Canada

"Toronto has become the first major city in Canada to ban plastic shopping bags in a surprise city council vote that the mayor denounced as 'ludicrous.'"

"OTTAWA -- The federal government has suggested it could replace a team of smokestack pollution specialists by turning to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, appearing to contradict its own description of the scientists and their work on Environment Canada's website."

"Canada is dismantling the nation's entire ocean contaminants program as part of massive layoffs at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans."

"VANCOUVER -- Atlantic salmon farms around Vancouver Island have begun testing and formed a special outbreak management team after a virus outbreak at one farm led to a site quarantine and the cull of more than half a million fish."

"VANCOUVER - A giant 800-year-old red cedar tree has been poached from a provincial park on southern Vancouver Island, but the culprits who repeatedly returned to the site to hack it down may never be brought to justice."

"EDMONTON -- On the one year anniversary of the Slave Lake fire, here is a troubling thought. There is a good chance — an ever-increasing chance, as a matter of fact — that it will happen again. Perhaps not to Slave Lake, Alta., but to another community, or communities, nestled in the national tinderbox that is the great boreal forest stretching from British Columbia to Labrador."

"Long involvement in Canada's tar sands has been central to Koch Industries' evolution and positions the billionaire brothers for a new oil boom."

"Canada is acting too slowly to combat climate change and has little chance of achieving its modest 2020 target for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, Parliament's environmental watchdog said on Tuesday."

"Fourteen Canadians were arrested for civil disobedience at 6 p.m. after sitting down on the tracks in front of an oncoming coal train in White Rock. Their vigil began at midnight, but Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) cancelled many of its scheduled runs in anticipation of the protest."

"HARTLEY BAY, B.C. -- The Gitga'at Nation of Hartley Bay has reported an oil spill between two and five miles long in the Grenville Channel, not far from the tanker route for the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline."