In the news today: Liberals meet in Ottawa amid leadership race

Here is a roundup of stories from The Canadian Press designed to bring you up to speed…

Liberals meet in Ottawa amid leadership race

The Liberals are gathering on Parliament Hill for a second day in a row to talk next steps as the party searches for a replacement for outgoing leader Justin Trudeau.

The candidates only have until Monday to sign up new members who can vote for them in the race.

Thursday marked the cutoff deadline for contestants to file their registration papers — meaning no other challengers can enter the race.

But leadership hopefuls must still pay the party a steep entry fee by Feb. 17 — a total of $350,000.

The field consists of former central banker Mark Carney, Liberal MPs Chrystia Freeland, Karina Gould, Jaime Battiste and Chandra Arya, and former Liberal MPs Frank Baylis and Ruby Dhalla.

Here’s what else we’re watching…

Doug Ford to call snap election next week: sources

Premier Doug Ford plans to call a snap election next Wednesday and send Ontarians to the polls on Feb. 27, The Canadian Press has learned.

Two senior government sources say Ford recently made the decision for the rare winter election after waffling for months.

The Canadian Press is not naming them so they can speak candidly about internal government deliberations.

The election had been set for June 2026, but Ford has said he needs a new mandate in order to deal with four years of a Donald Trump presidency in the United States.

His Progressive Conservative party plans to hold a “super caucus” event on Saturday to talk about the tariffs and “what’s going on here in Ontario.”

Viral Canada hat offers lesson in manufacturing

The weeks since Liam Mooney and Emma Cochrane dreamt up a viral hat meant to fend off any notion that Canada will be taken over by the U.S. has been more of a crash course in manufacturing than in politics.

The pair of Ottawa-based marketers behind the “Canada is not for sale” hats made famous by Ontario Premier Doug Ford last week say they’ve realized how difficult it is to produce a ball cap fully made in Canada.

Over the last few weeks, the duo approached several players in the apparel sector to help them and mostly heard the same refrain: they don’t manufacture hats fully in Canada because the cost is so high and the demand isn’t there.

Mooney and Cochrane have since found some hats completely made in the country but haven’t settled on a long-term solution, so they are mostly relying on ball caps imported from Vietnam, Bangladesh and China and toques from the U.S., which then get embroidered in Canada.

The difficulty in making apparel or accessories completely in Canada stems from years of blows to the country’s textile industry, which lost much of the clothing manufacturing capacity it developed in the 19th century as industrialists migrated to Canada and took advantage of the introduction of the sewing machine.

Meet Poppy, the oil spill-sniffing dog

Poppy, a six-year-old springer spaniel with floppy brown ears and a tail that never seems to stop wagging, is by all accounts a very good dog.

Her white, brown speckled nose has also made her something of a trailblazer.

In a first-of-its-kind study, Poppy was able to do something with ease that’s proven far more challenging for humans and their machines: she sniffed out an oil spill submerged in water and trapped under ice.

For at least the past decade, dogs have been sniffing out oil spills in Canada, helping clean Nova Scotia’s shores of tanker oil and one of the Prairies’ most vital watersheds of a large pipeline spill.

While the practice has shown promise in the field, there’s been limited scientific evidence to back it up.

Ontario creatives nab Oscar noms for ‘Nosferatu’

Traci Loader helped devise the haunting blood tears Lily-Rose Depp’s character cries in “Nosferatu.”

On Thursday, the Ontario makeup artist said she couldn’t contain her own tears as she learned she’d earned her first Oscar nomination.

The Newmarket, Ont., native is part of the team from Robert Eggers’ gothic horror film who are up for best makeup and hairstyling, along with England’s David White and Suzanne Stokes-Munton.

Loader is one of several Canadians who’ve earned Oscar nods for their work on Eggers’ remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent classic, which stars Depp as Ellen Hutter, a young woman ensnared by the dark obsession of the enigmatic vampire Count Orlok, played by Bill Skarsgård.

Toronto’s Linda Muir is up for best costume design, while fellow Torontonian Craig Lathrop is competing for best production design.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 24, 2025.

The Canadian Press