The Decibel

This weekend, Hong Kongers head to the polls to elect their government . Well, to elect 20 of the 90 seats in their Legislative Council – and from a roster of candidates carefully vetted by the Communist Party of China in Beijing. The Globe’s Asia correspondent James Griffiths tells us how Hong Kong’s normally boisterous election has been quieted by the new national security law , and why it’s sti...

Case counts are rising in many parts of the country as Omicron becomes the dominant variant of COVID-19. As some regions reintroduce public health restrictions, there’s a growing call to make rapid tests (also called rapid antigen tests) more widely available. The availability and cost of these tests varies across the country – anyone can buy them online, but at a fairly steep price compared to th...

Two years ago, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But for over a year now, a civil war has raged in Ethiopia between the federal government and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. Throughout the conflict, reports emerged of violence against civilians being committed by all sides, including horrific sexual assault. Lucy Kassa is an Ethiopian freelance journalist i...

What is the price of a wetland? A forest? A river? How can you even go about assessing the value of natural habitats? How do you factor in the watershed’s ability to mitigate flooding? What’s the price of all that carbon a forest sucks up? Governments in Canada are starting to grapple with these questions, especially in face of climate change and increasing extreme weather events. Environment repo...

In 1957, a lone Mountie in northern B.C. heard rumours about sexual abuse of boys who attended the Lower Post residential school. The Mountie and a group of Kaska Dena children brought the sexual predator to trial, but intimidation of witnesses derailed the case. Fast forward decades later , to mark Canada’s first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, the Lower Post Nation burned the former r...

Ukraine and U.S. intelligence officials, as well as online sleuthers , have noticed a buildup of Russian troops along most of the border separating the former Soviet country from Russia. It has sparked worries that an invasion may be imminent and we could see a repeat of 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula. Senior International Correspondent Mark MacKinnon recently travelled to Kyiv to...

In December of 2020 there was a lot of hope in the air as the first shots of the COVID-19 vaccine were administered in Canada. Fast forward a year and more than 75 per cent of the population is considered fully vaccinated with two doses. But with the Delta variant still dominant and public health officials on high alert about the new Omicron variant, another shot of the vaccine is being recommende...

The experts said there’d be about 38,000 jobs added to Canada’s labour force in November. So when Statistics Canada announced that that number was actually 154,000 , people were left scratching their heads. Especially since this news comes at a moment when Canada is facing a labour shortage . So what’s going on? And just how good is this news, actually? Economics reporter for The Globe and Mail Ma...

It has been 32 years since the École Polytechnique massacre, which left 14 women dead and spurred a debate about gun control in Canada. Progress on this file has been mixed, with various pieces of legislation over the decades that have made some efforts to prevent more mass shootings but stopped short of full-on bans of certain weapons . The Globe and Mail’s Patrick White clarifies which guns are...

The debate over the place and importance of the French language in Canada erupted into the corporate world after Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau gave a speech, mainly in English, in Montreal, and afterward said it was “testament” to the city that he hasn’t needed to learn French in the 14 years that he has lived there. His comments caused a cascade of criticism from politicians and ended up having...

Barbados has moved on to a new future after the country declared itself a republic and replaced Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state with its recently elected president, Sandra Mason. The land was colonized by Britain 400 years ago, eventually becoming a slave society where hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were brought to work on plantations growing tobacco, cotton, and sugar, among o...

A bill first introduced in March 2020 is back in Parliament , as its backers try for the third time to put conversion therapy in the Criminal Code of Canada. And this time, the bill would ban the practice for adults as well as children. Globe Parliamentary reporter Janice Dickson has the latest on the effort to effectively ban the disgraced practice that purports to change people’s sexual orientat...

Last week the world learned about Omicron, the new COVID-19 variant. It was first detected in Southern Africa and many countries quickly tightened restrictions on travellers arriving from the region and imposed travel bans. The World Health Organization declared Omicron “a variant of concern” because of the very large number of mutations that could pose a high global risk of infection surges. The...

Many producers and investors had high expectations that cannabis-infused drinks would offer new and existing users a new way to get high. Some predicted hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales from this type of product. But so far, reality hasn’t lived up to the hype, as THC drinks struggled to break into an extremely competitive and regulated market with only mellow sales. The Globe’s bus...

Last week, two Cineplex movie theatres in Richmond Hill and Oakville Ontario were vandalized. Both theatres were showing the South Indian film, Kurup, and had multiple screens slashed. The mysterious incident is not the first time South Indian movie screenings have been targeted. It’s something that’s been happening since 2015. Joe Castaldo is a reporter for the Report on Business at The Globe. He...

The floods in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley have left much of the area in ruin. One community that has been particularly hard hit is farmers. Damage to farms in the area – which supply about half of B.C.’s eggs, dairy and poultry – has been catastrophic. Thousands of animals have died and many of the properties remain underwater. The Globe’s Andrea Woo describes her experience on the ground in...

Pretty much as soon as the election was over, murmurs began, questioning how much longer Conservative leader Erin O’Toole would lead. Now there’s a new session of Parliament and O’Toole can’t seem to get away from questions about strife within his own party, from issues like the vaccine status of his caucus members to petitions being launched about the timing of his next leadership review . Ian Ba...

Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai disappeared from the public eye after accusing the former vice-premier of China of sexually assaulting her. The accusation was wiped from her Weibo account within an hour. Nothing much happened until tennis stars like Naomi Osaka and Billie Jean King, along with international media and the Women’s Tennis Association , began asking where Peng went a few weeks later. T...

Gender-based violence often doesn’t get reported to authorities, and the signs that someone might need help are easily missed by friends, family and even the person experiencing the abuse. But a hand signal created for people to silently ask for help recently went viral on Tik Tok – and was used by a missing teen who ended up getting rescued in Kentucky. Elizabeth Renzetti is a columnist and featu...

A border between Poland and Belarus which has been at the centre of a geopolitical conflict is now quiet. Thousands of asylum-seekers, many of them fleeing conflict zones in the Middle East, were trapped in Belarus hoping to cross over into Poland. On Thursday , Belarussian authorities cleared the main camps, but it’s not known what will happen to the people still trying to cross into the EU. Mark...

It has been five years since the North American leaders have gathered together for one of their so-called Three Amigos Summits. And while U.S. President Joe Biden is a familiar face to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, some of the current U.S. policies are not so nice to Canada. The Globe and Mail’s Washington, D.C. correspondent, Adrian Morrow , is on the show to discuss what Trudeau will likely be...

Record rainfall has caused flooding and mudslides in several parts of Vancouver Island and southern mainland B.C. Hundreds were trapped in their cars by mudslides, with at least one person killed and thousands evacuated from communities devastated by flooding. Globe environment reporter Kathryn Blaze Baum explains what caused the rainstorm that wreaked havoc on the province and how this summer’s w...

Lee Maracle’s career inspired a generation of Indigenous writers to write about their own experience. The author, poet and activist died last week at 71 years old. Maracle’s friend, the playwright, author and frequent Globe columnist Drew Hayden Taylor , remembers Maracle and her legacy. You can listen to Maracle’s Margaret Laurence Lecture from the Writers’ Trust of Canada here . Hosted by Simple...

A recent Ontario Court of Appeal ruling found that the Crown violated two treaties signed in 1850. The agreements cover a vast part of Northern Ontario, and were originally about sharing the wealth of the land. But the government has been paying the Anishinaabe descendants of that land just $4 per person per year. Sara Mainville is an Anishinaabe lawyer and partner at Olthuis Kleer Townshend in To...

Humans make a lot of noise – in our streets, in the skies and in our seas. All this anthropogenic clamour is not just annoying, it can be detrimental to the health of both humans and animals. But scientists have never really had a chance to study just how much noise we produce and what would happen if we stopped producing it … until the COVID-19 global pandemic sent most of the world into a lockdo...