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These are the top stories:
The three victims of the CP Rail train derailment in the Rocky Mountains
Conductor Dylan Paradis, engineer Andrew Dockrell and trainee Daniel Waldenberger-Bulmer died after they lost control of a freight train and plunged about 200 feet off a bridge into a river (for subscribers).
In a Facebook post, Albe Bulmer mourned the loss of his son Daniel Waldenberger-Bulmer: “I am sad to report that I have lost one of the jewels in my crown last night in a tragic accident while he was training to be a conductor for CP rail,” he wrote. A friend of Paradis remembered the conductor as someone who “loved his wife and children more than anything, he was hardworking, kind and had a great sense of humour.”
The crew radioed to the railway’s traffic controllers moments before the crash, saying they had lost control on a steep descending grade. The Transportation Safety Board is investigating.
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Canada and its Lima Group allies are urging Venezuela’s military to back Juan Guaido
The call comes as the influential army’s support for socialist President Nicolas Maduro appears to be cracking. The country’s air force commander recently broke ranks and endorsed Guaido as interim president. Speaking to reporters after the meeting in Ottawa, Julio Borges, the leader of one Venezuelan opposition party, alleged the younger ranks of the military support Guaido, but have been silenced by interrogation and torture.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced $53-million in new Canadian funding to support the needs of Venezuelans, including the three million refugees who fled the humanitarian crisis.
The international community will continue to apply pressure on Maduro when some European Union members meet with South American officials in Uruguay on Thursday.
Campbell Clark writes about the Lima Group’s efforts: “The question is whether this kind of thing – the banding together of middle powers and smaller countries – can be more than words, and in this case, actually help nudge Venezuela to transition to democracy. Maybe it can, in a modest way.”
Toronto’s transit agency is overhauling its anti-suicide efforts
Amid a “statistically significant, upward trend,” the TTC is making a number of changes in a bid to reverse a worsening string of suicides on the subway system. Among the ideas on the table: encouraging members of the public to approach those in distress; modifying stations to feature blue lights and soothing artwork; refreshing current posters advertising a suicide hotline. More ambitious ideas such as a lifting cable-barrier to keep people off the track are at an early exploratory stage.
It’s not clear why the numbers are up in Toronto; neither Montreal or Vancouver have seen a spike in incidents on their transit systems. The average annual count of suicides and attempts in Toronto’s underground has been around 27 this decade.
Bruce McArthur’s sentencing hearing: ‘If anyone can explain this to us, please let us know’
As families and friends deliver impact statements in a Toronto courthouse, many are still searching for answers as to what drove McArthur to kill eight men over the span of nearly 10 years.
Dean Lisowick’s daughter, Emily Bourgeois, never met her father. But she held onto the possibility that one day things would change. “He was taken away from the world, and never got a chance to right his wrongs,” she said.
Adrian Betts, a friend of Andrew Kinsman, spoke of their falling out. “I always knew that one day we would resolve it. I thought we had time.”
The comments came on a day where the court heard about a potential ninth victim: A man named John was found tied up but unharmed when police arrested McArthur at his Toronto apartment last year.
Canada’s banking regulator is proposing tougher rules on deposits
The move would make banks more stable in times of stress but could also put some smaller lenders at a competitive disadvantage (for subscribers). If approved, banks would be required to hold 20 per cent to 40 per cent of deposits gathered from online or third-party brokers as a buffer against sudden withdrawals that could put a lender at risk. But there are concerns the proposed rules could also indirectly influence the interest rates and terms consumers are offered on deposits.
These rules are being considered less than two years after Home Capital faced a liquidity crisis when customers withdrew large sums of money over allegations the mortgage provider had failed to disclose fraud.
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ALSO ON OUR RADAR
U.S. President Donald Trump will deliver his State of the Union address tonight in front of a divided Congress – and Democrats are preparing to confront him. Some female congresswomen are planning to wear white, the colour of the women’s suffrage movement. The addresses have a history of theatrics: In 2009, one Republican shouted “You lie!” when Barack Obama spoke about health care.
A Vancouver teardown that sold for nearly $2.9-million in 2016 sold for less than $2-million this year. Call it Exhibit A in the city’s housing slump, Brent Jang reports. The property was on the market for 14 months as housing sales in the region hit their lowest January mark since 2009. (for subscribers)
MORNING MARKETS
Stocks rise
Europe’s miners and banks helped world stocks extend their white hot start to the year on Tuesday, while the greenback was straining for a fourth day of gains as traders waited for U.S. President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. The Federal Reserve’s cautious turn last month was continuing to drive up appetite for riskier assets but there were also a number of idiosyncratic factors feeding out-sized moves. Tokyo’s Nikkei lost 0.2 per cent, but just about everything else is up. In Europe, London’s FTSE 100, Germany’s DAX and the Paris CAC 40 were up by between 0.9 and 1.4 per cent by about 7 a.m. ET. New York futures were also up. The Canadian dollar was below 76.5 US cents.
WHAT EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT
Two deaths in Ottawa add to Canada’s mass graves of brown bodies
“[Abdirahman Abdi and Greg Ritchie] were people, not statistics, but their lives had tragic similarities and vulnerabilities. They both had mental-health issues, which increased their likelihood of encountering police. One was black and the other Indigenous, the two racial groups for whom police interactions are fatal far out of proportion to their numbers in the population. And the negative attention focused on the Ottawa Police Service is entirely deserved, given its history of disrespectful incidents.” – Denise Balkissoon (for subscribers)
Tilting at windmills won’t solve our health-care woes
“On Thursday, an Ontario panel examining the perennial Canadian problem of wait times released its interim report, but it was quickly overshadowed by the leak of draft legislation purportedly showing the province is preparing to throw open the doors to privatization. There, in a nutshell, is why nothing ever improves in Canadian health care: We’re so preoccupied with slaying mythical privatization beasts that we never get around to solving real problems.” – André Picard (for subscribers)
The Kondo effect: The economy-changing magic of tidying up
“What if the decluttering leads to a decision to actually spend less on things, rather than to replace the bags headed to the charity stores? That would be a sea change for North America, one that could potentially have a biting economic impact.” – Linda Nazareth, senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute
LIVING BETTER
From Banff to Vancouver, two restaurants worth checking out (for subscribers)
A great dinner in the heart of Banff is near impossible to find. But The Vermillion Room is a breath of fresh – yet classically French – air in an otherwise mediocre food town, Dan Clapson writes. (3 stars)
The vinyl-spinning, craft-cocktail-shaking, stick-it-to-the-influencers 13-seater Trans Am Restaurant is easily one of the coolest bars in Vancouver, writes Alexandra Gill. And it has a limited, tasty food menu to boot. (3.5 stars)
MOMENT IN TIME
World’s biggest gold nugget found
(Rodney Start/Museums Victoria)Rodney Start/Museums Victoria
Feb. 5, 1869: On this day in Australia 150 years ago, prospectors John Deason and Richard Oates didn’t have to dig far to unearth the largest alluvial gold nugget ever found. Just three centimetres below the surface in Bulldog Gully, near Moliagul, Victoria (about 200 kilometres northwest of Melbourne), they found a nugget so large it was named “the Welcome Stranger.” After their discovery, Deason and Oates hosted a party to reveal their finding and were eventually paid £9,381 by the London Chartered Bank of Australia for the nugget. The nugget weighed approximately 159 pounds. At the time, no scale could properly get a reading, so it had to be cut into three separate pieces to accurately calculate its weight. Eventually, the nugget was melted down into blocks and sent to Melbourne to then be forwarded to the Bank of England on a steamship. A monument stands where the nugget was discovered and two replicas of it exist today: one is owned by the descendants of Deason, and the other can be seen at the City Museum in Melbourne. – Mira Miller
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Arik Ligeti