Flood warning in B.C. as power outages persist : In The News for Dec. 27

“Water levels are forecasted to be at their highest at 9:00 am (on) December 27, when a king tide combined with a significant storm surge of ocean water from the incoming storm is anticipated to raise the tide to a historic high,” read a statement.

On the other side of the country, utility crews in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick continued working to restore electricity to thousands of customers who have been in the dark for days.

Some train service will soon be back to normal, however, with Via Rail announcing plans to resume trains on its Toronto-Ottawa and Toronto-Montreal routes Tuesday, days after a CN train derailment forced the cancellation of those trains scheduled for Christmas and Boxing Day.

CN confirmed in a statement that the tracks where its train derailed on Christmas Eve will be reopened Tuesday and said Via Rail plans to run all trains on the route, but on a modified schedule available on its website.

As of Monday evening, power was still out for over 42,000 Hydro-Quebec customers and over 11,000 Hydro One customers.

New Brunswick Power had restored power by Monday evening to a majority of customers who were impacted by the storm, which it said was one of the largest provincewide outage events of the last 25 years. The utility said just under 300 customers were still in the dark as of Monday evening.

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Also this …

All of the remaining patients in hospital from a deadly Christmas Eve bus crash in British Columbia are expected to survive, according to an Interior Health official.

Michaela Swan, a spokeswoman for the health authority, says seven people who were brought to three hospitals after the bus rolled on the Highway 97C Okanagan Connector on Saturday evening are still patients, down from eight on Sunday.

Two patients had been listed in serious condition on Sunday, but Swan said their conditions have since improved.

Four people died and dozens of others were injured in the crash east of Merritt near the Loon Lake exit, which police have said they suspect was caused by extremely icy road conditions.

Police have not released the names of those who died.

Swan says she doesn’t have numbers on how many health-care staff were called in, but says many came in without being asked.

“What we did hear from the front line was just that initial heart-sinking feeling when you hear about this accident and the impacts to those potential patients and their families,” Swan said.

“It actually caused Interior health staff and physicians just to respond to the sites knowing you’re going to need all hands on deck.”

Interior Health implemented a Code Orange response _ signalling a disaster or mass-casualty event _ in the hours following the crash.

Police have said the road conditions were described “as very poor with ice and snow on the road surface along with rain and hail falling.”

Investigators have asked anyone who witnessed the collision or who has dashcam video of the bus before the crash to please contact their local RCMP detachment.

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What we are watching in the U.S. …

A steely rebel who wanted to inspire a revolution by kidnapping Michigan’s governor or an insecure patsy who was cleverly swayed by federal agents and informants?

A judge has been given two very different portrayals of Adam Fox, who faces a possible life sentence Tuesday for conspiring to abduct Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and blow up a bridge to ease an escape in northern Michigan.

Fox and co-defendant Barry Croft Jr. were accused of being at the helm of a wild plot to whip up anti-government extremists just before the 2020 presidential election. Their arrest, as well as the capture of 12 others, was a stunning coda to a tumultuous year of racial strife and political turmoil in the U.S.

Fox and Croft were convicted at a second trial in August, months after a different jury in Grand Rapids, Michigan, couldn’t reach a verdict but acquitted two other men.

Fox and Croft in 2020 met with like-minded provocateurs at a summit in Ohio, trained with weapons in Michigan and Wisconsin and took a ride to “put eyes” on Whitmer’s vacation home with night-vision goggles, according to evidence.

“People need to stop with the misplaced anger and place the anger where it should go, and that’s against our tyrannical … government,” Fox declared that spring, boiling over COVID-19 restrictions and perceived threats to gun ownership.

Whitmer wasn’t physically harmed. The FBI, which was secretly embedded in the group, broke things up by fall.

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What we are watching in the rest of the world …

Ukraine’s foreign minister said Monday that his nation wants a summit to end the war but he doesn’t anticipate Russia taking part, a statement making it hard to foresee the devastating invasion ending soon.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told The Associated Press that his government wants a “peace” summit within two months at the United Nations with Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as mediator.

The U.N. gave a very cautious response.

“As the secretary-general has said many times in the past, he can only mediate if all parties want him to mediate,” U.N. associate spokesperson Florencia Soto Nino-Martinez said Monday.

Kuleba said Russia must face a war-crimes tribunal before his country directly talks with Moscow. He said, however, that other nations should feel free to engage with Russians, as happened before a grain agreement between Turkey and Russia.

The AP interview offered a glimpse at Ukraine’s vision of how the war with Russia could one day end, although any peace talks would be months away and highly contingent on complex international negotiations.

Kuleba also said he was “absolutely satisfied” with the results of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to the U.S. last week, and he revealed that the U.S. government had made a special plan to get the Patriot missile battery ready to be operational in the country in less than six months. Usually, the training takes up to a year.

Kuleba said during the interview at the Foreign Ministry that Ukraine will do whatever it can to win the war in 2023.

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On this day in 1972 …

Lester B. Pearson, prime minister from 1963-68, died in Ottawa at age 75. Serving first as deputy minister and then as minister of external affairs, Pearson was instrumental in the formation of the United Nations and of NATO. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for proposing a UN peacekeeping force to ease the British and French out of Egypt. It was also the Pearson government that brought in the Canada Pension Plan, a national medicare system and the Maple Leaf flag.

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In entertainment …

The chorus against Ticketmaster’s contentious concert pricing practices is growing, including Zach Bryan and friends. The country music artist dropped a live album titled “All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster” on Sunday. Bryan also issued a statement on social media in which he decried “a massive issue with fair ticket prices to live shows lately.” The statement doesn’t mention Ticketmaster by name except in the new album title, though he tagged the company in a separate Instagram post displaying the track listing.

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Did you see this?

Harry Bond is blunt in his assessment of the RCMP’s role on the night his mother and father died in the Nova Scotia mass shooting _ and of the force’s potential to reform in the future.

“My trust for the RCMP is gone,” he said during a recent telephone interview from his home near Mahone Bay, N.S., where he’s been going over the hundreds of hours of testimony heard at a public inquiry into the April 18-19, 2020 rampage.

His parents, Peter and Joy Bond died at their Portapique, N.S., home between 10:04 p.m. and 10:45 p.m. on the first night, murdered by a 51-year-old neighbour who drove a replica police car and carried on his killings the next day _ taking a total of 22 lives, including a pregnant woman.

During the public inquiry, Bond heard senior Mounties testify they didn’t send out an emergency alert that night due to lack of protocols; that just four officers were available to enter Portapique because of chronic staff shortages; that no RCMP air support was available; and that basic smartphone apps to let police officers track one another in the dark also weren’t available.

And he said the explanations for these and a multitude of other shortcomings _ including failures to probe early reports of domestic violence by the perpetrator _ never seemed to begin with an admission that the force’s rural policing has failed to adapt to modern times.

“The biggest thing we need is for some of the senior people to say, ‘We screwed up. This is what we did wrong.’ Otherwise, nothing is going to be solved. This will happen again,” he said.

The revelations during the mass shooting inquiry are the latest to fuel a distrust in Canada’s national police force that some experts suggest has been building for years. There were calls this year from an Indigenous group in Newfoundland and Labrador and from a government committee examining systemic racism in British Columbia for those provinces to get rid of the RCMP, while Alberta’s United Conservative Party government is working on a plan to replace the Mounties with a provincial police force.

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This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 27, 2022.

The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

Flood warning in B.C. as power outages persist : In The News for Dec. 27

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