James C. McCrae: A Separate Health Department is More Home-grown Apartheid

A recent Winnipeg Free Press article – Citizens panel recommends Indigenous health department – by Katie May reports that a panel of thirty “randomly selected volunteers” is recommending a “dedicated Indigenous health department” in Manitoba, as an “undisputed priority”.

A health department exclusively for Indigenous people may not, however, be an undisputed priority of most Manitobans. Manitoba already has an Indigenous Affairs Secretariat. The very first principle objective of the Secretariat is: “influencing the development and delivery of policies, programs and services that help create safe, healthy and secure environments for Indigenous people.”

Jeffrey A. Tucker: How Coercion Compromised the Vaccine

The fight over the COVID vaccines has become an epic struggle. It’s not just about who should get the shot and how many shots. The fight ever more centers on issues of effectiveness and safety of the product itself.

One group is convinced they are very dangerous for many people. The other side says that the people who say this are crazy, ideologically motivated, and spreading misinformation. Truth is, they say, these vaccines saved a million lives, are perfectly safe, and everyone should accept them, by force if necessary, including a booster and a fourth dose.

Karen Selick: GIGO Applies to Legal Opinions Too

Garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is an expression often used in the computer world, but it can also apply to the legal world.

Take, for example, the jaw-dropping legal opinion expressed by David Beatty, professor emeritus of the University of Toronto Law School, when he wrote in last week’s Globe and Mail that vaccine mandates “are justified as a matter of community self-defence and justice.”

Professor Beatty has apparently swallowed an enormous dollop of intellectual garbage, so it’s not surprising that his output is a tad rotten.

The first of his defective premises is that “COVID-19 is a serial killer” that “has taken the lives of more than five million people.” He never cites the source of his data, so one can’t help wondering whether he is completely ignorant of the chicanery that has been exposed behind statistics such as this.

Rodney Clifton: A Meaningful Job is the Only Way Forward for First Nations People

There is little doubt that the condition of Indigenous people is desperate in Canada, especially for those living in the 600 or so small isolated First Nations communities.

Most Canadians know some facts about the quality of lives of the people in these communities, but let’s refresh our minds with a few statistics. 

First Nations have the highest rates of incarceration, homelessness, poverty, and welfare dependency. They also have the highest rates of infant mortality, suicides, and the lowest life expectancy of any racial or ethnic group in Canada. As well, reserve communities have the highest rates of sexual abuse, single motherhood, and alcohol and drug abuse.1  

Michael Zwaagstra: How Schools can Close the Gap

Picture a school in an underprivileged part of north London, England.

One-third of nearby families live in poverty, a significant percentage are visible minorities, and the neighbourhood crime rate is twice the national average. What kind of academic results would you expect from this school?

If you expected this school to score below average, think again. Michaela Community School is one of the top-performing schools in the United Kingdom. In fact, students at Michaela scored substantially higher than the national average.

With such impressive results, this school is definitely worth a closer look.

Brian Giesbrecht: More Countries are Quietly Following Sweden

Most countries that adopted the “lockdown” model are still in the thick of the pandemic. Typically, there is an easing of rules when infection rates decrease, but when rules are relaxed and infection rates naturally rise, authorities clamp down again. Masks go off – then on again. Meanwhile, the horrendous cost of paying furloughed workers and closed businesses is bankrupting lockdown countries, and taking lives. And there is no end in sight.

Sweden found a better way.

Lee Harding: Muslim Brotherhood Needs Examination

In July, the government of France did what no western government had done before. Following eight months of investigation into the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the Senate issued a 244-page report that named MB the top Islamist enemy. The report made 44 recommendations, including banning MB leaders from France and ending international agreements that trained and imported imams. It’s time for Canada to make its own examination.

Canadian security expert Tom Quiggin has wanted Canada to pay heed to the Muslim Brotherhood since at least 2014. Back then, he penned a 202-page report that demonstrated how MB worked subversively through front organizations to advance ideals inconsistent with western values and send money to terrorist organizations.

Brian Giesbrecht: Systemic Racism

The current Prime Minister recently publicly contradicted RCMP Commissioner, Brenda Lucki, for saying there is no systemic racism within the RCMP. Actually, Lucki said she didn’t know what “systemic racism” is.

In her words, “I have to admit, I really struggle with the term ‘systemic racism’. I have heard about five or ten definitions on TV. I think that if systemic racism is entrenched in our police and our procedures we don’t have systemic racism”.

Gerry Bowler: Canada is Systemically Racist – but not in the way you think

Words are important tools in human interaction and, used in certain ways, they become weapons. Politics these days is the art of twisting language to do harm to your enemies.

Let us examine how certain words and phrases have lost their original meanings and have become useful clubs with which to thrash healthy heterosexual males, white people, and folks of all colours who are insufficiently enthusiastic about the revolution.

Take “race” for a start. This word originated in the idea that physical characteristics such as skin colour and skull shape could be used to subcategorize the human species; it’s an idea as least as old as civilization. 

Peter Holle: A Canadian Perspective - Rogernomics in 2020

Many Winnipeggers are disappointed that Exchange District restaurant Hermano’s is closing. It is just one of thousands of businesses which will not survive the government’s drastically overwrought and badly informed decision to shut down the economy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

History will show how wildly inaccurate computer models grossly exaggerated fatality projections. Unfortunately, too many folks still think holding the economy underwater will end the virus’s progression. Sadly, it is just delaying the virus; we can expect Covid to return after the summer.

But hold the panic. A May 21 National Post commentary by 4 infectious disease doctors discussed their study which showed that in Canada, the individual rate of death from COVID-19 for people under 65 years of age is just six per million people, or 0.0006 percent. This is roughly equivalent to the risk of dying from a motor vehicle accident within the same time period.

Brian Giesbrecht: The only thing we have to fear is fear Itself

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Those were the famous words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, spoken at his first inauguration on March 4, 1933, at the height of the Great Depression.

Unemployment had hit 25 percent and there was panic in the land. Roosevelt was the epitome of calm and reassurance. He told the American people truthfully that they must not give in to “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” Roosevelt was speaking to a people demoralized and thoroughly spooked by a crushing depression and a loss of confidence in the institutions that had seemed unassailable only a short time before.

The rest, as they say, “is history.” Although difficult years lay ahead, Roosevelt proved to be exactly the president the American people needed, and he led them out of that very deep and dark place.

Rodney Clifton: An Uprising in Canada

Ten years ago, Douglas Bland, a retired lieutenant-colonel from the Canadian Forces and the Chair of Defense Studies at Queen’s University, wrote Uprising: A Novel. 

In this 500-page work of “fiction,” Bland outlines how militant Indigenous warriors and their allies could, in the tradition of Louis Riel, hold Canada up for ransom, stopping rail traffic, blocking highways, disrupting government offices, and even bombing hydro towers north of Winnipeg.

Marco Navarro-Genie: Want to Help Harry and Meghan? Leave Them Be.

Personal autonomy and the exercise of individual conscience are cornerstones of western civilization. We expect mature individuals to accept that personal autonomy includes embracing the consequences of independent decisions. We have entrenched these values in the canon, from Magna Carta (1215) to Canada’s Constitution Act (1982). 

So, when Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, announced they no longer wish to have official royal duties, our generous inclination is to support their desire for greater autonomy. 

Plenty of ink is being dedicated to the Sussexes, but little has focused on an important consequence of their decision: they have renounced their public duty. 

Brian Giesbrecht: Gender self-identification

The transgender movement advances the cause of a marginalized minority. However, the recent decision by a confused Vancouver City Council to cancel funding for a rape crisis centre, that quite rightly allows only women at its facility, is a sign that the movement has gone too far.

Gender dysphoria is a psychiatric disorder involving an anatomical male who believes that he is actually a female in a man’s body (reverse for women). While the condition affects only about 1/10 of 1% of the population, the condition has received considerable attention in recent years — finding its way into legislation and, even, corporate and institutional policy.

Brian Giesbrecht: Reforming Canada’s Failing Health Care System

Most Canadians think that our healthcare system is a national treasure. One much superior to the system to the south where poor people often don’t get the treatments they need, and the costs can be catastrophic. Instead of focusing on how Canada’s health care system compares to America’s, we should be looking at European systems that offer both better health outcomes and cost effectiveness. 

We have modern hospitals, competent doctors and nurses, and once you are in the system, the care given is usually first class. However, if you are on one of the many long medical waiting lists, then our system fails. You can wait a year or more to see certain specialists. And, if you are held waiting well over a year for a hip or knee transplant – or for a life-saving heart or cancer treatment – our Canadian system is far from first class.

James C. McCrae: Acts of War? Or War Crimes?

The revision of history continues. The City of New Westminster has taken down the statue of British Columbia’s first chief justice, Matthew Begbie. According to the Vancouver Sun, the statue was “a symbol of the colonial era and a grave injustice.” 

Prior to becoming B.C.’s first chief justice, Matthew Begbie was the colonial British judge who presided at the murder trial of six Tsilhqot’in (Chilcotin) Chiefs.

Let’s try to understand this. The six chiefs were hanged in the colony of British Columbia, in 1864, three years before Confederation and seven years before British Columbia became part of Canada. The chiefs had been convicted of murder. British Columbia being British, not Canadian, they were tried and hanged under British law. They had slaughtered 19 innocent civilians, some of whom who were involved in the building of a wagon road, a project that had been underway for two years.

Fergus Hodgson: Canadians Abandon Ownership Thanks to Mortgage Restrictions

An uproar is brewing over real estate in Canada, fueled by a misguided attempt to protect willing homebuyers from themselves. Owners see prices declining, while prospective first-time owners find themselves locked out by mandated stress tests.

As sought by lenders and industry experts, the federal regulator should ease stress-test requirements—if not eliminate them altogether—before they cause further harm and curtail construction and broader economic activity.

Brian Giesbrecht: UNDRIP won’t help marginalized aboriginals

Bill C-262, the proposed legislation requiring Canadian laws to meet an undefined measure of compliance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Aboriginal Peoples (UNDRIP) is being held up by Conservative senators.

Tax paying Canadians should be thankful.

Advocates of the Bill say that the legislation will create no additional legal impediments for Canada, but it will significantly improve the lives of poor and marginalized Indigenous people.

Frances Widdowson: The Threat to Academic Freedom, Freedom of Inquiry and Academic Standards

In September 2018, the Office of Academic Indigenization provided Mount Royal University (MRU) faculty with a document entitled “Indigenizing Mount Royal’s Curricula: A Call For Engagement”. 

This document affirmed MRU’s “commit[ment] to indigenizing its curricula to ensure that all students graduate with a basic understanding of Indigenous content informed by Indigenous perspectives”, and encouraged faculty to transform their courses on this basis. These arguments for “curricula indigenization”, however, have not been subjected to any critical analysis. In fact, “Indigenizing Mount Royal’s Curricula” contains serious flaws and constitutes an unprecedented threat to academic freedom, freedom of inquiry and academic standards at MRU.

Brian Giesbrecht: Is it Okay to Be White?

Last Hallowe’en night a costumed person was seen tacking up posters at the University of Manitoba. The posters said “It’s Okay To Be White”. This strange occurrence was uniformly denounced by the university administration and various student associations who claimed that it was the organized work of white supremacists. 

The administrators also claimed that these racists had deliberately targeted an Indigenous students’ organization by sending copies of the posters to their office. In fact, so seriously has the university administration taken this incident that they called in the police to conduct an investigation into a possible hate crime. If the administration’s claims are true, and this was the organized work of racists or white supremacists the administrators’ actions make sense.