Police service officially replaces RCMP in northern Alberta city
A new police service has officially taken the reins from the Mounties in a northwestern Alberta city.
The Grande Prairie Police Service said the RCMP is no longer responding to calls coming from within city limits starting Wednesday.
The service said it has completed its transition into becoming the city's official police force two years ahead of schedule.
It said the city's roughly 71,000 residents should still call 911 for emergencies.
Grande Prairie councillors voted not to renew a contract with the RCMP in 2023 after a cost analysis found that having a municipal police service wouldn't be as expensive.
Mayor Jackie Clayton said the transition is a significant milestone.
"This transition reflects years of planning, collaboration, and commitment from many people and organizations," she said in a statement Wednesday.
"We are proud to welcome the Grande Prairie Police Service as our police service, marking a new chapter in public safety built on local oversight, strong community partnerships, and a shared commitment to keeping Grande Prairie safe."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2026.
Copyright 2026, The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
Canadian news publishers worried about Meta’s new terms of service
Canadian news companies say they’re worried about changes to Meta’s terms of service and want the company to clarify how they will be affected.
Meta’s changes to its terms of service, first reported by Neiman Lab, led some to suggest the terms could allow scraping of websites associated with a business account for AI training purposes.
Meta has now revised those terms but the anxiety has not abated. European and British publishers are asking governments and regulators to step in.
Publishers’ association News Media Canada said a statement that "like publisher associations everywhere, we’re very concerned and are seeking clarity."
The fact Meta blocked news content in Canada following the passage of the Online News Act in 2023 is creating additional uncertainty over how Canadian outlets could be affected by the new terms.
The Canadian Association of Broadcasters said its members have raised concerns and at a minimum, Meta should be transparent about how the new terms will affect Canadian outlets.
Association president Kevin Desjardins said there is an "obvious contradiction" and that Meta has blocked news "arguing that news provides insufficient value to its platforms."
"Yet it now appears to be seeking broad permissions to access and use content from publishers’ websites for its own commercial purposes," he said.
Desjardins said "Canadian broadcasters should not be put in a position where their journalism is unavailable to Canadians on Meta’s platforms, while Meta potentially reserves broad rights to exploit it."
In response to a question about how the terms apply in Canada, a Meta spokesperson said "the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we've clarified that in the terms themselves.
"It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don't give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”
Various Canadian news publishers already use robots.txt to block bots from AI companies like OpenAI.
A number of Canadian news outlets, including The Canadian Press, have launched lawsuits against OpenAI and Anthropic over the use of copyrighted content for training AI systems.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2026.
By Anja Karadeglija | Copyright 2026, The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
Fact File: Claims about fraudulent results in Alberta referendum false, expert says
Posts questioning the results in Alberta's referendum spread on the social media platform X this week as the numbers were released. One claimed that hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots were dumped to answer just one of the questions put to voters — the 10th question asking about independence. Another concluded more people had voted than the number of registered voters. Elections Alberta and one expert say the people making these claims either misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented the vote-counting process.
THE CLAIM
An Oct. 20 post on X alleged that hundreds of thousands of special ballots were dumped to tilt the outcome of the independence referendum question in favour of Alberta remaining in Canada.
“Look at the dump of mail in votes for the Alberta Referendum. Almost all ... the mail in ballots appear to only have answered question 10," it said, posting screenshots of live preliminary results for each referendum question from the Elections Alberta site. The figures in the screenshot showed substantially more votes tallied for the independence question than for the others.
"That smells of corruption," the post, which had received close to 67,000 views hours it was posted, continued.
THE FACTS
Duane Bratt, a professor of political science at Mount Royal University in Calgary, described the claim about a mail-in ballot dump as "ridiculous."
He said the sudden appearance of the results for the independence question after the polls closed was expected, as the government had said results for that question would be announced first, and workers had begun counting the ballots hours before polls closed.
"They had been counting the advanced polls and the mail-in votes since 5 o'clock that afternoon, so it's not surprising that there was a whole bunch of results, the moment that they could officially release them," Bratt said.
Bratt referred to Elections Alberta releasing the initial results for the question minutes after the last poll closed, with the results showing a sizable lead for Alberta remaining in Canada over the option of a referendum on leaving the country.
Soon afterwards, the results for the remaining questions also began to trickle out.
In an emailed statement Tuesday from Elections Alberta, the office said that there was no mail-in ballot dump, and that they had announced the order in which results would be released on May 29.
The office added that it received 519,082 special ballots on the independence question. The Elections Alberta live results web page on Wednesday showed 2,021,521 total votes cast for this question, with 95 per cent of locations reporting.
"This allegation now is disinformation at best and an attempt to deliberately undermine faith in the democratic process at worst," an Elections Alberta spokesperson said.
Bratt added that, while the polling stations workers were counting the ballots for the independence question, they would also count the ballots for the remaining questions.
"In each polling station, they counted Question 10 first, then they went through one to nine. That is why there was a discrepancy, and there continues to be a discrepancy in the totals that emerged," he said in an interview Tuesday.
Bratt added that another reason for the discrepancy was that some voters may have found the wording of the remaining questions confusing and skipped them, and others were encouraged to vote only on the independence question. Voters were free to answer as many referendum question as they chose.
"If you were to vote in person, you don't have to take all 10, you don't have to drop off all 10. It's the same thing with the special ballots," he said. "You could submit one ballot or you could submit 10 ballots."
THE CLAIM
Another Oct. 20 post on X questioned the number of votes processed compared to the number of eligible voters, appearing to equate each valid vote cast with a voter and alleging there might be an "election fraud."
"Elections Alberta noted in advance that the province had 3,148,343 eligible voters," the post said. "The problem is that the numbers below add up to 4,352,679 votes cast."
The post, which received more than 190,000 views in the hours after it appeared, claimed there were 1.2 million more votes than eligible voters, adding that it was hard to believe 100 per cent of eligible voters took part in the referendum.
THE FACTS
Elections Alberta's referendum results website provides a clear distinction between the number of eligible voters and the number of votes cast.
The vote total represents "valid votes cast across 10 questions," in which each ballot submitted counts as one vote. For this referendum, each voter received 10 ballots, one for each question, so in theory the maximum number of votes cast is 10 times the number of voters.
The official results for all 10 questions are expected to be released and finalized on Oct. 29, according to the web page.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2026.
By Timon Johnson | Copyright 2026, The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.