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How the corporatization of vet clinics is driving up prices across the country
Watch here as CBC Marketplace’s Charlsie Agro searches cross-country for answers.
When Maja Terzic brought her sick cat to the vet, she agreed to a few hundred dollars in blood work to hopefully find out what was wrong with him. Guppy was then whisked away to a back room.
“I was just kind of in the dark, I didn’t know what was happening,” Terzic said.
An hour later, she was handed a $1,100 bill, full of tests and treatments she says she never agreed to.
“My stomach literally dropped. I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to do the credit card not the debit card today,'” said Terzic, who had no idea the clinic was owned by the largest veterinary consolidator in Canada.
Terzic’s experience mirrors that of a rising number of pet owners who say they’ve seen a dramatic increase in their veterinary bills in the past few years — a trend that’s arisen alongside the practice of multinational corporations quietly buying up independent vet clinics across the country.
Before 2010, almost all veterinary clinics in Canada were owned by the vet you visited. Today, more than half of emergency and specialty hospitals and more than 20 per cent of all clinics are owned by six corporations.
To see what type of care would be recommended and how much it would cost at corporate-run clinics, CBC’s Marketplace scheduled appointments at six different clinics across Toronto, all of them owned by one of the three biggest corporations in Canada.
This story is part of a joint investigation with The Fifth Estate, Marketplace and Radio-Canada’s Enquête and La Facture looking at the changing pet health sector in Canada. Read more
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For the full investigation, watch “Cause for Paws: The rising cost of pet care” on YouTube or CBC Gem.
Amazon to close Quebec facilities, insists it’s not because of new union
Amazon has announced it will close all of its operations in Quebec, resulting in nearly 2,000 people losing their jobs. The decision has some questioning the timing of the closure because one of the facilities had recently unionized.
Amazon announced on Wednesday it will shutter its facilities in Quebec in the coming weeks and cut nearly 2,000 jobs, 1,700 of which are permanent positions.
A company spokesperson said Amazon will outsource deliveries to smaller contractors. The spokesperson insisted that the decision was tied to cost savings — not the recent unionization of about 300 employees at a Laval, Que., warehouse.
“Following a recent review of our Quebec operations,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement, “we found that returning to a third-party delivery model supported by local small businesses, similar to the one we had until 2020, will enable us to offer the same excellent service and deliver even greater savings to our customers in the long term.”
It was not immediately clear when Amazon would close its facilities, but the spokesperson told Radio-Canada it would happen in the “next two months.”
A Quebec Employment Ministry spokesperson said Wednesday that Amazon Canada issued a notice of collective layoff affecting 1,997 employees across seven locations. Read more
Cyberattack affecting school boards across Canada may involve decades of data. What can families do?
Over the past two weeks, school boards across Canada — including the country’s largest — have revealed details about a major data breach connected to PowerSchool, an outside provider K-12 schools use to manage student info.
As investigations into the cyberattack continue, a broader understanding of the incident is emerging, with some boards saying that student data dating back decades may be impacted.
Despite the breadth of data that could be potentially accessed, however, experts say there are still measures families and schools can take to protect themselves.
School divisions across Canada — in Alberta, Ontario, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Northwest Territories, Prince Edward Island and Saskatchewan — use PowerSchool, primarily to manage students’ personal and sometimes medical information, grades and other learning details. Some use it as a portal to communicate with families.
Officials are working with PowerSchool to determine the extent of the breach, which occurred in late December when a back-end account used to offer school boards technical support with the platform was compromised.
Names, birthdates, home addresses and phone numbers are commonly cited as the data accessed about recent students.
However, depending on the board, other information — such as student ID numbers, grade, gender, medical info, emergency contacts and disciplinary notes — might also have been accessed. The severity of the incident has also attracted the attention of Canada’s privacy commissioner. Read more
What else is going on?
Trump targets Canada’s digital services tax with America First trade policy
Business groups in Canada, U.S. urge Ottawa to scrap measure they’ve long opposed.
Provinces warn Ottawa slashing immigration program in half will hurt economy
Government halving provincial nominee programs as part of overall immigration cuts.
This man faced a $4K bill for truck reported stolen after police sent pickup notice during postal strike
Ottawa police say other efforts to contact truck owner were unsuccessful.
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