It's Climate Change I tell'ya!! IT'S CLIMATE CHANGE!!
- Thread starter B00Mer
- Start date
Same 100 miles from TO. Must be my age, cus I just can't take the heat anymore. Thank god for AC.
My son is flying to Ottawa for a week to meet a friend of the family & visit so I guess I should pack lots of shorts. BTW I'm in Alberta so it's much cooler here! Today it's nice but the freakin wind is just non stop!! It's almost like we live in Lethbridge or something LOL!
Ex-pilot called himself messiah on climate-change mission, day before alleged hijack
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Darryl Greer and Chuck Chiang
Published Jul 17, 2025 • Last updated 12 hours ago • 4 minute read
Reports of a plane flying erratically were made on Tuesday afternoon.
VANCOUVER — The day before the suspected hijacking of a light aircraft triggered a security scare at Vancouver’s airport this week, former commercial pilot Shaheer Cassim posted on social media that he was a “messenger of Allah” sent to save humanity from climate change.
A 39-year-old man with the same name has now been charged with hijacking, constituting terrorism, over the incident on Tuesday that saw Norad scramble F-15 fighter jets before the plane safely landed.
RCMP said the suspect seized control of a Cessna at Victoria International Airport by threatening a flight instructor, before flying to Vancouver.
“Investigators have determined the suspect acted with an ideological motive to disrupt airspace,” said Sgt. Tammy Lobb in a statement late Wednesday.
Images posted on social media of the arrest of the Cessna’s pilot on the airport’s north runway show a bearded man who resembles Cassim.
“I am a messenger of Allah. I am the Messiah sent to save humanity from climate change and usher in an era of world peace,” Cassim said on Facebook on Monday.
His profile says Cassim attended high school in Lloydminster, Alta., before studying aviation at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.
Cassim’s last post warns about “abrupt runaway global warming” that will cause humans to go extinct within a few years.
Cassim also says in the post that he is “Sam Carana,” who runs the “Arctic News” blog that describes itself as a place where contributors “all share a deep concern about the way climate change is unfolding in the Arctic and the threat that this poses for the world at large.”
It includes hundreds of posts since 2011, many of them highly technical, with the latest entry made on Saturday and titled: “Will humans go extinct soon?”
A Facebook account under Carana’s name has more than 4,000 followers.
The Arctic News blog lists more than 30 contributors, including prominent academics from universities in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Peter D. Carter, who founded the environmental website Climate Emergency Institute in 2009, has interacted with Carana on social media.
“He’s a bit of a mystery,” said Carter, who lives in Victoria, adding that he had never met Carana in person.
Carter is listed as a contributor on Arctic News but he denied contributing.
That someone might hijack a plane in the name of climate change was “absolutely absurd,” Carter said, although he hoped people could see past this for the urgent need to address the issue.
“Our problem is that there’s next to no interest in climate change out there,” Carter said. “Over the years, recent years, the public interest in climate change has been dropping, dropping, and dropping.”
Stanford University Prof. Mark Z. Jacobson, who researches global warming and its solutions, is also listed as an Arctic News contributor. He said in an e-mail that Carana contacted him sporadically between 2013 and 2018 on climate issues, and in 2020 wrote “one four-word comment on a post I posted on Facebook,” Jacobson said.
“Otherwise, I can’t find any other communication with him.”
He also said he had never met Carana.
In 2012, Cassim held a news conference before going on a cross-country bicycle ride to raise awareness for global warming.
His Facebook profile says he was employed from 2008 to 2010 by now-defunct KD Air, a small airline based on Vancouver Island.
The airline’s former owners, Diana and Lars Banke, said in an interview on Wednesday that Cassim was one of the smartest and best pilots they ever worked with, calling him a fast learner who was highly intelligent.
But Lars Banke said Cassim left the airline after getting “bored” and then went to medical school. He also said Cassim believed the world was coming to an end.
Diana Banke said she was “very surprised” to hear of Cassim’s charges, saying he was quite young when he worked for them and was “like a kid.”
“Something would (have to) be going on that’s not normal,” Lars Banke said. “He was, I would say, a caring person.”
Diana Banke said she remembered Cassim “doing a really long bicycle trek,” and that he brought a dog along with him.
Lars Banke said he recalled that Cassim was somewhat interested in environmentalism, but he was unaware of any kind of religious beliefs.
“He never spoke religion with us,” Diana Banke said.
Cassim’s online posts include musings on religion, climate science, and advocacy for tolerance and peace, including a claim “the Angel Gabriel appeared before me and gave me a message from Allah.”
“I’m really surprised that he would’ve done something like this,” Diana Banke said.
B.C. Premier David Eby said when asked about the incident on Thursday that it was a “bizarre moment,” and the fact that it ended without a more significant disruption at the airport is a “testament” to the skill of responders who talked the suspect down.
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Darryl Greer and Chuck Chiang
Published Jul 17, 2025 • Last updated 12 hours ago • 4 minute read
Reports of a plane flying erratically were made on Tuesday afternoon.
VANCOUVER — The day before the suspected hijacking of a light aircraft triggered a security scare at Vancouver’s airport this week, former commercial pilot Shaheer Cassim posted on social media that he was a “messenger of Allah” sent to save humanity from climate change.
A 39-year-old man with the same name has now been charged with hijacking, constituting terrorism, over the incident on Tuesday that saw Norad scramble F-15 fighter jets before the plane safely landed.
RCMP said the suspect seized control of a Cessna at Victoria International Airport by threatening a flight instructor, before flying to Vancouver.
“Investigators have determined the suspect acted with an ideological motive to disrupt airspace,” said Sgt. Tammy Lobb in a statement late Wednesday.
Images posted on social media of the arrest of the Cessna’s pilot on the airport’s north runway show a bearded man who resembles Cassim.
“I am a messenger of Allah. I am the Messiah sent to save humanity from climate change and usher in an era of world peace,” Cassim said on Facebook on Monday.
His profile says Cassim attended high school in Lloydminster, Alta., before studying aviation at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.
Cassim’s last post warns about “abrupt runaway global warming” that will cause humans to go extinct within a few years.
Cassim also says in the post that he is “Sam Carana,” who runs the “Arctic News” blog that describes itself as a place where contributors “all share a deep concern about the way climate change is unfolding in the Arctic and the threat that this poses for the world at large.”
It includes hundreds of posts since 2011, many of them highly technical, with the latest entry made on Saturday and titled: “Will humans go extinct soon?”
A Facebook account under Carana’s name has more than 4,000 followers.
The Arctic News blog lists more than 30 contributors, including prominent academics from universities in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Peter D. Carter, who founded the environmental website Climate Emergency Institute in 2009, has interacted with Carana on social media.
“He’s a bit of a mystery,” said Carter, who lives in Victoria, adding that he had never met Carana in person.
Carter is listed as a contributor on Arctic News but he denied contributing.
That someone might hijack a plane in the name of climate change was “absolutely absurd,” Carter said, although he hoped people could see past this for the urgent need to address the issue.
“Our problem is that there’s next to no interest in climate change out there,” Carter said. “Over the years, recent years, the public interest in climate change has been dropping, dropping, and dropping.”
Stanford University Prof. Mark Z. Jacobson, who researches global warming and its solutions, is also listed as an Arctic News contributor. He said in an e-mail that Carana contacted him sporadically between 2013 and 2018 on climate issues, and in 2020 wrote “one four-word comment on a post I posted on Facebook,” Jacobson said.
“Otherwise, I can’t find any other communication with him.”
He also said he had never met Carana.
In 2012, Cassim held a news conference before going on a cross-country bicycle ride to raise awareness for global warming.
His Facebook profile says he was employed from 2008 to 2010 by now-defunct KD Air, a small airline based on Vancouver Island.
The airline’s former owners, Diana and Lars Banke, said in an interview on Wednesday that Cassim was one of the smartest and best pilots they ever worked with, calling him a fast learner who was highly intelligent.
But Lars Banke said Cassim left the airline after getting “bored” and then went to medical school. He also said Cassim believed the world was coming to an end.
Diana Banke said she was “very surprised” to hear of Cassim’s charges, saying he was quite young when he worked for them and was “like a kid.”
“Something would (have to) be going on that’s not normal,” Lars Banke said. “He was, I would say, a caring person.”
Diana Banke said she remembered Cassim “doing a really long bicycle trek,” and that he brought a dog along with him.
Lars Banke said he recalled that Cassim was somewhat interested in environmentalism, but he was unaware of any kind of religious beliefs.
“He never spoke religion with us,” Diana Banke said.
Cassim’s online posts include musings on religion, climate science, and advocacy for tolerance and peace, including a claim “the Angel Gabriel appeared before me and gave me a message from Allah.”
“I’m really surprised that he would’ve done something like this,” Diana Banke said.
B.C. Premier David Eby said when asked about the incident on Thursday that it was a “bizarre moment,” and the fact that it ended without a more significant disruption at the airport is a “testament” to the skill of responders who talked the suspect down.
Ex-pilot called himself messiah on climate-change mission, day before alleged hijack
RCMP say the suspect had an "ideological motive" and allegedly seized control of the plane at Victoria International Airport.
perhaps greta will help him.Ex-pilot called himself messiah on climate-change mission, day before alleged hijack
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Darryl Greer and Chuck Chiang
Published Jul 17, 2025 • Last updated 12 hours ago • 4 minute read
Reports of a plane flying erratically were made on Tuesday afternoon.
VANCOUVER — The day before the suspected hijacking of a light aircraft triggered a security scare at Vancouver’s airport this week, former commercial pilot Shaheer Cassim posted on social media that he was a “messenger of Allah” sent to save humanity from climate change.
A 39-year-old man with the same name has now been charged with hijacking, constituting terrorism, over the incident on Tuesday that saw Norad scramble F-15 fighter jets before the plane safely landed.
RCMP said the suspect seized control of a Cessna at Victoria International Airport by threatening a flight instructor, before flying to Vancouver.
“Investigators have determined the suspect acted with an ideological motive to disrupt airspace,” said Sgt. Tammy Lobb in a statement late Wednesday.
Images posted on social media of the arrest of the Cessna’s pilot on the airport’s north runway show a bearded man who resembles Cassim.
“I am a messenger of Allah. I am the Messiah sent to save humanity from climate change and usher in an era of world peace,” Cassim said on Facebook on Monday.
His profile says Cassim attended high school in Lloydminster, Alta., before studying aviation at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.
Cassim’s last post warns about “abrupt runaway global warming” that will cause humans to go extinct within a few years.
Cassim also says in the post that he is “Sam Carana,” who runs the “Arctic News” blog that describes itself as a place where contributors “all share a deep concern about the way climate change is unfolding in the Arctic and the threat that this poses for the world at large.”
It includes hundreds of posts since 2011, many of them highly technical, with the latest entry made on Saturday and titled: “Will humans go extinct soon?”
A Facebook account under Carana’s name has more than 4,000 followers.
The Arctic News blog lists more than 30 contributors, including prominent academics from universities in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Peter D. Carter, who founded the environmental website Climate Emergency Institute in 2009, has interacted with Carana on social media.
“He’s a bit of a mystery,” said Carter, who lives in Victoria, adding that he had never met Carana in person.
Carter is listed as a contributor on Arctic News but he denied contributing.
That someone might hijack a plane in the name of climate change was “absolutely absurd,” Carter said, although he hoped people could see past this for the urgent need to address the issue.
“Our problem is that there’s next to no interest in climate change out there,” Carter said. “Over the years, recent years, the public interest in climate change has been dropping, dropping, and dropping.”
Stanford University Prof. Mark Z. Jacobson, who researches global warming and its solutions, is also listed as an Arctic News contributor. He said in an e-mail that Carana contacted him sporadically between 2013 and 2018 on climate issues, and in 2020 wrote “one four-word comment on a post I posted on Facebook,” Jacobson said.
“Otherwise, I can’t find any other communication with him.”
He also said he had never met Carana.
In 2012, Cassim held a news conference before going on a cross-country bicycle ride to raise awareness for global warming.
His Facebook profile says he was employed from 2008 to 2010 by now-defunct KD Air, a small airline based on Vancouver Island.
The airline’s former owners, Diana and Lars Banke, said in an interview on Wednesday that Cassim was one of the smartest and best pilots they ever worked with, calling him a fast learner who was highly intelligent.
But Lars Banke said Cassim left the airline after getting “bored” and then went to medical school. He also said Cassim believed the world was coming to an end.
Diana Banke said she was “very surprised” to hear of Cassim’s charges, saying he was quite young when he worked for them and was “like a kid.”
“Something would (have to) be going on that’s not normal,” Lars Banke said. “He was, I would say, a caring person.”
Diana Banke said she remembered Cassim “doing a really long bicycle trek,” and that he brought a dog along with him.
Lars Banke said he recalled that Cassim was somewhat interested in environmentalism, but he was unaware of any kind of religious beliefs.
“He never spoke religion with us,” Diana Banke said.
Cassim’s online posts include musings on religion, climate science, and advocacy for tolerance and peace, including a claim “the Angel Gabriel appeared before me and gave me a message from Allah.”
“I’m really surprised that he would’ve done something like this,” Diana Banke said.
B.C. Premier David Eby said when asked about the incident on Thursday that it was a “bizarre moment,” and the fact that it ended without a more significant disruption at the airport is a “testament” to the skill of responders who talked the suspect down.
Ex-pilot called himself messiah on climate-change mission, day before alleged hijack
RCMP say the suspect had an "ideological motive" and allegedly seized control of the plane at Victoria International Airport.
Federal officials say wildfire forecast shows high risk of more fires in August
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Sarah Ritchie
Published Jul 18, 2025 • Last updated 12 hours ago • 4 minute read
OTTAWA — The 2025 wildfire season is already one of the worst on record for Canada, federal officials said Friday, and there is a high risk that more fires will break out in August.
More than 55,000 square kilometres of land has burned so far this year, an area roughly the size of Nova Scotia. That is more than double the 10-year average of the area burned by mid-July.
There were 561 fires burning as of Friday morning, including 69 that were considered out of control. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre says almost 3,300 fires have been recorded this year so far.
The record was set in 2023, when more than 6,000 fires burned more than 150,000 square km of land — an area larger than all three Maritime provinces put together.
That devastating season, where wildfires raged from Newfoundland to B.C. for months on end, sparked significant public pressure for the federal government to create a new kind of disaster response agency.
Former emergency management ministers Bill Blair and Harjit Sajjan both mulled the idea of such an agency during their time in office, with both ministers acknowledging the strain natural disasters have put on the Canadian Armed Forces and the provinces and territories.
The government said it was looking to the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency and Australia’s National Emergency Management Agency as potential examples.
Final decisions on that front still have not been made.
During a Friday afternoon briefing with several of her cabinet colleagues, Emergency Management Minister Eleanor Olszewski said her department will be making changes to how it responds to wildfire seasons, which are becoming longer and more severe.
“We think that the formation of such an agency could have a very positive impact on our ability to co-ordinate how we respond to national disasters across the country,” Olszewski said.
That could mean having regional water bombers to respond more quickly to fires in areas that have fewer resources, she said, or leaning on a “humanitarian task force” to ensure people can be deployed where they’re needed.
Matthew Godsoe, a senior director of the government operations centre at Public Safety Canada, said natural disasters are outpacing the capacity of the country’s emergency management system.
“In that current context, maintaining the status quo is equivalent to doing less,” he told reporters at a technical briefing Friday, adding that all levels of government and individual Canadians must work together “to slow or stop this nearly exponential growth in disaster losses that we’re experiencing as a country.”
The federal government has been called in to provide help five times this wildfire season, including last week, when the Armed Forces and the Red Cross helped to evacuate more than 2,800 people from Garden Hill First Nation in Manitoba.
Olszewski said she expects to have an update on a federal emergency agency in the fall.
In the meantime, communities in high-risk areas are bracing for things to get worse in the next two months, which are typically the most active months of the fire season.
Saskatchewan has already seen one of the worst fire seasons ever in terms of the total area burned, and a record number of people have been forced out of their homes in that province.
Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty said 39,000 people have been forced to evacuate from 66 First Nations, mostly on the Prairies, calling the fire season unprecedented.
“It is, I hope, not the new reality that we have to live with, but I’m asking myself what this looks like,” she said.
Gull-Masty said the government’s goal at the end of the wildfire season is to “come together, debrief, reflect, and put tools in place for the next possible time that this occurs.”
Officials said the fire risk typically rises throughout August as temperatures get hotter, and they are predicting higher than normal temperatures for most of the country next month.
“This is consistent with climate change projections, which show that the next five years will be warmer than (we) are used to,” said Sebastien Chouinard, the director of operations at the Canadian Meteorological Centre.
August is also slated to bring below-normal rainfall levels for the Prairies, B.C. and the Maritimes.
More than 530 firefighters from Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Mexico and the U.S. are in Canada to help.
Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson said his department is setting aside $11.7 million over four years to create the Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada, an agency he said will “connect domestic, international governments, the private sector, wildfire scientists and experts and affected communities to share knowledge, science and technology so we can fight fires better.”
The consortium is part of Canada’s commitment to a wildfire co-operation charter that was signed at the G7 leaders’ summit in Kananaskis, Alta., this summer.
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Sarah Ritchie
Published Jul 18, 2025 • Last updated 12 hours ago • 4 minute read
OTTAWA — The 2025 wildfire season is already one of the worst on record for Canada, federal officials said Friday, and there is a high risk that more fires will break out in August.
More than 55,000 square kilometres of land has burned so far this year, an area roughly the size of Nova Scotia. That is more than double the 10-year average of the area burned by mid-July.
There were 561 fires burning as of Friday morning, including 69 that were considered out of control. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre says almost 3,300 fires have been recorded this year so far.
The record was set in 2023, when more than 6,000 fires burned more than 150,000 square km of land — an area larger than all three Maritime provinces put together.
That devastating season, where wildfires raged from Newfoundland to B.C. for months on end, sparked significant public pressure for the federal government to create a new kind of disaster response agency.
Former emergency management ministers Bill Blair and Harjit Sajjan both mulled the idea of such an agency during their time in office, with both ministers acknowledging the strain natural disasters have put on the Canadian Armed Forces and the provinces and territories.
The government said it was looking to the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency and Australia’s National Emergency Management Agency as potential examples.
Final decisions on that front still have not been made.
During a Friday afternoon briefing with several of her cabinet colleagues, Emergency Management Minister Eleanor Olszewski said her department will be making changes to how it responds to wildfire seasons, which are becoming longer and more severe.
“We think that the formation of such an agency could have a very positive impact on our ability to co-ordinate how we respond to national disasters across the country,” Olszewski said.
That could mean having regional water bombers to respond more quickly to fires in areas that have fewer resources, she said, or leaning on a “humanitarian task force” to ensure people can be deployed where they’re needed.
Matthew Godsoe, a senior director of the government operations centre at Public Safety Canada, said natural disasters are outpacing the capacity of the country’s emergency management system.
“In that current context, maintaining the status quo is equivalent to doing less,” he told reporters at a technical briefing Friday, adding that all levels of government and individual Canadians must work together “to slow or stop this nearly exponential growth in disaster losses that we’re experiencing as a country.”
The federal government has been called in to provide help five times this wildfire season, including last week, when the Armed Forces and the Red Cross helped to evacuate more than 2,800 people from Garden Hill First Nation in Manitoba.
Olszewski said she expects to have an update on a federal emergency agency in the fall.
In the meantime, communities in high-risk areas are bracing for things to get worse in the next two months, which are typically the most active months of the fire season.
Saskatchewan has already seen one of the worst fire seasons ever in terms of the total area burned, and a record number of people have been forced out of their homes in that province.
Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty said 39,000 people have been forced to evacuate from 66 First Nations, mostly on the Prairies, calling the fire season unprecedented.
“It is, I hope, not the new reality that we have to live with, but I’m asking myself what this looks like,” she said.
Gull-Masty said the government’s goal at the end of the wildfire season is to “come together, debrief, reflect, and put tools in place for the next possible time that this occurs.”
Officials said the fire risk typically rises throughout August as temperatures get hotter, and they are predicting higher than normal temperatures for most of the country next month.
“This is consistent with climate change projections, which show that the next five years will be warmer than (we) are used to,” said Sebastien Chouinard, the director of operations at the Canadian Meteorological Centre.
August is also slated to bring below-normal rainfall levels for the Prairies, B.C. and the Maritimes.
More than 530 firefighters from Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Mexico and the U.S. are in Canada to help.
Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson said his department is setting aside $11.7 million over four years to create the Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada, an agency he said will “connect domestic, international governments, the private sector, wildfire scientists and experts and affected communities to share knowledge, science and technology so we can fight fires better.”
The consortium is part of Canada’s commitment to a wildfire co-operation charter that was signed at the G7 leaders’ summit in Kananaskis, Alta., this summer.
Federal officials say wildfire forecast shows high risk of more fires in August
The 2025 wildfire season is already one of the worst and there is a high risk of more fires in August, federal officials said.
I flew with Him a few times. KD Air was our local puddle jumper. Sold to an idiot that promptly went bankrupt as so many of these airlines do.Ex-pilot called himself messiah on climate-change mission, day before alleged hijack
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Darryl Greer and Chuck Chiang
Published Jul 17, 2025 • Last updated 12 hours ago • 4 minute read
Reports of a plane flying erratically were made on Tuesday afternoon.
VANCOUVER — The day before the suspected hijacking of a light aircraft triggered a security scare at Vancouver’s airport this week, former commercial pilot Shaheer Cassim posted on social media that he was a “messenger of Allah” sent to save humanity from climate change.
A 39-year-old man with the same name has now been charged with hijacking, constituting terrorism, over the incident on Tuesday that saw Norad scramble F-15 fighter jets before the plane safely landed.
RCMP said the suspect seized control of a Cessna at Victoria International Airport by threatening a flight instructor, before flying to Vancouver.
“Investigators have determined the suspect acted with an ideological motive to disrupt airspace,” said Sgt. Tammy Lobb in a statement late Wednesday.
Images posted on social media of the arrest of the Cessna’s pilot on the airport’s north runway show a bearded man who resembles Cassim.
“I am a messenger of Allah. I am the Messiah sent to save humanity from climate change and usher in an era of world peace,” Cassim said on Facebook on Monday.
His profile says Cassim attended high school in Lloydminster, Alta., before studying aviation at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.
Cassim’s last post warns about “abrupt runaway global warming” that will cause humans to go extinct within a few years.
Cassim also says in the post that he is “Sam Carana,” who runs the “Arctic News” blog that describes itself as a place where contributors “all share a deep concern about the way climate change is unfolding in the Arctic and the threat that this poses for the world at large.”
It includes hundreds of posts since 2011, many of them highly technical, with the latest entry made on Saturday and titled: “Will humans go extinct soon?”
A Facebook account under Carana’s name has more than 4,000 followers.
The Arctic News blog lists more than 30 contributors, including prominent academics from universities in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Peter D. Carter, who founded the environmental website Climate Emergency Institute in 2009, has interacted with Carana on social media.
“He’s a bit of a mystery,” said Carter, who lives in Victoria, adding that he had never met Carana in person.
Carter is listed as a contributor on Arctic News but he denied contributing.
That someone might hijack a plane in the name of climate change was “absolutely absurd,” Carter said, although he hoped people could see past this for the urgent need to address the issue.
“Our problem is that there’s next to no interest in climate change out there,” Carter said. “Over the years, recent years, the public interest in climate change has been dropping, dropping, and dropping.”
Stanford University Prof. Mark Z. Jacobson, who researches global warming and its solutions, is also listed as an Arctic News contributor. He said in an e-mail that Carana contacted him sporadically between 2013 and 2018 on climate issues, and in 2020 wrote “one four-word comment on a post I posted on Facebook,” Jacobson said.
“Otherwise, I can’t find any other communication with him.”
He also said he had never met Carana.
In 2012, Cassim held a news conference before going on a cross-country bicycle ride to raise awareness for global warming.
His Facebook profile says he was employed from 2008 to 2010 by now-defunct KD Air, a small airline based on Vancouver Island.
The airline’s former owners, Diana and Lars Banke, said in an interview on Wednesday that Cassim was one of the smartest and best pilots they ever worked with, calling him a fast learner who was highly intelligent.
But Lars Banke said Cassim left the airline after getting “bored” and then went to medical school. He also said Cassim believed the world was coming to an end.
Diana Banke said she was “very surprised” to hear of Cassim’s charges, saying he was quite young when he worked for them and was “like a kid.”
“Something would (have to) be going on that’s not normal,” Lars Banke said. “He was, I would say, a caring person.”
Diana Banke said she remembered Cassim “doing a really long bicycle trek,” and that he brought a dog along with him.
Lars Banke said he recalled that Cassim was somewhat interested in environmentalism, but he was unaware of any kind of religious beliefs.
“He never spoke religion with us,” Diana Banke said.
Cassim’s online posts include musings on religion, climate science, and advocacy for tolerance and peace, including a claim “the Angel Gabriel appeared before me and gave me a message from Allah.”
“I’m really surprised that he would’ve done something like this,” Diana Banke said.
B.C. Premier David Eby said when asked about the incident on Thursday that it was a “bizarre moment,” and the fact that it ended without a more significant disruption at the airport is a “testament” to the skill of responders who talked the suspect down.
Ex-pilot called himself messiah on climate-change mission, day before alleged hijack
RCMP say the suspect had an "ideological motive" and allegedly seized control of the plane at Victoria International Airport.
How many were caused by arson? Just askin....Federal officials say wildfire forecast shows high risk of more fires in August
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Sarah Ritchie
Published Jul 18, 2025 • Last updated 12 hours ago • 4 minute read
OTTAWA — The 2025 wildfire season is already one of the worst on record for Canada, federal officials said Friday, and there is a high risk that more fires will break out in August.
More than 55,000 square kilometres of land has burned so far this year, an area roughly the size of Nova Scotia. That is more than double the 10-year average of the area burned by mid-July.
There were 561 fires burning as of Friday morning, including 69 that were considered out of control. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre says almost 3,300 fires have been recorded this year so far.
The record was set in 2023, when more than 6,000 fires burned more than 150,000 square km of land — an area larger than all three Maritime provinces put together.
That devastating season, where wildfires raged from Newfoundland to B.C. for months on end, sparked significant public pressure for the federal government to create a new kind of disaster response agency.
Former emergency management ministers Bill Blair and Harjit Sajjan both mulled the idea of such an agency during their time in office, with both ministers acknowledging the strain natural disasters have put on the Canadian Armed Forces and the provinces and territories.
The government said it was looking to the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency and Australia’s National Emergency Management Agency as potential examples.
Final decisions on that front still have not been made.
During a Friday afternoon briefing with several of her cabinet colleagues, Emergency Management Minister Eleanor Olszewski said her department will be making changes to how it responds to wildfire seasons, which are becoming longer and more severe.
“We think that the formation of such an agency could have a very positive impact on our ability to co-ordinate how we respond to national disasters across the country,” Olszewski said.
That could mean having regional water bombers to respond more quickly to fires in areas that have fewer resources, she said, or leaning on a “humanitarian task force” to ensure people can be deployed where they’re needed.
Matthew Godsoe, a senior director of the government operations centre at Public Safety Canada, said natural disasters are outpacing the capacity of the country’s emergency management system.
“In that current context, maintaining the status quo is equivalent to doing less,” he told reporters at a technical briefing Friday, adding that all levels of government and individual Canadians must work together “to slow or stop this nearly exponential growth in disaster losses that we’re experiencing as a country.”
The federal government has been called in to provide help five times this wildfire season, including last week, when the Armed Forces and the Red Cross helped to evacuate more than 2,800 people from Garden Hill First Nation in Manitoba.
Olszewski said she expects to have an update on a federal emergency agency in the fall.
In the meantime, communities in high-risk areas are bracing for things to get worse in the next two months, which are typically the most active months of the fire season.
Saskatchewan has already seen one of the worst fire seasons ever in terms of the total area burned, and a record number of people have been forced out of their homes in that province.
Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty said 39,000 people have been forced to evacuate from 66 First Nations, mostly on the Prairies, calling the fire season unprecedented.
“It is, I hope, not the new reality that we have to live with, but I’m asking myself what this looks like,” she said.
Gull-Masty said the government’s goal at the end of the wildfire season is to “come together, debrief, reflect, and put tools in place for the next possible time that this occurs.”
Officials said the fire risk typically rises throughout August as temperatures get hotter, and they are predicting higher than normal temperatures for most of the country next month.
“This is consistent with climate change projections, which show that the next five years will be warmer than (we) are used to,” said Sebastien Chouinard, the director of operations at the Canadian Meteorological Centre.
August is also slated to bring below-normal rainfall levels for the Prairies, B.C. and the Maritimes.
More than 530 firefighters from Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Mexico and the U.S. are in Canada to help.
Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson said his department is setting aside $11.7 million over four years to create the Wildfire Resilience Consortium of Canada, an agency he said will “connect domestic, international governments, the private sector, wildfire scientists and experts and affected communities to share knowledge, science and technology so we can fight fires better.”
The consortium is part of Canada’s commitment to a wildfire co-operation charter that was signed at the G7 leaders’ summit in Kananaskis, Alta., this summer.
Federal officials say wildfire forecast shows high risk of more fires in August
The 2025 wildfire season is already one of the worst and there is a high risk of more fires in August, federal officials said.