Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says 240,000 people successfully applied for emergency relief in the first few hours after Ottawa opened the process.Only people with birthdays in the first three months of the year can apply for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit today.The benefit offers $500-a-week payments for workers who have lost all of their income.Trudeau says changes to the program will come soon to offer help for people whose hours have been slashed but who are still working a little.

Commercial vessels and passenger ferries face more restrictions in a government effort to clamp down on the spread of the novel coronavirus. Transport Canada has ordered a stop on all non-essential vessels with a capacity of 12 or more passengers, such as recreation and tourism vessels. BC Ferries and other essential vessel operators have been told to immediately cut in half the maximum number of passengers carried on their ships. Over the weekend, BC ferries chopped its service after it said ridership was down by about 80 per cent.

The steps the Ontario government has taken so far to limit the spread of COVID-19 have likely saved tens of thousands of lives, public health officials said Friday, but even with further action the death toll could reach as high as 15,000. Projections released by the province showed 100,000 Ontario residents could likely have died over the full course of the pandemic if the province hadn't implemented measures such as widespread closures of businesses and schools in order to promote physical distancing. As it is, the figures estimate thousands of people could still die without more aggressive

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the Canadian Forces are being sent to northern Quebec to help communities there prepare to respond to COVID-19. He says the federal government is answering a call from the Quebec government. In a daily appearance outside his Ottawa residence today, Trudeau also says the federal government has an agreement with Amazon to use its distribution network to send medical supplies to meet provincial needs. Trudeau also announced that the government would donate $100 million to meet urgent food needs across the country, including in northern and Indigenous communitie

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he will soon be able to give Canadians a better sense of the impact COVID-19 is going to have on this country but he isn't able to do it yet.As countries like New Zealand and the United States project the numbers of people in their countries who might die from COVID-19, Canada has thus far refused to release any of the modelling done with the data here.Trudeau says he knows Canadians want to be able to plan and see what is working and what is not and promises that information will be ready soon.Trudeau says he is chairing a first-ministers meeting with premie

There are 9,729 confirmed and presumptive cases in Canada. Quebec: 4,611 confirmed (including 33 deaths, 155 resolved) Ontario: 2,392 confirmed (including 37 deaths, 689 resolved) British Columbia: 1,066 confirmed (including 25 deaths, 606 resolved) Alberta: 871 confirmed (including 11 deaths, 142 resolved) Saskatchewan: 193 confirmed (including 3 deaths, 21 resolved) Newfoundland and Labrador: 175 confirmed (including 1 death, 10 resolved) Nova Scotia: 173 confirmed (including 10 resolved) Manitoba: 109 confirmed (including 1 death, 4 resolved), 18 presumptive New Brunswick: 81 con

RCMP in Nova Scotia say four people have been charged under the Health Protection Act in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Police say two people were charged for failing to self quarantine after returning from abroad, and two others were charged for not maintaining a social distance of two metres. Police say all four were fined $697.50. They did not say where in the province these charges were laid.

Alberta is reporting 117 new cases of COVID-19, bringing the total number in the province to 871. Premier Jason Kenney also announced two additional deaths for a total of 11. He says it's been a tough week in Alberta, and things will get worse before they get better. The province says 142 people have recovered.

Chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam says the health care system has the potential to be overwhelmed in all of the COVID-19 scenarios projected by the federal government. The government has not shared any of its projections related to how the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to play out in Canada. But Tam says the health system is not designed to deal with this kind of surge, and could be facing difficult decisions about how to allocate scarce resources in all those scenarios. She says in some of the worst case scenarios, the health care system will not be able to cope.