Ottawa Food Bank receives largest donation in its 40-year history
210,000 pounds of food was delivered to the Ottawa Food Bank on Saturday, the largest donation in its 40-year history.
Former Premier Li Keqiang, China's top economic official for a decade, died Friday of a heart attack. He was 68.
Li was China's No. 2 leader from 2013-23 and an advocate for private business but was left with little authority after President Xi Jinping made himself the most powerful Chinese leader in decades and tightened control over the economy and society.
CCTV said Li had been resting in Shanghai recently and had a heart attack on Thursday. He died at 12:10 a.m. Friday.
Li, an English-speaking economist, was considered a contender to succeed then-Communist Party leader Hu Jintao in 2013 but was passed over in favor of Xi. Reversing the Hu era's consensus-oriented leadership, Xi centralized powers in his own hands, leaving Li and others on the party's ruling seven-member Standing Committee with little influence.
As the top economic official, Li promised to improve conditions for entrepreneurs who generate jobs and wealth. But the ruling party under Xi increased the dominance of state industry and tightened control over tech and other industries. Foreign companies said they felt unwelcome after Xi and other leaders called for economic self-reliance, expanded an anti-spying law and raided offices of consulting firms.
Li was dropped from the Standing Committee at a party congress in October 2022 despite being two years below the informal retirement age of 70.
The same day, Xi awarded himself a third five-year term as party leader, discarding a tradition under which his predecessors stepped down after 10 years. Xi filled the top party ranks with loyalists, ending the era of consensus leadership and possibly making himself leader for life. The No. 2 slot was filled by Li Qiang, the party secretary for Shanghai, who lacked Li Keqiang's national-level experience and later told reporters that his job was to do whatever Xi decided.
Li Keqiang, a former vice premier, took office in 2013 as the ruling party faced growing warnings the construction and export booms that propelled the previous decade's double-digit growth were running out of steam.
Government advisers argued Beijing had to promote growth based on domestic consumption and service industries. That would require opening more state-dominated industries and forcing state banks to lend more to entrepreneurs.
Li's predecessor, Wen Jiabao, apologized at a March 2012 news conference for not moving fast enough.
In a 2010 speech, Li acknowledged challenges including too much reliance on investment to drive economic growth, weak consumer spending and a wealth gap between prosperous eastern cities and the poor countryside, home to 800 million people.
Li was seen as a possible candidate to revive then-supreme leader Deng Xiaoping's market-oriented reforms of the 1980s that started China's boom. But he was known for an easygoing style, not the hard-driving impatience of Zhu Rongji, the premier in 1998-2003 who ignited the construction and export booms by forcing painful reforms that cut millions of jobs from state industry.
Li was believed to have supported the "China 2030" report released by the World Bank and a Cabinet research body in 2012 that called for dramatic changes to reduce the dominance of state industry and rely more on market forces.
The Unirule Institute, an independent think tank in Beijing, said state industry was so inefficient that its return on equity -- a broad measure of profitability -- was negative 6 per cent. Unirule later was shut down by Xi as part of a campaign to tighten control over information.
In his first annual policy address, Li in 2014 was praised for promising to pursue market-oriented reform, cut government waste, clean up air pollution and root out pervasive corruption that was undermining public faith in the ruling party.
Xi took away Li's decision-making powers on economic matters by appointing himself to head a party commission overseeing reform.
Xi's government pursued the anti-graft drive, imprisoning hundreds of officials including former Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang. But party leaders were ambivalent about the economy. They failed to follow through on a promised list of dozens of market-oriented changes. They increased the dominance of state-owned banks and energy and other companies.
Xi's government opened some industries including electric car manufacturing to private and foreign competition. But it built up state-owned "national champions" and encouraged Chinese companies to use domestic suppliers instead of imports.
Borrowing by companies, households and local governments increased, pushing up debt that economists warned already was dangerously high.
Beijing finally tightened controls in 2020 on debt in real estate, one of China's biggest industries. That triggered a collapse in economic growth, which fell to 3 per cent in 2022, the second-lowest in three decades.
Li showed his political skills but little zeal for reform as governor and later party secretary of populous Henan province in central China in 1998-2004.
Li earned the nickname "Three Fires Li" and a reputation for bad luck after three fatal fires struck Henan while he was there. A Christmas Day blaze at a nightclub in 2000 killed 309 people. Other officials were punished but Li emerged unscathed.
Meanwhile, provincial leaders were trying to suppress information about the spread of AIDS by a blood-buying industry in Henan.
Li's reputation for bad luck held as China suffered a series of deadly disasters during his term.
Days after he took office, a landslide on March 29, 2013, killed at least 66 miners at a gold mine in Tibet and left 17 others missing and presumed dead.
In the eastern port of Tianjin, a warehouse holding chemicals exploded Aug. 12, 2015, killing at least 116 people.
A China Eastern Airlines jetliner plunged into the ground on March 22, 2022, killing all 132 people aboard. Authorities have yet to announce a possible cause.
Li oversaw China's response to COVID-19, the first cases of which were detected in the central city of Wuhan. Then-unprecedented controls were imposed, shutting down most international travel for three years and access to major cities for weeks at a time.
In one of his last major official acts, Li led a Cabinet meeting that announced Nov. 11, 2022, that anti-virus controls would be relaxed to reduce disruption after the economy shrank by 2.6 per cent in the second quarter of the year. Two weeks later, the government announced most travel and business restrictions would end the following month.
Li was born July 1, 1955, in the eastern province of Anhui and by 1976 was ruling party secretary of a commune there.
Studying law at Peking University, he was the campus secretary of the ruling party's Communist Youth League, an organization that launched the political careers of former party leaders Hu Jintao and Hu Yaobang. He was a member of the League's Standing Committee, a sign he was seen as future leadership material.
After serving in a series of party posts, Li received his Ph.D. in economics in 1994 from Peking University.
Following Henan, Li served as party secretary for Liaoning province in the northeast as part of a rotation through provincial posts and at ministries in Beijing that was meant to prepare leaders. He joined the party Central Committee in 2007.
------
Leung reported from Hong Kong. Former AP correspondent Joe McDonald, who retired earlier this year, was the principal writer of this obituary.
210,000 pounds of food was delivered to the Ottawa Food Bank on Saturday, the largest donation in its 40-year history.
Your father's diet before you were born could have played a role in your health, a new study has found.
Canadians would get more than $1 billion in unclaimed benefits each year through an automatic tax filing system, according to a report published by the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO).
Nova Scotia has installed fewer than 10 per cent of the 200 shelters it promised to set up for the province's homeless residents more than eight months after first making the pledge.
Prince William on Sunday shared a photograph showing him as a child with his father, King Charles III, to mark Father’s Day in the United Kingdom this year.
Some of Hollywood's brightest stars headlined a fundraiser for U.S. President Joe Biden that took in a record US$30 million-plus for a Democratic candidate, according to his campaign, in hopes of energizing would-be supporters for a White House contest they said may rank among the most consequential in U.S. history.
A fire in an underground parking facility in Regina led to no injuries, according to the city's fire department.
On a day that a local state of emergency was declared in Calgary, city residents answered a request from the mayor and emergency officials to use less water.
Nearly 80 countries called Sunday for the 'territorial integrity' of Ukraine to be the basis for any peace agreement to end Russia's two-year war, though some key developing nations at a Swiss conference did not join in. The way forward for diplomacy remains unclear.
The thunderstorm that hit Ottawa Thursday evening was accompanied by heavy rain and lightning that struck a house in Orléans.
Canadian and U.S. ironworkers shook hands across the border as the Gordie Howe bridge deck officially becomes an international crossing.
Age may be just a number to George Steciuk, but it’s just one of many that add up to one inspirational athlete.
It has taken more than 100 years, but Almonte’s forgotten soldier, George B. Monterville has had his name etched back into history.
For Father's Day, CP24.com and CTVNewsToronto.ca reached out to local politicians, community advocates, and other prominent figures in the city to ask them to share what important lesson they have learned from their dads.
Fancy Pokket owner Mike Timani has decided to create a 220-foot long flat bread to celebrate its 35th anniversary.
If certain goals that are in the Paris Climate Accord aren't met, the existence of polar bears in the Hudson Bay may come to an end.
In an attempt to invite one of the most popular recording artists in the world to the land of living skies – the City of Swift Current has offered to rename itself in honour of Taylor Swift.
More than a dozen dogs arrived by Cargojet early Thursday morning to the People for Animal Wellbeing Shelter to find a permanent place to call home in New Brunswick.