New data are shedding light on the plight faced by Canadians struggling to afford housing in Canada’s most expensive province.
According to a recent report by the Vancouver Sun based on the Canadian Rental Housing Index, more people are living precariously close to homelessness in B.C. than in any other province.
The index showed that B.C. and Ontario have the largest share of renters spending over half of their income on rent and utilities, a situation that puts them at risk of homelessness.
B.C. has more than 660,000 renter households, according to the latest census. Within that figure are over 105,000 households that contribute 50% of their income for utilities and rent, while another nearly 150,000 households pay more than 30%.
CEO of the B.C. Non-Profit Housing Association, Jill Atkey helped create the index and she says that the rental crisis in B.C. is worse than anywhere else in the country.
“The rental crisis is worse here (in B.C.) than pretty much anywhere else in the country,” said Atkey.
“Those sorts of things have real long-term impacts for people.”
The analysis revealed that the average rent in B.C. rose by 30% from 2016 to 2021, the highest increase in the entire country.
“A quarter million renter households in British Columbia who are struggling to afford rent don’t need a new unit of housing,” Atkey said.
“They need help affording their current rent.”
Atkey explained that paying too much for rent forces people to cut back on other basic necessities, such as food, education, and health care.
The analysis also found that the number of renters in Canada has increased significantly due to population growth and high home prices.
Last week, the Community Food Centres Canada released a study showing that 22% of single working-age Canadian adults were living below the poverty line.
The University of Oxford’s annual report on global media has found that a vast majority of Canadians don’t trust legacy news media.
According to the Digital News Report 2023 published in partnership with Reuters Institute, one of the most pressing concerns for the Canadian media landscape is the “more central” role taken by the federal government in regulating the news media.
The study surveyed trust in legacy media outlets including CBC, Global News, CTV News, CP24, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail and others.
“Faced with rising costs and falling income, Canadian news media are restructuring and experimenting with new content and business models. The state’s role is becoming more central, from proposals to force Google, Facebook, and others to compensate publishers, to the future of the national broadcaster,” wrote analysts Colette Brin and Sebastien Charlton.
Trust has declined by 15% since 2016 when 55% of Canadians indicated overall trust in the news.
In 2023, Canadians reported an all-time low trust level of 40%. Additionally, trust in English speaking Canada was much lower (37%) than in French Canada (49%).
Additionally, the report found that attitudes towards publicly-funded outlets like the CBC “are more negative.”
“Trust in news overall is falling among English-speaking Canadians, placing them in the lower end of surveyed markets,” wrote Brin and Charlton.
“Attitudes towards publicly funded news services are also more negative than in past studies, especially in the West. However, Francophones maintain more positive views, with a slight bump this year for trust in news generally.”
Social media continues to be the top choice for Canadians when it comes to accessing news with 69% saying they stay up to date using online sources. Another 49% said they rely on TV to get their news like only 14% continue to rely on print media.
Only a small-subset of Canadians are choosing to pay for online news (11%). Podcast use has taken a substantial role in how people consume news with 33% of Canadians saying they have listened to a podcast in the past month.
“Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government proposed that Meta, Alphabet, and others should compensate publishers for linking to news stories, going further than the equivalent Australian News Bargaining Code which has reportedly led to US$134m per annum being paid to publishers by platforms,” the report noted.
“The Canadian model would include broadcasters and smaller publishers, and would also impose tougher penalties for non-compliance. In response Meta has said that being compelled to pay for content that it has not itself posted is not sustainable, especially when news is not the main reason for people using its platforms.”
The Crown has dropped a hate crime charge against Calgary Black Lives Matter president Adora Nwofor just two weeks after police arrested her on a hate-based mischief at St. Thomas Aquinas School.
Ottawa parents are fighting back against woke school board trustee Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth for wanting to ban protests against gender ideology near schools.
The Supreme Court of Canada is refusing to hear the case of a dying, unvaccinated woman after she was denied an organ transplant.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer warns that the Trudeau government’s latest corporate subsidies set a dangerous precedent.
Tune into The Daily Brief with Andrew Lawton and Lindsay Shepherd!
Quebec City’s Laval University has opted to suspend an Immunology professor and mRNA scientist who’s skeptical of Covid jabs for kids, after he spoke with independent media during a prior suspension.
As reported by Le Journal De Quebec, Dr. Patrick Provost will be suspended without pay for the week of June 24 to July 3. This is the fourth time Provost has been suspended by Laval University.
The suspension is being denounced by the faculty union, citing Provost’s right to freedom of expression.
Speaking to Le Journal, Provost said the university is “still seeking to silence me, and it’s absolutely deplorable.” He claims the school’s management is “trying to make me wear the Laval University professor hat at all times, in every aspect of my life [which curtails] my freedom of expression.”
Laval University faculty union president Louis-Phillipe Lampron told Le Journal they are “vigorously contesting” the latest suspension, and warned that it could create “a dangerous precedent for academic freedom.”
“Regardless of what we think of colleague Provost’s stances, for us, the big problem is the sanctions imposed, and the reasons put forward to justify them,” explained Lampron.
The new sanctions against Provost come despite Laval University adopting policies in line with the Quebec Government’s academic freedom legislation passed last year to combat growing censorship in academia.
The university told Le Journal that it cannot directly comment on the situation due to confidentiality reasons, but claimed to be committed to free speech.
“Laval University subscribes to its members’ fundamental commitment to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly in a safe environment conducive to the free exchange of ideas for the advancement of understanding and knowledge,” said spokesperson Andree-Anne Stewart.
Stewart added that the university “aims to be a place where all voices can be heard, and where different points of view can be submitted and debated in a spirit of inclusion, respect and dignity.”
Provost was previously suspended twice for his opposition to giving children mRNA Covid shots. He also received a suspension for sending unauthorized mass emails.
They met at the back of a sports bar in a town two hours north of West Palm Beach mere weeks after they’d made national headlines for having a highly distasteful Holocaust book removed from their school library.
Jennifer Pippin, chairman of Florida’s Indian River chapter of Moms for Liberty, told the 30 odd parents assembled at their monthly meeting that an organization called Community One Initiative – which engages in Holocaust education – reviewed the book and said it was not to be on the (school library) shelves for children.
The book is called Anne Frank’s Diary, The Graphic Adaptation. It is a highly inappropriate, bordering on distasteful, cartoon adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which was written in 1947.
It includes pictures of Anne strapped into an electric chair so someone can feed her and of showgirls in hot pants showing off their lean figures from eating rations, among other things.
“We made national news with this,” Pippin said.
She said the media reported that “Anne Frank was banned in Indian River County,” and they “killed Anne Frank again.”
“Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” was removed in Indian River County FL schools for “minimization of the Holocaust.”
Florida state standards dictate that all teaching of the Holocaust must be historically correct, specifically 6A-1.094124 (3)(b). It was decided that… pic.twitter.com/ZpQZ2YMvs5
The newspaper reports, which never provided examples of the book, used inflammatory words like “censored” and “banned.”
Pippin says they were called Hitler, anti-Jew, against history and Holocaust deniers by the woke for having this highly objectionable book removed from the school library.
“I’m sure I’m missing a few (names),” she adds.
Their efforts even made a recent segment on school book bans on CBS Sunday Morning. The highly skewed report portrayed the Moms for Liberty members as far-right zealots.
She said to date, they’ve had 52 pornographic, sexually explicit and Critical Race theory books removed from local school libraries and 200 more are being reviewed.
“These books are being put on the shelves without being vetted,” she says. “We’re finding rape, incest, pedophilia, bestiality, oral and anal sex…to have them in the hands of unaccompanied minors could be harmful.”
The highly organized local chapter has an entire committee consisting of parents and grandparents who read every questionable book.
The Indian River chapter got up and running two years ago as part of a larger Moms for Liberty movement across the United States.
Founded by Florida moms Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich it now has 285 chapters in 44 states and some 120,000 members.
Their efforts to champion “parental rights” in education has made them a major player in the 2024 presidential campaign.
In an interview with True North last year, Justice said the Covid pandemic made parents realize they were being ignored whether it involved masking mandates, quarantines or the push to embed critical race theory and harmful gender ideology into the curriculum.
Justice said at the time that when their members walk into a school board meeting with their “Moms for Liberty” shirts, school staff and administrators realize they mean business.
This is certainly the kind of organization sorely needed in Ontario, where brave parents and teachers have been cancelled, harassed and intimidated for raising any issue about highly sexualized (mostly LGBTQ books) in elementary school libraries.
Retired Waterloo teacher Carolyn Burjoski, one example, is in the midst of fighting a defamation suit against the Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) and its former chairman Scott Piatkowski for cancelling and labelling her transphobic after she raised the issue of two such books at a board meeting last year.
Waterloo parent, David Todor, became the subject of a defamatory open letter posted by the WRDSB earlier this year after he, too, spoke to trustees about sexually explicit material contained in elementary school libraries.
Even non-woke trustees in boards like Durham, Ottawa, Waterloo and Toronto have found themselves up against a brick wall whenever they endeavour to obtain that kind of information.
In fact, last week, Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) trustee Cindy Watson tabled a motion asking that parents be informed about sexual health teaching and class discussions and that those who wish to be accommodated should be not just based on religion but their concerns of age appropriateness.
It certainly doesn’t hurt that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has brought in legislation that bans the teaching of gender ideology and same-sex relationships in the primary grades – known by activists as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Pippin says that characterization couldn’t be further from the truth. She said all the legislation does is ensure that the “fundamental right” to discuss gender ideology and same-sex relationships is left to parents or guardians when they feel it is age-appropriate.
I asked her what she would recommend parents do who are being shut out by their local school boards here in Ontario.
“Don’t give up… get a group together … there’s power in numbers,” she said.
“Send e-mails … bring children in and have them tell (school board administrators) what they’ve seen in their classrooms.” She says, laughing, that it has certainly been an uphill battle trying to make school boards accountable.
But they’re showing up at school board meetings and having peaceful protests.
“I say I’m driving a bus and it’s on fire and get on if you want to,” Pippin said. “But parents and grandparents have gotten together across the country and are taking on these issues one at a time.”
On a sunny afternoon in 2021, a few days after Father’s Day, my eighteen-year-old daughter called me. She seemed hurried, nervous.
“Dad, I just wanted to let you know I’ve started HRT! (hormone replacement therapy)”
The words tumbled from her mouth. The floor became unsteady beneath me.
I had hoped it was a phase. A fad. I had told myself she’d sort herself out through the vicissitudes of teenage girlhood, that changing names and pronouns, experiments with clothes and testy attitudes were only symptoms of difficult, awkward adolescence.
I cannot possibly convey how hard it is as a dad to speak publicly about this issue and to share this with readers and the implications and personal cost of doing so. It makes people uncomfortable. I ask myself about my duty to my child and about the best thing I could possibly do to serve her when everyone else in her life is hypnotized or emotionally blackmailed into affirming her sex change.
She’s an adult now. She stands on the other side of the divide, believing that I am the enemy, that I hate her, that failing to affirm her was abuse, and that I failed as a father for loving her girly-girl nature as a child. The bizarre convolutions of this ideology tell her that I somehow imposed my beliefs about gender on her as she grew up, and that my stereotypes made her believe that she was a girl, when she was really something else.
I hope that what I have chosen to do will help her in the future, and that it serves a greater good, but I can’t possibly know. I speak because other parents can’t for fear of consequences both public and private for anyone who does so. Yet if no one speaks, no change will come.
Loving parents across the country are paralyzed, intimidated into silence, and threatened with repercussions for speaking the truth about what’s happening with gender and schools. I speak for those who can’t speak for fear of alienating children to who they remain tenuously connected and who all have stories like mine. I lay bare my family struggles to say openly that like many, my daughter was dragged through a needlessly acrimonious custody battle at a young age, that she was caught in the crossfire common to so many vulnerable kids swept into gender ideology. Like so many, she struggled with mental health issues, self-harming, food, body image, depression and anxiety, and the challenges she faced growing up. I share, too, that she is deeply introverted and imaginative. She’s intelligent, creative, and if she could remember it, she is loving and gentle and funny and curious.
Three years before she called to tell me she was taking testosterone, my daughter, then fifteen, told me that she couldn’t live with me anymore and was going to live with her mother full-time after a decade of shared custody. She said she couldn’t be her true self, that she couldn’t live up to the expectations I had imposed on her, and that she felt unsafe. I didn’t understand these words at the time, but today I do, as the vocabulary of an ideology that believes human beings, unto even toddlers, can realize an innate gender identity different from their biological sex.
An ideology now entrenched in public policy and laws in Canada and in developed countries around the world. It seems to have come, like the call that sunny afternoon, out of nowhere, but it has consumed the lives of hundreds of thousands of families with its divisive, aggressive defence of its radical beliefs.
It wasn’t as ubiquitous just two years ago to hear from a friend, a relative, a colleague that a child or teen in their social orbit had changed pronouns or identified as transgender. It wasn’t as common to hear a parent of tweens remark that they were surprised by the number of their children’s friends who had changed their names.
One Ottawa Public School Board teacher recently bragged on Twitter that seven of her thirty students in her grade 5-6 class had confided in her about their gender identities.
In my family, my niece, now in her early twenties, reverted to identifying as a girl after some years, but her two half-siblings both changed their sex identification in the meantime and started hormone therapy.
Were it as simple as an expansion of the acceptance of personal liberty and expression, I’d be celebrating, but the wholesale medicalization of vulnerable children with drugs and surgeries that will render them infertile and, in many cases, will undermine their capacity for fulfillment in intimacy as adults, is a modern atrocity. I am driven to speak and condemn this despite the costs.
I could write at length about the lack of science and the cultish sloganeered meted upon the vulnerable. “GAC saves lives!” False promises of happiness with the discovery of “your True Self”
Lies.
Others better than me can tell you about the British Medical Journal report this year, about the scathing condemning the world’s largest pediatric gender clinic, about the evidentiary reviews leading to snowballing radical course-correction rolling from Finland, Sweden, Norway, and the UK through the highly politicized domain of Florida and the United States. Others might point as well too to the decision days ago in the UK to ban puberty blockers for treating gender dysphoria in youth except in limited and controlled clinical trials.
Parents are deemed unsafe for pointing to this. For asking for evidence. For referring to studies.
My daughter estranged herself the day I asked if she understood the risks of hormones versus the benefits. I asked if she understood that she would lose her beautiful hair, that her singing voice, which left me puddled with fatherly adoration since the first sounds she intoned upon this world, would be lost. I asked if she understood that testosterone would lead to a hysterectomy in a few short years, to lifelong shots and significantly elevated risk of cancers. I asked only as any loving dad.
It was the day she fully embraced the narrative from the gender zealots, that any question of her choices meant I hated her, that anything but affirmation meant I denied her existence. That I was participating in the trans genocide. She turned on me.
On my desk now, the documentation to apply for a peace bond, the Canadian equivalent of a restraining order, because of the frightening threats that followed, uncharacteristic of her, likely from the massive doses of testosterone, the liquid rage she is injecting.
To loving parents and grandparents, take heed.
Schools across Canada have explicit policies to keep gender transitions secret from parents. They are mandated under the rubric of so-called human rights to divide children from parents, to assume that questions based in evidence, research, and science make a child “unsafe.” They are empowered to radically act.
In British Columbia, Child and Family Services have the authority to remove a child from parental custody for failing to sufficiently affirm a child’s stated gender identity. Federally, Bill C-4, passed late in 2021, makes it a punishable crime for anyone to question a child’s gender confusion.
Two years ago, this was unheard of. It was kept a secret at school. Two years ago, most of us never questioned the binary of sex, the basis of nature itself or even heard of such convolutions as AFAB (Assigned Female at Birth).
Two years ago, not long after Father’s Day, I was living a normal life.
I was with friends at a cottage when the phone rang.
A shocking study by Community Food Centres Canada (CFCC) reveals that nearly one fifth of working-age single household Canadian adults are living in poverty.
The report, “Sounding the Alarm,” found that 22% of adults in this category lived below the official poverty line, which is three times higher than the national average.
It also concluded that many single adults are trapped in low-wage, precarious jobs that offer no real benefits or stability. CFCC also cited insufficient relief for those affected.
One of the main consequences of living below the poverty line is food insecurity.
Poll results show that this group made up 38% of all households that had trouble affording food in Canada. Additionally, 61% reported that they were severely disabled.
Food insecurity has serious impacts, including on physical and mental health, as well as social and economic well-being.
CFCC found that nearly one million people in this group were only earning an income of $11,700 is the average annual income for working-age single adults living in poverty in Canada.
Housing is also a major issue for this group. 47% of the respondents said they could not afford housing. Additionally when it comes to who access shelters, 81% belonged to working single-adults.
“The evidence is overwhelmingly clear – through woefully inadequate income support programs and a labour market that creates precarity because of low wages and few benefits, we are trapping people in poverty in this country,” said Nick Saul, CEO of Community Food Centres Canada, in a press release.
The report calls for urgent action from federal and provincial governments. Some of the recommendations include strengthening the social safety net and better unemployment protections.
“Sounding the Alarm illustrates that our governments and employers are leaving working-age single adults behind,” said Saul.
“We urgently need a national solution that responds to the realities that people are voicing in this report. If Canada is serious about making life equitable for everyone, then we need to find the political will to create income policies that take people out of poverty – not for a week, or a month, but for good.”
The recent survey reflects some of the other troubling recent surveys surrounding Canadians accessing food banks and homeless shelters.
This week on The Alberta Roundup with Rachel Emmanuel, Rachel discusses Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s revelation that she’s prepared to form a coalition with like-minded provinces to fight the Trudeau government’s energy policies.
Rachel also breaks down Meta’s responses to Smith’s claims that she was briefly banned from Facebook.
Finally, Rachel reveals that Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley is going to spend some time considering her role as party leader.
The Crown has dropped a hate crime charge against Calgary Black Lives Matter president Adora Nwofor, less than two weeks after she was arrested by police.
Prosecutor Will Tran told Justice Indra Maharaj the Crown would not be proceeding with the allegation Nwofor committed a hate-based mischief by interfering with people’s access to St. Thomas Aquinas School.
“There’s just one matter before the court. It’s the Crown’s application to withdraw it,” Tran told Maharaj, about the single allegation against Nwofor.
On June 2, Adora Nwofor was charged with mischief in connection with a May 26 incident for allegedly “wilfully obstructing and interfering” with the use of a property “primarily used for religious worship and educational purposes.”
Court records alleged she interfered with people’s use of St. Thomas Aquinas School on 26 Avenue SW “for reasons of bias, prejudice, or hate based on race or ethnic origin.”
Nwofor, 47, is president of Black Lives Matter YYC.
An official statement from the Alberta Crown Prosecution Service (ACPS) to Postmedia said the allegation wasn’t reviewed by a prosecutor prior to Nwofor being charged.
“The ACPS is working to roll out a pre-charge process province-wide, but Calgary is not currently a participant in this process,” the statement said.
“With the pre-charge process, the prosecutor would have reviewed the potential charge prior to it being laid. The prosecutor would then provide this assessment to law enforcement to consider prior to laying charges.”
“This process helps to ensure charges entering the system meet the standard for prosecution and resources are focused on viable matters.”
It also said cases are routinely reviewed after charges are filed to make sure the proceeding is in the best interest of the public and there is a reasonable likelihood of conviction.
“If at any time following the laying of charges the Crown prosecutor becomes aware that the standard for prosecution is no longer met, then the charges may be stayed, withdrawn or downgraded.”
Defence counsel Chad Haggerty said the allegation his client was motivated by “hate based on race or ethnic origin” may have been filed in error, something later confirmed by the Calgary Police Service.
“It looks like there was a clerical error with the initial charge, with the incorrect (Criminal Code) subsection,” the service said.
Canada’s reputation as a country where major infrastructure projects die in their infancy due to overregulation will make it impossible to reach the Liberal government’s ambitious climate goals, a new report warns.
A study from the Business Council of Alberta (BCA) says that Canada needs to streamline regulations for major projects if it wants to meet its 2050 climate goals.
The report argues that Canada will require vast spending on infrastructure projects such as renewable energy, hydrogen technology and critical minerals mining in order to reduce emissions.
However, the report also warns that Canada is known internationally for long delays and uncertainties in the approval process, which discourages investors and hampers innovation.
“A lot of projects end up not coming forward at all because companies aren’t willing to go through the uncertainty of the process,” said BCA chief economist Mike Holden.
“So there are a lot of cases where investment passes Canada by, or it gets downscaled.”
The report goes on to call for a more efficient, predictable and transparent regulatory system which would also benefit other energy development.
Further collaboration with Indigenous communities, provinces and territories, and other stakeholders will also be necessary to speed up project approvals.
“Historically, we set up our systems to stop bad things from happening. Now we need to make good things happen and make them happen fast.”
Several major energy projects have been stalled and delayed in recent years, including the Trans Mountain Pipeline. Some of this is due to legislation like the Impact Assessment Act and the Liberal government has more plans to introduce further restraints on energy development.
The report claims that by improving its regulatory system, Canada can attract more investment, create more jobs, while achieving its climate targets.
The federal government has committed to reducing its emissions by 40% to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030, and achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. However, some experts have questioned whether Canada has a realistic way to meet these targets.
