The executive director of Canada's drug pricing regulator is stepping down, just days after another member resigned because of concerns that the federal government was undermining the regulator's work.Douglas Clark, executive director of the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, announced today he will be leaving his post after almost a decade with the regulator.On Thursday, Matthew Herder, a professor of health law at Dalhousie University, announced he had resigned from the board, accusing the federal government of failing to implement critically important reforms that would lower the cost o

The Vancouver Fraser Port Authority is suspending a controversial program to replace older trucks servicing the port for at least another nine months while it reassesses its plans.It is the third time the port is postponing the Rolling Truck Program which was supposed to begin April 3 to phase out trucks more than 12 years old to improve air quality and community health.Truckers that use the port say the onus is on owners and operators to replace the older vehicles at a steep cost even though many of them already meet emissions standards.Last week four Liberal MPs from the Vancouver area asked

The federal government is rolling out special temporary measures to make it easier for Iranians in Canada to stay.As of March 1, measures will come into effect to simplify the process for Iranians who are visiting, studying in or working in Canada to extend their stay and switch between temporary streams.For Iranians already in Canada, an open work permit pathway will be introduced as well.The federal government will waive fees for passports, permanent resident travel documents and citizen certificates for Canadian citizens and permanent residents in Iran who wish to come back, and for those i

A panel tasked with flagging incidents of foreign interference in Canada's elections has still not released a report evaluating its own work in the 2021 election, more than a year after the Liberals won a second minority government.The Critical Election Incident Public Protocol was created to monitor and report on threats to the 2019 election with a mandate to continue its work during future elections.It's also supposed to do a postelection assessment of how it communicated with Canadians.An assessment was made public about seven months after the 2019 election, but a similar report for the 202

Nurse practitioners in British Columbia now have expanded authority to assess people in crisis for involuntary admission to a treatment facility under the Mental Health Act.The New Democrat government says it changed the Mental Health Act last spring to help people get care during a mental health crisis, while respecting their legal rights.Jennifer Whiteside, B.C.'s mental health and addictions minister, says giving nurse practitioners authority to approve involuntary admission for a patient will reduce pressures on emergency departments and help people get faster treatment.She says when a per

Advocates for the print and digital media industry say Google is disrespecting Canadian readers by temporarily blocking news to some of its users.News Media Canada president Paul Deegan says the action is unbecoming of the leading global company.Google confirmed on Wednesday that it's blocking less than four per cent of Canadian users from viewing news content in a five-week test run of a potential response to the Liberal government's online news bill.Bill C-18 would require digital giants such as Google and Meta, which owns Facebook, to negotiate deals to compensate Canadian media companies f

The Coalition Avenir Québec government will table the first budget of the party's second mandate on March 21.Finance Minister Eric Girard made the announcement today at the province's legislature.He says the budget will keep all the commitments his party made during the fall election.Those promises included an income tax cut starting this year of one percentage point on the first two tax brackets.Girard says that despite the rise in interest rates, Quebec's economy so far in 2023 has performed better than expected.The minister's December update forecasted that the province would end the 2022-

The federal government is announcing it has reached agreements in principle for health-care funding with Ontario and Prince Edward Island.It comes a little more than two weeks after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered the premiers $46 billion in new money for health care over the next decade.As part of the deal, the federal government promised to negotiate bilateral agreements with each premier to target specific priority areas such as primary care, mental-health care and data sharing.In a news release today, the federal government says it has reached a 10-year deal with Ontario Premier Doug

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says there are no simple solutions to shutting down a rural road in southern Quebec used by thousands of asylum seekers to cross irregularly into Canada.His comments come a day after Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said the prime minister should shut down the rural crossing known as Roxham Road within 30 days.Trudeau says closing that road would only encourage asylum seekers to use another forested path along the thousands of kilometres of border between Canada and the United States.The prime minister says the federal government also wants to close down that