Canada’s economic output shrank by its largest percentage since the global economic crisis as the country’s oil sector continued to struggle.
The Canadian government said gross domestic product (GDP) in the second quarter shrank by 1.6%, its largest loss since 2009.
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Jesse Seibel of Whitecourt, Alberta, used to wake up every day at 3am, fully rested and ready to work. Having laboured in the northern oil patch since his teens, just like his father, the tattooed and pierced wireliner had grown oddly appreciative of the work’s long hours and hard labour.
At 26, Seibel, who never finished high school, was earning as much as $5,000 a month threading electrical cables into reservoirs, enough to live comfortably and never miss paying rent and child support.
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Spencer Stone, hailed as a hero after an attack on a French train, has been stabbed in Sacramento, California.
He was attacked while defending a friend, an Air Force official told the BBC. A hospital official says his condition is “serious”.
Police say two men attacked Mr Stone in the early hours of Thursday morning. One man stabbed him before fleeing.
Ken Bernard of the Sacramento police said that the incident is not related to the train attack.
If a brick-and-mortar wall is good for the United States’ southern border with Mexico, then it’s also good for the border with Canada — at least this is what four in 10 Americans claim, according to a new Bloomberg Politics poll. The poll, released Thursday, found that 41 percent of U.S. adults support building a wall along both the southern and northern U.S. borders. A majority of people surveyed, however, said there should not be a wall built on either frontier. Roughly 55 percent opposed a wall along the Mexican border and 56 percent were against one on the border with Canada.
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The United States lags far behind other developed countries in terms of personal, civil and economic freedoms, according to a study released this month. Its neighbor to the north, for example, ranked 14 spots ahead of the so-called “Land of the Free.”
Three international think tanks — the U.S.-based Cato Institute, Canada’s Fraser Institute, and Germany’s Liberales Institut at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom — released the Human Freedom Index earlier this month. In addition to major civil liberties, the study considers safety and rule of law, relative size of government and capitalist values like the soundness of money, property rights, and access to international trade. The authors used a total of 70 data sources ranging from 2008 to 2012, the most recent year for which all necessary data is currently available.
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