Tag: usa

Conditions force some summer camps to shift activities indoors, adjust programs

This article was written by Claire McFarlane, Ian Bailey, and Evan Roth, the Associate Director for the Crestwood Valley Day Camp in Toronto, and was published in the Globe & Mail on July 15, 2025.

Some locations are redesigning daily events to tackle the double challenge of heat and poor air quality

Wildfire smoke in several parts of the country is forcing summer camp providers whose communities are under air quality warnings to shift activities indoors or make other changes to keep campers safe.

Environment Canada issued special air quality statements or warnings on Monday for much of Central Canada, Manitoba and Saskatchewan owing to smoke from wildfires in northern Ontario and the Prairies, while smoke also drifted into Quebec and Atlantic Canada.

Evan Roth, associate director for the Crestwood Valley Day Camp in Toronto, said the camp began receiving e-mails from parents early on Monday morning asking what the plan for the day was and how it might adapt to the poor quality of air lingering in the city.

He said the camp quickly issued a message notifying the community that all programming would be moved indoors for the time being.

“Thankfully, a lot of our programs have the ability to be a little bit portable,” Mr. Roth said.

He said that if poor air quality becomes a more frequent phenomenon, he hopes to receive more guidance from government about how to safely proceed with camp activities.

“Our hope is that this doesn’t obviously become a regular thing, because it would ultimately change the overall camp experience if the kids can’t be in the pools and using the sports fields.”

On Monday morning, summer camps across the region were left to decide how to proceed with camp activities, as wildfire smoke hung in the air.

Camp Robin Hood in Markham, Ont., runs exclusively outdoor programs.

“Days like this can be challenging, of course, because we don’t have air-conditioned spaces for campers or staff,” said Howie Grossinger, co-director of the camp.

He said that on days that are especially warm, or when the air quality is poor, the camp designs programs that can take place in the shade and that avoid children overexerting themselves.

Mr. Grossinger said the camp has three registered nurses on site and that staff are trained to look for signs of overexertion.

The YMCA offers summer camp programming at 45 locations – both indoors and outdoors – across the GTA.

They, too, were modifying their outdoor programming, opting for low-intensity games in lieu of flag football or soccer.

Our hope is that this doesn’t obviously become a regular thing, because it would ultimately change the overall camp experience if the kids can’t be in the pools and using the sports fields.

Lisa Greer, the general manager of YMCA day camps, said the camps also offer values-based programs such as storytelling that they can pivot to on days when outdoor exertion might be ill advised.

“The staff are so adaptable, and we have so many programming options that it would take us a few weeks of really, really hot weather to run out of ideas,” Ms. Greer said.

She said all staff are trained in first-aid and CPR, and that they monitor the children closely, especially those with asthma who may be sensitive to air quality.

Attendance at the YMCA’s camp on Toronto Island was “a little lower than normal,” Ms. Greer said, as some parents may have opted to keep children indoors at home. But she couldn’t conclusively say it was related to the air quality in the city.

All CampTO locations have access to indoor spaces in the event of extreme weather, and programming is adjusted accordingly, said Jas Baweja, senior communications adviser for the City of Toronto, in a statement.

Camp organizers in Ottawa say wildfire smoke hasn’t yet had any impact on programming so far this summer.

Retired navy captain, Graham Roberts, with the Tall Ships Adventure program, said that, during extensive fires in 2023, he had to limit activity for workers for about a week while preparing for the summer. But he noted that the actual camp has not been affected since he joined in 2022.

Cary Primeau, the director of the University of Saskatchewan’s USask Rec program that provides recreation programming for students, staff and members of the community, said the smoke from wildfires across Western Canada has an impact on all programming.

“In all instances, our most important focus is to ensure the safety of the children in our programs,” he said in a statement.

“We have not yet had to cancel programs but have made some operational changes so that we can continue to provide this very valuable service to the community, but in the safest manner possible.”

The university offers a number of children’s activity camps, sports camps for children and youth, and camp programs for children who are visually or hearing impaired and physically and/ or developmentally delayed.

He said programming is being moved indoors when smoke, as measured by portable air quality monitoring devices, gets above a certain threshold.

In Manitoba, where there was a special air quality statement issued on Monday, the City of Winnipeg offers a program of summer camps. Adam Campbell, a communications officer for the city, said most offered summer programs have access to indoor spaces.

“When smoke is particularly bad, we direct program leaders to spend more time indoors and/or reduce the time spent on more intense physical activity,” Mr. Campbell said in a statement.

Michael Sabia warns Canada’s ‘ambition deficit’ is discouraging investment

This article was written by Tim Kiladze and was published in the Globe & Mail on June 10, 2025.

Michael Sabia speaks on Monday at the Intersect 2025 conference in Toronto, an event organized by The Globe and Mail to foster conversation around building a stronger Canada.

Michael Sabia, former head of Quebec’s powerful pension fund and current chief executive officer of Hydro-Québec, warns Canada has long lacked the willpower and ambitious thinking needed to spur national projects, and he believes this must change fast in order to transform the country’s economy.

“We have an ambition deficit,” he said on stage Monday at Intersect 2025, The Globe and Mail’s conference designed to foster conversation around building a stronger Canada.

Fixing the economy, he argued, will involve condensing layers of regulation that discourage foreign investment and changing how businesses and governments partner with Indigenous communities. He also said Canada must find a new source of capital for getting these projects up and running, because a lot of long-term capital, such as pension funds, typically avoid riskier early-stage ideas.

“We’ve got a lot to fix on the regulatory side,” Mr. Sabia said, arguing that many rules, such as regulations around energy emissions, were likely implemented with good intentions but have been piled on top of each other like “a stack of pancakes.”

Because there are now so many, the regulations are tough to navigate and can discourage sources of private capital from making investments here, he said.

“We need to stand back and say, ‘There’s got to be a simpler, better way,’ ” he said.

Simplifying and shortening the approval process is a focus of Prime Minister Mark Carney. As part of new legislation his government tabled last week, the One Canadian Economy Act, he wants to define and fast-track certain “nation-building” projects, and has set out criteria to declare a “major project” in Canada’s national interest. Regulatory approvals for such projects would be made in two years, as opposed to the current five-year timeline.

“For too long, when federal agencies have examined a new project, their immediate question has been: Why?” Mr. Carney told reporters on Friday. “With this bill, we will instead ask ourselves: How?”

As for relationships with Indigenous communities, Mr. Sabia said there needs to be a new approach to partnerships – something that is starting to materialize.

In his role as Hydro-Québec’s CEO, he’s spent a lot of time visiting Indigenous communities in the province and said he has a better appreciation of how crucial it is for leaders to show up in person when trying to negotiate business partnerships.

“There is no substitute when working on these transactions for human presence,” he said. “Human presence leads to trust. And we don’t have a lot of that right now.”

Because there hasn’t been much trust, “First Nations understandably have become very good at taking projects and governments to court,” he said. “What happens in court? You lose decades.”

“If we keep doing things the old ways, it’s not going to work,” he added.

Mr. Sabia, who was the federal deputy minister of finance from 2020 to 2023, also stressed that Canada must reconsider how it will finance national resource and power projects.

For so long, the hope has been that major pension funds such as Canada Pension Plan Investment

Board and the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec – which Mr. Sabia ran for more than 10 years – will help fund new developments. But he said there’s a major mismatch between what these funds require to meet their investment criteria and what these projects can deliver in their early years.

“Big institutional investors, they think about infrastructure as a set of financial characteristics,” he said, such as stable healthy cash flows for decades.

Early-stage infrastructure projects, however, are extremely risky because of variables such as cost overruns.

“Asking that source of capital to take all sorts of risk? That’s a crazy question,” he said. “It doesn’t work.”

Instead, he said Canada needs to think about a form of bridge capital that comes in early, takes some risk, and then once the projects have operating cash flows, major investors such as pension funds can be brought in.

But he was adamant that we’ll figure it out quickly, because now is the time to act. “We’re all worried about economic slowdown, and rightly so,” he said. “But the more we invest, and invest at scale, the more [economic pain] we can mitigate.”

“Just go forward and seize the moment,” he said.

There is no substitute when working on these transactions for human presence. Human presence leads to trust. And we don’t have a lot of that right now.

MICHAEL SABIA, HYDRO-QUÉBEC CEO

Great Lakes threatened by cross-border tensions, scientists say

This article was written by Patrick White and was published in the Globe & Mail on March 24, 2025.

Chunks of ice float in Lake Michigan earlier this month as a fisherman tries his luck in St. Joseph, Mich.

U.S. cuts to federal research jobs could have catastrophic results, experts warn

The annual Great Lakes Day in Washington has long stood as a shining example of Canada-U.S. co-operation – a convivial gathering of lawmakers and advocates from both sides of the border, coming together to shape the future of North America’s freshwater powerhouse.

At least, that’s how things used to be.

During a reception at the event earlier this month, the wonkish cross-border collegiality evaporated the moment Bernie Moreno, a Donald Trump-aligned senator from Ohio, took the floor and proceeded to berate Canada for allowing drugs into the United States.

“He gave this very combative speech that focused on fentanyl, of all things,” said Mike Shriberg, an environmental policy and planning professor at the University of Michigan who’s been attending the event for a decade. “Most people were still there with a message of unity, that was still the dominant trend, but I saw things like I’ve never seen before in terms of combativeness and aggressiveness toward Canada.”

For decades, the prosperous Great Lakes region has stood as a model of cross-border collaboration, with civil servants from both sides working together on everything from sea lamprey control to toxic algae tracking, water-quality monitoring to water-level forecasting. Together they have authored one of the world’s great environmental comeback stories.

In the 1960s, Lake Erie was declared dead and Ohio’s Cuyahoga River feeding into the Great Lakes caught fire 14 times owing to industrial pollution. The sorry state of the lakes helped spur the modern environmental movement and the 1972 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement that committed Washington and Ottawa to restore and protect the ecosystem.

But the Trump administration’s combative stand on binational relations – coupled with deep job cuts to U.S. civil servants dedicated to Great Lakes initiatives – have strained the partnership and put the region’s hardwon environmental progress at risk.

“We’re seeing a real degradation of the capacity to protect the lakes,” Prof. Shriberg said.

Scientists on either side of the border say the U.S. administration has put a freeze on crossborder communication for civil servants. Joint meetings have been cancelled or delayed and travel to Canada has been curtailed.

Gail Krantzberg, an engineering and public policy professor at McMaster University who specializes in the Great Lakes, said a cross-border science advisory board she co-chairs is uncertain how to proceed given the new political climate.

“A lot of scientists have been told ‘You’re not going to Canada and you’re not talking to Canadians,’ ” she said.

Those are the ones who still have jobs. Many are now unemployed, their positions eliminated through Elon Musk’s slashing of the federal work force.

Among the casualties is 10 per cent to 20 per cent of the staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency responsible for ocean, weather and climatic forecasting.

Fifteen of the laid-off NOAA staff worked for the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, according to a letter from two members of Congress to NOAA demanding more information on the cuts. The lab monitors water quality, tracks pollution, predicts toxic algae blooms and studies fish populations with an overall goal of protecting the lakes that provide drinking water to 40 million people – including about 10 million Canadians.

It also studies how the region will fare from climate change, a phenomenon that Mr. Trump has repeatedly mocked.

“The recent layoffs jeopardize the continuity and depth of this work and could have long-term repercussions for the future of the Great Lakes and the communities that depend on them,” states the letter, signed by Michigan Representative Debbie Dingell and Ohio Representative Marcy Kaptur, both Democrats.

Mr. Musk’s chainsaw-wielding cutback have also carved hundreds of jobs from the Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal agency that is a key player in the binational effort to control the invasive sea lamprey – a major threat to Great Lakes fisheries.

Several news media reports state that 12 people from the lamprey control team have been let go, but neither the Fish and Wildlife Service nor the Great Lakes Commission, which administers the lamprey program, responded to requests for further details on the cuts.

Launched in the 1950s when the invasive sea lamprey had nearly wiped out several native Great Lakes fish species, the eradication program has reduced the lamprey population by 90 per cent. But it relies on the annual application of a chemical called lampricide to keep the parasitic fish at bay. When the COVID-19 pandemic prevented crews from applying lampricide, the populations of lampreys surged.

“This is an example of a program with a proven track record that helps our economy and our environment, and we’re leaving it in the hands of Donald Trump,” said Brian Masse, NDP MP for Windsor West who also attended Great Lakes Day.

Cuts have also targeted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where more than 1,000 scientists and other employees could be fired, according to the Associated Press. The EPA has played a key role in cleaning up the Great Lakes since the burning-river days. Last year, the agency proposed new wastewater discharge limits on toxic forever chemicals, or PFAS, that would have reduced regional waterway contamination further, but the proposal was withdrawn shortly after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

The moves could leave a void in Great Lakes science and policy, say regional leaders, putting pressure on Ottawa to step up.

“We can’t rely on what’s going to happen in Washington every day or every week,” said Mr. Masse. “We need to take a stronger position to protect the water and the economy.”