Ontario’s education minister has directed the province’s school boards to stream Team Canada’s Olympic hockey games during classroom times so students can “rally together and cheer on some of Canada’s best.”

Premier Doug Ford announced the idea in a social media post on Wednesday evening, saying he had told Education Minister Paul Calandra to work out how schools could make it possible.

“To help everyone get in the spirit of the games, I’ve directed the Minister of Education to make sure all Ontario students are able to watch the remaining Team Canada hockey games that take place during school hours, starting with tomorrow’s game,” the premier wrote.

The Canadian women’s hockey team plays its gold medal match against the USA at 1:10 p.m. on Thursday, while the men’s semi-final against Finland will be played at 10:40 a.m. on Friday.

Calandra confirmed Thursday morning he had moved on Ford’s request and told schools they must let students watch the games.

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“In recognition of the Olympics and this exciting time for Team Canada, I am directing all school boards to let students tune in to both the Women’s and Men’s hockey games during school hours,” he said in his own social media post.

“Big games like these aren’t just about the outcome, they’re a chance to rally together and cheer on some of Canada’s best.”

The Winter Olympics wrap up on Feb. 22.

&copy 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is signalling he will stand firm on his government’s changes to student loans as opposition to a major restructuring of the program grows in the province.

As part of a push to sustain the struggling post-secondary sector, the province will inject new cash into colleges and universities and allow them to raise tuition fees by two per cent a year.

The changes also shifted how OSAP operates, moving away from grants to offer students more loans instead.

The existing proportion of OSAP was about 85 per cent grants to 15 per cent loans, the government said, but starting this fall, students will receive a maximum of 25 per cent of their OSAP funding as grants.

Now, advocates and opponents are pushing the premier to reverse course, accusing him of trying to balance the books on the backs of students.

“Doug Ford has shown that he doesn’t mind a good flip-flop, so we’re going to hand him an opportunity,” Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles said.

“Families that I’m hearing from are furious. Not only is this an attack on students saddling them with massive debt when they least need it … but it is also a hit on our economy.”

The NDP has launched a campaign to “save OSAP,” urging students and families to sign its petition and write to their local MPPs.

“We have been contacted already by thousands of people, thousands of students,” Stiles said. “Even the premier acknowledged he’s getting thousands of calls. No kidding. My phone was lighting up all weekend; I expect every MPP was getting lots of calls.”

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Bella Fischer, with the College Student Alliance, said the OSAP changes and hiked tuition fees could put some off college or university by making them pay more for longer.

“They’re putting basically all of the burden onto the students,” she said. “The decisions in life later are going to also be affected because they’re going to have more debt to pay.”

Ford, however, justified the decision at an unrelated event on Wednesday, saying the existing system was “unsustainable” and claiming the government had been “paying for everyone’s education.”

He added, “The most vulnerable are going to be taken care of, that’s clear and simple. It’s going to be 25 per cent — and that puts us in the middle of the pack.”

Ontario Liberal MPP John Fraser said the premier didn’t understand the impact on students.

“He’s out of touch with people’s everyday lives, what families go through to make sure that their kids get an education and are ready for the future,” he said. “They give up a lot.”

&copy 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

The B.C. government announced on Tuesday that it is pressing pause on one of its longstanding promises: universal $10-a-day child care.

The province is putting a three-year freeze on that program.

New enrolment is being paused and there won’t be any further expansion of spaces.

The province says the goal is to stabilize the program, instead of rolling it back and moving to income-tested eligibility.

“We are hearing from families that it’s a lottery system,” B.C. Education Minister Lisa Beare told Global News.

“We’re hearing from operators that we don’t have the operating model quite right. There is an equity in the system.

“We’ve been talking to the federal government and our provincial and territorial partners about the sustainability and the inflexibility in the program. You know, so these are all things that need to be addressed.”

Beare said any current fees are not changing and any families receiving subsidized daycare will continue to do so.

She said they are going to take this stabilization period to get the program “right.”

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Emily Mliecako, with Early Childhood Educators of BC, told Global News that they are happy the province is pausing the program.

“Especially the newest funding model, the operating funding model that is being used right now, we have heard many, many stories and have reported out to government that that funding model isn’t working for the operators and for the sector itself,” she said.

“So having a pause actually was welcomed at that moment.”

However, Mliecako said she thinks a three-year pause is too long.

“With this new amount of funding coming, that is a good thing because it’s maintaining what they have right now,” she said.

“However, there’s no room for real growth or opportunities for early childhood educators to have a robust wage grid, looking at their working conditions, looking at the quality of the programmes of the early childhood child care centres, all of those things are such critical pieces.”

&copy 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

Newswise — New work from Georgia Tech is showing how a simple glass of wine can serve as a powerful gateway for understanding advanced research and technologies.

The project, inspired by an Atlanta Science Festival event hosted by School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Assistant Professor Andrew McShan, develops an innovative outreach and teaching module around nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques, and is designed for easy adoption in introductory chemistry and biochemistry courses. 

Published earlier this year in the Journal of Chemical Education, the study, “Automated Chemical Profiling of Wine by Solution NMR Spectroscopy: A Demonstration for Outreach and Education” was led by a team from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry including lead author McShan, Ph.D. students Lily Capeci, Elizabeth A. Corbin, Ruoqing Jia, Miriam K. Simma, and F. N. U. Vidya, Academic Professional Mary E. Peek, and Georgia Tech NMR Center Co-Directors Johannes E. Leisen and Hongwei Wu.

“NMR is one of the most widely used analytical tools in chemistry and the life sciences, and Georgia Tech hosts one of the most cutting-edge NMR centers in the world,” McShan says. “Our study shows that you don’t need advanced training to appreciate how powerful tools like NMR work and how those tools are used in research.”

All materials, tutorials, and data are freely available via online tutorials and a YouTube video, enabling educators to replicate or adapt the activity even in settings with limited access to NMR facilities.

Wine sleuthing at the Atlanta Science Festival

From families with K-12 students to undergraduates to adults with no prior chemistry experience, nearly 130 visitors explored wine chemistry at the Georgia Tech NMR Center during the Atlanta Science Festival event. With McShan’s guidance, they identified and quantified more than 70 chemical components that influence wine taste, aroma, and quality by analyzing the chemical composition, structure, and dynamics of molecules.

Taking on the role of wine investigators (a real-world application of NMR), the group investigated examples of wine fraud, learning to identify harmful additives like methanol, antifreeze, and lead acetate – additives that played roles in both historical and modern wine scandals.

“By connecting the science to something familiar like wine, we were able to spark curiosity and excitement across age groups,” says McShan. “This a framework for how complex analytical techniques can be made inclusive, interactive, and inspiring whether in the classroom or at a science festival.”

Science for all

The study underscores the potential of NMR and other powerful technologies as outreach opportunities – from engaging the public to better teaching undergraduate students.

“After the event, adults said they learned how chemical composition affects wine characteristics and how NMR is used in research and industry,” McShan says. “Younger participants learned key concepts about wine composition and found benefits from the sensory elements, like watching the spectrometer in action.”

They aim to use these takeaways to continue developing outreach tools. “My end goal is to develop NMR into a practical teaching tool by grounding the technique in real-world examples,” adds McShan. “Using this approach is a clear avenue to introducing the general public to the world-class instruments used by researchers at Georgia Tech and exposing undergraduate students to the powerful analytical techniques they are likely to encounter throughout their careers.”

 

Funding: National Science Foundation

 

Post-secondary students in Ontario say the government’s decision to reduce financial assistance grants while lifting a long-standing tuition fee freeze will leave students who are already struggling financially with more debt.

The government said last week that it will decrease the proportion of grants offered through the Ontario Student Assistance Program from about 85 per cent of funding to a maximum of 25 per cent in the fall, making the rest student loans.

The government is also lifting a seven-year tuition fee freeze to allow colleges and universities to raise fees by up to two per cent per year for the next three years.

Alex Stratas of the student union at the University of Ottawa says the changes in OSAP structure are devastating for students who rely on the program’s grants to pay for food, housing and tuition.

Stratas, a fourth-year political science and communications student, says she and many others couldn’t afford school without those grants because they don’t have enough financial support from family, and the move sends a message that the government doesn’t care to make students’ lives more affordable.

Husam Morra, the president of University of Windsor Students’ Alliance, says students are already facing an affordability crisis and the tuition fee and financial assistance program changes will make education less accessible.

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Morra, a fourth-year computer science student, says the changes will impact students even after graduation as they will have to pay back larger loans.

The changes announced by the government came with an additional $6.4 billion for the post-secondary sector over four years, following a funding formula review and a strong push from cash-strapped colleges and universities.

Ontario universities and colleges have long faced low levels of government funding, stagnant tuition levels since 2019 and sharply reduced numbers of international students, who are charged far higher tuition fees than domestic students.

Colleges in particular increasingly turned to international student tuition revenue to stabilize finances after the government cut tuition fees by 10 per cent and froze them at that level seven years ago.

&copy 2026 The Canadian Press

A northern Saskatchewan high school that was the site of a deadly shooting a decade ago closed for weeks before students returned to class.

Jason Young with the Northern Lights School Division says time was needed after the tragedy at Dene High School in La Loche to ensure supports and security were in place. Two died and several were injured.

“We were just in a difficult position to be able to start school again,” Young said in an interview.

“We didn’t have the resources to do that. We just needed to meet with people where they were at and slowly work together to try and start school up again.”

On Tuesday, a mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and at a home in the town in northeastern B.C. left nine children and adults dead, including the shooter.

RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald told a news conference Friday that children need to return to school at an appropriate time.

He said he’s hopeful investigators will be out of the school as soon as possible so the town can begin to heal.

The Grade 7-12 school has roughly 160 students.

B.C. Premier David Eby told a vigil in Tumbler Ridge on Friday night that students won’t have to go back if they don’t want to.

“I will promise you that not one of you will ever be forced to go back to that school. We will provide a safe place for you to go to school.”

Christy Fennell, superintendent of the Peace River South School District, said in a statement posted on the school’s website that it would share back-to-school plans over the next week.

“We know some families will want the stability of school routines, while others may not feel ready,” she said.

“The expectation is that we will not be returning to the current high school site.”

RCMP said 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar first killed her mother, 39-year-old Jennifer Jacobs, and 11-year-old brother, Emmett Jacobs, at the family’s home in Tumbler Ridge.

She then headed to the high school with two guns, killing five students — Kylie Smith, Zoey Benoit, Ticaria Lampert and Abel Mwansa Jr., all 12, and Ezekiel Schofield, 13. Shannda Aviugana-Durand, 39, an education assistant at the school, was also killed.

When police arrived, Van Rootselaar shot herself.

Young said there were similarities in La Loche.

On Jan. 22, 2016, a 17-year-old student killed two of his cousins at a home in the remote Dene community — Dayne Fontaine, 17, and Drayden Fontaine, 13. He then went to the school and gunned down teacher Adam Wood and a teacher’s aide, Marie Janvier, and wounded seven others.

In both cases, frightened students huddled in classrooms, consoled each other and waited.

In La Loche, Mounties announced over the school’s intercom that they had arrested the shooter.

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Randan Fontaine later pleaded guilty to various counts of first-degree murder, second-degree murder and attempted murder. He was sentenced as an adult to life in prison with no chance of parole for 10 years.

In the weeks that followed the shooting, the La Loche school hired security guards to ease fears over safety, Young said. RCMP also provided a resource officer to work in the building.

“We knew that one of the steps we needed to take was how do we reduce anxiety,” he said. “When you’re able to offer that type of support, staff and students can focus on what they need to do.”

The school also worked with the provincial and federal governments to provide additional mental health supports, including more counsellors.

Young said staff heard from students that they wanted to return.

“You get back to as normal education as you possibly can,” he said.

“(Teachers were) just doing the best they can, given the situation we were all dealing with.”

Security guards still remain in place at the school, he said, though the RCMP resource officer isn’t working out of the school as much.

“Part of the challenge with that is recruitment challenges,” Young said. “We’re doing the best we can with what we’ve got.”

Each year on the anniversary of the shooting, the school has closed — except this year. A ceremony was held at the school to mark the 10th anniversary.

Young said students and staff will never forget what happened.

“(The anniversary) will just be a day where they can actually focus on service to others. That’s going to be the theme going forward,” he said.

“Obviously, it’s not something you can ever forget.”

Young said his school division has reached out to the Peace River South School District.

“All I can do is just continue to pray and think about those that are affected in that community,” he said.

“I know that they too will be resilient through this, as difficult as it is right now.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 14, 2026.

&copy 2026 The Canadian Press

In the aftermath of a devastating shooting spree that left six children and two adults dead in the small northern B.C. town, schools in at least three communities across Alberta have dealt with firearms reports that turned out to be false, while a fourth had a man acting erratically while in possession of a toy gun.

Mounties in Alberta have seen an uptick in calls about reports of firearm sightings, which RCMP Corp. Mathew Howell said was expected.

“It’s something we’ve noticed with a lot of traumatic events in the past,” Howell said on Thursday.

“That will, in a lot of people, spike that fight-or-flight response and that vigilance.”

RCMP said people become more aware after incidents like this week’s school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, and police encourage citizens to trust their gut and call 911 if something seems off.

“Even if, in the end, it turns out there was no incident or it turns out there was no firearm or whatever the case may be — it’s always better to call it in and to be sure than to brush it off.”

In light of the tragedy in B.C., Premier Danielle Smith and Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides said school boards will be asked to audit their security measures.

“At the same time I’ll also be conducting an audit of provincial standards with respect to security measures, to make sure that we have adequate minimum standards for our school divisions and evaluate whether those minimum standards need to be elevated or updated,” Nicolaides said.

High River

The latest happened Thursday in southern Alberta. RCMP in High River received a report around 10:30 a.m. from École Secondaire Highwood High of a threat received at the school.

An unknown person called and said that someone would be going to the school with firearms, police said.

The school was placed in a hold and secure while it was searched by staff and police officers, whom the RCMP said arrived within two minutes of receiving the call.

During a hold and secure, exterior doors are locked so people can’t move in and out of the building, but operations inside carry on as normal.

The hold and secure was lifted by the noon hour, RCMP said, adding officers would remain on site for the rest of the day.

The incident came as Foothills School Division has lowered its flags until next week out of respect for the community of Tumbler Ridge.

“We are profoundly saddened by the tragic events that unfolded,” said a joint statement by superintendent Chris Fuzessy and board chair Theresa Letendre.

“Schools are places of safety, connection, and belonging. When violence touches a school community, it reverberates far beyond its walls.”

Fort McMurray

Thursday’s gun incident south of Calgary comes after two other Alberta communities also dealt with similar scenarios on Wednesday.

Wood Buffalo RCMP in Fort McMurray received a call around 2:42 p.m. stating that a student had brought a firearm to school.

Fort McMurray Public Schools said Frank Spragins High School briefly transitioned into a lockdown while officers from multiple RCMP departments converged upon the building.

Upon arrival, Mounties said they found a suspect, who was taken into custody, but no firearm was located.

“In light of the events in Tumbler Ridge, we understand that reports of this nature may cause heightened concern for students, families, and staff,” Fort McMurray Public Schools Superintendent Annalee Nutter said in a memo posted to school’s website.

“Please know that we approach situations like this with seriousness, care, and a strong commitment to safety.”

The  division acknowledged even when situations are resolved safely, they can create stress or anxiety, so a support team was made available on Thursday for students and staff.

“We will review our response, as we do after any incident, and address any areas for improvement if needed. We are committed to transparency and to responding directly and responsibly to concerns.”

Sherwood Park

The third incident this week happened in the Edmonton region, just east of the city at a high school and junior high in Sherwood Park.

Just before 10 a.m. Wednesday, Strathcona County RCMP said it received a report of a person with a possible firearm in their pocket at the Strathcona Athletic Park in Sherwood Park.

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The nearby Bev Facey Community High was put on lockdown while F.R. Haythorne Junior High was placed in a hold and secure.

Police said they quickly responded to the park and searched the area.

RCMP said they found the purported suspect and confirmed the man didn’t have a gun and no offences were committed.

The status of the schools were lifted over the noon hour.

On Thursday, Strathcona County’s public school division, Elk Island Public Schools, issued a statement of condolence for Tumbler Ridge, B.C.

“The recent shootings at Tumbler Ridge Secondary have deeply shocked and saddened all of us,” said EIPS board chair Colleen Holowaychuck.

“Our thoughts are with students, staff and families who are now navigating this devastating tragedy.”

Elk Island said all its schools and head office have also lowered their flags to honour those lost in the school shooting.

Edson

The fourth incident in which a person did have a replica gun occurred Tuesday in western Alberta.

RCMP said officers from Edson, about 1.5 hours west of Edmonton, were called on Tuesday about a man reportedly acting strangely outside Mary Bergeron School.

“The call came in as a cap gun and not a real firearm,” said RCMP Corp. Mathew Howell. “That being said, when it comes to police response, police response is always the same. We err on the side of caution and public safety is always a priority.”

Police said the man was seen throwing beef jerky and yelling bible verses at students. While the situation sounds laughable, RCMP said it still counts as violent behaviour.

“Yes, we’re talk about beef jerky, but technically throwing an item at someone is technically considered assault, so he was technically assaulting kids and then pulled out what turned out to be an imitation firearm.”

Investigators allege when the principal approached, the man pulled out the cap gun and fired three shots in their direction before leaving in a car.

Police said the man randomly showed up at the school and no student witnessed the cap gun incident.

Officers tracked down the vehicle, which took off heading west down the Yellowhead Highway and was pursued by several police units, including a canine team and air services.

After traveling a long distance on Highway 16 west to Hinton, RCMP said the vehicle turned off onto secondary roads north of the highway and ended up stopping on a private farm east of Hinton.

The man got out of the vehicle and was arrested without incident.

A 39-year-old man from Dawson Creek, B.C., was charged with mischief, dangerous driving, fleeing from police and imitation firearm charges.

— With files The Canadian Press

A number of school pupils were turned away from the school on Wednesday (February 4).

A teenager has been arrested after a Cambridgeshire school received a hoax bomb threat. Cambridgeshire Police were called to Ernulf Academy in Eynesbury, near St Neots, just before 9am on Wednesday (February 4).

The school put emergency procedures in place as a caution after receiving a bomb threat. Officer arrested a 15-year-old boy from Cambridgeshire on suspicion of suspicion of malicious communications.

He has since been bailed until May 3 with conditions not to enter or go within the school location. The school reopened as usual on Thursday (February 5).

Sergeant Rob Streater, from the St Neots Neighbourhood Team, said: “Neighbourhood officers will be out on foot patrol today and Friday, and available to speak to anyone who may have concerns.

“On behalf of the school and local police, we would like to thank parents and members of the community for their support.”

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