School Trustee Howard Kaplan Dies at 72

Flags in local schools were flown at half-mast when news broke. Howard Kaplan will be remembered as an activist in the local community that cared deeply about public education and issues of equity. He was first elected TDSB Trustee in 2010 and was re-elected in 2014. He fought for early childhood education programs, equity in education and was a very active member in the community.
Howard became ill recently and was waiting for a liver transplant.
He wrote on Facebook in November:“I've been diagnosed with an auto-immune condition: IgG4-related sclerosing cholangitis. Look it up, it's too complicated to explain it here. What it means is that I will eventually need a new liver. I am currently undergoing a battery of tests to see if I am a suitable candidate for a transplant: I have to be healthy enough -- good heart, lungs, kidneys, etc; and I have to be sick enough -- my liver has to be really bad. Accordingly, my energy level fluctuates day-by-day. I don't know from one day to the next how much work I can do. It will get worse as time goes on until I get a new liver... if I'm a suitable candidate. As far as my work as a Trustee goes, I'm doing what I can, when I can. Staff are aware of my condition, and are taking on some of my constituency work.”
On behalf of The Downsview Advocate we send his family our deepest condolences during this difficult time -he was a great man that did very good things for this community.

Syrian refugees settling in Downsview at The Toronto Plaza Hotel

The lobby of the Toronto Plaza Hotel, located on Wilson Avenue near Downsview Arena, hums with laughter, conversation and the scampering of Syrian children running and exploring their temporary home. Women chat in groups, many of them holding their pregnant bellies, and the men converse separately; some smoke outside in clusters while five boys play soccer.The Toronto Plaza Hotel will be home to around 400 Syrian refugees until COSTI Immigrant Services can relocate them to permanent housing.As an active and passionate participant of NGO projects overseas, General Manager Rehan Chaudary welcomes the newly landed refugees and is happy to take part in his own NGO project right at home.The refugees arrived earlier this month over a four-day period, in accordance with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise to approve 25,000 refugees to live in Canada. The hotel has rented 100 rooms for its uncommon guests and expects 80 more by the end of this week.“It has really been affecting the business,” says Chaudary. “The tourists aren’t used to so many guests and local travelers are not always happy to see the Syrians. We still have walk-in traffic and our banquet halls are open, but right now we are fully catering to our Syrian guests.”The hotel is doing everything they can to accommodate the needs of the refugees.The hotel restaurant, Greenery Restaurant, has Muslim cooks who prepare halal meals for the Syrians three times a day, free of charge. The hotel also has a medical team on standby to assist the pregnant women –one who just gave birth –and tend to the children, which Chaudary describes some as “in pretty bad shape.”Chaudary has hired a few Arabic-speaking employees who communicate with the refugees and who have placed signs written in Arabic around the hotel. The language barrier has been extremely difficult for the staff as almost none of the Syrians currently residing in the hotel speak English.Recently, on January 10 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., The Clothing Drive [an initiative to collect winter clothes for Syrian refugees] and Let Them be Kids [an initiative to collect toys for Syrian refugee children] held a pop-up shop at the hotel. Volunteers gave the refugees donated winter clothes, toys and other necessities, while COSTI Immigrant Services works to fulfill the refugees’ necessities of permanent housing.COSTI has hired extra staff to speed up the housing process as they have never handled so many refugees in such a short period of time. The agency, however, strives to find the refugees homes, assist them in the employment process and offer them free English lessons.The Syrian refugees at Toronto Plaza Hotel have endured significant hardships these past few years, from losing their homes to watching bombs go off in front of them. It has been a difficult journey for them as they have fled their violence-stricken country to an unfamiliar place where they do not know the language or the culture. The Downsview community, however, has been displaying its generosity through donations, sponsorships and simply by welcoming the refugees into the community.

Canada’s Hollow Victory

Plenty of Canadians are celebrating that Stephen Harper’s autocratic and malicious rule has finally come to an end, and their sentiments are perfectly understandable.But I hope those enthusiastic about the words “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau” will try to understand why some of us don’t feel like celebrating today, and why the defeat of the Harper Conservatives by the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau rings hollow.The Liberal campaign embraced a sprightly lexicon of positivity, unity, and tolerance in contrast to a Conservative campaign built on fear and race-baiting. But their parliamentary caucus voted for Harper’s absurd “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act” only a few short months ago. And they supported (and will not repeal) Bill C-51, which risks criminalizing people who protest oil pipelines and threatens artistic expression.Behind the selfies and the carefully staged theatrics, behind the vague but flourishing invocations of “hope” and “change,” behind the crowds of grinning patricians, behind the formless nostalgia for ’60s Trudeaumania, many of us see a politics as calculating and ultimately uninterested in social justice as that which today’s liberalism sets itself against.In many parts of the country on October 19, environmentalists, trade unionists, and progressives were unseated in favor of corporate technocrats. The business of hyper-professionalized politics — momentarily disrupted by a new political dynamic — will now reassert itself with a vengeance.The new government is going to temporarily invest billions in new (though largely unspecified) infrastructure, after which it will make billions in (also unspecified) cuts. It will not create any new social programs, and has instead promised to adopt a means-tested approach to social policy that simply helps some low-income earners better navigate unjust market structures with bigger checks than they were getting before.It will not set targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (because, in Trudeau’s words, “what we need is not ambitious political numbers”).It will almost certainly finalize a trade deal that will decimate what remains of manufacturing in Canada’s largest province, undermine Canadians’ privacy online, make life-saving drugs unaffordable by creating a global cartel for pharmaceutical giants, and erode the country’s democratic sovereignty by enabling multinationals to sue elected governments over laws and regulations they dislike.Throughout its entire democratic history, Canadian politics has oscillated between two parties that do not seriously challenge the status quo or the injustices it permits. Occasionally goaded by popular movements, they have both been compelled, particularly during minority parliaments, to make concessions while preserving the fundamental contours of the political order.Against this a third current, born from Methodist social gospel and the labor mobilizations of the nineteenth century, has always insisted that fundamental change is necessary to build a truly just society. It was this ethos that gave us Medicare — an institution built from the ashes of war and depression on principles of universalism and social solidarity. Neither sweeping platitudes nor bureaucratic conservatism will ever deliver us social progress of this kind, eradicate poverty, or save the environment from the extractive economic structures that degrade it every day.Despite the palpable optimism throughout much of the country last month, many of us cannot read a return to the historic two-party dynamic as anything other than a setback, and a major one.It’s time we stopped marginalizing social justice, or patronizingly relegating it to the fringes. Achieving social progress requires more than just a perpetual return to the traditional, professionalized politics that continues to leave one in seven Canadians in poverty, tolerates people having to sleep on the streets, and allows thousands of children to wake up hungry and badly housed every single day in one of the richest societies in the world.We have to demand better. And plenty of us believe and hope that, one day, we really will.**This article was originally published in: https://ricochet.media/en/690/why-even-harpers-defeat-rings-hollow

Giving up the Vote

 

Giving_up_voteIt was great to see that our recent federal election had one of the highest voter turnouts since 1993, at 68%. It also had the highest amounts of visible minorities being elected as MPs. But what about the specific turnout of visible minority groups? How did minority vote fair up in this last election? The First Nations community increased their votes so much that two ridings ran out of ballots. Thanks to social media, the youth vote also increased in this year’s 42nd election where the Liberal party won a majority. However these advancements for minorities can distract from the plight of other marginalized groups, such as Black Canadians, very few of which have been elected to parliament, and none chosen for Trudeau’s “diverse” cabinet. After interviewing several minorities in our Humber River, Black Creek riding, many minorities claimed that they voted and encouraged their children to vote. The few that did not vote claimed that their vote did not matter so they did not bother voting. Some even claimed, “All politicians are the same”. Others claim our existing democracy is too shallow. However, have we taken the time to really learn about our political system? Who were the 5 candidates running in our riding and what were their platforms? Who are the major Canadian political parties and what do they represent? What does left wing and right wing even mean? If you have not had schooling in Canada, all of this may be unfamiliar and there is rarely a crash course in Canadian politics.

Though the current political structure may not benefit the majority of people, refusing to vote makes citizens compliant to the current system. It says I agree with the decisions our government makes. As citizens our vote matters and we have the opportunity to promote positive values. Our one vote can help to change systems and reform policies. Collectively, we can promote long-term change, one vote at a time. So whether it be another federal election, provincial or the municipal election, get out and make your opinion matter by casting your vote!