 Here’s what you need to know to get the day started: | | | What we can learn from Canada's record wildfire season, as a new one approaches | | |  | A gas station destroyed by a wildfire is seen in Squilax, B.C., last September. B.C., Alberta, Quebec and the Northwest Territories all had record wildfire seasons in 2023. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press) | | | Fire crews across much of Canada are already on high alert for the coming wildfire season, only months after the conclusion of the worst season on record.
Quebec's fire monitoring agency, SOPFEU, issued a warning for some parts of the province last week, the earliest in its history. Alberta also declared last month that its wildfire season had started — 10 days early and B.C. issued a notice saying it was monitoring holdover fires from last year.
"It's going to get dry very quickly, so it's going to become very, very easy to start a fire," said Philippe Bergeron, a spokesperson for SOPFEU, based in Quebec City. "We have an early spring that is coming, a mild end of this winter and the snow cover that is disappearing faster than usual."
The B.C. Wildfire Service has since announced a number of prescribed burns, in an attempt to reduce dried vegetation and protect communities against wildfires. More than 100 fires are still burning in B.C. and Alberta after unusually dry conditions in both provinces.
The warnings about the upcoming season come as researchers take stock of last year's historic wildfires, and analyze what can be done differently. Although the number of fires wasn't unusual compared to other years, their average size was far larger. Approximately 15 million hectares burned, over seven times the historic national annual average.
"'Record-breaking' is almost a euphemism. I mean, it really shattered past records," said Marc-André Parisien, an Edmonton-based research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, part of Natural Resources Canada. Last year's season "challenged what we thought we understood about wildland fire," he said. | | | | | Chaos reigns in Haiti, say Canadians stranded amid mounting violence | | |  | (Clarens Siffroy/AFP/Getty Images) | | | | Haitian police officers deploy in Port-au-Prince on Saturday in a bid to quell the recent explosion of gang violence. Canadians there say the crisis in the Caribbean nation has been years in the making, and all they can do now is hunker down amid the escalating violence. Read the full story here. | | | | | | | | | In brief | | | Jacinthe Dupuis knew something was off when she noticed hundreds of emails had flooded her inbox in just a few hours. After an online search, the woman, who lives in Léry, Que., on Montreal's South Shore, realized that she'd likely been the victim of something called email bombing. It's a technique used by hackers to overwhelm someone's inbox with useless emails to take their focus away from the one message they should be paying attention to. By the time she realized what hackers were up to, it was too late. Buried in that pile of emails was a warning from Aeroplan, Air Canada's loyalty program. It was alerting her that changes had been made to her account. When she checked, more than 100,000 Aeroplan points had disappeared. Someone had already booked a flight from Malaysia to Abu Dhabi, and she had only about 12,000 points left. Read the full story here.
Early Tuesday, brothers Mahmoud and Abdelrahman Kouta, each wearing a slim backpack, waited in line to board an idling white tour bus in Rafah just a few minutes' drive from Gaza's border with Egypt. Abdelrahman climbed the steps and disappeared into the bus first, with Mahmoud squeezing through the crowd to follow close behind. After 160 days living under threat of bombing, starvation, dehydration and illness, the brothers from London, Ont., were getting out of Gaza. "What we have been living the past six months is something unexplainable … living more than a horror movie, more than what you'd see in a Hunger Games movie," said Mahmoud, 21, speaking to a freelance journalist working for the CBC while waiting for the bus to take him and his brother to Cairo. "I am sad and happy at the same time," he said. "I am happy that I had the chance to evacuate and that I will evacuate today, but I'm sad that my family and relatives are still in Gaza dying under the threat of bombing and starvation." The brothers are among hundreds of Canadians who have fled Gaza since war broke out between Israel and Hamas on Oct. 7. Read the full story here.
In an attempt to combat theft at its stores, Loblaw is testing receipt scanners at four of its locations, the grocery giant told CBC News. Customers who go through self-checkout must use the device to scan their receipt's barcode — confirming that they paid something — which opens a metal gate, letting them leave. Loblaw didn't provide any further details, but CBC discovered the devices in a Loblaw-owned Zehrs and two Superstore supermarkets in southern Ontario. Several shoppers were unhappy about them. "It's very intrusive. It makes you feel like a thief," said Paul Zemaitis, who recently discovered a scanner at his local Zehrs in Woodstock, Ont. Read the full story here.
Despite being subject to over 16,000 sanctions, Russia's economy is not on the brink of collapse. Over the past two years, Russia's government has managed to steer through sanctions and limit inflation, while investing nearly a third of its budget in defence spending. It's also been able to increase trade with China and sell its oil to new markets, in part by using a shadow fleet of tankers to skirt a price cap that Western countries had hoped would reduce the country's war chest. "I think for the next 12 to 18 months, [Russian President Vladimir Putin] has enough resources ... to continue to fulfil his war machine," said Alexandra Prokopenko, a former adviser with Russia's Central Bank. Read the full story here.
SpaceX will attempt to launch its 122-metre tall — or 37-storey — mega-rocket on its third test flight on Thursday. The Starship rocket is SpaceX founder Elon Musk's pet project that he says will not only be able to spit out ever more Starlink satellites but also eventually take humans to Mars. But the bigger, more pressing goal is to prove that Starship will be ready for NASA's Artemis III mission to the moon, slated to launch in 2026. A variation of the SpaceX vessel, called the Human Landing System, will be critical to putting humans on the lunar surface. In order to do so, SpaceX needs to clear a number of hurdles, including demonstrating a ship-to-ship transfer of fuel. But so far, Starship has seen only incremental achievements. Read the full story here.
Now here's some good news to start your Wednesday: Shirley Simson, an 84-year-old grandma from Kelowna, B.C., is working hard on her basketball skills to try and make it to the WNBA. Watch the video here. | | | FIRST PERSON | As a caregiver, I was rarely invited to funerals. Still, I mourned deeply from a distance | Lana Cullis’s perspective on funerals and the role of caregivers changed when one of her clients died by suicide. Read her column here. | | | | | | |  | Royal mystery: What's going on with Kate Middleton? | A photo released by Kensington Palace of Kate Middleton and her children was supposed to quell online theories that something is wrong with the Princess of Wales. Instead, it deepened the curiosity and the questions about her whereabouts.
Listen to today's episode. | | | Today in history: March 13 | | | 1914: Canadian writer W.O. Mitchell is born in Weyburn, Sask. The author of Who Has Seen the Wind and Jake and the Kid died in Calgary in 1998.
1953: The Soviet Union vetoes a recommendation by the UN Security Council that Canadian External Affairs Minister Lester Pearson be named UN secretary-general. Days later, Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden was selected for the post.
1989: Deborah Grey wins a byelection in the Alberta riding of Beaver River to become the Reform Party's first member of Parliament. From March to September of 2000, Grey was the interim leader of the Canadian Alliance, making her the first female Leader of the Opposition in Parliament.
2008: The price of gold hits $1,000 US per ounce for the first time. | | | (With files from CBC News, The Canadian Press, The Associated Press and Reuters) | | | | |  | CBC NEWS APP | The most convenient way to get your news
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