IN THE NEWS

Julie Michaud, a 35-year old middle school science teacher in northern New Brunswick has been charged with cocaine trafficking along with eight other people. The arrests resulted from an 18-month RCMP investigation.

A new scan of the Indian Ocean floor for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has searched nearly 80,000 square kilometres since January without finding any sign of the wreckage. But the company looking for the plane, which has been missing for more than four years, said it is still determined to find it.

Asylum seekers enter Canada illegally to avoid dealing with the Canadian Border Service Agency (CBSA), whose mandate is to reject them under the Safe Third Country Agreement. Last weekend, near an illegal crossing point in Quebec, a reporter saw  a CBSA vehicle and employees apparently co-operating with RCMP officers processing migrants entering Canada.

Chinese officials have been quietly grilling Canada about illicit marijuana flowing to their country, prompting Ottawa to agree to work with them on the problem, an internal federal memo reveals. The previously unknown issue arose during talks between the two countries on curbing the clandestine importation of opioids into Canada, which has fuelled a crisis of overdose deaths from fentanyl and related compounds.

An APTN investigation has found racist and derogatory remarks about Indigenous people on a 'private' Facebook site for RCMP members. The force is investigating and Brenda Butterworth-Carr, Commanding Officer of the RCMP's ‘K’ Division in British Columbia said, "There’s zero tolerance.”

Ward Elcock, the former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service warns that the sale of Aecon Group Inc. to Chinese interests would threaten Canada’s national security. Elcock says rejecting the sale would bring a “sharp reaction” from China.

Alek Minassian, charged with murdering ten people and injuring 15 others with a rented van in north Toronto, repeatedly threatened the arresting officer with a weapon he did not have, and asked the officer to kill him. The arrest was made without shooting.

A commons committee has modified a new security bill to exclude information Canadians think has a "reasonable expectation of privacy" from the definition of "publicly available" data. The goal of the change is to keep intelligence agencies from randomly looking through personal information. The Communications Security Establishment has told the committee it wants publicly available materials for background information.

After a massive manhunt, police in Nashville have arrested Travis Reinking, suspected of killing four people at a Waffle House in the early hours of Sunday. As the search continued for the gunman, James Shaw Jr. who snatched the rifle from the shooter said it was a "selfish" act of self-preservation and he doesn't consider himself a hero.

Bell, Rogers and Public Safety Canada refused to respond to interview requests after a November CBC story about the ease with which cell phones could be hacked. A review of the lobbyist registry shows the companies did speak privately with the government about the security vulnerability.

Chinese Triads have infiltrated Canada’s economy so deeply that Australia’s intelligence community has coined a new term called the “Vancouver Model” of transnational crime.

Sindri Thor Stefansson was in custody for allegedly being the mastermind behind a heist in which 600 computers used to mine bitcoin were stolen. People in Iceland are wondering how a suspected criminal managed to jump out a prison window and catch a flight to Sweden without anyone noticing — especially the prime minister, who happened to be on the same flight.

The Conservative opposition is putting pressure on the Trudeau government to put a stop to illegal migrant border crossings. In Quebec, provincial government officials say the increase in illegal immigrants has strained their resources to the breaking point.

The recent collapse of negotiations between the Government of Canada and lawyers for suspected terrorist Abousfian Abdelrazik, highlights the urgency with which Canada needs to develop an effective strategy to clarify how its national security enforcement and intelligence officials deal with foreign governments relating to Canadians, or persons linked to Canada, who are involved in terrorism-related investigations. 

Newly disclosed documents show a top secret federal report - kept under wraps for over a decade - criticized Canada's spy agency for shortcomings as its members increasingly travelled overseas to interrogate people in foreign prisons in the name of fighting terrorism.

Canada’s fisheries minister Dominic LeBlanc wants the G7 to use military and other surveillance technology to name and shame countries that are conducting massive illegal overfishing operations.

A November 2006 report by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service inspector general advised the agency to take precautions when interviewing detainees abroad, because of concerns about torture. The document has emerged through disclosure in a lawsuit against the federal government.

Beyond the unprecedented outpouring of support to the Humboldt Broncos victims and their families, it has become clear that no agency of the government of Canada has a mandate to conduct an in-depth safety investigation of this crash, or of any other road crash, no matter how tragic its outcomes are.

The British Columbia Workers Compensation Act is adding post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental injuries to the 'presumptive' conditions that no longer require proof they are work related.

August 2016 speaking notes for Michel Coulombe, then head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service warn politicians that foreign agents are working to influence their decisions. Russia and China could use “free travel or financial contributions” and even “coercion based on some observed exploitable personal or family weakness”, techniques that have worked well in the past.

Shortly after shooting about a dozen people inside a Quebec City mosque, Alexandre Bissonnette called 911 and asked the operator, "I didn't hurt anyone earlier, did I?"

A study by Carleton University's Police Psychology Research Lab grew out of an RCMP officer's health-and-safety complaint about the Mounties' standard-issue light grey shirt. The RCMP-sponsored study measured how ordinary Canadians react to the outward appearance of cops, with variables ranging from sunglasses and piercings to gloves and ball caps.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague has found Vojislav Seselj - leader of the Serbian Radical Party - guilty of war crimes against Croatians in Serbia's northern province of Vojvodina during the war in former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and sentenced him to 10 years in prison.

Documents obtained by the National Post show elaborate planning, over the past five weeks, for a drill at a major government building in Gatineau, Que., on April 18. The drill will involve just over 1,000 people, most of whom work for government departments. The majority, about 850, work at National Defence.

Bill C-75, the Trudeau government's new crime legislation, could change police accountability in Canada. It would allow courts to accept police evidence in writing instead of testifying in person, and in some cases, defence lawyers would not be able to question officers on the witness stand.

Health experts and organizations across Canada anticipated that the Liberal government’s would renew the federal Tobacco Control Strategy, which expired on March 31. Instead, the government says the $11-million that was committed to the strategy this year, and the $16-million promised next year, will be used to stop the influx of contraband tobacco and to pay for unspecified “targeted actions” to help Canadians quit smoking.

A BC Supreme Court judge is calling on the province to press criminal charges against protesters arrested for violating an injunction while protesting the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

The National Energy Board hired private detectives to probe the affairs of a journalist, Postmedia's Mike De Souza, who had been looking into its operations. In September, the board released some of the reporter's personal financial information to an unidentified individual.

Thousands of Google staff are protesting against the use of the company’s technology in the Pentagon’s controversial drones programme. Google confirmed last month that the Pentagon was using its technology, sparking outrage among some of its employees.

A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation team has assembled a national database of police-related fatalities between 2000 and 2017. In-custody deaths, suicides or deaths as a result of police chases are not included. British Columbia has the highest per capita rate of police-involved deaths in Canada.

As shipping and tourism are ramping up across the Arctic region, the potential for environmental damage and dangerous rescue incidents becomes inevitable. Sea ice, unforgiving weather, remoteness and sparse charts are just a few of the complications that responders would face in the event of a spill – challenges that would be daunting for seasoned responders, and much more so for untrained locals.

Declaring that "the security of the United States is imperiled by a drastic surge of illegal activity on the southern border," President Donald Trump is sending the National Guard to the Mexican border. The White House has provided no details on force strength, length of deployment or costs.

Chinese parents who never gave up the search for their missing daughter were finally reunited with her in a story that has captured hearts all over the world. In 1994, Wang Mingqing and his wife Liu Dengying were working as fruit vendors in the city of Chengdu, in China’s Sichuan province, when their three-year-old daughter Qifeng vanished.

In January 2017 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posted a message on Twitter welcoming refugees to Canada, possibly in response to President Trump's policy of refusing admission to some categories of non-US citizens. The Trudeau tweet brought a rush of inquiries to Canadian embassies and confusion within the federal government.