Alberta playing risky politics by denying free contraceptives, physicians say

Story by The Canadian Press •

The Government of Alberta's plans to opt out of a recently tabled federal pharmacare program are "naïve and premature," and would leave tens of thousands without access to diabetes medication and contraceptives, says the Edmonton Zone Medical Staff Assocation.

Throughout the province, access to free birth control products is insufficient and inequitable, the physicians represented by EZMSA said in a statement, and they are outraged that drugs "essential for women’s reproductive health and reducing costs to the health system" would be refused by the province.

"Albertans must receive the same coverage for free birth control as the rest of Canada—it is absurd to play politics with the health of our patients and deny Albertans this groundbreaking program," the group said in a statement.

Legislation introduced by the Government of Canada last week lays the groundwork for the country's first universal, single-payer pharmacare program, and will initially cover some forms of birth control and diabetes medications.

Before full details of the pharmacare program were released, however, Alberta's health minister Adriana LaGrange signalled the province would not be signing on to the agreement. Instead, LaGrange said during a news event on Monday the province will request the full per capita share of funding to "enhance" the programs it already has in place.

"Alberta’s government supports protecting choice for women accessing reproductive health care services and products in Alberta. The vast majority of Albertans can already access contraceptives through either employer or government provided health care insurance plans," a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health said in an email.

"These products include oral contraceptives, injectable contraceptives, intrauterine devices and others to support women in their reproductive health care choices."

Bobbi Jo Hawkes, manager for EZMSA, said it has long been the province's position that its existing reproductive health programs are sufficient, but the groups research shows otherwise.

Roughly one in five Canadians don't have drug coverage through either an employer or government-funded plan. While Alberta Health Services does provide free hormonal birth control or IUDs, there are no AHS facilities in either the north or south zones where these services are available, according to a paper published by EZMSA in December, 2023.

"And so they have to travel to either Edmonton or Calgary. And they have to stay for more than one appointment," Hawkes explained. "That travel is a huge barrier."

Along with the cost and inconvenience of travelling to another city to get free birth control, Hawkes said women often have to attend one appointment to get the prescription and another to get the drugs or for IUD insertion, requiring them to stay more than one day to access these free programs.

The AHS facilities in Edmonton, Calgary, and central zones that do offer free birth control also report not having enough supplies to meet existing demand, Hawkes said.

For women who don't have employer or government-funded insurance coverage, the cost of birth control can be prohibitive, "and we know that in fact there are some women that cannot afford it and are being forced with difficult decisions because of that," Carmen Wyton, chair of the Women's Health Coalition of Canada.

The up-front cost of an IUD is upwards of $300, putting it out of reach for many low-income women and marginalized groups, she said.

"We need to think about access to contraceptives with a bigger picture in mind and make sure that women have access no matter where they are," Wyton said.

"The bigger issue here is that women's health isn't prioritized enough – whether it's menstrual or reproductive health, access to free menstrual products, access to contraception, the preference to male surgeries versus female surgeries. At the root of all of this is that women's health is not prioritized."

Brett McKay, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, St. Albert Gazette

'Learning to live with fire': New study details impact of 2023 wildfire season

Story by Cindy Tran • 

Wildfire smoke blankets Downtown Edmonton on May 19, 2023.© Provided by Edmonton Journal

Researchers across Canada have released a new study on the 2023 wildfire season classifying it as a record-breaking year across the nation.

An early wildfire season spanning from late April 2023 to early November 2023 has had “profound” impacts on Canadians, from health issues due to mass amounts of smoke to record-breaking evacuations.

Postmedia spoke to Ellen Whitman, a forest fire research scientist with Natural Resources Canada in the Canadian Forest Service, and one of the authors of the new study. She said the residual impacts of the 2023 season will make the 2024 wildfire season in Alberta challenging due to the lack of recovery from the drought.

Here’s a breakdown of the main causes of the 2023 wildfire season, impacts on communities and how it will inform 2024.

Extreme weather, drought among drivers of 2023 season

A combination of extreme weather conditions, primarily the early season drought, early snowmelt and sustained extreme fire weather were large contributors throughout Canada in 2023, according to the report.

Several indicators throughout the research illustrated a record-breaking year, with more than 15 million hectares burned in Canada in 2023 from April to October, seven times the historic national average of about 2.5 million per year.


Evacuees from the Yellowknife wildfires arrive at the wildfire evacuation centre at the Edmonton Expo Centre, Saturday Aug. 19, 2023.© David Bloom

Whitman said researchers often talk about extremities in percentile. The 95th percentile which would be considered an “extreme outlier above average fire conditions” was seen in forested areas across the country, particularly from May to June.

These extreme conditions were mainly concentrated in northern Alberta, northern British Columbia and the southern Northwest Territories

When looking at the distribution of the number of days spent above the 95th percentile of weather conditions in 2023, places like northern Alberta had over 60 days above that condition, which Whitman said is “really dramatic” and affected a lot of the country.

“A year that extreme was a function of the weather which is indirectly a function of the climate,” Whitman said. “There’s a very strong tie to what we’re experiencing and the atmosphere conditions which are associated with anthropogenic climate change.”
‘Learning to live with fire’

With low snowpacks throughout western Canada, Whitman anticipates the most challenging aspect of the 2024 wildfire season is the lack of recovery from the 2023 drought.

“When we enter the spring in a drought condition already and then very low snowpack, often those are indicators of high area burned the next year or the next spring a nd a lot of that is essentially a holdover from last year because we just didn’t get the relief from that drought,” Whitman said.


Dry grass frames the downtown Calgary skyline on Wednesday, January 31, 2024. Drought conditions are forecast again this summer in southern Alberta.© Gavin Young

Holdover fires, which are dormant and often undetected, persist year to year. It is possible for fires to move underground for a period of time, for weeks or even months. When the weather dries out and temperatures rise these fires can flare up again.

After experiencing a wildfire season like 2023, Whitman says communities need to be more proactive, citing the benefit to fuel mitigation around communities, whether through fire smart thinning of prescribed burning or trying to get ahead of the problem by treating the landscape.

“I certainly think that some of it is going to be learning to live with fire, as we saw in 2023,” Whitman said. “It’s beyond our capacity, at least at present, to extinguish all these fires. To some degree, we do need to sort of adapt the ways that we live alongside fire, accepting some of them, allowing some to burn under conditions that are favourable and in locations where people are not endangered.”
Thousands forced to evacuate, poor air quality

According to the study, 232,000 people across 12 of the 13 provinces and territories were forced to evacuate. The study notes the largest wildfire evacuation in Canadian history came in 2016 when 88,000 people where forced to leave Fort McMurray.

Canada experienced five of the largest evacuations since 1981, among them was Edson. The town about 200 km west of Edmonton, with a population of just under 9,000, experienced the ninth biggest evacuation across the country with multiple evacuations in 2023.


Pedestrians make their way through the heavy fog and smoke in Edmonton on Aug. 25, 2023. A special air quality statement was issued as smoke from wildfires continues to cause poor air quality and reduced visibility.© Provided by Edmonton Journal

According to the study, eight people working on the wildfires in Canada were killed in the 2023 fire season.

Poor air quality throughout the season resulted in several extreme weather warnings against going outdoors. Fires in the southern Northwest Territories and northwestern Quebec were particularly influential sources of smoke in 2023.


“There was really extreme levels of smoke within Canada that affected a lot of different communities and because of the long-distance transport of smoke, those effects were really profound,” Whitman said. “So many people across Canada, even at large population centres that may not necessarily have been close to fires, had really, really poor air quality sort of on the scale that hasn’t been recorded in recent history.”

Related
Alberta declares an early start to wildfire season

Union warns of Alberta Wildfire staffing crisis ahead of season

Alberta saw record-breaking numbers

Alberta saw 2.2 million hectares burned between Mar. 1 and Oct. 31, 2023. The province’s five-year average prior to this year was 226,000 hectares of burned land.

Alberta had the warmest fire season since 1940, particularly up north, according to Whitman.

“In terms of temperature and then in terms of moisture or vapour pressure deficit, which is essentially a measure of how much moisture holding capacity the air has which represents how dry the fuels are, it was the driest year generally since 1940.

In Alberta, June is typically referred to as “June monsoon” following a warm, dry and sometimes windy spring — the promise of rain in June is supposed to help, but last year there was a lack of precipitation in the north and south, which were extremely dry.

The wildfire season traditionally runs from March 1 to Oct. 31. However, on Feb. 20, the Alberta government declared an early start to the 2024 season , 10 days earlier than usual.

BP's operational emissions edge higher in 2023


The logo of British multinational oil and gas company BP is displayed at their booth during the LNG 2023 energy trade show in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, July 12, 2023. REUTERS/Chris Helgren© Thomson Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - BP's carbon emissions from its own operations rose slightly in 2023 due to oil and gas projects starting up and operational issues, the energy company said in its annual report.

Direct emissions from operations, known as Scope 1 emissions, rose last year to 31.1 million metric tons from 30.4 million tons in 2022.

Indirect emissions from operations, or Scope 2 emissions, declined to 1 million tons from 1.4 million tons the previous year.

Together, Scope 1 and 2 emissions rose by 0.6% in 2023 from the previous year.

BP aims to reduce its operational emissions by 20% by 2025 from 2019 levels and by 50% in 2030. The emissions fell by over 40% between 2019 and 2023.

The overall increase in operational emissions was due to "temporary operational changes" and project start-ups including in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea.

(Reporting by Ron Bousso and Deep Vakil; Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Mark Potter)

A pit of bones discovered under a castle could unlock key questions about what makes us human

Story by Evan Bush •


Inside a cave beneath a medieval German castle, researchers have discovered a pit of bones that they say unlock secrets of the earliest humans.

The remains — buried in layers of soil in the collapsed cave — contained the genetic material of cave bears, hyenas and 13 bones of early humans who died some 45,000 years ago.

The findings — which were described in a trio of papers published Thursday in the journals Nature and Nature Ecology & Evolution — show that early humans ventured further north earlier than scientists had realized, that they could craft spear-shaped tools, and that humans then had the wherewithal to thrive in temperatures far more frigid than the climate today.

The discoveries, which were made possibly because of the development of new DNA technology, are reshaping how scientists understand the time when both humans and Neanderthals walked the European continent.

“Because of the age of this site and location, we know Neanderthals and humans quite definitively had a large overlap,” said Elena Zavala, a paleo and forensic geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped author the three studies. The species likely roamed the same geography for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.


science ranis cave excavation (Tim Schüler via Springer Nature)© Tim Schüler via Springer Nature

The discoveries could bring scientists closer to understanding why Neanderthals ultimately died out and what role humans played in their demise.

John Hawks, a University of Wisconsin-Madison paleoanthropologist who studies ancient human relatives but was not involved in this research, said the study helps solidify the theory that patches of different human cultures were developing as Neanderthals neared their end.


“These groups are exploring. They’re going to new places. They live there for a while. They have lifestyles that are different,” he said of the early humans. “They’re comfortable moving into areas where there were Neanderthals.”

These discoveries were only possible because previous researchers left a stone unturned. Archaeologists in the 1920s and 1930s previously excavated the Ilsenhöhle cave, below the Ranis Castle in Germany’s Thuringia region. The castle was built above the cave long before any excavation.

At that time, the scientists hit a more than 5-foot-thick rock, which blocked them from burrowing into key layers of the collapsed cave.

In 2016, armed with modern digging technology and new forms of analysis, the researchers returned. About 24 feet below the surface, they found layers that contained leaf points — which are like spear points — and human bone fragments.

The discovery of human bone fragments sent the researchers digging through the material excavated about nine decades ago — in which they found additional skeleton fragments.


science stone tools ranis cave excavation (Josephine Schubert via Springer Nature)© Josephine Schubert via Springer Nature

“Finding human remains mixed with animal bones that had been stored for almost a century was an unexpected and fantastic surprise,” Hélène Rougier, a palaeoanthropologist at California State University Northridge, said in a news release.

In all, the researchers were able to identify 13 pieces of bone. DNA analysis confirmed the bone fragments were from humans and also that some were linked to the same person or a family member. Tests of animal bones found nearby suggest that the climate was harsh — comparable to modern-day Siberia.

That means humans were having success in an extreme climate some 45,000 years ago.

“These early modern people seem to have mastered or put together a cultural package that let them succeed at northern latitudes better than Neanderthals had done,” Hawks said.

The study also suggests that the leaf point technology scientists had once attributed to Neanderthals was used by humans.


ranis cave excavation site (Tim Schüler via Springer Nature)© Tim Schüler via Springer Nature

“It’s a thoroughly skilled process to make those things,” Hawks said of leaf points, which are flakes of rock thinned into the shape of an olive leaf. “The fact that people invested the energy to make that beautiful thing -- tells us about their social system. It tells us they were not living hand to mouth. They had time to invest.”


The fate of Neanderthals has been a subject of hot debate. Did a shift in climate doom them? Did humans kill them off? Did they simply get absorbed into humanity as the species interbred?

Today, depending on their ancestry, many people still have a sliver of Neanderthal DNA in their genetic code.

More complicated genetic testing of the Ranis bone fragments, a project that is underway, could identify whether there are traces of Neanderthal genes in the recently discovered bone fragments.

“The big question — is there Neanderthal DNA? Did these humans potentially intermix with Neanderthals?” Zavala said.

Answers to questions like these in Ranis could help answer the questions intrinsic to our species’ existence, the researchers say.

“It goes after this question — what makes us human. 100,000 years ago, throughout the globe, there were multiple kinds of hominins on the planet,” Zavala said, referring to mankind’s close genetic relatives.

“Now, it’s just us. Why did that happen? How did evolution get to where we are and what does that mean for our future?”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

Jack Mintz: Don’t solve investment woes on workers’ backs

Opinion by Jack M. Mintz •

In the past few weeks, I have attended four meetings in which Canadian business leaders pointed to the lack of capital to fund projects in Canada. These entrepreneurs were not the ones you would expect, like oil and gas producers. Instead, they were from companies in tech, renewable energy and critical mining — who you would think would have no trouble attracting funds, given the heaps of government handouts these days. But even these companies are looking to invest outside Canada, especially in the United States, with its booming US$25-trillion economy.

I heard many reasons as to why Canada is out of favour these days. Miners referred to labour shortages, regulations and unsettled treaty issues with First Nations that make it hard to build anything. Startups say innovation hubs lack connections with venture capitalists. Several complained that big Canadian banks lack enthusiasm for investment in our slowing economy. Investors are also concerned about deficit spending, uncompetitive tax policies and scant political interest in private-sector investment.

No one knows exactly why investors are so turned off Canada but, with real per capita GDP essentially flat for eight years, our economy seems to be as stuck “as a painted ship upon a painted ocean” (to borrow Coleridge’s phrase from the Ancient Mariner). This week, however, an old guard of Canada’s business community says it knows what’s wrong: too much pension money is invested internationally. In a full-page newspaper ad, they pressed governments “to amend the rules governing pension funds to encourage them to invest in Canada.” They should do so because pension funds would not exist “without government sponsorship and considerable tax assistance.”

This policy prescription is as smart as a bag of hammers. Canada will not improve its business environment by going back to an old form of capital controls. After years of debate, in 2005 we finally abolished foreign property rules restricting pension and RRSP funds to holding no more than 30 per cent of their assets in shares and bonds issued by non-resident entities. We abolished it for a simple reason: to enable employees to get better returns on their retirement assets by diversifying internationally.

That’s exactly what happened after the rule was removed. According to OECD statistics , Canadian pension funds increased the foreign share of their assets from 26 per cent in 2005 to 35 per cent in 2020. (That last figure jumped to 47 per cent in 2021, not because of a major shift in pension plan behaviour but due to a break in the series due to a redesign of the quarterly survey — a crucial point missed by the National Bank of Canada in a memo suggesting pension funds are abandoning Canada.)

Our pension funds’ 48 per cent foreign share in 2022 makes them more internationally diversified than some countries’ funds, less diversified than others’. Funds in the Netherlands hold fully 85 per cent of their assets outside that country. In Italy the foreign share is 68 per cent. In New Zealand it’s 58 per cent; in Switzerland, 38 per cent. Unfortunately, the OECD does not provide numbers for the U.S. and Australia.

Canadian markets account for only about three per cent of the global equity market. So you might argue our pension funds should be a lot more diversified than they are today. Many investors have a “home bias” that favours putting their money in domestic companies they know better (or think they know better). But Canadian fund managers are accustomed to operating globally, so, if anything, our funds probably aren’t diversified enough.

Over the last few decades, we have gradually abandoned regulation of pension plan performance. That hasn’t prevented the World Bank from congratulating us for pension funds that are the envy of the world. In 2017 it wrote: “Over the past three decades, a ‘Canadian model’ of public pension has emerged that combines independent governance, professional in-house investment management, scale, and extensive geographic and asset-class diversification.”

Tax assistance to pension (and RRSP) funds should not be held over pension managers’ heads to force them away from international diversification. In fact, it can be argued there is no “tax assistance” at all. Pension contributions are indeed deductible from taxable income. But that’s not tax favouritism. It merely prevents the double taxation of savings since pension benefits withdrawn from the plan, including accumulated returns, are fully taxed (as they should be). Taxing both returns within the pension plan and withdrawals would tax savers more heavily than non-savers, which would be neither fair nor good policy.

Restricting their pension funds’ international diversification would cost Canadian savers the opportunity to earn the higher returns available from investing in companies like Nvidia and Microsoft. And if pension funds are forced to hold mainly domestic assets, Canadian businesses will have less incentive to improve their productivity.

Alberta renews quest for healthy Heritage Fund

Protecting corporate Canada from takeovers hurts productivity

Vacant home taxes may be worsening housing crisis

The solution to Canada’s investment malaise is to adopt policies that improve, not worsen, the return to investment in this country. We should not try to offset the effects of unwise federal regulatory and tax policies by saddling hard-working Canadians with inferior pensions later in life.

Financial Post

Greenwashing death threats ‘show you who the Conservatives are,’ NDP leader says

Federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh slammed the federal Conservatives on Wednesday for spreading falsehoods that left his party's natural resources critic facing death threats and homophobic slurs.

Earlier this week, Canada's National Observer reported that NDP MP Charlie Angus had been "inundated" by calls from people — mostly men — threatening and insulting him for tabling a bill to rein in misleading advertising by the fossil fuel industry. If successful, Bill C-372 would prohibit oil and gas companies from marketing their products as a solution to climate change.

The federal Conservatives have attacked the proposal, launching an online petition claiming the bill would "prescribe jail time for Canadians who speak positively about the oil and gas industry in Canada." This is false. The proposed law targets companies, not individuals, and wouldn't send anyone to jail.

"This bill is about making sure misinformation, false information cannot be spread," said Singh. "The fact that Conservatives are opposed to the idea of not letting corporations lie … and [that] they would resort to cheering on attacks of a very personal nature, death threats, inappropriate things like that, shows you who the Conservatives are."

"The casual disregard of facts and science in pursuit of partisan advantage goes beyond the climate change issue: it also becomes an issue for the health of our democracy," said federal environment minister Steven Guilebault in a statement. "We know that a large majority of Canadians want more action on the environment, but a noisy minority of climate skeptics unfortunately dominate the online public discourse."

Experts agree that burning fossil fuels is the main driver of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that misinformation and greenwashing are "barriers" to tackling the climate crisis by slowing down vital policies.

Other countries have already regulated fossil fuel advertising to minimize greenwashing. France, for instance, banned the practice in 2022 and requires high-carbon industries to carry warnings about their climate impacts. Modelled on 1997 laws regulating tobacco ads in Canada, Bill C-372 aims to help Canada catch up with its global peers on the issue.

Angus said opposition from the Conservatives, their supporters and the fossil fuel industry has been vociferous and swift. In addition to the petition and "rage farm" of angry men personally attacking him and his staff, he has also received more conventional "blowback" from industry supporters.

Still, the most aggressive attacks have come from those enraged about the false prospect that their freedom to support oil and gas could be curtailed. This window into "petro-masculinity" — a culture where masculinity is defined by aggressive behaviour, right-wing extremism and climate denial — has made meaningful debate impossible, Angus said.

"We used to debate issues. People would phone me and say, ‘I really think that bill is really stupid.’ And I'd explain it to them and that's a good conversation," said Angus. "But when people are phoning me saying: 'You m*fo, you're never going to jail me. I'm going to die with my oil and gas bumper stickers in my cold dead hand.' How do you converse with people?"

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson & Rochelle Baker / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson & Rochelle Baker, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Canada's National Observer

Canada's Gabriel Resources loses damage claim against Romania for failed gold mine project

BUCHAREST (Reuters) - The Romanian government said on Friday it won an arbitrage trial filed by Canada's Gabriel Resources which wanted compensation after its plan to build Europe's largest open cast gold mine in the western Romanian town of Rosia Montana failed.

Gabriel Resources had sought at least $4.4 billion in damages from Romania when it filed its claim at the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes in 2015 for losses related to its stalled project.

The Romanian government, which had a 20% stake in the project, officially withdrew its support for the mine in 2014 after months of country-wide street protests against it.

"The Romanian government salutes this decision and thanks everyone involved in defending the interests of the Romanian state," the cabinet of Socialist Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu said in a statement. The government had initially expected a negative ruling.

Gabriel Resources gained concession rights to the Rosia Montana area in 1999 and fought a decades-long battle with civil rights and environmental groups which argued the project would destroy ancient Roman mine galleries and villages, and could lead to an ecological disaster.

The project envisioned using cyanides and carving open four quarries which would have destroyed four mountain tops and wiped out three outlying villages of 16 that make up the Rosia Montana municipality.

Rosia Montana's remaining reserves were estimated at 314 tonnes of gold and 1,500 tonnes of silver.

Prior to Friday's ruling, Ciolacu wondered whether Romania should revive plans to extract the gold reserves from the area. However, in 2021 UNESCO added the ancient Roman gold mining area of Rosia Montana in western Romania to its list of protected World Heritage Sites.

(Reporting by Luiza Ilie in Bucharest; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

Romania wins legal battle against a Canadian miner over failed plans to open a gold mine

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — The Romanian government has won a years long legal dispute with a Canadian mining company seeking damages over failed plans to open a gold and silver mine in the Eastern European country.

Gabriel Resources was seeking $4.4 billion (4 billion euros) in damages from the Romanian state, which owned a 20% stake in the mining project in Rosia Montana, a mountainous western region that contains some of Europe’s largest gold deposits. The Romanian government withdrew its support for the project in 2014.

The government said that the ruling late Friday by the Washington-based International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes ordered Gabriel Resources to reimburse its legal costs for the arbitration case the Canadian miner launched in 2015.

Romania’s Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu said it would have been unfair for Romanian citizens to be burdened with high costs a loss would have incurred. “I thank the team of lawyers who represented Romania with professionalism,” he said after the ruling.

The decision came 25 years after Gabriel Resources gained concession rights for the mining project that planned to extract gold and silver over a 16-year period. It would have involved razing four mountain tops, displacing hundreds of families and leaving behind a waste lake containing cyanide, a toxic chemical used in the process of gold extraction.

The project drew strong opposition from environmental and civic activists who helped organize protests that drew tens of thousands of people to Romania’s streets in 2013. Gabriel Resources said the project would have provided jobs in an area where employment opportunities are scarce.

Rosia Montana is also home to ancient Roman mining galleries, which were added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 2021.

The Associated Press

With AI, workplace surveillance has ‘skyrocketed’—leaving Canadian laws behind

© Provided by The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — Technology that tracks your location at work and the time you're spending in the bathroom. A program that takes random screenshots of your laptop screen. A monitoring system that detects your mood during your shift.

These are just some ways employee surveillance technology — now turbocharged, thanks to the explosive growth of artificial intelligence — is being deployed.

Canada's laws aren't keeping up, experts warn.

"Any working device that your employer puts in your hand, you can assume it has some way of monitoring your work and productivity," said Valerio De Stefano, Canada research chair in innovation law and society at York University.

"Electronic monitoring is a reality for most workers."

Artificial intelligence could also be determining whether someone gets, or keeps, a job in the first place.

Automated hiring is already "extremely widespread," with nearly all Fortune 500 companies in the United States using AI to hire new workers, De Stefano said.

Unlike traditional monitoring, he added, AI is making "autonomous decisions about hiring, retention and discipline" or providing recommendations to the employer about such decisions.

Employee surveillance can look like a warehouse worker with a mini-computer on their arm that's tracking every movement they make, said Bea Bruske, president of the Canadian Labour Congress.

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"They're building a pallet, but that particular mini-computer is tracking every single step, every flick of the wrist, so to speak," Bruske said.

"They know exactly how many boxes are being placed on that pallet, how much time it's taking, how many extra steps that worker might have taken."

There is little data documenting how widespread AI-powered worker surveillance might be in Canada. Unless employers are up front about their practices, "we don't necessarily know," Bruske said.

In a 2022 study by the Future Skills Centre, the pollster Abacus Data surveyed 1,500 employees and 500 supervisors who work remotely.

Seventy per cent reported that some or all aspects of their work were being digitally monitored.

About one-third of employees said they experienced at least one instance of location tracking, webcam or video recording, keystroke monitoring, screen grabs or employer use of biometric information.

"There is a patchwork of laws governing workplace privacy which currently provides considerable leeway for employers to monitor employees," the report noted.

Electronic monitoring in the workplace has been around for years. But the technology has become more intimate, taking on tasks like listening to casual conversations between workers.

It's also become easier for companies to use and more customized to their specific needs — and more normalized, said McGill University associate professor Renee Sieber.

De Stefano said artificial intelligence has made electronic monitoring more invasive, since "it is able to process much more data and is more affordable."

"Employer monitoring has skyrocketed" since AI has been around, he added.

Those in the industry, however, insist there's also a positive side.

Toronto-based FutureFit AI makes an AI-powered career assistant, which CEO Hamoon Ekhtiari said can help individuals navigate workplaces that are being rapidly changed by the technology.

AI can look for jobs, give career guidance, look for training programs or generate a plan for next steps. In the hiring process, it can give applicants rapid feedback about gaps in their applications, Ekhtiari said.

As artificial intelligence permeates Canadian workplaces, legislators are making efforts to bring in new rules.

The federal government has proposed Bill C-27, which would set out obligations for "high-impact" AI systems.

That includes those dealing in "determinations in respect of employment, including recruitment, referral, hiring, remuneration, promotion, training, apprenticeship, transfer or termination," said Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne.

Champagne has flagged concerns AI systems could perpetuate bias and discrimination in hiring, including in who sees job ads and how applicants are ranked.

But critics have taken issue with the bill not explicitly including worker protections. It also won’t come into effect immediately, only after regulations implementing the bill are developed.


In 2022, Ontario began requiring employers with 25 or more employees to have a written policy describing electronic monitoring and stating for what purposes it can use that information.

Neither the proposed legislation nor Ontario law "afford enough protection to workers," De Stefano said.

Activities like reading employee emails and time tracking are allowed, as long as the employer has a policy and informs workers about what's happening, he added.

"It's good to know, but if I don't have recourse against the use of these systems, some of which can be extremely problematic, well, the protection is actually not particularly meaningful."

Ontario has also proposed requiring employers to disclose AI use in hiring. If passed, it would make the province the first Canadian jurisdiction to implement such a law.

Provincial and federal privacy laws should offer some protections, in theory. But Canada’s privacy commissioners have warned that existing privacy legislation is woefully inadequate.

They said in October "the recent proliferation of employee monitoring software" has "revealed that laws protecting workplace privacy are either out of date or absent altogether."

Watchdogs in other countries have been cracking down. In January, France hit Amazon with a $35-million fine for monitoring workers with an "excessively intrusive system."

The issue has also been on the radar for unions. The Canadian Labour Congress isn’t satisfied with Bill C-27, and employees and their unions have not been adequately consulted, Bruske said.

De Stefano said the government should "stop making the adoption of these systems the unilateral choice of employers" and instead give workers a chance to be fully informed and express their concerns.

Governments should be aiming for something that distinguishes between monitoring performance and surveillance, putting bathroom-break timing in the latter category, Sieber added.

A case could be made to ban some technologies outright, such as "emotional AI" tools that detect whether a worker in front of a computer screen or on an assembly line is happy, she said.

Emily Niles, a senior researcher with the Canadian Union of Public Employees, said AI systems run on information like time logs, the number of tasks completed during a shift, email content, meeting notes and cellphone use.

"AI doesn't exist without data, and it's actually our data that it is running on," Niles said.

"That's a significant point of intervention for the union, to assert workers’ voices and control over these technologies."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 9, 2024.

Anja Karadeglija, The Canadian Press

Florida GOP passes 'vicious' bill banning mandatory water breaks for workers

Story by Julia Conley, Common Dreams • 

Photo by Nigel Msipa on Unsplash© provided by AlterNet

Displaying "punitive cruelty" toward Florida residents who work outdoors, the Republican-controlled state House on Friday approved a bill that would ban local governments from requiring that workplaces provide water breaks and other cooling measures.

The state Senate passed the measure on Thursday, with Republicans pushing the bill through as Miami-Dade County was scheduled to vote on local water break protections. If signed into law by the Republican governor, the proposal will preempt the county's vote.

Roughly 2 million workers are expected to be affected by the legislation in Florida, where parts of the state experienced record-breaking heat last year. Meteorologists found that last month was the hottest February ever recorded globally, and the ninth straight month to set such a record.

Miami-Dade County officials estimate that 34 people die from heat-related causes each year.

"Every single year, it's going to get hotter and hotter," Oscar Londoño, executive director of worker advocacy group WeCount!, toldThe Guardian. "Many more workers' lives are going to be at risk. We will see fatalities, because of what Florida Republicans chose to do this week."

Londoño called the bill a "cruel... bad faith attempt to keep labor conditions very low for some of the most vulnerable workers."

Under the legislation, cities and counties will be prohibited from setting workplace standards that require drinking water, cooling measures, and recovery periods after grueling work in hot weather. Requiring companies to facilitate emergency responses or to post or distribute materials informing workers about staying safe in sweltering heat would also be prohibited.

"The vicious inhumanity at the heart of this legislation will cost the lives of and impose needless suffering on workers—especially workers of color and immigrant workers, who make up a disproportionate share of agricultural and construction workers—across the state," said Juley Fulcher, worker health and safety advocate with Public Citizen. "Gov. Ron DeSantis should veto this legislation."

There are no federal protections requiring that workplaces protect employees from the dangers of working in hot and humid conditions, even after scientists projected last year that heat-related deaths will continue to rise.

In 2021 the Biden administration called on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to develop workplace heat safety standards, but it has not yet done so.

Republicans in Texas passed a bill last year that would have prevented cities from enacting and passing local ordinances, including those that require water breaks and other worker protections. A district court ruled that the proposal was unconstitutional last August, just before it was set to go into effect.

Fulcher said Congress must pass the Asuncíon Valdivia Heat Illness, Injury and Fatality Prevention Act, which was named for a worker who became unconscious after picking grapes for 10 hours straight in 105-degree heat in 2004. His employer did not call an ambulance but instead directed Valdivia's son to drive his father home. Valdivia died of heat stroke soon after at the age of 53.

The federal law would direct OSHA to immediately adopt interim heat standards while officials continue the process of adopting a final rule.

"With Florida joining Texas in preempting even the most minor workplace protections for excessive heat exposure," said Fulcher, "it's past time for the federal government to step up."

70 per cent of Air Canada pilots willing to walk away if pay doesn't improve, union boss says

Story by Special to National Post

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Air Canada logos are seen on the tails of planes at the airport in Montreal, Que., on June 26, 2023.© Provided by National Post

“It’s not justifiable that our American counterparts — flying the same airplanes, same airspace, same routes — that they’re making twice as much as us, if not more,” declares Charlene Hudy, first officer on the 737 Max and chair of the Air Canada pilots union.

For the past seven months, Hudy, 41, has been hammering this message at the negotiating table with Air Canada, demanding parity with American counterparts on behalf of the nearly 5,300 pilots on Air Canada’s roster. A decade ago, pilot salaries at Air Canada and United Airlines were nearly equal; today, the Americans earn twice as much.

The salary range for Canadian pilots is roughly $40,000 for a new hire to more than $200,000 for an experienced captain.

Make no mistake, I’m not inclined to be overly sympathetic to unions. But this airline’s antics — ranking dead last among North America’s 10 major airlines in on-time performance in 2023, and the axing of western Canadian routes — predispose me, a million-mile flyer with the carrier, to listen to what the pilots have to say.

And the airline can afford to be fair. The company posted a $2.28-billion profit in 2023 ($1.71-billion in adjusted net income). For that, Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau was rewarded with a $2.6-million bonus. And, Hudy confirms, executives at Air Canada get compensated at rates on par with their counterparts working for legacy airlines in the U.S.

Hudy is an airline pilot. It’s not inconceivable that she could fly from Saskatoon, where she lives, to meet me in Calgary for an interview to talk about this unfolding situation. It’s just a short hop between prairie cities. But no. “I can’t fly on Air Canada from Saskatoon to Calgary, or Regina to Calgary,” she winces, “without being routed through Toronto or Vancouver.” We agree to meet online instead.

Hudy isn’t exactly who I expect to find in the captain’s seat, negotiating on behalf of a union where only 7.7 per cent of the pilots are female. Her peers assure me she’s the kind of “next generation leader needed at this watershed moment in Canada’s aviation history.” After a few meetings with Hudy, I concur; she’s as talented as this job requires, and not another affirmative action program gone wrong. In airline vernacular, she’s a spitfire.

She joined the Air Cadets in junior high and earned a glider’s licence before she even held a licence to drive a car. Prior to joining Air Canada, she was a flight instructor in Yorkton, Sask., and then headed north, and farther north, flying above the 60th parallel for First Air.

“I would fly from Iqaluit to Resolute Bay,” she grins, “and they would have a notice saying, when you’re doing your walk around — to make sure the airplane’s OK before you take it flying — beware of the polar bears.”

Like many pilots, Hudy’s first love is flying. And, as she explains, that’s the root of the challenge for the pilots union: “Because you love your job so much, you get undervalued right away. Since you love your work, you’re not going to really be paid all that well. You’re expected to work long hours and give a lot because, hey, at the end of the day, you get to love what you do, whereas a lot of people can’t say the same thing.”

In these contract negotiations, her aim is making sure Air Canada pilots are valued properly for the work they do. It’s that simple. Her union’s talking points: Air Canada pilots took deep pay cuts after 9/11 to help save the carrier and keep Canadians flying; other legacy pilot groups have recouped these sacrifices, but not Air Canada pilots.

And this all comes with a warning. If fair compensation isn’t on offer, this airline should expect a talent drain of epic proportions.

“They’re waiting to see what happens with our negotiations,” Hudy shares, “but seven out of 10 of my pilots are thinking — if these negotiations aren’t historic in nature, they will either exercise their option to work south of the border, go overseas or they’re going to completely leave the profession.” And she’s got survey data gathered by the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) to back up her claims.

“Ten per cent of our pilot group, so about 500 pilots, are active with a U.S. immigration firm to get their E2-B visa to then work in the States,” she reports. Canadian aviators don’t automatically have green card eligibility in America but cross-border momentum is picking up, she explains, because pilots can now apply for a U.S. visa without a job offer in hand.

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Still, she’s pitching a win-win to the airline. A robust pilot squad is essential to Air Canada’s future success, she posits. American carriers who “modernized their pilot contracts” have been able to improve on-time-performance, make money, expand routes and subsequently lower ticket prices.

Can we talk routing, just for a moment, I interject. Why the heck is the airline axing direct flights to prairie hubs, first-tier routes, and at the same time adding flights from Toronto and Montreal to tertiary markets — destinations like Toledo, Ohio?

Hudy doesn’t take the bait on my theories about Air Canada and WestJet divvying up the country. “Great questions for Air Canada,” she chuckles. And then she proceeds to map out how her airline brings Americans across the border to Toronto or Montreal, and then flies them overseas.

Plan A, obviously, is to get a deal at the table, but what’s Hudy’s Plan B if Air Canada doesn’t play fair? Right now, she says, we’re committed to negotiating at the table. “But, if we can’t make any more progress in mediation and we have to exercise our right under the Canada Labour Code with the notice of dispute and potential job action, we will do that,” Hudy explains, her voice even. “We’re not there yet, but it is a step we’re willing to take, because we need to be valued appropriately.”

Her personal aim is to get back into the cockpit. But she has a job to do first, and that’s to get Air Canada pilots in the same ballpark as their American counterparts.

Don’t take us for granted is her rallying cry to the airline. As a frequent flier, I echo that sentiment.

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