 Haitian political and economic officials. It has also provided security and humanitarian assistance as well as funding to fight corruption and impunity in Haiti, the office noted.

(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Chicago, editing by Deepa Babington)

Mexican workers accuse Canadian farmers of mistreatment

Yesterday 

Seasonal farm workers are speaking out over what they describe as inhumane treatment from their Canadian employers.

Mexican agricultural workers have written an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president of Mexico, outlining conditions they say they face working in the Canadian agriculture industry.

“For more than half a century, our well-being has not been thought of and we are still treated as disposable objects for employers,” the workers wrote in their open letter.

About 47 workers from 40 different farms across Canada collaborated on the Nov. 8 letter, but only 26 signed their names.

Of the 26 who signed, one was from a Niagara-on-the-Lake vineyard.

One of the demands from workers is permanent status for all, including for seasonal workers who come to Canada through the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program.

“Employers threaten to fire us, deport us and kick us out of the program. Without permanent status, employers have the power to get rid of us whenever they please as if they owned us,” the workers said in the letter.

Some workers have been coming to Canada for upward of 20 years, but only have temporary status. They say this can make it hard for them to defend their rights.

“There’s always the fear of being sent back or not coming back next season,” said Luisa Ortiz-Garza, an organizer with Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, who worked closely with the workers to produce the open letter.

The workers are also members of Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.

According to Leonel Nava, a Mexican worker who works at a Christmas tree farm in Nova Scotia, about 10 workers have been deported since September for speaking up about their concerns at his farm.

“The mistreatment or abuse of temporary foreign workers is unacceptable,” a spokesperson from the office of federal employment minister Carla Qualtrough said in an email to The Lake Report.

“The experiences detailed in this letter from Mexican migrant workers are disturbing and inhumane.”

Qualtrough’s ministry oversees Employment and Social Development Canada and the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program falls under its jurisdiction.

“Our government is working closely with all partners to improve this program and ensure that workers are protected at all times,” the ministry spokesperson said.

This open letter comes not long after workers from Jamaica wrote and signed a separate letter to the Jamaican and Canadian governments in August, outlining what they described as “systemic slavery.”

“They got really inspired (by) that letter and also they wanted to show unity,” said Ortiz-Garza.


One of the demands made by workers is for the Canadian government to implement a national housing standard across the country.

One of the most common complaints Ortiz-Garza heard from employees was about their living conditions.

“We sleep in bunk beds with bed bugs, in houses full of rats, sharing the bathroom with more than 10 people. We have no privacy,” the workers wrote.

Nava worked in British Columbia from 2014 until 2021, but wasn’t invited back by his employer after he raised some concerns about his living conditions.

“My house was destroyed by a fire, then he sent me to live in a basement without (a) washroom,” said Nava.

The employer put three other workers in a hotel after the fire but Nava and another worker had to live in a basement.

“I complain about that. He don’t apply for me anymore,” he added.

Nava now shares a house with about 20 people in Nova Scotia, with five to a room. They share everything, he said.

Living with so many people makes it difficult for Nava to have a private call with his wife and two children back home in Mexico. He doesn’t see them for half the year.

The letter described the inability to communicate privately with their families back home as “humiliating.”

Qualtrough’s spokesperson said this year she “convened two meetings with provincial and territorial governments, international governments, migrant worker organizations, and other partners to improve the regulations around accommodation” for temporary foreign workers.

Workers are also asking for open work permits, so they can easily switch farms, and for a system where workers can report abusive employers anonymously.

“The abuse at work that we experience is inhumane. We have to endure shouting, racist comments (and) insults,” the workers said in their open letter.

Employment and Social Development Canada operates a confidential telephone tip line in more than 200 different languages so that workers can report employers for wrongdoings.

But sometimes workers aren’t told about the tip line, said Kit Andres from Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.

Other demands outlined in the letter included better job security, access to the benefits they pay for, better protection from Mexican consulates, the ability to represent themselves during contract negotiations and being better informed about the contracts they sign.

Workers want to be able to decide their own futures and if a new opportunity shows up, be able to take it, said Nava.

Canadian citizens can choose where they want to work, said Nava.

“We can’t,” he said.

Along with the open letter, the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change released a video that details some of the conditions outlined in the letter.

The annual review of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program between Canada and Mexico will be held in the coming weeks.

Somer Slobodian, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Lake Report

US appeals ruling that would lift asylum restrictions


SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — The U.S. government said Wednesday it is appealing a court ruling that would otherwise lift asylum restrictions that have become the cornerstone of border enforcement in recent years.


US appeals ruling that would lift asylum restrictions© Provided by The Canadian Press

The disputed enforcement rule first took effect in March 2020, denying migrants' rights to seek asylum under U.S. and international law on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19.

The Homeland Security Department said it would file an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, challenging a November ruling by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan that ordered President Joe Biden's administration to lift the asylum restrictions.

The restrictions were put in place under former President Donald Trump at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The practice was authorized under Title 42 of a broader 1944 law covering public health, and has been used to expel migrants more than 2.4 million times.

The appeal could scuttle a Dec. 21 deadline set by Sullivan for his order to go into effect.

Sullivan has called the expulsion of migrants under the rule “arbitrary and capricious.”

And immigrant rights’ groups have argued that the use of Title 42 unjustly harms people fleeing persecution and that the pandemic was a pretext used by the Trump administration to curb immigration.

“The Biden administration’s decision to appeal is unsurprising given its vigorous defense of the policy for the past two years,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney for the ACLU and lead counsel on its Title 42 litigation, in an email.

A coalition of conservative-leaning states wants to keep in place the Trump-era public health rule that allows many asylum seekers to be turned away at the southern U.S. border.

The ban has been unevenly enforced by nationality, falling largely on migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador — as well as Mexicans — because Mexico allows them to be returned from the United States. Last month, Mexico began accepting Venezuelans who are expelled from the United States under Title 42, causing a sharp drop in Venezuelans seeking asylum at the U.S. border.

The asylum rule has been used by the Biden administration to expel migrant families and single adults, though not children traveling alone.

Morgan Lee, The Associated Press

Why Republicans are so intent on rolling back the military’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate

Story by Li Zhou 

This year, Congress’s annual defense bill, a must-pass measure that authorizes military spending for the next year, includes a unique provision.


Sen. Marsha Blackburn, an outspoken critic of the military’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate, heralded its rollback in the defense bill.© Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The legislation, known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), lays out more than $840 billion in defense funds and would roll back the military’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate. That mandate, put in place in August 2021 to prevent the spread of coronavirus among service members, is opposed by Republicans, who’ve long railed against vaccine mandates in general. Now the GOP is using the NDAA to seize a win on something they’ve made into a culture war issue.

Republicans’ main argument centers on staffing: They say the military’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate has pushed out thousands of service members in a time when there are already severe labor shortages. Roughly 8,000 active-duty service members have been discharged because they refused vaccination, per US News, but that represents a small fraction of the military’s more than 1 million active-duty service members. As Politico reported, about 98 percent of the military has been vaccinated.

Because the NDAA needs at least 10 Republican votes to pass in the Senate, and will probably need House Republican support given Democrats’ narrow majority in that chamber, the GOP has a key opportunity to secure a policy and messaging win on vaccine requirements. Republican efforts hint, too, at how they’ll continue to leverage Democrats’ need for their cooperation in the new term, when they’ll control the House and the Democrats the Senate.

“That’s the first victory of having a Republican majority, and we’d like to have more of those victories, and we should start moving those now,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said on Fox News this past weekend, regarding the vaccine mandate rollback.

Why Republicans pushed to overturn the vaccine mandate

The Biden administration, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, has opposed putting the repeal of the vaccine mandate in the NDAA, though it’s stopped short of saying the president won’t sign it if it contains this provision. “A million people died in the United States of America. We lost hundreds in DOD. So this mandate has kept people healthy,” Austin told reporters this past weekend. Additionally, the White House has noted the military has long had mandates for other vaccines including the flu and a host of other illnesses.

Related video: Congress set to rescind COVID-19 vaccine mandate for troops (WTKR Norfolk, VA)

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In recent weeks, however, Republicans have made repealing the Covid-19 vaccine mandate a chief priority, claiming that it’s impacted the military’s ability to staff itself. The NDAA represented a prime chance to make a point on this issue, which has been politicized over the past few years, with Republicans arguing mandates represent an un-American assault on personal freedom. As Covid-19 cases have declined across the country, Republican lawmakers have only argued more vocally that there’s less of a need for these requirements.

Republicans’ main grievance is that the vaccine mandate has made it tougher for the military to retain people and recruit new service members, a claim that isn’t backed up by “hard data,” according to Austin. The reasons for recruitment shortfalls are nuanced: As the Associated Press reported, the Army did miss its recruitment target by 25 percent in the last year, with military leaders attributing the gap to a number of factors, including inability to do in-person recruiting because of the pandemic as well as vaccine hesitancy. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger, a top military leader, has said vaccine mandates pose some obstacles in recruiting due to misinformation about the Covid-19 shots.

Along with the rescinding of the mandate, Republicans have called for a provision that would reinstate service members who’ve been discharged in the past because of the vaccine mandate, though that has not made it into the bill.

The push against the military vaccine mandate marks the latest effort by the GOP to make vaccine mandates an issue of contention in different must-pass bills. Republicans have repeatedly threatened to hold up government funding unless they could vote on amendments that would defund vaccine mandates the Biden administration has put in place for federal employees and medical workers. Since those mandates were established, GOP lawmakers have frequently tapped into the issue as a way to show their base that they’re protecting people’s liberties.

“It’s an honor to fight for our servicemembers and ensure they are protected from Biden’s COVID vaccine mandate,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) tweeted.

The White House, on the other hand, has criticized Congress’s decision to rescind the vaccine mandate, saying immunizations remain important for maintaining troops’ ability to serve whenever and wherever necessary. “Vaccines are saving lives, including our men and women in uniform. So this remains very, very much a health and readiness issue for the force,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Monday, per the New York Times.

Republicans want to use these bills to score political points

McCarthy has signaled that Republicans are eager to use legislation like the defense bill to make their case on cultural issues once they assume the House majority in January. He even urged Congress to delay the passage of the defense bill until next year so they could include more provisions that combat the “woke-ism” that he argued Democrats are supporting. Although McCarthy did not specify which policies he was interested in targeting, Politico has reported that this umbrella could include things like initiatives aimed at making the military more diverse.

Republicans’ pushback on this issue indicates how they may use House control next year in a split Congress to secure their priorities on everything from defense policy to appropriations to the debt ceiling. Because several must-pass bills will need House support to advance, the GOP will have multiple opportunities to use their leverage to lobby for provisions like this one. The House is expected to pass the NDAA with the inclusion of the vaccine mandate rollback this week, a move Republicans have described as just the beginning.

“[I]n 28 days, the real work begins,” McCarthy said in a Tuesday statement. “The new House Republican majority will work to finally hold the Biden administration accountable and assist the men and women in uniform who were unfairly targeted by this administration.”

Alberta teachers could be investigated for failing to report abusive colleagues under new code

Story by Janet French • Yesterday 4:58 p.m.


A new code of conduct for Alberta teachers requires them to report to authorities any colleague who harms or abuses a student.

The new code, which will apply to all of the province's 53,000 teachers as of Jan. 1, 2023, could see teachers who conceal their colleagues' abusive behaviour also be charged with unprofessional conduct.

The new code is part of a massive overhaul to how teachers are regulated in Alberta.

Earlier this year, the United Conservative Party government passed a contentious bill to appoint a new teaching commissioner, who will handle all formal complaints of unprofessional conduct and incompetence. Currently, the Alberta Teachers' Association (ATA) is in charge of investigating any allegations of wrongdoing by its 46,000 members, who teach in public, Catholic, and Francophone schools across the province.

Most teachers in private schools, charter schools, and on First Nations are not ATA members, nor are school superintendents. An arm of the education ministry investigates any allegations of misconduct against non-ATA teachers.

The expectations for both sets of teachers are different.

As of Jan. 1, Alberta's new teaching commissioner, lawyer Julia Sproule, will take over the regulatory process for all of the province's teachers in a new office with 20 employees in downtown Edmonton.

The government says the change is an opportunity to update and combine teachers' codes of conduct.

"With a consistent set of overarching principles, we can show Albertans our education system is more cohesive, integrated and inclusive, and we can more clearly demonstrate there is a high standard of conduct and professionalism among all teachers," Education Minister Adriana LaGrange said in a letter sent to all teachers late Wednesday afternoon.

The minister was not available for an interview.

Code prevents taking 'ideological advantage'

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In a technical briefing on Wednesday, education officials said the new code explicitly states teachers are not to harm or abuse a student verbally, psychologically, emotionally, physically or sexually. The previous codes were not that specific.

The teaching commissioner would also consider causing risk of harm to students to be unprofessional conduct.

For the first time, the code specifies that teachers aren't to take "ideological advantage" of students' naivete — language adapted from the British Columbia Teachers' Federation's code of ethics.

The code will define ideological advantage as "perspectives taught to students in a biased manner with the intent to take advantage of a students uninformed or under-informed opinions" but excludes material in the curriculum.

Also new is the requirement that teachers respect people's dignity and rights as protected in the Alberta Human Rights Act and Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Other requirements to respect students, parents and colleagues carry over from the current codes.

The government is also removing a requirement that teachers approach a colleague directly with a concern about their behaviour before escalating it to their supervisors. Officials hope this will create a safer environment for school employees who want to flag concerns.

To shape the new code, the government consulted with six education groups and four organizations that help the survivors of abuse and bullying. It also ran an online public survey for two weeks this fall, which received about 3,000 responses.


Alberta Teachers Association president Jason Schilling. One reason why teachers are angry is the fact that they were doing just fine managing their own pension fund and were consistently beating performance benchmarks.© Trevor Wilson/CBC

ATA president Jason Schilling said Wednesday he's pleased the government considered the association's feedback when crafting the new code. Teachers will welcome the protection of human rights, he said.

However, some teachers may bristle at the mention of "ideological" manipulation, Schilling said. The term is politically loaded, he said. Some provincial politicians have accused teachers of trying to torque how students see divisive issues.

After more than 80 years of disciplining its members, the ATA has lingering concerns about the government taking that complex function from the organization, Schilling said.

"I just hope the government knows what they're doing."

A tiny fraction of teachers are the subject of professional complaints. The ATA's 2021 annual report says it received 163 requests for new investigations that year, and 132 investigations were completed.

Hearing panels found 29 members guilty of unprofessional conduct in 2021. The education minister cancelled five of their teaching certificates and suspended five others' certificates. Others received penalties like reprimands or fines.

Although the new teaching commissioner will began accepting new complaints on Jan. 1, there is a six-month transition period when the ATA will conclude any ongoing discipline files.

A key climate metric gets an overdue update

Opinion by Max Sarinsky and Peter Howard, opinion contributors •

Amid the flurry of news from the recent UN climate summit COP27, the Biden administration made an overlooked announcement that could help modernize U.S. climate policy. In trying to assess how much a ton of climate pollution harms society, the U.S. government has long used a metric called the social cost of carbon. That metric places a dollar value on greenhouse gas emissions and enables government decision-makers to weigh the costs and benefits of policies that affect climate pollution.


A key climate metric gets an overdue update© Provided by The Hill

But there’s one problem. Since the government began using the social cost of carbon under the George W. Bush administration, it has repeatedly recognized it as an undervaluation that omits known consequences of climate change. The government has thus consistently undercounted the societal benefits of reducing climate pollution when assessing regulations and other policies, tipping the scales toward polluters over people.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took a critical step to correct this problem by proposing a comprehensive update to the social cost of carbon. Consistent with the scientific and economics literature from independent researchers, the update would raise the metric’s central value from $51 to $190 for each ton of carbon-dioxide emissions in 2020.

The revision is the first comprehensive update to the social cost of carbon in nearly a decade. It implements a roadmap laid out in 2017 by the National Academy of Sciences, which offered numerous suggestions for improving the metric. The Trump administration sat on that report and instead made controversial changes to the estimate, obscuring the true costs of climate pollution and drawing a rebuke from a federal court for ignoring the best available science.

By increasing the social cost of carbon, EPA’s new draft valuations reflect the longstanding and bipartisan understanding that prior values were a conservative underestimate. When EPA first valued the social cost of carbon under the George W. Bush administration in 2008, it explained that available calculations did “not capture many of the main reasons for concern about climate change,” including risks of extreme weather, harms to wildlife, humanitarian crises and long-term catastrophic events.

Over time, experts have also recognized that the impacts of climate change are likely to be worse than projected in the models underlying the government’s previous estimates of the social cost of carbon. Dozens of peer-reviewed studies over the past decade point to higher damage estimates for key impacts such as human health and agriculture.

Related video: Climate Change Affects Most Americans, New Survey Finds (Money Talks News)

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Newer research also shows that the government’s climate-damage figures undervalue the harms that future generations will face, due to the misapplication of the discount rate (the economic function determining how to convert future losses into present value). Recent research and data confirms that the government’s previous valuations discount effects on future generations too heavily, further driving down the social cost of carbon.

EPA’s update corrects for two of these three limitations. Following the National Academy’s recommendations, the updated estimates apply lower discount rates that reflect long-term uncertainty and account for recent theory and evidence. The new valuations therefore more appropriately value harms to future generations.

The updated estimates also apply newer damage functions that incorporate recent findings on the severity of climate change and its impacts. This update therefore reflects the extensive economic and scientific research on climate change that has been published since the values were last updated years ago.

But the problem of omitted damages remains largely unresolved, as numerous categories of climate-related damages remain unquantified in the update due to insufficient data. Accordingly, EPA recognizes that its updated valuations still likely underestimate the true cost of climate pollution.

EPA is now accepting public comments on the draft valuations and commencing a peer-review process. It will be at least several months before EPA completes these steps and finalizes any valuations. The peer-review process, in particular, offers an opportunity for independent experts to ensure that EPA’s update incorporates the best science available. So far, experts have offered high praise.

But other agencies and institutions need not wait for EPA to finalize these valuations before incorporating them into relevant processes and analyses. For instance, the numerous states that rely on the federal government’s climate-damage valuations should begin using the draft valuations where permitted by law. Other federal agencies should also consider how these draft estimates affect pending actions with significant climate effects.

Whether these values get incorporated into policymaking quickly or gradually, they represent a substantial step forward in our analysis of climate damages. Five years after the National Academy called on the government to update the metric and counter its pro-polluter bias, EPA has finally delivered. Soon, the decision-makers weighing critical policy choices will be equipped with a much more accurate tool for understanding climate impacts.

Max Sarinsky is a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

Peter Howard, Ph.D., is the economics director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

World Bank, partners launch tracking system to clean up carbon markets

Story by By Susanna Twidale and Simon Jessop • Yesterday 

FILE PHOTO: Smoke and steam billows from Belchatow Power Station© Thomson Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - The World Bank and partners including Singapore on Wednesday launched a global tracking system to clean up the opaque market for carbon credits and help developing countries raise much-needed climate finance quickly and more cheaply.

Carbon credits - generated through activities such as planting forests or pulling climate-damaging carbon dioxide from the air - are sold to polluters to offset their emissions as a way of helping them reach net-zero emissions to limit global warming.

While governments wrangle over the rules for trading so-called compliance credits, projects are being launched to generate new credits and countries are setting up registers to track them.

Private-sector efforts also have sprung up offering credits for "voluntary" carbon markets, while a range of registries such as Verra and Gold Standard is accrediting and tracking them.

The $2 billion voluntary market has remained small. Critics cite concerns including poor market transparency, a limited supply of credits and questions over the quality of projects.

The new database - called the Climate Action Data Trust (CAD Trust) - aims to address these issues by collating all the project and carbon credit data in one place and making it free to the public.

"The goal for us was to create this global, public data layer which allows people to get a better sense of what's happening across the world, across different jurisdictions, across different programmes," Chandra Shekhar Sinha, an adviser of the Climate Change Group at the World Bank, told Reuters.

"We're able to track it, avoid double-counting (and) figure out what are the innovations that are taking place," and hopefully create a "race to the top" at the same time as lowering the barriers to entry for market participants.

The CAD Trust, co-founded with the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), will provide a platform listing various existing carbon offset registries to make it easier for companies and countries to share data.

Sonam Tashi, chief planning office at Bhutan's Ministry of Economic Affairs, told Reuters the new CAD Trust portal would allow the country to save around $1 million in initial costs for accessing the market, compared with the costs of setting up its own systems.

"It really helps us ... leapfrog the entire learning process. It brings us up to speed with what is required within the carbon markets," he said.

He said Bhutan is in discussions with possible buyers who want details about how carbon credits from its forests are being registered, verified and monitored.

"This is where the World Bank facility will help us," Tashi said. "The CAD Trust meets all the technical requirements of host countries and buyers."

Using the CAD Trust means Bhutan would likely be able to start selling credits in 2023 - a year earlier than if the country had not been able to access the facility, he said.

(Reporting By Susanna Twidale and Simon Jessop; Editing by Katy Daigle and Lisa Shumaker)

MANITOBA

High cost of living drives people to food banks

Yesterday 

In 2022, more Manitobans than ever are reaching out to local food banks for help to get through these tough inflationary times. So far, the donations continue to meet demand.

Niverville Helping Hands

Helping Hands coordinator Larissa Sandulak says that the Niverville-based food bank began receiving a significant increase in food hamper requests long before this year’s Christmas season.

“Since the summer, we’ve had a 20 percent increase in families needing hampers,” says Sandulak. “Every week we have multiple new families getting in touch with us. This significantly increases the amount of food we require to keep up with the need.”

Sandulak is thankful for the various food drives and collection bins around town that have been keeping the pantry stocked. She’s hopeful that December’s collection efforts will be enough to fill the many Christmas hamper requests coming in.

“We will need the community’s continued support in the coming months,” says Sandulak. “Residents can leave donations in our bin at Bigway or make a tax-receipted financial donation on our website if they’d like to help us meet the increased needs.”

Helping Hands is also seeking groups, businesses, or individuals who are willing to sponsor a family in need this Christmas. As of December 1, there were still 22 families awaiting sponsorship.

IDC Food Bank

Suzanne Tetreault is one of three coordinators who manage the Île-des-Chênes food bank out of the rectory next to the IDC Parish. Due to a lack of space for large-scale food and toy storage, the food bank relies on sponsorships of families at Christmas as well.

In Ritchot, local companies have stepped up in a big way this year, reaching out to the food bank to offer sponsorship of multiple families at a time.

“We’ve given out the names of nine families, mostly those with kids,” says Tetreault. “So the [company staff] will be making their Christmas hampers and buying cute gifts for the kids.”

This generosity will mean the food bank can use items coming in from the local food drives to keep their shelves full, as Tetreault doesn’t see the need for food assistance going down anytime soon.

Tetreault and her team also witnessed a surge in hamper requests this past summer. They have been consistently filling 24 biweekly hampers in comparison to the average 17 hampers needed in the first half of 2022.

All recipients of food hampers this December will be receiving an additional gift certificate redeemable at the Red River Co-op.

Harvest Manitoba

Harvest Manitoba, once known as Winnipeg Harvest, is also witnessing a surge in requests for food aid like they’ve never seen before.

“Since last year around this time, the demand for food at Harvest has increased by 41 percent,” says Harvest’s Christa Campbell. “And the number of people with jobs who are accessing the food banks has increased by 50 percent. There is no precedent in our 38-year history for an increase of this size.”

Currently, Harvest Manitoba supplies food supports for around 90,000 Manitobans, almost half of whom are children. That equates to 12 million pounds of food annually.

To pull this off, says Campbell, it requires an ongoing army of faithful and generous supporters. To date, the support being received is still adequate in meeting demand.

Recently, CBC held their annual Make the Season Kind radiothon in support of Harvest. The project has raised $364,000.

Harvest Manitoba also provides food to many smaller food banks around the province when their own resources run low.

A Food Bank User Tells Her Story

Former Niverville resident Donna Swarzynski recalls with poignancy the memory of the first time she needed the help of a food bank to get back on her feet.

It was 2016. Swarzynski and her young daughter were enjoying the feeling of new condo ownership in Niverville and Donna’s career as a car sales consultant was going well.

One day, Swarzynski says, it all came apart when the feelings of deep sadness she’d been experiencing rose to the surface. Her doctor recommended short-term sick leave from her job, but the mental battle persisted and soon she found herself jobless.

Trying to subsist on health insurance payouts alone wasn’t enough and she had nowhere to turn for help. Her parents had died years prior.

She said it was a church acquaintance who suggested that Swarzynski take advantage of the services of Helping Hands. This was a first for her. She’d placed donations in the bin at the local grocery store before. Never had she considered she might someday need it herself.

“I remember pulling up to the [food bank] and feeling hopeless and so alone,” says Swarzynski. “I sat in my car for a few minutes before I had the courage to walk inside and ask for help. I remember walking up to the big brown steel door and starting to cry. I couldn’t believe I was in this position of needing help. I had always worked, since I was 14 years old. Never could I have ever imagined that I would be in need of help one day myself. As I started to walk down the stairs, with my head held down and with tears in my eyes, I looked up to see about six ladies smiling and welcoming me to Helping Hands. One of the ladies immediately came up to me and put her arms around me and comforted me. She was like an angel in disguise, giving me hope in what I felt was a hopeless situation.”

Swarzynski’s challenges didn’t end that night. She eventually found herself in a shelter in Steinbach until affordable housing was found.

Today, she has become a valuable volunteer at Steinbach Community Outreach, an organization whose mandate is to assist people experiencing poverty and lack of housing by providing food, shelter, clothing, and friendship.

One of her greatest joys now is being that angel in disguise for someone who comes to the Outreach for help.

“I feel like I’m able to empathize with people more,” Swarzynski says. “When I tell them that I used to be homeless, people’s eyes just get big and they can’t believe that [someone like me] was once in their shoes.”

It’s especially hard for parents, she adds, when they feel the pressure of needing to provide not just for themselves but the little lives that depend on them. Not to mention the extra dose of humility it takes to tell the children where their food and clothing comes from.

“I think any time of year is a hard time for people to ask for help, whether it’s Christmastime or not,” Swarzynski says. “It’s easy for people to naturally want to help other people, I think, but to ask for help is very difficult.”

For this reason, Swarzynski is glad to tell her story. She’s a survivor and she wants to help break through the shame so that others can become survivors too.

Brenda Sawatzky, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Niverville Citizen

Oldest DNA sheds light on a 2 million-year-old ecosystem that has no modern parallel

Story by Katie Hunt • CNN - Yesterday


A core of ice age sediment from northern Greenland has yielded the world’s oldest sequences of DNA.

The 2 million-year-old DNA samples revealed the now largely lifeless polar region was once home to rich plant and animal life — including elephant-like mammals known as mastodons, reindeer, hares, lemmings, geese, birch trees and poplars, according to new research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

The mix of temperate and Arctic trees and animals suggested a previously unknown type of ecosystem that has no modern equivalent — one that could act as a genetic road map for how different species might adapt to a warmer climate, the researchers found.

The finding is the work of scientists in Denmark who were able to detect and retrieve environmental DNA — genetic material shed into the environment by all living organisms — in tiny amounts of sediment taken from the København Formation, in the mouth of a fjord in the Arctic Ocean in Greenland’s northernmost point, during a 2006 expedition. (Greenland is an autonomous country within Denmark.)

They then compared the DNA fragments with existing libraries of DNA collected from both extinct and living animals, plants and microorganisms. The genetic material revealed dozens of other plants and creatures that had not been previously detected at the site based on what’s known from fossils and pollen records.

“The first thing that blew our mind when we’re looking at this data is obviously this mastodon and the presence of it that far north, which is quite far north of what we knew as its natural range,” said study coauthor Mikkel Pedersen, an assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, at a news conference.

It smashes the previous record for the world’s oldest DNA, set by research published last year on genetic material extracted from the tooth of a mammoth that roamed the Siberian Steppe more than a million years ago, as well as the previous record for DNA from sediment.


An artist's reconstruction of what the Kap København Formation in northern Greenland might have looked like 2 million years ago. - Beth Zaiken

Lush ecosystem

While DNA from animal bones or teeth can shed light on an individual species, environmental DNA enabled scientists to build a picture of a whole ecosystem, said professor Eske Willerslev, a fellow of St John’s College at the University of Cambridge and director of the Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre. In this case, the ecological community researchers reconstructed existed when temperatures would have between 10 to 17 degrees Celsius warmer than Greenland is today.


“Only a few plant and animals fossils have been found in the region. It was super exciting when we recovered the DNA (to see) that very, very different ecosystem. People had known from macrofossils that there had been trees, some kind of forest up there, but the DNA allowed us to identify many more taxa (types of living organisms),” said Willerslev, who led the research.

Researchers were surprised to find that cedars similar to those found in British Columbia today would have once grown in the Arctic alongside species like larch, which now grow in the northernmost reaches of the planet. They found no DNA from carnivores but believe predators — such as bears, wolves or even saber-toothed tigers — must have been present in the ecosystem.

Love Dalen, a professor at the Centre for Palaeogenetics at Stockholm University, who worked on the mammoth tooth DNA research but wasn’t involved in this study, said the groundbreaking finding really “pushed the envelope” for the field of ancient DNA.

“This is a truly amazing paper!” he said via email. “It can tell us about the composition of ecosystems at different points in time, which is really important to understand how past changes in climate affected species-level biodiversity. This is something that animal DNA cannot do.”

“Also, the findings that several temperate species (such as relatives of spruce and mastodon) lived at such high latitudes are exceptionally interesting,” he added.



A close-up of organic material in the coastal deposit at the Kap København formation in northern Greenland. - Professor Svend Funder

Genetic road map for climate change?

Willerslev said the 16-year study was the longest project of its kind he and most of his team of researchers had ever been involved in.

Extracting the fragments of genetic code from the sediment took a great deal of scientific detective work and several painstaking attempts — after the team established for the first time that DNA was hidden in clay and quartz in the sediment and could be detached from it. The fact that the DNA had binded itself to mineral surfaces was likely why it survived for so long, the researchers said.

“We revisited these samples and we failed and we failed. They got the name in the lab the ‘curse of the København Formation,’” Willerslev said.

Further study of environmental DNA from this time period could help scientists understand how various organisms might adapt to climate change.

“It’s a climate that we expect to face on Earth due to global warming and it gives us some idea of how nature will respond to increasing temperatures,” he explained.

“If we manage to read this road map correctly, it really contains the key to how organisms can (adapt) and how can we help organisms adapt to a very fast changing climate.”

COP15
Canada commits $800 million to support Indigenous-led conservation projects


MONTREAL — Ottawa will spend up to $800 million to support four major Indigenous-led conservation projects across the country covering nearly one million square kilometres of land and water, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Wednesday.


Canada commits $800 million to support Indigenous-led conservation projects© Provided by The Canadian Press

Trudeau made the announcement at the Biosphere environment museum in Montreal accompanied by Indigenous leaders and federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault as a UN meeting on global biodiversity, known as COP15, takes place in the city.

Trudeau said the four projects — which will be located in British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, northern Ontario and Nunavut — will be developed in partnership with the communities in question.

"Each of these projects is different, because each of these projects is being designed by communities, for communities," he said.

Chief Jackson Lafferty, of the Tlicho government in the Northwest Territories, said Indigenous groups have long been working to protect their lands and water but have lacked resources and tools to fully do so.

Lafferty, who attended the announcement, called the funding "a significant step forward on a path to reconciliation across Canada."

Among the projects to be funded is a marine conservation and sustainability initiative in the Great Bear Sea along British Columbia's north coast, championed by 17 First Nations in the area.

Another project includes protection for boreal forests, rivers and lands across the Northwest Territories, spearheaded by 30 Indigenous governments.

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Funds will also go to an Inuit-led project involving waters and land in Nunavut's Qikiqtani region and to a project in western James Bay to protect the world's third largest wetland, led by the Omushkego Cree in Ontario.

Trudeau told reporters that the exact details of the agreements have yet to be worked out — including which portions of the lands will be shielded from resource extraction.

The Indigenous partners, he said, will be able to decide which lands need to be completely protected and where there can be "responsible, targeted development."

"We know we need jobs, we know we need protected areas, we know we need economic development," he said. "And nobody knows that, and the importance of that balance, better than Indigenous communities themselves that have been left out of this equation, not just in Canada but around the world, for too long."

Dallas Smith, president of Nanwakolas Council, said the B.C. funding to help protect the Great Bear Sea would allow Indigenous groups to build on previous agreements to protect the terrestrial lands of Great Bear Rainforest, which were announced about 15 years ago.

"I did media all over the world, and I got home and my elder said, 'Don't sprain your arm patting yourself on the back, because until you do the marine component, it doesn't mean anything,'" he said.

Grand Chief Alison Linklater of the Mushkegowuk Council, which represents seven Cree communities in northern Ontario, said their traditional territory includes ancient peatlands that store "billions of tons" of carbon, as well as wetlands that are home to many migratory birds and fish, and 1,200 kilometres of coastline.

She said caring for the lands is one of her sacred duties as grand chief and one of the main concerns of the people she represents.

"Without our lands and waters we do not exist," she told the news conference.

In a statement, the federal government said the program would employ a "unique funding model" bringing together government, Indigenous Peoples, philanthropic partners and other investors to secure long-term financing for community-led conservation projects.

The government did not specify how much of the funding would be allocated for each project.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 7, 2022.

Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press