Voyageur 120
Your Bag Tag Can Put You in a Foreign Jail, and Beef Is Up $9.61 a Kilo Back Home.
News for residents of the “11th province”: Canadians abroad.
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Your Bag Tag Can Put You in a Foreign Jail
A Toronto woman checked her bag at Pearson and spent the next few weeks in a Philippine jail cell, accused of smuggling 24 kilograms of methamphetamine she says she didn’t pack.
She is one of at least 17 Canadians who flew out of Canadian airports in the past year and ended up tied to drug-filled suitcases they claim were never theirs, according to a CTV W5 investigation. The RCMP has arrested six baggage and ramp workers at Toronto Pearson, all employed by Air Canada or Swissport. The way it works is that an insider peels the tag off a passenger's bag, ditches the suitcase, and sticks that tag on a case packed with drugs. The drugs then fly under the innocent traveller's name. When the people meant to collect the goodies abroad fail to show, the traveller is the one holding the bag (no pun intended).
Some of the flights landed in countries where trafficking can result in the death penalty.
Read more: CTV News (W5) / CP24
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A photo from the old country:
Beef Is Up $9.61 a Kilo
A kilogram of beef striploin in Canada now runs $42.42, up almost $10 when compared to the price a year ago. Coffee, tomatoes and most of the vegetable aisle are climbing right behind it.
Statistics Canada says a 340-gram bag of ground coffee hit $9.39 in April, a fifth more than the year before. Tomatoes went from $4.69 a kilo to $6.18. Vegetables as a group rose 7.8% from a year ago, their biggest jump since 2023. Food has been pulling Canada's whole inflation number up for months.
Plenty of expats are heading back this summer, some for the World Cup (Voyageur 112), and the trip home now is likely to come with a jolt at the checkout. If you’re wiring money to family in Canada or weighing an eventual move back, the grocery math keeps getting worse.