Moving mountains

Suspension upheld for teen hockey player involved in hazing

A high school hockey player who was found to have been involved in sexualized hazing of rookie teammates lost his suspension appeal.

The youth player was barred from Hockey Canada-sanctioned activities. He was handed the four-year and nine-month suspension from sanctioned hockey after an interim ban issued in March 2024.

He appealed his suspension late last year to the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada, an independent conflict tribunal, but the centre upheld the youth’s suspension, according to a written decision issued earlier this year.

An independent investigator who probed the hockey player’s actions described the youth as a veteran player who both participated in and co-ordinated the “assigning” of rookie team members to veteran players to perform tasks for them. He himself was “assigned” a rookie, the decision said.

Conservatives tell Carney to show ‘backbone’ as trade team heads back to Washington

OTTAWA - Canada's top trade negotiators are heading back to Washington this week for more meetings with the Trump administration as the Opposition Conservatives urge Prime Minister Mark Carney to stop making concessions in pursuit of a tariff-free deal.

Negotiations between Canada and the United States have ramped up in recent weeks ahead of an Aug. 19 deadline that would see a range of Canadian exports hit with 50 per cent tariffs.

Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Janice Charette, Canada's chief negotiator, will be back in Washington this week for another round of talks, LeBlanc's spokesman Gabriel Brunet told The Canadian Press on Sunday.

Canada's trade team has met with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer twice in the past two weeks. Brunet said talks have broadly covered the newly threatened duties, existing sectoral tariffs and renegotiations of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico agreement, or CUSMA.

Kinder, gentler drug crackdown finds support, tempered expectations in Main Street area

Drawing a lighter from his pocket, a shirtless man perched on a concrete wall outside United Way Winnipeg’s Main Street headquarters heats a substance in a glass pipe and moves the tube toward his mouth.

Woman dead in B.C. wildfire as grim video reveals village in ruins

PENTICTON - The wildfire raging near Okanagan Lake in British Columbia's southern Interior claimed the life of an 80-year-old woman as she tried to escape the flames, police said on Sunday, as video footage and grim accounts emerged of nearby devastation.

A statement from Penticton RCMP said the resident of Meadow Valley, northwest of Summerland, B.C., had been trying to flee with a family member "when she died suddenly," believed to be a result of the fire.

Police said the death, reported early Saturday by a witness who was also evacuating, was the only known fatality in the blaze that has forced about 20,000 people out of their homes and left the community of Faulder a smouldering ruin.

The BC Coroners Service was investigating the nature of the woman's death, and police were not aware of any other fatalities in the fire, calling it "a deeply traumatic event," the statement said.

Luxury and livability

Those in the market for a new luxury home tend to be looking for two things.

First, the home must be unique — which is to say it possesses defining design characteristics that set it apart from other homes. Second, while the home must be different, it also must be livable.

Problem is, many home builders get too focused on fashion, which often makes for a visually arresting home that, sadly, isn’t as functional as it could be.

Fortunately, that’s not the case in Maric Homes’ stunning bungalow show home at 2 Woodland Lane in Headingley’s Forest Grove Estates.

Memories of East Selkirk evoked on Zoon Monkman’s new album

At the dawn of the MP3 era, an adolescent Zoon Monkman didn’t have the money for an iPod or a Microsoft Zune, the short-lived competitor to Apple’s revolutionary personal-listening device.

What the recording artist from Brokenhead Ojibway Nation did have in his backpack was the catalogue for the Scholastic Book Club, where only one product demanded attention: an AM-FM radio pen that scoured the airwaves for connection with every click.

For Monkman — a Polaris Music Prize-nominated musician who records as Zoon and pioneered the “moccasingaze” genre, which blends the dreamy textures of shoegaze with the rhythms and energies of Indigenous song — his mother’s gift of the ballpoint pen was a means of both self-discovery and the development of his musical taste.

During lonely days as an elementary student at East Selkirk’s Happy Thought School, the device was also a recess-hour tether to distant worlds, where artists such as Feist, Avril Lavigne and Broken Social Scene were introduced by the enthusiastic voice of a man who called himself Ace Burpee.