TORONTO - The Pan Am Games torch relay begins its 41-day journey through Ontario today, with torchbearer and Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield helping to fan the flames of excitement ahead of the event.

The flame will arrive on Toronto's waterfront this afternoon, before being taken in a flotilla of canoes to a welcoming ceremony with musical performances and members of the province's First Nations communities.

The first torchbearer of the relay will depart from the ceremony carrying the Pan Am flame through the city's downtown core.

The final torchbearer of the day will be Hadfield, self-described first Canadian to walk in space, who will deliver the flame to a community event in Toronto's Distillery District where he'll light a cauldron with the flame.

About 3,000 torchbearers will run legs of the 41-day relay that will conclude with the lighting of the official cauldron at the Games opening ceremony on July 10 in Toronto.

The torch relay will cover 5,000 km on the road and 15,000 km by air.

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Canada is second only to the U.S. in levels of entrepreneurial activity, beating most G7 countries and much of the developed world.

That's the conclusion of the Centre for Innovation Studies in Calgary, which researched the state of entrepreneurship in Canada for the international Global Entrepreneurship Monitor in London.

Canada's level of entrepreneurship is on a par with Australia, with about 13 per cent of the working-age population involved in early-stage entrepreneurial activity, according to Peter Josty, executive director of the Centre for Innovation Studies.

"The Canadian environment and culture for entrepreneurship is healthy. Entrepreneurship is seen as a good career for which opportunities exist within the capacities of a large segment of the population," the report says.

Among the positive attitudes cited for Canadian culture:

- Highly supportive of individual success achieved through personal effort.

- Emphasizes self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal initiative.

- Encourages creativity and innovation.

But the culture of innovation is different in Canada.

"In most countries consumer services is the big sector, but in Canada, the highest rate is in the business to business services and that's a whole different ballgame," Josty said in an interview with CBC News Network's The Exchange with Amanda Lang.

Canada also lags in entrepreneurship — in which process engineers and others improve business efficiency within a larger company, he said.

"The number of people in large businesses doing this is half the rate in the U.S. and Australia and we think this correlates with poor innovation and productivity in Canada," Josty said.

The peak age range for Canadian entrepreneurship is 45 to 64, but there remains a lot of activity among Canadians under age 45.

More highly educated Canadians are more likely to start businesses, but there are entrepreneurs with every level of education.

Education and innovation

Josty still sees some opportunity to boost entrepreneurship through the school system.

"The Canadian education systems, from the earliest levels, are suitably creativity oriented, but lacking in specific basic economic education and introduction to entrepreneurship itself," the report says.

Alberta has the highest number of early-stage entrepreneurs, while Quebec excels in entrepreneurs who create new business lines within an existing company.

"It turns out that Alberta's got the highest rate of entrepreneurship and it's also got the highest rate of gross domestic product per capita and if you look at the other provinces, it generally scales down according to their wealth," Josty said. 

As data for the report was gathered in 2014, when the economy was humming along, Josty expects data for this year should prove whether a faltering economy pushes more people toward starting businesses.

"I think there is quite a lot of incentive to stay small in Canada — there's the small business tax rate and the fact that quite a lot of people start lifestyle businesses, where they're not looking to be a global player, they're just looking to provide employment for themselves," he added.

Two women are entrepreneurs for every three men, a figure Josty says could be improved with policies to support female entrepreneurs.

Canada has a strong track record among G7 countries for turning its entrepreneurs into established businesses, with 9.4 per cent lasting at least 3½ years.

On the other hand, a large number of entrepreneurial startups don't survive, and others sell to new owners who continue the business.

Weakness in financing

Canadian entrepreneurs set less ambitious targets than their U.S. counterparts, perhaps because of the size of the economy, Josty said.

The weak areas in Canada's entrepreneurial sector are financing and creating opportunities for transformative innovation, as there are often delays in accepting new technologies.

"For example, programs at all levels could promote the rapidly emerging green technology industry in Canada as a transformative sector," the report said.

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VANCOUVER - At age 22, Quebec native Joanne Mayer was greeted at her first RCMP posting in Gibsons, B.C., with a handshake and a blunt statement from the sergeant: "We don't think women should be in the force, and especially not French-speaking ones."

Mayer said that along with her regular duties, she spent over two years doing "sexist" chores including making coffee, ensuring there was an ample supply of cream and sugar, and cleaning police cruisers.

A quarter-century later, Mayer has joined hundreds of other former and current RCMP members hoping for justice over alleged gender discrimination, bullying and harassment with a potential class-action lawsuit.

A five-day hearing to determine certification of a class-action proceeding involving 362 women is set to begin Monday in B.C. Supreme Court.

"I didn't tell my parents or anybody what had happened to me. I went through this all on my own," said Mayer, who plans to fly to Vancouver from Ottawa along with several other women expected to attend from across Canada.

Mayer was emboldened to come forward after Janet Merlo, a 19-year RCMP veteran from Nanaimo, B.C., went public with her own experience of ongoing discrimination before launching the suit in March 2012.

"I was like, 'Well, I went through that, too. Maybe it wasn't my fault,'" Mayer said. "I had blocked it out, to be honest. I didn't realize what was happening to me at the time and I was too scared to speak out."

In the three years it has taken to wind through the legal system, a law firm championing the case has canvassed more than 100 women with a detailed questionnaire, said lawyer David Klein.

"They share an unfortunate common bond," he said. "They were subjected to systemic harassment, bullying and discrimination over a long period of time. The bond they share is the consequence of that treatment."

Klein said he will introduce the case and present key evidence from Merlo's affidavit and an expert he calls the leading authority on gender harassment and discrimination.

He will also explain why it's crucial to tackle the allegations en mass with a class action rather than require individual women to file hundreds of lawsuits on their own.

"Reality is, some of the claims are too small to warrant individual litigation," he said.

"The only way many of these women will have access to the civil justice system is if it is done through a class action."

None of the claims have been tested in court.

Klein said that while he believes the RCMP has begun taking steps to reduce harassment against women, people who have made allegations are still being challenged on every statement they make.

"It's time for the government of Canada to step in and direct the RCMP to take these claims seriously."

Jeremy Laurin, a spokesman for the federal Public Safety Department, said he couldn't comment while the case is before the courts but that the government takes issues of discrimination and sexual harassment "very seriously.

"All RCMP members and employees should feel safe and respected amongst their colleagues and superiors," he said in a statement. "Canadians have the right to expect professional and exemplary conduct from their national police service."

For Mayer, who had dreamed of being a police officer since she was a little girl, settlement is the only way to bring closure because she felt forced to switch careers.

"My hope is that the force will recognize that it has affected a lot of female members," she said. "I wouldn't want this to happen to new members going in, new females. If this is truly what they want to do they should be able to do the same job as anyone else."

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MONTREAL - A Montreal-based human rights think-tank wants to fight jihadist groups on their own online turf, saying it's time to push back against the propaganda.

Kyle Matthews, who heads Concordia University's Digital Mass Atrocity Prevention Lab, says the use of social media by groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant to lure young people and promote its cause goes largely unchecked.

Groups like ISIL are evidence of the increasing convergence between new technology, atrocities and extremist factions, said Matthews.

"ISIS has become like a genocidal force where it exists and it tends to squash all diversity and annihilate anyone who is different," he said in a recent interview.

"Tied to that, we have cases in Canada where individuals are being radicalized online, targeted on social media much like online sexual predators."

The lab was introduced this year and is part of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, where Matthews is deputy director.

Montreal has been the focus of much scrutiny after the recent arrest of 10 youths suspected of wanting to join jihadist groups in the Middle East. Their passports were confiscated, although no charges were laid.

A local junior college attended by some of those youths noted it was powerless to stop recruitment that largely takes place online.

That followed the disappearance in January of several young Quebecers who are believed to have fled to Turkey to eventually join jihadist organizations in the Middle East. Some are thought to have attended the same school.

In Quebec, the province is set to introduce anti-radicalization measures in the coming weeks, while the City of Montreal has said it plans to open an anti-radicalization centre.

While some people advocate closing down social media accounts and outing jihadist cheerleaders, Matthews said responding to such propaganda and tackling the ideology is equally important.

"They're creating a narrative that kind of makes the ISIS fighter look like the Che Guevara of 2015," Matthews said.

The propaganda videos are professionally produced. Groups like ISIL are also prolific, with thousands of Twitter and Facebook accounts that constantly recruit and target disaffected youth in the West. There have been reports about their use of apps and other programs, like the Russian equivalent of Facebook, to bypass western intelligence.

Jihadists have also demonstrated a long reach: an ISIL audio recording in mid-May, purportedly from its reclusive leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was translated into several languages and shared via some 46,000 Twitter accounts linked to the group.

With so much jihadist content available, Matthews said governments and organizations worldwide are struggling to keep up.

"The response is so slow and what I keep telling people, the government can't do this stuff: bureaucrats are not creative, they don't understand how social media works," Matthews said.

"The ideas are where we have to engage if we want to prevent this from getting any worse."

Matthews and his team will present ways to deal with digital jihadism at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in Germany in June.

The best line of attack, he believes, may lie in a diverse group of untapped sources such as creative filmmakers, tech firms and Muslims who understand the situation and can provide a counterpoint.

"They (ISIL) have got an entire social media infrastructure that's laid out and they're doing it in multiple languages and I don't see any equivalent response," Matthews said.

Programs combating extremism are rare. One program launched in February is called Extreme Dialogue, an educational tool that features testimonial videos and resources to get teens to question views being peddled to them.

Among the participants is Christianne Boudreau, a Calgary mother whose 22-year-old son, Damian Clairmont, was killed last year while fighting with jihadists in Syria.

She said many youths sympathize with radical groups because they find a sense of belonging and family online.

"They're being told that all the propaganda (in western media) is all lies — my son was told the same thing," Boudreau said, adding many Canadian kids likely sympathize with the movement but have not yet acted upon their feelings.

Boudreau also works with families touched by radicalization and notes resources are scarce.

"Until we start bonding together and building community resilience and creating those outreach points for people, it's going to be very difficult to slow this down," she said.

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The commission that has spent five years examining one of the darkest chapters in Canada's history is winding up its work with a key question left unanswered — exactly how many aboriginal children died in residential schools?

Justice Murray Sinclair, who heads the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, says the federal government stopped recording the deaths around 1920 after the chief medical officer at Indian Affairs suggested children were dying at an alarming rate.

"He was fired," Sinclair says. "The government stopped recording deaths of children in residential schools, we think, probably because the rates were so high."

Sinclair has guessed up to 6,000 children may have died at the schools but it's impossible to say with certainty.

"We think this is a situation that needs further study," he said.

More than 130 years after the first residential schools were established to "take the Indian out of the child," the commission is to release a summary of its six-volume final report on Tuesday. It will include testimony from survivors, as well as numerous recommendations to address the legacy of forced assimilation.

The commission didn't originally intend to examine how many children never came home, but it quickly emerged as an issue, Sinclair says.

Schools were often crowded, poorly ventilated and unsanitary. Children died from smallpox, measles, influenza and tuberculosis. Some were buried in unmarked graves in school cemeteries, while others were listed as "missing" or "discharged." In some cases, parents never found out what happened.

Some provinces handed over death certificates to the commission, but Sinclair says the work is far from over.

"We have recommendations around that in the report. We're going to tell you there are lots of records out there that are missing."

About 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children were taken from their families and forced to attend government schools over much of the last century.

The $60-million commission was part of a landmark compensation deal between Ottawa, the Crown and residential school survivors. It visited hundreds of communities and heard testimony from 7,000 survivors, including graphic details of rampant sexual and physical abuse.

The legacy of the schools is evident today, Sinclair says. High poverty rates, a large number of aboriginal children in foster care, a disproportionate number of aboriginals in jail and hundreds of missing and murdered aboriginal women can all be traced back to residential schools, he suggests.

National Chief Perry Bellegarde of the Assembly of First Nations says part of reconciliation is ensuring that aboriginal children have the same quality of life as everyone else. If that doesn't happen, he says, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's historic 2008 apology to residential school survivors will mean nothing.

"If we're going to talk about reconciliation, there really has to be action attached to the apology."

The churches that ran the majority of the schools have promised to work toward reconciliation.

In a letter from the Ottawa archdiocese, released by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Terrence Prendergast calls on the faithful to repent for how the church treated aboriginal people.

"We face the past and sincerely ask for forgiveness," the letter reads.

The Anglican Church of Canada apologized to students and their families in 1993.

"We've been trying to live into that apology ever since," the church says on a website dedicated to reconciliation.

Some worry the commission is ending its work before real healing has begun.

Manitoba Aboriginal Affairs Minister Eric Robinson was sent to a residential school when he was five and left when he was nine - one of the lucky ones, he says.

The number of children who died at residential schools is just one of the areas that needs more exploration, he says. The medical experiments conducted on children, as well as forced military training, should also be properly studied.

"Five or six years is hardly enough time to ascertain a century and more of hurt and punishment inflicted upon Indian people. We almost need a permanent forum."

Sinclair says the responsibility to repair the relationship with aboriginal people rests with Canadians.

"It's the people talking at the community level, the need to overcome racism that people have been raised with, overcoming the stereotypes.

"One of their first obligations is to recognize they are in a relationship with aboriginal people that is like no other."

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Prosecutors are set to begin closing arguments Monday in the retrial of Mohamed Fahmy on widely-denounced terror charges.

But as the case inches closer to a verdict, the Canadian journalist says he dreads having to pay the price for errors he claims were made by the company he worked for — Al Jazeera English.

Fahmy was the Cairo bureau chief for the Qatar-based satellite news broadcaster when he and two colleagues were arrested in December 2013.

After the successful appeal of his internationally decried conviction, Fahmy was granted bail in February following more than a year in prison.

The 41-year-old journalist says it's become clear Al Jazeera failed to protect its employees working in Egypt.

Crucial to his case at this point, he says, is being able to separate himself from the broadcaster, who he is now suing for $100 million in damages.

"I pay the price for the network, it's not the network that pays," he told The Canadian Press. "Our job in the courtroom is to differentiate between the responsibilities of the network and us, and prove to the judge...that we had no clue about a lot of this stuff."

Al Jazeera is owned by the Qatari government, a fact which plays an important role in Fahmy's case.

Egypt and Qatar have had tense relations since 2013, when the Egyptian military ousted former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi. Qatar is a strong backer of Morsi's now-banned Islamist Muslim Brotherhood group.

Fahmy alleges Al Jazeera used its Egypt-focused Arabic channel, which was banned in Egypt, to promote propaganda of the Muslim Brotherhood.

He also alleges the broadcaster failed to secure proper licenses for its staff and aired reports from Al Jazeera English on its banned Arabic channel — factors he says have contributed significantly to the charges against him.

"I am very worried about the outcome," he said of his trial. "Unfortunately, I am in that frame of assisting the Muslim Brotherhood, so I've got to worry, I can't let my guard down."

Fahmy said he complained many times about his staff's English reports being broadcast on the banned Arabic channel but adds he was dismissed by the network's executives.

He also said he and his staff never even thought to check if Al Jazeera had secured broadcast licences for its channel in Egypt.

"We are going to explain to the judge that we, three journalists, had no ill intent towards Egypt or malicious plans to breaks the law as the network did," he said of his defence lawyer's planned arguments in the coming weeks.

"Journalism is not political activism ... At the end of the day there are laws in Egypt and they ignored these laws, challenged them and didn't give us the choice to accept their way of doing things."

Al Jazeera has said Fahmy should be targeting his captors, not his employer.

The media company has also said that while all governments have news outlets they don't like, they don't use "spurious grounds" to put journalists in jail.

As his trial moves along, Fahmy is also hoping the Canadian government will continue to engage its Egyptian counterparts to push for his freedom.

Fahmy moved to Canada with his family in 1991, living in Montreal and Vancouver for years before eventually moving abroad for work, which included covering stories for the New York Times and CNN.

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A photo posted by CanadaGram Project (@canadagram) on May 24, 2015 at 11:51am PDT

A photo posted by CanadaGram Project (@canadagram) on May 25, 2015 at 5:06am PDT

A photo posted by CanadaGram Project (@canadagram) on May 26, 2015 at 6:51am PDT

OTTAWA - At the Ottawa courthouse, a suspended senator's criminal trial continues.

Up the street, on Parliament Hill, a different system of justice is unfolding for senators apparently caught up in some of the same alleged misspending.

That asymmetrical response by the upper chamber is expected to come under scrutiny as Sen. Mike Duffy's fraud, breach of trust and bribery trial enters its second phase.

The Senate is simultaneously bracing for the release of the auditor general's report on the expenses of all senators. Former Supreme Court Justice Ian Binnie has been named as an arbitrator for MPs identified as having questionable claims.

Neither Duffy nor fellow senators Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau had such recourse when they were suspended in 2013 "because at the time, unfortunately, this process wasn't in place," Senate Speaker Leo Housakos said when Binnie's role was announced last week.

"There is no plausible reason why the same process wouldn't be open to us," Wallin's lawyer Terrence O'Sullivan told the Toronto Star.

Duffy's defence lawyer Donald Bayne has already railed in the courtroom against the prosecution's treatment of Duffy as a scapegoat for practices that were apparently all too common for the Senate.

To that end, the next chapter of the trial will begin with Bayne arguing that the Senate should hand over the results of another internal audit — one done by the Senate in 2013 examining the residency status of all senators.

Some of the 31 charges that Duffy is facing are related to the living and travel expenses he filed after declaring a secondary residence in the Ottawa area. Duffy has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges against him.

The Senate is refusing to divulge the internal residency audit, citing parliamentary privilege — a form of immunity that exempts lawmakers from certain aspects of the justice system to allow them to do their work.

Here again, the Senate appears to have taken a mercurial stand.

In January, the Senate rules committee issued a report on parliamentary privilege recommending that the approach be modernized.

"The service of court documents should also be revisited. It is difficult to understand today how the service of court documents, at least by mail, actually infringes privilege," read the report.

"It should also be made clear that this privilege does not apply in situations where the parliamentarian (or official) is a party to a court action."

Once the privilege issue is dealt with in the court, the Crown will resume hearing from its witnesses. The most notable witness expected to appear soon is Gerry Donohue, a friend of Duffy's who received tens of thousands through Senate contracts, and then paid other individuals who did work for Duffy.

But prosecutors won't wrap up their case within these three weeks allotted to the trial, and that makes it unlikely that key witness Nigel Wright — the prime minister's former chief of staff — will appear in June.

The court is expected to learn soon whether arrangements have been made to have the trial extend into the summer months, where it could end up overlapping with the federal election campaign.

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Digesting The Label is a series that takes a look at what exactly is in the food that we're buying and eating from a nutritional standpoint. Every two weeks, we'll examine a food and help determine whether or not it's all it's cut out to be .. or in some cases, even better for us than we thought. This week, we're looking at the sodium content in tomato-based pasta sauces.

I'm so happy after such a long struggle to be living my true self. Welcome to the world Caitlyn. Can't wait for you to get to know her/me.

— Caitlyn Jenner (@Caitlyn_Jenner) June 1, 2015

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OTTAWA - The chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into Canada's residential schools system says Canadians must not permit discomfort with the past to shield them from the truth.

Rather, Justice Murray Sinclair says the difficult — almost incomprehensible — stories of residential school survivors should help set the course for future action, particularly in education.

Sinclair is set to deliver the commission's report on the wrenching, five-year inquiry on Tuesday, but events leading up to the report's release have been taking place for several days in Ottawa.

Hundreds of school survivors were among a huge crowd today at a downtown Ottawa hotel, where survivors continued to share their stories while provincial ministers began gingerly plotting a way forward.

Education is a key theme, and Northwest Territories education minister Jackson Lafferty is offering a ready-made curriculum on the residential schools and their legacy that could be taught in classrooms across the country.

Sinclair told the gathering that apologies and listening to painful histories are only a beginning, and that the next step — reconciliation — is only achievable by acting differently.

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