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The federal government is directing another $300 million in renewed funding to Indigenous-led housing projects in urban, rural and northern communities. It would bring the total investment through the organization to more than half a billion dollars.
Indigenous Services Canada announced Monday it is renewing funding for the National Indigenous Collaborative Housing Incorporated (NICHI) to deliver through its “For Indigenous, By Indigenous” (FIBI) housing initiative at the Annual General Meeting in Ottawa.
“This investment will support a new round of projects helping deliver more homes where it is needed the most, and ensuring that we are strengthening Indigenous capacity to lead that hope,” Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty said.
The funding will go toward capital developments and renovations to existing Indigenous housing, with a focus on addressing urgent and unmet housing needs in urban, rural and northern communities. The money also builds on the $281.5 million in federal funding previously provided to NICHI through the first round of the FIBI initiative in 2023.
Sydney Ko reports.
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand is co-hosting a global conference in Toronto on the plight of Ukrainian children abducted by Russian officials.
In 2024, the Trudeau government co-launched with Ukraine an international coalition of nations committed to finding and returning Ukrainian children abducted by Russia since it began its full-scale invasion in 2022.
Ukrainian authorities cite what they say are more than 20,651 records of possible unlawful deportations or forcible transfers of Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-occupied territories of eastern Ukraine.
Officials in Ukraine say 2,573 of those children have been returned.
Abducted children returned to Ukraine have reported being subjected to physical and sexual violence and exposed to educational programming meant to strip them of their Ukrainian identity, says Bring Kids Back, a coalition launched by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The Canadian Press has more.
The Competition Bureau has launched an investigation into the use of minimum advertised pricing policies in the grocery sector, rules that can prevent retailers from advertising their lowest prices in flyers, apps and online promotions.
The watchdog is examining whether the policies make bargains harder to find, blunt competition among grocers, and put new and discount stores at a disadvantage.
“Canadians expect grocery stores to be able to advertise their best deals,” Jeanne Pratt, the agency’s interim competition commissioner, said in a statement Monday.
“We’re concerned that policies that prevent this make it harder for grocers to compete, and for consumers to access lower prices,” she said. “At a time when food affordability remains an important concern for Canadians, we want to hear about how these policies are affecting grocery prices and consumer choice.”
CP’s got this one too.
In Other Headlines
Internationally
Elsewhere, each year, Congress passes laws which allocate money to the federal government’s various programs and agencies. Trump, for the second year in a row, is refusing to send some of that money to the places that Congress says it has to go, setting off a fresh battle with lawmakers over who controls federal spending.
Of the $810 million being withheld, $567 million comes from programs that “provided services to refugees, asylees, and other non-citizens,” according to a memo from the White House.
The move, called a pocket rescission, is illegal, according to the Government Accountability Office, an independent, non-partisan watchdog agency charged with providing federal agencies fact-based information.
Article 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to levy taxes and decide how federal funds are spent — known as power of the purse. If the president disagrees, he or she can send a request to Congress to cancel the fund, but that is supposed to happen with 45 days notice in order to let Congress agree or disagree.
NPR has more.
Two of the “godfathers” of modern AI and senior executives at OpenAI and Anthropic have warned governments to prepare for an AI “intelligence explosion”, which they say could be the most consequential technological development in history.
A report co-authored by the Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and the Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, considered godfathers of modern AI for their work in the field, urges politicians to act now before there is runaway progress in the technology.
The authors say they are concerned about an “intelligence explosion”, which they describe as a “dramatic AI-driven acceleration of AI progress, compressing advances that would otherwise take years into months or less”.
The paper, titled “What if automating AI R&D triggers an intelligence explosion”, is authored by more than 20 people including Hinton and Bengio. Other authors of the paper include Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, and Jakub Pachocki, the chief scientist at OpenAI.
Read more from the Guardian.
