Catch up: Europe's worst refugee crisis in 70 years and other stories you may have missed

Europe’s failure to forge a response to its greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War is now on full display in downtown Budapest, Joanna Slater reports.

Hundreds of refugees from the Middle East and Africa hoping to resettle in Western European countries like Germany or Sweden have been held up at the city's main railway station, as the European Union dithers over how to handle the mounting crisis.

The area around the station has been transformed into a makeshift refugee camp for hundreds of migrants with nowhere to go. The government won't allow them to leave nor stay, even if they have train tickets. The lucky ones have tents, but many sleep on flattened boxes or steps leading to the subway, with only water bottles for pillows.

Bashir Fidawi, 30, a law student from Aleppo, Syria, has blisters on his hands and feet. He has been a refugee for two years – first Turkey, now here.

“Canada is big,” he says. “Why not say, ‘Syria, come’?”

A computer glitch at Air Canada that sold flight passes at 10 per cent of the normal price has triggered a class-action lawsuit after the company took the passes back.

When Air Canada offered a bundle of 10 business class tickets for less than $800, passengers thought they were getting a great deal. Turns out the package of one-way flights in the western U.S. or Canada should have actually cost $8,000, but the error wasn't discovered until passes had already been sold.

Air Canada apologized and offered refunds to the affected passengers, but court documents allege the airline refused to live up to their legal contractual obligations.

“Our view here is that Air Canada has made an enforceable contract, it delivered the flight packages to consumers and it has improperly taken them away,” lawyer Garrett Munroe said.

The allegations have not been proven in court.

Calgary's housing market took a beating in August as home sales fell by 27 per cent from a year earlier, while the
average resale price dropped by nearly 2 per cent to $466,570, Jeff Lewis reports.

The news came as the city's energy industry announced yet another round of layoffs Tuesday, as ConocoPhillips Co. and Penn West Petroleum cut 900 jobs between them, adding to thousands of job losses that have come in the wake of the collapse of oil prices this year.

“If people have lost their jobs and they can’t replace them over a period of time, and or can’t replace them at a
similar salary, that’s when it starts to have that trickledown effect into the housing market,” said Ann-Marie
Lurie, chief economist with the Calgary real estate board.

Alberta's NDP government is predicting a deficit of as much as $6.5-billion as the province's oil-dependent economy is expected to shrink by 0.6 per cent this year.

Royal Bank of Canada customers on all Android devices can now use their phones for mobile payments on any network, after the bank received a patent for its new mobile payments technology from the U.S. Patent Office, David Berman reports.

The RBC Wallett app is being released ahead of Apple Pay's Canadian launch. The contact-payment technology has been popularized in the United States through apps like Apple Pay and Google Wallet. Using the apps, users can make payments with their credit cards or debit cards that have been directly connected to their smartphones.

But Linda Mantia of RBC says it's still too early for RBC customers to leave their wallets at home -- the technology only works if vendors have it, too.