Canada can do more for military members struggling to find housing: defence minister

Carolyn Law didn’t think much of it when a snow goose landed in her Richmond, B.C., backyard, on Halloween.

But hours later it had barely moved. Then it started bobbing its head repeatedly. About eight hours after she first saw the bird, it rolled over, began convulsing and died.

“It was quite a sad thing to see, actually — really frightening,” Law said.

Law said she called a wildlife rescue group and was told the symptoms suggested avian flu rather than a physical injury, but without testing it couldn’t be confirmed.

Encounters like Law’s are under new scrutiny after a B.C. teenager tested positive for bird flu in the first presumptive case of human infection occurring in Canada. The patient is in critical condition.

Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said in a news conference on Tuesday that the source of infection wasn’t clear.

Experts and health authorities say that while the risk of human infection with the H5N1 strain of the avian influenza remains low, people should avoid contact with sick or dead birds.

“People who work with animals or in environments contaminated by animals should take precautions, including using other personal protective measures to reduce the risk of getting or spreading respiratory infectious diseases,” Health Canada said in a statement.

Concerns around bird flu have heightened in recent years, with the virus resulting in millions of poultry across North America being culled.

Infections among commercial flocks have jumped to more than 20 in B.C. in recent weeks as migratory birds fly south for winter.

Brian Ward, an infectious diseases microbiologist at McGill University, said he couldn’t speculate whether the goose in Law’s backyard had influenza, but “it’s possible if there are some increasing number of ducks and geese found dead, then they’re very likely to have been infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza.”

Ward said it was concerning that authorities were unsure how the sick B.C. teenager caught H5N1, with Henry saying the teen had no known contacts with poultry farms.

But Ward said a human infection in Canada was “almost inevitable,” given the spread of the disease in recent years in North America and Europe. The U.S. Centres for Disease Control says there have been 46 human cases of avian flu in the U.S., although there has been no known human-to-human spread.

Health Canada said in a statement that current evidence domestically shows that “risk to the general public remains low.”

“To date, there has been no evidence of sustained person-to-person spread of the virus in any of the cases identified globally,” the department said. “Human infection with avian influenza A (H5N1) is rare and usually occurs after close contact with infected birds or highly contaminated environments.”

The agency’s website says humans are unable to get infected by eating thoroughly cooked poultry, eggs or meat.

Henry said the only other case in Canada was recorded in Alberta in 2014, in a person who likely contracted the virus while travelling in China.

But Henry acknowledged the risk posed by wild birds.

“One of the important things that we need to do right now, recognizing that this virus is circulating in wild foul, geese and ducks primarily, (is) be sure that if you’re in contact with sick birds or dead birds, that you don’t touch them directly (and) keep pets away from them,” she said, noting that in Ontario a dog was infected after biting a dead bird.

Henry said that humans may be infected by “inhaling the virus in aerosols, in droplets that get into the eyes, back of the throat, nose or deep into the lungs.”

“There’s been very few that might have been transmitted from person to person, so in some ways this is reassuring, in that this virus doesn’t seem to spread easily between people if they get infections, but it also causes very severe illness, particularly in young people,” she said.

Henry said it’s very likely that the B.C. teen’s infection took place due to an exposure to either a sick animal or something in the environment, but it is a “real possibility” that they may never determine the source.

Her office said Tuesday that people should report dead or sick poultry or livestock to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency animal health office and that encounters involving wild birds should be reported to the BC Wild Bird Mortality Line.

It said anyone exposed to sick or dead birds, or who had been in contact with farms where avian flu was confirmed, should watch for flu-like symptoms.

“If you get symptoms within 10 days after exposure to sick or dead animals, tell your health-care provider that you have been in contact with sick animals and are concerned about avian influenza,” it said. “This will help them give you appropriate advice on testing and treatment. Stay home and away from others while you have symptoms.”

Ward also advised people who encountered a dead bird to call authorities instead of disposing of it themselves.

“But, if it’s on your property and you want to dispose of it, then certainly wearing a mask and gloves, getting it into a plastic bag as soon as possible, and doing everything you can to avoid aerosols, makes a great deal of sense,” he said, noting that H5N1 is a respiratory virus.

Law said her biggest concern was about her dog that came within a few feet of the dying goose.

“We didn’t want to approach it,” she said.

But later that night, her husband took matters into his own hands.

Wearing gloves and a mask, he double bagged the dead bird, and put it in the garbage bin, “which I felt was kind of unceremonious, but I guess that’s what you would do,” Law said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2024.

LONDON, Ont. – A mischief charge against a doctor who squirted ketchup on the London, Ont., office of a member of Parliament last year has been dropped.

The lawyers representing Tarek Loubani, a local physician and activist, said the Crown withdrew the charge after determining it was “not in the public interest” to proceed with the prosecution.

Arash Ghiassi and Riaz Sayani said in a statement that Loubani’s actions were not a crime but rather part of his constitutional right to protest against an elected official — in this case, Liberal MP Peter Fragiskatos.

Staff at the London courthouse confirmed a mischief charge against Loubani was withdrawn Tuesday.

Loubani was arrested in November 2023, but the incident took place weeks earlier after a protest in downtown London.

Police said at the time that Loubani and three others went to an office on Hyman Street, where he squirted ketchup on the door and front of a building.

They said he then took out other bottles of ketchup, handed them to the others and “encouraged them to also deface the building.”

The other three went into a court diversion program, which provides an alternative to prosecution in cases involving minor offences, police said.

The decision to lay charges was made by police, and it was up to the Crown to determine whether to proceed with the case, Fragiskatos said in a statement Tuesday, adding it would be inappropriate for him to comment further on the process.

“That being said, over the past several years our office and staff have experienced various acts of vandalism, threats and hostility. This will always be completely unacceptable,” he said.

His office said there was another “incident” at the London office Tuesday.

In their statement, Loubani’s lawyers said police’s “heavy-handed approach to political protest in this case” is only one example of a broader response to pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

“This kind of expression has been criminalized in nearly 100 cases in Toronto alone, and many more across Canada. While many of these charges are eventually withdrawn, this systemic overcharging nevertheless chills legitimate political expression on pressing issues,” they said.

— By Paola Loriggio in Toronto.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.

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HALIFAX – When legal scholar Elaine Craig started researching pornography, she knew little about websites such as Pornhub or xHamster — and she did not anticipate that the harsh scenes she would view would at times force her to step away.

Four years later, the Dalhousie University law professor has published a book that portrays in graphic detail the rise of ubiquitous free porn, concluding it is causing harm to the “sexual integrity” of girls, women and the community at large.

The 386-page volume, titled “Mainstreaming Porn” (McGill-Queen’s University Press), begins by outlining how porn-streaming firms claim to create “safe spaces” for adults to view “consensual, perfectly legal sex,” as their moderators — both automated and human — keep depictions of illegal acts off the sites.

But as the 49-year-old professor worked through the topic, she came to question these claims. Depictions of sex that find their way onto the platforms are far from benign, she says.

“Representations of sex in mainstream porn … that weaponize sex against women and girls, that represent it as a tactic to be deployed against unconscious women or unsuspecting ‘daughters’ when their mothers are not home … do not promote sexual integrity and human flourishing,” she writes in her closing chapter.

Joanna Birenbaum, a Toronto-based lawyer who has worked with sexual assault victims for 20 years, said in a recent email that Craig’s work is the first to “really make the connection between porn, its impact on women and girls … and the ways in which it has evolved to become part of the tech industry.”

“It is eye-opening because it is so frank and concrete … for those who are unaware of what can be found on these mainstream platforms.”

For example, Canadian criminal law is clear that when a person is asleep, they lack the capacity for sexual consent. But Craig’s online searches of porn platforms found “countless videos” depicting the perpetration of sexual assault on “sleeping or unconscious women.” The difference in the pseudo-reality of porn was the women were almost always depicted as pleased and accepting.

Meanwhile, the book finds that “incest-based” porn — and the associated “tags” designed to draw viewers — are “as prolific as they are popular.” Craig said during an interview at her campus office that she believes a subset of this category, showing male family members having sex with female performers depicted as girls, meets the definition of child pornography.

Then there are the depictions of the surreptitious filming of sex without the knowledge of those being recorded, “another relatively common phenomenon on porn-streaming platforms,” she writes. In her closing chapters, she urges all provinces to pass laws to allow rapid removal of such material from sites.

For Craig, a mother of two boys, her journey into this world was draining. After writing the chapter on incest-themed porn, she had to take three months away from the project. “I found it challenging to watch some of it,” she said.

In her book, Craig notes how last year, after a judge sentenced an Ottawa man to seven years in prison for posting secret sex videos, a vice-president with Ethical Capital Partners — which owns Pornhub’s parent Aylo — said the site no longer allows individuals to search for videos under the tag, “hidden camera.”

But when Craig checked she found that, while the term “hidden camera” yielded no videos on Pornhub, using just the term “hidden” did produce results. Titles on the first page of her search results included, “Dragged a sexy classmate into bed and filmed sex on a hidden phone.” Other categories including “secret voyeur,” “real amateur hidden” and “spy” also yielded videos.

A Pornhub spokesman said in an emailed statement this week that the company has a list of more than 35,000 banned keywords and millions of permutations “that prevent users from trying to search for words that may violate our terms of service.” He said the list is “constantly evolving, with new words regularly added in multiple languages.”

In her closing chapters, Craig questions whether using criminal law to go after the producers and possessors of the porn she considers illegal will be effective. Instead she prefers a human rights approach that identifies “hateful” porn and monitors remedies over time.

Her research found that certain graphic slurs directed at women yielded links to hundreds of videos last year on Pornhub, and Craig argues these expressions can be seen as part of a “taxonomy of misogyny and racism” that the sites are building.

She argues for federal legislation to prohibit streaming companies from promoting videos with titles, tags and categories that meet the definition of hate speech — “vilification and detestation on the basis of sex or race, for example.”

The author notes that the Online Harms Act — currently before Parliament — would create a digital safety commission and impose a “duty of responsibility” on porn sites to prevent harmful content toward children. However, Craig calls for the same approach to be applied to “the unique harms” the streaming platforms are creating for women.

Craig argues against an “absolutist” ban on porn, making the case that this is unrealistic, but she calls for a landscape where “sex should not be mean” and where parents and schools start to educate teenagers about the harmful forms of sexuality they may encounter on the free platforms.

“Mainstream porn-streaming platforms should be held more responsible for preventing these harms and for bearing their costs when they fail,” she writes.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2024.