A mother, father and four children who perished in a fire inside their vacation trailer are being recalled as an active, boisterous family by a friend who rented them the Amherst, N.S. farmhouse where they lived. Colin Smith said he was close to the father, 30 year old Robert Jorge (R.J.) Sears, and his friend's life centred on working hard and enjoying his young family alongside his partner, 28 year old Michelle Robertson, at their home in Amherst, N.S. The 44 year-old recalls their bustling household included a cat, a dog and a bearded lizard, and he has strong memories of all four children

Justin Trudeau is making no apologies for losing his cool with a protester in Vancouver who screamed obscenities at him. Trudeau says the man crossed a line yesterday when he started saying derogatory things about his wife.The man called Trudeau a communist and screamed a misogynist comment referencing the Liberal leader's wife. Trudeau responded by asking the man if there was a hospital he should be bothering, a reference to the anti-vaccine protests that took place yesterday outside hospitals across the country.

A new poll shows a complete deadlock between Justin Trudeau's Liberals and Erin O'Toole's Conservatives with less than one week left in the federal election.The poll conducted by Leger in collaboration with The Canadian Press shows both parties tied with the support of 32 per cent of decided voters, with the NDP in third place with 20 per cent.A similar poll conducted two weeks ago had the Conservatives ahead with 34 per cent compared with 30 per cent for the Liberals and 24 per cent for the NDP.The polls cannot be given a margin of error because internet-based polls are not considered random

Six members of a family have died in a fire Sunday evening in a travel trailer in rural Nova Scotia. The RCMP say firefighters were called to Mountain Road in Millvale, N.S., Sunday evening around 6:30 p.m. A release says when they arrived, officers discovered the bodies of a 30-year-old man, a 28-year-old woman and four children, ages three, four, eight and 11. It will be up to the fire marshal's office to establish the cause of the fire, but police say after a preliminary investigation they do not consider the fire suspicious. The medical examiner's office will be determining the cause of th

Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole focused his campaign on families this morning.He's announced a plan that would allow new parents to earn up to one-thousand dollars per month from remote or part-time work without it affecting their maternity or parental leave payments. N-D-P Leader Jagmeet Singh used a stop in northwestern Ontario to criticize anti-vaccine demonstrations planned in front of hospitals today.He says he'd beef up the Criminal Code to deter protests close to a hospital or health-care workers.Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau will speak later today in Vancouver.

Amazon Canada plans to hire 15-thousand new warehouse and distribution workers across the country and is boosting the starting pay for front-line, hourly employees by 27 per cent to $21.65 an hour.Current employees are getting raises immediately, regardless of how long they've been with the company.Amazon Canada has 25-thousand full and part-time workers in 25 communities across five provinces, and is growing rapidly due to the pandemic-driven explosion in online shopping.

Statistics Canada says the economy added 90-thousand jobs in August in the third consecutive monthly rise.The unemployment rate fell to 7.1 per cent for the month, compared with 7.5 per cent in July, bringing the rate to the lowest level since the onset of the pandemic last year.The agency says overall employment is within 156-thousand jobs, or 0.8 per cent, of the level recorded in February 2020 before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A pair of unseeded teenagers will take the stage in the U.S. Open women's semifinals: 18-year-old Emma Raducanu of Britain and 19-year-old Leylah Fernandez of Canada. The 73rd-ranked Fernandez takes on No. 2 seed Aryna Sabalenka in the first semifinal Thursday night. Play in that match is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. in Arthur Ashe Stadium. That will be followed by the 150th ranked Raducanu against No. 17 seed Maria Sakkari of Greece. Raducanu is the first female qualifier to get to the final four at the U.S. Open in the professional era, which began in 1968. None of the four women remaining

A new report says costs for a COVID-19 patient treated in intensive care can climb to an estimated $50,000 compared with about $8,400 dollars for someone who's had a heart attack. The Canadian Institute for Health Information report says the cost for a pneumonia patient being in ICU is about eight-thousand dollars.But it says COVID patients remain there for much longer and, on average, their treatment amounts to about $23,000.The report covers data from between January 2020 and March 2021.It says COVID-19 cost Canada's health-care system a billion dollars during that time, but it excludes cost