MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — A seaplane crashed during takeoff from an Australian tourist island, killing three people including Swiss and Danish tourists and injuring three others.

Only one of the seven people aboard the Cessna 208 Caravan was rescued without injury after the crash Tuesday afternoon on Rottnest Island, police said.

The plane owned by Swan River Seaplanes was returning to its base in Perth, the Western Australia state capital 30 kilometers (19 miles) east of Rottnest Island, which is also known by its Indigenous name Wadjemup.

The dead were a 65-year-old Swiss woman, a 60-year-old man from Denmark and the 34-year-old male pilot from Perth, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook said.

The dead tourists’ partners, a 63-year-old Swiss man and a 58-year-old Danish woman, survived. A Western Australian couple, a woman aged 65 and a 63-year-old man, also survived.

It is not clear which passenger was uninjured. Western Australian Police Commissioner Col Blanch said no survivor sustained life-threatening injuries.

The three injured people were flown to a Perth hospital.

Cook said the cause of the crash was not yet known. Reports that the plane had struck a rock at the entrance of a bay on the west side of the island could not be confirmed from video viewed so far, Cook said.

Rottnest Island is renowned for its sandy beaches and cat-sized hopping marsupials called quokkas which are rare on the Australian mainland. The island’s tourist accommodation is fully booked during the current Southern Hemisphere summer months.

“Every Western Australian knows that Rottnest is our premier tourism destination,” Cook told reporters.

“For something so tragic to happen in front of so many people, at a place that provides so much joy, especially at this time of the year, is deeply upsetting,” Cook added.

Blanch said police divers had recovered the bodies on Tuesday night from a depth of 8 meters (26 feet). Wreckage of the plane was still being recovered.

Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the aviation crash investigator, said specialist investigators were being sent to the scene.

“As reported to the ATSB, during take-off the floatplane collided with the water, before coming to rest partially submerged,” the bureau’s chief commissioner Angus Mitchell said in a statement.

Greg Quin, a tourist who was vacationing on Rottnest, said he saw the plane crash.

“We were watching the seaplane take off and just as it was beginning to get off the water, it just tipped over and it crashed,” Quin told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio in Perth.

“A lot of people in the water on their boats rushed to the scene and I think got there really, really quickly,” he added.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the crash as “terrible news.”

“The pictures would have been seen by all Australians as they woke up this morning,” Albanese told ABC television. “My heart goes out to all those involved.”

Rod Mcguirk, The Associated Press

President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday that he would move to try to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” a name he said has a “beautiful ring to it.”

It’s his latest suggestion to redraw the map of the Western Hemisphere. Trump has repeatedly referred to Canada as the “51st State,” demanded that Denmark consider ceding Greenland, and called for Panama to return the Panama Canal.

Here’s a look at his comment and what goes into a name.

Why is Trump talking about renaming the Gulf of Mexico?

Since his first run for the White House in 2016, Trump has repeatedly clashed with Mexico over a number of issues, including border security and the imposition of tariffs on imported goods. He vowed then to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it. The U.S. ultimately constructed or refurbished about 450 miles of wall during his first term.

The Gulf of Mexico is often referred to as the United States’ “Third Coast” due to its coastline across five southeastern states. Mexicans use a Spanish version of the same name for the gulf: “El Golfo de México.”

Americans and Mexicans diverge on what to call another key body of water, the river that forms the border between Texas and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas. Americans call it the Rio Grande; Mexicans call it the Rio Bravo.

Can Trump change the name of the Gulf of Mexico?

Maybe, but it’s not a unilateral decision, and other countries don’t have to go along.

The International Hydrographic Organization — of which both the United States and Mexico are members — works to ensure all the world’s seas, oceans and navigable waters are surveyed and charted uniformly, and also names some of them. There are instances where countries refer to the same body of water or landmark by different names in their own documentation.

It can be easier when a landmark or body of water is within a country’s boundaries. In 2015, then-President Barack Obama approved an order from the Department of Interior to rename Mount McKinley — the highest peak in North America — to Denali, a move that Trump has also said he wants to reverse.

Just after Trump’s comments on Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said during an interview with podcaster Benny Johnson that she would direct her staff to draft legislation to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico, a move she said would take care of funding for new maps and administrative policy materials throughout the federal government.

How did the Gulf of Mexico get its name?

The body of water has been depicted with that name for more than four centuries, an original determination believed to have been taken from a Native American city of “Mexico.”

Has renaming the Gulf of Mexico come up before?

Yes. In 2012, a member of the Mississippi Legislature proposed a bill to rename portions of the gulf that touch that state’s beaches “Gulf of America,” a move the bill author later referred to as a “joke.” That bill, which was referred to a committee, did not pass.

Two years earlier, comedian Stephen Colbert had joked on his show that, following the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it should be renamed “Gulf of America” because, “We broke it, we bought it.”

Are there other international disputes over the names of places?

There’s a long-running dispute over the name of the Sea of Japan among Japan, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, with South Korea arguing that the current name wasn’t commonly used until Korea was under Japanese rule. At an International Hydrographic Organization meeting in 2020, member states agreed on a plan to replace names with numerical identifiers and develop a new digital standard for modern geographic information systems.

The Persian Gulf has been widely known by that name since the 16th century, although usage of “Gulf” and “Arabian Gulf” is dominant in many countries in the Middle East. The government of Iran threatened to sue Google in 2012 over the company’s decision not to label the body of water at all on its maps.

There have been other conversations about bodies of water, including from Trump’s 2016 opponent. According to materials revealed by WikiLeaks in a hack of her campaign chairman’s personal account, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2013 told an audience that, by China’s logic that it claimed nearly the entirety of the South China Sea, then the U.S. after World War II could have labeled the Pacific Ocean the “American Sea.”

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Kinnard reported from Chapin, South Carolina, and can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP.

Meg Kinnard, The Associated Press

The clock is ticking for Health Minister Mark Holland to sign agreements with the provinces and the territories that would see the cost of medications for diabetes and contraceptives covered, says the former chairman of an advisory council on universal drug access.

In an interview, Eric Hoskins said time is of the essence to reach the bilateral deals.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says he has deployed provincial police officers to boost security along the border with the United States, the latest move aimed at convincing U.S. president-elect Donald Trump to spare Canadian imports from his threat of tariffs.

The province announced on Tuesday that the plan, actually launched Dec. 6 and dubbed “Operation Deterrence,” includes a special team of 200 Ontario Provincial Police officers as well as planes, helicopters, drones and boats, with 6,000 hours so far of patrols at areas outside formal crossing points. Ontario’s border with the U.S. spans 2,760 kilometres.

For years, Ottawa has been working to implement a national digital identification system that would offer citizens one secure key to unlock access to all its services. 

But the federal government is virtually no closer to realizing this vision than it was five years ago. 

That is the key finding of a recent report by Canada’s auditor general, whose audit revealed a government grappling with inadequate funding, bureaucratic impasses and privacy concerns.

“They’re definitely not progressing as quickly as they ought to be,” said Teresa Scassa, a professor of information law and policy at the University of Ottawa. “The private sector is moving towards digital ID applications, and people are embracing them and adopting them. 

“And the government is just lagging behind.”

Funding hurdles

According to the auditor general’s report, the federal government has been working since 2019 to enable individuals to digitally validate their identity “to access services from all levels of government and elsewhere in the public and private sectors.” 

Ottawa’s aim is to implement a digital ID system that would replace nearly 90 separate sign-in portals managed by individual federal departments. The Canada Revenue Agency’s sign-in portal is one example of such a portal.

The Treasury Board Secretariat — which in 2021 received a mandate to lead this work — has cited inadequate funding as the key reason for its slow progress.

The report does not reveal how much the government has spent on this work so far. Employment and Social Development Canada, the agency to which questions about the report were to be directed, did not respond to multiple requests for comment by press time.

Ottawa’s 2024 budget allocates $25 million over five years for Employment and Social Development Canada to establish a modern, single sign-in portal for federal government services. It is unclear whether this funding will be adequate. The report says the government does “not yet know what it will cost for departments to make that transition or how those costs will be funded.” 

“ I think $25 million is a very low number for what is so much digital transformation,” says Joni Brennan, president of the Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada, a non-profit that promotes digital identification technologies.

A 2018 study by the council pegged the potential value of implementing a “trusted digital identity” for Canadian citizens at one per cent of GDP, or $15 billion. The council’s study says its estimate is informed by evidence from other countries that have implemented a digital identity. These jurisdictions realized savings by reducing the cost of serving citizens, reducing fraud and reducing friction in the client experience. 

“Whether that’s me having to call to reset my password, or losing my password, or a data breach, for Canadians to be competitive at home and on the global stage, there’s massive opportunity here,” said Brennan. 

Scassa says there would be significant security benefits to adopting a standard digital identification.

“Anything that’s a more secure form of access to government services is a good thing — better than scribbling passwords down here or there, forgetting passwords, using the same password over and over. … I mean, there’s a lot of things that are not particularly secure about how we do things currently.”

Pushing back

Not everyone is convinced that following in the footsteps of other advanced countries is prudent policy. 

“ Just because the other nations are doing it is no good reason for us to do it,” said Sharon Polsky, president of the Privacy and Access Council of Canada, a non-profit that promotes access to information, privacy and data protection.

“ What happens when things go wrong? … Look at the unintended consequences. That is something most people don’t look at.”

One of Polsky’s concerns is that digital identification protocols have the potential to undermine civil liberties.

“ Everything you do leaves a digital trail everywhere you present it,” she said. “Geolocation, precise time. They’re collecting that information. What assumptions will they make from it? Will those assumptions be correct?

Polsky says it is possible for citizens to resist entirely transitioning away from analogue forms of identification, and notes that some people are already choosing to do so. 

“How many people your age are dumping their smartphones and going back to stupid flip phones because they’re sick and tired of being monitored, tracked and surveilled and being online all the time,” she said.

Brennan says that the Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada, which sets digital ID standards in Canada, takes seriously the issue of safeguarding Canadians’ personal information. The council includes representatives from government, financial institutions, payment networks and technology service providers.

“ We are dedicated to putting Canadians’ values and privacy and data control and respect at the centre of [standards] design,” Brennan said.

Lags behind

The auditor general’s report says Canada now lags well behind peer nations on digital identification development.

In 2022, Canada ranked 32nd in the United Nations’ EGovernment Development Index, down from third place in 2010. The index ranks countries on their digital government capabilities, with a country’s score reflecting how well it leverages information technologies to improve public service delivery.

Canada’s federal structure is one reason a unified digital identification has been difficult to implement, the report says.

“ B.C. and Alberta are both further along in digital ID, and identity wallets in the case of B.C.,” said Scassa. “I think the risk that we run here is that we’re going to have … a fractured system like we often have in Canada.”

“ [T]here needs to be an ecosystem approach,” said Brennan. But collaborative data governance remains a big challenge, she says.

The provinces are the “data authorities” for most matters, she said, pointing to birth certificates and driver’s licenses as two examples. This leaves the federal government as the “consumer of identity from the provinces,” rather than the authority on data governance.

Senior federal officials believe implementing a single sign-in system prior to developing a national approach to digital identity could make it difficult to later achieve interoperability between systems, according to the auditor general’s report. 

“They also acknowledged that the longer it takes, the more technically difficult and costly it will be,” the report says.

The post Ottawa’s efforts to create digital ID for citizens stalled: report appeared first on CANADIAN AFFAIRS.

First Nations leaders who championed a federal bill intended to address long-standing drinking water issues on reserves say the prorogation of Parliament has killed the proposed legislation and dashed hopes that Ottawa will ever tackle the problem.

“It’s dehumanizing,” said Neskantaga First Nation Chief Chris Moonias, who spent much of his Christmas holiday dealing with shortages of bottled water across the community, home to Canada’s longest-running boil-water advisory. “I supported the bill because it would set minimum standards for our First Nations drinking water so that it doesn’t fall below a certain standard. Now the whole thing is likely dead.”

Concord Pacific says it’s ready to push forward with what it’s calling Concord Landing — a development of the long-dormant northeast shore of False Creek that the developer says will create housing but also “a vibrant, walkable village that serves both residents and visitors.”

A Winnipeg man has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for killing a 45-year-old man whose charred body was initially misidentified by police and a medical examiner.