Kitchener, ON – The Rangers welcomed 45 players to Kitchener for fitness testing, four on-ice sessions, and tours of Kitchener Memorial Auditorium. Rangers’ newly drafted prospects from the 2024 OHL Priority Selection and 2024 U-18 Priority Selection, prospects from previous OHL Priority Selections, as well as free agent invites were in attendance. There were two teams made up of 12 forwards, eight defencemen, and two/three goaltenders. Both teams practiced Friday evening before playing each other twice on Saturday and once on Sunday morning.

“Our new prospects showed great enthusiasm hitting the ice this weekend,” said General Manager Mike McKenzie. “It was also great to see the significant growth in our older prospects throughout the year and we’re excited about the talent we have here.”

GAME ONE: 6-5 Team Blue

GAME TWO: 7-1 Team White

GAME THREE: 6-3 Team White

To follow along with Rangers updates throughout the offseason follow us on social media @OHLRangers, sign up for our newsletter, or stay tuned on kitchenerrangers.com.

A vineyard in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., has bottled a 2021 field blend wine in reused bottles for the first time.

Stratus Vineyards collaborated on the intiative with Circulr in Kitchener, Ont., a company that provides reusable packaging like jars for stores and other retailers.

Stratus gathered used wine bottles from customers and collected bottles from the winery's tasting room, then gave them to Circulr to figure out how to properly process them so they could be used again.

"This has never really been done before in Ontario," Circulr co-founder Tyler De Sousa said in an interview on CBC Kitchener-Waterloo's The Morning Edition.

"We had conversations, I think over two years ago now, about how we wanted to do this and it was something we wanted to pursue."

Stratus collected 50 cases of bottles for Circulr to test. They had to figure out what could be done with the screw caps, how to properly wash and sanitize the bottles and how to remove the labels.

"The labels that are on there ... they've sort of been built up over years and years to be bulletproof pretty much to make sure that they don't come off after a decade or two of aging. So it's a long process to get the labels off," he said.

"Once the label's off, the hard part is done."

WATCH | Ontario winery to resuse bottles:

6 days ago

Duration 2:27

An Ontario wine company has announced its going to release a new wine in bottles that are being used a second time. A Kitchener company is helping to sterilize them and return them into circulation. CBC K-W's Craig Norris speaks with Dean Stoyka of Stratus Vineyards in Niagara-on-the-Lake and Tyler De Sousa, co-founder of Circulr in Kitchener.

European case study had promising results

Currently in Ontario wine bottles are recycled through blue bin systems or by people who return them to The Beer Store, which runs a recycling program.

The practice of reusing wine bottles is more popular in Europe. The group Zero Waste Europe reported in 2021 that as part of a reWINE case study, 82,239 glass bottles were reused by wineries, which saved an estimated 171,058 tonnes of CO2, which is the equivalent to the amount of emissions a car would produce while travelling 11 times around the world.

The case study was done in Spain by the company Rezero between 2016 and 2020 and involved 99 stakeholders, from wineries to stores and restaurants and municipal waste collection points.

Marta Beltran, project director at Rezero, said in the 2021 release about the case study that the project "clearly shows the positive impact of wine bottle reuse on climate change mitigation and is key for the transition of the sector towards zero waste."

But, Beltran added, in order to make wine bottle reuse successful there would need to be an investment in the tools to make it happen and government regulations would need to be in place.

Advocacy group applauds move

Reusing wine bottles is an idea Ashley Wallis applauds. She's the associate director of Environmental Defence, and the group wrote a paper in 2011 advocating for refillable wine bottles in Ontario.

"Despite nearly 80 per cent of glass wine and liquor bottles being returned to The Beer Store through the province's highly successful deposit return program, these bottles have not up to this point been reused. This is a missed opportunity, and one we're happy to see local wineries, like Stratus, address," Wallis said in an email to CBC News.

She said it takes a lot of energy and resources to make products that are used briefly before they're thrown away.

"We need to massively reduce the amount of single-use products and packaging in our economy, and favour non-toxic, low-carbon reuse systems. Reusing glass wine bottles, at a regional or local level, is just the kind of initiative we need more of," she said.

Wallis also said there's no reason to stop at wine bottles. Environmental Defence has been calling on the province to broaden the deposit return program to include pop, juice and water containers since 2014, she said.

A broader program "would make it easier for companies to sell non-alcoholic drinks in reusable containers, and keep billions of single-use bottles and cans out of our environment, landfills, and incinerators."

'Have to start asking questions'

Dean Sloyka is the winemaker at Stratus Vineyards and says many wineries want to go on "the path of least resistance" and that's the usual way to recycling bottles.

"The thought of going through all these extra steps is, for a lot of companies like, well, why would I do that?" he said.

"With our sustainable mindset, we kind of have to start asking questions," he added. "Can we continue to go down this path where we're using these bottles once and then they're sometimes being recycled, but usually not being reused almost ever?"

Suzanne Janke is the estate director at Stratus Vineyards and says reusing bottles is another step in their commitment to environmental stewardship. The winery earned a LEED certification for their full facility in 2005 when it opened. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental design and is a global rating system that certifies green buildings.

"From that day forward, we've engaged in all kinds of different activities from the way we service our guests, the way we form the vineyard, the way we make our wines in terms of being as mindful of the environment as possible, obviously, because wine comes from the land," she said.

"We have a very obvious and inherent responsibility to make our work this way."

LISTEN | Kitchener company Circulr works with stores, businesses to recycle jars:

The Morning Edition - K-W6:35Kitchener company Circulr works with stores, businesses to recycle jars

A growing Kitchener business is hoping to get you to buy items in their reusable jars - then return them to the store where you bought them. Circulr co-founder Tyler De Sousa says the company was started in late 2020 and since then, has grown to stores throughout Waterloo region and in Toronto.

'Something really big'

Sloyka says they have plans to grow from 50 cases to 200 cases this year. He said they haven't found an alternative to the wine bottle that allows wine to age the same way, "so we're really married to the wine bottle."

Knowing that, he wants to see the idea of reusing bottles take off across the province.

"The idea is to grow it more and more with Circulr until we can maybe find a standardized bottle and get a bunch of wineries going on," he said.

"Ideally our entire production and all of Ontario — we have a really small, tight-knit community … we're kind of perfectly set up to sort of band together and take initiative where there's bottles being used by the wineries."

De Souza says he expects their Kitchener facility "is going to see a lot of bottles in the next 12 months" as more wineries and vineyards express interest in the idea of reusing their bottles, too.

"There's a lot of interest in that movement," he said, adding Circulr has talked to two dozen wineries who seemed open to the idea of what the company is doing.

"We're kind of just getting our stuff together," he said, adding Stratus and Circulr are excited to "start the ball rolling on something really big."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Reporter/Editor

Kate has been covering issues in southern Ontario for more than 20 years. She is currently working for CBC Kitchener-Waterloo. Email: kate.bueckert@cbc.ca

Kitchener Centre voters have spoken and Green Party candidate Aislinn Clancy has been unofficially elected as the new Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) in the riding.

“I am so incredibly grateful to the Kitchener community for putting their trust in me. To every single person who supported our campaign – thank you,” Clancy said in a statement. “I’m honoured to have you behind me, and I’m ready to be your voice at Queen’s Park.”

It was a historic night for the Greens as they now have two MPPs in the Ontario legislature, with Clancy joining party leader Mike Schreiner, who represents Guelph, in the legislature.

Clancy, who is a city councillor in Kitchener in Ward 10, collected 47.99 per cent of the vote while another city councillor, NDP candidate Debbie Chapman, finished with 26.73 per cent of the vote.

It was hotly-contested campaign between the Green Party and NDP with federal party leaders Elizabeth May and Jagmeet Singh both making appearances in Kitchener over the final week of the campaign to drum up support for their candidates.

The riding is also represented by the Green Party in Ottawa as Kitchener Centre voters elected Mike Morrice as their MP in 2021.

The PC Party named Rob Elliott, who resides north of Toronto in Keswick, as its candidate five days before they dropped the writ to open the campaign.

More on Politics

He finished third in the election, ahead of Liberal candidate Kelly Steiss, in a sign that the Liberals still have much work to do in repairing their relationship with voters.

The Liberal Party had previously held the seat from 2003 until 2018 when former NDP MPP Laura Mae Lindo was elected.

The seat, which is in the heart of Kitchener, had been vacant since Lindo resigned last summer.

In January, she announced she was resigning the seat less than a year after he had been re-elected to take a job at the University of Waterloo.

Voter turnout was low in the byelection as just 27.1 per cent of the 87,151 people who were eligible to cast a ballot actually voted.

Elections Ontario said that during the 2022 election, 46.2 per cent of registered voters in Kitchener Centre cast a vote.

International student cap could hit colleges, universities financially: Experts

The cap on international students is here and Ottawa hopes it will ease the pressure on the housing market. But student and faculty groups are warning something will have to give unless provinces step up with more financial support.

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A Waterloo Regional councillor says he will be sending a letter to Conestoga College’s president after speaking to a student who was living in a house with 13 other people in a situation he described as “inhumane and down right unsafe.”

Kitchener councillor Michael Harris issued a series of tweets on Tuesday after he spoke with a student who was hauling a chair down the street.

He told Global News that he was collecting his mail from a community mailbox when he spotted the student.

“I saw down the street there was this guy carrying a chair down the street with a bunch of parcels or packages,” Harris said.

“He kind of stopped not too far from me and put the chair down to take a bit of a break and me being me, I went up to him and said, ”Hey, what’s going on here? What are you doing?’”

More on Canada

That began a conversation between the two, in which the Kitchener councillor was told that the man was from India and was studying at the nearby main campus of Conestoga College

“I kind of knew roughly whereabouts he was heading, offered to give him a hand and I just asked him, I said, ‘What’s your situation there?’” Harris explained. “How many people are you actually living with? And he told me 13.”

Harris said he was floored by that news although at the same time he noted that there has been a large influx of international students into his area of the city.

Breaking news from Canada and around the world sent to your email, as it happens.

Conestoga College is the largest post-secondary institution in the country for international students and has expanded to add thousands of new students over the past few years.

“And it’s obvious the expansion and growth of international students across the college has led to this influx of students in the Doon area,” Harris said. “But I just felt that it … really sounded like an unsafe living situation.”

That led him to put out a series of posts on X on Tuesday night.

“I just thought it was time that I, I spoke up and I had to put that tweet out, just kind of telling people my experience that evening,” he explained.

He said the move to X brought on a massive response from the community.

In one case, he heard stories of people renting out driveways in Brampton so people could live in their cars.

Harris said that the recent mass influx of foreign students has begun to strain other areas for the region.

“Even from a regional perspective, the housing crisis that we’ve experienced in the last few years, a lack of housing, the cost of housing, but also the strain on regional services, transit, we know, is at record ridership levels,” he said.

“The strain from the food bank locally at this, past recent budget and I would say to you that stems back to the increase in the amount of international students at the at the college.

“I mean, you can’t … plug 10,000 students into a community and not feel the pressures of social services and even housing.”

It was a tough Tuesday for Conestoga College president John Tibbits, as some media outlets reported that he used some colourful language about another college president during an event.

Some have said Harris was piling on after the blowback began to Tibbits reportedly calling the other president a “whore” among other things but the Kitchener councillor said he was unaware of the other comments.

“I had no clue that was even happening, nor was I aware of any comments that he had made Tuesday afternoon,” Harris said. “I think I put my tweet out Tuesday evening.

The school’s board of directors released a statement on Thursday evening which said that they were reviewing Tibbits’ comments and that he had expressed his regret and apologized.

Harris, who is a graduate of and donor to Conestoga College, noted that the school needs to build more housing as it has fewer than 1,000 beds in Kitchener, Waterloo and Brantford.

“That residence that’s there was probably built early 2000s and there’s been nothing done since then,” he said. “You know, to accommodate more student residence units, especially on college-owned land, knowing that they are the benefactor of a significant amount of land.”

The school is currently working on new housing locations in Kitchener and Waterloo.

“I get that things take time to build. But when you know that you’ve got numbers coming through the door like they have, they need to have done better and they need to communicate frankly their plans to build more residential spaces if, in fact, they have them,” he said.

Global News reached out to Conestoga College to get a response to Harris’s posts but has yet to receive a response.

Conestoga has come under fire recently as the school has 30,000 international students with housing for less than 1,000.

Last month, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced that the feds were set to install a two-year national cap on the intake of students which would see 364,000 approved study permits, down 35 per cent from 2023.

“In order to maintain a sustainable level of temporary residence in Canada, as well to ensure that there is no further growth in the number of international students in Canada for 2024, we are setting a national application intake cap for a period of two years for 2024,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller said when the move was announced.

That prompted Tibbits to issue a memo to staff earlier in February which called on the federal government to slow its move to curb the intake of international students into Canada.

“We agree that changes need to be made, especially in relation to private colleges, but the federal government’s decision should have been phased in over time and done in consultation,” the letter Tibbits issued on Friday said. “Instead, Canada’s reputation as a destination for post-secondary education is threatened.”

On Tuesday, the college touted the findings of a report which it had commissioned.

The report noted that Conestoga graduates add more than $6.2 billion annually to the province’s economy while more than 5,200 Conestoga graduates are local entrepreneurs.

It also noted that the college has spent $500 million over the last five years to expand campus locations and modernize buildings in the communities it serves.