Canada's spy agency accused of 'nabbing British children and trafficking them' to Islamic State

Ottawa is accused of covering up its handling of a double agent who smuggled British teenagers into Islamic State territory to join the terror group while he was spying for Canada.


An undated file photo of Shamima Begum.

Adrian Humphreys - Yesterday 

National Post

Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, did not deny Ottawa’s work with an operative smuggling Western children to a dangerous battlefield, as outlined in a new book, saying that Canada’s spy agency must “be flexible and be creative” in the war against terrorists.

A book about Western intelligence agencies says that while police in Britain were searching for three schoolgirls who left their homes in London in 2015, Canadian intelligence and diplomatic officials withheld information about where they were and how they got there.

Canada then worked with British authorities to cover up its role, according to allegations on this long-percolating controversy in The Secret History of the Five Eyes by Richard Kerbaj, who was the security beat reporter for Britain’s Sunday Times from 2010 to 2020.

Canada was part of the military coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq at the time.

The book’s details are igniting alarming headlines internationally.

The information is particularly controversial in Britain because one of those smuggled teens was Shamima Begum, then 15, who remains in a detention camp in Syria fighting to return to Britain after her British citizenship was stripped from her because of her support for IS.

Part of Begum’s argument for returning is that she is a victim of human trafficking.

Tasnime Akunjee, Begum’s lawyer, told National Post that Canada’s actions facilitated human trafficking of minors.

“They have effectively been nabbing British children and trafficking them across the Syrian border for delivery to ISIS all in the name of intelligence gathering,” Akunjee said.

“Britain has lauded its efforts to stop ISIS and the grooming of our children by spending millions of pounds on the Prevent program and online monitoring. However, at the very same time we have been cooperating with a western ally, trading sensitive intelligence with them” as they worked with Mohammed Al Rashed, who claimed to be a spy for Canada.

“The calculation here is that the lives of British children, and the risk of their death, is part of the algorithm of acceptable risk that our Western allies have taken,” Akunjee said.

Begum herself recently told the BBC about Rashed saying: “He organized the entire trip from Turkey to Syria…. I don’t think anyone would have been able to make it to Syria without the help of smugglers.

“He had helped a lot of people come in…. We were just doing everything he was telling us to do because he knew everything, we didn’t know anything.”

Kerbaj said Canada’s role is well documented.

“There is absolutely no doubt that the Canadians worked on this and also it brings into question … about what role Britain played,” Kerbaj told TV news show Good Morning Britain on Wednesday. “The only way to get to the bottom of this is to have an inquiry,” with access to CSIS documents, he said.

Trudeau was asked about the controversy Wednesday.

Canadian intelligence services bound by ‘strict rules’: Trudeau

“We live in a particularly dangerous world,” he said.

“The fight against terrorism requires our intelligence services to continue to be flexible and to be creative in their approaches, but every step of the way, they are bound by strict rules, by principles and values that Canadians hold dear … and we expect that those rules be followed.

“I know there are questions about certain incidents or operations of the past and we will ensure to follow up on this,” he said.

Asked if CSIS went too far and if there would be an inquiry, Trudeau said “rigorous oversight mechanisms” monitor CSIS operations but he would consider “further steps” if needed.

Other Canadian officials, however, remained mute on the subject.

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, the Department of Public Safety Canada, and Global Affairs Canada all referred questions about their respective roles to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

CSIS spokesman Brandon Champagne simply replied: “I cannot publicly comment on or confirm or deny the specifics of CSIS investigations, operational interests, methodologies, or activities.”


A 2015 combination of handout CCTV pictures shows, left to right: British teenagers Kadiza Sultana, Amira Abase and Shamima Begum.© Metropolitan Police Service

London’s Metropolitan police also said sensitivity prevented public discussion.

“We do not comment on matters relating to intelligence,” Met spokesman Matthew Russell said.

The issue of Rashed’s role was first revealed in 2015 after the high-profile disappearance of Begum, along with schoolmates Amira Abase, 15, and Kadiza Sultana, 16.

The three left their homes in England and flew to Turkey to join the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, where they were met by Rashed.

Rashed then helped smuggle them into IS controlled territory. He was arrested by Turkish police soon after.

Turkish media reported in 2015 on Turkish intelligence leaks, writing that Rashed carried documents, photos, and videos revealing his activities, including a video — apparently taken by Rashed with a hidden camera — showing him with the missing British girls near Turkey’s border with Syria.

Rashed told Turkish authorities he built a relationship with Canadian officials in 2013 when he sought asylum in Canada. He said in a statement to police at the time he was offered Canadian citizenship in return for information on IS, according to contemporary reports.

Rashed’s police statement said he was working for CSIS and passed information through Canada’s embassy in Jordan. Postmedia reported at the time that the embassy in Amman was run by a former RCMP officer who was Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former top bodyguard.

Rashed was described as a Syrian dentist, also known as Mohammed Mehmet Rashid and Dr. Mehmet Rashid, who fled from Syria in 2013 during the civil war, moving to Jordan and then sought protection from Canada at its embassy in Amman.

A Turkish pro-government newspaper reported at the time that Rashed then travelled to Canada for several months before returning to the Middle East to work as a spy.

He claimed to have helped 15 people from Western countries travel into IS territory while working with CSIS and being paid by Canada to investigate the flow of foreign fighters to the IS battlefields.

The Secret History of the Five Eyes widens what has previously been published about Canada’s relationship with Rashed. Five Eyes is the name of the intelligence alliance of five countries: Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

Kerbaj writes that Rashed sent passport information, luggage details, photos, and other information to Canada, including details on Begum and her friends, according to media accounts of the book.

Canada, however, did not learn details of the girls’ travels until four days after they crossed into Syria, Kerbaj writes.

“For seven years now, this has been covered up by the Canadians,” Kerbaj told The Guardian newspaper .

“I think the cover-up is worse than the offence in many ways here because you would expect human intelligence agencies to recruit members of criminal groups and terrorist groups,” he said.

• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | Twitter: AD_Humphreys

Bank of Canada takes to Twitter to set record straight on 'printing money' claim

Yesterday 

OTTAWA — As the Bank of Canada tries to reign in red hot inflation, the central bank is engaging in another fight: one against misinformation.


Bank of Canada takes to Twitter to set record straight on 'printing money' claim© Provided by The Canadian Press

In recent weeks, the central bank has been using social media to engage the public on the economy, explaining how inflation works and what it's doing to bring inflation back to its two per cent target. However, in its most recent Twitter thread, the bank went beyond explaining economics and took direct aim at a common attack levied against its policy decisions during the pandemic.

“#YouAskedUs if we printed cash to finance the federal gov’t. We didn't,” the Bank of Canada tweeted on Aug. 25, followed by a series of tweets refuting the claim.

While central bank officials normally hold speeches and other events to communicate their thinking and to set expectations, Laval University economics professor Stephen Gordon says its audience has traditionally been smaller than it is today.

“The only people who pay attention are insiders and market experts. And that's usually the only people that they have to talk to,” Gordon said.

Today’s high inflation environment and the politicization of the central bank has led to a wider audience, with more Canadians concerned about rising interest rates and the high cost of living. Alongside this heightened interest has also come a level of distrust of the Bank of Canada's operations and a misperception that it printed money during the pandemic.

Conservative leadership front-runner Pierre Poilievre has been a loud critic of the Bank of Canada, vowing to fire Governor Tiff Macklem if he becomes prime minister. Poilievre has not explained how he plans to fire Macklem given the Bank of Canada Act does not provide the federal government with that power.

He’s also repeatedly claimed that the central bank printed money to finance federal spending and therefore caused inflation.

However, the Bank of Canada and economists say that’s not what happened.

“There's always been this expression of the bank printing money whenever they engage in these kinds of policies, but it's not actually what happens,” said Jeremy Kronick, the director of Monetary and Financial Services Research at the C.D. Howe Institute.

Related video: Inflation and increased demand leave Breakfast Club of Canada with $2M shortfall

Duration 4:49  View on Watch

The policy Kronick refers to is quantitative easing, a measure the Bank of Canada attempted to explain in a series of tweets.

“We bought existing gov't bonds from banks on the open market. Why? This helped unblock frozen markets at the start of the pandemic. It let households, companies and governments access funding when they really needed it,” one of the tweets said.

“We did not print cash to pay for the bonds,” the thread went on to say.

Sometimes referred to as QE, quantitative easing is a relatively new tool used to keep money flowing when interest rates are already hovering around zero and can't be cut further. It garnered worldwide attention when it was used by the U.S. Federal Reserve in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

The Bank of Canada used this policy tool for the first time when the pandemic hit to fight off the risk of deflation. It bought government bonds from financial institutions using settlement balances, or reserves, that it deposited into the accounts of financial institutions and paid interest on. As the bank stated, these reserves are not the same as cash.

“That purchase of the bond lowers the interest rate on that bond and therefore lowers other interest rates, which makes it cheaper to borrow for you and me. So that's really where QE has its impact, not so much from the exchange,” Kronick said.

The Bank of Canada began the process of quantitative tightening, where bonds are sold back to financial institutions or allowed to mature without being replaced, in April of this year. The central bank has opted for the latter option.

While the Bank of Canada’s motivation to speak directly with Canadians and justify its policies is understandable, Gordon says he’s unsure how effective its efforts are given the central bank doesn’t have much experience in this realm.

“They don't have nowhere near the media arsenal of the people who are trying to promote the wrong agenda. So, they're in some sense massively outgunned,” he said.

A recent Angus Reid survey found 46 per cent of Canadians trust the Bank of Canada to fulfil its mandate, while 41 per cent said they don’t. The survey found distrust was higher among people who had voted for the Conservatives or the Peoples Party of Canada.

The online poll surveyed 5,032 Canadian adults and was conducted between June 7 and 13. It cannot be assigned a margin of error because according to the polling industry's generally accepted standards, online surveys do not randomly sample the population.

Looking ahead, the Bank of Canada plans to expand its educational programming on the economy and the bank's role.

Kronick meanwhile says what will ultimately help foster trust in the Bank of Canada is bringing inflation back down to target.

“What matters and what will regain that trust is the bank getting inflation back under control."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 31, 2022.

Nojoud Al Mallees, The Canadian Press

THIRD WORLD U$A

Flooding broke open Jackson's water crisis, but it can't be disentangled from race, experts say

Nada Hassanein, USA TODAY - 

The water crisis in Mississippi’s capital city cannot be disentangled from racial inequities, experts say.

About 150,000 residents in Jackson were without safe water Wednesday. Excessive rainfall led to flooding of the Pearl River and problems at one of the town’s two water-treatment plants, causing the pumps to fail. Low water pressure has left many without water to drink, brush teeth or flush toilets.

Residents in the majority-Black city have been on a boil-water notice since late July, and they have faced water supply problems in the past, from lead concerns to a cold snap last year that left residents without water for weeks.

Jackson, long beleaguered by a water crisis, has struggled with an aging water infrastructure in chronic neglect, experts say, reflecting how communities of color take the brunt of underinvestment. Today's crisis is part of an ongoing one that illustrates how America’s legacy water systems are failing low-income people of color.

“It's shameful. There is no question in my mind that if Jackson was 70% white, there would be a greater investment in water infrastructure,” said Andre M. Perry, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program and author of “Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities.”

Background: Biden approves emergency declaration amid Jackson water crisis

More: How Jackson's water system made it a focus in America's infrastructure crisis

Perry said Black cities are consistently “devalued,” putting communities on the line.

More than 80% of Jackson's residents are Black, the result of a gradual exodus of white, wealthier residents into the suburbs after the racial integration of public schools in 1970. About a quarter of Jackson’s residents live in poverty.

The city has lost tax revenue, and over the years water service has gotten increasingly expensive and the infrastructure harder and pricier to maintain.

“There has been an overall lack of investment in infrastructure,” said Perry, an expert in economic inclusion and equity.

He said infrastructure is a shared responsibility among local and state leaders, which can make it difficult to coordinate investments.

“Inevitable crises, storms will come. However, Jackson always ends up taking two steps back whenever there's a crisis,” he said. “This is the quintessential example of how structural racism plays out in this country."

Earlier this year: Will coronavirus relief money fix Jackson's water and sewer system?

Troubled waters in other cities, like Flint

Aaron Packman, Northwestern University environmental engineering professor, said the problem is systemic and complex. Communities of color are often “systematically undersupported” and see increasing infrastructure failures.

He pointed to a 2016 Government Accountability report that analyzed cities with declining populations and water infrastructure problems. The report cites majority-Black Flint, Michigan, as an example of the consequences of chronic underinvestment in water infrastructure, Packman said.

Flint, where water was discovered to be contaminated with lead after regulatory failures at multiple levels, has also seen white flight and gradual population loss.

The city is not “unique in the challenges it faces,” the report says.

Mississippi's Pearl River floods homes, daycares and roads after heavy rains

View on Watch

“This is a common challenge in under-resourced communities, or especially in communities where the population and the economic base has been decreasing over time. A lot of those communities are communities of color,” Packman said. “It means that we end up with a lot of people of color who are in vulnerable positions, who don't have a strong political voice and who are not able to get the investments that are needed.”

There should be multiple mechanisms in place to protect drinking water supplies, Packman said, so when a crisis like Jackson’s happens, it signifies multiple failures.

In Flint, “people were not listened to,” he said. “And I'm not sure that this importance of governance, of shared responsibility for safe water, has been learned well enough.”

Lingering lead: Biden plan to eliminate old pipes highlights longstanding contamination in communities of color

Warning signs were ignored

Experts such as Perry warned that while the floodwaters allowed for the system to tip over, they weren’t the cause – rather, the latest in a series of payment and management challenges, contamination and climate threats are to blame.

“We had many warning signs as we approached the crisis and points of intervention that could have been taken but were ignored,” said Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.

In the first quarter of 2020, nearly half a billion gallons of raw sewage leaked into the Pearl River, along with close to 6 billion gallons of minimally treated sewage, the Mississippi Clarion Ledger reported.

Overflows have long been a problem for the state's largest city, the newspaper reported. The Environmental Protection Agency has watched Jackson closely and put the city under a consent decree in 2012.

In 2016, the state health department issued a lead warning.

And last year, a cold snap across the South in areas not accustomed to freezing conditions left the town’s pipes frozen and residents without running water for a month. It wasn't the first time.

Natalie Exum, an assistant scientist of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the problems with Jackson's water system have been known for a long time.

“This is not a problem that happens overnight,” she said.

Communities that are majority-Black or Hispanic often lack the resources to get those problems fixed, she said.

Climate action is critical for health equity: Community health clinics are key - and need more support.
Climate change threatens to bring more crises

Climate change will continue to test fragile infrastructure in communities of color like Jackson.

“This is not going to be the last time something like this happens in the United States, because we have an increasingly unpredictable climate, and we have aging infrastructure – and we have widening wealth gaps,” she said. “The climate crisis is going to present many additional opportunities for us to learn from the past.”

The nation's water systems are highly fragmented, variable and localized, said Joseph Kane, also a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies environmental and water infrastructure problems.

That means poorer communities, often those of color like Jackson, struggle to pay for water management and aging systems, especially in the face of climate change. A lack of federal and state aid has led to privatization, which sends costs to ratepayers who see their bills rise, he explained.

That's "no accident," he said.

EPA: People of color face disproportionate harm from climate change

"Places like Detroit or Flint (are) in this category as well, where the infrastructure concerns are inextricably tied to the economic concerns of the jurisdiction," he said. "Jackson is one of the most impoverished areas or cities in the country. And so their ratepayers don't necessarily have the same ability as ratepayers do in some other parts of the country."


Pump failure at Mississippi plant causes water crisis© AP

The federal infrastructure bill passed in 2021 will provide an infusion of financial support. Still, the money will take time to trickle down, and "that isn't going to automatically reverse what's been happening over the last few decades," Kane said.

Perry worries that state leadership will not equitably distribute those federal dollars when they're available.

Epidemiologist Maureen Lichtveld, dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health, said the most important lessons the nation continues to overlook from past disasters are rooted in preparedness investment and strengthening systems to increase community resilience.

Those lessons, she said, could have been learned from past system and regulatory failures – from Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in New Orleans after years of neglecting the city's levee system to regulatory failures in Flint, Michigan.

“The most pronounced lessons not learned continue to be not learned,” she said.

Reach Nada Hassanein at nhassanein@usatoday.com or on Twitter @nhassanein_.

A 'lifetime of burden': Older Black adults die from air pollution three times the rate of white adults, study finds

The health effects of climate change: Study shows health woes following Hurricane Maria

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Flooding broke open Jackson's water crisis, but it can't be disentangled from race, experts say

Gibraltar races to stop 'significant' oil leak from ship collision with gas tanker

Alex Hardie - 1h ago - CNN

A cargo ship that collided with a natural gas tanker earlier this week off Gibraltar has “crumpled” and is leaking a “significant” amount of oil Thursday, according to authorities, who said efforts were underway to salvage the vessel.

A “major incident” was declared in Gibraltar on Wednesday after the OS 35 cargo ship collided with a liquefied natural gas carrier the day before, according to the government.

The cargo ship, which is carrying 215 tonnes of heavy fuel oil, 250 tonnes of diesel fuel and 27 tonnes of lube oil, was beached to prevent it from sinking in the bay of Gibraltar. All 30 people on board, including 24 crew members and 6 surveyors, were evacuated.

The Gibraltar government said Thursday that the oil leak is “significant,” but that the oil is lighter than some other cases and should be easier to clean if any of the oil reaches the shore.

“Analysis from today shows that although this has been a significant leak, the consistency of the low sulphur fuel oil is lighter than during other incidents which have occurred in the Bay and this means it should be easier to dissipate and clean if any of the fuel oil reaches our shorelines,” the government said in a press release.

It is expected that most of the diesel will be pumped out by Friday morning, according to the government statement.

Earlier in the day, the Gibraltar Port Authority (GPA) confirmed that there had been a leak of oil that escaped the perimeter of a boom set up in the wake of the accident.


 Satellite imagery shows the damaged and partially submerged OS 35 cargo

 ship off the coast of Gibraltar. - Satellite image ©2022 Maxar Technologies

Related video: Ship-tanker collision off Gibraltar coast causes oil leak | Satellite pics show extent of spill  Duration 2:27 View on Watch

“The salvage team onboard have identified the source of this leak to two tank vents from the vessel’s bunker tanks. All vents had previously been sealed, but the seal of two vents became loose on the crumpling of the vessel,” the GPA said in a statement.

The statement said divers on scene have been able to re-establish the seals and the GPA was in the process of stopping the release of oil from the vents. Authorities were collecting the free floating oil that has already vented, while booms to absorb the oil were being deployed.

On Wednesday night, the government said there were indications that the cargo ship had “not broken apart as such, but has crumpled,” and that the “first concern” was the offloading of the low sulfur heavy fuel oil it carried as soon as possible, followed by diesel and lube oil.

The government added that there “has been no way to remove the fuels in question from the vessel any sooner in a manner that was not a risk to the environment.”


Diveres worked to fix the seals around several vents on the stricken vessel. 

- HM Government of Gibraltar

Greenpeace told CNN it is worried as the area of the incident is a heavily polluted area due to the volume of ships passing by.

Greenpeace campaigner Francisco del Pozo, who is monitoring the situation, told CNN that “as it is, there is no major oil spillage.”

According to the Gibraltar authorities, it will take around 50 hours of pumping with the operation carried out “under the strictest supervision to seek to avoid any spillage.”

Additional oil spill equipment is expected to arrive in Gibraltar from the UK on Sunday, the statement said.

Gibraltar’s government said the timeframe for salvaging the hull of the OS 35 cargo ship is likely to extend longer than the previous expectation of a few weeks.

U.S. Appeals Court upholds $14 million judgment against Exxon

Yesterday 

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans on Tuesday upheld a $14.25 million judgment against Exxon Mobil Corp for pollution from its Baytown, Texas, refining and petrochemical complex.


View of the Exxon Mobil refinery in Baytown, Texas

© Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi

The judgment stems from a U.S. Clean Air Act lawsuit brought by two environmental groups, Environment Texas and the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter.

This is Exxon’s second appeal of a Houston U.S. district court’s ruling that Exxon was responsible for repeated releases of pollution from the refinery and chemical plants in Baytown.

Exxon stipulated the Baytown complex had 16,286 days of violations between October 2005 and September 2013, which included multiple simultaneous violations.

“While we respect the court’s opinion, we disagree with the decision,” said Exxon spokeswoman Julie King. “We have acted responsibly and in accordance with regulatory requirements. We are reviewing the decision and considering next steps.”

Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas, called on Exxon to accept the repeated decisions in the case against the company.

“After 13 years of litigation – including a three-week trial, two appeals, two remands of the case to the trial court for additional findings, and three appellate decisions against them – it is long past time for Exxon to accept responsibility and finally pay what it owes to the public for years of illegal, toxic pollution,” Metzger said.

The case was brought by the two groups under a provision of the Clean Air Act that allows citizens to sue when government agencies have failed to prevent pollution.

(Reporting by Erwin Seba; editing by Richard Pullin)

Snap to lay off more than a thousand employees
MobileSyrup - Yesterday 

Snap to lay off more than a thousand employees© Provided by MobileSyrup

Snap will lay off a fifth of its workforce starting today, according to The Verge.

The publication states the company has been planning the layoffs for weeks.

Sources familiar with the matter state some departments will be impacted greater than others. This includes the team responsible for the social mapping app Zenly, as well as their hardware division, responsible for the Pixy camera drone. The product, which was revealed in April, has been cancelled.

Related video: Snap Planning to Cut 20% of Workforce Starting Wednesday
Duration 2:02  View on Watch

The Verge says the layoffs shouldn’t be a surprise, as the company’s stock prices have sunk 80 percent since the year began. The company hired aggressively during the pandemic, growing its workforce to over 6,400 employees.

Snap isn’t the only tech company to recently let go of employees or slow its hiring. Shopify and Tesla, to name a few, have also gone this route.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Source: The Verge

Many Philadelphia schools forced to close early due to lack of air conditioning

CBS News - Yesterday 


More than 100 schools in Philadelphia will dismiss early on Wednesday due to a lack of functioning air conditioning in the hot weather. The schools will let out three hours earlier than the normal dismissal time, CBS Philidelphia reports.

Some parents told CBS News' Elise Preston that the uncomfortable conditions are nothing new for their children.

"[My son] Juelz had to go to the nurse's office to get relief from the heat because that was the only place they had air conditioning," parent Sherice Workman said.

Workman advocated to get air conditioning put in over the summer, and as a result her son's school did not have to close yesterday.

Public schools in Philadelphia face other problems aside from a lack of air conditioning. Some school buildings are old and inadequate.

In a district-wide assessment, Meredith Elementary School received an "unsatisfactory" rating after the assessment raised questions about students' access to working water fountains and safe stairways.

More than 100 schools in Philadelphia forced to close early amid sweltering conditions

Duration 3:53

View on Watch

"I don't understand why any school district would subject their students to unsafe, deplorable, oppressive conditions," Workman said.

A recent U.S. Government Accountability Office federal survey found that around 54% of U.S. school districts needed to update their infrastructure. The survey estimated that students in roughly 36,000 schools are saddled with outdated heating, ventilation, and AC systems.

American University Professor Claudia Persico said Philadelphia's shortcomings are part of a greater "national problem." Persico said these conditions could have long-term implications for a student's education.

"Heat impacts learning across the school year by potentially making it harder for kids to learn and focus. There's also evidence that if you take a test on a particularly hot day, you'll score much lower than if you take a test on a cooler day," said Persico.

Philadelphia School District officials tell CBS News that their average school building is more than 72 years old.

Officials said the district is in the process of installing air-conditioning units across the city and the entire process could take two years.

Heather Ganshorn, Medeana Moussa: Beware 'privatization creep' in education system

A well-funded public system is the right of every child, and the responsibility of us all. Privatization creep threatens public education.

Author of the article:Heather Ganshorn, Medeana Moussa
Publishing date:Sep 01, 2022 • 

The debate over public funding of private/independent schools in Saskatchewan has been reignited. 

Public funding of private schools has been on the radar in Saskatchewan recently in light of troubling allegations of abuse at Legacy Christian Academy, a school that receives significant public funds (more than $730,000 last year). While schools like Legacy currently receive 50 per cent of the per-student allocation of students in the public system, Saskatchewan has announced plans to create a new class of private schools that would be funded at 75 per cent of the public per-student allocation. In a recent interview with CBC, Education Minister Dustin Duncan said that Legacy would have met the criteria for this level of funding, though it will not be funded at this level pending an investigation.

This funding hike, which seems to have been implemented without public consultation, will put Saskatchewan well ahead of the rest of the country, where public funding for private schools ranges from zero in Ontario to 70 per cent in Alberta. Our organization, Support Our Students Alberta, advocates for an equitable and accessible public education system. We have seen years of “privatization creep” in Alberta education, and we are dismayed to see Saskatchewan pursuing a similar path.

Privatization is not about individuals paying for choices outside the public system, it’s about diverting public dollars to private, unaccountable entities. As this is generally unpopular, privatizers work hard to manufacture consent using other arguments.

Private schools prefer to call themselves “independent schools” (despite increasing dependence on public funds). Proponents suggest that public funding for meeting certain requirements balances a school’s independence with a reasonable level of oversight by government.

However, the Legacy case suggests that these rules are enforced minimally until a crisis draws scrutiny. It’s an impossible contradiction to have a school that is both “independent” and subject to government oversight. We should all question the use of public funds for unaccountable organizations that may place vulnerable children in a precarious situation.

Sask. taps administrators to oversee three schools after abuse allegations

Bank loans, farmland accepted as donations by Saskatoon church linked to Legacy Christian Academy

Privatizers frame education as a private good rather than a public one that benefits all of society. In this view, “parent choice” is the overriding value, rather than the right of all children to a quality education, or the broader societal interest in having an education system that prepares future citizens to participate in democracy.

Privatizers argue it’s only fair for parents to take “their” share of public funding to the provider of their choice. But this is not how publicly funded services work. If we don’t use the public library, we don’t get a subsidy to go buy books at Indigo instead. Nor do people without children receive any kind of tax break because they are not directly using the education system. Taxes are collected from everyone, to fund public services that serve everyone.

Privatizers suggest that private school families are somehow costing the public system less because their children receive less funding. However, funding individuals is not how education spending works. The per-student allocation is meant to be an estimate of how much an “average” child costs to educate. Some children require more resources than others, and that per-student funding is pooled to serve all students.

Private schools can select students with fewer special needs, from better-off families. When “funding follows the student” out of the public and into the private system, public schools risk being left with fewer students, but a greater concentration of high-needs students, and fewer dollars to support those needs. Schools also have fixed costs such as utilities and maintenance, which they must now cover with less funding, or make hard choices such as closing schools, increasing class sizes, or cutting support staff.

A well-funded public education system is the right of every child, and the responsibility of us all. Privatization creep threatens public education and is done largely without public discussion.

Heather Ganshorn is the research director and Medeana Moussa is the executive director for Support Our Students Alberta.

CANADA
Most doctors took financial hit in 1st year of COVID, but top earners did just fine

Valérie Ouellet, Katie Newman, Zach Dubinsky, Madeline McNair - CBC

Twenty-twenty was a brutal year for doctors. The COVID-19 pandemic struck, lockdowns forced the cancellation of scores of non-essential surgeries, hospitals faced a capacity crisis and health-care workers of all kinds endured threats of violence and even death.

For most physicians in Canada, the first full year of the pandemic also delivered a financial gut punch, according to a CBC News analysis of government health plan payments to 58,000 doctors in six provinces that make such data available.

A quarter of those doctors suffered a drop of at least 20 per cent in their billings compared with the year before, according to CBC's analysis. In a country where the average doctor makes $350,000 a year, that means that on average, one in four of those physicians was out around $70,000 in revenue.

"People need to remember right back at the beginning of the pandemic, things were really shut down hard," said Michael Green, a family physician and a professor and chair of the department of family medicine at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.

In the early months of the pandemic, he noted, everyone was told to stay home, so few people saw their doctor in person. For about 60 per cent of physicians who get paid for each procedure or service they do — a payment system called "fee-for-service" — the lack of patients in the first few months of the pandemic meant a noticeable dent in their revenues for the year.

Ophthalmologists among most impacted in 1st pandemic year

But for a select group of highly paid doctors, it was a different story, CBC's analysis found.

Among the 100 doctors in each province who billed the most to their provincial health plan — a group that mostly comprises specialist physicians — only about seven per cent suffered the same 20 per cent drop in payments during the first year of the pandemic.

In fact, twice as many of these high-billing doctors had a 20 per cent increase in their fee-for-service revenues.

CBC's analysis also found a large number of them got federal money, too, in the form of the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy.

Woe for pediatricians, dermatologists

Plenty of governments publish "sunshine lists" of public-sector salaries, but provincial health-plan payments to physicians are a bit of a slippery fish. Only five provinces (B.C., Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador) routinely make the data public, while a sixth, Ontario, requires an access-to-information request.

The figures come with caveats: Generally only fee-for-service payments are included, which leaves out the many doctors paid by salary, hourly wage or by how many patients are enrolled in their family practice. And the payment numbers don't account for overhead, which typically ranges from 13 to 43 per cent of a doctor's billings.


Family doctor Michael Green said that at the start of the pandemic, patient visits to doctor offices dropped 'like a rock.' Later, some physicians were able to make back the resulting lost revenue — and then some.© CBC

The provincial payment data shows that COVID-19 lockdowns hit some specialties particularly hard. For instance, 45 per cent of ophthalmologists in Ontario lost at least a fifth of their billing revenue. The figure was nearly as high for pediatricians (42 per cent), dermatologists (40 per cent), ear-nose-and-throat specialists (39 per cent) and plastic surgeons (37 per cent).

Other specialists in Ontario fared relatively well. Only five per cent of endocrinologists saw their billings drop by a fifth, as well as nine per cent of hematologists and 11 per cent of vascular surgeons.

Green, the Queen's University professor and doctor, theorizes that some of these differences in how the pandemic affected doctors might be because once lockdowns ended, certain kinds of physicians had backlogs of work they could burn through, while others who tend to treat transient illnesses did not.

"Groups that would [be] able to, say, catch up on numbers of procedures later in the year — to make up for their backlog — would have a chance to get their billings back up overall for the whole year, even if they had a very low period during those initial months," he said.

Among them was Gdih Gdih, a Winnipeg ophthalmologist who was the fifth-highest-billing medical doctor in Manitoba last year, and one of the highest-billing doctors in all of Canada, according to the publicly available data gathered by CBC.

He said the first weeks of the pandemic were a trying time for his laser eye surgery clinic.

"When Covid hit, things went so slow and we literally had close to no income to pay 10 salaries… rent, insurance, equipment, lease, etc.," Gidh wrote in an email in response to questions from CBC News. He said his overhead costs normally run above $80,000 a month, or close to $1 million a year.

By the end of the year, though, business was booming for the ophthalmologist. On average, he had billed about $2.2 million a year in services from 2016-17 to 2019-20. But for the fiscal year from April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021, his total billings climbed to $3 million.
Cardiologist's revenues jumped from $1.5M to $2M

Gdih said there are a "few reasons for the unexpected increase," including heightened demand for some of the higher-paying interventional procedures he performs; more work becoming available because of colleagues who decided to retire early or take stress leave; and extra time in his schedule to do that work since travel was mostly shut down.

Related video: Some of Canada’s highest-paid doctors benefitted from emergency COVID funds   Duration 3:10   View on Watch

The onset of COVID was Gdih's best year for billings since at least 2016, and he's not alone in that regard. An Ontario cardiologist billed the province $1.5 million for his services in the 2019 fiscal year, then upped his billings to more than $2 million during the first year of the pandemic. A urologist in B.C. who averaged $875,000 in revenues for the four years prior to the pandemic billed for $1.24 million in procedures in fiscal 2020.

Mohamed Awad was the 29th-highest-billing doctor in Ontario during the first year of the pandemic. The pain specialist's gross payments from the Ontario Health Insurance Plan jumped from $1.4 million to $2.35 million.

Awad told CBC News in an email that he, too, took on "numerous new patients whose primary physicians retired during the pandemic," and also boosted his work hours. By coincidence, he also opened another clinic in March 2020, just as the pandemic was getting under way, he said.

CBC reached out to a dozen other doctors who saw some of the highest spikes in billings during the first year of the pandemic. Two of them explained it was because they had only begun their medical practice partway through the previous year; another said it was because she was on leave before COVID, so her pre-pandemic billings were unusually low. None of those three doctors agreed to speak on the record.

The rest did not reply.

Overall, CBC News found at least 60 of the 600 highest-billing doctors had their best financial year in the 12-month period that began as COVID took over.

What's more, CBC discovered that some of them even took federal subsidies meant to help slumping businesses keep workers on their payrolls.
Federal subsidies for highest billers

Launched in March 2020, the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy was the federal government's single-largest COVID relief measure, providing up to $960 a week to employers per worker on their payroll so that they could keep paying staff instead of laying them off when business waned.

In the 600-strong group of top-billing doctors from each of six provinces, more than a quarter received CEWS money.

Winnipeg ophthalmologist Gdih resorted to the subsidy in the early months of COVID. He said the uncertainty of how the pandemic was going to affect "the future and the continuity of our business" prompted him to seek out the money.

"However, when we picked up later, I paid it back in full as soon as funds [were] available," Gdih said.

Awad also received some CEWS money. His accountant applied for it without his knowledge, he said, but he never accessed the funds and "promptly repaid" it once it became apparent his billings were surging and not plunging. He provided CBC with his CEWS account statement, which shows offsetting credits and refunds.

It's not known how much CEWS money the top-billing doctors received or for how long, because the federal government has only published the names of CEWS recipients. But there is no suggestion of any wrongdoing or that they didn't qualify under the terms of the subsidy, which only required that a business have a drop in revenue during certain four-week periods in order to receive federal funds.


Richard Leblanc, a professor of governance, law and ethics at York University in Toronto, said doctors who got CEWS should pay it back if they ultimately had a banner year financially.© CBC

In an odd quirk, CBC's analysis found that doctors who received CEWS payments during the first year of the pandemic billed more money to provincial health insurance, on average, than those who didn't get the subsidy.

Among the 600 top-billing doctors in the provincial data, the average physician who benefited from CEWS billed $1.7 million, while those who didn't get the federal cash billed their province roughly $1.25 million on average. It's unclear exactly why, but it could be that higher-billing doctors have more — and more specialized — staff who can handle financial matters like applying for a subsidy. Or they might have higher overhead and felt more pressure to shore up their finances when, in the early pandemic, the outlook for all businesses was bleak.
'Give the money back'

Though the doctors were all entitled to get the federal subsidy, York University law and ethics professor Richard Leblanc said it goes against the spirit of the government's COVID emergency relief measures.

"If you're a doctor and your revenue has been at a certain level and then during the pandemic it jumps 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, I think I saw a figure close to 90 per cent… That wasn't the intent of CEWS," Leblanc said.

"The spirit of CEWS is not a windfall. The spirit of CEWS is to make you whole."

He suggested that doctors who got the subsidy but, at the end of the year, showed a marked improvement in their bottom line during the pandemic should do like Gdih, the Winnipeg ophthalmologist.

"Do the right thing and give the money back. Because it's not their money. It's taxpayers' money."

CBC News asked the Department of Finance, which designed the $100.7-billion CEWS program, whether it was always intended that businesses could collect CEWS money early on in the pandemic and not have it clawed back if they ended the year with extra revenues.

The department said forcing employers to pay back CEWS for that reason wouldn't have been wise.

"Had additional conditions such as these been introduced to the program, together with anti-avoidance rules necessary to maintain the integrity of the conditions, they would have added considerable complexity to the rules and their administration," a Finance spokesperson wrote in an email.

"Such complexity and the accompanying uncertainty would have undermined the primary objective of the program, which was to support Canadian workers in a timely manner."
How did CBC News analyze doctor billings data?

To build a database of the highest-billing doctors in each province, CBC News compiled doctors' gross fee-for-service billing totals that five provinces publish every year, with information for Ontario obtained via an access-to-information request. The full names, specialty, years of practice and gender of the 100 doctors who billed the highest amount to their province's health insurance plan during fiscal year 2020-21 (April 1, 2020 - March 31, 2021) were compiled, as well as historical billings for fiscal years 2016-17 to 2019-20.

The full data sets of all doctor billings in each province were used to calculate the percentage change in all doctors' billings for fiscal years 2018, 2019 and 2020. Our analysis identified doctors in both data sets who had seen their billings increase or decrease by 20 per cent or more during fiscal years 2019-20 and 2020-21.

To find doctors who had received the Canadian Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS), CBC compared a Canada Revenue Agency list of CEWS beneficiaries dating back to Jan. 19, 2021, against the names of top-billing doctors as obtained from public records. When a corporate entity was composed of multiple doctors registered as partners, their names were separated and matched individually. Matches between the CEWS list and doctor names were confirmed through supplementary research, including professional licensing information, corporate registry searches, associated clinics and other documentation. The CRA's CEWS list does not specify the amount of each subsidy or how long it was provided.

In order to develop its methodology and better understand the data and any caveats, CBC consulted Dr. Michael Green of Queen's University and three other academics who have done research on fee-for-service physician billings.

Valérie Ouellet, Katie Newman (April-August 2022)

Madeline McNair, Zach Dubinsky, Mohammed Abdul-Hussain (April-August 2022)

Starbucks executives, directors are sued over diversity policies

By Jonathan Stempel - Yesterday - REUTERS

A Starbucks coffee shop is seen in downtown Los Angeles

© Reuters/LUCY NICHOLSON

(Reuters) - Starbucks Corp executives and directors have been sued by a conservative think tank that believes the coffee chain's efforts to promote diversity amount to racial discrimination.

In a complaint filed on Tuesday, the National Center for Public Policy Research objected to Starbucks' setting hiring goals for Blacks and other people of color, awarding contracts to "diverse" suppliers and advertisers, and tying executive pay to diversity.

The plaintiff, a Starbucks shareholder, said those policies require the company to make race-baced decisions that benefit minorities, and violate federal and state civil rights laws.

Thirty-five current and former Starbucks executives and directors, including interim Chief Executive Howard Schultz, are among the defendants.

The diversity push "benefits them personally to pose as virtuous advocates of 'Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity,' even as it harms the company and its owners," the complaint said.

Starbucks did not immediately respond on Wednesday to requests for comment.

The Seattle-based company had 34,948 stores worldwide as of July 3, including 17,050 in North America.

Many companies have been boosting their focus on diversity and training, including after the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

In October 2020, Starbucks said it would aim for Black people, indigenous people and other people of color to hold at least 30% of U.S. corporate jobs and 40% of U.S. retail and manufacturing jobs by 2025, and tie executive pay to its diversity efforts.

Then in January, Starbucks said it planned to nearly double its annual spending with diverse suppliers and vendors to $1.5 billion by 2030, and committed to allocating 15% of this year's ad budget to minority-owned and "targeted" media companies.

Tuesday's lawsuit was filed in a Washington state court in Spokane.

It seeks to void Starbucks' diversity policies, and have the defendants or their insurers pay damages to the company.

The case is National Center for Public Policy Research v Schultz et al, Spokane County Superior Court, No. 22-2-02945-32.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)