Tentative agreement reached with Treasury Board for workers: In The News for May 1

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 May 1 …

What we are watching in Canada …

The Public Service Alliance of Canada has reached a tentative contract agreement with the Treasury Board covering more than 120,000 federal government workers across the country.

The national strike is now over for Treasury Board workers, specifically members of the PA, SV, TC and EB bargaining groups, who are required to return to work May 1st at 9 a.m. Eastern Time or their next scheduled shift.

PSAC says strike action continues for 35,000 Canada Revenue Agency workers nationwide, with contract negotiations ongoing.

Public servants hit picket lines at locations across the country beginning April 19th in what the union said was one of the biggest job actions in Canadian history.

Service disruptions loomed large during the job action, from slowdowns at the border to pauses on new employment insurance, immigration and passport applications.

Initial negotiations on a new collective agreement initially began in June 2021, and the union declared an impasse in May 2022, with both parties filing labour complaints since.

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Also this …

A sentencing hearing is expected to take place today for an Ontario man who pleaded guilty after being accused of throwing gravel at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a September 2021 campaign stop.

Shane Marshall of St. Thomas, Ont., pleaded guilty in March to a lesser charge of common assault after first facing a charge of assault with a weapon.

The 26-year-old was charged after police alleged he threw gravel at Trudeau, who was boarding a campaign bus after a stop in London, Ont., that was disrupted by a protest.

The People’s Party of Canada has previously said it removed a man by the same name as riding association president after reviewing video clips of the incident.

The prime minster, who was campaigning at the time as Liberal party leader, was not hurt.

Today’s court hearing is set to begin at 9 a.m.

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What we are watching in the U.S. …

Wilson Garcia hadn’t even asked his neighbour to stop shooting his gun.

People in their rural town north of Houston are used to people firing their weapons to blow off steam, but it was late Friday night, and Garcia had a month-old son who was crying.

So, Garcia said, he and two other people went to his neighbour’s house to “respectfully” ask that he shoot farther away from their home.

“He told us he was on his property, and he could do what he wanted,” Garcia said Sunday after a vigil in Cleveland, Texas, for his 9-year-old son who was killed in the attack that soon followed.

The suspect, 38-year-old Francisco Oropeza, remained at large late Sunday despite a search involving more than 200 police from multiple jurisdictions.

Garcia called the police after Oropeza rejected his request. The man shot some more, and now it sounded louder. In the neighbourhood of homes on 1-acre lots, Garcia could see the man on his front porch but couldn’t tell what he was doing.

His family continued to called police — five calls in all, Garcia said. Five times the dispatcher assured that help was coming.

And then, 10 to 20 minutes after Garcia had walked back from Oropeza’s house, the man started running toward him, and reloading.

“I told my wife, `Get inside. This man has loaded his weapon,” Garcia said. “My wife told me to go inside because `he won’t fire at me, I’m a woman.”’

The gunman walked up to the home and began firing. Garcia’s wife, Sonia Argentina Guzman, 25, was at the front door, and the first to die.

The house held 15 people in all, several of them friends who had been there to join Garcia’s wife on a church retreat. The gunman seemed intent on killing everyone, Garcia said.

Also among the dead were Garcia’s son, Daniel Enrique Laso, and two women who died while shielding Garcia’s baby and 2-year-old daughter. Garcia said one of the women had told him to jump out a window “because my children were without a mother and one of their parents had to stay alive to take care of them.”

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What we are watching in the rest of the world …

King Charles III hasn’t even been crowned yet, but his name is already etched on the walls of Hill House School in London.

A wooden slab just inside the front door records Nov. 7, 1956, as the day the future king enrolled at Hill House, alongside other notable dates in the school’s 72-year history. There is a photograph of staff welcoming the then Prince Charles on his first day of school, and another of the 7-year-old boy getting into a Ford Zephyr with his bodyguard for the short trip back to Buckingham Palace.

To say Hill House is proud of its royal connection as Charles prepares for the coronation ceremony on May 6 would be an understatement.

“It’s just so fun to think the king went to our school,” said 11-year-old Lola Stewart. “Like, he’s worn our uniform. He’s probably been in this room. It’s just very exciting knowing that.”

Charles, the first U.K. monarch to be educated outside the palace walls, began his school career at Hill House, although he spent less than a year there before moving on to Cheam, an elite boarding school in the countryside west of London. Hill House, a family-run primary school in London’s tony Knightsbridge neighborhood is just a stone’s throw from the luxury department store Harrods and a short drive from Buckingham Palace.

But the future king was treated like anyone else, wearing the school uniform with a burnished gold jumper and walking through the streets to the nearby sports field without a bodyguard, though the headmaster’s wife was nearby.

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On this day in 1909 …

Alcohol prohibition went into effect in Ontario. It was abolished in 1927.

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In entertainment …

The pioneering and scandalous French stage star Sarah Bernhardt was one of the world’s most famous women by the time of her death in 1923. She owed her fame not only to her acting talent but her instinct to use the press for branding decades before the word existed. Nonetheless it has taken 100 years to stage what is in France the first complete retrospective on the eccentric and multihyphenate star known as “La Divine” whom many consider the world’s first celebrity. The public is now discovering the eccentric jigsaw puzzle of her life iside the Petit Palais museum in Paris. The exhibition is called “Sarah Bernhardt: And the woman created the star” and it runs until Aug. 27.

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Did you see this?

Quebec’s minimum wage will rise by one dollar to $15.25 as of Monday.

The Quebec government says it is trying to improve the purchasing power of low-income earners and encourage participation in the labour market.

The province’s labour department says nearly 299,000 workers will benefit from the increase, including more than 164,000 women.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which represents small and medium-sized businesses, says it worries about the effect the new wage will have on its members, noting it comes on top of rising costs for electricity, raw materials and other expenses.

Meanwhile, a group dedicated to fighting poverty in the province says the increase isn’t sufficient given rampant inflation.

Virginie Lariviere says social and labour groups had been seeking $15 an hour as far back as 2016 and have been advocating for the minimum salary to be raised to $18 an hour over the past two years.

The increase from the current $14.25 wage is the largest percentage increase in the province’s minimum salary since 1995.

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This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 1, 2023.

The Canadian Press