Toronto’s former police chief and mayoral candidate Mark Saunders positioned himself as the only alternative to stop former NDP MP Olivia Chow from becoming mayor, as the campaign enters its final two weeks.
Saunders, who has campaigned on a moderate centre-right platform, has released several policy announcements contrasting himself with Chow on fighting crime in the city and decongesting Toronto’s crowded streets.
Saunders has made a considerate push to portray the former NDP MP as a radical progressive who is incapable of keeping Torontonians safe and himself as the candidate voters and other candidates should rally behind.
“On one hand – there’s Olivia Chow. She’ll defund the police. She’ll raise your property taxes by at least 25%. She’ll ram bike lanes onto every single major street,” said Saunders.
“On the other hand – there’s me. I will fund the police. I will freeze taxes and I will get traffic moving.”
Specifically, Saunders slammed Chow for not having a plan to tackle the spike of car jackings in Toronto, her lack of funding for more police resources, and Chow’s inability cut the time it takes to report an auto theft.
“Olivia Chow hasn’t said how much she will cut the police budget, but we know she’s tried to defund the police her entire career as a professional politician,” said Saunders.
“At a time when car jackings and thefts are on the rise, I will do whatever it takes to ensure our men and women in uniform have what they need to protect car owners and lock up car thieves.”
Saunders also announced that he would hire an additional 600 uniformed officers – 400 police officers, 200 TTC special constables – in an effort to “reverse the rising tide of violence in Toronto.”
“As a long-time NDP politician, Olivia Chow has a deep hostility toward police, taking every opportunity to cut their budgets and make it harder for them to do their job,” said Saunders.
Saunders also slammed Chow on her inability to ease the gridlock on the city’s roads, declaring that the way to stop traffic congestion in Toronto is to stop Chow.
“Mark Saunders is the only candidate who can stop Olivia’s Chow anti-car agenda and deliver a credible plan to fight congestion, including opening up King Street to all traffic while Queen Street is shut down,” reads a Saunders press release.
Forum Research’s latest poll shows Saunders in a distant second place to the frontrunner Chow, reaching 14% support to Chow’s 35% support. Saunders’ position in second place isn’t safe though, as Anthony Furey and former deputy mayor Ana Bailão rest closely below Saunders at 11% and 10% support respectively.
Furey is currently on leave as True North’s VP for editorial and content.
Former governor general David Johnston resigned as the Trudeau government’s controversial “special rapporteur” on Chinese election interference late Friday and now the feds claim they’re open to setting up a public inquiry into foreign interference in Canadian elections.
Plus, a large protest against gender ideology in Canada’s schools took place on Friday – and Canadians from various backgrounds and religions took part in the protest.
And following the vandalism of a statue of the late Queen Elizabeth II at the Manitoba Legislature, Governor General Mary Simon is refusing to condemn the crime.
Tune into The Daily Brief with Rachel Emmanuel and Andrew Lawton!
Now that former governor general David Johnston has been badgered into resigning as special rapporteur into election meddling by communist China, what next?
Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc says a public inquiry into foreign interference “has never been off the table,” following the sudden resignation of Johnston.
“All options remain on the table,” LeBlanc told reporters Saturday. “The prime minister said so when he announced the appointment of Mr. Johnston.”
Hmmm. Must have missed that press conference.
LeBlanc, who is also the minister responsible for democratic institutions, also said that following Johnston’s resignation, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tasked him with “consulting … experts, legal scholars and opposition parties on what the next steps should look like and determine who best may be suited to lead this public work.”
Johnston resigned Friday evening, citing in a letter addressed to the prime minister the intense politicization of his appointment and work as the reason for his departure.
Since he was appointed to the role of special rapporteur in March, Johnston has faced heavy scrutiny from opposition parties for his personal connection to the prime minister. That criticism grew louder when he recommended against a public inquiry, instead suggesting public hearings that would be led by him.
Earlier this month, MPs also voted in favour of a non-binding motion to ask Johnston to step down, but just three days before his resignation, he testified before a parliamentary committee that he planned to stay on and forge ahead with his mandate.
LeBlanc said he’ll be asking “opposition leaders to take this matter seriously,” and to “not just simply say there has to be a public inquiry.”
He said he’d be in talks with opposition parties to take suggestions on who could lead a public inquiry if one were called, what the timeline would be, and how classified security information should be handled in such a situation, for example.
“Those are the kinds of conversations we’re prepared to have in very short order,” LeBlanc said. “We’ve said all along that all options remain on the table.
“We think there should be a public process going forward, as Mr. Johnston recommended,” LeBlanc added. “So my hope is very quickly, we can come to some consensus around those next steps.”
But LeBlanc also took aim at Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre specifically, accusing the Opposition leader of “character assassination” and “partisan buffoonery” in the last few months when it comes to Johnston’s appointment.
Poilievre has repeatedly referred to Johnston as Trudeau’s “cottage neighbour” and “ski buddy,” and described the role of special rapporteur as a “fake job.”
“One of the challenges would be many eminent Canadians will understandably hesitate to step forward to undertake this kind of work when they see what the opposition parties did to the Right Honourable David Johnston,” LeBlanc said.
“So if we can lower the partisan temperature and have a serious conversation about a serious issue, we’re confident that we could find the right eminent person to lead this next public phase of the engagement.”
Meanwhile, Trudeau paid a surprise visit to Kyiv on Saturday and announced $500 million more in Canadian military aid as Ukraine stepped up its long-anticipated counteroffensive to drive Russia’s army out of occupied eastern and southern regions of the battered country.
Trudeau said that since last year, Canada has committed over $8 billion in funding assistance to Ukraine, including over $1 billion in military aid, since the start of the Russian invasion early in 2022.
The prime minister offered no details on how the new funding would be spent. However, he indicated Canada would also extend its military training mission — known as Operation Unifier — until 2026 and offered to help train Ukrainian pilots, along with other countries, on the F-16 fighter aircraft.
Back in Canada, the federal government said it intends to seize a massive Russian-registered cargo aircraft that landed in Toronto on Feb. 27, 2022, days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That same day, Transport Minister Omar Alghabra announced the closing of Canada’s airspace to all Russian aircraft in response to the invasion, and the plane, the largest ever, has been grounded ever since.
If seized, it would become the first physical asset confiscated under Canada’s updated sanctions system.
A report from RBC Capital Markets has warned that housing affordability in two key Canadian markets is irreparable.
The report, prepared by Geoffrey Kwan and entitled RBC Capital Markets Canadian Housing & Mortgage Virtual Conference Recap, which was sent to True North, included the ominous warning.
“Fixing housing affordability, particularly in Toronto and Vancouver, is likely past the point of no return; housing activity remains weak, but is showing early signs of improvement as year-over-year comparisons improve through 2023,” Kwan’s report read.
As the Bank of Canada (BoC) began considerable hikes to its Overnight Lending Rate last year, homebuying activity softened and relieved upward pressure on prices. However, not even that was enough to bring home prices down to affordable levels; in fact, in tandem with higher rates resulting in elevated monthly carrying costs, housing arguably became even less affordable.
In Vancouver, Robert Mogensen, a broker with The Mortgage Advantage, says affording a $500,000 condominium—a rare find anywhere in the metropolitan region—requires household income of $125,000 to meet the 5% minimum down payment, but commonplace in the city are people who make less than that.
“I see a lot of clients who make half that or less than half of that, and they’re regular working people. There’s no hope in hell they can afford their own condominium, let alone single-family housing,” Mogensen told True North.
“The payment on a $500,000 condo at a decent market mortgage rate is $2,900 a month, and then you have strata fees and property taxes on top of that, so who has that kind of disposable money for living expenses? It’s just off the charts. Is the housing market so broken that it can’t be fixed? At this point in time, I 100% agree with that.”
According to the latest statistics from the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, the benchmark price of a Metro Vancouver home was $1,188,000 in May. A detached home was $1,953,600 while condos were significantly less expensive, albeit not necessarily more affordable, at $760,800.
Many homebuyers in the city leverage existing home equity to move up the housing ladder, but most of the city’s younger residents aren’t as fortunate.
They’re hardly the only ones vying for housing at the lower end of that ladder, and that fierce competition is driving prices up from the bottom up.
“With the influx of people coming into areas like Vancouver and Toronto, and without that supply being replenished, conditions will get tighter and tighter and tighter,” Mogensen continued. “We’re seeing multiple offers again on condos with 20-30 people going through open houses and making offers in subsequent days.”
The latest data made available by the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board revealed similar circumstances in Canada’s largest metropolitan region. In May, the benchmark price of a home was $1,196,101, and according to Tom Storey, a broker with Royal LePage Signature Realty, Kwan’s statement is an opposite representation of what affordability looks like locally.
“Especially if you just look purely at what the income is and what people can afford to buy in these major markets,” Storey said. “I’d say we passed the point of thinking we could get back to affordable levels a long time ago.”
He added that smaller markets, too, are experiencing mounting affordability woes. The BoC’s quantitative easing (QE) program during the pandemic, which essentially made borrowed money free relative to asset appreciation, was the impetus for a housing rush in far-flung Halifax. Storeys says locals unaccustomed to such market realities naïvely believe home prices will return to pre-pandemic levels.
But home prices won’t return to healthier levels in Halifax, and they certainly won’t in Toronto.
The balance, or lack thereof, of supply and demand governs market behaviour, and influencing the latter is access to capital, which was made easy in response to the Great Recession, plunging lending rates to prolonged record lows.
That, in turn, sparked the housing rush that has turned homeownership into the domain of the affluent, subjugating the rest to an historically tight, and unpredictable, rental market, wherein renters spending up to half their monthly income on shelter is common in Toronto and Vancouver.
“Most people in Canada buy homes with a mortgage, and having the ability to go to a bank and put down as little as 5% if you buy under $500,000, can get you a mortgage and a property. A lot of other places in the world don’t have that access,” Storey said.
“Our access to capital isn’t going away, but as interest rates go up, so is the stress test.”
The B-20 mortgage stress test, in its present incarnation, was announced by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions in Oct. 2017, and stress tests mortgage originations at a floor rate determined by the central bank’s overnight lending rate, or 2% above the borrower’s qualifying rate—whichever is greater.
Qualifying for a million-dollar mortgage is hard enough, but doing so in a rising interest rate environment is downright impossible for more Canadians than ever before.
The stress test, however, was introduced to avert a financial calamity similar to the one in 2007-08 when interest rates invariably rose.
But B-20’s implementation wouldn’t have been necessary in a country in which housing prices remained tethered to domestic incomes. Juxtaposing surging homeownership prices with wage growth, the latter has effectively been static.
“Even though prices are lower [because of roughly a year’s worth of subdued market activity], mortgage rates are higher,” Storey said. “Home prices coming down is one thing, but the true cost of ownership on a monthly basis is another conversation.”
Both Mogensen and Storey cite Canada’s elevated immigration numbers—which excludes annual permit workers entering the country—as the main reason for runaway housing prices, which both conclude cannot plunge to reasonable levels so long as such policies exist.
There are many ways unaffordable housing affects cities, one of which, Mogensen says, is hostile conditions for young people, who feel they have no other option, spur them to search further afield for better cost of living standards.
“It sucks the vitality out of a city because, as things get progressively more expensive, you’re left with a well-heeled, older generation who may not have mortgages at all because they’ve owned their properties for a long time, but the creative younger generation who work in the arts or service industry—the people who make cities vibrant—you won’t see them,” Mogensen said. “It’s turning Vancouver into a haven for rich older people.”
Vancouver’s runaway housing prices are primarily a ramification of foreign capital that began pouring into the city when China’s repossession of Hong Kong was imminent. Mogensen says the problem has since festered—and citing Kwan’s report, he added that housing affordability in Vancouver is past the point of no return.
“Nobody saw it as a problem back then, and it just went on and on and escalated in a huge way with no end in sight,” he continued. “Now we’re in a predicament where only the wealthy can afford homes, even modest places, and I don’t know how you can unwind that.”
Canada is one of few countries to have no laws on abortion, amid the majority of Canadians being pro-choice. Even Parliament is so pro-abortion, they’re unwilling to pass legislation to protect pre-born girls from sex-selective abortion.
This has led some to wonder if Canada’s pro-life movement should shift its focus to advancing pro-family initiatives and policies, rather than try and restrict abortion.
True North’s Elie Cantin-Nantel spoke about the matter, as well as the current state of Canada’s pro-life movement, with RightNow co-founder Alissa Golob.
RightNow describes itself as an organization which “exists to nominate and elect pro-life politicians by mobilizing Canadians on the ground level to vote at local nomination meetings, and provide training to volunteers across the country to create effective campaign teams in every riding across Canada.”
Americans are losing sleep over the wildfires burning up the neighbouring north.
Smoke from wildfires in various provinces has blown across the southern border. Combined with smoke from US wildfires, millions of Americans are now living in unsafe air quality.
According to a new survey from the Sleep Foundation, 58.1% of US adults said smoke during wildfires is costing them about 1.5 hours of shut eye per night. Assuming 2023 is a standard three-month wildfire season, that would total 134.9 hours of sleep this year.
Melissa Milanak, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, said stress from wildfire health risks can keep us up, even if we’re not in the fire’s direct path.
“For most people, when they’re thinking about trauma, they think of nightmares and forget that insomnia is such a huge piece [of it],” Milanak told the Sleep Foundation.
“No matter how exhausted you are, your body’s not going to let you rest because it wants to keep you on edge [and to] keep you on alert to be able to protect yourself.”
Adults in the Census region stretching from Oklahoma and Texas to the Atlantic Coast reported losing 1.53 hours of sleep each night when wildfires were at their worst. Another 41.8% of respondents said they had to shut their windows because of fire smoke seeping in.
Canada’s wildfires started unseasonably early this year, with the fires reaching a crisis point in Alberta in early May, just days into the provincial election campaign. Some 72 wildfires were still ongoing as of Thursday, down from over 100 earlier in the year, but fires have now started up in Quebec and New Brunswick.
According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Canada’s spring fires have covered large chunks of the States in a smoky haze for more than a month as of June.
From January to July 2022, 5.7 million acres of U.S. land burned because of wildfires. The U.S. Forest Service says the typical length of the wildfire season has practically doubled, forcing a shift to the concept of a “fire year.”
The result is that 60.2% of respondents say they’ve smelled wildfire smoke at their home or workplace in the past five years, and 47.8% say they’ve seen it.
Of respondents, 86.2% lived or worked at least 10 miles from the nearest wildfire, with 50.2% being at least 50 miles away.
Oshawa’s Ontario Tech University is holding segregated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) clubs for black youth – with funding from the Government of Canada.
The university also ran workshops dedicated to those who identify as black girls.
Ontario Tech University is running segregated STEM clubs for black kids. For the "Black Girls Empowerment STEM Club," it uses "an inclusive view of the word 'girl'," meaning "non-binary, two-spirit, trans, genderqueer and any other youth that (identifies)" can attend. pic.twitter.com/meJJ1RU3cZ
In the description for the racially-segregated STEM club, Ontario Tech notes it is “committed to ensuring Black youth have a community-oriented and accessible learning environment to explore different facets of STEM, coding, and engineering design.”
“Designed by Black STEM students, the program provides Black youth with a community-oriented and accessible learning environment to explore different areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as well as coding, and engineering design. With an intent for students to develop skills critical for the future, the program highlights Black role models, promotes academic pursuits, and encourages growth in STEM literacy.”
The “Black Youth STEM and Coding Clubs” are running between April and June.
Ontario Tech also ran a seperate “Black Girls Empowerment” STEM club in February, which was led by black female STEM students. Citing “an inclusive view” of the word girl, the university said biological black males who identified as a girl were also able to attend.
“Please be aware that we have an inclusive view of the word ‘girl’,” reads a note on Ontario Tech’s website. “All-girl camps and clubs welcome non-binary, two-spirit, trans, genderqueer and any other youth that identify with in these programs.”
Ontario Tech’s segregated clubs receive funding from the Government of Canada’s CanCode program. The latter “aims to equip Canadian youth, with a focus on inclusion of underrepresented groups, with the skills they need to be prepared for further studies.”
Ontario Tech also ran a racially segregated STEM camp last summer, in partnership with the Durham Catholic District School Board (DCDSB). The University of Waterloo is also offering free “summer day camp programming for self-identifying Black Youth entering grades 2 to 12”.
True North reached out to Ontario Tech University for comment, but it did not respond in time for publication.
The largest protest against gender ideology in Canadian history took place in Ottawa on Friday and thousands of people attended on both sides of the debate. Organized by Chris Elston, better known as Billboard Chris, and student activist Josh Alexander, hundreds of parents and students gathered peacefully to oppose radical gender ideology and indoctrination in Canada’s schools.
Despite the counter protesters trying their best to disrupt and impede the rally, and label the group as “transphobic fascists,” that didn’t stop people from all racial and ethnic backgrounds from uniting in their calls to rid gender ideology from education.
Harrison Faulkner was on the scene and interviewed parents who attended the rally along with Billboard Chris and Josh Alexander.
This week on the Alberta Roundup with Rachel Emmanuel, Rachel discusses Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s latest pledge to hire outside arson investigators to look into the 175 wildfires that have no known cause.
Rachel also takes a quick look at the new cabinet, and the official election results which includes new numbers for two recounts.
Finally, Rachel has some shocking news about Calgary city council’s latest bid to restrict pro life messaging.
Governor General Mary Simon refused to condemn the vandalism of a Queen Elizabeth II statue last week despite being mandated to represent the monarchy in Canada.
In response to reports that the statue of the late monarch was defaced with the words “killer” and “colonizer” in Winnipeg, shortly after it was re-erected in the province’s capital, Simon claimed she “can’t say” whether the criminal actions were wrong.
“I think it’s really important for Indigenous people to express themselves in whichever form they want, but it’s also very important for us to recognize that the effects of colonization and residential schools have had such a devastating impact on the cultures and identity of Indigenous people, that there are frustrations. There’s anger,” said Simon.
“And they will, from time to time, express that anger and the frustrations. For me, as a representative of the King, my role is to help understand what’s going on. So in a way, I can’t say whether it’s right or wrong. It’s right for the people maybe who are doing it but wrong for the people that want the history to continue as it was.”
According to the Governor General’s constitutional responsibilities, Mary Simon “exercises the powers and responsibilities of the Head of State, His Majesty The King. As such, the governor general is non-partisan and apolitical.”
Simon gathered in Manitoba on Wednesday to meet with Premier Heather Stefanson and Indigenous elders to discuss the situation.
In a subsequent statement, Simon claimed that King Charles III “understands the importance” of reconciliation.
“The King understands the importance of walking the path of reconciliation with Canada and Indigenous peoples. Discussions like these are vital. They will start slowly, and grow, forming the pillars of a renewed relationship with Indigenous peoples that is based on respect and understanding,” said Simon.
The toppling of the statue on Canada Day in 2021, elicited praise from radical NDP MP Niki Ashton who called it an act of “decolonization.”
“Decolonization on the grounds of our legislature on Treaty 1 Territory, the homeland of the Métis,” tweeted Ashton at the time with a heart emoji.
