Blog Posts by Steve Mertl

If your house has an attached garage, after you read this you'll be thinking twice about idling the car for long before you pull out on a winter morning. It appears you're increasing the chances of your family getting cancer.

The National Post reports Health Canada is preparing new guidelines for homeowners to improve the sealing and ventilation of their attached garages to reduce the migration of toxic vapours, especially benzene from car exhaust, into the home.

Your first reaction might be an eye-rolling "c'mon!" Isn't this a bit of unnecessary nanny-stateism, particularly from a government that downplays climate change and has muzzled federal scientists so they can't publicly contradict economic policies seen as bad for the environment?

But Health Canada has long played a role in setting guidelines for exposure to harmful substances. Its current Residential Indoor Air Quality Guidelines provide maximum exposure limits to a number of pollutants that can be found in the home

Read More »from Health Canada warns of cancer risk from fumes entering homes from attached garages

We've somehow entered a dark new place when it comes to cyber-bullying; the social-media humiliation of sexual-assault victims.

We got a taste of the phenomenon recently in the Steubenville, Ohio, case where two high school football players were convicted of recording their assault of a heavily intoxicated teenaged girl and posting the video online.

Admittedly, the boys, who were sent to prison for the attacks, might never have been convicted without the video as evidence. But the unnamed 16-year-old victim's degradation was dreadfully public in a way that previous generations couldn't imagine.

Closer to home, a 16-year-old girl was alleged to have been gang-raped at a rural rave in the Vancouver suburb of Pitt Meadows in 2010, the assault compounded when a bystander posted photos of the assault on Facebook.

Police couldn't amass enough evidence to prosecute the teen's alleged attackers and had to settle for charging 18-year-old Dennis Warrington for posting the photos that led the

Read More »from Who failed Rehtaeh Parsons? Almost everyone

Police say the man scammed grocery, hardware and department stores out of thousands of dollars by showing up with blood-stained receipts after intentionally cutting himself with razor blades.The scam was clever, if somewhat bloody.

A Calgary man is facing charges for allegedly conning retail stores into giving him refunds for things he never bought by claiming the products injured him.

According to the Calgary Herald, police say the man scammed grocery, hardware and department stores out of thousands of dollars by showing up with blood-stained receipts after intentionally cutting himself with razor blades.

The blades were sometimes embedded in shopping carts so the man could claim a sharp edge on the cart had sliced him.

“He was not only committing fraud, he was also posing a danger to the public,” Const. Lara Sampson of the Calgary Police Service's retail crime initiative told the Herald. “With the blood, if they grab the same basket or happen to grab the razor blades he’s implanted, they are also at risk.”

The scam was an extreme version of retail return fraud, which is among the most common types of fraud victimizing stores in Canada and the United States.

American

Read More »from Calgary man charged with ‘bloody’ store scam involving razors, high-end merchandise

Never mind oranges. Offenders should have to buy coffee and doughnuts for everyone at the game.Constance Barnes' suggestion that misbehaving parents at kids' sports events should do pushups was partly tongue-in-cheek but the Vancouver Park Board commissioner is trying to draw attention to a serious chronic problem at Canada's hockey rinks and ballfields.

Barnes' proposal that parents who are habitual boo birds and who bully players and refs should be required to do 100 pushups or donate bags of oranges to the opposing team has raised eyebrows since it was tabled last week.

Barnes, who belongs to the city's governing Vision Vancouver civic party, suggested the punishments as part of her motion for a spectators' code of conduct. The board approved it 3-2 at its Monday-evening meeting, the Vancouver Sun reported.

But not without some finger-wagging from fellow Commissioner Melissa DeGenova of the opposition Non-Partisan Association, who apparently didn't seen anything funny in the idea of soccer moms and hockey dads being told to "drop and give me 100."

"Mixing a serious subject

Read More »from Vancouver Park Board passes anti-bullying guidelines with ‘pushups’ penalty

This is Vimy Ridge Day, marking the 96th anniversary of what many see as a battle that helped define Canada as a nation.

Given the Conservative government's fixation on things military, it was surprising to see that commemoration of this watershed event at the National War Memorial was being led not by Prime Minister Stephen Harper but Gordon O'Connor, the Tories' chief whip.

But really, do we need the prime minister to help us mark the day?

Next year marks the centenary of the First World War and John Babcock, Canada's last known soldier to have served in that war died in 2010 at age 109. The living links to that war are gone, so it's up to us to remember what they did and why.

That's why the dozens of local commemorations are probably more critical than the still-important national wreath-laying in Ottawa.

For example, military cadets in Kitchener, Ont., didn't wait until this week, choosing to commemorate the battle last Wednesday at the local armoury, according to The Record.

The

Read More »from Canadians find that the best way to mark Battle of Vimy Ridge is to pass on its significance

Critics say rural and northern B.C. has "third-world" response times for emergency services.Census data has shown for quite some time that most Canadians live in cities and towns, most hugging our border with the United States.

Not surprisingly, governments direct most of their services to those communities, which leaves less taxpayer money for rural and especially northern areas.

The gap in services has yawned wider in recent years as governments look for ways to trim budgets by shuttering rural hospitals, centralizing trauma care in larger cities and cutting back on ambulance services.

A Canadian Press report focusing on emergency response services in British Columbia highlights the problem in the westernmost province but the same is likely true almost everywhere across the country's interior and northern regions.

Critics say rural and northern B.C. has "third-world" response times for emergency services, CP reports.

B.C. Auditor General John Doyle issued a report last month on the B.C. Ambulance Service's air-ambulance service that found it wasn't doing a good job

Read More »from Critics slam ‘third world’ ambulance response times in northern B.C.

The industry is losing millions of dollars in machinery and material.Industrial equipment and material have always been a tempting targets for thieves and Alberta's thriving oil and gas industry is discovering crooks can't resist helping themselves to some of the gear that can't always be put under lock and key.

The industry is losing millions of dollars in machinery and material, the Globe and Mail reports, everything from copper wire to ATVs and whole drilling rigs.

“These are high-ticket items,” Wood Buffalo RCMP S.Sgt. Keith Durance, based in Fort McMurray, told the Globe. “Generally speaking, there is a pretty lucrative market in larger industrial equipment.”

The problem exists anywhere energy companies operate. According to the Texas web site StopOilfieldTheft.com, the U.S. industry estimates it loses almost a $1 billion a year to thieves.

"Criminals will steal whatever they can get their hands on—and they can get their hands on a lot of expensive equipment in the oilfield," the site says. "From $100 tools to $10,000 tongs, it all adds up to a big

Read More »from Alberta energy sector, RCMP struggle to deal with numerous oilfield thefts

Just days after showing off its fancy new headquarters, Vancouver high-tech darling HootSuite has found itself in hot water over its use of unpaid interns.

The row started last Friday when someone named Ryl posted on reddit that the social-media dashboard creator's use of unpaid interns for three months at a time was illegal under B.C. labour legislation.

By Monday, the thread had grown to hundreds of comments and pushed out into other social media and mainstream news outlets.

"Unpaid internships are exploitive," Amanda Soehnlen posted on Hootsuite's Facebook page. "I love that in your statement, you didn't address the fact that unpaid internships are wrong as well as illegal, just saying you'd make sure not to break the law in the future.

Hootsuite, a darling of Vancouver's IT sector and one of the city's most successful startups with some 250 employees, was pushed into damage control.

[ Related: 10 Canadian tech companies to watch in 2013 ]

According to the Vancouver Sun, Hootsuite

Read More »from HootSuite under fire for using unpaid interns after barrage of online criticism