Leaders spar over health care as advance voters set new record
CBC
All three leaders of British Columbia's main political parties converged on Vancouver Island on Wednesday, three days out from election day.
Record numbers of voters have already cast their ballots in advance polling.
Elections B.C. said more than 181,000 people voted on Tuesday, breaking a record set on the first day of voting last week. The agency says 778,000 people had already cast their ballots ahead of Wednesday's final day of advance voting.
The NDP has long regarded Vancouver Island as a stronghold, but Conservative Party of B.C. Leader John Rustad has said he sees it as winnable territory, while both of the Greens' two current seats are on the island.
Rustad says he has no plan for user-pay health care in B.C., after the rival NDP released a recording of him calling the Canada Health Act "silly" for not allowing such a system.
Rustad told a news conference in Nanaimo, B.C., that the NDP's claim was "just another lie."
"We have never said that is what we're going to be doing," Rustad said. "That would be contrary to the Canadian health act. We have not talked about that one little iota."
NDP Leader David Eby had earlier said Rustad was planning an "American style" user-pay model, saying he would let people "buy their way to the front of the line."
In the recording of an event that the NDP said happened in August, Rustad can be heard criticizing the Canada Health Act for not allowing a user-pay model and saying that "hopefully, one day we'll get some changes there."
Eby told a campaign event, also in Nanaimo, that Rustad presented a risk to the health-care system at a time when the province had a shortage of health-care workers.
"Taking some of those health-care workers and putting them behind a paywall doesn't help," Eby said. "It just means that some people are able to buy their way to the front of the line while you and your family are stuck with less care. It's not a solution."
Rustad released his party's costings on Tuesday for a platform that makes no mention of a user-pay health-care model and instead promises a single-payer system delivering care through public and non-governmental facilities.
He said Wednesday that the system proposed by the B.C. Conservatives was based on European models where the government remains the only payer for health care.
"It's universal health care, but it's delivered by both government and non-government agencies," Rustad said. "And by doing that, we're going to be far more efficient in terms of the services we can deliver, in terms of attracting and retaining the professionals that we need."
More than 100 workers at a steel plant in eastern Ontario are being laid off either temporarily or permanently, as a company with facilities in Quebec and Ontario cuts its workforce due to challenging market conditions — including U.S. tariffs.
A small town northwest of Thunder Bay, Ont., has become the unlikely home for hundreds of foreign workers, but many may have to leave the community they've embraced after the end of a federal program put in place to fill gaps in Canada's labour market.
There's mixed reaction in Waterloo to an injuction allowing police to detain, arrest and charge anyone who is participating in unsanctioned street parties in that city this weekend.
Diabetes Canada is excited about Prince Edward Island's new pharmacare deal with the federal government, but hopes the province will reevaluate copays on diabetes supplies, says a senior manager with the organization.
After 26 years of accommodating guests from across the world, Faith Embleton says she and her husband Ken are ready to sell their bed and breakfast.
A group of big-name companies including Google, Meta and Dow have signed a pledge to support tripling the world's nuclear energy capacity by 2050, a signal of the technology's growing resurgence in popularity.
Five years on, Toronto-area doctors and public health officials are looking back at what they've learned since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and most agree the early experience will prove useful if the city faces another infectious disease crisis.
City staff would like Londoners to take a good look around their home and ask themselves a direct and possibly difficult question: Could everyone in your family survive at home, without leaving and with no other help, for a full 72 hours?
Liberal Leader Mark Carney will officially become Canada's next prime minister within a few hours, taking the reins as the country barrels toward a general election and continues to fend off verbal and economic attacks from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Recent cyberattacks in Newfoundland and Labrador should have been a wake up call for the federal government about the reality of an increasingly hostile world, says one cybersecurity expert.
A recent CBC News analysis found that Nova Scotia is rapidly losing some of its most affordable apartments, but housing experts say there are ways to prevent that.
Premier Susan Holt is defending her decision to not use electricity exports to Maine as leverage against U.S. tariffs, arguing the move might cause long-term pain for New Brunswickers.
Montreal's St. Patrick's Day parade first started on Saint-Paul Street in 1824, and a couple centuries later, this annual tradition is still going strong.