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Border Patrol working in the north of the US have reported a 743 percent rise in migrant encounters compared to the same period a year ago. Robert Garcia, the chief patrol agent for the Swanton Sector - which covers Vermont, New York and New Hampshire - said he was troubled by the increasing popularity of the people-smuggling route. He warned traffickers are exploiting desperate asylum seekers with potentially lethal consequences, amid freezing temperatures and dangerous passages.

Federal authorities say Rajinder Pal Singh had figured out a pretty sweet scam, smuggling illegal immigrants from India across the northern border and into the Seattle area — by putting them in Ubers. Investigators revealed evidence of more than 90 Uber trips they say showed patterns of smuggling that they connected to Mr. Singh from just one Uber account. And they traced a total of 17 accounts to his organization, according to court documents. Mr. Singh’s arrest late last month underscored the dangers and vulnerabilities at the northern border, far from the U.S.-Mexico boundary that gets most of the attention...

Day 328 Of The Dictatorship Of COVID-19, Day 328 Of America And The World Held Hostage In Ontario Canada its: Another Day In The Year Of Our Ford As in Doug Ford the Grand Poobah of Tyranny for Canada's most populous province... Out in the 'conservative' province of Alberta the tyrant is Premier Jason Kenney... AOC Reveals Something I Can Relate To Alexandria Ocasio Cortez decided to bring in her experience during "The Capitol Incident" to recall being sexually assaulted. When it comes to sexual matters or other matters life is 10 percent what happens to us and 90 percent...

We pause in the  Trump! Russia! Trump! Russia!  coverage to ponder over what it is about Canada that makes it so cool. Maybe it’s the hot, metrosexual PM Justin Trudeau. Or maybe it’s his counterpoint: the toques and music of the Great White North.Cooo, loo, coo, coo, coo, coo, coo, coooo!But for the moment, everything Canadian is too cool for school. Take the hot new sport sweeping Colorado, Axe Throwing: A new sport is coming to Denver: Ax throwing. Two recreational ax-throwing venues opening this summer are trying to prove that Canadian backyard shenanigans can be as popular as bowling...

University of Toronto professors Jordan Peterson and A.W. Peet discuss the use of alternate pronouns on campus for those who say words like 'he, she, him or her' don't represent them accurately. (This is a courageous professor, Jordan Peterson, at Toronto University standing up to the language Nazis. These people have got to be destroyed!!)

MONTREAL — In the basement of a public housing complex on the outskirts of downtown Montreal is a large walk-in freezer used solely to kill bed bugs. The freezer is a local solution to a problem that has been haunting the city for years and is not improving, says Melanie Sanche, head of sanitation for the public housing authority. As in many large North American cities, cases of bed bugs have exploded here in the past 10 to 15 years, and the problem is particularly acute in areas with transient populations such as students, as well as in districts with...

Dec 11 (Reuters) - Canada's postal service will phase out urban home delivery within five years and hike the cost of postage stamps to try to stem soaring losses, the post office said on Wednesday. Canada Post, like the U.S. Postal Service, is suffering as customers switch to digital communications. In August it said it was on track to run short of cash by the middle of 2014 unless major changes were made. The government-owned corporation - which has a mandate to be self-financing - last month reported a third-quarter loss of C$109 million ($103 million) before tax and said...

Toronto's crack smoking mayor got his own TV show - and finally could speak his mind without all those pesky reporters asking questions. The hour-long "Ford Nation" show that aired Monday on Canada’s Sun News Network gave Rob Ford a pressure-free environment to tell his side of the story after spending the last week sticking his foot in his mouth in front of the press and being attacked politically after admitting to drinking too much - and sometimes smoking crack cocaine.

I'm so loyal to the Canadian flag, when you cut me I bleed red while my face goes a little white. I believe in the sanctity of poutine with real curds and the need to do everything — including using the military option — to stop the U.S. from off-loading their inferior chocolate bars on us. I feel safest in foreign lands with a Canadian flag sewn on my backpack and list my passport as the document I'm most proud of. That said, I think as a nation we wrap ourselves in myth as much as that Maple Leaf....

It can be hard living next to history’s greatest cultural, military and economic superpower. But that doesn’t mean the United States is best at everything. As Canada celebrates its 146th birthday we dig into the numbers to find some of the many ways Canada is better off–from sports and sex to politics and entertainment. Life & well-being 1. We live longer: Canadians born today will live an average of three years longer than Americans (81 years in Canada versus 78.7 south of the border). Not only that, the gap between life expectancy in the two countries is widening with each...

A Canadian Mountie gave a possibly orphaned baby moose a ride in a cruiser to an animal protection group that is caring for it, the group's manager says. The calf, about 3 or 4 weeks old, drew a crowd Sunday along the Trans-Canada Highway near Appleton, Newfoundland, Bonnie Harris of the Gander Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. "The moose was crying out for its mom, but no sign of her," Harris saiid. "A couple of people from the Glenwood area had said that there were two moose hit in the last week...

One of the world's early documentaries featured unique footage of the lives of Arctic fur trappers in 1919. After long being forgotten, it's now been restored for modern audiences in Canada, including communities descended from those featured in the silent film.In July 1919, the RMS Nascopie departed Montreal. It carried supplies bound for Arctic fur trade posts. But the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) ice-breaker had extra cargo on its annual trip. A film crew is on board. The ship headed north. As they travelled, a cameraman filmed the Nascopie crashing through ice floes. When the ship anchored, he went overboard,...

Canadian explorers have drawn a blank in the latest hunt for the remains of Captain Sir John Franklin's fatal expedition, 160 years after he took his crew of 129 men deep into the Arctic.In 1845, Capt Franklin, an officer in the British Royal Navy, took two ships and 129 men towards the Northwest Territories in an attempt to map the Northwest Passage, a route that would allow sailors to travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific via the icy Arctic circle. Stocked with provisions that could last for seven years, and outfitted with the latest technology and experienced men, the...

A rowdy Ontario legislature passed a hike in the sales tax and tolls on all highways yesterday. Don't panic though, it was the Ontario Youth Parliament, sitting in London, that gave the green light to highway tolls to pay for our crumbling roads and to raise the provincial sales tax to nine per cent. The 39th Ontario Youth Parliament continues today and tomorrow at Riverside United Church. More than 100 delegates, age 14 to 21, beat the weather and arrived Friday for their annual meeting, held in London for the first time since 2003. Welland delegate Mandy Lewis, a Grade...

Militaristic zeal appears to be sweeping the Stephen Harper Minority government. This militarism is just part of an apparent adopted agenda of 'Americanization' by this government. By the way, thanks so much Mr. Harper, for introducing Canadians to American-style reviews of Supreme Court Judge nominees. You and your associates in CanWest Global, and elsewhere in Canada's 'corporatized' mass-media, appear to be trying to "prepare" us for their apparently desired U.S. take-over of Canada. While Harper stipulates that this initiative was about "accountability", he reportedly shirks the kind of ethics review on which he had campaigned. The spectre of Americanization against...

Call it a sexual revolution of the virtual kind -- young Canadians are practicing a new style of safe sex and the only touching required involves a keyboard. Of more than 2,500 university and college students polled across Canada, 87 percent of them are having sex over instant messenger, webcams or the telephone, according to results of a national survey released on Monday. "We were very surprised," Noah Gurza, a founder of Toronto-based CampusKiss.com, an online dating community for students, which commissioned a Canadian CampusKiss & Tell Survey. "We did realize that new technologies are always embraced by younger individuals,...

RICHMOND, British Columbia (Reuters) - Prime Minister Paul Martin escalated a war of words with the United States on Wednesday, telling Washington not to dictate to him what topics he can raise in the run-up to Canada's January 23 election. U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins warned Martin and other Canadian politicians on Tuesday not to bash the United States as part of their campaigning. But Martin -- who has regularly attacked the U.S. stance on a bilateral trade dispute over softwood lumber and also criticized Washington's approach to climate change -- said he was not paying attention. "When it comes to...

By JOSE RODRIGUEZ   This space is generally reserved for cutting commentary, venomous verbiage and the odd shot of comic relief. Not today. Because even those of us lucky enough to be in the opinion industry (read: professional whiners) know a good thing when we see it.   It's Canada Day and despite the chronic criticisms that clacks from this keyboard all the other days of the year, today is a day to toast the Maple Leaf and raise a beer to Mother Canada. So bottoms up -- we have plenty to celebrate. If it wasn't for Canadians, the world...

Canada's election campaign is turning nasty as accusations fly about being George Bush's lapdog Toronto – The American flag was waving and George Bush was confidently strutting across the TV screen in military fatigues. You might think this television ad was for the US President's campaign for re-election, but it's actually a Canadian ad that began running last week for the left-wing New Democratic Party. The voice-over accuses the two front-runners in Canada's upcoming national election of being "too close" to President Bush and sacrificing Canadian "independence". Canadians go to the polls on June 28 and as the race gets...

'I don't know who taught him to fly, but they didn't tell him to check the gas'. A 25-year-old man is facing several charges after his plane, reported stolen from an airfield in Maine, crashed into a Montérégie field yesterday morning. The man, a Livingston, Me., resident, suffered only minor injuries in the accident. He had been flying a Cessna without a pilot's licence or flight training, said Constable Manon Gaignard of the Sûreté du Québec. For unknown reasons, the man left a private airport, near Turner, Me., about 6:30 a.m., running out of gas three hours later above St....