Friday Morning News – February 8

There are no weather alerts this morning, and all buses are running. Highway 17 has been reopened.

Weather – Periods of light snow. Wind northwest 20 km/h gusting to 40 becoming light this afternoon. High minus 16. Wind chill minus 30 in the morning and minus 24 in the afternoon. Risk of frostbite.
Tonight Periods of light snow ending late this evening then partly cloudy. Wind up to 15 km/h. Low minus 26. Wind chill minus 27 in the evening and minus 35 overnight. Risk of frostbite.

News Tidbits – Chief Matthew Keewaykapow of Cat Lake First Nation ( 600 kilometres north of Thunder Bay) has issued a state of emergency last month because of the terrible housing conditions. Over half of the homes in the community, 87 of the 128 homes have been declared uninhabitable.

In 2012 the University of Victoria issued a study paper detailing the extent of mould in Canada’s First Nation reserves. The root cause was linked to “Failed commitments from the federal government to improve housing and socioeconomic conditions have resulted in a legacy of widespread substandard housing and severe housing shortages that yield overcrowding, which in turn aggravates mould growth.” Manny Jules, chief commissioner of the First Nations Tax Commission explained, “First Nations members aren’t allowed, like every other Canadian, the choice of owning their own home, and that leads to a situation where a lot of our housing is built substandard,”. In that same year, Attawapiskat had about 80 homes of 340 declared unfit for numerous reasons including: cracked walls, flooding, leaks and mould.

Did you know… that in 1879, at the Canadian Institute in Toronto, engineer-inventor Sandford Fleming proposee Universal Standard Time, dividing the world into 24 equal time zones. It would be adopted across Canada by 1884.