Beyond Local

OTTAWA — Canada's largest federal public-service union and Ottawa are both warning of likely service disruptions as nearly one-third of all federal workers remain on strike for a second day in a row.

MONTREAL — The Quebec government is modifying the province's anti-tobacco law to crack down on vaping, including by banning the sale of flavoured products.

EDMONTON — Alberta's United Conservative Party government released a climate plan Wednesday that it hopes will take the province to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 but offers few details, targets or new measures on how it would get there.

TORONTO — Increased time online during the pandemic may have made young Canadians meaner, a researcher said Wednesday, warning that declining empathy which emerged during isolation was now fostering increased cruelty during in-person interactions, including at school.  

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court is buying itself two more days before it resolves a legal stalemate over the abortion drug mifepristone.

OTTAWA — Humanitarian and development groups are expected to testify this afternoon as the House justice committee examines a bill that would amend the Criminal Code to allow aid workers to operate in Taliban-held Afghanistan.

A lawyer for two Canadian women and three teen girls who were to be repatriated from northeastern Syria earlier this month says they were mistreated by guards and are being detained in a camp primarily holding family members of individuals with alleged links to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

OTTAWA — United States chambers of commerce are pushing Washington and Ottawa to strike the right balance between protecting supply chains and maintaining free trade across the continent.

BURNABY, B.C. — A Vancouver police officer told a British Columbia coroner's jury that he punched Myles Gray in the head as hard as he could several times because he didn't think anything else would work to subdue the man, other than shooting him.

VANCOUVER — The mother of a teenager stabbed to death on a transit bus in Surrey, B.C., says she hopes her son's death will bring change.