Good evening, let’s start with today’s top stories:
Ukraine said as many as 50 people, including five children, were killed and many more were wounded and lost limbs in a rocket strike at a railway station packed with civilians fleeing the threat of a major Russian offensive in the country’s east.
About 4,000 people, most of them elderly, women and children, were at the station in Kramatorsk, a city in the Donetsk region, when it was hit. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the strike a deliberate attack on civilians.
Meanwhile, a group of European Union leaders visited Kyiv to offer Zelensky support and assure him there will be a path to EU membership for Ukraine. The federal government is also proposing to assist Ukraine’s war-ravaged economy by offering a $1-billion loan through a new Canada-led international financial program, Janice Dickson reports.
The cost of war
Paul Njie and Geoffrey York report on the rise in food prices in many countries, sparked by Russia’s war in Ukraine. As many as 47 million additional people will fall into acute hunger in 81 countries worldwide this year because of higher grain and fuel prices resulting from the Ukraine war – with African countries likely to be the hardest hit, according to a report released on Thursday by the United Nations World Food Programme.
Even if the war is over by the end of this month, acute hunger globally will still increase by 33 million people, the report found.
Investigating evidence of war crimes
Nathan VanderKlippe reports an in-depth look at Ukrainian prosecutors’ efforts to gather evidence of war crimes in Bucha. The allegations of war crimes against Russian forces are founded on the discovery of civilians who appear to have been tortured, raped and executed.
Read more:
- Russia-Ukraine April 8 live updates
- Ukrainian forensic investigators start exhuming bodies from Bucha mass grave
- War in Ukraine revives East Coast dreams to build LNG export facilities
Ukrainian soldiers walk towards a military truck after a rocket attack killed at least 35 people on April 8, 2022 at a train station in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, that was being used for civilian evacuations.FADEL SENNA/AFP/Getty Images
Liberals stake their reputation as inflation-fighters with help for homebuyers in budget 2022
Inflation today is caused by low interest rates, tangled global supply chains, disruptions related to war in Ukraine and the many households eager to spend money after two years of pandemic lockdowns.
A government can’t fix that kind of stuff in a budget, writes Globe columnist Rob Carrick, but it has to act like it can. So while the word “inflation” appears 86 times in the document released Thursday, the only fresh, highlighted measure that isn’t connected to housing is coverage for dental care, which starts this year for children under 12 in lower-income families.
Housing is where the government will stake its reputation for helping with affordability. There’s an entire chapter in the budget on housing – 24 pages of programs to build more houses, ban foreign investors from buying residential property for two years, tax people who flip homes and help first-time buyers. Front and centre for rookie buyers is the Tax-free First Home Savings Account promised by the Liberals in the previous election.
Recapping Thursday’s budget announcements
The federal government’s 2022 budget plan laid out more than $56-billion in new spending over six years, as part of a package Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland says will boost innovation and green technology.
The budget, which the government described as a strategy to grow the economy and make life more affordable, includes $5.3-billion to run a national dental-care program for lower-income people, the creation of two arm’s-length agencies focused on attracting private investment in Canada, and billions for housing and defence.
Here’s what you need to know, with charts, to help you understand new spending in the plan to boost the economy, spur innovation and make life more affordable.
Read more:
- A tax-free savings account is coming for new home buyers. What you need to know
- Federal budget hits mark with enough funding to meet record-setting immigration levels
Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speak with members of the media before the release of the federal budget, on Parliament Hill, in Ottawa, April 7, 2022.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
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ALSO ON OUR RADAR
Ready to go out as pandemic restrictions fade away? Prepare for sticker shock: While COVID-19 restrictions are falling away from coast to coast, soaring prices are the new obstacle to socializing. With Canada’s annual inflation at a three-decade high of 5.7 per cent, virtually everything is more expensive – restaurants, movies, concerts and the pub – and Canadians are finding that having fun is much more expensive than it used to be.
Will Smith gets 10-year Oscars ban over Chris Rock slap: The motion picture academy on Friday banned Will Smith from attending the Oscars or any other academy event for 10 years following his slap of Chris Rock at the Academy Awards.
STIs rise across Canada, after limited access to testing and treatment throughout the pandemic: Public health authorities, sexual-health experts and AIDS advocates are sounding the alarm over rising rates of certain sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections throughout parts of Canada, after testing, treatment and prevention campaigns fell by the wayside during the pandemic.
Shopify to overhaul employee compensation with choice between cash and stock: Shopify Inc. is overhauling compensation packages for its employees, giving staffers more choice between cash and equity in a bid to address employment challenges brought on by the company’s fallen stock price and the hotly competitive technology labour market.
Pierre Poilievre draws crowds, but that isn’t crucial for winning, Conservative leadership rivals say: The crowds turning out for rallies held by Pierre Poilievre as he seeks the federal Conservative leadership are not crucial to winning the race, say rival camps, who insist there are less flashy ways to gather the support required for victory.
MARKET WATCH
The Dow rose and the S&P 500 ended lower in choppy trade on Friday, as beaten-down bank shares gained and investors grappled with how best to deal with an economy that could skid as the Federal Reserve moves to aggressively tackle inflation. The TSX ended with a modest gain, largely thanks to a rally in the energy sector.
The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note hit a three-year high of 2.73 per cent, helping boost the S&P banking index, which on Thursday had slumped to 13-month lows. Rate-sensitive lenders JPMorgan Chase & Co, Bank of America Corp, Citigroup Inc and Goldman Sachs Group Inc all gained.
That upward movement in bond yields was felt in Canada as well, where the country’s latest jobs report showed the unemployment rate hitting a record low of 5.3 per cent in March. The economy added 73,000 positions last month, following a blowout return of 337,000 in February, Statistics Canada said.
According to preliminary data, the S&P 500 lost 11.59 points, or 0.26 per cent, to end at 4,488.62 points, while the Nasdaq Composite lost 183.66 points, or 1.32 per cent, to 13,713.64. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 144.21 points, or 0.42 per cent, to 34,727.78.
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TALKING POINTS
Why disasters – from wars to plagues – seem to happen all at once
“A significant number of history’s greatest disasters can be attributed to the decisions of dictators – from the man-made famines caused by Josef Stalin’s and Mao Zedong’s policies of forced collectivization of agriculture to the Holocaust, which is very hard to imagine without the malevolent figure of Adolf Hitler as the German Fuhrer. The war in Ukraine is equally hard to imagine without Mr. Putin as Russian President.” – Niall Ferguson
Doug Ford’s pre-election gift-giving bonanza has begun
“You can tell an election is in the air in Ontario. The birds are singing, the Liberals are stirring up their quadrennial panic about the privatization of health care, and the incumbent government is offering a plethora of gifts in the hopes that voters will forget about past unpleasantness and again choose to lend them their support.” – Robyn Urback
Parliament needs to step up to fix the Canadian Armed Forces’ broken culture
“It is clear that the structures of Canadian civil-military relations must change so that powerful officers do not feel like they can act with impunity. Broadening the focus of Canada’s Parliament so that it considers oversight over the armed forces as part of its responsibilities would help spark the institutional changes needed both inside and outside the military.” – Stephen Saideman
LIVING BETTER
Norton Winery, Mendoza, Argentina.
With its strong focus on malbec, Argentina’s wine industry has turned April 17 into an international celebration of its most successful grape variety. Malbec World Day marks the day in 1853 when the first malbec vines arrived in the country as part of the plans to establish Argentina’s first agricultural and winemaking school.
Celebrating 169 years of drive and determination to produce well-made and enjoyable malbecs is certainly worthy of praise. While the malbec grape was originally cultivated in Bordeaux and the Cahors region of France, for many wine lovers, it has become synonymous with Argentina.
Of every three bottles shipped from wineries in Argentina, two are malbec. Considering that Canada represents the third largest market for malbecs made in Argentina, a sizable number of those shipments land here. Christopher Waters recommends eight enjoyable malbecs to celebrate the varietal’s ongoing success in Argentina.
TODAY’S LONG READ
Canadian Amber Bracken wins World Press Photo of the Year for residential school memorial photo
Red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside commemorate children who died at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, an institution created to assimilate Indigenous children, following the detection of as many as 215 unmarked graves, Kamloops, British Columbia, June 19, 2021.Amber Bracken/The Associated Press
On June 19, 2021, Canadian photojournalist Amber Bracken took a photo of a memorial on Tk’emlups te Secwepemc land just outside Kamloops, B.C.: Red dresses hung on crosses as the evening sun broke through the rain. She was on assignment, following the discovery of unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
That photo – taken by a stretch of Highway 5 between the powwow grounds and the site of the former residential school – has just been named the World Press Photo of the Year.
“It is a kind of image that sears itself into your memory, it inspires a kind of sensory reaction,” said global jury chair Rena Effendi, in a news release out Thursday. “I could almost hear the quietness in this photograph, a quiet moment of global reckoning for the history of colonization, not only in Canada but around the world.”
Bracken – who turned 38 last week while in Rome covering the Indigenous delegation to the Vatican – won a World Press Photo Award in 2017, but winning the top prize is “next level,” she says.
She also says she doesn’t feel like this picture belongs to her, but to the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc people. “There would be no picture there for me without the work that they had done.”
Evening Update is written by Emerald Bensadoun. If you’d like to receive this newsletter by e-mail every weekday evening, go here to sign up. If you have any feedback, send us a note.