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IN THE NEWS – Nanaimo Bulletin - West Coast officials scramble for solutions after losing bus service

Courtenay-Alberni MP Gord Johns said the federal government needs to be ready to support the province to establish service.

"Wilson's has made it clear for a long time that they can't afford to run these routes and lose more money. They bled a lot through COVID and they just simply aren't going to recover in the shortterm and they can't afford to subsidize it," Johns said. "The province can't continue to shoulder all of this. They need a federal partner. The federal government, jurisdictionally, is downloading again and it's unacceptable. They need to take leadership here."

Johns is calling on the federal government to better support private bus companies.

"They need direct funding that's carved out and allocated for the private sector so they can operate these routes that are in jeopardy and under threat," he said. "They're playing a critical and pivotal role in connecting communities, in fact the government is kind of relying on the private sector without supporting them ... They're offering hundreds of thousands of kilometres in non-subsidized routes and really are the only mode of transportation in rural communities."

 

Exclusive Data Shows Canadian Cops Target More Black and Indigenous Folks for Drug Arrests

While it is clear that Black and Indigenous people have long been disproportionately arrested for drug possession across North America, a VICE World News investigation has compiled one of the first datasets of its kind that shows the extent to which it is happening in Canada.

Through Freedom of Information requests to police services, VICE World News has compiled national non-cannabis drug possession arrest data broken down by race, something that does not yet exist publicly in Canada. This dataset follows VICE’s 2018 investigation into arrests specifically for cannabis possession, which also revealed stark racial disparities. While the number of drug possession charges and arrests in Canada has declined even further since then, after cannabis was fully legalized in 2018, Black and Indigenous people are still much more likely to be arrested for drug possession—with Indigenous people eight times more likely to be arrested than white people in one major city. 

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