Provincial and Territorial Update – January 23, 2026
An overview on Provincial and Territorial updates for the week of January 23, 2026. Written by Wes McLean.
New Brunswick
- Patients waiting for a nursing home bed at the Moncton Hospital are now required to accept the first available space — even if it’s not their first choice. Until now, these patients have been able to decline a nursing home bed and remain in a hospital bed until space opens up in a nursing home they prefer. Known as an alternate level of care, or ALC, these patients were, as of Tuesday, occupying 36 per cent of Horizon Health Network’s bed space provincewide.
- Environmental substances like herbicides and heavy metals are likely not causing the neurological symptoms reported by hundreds of New Brunswickers, an investigation by the province into the so-called mystery brain illness has concluded. Dr. Yves Léger, the chief medical officer of health, released the final report on the investigation into 222 of the cases of “undiagnosed neurological illness” on Friday.
- Emotional and spiritual supports have been implemented in Neqotkuk First Nation to help community members as they grieve the sudden, violent death of one of their own. Bronson Paul, 40, died after being shot inside his home by a Mountie who was responding to a call about a domestic dispute in the northwestern New Brunswick community on Sunday afternoon. To many in the Wolastoqey Nation, Paul’s death feels like the latest in a series of tragedies, said Terry Young, a member of Bilijk First Nation, another of the six Wolastoqey communities in New Brunswick.
- The responsibility and budget for New Brunswick seniors and long-term care will now fall under a dedicated seniors minister, the province announced Wednesday. The province is touting it as a stronger commitment to seniors. But it won’t come with additional funding or staff. Some say it doesn’t go far enough and are calling for a dedicated department, while others believe the move will bring a necessary, greater focus on a long-term care system in crisis.
Nova Scotia
- Bridgewater Mayor David Mitchell says he and his municipal colleagues across Nova Scotia are prepared for a difficult provincial budget. Mitchell, who is also president of the Nova Scotia Federation of Municipalities, met in that capacity Thursday with Premier Tim Houston and the topic of finances was high on the agenda. Houston told reporters last week that the provincial deficit is on track to top $1.4 billion for 2025-26.
- Premier Tim Houston says the value of Nova Scotia Power’s coal plants needs to be reassessed, suggesting the company has kept the value unfairly high to earn more profit. As of December 2025, the utility said the plants had a net book value of $700 million. Nova Scotia Power is looking to recoup that amount of money by issuing bonds, a process called securitization. According to documents filed with the Nova Scotia Energy Board, the utility has been working on the approach with the province for months. Nova Scotia Power needs the government to enable securitization through regulations.
- Senior members of the Nova Scotia Health leadership team have delivered a blunt warning to MLAs about spending rates, saying a new approach is needed for infrastructure projects. “The same way of doing it across the province is not sustainable and won’t happen. It’s just not in the cards,” NSH chief financial officer Derek Spinney told members of the legislature’s public accounts committee on Wednesday. Interim CEO Karen Oldfield said provinces across the country and governments beyond Canada are contending with construction prices that keep rising amid a variety of demands.
- A French energy company looking to get in on the ground floor of Nova Scotia’s nascent offshore wind sector says it will help the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) train workers over the coming years. Q Energy France signed a memorandum of understanding in Halifax with the college and The Pier research hub, pledging to work hand-in-hand to help train workers. The provincial government has been promoting Wind West, a multi-billion dollar project that could generate about a quarter of Canada’s energy capacity if all phases are completed.
Prince Edward Island
- A debate on land use in P.E.I. erupted into a shouting match between the two men who want to lead the Progressive Conservative Party into the next election. This was the second in a series of three leadership forums for P.E.I.’s governing PC Party. This one was held Thursday night in Montague. Mark Ledwell says he’s committed to overhauling the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission (IRAC), suspending land transfers to Bliss and Wisdom, and calling a public inquiry. Bliss and Wisdom is a Taiwan-based Tibetan Buddhist movement. Landholdings of groups associated with the movement in eastern P.E.I. have been the subject of speculation and controversy for years.
- Some farmers in Prince Edward Island say they don’t want to take any chances when it comes to the possibility of another drought this year. After a dry summer in 2025, the P.E.I. government said it has seen an increase in applications for irrigation wells as farmers look to ensure their crops get the water they need for a strong season. Derrick Curley, owner-operator of Monaghan Farms in Norboro, said his operation has applied for 14 new wells — a move into uncharted territory for the business.
- Mark Ledwell, a candidate for the leadership of P.E.I.’s Progressive Conservative Party, says his comments about the province’s French-language school board that drew backlash from the francophone community were taken out of context. When asked during a Jan. 14 leadership forum about the effectiveness of elected school boards, Ledwell said: “We need to have a single entity. We don’t need to have separate boards. We don’t need an English board. We don’t need a French board. It creates confusion, it costs money, it’s cumbersome, it’s bureaucratic, and I think people are fed up with it.”
- Ottawa is spending $10 million to help build a key part of the Town of Stratford’s plan for a community campus. The money will go toward breaking ground on a town wellness centre, said Stratford Mayor Steve Ogden. “The design hasn’t been completed yet, but we envision that … a lot of necessary community needs will be addressed,” Ogden said, adding there are plans to have an ice rink, indoor turf field and a youth centre inside the facility.
Newfoundland and Labrador
- Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Tony Wakeham says moves by the United States to annex Greenland strengthen the argument that this province should get more defence spending from Ottawa. Speaking at a luncheon in St. John’s on Thursday, Wakeham called for the federal government to increase military spending in the province, saying he supports Ottawa “stepping up to meet its NATO commitments.”
- Dr. Pat Parfrey, a medical practitioner for more than four decades, is out as the head of Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services. The announcement was made by Premier Tony Wakeham in a news release late Thursday afternoon. Ron Johnson, most recently the health authority’s chief information officer and vice-president of digital health, information and research, has been appointed as interim CEO. NLHS is the sole health authority in Newfoundland and Labrador since April 2023 — largely due to the work of Parfrey, who, in part, recommended that the previous four regional health authorities merge into one.
- The Inuit government in northern Labrador is standing in solidarity with Greenland amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to take control of the Danish territory. Nunatsiavut President Johannes Lampe says the people of Greenland, the majority of whom are Inuit, have a right to determine their own future. In a statement, Lampe says any attempt to impose outside control over Greenland is an attack on Inuit freedom and self-determination.
- A key member of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Churchill Falls negotiation team says he hasn’t spoken to Tony Wakeham since the new premier was elected last October. Karl Smith, the former Fortis chief financial officer, told Radio-Canada on Tuesday that he didn’t even know whether he was still a member of the three-person team negotiating the future of the Churchill Falls and Gull Island hydroelectric projects with Quebec. “I have heard nothing one way or the other,” said Smith in an email.
Quebec
- Christine Fréchette, Quebec’s economy minister, will be running to be the next leader of Coalition Avenir Québec — and the province’s next premier. Fréchette, 56, will launch her campaign on Sunday at an event in her hometown of Trois-Rivières, Que. The information was first reported on 98.5 FM and confirmed by Radio-Canada. Fréchette was first elected with the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) in 2022, and served as immigration minister before taking over as minister of economy, innovation and energy in 2024. She previously served as the chief of staff to Jean-François Lisée in the Parti Québécois government of Pauline Marois.
- Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette says he won’t seek the Coalition Avenir Québec leadership to replace François Legault. Jolin-Barrette says he decided not to run for family and professional reasons. Jolin-Barrette, first elected in 2014, had received the support of several CAQ caucus members since Legault’s announcement. Facing dismal polling, Legault said last week he would step down as party leader and premier after a successor is named at a leadership convention on April 12.
- The Coalition Avenir Québec will choose Premier François Legault’s successor on April 12. The party says the leadership race starts today, and candidates have until Feb. 21 to submit their application. To enter the race, candidates must get signatures from 1,000 party members from at least 75 ridings, including 15 legislature members and 100 members of the party’s youth wing. The party says voting will be conducted by telephone using a system in which voters rank their choices in order of preference. Legault said last week that he would step down as party leader and premier after a successor is named.
- On the heels of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s call for unity in Quebec City on Thursday, the Parti Québécois is laying out a roadmap ahead of the upcoming provincial election, with a promise of a referendum at its heart. Members of the sovereigntist party will gather this weekend at a convention in St-Hyacinthe, a small city east of Montreal, to vote on the party’s “national project” – a suite of policies that opens with an “unambiguous” promise to hold a third referendum on independence.
Ontario
- Ontario Premier Doug Ford says that U.S. President Donald Trump “remains relentless in his campaign to create a more unstable, unsafe and uncertain world.” Ford made the comment during a news conference alongside auto sector leaders at Queen’s Park on Wednesday morning. The comment comes after Trump delivered a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he reiterated his desire to take control of Greenland and warned Canada only “lives” because of the United States.
- Ontario Premier Doug Ford is calling on Canadians to boycott Chinese-made vehicles in the wake of a federal trade deal that will allow them into the country. “Boycott the Chinese EV vehicles. Support companies that are building vehicles here,” Ford said at a news conference at Queen’s Park on Wednesday, flanked by representatives from the auto industry. “This is a Team Canada approach. We gotta stick together.” Last week Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a trade deal with China that will see the federal government allow close to 50,000 Chinese-made electric vehicles a year to come into Canada in exchange for greatly easing tariffs on Canadian agricultural products.
- For the second time in as many days, Ontario Premier Doug Ford suggested he was willing to back down from his threat to remove Crown Royal from the LCBO, but only if his government can extract concessions from the international alcohol maker that produces the Canadian whisky. On Wednesday, Ford said he was offering the company Diageo an “olive branch” to present the government with a plan to replace the 160 jobs that were impacted by the closure of a Crown Royal bottling facility in Amherstburg in order to avoid a booze ban at the LCBO.
- Ontario’s struggling universities and colleges are again sounding the alarm, begging the Ford government to set aside billions more for post-secondary education. During pre-budget consultations and submissions, groups representing both colleges and universities asked for significantly more funding, saying tuition fee freezes and international student caps have left them with few options. “Right now, Ontario universities are the lowest funded in the country when you look at it per student,” Council of Ontario Universities president and CEO Steve Orsini told MPPs on Wednesday.
Manitoba
- Manitoba is launching a review into the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the health minister says the analysis will be limited because people have moved on from the global health crisis. Manitoba registered the second-highest COVID-19 death rate among the provinces, behind Quebec, and sent 57 intensive care patients to other provinces because its health-care facilities didn’t have room to care for them. “There’s opportunity here, as you can imagine, to make this [review] really, really big, but what we know is Manitobans don’t want that,” Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said.
- Manitoba is not managing dialysis services as smoothly as it should, a new report by the province’s auditor general says. Manitoba Auditor General Tyson Shtykalo’s report, released Thursday, was done to determine whether Manitoba Health and Shared Health are managing dialysis services efficiently as the need increases. The province’s rate of end-stage kidney disease was Canada’s highest from 2013 to 2021 and continues to rise, Shtykalo said.
- Manitoba’s health-care system is again working with some of the private nursing agencies it cut loose only days ago, after some rural hospitals struggled to fill shifts when they could rely on only a handful of agencies. This week, the province returned to some of the private nursing agencies it had dropped in an effort to find enough nurses to address staffing shortages. Manitoba cut ties with dozens of agencies Jan. 15 in a bid to reduce the health-care system’s reliance on private agencies, which it argued have squeezed the public system for millions of dollars in higher wages, travel fees and per diems.
- The Manitoba government will not be giving disaster aid to Steinbach residents who were hit with two months’ worth of rain in one night last September. Steinbach city council learned this week from the province that the city’s application to the province’s Disaster Financial Assistance program, on behalf of about 200 property owners, was denied. A provincial spokesperson said in an emailed statement on Wednesday that this was because most of the reported damage was insurable, and “the event did not cause widespread damage or disruption to essential assets or essential services.”
Saskatchewan
- Saskatchewan continues to struggle to fill medical radiation technologist (MRT) positions in rural and urban areas. Advocates say hiring more MRTs is essential to decreasing the wait times for women who want and need mammogram screening. The supply issue in the province is under particular scrutiny as the Ministry of Health continues its phased approach to lower the age qualification for mammogram booking without a doctor’s referral from 50 to 40. At this time, women who are 43 and older qualify. The qualification age is expected to reach age 40 by June.
- Global mining giant BHP has again raised the cost estimate for the first stage of its Jansen potash project in Saskatchewan. The first stage of the mine is now expected to cost $8.4-billion US after a review of its budget and schedule, the Australia-headquartered company said Tuesday. The forecast is up from expectations in July 2025 for between $7-billion US and $7.4-billion US. Jansen was initially estimated to cost $ 5.7 billion US when it was approved in August 2021.
- The Saskatchewan Health Authority says new metal detectors in Saskatoon and Regina hospitals are already showing results. On Thursday, health authority CEO Andrew Will and Health Minister Jeremy Cockrill announced an independent review of how staff and patients are protected in hospitals and other health-care facilities. Will said the health authority installed metal detectors at emergency departments in St. Paul’s Hospital and Saskatoon City Hospital on Jan. 19, and at Regina General Hospital and Pasqua Hospital emergency departments on Jan. 20.
- Canada and China have reached a preliminary agreement to remove all tariffs on canola meal and peas. Premier Scott Moe announced details on the deal at a news conference in Saskatoon on Tuesday. Tariffs on canola seed are expected to be reduced to 15 per cent. The changes within the Canada-China agreement are expected to take effect by March 1. Last March, China imposed a 100 per cent tariff on Canadian canola oil, meal and seeds, as well as peas. In exchange for China’s cutdown of these tariffs, Canada will slash tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. The deal was struck on Friday.
Alberta
- Three weeks after she last took questions from the media, health care workers are wondering why Alberta’s premier isn’t addressing their system concerns. Danielle Smith last spoke to reporters on Jan. 2. In the 21 days since, the province’s physicians, nurses and emergency staff have called for a state of emergency to confront growing hospital wait times and overcrowding. Their request has been denied. Matt Jones, the Minister of Hospital and Surgical Services, said earlier this week the province already has the tools it needs to weather the storm. But Jones was also “hiding from Albertans” before making that clear, according to the organization Friends of Medicare.
- Alberta’s education minister says an unsuccessful recall petition launched against him represents a new vote of confidence in the government and the direction he’s taking the file. Demetrios Nicolaides, in a letter to constituents posted to social media, said the campaign’s result validates the government’s priorities and has him “energized by the opportunity to keep building on the progress we have made together.”
- The new year will bring some big changes to the rules on in-office work for many employees across the country — including tens of thousands of provincial government staff in Ontario and Alberta, who will soon be required to return to the office full time. As of Jan. 5, Ontario provincial government employees will be expected to work in the office five days per week. Alberta’s public service is also returning to full-time, in-office work in February to “strengthen collaboration, accountability and service delivery for Albertans,” a spokesperson for the Alberta government said.
- Two former Progressive Conservative justice ministers and nearly 30 other lawyers are denouncing Alberta’s UCP government for what they say are self-serving legal manoeuvres and “unacceptable” attacks on the justice system. In a letter published this week in a newspaper in Camrose, the lawyers wrote they felt a professional responsibility to “point out things that we think are wrong or anti-democratic.” The letter covers the government’s four invocations of the Charter’s notwithstanding clause last fall and its retroactive rule changes that advanced a petition for an Alberta separation referendum. Those rule changes also stripped the province’s chief electoral officer of much of his decision-making authority over such petitions.
British Columbia
- An event at the University of British Columbia by the OneBC political party ended with its leader and a couple of dozen supporters being escorted by police onto a waiting bus after being surrounded in a building by opponents for nearly an hour. “We chased them out. And now, they’re hiding in a public building,” said Andy Lin, one of nearly a thousand people who took part in duelling events in the middle of campus Thursday afternoon. “It’s really angering for me to see these people come here to try to wreak havoc … you have one of the best schools in the country, and it’s a productive society that we have going on here. And they’re here to just wreak havoc. So, of course, I’m going to voice my opinion.”
- Surrey’s chief of police is asking for increased resources and promising to name and provide photographs of suspects charged with extortion, as the service investigates 35 suspected cases so far this year. “We are currently experiencing another spike in both extortion threats and associated violence,” said Chief Const. Norm Lipinski in the video posted to social media Tuesday afternoon. “We are adjusting our strategies in dealing with this spike in shootings.”
- B.C. Premier David Eby says the head of a police anti-extortion task force needs to step aside if he cannot demonstrate a sense of urgency in the fight. Eby’s remarks about RCMP Assistant Commissioner John Brewer come a day after Brewer repeatedly declined to characterize a wave of extortion-related shootings in the Lower Mainland as a crisis. The premier says Brewer’s comments “cut at public confidence” and he needs to clarify himself.
- The race to replace John Rustad as leader of the B.C. Conservatives are heating up, with the rules for the race released last week and five high-profile candidates trying to convince members they should be the one to lead the party into the future. Brad Zubyk, Rustad’s former chief of staff, said several candidates are already positioning themselves to differentiate themselves from their opponents. He pointed to Prince George-North Cariboo MLA Sheldon Clare, trying to paint himself as the only “true-blue conservative” in the race, while former B.C. Liberal cabinet minister Iain Black touts his political experience, and prominent academic Caroline Elliott gets the jump on the controversy over the Cowichan land title decision in Richmond.
Northwest Territories
- They came to Yellowknife to talk about “Resilience in the Arctic,” but ambassadors from five Nordic countries could not escape Donald Trump. Just minutes before the diplomats took to the stage for a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. president announced on social media he and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte had reached the outline of a deal on Greenland and “the entire Arctic region.” There are no details yet on what that deal might entail, but it does appear to mean Trump’s threatened tariffs against countries opposed to American control of Greenland will now not go ahead.
Yukon
- Former Premier Mike Pemberton has resigned as Yukon Liberal Party leader. Vuntut Gwitchin MLA Debra-Leigh Reti will replace him as interim party leader. She was appointed by the party executive, according to an emailed statement from the party on Wednesday, announcing Pemberton’s departure. The statement says Pemberton had stepped down “effective immediately.”
Nunavut
- New Democratic Party MPs are in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, for their annual caucus meeting this week, which had to get started on Tuesday without Nunavut’s own MP Lori Idlout, who was delayed by a storm. The NDP says it’s the first time a major federal party has held its caucus meeting in the North. While the session serves as preparation for the upcoming session of the House of Commons, interim NDP Leader Don Davies said the NDP is also there to hear about issues Nunavummiut and other northerners face.