Analysis of samples from one of the city’s water tanks found “exceedingly high levels of various fuel components,” Amy Elgersma, Iqaluit’s chief administrative officer, said, adding it was likely diesel or kerosene.

Residents in Iqaluit, the capital of Canada’s northernmost territory Nunavut, reported fuel odours in the water over the weekend, but the source was not clear.

The city declared a state of emergency on Tuesday night, telling residents to stop using city water for drinking and cooking. The water would not be safe even after boiling, the city said.

Officials suspect the fuel entered the tank from soil or ground water contamination, and are emptying water from the tank to conduct further investigations.

Meanwhile water will be routed around the tank, and Elgersma said Iqaluit’s roughly 7,000 residents will receive instructions from the city on when they should flush their pipes.

“The best evidence that we have right now indicates that the risk of long-term health effects (for those who drank the water) is not a concern at this point,” Dr. Michael Patterson, Nunavut’s chief medical officer, said.

He added that there was “no evidence” of carcinogenic chemicals officials had worried about, including benzene and toluene, both of which can be found in fuel.

However, he cautioned that it could be the middle or end of next week before the city lifted the do-not-consume order.

Although Canada has 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water within its borders, 45 Indigenous communities across the country currently have boil-water advisories. Nunavut’s population is 86 per cent Indigenous.

Canada’s Indigenous people experience the country’s highest rates of poverty, with 25 per cent estimated to be living in poverty, according to the Canadian Poverty Institute.

Water is a contentious issue for Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was first elected in 2015 with a promise to end all boil-water advisories within five years.

— Moira Warburton reports for Reuters from Vancouver.

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Over 710,000 lightning events were recorded in British Columbia and northwestern Alberta between 3 p.m. on Wednesday and 6 a.m. on Thursday, up from an average 8,300 from the same period over the past five years, said Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist with Vaisala, a global environmental measurements company which collects the data.

Of those events, the company said, over 112,000 were “cloud-to-ground” lightning, while over 597,000 were “in-cloud” pulses.

British Columbia has been recovering from the grip of an unprecedented heat wave, which has so far caused 719 confirmed deaths, triple what would normally occur in the same time period, the province’s chief coroner said on Friday.

During the heat wave, the town of Lytton, southwest of Kamloops, broke Canada’s 80-plus year old heat record with a 49.6 C temperature. A forest fire that started on Wednesday razed Lytton to the ground, and caused two deaths. The cause of the fire was under investigation.

British Columbia usually accounts for about five per cent of Canada’s total lighting strikes each year, but it has reported its annual number in less than 48 hours, Vagasky said.

The figure is comparable to “what you would typically see on some of the bigger lightning days in really lightning prone regions of the United States, like Texas or Oklahoma,” Vagasky said, and is unheard of for a region like British Columbia.

The high number of lightning strikes was caused in part by the heat wave, which created high levels of moisture in the atmosphere in the form of melting snow and evaporation of water from vegetation, said Jonathan Bau, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

The moisture fueled the unusually fierce thunderstorms.

“We’re not in the middle of summer where everything’s dried out,” Bau said, adding that more lightning was forecast for the weekend.

The strikes caused several forest fires across central British Columbia, with 136 fires burning as of Friday afternoon, B.C. officials said at a briefing.

The fires are expected to burn through 100,000 hectares (247,105 acres) by the end of the weekend, officials said, a significantly higher figure than by this point in previous years — B.C. does not usually see its forest fire season ramp up until late July.

Over 1,300 homes have been ordered evacuated, and it is not known how many people are missing. The Red Cross is running a phone line for family reunification, officials said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Moira Warburton in Vancouver. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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The two provinces joined in a so-called “bubble” with the other Atlantic provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in early July, agreeing to allow residents from within their borders to travel freely without quarantine. Anyone from other parts of Canada and internationally had to quarantine for 14 days.

But as cases rose in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in recent days, Premier Dennis King of P.E.I. and Premier Andrew Furey of Newfoundland and Labrador pulled out, instituting 14-day quarantine requirements for everyone entering their provinces starting on Tuesday for at least two weeks.

“The Atlantic bubble has been a source of pride,” Furey said at a news conference. “But the situation has changed (and) I have made the tough decision to implement a circuit break.”

Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were yet to make to any changes to their quarantine rules.

The border restrictions, along with tough public health measures, helped the East Coast provinces, which have a combined population of 2.4 million, tamp down COVID-19 early in the pandemic and keep the virus largely at bay even as the rest of the country entered a second wave of infections. The average number of new infections reported in Canada each day recently reached a new high of more than 4,900 daily.

The bubble helped save the all-important summer tourism for region, worth around $5 billion annually.

“Our healthcare system is strong but it has limitations,” King said. “The potential of a large outbreak as we have seen in other jurisdictions would put pressure on our system and we could easily become overwhelmed.”

As of Nov. 22, Canada had reported 330,503 total COVID-19 cases, adding 4,792 in 24 hours, and 11,455 deaths, a one-day increase of 49, according to government data.

— Reporting for Reuters by Moira Warburton in Toronto.

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Meng, 48, was arrested in December 2018 on a warrant from the United States, which alleges that she misled the bank HSBC about Huawei’s business dealings in Iran.

Meng has been on house arrest in Vancouver since then, fighting extradition, and has said she is innocent. Her case has caused a diplomatic row between Canada and China, which has demanded that Meng be released. China detained two Canadians after Meng’s arrest.

The documents, which were filed last week and released to media on Friday, are a precursor to the formal hearing on committal, or whether Meng should be extradited to the United States. Those hearings will take place in April 2021.

The documents outline the evidence in support of Meng’s custody and conclude that the test for committal has been met.

The extradition hearings are not a full trial on the charges laid by the United States, the documents state, only whether there is the potential for those charges to be found valid.

“The evidence demonstrates that Ms. Meng deliberately made dishonest representations to HSBC in an attempt to preserve Huawei’s relationship with the bank,” lawyers for federal Justice Minister David Lametti wrote.

“Since Ms. Meng concedes that she is the person sought for prosecution for the conduct set out in the extradition request, all of the formal requirements for committal are established.”

Huawei declined to comment and pointed instead to its past legal submissions on its arguments.

In May, a judge in British Columbia’s Supreme Court found that the legal standard of double criminality — meaning that Meng’s actions could be considered a crime in both Canada and the United States — had been met, dealing a blow to hopes for a quick end to the trial.

The next hearings, scheduled for Aug. 17-21 in Vancouver, will discuss whether the attorney general’s assertion of privilege in declining to release some documents requested by Huawei relating to Meng’s initial arrest is valid.

Hearings for the trial are scheduled to wrap up in April 2021, although the potential for appeals of the decision from either side means the case could drag out over several years.

— Reporting for Reuters by Moira Warburton in Toronto.

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Meng was arrested in December 2018 by Canadian authorities at the Vancouver International Airport on a U.S. warrant from the charging her with bank fraud for allegedly misleading HSBC on Huawei’s business dealings in Iran.

She has been on house arrest in Vancouver and is fighting extradition to the United States.

A Canadian judge ruled in May that the case met the standard of double criminality, meaning her alleged crimes would be illegal in Canada as well as in the United States, dashing her hopes for an early release.

The hearings were initially scheduled to wrap up in October 2020. But in light of the coronavirus pandemic, both Canadian prosecutors representing the federal government and Huawei lawyers agreed to an extended schedule for the hearings, which was approved by a judge on Tuesday.

Hearings relating to Meng’s remaining claims — including abuses of process by Canadian and U.S. authorities in her arrest and the request for extradition — will take place between July 2020 and April 2021.

After Meng’s arrest, China detained two Canadian citizens on state security charges and blocked imports of canola seed from two major Canadian grain firms.

— Moira Warburton reports on tech news for Reuters from Toronto.

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Meng, a Chinese citizen, was arrested in December 2018 in Vancouver on a warrant issued by U.S. authorities, who accuse her of bank fraud and misleading HSBC about a Huawei-owned company’s dealings with Iran, thereby breaking U.S. sanctions on Tehran.

Huawei’s legal team had argued in January that since the sanctions against Iran did not exist in Canada at the time of her arrest, Meng’s actions were not a crime in Canada.

But British Columbia’s Superior Court Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes disagreed, ruling the legal standard of double criminality had been met.

“Ms. Meng’s approach … would seriously limit Canada’s ability to fulfill its international obligations in the extradition context for fraud and other economic crimes,” Holmes said.

Prosecutors representing the Canadian government had said in court that the lie itself was the fraud, regardless of the existence of sanctions.

The ruling paves the way for the extradition hearing to proceed to the second phase starting in June, examining whether Canadian officials followed the law while arresting Meng.

Closing arguments are expected in the last week of September and first week of October.

Shortly after the ruling was released Meng, 48, arrived at the courthouse but made no comment. Meng says she is innocent.

The Chinese embassy in Ottawa did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The case has strained relations between Ottawa and Beijing. Shortly after Meng’s arrest, Chinese authorities detained two Canadian men in China on state security charges. Beijing has also since restricted imports of Canadian canola seed.

ICE canola futures dipped on Wednesday, giving up gains after the release of the court ruling. Most-active July canola shed $1.30, to $463.50 per tonne.

— Reporting for Reuters by Moira Warburton in Toronto and Tessa Vikander in Vancouver; additional reporting by Steve Scherer in Ottawa and Rod Nickel in Winnipeg.

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Canada became the first G7 country to legalize recreational marijuana in October 2018 but sales have been dampened by supply constraints and prices that are higher than those on the black market.

While the provinces can set their own cannabis guidelines, a provincially run distributor purchases the cannabis from federally licensed producers, and then allocates it to retail locations approved by the province.

Ontario said last week that bottleneck on the federal government’s side is the reason the province will release only 50 cannabis licenses later this summer.

“We urge the federal government to take steps to quickly increase the supply of recreational cannabis so that we can continue combating the illegal market in Ontario,” Marc Pichette, spokesman for the Ontario Ministry of Finance, said in an email.

But the federal government has pushed back on this assertion, as have industry analysts and regulatory bodies in other provinces.

“With the notable exception of Ontario, the rest of the country has made steady progress in displacing the illicit market with licensed and regulated retail stores,” Bill Blair, federal minister for border protection and organized crime reduction, said in a statement.

Blair’s office is one of the departments in charge of cannabis legalization in Canada.

Black market

The most recent government data available from April 2019 states that 8,853 kilograms of cannabis products were sold in Canada, which has a population of 37 million. The national inventory of cannabis ready to be shipped and sold was 31,880 kg.

By comparison, Oregon, a U.S. state of four million people, announced in 2018 a stockpile of 435,000 kg of cannabis, causing prices and profits to drop.

Jay Rosenthal, co-founder and president of the research company Business of Cannabis, said Ontario’s slow retail start leaves room for illegal weed sales.

“The black market is really effective at filling gaps,” Rosenthal said.

A major gap he sees is retail. Ontario has just one legal retail cannabis store per 200,000 people, compared with Alberta’s one store for every 28,000 people.

A possible reason for this, Rosenthal thinks, is the “dramatic shift from one government to the next” that occurred in Ontario in the lead-up to legalization.

The province had initially intended to open government-run cannabis stores, similar to how liquor is sold in the province, but a change of government that came into effect just a few months before legalization opted instead for privately owned businesses.

In the aftermath of this short-notice policy switch, Rosenthal said, “The supply shortage is an easy scapegoat.”

Nick Kuzyk, chief strategist officer for High Tide , which currently owns or has partnerships with eight operational retail stores across Canada, also is concerned about the black market in Ontario.

But overall he and other retailers Reuters spoke to are happy with how the Ontario government has handled legalization so far, including the latest lottery of 50 licenses.

“I think the government has looked at the data and chosen the number accordingly,” Kuzyk said. “They could have chosen 100 or 150 but they chose 50.”

— Reporting for Reuters by Moira Warburton in Toronto.

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