The chances that pigeons are the source behind several complaints of defecation in the backyards of one Ontario city are low, city staff say.

Brantford councillors, who were discussing amendments last week to the city’s pigeon-keeping bylaw, had received complaints from residents that the birds were ruining backyard barbecues.

Dave Wiedrick, the city’s director of bylaw compliance and security, said pigeons aren’t the source of the problem.

“Scientifically, naturally, it’s not possible,” he told councillors on March 10.

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“Pigeons defecate before they fly, not during flight, to make themselves lighter.”

Last August, Brantford council directed staff to investigate further regulations or eliminate the ability to keep pigeons within city limits. The city had received five complaints over two years regarding pigeons causing a nuisance in high-density areas.

Two of those complaints were directed toward a Canadian Racing Pigeon Association member of the Brantford Invitational Racing Pigeon Club, staff said in a report.

The association told staff it had disproved the accusations, but the pigeon keeper in the area was trying to continue his racing hobby while being mindful of the complaints. They also expressed concerns that they were being penalized due to the actions of feral pigeons, staff wrote.

The association agreed that a permit allowing staff to know the membership would allow staff to investigate complaints in a timelier manner.

Staff recommended the city introduce a permit system for all pigeon keepers, as well as allow a six-month grace period for all current members to register with the city at no cost.

Council voted 9-1 in favour of the recommendations.

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RCMP say they’ve made an arrest after a “devastating” attack on a New Brunswick musician this past weekend.

John McLaren, a solo musician from Shediac, N.B., had been performing at Happy Craft Brewing at 800 Main St. in Moncton on Saturday before the attack.

Codiac Regional RCMP said their officers responded to a report of an assault in the area at about 11:50 p.m. They said they responded to the report near 889 Main St., but that based on details from their investigation, the assault is likely to have occurred near 806 Main St.

They found a 37-year-old man injured and unconscious. He was rushed to hospital with what were believed to be serious injuries. As of Monday, McLaren was in the intensive care unit.

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The suspect had fled the area before police arrived.

On Tuesday, police located and arrested a man at a home on Weldon Street.

Luke Powers appeared in Moncton provincial court Wednesday and was charged with aggravated assault. He was remanded into custody pending a court appearance Friday.

“John’s a great guy, straight moral compass, he would never want anything negative upon anyone,” said Ryan Mazerolle, a guitarist from the band Before the Dinosaurs.

“The fact that it happened to him is very devastating to the overall community.”

In the days after the attack, some artists say they’re hesitant to play in the Moncton area.

Michel LeBlanc told Global News that McLaren was “such a good person” and that there was “no way” he did anything to deserve being attacked.

“Disappointed that these things keep happening in Moncton, and especially to someone like him,” LeBlanc said.

Due to concerns over violence, some musicians have said they take extra steps when loading and unloading equipment at venues to ensure safety.

“Even before our first gig, I was telling them that we need to post up a sentry system where someone is on stage and someone is at the trunk and there is two guys going between with the gear,” Mazerolle said.

“So there are eyes on everyone’s shoulders at all times.”

LeBlanc said he believes more needs to be done.

“It’s getting worse; it doesn’t feel like it’s getting any better and we are on our own out here,” LeBlanc said.

The RCMP said its investigation is ongoing.

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As the Ontario government cuts funding for seven supervised drug consumption sites in the province, workers at three remaining sites in Toronto that don’t rely on provincial funding say they’re worried the move will further strain their resources and lead to more overdoses and open drug use across the city.

The province said Monday it will initiate a 90-day wind-down period to give the seven defunded consumption sites time to transition to the government’s abstinence-based model — homelessness and addiction recovery treatment, or HART, hubs.

It said the move affects two sites in Toronto, two in Ottawa and one each in Niagara, Peterborough and London, with Health Minister Sylvia Jones saying in a statement that the government is “focused on treatment, recovery and safer communities.”

Health-care workers and harm reduction advocates have said the defunding would force these sites to close, leading to more overdoses and deaths.

In Toronto, the move likely means only three supervised consumption sites – Street Health, Casey House and the Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site – would remain because they’re donor-funded.

Matt Johnson, an overdose prevention site supervisor at Street Health, says they were “not surprised, but horrified” by the province’s decision.

Johnson says the closure of two sites in the city means Street Health expects to see more people coming through its doors.

“Part of the reasoning behind having sites all over the city was so that no one site would be overly impacted. But if you take a bunch away, it means that the ones that are left have to pick up the slack and they get used more,” says Johnson.

“For those of us who work with this community and know these folks, it’s terrifying because we know the absolutely horrific impact it’s to have on the people who use these services.”

In 2024, Premier Doug Ford’s government banned consumption sites within 200 metres of a school or daycare, targeting 10 sites across the province for closure by the end of March 2025. Most of those sites chose to convert to the province’s abstinence-based model and closed. The government also banned new sites from opening.

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After that move, Johnson says the number of people going to Street Health soared.

“We’ve already been feeling the impact of the closures that have already happened. Our numbers are way up, overdoses are way up. We are facing a need unlike anything we’ve seen in a long time,” Johnson says. “We’re a small site, we only have three booths. I don’t know how we’re going to address this.”

Though Street Health isn’t facing defunding after the province’s latest move, Johnson remains wary about the future of its overdose prevention site, given how the government “very clearly wants all the sites shut down.”

“On Monday, when our clients were first coming into the site, they were asking us questions about this and they were saying, ‘Is Street Health being shut down?’ And I kept saying, we are safe — for now. I can’t give anybody any assurances,” says Johnson.

“The other response I got was, ‘If they’re shutting all these places down, where do they expect us to go? And what do they expect us to do, just die?’”

Bill Sinclair, CEO of The Neighbourhood Group that runs the Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site, says the two sites at Moss Park and Fred Victor that are set to be defunded are both far away from Kensington Market, so it’s unclear if their clients will travel to the remaining three sites or if it will result in more open drug use.

“I’m not sure whether people will make the trip, or in fact, they will just use unsafely, or as we’ve observed, people will start using (on public transit), people are using in public libraries,” Sinclair says.

The Kensington Market site remains open thanks to a court injunction last year following a Charter challenge. Still, it’s bracing for a jump in visitors in the fallout of the province’s latest decision, he adds.

“The smaller sites will do the best they can … this is not good health care. This is not how they should do it,” he says. “We’re grateful for our donors, but this is bigger than one or two charities can solve. We all need to get on the same page.”

Joanne Simons, CEO of Casey House, says her team was “devastated” to learn the province was defunding the seven sites. Casey House, which is also donor-funded, will likely see its resources stretched in the aftermath, she says.

“We anticipate that capacity will need to increase and our team is working on how we actually manage that,” says Simons, noting they’re currently assessing staffing needs and their hours of operation.

She’s also considering the “moral distress” the move could have on staff as they respond to increased demand, she says.

“Closing of the supervised consumption sites means that we are restricting access to a particular group of people. So how do we think about that from a human rights perspective?” she says.

Ford defended the decision to defund the provincially-supported sites earlier this week, claiming that unlike HART hubs, consumption sites “encourage” drug use.

“I don’t want to hurt these people. I want to help them. I want them to be productive,” Ford said Monday at an unrelated press conference, noting the province is investing $550 million in HART hubs.

But advocates say the defunding of consumption sites and their consequent closures will ultimately lead to more deaths. Janet Butler-McPhee, co-executive director of the HIV Legal Network, said last week that the province’s decision is a “cowardly move.”

“People will die without access to the life-saving care they receive at these sites. The sites exist within our communities and make them better and safer for everyone,” she said at a virtual press conference Friday.

Organizations including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Amnesty International have also condemned the move, calling on the Ontario government to reverse its decision.

Johnson says it’s a misconception that harm reduction advocates are opposed to treatment. Supervised consumption sites do more than just distribute safe supplies and prevent overdoses, Johnson says — they’re often a “home base” for their clients and a place to access health care without barriers.

“We all support people who want to stop or change their drug use. But those of us who work in the field understand that that is often a really long process that requires a lot of support,” says Johnson.

“What safe consumption sites do is … they make sure that people can stay alive during that process.”

James Wolfe, who lives in B.C.’s Fraser Valley, spent the last year and a half looking for a long-term care bed for his 68-year-old brother Brian, who has Down syndrome and non-verbal dementia.

Mostly, it involved a back-and-forth with local health administrators. “They are great people,” he said. “They are very compassionate doing their job.”

But there was simply a lack of appropriate facilities, and Wolfe said his brother was in and out of hospital as his health declined.

“At Christmas, he was really sick in the hospital,” Wolfe said, and while his brother was eventually discharged, he was back in hospital with pneumonia and sepsis in January.

Wolfe’s advocacy has now finally landed his brother in a group home for adults living with disabilities.

Looking back, Wolfe said he wondered where his brother would be without family support, and he criticized a recent B.C. government decision to delay construction of seven long-term care projects.

The decision, announced in the February budget, comes amid a shortfall of long-term care beds that is projected to soar over the next decade as the population ages.

“I think it’s horrendous,” Wolfe said of the delays. “You are essentially putting people in danger, if you do not have a place to put them.”

The facilities being put on hold are in Squamish, Abbotsford, Campbell River, Chilliwack, Delta, Kelowna and Fort St. John. They involve 1,223 beds, although some of those would replace current beds in existing facilities.

The Squamish project is a planned 152-bed facility that was originally set for construction in 2027. The government hasn’t offered a new timeline.

The Sea to Sky Hospice Society had been planning to move into the new facility and the open-ended delay has stressed board chair Marya Hackett.

“We have a population of seniors that is aging, and is going to need long-term care. What are you going to do with them?” she asked.

Hackett said that even if it proceeds, the new project would not be keeping up with the need in the region. Eight of its beds have been slated for hospice care, although only four of them are new, with the others being transferred from an existing facility in Squamish.

The same could be said for the rest of the province.

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Figures released by the Office of the Seniors Advocate in January pegged the shortfall of long-term care beds at 2,000.

Government numbers released last year, meanwhile, show B.C. will need 16,000 new long-term care beds over the next decade to make up the gap between the projected supply of publicly subsidized beds and projected demand.

B.C.’s senior population, aged 65 and older, is projected to increase by 26 per cent in the next 10 years, and wait-lists for long-term care have “ballooned,” according to a report released by the seniors advocate in July 2025.

It shows that the number of people on the wait-list for long-term care tripled from 2,381 to 7,212 between 2016 and 2025. Wait times doubled from 146 days in 2018, the first year of data collection, to 290 days in 2025.

“Without significant additional investment in building more new long-term care beds, wait-lists and wait times will continue to rise to unsustainable levels,” it reads.

When Finance Minister Brenda Bailey announced the delays in last month’s budget, she said they would allow the facilities to be built at a lower cost in the future, by better distributing demand for building materials and other costs.

Speaking to local business leaders one day after tabling her budget, Bailey said she was asked to sign off on a project that would have cost $1.8 million per bed.

“That’s crazy,” Bailey said. “That is so expensive, you could buy a condo in (Victoria’s) James Bay for $1.8 million.”

Government, she said, had to do better. “How are we going to serve seniors? If we are spending that kind (of money), we’re going to be able to build very few.”

The finance minister said the government was looking into ways to standardize design of long-term care facilities without compromising quality of care, and she has insisted the delays are not cancellations.

Hackett agreed with Bailey’s rationale to save money — but only to a point.

Government, she said, needed to make sure that it got the best value for money. “But any time you delay a project, your costs are going to increase, because the costs of everything are increasing,” Hackett said.

The Opposition is not buying Bailey’s arguments.

Peter Milobar, the Conservative finance critic, called the delays a “mean-spirited attack” on seniors during budget debate last month.

His colleague Brennan Day, critic for rural health and seniors health, said in the legislature that he did not believe Bailey’s promise to build the delayed projects at lower costs, saying the government had “completely abandoned seniors.”

He later tabled legislation to require government to become more transparent around the state of long-term care.

“You cannot fix what you do not measure,” he said last month. “This bill forces the government to publish and update annually a clear plan to address long-term care beds, hospice capacity, wait-lists and care at home in full public view,” he added.

Dan Levitt, B.C.’s seniors advocate, told reporters after Bailey presented her budget that the delays would deepen the gap between projected needs and construction of long-term care beds.

While he acknowledged the financial realities facing the province, he said delays would put more pressure on hospitals as seniors spent more time in emergency rooms and acute care.

“It’s going to put pressure on doctor’s offices, because that is where the seniors are going to go to get medical care,” he said.

“It’s going to put pressure on the family caregivers. People who should be in workforce are now caring for that senior. It’s also going to create a situation where seniors are not getting the kind of care they should be.”

The process of finding a long-term care solution for Brian Wolfe wasn’t easy for James Wolfe, but he said it was worth it.

Wolfe said his brother is “doing really well,” after having regained up to 13 pounds in weight in five weeks. Wolfe said his brother weighed only about 96 pounds when he went to hospital in January.

“I had to take time off work to go deal with where he is, and stuff like that,” he said.

“It’s quite an emotional roller-coaster, and it doesn’t seem like anybody truly has any answers to anything.”

Canada’s middle class appears to be struggling with the higher cost of living, with new data showing more are taking on debt as financial pain bleeds out into broader sections of the economy.

It comes as the so-called “K-shape” economy continues to underscore a widening wealth divide between Canada’s highest and lowest income groups, with Equifax reporting debt among Canadians with higher credit scores is rising.

“There’s more of a divergence happening and a few of the higher income or low-risk people are kind of switching almost on that ‘K’,” says Rebecca Oakes, vice-president of analytics at Equifax Canada.

“Everything that’s happening right now is just going to add pressure to an already difficult situation where we did have diversions in financial health.”

Total Canadian consumer debt in the fourth quarter, or final three months of 2025, increased 3.13 per cent from a year earlier to $2.65 trillion, and non-mortgage debt increased by 4.5 per cent.

Those with higher credit scores of between 751 and 880 out of the scale to 900 saw their non-mortgage debt rise by 6.1 per cent, while lower credit scores of 320 to 580 remained mostly the same, the report showed.

“It doesn’t really matter what your credit score is. What matters is how much income you have relative to your expenses. And so if your expenses are growing faster than your income, a 750 or 800 FICO score isn’t going to make you any wealthier,” says mortgage expert Clay Jarvis at NerdWallet Canada.

“So if anything, I would say having a higher credit score may have actually hurt some of these homeowners by allowing them to squeeze into these giant mortgages at a time when everything else is becoming more expensive.”

1:59
Affordability remains top of mind for many Calgarians

Missed payments on non-mortgage debt peaked at the end of December, Equifax says, with the number of Canadian households that missed a minimum debt payment by 90 days or more rising from 1.64 per cent to 1.73 per cent.

That’s a 5.43 per cent increase from the previous year.

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The data may soon show more severe changes, too.

That’s because this data out now shows a snapshot from the end of 2025, and a lot has happened since then, including the Iran war, which is expected to lead to higher prices for gas at the pumps, groceries, and just about everything else.

“With all these headwinds in what’s happening this year since January, that’s just going to put more pressure,” Oakes says.

The K-shape economy refers to a sharp divide between higher-income earners being able to spend more over time without going into debt, while lower-income earners are losing purchasing power and have to cut back more and more to make ends meet.

It’s effectively a visual cue to picture an economy where those on the upper end of the spectrum are able to continue increasing spending, while those on the lower end are declining.

A report from November 2025 showed this pattern unfolding based on survey data on expected holiday spending among consumers. Twenty-six per cent of shoppers said they planned on spending more than $1,000, while 46 per cent planned to spend less than $500, and 15 per cent said less than $100.

The Equifax data, Oakes says, shows a consistent result, where consumers did spend less than the year before.

“Our numbers are telling us is that there definitely is more concern, I think, coming from consumers in terms of affordability. We’re seeing that translate into spending behaviour,” she says.

“In the backend of last year, it was a holiday period. We saw quite a pullback in terms of spend by certain groups of consumers during that holiday period.”

Oakes adds that these higher debt levels, especially when including mortgage debt, were concentrated in British Columbia and Ontario, where cities like Vancouver and Toronto demand higher incomes to keep up with the relative cost of living, including for housing.

2:21
Dream of home ownership still alive for majority of Canadians: RBC

Mortgage debt increased to $1.95 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2025, Equifax said, which was up 2.6 per cent from the previous year.

A large wave of mortgage renewals was the main reason for this, Oakes says, and many Canadians locked in at higher interest rates than when they started in 2020, 2021 and early 2022, when rates were at multi-year lows.

“Stronger credit scores, maybe strong incomes, are able to kind of get hold of those higher balance mortgages. But the reality is that the payment shock they’re now seeing on renewal is just too much for them,” she says.

“Combine a cost of living increase with a payment shock if your mortgage is renewed at a higher rate or higher payment amount, and that, for some consumers, is just too much.”

On Wednesday, the Bank of Canada left its benchmark interest rate unchanged for the third straight meeting, but signalled the Iran war was raising the risk for Canada’s economy and the outlook is even more uncertain.

Some economists even suggested, based on what the Bank of Canada said after the announcement, that rates may even need to be increased in Canada if the war leads to long-term inflation spikes.

“It’s just it’s so hard to be positive about anything. Anybody I talk to about anything is feeling really really down and that’s just the overall sentiment when it comes to your finances,” says Jarvis.

“Anybody who is able to glide through this right now without having to worry about their finances every day … I don’t think they realize how lucky they are and what kind of a bubble they’re living in.”

At the beginning of 2023, Ontario officially moved forward with a plan to allow pharmacists to prescribe medicine for common ailments like hay fever, cold sores and acid reflux.

A new system ushered in by the Ford government paid pharmacists a $19 assessment fee for each consultation and gave them powers to make decisions on a total of 13 minor medical issues.

A few months later, Health Minister Sylvia Jones met with Jeff Leger, the then-president of Shoppers Drug Mart.

An internal briefing note obtained by Global News using freedom of information laws shows Jones’ staff thought the purpose of the meeting was to discuss “shared solutions to enhance the provincial primary care system.”

It’s unclear exactly what was talked about, but the two sides appear to have different memories.

A spokesperson for Loblaw, which owns Shoppers Drug Mart, told Global News the meeting was a “discussion focused on the pharmacy redesign and sharing some of our clinic experiences in other provinces.”

The government, however, indicated in response to questions from Global News that the meeting was requested by Shoppers to talk about its experience in the months since Ontario had allowed pharmacists to prescribe for minor ailments.

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The documents written to brief Jones before the meeting show her staff expected Shoppers to ask if pharmacist powers could be expanded further.

At the time, the government was already preparing to add a further six minor ailments to the list, a move put in motion by October of 2023.

The briefing suggested Jones should tell Shoppers Drug Mart to share feedback on changes to prescription powers with the Ontario College of Pharmacists.

If Leger asked to expand pharmacists’ scope even further, Jones’s briefing notes suggested she indicate the government would entertain the idea.

“The ministry is open to working with the pharmacy sector to develop optimization strategies to make the best use of pharmacy professionals to allow patients to have more timelier, accessible experiences with the health system,” Jones’ notes say.

The document cautioned that any changes to expand scope would also have to involve consultations with the Ontario Medical Association, which has raised repeated concerns about the expansion.

Loblaws emphasized that the meeting with Jones came half a year after the government expanded pharmacists’ powers. It said the meeting was the most recent time the Shoppers president and Jones had met.

In July 2024, roughly a year after the sit-down, Ontario announced it would begin consultations on adding another 14 minor ailments to the list from which pharmacists could prescribe, including shingles and insomnia.

It directed the Ontario College of Pharmacists to develop regulatory changes to bring those updates in around September 2025.

A spokesperson for Jones told Global News the expansion had been a success following its introduction in 2023.

“Since we introduced these changes, over 2 million people have accessed care for a minor ailment at their local pharmacy,” they said.

Dr. Zainab Abdurrahman, president of the Ontario Medical Association, said her organization was concerned with how the powers were being rolled out — and what they could mean for patient care.

“It’s important to have pharmacists and other health care professionals involved in care. And that’s not something that any of us will argue about,” she told Global News, suggesting pharmacists should work with doctors instead of separately.

“Physicians are willing to collaborate on innovative solutions to improve access, but not at the expense of the patient’s health outcomes or trust in the health-care system due to this fragmentation and lack of oversight,” she added.

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It was a packed house at Platform Calgary on Wednesday as Canada’s minister for AI and digital innovation, Evan Solomon, explained more on how the government is looking to support the growing AI industry.

“We are on a mission for ‘team yes’ to find answers,” explained Solomon. “My job is to facilitate ‘team yes.’ To get out of the way when we need to, and to give a boost when we have to.”

According to Solomon, Canada is at a critical juncture where we are living through a period of political and technological change happening at an exponential rate.

“This political and this technological realignment poses real challenges to our sovereignty, to our values, to our communities… but it also presents opportunities,” Solomon noted.

Minister Solomon noted that there seem to be two distinct sides of the AI coin. Those with pompoms, who believe AI will solve all the world’s problems, and others with pitchforks, who say AI will take away jobs, harm the environment and our future.

“We’ve got to be open to the opportunities here and not stifle the innovation, and make sure that we’re candid about their concerns,” said Solomon. “Privacy, data, jobs, and we will protect those things as well.”

Alberta-based AI firms are responding positively to the idea that the fed’s are willing to fight to keep Canadian companies in the country.

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“That spirit of collaboration and ecosystem growth, built on an actual federal level? I think that’s absolutely key,” affirmed Ferdinand Hingerl, chief technology officer with Ambyint.

“With such a strong neighbour in the south that we always have to deal with (brain drain), the question is how can we address that challenge so that all the money we invest in our people here stays in Canada.”

There are three key pillars to the federal government’s plan: ensuring access to capital, computing, and consumers.

“Most companies would rather have a contract than a grant, and the federal government can play a big role in that,” said Shannon Vander Meulen, co-founder of WaitWell. “There’s a bit of a double-edged sword with that because obviously a lot of companies like mine sell extensively into the U.S.”

Currently, Canada only has a voluntary code of conduct for the development and management of advanced generative AI systems. Solomon tells Global News that he and other ministers are working on introducing new legislation to provide more concrete framework to protect Canadians and their data.

“The justice minister has tabled legislation on the non-consensual sharing of sexual and synthetic deep-fake imagery, to criminalize that,” Solomon shared.

“I will be tabling legislation to update our privacy, to protect our consumers, to protect our children, and make sure our children’s information is safe… And then Marc Miller is going to have the online harms element.”

At Mount Royal University, information design associate professor Lauren Dwyer says sorting out a mandatory framework to protect Canadians is hugely important.

“We are driving next to a cliff with potential huge consequences if we aren’t managing this properly,” noted Dwyer. “And we’ve seen some of the most deadly versions of this when we look at what happened in Tumbler Ridge.”

Dwyer’s research focuses on a number of different areas within the sphere of artificial intelligence, including how the design of AI shapes communication, our behaviour, and what people do about it.

To her, if we want to remove the human element, there needs to be a greater focus on accuracy.

“When we’re using this tool to make things more efficient, we’re also removing the possibility of a person at every single step,” Dwyer said. “We love to talk about artificial intelligence with this ‘human in the loop,’ someone supervising the decisions being made, and that’s fantastic if efficiency isn’t the goal. If you’re supervising all these decisions but you’re being urged to move faster, and chances are you’re only taking a quick glance.”

Dwyer notes that, traditionally, in order for a new technology to be adopted, there has to be a foundation.

“A study coming out of Toronto Metropolitan University’s social media lab showed the majority of Canadians that they surveyed were using AI, specifically gen-artificial intelligence like ChatGPT,” explained Dwyer. “And yet the majority of Canadians (who were surveyed) said they didn’t trust the information that was coming out of it. So we’re seeing those models start to break.”

But Dwyer is optimistic that Canada is following other jurisdictions when it comes to coming up with those regulations.

“The European Union is doing a phenomenal job with regulation and it’s doing a much stronger job than let’s say the U.S. is doing with regulation,” Dwyer said.

“That doesn’t mean that they have it perfectly figured out, and that the work the EU is doing isn’t without its flaws. Canada is right to be taking its own path on this and figuring out how to strike the best balance.”

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Trains are a part of Canadian heritage, linking cities from coast to coast to coast.

Currently, there are about 42,000 km of track running across Canada.

There is also a vast network of roads, meaning they will occasionally cross paths — and this is where it can be dangerous.

“In Canada in 2025, there were 160 crossing incidents and 92 trespassing incidents. That includes fatalities and injuries,” said Chris Day, the national director of Operation Lifesaver Canada.

On Tuesday afternoon, RCMP say a train was travelling westbound near Taber, Alta., when it struck a northbound semi-truck.

“Unfortunately, the train wasn’t able to stop in time, striking the back end of the semi-truck,” said Cpl. Troy Savinkoff with the Alberta RCMP.

The police investigation determined the truck had stopped before the tracks, then proceeded onto them, stopping again while the trailer was still in the way of the train.

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“My understanding is it’s quite open, lots of fields. It’s Taber/Vauxhall area, so we’re not talking a lot of hills or anything. (The semi-truck driver) just missed it,” said Savinkoff.

The driver was ticketed with careless driving following the incident, but thankfully no injuries were reported.

While it may seem like this shouldn’t have happened, one driving expert says overall motorist behaviour has been declining for years.

“We know that statistically, across North America, driving behaviours have degraded basically since the pandemic,” said Hannah Hamilton, program manager of safe communities with the Alberta Motor Association.

She says the exact reasoning isn’t known, but entitlement could be a partial culprit.

“There’s some psychology into (the idea that) people are less community minded now — they’re thinking more about themselves.”

Hamilton says the roadway is a shared experience with everything from a two-door sedan to a multi-car train.

For Day, he’s concerned about the almost 25,000 railway crossings in Canada where people need to think about more than just themselves.

“There are a lot of places where people who may, or may not, be paying the attention they should be, can find themselves in conflict or collision with a train,” said Day.

He says the amount of annual incidents involving trains and vehicles or pedestrians has declined significantly over the past 40 years, but the five-year average has been up.

As a result, every expert says it’s important to just remember you aren’t alone on the road and paying attention is a must.

“I think the biggest message is remember that driving, whether (knowing your route) like the back of your hand or not, is an activity that requires your full attention,” said Hamilton.

2:13
GO train partially derailed outside Union Station causes nightmare for commuters

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Canadian comedian Ben Bankas is pushing ahead with his planned Kelowna, B.C., stop, despite growing calls to cancel the show.

In a video posted online ahead of March 19, Bankas tells fans he’s coming to Kelowna. Wearing a Kelowna Rockets jersey, the Toronto-born comic, now based in Austin, Texas, is seen stepping off a plane in another online video saying “can’t stop me.”

Bankas has built a reputation for controversial material, including a recent set where he compared Winnipeg to an apocalyptic scene involving Indigenous people.

Kelowna Pride spokesperson Candace Banks says that kind of content is part of a broader pattern.

“If you look up any of the clips on YouTube, it only takes a second for him to get into trashing immigrants, Indigenous people, women, trans folks, queer folks,” she said.

His “I Said What I Said” tour has already faced fallout. A show in Nanaimo was cancelled, with the Port Theatre saying it supports freedom of expression within the bounds of the law.

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In the U.S., multiple sold-out shows in Minnesota were also scrapped after backlash to a routine referencing Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother who was fatally shot by an ICE agent earlier this year.

Bankas joked about her death during a performance, saying it was ‘good,’ drawing widespread criticism.

“To make light of the death of a human, an innocent woman, that’s not comedy,” Banks said.

Kelowna Pride is now calling on Prospera Place to cancel Thursday’s show.

“Especially for a public venue where we get most of our entertainment from, I think our entire community needs to feel comfortable and safe there. With events like this, there is no safety,” she said.

In a statement, Prospera Place says it is listening to feedback.

“The venue hosts a wide range of events throughout the year, presented by different organizers. When providing the space for these events, we recognize that not every performance will resonate positively with the whole of our community,” said Prospera Place.

“Any decisions related to an event proceeding are considered carefully and take into account a variety of factors, including existing agreements and public safety.”

Global News reached out to Bankas’ team for comment but did not receive a response.

For now, the nearly sold-out show is still expected to go ahead.

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