A public warning has been issued by the Edmonton Police Service (EPS) regarding the release of a violent sexual offender that police suspect will reoffend.
On Saturday, the EPS released a statement saying that David Hay is set to be released from custody and will reside in Edmonton with conditions from a court order. Hay will be supervised by the Behavioural Assessment Unit.
Hay is 22-years-old, five-foot-seven and 165 pounds with blue eyes and brown hair. He sometimes goes by the alias Chance Morgan.
Police said that Hay is a sexual offender who has committed multiple physical assaults, often believed to be random attacks on victims he does not know.
Hay has several conditions upon his release, including a curfew of 9pm-6am and he cannot be within 100 metres of a public park, public swimming area, daycare, school, playground. recreational centre, community centre, library or any other area where children are likely to be.
Hay also cannot be in the presence of children under the age of 16 unless he was in the company of an approved adult who is aware of his criminal record.
Additionally, Hay is not permitted to leave the city of Edmonton or change his home address without authorization and cannot consume alcohol or drugs.
Edmonton police are worried that even with Hay’s conditions in place that there is still “reasonable grounds to believe he will commit another violent offence against someone while in the community.”
“Anyone with any information about any potential breaches of these conditions or concerning behaviour by David Hay can contact EPS at 780-423-4567,” said police in the release.
A London, Ontario, doctor has filed a lawsuit against Queen’s University and its head of medicine, after he was allegedly shuffled from his job for voicing opinions about the Covid-19 pandemic. Dr. Matt Strauss joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss the importance of academic freedom, and the growing authority of regulatory bodies.
One Western Canadian agriculture group is blasting the federal Liberals for holding the sector hostage by dictating the allocation of research funding towards climate and social causes to the detriment of other priorities.
According to Western Canadian Wheat Growers Director and Western Grains Research Foundation Board Member Kenton Possberg, moving funding into federal priorities means the industry is falling behind in other vital areas.
“The industry used to be able to dictate what those research priorities were, and the federal government was kind of hands off,” Possberg told The Western Producer.
“They’re sort of holding the industry hostage. Saying you guys can choose what you want to do for some of these projects, but unless 30% is here and 20% is here (for) societal or climate change, then you don’t get anything,” he continued.
“Having to position some of the funds and move it towards some of these other federal government interests, that’s going to take away from… projects we feel really need to get done.”
The Trudeau Government has used the AgriScience program to distributed funding for priorities such as climate change and societal changes.
“The Cluster consists of research activities in each of the AgriScience program priority areas: Climate Change & Environment, Economic Growth & Development, and Sector Resilience & Societal Changes,” an Agriculture Canada news release explained.
According to Possberg, while the federal government has authority to dictate where federal funds are distributed it shouldn’t force the issue when partnering with agriculture commodity groups.
“If the federal government thinks it is that high of a priority and that high of a societal need, then the federal government should be funding those projects — 100 percent. They shouldn’t be holding the industry back,” said Possberg.
Farmers groups have also challenged the federal government’s 30% fertilizer emission reduction target.
A recent report by the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy found that the federal target was impossible without “drastic reduction” in nitrogen fertilizer use – a reduction which farmers in Western Canada say is impossible without significantly impacting yields.
“The proposed target (is) unachievable without drastic reductions in nitrogen fertilizer use,” wrote the report’s authors.
“Given the variation in climate and production across the country, a one size fits all approach is unlikely to be effective. Provincial governments and organizations should be encouraged to develop regional solutions to meet national objectives, with the (federal government) providing coordination and support.”
Earlier this week, an Ontario court upheld the decision of the Ontario College of Psychologists to force Dr. Jordan Peterson to attend a social media training program. Canadian Constitution Foundation lawyer Josh Dehaas joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss the case, and the implications of the ruling.
Canada’s trucking industry is seeing low profits and high costs coming out of the pandemic due in part to fewer shipments and a lower freight rate.
The industry also faces a drop in consumer demand, especially in relation to how much people were buying and having delivered during the lockdown.
“It’s slow right now, not too many loads,” said Jas Singh, 45, who owns the Brampton-based trucking company JK Transport.
Singh said that prices in the industry have shot up, saying that the price of buying a new tractor now is $225,000, an enormous jump from what he paid for in 2019, costing him $135,000. Singh also mentioned that trailers for his fleet are now twice the price, at $80,000 each.
Last year, he could charge $2.30 per mile and now Singh can only charge $1.50 per mile for deliveries. “A lot of problems this year,” he said in a phone interview with the Globe and Mail.
Trucking HR Canada released a report that revealed the industry let go 7% of its overall workforce in the beginning of 2023, over 20,500 jobs.
“As the economy has essentially softened a little bit, so has demand for trucking services,” said chief programs officer Craig Faucette for Trucking HR Canada.
Drop in freight demands has alleviated the industry’s labour shortage during the pandemic, however the industry faces new challenges from the decline as well.
“As things opened up, we saw a slight downturn as people returned to travel, restaurants … as opposed to the items to renovate their houses or their backyards,” said Mike Millian, president of the Private Motor Truck Council of Canada.
Consumers are also less likely to make purchases as a result of rising interest rates and overall inflation. “You need less trucks to move it because there aren’t as many goods moving,” said Millian.
“You’re seeing a lot of smaller fleets struggling, especially ones that rely on what we call the spot market,” continued Mr. Millian, referring to single shipments as opposed to long-term contracts or regularly scheduled shipments.
The U.S. has seen an even bigger drop in shipments, which also affects Canadian truckers as they often won’t have loads to haul back to Canada after making a delivery south of the border.
“We wait for one to three days for it to come back,” said Singh, talking about preload wait times for his shipments to California.
Yellow Corp, an American trucking company in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy in August, after 94 years in business. John Gradek teaches supply chain management at McGill University and he said that Yellow Corp’s bankruptcy was just the “tip of the iceberg.”
“You have a number of carriers that are in very, very tight financial scenarios,” said Gradek.
Truckload carriers that take multiple loads of cargo to be delivered to different clients, known as less-than-truckload (LTL) operations, are even more vulnerable than truckers who have stable contracts that they can rely on.
Gradek said that the “mom-and-pop shops” of trucking companies have to bid daily for shipments through different apps like Freightera and FreightSimple.
There are even some large scale companies relying on LTLs as well, like TFI International, based out of Montreal, who employs over 25,000 people and has more than 11,000 tractors on the road. “Our Canadian LTL revenue is down big-time,” said CEO Alain Bedard.
Bedard said that while the drop in LTL operations was unexpected, it’s not unique to just that type of shipping.
“We never anticipated such a major, major disruption in the market in Q2,” said Bedard. “Everybody’s going through a sort of very tough patch in the freight environment.
In the first six months of 2023, total revenue in the trucking industry fell by 22% compared to that same time period in 2022. Additionally, the B.C. port strike in July also added strains to the industry, according to Bedard.
The following is a chapter excerpt from the Aristotle Foundation’s new book, The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should be Cherished—Not Cancelled. Purchase your copy here.
It is accepted as fact in many quarters that Canada is a systemically or institutionally racist country. The federal government’s Department of Canadian Heritage, for example, posits in its 2019-2022 anti-racism strategy that “we know that even today there are people and communities who experience systemic racism and discrimination.” Likewise, the federal government echoes in its 2021-2024 anti-racism strategy the Prime Minister’s assertion that there are in Canada “profound systemic inequities and disparities that remain present in the core fabric of our society, including our core institutions.”
The evidence does not bear this claim out.
To be sure, if the question is only as to whether personal prejudice or racism exists in Canadian institutions, then the answer is that there is some. Institutions are made of people, and as long as some people hold some prejudices (some always will) and reveal and act upon them (hopefully rarely), there will be racism in institutions.
However, the personal prejudices of people within institutions does not constitute institutional racism in the classical sense, in which the rules or policies of the institution are discriminatory. Historical examples of real institutional racism include colleges and universities in decades past limiting the proportion of Jewish students on campus, or the minimum wage law implemented in British Columbia nearly a century ago, which had, as Thomas Sowell has written, “the intent and effect of pricing Japanese immigrants out of jobs in the lumbering industry.”
But if the typical anti-racism activist today is looking for widespread institutional or systemic discrimination of the kind that existed before the mid-twentieth century, which was directed at minorities or women, they simply will not find it.
Ironically, the most socially accepted and likely most common form of institutional racism today is the discrimination practiced in the name of social justice or anti-racism.
In 2016, the University of Manitoba Senate approved a new admission policy for the Bachelor of Education Program in which only 55 per cent of admissions would be based on admissions scores, and 45 per cent on “diversity” categories that included racial preferences. Today, the federal regulator requires the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to apply racial preferences by dedicating a certain percentage of its programming spending to producers from minority backgrounds.
Such examples show that in Canada there are still institutional policies that outright discriminate based on race. Yet such examples clearly do not fit the governmental definition of systemic or institutional racism, in which “racialized persons” are put at relative disadvantage.
What the statistics show—and what they do not
Accusations of systemic racism in Canada are often made by pointing to disparities in labour market outcomes. However, a top-line look at the statistics does not support such accusations. Using data from the 2016 Census on the weekly earnings of Canadian-born individuals, a pair of Statistics Canada researchers compared the weekly earnings of 10 visible minority groups to those of the white population.
Among men four had higher earnings than the white population (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and South Asian), and among women seven had higher earnings than the white population (Korean, Chinese, South Asian, Japanese, Filipino, “Other,” and Arab or West Asian).
The white cohort therefore finds itself somewhere in the middle of the pack, so the evidence in favour of the theory that Canada’s institutions are rigged to disfavour visible minorities is indeed slight.
Of course, the raw data alone may not mean much. It could be that, for example, Chinese men must be 25 per cent more productive than white men to earn three per cent more, and that black women earn 10 per cent less than white women despite being equally productive. In other words, an apples-to-apples comparison requires controlling for education, occupation, and other factors that affect earnings.
Importantly, the Statistics Canada report does attempt to control for such factors, again with results that dispel the notion that white Canadians have an unfair advantage over minorities. Segmenting the minority population into 10 racial groups and the two sexes yields 20 minority groups that can be compared against their white counterparts.
Of these, five minority groups have earnings statistically higher than the white population after controlling for employment and sociodemographic factors (South Asian men, Chinese women, South Asian women, Filipino women, and Southeast Asian women), while only four (men from the Black, Latin American, Filipino, and “Other” racial backgrounds) have lower earnings, with the other 11 groups showing no statistically significant difference from whites.
In other words, according to the Statistics Canada data, although the Korean and Japanese populations enjoy far higher weekly earnings than the white population, this is accounted for by differences in sociodemographic and employment characteristics (and thus we cannot infer from statistics that there is any discrimination that favours Koreans or the Japanese). Among the Chinese, however, relatively high earnings are explained by the sociodemographic and employment characteristics present among men, but not among women.
Thus, if we were to attribute to unfair discrimination earnings disparities not explained by the Statistics Canada’s researchers’ attempts to control for sociodemographic and employment characteristics, we would have to conclude that labour market discrimination favours Chinese women, but not Chinese men, and not Korean or Japanese women. We would likewise have to conclude that labour market discrimination favours Filipino women relative to white women, but white men relative to Filipino men. Moreover, the discrimination faced by Latin American and black workers singularly affects only men and not women.
If this does not make any sense—which one must admit that it does not—then it must be allowed that unfair discrimination is a poor explanation for racial disparities in earnings.
Clearly, caution is needed when trying to draw inferences from statistics. It cannot be that disparities, even after researchers try to control for relevant factors (such as education, profession, and so on), can simply be put down to unfair discrimination. Other factors are always at play, and the reality is that the number of factors that affect earnings are innumerable and many of the material ones—such as individual preferences and family culture—are difficult or impossible for researchers to observe or measure.
Invariably, researchers cannot control for everything and so many find through statistical inference disparities that cannot be explained by the factors controlled for. There is no reason to suppose that the explanatory factor is unfair discrimination. Other possible explanations exist, and many are more plausible. Assigning to discrimination differences in income (even after controlling for sociodemographic and employment characteristics) leads to conclusions that simply make no sense.
A coherent story of Canada as a systemically racist country simply cannot be formed by statistical analysis and direct evidence. That does not mean that no personal prejudice or racism exists in Canadian institutions. It is only to say that the portrait of Canada as a systemically racist country painted by some is not supported by evidence.
Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer and a senior fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. This chapter excerpt is from the Aristotle Foundation’s new book, The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should be Cherished—Not Cancelled, edited by Mark Milke. Purchase your copy here.
As the use of artificial intelligence grows, its transformative impact on society is becoming increasingly evident. A new essay in C2C Journal titled “AI, the Destruction of Thought and the End of the Humanities” seeks to explore the profound implications of AI’s increasing presence in our lives. Dalhousie University lecturer Christopher Snook joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss his essay. Read the essay here.
In the last few weeks, the Conservatives have been surging in the polls, gaining support in almost every demographic and region in Canada. In fact, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s approval rating hasn’t been this low since he first became prime minister in 2015.
As a result, the Liberals have tried everything to stop Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s momentum, including accusing those who oppose carbon taxes of being “arsonists” and labeling everything and anything as “far-right.” Are the Trudeau Liberals getting desperate?
On this episode of The Rupa Subramanya Show, the Macdonald Laurier Institute’s Director of Domestic Policy Program Aaron Wudrick joins Rupa to discuss the Liberal’s attempt to stop Poilievre’s momentum, how the Conservatives can form government in the next election and much more. Tune into The Rupa Subramanya Show!
Jaushieh Joseph Wu is the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China (Taiwan)
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a reminder of how autocracies care little about causing death and destruction. The war is a gross violation of human rights and the principle of peaceful settlement of international disputes as codified in the United Nations Charter, which has helped maintain the rules-based international order and kept the world in relative peace since the end of the Cold War.
The war’s humanitarian and economic fallout has also shown that in a globalized world, crises cannot be contained within national borders. It is, therefore, imperative to deter similar threats to global security from happening elsewhere. Taiwan—a democracy that is home to over 23 million people and that I proudly represent—continues to confront enormous challenges posed by China.
Since the mid-20th century, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has vowed to take control of Taiwan and refused to renounce the use of force, despite never having ruled Taiwan. For decades, the people of Taiwan have remained calm in safeguarding the status quo of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. However, as China’s economic and military might has grown stronger, it becomes increasingly aggressive in flexing its military muscle to intimidate Taiwan, thereby threatening our democratic way of life. This includes sending warplanes and ships across the median line of the Taiwan Strait and encroaching into our air defense identification zones. It has also intensified gray-zone tactics, such as disinformation and economic coercion, in an attempt to wear down our will to fight.
The PRC’s expansionism does not stop at Taiwan. China’s use of gray-zone activities in the East and South China Seas are designed to expand its power and substantiate its hawkish territorial claims. In addition to signing a security agreement with Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, the PRC has been securing ports for future military use in the Indian Ocean. All of these maneuvers are causing grave concerns that peace is becoming more difficult to maintain.
Ensuring peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is in everyone’s best interest. Half of the world’s commercial container traffic passes through the Taiwan Strait each day. Taiwan produces the majority of the world’s semiconductors and plays a key role in global supply chains. Any conflict in the area would have disastrous consequences for the global economy.
In recent years, bilateral and multilateral forums have repeatedly emphasized that the peace and stability over the Taiwan Strait is indispensable to global security. While we can all agree that the war must be avoided, how to best do so requires inclusion, dialogue, and, most of all, unity.
The United Nations remains the best platform for global discourse. UN officials speak often of joint solutions, solidarity, and inclusion in tackling the pressing issues of our time. Taiwan is more than willing and able to take part in these efforts.
However, Taiwan continues to be excluded from the UN due to China’s distortion of UN General Assembly Resolution 2758. This resolution neither states that Taiwan is a part of the PRC nor gives the PRC the right to represent the people of Taiwan in the UN and its specialized agencies. In fact, the resolution only determines who represents the member state China, a fact that the international community and China itself recognized following the relevant vote in 1971. The subsequent misrepresentation of Resolution 2758 contradicts the basic principles upheld by the UN Charter and must be rectified.
The 78th session of the UN General Assembly, which will center on the theme “rebuilding trust and reigniting global solidarity,” is timely in light of a number of broad global challenges. For example, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were designed as a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity. Yet the most recent SDG progress report showed that just 12 percent of SDG targets were on track, while progress on 50 percent has remained insufficient. And on more than 30 percent, we have stalled or even regressed.
While there are no easy answers, the first step is dialogue. As a truly global institution, the UN can serve as a champion of progress. We call on the UN to uphold its principle of leaving no one behind by allowing Taiwan to participate in the UN system, rather than excluding it from discussions on issues requiring global cooperation. A good first step would be to allow Taiwanese individuals and journalists to attend or cover relevant meetings, as well as ensure Taiwan’s meaningful participation in meetings and mechanisms regarding the SDGs.
Ukraine’s incredible bravery and resilience have inspired countries around the globe. The war there has forged a new sense of togetherness in the world. Unity is crucial to pushing back against Russia’s aggression and to preserving universal values, such as human rights and global peace, more broadly.
It is vital to make China and other authoritarian governments aware that they will be held accountable and to urge them to settle differences through peaceful means. Allowing Taiwan to meaningfully participate in the UN system would benefit the world’s efforts to address pressing global issues. This would also demonstrate the UN’s determination to unite for global peace at a critical juncture when the future of the world is at stake.
We are stronger together. Now is the time to act on this fundamental principle by including Taiwan.
