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All Canadian political parties vow to topple Trudeau government regardless of resignation

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4 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

All major political parties, including the Conservative Party, the New Democratic Party and Bloc Québécois are renewing the call for an early election.

Every major political party in Canada has promised to bring an election as soon as possible regardless of Trudeau’s resignation. 

Following Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation announcement yesterday, all major political parties, including the Conservative Party, the New Democratic Party (NDP) and Bloc Québécois are renewing the call for an early election.  

“Nothing has changed,” Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre wrote on X.   

 

“Every Liberal MP and Leadership contender supported EVERYTHING Trudeau did for 9 years, and now they want to trick voters by swapping in another Liberal face to keep ripping off Canadians for another 4 years, just like Justin,” he continued. 

“The only way to fix what Liberals broke is a carbon tax election to elect common sense Conservatives who will bring home Canada’s promise,” Poilievre declared.  

Likewise, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh revealed that he views Trudeau’s resignation as irrelevant as Canadians have tired of the entire Liberal Party.  

“We should fire the Liberals,” he said. “They have let down Canadians. They need to get fired.”  

“Why not give the government a few more months?” a reporter questioned.  

For the past years, the NDP have been propping up the Trudeau government, which only won a minority government in the last election. So far, every time Conservatives have put forward a non-confidence motion, NDP MPs have voted against it, with the most recent vote taking place on December 9.  

However, Singh has since promised to put forward his own non-confidence motion to bring down the Trudeau government in 2025.

Additionally, Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet told media that Trudeau’s resignation did not shake his determination to bring down the Liberal government. 

“We are beyond that,” he said. “Now is the time for an election which I understand will be held after the Liberal Party has chosen a new leader. There is nothing else to be taken into consideration at this point.”  

“There is no possible way for this Liberal Party to become something else in a few weeks,” said Blanchet. “We are facing the same people with the same values, the same ideology. We have to go to an election.” 

As it stands, Trudeau has suspended Parliament until March 24, meaning that the Liberal government cannot be brought down during this time. This maneuver buys the Liberal Party a couple months’ time to select a new leader and rebrand their government.   

However, the selection of a new leader may not be enough to convince Canadians that the party will not continue Trudeau’s anti-life and anti-freedom legacy.   

Indeed, as LifeSiteNews previously reported, each of the possible contenders for Liberal leader is set to plunge Canada into another term of anti-freedom laws

Addictions

Four new studies show link between heavy cannabis use, serious health risks

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Cannabis products purchased in Ontario and B.C., including gummies, pre-rolled joints, chocolates and dried flower; April 11, 2025. [Photo credit: Alexandra Keeler]

By Alexandra Keeler

New Canadian research shows a connection between heavy cannabis use and dementia, heart attacks, schizophrenia and even death

Six months ago, doctors in Boston began noticing a concerning trend: young patients were showing up in emergency rooms with atypical symptoms and being diagnosed with heart attacks.

“The link between them was that they were heavy cannabis users,” Dr. Ahmed Mahmoud, a cardiovascular researcher and physician in Boston, told Canadian Affairs in an interview.

These frontline observations mirror emerging evidence by Canadian researchers showing heavy cannabis use is associated with significant adverse health impacts, including heart attacks, schizophrenia and dementia.

Sources warn public health measures are not keeping pace with rapid changes to cannabis products as the market is commercialized.

“The irony of this moment is that society’s risk perception of cannabis is at an all-time low, at the exact moment that the substance is probably having increasingly negative health impacts,” said Dr. Daniel Myran, a physician and Canada Research Chair at the University of Ottawa. Myran was lead researcher on three new Canadian studies on cannabis’ negative health impacts.

Legalization

Canada was the first G7 country to create a commercial cannabis market when it legalized the production and sale of cannabis in 2018.

The drug is now widely used in Canada.

In the 2024 Canadian Cannabis Survey, an annual government survey of cannabis trends, 26 per cent of respondents said they used cannabis for non-medical purposes in the past year, up from 22 per cent in 2018. Among youth, that number was 41 per cent.

Health Canada’s website warns that cannabis use can lower blood pressure and raise heart rates, which can increase the risk of a heart attack. But the warnings on cannabis product labels vary. Some mention risks of anxiety or effects on memory and concentration, but make no mention of cardiovascular risks.

The annual cannabis survey also shows a significant percentage of Canadians remain unaware of cannabis’ health risks.

In the survey, only 70 per cent of respondents said they had enough reliable information to make informed decisions about cannabis use. And 50 per cent of respondents said they had not seen any education campaigns or public health messages about cannabis.

At the same time, researchers are finding mounting evidence that cannabis use is associated with health risks.

A 2023 study by researchers at the University of Calgary, the University of Alberta and Alberta Health Services found that adults with cannabis use disorder faced a 60 per cent higher risk of experiencing adverse cardiovascular events — including heart attacks. Cannabis use disorder is marked by the inability to stop using cannabis despite negative consequences, such as work, social, legal or health issues.

Between February and April of this year, three other Canadian studies linked frequent cannabis use to elevated risks of developing schizophrenia, dementia and mortality. These studies were primarily conducted by researchers at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and ICES uOttawa (formerly the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences).

“These results suggest that individuals who require hospital-based care for a [cannabis use disorder] may be at increased risk of premature death,” said the study linking cannabis-related hospital visits with increased mortality rates.

The three 2024 studies all examined the impacts of severe cannabis use, suggesting more moderate users may face lower risks. The researchers also cautioned that their research shows a correlation between heavy cannabis use and adverse health effects, but does not establish causality.

 

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Budtenders

Health experts say they are troubled by the widespread perception that cannabis is entirely benign.

“It has some benefits, it has some side effects,” said Mahmoud, the Boston cardiovascular researcher. “We need to raise awareness about the side effects as well as the benefits.”

Some also expressed concern that the commercialization of cannabis products in Canada has created a race to produce products with elevated levels of THC, the main psychoactive compound that produces a “high.”

THC levels have more than doubled since legalization, yet even products with high THC levels are marketed as harmless.

“The products that are on the market are evolving in ways that are concerning,” Myran said. “Higher THC products are associated with considerably more risk.”

Myran views cannabis decriminalization as a public health success, because it keeps young people out of the criminal justice system and reduces inequities faced by Indigenous and racialized groups.

“[But] I do not think that you need to create a commercial cannabis market or industry in order to achieve those public health benefits,” he said.

Since decriminalization, the provinces have taken different approaches to regulating cannabis. But even in provinces where governments control cannabis distribution, such as New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, products with high THC levels dominate retail shelves and online storefronts.

In Myran’s view, federal and provincial governments should instead be focused on curbing harmful use patterns, rather than promoting cannabis sales.

Ian Culbert, executive director of the Canadian Public Health Association, thinks governments’ financial interest in the cannabis industry creates a conflict of interest.

“[As with] all regulated substances, governments are addicted to the revenue they create,” he said. “But they also have a responsibility to safeguard the well-being of citizens.”

Culbert believes cannabis retailers should be required to educate customers about health risks — just as bartenders are required to undergo Smart Serve training and lottery corporations are required to mitigate risks of gambling addiction.

“Give ‘budtenders’ the training around potential health risks,” he said.

“While cannabis may not be the cause of some of these negative health events … it is the intersection at which an intervention can take place through the transaction of sales. So is there something we can do there that can change the trajectory of a person’s life?”


This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.

Our content is always free – but if you want to help us commission more high-quality journalism, consider getting a voluntary paid subscription.

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Business

Net Zero by 2050: There is no realistic path to affordable and reliable electricity

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  By Dave Morton of the Canadian Energy Reliability Council.

Maintaining energy diversity is crucial to a truly sustainable future

Canada is on an ambitious path to “decarbonize” its economy by 2050 to deliver on its political commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Although policy varies across provinces and federally, a default policy of electrification has emerged, and the electricity industry, which in Canada is largely owned by our provincial governments, appears to be on board.

In a November 2023 submission to the federal government, Electricity Canada, an association of major electric generators and suppliers in Canada, stated: “Every credible path to Net Zero by 2050 relies on electrification of other sectors.” In a single generation, then, will clean electricity become the dominant source of energy in Canada? If so, this puts all our energy eggs in one basket. Lost in the debate seem to be considerations of energy diversity and its role in energy system reliability.

What does an electrification strategy mean for Canada? Currently, for every 100 units of energy we consume in Canada, over 40 come to us as liquid fuels like gasoline and diesel, almost 40 as gaseous fuels like natural gas and propane, and a little less than 20 in the form of electrons produced by those fuels as well as by water, uranium, wind, solar and biomass. In British Columbia, for example, the gas system delivered approximately double the energy of the electricity system.

How much electricity will we need? According to a recent Fraser Institute report, a decarbonized electricity grid by 2050 requires a doubling of electricity. This means adding the equivalent of 134 new large hydro projects like BC’s Site C, 18 nuclear facilities like Ontario’s Bruce Power Plant, or installing almost 75,000 large wind turbines on over one million hectares of land, an area nearly 14.5 times the size of the municipality of Calgary.

Is it feasible to achieve a fully decarbonized electricity grid in the next 25 years that will supply much of our energy requirements? There is a real risk of skilled labour and supply chain shortages that may be impossible to overcome, especially as many other countries are also racing towards net-zero by 2050. Even now, shortages of transformers and copper wire are impacting capital projects. The Fraser Institute report looks at the construction challenges and concludes that doing so “is likely impossible within the 2050 timeframe”.

How we get there matters a lot to our energy reliability along the way. As we put more eggs in the basket, our reliability risk increases. Pursuing electrification while not continuing to invest in our existing fossil fuel-based infrastructure risks leaving our homes and industries short of basic energy needs if we miss our electrification targets.

The IEA 2023 Roadmap to Net Zero estimates that technologies not yet available on the market will be needed to deliver 35 percent of emissions reductions needed for net zero in 2050.  It comes then as no surprise that many of the technologies needed to grow a green electric grid are not fully mature. While wind and solar, increasingly the new generation source of choice in many jurisdictions, serve as a relatively inexpensive source of electricity and play a key role in meeting expanded demand for electricity, they introduce significant challenges to grid stability and reliability that remain largely unresolved. As most people know, they only produce electricity when the wind blows and the sun shines, thereby requiring a firm back-up source of electricity generation.

Given the unpopularity of fossil fuel generation, the difficulty of building hydro and the reluctance to adopt nuclear in much of Canada, there is little in the way of firm electricity available to provide that backup. Large “utility scale” batteries may help mitigate intermittent electricity production in the short term, but these facilities too are immature. Furthermore, wind, solar and batteries, because of the way they connect to the grid don’t contribute to grid reliability in the same way the previous generation of electric generation does.

Other zero-emitting electricity generation technologies are in various stages of development – for example, Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS) fitted to GHG emitting generation facilities can allow gas or even coal to generate firm electricity and along with Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) can provide a firm and flexible source of electricity.

What if everything can’t be electrified? In June 2024, a report commissioned by the federal government concluded that the share of overall energy supplied by electricity will need to roughly triple by 2050, increasing from the current 17 percent to between 40 and 70 percent. In this analysis, then, even a tripling of existing electricity generation, will at best only meet 70 percent of our energy needs by 2050.

Therefore, to ensure the continued supply of reliable energy, non-electrification pathways to net zero are also required. CCUS and SMR technologies currently being developed for producing electricity could potentially be used to provide thermal energy for industrial processes and even building heat; biofuels to replace gasoline, diesel and natural gas; and hydrogen to augment natural gas, along with GHG offsets and various emission trading schemes are similarly

While many of these technologies can and currently do contribute to GHG emission reductions, uncertainties remain relating to their scalability, cost and public acceptance. These uncertainties in all sectors of our energy system leaves us with the question: Is there any credible pathway to reliable net-zero energy by 2050?

Electricity Canada states: “Ensuring reliability, affordability, and sustainability is a balancing act … the energy transition is in large part policy-driven; thus, current policy preferences are uniquely impactful on the way utilities can manage the energy trilemma. The energy trilemma is often referred to colloquially as a three-legged stool, with GHG reductions only one of those legs. But the other two, reliability and affordability, are key to the success of the transition.

Policymakers should urgently consider whether any pathway exists to deliver reliable net-zero energy by 2050. If not, letting the pace of the transition be dictated by only one of those legs guarantees, at best, a wobbly stool. Matching the pace of GHG reductions with achievable measures to maintain energy diversity and reliability at prices that are affordable will be critical to setting us on a truly sustainable pathway to net zero, even if it isn’t achieved by 2050.

Dave Morton, former Chair and CEO of the British Columbia Utilities Commission (BCUC), is with the Canadian Energy Reliability Council. 

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