A coronavirus report card for Ontario and Quebec schoolsTuesday May 5th, 2020
In last week’s column, I illustrated, via the experiences of two families, the dramatic difference in responses to school closures in Quebec between the public and independent schools. The private schools, secular and parochial, immediately committed to mandatory remote-learning schedules approximating in-school routines, with a minimum of five hours a day devoted to instruction, assignments...
New petition demands fairness for women in Olympic sportsMonday May 4th, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic has affected every facet of our social, cultural and economic lives, in ways too many to count, both small and large, affecting every institution in every community, from neighbourhoods to cities to the nation and beyond. Internationally, the cancellation of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics was a particularly bitter pill to swallow for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), ...
An eye-opening tale of two school systems during the COVID-19 crisisTuesday April 28th, 2020
A clever tweet: “We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm.” So true. Pandemic privilege comes in many forms. One that preoccupies me is the disparity in parental burden in homeschooling children. Private school parents live on a yacht, public school parents in a rowboat.This is a tale of two Montreal families. One is my daughter Joanne’s, whose older da...
Barbara Kay on COVID-19: The country house pandemic problemWednesday April 22nd, 2020
MONTREAL — On April 1, Premier François Legault told Quebecers they should avoid all “non-essential” travel around the province. That meant Montrealers should not be going to their country houses (as we call our “cottages”), nor should people living in other regions travel to Montreal. This was not a suggestion, it was a decree. (One Montrealer who decide...
Barbara Kay on COVI-19: The country house pandemic problemWednesday April 22nd, 2020
MONTREAL — On April 1, Premier François Legault told Quebecers they should avoid all “non-essential” travel around the province. That meant Montrealers should not be going to their country houses (as we call our “cottages”), nor should people living in other regions travel to Montreal. This was not a suggestion, it was a decree. (One Montrealer who decide...
The coronavirus crisis reveals the hypocrisy of the ‘diversity’ squadTuesday April 21st, 2020
Global statistics reveal that hospitalized men are far more likely to die of COVID-19 than women. Are men more vulnerable because of lifestyle choices—elevated smoking and obesity rates, say—or for biological reasons yet to be discovered? The jury is still out.
Apart from being used as leverage for dark humour by misandrists, this disparity hasn’t attracted significant public...
Human Wreckage: Pondering Lenin’s Legacy on 150th Anniversary of His BirthSunday April 19th, 2020
Commentary
Canada’s Liberal government has dragged its feet on acknowledging the duplicity of the Chinese Communist Party throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Occasionally, as when Health Minister Patty Hajdu recently told a journalist that accusing China of concealing the extent of its outbreak was “feeding into conspiracy theories,” the Canadian response has skirted “useful idiot” territor...
Social distancing rules are getting out of hand in the coronavirus eraThursday April 16th, 2020
We’re all doing our best to “social distance.” We get it. This novel coronavirus spreads through the air, and two metres between people is needed to keep ourselves from infection or from infecting others. We’re most of us trying to do that. But we’d be happier doing it without Big Brother hovering over us. Because, as I said, we get It
Last Friday, Oakville, Ont r...
Is it any wonder Americans are losing trust in their institutions?Tuesday April 14th, 2020
In the summer of 2018, Donald Trump was enjoying himself in Florida, immersed in his favourite activity, a rally for Donald Trump. CNN reporter Jim Acosta, an aggressive critic Trump loves to bait, was covering the event live on air, when a group of Trump supporters started screaming at him and making threatening gestures behind him into the camera.But after the rally ended and Acosta got of...
BDS founder wants to boycott everything except Israeli medical helpFriday April 10th, 2020
Omar Barghouti, founder and leading guru of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, whose goal is to weaken Israel economically to the point of collapse, now finds himself in an embarrassing position, for having, in a moment of candour, exposed the inherent contradictions at the heart of his project.
Speaking of the pandemic in an Arabic-language Facebook broadcast, as part of a ...
Barbara Kay on the COVID-19 lockdown: You can’t go to the theatre, so it’s coming to youTuesday April 7th, 2020
In 1984, George Orwell’s iconic 1949 novel about a future totalitarian dystopia, everyone had a “telescreen.” It couldn’t be turned off, so people were forced to watch Big Brother’s propaganda continuously. Worse, the telescreen could spy on them. The image was so powerful and disturbing, many early readers were afraid to buy the recently invented televisions th...
Canada loses a vital voice in media as CJN shuts downSaturday April 4th, 2020
The headline struck me with force: “Another Covid-19 casualty: After 60 years, the Canadian Jewish News will cease operations.” As the article explains, the combined impact of dwindling ad revenues, a problem for all print media, and the Covid-19 virus, was too much to withstand.
It was a sad moment for me on both a personal and a professional level. Professionally, I am now ...
Where is the GG during Canada’s coronavirus crisis?Wednesday April 1st, 2020
I’m a monarchist. That was the norm I grew up with. But I recognize I’m a dying breed in Canada. The monarchy still serves a vital purpose in the United Kingdom, but it has become a vestigial institution in Canada, and in most other Commonwealth nations. (When did you last hear the word “Commonwealth” in these globalized times?)Prince Harry’s “Meghixt&rdqu...
Many of our temporary coronavirus measures will become permanentMonday March 30th, 2020
The headline was a first in Jewish history: “Senior Orthodox rabbis allow Zoom for Passover seder due to Coronavirus.” It’s a symbol of the strange moment we find ourselves in, with much to say about the devastating social effects Covid19 has unleashed on everyone, especially the old.
It speaks as well to evidence that ancient religious traditions, like Juda...
There's never been a better time to buy a bidetFriday March 20th, 2020
In some respects, journalists are lucky. The Covid 19 virus doesn’t affect the work lives of most of us, who have always worked at home or can easily switch to home writing. The problem is that in a crisis, editors are pretty well indifferent to any content that doesn’t bear directly on the Big Story. This is a good time to be an epidemiologist with writing skills.
I ha...
Our small community, united, is getting through this as best we canWednesday March 18th, 2020
We live in a nice house on a pleasant street. What we particularly like about our neighbourhood is the eclecticism in the demographic. There is no uniformity in the house sizes, so there are cozy empty-nesters like us living cheek by jowl with large families. Young, middle-aged and old are equally represented on my block.When we moved to this retirement downsizer, we only got to know our imm...
Explosive lawsuit by former white supremacist causes tension in Canada's Jewish communitySaturday March 14th, 2020
Prologue
On March 19, a kind of mini-trial will take place in a Toronto courtroom—a hearing, actually—in which neither plaintiff or defendants, but a mountain of paper evidence: statements of claim, counter-claims, affidavits, supporting documents and so forth will be, figuratively speaking, called to the stand.
Based on what he has read, the judge will take one of...
Kay: Jews are finally pushing backThursday March 12th, 2020
Recently I had the pleasure of meeting Izzy Ezagui, the famous IDF soldier who lost his left arm to a mortar shell in Gaza, yet returned to duty as a reservist. Author of the 2018 book, Disarmed: Unconventional Lessons from the World’s Only One-Armed Special Forces Sharpshooter, Izzy was the keynote speaker at a Hasbara Fellowships event in Toronto, where he addressed a full auditorium of atten...
Another one bites the dust — Woody Allen the latest victim of cancel cultureTuesday March 10th, 2020
Hachette Book Group (HBG) announced last week that it had cancelled its scheduled April publication of 84-year-old film director Woody Allen’s memoir, “Apropos of Nothing.”The decision was sparked by protest from investigative reporter Ronan Farrow, Allen’s estranged son, whose #MeToo-themed book, “Catch and Kill,” was also published by HBG. Ronan Farrow is the ...
A closer look at the sad, but improvable, lives of ‘pickup artists’Thursday March 5th, 2020
Before there was Harvey Weinstein, there was Daryush Valizadeh — more commonly known as “Roosh V” — a guru in what is known as the “seduction community” for his expertise in “pickup artistry” (PUA). Roosh V’s website, Return of Kings (successfully shuttered by boycotts in October 2018), included such abhorrent material as advocacy for cha...