NightOwl

The government’s intervention in the rail dispute is especially troubling for a number of reasons.

For starters, this was an employer lockout imposed in an effort to extract concessions that rail workers argue will make both themselves and the broader public less safe.

Larry Hubich, former president of the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour, in fact argues that the rail employers, along with other companies who are members of FETCO (Federally Regulated Employers – Transportation and Communications), were trying to cause enough economic disruption through the lockout to force the government to curtail rail and federal workers’ rights to strike. It seems the government largely obliged.

Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon met both the company and the union on Thursday. Both sides are still far apart on the question of wages.

MacKinnon has broad powers to tackle disputes and last month intervened within 24 hours to end a stoppage at the country's two largest railway companies, Canadian Pacific Kansas City and Canadian National Railway.

Air Canada says this set a precedent. But while Ottawa has intervened several times in labor disputes over the last few decades, it has only done so after stoppages have begun, not before.

"We are not going to interfere, we are not going to take action before it really becomes very clear that there is no goodwill at the negotiating table," said Trudeau.

The Business Council of Canada, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a joint statement on Friday calling on Ottawa to intervene to prevent a strike before it began.

There are important geopolitical and cultural factors that influence Canadian support for Israel and help explain Saini's hostility to divesting, as the university recently did with fossil fuels and Russia. But the most pressing element is a remarkably empowered victim narrative.

"Jews at McGill: 'We feel alone'", blared the cover of Saturday's National Post, linking to a two-page spread that included the spurious claim students organized a "Kristallnacht-themed rally" in November. (73 Postmedia outlets reportedly ran the story). The New York based Jewish Forward published a similar commentary headlined "For Jewish students at McGill like me, our return to campus is filled with dread".

On Friday McGill students organized a walkout and some ripped up the grass where the encampment was demolished. Those who see little problem with destroying everything in Gaza were outraged grass had been damaged.

Canada is looking for a bigger security role in Asia and has made forging deeper ties with Japan and South Korea a priority. As its defence commitments expand at home and overseas the country is expanding military spending.

"Next year, my defence budget will rise by 27% over this year, and, frankly, in the next three or four years, our defence spending will triple," Blair said.

But Salem said elected officials have an obligation to engage with their constituents. He said Plante could deal with online harassment by blocking individual accounts or reporting them to the police. "When we decide to be public figures, that goes with the position," he said. "When we want to be representative of the population, we have to be representative of the whole population."

Anaïs Bussières McNicoll, director of the fundamental freedoms program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said a "blanket prohibition on comment" is an unreasonable limitation of people's freedom of expression. Instead, she said, elected officials should evaluate inappropriate comments on a case-by-case basis.

"I would say that elected officials with significant resources shouldn't have their cake and eat it too," she said. "In that if they choose to have access to and to use social media platforms in the context of their public work, they should also accept that their constituents might want to comment on their work on that very public platform."

But researchers say focusing on the environmental impacts and potential health harms of the finished products alone hides their actual environmental impact. Manufacturing Teflon and other fluoropolymers uses other, more dangerous PFAS chemicals. These compounds are known to contaminate the environment surrounding manufacturing facilities, said Rainer Lohmann, a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.

"Basically, anywhere where there's a major fluoropolymer producer, they seem to have succeeded in contaminating the entire region with their production process," he said.

The ministry's move to remove fluoropolymers from its proposed rules suggests those industry lobbying efforts have worked, MacDonald said. Using a study with self-declared ties to the chemical industry to back up the ministry's decision to exclude fluoropolymers "just kind of shows a little bit of what's happening behind the scenes in terms of where the government is taking the industry's word," she said.