Last July 25, just 12 days after Richard Bilkszto’s tragic suicide, education minister Stephen Lecce announced a review of the circumstances leading to his death.
Calling the allegations raised in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) principal’s $750,000 statement of claim against the board “serious and disturbing,” Lecce said he wanted to ensure what happened to Bilkzsto in a series of DEI workshops led by Kike Ojo-Thompson never happened again.
In 2016, the Law Society of Ontario published a report, “Challenges Facing Racialized Licensees: Best Practices memorandum,” setting out LSO expectations of members in combatting alleged “systemic racism” in the profession.
Henceforth, every licensee would be required “to adopt and to abide by a statement of principles acknowledging their obligation to promote equality, diversity and inclusion generally, and in their behaviour towards colleagues, employees, clients and the public.” The LSO also demanded demonstration of “a personal valuing” of these principles.
As diversity, equity, and inclusion offices proliferate in academic and professional spaces, Jews, always the miner’s canary, now have to worry about whether human rights codes will be weaponized against them.
In a recent example, an Ontario-based Jewish social worker was publicly labeled “racist” and “anti-Arab” for challenging her colleague’s assertion that Zionism is a “genocidal ideology.” This incident is reminiscent of another: several years ago, a Toronto social work student was denied an internship at a mainstream Jewish organization that her fieldwork coordinator deemed “anti-Palestinian.” It would seem the bar is rather low when it comes to being labeled “anti-Arab” or ”anti-Palestinian.” Being Jewish may be the only prerequisite!
Restrictions listed on recent postings for Canada Research Chair positions have surprised some people. It’s not that someone with a biology degree might be barred from applying to teach South American history, or that an engineer might not be eligible for a position teaching English literature, but rather that skin colour and gender identity have been limiting factors.
Think the only problem you have with the government interfering in your life is politicians constantly telling you what to believe and how to raise your children according to the woke talking points of the hour?
The rot runs deeper than that, into the institutions that are supposed to be apolitical and operate at what should at least be arm’s-length from their political masters.
Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital is now receiving increased police protection following a pro-Palestinian protest held outside its doors on Feb. 12. It was reported that protesters blocked access—an offence under the Criminal Code—and chanted in support of the terrorist group Hamas.
Organizers of the protest have denied that Mount Sinai was targeted because of its links to Toronto’s Jewish community (it was founded by the city’s Jews when Jewish doctors were facing public discrimination). However, that claim has been met with skepticism.
The U.S. Navy approved more than $750,000 for a project that, while purporting to “equitably” increase the number of students interested in serving in the Navy’s STEM fields, prioritized recruiting underrepresented minority students, documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show.
The Lone Star State takes aim at diversity programs at public universities, with varying success.
States across the country are cracking down on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in higher education. But even as some legislatures successfully ban DEI on public campuses, some schools have tried to skirt the rules.
Texas, for example, banned DEI offices and functions at public universities in 2023. To ensure compliance, the state requires public universities to submit annual reports to the legislature and makes similar demands of each school’s governing board. Colleges or universities defying the ban must either correct their violations or face financial penalties.
A critical examination of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training programs suggests they often make racism in the workplace worse, according to a report by David Haskell, an associate professor of digital media and journalism at Wilfrid Laurier University.
As a veteran who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, I must join the criticism of ludicrous, unsafe and unfair policies
The Army has had many mottos, including most recently: “Be the best” and “Serve your King and country!” But these fundamental sentiments are increasingly under attack from woke targets that seek to degrade our military, ultimately denigrating our combat effectiveness.
Like every army ever, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) have always been predominantly male. And, as a country with a majority of the population being of European descent, its members have been predominantly white. These facts should be uncontroversial.
But unlike every army ever, the CAF is using the identities of its historic membership to promote an ethos of guilt and shame within the institution. This isn’t fixing the present recruitment crisis and it’s doubtful that it ever will — but this approach has the firm support of scholarly military voices, the latest example coming to us from Paul Mitchell, a defence studies professor at the Canadian Forces College.
Politicians SAY a lot of things; some they mean, some they don’t.
So you should always look at what they do and how they spend the money they take from citizens. And, as importantly, whose pockets that money ends up in. The latter is even more important than the former.
A Hamilton newspaper recently published three disturbing photographs of women who had been assaulted. One was a picture of bruises across a woman’s thigh. Another was a close-up of the face of a woman who had been heavily bruised around an eye socket. The third was another close-up of an eye, this one a gash just beside a woman’s eye socket.
They looked like police evidence used for a domestic assault case. They weren’t. They were pictures of Hamilton educators highlighting the very real harms they had suffered at the hands of their students.
Amid the febrile ideological skirmishes that have begun to break out across Canadian university campuses, the impartial observer would quickly conclude that dark clouds are gathering over our modern society when they notice academic scientists contemplating ushering such counter-rational notions as “Indigenous science” into their classrooms. The thought that a new generation of physicians in Canada might qualify in the profession believing the ancestral knowledge and value systems of the Inuit and Métis should play as much a role in your diagnosis as an MRI scan seems at once risible and regressive to most Canadians. But, if you trace that doomsaying prediction back to today’s university quadrangles, you soon realize that it is merely a logical consequence of what we ungovernable, outspoken academics are now planning to teach.
Months before the eruption of the Israel-Hamas war ramped up ethnic and religious tensions in many Canadian communities, a government task force rejected requests to recognize Muslim and Jewish public servants as separate groups facing systemic workplace barriers, CBC News has learned.
Muslim and Jewish public servants asked to be designated as employment equity groups under the Employment Equity Act nearly two years ago in submissions to the task force, set up by Employment and Social Development Canada.
Well the Task Force did the right thing. Rare for government nowadays with anti-White racism all the rage.
