N.B. minister’s comments on homeless state of emergency lack compassion: mayor

The mayor of a New Brunswick municipality that declared a state of emergency due to unprecedented levels of homelessness — and a recent death of an unhoused person — says he was taken aback by dismissive comments on the matter from a provincial minister.

New Brunswick’s minister of public safety, Kris Austin, said Tuesday that the state of emergency declared by the municipality of St. Stephen is frivolous and disappointing. “People die all the time in car accidents. We don’t (call) a state of emergency over vehicles on the road,” he said.

Austin’s comments, St. Stephen Mayor Allan MacEachern said, lack compassion and downplay the seriousness of the situation in the small community.

“I don’t like his choice of words. I don’t appreciate that. There’s no compassion there,” MacEachern said in an interview Wednesday.

The state of emergency declaration accuses the provincial government of failing to provide housing and social services to the area, where 70 people are homeless in a community of about 4,150. It says “a resident of a public space” died last week, “a situation which will only become more likely” as winter sets in.

St. Stephen RCMP Sgt. Scott MacKenzie confirmed police responded to a 41-year-old man in need of medical attention in St. Stephen around 3 a.m. on Dec. 2. The man was transported to hospital, where he died several hours later. MacKenzie would not say if the man was experiencing homelessness. |Read more https://globalnews.ca/news/10151887/st-stephen-homelessness-mayor-state-of-emergency/| globalnews.ca/news/10151887/st…

#nbpoli #homelessness #death #St Stephen #KrisAustin #callousness #NoCompassion #Emergency

We followed an old-growth detective into the forest to fact-check B.C.’s suspicious claims about the age of trees

This July, reporter Sarah Cox got a bird’s-eye view of some of the reasons why B.C.’s deep-snow caribou populations are dwindling.

A reporting trip — following an old-growth detective into the shrinking bounds of a disappearing inland temperate rainforest — led her down a path that was perhaps crossed earlier by migrating caribou, bears or deer.

After navigating the maze of logging roads in Nagle Creek Valley, 150 kilometres north of Revelstoke, B.C., Sarah and Eddie Petryshen found themselves hiking deeper into the globally rare rainforest to ground-truth the age of trees. https://thenarwhal.us15.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d4ccbf5717196773d100e7ecd&id=943e90cd03&e=545de27860

According to BC Timber Sales, the provincial agency responsible for planning and auctioning off logging cutblocks, the cedar and hemlock trees in the forest are between 224 and 336 years old. Forests older than 400 years are automatically off-limits to logging: classified as ancient, they meet B.C.’s criteria for old-growth logging deferrals.

Petryshen, who works with the conservation group Wildsight, wanted to verify the age of the trees himself. Sarah watched him use a diameter measuring tape to gauge the age of ancient cedar trees in one of the planned cutblocks.

His findings? The trees were well over 400 years old — meaning groves of old-growth trees are on the chopping block https://thenarwhal.us15.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d4ccbf5717196773d100e7ecd&id=106cdf95c6&e=545de27860, despite the province’s promise to protect ancient forests and biodiversity.

“This is a red-listed ecosystem right at imminent threat of ecosystem collapse,” he told Sarah. “The longer we wait to act, the closer we get to that collapse.”

As Sarah’s in-depth feature suggests, sometimes you just have to be on the ground to get the full picture. |Read more https://thenarwhal.ca/bc-rainforest-old-growth-detectives/ | thenarwhal.ca/bc-rainforest-ol…

#bcpoli #environment #OldGrowth #logging #rainforest #cedar #hemlock #ancient #off-limits

Generative AI, deepfakes will ‘pollute’ election campaigns, CSE warns

Canada’s cybersecurity watchdog is warning fake images and videos created by artificial intelligence (AI) will “very likely” be used to try to undermine voters’ faith in democracy in upcoming election campaigns.

In a new report published Wednesday, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) stated AI-created deepfakes – computer-generated images and videos that show events that did not take place – “will almost certainly become more difficult to detect, making it harder for Canadians to trust online information about politicians or elections.”

“Despite the potential creative benefits of generative AI, its ability to pollute the information ecosystem with disinformation threatens democratic processes worldwide,” the agency wrote.

“So to be clear, we assess the cyber threat activity is more likely to happen during Canada’s next federal election than it was in the past,” CSE chief Caroline Xavier said.

“AI-generated deepfakes can create a video of something that never happened and put words into politicians’ mouths that they never said,” Xavier said, speaking at a press conference in Ottawa.

She added that social botnets (networks of accounts that spread items on social media) “enhanced by AI can artificially amplify disinformation that’s already out there to fan the flames of political discord and push people to more extreme positions.”

While the technology isn’t widely used yet, the report states the CSE expects use to increase in the next two years. |Read more https://globalnews.ca/news/10151522/cse-report-artificial-intelligence-election-threats/ | globalnews.ca/news/10151522/cs…

#cdnpoli #election#DeepFake #democracy #disinformation #CSE #extreme #AI