Studying racial and ethnic health inequality in Canada: What we need to get right

2026/05/13 Leave a comment

Good reminder that Canadian history, context and policies are different. Now if we could only stop using US terminology like BIPOC….:

…Canada is not the U.S.

Canada’s social policies are distinct from American policies. To begin with, the racial and ethnic makeup of the populations differ. Canada, for example, has a smaller Black population and a larger Asian population than the U.S.. These differences reflect broader historical and institutional contexts that shape how racial and ethnic inequalities are structured in each country.

At the same time, Indigenous Peoples are more central to health inequality in Canada. This is because Canada has a relatively high percentage of Indigenous Peoples compared to the U.S. and many other more economically developed nations. The health of Indigenous Peoples is shaped by a long history of colonialism and ongoing structural disadvantage.

Immigrant population also differs. About one-quarter of Canada’s population is foreign-born, compared to about one in seven in the U.S. Canada’s selective immigration system means many immigrants arrive with relatively high levels of education and good health. This contributes to patterns like “the healthy immigrant effect.” 

Research has shown that Canada exhibits the healthy immigrant effect, in which newly arrived immigrants tend to have better health than the Canadian-born population, though this advantage often declines over time with longer residence. Inequality does not line up neatly with race.

Policy matters too. Canada promotes multiculturalism, while the U.S. emphasizes assimilation into a single national culture. Canada has universal health care, which reduces financial barriers to basic care. 

But this coverage is partial. Services such as prescription drugs, dental care and mental-health support are not fully covered and often depend on employment benefits or where people live. Since health care is organized at the provincial level, access and quality also vary across regions. These gaps shape who gets timely care and who falls through the cracks….

A Canadian approach

Studying racial and ethnic health inequality in Canada requires a distinctly Canadian approach. The population, data and policy context differ from those in the U.S., and these differences shape both how inequalities emerge and how they should be studied.

This means moving beyond broad categories, improving race-based data, and using more meaningful and diverse measures of health. It also requires closer attention to context, including Indigenous and rural settings, as well as Canada’s social, immigration and health policy landscape.

To effectively address health disparities, research needs to be grounded in Canada’s realities, not simply adapted from models developed elsewhere.

Source: Studying racial and ethnic health inequality in Canada: What we need to get right

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Jamie Sarkonak: Progressive judge spares violent loan shark criminal record to avoid deportation

2026/05/12 Leave a comment

Part of her ongoing series:

…Mandhane treated a case of loan-shark violence by a foreigner against a petite, young woman in a dark street as if it were a toy-sharing dispute between children at a daycare. Every day, courts see a good number of low-stakes, wrong-place-at-wrong-time cases where a conditional discharge is appropriate; this was absolutely not one of them.

The suitable result would have been jail, or at least house arrest or probation. That’s what you see when crime is committed in the course of debt collection: for example, a man in Newfoundland was sentenced to one year in jail in 2022 for participating in a group break-in during which “PAY THE DEBT” was written on the victim’s walls (among other acts of vandalism) and during which he stole some cannabis from the house; the organized crime factor worsened his case, but he was a young, first-time offender like E.A., and he didn’t physically attack anyone. He was a citizen though, and he was evidently not before a soft judge, resulting in a much more appropriate sentence.

“But what stings most about E.A.’s case is the Crown prosecutor’s failure to pursue a proper punishment. No one at court that day stood up for the public interest — not even the guy whose job was specifically that.

This can change, but it’s going to take Ontario’s attorney general toughening up his prosecutions, Parliament prohibiting immigration status from being considered in sentencing, and people making sure that judges know when their decisions bring the administration of justice into disrepute. If we tolerate authorities who do everything they can to keep violent non-citizen rulebreakers in Canada, it’s going to keep happening.

Source: Jamie Sarkonak: Progressive judge spares violent loan shark criminal record to avoid deportation

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Dissecting 2024-25 data on the public service, early cuts, and equity goals (paywall)

2026/05/12 Leave a comment

My latest analysis. Short version in the Hill Times.

Source: Dissecting 2024-25 data on the public service, early cuts, and equity goals

Full detailed version below:

EE – Analysis of disaggregated data by group and gender 2025 Draft SubmissionDownload

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The CAF recruitment system is failing everyone: J.L. Granatstein for Inside Policy

2026/05/11 Leave a comment

Not the principle but the details need to be fixed:

…Very simply, the problems with the CAF’s recruiting system have not yet been remedied. Yes, permanent residents and naturalized citizens should be encouraged to join the military, but not until they can speak, read, and understand French and/or English and are adapted to Canadian life and the military’s expectations. Yes, those with medical problems should be enlisted, but only if they have been properly screened in the recruitment process. And certainly, the CAF should not accept candidates who cannot read, write, or comprehend instruction at an acceptable standard.

To judge by his long memorandum with its substantiated recommendations, Kieley is a very able officer doing his best to deal with the difficulties he and his understrength staff face. The generals in Ottawa had changed the rules to speed up recruiting with good intentions but had failed to consider the possible consequences. The recruiting officers across the country too often pushed the unqualified to Saint-Jean, and Kieley had to clean up the mess. It’s almost as if NHL scouts sent those who cannot skate to training camp. This cannot work.

This matters because such applicants at the CAF’s Leadership and Training School cost DND money and take spots from better-qualified candidates. It also matters because General Carignan is studying options to expand the CAF to as many as 85,500 regular force members. “In the next month or so,” the CDS told the CBC in April, “we will be able to present various options, and the discussion is going very well,” Carignan said. “There is a lot of interest in doing this.”

Canada needs a bigger and better Canadian Armed Forces, and the Carney government is putting much money (and much of its credibility) into getting this program right. But if the recruitment process does not speed up and function properly, that investment will achieve little. The generals at National Defence Headquarters and officers in recruiting centres across Canada must fix these problems now.

Source: The CAF recruitment system is failing everyone: J.L. Granatstein for Inside Policy

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An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’

2026/05/08 2 Comments

Of note:

On Nov. 10, 2023, the Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov published a guest essay in the New York Times. Though scarcely a month had passed since the Hamas massacre of hundreds of Israeli men, women and children, Bartov expressed fears over Israel’s military response to this horrifying act of barbarity. But, he concluded, while “it is very likely that war crimes, and crimes against humanity, are happening,” he concluded, there is “no proof that genocide is taking place in Gaza.”By mid-2025, however, Bartov revised his stance in a second Times essay. As a scholar of genocide who has taught classes on the subject — including at Brown University, where he is currently based — for a quarter of a century, he announced, “I can recognize one when I see one.”In his new book Israel: What Went Wrong?, Bartov offers a searing analysis, both personal and professional, of the tragically entwined history of Israelis and Palestinians that climaxed with the disaster of October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, followed by the even more disastrous response of Israel. Bartov’s account resembles an earlier book on an earlier war: Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat, in which the veteran of two world wars examines the causes to France’s collapse in 1940. Both internationally known historians, and patriots who served their nation in arms, each man wrote their book when the debacles were still fresh.

For France, the collapse was as much moral and political as it was military. “Whatever the complexion of its government,” Bloch observed, “a country is bound to suffer, democracy becomes hopelessly weak, and the general good suffers accordingly if its higher officials are bred up to despise it.”As Bartov’s book reminds us, this diagnosis applies not just to the decay that undermined the French Third Republic, but also to the moral rot that has been sapping the foundations of the Israeli republic. In his account, Bartov weaves the parallel histories of Israelis and Palestinians — a history composed of two catastrophes, the Shoah and the Nakba, that have ever since shaped events.

Inevitably, the very mention of these events in the same breath often sparks a violent response from many Israeli and diasporic Jews, but Bartov rightly insists upon their pairing. One of the many reasons why Bartov’s book is so important is his insistence that the two events are “inextricably linked historically, personally and as part of a politics of memory” and that they each have “become constitutive of Israeli and Palestinian national identities.”William Faulkner’s old chestnut — the past is neither dead nor even past — is the through-line to Bartov’s sharply, at times brutally, etched history of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Crucially, Bartov argues that what has gone so terribly wrong since 1948 was inevitable only in retrospect. An alternative history, one shaped by a Zionism faithful to the ideals of the Enlightenment, was, if unlikely, certainly not impossible. At the very least the history of the past eight decades could have gone in a liberal and democratic direction….

Source: An Israeli genocide scholar looks to Israel’s history to understand ‘what went wrong’

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Black women say they’re at risk due to unequal health care. The Ford government is being urged to act

2026/05/08 Leave a comment

Of note:

…At Queen’s Park on Wednesday, the Black Women’s Institute of Health pushed for urgent action on equity for Black women’s health, based on these experiences, shared by women in a report completed by the institute. The report, “Voices UnHeard,” was based on the findings of a first-of-its-kind national survey that focused on the experiences of Black women and girls and health care.

“There’s nothing in this report that I would say I haven’t lived or experienced,” said Kearie Daniel, who spearheaded the report and is the executive director of Black Women’s Institute for Health.

“This is the first time ever that we had anyone survey Black women across this country to this extent in a cohesive way,” Daniel said.

Researchers say there’s a lack of data about the experiences of Black women and girls in Canada when accessing health-care — that’s why a report like this is desperately needed. A health system ill-equipped to provide a basic standard of care for a community group that already disproportionately faces higher rates of certain chronic illnesses and medical conditions could lead to worse health outcomes and higher mortality.

The briefing Wednesday “was part of taking the report from just a report into action,” Daniel said.

The “Voices UnHeard” report was published in November. The report served as an anchor for the policy and legislative moves Daniel is advocating for at Queen’s Park.

The briefing followed Tuesday’s tabling by the NDP of the Black Health Equity and Accountability Act, 2026 (Bill 115), which Daniel says aligns with many of the 70 recommendations in the report….

…At Queen’s Park on Wednesday, the Black Women’s Institute of Health pushed for urgent action on equity for Black women’s health, based on these experiences, shared by women in a report completed by the institute. The report, “Voices UnHeard,” was based on the findings of a first-of-its-kind national survey that focused on the experiences of Black women and girls and health care.

“There’s nothing in this report that I would say I haven’t lived or experienced,” said Kearie Daniel, who spearheaded the report and is the executive director of Black Women’s Institute for Health.

“This is the first time ever that we had anyone survey Black women across this country to this extent in a cohesive way,” Daniel said.

Researchers say there’s a lack of data about the experiences of Black women and girls in Canada when accessing health-care — that’s why a report like this is desperately needed. A health system ill-equipped to provide a basic standard of care for a community group that already disproportionately faces higher rates of certain chronic illnesses and medical conditions could lead to worse health outcomes and higher mortality.

The briefing Wednesday “was part of taking the report from just a report into action,” Daniel said.

The “Voices UnHeard” report was published in November. The report served as an anchor for the policy and legislative moves Daniel is advocating for at Queen’s Park.

The briefing followed Tuesday’s tabling by the NDP of the Black Health Equity and Accountability Act, 2026 (Bill 115), which Daniel says aligns with many of the 70 recommendations in the report….

Source: Black women say they’re at risk due to unequal health care. The Ford government is being urged to act

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Carney to continue using Trudeau-era advisory board to suggest Senate appointments

2026/05/08 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see whether there is any impact on the diversity and political leanings of Carney appointments. Trudeau appointments: 55.2 percent women, 19.8 percent visible minorities, and 12.5 percent Indigenous:

Prime Minister Mark Carney said Wednesday he will continue to rely on the independent advisory board created by Justin Trudeau to suggest Senate appointments, but gave no timeline for filling a growing number of vacancies. 

After more than a year in office Mr. Carney has yet to make a single Senate appointment. Vacancies are mounting not just among senators but also on the board tasked with selecting new members of the Senate. 

There are currently nine vacancies in the 105-member Senate and another six senators are planning to retire by the end of 2026. The Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments, consisting of federal, provincial and territorial representatives, currently has just five members. It has 24 vacancies, leaving most provinces without representation on the board. 

At a Montreal-area press conference, Mr. Carney gave no indication of when he would begin addressing the vacancies in the Senate. “We will be appointing senators in due course, and I will take into account the advice of the independent advisory committee that was established by my predecessor,” he said. 

Source: Carney to continue using Trudeau-era advisory board to suggest Senate appointments, Carney not planning to allow senators in Liberal caucus, senior government official says


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Telus using AI to alter the accents of customer service agents

2026/05/07 2 Comments

Understand the concerns but on the other hand, as someone whose cancer treatment impaired my hearing, both physically and mentally, this would be an improvement:

…For labour representatives, the feature is another concern among many when it comes to the effects of AI on their members. 

At a hearing before the parliamentary standing committee on industry and technology last week, Roch Leblanc, Unifor telecommunications director, called on government to require companies to inform Canadians when AI was being used. 

He told members of Parliament that the union was aware of at least one Big Three telco using AI to mask the accents of offshore agents, “altering how customers perceive who they’re talking to.”

“The use of AI technology to deceive Canadians in any way should be prohibited,” he said.

United Steelworkers Local 1944 president Michael Phillips said he is aware of Telus using the technology internally, between agents based in Canada and overseas. 

He said that he was informed by a B.C.-based Telus employee that they had spoken with an agent in the Philippines. According to that employee, “this overseas agent was laughing about it, turning the accent masker on and off, revealing their Filipino accent, and then, taking the accent away when they turned on the AI technology,” Mr. Phillips said.

“As we’re trying to figure out what the parameters around AI and AI limitations are, I think that a very clear right that Canadians should insist on is the right to not be deceived by AI, especially not by folks that they are paying to provide telephone services for,” he said….

Source: Telus using AI to alter the accents of customer service agents

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Elkouri: La loi qui renforce l’absurdité

2026/05/05 Leave a comment

Indeed:

C’est ce que je me suis dit en prenant connaissance du tableau explicatif byzantin que le centre de services scolaire de Montréal a présenté cette semaine à son comité de parents qui voulait comprendre comment serait appliquée la loi 94 pour les parents et les élèves.

On se rappellera que cette loi adoptée dans la foulée du scandale de l’école Bedford ne fait pas qu’élargir l’interdiction de porter un signe religieux aux membres du personnel scolaire. Elle s’étend aussi aux parents bénévoles et à toute personne qui fournit régulièrement des services aux élèves.

Dans quels cas un signe religieux est-il autorisé ?

On apprend donc en consultant le tableau explicatif qu’un parent portant un signe religieux, c’est-à-dire en l’occurrence une mère voilée, pourrait préparer un gâteau pour une fête à l’école de ses enfants, mais ne pourrait pas servir elle-même ledit gâteau. Elle pourrait participer à l’organisation d’une sortie scolaire, mais elle ne pourrait pas y accompagner les enfants. Elle pourrait assister à un spectacle de fin d’année comme parent. Mais elle ne pourrait pas donner un coup de main durant le spectacle comme bénévole. Elle pourrait tricoter des mitaines pour la classe le soir, mais pas participer à un atelier de tricot à l’école le jour. Vous suivez la logique ?

La loi suscite son lot d’inquiétudes sur le terrain. Elle semble à bien des égards inapplicable. Comment des directions d’école qui ont déjà leur lot de défis quotidiens vont-elles gérer la chose ? Qui aura l’odieux d’annoncer à une mère enthousiaste et appréciée de tous qu’en raison de son signe religieux, elle peut continuer à être présente à l’école comme mère, mais plus comme bénévole ? …

Mais quel message envoie-t-on aux enfants quand on leur dit que certaines éducatrices, aussi compétentes et professionnelles soient-elles, et certaines mères, aussi impliquées soient-elles, sont désormais infréquentables par leur seule présence auprès des enfants, sans avoir commis aucune faute ? Si infréquentables qu’il faudrait ériger un « cordon sanitaire » entre elles et l’école de peur qu’elles contaminent l’esprit des enfants ?

Je suis désolée, mais le principal message que j’y vois est un message raciste et paternaliste qui a été normalisé ces dernières années. Un message qui tient pour acquis que ces femmes sont incapables de faire leurs propres choix et que l’on devrait donc choisir pour elles. Soumettez-vous à nous ou retournez à la maison, mesdames ! On fait ça pour votre bien, afin de favoriser l’égalité homme-femme… Parce qu’au Québec, c’est comme ça qu’on vit. Vraiment ?

Source: La loi qui renforce l’absurdité

This is what I thought to myself when I read the Byzantine explanatory table that the Montreal school service center presented this week to its parents’ committee who wanted to understand how Bill 94 would be applied to parents and students.

It will be remembered that this law passed in the wake of the Bedford School scandal does not only extend the ban on wearing a religious sign to members of school staff. It also extends to volunteer parents and anyone who regularly provides services to students.

In which cases is a religious sign allowed?

We therefore learn by consulting the explanatory table that a parent wearing a religious sign, that is to say in this case a veiled mother, could prepare a cake for a party at her children’s school, but could not serve said cake herself. She could participate in the organization of a school trip, but she could not accompany the children. She could attend an end-of-year show as a parent. But she couldn’t help out during the show as a volunteer. She could knit mittens for the class in the evening, but not participate in a knitting workshop at school during the day. Do you follow the logic?

The law raises its share of concerns on the ground. It seems in many ways inapplicable. How will school principals who already have their share of daily challenges handle this? Who will have the hate to announce to an enthusiastic and appreciated mother that because of her religious sign, she can continue to be present at school as a mother, but no longer as a volunteer? …

But what message do we send to children when we tell them that some educators, no matter how competent and professional they are, and some mothers, no matter how involved they are, are now infrequent by their sole presence with the children, without having committed any fault? So infrequent that a “sanitary cordon” should be erected between them and the school for fear that they contaminate the minds of children?

I’m sorry, but the main message I see in it is a racist and paternalistic message that has been normalized in recent years. A message that takes for granted that these women are unable to make their own choices and that we should therefore choose for them. Submit to us or return home, ladies! We do this for your good, to promote gender equality… Because in Quebec, that’s how we live. Really?

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The world today resembles my grandmother’s much more than my parents’

2026/05/04 Leave a comment

Disturbingly:

…Not that I was alone in this regard. Theodor Adorno decreed after the war that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”; 15 years later he made an exception for those who had lived through it. Nothing had changed in the culture he was describing. What changed was his understanding that witnesses possess a seemingly unimpeachable answer to most arguments, including his: “I was there.” That is an exercise not in logic or persuasion, but of authority – one of the few places it persists in modern culture. Even if that witness’s recollections are mistaken, even if they are influenced by preconceived ideas, we give that person special consideration. Rightly, and sometimes wrongly, a witness tells us things no one else can, and that no one else dares. And my grandmother was daring – only she regarded her daring as common sense. 

To read the news, or walk down to Yonge and Bloor (or Bathurst and Sheppard) on some Sunday afternoons in Toronto, is to watch embryonic versions of the types that made my grandmother’s life so full of history. Once again they are transgressing society’s limits, seeing what Canadians will tolerate and against whom we’ll tolerate it. In a way I did not foresee, the world today resembles my grandmother’s much more than my parents’. She would be the ideal interlocutor. But to the many questions I would ask her – for example, when precisely did you no longer find yourself at home in the country where you were born? – I have no sense of what she would pick out of her thoughts and memories as a response….

Now when I think back to my grandmother’s stories, it is not as an adult armoured with so-called experience and education. It is as the child of eight or nine, listening for the first time, at about the same age my grandmother was when she experienced this history herself. Both of us too young to make any sense of the experience. 

All the subsequent listening, recording, teaching, writing, remembering: They were, as I imagined, a battle, but now I see they were not against some notion of collective amnesia or falsification of history, but against helplessness of that first encounter.

While alive, my grandmother represented, among many other things to me, the idea that a person can contain and disseminate a witness’s idiosyncratic, fragile and irreplaceable knowledge. I believed this because she had done this herself, in her person. I thought I could take on some part of this. It took only a few years of her absence to show me that this was an illusion.

Source: The world today resembles my grandmother’s much more than my parents’

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust Tagged with

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