NightOwl

Shauna MacKinnon, the chair of Urban and Inner-City Studies at the University of Winnipeg published an article last February calling Canada's 30-plus year experiment of trusting the private sector to provide housing "a failure."

Despite a repeated push from advocates to create more non-market housing options, the province of Ontario still relies on the private sector to reach its housing targets. Unfortunately, Ontario has also repeatedly failed to reach its own housing targets.

Ricardo Tranjan, an economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives with a focus on housing, said for-profit development follows a market logic, and these delayed housing projects shouldn't come as a surprise given Ontario's reliance on for-profit developers to build housing.

"It's cyclical, we only build when we can make a lot of money out of it

or good money out of it," Tranjan told PressProgress.

Tranjan said that housing prices are currently falling in Ontario, which means housing starts will slow down, which will limit supply and drive up prices. Once prices go up again, supply will begin to increase.

Canada's non-market housing programs were gutted in the 90s by the Mulroney and Chrétien governments.

Since then, responsibility for housing has been downloaded to provinces

and certain responsibilities have since been passed down to municipalities. Meanwhile, housing affordability has continued to decrease.

The bill also expands limits on demonstrations by banning protests around community, cultural, and religious centres, regardless of the activities taking place inside. Critics warn that creating “bubble zones” around such places restricts freedom of speech and peaceful assembly, and could effectively criminalize lawful protest that is not hate-motivated—for example, when Palestine solidarity protesters (many of them Jewish) protested outside synagogues hosting non-religious events promoting the illegal sale of Palestinian land in the West Bank.

The federal government says these new restrictions aim to make Canada safer and better able to fight hate crimes. But, in a joint letter, 37 diverse civil society organisations stressed their opposition to the bill. The signatories demanded that Parliament withdraw the bill, saying it would worsen systemic inequities and undermine Canada's commitments to freedom of expression.

Some legal infrastructure defining criticisms of Israel as hate speech is already in place. In 2019, the federal government adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which broadens the definition of antisemitism to include some criticisms of Israel. According to the federal government's document on the subject, referring to "the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavor" is anti-semitism. The document's list of examples of hate-speech includes phrases such as "you can't be antiracist and Zionist" and that "Zionism is a racist & violent settler-colonial project." Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) criticized the definition, saying it was being used to "suppress and even criminalize pro-Palestine speech and activism."

Archive: [ https://archive.is/j4Eak ]

Archive: [ https://archive.ph/8OuhA ]

China is not the only source of weapons that likely reach the RSF through the UAE however. Raymond notes that arms produced by Canadian companies, including Sterling Cross and the Streit Group, have also made their way onto the battlefield and into the hands of the RSF.

Sterling Cross has not publicly clarified whether it has sold weapons to the UAE, and a 2016 United Nations report accused the Streit Group of supplying arms to the Emirates.

Organizations such as the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights have called on Canada to enact an arms embargo against the UAE and to target key perpetrators and enabling entities with sanctions.