Posts Tagged ‘rights’

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When Canada negotiates with Donald Trump’s America, it’s not just trade that’s at stake. It’s our sovereignty

Wednesday, May 6th, 2026

… CUSMA… does not just regulate trade. It restricts what Parliament can legislate, what regulators can require and what courts can enforce… Canada needs to govern its own digital economy. We need sovereignty over data, accountability for algorithms, and protection of critical digital infrastructure… We have just under sixty days until we move dangerously close to becoming the fifty-first state. We can still reverse course, but only if we act before the review’s July 1 Canada Day deadline.

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Coercion isn’t care, and new laws that enforce treatment and confinement are dangerous

Monday, April 27th, 2026

Coercion is articulated as care and involuntary treatment is presented not as a restriction of liberty but as a necessary response to incapacity and risk. This appeal to compassion functions as a unifying political language, enabling cross-partisan support despite differing ideological stances.  By portraying these policies as pragmatic, humane and long overdue, policymakers limit opposition. They also reconfigure the boundaries of acceptable state intervention…

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What Pierre Poilievre Doesn’t Get About His Economic Hero

Monday, April 27th, 2026

Poilievre presents justice — fairness, poverty reduction, the well-being of those left behind — as something that markets produce incidentally when they are left alone. The claim is that free markets lifted billions out of poverty; therefore the path forward is more free markets, fewer regulations, lower taxes, more oil and gas. But this framing depends on a separation of efficiency and justice that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

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Doug Ford’s push for secrecy is putting the health of Ontarians at risk

Monday, April 13th, 2026

It’s Ontarians who bear the consequences when governments grant themselves the power to be unaccountable. It’s Ontarians who endure longer ER and surgical wait times. It’s Ontarians who are left wondering where their tax dollars have gone — as leaders secretly spend public funds… Here’s what Ontario should be doing: Legislate bans on FOI carve-outs so politicians cannot simply write themselves out of oversight… Secrecy breaks the basic social contract — not only of health care, but of democracy itself.

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The Trump era demands we rethink Canada’s constitutional ‘nuclear option’

Tuesday, March 31st, 2026

… everything that is happening in the United States, more or less, could happen here in a perfectly constitutional manner,” …  thanks to the notwithstanding clause… The question is not whether Section 33 can be used, however, but when and how… In just the past six years, however, various governments have used it nine times… voters have proved generally disinclined to punish political parties who use and abuse the notwithstanding clause.

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Privacy commissioner challenges Doug Ford’s reasons for changing access-to-information rules

Friday, March 27th, 2026

Information and privacy commissioner Patricia Kosseim has filed a six-point rebuttal to Premier Doug Ford’s “various” reasons for exempting himself, his cabinet ministers and political aides from access-to-information laws… in a response to Ford’s suggestion that only the media and opposition parties use the laws, the commission said that in the 2024 FOI requests, “more than 95 per cent were submitted by “individuals, businesses, researchers, and community organizations.”

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Carney government replacing Islamophobia and antisemitism envoys with advisory council

Wednesday, February 4th, 2026

The council on “Rights, Equality and Inclusion” will be made up of Canadian academics, experts and community leaders “with a mission to foster social cohesion, rally Canadians around shared identity, combat racism and hate in all their forms, and help guide the efforts of the Government of Canada… “Disagreement is legitimate, harmful or abusive conduct, including disinformation, is not.”

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Reducing Ontario health care waits: Six solutions avoiding privatization pitfalls

Friday, January 9th, 2026

Canada has long been among the worst performers on specialist wait times in high income countries… Every dollar Ontario shifts to private medicine is a dollar not spent on public health-care… Four of these six fixes leverage technology Ontario already owns. Each would reduce misery, lower wait times and save lives. Refusing to act isn’t caution — it’s complicity. Wait times aren’t a matter of shortage, they’re a policy choice

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Ontario judge grants international medical school grads a temporary lifeline

Thursday, December 4th, 2025

An Ontario judge has given a temporary lifeline to international medical school graduates who would have been excluded from qualifying for the first round of matching for medical school residency placements under the province’s controversial new rule… More than 92 per cent of the spots are filled in the first iteration of the matching…

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It’s time to admit our Charter rights are under attack

Tuesday, November 4th, 2025

Too many premiers are testing citizens’ willingness to accept gross power grabs, the targeting of vulnerable groups for political purposes, the weakening of groups they dislike, by invoking the notwithstanding clause… Are they seeking to normalize its use? To normalize breaches of rights? … “What we’re seeing is an erosion of that very, very basic principle of human rights as a way to structure relations in society, and provide a check on government power”

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