Canada's environment commissioner says the country is nowhere near to meeting its goal of planting two-billion trees by 2030.
The Liberals first made the massive tree-planting promise during the 2019 federal election campaign and followed through with a 10-year 3.2-billion-dollar budget for it in 2020.
However, an audit of the first two years of planting says it appears the government isn't on track to get even four per cent of the promised trees in the ground by the end of 2030.
Health Canada says that four pharmaceutical companies are experiencing shortages of drugs that contain amoxicillin, an antibiotic medication that’s commonly used to treat children with bronchitis, pneumonia and ear infections.
The meetings in Vancouver are the first time all of Canada's health ministers have gathered in person since 2018. The premiers met in July, when they asked the federal government to increase health transfers to 35 per cent, up from what they said was 22 per cent funding.
Strong winds continue to buffet parts of coastal B.C. and the central Interior, packing gusts of at least 110 kilometres per hour along the north and central coasts, pushing wind chill factors in Terrace and elsewhere to -20 or lower.
The service says 171 people died of toxic drugs in September, bringing the total for the year to 1,644, the largest number ever recorded for the first nine months of a calendar year.
Immigrants who arrived in Canada over the past five years had an employment rate of 70.7 per cent, a higher rate than October 2019, pre-pandemic, the Labour Force Survey data 2022 released by Statistics Canada said.
The meeting comes after Canada's premiers met in Victoria last July, where they asked Ottawa to boost the Canada Health Transfer, the money each jurisdiction gets for health care, to 35 per cent, up from what they said amounts to 22 per cent.