(All pictures have been removed from the articles because they take up so much memory in each post. To see the pictures use the web address and visit the sites of the newspapers.)
Manitoba
champion coaches Kenora students on curling basics
SHERI LAMB
Miner and
News
Thursday,
January 12, 2017 6:25:46 EST PM
Liz Fyfe,
second for Manitoba's Kerri Einarson, spent the day at King George School
teaching students like James Sinclair the basics of curling through the Rocks
and Rings program. SHERI LAMB/Daily Miner and News
Elementary
school students at Kenora-based Keewatin-Patricia District School Board
institutions received a lesson about brooms and rocks this week.
Liz Fyfe,
second for Kerri Einarson’s Manitoba curling rink, took some time out from
preparing for the Manitoba Scotties Tournament of Hearts to visit Kenora and
try and get some youngsters interested in the sport. Fyfe visited Valleyview
School, Evergreen Public School, King George School and Keewatin Public School
as part of the Rocks and Rings in-school curling program, sponsored by Northern
Ontario curling through an RBC grant that allows communities to bring in
seasoned curlers like Fyfe to teach students the basics.
“It’s the
future of curling, if we don’t get kids involved then who is going to be there
in 10, 15 years. We need to encourage people to do what we’re doing now,” said
Fyfe.
“Different
schools have a different atmosphere and it’s great to see some kids get really
excited about it who maybe didn’t know anything about curling before, or kids
who have done it before but have gotten into it now because of this program,”
she added.
The
29-year-old was a member of the Einarson team who represented Team Manitoba at
the 2016 Scotties Tournament of Hearts in Grande Prairie, AB, where their
fellow Manitoban Jennifer Jones was under the Team Canada banner. In 2017, both
teams are among those trying to qualify as Team Manitoba.
Fyfe will
have many new fans cheering for her at the 2017 Manitoba Scotties Tournament of
Hearts, Jan. 24-29, based on the wide-eyed interest from many of the Grade 5
students at King George School on Wednesday, Jan. 11.
James
Sinclair was one of the students who enjoyed the curling lessons Fyfe gave him
and his classmates.
“I learned
more about how to use the brooms in sweeping,” said Sinclair. “One hand goes on
the top and one hand in the middle and both hands have to stay on the broom as
it moves back and forth cleaning the ice for the rock.”
Besides
populating Canada’s future Olympians and Scotties Tournament of Hearts and
Brier winners, today’s youth can also enjoy curling throughout their lives for
exercise and socializing in their communities.
“Curling is
a lifelong sport,” said Andrea Ronnebeck, Northern Ontario technical director.
“These kids are the future of curling.”
This
weekend the Kenora Curling Club and the Keewatin Curling Club have agreed to
open their doors for free on-ice introduction to curling sessions for students
and parents. In Kenora the sessions will be Saturday, Jan. 14 at 1 p.m. and 2
p.m. and in Keewatin the sessions are Sunday, Jan. 15 at 3 p.m. and 4 p.m.
SLamb@postmedia.com
CCI students
learn to Stand-Up Stay-Strong
By Cecilia
Nasmith, Northumberland Today
Monday, January
16, 2017 5:47:11 EST PM
The minds
behind the Stand-Up Stay-Strong program joined with members of the Cobourg and
Port Hope police services to launch the first of two self-defence and
safety-training workshops at Cobourg Collegiate Institute for Grade 9 girls.
That group includes (back, from left) Cobourg Special Constable Todd Long,
Cobourg Sergeant Mike Richardson, Cobourg Constable Robbilyn Parker, Darryl
Goodall, (front, from left) Cobourg Constable Frank Francella, CCI teacher
Katrina Read, Cornerstone community counsellor Lucy Caldwell, CCI
student-retention counsellor Deb Kimmett, Police Constable Nick Moeller, Port
Hope Constable Tammie Staples and (not present) Loren Macklin. SUBMITTED PHOTO
COBOURG -
Grade 9 girls at Cobourg Collegiate Institute had the opportunity last week to
participate in a pilot project called Stand-Up Stay-Strong.
This new
program was facilitated by Cobourg Police Services Constable Frank Francella
and community counsellor Lucy Caldwell of Cornerstone Family Violence
Prevention Centre. It is designed as a self-defence and safety-training
initiative that can provide students with the information and practical
knowledge to protect themselves in a variety of risky situations.
Committed
to creating safe communities, local businessman (and father) Darryl Goodall saw
the need for self-defence and prevention education for young adults, and set
the wheels in motion. With support from Cornerstone, local police services and
local business sponsors, as well as some very engaged teachers, the Stand-Up
Stay-Strong program was formed.
“I had
difficulty finding a local self-defence program for my teenage daughter, and
decided to reach out to my contacts within the community to see if there was a
way to provide this training to all the girls,” Goodall said in the press
release.
“I have
been amazed at how quickly the various stakeholders were able to get behind
this initiative and make it a reality. And because of this efficiency, there is
potential for all high-school female students to receive self-defence training
before graduation.”
Currently
designed as a one-time two-hour workshop, Stand-Up Stay-Strong includes
discussion and information about healthy and unhealthy relationships, as well as
domestic and sexual or dating violence. There will be a large focus on safety
planning and how to minimize or mitigate risk. And students will also be taught
basic self-defence strategies, with the opportunity to practice these skills
with trained police professionals.
Cornerstone
executive director Nancy Johnston said her agency is proud to be involved with
this program.
“It allows
us to continue in our mission to provide prevention services, and offers a
platform to expand our support to young adults throughout Northumberland
County,” she said.
“Stand-Up
Stay-Strong helps to build a solid foundation for the future, creating stronger
and safer communities free from family violence.”
“As part of
the Community Mobilization Unit, I am very pleased to be involved with this
women’s self-defence and safety-awareness initiative,” Francella added.
“Chief Liu,
Deputy Chief VandeGraaf, myself and many of my fellow officers are here and
eager to volunteer our expertise. Our goal is to help students work toward building
healthy relationships, while also developing awareness of personal safety at
school, home and while in the community.”
Organizers
also extended thanks to a list of community sponsors, including Spoolon
Manufacturing Ltd., Kawartha Metals Corp., Third Street Law, Part Time CFO
Services, Lynch Rutherford Tozer Chartered Professional Accountants, National
Shunt Services Ltd., PACE Network, Finlay Construction, TD Bank and
Sommerville’s.
School 'dream
come true' for Rwandans
By Mary
Katherine Keown, The Sudbury Star
Monday,
January 16, 2017 8:48:16 EST PM
Marie
Ntaganda shows off the work Le chemin de la lumiere has done to local
dignitaries and media, in Kavumu, Rwanda. (Photo supplied)
On a
hillside in rural Rwanda, a school opened its doors recently to 120 bright
little minds, all eager to learn about the world around them.
Le chemin
de la lumiere, (Inzira y’urumuri in Kinyarwanda or Path to Knowledge in
English) has finally opened the doors to their kindergarten classes in Kavumu,
in southern Rwanda. Inauguration day was Jan. 9 and Noreen Barbe, one of the
group’s co-founders, could not be more pleased.
“They had
the inauguration with the villagers and dignitaries,” Barbe said from her home
in Coniston. “Everything seems to have gone according to plan. I cannot tell
you how proud I am.”
Barbe along
with Marie Ntaganda, who works with the French-language public school board in
Sudbury, and Adolphine Mukamanzi launched Le chemin in 2013 to raise money to
build a school near Ntaganda’s home village in the central African nation. They
still have a ways to go, but so far, have raised about $115,000 (most of it
locally) for the school, mostly from small fundraisers such as car washes,
banquet dinners, a church craft show and personal donations. Mukamanzi, who is
based in Toronto, also raised some money in that city.
They
received about $50,000 – including a $45,000 donation that was funneled through
the Sudbury Community Foundation – from a business person in town who has
requested anonymity.
“He matched
what we had raised, which was $45,000,” Barbe said. “We asked him why he was so
generous – we had nothing tangible to give him – and he said ‘because, I have a
family and I have a business and I don’t have the time to give to such a
project, but my entire life, it’s been my want to do something like this and
I’m doing it through you.’ I have tremendous respect for that person. And he’s
just a young man.”
They are
still raising money for the school’s latrines – three for the boys and three
for the girls – which will cost about $20,000. But luckily, Barbe said the
group struck a deal with a kind builder in Rwanda who went ahead with
construction and agreed to wait for payment.
“Our
concerns about his honesty were all gone,” Barbe said. “He’s even tiled the
walls, which we didn’t expect.”
To date,
Barbe, her colleagues in Canada and the villagers of Kavumu have built three
kindergarten classes. The village was deeply involved in the construction of
the school.
Barbe could
not be in Rwanda for the big day, but Ntaganda and Mukamanzi made the trip from
blustery Ontario to the warm, sunny country of a thousand hills.
I lived in
Rwanda a few years ago and walked many of those hills. I can tell you, there
are at least 1,000 hills, most of which are covered in terraced farms and
small, adobe-style homes. The country is breathtakingly beautiful and after
more than 22 years, it continues to heal from the 1994 genocide. Education for
its young people is an instrumental tool in that healing.
“My heart is so big,” Barbe said. “I’ll be 79
years old in May and to think that I’d be working to build a school in Rwanda –
one person can do anything and anything can happen.”
Barbe said
the villagers in Kavumu are “beyond words” happy about their new school.
“It’s more than they expected, it’s a dream
come true,” she said. “Those kids can now walk there easily from all the towns
around. The school they attended is 2.5 hours away.”
Many of the
roads in Rwanda are full of potholes and crevices – they make Sudbury’s roads
look as smooth as melted chocolate – and Barbe said that during the rainy
season, some of the roads became impassable to cars and pedestrians alike. The
rains in Rwanda are very heavy. Umbrellas are useless and will often break
under the weight of the water and wind. You must take cover. Rain falls in
sheets and while it cools the air, which is often welcome, it can bring other
challenges.
That made
it very difficult for the children to make their way to school.
“The laneway and the route they used was
muddy, and would be full of holes and stuff,” she explained. “These smaller
children, maybe they couldn’t get to grade one. They would be tired by the time
they got home and would have to stop at houses along the way. … That was a
pushing point for us. They should not have to walk 2.5 hours in the heat or in
the rain, or following a heavy rain.”
Barbe
explains the three kindergarten classes they have built are phase one, the
latrines are phase two and the classrooms for grades one through nine are phase
three.
“It’s ongoing,
it’s unfinished,” she said. They hope to resume fundraising in the near future
for the next set of classrooms and for the latrines. “Hopefully we can start to
work on the other buildings.”
For more
information about the organization or to see more photos of the school, visit
Le chemin on Facebook at facebook.com/lechemindelalumiere.
Twitter:
@marykkeown
FCA
Foundation doles out grants to local school robotics
Mary Caton
Published
on: January 12, 2017 | Last Updated: January 12, 2017 6:11 PM EST
Teams
compete at the FIRST Robotics 2015 Windsor-Essex Great Lakes Regional
competition at the St. Denis Centre on April 3, 2015.Dax Melmer / Windsor Star
Teams from
12 local schools were awarded grants of US$5,000 each from the FCA Foundation
Thursday to help offset costs associated with competing in the FIRST Robotics
program.
The grant
will help with registration fees, parts and materials.
Local
schools receiving help from the North American automaker’s charitable arm are
Maranatha Christian Academy, Tecumseh Vista, Holy Names high school, Cardinal
Carter, Kingsville District, Sandwich Secondary, Lamothe-Cadillac, Massey,
Belle River, St. Anne’s, L’Essor and Villanova.
Louise
Arbour Secondary in Brampton also received a grant.
Under
strict rules, limited resources and an intense six-week time limit, FRC teams
are challenged to raise funds, design a team brand, hone skills, build and
program industrial-size robots to play a difficult game against like-minded competitors.
“The
real-world experience that students gain through their participation in FIRST
programs is invaluable in preparing students for the future,” said Phil Jansen,
head of product development, FCA – North America.
Teachers’
union raises alarm over rising violence in schools
ETFO calls
for more supports for kids with behavioural issues.
Sam
Hammond, president of the Ontario elementary teachers union, said incidents of
"aggresive, destructive student behaviour in classrooms" are
increasing. (Melissa Renwick / Toronto
Star File Photo)
By Andrea
Gordon Education Reporter
Tues., Jan.
17, 2017
Ontario’s
elementary teachers say the “critical lack of support” for children with
serious behavioural issues has led to a rise in violent outbursts that puts
students and teachers at risk.
And they
are calling on the province to address it with more funding for special
education and children’s mental health.
“Increasingly
we are seeing incidents of aggressive, destructive student behaviour in
classrooms,” Sam Hammond, president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of
Ontario, told a news conference Tuesday.
“Many of
these students are suffering and we need to step up to help them.”
ETFO
planned to meet with ministers of education and labour on Wednesday to
highlight how profoundly the shortage of supports across the province is
affecting schools.
The problem
is regularly the number one issue on the table when union representatives
across the province meet and something the federation hears about “every single
day,” said Hammond.
Too many
children as young as 4 or 5 are stuck on long wait lists for the vital early
interventions they need — including assessments that would give them access to
supports. Even then, those resources are inadequate to meet the growing demand,
he said.
Education
Minister Mitzie Hunter said Tuesday the government is currently holding
consultations to develop a new strategy to ensure the safety and well-being of
all students.
It is “a
top priority for us,” she said.
“We want
our education workers and staff, we want our students when they walk into a
school, to feel that safety. We want to ensure that they have the resources in
place.”
But Hammond
said the province must deliver on that promise without further delay.
Chronic
underfunding has led to boards across the province cutting educational
assistants — who can be key to the success of special needs students — as they
struggle to balance their budgets.
The
federation also wants a co-ordinated system that would provide quicker access
to children’s mental health services in the community and schools.
“We know
that students who have timely access to effective supports do better in
school,” said Janet Bigham, president of the ETFO Simcoe County teacher local.
She said
principals and superintendents need more training on how violence affects
teachers and how to respond, including by filing violent incident reports, to
ensure those students and staff get help.
“We cannot
allow this type of environment to become the norm.”
ETFO did
not provide numbers from its members about how frequently they deal with
violent incidents. But it cited statistics from the Workplace Safety and
Insurance Board showing that education workers have one of highest levels of
lost time due to injuries as a result of workplace violence. Elementary
teachers have more than twice the rate of secondary teachers, Hammond said.
Such
outbursts profoundly affect all students and can create so much stress for
teachers that they take time off work, said Shirley Bell, union local president
for Kawartha Pine Ridge.
“Resources
are spread so thin that we are left trying to offer Band-Aid solutions that
help us survive day to day,” she said. “But these do not address the real need
for services to properly support our most vulnerable students.”
With files
from Kristin Rushowy
Are autistic
children more likely to believe they’re transgender? Controversial Toronto
expert backs link
Sharon
Kirkey | January 12, 2017 5:02 PM ET
|
@sharon_kirkey
Getty
Images “It is possible that kids who have a tendency to get obsessed or fixed
on something may latch on to gender,” Zucker says in the film, according to The
Telegraph.
Many
children who are diagnosed as transgender may actually be autistic, whose
“fixation” with the opposite gender may be as fleeting as a toddler’s obsession
with trains or trucks, according to a new theory that is already drawing ire.
Doctors
working in gender disorder clinics are seeing a higher-than-expected number of
children with autism, while recent studies have found young people with autism
were nearly eight times more likely to exhibit “gender variance” — the wish to
be the opposite sex — than normally developing children.
Now, a
prominent but controversial Canadian psychologist claims autistic traits of
“fixating” on issues could convince children they are the wrong sex.
In a new
BBC documentary, Dr. Kenneth Zucker, hastily dismissed two years ago from his
30-year directorship of the gender-identity clinic at Toronto’s Centre for
Addiction and Mental Health, said children identifying as transgender often
display autistic tendencies.
Autistic
adolescents struggling to deal with their quirky cerebral wiring do not need to
be told they are ‘a girl trapped in a boy’s body’ or vice versa
Susan
Bradley: How trans activists are unethically influencing autistic children to change
genders
Has the
transgender movement gone too far?
It began,
commendably, as activism for the rights of that very small number of people who
experience persisting discomfort with their biological gender. But it has
evolved into an ideological movement to normalize the practice of changing
genders — and in the process is crossing ethical lines with a particularly
vulnerable subset of young people struggling with issues of gender identity.
A recent
article by Elise Ehrhard in Crisis Magazine, a Catholic periodical, addresses
the aggressive approach by adult trans activists in recruiting adolescents with
Asperger’s Syndrome or other types of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to their
cause.
Ehrhard has
Asperger’s. As is typical among Asperger’s girls in their adolescence, she
preferred the company of boys, with whom she identified cerebrally, a tendency
encouraged by the bullying she experienced from other girls.
“It is
possible that kids who have a tendency to get obsessed or fixed on something
may latch on to gender,” Zucker says in the documentary, according to The
Telegraph.
“Just
because kids are saying something doesn’t necessarily mean you accept it, or
that it’s true, or that it could be in the best interests of the child,” he
said, later adding: “A four-year-old might say that he’s a dog — do you go out
and buy dog food?”
His
comments are drawing outrage from the LGBT community. Some fear transgender
children could become targeted for being somehow “mentally disturbed.”
Others
argue the transgender movement has gone too far.
“Autistic
adolescents struggling to deal with their quirky cerebral wiring do not need to
be told they are ‘a girl trapped in a boy’s body’ or vice versa,” Dr. Susan
Bradley, former chief of psychiatry at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children,
writes in an opinion piece published in the Post. Yet “many parents are buying
into this completely unscientific hypothesis.”
However,
several studies have suggested autism and gender dysphoria co-occur more often
than by chance in adolescents. And new guidelines published in October state a
diagnosis of autism “should not exclude the potential for GD (gender dysphoria)
treatment,” including cross-sex hormones that can have permanent effects, even
if stopped.
A pivotal
study published two years ago led by Dr. John Strang, of the Children’s
National Health System in Washington, D.C., found gender variance was eight
times more common in children with autism spectrum disorder, and seven times
more likely in children with ADHD.
It’s not
clear what might be behind the overlap.
One of the
most striking features of autism is what has been described as “social
blindness” or disconnection. Children are less inhibited by social
expectations, and therefore may have less of an impulse to avoid expressing
gender behaviour that doesn’t fit stereotypical norms, Strang has argued.
'I feel
like a boy, mom.' Doctors seeing an increase in preschoolers convinced they are
in the wrong body.
Barbara
Kay: Scandal at CAMH — one entirely of its own making
“Children
and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders may be less aware of the social
restrictions against expressions of gender variance and therefore less likely
to avoid expressing these inclinations,” he said when the study was published.
“It could also be theorized that excessively rigid or ‘black and white’
thinking could result in such a child’s rigidly interpreting mild or moderate
gender nonconforming inclinations as more intense or absolute.”
Zucker
posits that autistic traits of “fixating” on issues could convince children
they are the wrong sex, according to the Telegraph.
Once an
academic star, Zucker left CAMH after an external review concluded not all his
practices were “in step with the latest thinking.” His published research
suggests 80 per cent of children treated for gender dysphoria no longer
identify as the opposite sex by high school. They grow to accept the gender
they were “assigned” at birth.
In the
documentary, he rejects claims he practiced so-called “conversion therapy,”
saying instead his approach was “developmentally informed therapy,” according
to the Guardian.
Dr. Stephen
Feder, co-director of the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario’s gender
diversity clinic in Ottawa, said children on the autism spectrum are
overrepresented in his clinic.
Gluten-free
baby: When parents ignore science
Inside the
troubling and dangerous rise of alternative medicine for kids
Aaron
Hutchins
January 11, 2017
The first
time Daniel Bissonnette saw Goldfish crackers, Fruit Loops and blue Jell-O, his
mother recalls, he mistook them for art supplies. He was three years old and
his preschool teacher had just served the kids snacks. Daniel began smearing
the Jell-O on a piece of paper as if he were painting the ocean. The Fruit
Loops were going to represent bubbles and the bright orange crackers,
obviously, fish. But he was really confused when the teacher handed him a
spoon. Then Daniel looked around the room and saw the other kids eating their
materials.“He’d only seen food in its unrefined raw form,” says Ilana Bissonnette from their home near Coquitlam, B.C. “Then he saw that things out there in the world were very different.”
That story may seem incredible, but for the first six years of his life, she says, Daniel was raised on a raw, vegan, non-GMO, unprocessed diet, which means he only ate uncooked, unprocessed foods, and no meat or products of animal origin. The diet stemmed from Ilana’s experience trying to get pregnant. When she went off birth control, her menstrual cycle wasn’t getting back to normal. She and her husband sought out solutions through conventional medicine, without success. Then, a year later, she switched to a vegan, mostly raw diet. She says her cycle resumed and she got pregnant with Daniel. So when it came time for him to start eating solid foods, she decided it was best to start him off on the same diet—despite objections from both doctors and relatives.
“My parents thought I was insane for going vegan, for going raw, and for breastfeeding as long as I did,” Ilana says—three years for Daniel and four years for her second son, Adam. It wasn’t just the extended breastfeeding. “It was pretty much exclusive breastfeeding for the first two years. My approach was to put the best nutrition in me so I could produce the best breast milk and feed it to my children.”
MORE: Why you should skip the kale salad and eat like your grandma
Bissonnette didn’t stop with her own sons; she created “Raising Raw Babies,” a three-hour audio program for interested parents (cost: US$75), which covers topics such as conception, pregnancy, breastfeeding and feeding children. Bissonnette acknowledges she’s not a nutritionist or a doctor. “I found the experts that I knew would have the answers and I did the research,” she says.
Bissonnette is among the growing number of parents discounting conventional nutrition—and in many cases, conventional medicine, too—to carve their own path in raising their children. It’s difficult to know just how many parents are raising their children sugar-free, gluten-free, or on raw-food or paleolithic diets. But browse your local bookstore, or Amazon, and you’ll find an abundance of literature on the subjects, from Well Adjusted Babies: A Chiropractic Guide for Holistic Parenting from Pregnancy Through to Early Childhood, written by Australian chiropractor Jennifer Barham-Floreani, to Eat Like a Dinosaur, which offers tips and recipes to raise kids on a paleo diet. Online there is a plethora of blogs, such as The Raw Food Mum, The Vegan Momma, Fruit-Powered and The Paleo Mom, whose author, Sarah Ballantyne, has published a book, The Paleo Approach, and claims the diet can help manage and even reverse autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis.
Ballantyne
discovered the benefits of going paleo first hand. A Canadian expat who got her
doctorate in medical biophysics at Western University in London, Ont., but who
now calls Georgia home, she was seeking help for her psoriasis and eczema five years
ago, so she did what comes naturally to her: research. Ballantyne found her
answer in “the caveman diet,” as it is often dubbed, which gives the green
light to fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood, nuts and seeds, and shuns all
dairy, grains, legumes, and vegetable oils as well as refined or processed
foods.
“I thought it sounded really extreme,” she
admits. But she gave it a shot, and not only did her skin soon clear up, her
migraines disappeared and her irritable bowel syndrome was gone. She felt so
good she followed through on the diet with her kids—first making the shift to
cut out gluten and then transition them to the paleo diet.
Ballantyne
insists she relies only on reputable research, but many of the alt-parenting
books and blogs draw from a wealth of popular yet contested work in alternative
nutrition and health.
In their
day-to-day lives, the Bissonnettes’ primary online health resource is the
website of Joseph Mercola, an anti-vaccine, alternative-health physician who
often counsels against trusting medical professionals, scientific researchers
and government agencies. While Mercola has been a guest on Dr. Oz’s TV show, he
was presented as “the man your doctor doesn’t want you to listen to.”
These are
arguably boom times for people who fit that description. Alternative therapies
are a growing business, while celebrities and bloggers are emerging as authorities
on lifestyle and nutrition, advocating for everything from the latest dieting
trends to homeopathic remedies. Now, we are witnessing the phenomenon filter
down to society’s most vulnerable members—children. The parenting choices of
Kourtney Kardashian are broadcast to her more than 50 million Instagram
followers and become fodder for tabloid news outlets, like her decision to
raise her kids on a gluten-free, dairy-free diet. Meanwhile, Rainbeau Mars, a
Hollywood yogi and former global ambassador for Adidas, encourages families to
go vegan.
But when
does out-of-the-box parenting end up going too far? A recent article on
Gizmodo, the popular tech website, argued, “If you feed your baby the paleo
diet you should be in prison.” Last summer, an Italian parliamentarian put
forward the idea of jailing parents who raise their kids on a vegan diet, after
a spate of high-profile cases of vegan toddlers needing emergency hospital
care.
Those are
extreme reactions, but dieticians agree that diets can be risky for children.
“Once you start restricting food groups or large chunks of food groups, you
start running into problems like vitamin and mineral deficiency,” says Karen
Kuperberg, a registered dietician who works with the Failure to Thrive program
at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. “In general, any diets for kids
aren’t recommended. You want kids to eat a variety of foods from all food
groups.”
Should
parents be left to decide what diet is best for their children, even against
the advice of medical professionals? Should they be allowed to impose
alternative remedies on their children like chiropractic care or homeopathy?
Parents only want what’s best for their own children, after all. And yet
parents following dubious authorities can go astray despite their best of
intentions. As Bissonnette puts it, coming from another perspective: “It’s not
something you want to play around with. It’s your kid’s life.”
The phenomenon of kids on fad diets is not
merely the reflection of recent fashions in dieting, but may rather be the
product of a number of broader cultural tendencies. For one, there is the trend
toward vilifying or fetishizing components of food, be it sugar, fat, gluten,
salt or protein. Consider the gluten-free boom: Despite the fact that only an
estimated one per cent of Americans lives with celiac disease, an autoimmune
disorder that would require a gluten-free diet, a 2015 survey found about one
of every five Americans actively choose to eat gluten-free foods. Meanwhile the
spike in protein consumption is so far-reaching that General Mills created a
“Cheerios Protein.”
Couple all
the nutritional tips and dietary hand-wringing with the influx of parenting
advice—via books and blogs on topics ranging from attachment parenting to
helicopter parenting to “tiger” parenting—and it’s not surprising that what
kids eat has become an area of serious focus in North America. A 2013 survey
from an independent American advertising agency found that 52 per cent of
Millennial parents closely monitor their children’s diet, while food-tracking
apps like Kurbo allow parents and their children to monitor eating habits via a
traffic light system (red: foods to avoid; yellow: eat in moderation; green:
help yourself).
Another
factor in the rise of the phenomenon is a broader data illiteracy in our
culture. “Stories and narratives always win out over the data,” says Timothy
Caulfield, a professor in law and public health at the University of Alberta
and the Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy. “One good cover story
in People magazine about Kourtney Kardashian is always going to win out over a
whole body of evidence.”
MORE: Why
it’s time for parents to grow up
With
cherry-picked scientific evidence, it’s possible to find support for almost any
argument, and medical professionals and scientists—no matter their
qualifications—now compete on the Internet with alternative health proponents
or bloggers who have little more than a personal success story. A claim on
Mercola’s website about certain kinds of brassieres potentially causing cancer,
for example, cited leaders in the alternative medical field and a 1995 study
from an anthropologist. Even though cancer researchers have found no such
linkage, the theory circulated far and wide—even ending up on the popular
(albeit equally controversial) lifestyle website Goop, curated by Oscar-winning
health authority Gwyneth Paltrow.
MORE: Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘Goop’ is duping us
all
One
frequently cited source for going raw (he pops up on Bissonnette’s website) is
Gabriel Cousens, a holistic nutritionist who claims to have a cure for diabetes
through a 21-day program where insulin is no longer needed after as little as
four days. Another popular figure is Brian Clement, a nutritionist who boasted
that his alternative therapy health spa in Florida has cured everything from
leukemia to multiple sclerosis. (He was ordered by the Florida Department of
Health to stop calling himself a medical doctor after treating
leukemia-stricken Ontario First Nations girls with Vitamin C injections, laser
therapy and a raw food diet.)
In a more
mainstream vein, the paleo diet has come under plenty of criticism from
experts. An evidence-based review of the diet for the Dieticians of Canada led
by Tanis Fenton, a dietician and epidemiologist at the University of Calgary,
concluded that “several of the premises of the paleo diet are not supported by
evidence.” Harvard’s medical school came to the same conclusion in a 2015 article:
“There is no strong scientific evidence at this time for claims that a paleo
diet helps prevent or treat many medical conditions.” Yet interest shows no
signs of ebbing.
For
children, following a strict paleo diet does offer some benefits: it means
eating whole foods as opposed to the prepackaged kind, long relied upon by
hurried parents. But it can also potentially lead to serious dietary
deficiencies. “A child would have to consume five cups of cooked spinach to get
the same amount of calcium as in two cups of milk,” says Fenton. “A couple of
cups of milk is possible in a day. I’ve never met a child that would eat five
cups of cooked spinach a day.” Fenton adds that shunning grains and legumes
isn’t recommended either because those foods can be rich in important vitamins,
minerals and nutrients.
It’s not
that restrictive diets—such as raw, vegan or paleo—can’t be followed; it’s just
easy to get them wrong. They’re also often unnecessary for parents looking for
ways to raise healthier kids.
(Carey Kirkella/Getty
Images)
Kuperberg,
the nutritionist at Sick Kids hospital in Toronto, has seen children in her
clinic with everything from cognitive delays to rickets, a softening of the
bones due to lack of vitamin D or calcium. One family, she remembers, had a
diet that encompassed basically fruit, nuts, seeds and homemade almond milk—and
the child came in with vitamin D deficiency, vitamin B12 deficiency, and, well,
“the list was endless,” Kuperberg says. Some families dutifully follow
Kuperberg’s advice to get their child’s diet back on track. For parents who
fail to provide their kids a healthy diet, under worst-case scenarios, she
says, Children’s Aid has had to step in.
Professionals
like Kuperberg, of course, can only help the kids who end up at a hospital or
clinic in the first place. Families with nutritionally starved children can
easily fly under the radar. “When the kids are at home, there’s no way of
knowing—especially infants or toddlers who aren’t even at school,” Kuperberg
says. In which case, parents are at risk of their own misinformation hurting
the ones they love.
“It’s an
interesting question: when does it cross over from reasonable parenting to
almost abuse?” says Caulfield. “When is that line crossed? When you’re
compromising the health of a child in some way, I think that’s when it becomes
an issue.”
Caulfield
thinks more science is the answer. “We need better information about what basic
nutrition is,” he says. “We need to have a science-literate society and a
food-literate society. The best we can do is work with the best evidence
available.”
Consider
the popular gluten-free diet. “It’s a restrictive diet that’s totally
unnecessary,” says Peter Green, director of the Celiac Disease Center at
Columbia University. “A gluten-free diet is a life-saving diet for those with
celiac disease. But if you don’t have celiac disease, we don’t think it’s a
healthy diet.” Green says that, for children, a gluten-free diet can often be
low in both vitamins and fibre, and there is the worry of companies adding
unhealthy ingredients so that gluten-free products still maintain their taste.
“If parents buy a lot of products labelled as gluten-free, often when they take
gluten out of the product, they add more salt,” Green adds.
A commentary published last year in the Journal
of Pediatrics likewise stated that gluten-free packaged foods often have more
fat and sugar than the equivalent foods containing gluten. Other studies have found that
a gluten-free diet coincided with increases in obesity, caloric intake and
new-onset insulin resistance. As for the claims that gluten is toxic or that a
gluten-free diet is a good idea for infants at risk of developing celiac
disease—all these were labelled as “fiction” by the commentary’s author,
gastroenterologist Norelle Reilly, director of the Celiac Disease Center’s
pediatric program.
Green is
all in favour of going gluten-free if it’s medically required. But therein lies
another problem: parents who incorrectly self-diagnose themselves or their
children. A 2013 study of people who self-reported as having non-celiac gluten
sensitivity found that “gluten-specific effects were observed in only eight per
cent of participants.” “If children are having problems, they should be
evaluated rather than [for parents to] assume that it’s gluten,” Green says.
But no
matter how many decades of research Green has published about why gluten isn’t
evil, or how many talks Fenton gives on reasons to avoid going paleo, or how
many times Kuperberg recommends parents avoid any kind of diet but a balanced
one, none of them can compete with the reach of the rich and famous like
Kardashian or Paltrow or the market appeals of a celebrity chef like Australian
Pete Evans.
Evans’s
paleo cookbook, Bubba Yum Yum: The Paleo Way for New Mums, Babies and Toddlers,
was delayed when the Public Health Association of Australia brought up major
concerns—namely that his liver-based do-it-yourself baby formula recipe would
have 10 times the daily maximum amount of vitamin A considered safe for babies.
“There’s a very real possibility that a baby may die if this book goes ahead,”
Heather Yeatman, president of the Public Health Association of Australia, told
local media. The publisher pulled the plug on the book, but Evans opted to
self-publish with minor modifications. The Dieticians Association of Australia
said the reworked recipe could still seriously harm babies, though Evans did
give the formula a new name: “Happy Tummy Brew.”
It seems
unfair to take parents to task for feeding their kids too many beets. Part of the
appeal of these new diets is the damage that more conventional eating patterns
can do. A gluten-free or dairy-free diet is counter to most nutritionists’
recommendations, but so too is taking a child regularly to fast food
restaurants or allowing them to fill up on pop or sugary treats at home, as
millions of North American parents do routinely. In Canada, 13 per cent of
children between the ages of five and 17 are obese, according to a 2016 Senate
report, nearly tripling the percentage from 1980. Another 20 per cent are
considered overweight, and the health consequences of the excess pounds range
from Type 2 diabetes to poor emotional health.
MORE: Death
by sugar, the deadliest health crisis of our time
But the
failures of the mainstream are not a direct path to alternative nutrition or
medicine, notes Caulfield. For alternative medicine proponents who argue some
practices in conventional medicine lack scientific evidence, “that’s an
argument for better science,” Caulfield says, as opposed to “alternative
medicine saying, ‘We want our turn to provide useless therapies too.’ ”
Parents who
are committed to newfangled diets do have an advantage: they are paying close
attention to what their children eat; they may also be more vigilant about
other health factors, like ensuring their kids get enough exercise. With good
science, their dedication would be commendable. With dubious science, though,
the results can be disastrous.
That’s a
lesson Katya Nova learned the hard way. Originally from Edmonton, Nova had plans
to her raise her son Zion on a vegan diet—and she had thousands of Instagram
followers giving her plenty of love throughout her journey. But trouble struck
when Zion’s teeth started to come in. One tooth, she recalls, had started to
crumble apart by his first birthday. “It happened so fast,” Nova says. “His
teeth are just really weak.”
She decided
to introduce some animal products into Zion’s diet, such as cod liver oil and
grass-fed dairy. When she announced her decision on social media, she says, “My
Instagram followers dropped by 2,000 in 48 hours. There were a lot of angry
vegans who said, ‘How dare you use your huge platform to say that a vegan diet
may not be suitable to all children?’ ”
Nevertheless,
Nova says her family has dropped the labels and won’t get neurotic if their
child has cake at a birthday party. “I can understand the danger of a
plant-based mama who is passionate about the ethical part of veganism but does
not know how to come up with a really balanced diet,” she says. “That can be dangerous.”
Indeed, the
headlines point to the tragic consequences when overzealous ideas about
“all-natural” food or medicine—for children, especially, the two are very
closely tied—go way too far. In Mississauga, Ont., in 2011, two-year-old
Matinah Hosannah died of complications from asthma and severe malnutrition
stemming from a vegan diet lacking in vitamin D and B12. A similar tragic
outcome occurred in 2012 with 19-month old Ezekiel Stephan of Cardston County,
Alta. His parents diagnosed their toddler’s meningitis as croup and treated it
with natural remedies like olive leaf extract, garlic, hot peppers and
horseradish. When his condition worsened—his tiny body was too stiff to settle
into a car seat—the parents consulted a naturopath (not a pediatrician) and
were given an echinacea treatment. After Ezekiel arrived at the Alberta
Children’s Hospital in Calgary with abnormal breathing, he was quickly put on
life support, but died within two days. David and Collet Stephan were sentenced
last summer to four months in jail and house arrest, respectively, for failing
to provide the necessaries of life.
If anyone
wants to see what living on natural medicine looks like, Michael Rieder
suggests, they should go to Afghanistan. “Afghanistan is about as natural as you’re
going to get in terms of accessibility to 21st-century health care,” says the
clinical pharmacologist and professor of pediatrics at Western University. For
every 10 children born in Afghanistan today, odds are one of them won’t see
their fifth birthday. “Most of them die before they turn one and most of them
die from infection,” Rieder says. “That’s what happens when you don’t have
vaccination or antibiotics.”
“We’re
slipping into this ‘all knowledge is relative’ dark age,” says Caulfield. “You
don’t see this in other areas of science. We don’t have alternative physics or
people who believe there’s a natural healing force that can be utilized to
build bridges. But in health, we have this huge tolerance for this alternative,
non-scientific perspective.”
Four-year-old
Cooper Fredrick has an adjustment from chiropractor Dr. Jennifer Wise.
(Photograph by Nick Iwanyshyn)
Imposing
adult lifestyle choices on infants and children often extends beyond diet and
into the realm of alternative medicine. At the Thrive Natural Family Health
clinic in Toronto, Jennifer Wise tries to dispel all the preconceived notions
of her job as a pediatric chiropractor, where she’s treated newborns as young
as a day old on their way home from the hospital. “There’s a common perception
that a chiropractor is going to crack your bones. It doesn’t work in that
kung-fu style,” she says. “With little ones, we’re certainly not doing those
gross manipulations. It’s very gentle contact. Usually it’s just holding the
area, light touch, light force.” She equates the amount of force to what
someone might do to a tomato at the grocery to check its ripeness.
But other
chiropractors might not be as gentle, as seen in a video posted by Australian
chiropractor Ian Rossborough (and subsequently watched over a million times),
who loudly cracked the back of a four-day-old as an attempt to treat her colic.
The newborn immediately screamed. Amid swift online backlash, the Australian
Health Practitioner Regulation Agency quickly banned Rossborough from working
on the spines of anyone under six years of age or any kind of chiropractic work
on children under the age of two.
Wise says
patients come to her for various reasons: maybe the baby is having trouble
latching during breastfeeding or consistently sleeps with the head facing one
direction. “Sometimes I’ll find jaw misalignments so I’ll do some cranial work,
and within a few adjustments babies start nursing more effectively,” Wise says.
In some
instances, Wise adds, the results of her work can’t be seen for decades, if at
all. “So you have a baby that’s born in a traumatic situation and as a result
maybe the top two bones in their spine are slightly twisted,” she offers as an
example. “As an infant or child, they don’t get any chiropractic care. They end
up 35 years old in the workplace and have chronic migraines, sinus issues and
allergies.”
Of course,
there are no longitudinal scientific studies to back up a claim that pediatric
chiropractic care prevents hypothetical migraines decades later; even short-term,
double-blind, placebo-controlled studies on infants, Wise will readily admit,
aren’t abundant in her field. And the studies that do exist have mixed results.
A clinical trial of 86 infants from 2001—one of the few studies co-authored by
both pediatric researchers and a private practice chiropractor—found that
chiropractic spinal manipulation therapy was no more effective in treating
colic than a placebo. A 2008 study from the Anglo-European College of
Chiropractic, of 43 infants younger than eight weeks old who typically cried
more than three hours a day, did find two weeks of spinal manipulation and
occipital-sacral decompression “appear to offer significant benefits to infants
with colic.” But in this study there was no control group, which is often a requisite
for researchers to eliminate potential variables or bias that can influence
results.
Reliable
studies can be especially hard to conduct when infants are concerned, according
to Brian Gleberzon, a Toronto-based chiropractor who conducted a review of the
scientific literature regarding the use of spinal manipulative therapy for
pediatric health conditions. “It could just be that over time, the [baby’s]
teeth erupted or they just grew up a little bit,” he says. “You try to control
for these variables but sometimes you can’t. And they’re babies, so they can’t
really fill out a form. The only outcome is what the parent perceives in how
much crying time is related to what they thought as colic.”
And yet,
Gleberzon still believes chiropractors should be allowed to treat for colic,
though parents should know it’s no sure-fire solution to their sleepless
nights. “It’s the same principle with your dentist or your chiropractor or
psychotherapist,” he says. “There’s no guarantee they can help you. You pay your
money and take your chances.”
Others
aren’t so sure. “I don’t think any amount of spinal manipulation cures colic,”
says Rieder, the Western University professor. “I think it’s insane. It’s a bad
idea. As a pediatrician, you don’t want my advice on building bridges. I stick
to my domain. Chiropractors shouldn’t be going into areas like colic.”
Britt Marie
Hermes is even more critical of alternative medicine than Rieder. That is
because she has seen the issue from the other side. She has no idea how many
serious diagnoses she missed in her three-year career as a naturopath, but she
can think of a few. Hermes does not have an M.D.; after an almost lifelong
interest in natural medicine, she completed the doctoral program in
naturopathic medicine from Bastyr University—an accredited American university
specializing in alternative medicine—which allowed her to use the “doctor”
designation in a few states, including Washington, where she later worked as a
naturopathic pediatrician.
But Hermes
has since emerged as a fierce critic of naturopathic medicine, via her blog and
as a regular contributor to Forbes covering medical pseudoscience; she is now
pursuing a master of science in biomedicine at the University of Kiel in
Germany.
Her four
years at Bastyr University, Hermes says, included more of a focus on homeopathy
than pharmacology. She was confident when it came to taking blood pressure and
drawing blood, but when it came to managing prescriptions, for example, she had
no clue. “I never learned how to prescribe insulin, which was a major problem
when I saw patients with diabetes,” she says. “I became friends with a
pharmacist. So what I would do is step out of the room, look up the information
on a physician database and then I’d call the pharmacist and run it past her to
see if I calculated the dosage wrong. I depended on her a lot.”
So why
would any parent take their child to a pediatrician who is so unprepared?
Hermes said there were two groups of patients: The first sought her out
specifically because she was as a “naturopathic pediatrician” and thus they
believed she would have a different philosophy toward vaccines or antibiotics
compared to most pediatricians. The second group blindly trusted Hermes when
she said she was trained as a medical doctor. After all, “doctor” and
“pediatrician” were in her title.
One missed
diagnosis that stands out was a little girl just over a year old, who Hermes
had been seeing since birth as her “primary care doctor.” The child started to
get persistent diarrhea and rashes. “I was seeing her in the office a lot and I
was getting the impression the mom was hyper-concerned about her daughter’s
health,” Hermes remembers. “Mom seemed to be panicked all the time and I
brushed it off as new-mom nerves. I spent most of my time in those visits
trying to reassure mom, but not doing so much physical examination of the child
because I thought she was healthy.” Food allergy testing didn’t resolve
anything, nor did the dairy-free or gluten-free diets the young girl was asked
to try. Hermes prescribed supplements like probiotics and L-glutamine to help
with the girl’s gut inflammation.
“I think I
diagnosed her with something like tummy aches or diarrhea,” Hermes explains.
Turns out the girl had cancer, something Hermes found out later—indirectly, through
social media; she never learned what type.
“Sadly,
there are probably other cases,” Hermes says. “Maybe not missing cancer, but I
think about it all the time: maybe I missed childhood diabetes or maybe I
missed some tumour. Maybe I missed growth or developmental problems because I
was doing my best to play doctor.”
When it
comes to kids, Hermes now argues there should be an outright ban on naturopaths
treating minors. “I think adults can make whatever decision they want regarding
their health, but I don’t think parents should be allowed to voluntarily take
their children out of the medical system.”
If
gluten-free and raw-food diets have something to teach the rest of us,
alternative medicine does have some lessons for doctors. One reason Hermes says
she had such a good rapport with her patients is because she took the time to
listen to them. A visit with each patient could last upwards of 90 minutes,
where she asked about their family life, their diet, what time they were waking
up. The minutiae may not have pertained in any way to what health concern they
came in with, but “it just feels good to know that someone is listening to
you.”
Engaging
more with parents is a way to actually serve their health needs better. It’s
also one way to ferret out families trying out restrictive diets—or those
feeding the kids fast food three times a week, often because of socio-economic
factors.
“It would
be lovely if pediatricians questioned a little bit more about what the child’s
diet is like at home,” says Kuperberg, the nutritionist. “That’d be a perfect
place to start screening these families.” If a doctor learned a family is
instilling a gluten-free or vegan diet, for example, Kuperberg says that would
be an opportunity to do some nutritional blood work to ensure the child is
getting all the required vitamins and nutrients.
Back in
B.C., Daniel Bissonnette is now 12 years old and appears to be a healthy,
energetic and well-spoken boy. His mother says he gets tested to make sure he
isn’t missing any vitamins or minerals from his diet. He has his own breakfast
book, speaks at anti-GMO rallies and has a weekly “Ask Daniel” segment on his
YouTube channel, offering tips on topics like cold therapy and dieting choices.
The Bissonnette family has also since relaxed from being strict raw vegans;
Daniel’s diet is now described as being whole foods, organic, non-GMO,
unprocessed and primarily vegan, and his mom says it’s extremely important to
do one’s homework to make sure children stay healthy.
“It’s okay
if you’re an adult and go on a diet. If it doesn’t work, you switch,” says
Daniel’s mom, Ilana. “But you cannot afford to make any mistakes when it comes
to your children.”
(In 1989 free trade came
into effect in Canada. A few years later Canada signed NAFTA with the
U.S. and Mexico and there was even more free trade. Then it became
globalization, almost totally wide open borders with no duties or
tariffs on imports. Since that time many of the manufacturing companies
have closed and have moved to areas that have much more relaxed health
and safety regulations and there are very few unions. Wages and benefits
for workers are much lower than in Canada but companies can still sell
their goods here. News reports indicate that corporate profits have
increased. Ontario alone has lost about 500,000 jobs in manufacturing.
If income tax is the main source of revenue for governments then Ontario
is in serious trouble unless they can create jobs in spite of
globalization. That's why Ontario is not generous in contracts with
those connected with government. The lack of opportunity in the private
sector is causing those who have personal contacts and the opportunity
to get good jobs over those who have more experience and qualifications
to use those contacts aggressively. Many workers went to the oil fields
since Ontario was hurting but then the price of oil dropped
significantly and 100,000 jobs were lost in the west. Enrollment in
Ontario dropped partly because of the families that moved out west and
because of a very low birth rate. Ontario is closing schools. It is not
the best of times. Be strong. Have faith.)(Sunday, January 8, 2017: A substitute teacher tells me there are 326 outstanding grievances with Toronto Catholic. Also, the exact information I have received is: 37 Toronto Catholic DSB teachers who had full-time, permanent contracts were let-go at the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year. These are teachers who had less than 5 years of seniority. The board informed them of their redundancy through a letter they received at the end of August. Also, the hiring at TCDSB has changed: all new hires for teaching will be placed on a supply teaching roster for both supply teaching and the Education Assistant, (E.A.), roster. This is in order to lower their wages.
My question is: will these qualified teachers be used to cover classrooms in place of persons who previously would have been given substitute teaching positions? Is this to put them into a different, more-cooperative and more-obedient union and to lower the rate of pay that the board has to pay them and to put them under a different collective bargaining agreement? Are classes this school year going to be covered by someone classified as an EA instead of someone who is classified as a Substitute Teacher so the board can pay them less? Is OECTA going to stand for this if this is the case? Is the province allowing this to happen because their financial position has become so desperate? Are parents going to allow their child to be taught in lieu of a full-time teacher by someone who is classified as only an EA? Are substitute teachers going to stand for this or are they going to set-up a protest system so they are not available on Mondays and Fridays, the days of the week that are the most frequent days of demand for substitute teachers? Are the full-timers going to use all of their sick days as a protest? If this arrangement has existed since August what have TOTL (union for substitutes) and OECTA (union for the full-timers) done about it? Have they just thrown their hands up and surrendered for the rest of the cba? What do the leaders of other unions think about this if it is the case? What do those who are studying in teacher's college in Ontario right now think of this development in the teacher market? Is a similar situation occuring with TDSB or any other board or just the unique TCDSB? Why have the media who cover education said nothing about this? Has TCDSB kept it a secret? Are teachers so cowed that they are too afraid to say a peep? Is this the new status in union shops in the 2000's? Comments?)
(Saturday, November 7, 2016: A substitute teacher with TCDSB tells me he checked the web sites for the unions affiliated with TCDSB and he sees no reference to job losses on the sites for TOTL-OECTA, TECT or TSU. He says he wonders if they are trying to avoid the subject since it may paint unions in a negative light since teachers lost their jobs but there's no job action, work-to-rule or strike by their fellow teachers with the board. This is a curious matter, isn't it? Is this evidence that the teachers and their union leaders have been completely cowed by the school board officials and the deals they make or are they just hoping to dodge the whole issue so no one says a word about the situation: unionized, dues-paying teachers losing their jobs and not a peep from their leaders. Hm. I guess publicity would be punished with no deals to hire family members in the future, wouldn't it? Ah, the teaching profession in Ontario. When is that next election? Is it time for a change?)
(Friday, January 6, 2017. I was recently told that several teachers with the Toronto Catholic District School Board, (TCDSB), were let-go. Any occasional teacher who had less than 5 years of seniority was dismissed. I was told that some full-time teachers were also dismissed who had less than 5 years of seniority but this fact is still unconfirmed. These teachers were sent a card in the mail that was marked URGENT! PLEASE READ! YOU NO LONGER HAVE A POSITION WITH TORONTO CATHOLIC. PLEASE CONTACT THE HUMAN RESOURCES DEPARTMENT TO ARRANGE A MEETING TO DISCUSS THE TERMS OF YOUR DISMISSAL.
I am told that an individual who is of Mediterranean background was recently hired before this notice went out and he was given a position as a full-time substitute teacher, he was not dismissed. I have also been told that anyone who is now hired as a substitute teacher is placed in different categories. I was told that one individual who had a contract position who has a master's degree is now a part-time substitute teacher and a substitute education assistant and is only earning $125.00 a day. I am told that some substitute teachers feel that this treatment is very unfair and that at least one individual with the right family connections or "personal contacts" is getting unfair preferential treatment in the hiring process. It appears that regulation 274/12 has not cleaned-up the family hiring with Toronto Catholic and perhaps with other school boards in Ontario. Some substitute teachers fear that with our low birth rate and declining enrollment and parents sending their children to private schools and home schooling to avoid the new sex ed curriculum that the number of students in our public and Catholic schools will continue to decline and the number of teachers that will be hired will be fewer and fewer. The fact that many new Canadians are not Christians also does not bode well for the future of Catholic education. I have no information about substitute teachers or full-time teachers with the Toronto District School Board.)
(I
include articles about First Nations communities and education because a
substitute teacher with Toronto Catholic started his teaching career in
a fly-in First Nations community. He asked me to include these
articles.)
Federal
government fails on First Nations child health delivery, says advocate
First
Nation children are falling through the cracks, says NDP MP Charlie Angus
By Kristy
Kirkup, The Canadian Press Posted: Jan 17, 2017 10:58 PM ET|Last Updated: Jan
18, 2017 11:41 AM ET
An
outspoken child advocate is accusing the federal government of dragging its
feet in implementing a funding principle aimed at ensuring all First Nations
children are able to access necessary services.
At the
heart of the dispute is Cindy Blackstock, a long-standing champion of the
rights of Indigenous children, and Jordan's principle — named for a
five-year-old boy who died in hospital in 2005 as the federal and Manitoba
governments squabbled over who should cover his home-care costs.
Blackstock
is taking issue with documents from February 2016 that show the federal
government explored different options for applying the principle, which holds
that no Indigenous child should suffer denials, delays or disruptions of health
services available to other children due to jurisdictional disputes.
■B.C. Indigenous leaders accuse Bennett of 'stall tactics' on child
welfare
■Liberals will support motion demanding action on First Nations child
welfare
■New Democrats try to force government action on First Nations child
welfare
Ottawa was
ordered to comply with the principle in January by the Canadian Human Rights
Tribunal after a nine-year battle led by Blackstock's group, the First Nations
Child and Family Caring Society, and the Assembly of First Nations.
In the
documents, the government describes the various choices as a "menu of
possible options" for abiding by the tribunal's ruling, including the cost
and policy ramifications of each.
For
Blackstock, those choices add up to nothing short of discrimination.
"They
are exploring ways to make a public relations gesture on Jordan's principle but
falling short on compliance," she said in an interview.
There
remains a chronic lack of mental health services for Indigenous youth across
Canada, Blackstock said. She cited the example of Wapekeka First Nation, a
remote northern Ontario reserve where two 12-year-old girls died by suicide
earlier this month.
"These
mental health services are available for every other kid and they are not
available to First Nations kids," she said. "The government knows
about it and yet they are not paying for it, with tragic results."
Government
says it is abiding
For its
part, the Liberal government says it is abiding by the tribunal's decision,
citing the July announcement of $382 million over three years to help First
Nations children living on reserve deal with disabilities or short-term
conditions.
Health
Canada is working to ensure resources are in place to reach families and
identify all cases where First Nations children cannot access appropriate
services, said Sony Perron, an assistant deputy minister of the department's
First Nations and Inuit health branch.
He also
expanded on the government's definition of the policy.
"Basically,
it means children that have a need," he said.
Work on the
application of Jordan's principle is not finished, Perron added, stressing the
government needs to both respond immediately to cases and build capacity for
prevention in communities.
"I'm
pretty sure ... with more efforts we are going to identify more situations
where children are not receiving the full breadth of services they would be
receiving if they were living in urban areas or they were not First Nations
children," he said.
"What
I can tell you, though, is if any case is brought to our attention that is
about a discriminatory practice where First Nation children do not have access
to similar care or service or social services than non-First Nation children,
we are taking measures on them."
In the
meantime, First Nations children are falling through the cracks and the
consequences are drastic, said northern Ontario NDP MP Charlie Angus.
The
tribunal is scheduled to hold "non-compliance" hearings in March to
examine how the government is addressing the issue of Indigenous child welfare,
as well as Jordan's principle — hearings that wouldn't be necessary if the
government simply complied with the tribunal's rulings, Angus said.
"Canadian
people can see through this," he said.
"If Justin
Trudeau really cared for the First Nation children who are being discriminated
against, he wouldn't be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars,
cross-examining witnesses who represent families who have been denied
service."
© The Canadian Press, 2017
http://www.kenoradailyminerandnews.com/2017/01/15/environmental-group-finds-mercury-in-soil-upstream-from-grassy-narrows-community-2
Environmental
group finds mercury in soil upstream from Grassy Narrows community
ALLISON
JONES
The
Canadian Press
Sunday,
January 15, 2017 4:56:35 EST PM
Gord
Miller, the Earthroots board chairman and former environmental commissioner of
Ontario, said the results of soil samples from a site near the Wabigoon River
provide “a solid reason to believe” there is a deposit of mercury below the
surface. FILE PHOTO/Postmedia Network
An
environmental group believes it may have found a source of ongoing mercury
contamination that has plagued a northern Ontario First Nation for more than 50
years.
The Grassy
Narrows community, 90 kilometres northeast of Kenora, has dealt with mercury
poisoning since a paper mill in Dryden dumped 9,000 kilograms of the substance
into the Wabigoon and English River systems during the 1960s.
But mercury
concentrations haven’t decreased in 30 years and dangerous levels are still
present in sediment and fish, causing ongoing devastating health and economic
impacts in the community. Researchers have reported that more than 90 per cent
of the people in Grassy Narrows and the Wabaseemoong (White Dog) First Nation
show signs of mercury poisoning.
A former
worker at the Dryden mill came forward last year saying he had buried more than
50 barrels of mercury and salt in a pit in 1972.
Ministry of
the Environment officials did geophysical testing, but found no barrels.
The group
Earthroots sent volunteers to take soil samples of the site near the Wabigoon
River and say their testing found high levels of mercury. The government says
that testing took place in a different area than the worker originally pointed
them to, so officials will review the new information and take “appropriate
investigative action.”
Gord
Miller, the Earthroots board chairman and former environmental commissioner of
Ontario, said the results provide “a solid reason to believe” there is a
deposit of mercury below the surface.
“We can’t
prove that this material is actually leaching into that drainage system, (but)
something is leaching into the draining system because it’s in the fish,” he
said.
“Something
has to be done. There is more than enough evidence to justify a complete
geotechnical survey of the site to find and establish if there are further
hotspots, any more deep concentrations of mercury.”
NDP critic
Peter Tabuns said such ongoing contamination would never have been allowed to
happen in the Greater Toronto Area, so it shouldn’t be happening in Dryden. New
testing should be done quickly, he said.
“My
assumption is technically it’s not difficult at all,” Tabuns said. “Apparently
a group of volunteers with plastic bags were able to go to the site area that
was identified and get the sample that implicates this site in ongoing mercury
contamination, so I don’t think that’s difficult. The question is: are they
willing to do it? It’s not a question of the ability to do it.”
Premier
Kathleen Wynne has said she is committed to cleaning up mercury in the river,
but doesn’t want to take any steps that could stir up more of the element
trapped in the sediment on the bottom of the waterways.
The
government earmarked $300,000 for Grassy Narrows to work with John Rudd, the
lead author of a study on the local mercury poisoning, and another $300,000 for
government scientists to start to implement Rudd’s suggested work plan to deal
with the problem.
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