We’re thrilled to announce the addition of Sue-Ann Levy as our newest contributor!
Sue-Ann was one of the top read Toronto Sun columnists because of her outspoken opinions, take-no-prisoners writing style and the fearless way with which she tackled the elites in government, other publicly funded institutions and in the media.
True North Founder and Editor-in-Chief Candice Malcolm welcomes Sue-Ann on The Candice Malcolm Show to discuss what True North Nation can expect from the renowned journalist.
A Toronto District School Board (TDSB) presentation from last year lectured parents on how treating people equally was a form of “colorblindness racism” along with other ideas stemming from critical race theory (CRT).
In a slideshow titled “Talking Race with your Child(ren),” the TDSB called on parents to “avoid neutral language” such as “we are all people” when having race-related discussions with their children.
“Colorblindness is the racial ideology that posits the best way to end discrimination is by treating individuals as equally as possible, without regard to race, culture, or ethnicity,” the TDSB claimed, citing a 2011 Psychology Today article.
This @tdsb presentation on talking to your kids about race is jam-packed with CRT ideas.
In a separate slide addressing colourblindness, the TDSB wrote that treating everyone equally “foists whiteness on everyone” and “strips non-white people of their uniqueness.”
The concept of colourblind racism comes out of CRT-related teachings which have received newfound attention south of the border, as a handful of state school boards have passed bills banning CRT in schools.
“Critical educators, particularly Critical Race pedagogues, critique color blind ideology as tantamount to racism because it serves to maintain racial inequality,” a 2008 paper by Governors State University professor Jung-ah Choi notes.
As a way to heighten knowledge about race, the TDSB advises parents to “intentionally seek out races/communities different from your own” and to only watch TV or radio programs that address racism.
The presentation was given during a November 12, 2020 Virtual Ward 8 Forum featuring TDSB Trustee Shelley Laskin which was open to parents and the general community on the topic of “equity.”
Ward 8 contains nearly 3 dozen schools in Toronto’s Eglinton-Lawrence area and beyond.
“This session explores these key terms (stereotype, prejudice, discrimination, oppression, race, racism, anti-racism, and anti-Black racism) along with our individual roles in reducing the educational disparities caused by systemic oppression,” a flyer advertising the event claimed.
According to an agenda of the event, a total of two presentations were given by TDSB’s Equity Coaches Jamie Berrigan and Shayle Graham. TDSB Superintendents John Chasty, Andrew Howard and Denise Humphreys were also in attendance at the event.
In the second presentation given by the TDSB’s Equity, Anti-Racism, and Anti-Oppression Team, presenters called for a deep commitment to “changing how educators conceptualize and engage in curriculum, pedagogy, classroom management and school culture.”
“Anti-oppressive education explores privileges and power imbalances within social groups and structures and expects to be different, perhaps uncomfortable, and even controversial,” presenters claimed.
A quarterly study commissioned by the Privy Council Office found that one in six Canadians do not trust information from the federal government.
The survey titled Continuous Tracking Of Canadians’ Views cost taxpayers $1,514,098 and was conducted by Elemental Data Collection Inc.
According to the survey results obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter, 16% of Canadians responded negatively to the question “to what extent do you trust Government of Canada information?”
Negative perceptions of government news were the highest in Alberta and the Northwest Territories which had 35% of people say that they had low trust. Trust was the highest in Atlantic Canada, where nearly 69% of people said they trust government information.
Meanwhile, 15% of people from Ontario said they didn’t trust government information, 10% from Quebec, 13% in British Columbia and 24% in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Nunavut.
“Through the use of this survey the Privy Council Office wanted to assess the perceptions of Canadians on governmental priorities,” wrote the survey methodology report.
“This input was needed because complex issues are often difficult to communicate to the Canadian public in a manner that is easily and clearly understood.”
With regard to specific issues, trust in government information about vaccines was the lowest. In total, 17.1% of Canadians reported that they had low trust in the government’s information about vaccines.
Trust was the highest among those polled when it came to the topic of “health advice” with 71.7% claiming that they had high trust in the information that the Government of Canada was providing them.
A new report from Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children found that most children in Ontario are suffering from symptoms of depression as lockdowns and school closures persist.
Released Thursday, the report found that just over half of children aged 8 to 12 reported symptoms of depression in February and March of this year.
Among children aged 13 to 18, a staggering 70% reported symptoms of depression.
“We are seeing that children of all ages have had negative consequences from public health guidelines that have largely been put in place to protect adults,” Sick Kids pediatrician Dr. Catherine Birken told the Toronto Star.
“[The results] are very, very concerning for us, and we wanted to share that preliminary information if it’s helpful for parents, clinicians and policy-makers to think about how to mitigate that as we move into the school year.”
The researchers found a strong relationship between school closures and poor mental health, concluding that keeping children out of the classroom has led to increased rates of depression.
The report also found that the number of children involved in sports or extracurricular clubs has declined significantly during the pandemic.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, children in Ontario have spent little time in the classroom due to multiple lockdowns. Experts across Canada have warned of a “mental health crisis” that disproportionately affects children, including increased hospitalizations for mental illnesses.
Earlier in 2021, Ontario entered another lockdown and remains one of the most locked-down places in North America. Schools have remained closed for much of 2021.
Sick Kids psychiatrist Dr. Daphne Korczak says there is no evidence children have learned to cope with constant lockdowns, with the research showing that mental health has not improved over time.
“We didn’t see evidence of adaptation and resilience. Kids in Ontario experienced this stressor chronically for this year, and the longer the stressors continue, like the cancellation or changes to schools, the greater the risk is of a long-term problem,” Korczak said.
“We have to have meaningful conversations as our society reopens about how we can prioritize children and their mental health.”
Two constitutional rights groups have raised the alarm bells over the Liberal government’s recently unveiled “online hate speech” bill, Bill C-36.
Both the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) and the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) have condemned the bill as dangerous and infringing on Canadians’ rights.
“Bill C-36 is not subtle legislation: it is a blatant attack on freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, as well as other Charter provisions,” said JCCF Litigation Director Jay Cameron told True North.
According to Cameron, the law’s “anticipatory of hate provision” in section 810.012 is particularly concerning from a legal perspective. The section, which amends the Canadian Human Rights Act, would allow anyone who has fear that a “hate propaganda offence or hate crime” will be committed to bring charges against another person.
“Not only is ‘hate’ not clearly defined in Bill C-36, but it allows a person to be punished and even incarcerated because of something someone imagines that they might say. This is an attack on the presumption of innocence, and is entirely unconstitutional, not to mention frighteningly despotic and totalitarian,” said Cameron.
The Liberals have been promising a bill to address so-called “online hate” since before the 2019 election. On June 23, Liberal Justice Minister David Lametti tabled Bill C-36 with only hours left before the House of Commons’ summer recess. It is expected that the Liberals will re-introduce the legislation when parliament returns in the fall.
True North also reached out to other civil liberties organizations including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) and the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) for comment on Bill C-36.
CAJ president Brent Jolly noted the technical aspects of the bill have not yet been released, but said his organization would “monitor” the bill’s developments.
“Like just about any proposed legislation dealing with speech, if the law is written badly it could impinge on the freedom of the press,” Jolly said. “We just don’t know enough at this very moment to come to a rushed position. So, we will continue to monitor the legislation and speak up in the event that it is necessary.“
The CJFE and CCLA did not respond to a request for comment, however the CCLA’s Cara Zwibel expressed concerns in an interview with the National Post.
“I think we will probably see people making complaints that probably shouldn’t go forward and there may be a chilling effect on people who were concerned about expressing themselves and whether they’ll cross some sort of line,” Zwibel told the National Post.
In a recent statement on the legislation the CCF, also slammed Bill C-36 for giving “unelected tribunal bureaucrats even greater control” over free speech.
“It essentially proposes to put bureaucrats in charge of parsing and policing speech on the internet,” wrote CCF Executive Director Joanna Baron in a recent op-ed.
Those found guilty of breaking the proposed law could face up to $50,000 in fines, probation, and in the worst case scenario even imprisonment for uttering statements perceived as “hateful.”
As noted by both the JCCF and the CCF, Canada already has hate speech laws in place to prosecute and charge people found to have said something criminally hateful.
“The truth is that Bill C-36 is about preventing disagreement with woke orthodoxies. Imagine being censored by Twitter, for example, for saying that men do not have uteruses, or something similar, and then getting a $50,000 fine from the Trudeau government, being put on 12 months probation where your expression is scrutinized for conformity to government orthodoxies, and if you refuse, being sent to jail,” Cameron told True North.
Other organizations including the People’s Party of Canada have also come out against Bill C-36.
New data by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) places Canada among the member countries with the highest unemployment rate.
According to OECD statistics, Canada’s unemployment rate is currently 8.2%, placing it behind countries like Turkey, Columbia, Spain, Greece, Costa Rica, Sweden and Chile.
The OECD blames “temporary layoffs” during the COVID-19 pandemics peak and a “larger decline in the employment rate than the OECD average” as being behind the high unemployment.
“The employment rate is likely to recover slightly more quickly, and the unemployment rate fall more rapidly, than the OECD average, and both are projected to return to pre-pandemic levels by early 2023,” the OECD wrote.
Canada’s unemployment rate has spiked since the COVID-19 pandemic, rising over 2% up from 5.7% since last year.
In response to the numbers, Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre tweeted about how Canada was only doing better than “a handful of mostly socialist countries.”
BREAKING: New data shows Canada having among the highest jobless rates in the OECD, with only a handful of mostly socialist countries worse. https://t.co/SoLPxKPQQI
According to Statistics Canada’s May Labour Force Survey employment also declined by 0.4% that month while the unemployment rate barely budged.
“In May, total employment in the goods-producing sector decreased for the first time since April 2020,” wrote Statistics Canada.
A majority of the jobs lost were in manufacturing, retail and other services. In their report, Statistics Canada noted that the tightening of third wave restrictions by provinces like Ontario and Alberta were a contributing factor in the trends.
A number of activists, academics and prominent public figures have excused recent church burnings and acts of vandalism targeting historical Canadian symbols.
Comments include open calls to “burn it all down” in reference to Catholic church fires as well as calls to dismantle Canada’s so-called colonial systems.
True North has compiled a list of every prominent individual who excused the recent incidents.
BC Civil Liberties Association Executive Director Harsha Walia
In a June 30 tweet, Harsha Walia said “burn it all down” in response to an article on two Catholic church burnings in British Columbia.
Following public backlash, Walia made her account private and claimed that she was not encouraging people to commit arson despite her comments. Walia still holds her position at the BC Civil Liberties Association.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
When asked about condemning the ongoing church fires, Trudeau told reporters on July 2 that the anger of those committing arson was “fully understandable” due to Canada’s “shameful history.”
“I understand the anger that’s out there against the federal government, against institutions like the Catholic Church. It is real and it’s fully understandable, given the shameful history that we are all becoming more and more aware of and engaging ourselves to do better as Canadians,” said Trudeau.
Gerald Butts
Echoing the prime minister’s remarks, former principal secretary to Trudeau, Gerald Butt, stated that the ongoing church burning “may be understandable” in response to a tweet by journalist Terry Glavin.
No Terry, it is not. Though it may be understandable.
MP Niki Ashton celebrated the toppling of statues at Manitoba’s legislature of Canada’s Head of State Queen Elizabeth II and the late Queen Victoria. Ashton referenced the criminal acts as “decolonization” before tweeting a heart emoji.
Decolonization on the grounds of our legislature on Treaty 1 Territory, the homeland of the Métis.
Ryerson School of Journalism assistant professor Karyn Pugliese
Karyn Pugliese, who teaches journalism students at Ryerson University, appeared on CBC At Issue where she stated “tear it all down” when asked about what can be done to achieve reconciliation on university campuses. Pugliese made the comments several days before a statue of Egerton Ryerson was pulled down and defaced by radicals.
Radio host Nesta Matthews
In a deleted tweet, Nesta Matthews, who hosts a radio show on St. John’s 97.3 The Wave, called for people to “burn the churches down” and to arrest staff at Catholic churches. Matthews later apologized for the tweet and claimed that she had let her anger “get the better” of her and that her post “was reckless and wrong.”
McGill University associate professor Debra Thompson
In a June 7 tweet referencing the recent London, Ontario vehicular attack and the Kamloops residential school announcement, Thompson mused how “it’s truly a wonder we don’t burn it all down.”
The family in London and their newly orphaned little boy and the 215 babies in Kamloops and everyone is always so vicious when I write about racism in Canada and I’m just so, so sorry and so broken and so full of RAGE and it’s truly a wonder we don’t burn it all down.
Lawyer and Chair of the Newfoundland Canadian Bar Association Branch Caitlin Urquhart
On June 8, in response to Debra Thompson’s tweet on the London, Ontario vehicular attack and the residential school announcement, Urquhart stated “burn it all down.”
Many are unaware that Ontario is the most locked-down region in North America.
While other parts of Canada begin to reopen, Ontarians continue to be bogged down by public health restrictions. In Ontario, there’s still a mask mandate, gyms and museums are still forced to shutter their doors and there are still capacity limits both indoors and outdoors.
This is Anthony Furey’s SOS message – send help to Ontario!
In a new op-ed, CBC host Wendy Mesley has some choice words for her former employer whom she accused of not offering her any public support after it was reported that she said the N-word during a staff meeting.
On June 9, 2020 Mesley was suspended from her show The Weekly with Wendy Mesley after using the N-word in full when discussing the issue of racism. In a previous incident, she also referenced the 1968 book “White N******* of America” by Quebec author Pierre Vallières. Soon after Mesley’s suspension, it was revealed that she would not be returning to her show.
“The details of the investigation, I was told, were to be kept confidential. Eventually, I would be allowed to make a statement that would be vetted by my employers. It was made clear to me that the CBC would look after the story – and me. Trusting them was my second big mistake,” Mesley wrote in the Globe and Mail.
“The CBC did not offer me any public support. And I did not defend myself because I just wanted to return to work. In the midst of last year’s racial reckoning, I also felt it would have been wrong for me to play the victim card.”
In the op-ed, Mesley also complained about how “players on all sides used me as a cudgel to advance political interests.” She also claimed that she was “horrified” by the support she was receiving from “free-speech warriors.”
“While some journalists offered public support, my most vocal defenders were free-speech warriors who wanted to make me a cautionary tale about the dangers of cancel culture. That distinction horrified me, because I’ve fought to cancel injustice my whole life. I resented being made a poster child of a movement I wasn’t part of,” wrote Mesley.
Mesley also accused the CBC of having “an agenda” to use the controversy surrounding herself to cover up the CBC’s underlying problems with racism.
“I soon learned there had been at least three other cases at the network involving shows in which the N-word was allegedly used in meetings. While one was reported, the other cases seem to have disappeared internally – the broader questions of systemic racism swept under the rug – until I became a convenient device for cleaning up their brand,” wrote Mesley.
Soon after Mesley’s show was cancelled by the CBC, fellow journalist and host Rosemary Barton received her own show on the network.
Canada’s former ambassador to China David Mulroney tweeted on Tuesday that Canadian elites were now “comfortable” with political violence that advances their own goals.
Mulroney made the statement in response to a tweet by former Liberal strategist Gerald Butts who said that the ongoing church burnings “may be understandable.”
We've crossed a threshold. Elites are now comfortable with violent, anti-social acts that align with their own politics. The law and its protections are conditional. This never ends well
Butts resigned from his post as Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2019 after being implicated in the SNC-Lavalin scandal.
“We’ve crossed a threshold. Elites are now comfortable with violent, anti-social acts that align with their own politics. The law and its protections are conditional. This never ends well,” tweeted Mulroney.
Mulroney is currently a Distinguished Fellow with the Munk School of Global Affairs and had served as Ambassador of Canada to the People’s Republic of China from 2009 to 2012. Mulroney also played a key role as a Deputy Minister in charge of the Afghanistan Task Force, among other political appointments.
Other prominent individuals have come under fire for seemingly condoning and egging on arsonists targeting Christian churches.
On June 30, lawyer and executive director of the BC Civil Liberties Association Harsha Walia tweeted “burn it all down” in response to a news article about two Catholic churches being engulfed in flames after they were targeted by arsonists.
To date at least 12 churches have been lit on fire and dozens more have seen incidents of vandalism and graffiti.
In his own statements addressing the church fires, Trudeau claimed that the incidents were “fully understandable.”
“It is unacceptable and wrong that acts of vandalism and arson are being seen across the country, including against Catholic churches,” said Trudeau.
“I understand the anger that’s out there against the federal government, against institutions like the Catholic Church. It is real and it’s fully understandable, given the shameful history that we are all becoming more and more aware of and engaging ourselves to do better as Canadians.”
