Hour 2 of Ottawa Now for Tues. July 14th, 2026

Watching your property and your possessions fill up with water often brings a very specific kind of helplessness. When you are standing in rubber boots, waiting on a claims adjuster to show up to your front door, only to find out that you have no coverage – it’s demoralizing pain. Nearly 6,000 basements have been impacted by this year’s Canada Day floods. Kristy’s basement is one of them, and that statistic is climbing. Insurance companies call this an ‘Act of God’ – a legal phrasing for something completely out of humanity’s control. So how do we cope when our safety net abruptly evaporates? That’s up for discussion in this week’s Self-Help Tuesday with psychotherapist Benslyne Avril. Meantime, after the U.S. launched a trade war with Canada last year, one of the first statement actions from Ontario’s Premier was a purging of U.S. liquor. Doug Ford yanked every single American bottle in sight off the store shelves. But now, the province is doing a tango with expiration dates and rising storage costs. Will it cost us more to run out the clock, or is the Buy Canadian movement too meaningful to waste away? We dig deeper with Michael J. Armstrong, an Associate Professor of Operations Research at Brock University.