Good evening, readers.
Industry Minister Melanie Joly is giving Stelco’s parent company 15 days to reverse layoffs at its sites in southern Ontario or risk a possible forced sales of their Canadian holdings.
In a letter to Cleveland Cliffs sent Wednesday, Joly accused the company of violating the terms of their 2024 agreement with the government to purchase Stelco. She said the company was failing to honour its pledges to maintain existing employment levels until 2029 and advocate for a Canadian exemption for U.S. steel tariffs, as well as breaking promises on facilitating shipments and charitable giving and co-op opportunities.
Joly said Stelco had 15 days to honour those terms or the government would apply to the courts to impose penalties, which could include fines or a forced sale.
Cleveland Cliffs signed the agreement under the terms of the Investment Canada Act, which gives Ottawa the ability to prohibit or set conditions for foreign acquisitions of key Canadian assets.
Also, Canada Post has begun transitioning the last homes that still receive home delivery to community mailboxes as part of a broader effort to return the Crown corporation to fiscal balance.
During the corporation’s annual public meeting on Thursday, Canada Post released 2025 financials and outlined its plans to overhaul the mail delivery service. It came roughly a year after the Carney government approved ending door-to-door delivery and ended the moratorium on closing post offices in rural and remote communities.
There are roughly 4 million addresses that still receive doorstep service. Canada Post is planning on moving 620,000 addresses to community mailboxes over the next several months, and the remainder by 2031.
Communities in Winnipeg and Quebec City are the first to start the transition, and the move will save the corporation around $500 million, according to Jon Hamilton, Canada Post’s vice-president of communications and stakeholder engagement.
Your phone’s map, your debit card payment and the 911 dispatcher who sends an ambulance all depend on the same thing: a signal from American military satellites. Ottawa now says Canada needs a backup.
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly released Canada’s first Positioning, Navigation and Timing Resilience Framework on Thursday, a plan to reduce the country’s reliance on global positioning system (GPS), the U.S. system that most Canadians use everyday.
The framework aims to “diversify” the country’s sources of positioning and timing signals, build Canadian capability for both civilian and military use and encourage investments in the industry.
It sets priorities rather than rules, and comes without new funding or requirements.
This comes two days after Ottawa poured $15 million through the Strategic Response Fund into Xona Space System, a company building a network of satellites to back up GPS.
Ottawa is sending $60 million additional federal funding to more than 60 national sports organizations, as part of a $755-million package announced in the spring.
“We’re maintaining the momentum,” Secretary of State for Sport Adam van Koeverden said at a press conference on Thursday. “This investment will increase access and deliver more sport programming to all Canadians,” he said.
This is the first major payout since the Future of Sport in Canada Commission found in March that the country’s sport system was chronically underfunded and failing to keep athletes safe.
Asked how the funding addresses safety, van Koeverden said protecting athletes is a pillar and a priority for every national sport organization at every level of sport.
“There is not a boutique program for safe sport,” he said.
In Other Headlines
- Top court will hear appeal on ruling that found feds violated charter during convoy protest (CBC)
- Accused Tumblr Ridge co-conspirator enters not guilty plea in U.S. court (CBC)
- Former Alberta cabinet minister says Smith can’t survive UCP crisis after referendum (Global)
- Carney, Erdogen launch ‘strong and resilient’ Canada-Turkiye partnership (Al Jazeera)
- Alberta welcomed migrant workers. Now it wants to restrict their rights (The Guardian)
- ‘Potentially irreversible harm’: Scientists sound alarm on PM Carney’s Bill C-39 (CTV)
- EU and Canada draw closer in Trump’s world, with Britain looking on (Euronews)
- Doug Ford is spending a lot of money ripping out bike lanes (The Walrus)
- Luxury hotel firm faces flak in an Ontario town’s debate over tourism and growth (The Globe and Mail)
- Nurse describes crowded, chaotic hospital ER at fatality inquiry for Edmonton man (CBC)
Internationally
Elsewhere, a federal judge in California is putting limits on pre-election field operations conducted by the Department of Homeland Security that the agency says is aimed at trying to find noncitizens who have illegally voted in nine states.
In recent weeks, armed Homeland Security Investigations officers have carried out field operations and visited homes to interview people suspected of illegally voting as noncitizens. The targets can include people who became citizens but voted before they naturalized.
In a 19-page order late Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, an appointee of President Joe Biden, wrote that the federal government was using “flawed” data in the initiative and that its efforts likely violated the Voting Rights Act, which bars voter intimidation.
Meanwhile, Iran will strike oil facilities, undersea cables, datacentres and AI facilities across as many as seven countries in the Gulf in the event of a fresh US-Israeli attack, Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, has said.
Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to Mohammad Ghalibaf, the hardliner who led Iran’s negotiations with the US to end the conflict between the two countries, said Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed in principle on an attack, but could not guarantee a successful outcome. He added: “We see the next conflict as an existential threat. The third war in two years means a threat to existence. Our strategy is ‘zero red lines’.”
Mohammadi said: “We break the temporal and spatial dimensions of the conflict. The war will continue longer and in a wider geographical area than the enemy anticipates.”
In Other International Headlines
- Trump forcefully backs Ramswamy’s Acton ad: ‘keep it up’ (Forbes)
- Louise Lucas arrested in federal marijuana corruption case (Axios)
- Macron bans ‘illegitimate’ protests in France as he tries to get a grip on unrest (The Guardian)
- Trump asks Musk to lift Ukraine Starlink restrictions, WSJ reports (Reuters)
- Trump says he called Google’s CEO to discuss renaming Atlantic Ocean (The Washington Post)
- U.S. pulls diplomats from Saudi Arabia as it reportedly readies Iran strikes after midterms (CNBC)
- Australian coroner moved to tears by the death of a child denied insulin on religious grounds (CTV)
- Russian strikes Kyiv with three cluster-warhead ballistic missiles, Zelenskyy says (Euonews)
- Fighting rages in Yemen’s Taiz as UN warns early 260,000 displaced (Al Jazeera)
- Trump approval hits new low to two weeks before midterms, poll finds (The New York Times)
The Kicker
To the Heated Rivalry fans, it’s time to run it back.
Cineplex is bringing all six episodes of the hockey romance to the big screen in November, including a full-season marathon on Nov. 8.
Safe to say while the weather is getting a lot chillier, Cineplex is finding ways to heat things up.