By John Woodside, National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
As Parliament gears up for a new legislative session, a new poll from Abacus Data shows Ottawa lagging behind what a majority of Canadians want when it comes to climate action and implementing a just transition for fossil fuel workers.
Continue reading Poll finds most Canadians want a just transition — and not a dollar more for TMXBy Morgan Sharp, National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The Canadian workforce changed a lot in September, with a return to schools helping more parents, especially so-called “core age” women, take full-time work while trimming the participation of returning students.
For younger people who aren’t in school, meaning almost one-third of all 15- to 24-year-olds in Canada, there aren’t as many jobs of a certain kind available even as the overall job market looks almost like it did in February 2020.
Continue reading Labour market bounces back to pre-COVID levelsUBC marine ecologist Dr. Chris Harley initially told the media that more than a billion mussels, clams, sea stars and other invertebrates may have cooked to death in the area between Campbell River and Washington state. That was a ‘back of the envelope’ estimate, based on his observations among the Lower Mainland’s mussel population and some preliminary reports. Harley has done a great deal more research since then. He now guesstimates that, conservatively speaking, the number of marine fatalities during last June’s heat wave is closer to 10 billion.
Continue reading Heat wave killed far more marine animals than originally thought, says scientistNational Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
There’s a type of killer whale that prowls deeper waters and specializes in hunting big game, research by a B.C. scientist suggests.
West Coast residents are familiar with the well-known and iconic chinook salmon-eating endangered southern resident killer whales in the Salish Sea, and the more numerous Bigg’s killer whales, or transient orcas, that ply the shallower waters of B.C.’s coast and inlets in search of seals and other sea mammals.
But evidence indicates there’s a newly identified type of orca — outer coast killer whales — that are a distinct subgroup of transient whales, and which frequent the ocean depths along the continental shelf off the coast of central California and Oregon, said lead author Josh McInnes, a scientist with the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the University of British Columbia.
Continue reading A type of Orca: the big game hunter of the seaExtreme marine high temperature events, such as the one that killed more than a billion shellfish off the West Coast last June, will devastate global fisheries over the decades to come, a new UBC study suggests.
Continue reading Extreme marine heat events will devastate global fisheries in the coming decades
