Welcome to the Canadian National Multilingual News Group (CNMNG). This is a project made possible through funding by Canadian Heritage. CNMNG aims to gather news researched and written by a corps of Canadian-based journalists/writers from the country’s multilingual community groups. The overall goal is to inform, analyze and critique the issues of the day in a professional manner and to provide that to publishers and editors active in the ethnocultural-multilingual press and media whose experience provides them with a perspective that is sensitive to news relevant to their own language group.
OTTAWA – Here we go again. The Bank of Canada will raise its benchmark interest rate by 0.75% on Wednesday: a new increase, therefore, after the 0.50% increase on June 1, when the rate was raised to 1.50. %. From Wednesday, it will be at 2.25%. The reason, as always, is that of the “fight against inflation” which in recent weeks has reached its highest level in almost 40 years: 7.7 per cent.
TORONTO – It is the news that no one likes to hear the one released by the Ontario Science Advisory Table. The province has likely entered a new wave of pandemic led by the BA.5 subvariant. In messages posted on Twitter, the technical-scientific table cites the “exponential growth” in the count of cases in about 80% of public health units, as well as the increase in the number of hospitalizations and test positivity rates.
TORONTO – More than a new wave: it’s a tsunami. Omicron has attacked (also) Canada, making the infections from Covid-19 increase exponentially, despite – after the winter wave – the virus seemed to be in a downward phase. In fact, data from the Canadian task force reveal how quickly Omicron and its sub-variants spread across the country as early as the end of 2021 and early this year. The task force reported that as many as 17 million Canadians were infected in just five months, between December 2021 and May 2022. This means that the daily average of new infections was over 100,000. A record, enough to push the members of the task force themselves to define the wave “Omicron tsunami”. →
TORONTO – There is already who talks about the fourth dose, when there are still hundreds of thousands of people who still have to get the third one. Omicron 5 and its infectivity are scary and “in a hurry”, but the scientific director of the Ontario Science Table, Dr. Fahad Razak, invites to keep feet on the ground. “Although much of the conversation right now is about the fourth dose, for me scientifically the clearest opportunity, the thing we should do – and it’s not a question about availability, the vaccine is available to us – is the third dose” , he told CP24 on Monday.
TORONTO – Covid-19 cases are again on the rise in Canada as well, “thanks” to the two fast-spreading Omicron sub-variants, otherwise known as BA.4 and BA.5. The latter, in particular, renamed Omicron 5, would represent almost 70% of Canadian cases. →
