Loblaw’s recent move to reduce discounts on last-day sale items is a normal practice in the industry, not a sign of collusion, according to an expert in Canadian competition.

“Retailers are always following each other,” said Michael Osborne, the chair of the Canadian competition practice at law firm Cozen O’Connor.

“It’s perfectly lawful to observe the prices that your competitor is charging, to observe the discounts that they have, and to just follow suit on your own.”

His comments

Canada’s financial intelligence agency warns that illicit cash is being laundered through online gambling sites that provide a variety of ways to disguise shady funds.

In a newly published bulletin, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada highlights the criminal exploitation of legitimate and unlicensed digital wagering operations.

The centre, known as Fintrac, notes the popularity of online gambling grew during the COVID-19 pandemic and has been fuelled by the 2021 legalization of single-event sports betting in Canada.

Fintrac identifies money linked

VANCOUVER — Another blast of winter weather hit southern British Columbia Thursday, a day after Vancouver saw its snowiest day in almost three decades, with schools shut for a second day and freezing rain on the way.

The fresh pummelling in B.C. came as Environment Canada issued warnings and advisories across the country, with snow squalls in Newfoundland and extreme cold in parts of Ontario, Quebec and the Prairies.

In B.C., forecasters said “a prolonged period of freezing rain” was due in the Fraser Valley

MELFORT, Sask. — The common-law partner of the man responsible for a massacre on a Saskatchewan First Nation wept as she talked about years of emotional and physical abuse that would culminate in the death of her father during the stabbing rampage.

“I wish I left sooner,” Vanessa Burns said Thursday while wiping tears from her eyes on the fourth day of a coroner’s inquest.

Burns met Myles Sanderson when she was 21 and he was 17. They would go on to have five children.

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — A Canadian was in Rome Thursday to deliver a lecture to religious scholars at a centuries-old university about clergy abuse and a proposed zero-tolerance policy that could help stop it.

Gemma Hickey, who uses the pronouns they and them, says their lecture at the Pontifical Gregorian University brings them one step closer to presenting the proposed regulations to Pope Francis, who they hope will adopt the policy into canonical law.

Current canonical law allows church officials known to have sexually

IQALUIT, Nunavut — As a child growing up in Canada’s northernmost community, P. J. Akeeagok wanted to be a water truck driver.

In Grise Fiord, an community on Nunavut’s Ellesmere Island where just 145 people live as of the 2021 census, the water truck driver served as a role model who delivered an essential public service.

Akeeagok’s public-service instincts led him in a different direction: the 39-year-old is now the country’s

VICTORIA — A cache of scientific equipment that could fit in the back of an SUV has been lowered into the Southern Ocean, north of the Antarctic Peninsula, and is already streaming open-source data for anyone wanting to monitor the ocean’s health.

Scientists say the underwater observatory collects measurements, including temperature, oxygen concentration and chlorophyll levels, and will fill a gap in data to help understand the impacts of climate change in the waters around Antarctica.

The project is being jointly run by Ocean Networks Canada, out of

The deadline for Canadian businesses to qualify for partial forgiveness of pandemic-era loans has arrived, as business groups warn struggling firms need more time to repay their debt.

Hundreds of thousands of businesses and non-profits received a Canada Emergency Business Account loan of up to $60,000 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Up to one-third of the loans could be forgiven if the outstanding amount is repaid by today, otherwise the debt will convert into a three-year loan with five per

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Republican lawmakers in Kansas on Thursday passed a broad package of tax cuts promoted as widespread relief that the Democratic governor is likely to veto because she says it favors the wealthy and threatens the state’s budget in the future.

The opposing viewpoints kept the two sides locked in a political impasse as the window for meaningful tax cuts narrows.

The GOP-supermajority Legislature approved a plan to cut income, sales and property taxes by a total of nearly $1.6 billion over the