Thousands of Canadians are spending another day in the cold and dark, as hydro crews continue working to restore electricity to those affected by the power outages caused by fierce winter storms last week.

As of early Monday morning, power was still out for nearly 71,000 Hydro-Quebec customers, more than 31,000 Hydro-One customers and 2,289 clients of NB Power.

A Christmas Eve train derailment is also continuing to wreak havoc on holiday travel plans in Ontario and Quebec.

After cancelling all Christmas Day trains on its Toronto-Ottawa and Toronto-Montreal routes, Via Rail tweeted Sunday evening that it was also cancelling all Boxing Day trains on the corridors due to the ongoing complications.

On the other side of the country in British Columbia, four people died and dozens were injured after a bus rolled over on an icy highway on Saturday night.

Environment Canada warned of ice buildup from ongoing freezing rain in the southern area spanning Whistler and the Fraser Valley to the Okanagan Valley, as well as a special weather statement for much of the interior, also for possible freezing rain.

OTTAWA — The federal conflict of interest and ethics commissioner says Trade Minister Mary Ng broke the rules when her office awarded a contract to one of her friends.

Commissioner Mario Dion released a report today after the federal Conservatives filed a complaint back in the spring, raising concerns over the fact that Ng’s office awarded media training contracts to the firm Pomp and Circumstance.

The firm was co-founded and run by Amanda Alvaro, a friend of Ng’s.

The commissioner says “there is simply no excuse for contracting with a friend’s company.”

In a statement posted to Twitter, Ng says she accepts “full responsibility for her actions” and should have recused herself.

The Canadian Press

TORONTO — Job search company Indeed says postings on its site for Canadian tech roles have dropped 32 per cent since May and are showing no signs of stabilizing as the sector grapples with layoffs.

With job postings across all sectors slipping nine per cent over the summer and increasing slightly since September, the tech openings drop brings postings in the industry closer to their pre-pandemic level than the rest of the economy for the first time in two years.

“We’ve gone from really a market in full-out overdrive, where there are such plentiful opportunities for job seekers and really tough competition for employers trying to fill these roles… to one where the situation is a little cooler,” said Indeed senior economist Brendon Bernard.

“Employers still looking to fill these jobs might have a bit of an easier time while job seekers probably won’t have the same level of options that they did.”

Bernard’s research shows tech postings were still above pandemic levels in late November and are roughly 47 per cent higher than they were in February 2020, when the health crisis began.

He attributes much of the easing to a shift the tech sector is experiencing.

The pandemic pushed investors to funnel massive amounts of money into tech companies, which were well suited to cater to remote work, videoconferencing and streaming.

Companies in such fields saw their valuations rise significantly until people returned to offices and reverted to prior shopping habits earlier this year, pushing tech stocks down and many companies in the sector to start aggressive cost-cutting.

The Canadian Press

Vancouver: The effects of climate change are taking a toll on Christmas tree farms across Canada, with one forestry expert and the head of the Canadian Christmas Tree Association saying the sector that’s already undergoing shifts will need to adapt.
The festive trees take eight to 12 years to reach the size most people look for, and young seedlings are particularly vulnerable to climate risks, said Richard Hamelin, head of the forest conservation sciences department at the University of B.C.
Much of the province has experienced prolonged drought and extreme heat over the last two summers, and the seedlings have shallow root systems that don’t reach beyond the very dry layers of soil near the surface, Hamelin explained.
Meanwhile, their older counterparts may survive but lose their needles or turn brown as a result of extreme heat and drought, he said in an interview.
Seedlings and their shallow roots are also at risk of being inundated during flooding, while wet, cool soils increase the risk of root diseases, Hamelin noted.
Record-breaking atmospheric rivers of rain caused extensive flooding throughout southwestern B.C. in November 2021, but Shirley Brennan, the executive director of the Canadian Christmas Trees Association, said farmers in the province reported their seedlings mostly appeared fine and the extreme heat had been much harder on the trees.
The effects of flooding, however, may become clearer over time.
“Right now the seedlings look OK, but it’s whether or not the root system is strong enough to grow into that tree, and that’s what we don’t know,” Brennan said.
Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia lead the country when it comes to producing Christmas trees, and Brennan said farmers in those provinces have also been grappling with the effects of increasingly extreme, unseasonable weather.
Brennan said she has spoken with tree farmers from across southwestern Ontario and the Greater Toronto Area, some of whom told her they lost upwards of 40 per cent of their crops as they didn’t receive rain between May and August this year.
Christmas tree farmers are no strangers to drought, Brennan added.
“Drought is part of farming,” she said. “Mother nature is a silent partner in any farming commodity, whether it’s Christmas trees or whether it is corn.”
The difference, Brennan said, is the extreme, unseasonable nature of recent droughts and other climate-related events, including intense late-spring frosts in Nova Scotia in 2018 followed by eastern Ontario and western Quebec in 2020.
Brennan said she expects more tree farmers will start planting seedlings in both spring and fall, when they would normally favour planting in one season.
Hamelin noted climate change is also causing warmer weather that fuels activity among pests, which can plague trees already weakened by drought or disease.
“Just like humans, when we are stressed or when we’re more tired, we’re more susceptible to diseases. Well, trees are the same way,” he said. “All this added stress from all this heat and flooding make the trees more susceptible to pests and pathogens.”
Climate change is not the only factor challenging farmers and threatening Canada’s stock of real Christmas trees, which has been declining for several years.
Since the trees take about a decade to reach the desired size, the closure of tree farms in Canada and the United States during the 2008 recession is now being felt.
The closures have continued since then. Data from Statistics Canada shows the total area of Christmas tree farms shrunk by nearly 20,000 acres between 2011 and 2021.
The average age of a tree farmer is between 65 and 85 years old, and younger generations aren’t entering the sector as longtime farmers retire, Brennan noted.
Hamelin said the high cost of land and competition with crops that yield revenue more quickly than festive trees may also be inhibiting factors for the sector in B.C.
He pointed to some options that could help Christmas tree farmers weather the effects of climate change, including genetically selecting and breeding the strongest trees among classic Canadian speciesor importing different species from parts of the world where fir trees are better adapted to sweltering heat, such as Turkey.
The plantation-like approach to Christmas tree farming is also “completely unnatural,” leaving seedlings and young trees exposed to the sun, he said.
Christmas tree farmers could consider letting some trees grow taller, or planting seedlings in areas where more mature trees could provide some shade, he said.
“I think there are some solutions, we just need to scratch our head and realize that things are different, and in the future we just need to change the way we do things.”

By Brenna Owen
The Canadian Press

Edmonton: Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is rejecting suggestions she made a mistake when she introduced a bill that would give her cabinet sweeping powers to rewrite laws outside the legislative process.
Smith says the changes being made to her sovereignty act reversing that authority simply reflect the normal process of honing and clarifying legislation.
“The sovereignty act wasn’t perfect in its wording. That’s why it’s being amended,” Smith told reporters Tuesday. “There are a couple of clarifications that we needed to make.
“I just look at this as part of the process. You introduce bills with three readings for a reason.”
Smith has been widely criticized for introducing those unchecked powers in her sovereignty act as part of a broader plan to fight what she deems federal intrusion in areas of provincial responsibility.
After accusations last week that the bill gave her those powers, Smith reversed course on the weekend and said there would be amendments to fix it.
Her comments echoed those made by Justice Minister Tyler Shandro on Monday, when he told reporters: “I’m not going to characterize it as a mistake.”
Neither Smith nor Shandro have explained how the powers ended up in the bill if they were not supposed to be there.
Shandro pushed back Monday on reporters, who suggested he and the other members of Smiths United Conservative government didn’t understand that the bill contained the sweeping powers provision.
“Of course, the bill was understood,” said Shandro.

By Dean Bennett
The Canadian Press