“Jack Jedwab: Reducing the Holocaust to yet another story of colonialism distorts history”

2026/01/27 Leave a comment

Needed reminder:

…“Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate the late Elie Wiesel warned repeatedly against precisely such historic revision and the distortion to which it has given rise. For Wiesel, the Holocaust was not merely one genocide among others, nor simply another chapter in humanity’s long record of cruelty. Rather, it was a singular event rooted in a uniquely European legacy of antisemitism, culminating in the systematic and industrialized attempt to murder Jews.

Wiesel’s insistence on this point was not at all about being indifferent to other victims of mass violence. On the contrary, he affirmed the sanctity of all human suffering. His concern was that careless comparison between genocides risked cancelling the very things that distinguished each horrific tragedy.

Today there is real need to heed Wiesel’s warning, as colonialist framings of the origins of the Holocaust gain traction with influencers and many academics. Recognizing the historical specificity of the Holocaust is in no way an obstacle to broader empathy or compassion for victims of other genocides. Rather it is essential in identifying the key lessons needed to prevent future atrocities. When it comes to the Holocaust, one hard truth must not be blurred: reducing it to yet another story of colonialism”

Source: “Jack Jedwab: Reducing the Holocaust to yet another story of colonialism distorts history”

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with

Krishnaraj: And How Will You Be Paying for Your Baby Today? [birth tourism]

2026/01/26 Leave a comment

Good in person account of how birth tourism and other medical services affects doctors and the healthcare system:

…The primary intended use for the credit card terminal was to collect fees from uninsured, non-resident patients. These patients, who are not covered by provincial, federal, or private insurance, need to pay out of pocket for services provided in the hospital. If they are admitted, the hospital cashier collects fees for services like the bed, food, medication, and nursing care. But doctors must collect their fees directly from these patients. The amount that they bill for each specific service is guided by a document of standardized fees published by the Ontario Medical Association.

If doctors don’t bill and work in a fee-for-service system, they do not get paid for their work. Which is why in the doctors’ lounge at Humber Regional Hospital, the question was not how much to bill, but rather how to have these conversations, and when.

Is it on admission, hoping for no complications, and no further charges? Prior to letting the non-birthing parent into the operating room during a caesarian? Or do you ask the new mother to reach for their wallet as the baby is learning to nurse?

Turns out there’s no good time to give someone a bill for their baby.

This is a side of practising medicine in Canada that is rarely discussed. There were an estimated 5,430 non-resident births in Canada in 2024, according to analysis of Canadian Institute of Health Information data published by Policy Options. This is just below the historic peak of 5,698 in 2019. In 2023 — the year I was at Humber —the hospital had the highest rate of non-resident births in the country, accounting for roughly one in 10 deliveries.

I witnessed this firsthand. Almost every day, I would be asked to assess the newborn baby of an uninsured, non-resident mother on the postpartum ward….

Gautham Krishnaraj MDc PhD is a Fellow in Journalism & Health Impact at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. 

Source: And How Will You Be Paying for Your Baby Today?

Filed under Birth Tourism, Citizenship Tagged with ,

“How Trudeau Liberals’ DEI obsession helped kill Canadian culture”

2026/01/26 Leave a comment



Good long and disturbing read:

…Some blamed a misreading of DEI as “Diversity, Equity, and Exclusion,” or the Canada Council’s zealous “decolonization” agenda; others noted that with only about 25 per cent of editorial staff male, female editors naturally preferred female perspectives; and some disputed that White male authors were disadvantaged at all, or, if true, that it mattered. Whatever the cause, male writers appear to have fallen out of fashion. The 2025 Sobey Arts Award shortlisted twenty-six women and twelve Indigenous artists among thirty nominees — none of the four men were White. Recent Giller and Governor General’s prizes show similar trends: roughly two-thirds of winners were women, and only one White man among them. These results likely reflect publishing priorities rather than overt bias, yet they signal a profound cultural shift.

Fundamental to any program to resurrect Canada’s book business is the necessity to reform its major cultural institutions. Over the last decade or more, they have become deeply politicized, pursuing a specific and polarizing social and economic agenda. They have turned it into a wedge that excludes certain people from consideration, certain forms of address from polite society, and certain manners of speaking as incompatible with good behaviour. The penalties for violating these often ambiguous standards can be devastating. These strictures have narrowed the boundaries of discourse and cast a chill on what can be said, written, or shown, radically restricting artists’ freedom of expression.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion were never supposed to evolve in this direction. Properly understood, it is not a negative, punishing exercise in ideological purity, but a formula for discovering and celebrating what had previously been arbitrarily suppressed. Murray Sinclair, the chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, made the point explicitly when he explained that reconciliation was not about tearing down the statues of John A. Macdonald, but raising up statues to Big Bear. It is a program that calls for a deep understanding of both the good and the bad in historical figures and events. It assumes that people are sufficiently sophisticated to hold two thoughts in their heads at the same time. Some of the things Macdonald did were good; some were bad. There is no need to choose sides, only to see clearly what happened. That is precisely why it was called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

When major funders like the Canada Council set out to “decolonize” Canadian literature, they are pursuing a political agenda as surely as the censors of the Soviet Union insisting that all writing conform to the dictates of “socialist realism.” When tenured bureaucrats can harass people for wrongthink, and when it’s possible to lose essential public support for straying beyond the boundaries of correct and morally appropriate thinking, creators and cultural workers will be cautious, often second-guessing themselves. Great work flourishes in environments where people can take risks, knowing that the worst consequence will be failure, not penury and banishment.

The DEI project in Canada’s cultural agencies, government, publishing houses, and media needs to be recalibrated. It needs to focus on its original aims of combatting racism, sexism, and intolerance. It needs to seek truth, not for the purpose of punishment, but for learning. When mistakes are made, when the wrong word or hurtful language is thoughtlessly used, it needs to be treated as a teachable moment, not as a call to puritanical vengeance. It needs to start from an assumption that the overwhelming majority of Canadians are people of good will. Do they sometimes make cruel mistakes? Of course. The important thing is to learn together and bank the fires of self-righteous rage.

— A former executive vice-president of the CBC, Richard Stursberg has written widely on Canadian media and cultural policy. His previous books include The Tower of Babble, named by the Globe & Mail as one of the best books of the year, and The Tangled Garden, which was short-listed for the Donner Prize for the best book on public policy written by a Canadian.

Source: “How Trudeau Liberals’ DEI obsession helped kill Canadian culture”

Filed under DEI, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’

2026/01/26 Leave a comment

Sigh…:

Genetic researchers were seeking children for an ambitious, federally funded project to track brain development — a study that they told families could yield invaluable discoveries about DNA’s impact on behavior and disease.

They also promised that the children’s sensitive data would be closely guarded in the decade-long study, which got underway in 2015. Promotional materials included a cartoon of a Black child saying it felt good knowing that “scientists are taking steps to keep my information safe.”

The scientists did not keep it safe.

A group of fringe researchers thwarted safeguards at the National Institutes of Health and gained access to data from thousands of children. The researchers have used it to produce at least 16 papers purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart.

Mainstream geneticists have rejected their work as biased and unscientific. Yet by relying on genetic and other personal data from the prominent project, known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the researchers gave their theories an air of analytical rigor.

earch group were ineligible to obtain data from the ABCD project. But one of them gained access through an American professor who was already being investigated by the N.I.H. over his handling of another child brain study.

Their papers have provided fodder for racist posts on social media and white nationalist message boards that have been viewed millions of times. Some of the papers are cited by A.I. bots like ChatGPT and Grok in response to queries about race and intelligence. On the social media platform X, Grok has referred users to the research more than two dozen times this month alone.

“It’s evil,” said Dr. Terry L. Jernigan, national co-director of the ABCD Study and a neuropsychologist at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s not just that the science is faulty, but it’s being used to advance an unethical agenda.”…

    Source: Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’

    Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

    List of suspected Nazi war criminals welcomed in Canada should stay secret, information watchdog rules

    2026/01/26 Leave a comment

    Seems a bit too precious given not released earlier prior to the Russian attack on Ukraine:

    …LAC had told Caroline Maynard, the Information Commissioner, that disclosing the list would result in significant injury to Canada’s relationship with a foreign government. LAC also told her it would “cause significant injury to the defence of a foreign state allied with Canada,” Maureen Brennan, an investigator in Ms. Maynard’s office, said in the e-mail. 

    The e-mail said the harm would extend “beyond Canada’s relations with the foreign government in question” and would adversely affect Canada’s relationships with other allied states.

    “I reviewed LAC’s consultation materials and note that there was an overall consensus that, in the current political climate, disclosure of the information would give rise to serious concerns about reasonably expected harm,” Ms. Brennan said. 

    Dozens of leading scholars from around the world, including Sir Richard Evans, former Regius professor of history at Cambridge University and author of 18 books, including Hitler’s People, have called on Canada to declassify the report.

    On Friday Canada’s Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, named after the famous Nazi hunter, reacted with dismay that the information watchdog had upheld Ottawa’s decision to keep the list secret. 

    “The government’s claim that revealing the truth about Nazi war criminals living in Canada could somehow be a threat to national security or international diplomacy is an insult to the intelligence of the public,” said Jaime Kirzner Roberts, senior director, policy and advocacy at the center. 

    “It is long past time for the facts to come out about the Nazi perpetrators of genocide and war crimes who were allowed to escape justice and live comfortable, protected lives in our country.”

    A research team led by UCLA historian Jared McBride, an expert on war crimes in the Second World War, last year unearthed what he concluded was an earlier annotated version of the secret list.

    The Information Commissioner’s office argued that this list had been released through an access to information request in 2019, “at a time which predates the relevant current global context.” 

    Among the names on this list, seen by The Globe, was Helmut Oberlander, a member of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen death squads during the Second World War. The Canadian government spent years trying to strip him of his citizenship, but he died at the age of 97 in 2021 while the matter was still before the courts.

    Professor Per Rudling of Lund University in Sweden, who has researched the settlement of alleged Nazis in Canada, said he found the decision to keep the list secret “curious.” He said Ukraine had opened up its own KGB archives and the U.S. has released the bulk of its documents pertaining to alleged Nazi war criminals. 

    “Of all comparable Western liberal democracies, Canada stands out as being particularly restrictive on archival materials in regards to purported war criminals,” he said in an e-mail. 

    Source: List of suspected Nazi war criminals welcomed in Canada should stay secret, information watchdog rules

    Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

    May: The Executive Cuts

    2026/01/26 1 Comment

    The latest overview of the approach in considerable detail:

    Too many layers. Everyone knew it.

    The executive ranks have been climbing for decades despite warnings about bloat and slow decision-making. Now a 12-per-cent cut is coming: about 1,120 executive jobs disappearing across 90 or so departments.

    The cuts will ensure Canada’s executive hierarchy is “a pyramid, not a cylinder,” says one senior bureaucrat. The big driver is saving money. But it’s also about speed. Fewer layers, faster decisions. That’s the plan, anyway.

    There are 9,155 bureaucrats who occupy five levels of executives (EX-1 to EX-5) between directors and assistant deputy ministers. But it’s not just them.

    Many expect PCO clerk Michael Sabia to also trim the deputy minister ranks, too, as he reshapes the senior bench of public service leaders. He started with a pre-Christmas shuffle — bigger than any seen in years — and promised another. No one at the top is safe, it seems.

    “The cuts are a shock to the system, like a taser,” says one senior official. But can cutting layers fix the public service and speed up decision-making like the Carney government expects?…

    Source: May: EXs, cuts and layers

    Filed under Government Tagged with ,

    Canada is asking the court to dismiss hundreds of immigration cases. Here’s why

    2026/01/23 1 Comment

    Makes sense and good to see some due diligence:

    Ottawa has asked the Federal Court to throw out hundreds of immigration cases en masse, alleging they were filed by unauthorized agents.

    In a motion last month, the immigration minister argued that the 430 applications, seeking relief from court over delays, should be heard and dismissed collectively due to “irregularities” stemming from the “similar format, style and phrasing” in court filings.

    The applicants also shared the same home addresses, phone numbers and email accounts despite claiming to have self-represented.

    The case involves Chinese applicants who have applied for study, work or visitor permits. They have asked the court to review the processing delays of their individual files and to order the Immigration Department to fast-track the application if the delay was found to be unreasonable.

    The use of unscrupulous “ghost agents” has posed an ongoing challenge for immigration officials and legal profession regulators because they operate behind the scenes and cannot be held accountable. Their incompetence can also lead to dire consequences for applicants and abuse of the immigration and legal systems.

    Recently, immigration officials appear to have stepped up efforts to detect the involvement of unauthorized agents in applications — and have been going after the applicants as a deterrent. Last year, multiple refugee claims by Sikhs were flagged and rejected for lack of credibility because their narratives were “nearly word for word” identical.

    Source: Canada is asking the court to dismiss hundreds of immigration cases. Here’s why

    Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

    Trump And Miller Slashing Legal Immigration By 33% To 50%

    2026/01/23 Leave a comment

    Of note:

    New research concludes the Trump administration’s policies will reduce legal immigration to the United States by 33% to 50% over four years. Restricting Americans’ ability to sponsor their closest family members will be the administration’s primary way to lower legal immigration. While aggressive deportation tactics by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have garnered headlines, cuts to the admission of legal immigrants will have a profound impact on the country and millions of people.

    Numerous Restrictions On Legal Immigration

    Trump officials have implemented policies to block American citizens and employers from sponsoring legal immigrants. The policies will override the immigration rules and categories that Congress established unless a lawsuit stops the actions.

    “The Trump administration’s policies will reduce legal immigration to the United States by an estimated 33% to 50%, or by 1.5 million to 2.4 million legal immigrants, by the end of Donald Trump’s four-year term,” according to a National Foundation for American Policy analysis.

    In FY 2023, 1,172,910 legal immigrants received permanent residence, also commonly referred to as green cards, on a pace for 4,691,640 over four years. “NFAP estimates 1,546,710 to 2,369,998, or 33% to 50%, fewer legal immigrants will gain green cards during Donald Trump’s administration due to policies that include significantly lower admission levels for refugees, restrictions on the Immediate Relatives of U.S. Citizens due to ‘public charge’ policies and a 39-country immigration ban, actions taken against Diversity Visa recipients and other policies.” The analysis provides a range because uncertainty remains about how restrictively administration officials will enact the policies….

    Source: Trump And Miller Slashing Legal Immigration By 33% To 50%

    Filed under Immigration, Trump administration Tagged with

    Volunteer program for immigrant doctors to improve medical English gets big boost

    2026/01/22 Leave a comment

    Good initiative. During my various cancer treatments, some, by no means all, of the doctors who helped treat me would have benefited from this training:

    Romel Castillo, a family physician originally from Cuba, learned much more than words when he joined a fledgling program to brush up on his medical English. 

    He learned the unspoken language of practising medicine in Canada, where concepts such as patient privacy, cultural competency and shared decision-making can be different than in an immigrant doctor’s homeland. 

    “In my country, it’s like you prescribe the medication, they take it,” said Dr. Castillo, 35, who moved to Canada in 2021 and now lives in Brampton, Ont. “But here, I ask you first, ‘What are your values, your understanding of the condition?’ I share with you my knowledge, and then we make an arrangement.” 

    Those subtleties, which would be hard to pick up from a Spanish-to-English medical dictionary, were the most important lessons that Dr. Castillo took away from Health English Language Pro (HELP), a program that pairs retired Canadian physicians with newcomer doctors to improve their medical English over the course of about 10 virtual conversations.

    On Tuesday, HELP will get a major boost when the Canadian Medical Association Foundation announces a $645,000 grant to expand the program so that volunteer Canadian doctors can share their expertise with at least 330 more immigrants like Dr. Castillo, who is working in the health system, but not yet as a doctor….

    Source: Volunteer program for immigrant doctors to improve medical English gets big boost

    Filed under Integration Tagged with , , ,

    ICYMI – ‘A win on all fronts’: Federal Court quashes Ottawa’s attempt to stop legal challenge on cabinet secrets in Canada-U.S. refugee deal

    2026/01/22 Leave a comment

    Not all that surprised:

    A Federal Court judge has rejected the Canadian government’s attempt to throw out a challenge by advocacy groups seeking greater transparency on how Ottawa decides to designate the United States as a safe country for refugees.

    The legal challenge by the Canadian Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers and the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario asked the government to pull back the curtain on its internal reviews regarding the Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S. In its application, the groups argue that Ottawa must be transparent about the process and ensure it complies with Canada’s Charter of Rights and its international legal obligations.

    Under the bilateral refugee pact, which was introduced in 2004, most asylum seekers are required to claim protection in the first safe country they arrive in. This means Canada can turn back refugees arriving from the U.S. on the basis they should pursue their claims in the U.S.

    The government brought forward a motion to strike the legal challenge last year, before the case could start. In a ruling on Monday, Justice Alan Diner rejected that request, saying the application was not “doomed to fail” and is strong enough to warrant a full hearing.

    Diner wrote that at the core of the government’s argument is the question of what constitutes a decision when it’s required to conduct an ongoing review — “a legal question that should not be answered on a truncated record.”

    The judge also granted the applicants “public interest standing,” while recognizing that the advocacy groups themselves are not “directly affected” individuals like refugee claimants.

    While the government argued the challenge was filed too late, Diner granted an extension and agreed with the applicants in finding that the delay was reasonable because the legal pathway to challenge the review process only became clear following a 2023 Supreme Court of Canada decision.

    Maureen Silcoff, a co-counsel for the refugee lawyer association, described the ruling as “a win on many fronts.”

    The question of why the Canadian government is continuing to designate the U.S. a safe country is more pertinent now than ever, Silcoff told the Star. “All we have to do is look south of the border and we see that the current administration has essentially eradicated the asylum process,” she said….

    Source: ‘A win on all fronts’: Federal Court quashes Ottawa’s attempt to stop legal challenge on cabinet secrets in Canada-U.S. refugee deal

    Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with , , ,

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