‘I think it’s a shame,” says Sasha Dyck, who was carpooling to the U.S. when ordered to turn back
Dyck said that he and his fellow travellers told the border agents they were going to Washington, D.C., to take part in Saturday’s women’s rights march, an event where hundreds of thousands are expected to attend.
.. Dyck says they were then held for several hours, fingerprinted and had their cellphones examined.
.. Dyck said the agents did not say why they were denied entry, but told them that if they tried to cross the border again this weekend, they would be arrested.
.. “I think it’s a shame. I think the U.S. has historically been a very open country — open to other ideas or open to other people. Perhaps we’re seeing the start of them closing in on themselves.”
Dyck said he remembers a completely different mood when he went to Washington for Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
“At that point, the border guard said, ‘Come on in!’ It was open arms. They were so happy to celebrate with the world. It’s going to be a very different feeling this time.”
As the Oil-Sands Industry Declines, Its Biggest Champion Bolts
N. Murray Edwards, who has acted as a sector standard-bearer in Canada for more than a decade, has decamped to London and lowered his profile
Alberta, which lured tens of billions of dollars in investments from the world’s biggest oil producers during a decade of heady growth from about 2003 to 2013, is now viewed as one of the places least likely to recover from the price rout because of high investment costs, long development time and looming limits on carbon emissions.
.. Royal Dutch Shell PLC took a $2 billion write-down last year after abandoning a major oil-sands project, and Exxon Mobil Corp. said earlier this year it may be forced to remove billions of barrels of oil-sands reserves from its books.
The dark side of the boom
Rock-bottom interest rates have made big mortgages look less expensive, lighting a fire under house prices. But for many homeowners, when rates start rising, it won’t end well.
A recent survey by Manulife found that one-quarter of people have just $1,000 set aside for emergencies, a dismally inadequate amount by any standard of financial planning.
.. “You’re arguing with success on a huge scale,” says Moshe Milevsky, finance professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business and author of several books on personal finance and investing. “There’s nothing that people could have done that would have resulted in a better return than housing over the past five years.”
.. The credit-monitoring firm TransUnion reported recently that 718,000 people with debt would be seriously affected if interest rates rose just 0.25 of a percentage point, and one million people would struggle to cope with a rise of one percentage point.
.. Canadians owed a record $1.68 for every $1 in after tax income.
What Does It Mean to Help One Family?
The family was living through the first refugee crisis in history in which people without countries or homes could communicate instantaneously with one another. Previous generations of refugees often ached for any information about relatives, but now messages zipped back and forth around the world on free apps. The joy of such regular communication came at a steep cost: constant updates on the misery of relatives left behind, intensifying worry and impeding progress for those trying to carve out a new life.
.. But thanks in large part to cellphones and social media, Canadians with no prior connection to the Middle East were getting glimpses into the well of desperation that was the refugee crisis.
.. delighted by things Canadians took for granted — new pencils, popcorn at the movies, a soccer goal with a net.
.. The Hajjes were supposed to be self-sufficient by next February, but she feared they had virtually no chance of succeeding. They could not fill out a permission slip, read a medicine label, pay a bill or navigate the subway to a new destination on their own.
.. “No matter how hard he tries, he may never really speak English well, and that will really limit him,”
.. The Canadian women saw sponsorship like a life raft: If you overloaded it, you risked sinking those you were trying to rescue.