From what it’s like to live off $1,100 a month to why we already have pandemic amnesia, we’ve selected some of the best long reads of the week on thestar.com.
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1. ‘Barely surviving.’ Ontario disability recipient shares what it’s like to live off $1,169 a month
As a child, when Anne Jensen would dream of what her life would be like when she grew up, she never imagined this. At the very least, she imagined living in a place she could call her own, without the stress of finances looming over her every day, hour and minute.
Instead, at 30, she’s lucky to have little more than the price of a cup of coffee left in her bank account at the end of each month.
She’s “barely surviving,” she told the Star. And some days, she’s “really angry.”
Jensen, who lives in Kitchener, is one of the many Ontarians on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) which provides income and employment support to people with disabilities. The program currently pays up to $1,169 per month for single adults without dependants.
Compared to the average income in the province which sits around $50,000 per year, ODSP recipients rank far behind at $14,028 per year.
2. There were telltale signs of money laundering. Why didn’t Canada’s major banks flag millions of dollars in suspicious wire transfers?
For eight years, Chinese property developer Runkai Chen used hundreds of wire transfers to move tens of millions of dollars into accounts at Canadian banks — what experts call a hallmark of money laundering.
Canada’s big banks — including the Royal Bank of Canada, CIBC, TD and the Bank of Montreal — all accepted the money, no flags raised.
But one financial institution acted: the Vancouver arm of Switzerland’s UBS bank, which in 2012 zeroed in on the massive flows of unexplained money as “suspicious” signs of potential money laundering.
“All kinds of alarm bells should have gone off” at the Canadian banks, said Garry Clement, a former RCMP superintendent focused on proceeds of crime and current chief anti-money-laundering officer for VersaBank.
“It almost gives the impression they’re asleep at the switch … It just shows that the system is broken.”
3. Doug Ford trounces the competition as Steven Del Duca and Andrea Horwath resign as party leaders
Ford more years.
Ontario voters gave Premier Doug Ford another four-year term Thursday in a resounding election victory for the Progressive Conservatives that reduced the size of the NDP opposition and left the Liberals banished to the political wilderness.
Both NDP Leader Andrea Horwath and Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca resigned their posts.
With the landslide win, the Conservatives exceeded their 2018 seat count in the legislature despite two years of COVID-19 that left 13,311 Ontarians dead and soaring inflation as the economy rebounds from the pandemic.
The Tories, who held 67 ridings at dissolution on May 4, won 83 of the 124 seats in the house with a dismal voter turnout of just 43 per cent, down from 57 per cent in 2018.
4. Rate hikes are cooling Toronto’s real estate market, but some homebuyers feel the chill more than others
In its efforts to cool inflation, the Bank of Canada has moved quick to raise interest rates — taking a bite out of housing demand. But while the move will lock many prospective homebuyers out of the real estate market, there are others who won’t feel the pinch.
The central bank has already raised rates twice this year, and is predicted to raise rates again on Wednesday.
The move has had a cooling effect on the GTA housing market, but experts say while homebuyers already in the market, who have equity built up, and Real Estate Investment Trusts are largely insulated from the rate hikes, it’s those lowest on the real estate ladder who are being most affected.
That means first-time homebuyers, new immigrants and those with less savings to break into the market, said Robert Hogue, an RBC senior economist.
5. ‘There’s no climax. There’s no end.’ Why we’re already suffering pandemic amnesia
The pandemic came up during an Ontario election debate the other day, but you probably missed it, writes Star columnist Bruce Arthur.
It was a passing exchange, incomplete, just another half-hearted attack in an election that feels like watching sleepwalkers play hide-and-seek. A real attack on Ontario’s incompetence-laced handling of the pandemic doesn’t seem to be coming, and you have to presume polling is telling the Liberals and the NDP that not enough people care to look back.
Which isn’t unique to Ontario. Call it exhaustion, being sick of it, being done. But beyond that there seems to be a determined, urgent imperative out there to not only pretend the pandemic is over, but not to revisit it at all: maybe not even to remember, even as it is still happening. Which, apparently, is how pandemics often work.
“I guess the first thing to keep in mind is that it tends to be what we do as societies after epidemics: it’s one of the peculiar things that medical historians have ruminated on for a long time,” says Mark Humphries, an associate professor of history at Laurier University, who wrote the book “The Last Plague” about the 1918 Spanish Flu and Canadian public health. “Pandemics, epidemics, they’re really important in the moment, but then they don’t tend to leave much of a lasting legacy in a lot of cases.
6. Ontario’s politicians all tout the same fix for the housing crisis: supply, supply, supply. But experts say it’s not that simple
It’s an idea we’ve heard throughout this election campaign — if you build more homes, housing will become more affordable in the GTA.
But there are dissenting opinions on how many homes we need and questions about whether flooding the market with more supply would actually bring the price of renting or owning within reach of more people.
It’s an attractive idea but it’s an illusion, says Luisa Sotomayor, associate professor at York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.
“It’s always politically effective to oversimplify a message and this is what’s happening here,” Sotomayor said. “It is never as simple as supply and demand.”
7. Is this the man Jason Kenney wants to replace him?
Here’s the big question these days in Alberta politics: Who in the Jason Kenney government wants to replace him?, writes iPolitics columnist Graham Thomson.
More specifically: Who in the provincial cabinet is interested?
And even more granularly: Will it be Finance Minister Travis Toews?
On Thursday, as the United Conservative Party government abruptly ended the spring legislative sitting two weeks early, word came that Toews was about to announce his candidacy. This was huge news and breathless journalists laced up their rhetorical running shoes, grabbed their microphones and raced after the first cabinet minister to officially declare his intention to run.
Alas, Toews said he was not about to make an announcement. But, to keep us in suspense, he added one might be coming.
8. The secrets, the torments and the words that haunt them still. What Canada’s spelling bee champions want this year’s Bee team to know
When Jonathan Schut was four, he announced that he could spell “octopus” and proceeded to wow his mom from the back of the minivan. Everyone knew Jon was a good speller, so when the Canspell bee came to P.E.I., his grandfather picked up a study kit.
Schut remembers sitting on the top bunk of his room that first year, staring at words he could barely pronounce. It took some time to settle in to the secret of competitive spelling, to treat the words as puzzles to unlock, not objects to memorize.
“I would say no to going out with friends … and it wasn’t that I had to study. It was that I wanted to,” says Schut, now 28 and the special projects co-ordinator for a trucking company. “It was just that much fun.”
Canspell was created in 2005 by the Canwest newspaper chain. Thousands of students competed and the best went to Ottawa for the national bee, then to Washington for the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Canadians did well there. Three came within a word of winning, dispatched by “Weltschmerz,” “coryza” and “sorites,” respectively.
Schut remembers every word he missed. He is haunted by yurt, which knocked him out in Ottawa in 2008. His reaction, eyes wide with skepticism, made the paper back home.
9. Ottawa is moving to fix Canada’s airport delays. What will that mean for travellers — and will it help?
From adding security screening officers to rolling back mandatory random COVID-19 testing for some travellers, the federal government is moving to address the chaos at Canadian airports, which have been plagued with delays as air travel ramps up ahead of the summer months.
The delays, which have been attributed by unions to preventable labour shortages, have caused long lines at security checkpoints for departing travellers.
As well, industry representatives have called for COVID-19 screening measures to be rolled back, as they are contributing to delays for arriving international passengers.
From adding security screening officers to rolling back mandatory random COVID-19 testing for some travellers, the federal government is moving to address the chaos at Canadian airports, which have been plagued with delays as air travel ramps up ahead of the summer months.
The delays, which have been attributed by unions to preventable labour shortages, have caused long lines at security checkpoints for departing travellers.
As well, industry representatives have called for COVID-19 screening measures to be rolled back, as they are contributing to delays for arriving international passengers.
10. Why were Chinese fighter jets ‘buzzing’ a Canadian aircraft? ‘That famous scene from Top Gun? … That’s not normal’
Sky-high drama playing out in the Asia-Pacific region has aggravated tensions between China and Canada amid reports that Chinese fighter jets have been “buzzing” a Canadian surveillance plane in international airspace.
The Canadian Armed Forces has confirmed news reported by Global that on several occasions Chinese aircraft approached an RCAF CP-140 Aurora aircraft patrolling as part of the UN’s Operation NEON — in several instances close enough that Canadian pilots were easily able to see the Chinese flight crews.
The CAF said the buzzing of aircraft on UN-sanctioned missions is “of concern and of increasing frequency.”
“In some instances, the RCAF aircrew felt sufficiently at risk that they had to quickly modify their own flight path in order to increase separation and avoid a potential collision with the intercepting aircraft,” said the CAF in a statement that called the actions “unprofessional.”
11. Canada has quickly rolled out the welcome mat to displaced Ukrainians but the real job has just started: How to properly settle them?
Nataliia Morozova has a lot on her mind.
First and foremost, the safety of her husband and other family members who are still in Ukraine, as Morozova and her daughter try to get by in Canada.
Then, there’s money.
Morozova and her daughter have been pinching pennies, conscious every time they buy something or just hop on the TTC, that they currently have no source of income and no way to transfer a large sum of money out of Ukraine.
Morozova has gone from job fair to job fair in Toronto, trying to secure a paycheque to make rent. Raisa Harusova, a Grade 12 student at Bloor Collegiate Institute, too, is seeking employment, unsure how she could afford the significant university tuition fees she faces as an international student without any financial help.
12. As anger simmers over police actions at Texas school shooting, RCMP in Nova Scotia set to face scrutiny over its response to a different mass shooting
As gunshots rang out inside an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and a gunman prowled the corridors, parents outside pleaded with a static police tactical squad to go inside and do something.
“Go in there! Go in there!” a women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, according to eyewitness reports.
“You all need to go in there. You all need to do your jobs,” other parents told them.
Eventually, the tactical squad entered the school and — 40 minutes to an hour after shots were first fired — killed the shooter in the classroom in which he’d barricaded himself.
He had by then killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School.
A full picture of what transpired at the school is still emerging, but it has become the latest high-profile case to raise questions around when police decide to immediately confront an active shooter, and when — and why — they may decide to wait. Amid a growing history of mass shootings and school shootings, experts say police have come by some hard-learned lessons, even as the conversation of what can be expected of officers in such crises continues.
The questions are some of the same ones that will likely be raised in a different context this week in Truro, N.S., at the public inquiry into the 2020 mass shooting in northern Nova Scotia.
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