MPs eye support for expat voters as PROC study on special ballot challenges wraps

2026/01/29 Leave a comment

Working on an analysis of these voters by riding, province and country of residence. Unfortunately, but also understandably, we don’t have party breakdowns of expat votes given confidentiality concerns. Committee report not released yet. Stay tuned:

A House committee study on challenges related to special ballot voting—particularly the experiences of expat voters—is coming to a close, and Liberal MPArielle Kayabaga says she has her sights on what more the foreign affairs department can do to help Canadians abroad cast their votes after hearing that some are paying out of pocket to ensure their ballots are counted.

“One of things that we’re looking to see is how Global Affairs Canada can partner with Canadians that live abroad to stay engaged … especially when there’s an election, where people can get up-to-date information through the already existing infrastructures that we have as services for Canadians abroad,” Kayabaga (London West, Ont.) told The Hill Times.

“The goal here is to really figure out ways to make it easy for Canadians to participate electorally and do their civic duty,” whether at home or abroad, Kayabaga said. “We have put forward helpful recommendations that will increase access and improve the processes in which Canadians vote, especially those who are voting with a special ballot.”

The Procedure and House Affairs Committee (PROC) launched its study on special ballot voting on Nov. 6, 2025, and heard from 13 witnesses over the course of four meetings.

Last spring’s election saw the highest number of Canadians yet cast their votes by special ballot, use of which has more than doubled over the last decade. But it also saw some challenges, with multiple instances of domestically cast special ballots mistakenly left out of official vote counts, leading Elections Canada to launch an internal review. The agency published its resulting report, outlining three phases of changes it’s pursuing, on Dec. 15, 2025.

…Timothy Veale, director of Grits Abroad, and Daniel Scuka, a Canadian currently living in Germany, were the first to testify before PROC, and spoke to the barriers facing expat voters. Veale said he sees “three main barriers” overall: technical, as voting is done by snail mail, which is made more challenging during short, snap campaigns; structural, as international voters “have no direct representation in Parliament,” leaving many, “in effect, disenfranchised,” whereas some countries, like France, have “dedicated overseas MPs”; and political, in terms of a lack of will to effect change. He noted other diasporas, including French expats, “outvoteus by a wide margin.”

That disconnect is something Scuka, who works for the European Space Agency, also touched on, saying “few, if any, candidates commit time or resources” to engage international voters. Scuka supported Veale’s argument for the creation of dedicated MPs to represent overseas voters, and also noted the disconnect created by how votes are counted, noting his last address in Canadawas in Ottawa, a place he only lived for two years, and to which he feels little connection.

Multiple witnesses highlighted the onus put on international voters to ensure their votes are returned on time in the current mail-in system. Scuka said it “took several weeks” after the 2025 campaign began for his ballot to arrive, and he’s previously paid the equivalent of $60 to ensure it made it back in time. Both Veale and Scuka said they’re unsure whether their ballots were ultimately even counted last year.

Another witness, Lucia Kovacikova, a Canadian expert on expat voting currently teach ing in Wisconsin, said she, too, received her ballot “quite late inthe process” last election, and paid $120 to use a private carrier to ensure it got counted.

Kayabaga said reports of expats incurring fees in trying to vote are an example of something she thinks the committee can “look at and figure out ways to improve.”

Scuka said Elections Canada should automatically identify international voters as part of the list of electors it shares with candidates, and urged the committee to consider enabling “Elections Canada to offer any mix of in-person voting or ballot drop-off at consulates or embassies, ballot return via tracked courier envelopes that are potentially prepaid, and the issuance of ballots and returned material via a digital platform,” which would enable voters abroad to “track the status of their ballots.”

Per the Canada Elections Act, expats are allowed to drop-off sealed ballot envelopes at Canadian embassies, high commissions, or consulates, “a Canadian Forces base or to any place that the Chief Electoral Officer may designate.”It does not, however, currently provide for in-person voting.

As part of her remarks, Dalhousie University professor Lori Turnbull said she’d welcome “giving more thought to electronic voting” as an option for all Canadians, including expats—an idea Kovacikova backed. Turnbull also suggested Elections Canada could likely do more to engage voters abroad “well in advance” of an election.

Among the witness list were a number of experts on the voting experiences of other diasporas.

Appearing on Nov. 25, 2025, Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault highlighted that while there was comparative “high-interest” among international voters last election, “more than half” registered after writs were issued. Data shows the later people register, the lower the return rate, he said.

Global Affairs Canada’s Kati Csaba spoke to the support her department offers—support that’s impeded, though, by the fact “many Canadians living abroad aren’t in contact” with GAC. GAC’s current role, she said, “is simply to provide logistical support through Canada’s network of diplomatic missionsabroad,” including by answering “general questions” about voting (“more complex inquiries” are directed to Elections Canada), emailing or faxing applications to register on behalf of expats who need help, posting information on their website, and sharing relevant updates on social media.Voters can also use missions as their mailing address in receiving special ballots, or to drop off completed ballots, she noted.

Conservative MP Michael Cooper (St. Albert–Sturgeon River,Alta.) said following the study he overall feels assured that “the special ballot voting process is working.” “There may be some areas for some minor changes … with respect to seeing that special ballot kits are delivered in a timely manner for Canadians living abroad,” he said, noting as well that he still has some questions over how Elections Canada verifies that ballots it mails overseas are received by eligible voters. “That’s something that I think warrants some further examination.”

On the idea of adding MPs to represent international electors, Cooper was not convinced, and said he’s “not heard any real appetite for” such a change…

Source: MPs eye support for expat voters as PROC study on special ballot challenges wraps

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StatsCan – Fertility and intentions: Socioeconomic factors

2026/01/28 Leave a comment

Interesting differences among visible minority groups, born in Canada and immigrants, religious non-religious:

In Canada, women’s family trajectories have seen major changes in recent decades. Increased educational levels, greater participation in the labour market, changing social norms and the widespread use of contraception have contributed to diversifying life paths, notably in terms of childbearing.

This reality is directly related to the sharp decline in fertility observed in Canada. In 2024, Canada became part of the group of countries with “ultra-low fertility,” with a total fertility rate of 1.25 children per woman. This strong decline in fertility is due not only to a decreased birth rate, but also to an increase in the number of women who do not have children either by choice, by circumstance or because they are delaying motherhood. In fact, the average age of mothers at the birth of their first child has been increasing in Canada for decades. In 2024, it reached an all-time high of 31.8 years. Although the decline in fertility is partly due to women delaying having children, the proportion of women aged 50 years and older with no children has also been increasing over a period of more than 30 years, from 14.1% in 1990 to 17.4% in 2022.

In a context where having children is being increasingly delayed, understanding the fertility intentions of women without children who are still of reproductive age is essential because having children as planned can affect the well-being and life satisfaction of individuals and families. To address these issues, the 2024 Survey on Family Transitions (SFT) was designed to explore the experiences of families in Canada over time by examining how individuals and families change throughout various life stages. The results can be used to develop programs and policies to improve the well-being of children and families.

Using these data, this release first examines the proportion of Canadian women of childbearing age (i.e., women aged 20 to 49 years without any biological or adopted children) and then considers their fertility intentions. The release highlights sociodemographic characteristics associated with not having children and with fertility intentions, such as age group, education level, employment status, marital status, immigrant status and population group. It aims to increase understanding of current trends and shed light on issues related to the diversity of women’s parental trajectories in a low-fertility context.

Source: Fertility and intentions: Socioeconomic factors

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Jewish group calls on Ottawa to launch commission on antisemitism

2026/01/27 2 Comments

Not convinced that having separate envoys for antisemitism and islamophobia improves understanding and integration. Former envoy Deborah Lyons was candid about her experience and frustrations:

Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith is calling on Ottawa to launch a commission on antisemitism and appoint someone to the envoy role that has been left vacant since July.

The group is holding a midday press conference on Parliament Hill today, a day before the annual remembrance ceremony at the National Holocaust Monument.

It’s asking Ottawa to fill the role of special envoy for combating antisemitism that has been vacant since Deborah Lyons resigned in July, three months before her term was set to expire….

Source: Jewish group calls on Ottawa to launch commission on antisemitism

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“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”

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“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”

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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’

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    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

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    Robson: Canada’s prevention gap grows wider the more complacent we become

    2026/01/21 2 Comments

    Thorny lines to draw and not easy to implement but needed given the nature of some of the protests and protestors:

    …Diaspora dynamics, therefore, require institutional maturity. The challenge is not to cast suspicion on whole communities. It is to distinguish legitimate protest from intimidation, and political grievance from early-stage radicalization cues—especially when imported conflicts are weaponized inside Canadian information spaces.

    Prevention doctrine has to be able to say, without flinching, that a small minority within some diaspora and newcomer populations—including naturalized Canadians—carry or adopt illiberal and extremist ideologies, and that those ideologies can express themselves as targeted hatred toward Jews. Treating that as an institutional design problem—triage rules, evidence standards, and earlier handoffs—avoids both naïveté and collective blame.

    It also means using international tools without outsourcing Canadian standards. Many subjects who could fall within the scope of a promotion offence did not begin their political trajectory in Canada. Some may have prior histories of supporting extremist organizations, being investigated abroad, or coordinating across jurisdictions.

    Canada already has mechanisms to seek corroborating information while preserving due process through the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act. The aim is not to “import” foreign decisions. It is to avoid assessing a suspect’s online activity here as if it exists in isolation—especially when trusted partners can corroborate a pattern of propaganda production or cross-border coordination that should inform Canadian risk assessments for bail, peace bonds, and sentencing.

    So what does “prevention” mean when radicalization cycles move faster than case-prioritization and reassessment? Canada has conceptual building blocks: the RCMP explicitly acknowledges the linkage between hate crime and violent extremism and stresses prevention alongside enforcement in its hate-crime overview. The gap is operationalization—multilingual capability, faster evidence capture, clearer handoff triggers, and disruption that treats a heightened hate environment as a security condition, not a communications problem.

    Canada cannot prevent every attack. But it can choose whether to keep treating antisemitic extremism as a late-stage file—something we condemn after it becomes violence. If we continue to manage weak signals as “not urgent,” we will eventually face the question other democracies face after tragedy: What did we notice early, and why did we decide it was not urgent enough?

    Daniel Robson is a Canadian independent journalist specializing in digital extremism, national security, and counterterrorism.

    Source: Canada’s prevention gap grows wider the more complacent we become

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    Supreme Court weighs road safety against racial profiling in ‘driving while Black’ case

    2026/01/20 Leave a comment

    To watch:

    …Now, in a two-day hearing starting Monday, the Supreme Court of Canada will hear this landmark equality and police powers case – and revisit a long-ago precedent.

    Quebec and several provinces, alongside lawyers for the federal government, will try to convince judges of the Supreme Court to overturn the rulings of the lower courts and reaffirm precedent. 

    Governments insist it is a matter of essential road safety.

    Mr. Luamba and an array of groups want the top court to strike down precedent and recognize that giving police such powers enables racism. They are calling on the Supreme Court to ban police from random stops of drivers throughout Canada.

    “There isn’t anything random about these suspicion-less stops,” said Harini Sivalingam, director of the equality program of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which, with Mr. Luamba and the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers, is a respondent at the Supreme Court.

    “We’re not saying all police officers are biased,” said Ms. Sivalingam. “But there’s a systemic bias – and it’s well-documented.” 

    In 1990, the Supreme Court ruled – in a 5-4 decision – that cops were allowed to randomly stop drivers, declaring “statistics relating to the carnage on the highways substantiate a pressing and substantial concern.”…

    Source: Supreme Court weighs road safety against racial profiling in ‘driving while Black’ case

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    Financialized landlords disproportionately apply to evict in Black neighbourhoods, study finds

    2026/01/19 2 Comments

    Good data-based study:

    Tenants of financialized landlords in high-income, majority-Black Toronto neighbourhoods faced 33 eviction applications per 100 households from 2016 to 2019 — a rate five times higher than the city average for that landlords group of 5.6 per 100 households, a new study has found. 

    “Financialized landlords” in the study refers to asset managers, real estate investment trusts, family conglomerates and “financialized property managers” focused on maximizing the value of portfolio assets for investors. 

    The report conducted by researchers at Toronto Metropolitan University, funded in part by the Canadian government and published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, draws from more than 100,000 formal eviction filings for purpose-built rental apartments in Toronto from 2016 through 2021.

    It found renters in Black-majority neighbourhoods experience “disproportionately high rates of housing instability and eviction filings by financialized landlords” and argues “profit-driven motives systematically undermine Black lives and spaces.”

    From 2016 to 2019, eviction rates in Black-majority areas, “regardless of income level, were significantly higher than in other racial/ethnocultural groups, with few exceptions.”

    The eviction-application rate in high-income, majority-Black neighbourhoods was more than double the rate of 14 per cent in low-income, majority-Black neighbourhoods from 2016 to 2019, the report found.

    The study categorized neighbourhoods as “low-income” or “high-income” depending on whether the areas had median renter household after-tax incomes above or below the Toronto renter median for the census year ($42,000 for 2016 and $57,600 for 2021).

    Lead researcher Nemoy Lewis, an assistant professor at TMU’s School of Urban and Regional Planning, said this finding challenges common assumptions about evictions….

    Source: Financialized landlords disproportionately apply to evict in Black neighbourhoods, study finds

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