Despite the federal government’s vocal commitment to human rights, the body in charge of Canada’s national pension plan has increased its investments in companies that profit off U.S. President Donald Trump’s migrant detention centres.

As first reported by nonprofit news site Documented and The Guardian, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board — an independent agency from the federal government — has increased their shares in two U.S. companies over the last year, namely CoreCivic and real estate investment trust GEO Group.

CoreCivic, formerly the Corrections Corporation of America, is the “largest owner of partnership correctional, detention and residential reentry facilities” in the U.S., according to its website. GEO Group is also one of the largest private prison contractors in the U.S., and both run detention centres near the U.S. border with Mexico.

Earlier: Donald Trump’s immigration plans will make private prison industries filthy rich. Story continues below.

After contributing to Trump’s presidential election campaign, both CoreCivic and GEO Group have gained from his administration revoking cuts to private prison use, as well as spending increases for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to The Wall Street Journal.

Both contractors have been named in stories about reports of migrants enduring abuse and harassment at the hands of private prison contractors and ICE officials.

CPPIB increased its investment

According to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the CPPIB held 73,700 shares in CoreCivic worth about US$1.7 million as of August 2018, more than double the shares it had the year before.

Its shares in GEO Group increased almost almost 13-fold, from 12,000 in August 2017 to 153,500 in August 2018, with a value of US$4.2 million.

NDP MP Charlie Angus raised the issue during question period in the House Of Commons on Monday.

“Does the finance minister believe that investing in cigarette companies and privatized prisons meets a credible standard of corporate investment for the Canada Pension Plan?” he asked.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau pointed to the CPPIB’s independence from the federal government, which he called “important to protect the pensions of Canadians both today and tomorrow.”

“We expect the CPPIB, like other Crown corporations, to live up to the highest standards of ethics and behaviour, and that is in fact exactly what it is doing.”

In June, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested it was not his place to be condemning Trump’s child migrant policy.

The CPPIB’s 2018 report on sustainable investment includes information on why the board does not divest from certain companies. It says the board’s responsibility is “to maximize investment returns without undue risk of loss.”

“In general, CPPIB believes we can more effectively press for positive change by being an active, engaged investor than we can by sitting on the sidelines,” it says.

“The aim is win-win: more responsible corporate behaviour from investees and higher returns for 20 million contributors and beneficiaries.”

Deborah Allen, CPPIB’s director of global corporate communications, said in an email to HuffPost Canada the investments in the two companies were part of “prudent global diversification” of the pension plan’s assets.

Allen said “virtually every mutual fund, exchange-traded fund, segregated fund” in Canada seeking exposure to “a widely-based U.S. stock index” would have be investing in CoreCivic and GEO.

“While we recognize it’s the principle rather than the amount of the stock for many people, we would note that we held about $5 million of these two stocks as of March 31 (the date of our last annual report),” Allen said.

“With the total fund as of the end of our first quarter (June 30) valued at $366.6 billion, those investments represent about 0.001% of holdings.”

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UPDATE: HuffPost Canada spoke to Faith Dickinson over Facebook.

“I was in complete shock!” the 15-year-old said. “I was ecstatic! I was shaking, I had tears in my eyes. It was the most exciting phone call that I’ve ever received!!!!”

Dickinson said she received the news last Tuesday from Tessy Ojo, the chief executive of The Diana Award, who called the teen from London.

“She told me that the Diana Award was given seven invitations to the royal wedding and I was one of the seven,” she explained. “Tessy asked me to keep the news quiet until the press release went out. It was so hard to keep it to myself!!! It’s really a dream come true!”

So what — or who, rather — is the teen most excited to see at the royal wedding? Harry, of course!

“I’m excited to see EVERYTHING!!!! But definitely Harry,” Dickinson said.

“Being invited is such an incredible honor!” she added. “I’m humbled to be invited to their special day. It’s a dream come true! The attention is overwhelming, but it adds to the excitement building up to going. It’s surreal!”

Original story:

New information regarding Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s royal wedding guest list has been announced — and one lucky Canadian teen has made the cut!

Peterborough, Ont.-native Faith Dickinson is one of seven “incredible young people” who have been invited to the grounds of Windsor for Harry and Markle’s nuptials on May 19, The Diana Award announced on Twitter.

Dickinson, 15, is the founder of Cuddles for Cancer, a non-profit organization that makes fleece blankets for cancer patients and soldiers living with PTSD. The hope is that the blankets will “keep them warm, comfortable and loved.”

In five years, the organization has sent 3,500 blankets around the world, CBC News reports.

Thanks to her work, Dickinson was one of 20 young people to receive a Diana Award — an honour created in the late Princess Diana’s name — for her “kindness, compassion and service.”

Princes William and Harry presented the teen with the honour nearly one year ago at St. James’s Palace in London.

“Prince William told me that I was just doing such an amazing thing,” the teen told CBC News last year. “And Prince Harry told me that I was the most impressive redhead there tonight.”

According to The Diana Award’s website, “seven inspirational young people from London, Birmingham, Bedford and Canada” have been invited to the royal wedding. These youth make up a group of 200 invitees “who have been nominated on the strength of their contribution to charities with a close connection to Prince Harry or Ms. Markle.”

Just last month, Kensington Palace announced that the couple had expanded their guest list to include members of the public, so Dickinson’s invitation isn’t a total surprise. In addition to the invited youth, there will also be a mix of people with various backgrounds and ages “from every corner of the United Kingdom” among the invitees.

Dickinson knows what an honour it is to be invited to the wedding of the year. On Twitter, the teen wrote:

HuffPost Canada has reached out to Dickinson for further comment.

Money is one of the biggest stressors in a relationship, and that may be why many Canadians are avoiding conversations about finances and even hiding debt from their significant others.

According to Manulife Bank of Canada’s annual debt survey, one in five Canadians try to avoid talking about money altogether. Although two in five Canadians do talk about money with their partner, half of them said those conversations can cause tension in their relationship.

Manulife Bank president and CEO Rick Lunny called money and debt “one of the most difficult things couples will ever discuss.”

“The trick is to get these issues out in the open and having an open and frank discussion about them,” Lunny said in a release.

Some indebted Canadians are also hiding purchases from their partners. One in 10 admitted to hiding a purchase from a loved one, and the same percentage have lied about about a purchase’s cost. While most of these purchases are under $1,000 (63 per cent), 8 per cent of men have hidden a purchase of $15,000 or more.

Two in five Canadians who owe money also said their debt negatively impacts their mental health. Most Canadians who have a lot of debt (70 per cent) say the same. One in three of those people say their debt keeps them up at night.

Canadians cutting back on spending

The Manulife survey also showed Canadians are bracing themselves for rising interest rates by cutting back on spending on both essentials and extras.

The poll, conducted by Ipsos for Manulife, surveyed 2,003 Canadians in all provinces, between the ages of 20 and 69, with household incomes of more than $40,000, from May 11-14, 2018. National results were weighted by gender, age, region and education. This survey has a credibility interval of +/- 2.5%.

With a file from The Canadian Press

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“In a sense,” says Alex Hutchinson, creative director of Journey to the Savage Planet, “this is a game for middle-aged people.” And in an instant, I’m sold.

“I want a game I can finish, I want a game that doesn’t take a thousand hours, I want a game that kind of reminds me of the Sega blue skies stuff, that I feel happy turning it on instead of being miserable and weighed down by things I don’t understand unless I’ve put in 100 hours. I don’t want an infinite game! I want it to finish!”

Alex is playing to the room, for sure – in this case, the room being a cozy hotel suite just on the outskirts of this year’s GDC, the audience a couple of men like myself with more than a dash of grey in their facial hair – but good god has he got a point. And he certainly knows what he’s talking about, having come from the world of triple-A development, alongside many of his team at the 25-strong Typhoon Studios, who count Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Army of Two – Army of Two! – among their past triumphs.

“When you’re working on those big triple-a games, you’re often doing the buffet lunch version of game design,” says Hutchinson. “You’re spending so much money that you need to appeal to everyone, you ask marketing who the audience is and they say ‘everybody’. That’s not an answer! You have to hit everything – multiplayer, single-player, co-op, UGC – anything you can imagine you have to fit into it so people can find the game that they want. It became obvious to us we wanted to create a game that was unique, was its own thing, was created by a small team that we like.”

That game is being properly unveiled here at GDC for the first time, and it took me a little by surprise. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t paying proper attention during its reveal at last year’s Game Awards – look, it was late, and I might have had a drink or two – but having seen the first trailer I’d assumed it was a more intimate No Man’s Sky, a sci-fi survival game set on some faraway colourful planet. It’s not, it turns out, and is something just as exciting – maybe more so. Journey to the Savage Planet plots its own course, somewhere between Metroid Prime and Dishonored, for a flavour that’s very much its own.

:: boss guide and walkthrough – boss and mini boss list and how to get through From Software’s stealth-action nightmare

“We’re not trying to do everything for everyone anymore,” explains Hutchinson. “We’re trying to make a funny, optimistic first person explore ’em-up.” Exploration is the key here, as you set foot on a colourful planet on behalf of Kindred Aerospace – proudly the fourth best exploration company in the universe – and scan the environment, charting the space and sending back word of your discoveries to your employer. There’s a sense of intrigue, too, as you set foot on a planet you’re told is uninhabited but spot traces of intelligent life out on the further reaches of the vista.

It’s a world that holds true to that beloved old maxim ‘see those, mountains, you can go there’, with your journey taking you to the peaks of the planet that are visible from the offset. Not that it’s a straight path, mind, with a small element of gear gating as you craft items that help you reach previously unreachable areas (and in our demo that’s thanks to a trusty grappling hook, unlocked late on in proceedings). A little bit Metroid, then? Well, yes, but you can also brute force solutions thanks to the gadgets you find in your possession, such as a pink jelly you can fire out that serves as a trampoline. “We’re open to speed running,” says Hutchinson. “Someone’s going to bust it in all sorts of ways. There’s a rough structure and we’re gating certain sections – but I’m sure after five minutes of releasing it someone will find a way around it.”

It’s a laid-back approach to what looks like a remarkably laid-back kind of game that’s never really fussy about how you go about things. It’s unfussy in a way that most triple-a games aren’t, a reaction to the team’s previous work in the salt mines of Montreal’s dev scene, and a very welcome one. “We used to joke that hidden content was wasted content,” says Hutchinson. “We’re breaking the rules on this one! We’re hiding a lot of the content – the basic premise is that you as a player should be rewarded for exploration. The main path of the game is 10-12, but if you rush through it you’ll probably miss half of it.”

Not that you’d want to miss out on a lot of it, as Journey to the Savage Planet is the kind of game that invites you to poke at it. It’s a world of clunking character, with jetpacks that stutter and belch out smoke and steam, purple critters that scream and then burst into even more purple screaming critters when you blast them and flying octopuses that explode in showers of gloopy ink. It’s got the colour and character of those early-noughties games that were once loved but aren’t spoken about enough these days – things like Metal Arms: Glitch in the System – and is the kind of thing that’s all too rare these days. As a proudly middle-aged player, I can’t wait.

Among Canadians, Boxing Day is out and Black Friday is in, a new survey has found.

The Retail Council of Canada (RCC)’s holiday shopping study, released Monday, shows 40 per cent of Canadians are planning to shop Black Friday sales, compared to 25 per cent who plan to shop Boxing Day deals.

Michael Leblanc, senior retail advisor for the RCC, said Black Friday became popular when the Canadian and U.S. dollars were on par, and Canadian retailers wanted to keep shoppers north of the border.

“Consumers like the fact that there’s a holiday before the 25th, so it’s an opportunity to shop gift-giving before Christmas,” Leblanc told HuffPost Canada.

Leblanc said Black Friday — which this year takes place on Nov. 23 — usually marks the start of the holiday shopping season. Though by that point, 20 per cent of Canadians have already started their shopping, according to the RCC’s survey.

John DeFranco, chief commercial officer for Staples Canada, told HuffPost Canada that Black Friday is a “more powerful and higher volume holiday than Boxing Day.”

Staples’ hottest holiday gifts are technology, but DeFranco said video gaming chairs have also been surprisingly popular.

“Having the best gaming chair to be your best at Fortnite is really important, so we’re selling a lot of gaming chairs.”

Emphasis on buying Canadian

Two-thirds of Canadians are planning on spending the same amount as they did last year for the entire holiday season, which on average is about $675.

A large majority of Canadians (87 per cent) believe it’s important to support Canadian retailers during the holiday season. More than a third of Canadians also said it’s more important to buy Canadian this year than it was last year.

Diane Brisebois, RCC president and CEO, said negotiations for the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) seem “to have stirred national pride.”

“While our shopping habits appear to be shifting and becoming more in tune with our neighbours south of the border, Canadians are showing a greater interest in keeping our dollars at home this year,” Brisebois said in a release.

The study was conducted online by Leger with a nationally representative sample of 2,504 adults from Oct. 10-22, 2018 using Leger’s online panel, in both English and French. A probability sample of the same size would yield a margin of error of +/- 2 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

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