Your World Tonight - Quebec Liberals want Trudeau to quit, Alberta EV tax, Puerto Rico blackout and more

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

The Quebec Liberal caucus is the latest to decide that Justin Trudeau should step down as leader. A recent opinion poll shows his popularity at an all-time low. What’s next for the prime minister?And: Alberta introduces a tax on electric vehicles. The province says EVs are harder on roads than gas-powered vehicles because of their heavy batteries, and the money will help with maintenance. EV advocates say gasoline vehicles impose a different cost on society — by polluting the air and environment.Also: Most of Puerto Rico has no power after a grid failure. The cause is likely malfunctioning equipment. Puerto Rico’s energy infrastructure was heavily damaged by Hurricane Maria in 2017. It’s struggled to get back to full strength ever since.Plus: Exoskeletons for kids with mobility issues, tracking seniors electronically, a look back at the year in climate news, and more.

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about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Well, at this point, it's pretty much everybody asking him to step down. Once you have Atlantic Caucus with 23 MPs, the Ontario Caucus with 75 MPs, and now the Quebec caucus with 33 MPs. The numbers are definitely not adding up in Justin Trudeau's favour. Is the countdown on to the end of his time as Prime Minister? The opposition is vowing to topple the government early in 2025

and more and more members of his own party are pushing him to resign. Welcome to Your World tonight. It's Tuesday, December 31st, just before 6pm Eastern. I'm Martina Fitzgerald. Also on the podcast... There was a bit of a shock knowing I'd have to pay $200 compared to the, I believe, about $90 it is now just for the gas car. New Year's EV.

Alberta gets ready to roll out its new tax on electric vehicles. The province says the tax will make sure all car owners pay their fair share. But proponents of EVs think the charge is being misdirected. The Quebec caucus of the federal liberals is adding its voice to calls for Justin Trudeau to step down. It follows closely on the heels of the caucuses in Atlantic Canada and Ontario. And that's not the only bad news for the PM. As David Thurton reports, a new poll puts his popularity at an all-time low. These are numbers that are going to really strike the ultimate level of fear into the survival of the party, at least in the short term. Satya Kohl says polling numbers for

the Liberals are at an all-time low. Kohl is president of the Angus Reid Institute. Support for the party, she says, trails numbers from the Liberals' worst electoral performance in 2011. This is a different story. We're rolling into the new year. We're into the new year with a very different reality for Trudeau and for the Liberals. The public opinion firm says the party's support is now just 16 percent. And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's approval rating is also at an all-time low, at 22 percent%. The poll is accurate plus or minus two percentage points, 19 times out of 20. Obviously, the situation is very unstable right now for the country. Quebec Liberal MP Alexandra Mendez says Trudeau enters 2025

facing an unpredictable Donald Trump presidency. Knowing what's coming in January in the United States, yes, we need to resolve this as quickly as possible. She's made it clear for some time she wants Trudeau to go. Now, more of her colleagues are joining the call. According to sources, the Quebec caucus chair has been consulting MPs in the province. As far as I know, the consensus was that the prime minister should step away. That has been the consensus that was communicated to the caucus chair and that he was meant to convey to the national caucus chair. The Quebec MPs joined Liberals in Ontario and Atlantic Canada,

and it comes after the explosive resignation of Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland earlier this month. All of this leaves the Prime Minister with little choice, according to David Hurley. He used to work for former Prime Minister Paul Martin. Well, I think everybody's expectation is the Prime Minister will return to Ottawa and will announce he's resigning. Hurley says the party has to consider what happens next and how it will deal with opposition parties who want to topple the Liberal government

as soon as Parliament returns at the end of January. Well, I think prorogation is necessary because the NDP have stated that they will vote down the government at the first confidence motion that's available to them. Liberal MPs are preparing for a future without Trudeau. CBC obtained an email that was circulated among Liberal caucus members. It outlines a path forward which includes prorogation and a short leadership race. David Thurton, CBC News, Ottawa. It may not be the charge we're expecting from an electric vehicle. Starting next month, drivers of Teslas and other EVs in Alberta will pay an additional $200 per year.

The new tax is supposed to help cover the cost of road maintenance. But as Madeline Cummings reports, some say it penalizes drivers for shifting to renewable energy. At first reading about it was a bit of a shock. Charging up his EV in Edmonton, Eugene Misakwe says cost savings are what attracted him to electric vehicles. So news of the extra fee came as a surprise. Still, he supports the idea of EV drivers contributing to road maintenance. And even with the new tax, he'll still be saving money. Knowing I'd have to pay $200 compared to the, I believe, about $90 it is now just for the gas car. But then looking at the savings I have in gas, I'm able to stomach that, offset it a bit more.

First announced last February, the $200 annual EV tax will be paid by drivers when they register their vehicles, on top of the existing registration fee. The United Conservative Party government says it's justified because electric vehicle owners don't pay the provincial tax on gasoline. The government also says EVs tend to be heavier, causing more wear on roads. Finance Minister Nate Horner says the surcharge is about fairness. I think all Albertans would like to do their part in making sure we can maintain our highway infrastructure. Alberta isn't alone. Saskatchewan introduced a similar charge in 2021, and some states in the U.S. also impose higher registration fees for electric vehicles. But critics say the tax punishes people whose vehicles pollute less at a time when some governments offer incentives for going electric. William York is a board member

with the Electric Vehicle Association of Alberta. He's against the tax, saying plenty of electric vehicles weigh less than gas and diesel powered trucks and SUVs. The real culprit in damage to roads due to weight is commercial vehicles that are above their allowed weight as per city bylaws. Those are the strongest contributors to road damage. Though electric vehicle drivers dodge Alberta's fuel tax, charging up isn't free. Eugene Misakwe plugged in his Volkswagen outside an Ikea on Tuesday, but typically charges at home. He says he pays about $7 per charge on his electricity bill, which includes GST. Vehicle registration data from March show more people are going electric in Alberta.

But according to 2021 figures from Statistics Canada, only about 3% of households owned an electric or hybrid car. That was lower than the national average of 5%. Alberta's new tax, once in effect, will apply only to fully electric vehicles and not hybrids. Madeline Cummings, CBC News, Edmonton. A large fire has destroyed a piece of Canadian history on Vancouver Island. Part of the boardwalk and a number of businesses in Telegraph Cove have burned down. The village sits about two hours north of Campbell River

and was home to BC's first whale-watching company. Denise Bastian is with the local art gallery. We've lost the restaurant, museum, whale watching offices are gone, and also the grippy bear tour office is gone. The resort is just devastated. Only 20 people live in Telegraph Cove. The village is a popular tourist spot. Officials say the fire started underneath the boardwalk. There is no word yet on the cause. On the podcast tonight, a grid failure leaves most of Puerto Rico without electricity.

Using technology to keep an eye on seniors with dementia. And 2024 will be remembered for less attention given to more extreme weather events. Backers of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-yool rallied in Seoul. Protesters are angry over an arrest warrant issued for Yoon. He's facing possible insurrection charges after a failed coup earlier this month. Yoon was stripped of his powers and suspended. South Korea's constitutional court is now deciding whether to permanently remove him from office. Mid-South Korea's political turmoil, the aftermath of one of its worst air disasters.

Tearful families grieve at a memorial in Muon Airport. A Jeju airliner crash-landed there Sunday, killing 179 people. Jeju's CEO says the company will compensate families of the victims and cover funeral costs. U.S. aviation officials are helping South Korea with the investigation. They say it could take weeks to decode information from the plane's black boxes. With the clock ticking down to midnight, millions of people in Puerto Rico are still without electricity. The hydrogrid collapsed this morning. Getting it back up and running could take days. Power outages in the U.S. territory have been a

source of frustration for years. Katie Nicholson has more on the bad timing and how Puerto Ricans plan to celebrate anyway. Power generators hum in Javier Ruajovet's San Juan neighborhood, part of a rude New Year's Eve awakening. While I was sleeping, it was around 5.30 a.m., I noticed that the air conditioner went off. Lucky for him, the renewable energy advocate has solar panels. Not enough power to run A.C., but enough to run his oven and bake sourdough for tonight's festivities. Puerto Rico's aging and fragile electricity grid often fails, especially after Hurricane Maria pounded the islands in 2017. Well, there's a level of people being used to it,

but at the same time, it's New Year's Eve, people have plans. So I think people are particularly mad today. In 2021, Luma Energy, a private company, took over management of the territory's grid from the government-owned authority. But problems persist. Today, a Luma spokesperson said a 130,000-volt cable failed, which caused a cascade effect. Laura Kuhl is a professor at Northeastern University who has extensively studied Puerto Rico's energy system. There's only a few primary distribution lines for electricity, which makes it very vulnerable. And I think that this outage today is a very clear example of the lack of redundancy in the system,

that if one place fails, it reverberates across the entire grid. Kuhl says while there have been some significant investments since Hurricane Maria, there is a long way to go. Some of the communities that I've talked with in our research talk about experiencing power outages two or three times a week regularly. Sometimes these are relatively short, but it's a very common occurrence. So reliability has not improved and costs continue to be high. Marta Fernandez lights a gas stove.

She has family from Toronto visiting her rural home outside of San Juan. Well, we have to make some changes to our plant. Still, she considers herself lucky. She has a generator. Many others do not. Many families have, without enough economical resources, here in Puerto Rico, more than 45% of our families are under poverty. So they have to make many sacrifices to deal with these problems, you know. Luma says it's already restored power to some areas,

but most Puerto Ricans will likely ring in the new year in the dark. Katie Nicholson, CBC News, Washington. The United Nations says hospitals in Gaza have become death traps for the Palestinians who need them. A new report by the UN's Human Rights Office condemns Israel's attacks on health care facilities. Jeremy Lawrence is a UN spokesperson. The report graphically details the impact of Israel's attacks from the destruction of buildings and facilities to the killings of patients, staff and other civilians, raising serious concerns about Israel's compliance with international law.

Israel's military accuses Hamas of using the hospitals as military command centres. The IDF says it has taken measures to keep civilians safe. The UN study says there is not enough information to substantiate either of those claims. It is the final day of the hottest year on record. How well did the fight against the changing climate go in 2024? The CBC's international climate correspondent says the answer is both hot and cold. Susan Ormiston spoke to Your World Tonight host Tom Harrington about the year that was and the year ahead. Tom started by asking Susan to explain why 2024 was hot and cold.

Well, because this year was the hottest on record for the second consecutive year, and next year is predicted to be in the top three, Tom, we're now flirting with increases in global temperatures that will exceed the goal we set in the Paris Agreement, trying to keep it to 1.5 degrees Celsius warming. We're now going past that on a monthly basis. So it's not in the right direction. We spoke to Freddie Otto with the World Weather Attribution Organization. Climate change did play a role and often a major role in most of the events we studied, making heat, droughts, tropical cyclones and heavy rainfall more likely and more intense across the world, destroying lives and livelihoods of millions. Okay, that's the hot part. What was cold? Well, I'm going to say cooling. And the answer to that is politics.

I mean, we saw up to 2 billion people voting this year in elections across the world, including in India U.S. election of Donald Trump, of course, who's signaling he'll cut climate incentives and tap down enthusiasm for renewable energies. We spoke to Aru Shania Jay. She's the executive director of the Sunrise Movement in the U.S. We have six years left to decarbonize this country and turn our economy around. Losing four of them to Trump is disastrous. And it wouldn't just be pressing pause on where we are right now. It would actually be actively undoing a lot of what we've already won. But Susan, what about the commitments that have been made at the big climate conferences, COP28 and 29? Yeah, we saw two quite contentious climate negotiations, the massive gathering in

Dubai at the end of 2023, committing countries to transition away from oil and gas. You may remember that. But in 2024, Tom, oil and gas production rose to record highs. And coal, it's now projected to reach record peaks through 2027. Really? Yeah, contrary to the International Energy Agency's earlier predictions. And then last month, we were in Baku, Azerbaijan, there was a huge push to provide financing for countries most vulnerable to climate change. It fell short. I mean, the countries agreed on something, but few people liked it and not those paying for it or those receiving it. So here are a few of those voices at COP29 beginning with India. This has been stage managed and we are extremely, extremely disappointed with this incident. Let us tell ourselves the truth. This is 3am and we're going to clap our hands and say this is what we're going to do? I don't think so.

We, of course, are aware and know that this is not adequate. And we say that, but we are glad that at least we were able to achieve something. So, Tom, 2024 is not feeling like a win-win, even as we saw record floods in Spain. You remember those cars piled up, deaths in India, and then the Jasper wildfires ripping through that community. So terrible, those images. You know, as obscured as it might have been by the pitched partisan politics we saw, Susan, what's maybe the hidden hope or success? Well, at the end of this year, we saw a preliminary report from Climate Change Canada saying our greenhouse gas emissions are dropping this year, slightly down, lower than they've been in two decades, excluding the pandemic years. So that's going in the right direction. And we are seeing an evolution in energy.

The move to wind, solar, back to nuclear and efforts to capture carbon is galloping along. Demand for electricity is really skyrocketing and companies are almost in a kind of gold rush to supply it without relying solely on fossil fuels. In the next five years, renewables are predicted to grow to supply 46% of our electricity demand. So that's a lot. And we're seeing private investment pouring into clean energy and clean tech. And many say that that kind of momentum can't be stopped in spite of political crosswinds. We went to Texas to see the boom in big battery storage, and we spoke to Tim Nelson from the multinational energy company RWE.

Texas itself is number two in the nation in energy storage. It's the leading renewable energy producer in the whole country. It's not necessarily the politics itself that's going to drive how this goes forward. It's the demand. We're continuing to see the demand increase. All right, looking ahead to 2025, are you optimistic? I'm inspired. I'm inspired by the degree of effort pouring into creative solutions to our energy and emissions problems. It's not at scale yet. I think, I believe that will come.

I'm not optimistic, though, about the power of governments or institutions like the UN to drag people fast enough, far enough towards the future. And then there's this surge of misinformation still, campaigns planting mistrust about the need to behave differently on climate. What we all want, which is to prevent irreversible warming and its consequences. Susan, thanks. You're welcome.

That is international climate correspondent Susan Ormiston speaking with Tom Harrington in Toronto. More Canadian seniors are living with dementia. One of the challenges for their children and caregivers is keeping track of where they are. A home in Montreal is using technology to give more freedom to residents and a sense of security for their families. But the devices they're using were never meant to keep track of people. Vanessa Lee reports. When 85-year-old Pierrette Beauvais leaves her seniors home to go for a walk,

she always wears a lanyard with her keys. And recently, she was given an air tag to attach to it. I feel more comfortable, yeah. Beauvais lives at Montreal's La Résidence Outremont, where Bluetooth-enabled trackers are helping seniors in cognitive decline maintain some independence. Nurse Lynn Vancelli founded the home. About three or four years ago, we realized that one of the residents, we couldn't find them. And this, of course, causes

a lot of stress and anxiety. That's when they decided to turn to technology. We use air tags in our luggage when we go on our trips. So why don't we put an air tag on the keys or in a purse or in a wallet of a person who we think that might get lost. Vinceli says the initiative, which requires residents and their families to consent, has been well received. Staff make their rounds every couple of hours, and if someone can't be found, they look for the location of the air tag. If an employee sees that the person is missing for an hour or so, they phone me and I check where they are and I go get them. But brand specific Bluetooth tracking devices have limitations. No technology is 100% effective. Technology analyst Carmi Levy says air tags should not be relied upon as the

only measure to keep people safe. These are not GPS devices. There's no GPS chip on them. They're not communicating with a satellite. So if you drop an air tag in a remote location, it's not looking for a satellite. It's waiting for another Apple device to get within radio range and then it pings off of it. Cell phones are more reliable to pinpoint an exact location, but batteries can drain within a day. Air tags last about a year. Karen Tyrell is a BC-based dementia expert. She says it's worth exploring tracking devices

if it means patients can have more freedom, noting each person's experience is different. Maybe we do a little bit of a test where we have somebody follow the person for the first time without them knowing, and if it all works out well, then we can add it in a care plan. Creative solutions leveraging technology in hopes of improving safety for seniors. Vanessa Lee, CBC News, Montreal.

A Canadian-made invention is giving some children the gift of mobility, an exoskeleton designed to help kids with disabilities learn to walk. But it's not cheap. And as Erin Collins reports, that's a big barrier for parents and therapists who'd like access to it. There you go, bud. For four-year-old Max LaBelle, every step is a struggle. Ready? Go. Born with hypotonic cerebral palsy, simple tasks like walking are a huge challenge.

But this BC family recently discovered a game-changer at a clinic in Alberta. Let's go! A Canadian-made exoskeleton designed to help kids like Max find their stride. The minute that he was put into it and they started walking, his face lit up. It's called a Trexo walker, and Max's mom, Jamie LaBelle, is sold. The set of robotic legs set inside a more traditional walker has her son moving. Just between September, him being in the Trexo, and now being more upright and wanting to use his legs more and his limbs more,

everything's changed. His posture's changed. His head control's changed. How has she been tolerating the Trexo lately? Julie Rubin sets up a Trexo at the private clinic she operates in Calgary. Max travels here from his home an hour outside Vancouver to use the device at the private clinic she operates in Calgary. Max travels here from his home an hour outside Vancouver to use the device at the clinic and Ruben says Max's isn't the only success story here. Literally just on Friday we had a kiddo take his first like three independent steps and that happens almost on a daily basis. But the walker and the step-up it offers is hard to find. There are only 400 in operation worldwide, making it out of reach for many kids who need it. The more supports we can provide to

a child, the more able-bodied they'll be down the road and the further along their development would be. The Trexo is a Canadian innovation designed in this Mississauga lab. The price tag for the cutting-edge device starts at around $40,000. It's expensive. It is a total game-changer for these families, but it is expensive technology, there's no question. Marc Robert works at Trexo. He also has a son who uses the device. Over time, it financially makes sense because it saves so much money in the back end with hospitalizations and, honestly, quality of life. Like many new medical advances, the Trexo isn't publicly funded, meaning families like the LaBelles who want one are left to foot the bill. The price check is a gut punch, and you're like, oh, okay, let's sit on that for a minute. Max's family is fundraising

to get him a Trexo of his own. They're more than halfway there and hopeful but Jamie LaBelle worries about others who may not have as much support. It's hard right like it's not you shouldn't have to choose between a mortgage payment and a piece of equipment for your kid. It's a choice the LaBelles hope won't be necessary in the future. But until then, they'll continue to take things one step at a time. Good job. Erin Collins, CBC News, Calgary. Finally, we often celebrate the lives of world leaders,

former presidents and prime ministers. Tonight, we honour 84-year-old Agnes Brake of Pasadena, Newfoundland. Brake and her late husband helped raise more than 20 children, five of them their own. She's helped feed hungry neighbours. She's received numerous awards for her charity work. There's no greater pleasure than to be able to help someone that really needs help. You know, we weren't hungry. If we knew anyone was in need of anything that we had, they could have it.

Brake still visits neighbors and she volunteers. She says she won't let anything stop her, including her own almost unbelievable health challenges. I think there's roughly 15 times I've had cancer. Yes, 15 times. The first diagnosis came when she was in her 30s. She's had malignant melanoma twice, also breast cancer, and today leukemia, the same type that took her husband's life more than 20 years ago.

For years, Brake ran a support group for cancer patients and says she learned a positive attitude is part of successful treatment. It's so much better not to be stressed out over it. Even now, like now on the phone, and sometimes someone will come to visit me, I still talk to them. Yes, yes, I have cancer. Yes, people die with cancer, but people live with cancer too. Brake says she plans on living for a while yet and plans to keep on helping out however she can. Thanks for being with us. This has been Your World Tonight for New Year's Eve 2024.

I'm Martina Fitzgerald. Best wishes for 2025.