Zelensky Pleads to Parliament for More Help. What Can Canada Offer?

The implications of that might be unthinkable, Max writes. Even a single nuclear strike by Russia might set off “a tit-for-tat change that, in escalating to strategic weapons like intercontinental missiles, might kill 34 million individuals inside a couple of hours.”

[Read: As Russia Digs In, What’s the Risk of Nuclear War? ‘It’s Not Zero.’]

Canadians and the federal authorities, in fact, had been fast to supply different types of assist to Ukraine. As of Friday morning, Canadians had donated 82 million Canadian {dollars} to the Canadian Purple Cross for reduction — a sum that doesn’t rely the federal authorities’s matching donation of 30 million Canadian {dollars}.

The Canadian authorities can be taking steps to ease immigration processes for Ukrainians. This week, officers rolled out an accelerated digital software course of that can permit Ukrainians to work in Canada for as much as three years. (Some immigration coverage consultants famous the distinction between this new system and the slower, extra cumbersome course of for Afghan refugees trying to completely settle right here.)

Because the battle drags on, it appears possible that Ukrainians will want extra assist. And as Canada ponders the right way to help them, it’s price remembering a probably awkward actuality: Canada is more likely to not directly revenue from the West’s isolation of Russia in a lot of methods.

Whereas commerce between Canada and Russia is just not intensive, the international locations compete in world markets for a variety of assets, together with grains, lumber and different forestry merchandise, potash for fertilizers, nickel and different minerals and, maybe above all, oil and fuel. Ukraine can be a significant exporter of wheat and different grains.

The impact of greater than three weeks of battle has not been a lot to create new markets for Canada because it has been to lift the costs of commodities, in some instances sharply.

In Alberta, after years of low costs had slowed the financial system and battered the provincial authorities’s funds, oil costs had been starting to rise earlier than the invasion. However strikes to close out Russia, one of many world’s high three oil producers, from world vitality markets has solely added to the pressures driving up costs. Clifford Krauss, a Occasions vitality reporter and a former Toronto correspondent, wrote that, all through historical past, “there have been few comparable disruptions of oil provides.”