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CTV News
37 minutes ago
- CTV News
OC Transpo scrapping youth passes on Sept. 1, charging 11-19 year-olds the same fare as adults
It will soon be the end of the road for OC Transpo's youth pass, as the City of Ottawa gets set to scrap the discounted pass for 11- to 19-year-olds at the end of August. In a memo to council, acting OC Transpo general manager Troy Charter reminded councillors the youth monthly pass will be discontinued as of September 1. 'Customers who currently have a Youth concession set on their Presto card will be charged an adult monthly pass on September 1,' Charter said. The youth monthly pass costs $104 a month, while an adult monthly pass costs $135 a month. Council approved the elimination of the youth monthly pass as part of the 2025 City of Ottawa budget in a bid to reduce a proposed budget deficit. The budget also eliminated free transit for 11 and 12-year-olds. A report for the Ottawa Student Transportation Authority shows the 2025-26 draft budget projected a $4.8 million increase in public transit costs due to the elimination of free transit for students 12 and under and scrapping the youth fare pass in September.
CBC
2 hours ago
- CBC
Canada's first quantum computing hub boots up in southern Alberta
Social Sharing Businesses in southern Alberta are getting the chance to try out a publicly accessible supercomputer. A quantum computing hub, created by SuperQ Quantum Computing, recently opened at the Tecconnect innovation centre at Economic Development Lethbridge. SuperQ founder Muhammad Khan says the platform called Super is web-based and, similarly to ChatGPT, allows users to ask about complex real-world problems in plain English, and comes up with all possible solutions simultaneously. Problems could include supply chain bottlenecks or manufacturing inefficiencies. "The way it does it is by combining classical computing with quantum computing, and doing all the complexity stuff under the hood," Khan told The Canadian Press in a recent interview. "Classical computing is what we use everyday on our computers, on our laptops. "Classical computing would take one route, and if it fails, it comes back and takes another route. Whereas quantum computing takes all the possible routes at the same time. And as a result, it is able to figure out the maze a lot faster." Businesses in the city southeast of Calgary can trial the technology by asking questions like how to find efficient delivery routes or how to schedule staff to minimize overtime, Khan said. Super is to eventually be made available to the broader public by licence. The Lethbridge Super hub is the first in a series of planned networks worldwide. Other locations are set to be established elsewhere in Canada, the United States, Europe, India and the United Arab Emirates. Khan said setting up the platform's nucleus in Lethbridge is a full-circle moment. "I have a deep affection for Tecconnect as my entrepreneurial journey started there," Khan said, adding the centre has helped facilitate emerging technologies in Alberta and Canada. "That appetite to promote emerging technologies with a business focus is something that is not very common. And if you go to the big centres, it's hard to bring about these programs." Renae Barlow, vice-president of entrepreneurship and innovation at Economic Development Lethbridge, said emerging technologies, such as Tecconnect, can keep businesses competitive. Local teams are offering workshops and training to help companies learn more about the platform, she said. "Having businesses understand why it's important for them to integrate this [technology] and to be on the leading edge and to really create that competitive advantage is what we wanted for our southern Alberta businesses," Barlow said. "To understand that this actually puts them ahead." Khan said some businesses in telehealth have also reached out about using the platform to build artificial intelligence doctors. "Their human doctors couldn't keep up with the demand," he said. "So that was done, but then the question was, 'How do you increase the accuracy of those AI clinicians?' And this is where we came in, and the Super platform came in to take those AI models to the next level." Barlow said there's been other interest in things like understanding global markets and even determining nutritional values for cattle. The hub is also getting noticed by government officials. Nate Glubish, Alberta's minister of technology and innovation, highlighted the hub on social media. "Alberta tech is booming," he said.
Globe and Mail
3 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
Canada Post is a case study in Canadian dysfunctionality
Les Viner was managing partner at Torys LLP for 22 years and was seconded to Canada Post as interim general counsel from October, 2022, to June, 2023. He is a senior fellow with the C.D. Howe Institute. Canada Post, which predates Confederation, is a vital national institution, playing a particularly important role in serving rural, Northern and Indigenous communities across our vast country. But today, Canada Post is effectively insolvent. Indeed, it would have run out of cash had the government not recently extended a billion-dollar lifeline. This situation is no surprise, and it has been developing for a long time. Canada Post has been impeded from adapting to modern business realities because of long-standing labour inflexibility as well as oscillation by prior governments between political indifference and political interference. However Canada Post and its main union, CUPW, resolve their current impasse, a much bigger problem looms for the Crown corporation and the federal government. Explainer: What you need to know about the Canada Post contract dispute William Kaplan, a highly respected mediator and arbitrator, recently examined this stalemate as a commissioner appointed under the Canada Labour Code. In his report this month he described Canada Post as facing an 'existential crisis.' He recommended drastic changes to its operations. And these changes must be made. Our new government said that it will do things differently, promising to act decisively and urgently in charting a new path for our country. It now has a golden opportunity to meet the moment by accepting all of Mr. Kaplan's recommendations and if there is any pushback from any of the parties, by appointing him to do it for them. As letter-mail business continues to erode, the future of Canada Post lies in parcel delivery, which is intensely competitive. Customers expect and demand seven-day-a-week service at competitive prices without undue risk of disruption. Paradoxically, the stakeholders who would be expected to have the keenest interest in ensuring the corporation's viability are blocking the company's ability to succeed. CUPW refuses to allow Canada Post to hire a dedicated force of flexible weekend workers. Meanwhile, workers, who get overtime pay for weekend work, earn more – roughly $30 per hour to start – than their counterparts at unionized competitors and vastly more than their counterparts at non-unionized competitors. As the Kaplan report outlined, those workers with tenure have job security for life, a defined-benefit pension plan, and postretirement benefits indexed to inflation, a multitude of generous leave entitlements, and are paid for eight hours of work whether or not it takes eight hours to complete a route. All these factors make seven-day-a-week parcel delivery impossible to achieve at competitive prices, which means that parcel delivery competitors are taking over most of the market share. Indifference of and interference by prior governments have exacerbated the situation. For example, even though 30 per cent of the thousands of corporate postal outlets classified as rural are now urban or suburban, Canada Post is directed not to close or consolidate any of them. Further, although door-to-door delivery costs 75 per cent more than delivery to community mailboxes, Justin Trudeau's incoming government imposed a moratorium on community mailbox conversions in 2015. The Kaplan report threads the needle. His recommendations include ending the moratoriums on rural post office closings and community mailbox conversions, changing collective agreements to allow for the flexible use of well-paid part-time employees, requiring employees to work the hours for which they are paid, and introducing dynamic routing to adapt routes to daily volumes. His well-reasoned report lays out the path for a future that sustainably preserves the institution of Canada Post and respects labour and other key stakeholders in a fair and balanced approach. Absent urgent structural change, the future of Canada Post will be doomed by private competition, unsustainable demands of labour combined, and no clear directional oversight by the sole shareholder as represented by prior governments. As the world evolved from paper to digital, from letter mail to parcels, and from a relatively benign competitive landscape to an intensively competitive one, politicization of key issues impeded necessary reform, perpetuating a cycle of waste, inefficiency and financial recklessness. Canada Post now loses a billion dollars of taxpayer money each year, and the prognosis is materially worse, absent major change. The operational straitjacket imposed by the union, together with past governments' failure to address the underlying structural issues, mean that Canada Post has effectively been disabled from running an operation that is even remotely commercially sensible. The math simply doesn't work.
