It sounds like a joke. It certainly looks like a joke, at least based on the unintentionally hilarious video circulating the web.

But the creators of Ultimate Tazer Ball insist their league — wherein eight men chase a giant ball around a pitch and try to fell each other with stun guns — is the real deal, and they've even got a Toronto franchise to boot.

"It's not fake. We're very serious about it," co-founder Eric Prum, 25, told the CBC. "We're hoping to turn it into a league with a series of events that we're travelling across the world."

Prum, a southern California resident who started as an extreme paintball player, devised the idea with fellow players, Leif Kellenberger and Erik Wunsch.

As QMI Agency reports, the full-contact game consists of four players on each side who vie to score goals by chasing an enormous soccer ball around a 200 by 85-foot field. Sounds OK, if a little strange so far.

But here's where it takes a turn for the weirder. Each player is equipped with a

Opponents of Alberta oil sands development are getting another weapon to use against the resource-rich province.

Animal lovers are raising the alarm over plans to help woodland caribou herds apparently affected by oil sands extraction in the province by killing wolves.

The Los Angeles Times noted a draft national woodland caribou recovery plan announced last fall by Environment Canada includes plans to cull wolves near three herds directly affected by oil sands development.

The Times said Environment Minister Peter Kent reportedly said thousands of wolves might have to be killed using strychnine poison and aerial hunting.

Alberta officials told the Times the program has not yet begun and that while the province already controls wolf populations, images of wholesale slaughter are exaggerated.

"This is quite an egregious misrepresentation of how we do predator management when we do have to do some of this," Dave Ealey, spokesman for Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, told the LA

Canadians often complain their roles in the First and Second World Wars get ignored. But now they get to bask in the glory for taking part in a future conflict, even if it's only in cyberspace.

The Canadian Arctic is part of the battlefield in a video game due out this spring. Naval War: Arctic Circle is the creation of Paradox Interactive, based in Stockholm. The game's premise: the year is 2030 and melting Arctic ice has opened the area to nations keen to exploit its untapped reserves of oil, gas and minerals.

"[In the game] the Arctic region is rapidly becoming the last unexploited resource of oil and gas and many rare minerals," Jan Haugland, who led the game's creative team, told Postmedia News. "The world is, then as now, really starving for these resources. The sovereignty of these areas are disputed."

The competition by nations staking their claims soon strikes sparks and the United States, Russia and Canada, among others, deploy their forces.

Haugland's small team of

No fools, those city councillors of Mississauga, the sprawling suburb west of Toronto.

The optics of voting themselves a pay raise while at the same time hiking municipal taxes were not lost on these canny politicians - even if it took a voter backlash to focus their attention on it.

Mississauga, population roughly 713,000 according to the 2011 census, already has the highest-paid councillors in Canada.

They earn $131,000 a year, which includes $50,000 for sitting on the Peel region's council. That compares with about $99,000 for their colleagues in neighbouring Toronto, population 2.6 million, $102,000 for prosperous Calgary, with 1.1 million residents and $63,600 for Vancouver, with about 600,000 citizens. The salary figures come from MIRANET, the Mississauga residents' organization that has fought the pay increase.

Council voted unanimously Wednesday to reverse the two per cent boost they gave themselves just the week before, the Toronto Star reported. In the same session, council

Pit Nights on the University of British Columbia campus are about to get a little extra homemade flavour.

As detailed in the Toronto Star, the Alma Mater Society — UBC's student union — announced its plans to open a student-owned brewery on campus by August 2014.

The brewery has been slotted for construction at the school's new Student Union Building, where it will provide the froth of its labour to two main campus pubs, the Pit and the Perch, with potential for sales at additional campus watering holes.

Though Niagara College boasts a university-run brewery, this will be the first student-run campus brewery in Canada.

The motivation? It matches the union's sustainability model.

"And we thought it would be awesome to brew our own beer," the student union's president, Jeremy McElroy, told the paper, adding they'd eventually like to go local — from hops grown on the campus farm to seasonal ingredients cultivated on the building's rooftop garden.

If all goes according to plan, over time

Canadians probably recognize the boyish face of Galen Weston from TV commercials where he pitches President's Choice frozen foods and other goodies.

But the billionaire grocer is coming under fire this week for apparently attacking farmers markets over food-safety concerns.

During a speech Tuesday to the Canadian Food Summit in Toronto, the Loblaws chairman made this off-the-cuff comment:

"Farmers' markets are great. . . ," the Toronto Star reported Weston as saying: "One day they're going to kill some people though."

"I'm just saying that to be dramatic though," he quickly added.

Weston told the 600 conference attendees there are ways to capitalize on consumer demand for locally sourced food but that food inspections are crucial, the Star reported.

Listening was Robert Chorney, executive director of Farmers Markets Ontario.

"We strenuously object" he told conference members, adding later.
"What (Weston) said was really saddening. It really put a damper on the day for some of us."

The Keystone Oil Pipeline is pictured under construction in North Dakota.Canada is figuring into the U.S. presidential race perhaps as never before.

Access to crude oil from Canadian oil sands reserves has become a major issue in the fight for the Republican presidential nomination, and likely will be important when the eventual winner confronts incumbent Democrat President Barack Obama.

There are really two fights here. The Republican hopefuls are battling each other over who can best expedite access to Canada's secure energy supplies. And whoever wins the Republican nomination will accuse Obama of caving in to environmentalists who oppose the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would bring oil sands crude to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

David Wilkins, former president George W. Bush's ambassador to Canada, is touting frontrunner Mitt Romney as best for Canada.

Wilkins told the Toronto Star on Tuesday that November's "watershed election" has significant ramifications for Canada.

Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline last month, after being

Ontario's decline from its traditional role as Canada's economic engine is setting off alarm bells about the implications for Canadian unity.

Since Confederation, Ontario was Canada's centre of gravity, a thriving manufacturing hub that consumed resources from the rest of the country and for the last few decades was the source of much of the money the federal government paid out in equalization payments.

Equalization is designed to ensure all provinces can offer comparable levels of health, education and social services. it's become part of the federation's bedrock.

But now the economic centre of gravity has shifted to the resource-rich western provinces while Ontario's manufacturing sectors stagnate.

Under the complex equalization formula, Ontario has become one of six have-not provinces and will receive about $3.2 billion in payments for fiscal 2011-12, according to the federal Department of Finance.

That's less than half the $7.4 million Quebec, a long-time equalization recipient,