The World This Hour - The World This Hour for 2025/02/07 at 10:00 EST

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

The World This Hour for 2025/02/07 at 10:00 EST

The following is advertiser content from Audible. In a world of endless noise, slowing down to meditate is key to ensuring your health. Author Chris Bailey shows that we all have time in how to train your mind. Listen to a sample now. I'll cover how to meditate, which is far simpler than you might think, in greater depth later on in the show. But in a nutshell, the practice simply involves focusing on your breath or on another object of meditation for an amount of time that you predetermine. Each time you get lost in thought, which you will constantly, you draw your attention back to your breathing.

That's pretty much it. Doing this lets you step back from the thought patterns in your head, which helps you think more clearly. Meditation can seem hard as hell in practice, but almost stupidly simple in theory. Explore over 890,000 titles on audible.ca by signing up for a free 30-day trial and start listening today. From CBC News, it's the World This Hour. I'm Joe Cummings. Looking for ways to make Canada less dependent on the United States, Prime Minister Justin

Trudeau is in Toronto today hosting a National Economic Summit. How do we make sure we are resilient as an economy. First of all, on Canada, it's about time we had genuine free trade within Canada. That's Trudeau opening the summit with a call for provincial trade barriers to be dropped. The U.S. tariff threats have led to this gathering, which has brought together business and labor leaders and politicians from all levels of government. Janice McGregor has more. Putting a couple hundred business, labor, and political leaders in a room with policy

experts today for four hours, of course, won't fix everything. The government hopes, though, to be seen as facilitating some of the tough conversations that are required right now. Labor leader Lana Payne from Unifor is on the front lines of this, representing auto workers once again fearful of their jobs heading south, realizing they can't count on the free market. You can't do that anymore. You have to absolutely put planning around what it is we do with our economy and how we can best build good, strong Canadian jobs.

Donald Trump frames economic prosperity as a national security issue. The upside of this is that it could focus Canadians to take a hard look at why they aren't more strategic about doing business with each other instead of relying so much on the Americans. Janice McGregor, CBC News, Ottawa. Still on the economic front, Statistics Canada says 76,000 jobs were added to the economy last month. That's something of a pleasant surprise, and it moves the unemployment rate down to 6.6%

from 6.7% in December. Peter Armstrong has more. This is two months in a row now of job market growth that's well above expectations, and it marks three straight months of gains in the jobs market after we had seen a pretty solid stretch where the unemployment rate had been rising relentlessly and over those three months Canada's added like 211,000 jobs. Better still these January numbers they were almost entirely private sector jobs. Now all this matters even more than usual as so much of the economic conversation in

Canada has been focused on the impact of a potential trade war with the United States. Canada's economy isn't exactly fighting that war from a position of strength. You look at per capita GDP, it's fallen for six straight quarters. The unemployment rate had been rising relentlessly. So this is good news, and it does provide at least something of a cushion that allows the economy to deal with all of this uncertainty that's just sloshing around the world right now. Peter Armstrong, CBC News, Toronto.

The federal liberal leadership candidates have another hurdle across today. It's a $125,000 payment to stay in the race. The candidates have already laid out $100,000 to get their campaign started, and then after today's payment, another $25,000 will be needed by February 17th. At least one candidate, Karina Gould, is critical of the steep cost, saying it's unfairly narrowing the field. A government employees union is filing a lawsuit over cuts being made to USAID. The lawsuit claims the Trump Administration's unilateral actions are unconstitutional and

illegal and will contribute to a global humanitarian crisis. Tens of millions of people around the world rely on the agency's aid and medical programs, but led by Elon Musk, the Trump White House is taking steps to dismantle it. Samantha Power is a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and the former head of U.S. AID. This is devastating and it is seeding the field as well to the People's Republic of China, to the Russian Federation and other malign actors who would like nothing more than to see the U.S. ground game in American foreign policy, the face of American values disappear like this.

Under Trump's proposed cuts, the agency's staff will be cut from 10,000 employees down to 300. And that is A World This Hour. For CBC News, I'm Joe Cummings.