Affordability measures dominated the promises on the federal election trail on Saturday, with the NDP focused on capping the price of some food items and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre offering more tax writeoffs to some trades workers.

The first week of the federal election drew to a close with both Liberal Leader Mark Carney and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh paying a visit to the national capital.

Singh visited a food bank in the city’s Ottawa Centre riding, and Carney stopped by his own campaign office in Nepean for the first time. Carney is seeking a seat in the suburban Ottawa riding and met with campaign volunteers and supporters in his only scheduled stop of the day.

The NDP leader promised to introduce emergency price caps on basic food items like pasta, frozen vegetables and infant formula. He is also calling for higher taxes on grocery chain profits and tighter competition regulations for the sector.

“A lot of Canadians are worried about how much it costs them when they go to the grocery store,” Singh said, noting those fears have intensified due to anxiety about the impact of U.S. tariffs under President Donald Trump.

“I want folks to know that we see you and we hear you,” Singh said Saturday.

Singh said corporate grocery stores are “ripping you off and driving up the cost of food.”

He said the emergency price cap would follow similar moves in France and Greece, and a party spokesperson said the measures proposed Saturday would only cost Ottawa some public-service hours and would not require federal subsidies.

Poilievre, the first national party leader to campaign in any of the prairie provinces so far, was in Winnipeg for an afternoon rally hours after unveiling a promise to help trade workers who must travel more than 120 kilometres from their homes to their jobs.

He said a Conservative government would expand the writeoff that trade workers can declare for work travel.

Trades workers can currently claim up to $4,000 in travel expenses for work tasks, which Poilievre said he would expand to include “the full cost of food, transportation and accommodation.”

The Tories also say they want to end tax writeoffs involving luxury corporate jets, arguing those businesses can instead write off the equivalent cost of commercial flights as well as any required charter flights.

“Conservatives want to unleash the strength of our mighty workers, unleash our economy, and put our country first for a change, by delivering tax fairness for everyone,” Poilievre said.

The Conservatives did not respond to a question about how much these measures would cost the federal government.

The announcement is unlikely to diminish criticism from within Poilievre’s own conservative circles that he and his campaign manager, Jenni Byrne, are failing to read the mood of Canadians and refocus the campaign on the impact of Trump’s tariffs and Canadian sovereignty.

Kory Teneycke, who was a communications director under former prime minister Stephen Harper and recently ran Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s third successful election campaign, threw down the gloves over Poilievre and the federal party’s performance in an event at the Empire Club of Canada on March 26.

“In the campaign cockpit, every buzzer and alarm is going off,” Teneycke said. He also accused Poilievre of focusing on things that have little relevance to voters now.

Before Trump took office, the Poilievre Conservatives had soared in the polls, and appeared to be heading toward forming a majority government on messages about the Liberals making life more expensive and harder overall.

But since Trump was sworn in and began his relentless campaign of tariffs, economic uncertainty and threats of annexation, Canadians priorities and anxieties have shifted.

Most polls now have the Liberals leading the Conservatives, a drastic turn around for a party that at the end of December trailed the Tories by more than 25 points.

Asked Saturday if his campaign was going to pivot at all to focus more directly on the impact of tariffs, Poilievre said he would retaliate against U.S. duties but turned the focus immediately back on the Liberals in Canada for what he called anti-energy laws that have driven investment elsewhere.

“We don’t know exactly what the Americans are going to do,” he said. “The president seems to change his mind from time to time. But we know what we can do. What we can do is take back control of our economic destiny, build an economic fortress by bringing home production, unlocking our resources, and standing strong for our economy here at home.”

Poilievre largely stuck to his own messaging later Saturday at a rally in Winnipeg, where he talked about taxes, inflation and crime, while criticizing Carneys time out of country and his business holdings.

Carney spent a large chunk of the first week directly addressing Canadians concerns about Trump, adjusting his campaign plan and donning his prime minister’s hat to return to Ottawa to meet with his U.S.-Canada cabinet committee following Trump’s new auto tariff announcement on Wednesday.

The Liberal leader also spoke with Trump by phone Friday for the first time. He also made announcements in the last week to aid the auto industry and its workers with a $2 billion fund, and to encourage the construction of nation-building projects like new highways and railways with a $5 billion infrastructure program.

Carney stopped by his candidate office in Nepean on Saturday, where he was greeted by a small but enthusiastic group of campaign workers and volunteers.

“Who is ready to stand up,” he started out saying, before teasing someone who had accidentally knocked over a campaign sign.

“Who is ready to put back the Carney signs,” he joked, drawing laughter.

He thanked them for their support to help get him elected as an MP for the first time.

Carney has faced questions about his decision to run in that seat, which became vacant only after the Liberal party ousted MP Chandra Arya as its candidate three days before the election was called.

The Liberal party has not clearly laid out exactly what Arya did that has prevented him from being a candidate, though Carney says it was a decision that was up to the green-light committee that screens candidates.

Last August, several Liberals criticized Arya for making an unsanctioned trip to India to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, even as Canada said it had evidence that agents of Modi’s government were involved in the murder of a Canadian citizen in British Columbia in 2023.

The Liberal party also barred Arya from running for the party leadership in January, citing various rules violations.

If March came in like a lamb, it’s certainly going out as a lion.

A winter storm moving across central Saskatchewan Thursday caused plenty of pains for drivers, with many highways in the area covered in snow or temporarily closed.

“The morning was good. It seemed like maybe we missed it,” Dundurn Fire Department Chief Tom Willms said.

“But then she snuck up. And once she started to freeze, it got to be a sheet of ice out there.”

Highway 11 south of Dundurn to Kenaston was a particularly troublesome spot. Dundurn Fire Chief Tom Willms says whiteout conditions led to multiple accidents in the area that ended up closing the highway for roughly three hours around 6:30 p.m.

First responders had a difficult time locating accidents along the highway, with such reduced visibility. Willms said he was responding to a crash and couldn’t see it until it was right in front of him.

Members of the Regina Fire and Protective Services (RFPS) say one person was treated for minor injuries following a house fire on Osler Street.

Crews responded to the 2300 block of Osler Street just before 8:30 a.m. Saturday.

Firefighters noted that flames were noticeable at the home upon arrival.

The chair of a charity Prince Harry set up to help young people with HIV and AIDS in Lesotho and Botswana has accused him of “harassment and bullying at scale” after he quit this week over a dispute he described as “devastating.”

Harry, the younger son of King Charles, co-founded Sentebale in 2006 in honor of his late mother Princess Diana. He left it, along with co-founder Prince Seeiso of Lesotho and the board of trustees, following a dispute with chair Sophie Chandauka.

In an interview with Sky News that will be broadcast in full on Sunday, Chandauka said, referring to the way Harry resigned: “At some point on Tuesday, Prince Harry authorized the release of a damaging piece of news to the outside world without informing me or my country directors, or my executive director.”

“And can you imagine what that attack has done for me, on me and the 540 individuals in the Sentebale organizations and their family,” she said. “That is an example of harassment and bullying at scale.”

Representatives for Harry and his wife Meghan did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegations.

Sky News said the couple declined to offer any formal response to the interview.

A source close to the charity’s trustees and patrons, including Harry, said they fully expected what they described as a publicity stunt and reached their collective decision with this in mind.

The same source said they remained firm in their decision to resign.

Harry and Seeiso said in a joint statement on Wednesday that it was “devastating” that the relationship between the charity’s trustees and Chandauka had broken beyond repair.

Chandauka has previously said Sentebale was beset by “poor governance, weak executive management, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny (and) misogynoir.”

In an interview with the Financial Times published on Saturday, she said she was asked by Harry’s team to protect Meghan after negative media coverage, which she refused to do.

She also said the way Sentebale was run “was no longer appropriate in 2023 in a post-Black Lives Matter world ... funders were asking for locally-led initiatives.”

Harry and Seeiso said on Wednesday that the trustees acted in the charity’s best interests in asking Chandauka to step down, but in turn she sued Sentebale to remain in her position.

Recent reports show that Canadians are losing sleep at an alarming rate.

A new sleep report conducted by GlobeScan for IKEA in 2025 shows that Canada’s Sleep Score falls five points below the global average.

The IKEA sleep report found that the average sleep score worldwide was 63 out of 100, while Canada’s score reached only 58.

The score was calculated based on people’s answers to five questions about good sleep: sleep quality, sleep duration, sleep flow, drift-off time, and their wake-up state.

Insufficient sleep for adults over 18 years of age is a recognized public health issue in Canada, according to the Canadian Sleep Society.

According to the report, there’s a global average of 1 hour and 20 minutes between how much sleep people want and how much sleep they’re getting.

The large-scale study was conducted using sleep habits and data gathered from over 55,000 people, along with six global experts, between Aug. 13, 2024, and Sept. 20, 2024.

The research was conducted online using national consumer research panels to recruit respondents, the report states.

Experts noted that although the report lacks peer-reviewed scientific rigor, it contains useful information, and the key points in the report are supported by global research findings.

Neurologist and sleep specialist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Dr. Brian Murray, said the findings of the report are “food for thought” and align with conventional research, he told CTVNews.ca on Saturday.

Meanwhile, another expert in the field, Dr. Wendy Hall, a nursing professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia and sleep specialist, noted that the research is based on people living in countries with IKEA markets, which points to a certain subset of the global population.

“It indicated that a lot of people don’t believe they’re getting enough sleep,” Hall told CTVNews.ca on Saturday.

“Part of the problem we face is that, as sleep becomes more recognized, people become more anxious about whether they’re getting enough sleep. Sometimes that anxiety gets in the way of getting enough sleep.”

Countries like the U.K. and Australia share similar sleep scores in the report, while Ireland, Sweden, the U.S., and Norway fall behind.

What can influence the quality of sleep?

Dr. Sophie Bostock, founder of The Sleep Scientist, says there could be a correlation between social connections, community living, and sleep patterns, which in turn could influence people’s overall happiness, according to the sleep report.

Tens of thousands of Ontarians went without power on Saturday as an ice storm pummeled parts of the province and threatened to hit even more .

A map from Hydro One, the provincial utility, showed more than 80,000 customers were in the dark Saturday afternoon because of outages concentrated in cottage country, from Tobermory and Gravenhurst to Peterborough and Kawartha Lakes.

The outages came after Environment Canada issued freezing rain warnings for swaths of Ontario and Quebec, starting on the northwestern shore of Lake Huron, extending as far south as Burlington, Ont., and as far east as Lac Megantic, Que.

Hydro One said crews were out in force to turn the lights back on.

By Saturday afternoon, people had started sharing images on social media of trees coated in ice and downed power lines.

Environment Canada was only predicting up to four millimetres of ice build-up in Toronto, but in Orillia the national forecaster said up to 25 millimetres of ice could accumulate.

The city at the heart of Ontario’s cottage country is among those hit by power outages, and officials said the public library was closed for the day because it’s without electricity.

Police advised against unnecessary travel over the weekend, saying the roads would likely be slippery.

Parts of southern Ontario have already been hit, but the storm is due to expand over the weekend.

It was also expected to be a stormy weekend in Quebec, where the southern part of the province is forecast to receive between five and 15 centimetres of snow into Saturday morning before freezing rain follows on Sunday for several hours.

Environment Canada also issued a special weather statement for a large swath of the province including the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region, the lower St. Lawrence, the Gaspe peninsula and the province’s north shore, where snow and freezing rain could last into Monday morning.

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe is travelling to Europe to promote the province’s agricultural, energy and manufacturing industries.

Moe is to attend a trade show in Hanover, Germany, where he is set to connect with investors in the technology and advanced manufacturing sector.

He says it’s more important now than ever to diversify the province’s trading markets, as Canada faces tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump.

Moe is also scheduled to make a stop in the United Kingdom for a keynote address at the London Stock Exchange before returning to Saskatchewan next week.

🎉 Update Completed Successfully! 🎉

We are thrilled to announce that our scheduled network update has been completed without any issues! 🚀 All our broadcast stations, streams, and websites are now fully operational and running better than ever.

What’s New?

Here’s what you can expect from this update:
✅ Improved Audio Player – No more interruptions or cutting off! Enjoy seamless streaming on our websites.
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Thank you for your patience and understanding during this process. We’re committed to providing you with the best listening experience possible and appreciate your support!

🎧 Happy Listening!
The EVO Radio & EVO Media Corporation Team

We’re committed to providing our audience with a listening experience like no other! To maintain this standard, we’re excited to announce a major update to our Broadcast Network.

What’s New?

This update will bring:

• A Better Audio Player: Improved performance on our websites to resolve issues with streams cutting off.
• Enhanced Session Operations: Ensuring error-free radio streams.
• Upgraded Security & Quality: Improved protection and overall broadcast quality.

Downtime Details:

• Expected Downtime: 1 hour (we’ve allocated up to 4 hours for any unforeseen circumstances).
• Impacted Services:
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    • Z103.5 – https://z1035.evoradio.ca/
    • 979 The Cowboy – https://979thecowboy.evoradio.ca/
    • 101 The Rockhound – https://101therockhound.evoradio.ca/
    • Classic 88.7 The Goat – https://887thegoat.evoradio.ca/
  • Websites:
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    • EVO Media Corporation – https://evomcorp.com/
    • DJ Spinderella – https://djspinderella.evomcorp.com/
  • Third-Party Apps: Any apps relying on our live broadcasts will also be affected.

Commitment to Excellence:
During the downtime, our team will work diligently to complete the update and monitor the network to ensure peak performance. We’re committed to enhancing your listening experience to the highest standards.

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We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your understanding as we work to improve our services.

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The EVO Radio & EVO Media Corporation Team