Never any doubt: Cambage all-in for Australia at Tokyo Games

FIFA president overshadowing the good of the game

There is a big London Derby on Sunday (Arsenal-Chelsea), and the weekend schedule also features marquee matches in Turkey (Feherbahce-Besiktas) and the Netherlands (Ajax-PSV Eindhoven), as well as a showdown between the Italian teams with the last four Scudetti between them (Inter Milan-Napoli).

Then there’s the Under-20 Women’s World Cup, which is set to kick off in Poland (Canada plays England on Saturday at 11:00 a.m.).

And yet, clouding it all — and the world of football is a massive thing to overshadow — is the figure of FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who suddenly finds himself facing a protracted legal battle over his scheme to sell off the World Cup’s commercial rights.

Specifically, UEFA — the sport’s governing body in Europe — is “preparing to bring criminal claims in Switzerland against Infantino…for criminal mismanagement under Article 158 of the Swiss Criminal Code.” So reads its recent filing in a Florida court.

Canada goes young and old for Olympic men's hockey

Canada is turning to a mix of youthful exuberance and battle-scarred experience in its quest for Olympic men's hockey gold minus the country's NHL stars.

The 25-man roster announced Tuesday is bookended by 37-year-old Eric Staal and fellow centre Mason McTavish, who turns 19 this weekend, for the upcoming Beijing Games.

"We always talk about playing the Canadian way," head coach Claude Julien said on a video conference call with reporters. "We're a proud country of the way we play the game.

"We're going to be an aggressive team."

Veterinarian petitions Ottawa to consider four-legged patients in legal cannabis regime

An Ontario veterinarian has launched a formal petition asking the government to include animals and the physicians who care for them in Canada's cannabis regulations.

"What we're hearing repeatedly from Health Canada... is that the entire framework surrounding cannabis legalization was focused on human consumption," said Sarah Silcox, who practices palliative and hospice care for companion animals in Ajax, Ont., and serves as president of the Canadian Association of Veterinary Cannabinoid Medicine.

"And so they hadn't even considered animals being involved in this, or veterinarians being involved in the medical side of things. And what that's left us with is this catch-22, because now it's perfectly legal for a Canadian adult to go out and purchase cannabis, and to give it to their animal, and yet veterinarians have no legal pathway to authorize its use... Therefore we're really limited in terms of the education and support that we can give our clients to ensure that they're doing that safely."

The online petition on the House of Commons e-petitions website was launched May 27, and already has more than 500 signatures — enough to require the government to table an official response in Parliament.

While the politicians talk, Bank of Canada aims to tame house prices with a dose of psychology

‘Any hope for bringing prices back to earth lies with those rising rates, rather than the flurry of words and actions we’ve seen in recent weeks from politicians at all levels.’

An opportunity to re-imagine downtown

The pandemic has been devastating for downtown Winnipeg. An abundance of “For Lease” signs in storefront windows has provided an intuitive glimpse, but a new report titled “State of Downtown: The impact of the pandemic to date” has quantified the profound challenges facing the economic, social and cultural heart of our city.

With the exodus of students and office workers, storefront businesses downtown have lost an average of $2 million per week in gross revenue since the pandemic began. This has led to more than 2,000 people losing their jobs and almost 50 storefront businesses permanently closing. The conference, hotel, hospitality, and arts and culture industries saw devastating declines, and more than 1.5 million square feet of office space are now vacant.

The pandemic has also exacerbated long-standing challenges of poverty and homelessness, with social agencies struggling to meet the needs of downtown’s vulnerable population.

The report paints a dire image, but we have been here before. Twenty years ago, downtown Winnipeg was in a similar situation. Population was at an all-time low as people moved to the suburbs, retail shops relocated from Portage Avenue to distant shopping malls, and office space was in decline. In the face of this challenge, government and private industry came together to rebuild downtown.

Explaining Canada’s superior employment rate

Donald Trump regularly makes outrageous claims. Fentanyl was pouring across the northern border from Canada and had to be stopped. Canada is nasty to deal with and has the highest tariffs in the world. Canada needs the U.S. but the U.S. doesn’t need Canada. Canadians want to become the 51st state. And so on.

In the latest trade dispute, after Mark Carney walked away from negotiations, Trump made a new claim that Canada’s unemployment rate was 10 per cent and climbing rapidly. Insofar as the unemployment rate is closely monitored, reported monthly, and given similar attention to the rates of inflation and economic growth, the comment was likely intended to signal Canada’s weakness. It fits Trump’s narrative that Canada needs the U.S. for its livelihood and protection and would be better off more directly under U.S. influence as a 51st state, or perhaps a protectorate like the Philippines or Panama in the past.

Fact checkers quickly reported that Canada’s unemployment rate is really 6.4 per cent for July, not 10 per cent, has fallen from 6.9 per cent in April, and is at its lowest rate since May 2024. Some astute observers pointed out that Canada’s method for the calculation of the unemployment rate leads to a higher rate than the U.S. by about one per cent. Under the American methodology, then, our unemployment rate would be 5.4 per cent, not that far off the U.S. July rate of 4.1 per cent.

Detection of unemployment is less straightforward that might appear, as it is sandwiched between the labour force statuses of employment and inactivity at a particular point in time. The internationally established standard for determination of unemployment is the notion of searching for work — you are unemployed if you do not have paid employment and you are looking for work without success. Surveys have been developed to categorize respondents as employed, unemployed or inactive, including the labour force survey (LFS) in Canada and the current population survey (CPS) in the U.S.