B.C.’s minimum wage will increase to $17.85 per hour on Sunday. It is currently $17.40, a 45-cent increase, or 2.6 per cent, from the current rate. The minimum wage also applies to residential caregivers, live-in support workers, live-in camp leaders and app-based delivery and ride-hailing workers. The government said in a press release Wednesday that this is the fourth consecutive year that the annual minimum wage has been increased to take inflation into account. The government says B.C. has the highest minimum wage among Canadian provinces, after Yukon and Nunavut. In Yukon and Nunavut,

Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa, one of the stalwart leaders of the Shiromani Akali Dal, has passed away. He was 89 years old. According to the information received, he had been ill for some time and was undergoing treatment in a hospital in Mohali, where he breathed his last today. He was honored with the Padma Bhushan award in 2019. Dhindsa has had a long political journey with the late Parkash Singh Badal. He entered the Punjab Vidhan Sabha after winning the election as an independent candidate in 1972, after which he joined the Shiromani Akali Dal under the leadership of Harchand Singh Longowal. H

Two men are to be sentenced today for their role in a human smuggling operation that saw a family of four freeze to death on the Canada-U.S. border south of Winnipeg. Harshkumar Patel and Steve Shand were convicted last fall on four charges related to bringing people illegally into the United States and transporting them. Court was told during one operation in January of 2022, a couple from India and their two children were left to walk across the border in an overnight blizzard on the bald prairie, as temperatures dropped below -20 C. Prosecutors say Patel organized the logistics while Shand

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum says Canada has invited her to attend the G7 leaders' summit next month in Alberta but she hasn't decided yet if she'll attend. At her press briefing this morning, Sheinbaum said she has not confirmed her attendance at the upcoming summit in Kananaskis, Alta. U.S. President Donald Trump is set to attend the summit, along with other leaders from the group of advanced, democratic economies, such as France and Japan. Ottawa also has invited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the summit, which runs from June 15 to June 17. Canada was supposed to host the

Parliament gets back to work Wednesday with a new Speaker, a new prime minister and plenty of new faces in the House of Commons. Speaker Francis Scarpaleggia will preside over the House of Commons for the first time today, while his office has confirmed that all 343 members of Parliament have now been sworn in. Roughly a third of those MPs, including Prime Minister Mark Carney, were elected for the first time in April and will face their first question period today. King Charles formally opened Parliament on Tuesday with the speech from the throne and the minority Liberal government says it