In The News is a roundup of stories from The Canadian Press designed to kickstart your day. Here is what's on the radar of our editors for the morning of March 16 ...
What we are watching in Canada ...
Statistics Canada say this morning how fast prices rose in February with broad expectations that the annual pace of inflation will rise from January.
The annual rate of inflation hit a three-decade high in January when the consumer price index registered a year-over-year increase of 5.1 per cent.
Price pressures have become more pervasive over the past few months.
RBC economists Nathan Janzen and Claire Fan say they expect pressures to continue to appear across an array of products in February to push the annual rate to 5.4 per cent.
But the duo warn that inflation likely didn't peak in February.
They say the rate could get closer to six per cent in March on the back of surging prices at the gas pumps and grocery stores as Russia's invasion of Ukraine pushed up global oil and wheat prices.
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Also this ...
The federal minister in charge of the Canada Revenue Agency was told after the election that the agency planned to go full speed on collecting debts just in time for tax season.
The briefing documents to Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier said the agency planned the full resumption of collection activities early this year.
The move was the last of four steps the CRA planned to take after it had to adjust its efforts given health and economic concerns linked to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As those concerns have waned, the agency and the departments it assists are readying for a bump in outstanding debts that will require extra effort to collect. particularly as tax season kicks up.
The tax filing deadline this year is set for May 2 because April 30th falls on a Saturday.
The revenue agency says a return is considered filed if it is received, or a paper filing is postmarked, on or before May 2.
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And this ...
A Ukrainian-Canadian man in Calgary says he has been imagining the highrises around him in shambles ever since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last month.
That's why the retired film professor George Melnyk, who escaped to the west from a German refugee camp with his parents in 1949, says he resonated with a speech Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave to Parliament yesterday
Zelenskyy asked over video for Canadians to visualize their country under attack -- to imagine Vancouver under siege or the C-N Tower hit by bombs.
Melnyk says the speech left him with mixed emotions.
He says he's hopeful because Zelenskyy is to make a similar speech to the American congress soon which he believes will be impactful.
But he's also sad to think the Ukrainian leader could be killed.
Yaroslav Broda is vice-president of the Edmonton chapter of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.
He says he thought Zelenskyy effectively portrayed what it’s like to live in a war zone, and what Ukrainians and Ukrainian-Canadians have been feeling.
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What we are watching in the U.S. ...
WASHINGTON _ A U.S. Senate committee has approved a bipartisan blueprint to overhaul the nation's public health system, applying the lessons of COVID-19 to future outbreaks through a new chain of command, a stronger medical supply chain, and clearer crisis communications.
The Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee approved the PREVENT Pandemics Act by a vote of 20-2 Tuesday.
But it's only a first step. If the ambitious vision does eventually pass Congress, lawmakers must still deliver the tens of billions of dollars it will take to translate it into reality and maintain focus after the coronavirus recedes. Right now, Congress is even having trouble meeting a White House request for additional funds to keep COVID-19 at bay the rest of this year.
The bill also calls for a national task force modelled on the 9/11 Commission to investigate what went wrong in the coronavirus response and make recommendations to the president and Congress. And the legislation incorporates creation of a new advanced medical research and development agency dubbed ARPA-H that President Joe Biden has called for.
The bill starts by formally placing responsibility for pandemic response in Burr's words, "mission control'' within a new White House office, on a similar footing as national security. In the Obama White House, the National Security Council had a global health unit, but that was disbanded under the Trump administration.
Congressional oversight of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be strengthened by requiring Senate confirmation of its director. Confusion over CDC's health recommendations has been recurring problem in the pandemic, so the legislation calls for an advisory council to instruct health officials on how to get fact-based information across to the public more clearly.
On the scientific front, the legislation takes multiple steps, including more active surveillance of emerging diseases, building a capability to forecast epidemics and improving data collection and distribution. The Food and Drug Administration would be assigned a higher priority on medicines and countermeasures targeting infectious diseases.
The bill calls for close attention to the medical supply chain, everything from raw materials for drug manufacturing, to protective equipment that was in such short supply in the first wave of the pandemic, to tests that continued to be an issue in the Omicron wave.
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