And the Rest of It

News that fits like print ... or something ...


 
Suckers!:

There’s a breaking point coming in Toronto and no one seems to have any idea what will happen when it does.

The city’s shelter system, overwhelmed by a two-year migrant surge, has gone past full and blown through bulging. It exists now somewhere east of burst beyond repair.

The city simply cannot take any more, Mayor John Tory said Tuesday, without significant help from the province and the federal government.

“We have exhausted our available sites, our resources and our personnel,” Tory said. “We need the other levels of government to step up and assist Toronto.”

All of that makes sense. More than 3,300 asylum seekers were spread across the Toronto shelter system as of June 24, according to city staff. The city’s existing shelter infrastructure, threadbare to begin with, was overwhelmed months ago. Today, asylum seekers are sleeping in press-ganged hotels and college dorms. And the latter is where the coming crisis lies.

Centennial and Humber colleges need their dorms back by Aug. 9. By then, the city expects 800 asylum seekers, including 200 children, will be living in those rooms. When that happens, Tory said, those 800 people will have nowhere to go.

“Relocating just this population of 800 would require the emergency closures of multiple community centres across the city and the cancellation of public programming in those centres,” he said. “And this is a step the city is not prepared to take.”

So what’s going to happen? Well, Tory wants Ottawa to step up with more cash and co-operation. He wants the federal government to identify and run its own shelter sites, and to spread asylum seekers out to other Ontario cities.

But the federal government doesn’t seem to share the city’s urgency. And if the city has a contingency plan in case the feds don’t come through, city staff aren’t letting anyone — in the public, or the agencies that deliver services — know about it.

 
John Tory can own this, just as Torontonians will.


 
Churches and other groups should stop wasting time mounting legal challenges they won't win. Instead, they should start raising money to fund their individual needs. Nothing could be clearer to the fascists in Ottawa than people who don't want or need them:

A batch of new and anticipated court challenges against the government’s Canada Summer Jobs abortion clause shows the legal fight over the controversial program is widening, and will likely last years.

The new challenges move beyond the right to advocate against abortion, and more squarely into arguments about religious freedom and compelled speech.

An evangelical Christian organization recently filed a case in Federal Court that marks the first time a religious group has entered the fray. On Tuesday, an Ontario concrete company filed a challenge that argues the attestation illegally forces businesses to take a stand on divisive moral and social issues.

Multiple sources, meanwhile, have told the National Post that more faith-based challenges are coming and the fight is expected to spread over the coming months to provincial courtrooms and human rights tribunals.

The attestation was added this year and required all Canada Summer Jobs applicants to declare that both the job and the organization’s “core mandate” respect reproductive rights (defined as access to abortion), as well as other rights and values underlying the Charter.

Following widespread outcry, the government issued a clarification that “core mandate” refers only to activities, not beliefs — but many organizations still refused to sign the attestation or wrote in their own interpretation. Government figures show 1,559 applications were eventually rejected over incomplete or modified attestations, though hundreds of religious groups were also approved for grants.

 
Why is this woman the science minister?:

(Sidebar: do we need a ministry of science?)

The theory is complicated, the equipment is expensive, the location is offshore and the payoff – if there is one – could be a decade away. But as federal Science Minister Kirsty Duncan prepared to announce $10-million in funding to help retool the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, she was happy to justify the commitment.

“It’s going to allow our researchers, our best and brightest, to work with their counterparts around the world,” Ms. Duncan told The Globe and Mail in an interview before Monday’s announcement. “This is asking the big questions about the universe.”

More technically, the funding will enable Canada to build and contribute new superconducting cryogenic units to the giant collider, where particles are smashed together at higher energies than anywhere on Earth. When the Canadian hardware is installed, it will help researchers manipulate the collider’s particle beams in new ways that will increase the number of collisions and therefore increase the flow of data from the international physics facility.

 
(Sidebar: this Kristy Duncan.)

That's nice, Kristy, but as neither you nor your bosses are scientifically-minded, this sounds like a puff piece that will end up nowhere, just like a feminism ambassador.


 
The Mali mission is a dangerous waste of time, money and will:

The German helicopter crews being relieved by Canada's peacekeeping mission in Mali say they have struggled with delays in getting approval for life-saving medical evacuations as pennywise UN officials wrangle over cost.

Some of those delays have lasted hours, they say — time that could mean the difference between life and death for injured peacekeepers in Mali's harsh environment and barren landscape.

**

As Canadian General Jonathan Vance said in a recent report, “This is a mission sponsored by the UN, and so think of it as a UN mission, not necessarily a peacekeeping mission.”

The report says,“But the reality has shifted. It is, as he puts it, “far messier.”‘

Even the CBC had to admit that it’s not a peacekeeping mission, though they just ‘had’ to throw in a climate change reference:

“The mission in Mali will not be about two once-warring states asking for UN help to maintain fragile peace. This is about a teetering country besieged in parts by extremists who are not loosening their grip and battling everything from climate change to poverty.”

Clearly, it’s not a peacekeeping mission.

  
Twenty-three years after the UN let his fellow Rwandans be murdered, a Rwandan man meets the Canadian soldier who saved his life:

Sammy Sampson, a former Canadian soldier who served in Rwanda, and Sammy Tuyishime, a 28-year-old genocide survivor, met yesterday for the first time in 23 years.

Sampson was deployed in Rwanda in 1994 when he met Tuyishime, then only four years old, and helped get him into an orphanage.

The two quickly formed a bond, and the boy — whose name at the time was unknown— was renamed "Sammy" after the soldier he so admired.

But when Canada's mission in Rwanda ended in 1995, Sampson was forced to leave him behind.

For more than two decades, Sampson feared the worst. Violence had flared up again after their departure, and he didn't know what had happened to the orphanage or its inhabitants.

Then, early this year, the two finally reconnected over social media, and made plans to meet in person.

Tie that kangaroo down, sport!:

A women’s soccer match in Canberra, Australia, had a surprise visitor on Sunday afternoon — and that visitor didn’t have any intention of leaving the field.

An eastern gray kangaroo found its way into a soccer stadium around halftime of the Canberra Football Club’s match against Belconnen United in the nation’s capital, and was hanging out between the stands and the field.

Then, the marsupial decided it wanted to be part of the action and bounded his way onto the field, delaying the match for more than a half hour.