schools for people to go and learn those kinds of skills and get information about those career paths,” the 22-year-old said.

That’s important since research by Statistics Canada shows that kids as young as 15 are beginning to make career choices, with about one in 10 young people remaining with the same career choice at age 25 that they made at 15.
It was even higher for young people with parents who valued higher education. Bram isn’t the only Canadian concerned that public high schools

To celebrate the rich cultural and heritage traditions of Indigenous people, FORED is sponsoring its annual artwork, photography and now video contest with $150 cash prizes for Indigenous youth aged 5-18. Theme: Indigenous Traditional Knowledge & Medicine.

 Please help us circulate this contest information to any and all educators and youth in your districts through email, social media, and website.

 This contest is a wonderful opportunity to find a mentor in the Elder community to pass down this important knowledge to Indigenous youth.
 View contest details here or use below button.

Give a hoot and help us name our owl!

FORED BC has a new mascot and we’re asking Canadians to help us name it. 🦉 This gorgeous Snowy Owl, who died nearly 30 years ago, likely after eating poisoned meat in B.C.’s Cariboo region, was given to two seniors, Boris and Henry, who rescued the sick bird from a remote logging road. They drove 80 kilometres to the game warden in Clinton. Unfortunately, the bird died despite medical care.
 

The two men were granted official permission — to preserve the bird, (pictured), which Boris and Henry shared with an agreement that when one of them died, the other would keep the owl.
 

While not considered an at-risk species under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, the Snowy Owl was given “vulnerable” status in 2017 globally. Click the video link below for the owl’s true story, featuring Indigenous beliefs and more.

Former premier joins coal company

John Horgan — who once famously said while running for office that he would use “every tool in the tool box” to block the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline and led arguably B.C.’s “greenest” provincial government — has surprised many by joining the board of a coal company.
 

The former NDP premier, 63, who recently resigned from politics in March, will help lead Elk Valley Resources, "in the process of being spun off from Vancouver-based Teck Resources Ltd.,” reported the Globe and Mail. The company produces coal used to make steel.
 

Horgan said he wasn’t concerned about criticism, including accusations of hypocrisy. “I don’t have a lot of time anymore, none in fact, for public comment on my world view, or what I am doing with my time,” he told the Globe, noting that coal used make steel — necessary to produce a host of green products — isn’t the same as burning coal to make electricity, which creates smog and serious human health conditions.

Canada produces ethical cobalt

Consumers who buy smart phones and electric cars may not know their rechargeable batteries are linked to miserable, dangerous working conditions and child slavery. 📱

In his new book, Cobalt Red, New York Times reporter Siddharth Kara  warns that 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt, an element critical to the production of rechargeable batteries, is found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where cobalt is “extracted by so-called ‘artisanal’ miners — freelance workers who do extremely dangerous labour for the equivalent of just a few dollars a day,” according to a National Public Radio report.⚒️

Kara says that the way cobalt is mined in the DRC (video) has resulted in the destruction of millions of trees, polluted nearby water with toxic effluents and exposed the poor workers, including child slaves and young mothers with babies strapped to their backs, to toxic cobalt dust.☠️

Kara says the world needs cobalt — a by-product of copper and nickel mining — but produced safely and ethically.

Canada, the world’s fourth-largest cobalt producer — so far in Newfoundland and Labrador and Ontario — is one source of ethical cobalt. In northern B.C., Giga Metals and Mitsubishi Corp. are working to develop a mine near Dease Lake. The deposit is considered one of the largest undeveloped sulphide nickel and cobalt sources in the world.

 The Fortis BC bill delivered monthly to its more than one million customers has a little note under the line for the carbon tax cost as an explanation or justification. 💸

 “Supports reduced carbon emissions,” it claims, but is that so?

 Although we can’t know how much natural gas people would have bought — mostly to heat their buildings — had the carbon tax not been imposed, there is little evidence to support Fortis’s claim to “reduced carbon emissions” in the five most- recent Gas Utility annual information forms available on the company's website.

Those reports reveal that Fortis delivered nearly 16 per cent more gas to its customers in 2021 (228 petajoules) than it did in 2016 (197 PJ).

Canada is leading world oil producer

Canada has the third-largest oil reserves in the world — after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, points out the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

The oil sands in northern Alberta contain the country’s main source of oil — about 165 billion of 168 billion barrels of known, economically recoverable oil.
 

Canada is the world’s fifth-largest producer of natural and the sixth-largest producer of crude oil. Based on Canada’s rate of domestic consumption, CAPP Canada has a 300-year supply of natural gas. 🛢️

Infographic from CAPP.