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At the 2017 Invictus Games, being held in Toronto from Sept. 23 to 30, retired sergeant Tyron Lincoln will be competing in three different sports — wheelchair rugby, cycling, and track and field — even though he battles chronic pain.

An accident that occurred while he was loading a bomb onto a fighter jet left him with a linear skull fracture. “So I suffer from severe headaches,” he explains. “I suffer from severe pain all the time. So I’m at a pain management clinic, and they can’t do nothing. The doctor just tells me, ‘You know what, you’ve got to live with it.’”
 For most of Al McFarlane’s 35 years with the Canadian Forces, he served as an aviation technician in the Air Force. But near the end of his military career, he worked at Defence Research and Development Canada as a crash and casualty investigator, studying the protective equipment worn by members of the Forces who died in Afghanistan. “We’d have to go to the morgue and pick up all the personal protective equipment that was on the bodies, take it back to our lab, and try and see how we can make that gear more efficient, safer for the troops in theatre,” he says.

McFarlane remembers exactly how many casualties he saw: 89. He had to analyze everything from their socks to their flack vests. At a certain point, he started responding personally to the victims. “I learned their names and I learned their faces,” he says.
 A new report argues small and medium-sized GTA businesses need to trade more with the world — and especially Europe — to boost economic growth.

According to the report, published Wednesday by the Toronto Region Board of Trade, only 4 per cent of Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises (those with fewer than 500 employees, also known as SMEs) export. That’s compared to 28 per cent in Germany, 27 per cent in France, and 24 per cent in Japan. Among G7 nations, Canada finishes last.

By comparison, 23 per cent of large Canadian firms trade internationally. The report found that if the same proportion of SMEs did so, they would generate $225 billion more in exports and create 2 million new jobs.
 Ontario’s Liberal government announced today that as of next July, consumers will be able to buy marijuana online and at 40 LCBO-run retail outlets.

The date is in line with the federal government’s plan to legalize pot by July 1, 2018. By the end of 2020, 150 small stand-alone stores should be up and running across the province. The legal age for purchase will be 19, one year higher than the minimum set by the federal government earlier this year.

Edibles and oils will not be on sale in Ontario, only dried cannabis, in line with federal requirements. The province is waiting on federal guidance on labelling and packaging, and had no comment on the potency of the pot that would be on offer.

Consumption will be limited to private residences, at least at the start. So while individuals will be able to spark up in their backyard, they won’t be allowed to use the drug in public spaces, at work, or in their cars. Yasir Naqvi, Ontario’s attorney general, said there may be opportunities in the future for licensing private establishments for the consumption of pot.
 The first round of negotiations toward a new North American Free Trade Agreement starts Wednesday in Washington, D.C. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland laid out Canada’s priorities in a speech at the University of Ottawa earlier this week.

Besides promising to modernize the trade deal, cut red tape, ease the movement of professionals across borders, and improve government procurement, Freeland emphasized that Canada would seek to make NAFTA a “more progressive” deal.

To this government, making the deal more progressive means adding chapters on labour safeguards, the environment and climate change, gender rights, and Indigenous issues, and it means reforming investor-state dispute resolution.

“Freeland was really focusing on a new agenda, or pushing out the envelope of what’s possible,” says Laura Dawson, director of the Canada Institute at the Wilson Centre in Washington. “And I think she did that because it’s important to Canadians, and it’s important to the Trudeau government.”

“When I look at Freeland’s agenda, I say, wow, good luck with that. Trade agreements are tough, and it’s really hard to put binding commitments into trade agreements that encourage positive behaviour,” she says. “Trade agreements are much better at the ‘thou shalt not’ stuff … But we don’t really know what’s possible to achieve until you put the stuff on the table.”

So what could these new progressive chapters look like?
 Ontario’s standing committee on finance and economic affairs criss-crossed the province in July, hearing out labour groups, businesses, and other interested parties on Bill 148 — the Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act. The bill includes a $15 minimum wage, more personal leave and vacation time, and measures to prevent employers from changing or cancelling shifts on less than 48 hours’ notice.

But some businesses are wondering how they’ll manage to deal with the changes. “Bill 148 is ill-advised,” says Karl Baldauf, vice-president of policy and government relations at the Ontario Chamber of Commerce. “The government has not provided for the kind of economic analysis that you would expect from a piece of legislation that’s going to have such profound impact as quick as it will on the Ontario economy.”

Earlier this summer, we asked labour groups what they wanted the government to add to Bill 148. So what do businesses want the government to do?
 Although it wasn’t included in this year’s federal budget, the government could still move on privatizing Canadian airports. Recent reports reveal the Liberals have asked consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to advise on how the feds could “act as a commercial adviser assisting with additional analytical work with respect to advancing a new governance framework for one or more Canadian airports” — in other words, how changes to the way Canadian-owned and -operated airports might be made.

Canada’s eight largest airports have since 1992 been run by private non-profits on land leased from the federal government. According to a report by the C.D. Howe Institute released earlier this year, Canada is the only country in the world that does things this way.

“The Mulroney government had us going down the path of full [privatization], but the Chrétien government made a promise to halt it in the early 1990s,” says Benjamin Dachis, associate director of research at the C.D. Howe Institute. “What they came up with instead was a classic Canadian comprise of starting along a path but not going all the way, because nobody was sure at the time what fully for-profit airports would look like.”

Disagreements over the best path forward have persisted ever since. Even airport authorities disagree: Ontario’s two biggest airports, Toronto’s Pearson and Ottawa’s Macdonald–Cartier, are on opposite sides of the fight.
 A number of trans and non-binary Canadians are arguing for the removal of sex as an identifier on government-issued ID.

Ontario-born activist and filmmaker Joshua Ferguson, who identifies as non-binary, wants the designation changed on their (Ferguson’s preferred pronoun) birth certificate.

Dustin Dyck, a father in Saskatchewan, is fighting to have his 14-year-old’s birth certificate scrubbed of a sexual identifier, because he says it’s led to severe bullying. (The teen, named Jordyn, identifies as “agender,” or genderless.)

A British Columbia couple demanded and, in June, received a health card for their baby, Searyl, with a “U” in place of an “M” or “F.” But the province won’t issue a birth certificate without a sex identifier, so now the parents are suing the Vital Statistics Agency.

Ontario decided in March to allow drivers to have an “X” on their licences instead of an “M” or “F” to indicate that they don’t identify as male or female. As of June 2016, sex does not appear on Ontario health cards.

Birth certificates are the next provincial document in line. The government held public consultations on the issue last summer and could take sex off birth certificates as early as next year.
 Last week, the federal government approved the Lake Erie Connector project, a 1,000-megawatt transmission line to be buried under the lake, sending electricity 117 kilometres back and forth between Nanticoke, Ontario, and Erie County in Pennsylvania.

“It couldn’t have come at a better time,” says Jatin Nathwani, executive director of the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy. “It fits in very well with Ontario’s climate change policies, national climate aspirations, and the ability to trade our low-carbon electricity into the U.S. market.”

The approval came just before the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers announced that the province had wasted 7.6 terawatt-hours of clean energy last year — a 58 per cent increase over the year before. “The power was not needed in Ontario, and could not be exported, so it was dumped,” said Paul Acchione, energy expert and former president of the OSPE.
