Winnipeg police get behind Ottawa’s ‘lawful access’ bill

Winnipeg Police Service Deputy Chief Cam Mackid said Wednesday the force fully supports the federal government’s proposed lawful access bill.

The legislation would give law enforcement and the national spy agency broader access to digital data following judicial authorization.

Part of the bill would require social media, internet service providers and telecommunication companies to adapt systems to allow for officials to more easily access data, after a warrant is obtained, and order certain providers to retain metadata for up to a year.

The bill has received significant pushback from advocates and technology companies who say it will erode privacy and civil rights and enable excessive surveillance.

Washing ceremony marks settlement of Canadian Tire racial profiling complaint

VANCOUVER - The sounds of Indigenous drums and song bounced off the walls of an East Vancouver banquet hall Tuesday evening as members of British Columbia's Heiltsuk Nation gathered for a traditional washing ceremony years in the making.

Dawn Wilson and her father Richard filed a human rights complaint against Canadian Tire and security company Blackbird Security over a racial profiling incident at a store in Coquitlam.

Canadian Tire acknowledged its former employee contravened the human rights code against racial profiling and discrimination when they searched Richard Wilson's bag in 2020.

The ceremony, held at the Croatian Cultural Centre on Commercial Drive, drew dozens to take part in the cultural healing process. Dawn Wilson thanked representatives of both companies for showing up.

This not just in: treaty rights carry legal force and are protected in the Constitution

More than a century after the numbered treaties were signed across Western Canada, the courts delivered a blunt reminder last week that those agreements are not ancient historical footnotes.

They still carry legal force and governments cannot ignore them.

Two major court rulings — one in Manitoba and one in Alberta — reinforced a reality many Canadians still do not fully understand: treaties between First Nations and the Crown remain constitutionally protected agreements that continue to shape Canadian law, public policy and governments’ obligations today.

The decisions also underscored something else: Canadians would benefit greatly from learning more about treaties, why they were negotiated as Canada expanded westward and why courts continue to uphold Indigenous and treaty rights.

Americans are looking back centuries to find Canadian ancestors — and citizenship

Cody Sibley was born and raised in Louisiana, but he always felt his family shared strong ties to Canada thanks to his Acadian ancestors from Nova Scotia.

Sibley said that as an eighth-generation descendant of Acadians, his family's roots could be traced back to "generation zero," Agathe Doucet, who was baptized on Jan. 19, 1710, in Nova Scotia.

He said Doucet married to Pierre Pitre in 1727, but the couple's lives were turned upside down in 1755 when British soldiers arrived at their doors and ordered their expulsion; like many Acadians, they ended up in Louisiana, where the community went on to become known as Cajuns.

Sibley is now among a surge of Americans combing through genealogical records in the hopes of finding a Canadian ancestor — some, like Sibley's, dating back hundreds of years, long before Canada officially existed. They plan to use the information to claim Canadian citizenship, under recently introduced legal changes that remove the so-called "first-generation limit" on citizenship for people born or adopted outside Canada to a Canadian citizen.

OpenAI avoided a costly court loss to Elon Musk, but neither side is unscathed

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — After prevailing in its court fight with Elon Musk, OpenAI — the ChatGPT maker valued at $852 billion — remains on track for what could be one of the largest initial public offerings in history.

Musk had been seeking the ouster of his fellow OpenAI co-founder, CEO Sam Altman, among other changes to the company. But with testimony from witnesses who called Altman dishonest, he’s hardly emerged unscathed.

At a time of growing concern about artificial intelligence's impacts, the landmark trial also shed new light on the flaws and outsize ambitions of the small number of billionaires steering the development of the breakthrough technology.

The trial was a reminder, said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute, “of how much the future of AI still depends on a remarkably small group of powerful tech figures and their personal rivalries.”

Province has to untie Winnipeg’s hands in fight against vacant, boarded-up properties

Mayor Scott Gillingham deserves credit for at least trying to tackle one of Winnipeg’s most stubborn urban problems: derelict, boarded-up houses that sit vacant for years, rot into neighbourhood eyesores and too often become fire traps.

AFN chief warns against changes to major projects development rules, calls for debate

OTTAWA - The national chief of the Assembly of First Nations says proposed changes to major project development rules are "not acceptable" and risk trampling on the rights of First Nations.

The federal government is proposing to grant authority to review interprovincial pipelines and transmission lines, and offshore renewable energy projects, to the Canada Energy Regulator instead of the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada.

The proposal, which will undergo a 30-day consultation process, would undo the move the Liberals made eight years ago to create the Impact Assessment Agency as a one-stop shop for all national project reviews.

National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak told The Canadian Press the proposed changes "demonstrate a pattern of exclusion" and she rejects the compressed timeline to submit feedback.

Supreme Court recognizes intimate partner violence as a legal basis for civil damages

OTTAWA - The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized intimate partner violence as a distinct legal basis for pursuing civil damages.

The top court's ruling Friday came in the case of a woman who was subjected to physical and emotional abuse by her husband during a 16-year marriage.

"Intimate partner violence is a social ill and a deep affront to one's dignity," Justice Nicholas Kasirer wrote on behalf of a majority of the court.

The court said the torts of assault, battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress — existing legal avenues for seeking financial damages — fail to remedy the specific harms to dignity, autonomy and equality caused by intimate partner violence.

Kinew says watchdog could enforce proposed social media ban

Premier Wab Kinew floated the possibility of using a regulator or commissioner to enforce his proposed ban on social media and artificial intelligence chatbot use for kids.

MPs amend bill criminalizing sexual deepfakes to include ‘nearly nude’ images

OTTAWA - A House of Commons committee has amended a proposed bill that would criminalize sexual deepfakes to ensure it covers "nearly nude" images.

The change to Bill C-16 comes after experts warned the original version of the bill likely would not cover many of the images created by Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot which proliferated on his X platform at the beginning of this year.

The original version of the bill would have criminalized the non-consensual sharing of images which show the subject nude, exposing their sexual organs or engaged in explicit sexual activity. The images created by Grok — such as edits of photos of women to depict them wearing see-through bikinis — may not meet that standard.

MPs on the justice committee voted in favour of amendments put forward by Conservative MP Andrew Lawton to change the wording of the legislation to address images in which the subject is nude or "nearly nude."

OpenAI did not respect Canadian privacy laws in developing ChatGPT, probe finds

OTTAWA - OpenAI failed to respect Canadian privacy laws when training its artificial intelligence-powered ChatGPT chatbot, federal and provincial watchdogs have found.

The conclusion came Wednesday in a report on a joint investigation by federal privacy commissioner Philippe Dufresne and his counterparts from British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec.

ChatGPT, released in November 2022, is a popular conversation-style tool that responds to online users' prompts with a wide range of information almost instantly — responses that may or may not be accurate.

The privacy watchdogs found OpenAI's collection of information to train its models was overly broad, resulting in the compilation and use of sensitive personal details.

Chartrand lauds court decision as ‘victory for Red River Métis’

The president of the Manitoba Métis Federation and others have been awarded nearly $12 million in legal fees after an unfounded and unreasonable attack by the Métis National Council, a judge has ruled.

Ontario Superior Court Justice Loretta Merritt said in a 15-page decision released on Monday that she was awarding court costs of $6.02 million to MMF president David Chartrand, $1.3 million to Clement Chartier, the MNC’s former president for almost two decades, and $2.06 million to former MNC executive director Wenda Watteyne.

The judge also awarded $2.4 million in costs to several consulting firms and consultants whose reputations were damaged when they were  falsely accused by the MNC of aiding the unfounded allegations of financial impropriety.

“Mr. Chartier and president (Chartrand) have devoted their lives to advancing the interests of the Métis nation,” Merritt wrote. “Ms. Watteyne dedicated the vast majority of her career to the service of the Métis community.

Feds, province urge court to toss ’60s Scoop lawsuits

Lawyers for the provincial and federal governments argue two lawsuits filed by the Manitoba Métis Federation over the apprehension of Métis children during the ’60s Scoop should be rejected.

In its first claim, filed in the Court of King’s Bench in November, the federation says the federal and provincial governments owe it damages for the harm caused by the ’60s Scoop to the Red River Métis as a whole.

In separate statements of defence filed in April, the two governments argue that lawsuit should be dismissed.

The Manitoba government, in its response, said it acknowledges children’s aid societies apprehended Indigenous children, including Métis, at a disproportionate rate and that many were placed for adoption in non-Indigenous homes across Canada and in the United States, which contributed to a loss in culture.

Empower youth by giving them tools to stay safe online

Do you support banning kids from social media? Do you also post photos of your kids on your Facebook or Instagram?

Whenever the topic of banning social media for kids comes up, as it did again this week when Premier Wab Kinew announced that Manitoba will ban youth from using social media and AI chatbots, we run into a wee bit of cognitive dissonance among the adults.

Many of today’s young people had social media presences long before they were old enough to consent to them — not as users, but as content posted by their parents. Instagram is nearly 16 years old; the iPhone nearly 20. A lot of kids have had digital footprints since the sonogram. Their whole lives are online.

So, as young people who are already on social media transition into social media users themselves, we should, as a society, empower them to make informed decisions about how, where and if they want to show up online, not ban them from platforms they use to connect with their peers, express their creativity and learn about the world. Platforms they’ve grown up around and, in many cases, on.

Expert accused of ‘speculating without evidence’ at inquest into teen’s death

The lawyer for Winnipeg police told an inquest Friday that a use-of-force expert who weighed in on the fatal shooting of teenager Eishia Hudson, by calling the officer’s actions unjust, had made errors of his own.

Kimberly Carswell suggested during her cross-examination of Peter Rampat that he relied too heavily on video evidence of the incident and discounted witness statements in his report into the death of the 16-year-old from Berens River First Nation.

Hudson was shot dead after leading police on a high-speed pursuit that ended with her crashing a stolen Jeep on Lagimodiere Boulevard during the evening rush hour on April 8, 2020.

Rampat’s report determined Const. Kyle Pradinuk was not justified when he fired two bullets at Hudson, who began to reverse the Jeep as officers swarmed the vehicle.

Census data does much more than determine population

The children of families who live in public housing in Tuxedo are more likely to graduate from high school, go to college or university, and less likely to need income assistance when they become adults than their counterparts who live just off Main Street in the North End.

How do we know this? The national census.

Officially known as the Census of Population, in the next few weeks, an estimated 41 million Canadians will receive this year’s census to fill in the boxes that reflect their lives. Most will receive the short form, which census officials say should take only five to 10 minutes to fill out. But 25 per cent of Canadians will receive the lengthier long-form census, which includes more demographic questions, and takes about a half-hour or so to complete, depending on the size of the household.

It’s only when the numbers are tallied that we will know exactly how many people there are in the country.

Feds to hike max fine for airlines abusing passenger protection regulations to $1M

OTTAWA - The federal government plans to quadruple to $1 million the maximum fine for airlines that repeatedly violate passengers' rights.

Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon said fining airlines is a last resort but the current system isn't working.

The Canadian Transportation Agency, which handles passenger complaints, is facing a backlog of more than 97,000 cases.

"The system is broken. Decisions by the Canadian Transportation Agency can take years. This is not acceptable. Canadians deserve better," MacKinnon said Friday at a press conference in Ottawa.

‘Denial of care’: Doctors worry about refugees as payment requirements take effect

TORONTO - Refugees now have to pay out of pocket for part of their drug prescriptions, mental health counselling, dental services, vision care and health equipment — including wheelchairs — as changes to a federal program take effect.

For decades, Canada's Interim Federal Health Program has provided complete health coverage to refugees and refugee claimants until they are eligible for provincial health plans and benefits.

But starting Friday, they must pay $4 for every prescription and 30 per cent of the cost of supplemental health products and services.

More than a dozen medical, nursing, social work and refugee organizations, including the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Paediatric Society, the Canadian Psychiatric Association and the Canadian Nurses Association, have warned that refugees can't afford those co-payments and their physical and mental health will suffer.

Archbishop of Toronto calls on Carney to stop extension of MAID for mental illness

OTTAWA - The Archbishop of Toronto is appealing to Prime Minister Mark Carney's Catholic faith and urging him to "choose life and not death" when it comes to the planned extension of assisted dying eligibility.

In a letter dated April 20, Archbishop Frank Leo expressed support for a Conservative private member's bill that would prevent access to medical assistance in dying from being extended to people whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness.

That change is set to take effect in March 2027. A special joint parliamentary committee of MPs and senators is currently studying whether Canada is ready for that to happen.

Leo urged the prime minister to allow Liberal members of Parliament to vote freely on the private member's bill to restrict MAID.

Alberta voter info database shut down amidst probes of alleged data breach

EDMONTON - A database belonging to an Alberta separatist group was shut down Thursday as elections officials and Mounties probe an alleged voter-list privacy breach affecting up to three million Albertans.

“The RCMP has initiated an investigation and is working with other law enforcement partners in the province to determine if any offences have been committed,” Alberta’s Mounties said in a statement.

Earlier Thursday, Elections Alberta officials were in court where they argued for and were granted an injunction to have the group, called the Centurion Project, be ordered to take down the database.

Joey Redman, a lawyer for the elections agency, told Court of King's Bench Justice John Little that the information on the list, and therefore in the database, is "incredibly confidential."

Young Canadians want AI companies to make their chatbots less addictive: report

OTTAWA - A new report focusing on the perspectives of young people says the government should order AI companies to take steps to curb the addictive aspects of their AI chatbots.

It’s one of a series of recommendations made by youth between the ages of 17 and 23 who took part in roundtables across the country.

Participants presented the report — published by McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy and Simon Fraser University's Dialogue on Technology Project — and its recommendations on Parliament Hill on Thursday.

Maddie Case, a youth fellow with the McGill centre, introduced the 25 young people who developed the chatbot recommendations.