Catch up: New rules for Canadian TV and other stories you may have missed today

Busy day? Here are five stories to help you catch up.

The CRTC has drastically reduced the number of hours each day that must be filled with made-in-Canada TV programs, James Bradshaw reports.

Half of the prime-time evening schedule will stay earmarked for Canadian programs on local networks. But during the daytime, the broadcast regulator dropped the quota for local channels from 55 per cent to zero.

It’s part of the CRTC’s plan to encourage producers and broadcasters to focus their spending on a smaller number of quality shows.

Other changes include:

• Encouraging shows with at least a $2-million dollar budget per hour-long episode, or that are based on best-selling Canadian novels
  
• Forcing broadcasters to offer CraveTV and Shomi to all Canadians
  
• Opening up competition between specialty networks like Discovery channel or Space by ending genre protection
  

A global organization promoting responsible whale watching is calling the death of a Canadian tourist off the coast of Mexico a freak accident, Affan Chowdhry reports.

“I think this is the first time that a whale or dolphin in the wild, as part of a whale-watching trip, has actually accidentally killed somebody,” said Dylan Walker of the U.K.-based World Cetacean Alliance.

The accident happened as a tour boat carrying whale watchers was returning to the resort city of Cabo San Lucas, Mexican authorities say.

The identity of the Canadian woman has not been released.

The new development at Toronto’s Yonge and Bloor streets is slated to be Canada’s second tallest building, trailing only the CN Tower. And perhaps its most expensive.

Besides its height, there are lots of features that will make it stand out, Alex Bozikovic writes.

The design includes:

• An eight-level luxury shopping mall
  
• A public atrium
  
• 72 levels of apartments, with about 9,000 square feet on each floor
  
• One or two strips of “winter gardens” on each facade
  
• A grid of structural steel that wraps around its glass skin, from ground to tip.
  

The proposal is being submitted to the city this week.

Next time your kids drive you nuts, think about all the taxes they’re saving you.

Child-care expenses are just one of those costs that parents have been able to deduct, Tim Cestnick explains.

Here’s how it works:

• You have to be living with the child and you must have personally paid the child-care cost
  
• If there’s more than one supporting person, the one with the lower income must make the claim
  
• You can claim expenses including babysitting, day nursery schools and daycare fees
  
• For 2014, the maximum you can deduct is the least of three amounts: (1) the total amount spent on child care expenses, (2) two-thirds of the lower-income taxpayer’s earned income, and (3) the maximum dollar limit for your children
  

The best strategy? Ensure that the lower-income supporting person has sufficient income to fully deduct all the child-care expenses incurred. Otherwise, you’re wasting good deductions.

One of the most experienced and most popular mountain guides in Western Canada was killed in an avalanche Tuesday afternoon near Sorcerer Lodge, a remote ski cabin near Golden, B.C.

Robson Gmoser, 45, had worked as a guide since 1985, and had been skiing since his infancy, Ian Brown reports. He was wearing an avalanche beacon, but was buried under 1 1/2 metres of debris. The guide-in-training managed to dig him out in 30 minutes, but Mr. Gmoser could not be revived.

Mr. Gmoser is the fifth avalanche casualty in Western Canada this winter; the average is normally 12 by this point in the season, according to Larry Stanier, an experienced mountain guide in the area.

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