Prentice writes:

Manitoba’s northern transportation policy can be summed up as a couple of decades of unfunded promises and funded illusions. The residents of the North have been let down by wasteful, short-sighted political strategies, rather than the embrace of economic realities.

Among the unfunded NDP promises are the creation of a road to Nunavut and the east side road network.

Millions of dollars have been spent engineering road systems that are uneconomic to build or operate. When the federal government refused to bite on these billion-dollar boondoggles, the provincial government decided to strike out alone to build 872 kilometres of gravel roads east of Lake Winnipeg. This $3-billion project would take 30 years to complete at current funding levels and would serve only half of the remote communities. A road to Nunavut would likely cost as much or more, but it exists only in the dreams of the Doer-Selinger era and their election campaign literature.

Read more at www.winnipegfreepress.com.

Waneek Horn-Miller has had quite the life so far, and she’s only 40 years old. Now an Ambassador for Reconciliation Canada, an Indigenous-led organization that aims to catalyze meaningful relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, as well as host of Working It Out Together, a program on APTN about Indigenous health and wellbeing, she first became known to the world as the Mohawk teenager who was stabbed nearly to death by a Canadian soldier while carrying her four-year-old sister behind the military lines at the Mohawk Resistance in Oka in 1990. After a months-long standoff, the town of Oka, Quebec, agreed not to extend the golf course and build the condominiums on The Pines, a sacred Mohawk area.

Horn-Miller remembers that time as “traumatizing,” since “every movement we made we had hundreds of guns pointed at us.” It was also formative. As she puts it, “I got a second chance and that’s pretty much what pushed me forward after that.” A longtime athlete, she went on to become co-captain of Canada’s water polo team, winning gold at the Pan Am Games in Winnipeg in 1999 and participating in the Sydney Olympics in 2000. She had no intention of letting a Canadian soldier’s bayonet, with all the symbolism that it implies about whose bodies count as Canadian and whose are perceived as threats to the nation (and condominium developments), stop her from accomplishing her goals. She recalls her mother telling her after the stabbing, “I never raised you to be anybody’s victim.”

When Waneek Horn-Miller spoke at a Reconciliation Canada event in Winnipeg in March of this year, she talked about the intimacy required to play team sports. You have to know your teammates’ bodies—how they move, where they will go—intuitively, as though they are an extension of you. Allowing for such intimacy on Team Canada, she said, required a lot of hard work on her part, work in letting go of the idea that her teammates represented a white Canada that hated her and her community, that brought in the Canadian Army to force them off the land. I can’t imagine the work required to do that letting go; Horn-Miller’s scars are all too real, and much too close to the heart.

Another Olympics gives us a chance to reflect once more upon expressions of nationalism, and to find them troubling. Take the national anthem, for instance. In a nine-line song, we have three lines, a full third, dedicated to standing on guard for Canada. Who are we standing on guard for Canada against, and who is “we”? Some propose that the “we” in the national anthem needs to be expanded to include daughters as well as sons, but this daughter wants no part in being commanded in true patriot love to stand on guard against Indigenous peoples and their claims to land and self-determination. And of course we need not look far to notice what happens when the national “we” excludes racialized people who become positioned as outsiders and as threats to the nation. Trump logic appears to have no borders.

In a lead up to the Olympics full (as usual) of concern about safety and doping, I hope we can collectively begin to think and act more like Waneek Horn-Miller, and be bridges rather than barricades. She sees in sport a larger purpose than winning and losing, than showing the strength of one’s nation by winning at all costs. For her, sports can play an important role in decolonization. She knows first hand the positive effects that sports can have on people’s lives and believes that her effort to support Indigenous people in sport is also her “effort to combat the murdered and missing women. That’s my effort to combat substance abuse. That’s my effort to help with mental health.” The everyday language we use, the symbols we adopt, and the lyrics we sing have a significance beyond themselves. They affect how we understand ourselves and shape our relationships with one another. This Olympics, I say let’s skip the flag-raising ceremonies and the medal counts and focus instead on the potential of sport to allow us the opportunity to play together across difference, to get to know one another under the skin. Go, Team Waneek!

Ezra, the Hebrew word for “help” can take many forms including making donations, volunteering one’s time or offering advice. Recently, some members of Winnipeg’s Jewish community have gone over and above, offering ezra to bring Yazidi refugees to safety by committing to help privately sponsor seven Yazidi families and raising awareness about their persecution locally and nationally.

Yazidi refugees are a Kurdish religious minority living predominantly in northern Iraq. Historically threatened for their unique religious beliefs, the Islamic State has violently targeted them for being ‘non-believers’ since taking control of the area in 2014. This has resulted in widespread murder, mass forced displacement and the systematic rape and sexual enslavement of Yazidi women and girls.

Private sponsors have played a critical role in influencing immigration policy, supporting and promoting the interests of newcomers coming to Canada and those already settled. One of the oldest resettlement agencies in Canada, the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society, was founded in 1922 in Montreal to help other Jewish refugees immigrate. Canada’s unique model for privately sponsoring refugees was established in large part because of the advocacy of average Canadians from different backgrounds; groups having the desire to help those in need, and recognizing more needed to be done to supplement government efforts. So it really isn’t surprising that today a Jewish community is part of an effort to sponsor refugees.

While the long-standing resettlement history of Jewish communities in Canada is characterized by sponsoring thousands of their own, groups are moving their work beyond this. Individuals and agencies are now considering helping refugees who are not friends or family and committing to supporting people from a region thousands of kilometres away marred by violence and extremism and whose culture and religion are often misunderstood.

Operation Ezra is an important multi-faith partnership fostered between individuals and agencies within the Jewish community, the Yazidi community and local organizations along a spectrum of different faiths and cultures. It has built on the hard work of individuals concerned about the well-being of others at home and abroad. Organizers have relied on the guidance from long-time sponsorship agreement holder Mennonite Central Committee and former refugees with experience and knowledge that has been critical in submitting the necessary paperwork and identifying the needs of new families once they arrive.

Operation Ezra represents a necessary step toward strengthening solidarity with refugees and rising above the hatred and a fear of “the other” that continues to spread around the world. As some Canadian Jewish groups have recently done with Syrian refugees, members of Winnipeg’s Jewish community are able to look beyond their differences, distance and politics to see a connection with Yazidis.

Both Jews and Yazidis have been victims of genocide and share the experience of governments turning their back on them. Recently, both the United Nations and the federal government acknowledged the actions of IS against the Yazidis as genocide. But the government has yet to make much of a commitment to helping those fortunate enough to flee to refugee camps in neighbouring countries or those remaining in Iraq. After the Holocaust, a strong resistance to resettling Jewish refugees was expressed by the Canadian government that claimed “none is too many.”

The first two families arrive Monday after being delayed by violence in Turkey. Their arrival is a bold expression of the often-ignored pledge of never again; a response to the atrocities committed during the Holocaust and a commitment of the international community for the future. Operation Ezra is the only group in Canada working to privately sponsor Yazidi refugees. This is something that should be praised, but also lamented. Currently, Operation Ezra is campaigning for other Jewish communities in Canada to follow its lead and for the federal government to take action to help resettle more Yazidis. More grassroots mobilization such as this can serve to increase awareness and tolerance of newcomers and their experiences.

Private sponsorship is not without its shortcomings. In fact, the backlog of cases, the extensive, complicated paperwork that goes into a sponsorship application and the lack of communication between government and sponsors are concerning and aggravating. There is frustration with the Canadian government trying to pass the buck on its resettlement responsibilities and non-Syrian refugees being unintentionally sidelined. But it is these challenges that illustrate how hard private sponsors strive to help over and above these setbacks, and how important it is that this work continue.

The advocacy, compassion and commitment to helping others demonstrated by Operation Ezra is a positive step in creating a more inclusive and engaged community. Ultimately, we can find something of ourselves in one another; sometimes we just need to open our eyes, our minds and our hearts.

Thursday’s Brexit vote was fuelled, in part, by long-term skepticism and populist resentment about what Europe was seen to be doing for Britain.

The Conservative party has been internally divided over Europe and Britain’s place in the economic and political union since the end of the Second World War. In recent years, especially under the leadership of David Cameron, coupled with the media attention afforded to populist leaders — in this case Boris Johnson — the visible extent of those divisions has grown.

But Britain’s ambivalent relationship to Europe and the idea of a more centrally managed economy goes back to the formation of the European Economic Community in 1957.

A bit of history is helpful here.

When Britain’s prime minister at the time, Harold MacMillan (also a Conservative), applied for EEC membership in 1961, France vetoed it. British humiliation by the French and, by extension, all of Western Europe, soured many of that generation on Europe — a cohort who made up the demographic of older voters supporting the Leave campaign. By the late 1960s, the mood toward Europe and the EEC had changed, however, and in 1973 the U.K. secured admission to the European economic group but with little domestic fanfare.

Despite some initial economic benefits from EEC membership, by the time Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, Britain had suffered almost a decade of economic decline as the country and its workforce de-industrialized and inflation ate away savings and wage power.

Thatcher was cool on Europe and her brand of conservatism consisted of stronger elements of British nationalism and neo-liberal economic policies that rejected mechanisms of centralization, taxation and public spending, which were seen to inhibit the growth of the free market. Thatcher also gained allies to her anti-Europe position from some in the Labour party who also pledged to withdraw from the EEC, if elected, in the name of protecting British jobs and industries. Her close relationship with president Ronald Reagan revealed her priority of the U.S. over the EU. A European free-trade zone certainly attracted Thatcher, but talk of centralized banking, currency, controls or quotas dictated by a federalist Europe did not.

This rhetoric remained part of the Cold War discourse used to challenge the Soviet Bloc. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Eastern Bloc and, importantly, German reunification, an economically powerful central Europe driven by a resurgent Germany was on the horizon. Lumbering negotiations to enlarge the EEC were given new impetus as former Communist Bloc states quickly sought membership in the “Western” EEC. Britain was still a part of the EEC, of course, but remained a cantankerous and nationalistic voice of opposition within the club.

Eventually, Thatcher’s hard line against a common European currency led to her removal in 1990 by her own Conservative Party. Her successor, John Major, was a more centrist figure who held out on the European negotiations over a new union and currency as he tried to placate the still vehement objections of the “Euroskeptics” within his own Conservative party. Major only signed on to the 1991 Maastricht Treaty when it was agreed Britain would not adopt the Euro, and would be excluded from certain regulations from Europe regarding workers’ rights, trade unions and other elements of the “social chapter.”

In 1993 the new European Union was formed, boasting a larger membership than the EEC, plans for a common currency, and with a Brussels-based European Parliament tasked with oversight of economic policies, laws and regulations across the region. Britain never adopted the Euro, but since 1993 debates have raged in British society about the extent of “unwanted,” “costly,” “unnecessary” regulation from Brussels.

The lingering Thatcher-era nationalists and Euroskeptics, plus the increasing number of workers displaced by ongoing de-industrialization and market globalization, did not quietly fade away, instead finding a new political home in the ultra-nationalist U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP. That party, along with a significant minority within the Conservative party, plus Europe-bashers from other parties and sectors, not to mention a brash, right-of-centre tabloid media, kept the populist, Euroskeptic fires burning.

And then Syria.

The massive destabilization of the Middle East and the refugee crisis rekindled the ugly rhetoric of xenophobia, Islamophobia, and “immigrants.”

Simplistic notions of Europe being soft on immigrants (code for “terrorists”) and Britain, an EU member, being “forced” to take in people it would have otherwise turned away re-emerged at the very moment David Cameron made the political decision to nip the Euroskeptics in the bud by silencing them once and for all by invoking the vox populi.

This gamble, by a politician who had inherited decades of European history and politics, will likely go down in history as his great folly: trying to solve a deeply complex, historical problem, in one fell swoop. His astute point of not being able to “scramble back into the cockpit,” having leapt from the metaphorical European Airbus, seems especially apt as his own parachute clearly did not deploy.

The degree to which social class and xenophobia underpinned the Leave campaign is suggested by some interesting data emerging from the polls. In general, the most newcomer-rich parts of the U.K. voted largely, sometimes overwhelmingly, with the Remain campaign. According to The Guardian newspaper’s blog, in the district of Lambeth in South London, 78 per cent voted Remain, a district where 4,598 new international migrants have settled. Manchester, with a net migration of 13,554 inbound, voted Remain, as did the Conservative riding of Wandsworth in London where 75 per cent voted Remain with a net migration of 6,295. Compare that with regions who welcomed hardly any migrants such as East Lindsey, whose net migration was 191 people in a population of more than 135,000 and who voted 69.9 per cent for Leave.

For Brits, Brexit will mean years of economic and political instability.

The British pound has already dropped beyond 30-year lows, stock markets around the world are seeing massive sell-offs of European stocks. That affects pensions as well as big-business bottom lines, in Britain of course, but around the globalized market, including Canada. Disengaging from the past 23 years of laws, agreements, policies and procedures — and replacing them with new British-only ones will consume an enormous amount of government resources.

Factions calling for “less government” and “less regulation,” such as the Tories, and UKIP, will have to wait further on that. It is possible that new restrictions on mobility of people, goods, materials, students, all the things that the EU membership facilitated, will become increasingly restrictive, perhaps even punitively so in the short term.

Worst of all, the poisonous impulses given free rein during the campaign will colour the tone and details of the exit process. Threats that other disgruntled parties to the Maastricht Treaty will pack up their Brussels offices and go home will continue. Others have already commented that with the U.K. clearly a house divided over Europe, surely other nationalist, independence movements in Scotland and Ireland will find new hope.

It is possible their populist desires can very soon be added to the increasingly full basket of formerly unimaginable political changes that will find their historical origins in the contemporary moment.

“What if the Canadian census form required participants to choose either English or French in answer to the question, “Which language do you speak most often at home?” Many Canadians — one in five, according to the 2011 census — would be perplexed about how to answer this question, since neither is correct.

The 2011 census found that almost 200 distinct languages are spoken in Canadian homes because it gave participants the option to specify a language other than English or French. We also know how many people use which languages and the regions where they use them. This information has important implications. Statistics Canada, for example, provides the 2016 census online in 24 languages it knows are commonly used.

So why is it that census fillers must still describe each member of their household as either “male” or “female” in answer to the question “what is the person’s sex?” There is no option to specify an “other” gender. For people who are inter-sexed, trans, or gender fluid, the choice is not straightforward.”