There’s nothing like having the window open or the top down on a great day with tunes blasting from the car stereo. Chances are you’ve got your favourite driving song, if not a series of driving playlists. Is it your imagination, or do some songs sound better while driving?

It has to do with the brain’s sweet spot when it comes to rhythm. The background noise of a car—the engine, the road noise, the vibrations—is pretty consistent. But when you combine that with the slightly less consistent rhythm of a song, your brain shifts into a space where it’s more likely to enhance the novelty of the music.

Driving fast (which adds a sense of danger) while knowing you’re in control (which inspires confidence), combined with a great song (which makes you want to move), results in a little extra adrenaline that just makes everything sound better.

Hey, it’s science.

© 2026 Corus Radio, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

The Black Keys have come a long, long way since that first gig in Akron, Ohio, sometime in early 2002.  They played a show in front of just ten paying customers.  The total take for the night was five dollars for guitarist Dan Auerbach and five dollars for drummer Patrick Carney.

Things improved slowly. Their first album was recorded in the basement of Pat’s family’s house. The third album was recorded in an abandoned tire factory. But with each new album, life got a little better–for an indie band, anyway. There was a lot of critical acclaim and much hipster love, but it wasn’t until their 2008 album, Attack & Release, that the rest of the world began to figure out what the Black Keys were all about.  And, of course, things blew up real good with their 2010 album, Brothers.

And where did the band get their name, anyway?  Pat’s father used the phrase “black key” as something that wasn’t quite right.  I wonder what he thinks of his son’s job?

© 2026 Corus Radio, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

Just four games into what’s been an incredible Stanley Cup final thus far, it’s become quite clear who the front-runner is to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as the Stanley Cup playoffs’ most valuable player.

Based on his point production, the timeliness of that offence and his ability to play defence by controlling possession of the puck, Vegas’s Mitch Marner is skating away from the field at a record pace.

But as valuable to the Golden Knights and their impressive playoff run have been the contributions of Oakbank, Man.’s Brett Howden.

He leads the league in playoff goal scoring with 14, including a Golden Knights playoff record three short-handed goals and three game-winners, and has provided the type of compete on every shift necessary to put him and his team in a position to win their second Stanley Cup.

And he’s spread it out, with an overtime winner against Utah and other game-winning goals against Anaheim and Colorado. No team in these playoffs has been spared Howden’s wrath.

Now, the eight-year NHLer doesn’t have the cachet that other major contributors on the Golden Knights like Jack Eichel, Tomas Hertl or even Mark Stone hold, but ask anyone on his team about his importance and unanimously they would admit their situation wouldn’t be the same without him.

And at just 28 years old and with four years left on his contract, it appears he’s just getting started, as he moves firmly into his prime and with a growing presence on an already star-studded roster.

At this point of the Stanley Cup final, Marner is the favourite to win the Conn Smythe, but without the contributions of his linemate through these playoffs, Vegas might not be sitting exactly where they are this June.

As such, Marner might be the front-runner to win the playoff MVP award, but Howden’s worth to his team’s Stanley Cup push to date has been uniquely just as valuable.

© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

Health officials in both Canadian cities hosting World Cup matches are warning visitors about the potential risk of the toxic illicit drug supply that could be very different from what they are used to at home.

Organizers of the seven games in Vancouver released a “know before you go” document in advance of kickoff, which in part warns visitors about B.C.’s illicit drug supply which has killed more than 16,000 people since a public health emergency was declared in 2016.

“The unregulated drug supply in Vancouver is unpredictable and may be more dangerous than what visitors are used to in other countries or regions. Even a very small amount of an unregulated substance — including opioids, cocaine, MDMA/ecstasy, ketamine, counterfeit pills, or other drugs — could contain fentanyl or other toxic contaminants and can cause overdose or death,” it says.

The BC Centre for Disease Control published a risk assessment for the games, labelling harms from substance use, including toxic drug overdoses and alcohol consumption, as “moderate risk,” calling the drug supply “very toxic and unpredictable.”

Toronto Public Health spokesperson Dane Griffiths said in a statement that Toronto’s unregulated drug supply is “extremely toxic and unpredictable and could be different from where tourists are visiting from.”

He said the agency is working with the city and others to prioritize public health at the World Cup, monitoring substance use trends and supporting harm reduction services.

People using substances in both cities are being urged to start with a low dose and pace their use slowly, use a drug-checking service in advance, carry naloxone and call 911 if someone overdoses.

Toronto Public Health notes that under Canada’s Good Samaritan Drug Overdose Act, people seeking help for themselves or someone else who has overdosed will not be charged with possessing or using drugs, nor will anyone else at the scene.

Dr. Mark Lysyshyn, the deputy chief medical health officer of Vancouver Coastal Health, said the authority will be campaigning on social media to warn people about the risks.

“We have been in this public health emergency for the past 10 years, people coming from Europe and other places that don’t really have the same problem, might be unfamiliar, and so we do want to let people know,” he said.

However, Lysyshyn noted that overall, those most at risk from the drug supply live in the province.

“(They are) B.C. residents who continue to die at high rates. It’s not frequent that travellers to British Columbia die of overdoses.”

The over consumption of alcohol has health officials more concerned, Lysyshyn said.

“These World Cup events are associated with a lot of alcohol use. Alcohol use in crowds can lead to violence, both in crowd settings, but also can lead to other types of violence,” he said.

Sarah Blyth, the executive director of the Overdose Prevention Society, which runs a supervised consumption site and offers services like drug testing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, said even people from places with toxic drug supplies should be aware, because the type of deadly contamination can vary from province to province and country to country.

“If it’s lethal in one city, it can be lethal in a different way in another, and so people really, when they go out, they have to understand that if they get handed a pill, people can die here by taking a pill,” she said.

Blyth said this type of education and awareness for major events is important. She’s not sure if her organization will see an increase in people wanting to get their drugs tested for contaminants, but that they are prepared to help.

“I would hope that people would get their drugs tested if they decide that they’re going to use them, because it’s not safe otherwise,” she said.

Tara Gomes, an epidemiologist and the principal investigator of the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network, said Toronto’s drug supply is dominated by fentanyl, while other substances, like veterinary tranquillizers, are increasingly cropping up.

She’s concerned the well-being of people living in Toronto who use drugs is being overlooked.

The first of six World Cup matches in Toronto kicks off on June 12, the day before the province stops paying for eight remaining publicly funded supervised consumption sites.

Gomes said she expects the “terrible timing” to displace people who use drugs, as celebrations cause crowding in the city.

“There could be an enormous and devastating impact on their safety and their risk level when using drugs throughout the World Cup and then into the future,” Gomes said.

She said she worries that the fanfare from around the world could put more pressure on the “already overstretched” harm reduction programs in the city.

“From my perspective, the World Cup is a global event — it puts us on an international stage,” Gomes said.

“We should be creating safety nets for people in that time instead of what really feels like pulling the rug out from under so many people who use drugs within the city.”

© 2026 The Canadian Press

Country music artist Corb Lund is expected to deliver his anti-coal mining petition to Elections Alberta Wednesday.

Lund announced this week that his team had collected more than the 178,000 signatures it needed to get the province to take action, but he didn’t share a final tally.

He says the success of the petition goes to show how much Albertans care about headwaters and protecting the Rocky Mountains.

Lund’s petition asked signers to endorse prohibiting new coal mining in the Rockies on the grounds it needlessly risks harming the environment, particularly water.

If Elections Alberta verifies the signatures, Premier Danielle Smith’s government would be forced to consider passing a law banning coal mining or sending it to a provincewide referendum.

Lund had said that even if they got the required signatures, he doesn’t necessarily trust Smith’s government to act on it.

© 2026 The Canadian Press

Close to 380,000 Canadians participated in Transport Canada’s public consultation regarding vehicle headlight glare, a number the department calls a “high volume of responses.”

From March 6 to April 20, Canadians were able to anonymously provide feedback to Transport Canada regarding travelling at night, contributing factors to headlight glare, driver behaviour and any input for possible solutions.

“While new headlight technology in vehicles can help drivers see better, they can also cause problems for other road users. Transport Canada wants to learn how headlight glare affects road users and what vehicle or lighting features may influence how people experience it at night,” the department’s release announcing the public consultation states.

“We want to hear about your experiences, opinions, and behaviours with vehicle headlight glare.”

Transport Canada stated to Global News that the department will be releasing its findings in a report but no publication date has been determined.

“Given the significant volume of responses received, analysis and compilation of the survey data is expected to take several months,” Transport Canada stated to Global News.

Bloc Québécois MP Xavier Barsalou-Duval currently has a petition open that urges the federal government to modernize its vehicle headlight regulations.

The petition is also calling for the government to “incorporate criteria into these regulations that consider human perception of brightness; more strictly regulate the colour spectrum, power and dispersion of light beams, particularly those using LED technology” and “take concrete measures to reduce glare and improve road safety for the entire population, especially seniors.”

It currently has 11,245 signatures. The petition opened on Feb. 17 and is set to close on June 17.

The American Automobile Association (AAA) also released a study in March that found that six in 10 drivers say glare is a problem after dark, with nearly three-quarters of those affected believing the issue has worsened over the past decade.

Pickup drivers were also found to be less likely to report glare (41 per cent) than drivers of other vehicle types (66 per cent).

© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

When Hudson’s Bay faltered last year, Manitoba Museum CEO Dorota Blumczynska didn’t even need to look at the institution’s bank accounts to know it couldn’t afford to buy the royal charter that formed Canada’s oldest business.

“Our acquisition budget as a museum has a balance of just over $4,000,” she said Monday. “Regrettably, it was nowhere in the realm of the possible.”

And yet later this week the Winnipeg institution will show off the 356-year-old document it now jointly owns in a welcoming ceremony expected to draw representatives from First Nations, Inuit and Métis governments, along with corporate supporters.

The Thursday ceremony will bring the charter home in some ways; the museum hosts 28,000 HBC artifacts donated in 1994 and Winnipeg is where the company opened its first department store in 1881.

The charter will be displayed during the ceremony before it’s sent back to storage in preparation for a one-year exhibition at the museum, likely in fall 2027.

The reception will mark a new chapter in the history of the 1670 charter, which gave HBC extraordinary control over Canadian land — and the Indigenous peoples who lived there — for decades before the country’s birth.

The artifact was sold to the Weston and Thomson families for $18 million after the fur-trading-company-turned-department-store’s collapse last year. Within 24 hours of the December purchase, they donated it to the Manitoba Museum, the Archives of Manitoba, the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que., and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Ont.

Blumczynska is still in disbelief that her museum was chosen not only to be the first to display the charter but also as one of its owners.

“I couldn’t have imagined it but here we are,” she said.

Since the quartet of institutions took ownership of the charter, Blumczynska said they’ve mostly been exploring how to work together.

“To the best of our knowledge, there has never existed this model of shared stewardship across four organizations spanning the country in a shared responsibility for one particular item,” she said.

Soon after the charter’s ownership was transferred to them, she said the artifact went through a thorough assessment from the Canadian Conservation Institute, a government agency that ensures historical items are preserved and accessible to Canadians.

The assessment was meant to get a sense of the charter’s condition, its conservation needs and how it could travel between the museums and any other institutions lends the document.

Blumczynska said what they found is that the charter “has generally held up very well,” despite its age and many moves.

The five-page vellum document with a red wax seal is notoriously fragile. Fluctuations in lighting, temperature and air quality can cause damage, as well as any movement or moisture.

When it travelled to the Manitoba Museum for its first and only public exhibition during the COVID-19 pandemic, the charter was transported on a private plane with a conservator specializing in paper documents and its own armed security team, who never took their eyes off the artifact.

It otherwise spent the last 52 years under glass in HBC’s Toronto head office, after centuries being shifted around HBC’s various England headquarters and a rural manor where it waited out the Second World War. (While it was for sale, it was stowed at a secret and secure storage facility.)

The challenge the Manitoba Museum and the charter’s other custodians now have is figuring out how to show the document to the public without compromising completely on its care.

“Absolute conservation might have it be in the dark, never moving, closed off from the public,” Blumczynska said.

“But then it doesn’t serve truth and reconciliation, it doesn’t serve our shared understanding of history and it doesn’t serve community connection and well-being.”

Over the next year, the new owners will decide whether the ROM or Canadian Museum of History will be next to host the charter.

They will also figure out how to balance all of the charter’s needs through a Weston and Thomson-ordered consultation with Indigenous groups, other museums, universities, archives, subject matter experts and the public.

They will be aided by $5 million the families donated to ensure the charter is preserved and shared with the public. Also at their disposal will be future support pledged by the Desmarais family and Power Corp. of Canada, along with the Hennick Family Foundation.

The plan is to find a way to preserve the charter but also let it visit public organizations from coast to coast.

Because not every community might have the right facilities and because the charter will likely need resting periods of perhaps five years, Blumczynska said high-end replicas are likely to be made.

Educational programs that integrate the charter into elementary and high school curriculum and teach adults about the document and HBC’s painful past will probably be in the mix, too.

Already, Blumczynska said seeing the document for herself has had an impact.

“It has shaped my understanding of my relationship with this country and that’s what I hope it offers others,” she said.

“I can’t say that it is a celebratory moment, but it is a transformative moment that will change, I hope, our collective understanding of who we are.”

© 2026 The Canadian Press

The Bank of Canada is set to make an interest rate announcement this morning after a turbulent period of economic data.

The central bank is widely expected to deliver a fifth consecutive hold to its benchmark rate, which stands at 2.25 per cent.

The Bank of Canada has largely kept to the sidelines this year as it waits for more clarity on how the Iran war and U.S. trade uncertainty will impact economic growth and inflation.

Statistics Canada says the economy contracted marginally in the first quarter on an annualized basis, undershooting the central bank’s expectations.

The agency also said the economy added a surprise 88,000 jobs in May, partially offsetting a decline in employment since the start of the year.

The latest price data showed the annual rate of inflation jumped to 2.8 per cent in April as the energy price shock from conflict in the Middle East has consumers paying more at the pumps this spring.

© 2026 The Canadian Press

The federal government will introduce legislation Wednesday addressing social media and AI chatbot safety.

Ottawa is set to introduce legislation to enact what the government is calling the Digital Safety Act and the Digital Safety Commission of Canada Act.

It’s expected to be introduced later Wednesday, with Culture Minister Marc Miller holding a news conference at 5 p.m. ET after a technical briefing.

The government says the legislation will make social media platforms and AI chatbots safer for children.

The bill is expected to include a ban on social media for kids under 16, although platforms that meet safety standards could obtain exemptions, The Globe and Mail and National Post have reported.

Miller said Tuesday the government will take all reasonable measures to ensure kids are safe and that the legislation is a priority because “kids are dying.”

© 2026 The Canadian Press

Canada’s public safety minister is one of several officials offering condolences after an Ontario Provincial Police constable was killed in the line of duty in northern Ontario.

Gary Anandasangaree says on social media he was saddened to hear of Const. Tarun Bali’s death in the town of Hearst, about 520 kilometres east of Thunder Bay.

OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique says Bali was struck by a motor vehicle Tuesday afternoon as officers were conducting an investigation and the 29-year-old later died.

Carrique says an 18-year-old man has been arrested on charges of first-degree murder, dangerous driving and flight from police.

“Charges will be filed before the courts as the investigation continues, but those are the charges on which the accused has been arrested,” Carrique told reporters Tuesday.

The union representing uniformed and civilian members of the OPP, as well as Carrique and Ontario Premier Doug Ford, also shared tributes on social media.

Bali had been with the OPP for two-and-a-half years and was assigned to central Ontario’s Dufferin detachment, but was on a deployment with the James Bay detachment.

Bali’s death comes a little more than one month after another OPP officer, Sgt. Brandon Malcolm, was killed in a highway crash involving a motorcycle on Highway 401 in Cobourg, east of Toronto.

Carrique said he’s met with Bali’s family and saw a picture of him at age two saluting another photo of a police officer. He described the constable as a dedicated officer and team player.

Carrique said officers risk their lives every day and it’s tough on members when they lose one of their own.

“The reality of this job really hits home,” he said. “Our officers right across this province are heroes … by putting their lives on the line to keep the rest of us safe.”

The union representing uniformed and civilian members of the OPP said it was a reminder of the dangers that police face on the job.

“On behalf of the OPP Association, we extend our heartfelt condolences to Provincial Constable Bali’s family, friends and colleagues,” said president David Sabatini in a statement.

“We will steadfastly support PC Bali’s family and co-workers.”

© 2026 The Canadian Press