dailynewsnblog
It was an exciting Thursday morning, because the government finally dropped the national electricity strategy – a 49 days in waiting since Prime Minister Mark Carney teased about it in Halifax.
Titled “Powering Canada Strong,” it very much resembles the “Powering Canada’s Future” strategy released in 2024, in that it explicitly aims to double Canada’s electricity generation and delivery capacity by 2050.
It proposes some of the same federal financial tools to help achieve this, including investment tax credits and public investment funds like the Canada Infrastructure Bank.
But while the 2024 plan leaned on the clean electricity regulations, the 2026 update promises changes to these regulations that will enable a greater use of natural gas.
Some of the proposed changes include allowing “greater use of credible offsets” like carbon credits.
The changes would also introduce more “flexibility” for existing gas-fired plants, while creating more room to add new units in the near term.
Aya Dufour has more.
Here’s another update on Alberta’s deal.
Prime Minister Mark Carney says the best place for Alberta to be is in Canada.
His comment comes a day after a judge threw out an Alberta petition calling for a referendum on separation.
The judge ruled the petition shouldn’t have been issued under provincial law and that Premier Danielle Smith’s government neglected its duty to consult First Nations.
Smith called the ruling “anti-democratic” and said the government would appeal.
Carney says referendums are part of any democracy but that rules also need to be followed.
He says that means also following a federal law that gives Ottawa a say on whether any separation question is clearly understood and what should be considered a sufficient majority vote.
The Canadian Press has more.
Provincially, the Liberals are bracing for another byelection in a Toronto riding in the coming months and there’s an emerging debate within the party on whether there should be a competitive nomination race.
For the April byelections, Prime Minister Mark Carney appointed high-profile candidates, tapping former Ontario NDP deputy leader Doly Begum in Scarborough Southwest and physician and advocate Danielle Martin in University-Rosedale.
With Nate Erskine-Smith set to resign his Beaches-East York seat to turn to provincial politics, it’s unclear if there will be a nomination race there or if the party will appoint a candidate.
The chair of the Beaches-East York Liberal riding association told iPolitics there’s been no indication from the party on how it will handle the candidate selection process.
Depending on when Erskine-Smith resigns, a byelection could be pushed off until early 2026. But doing so would create complications as the Liberals have a slim majority in the House.
Marco Vigliotti’s got this one.
In Other Headlines
Internationally
Elsewhere, China’s president, Xi Jinping, has warned of “clashes and even conflicts” with the US over Taiwan after meeting Donald Trump in Beijing.
Xi’s remarks, published by China’s foreign ministry after his two-hour meeting with Trump on Thursday morning, said Taiwan was “the most important issue in China-US relations”.
China is keen to put Taiwan at the top of an agenda that risks being overshadowed by the war in Iran and disagreements over trade. Beijing wants the US to reduce its levels of support for the self-governing island, which China claims as part of its territory. Xi has made “unification” with Taiwan a core priority for his legacy and has not ruled out the use of force to achieve that aim.
Trump later said Xi had pledged not to send weapons to Iran, despite recent reports that Chinese arms manufacturers had discussed deals to supply weapons to Tehran.
The Guardian has more.
Meanwhile, in a social media era rife with mouthwatering food content, kids will no longer settle for a drab school meal.
“I don’t have a TikTok account, but they’re telling me, ‘Hey, I saw this on TikTok. Can you make this? Can we do this?’” said Nichole Taylor, supervisor of food and nutrition services at the Great Valley School District in Malvern, Pennsylvania.
“I would have never asked my lunch lady to make something special for me. I would’ve just ate what they told me,” she said, adding that the students are “very engaged.”
Taylor has been working to refresh the suburban Philadelphia district’s meal program since she took over a year and a half ago, trying to balance a desire to cook more fresh food from scratch with budget constraints and a lack of skilled labor.
But now, districts like Taylor’s and others across the U.S. are waiting to see whether it will become even more expensive to prepare a meal.
Read more from NPR.
In Other International Headlines
The Kicker
We’re ending tonight’s newsletter with some more space content (sorry).
A newly discovered asteroid is set to pass within roughly 56,000 miles of Earth on Monday. That’s closer than the moon.
Even though, astronomers are saying there’s no risk of impact, maybe that’s another proof to why Canada’s gearing up for more space exploration.
More from ABC news.
P.S. Yesterday’s survey result on the defence hub location is in: Toronto took the cake!
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