Five Ontario school boards, two schools join legal fight against social media giants
By: Jordan Omstead
TORONTO (CP) – Five more Ontario school boards and two private schools have joined the multibillion-dollar legal fight against social media giants Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, accusing their parent companies of leaving educators to manage the fallout from their allegedly addictive products.
They join some of Ontario’s largest school boards which filed suits in March alleging the platforms are negligently designed for compulsive use and have rewired the way children think, behave and learn.
“This increasingly hinders students’ ability to absorb lessons, think critically and thrive in our learning spaces,” said Kelly Pisek, the director of education at District School Board of Niagara, one of the new plaintiffs.
Filing their own lawsuits this week were the Catholic boards in Ottawa, Dufferin-Peel and York, along with Trillium Lakeland District School Board and District School Board of Niagara. Holy Name of Mary College School, a private Catholic girls’ school in Mississauga, Ont., and a private Jewish day school, Eitz Chaim, round out the list of the new plaintiffs.
Together, the seven new schools and school boards are seeking $2.57 billion in damages for disruption to student learning and the education system, on top of the more than $4 billion already sought by the four school boards that filed earlier this year.
In March, Toronto’s public and Catholic school boards, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board and the Peel District School Board, filed their own cases with Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice.
“The addition of these school boards and schools to the ongoing litigation against technology companies demonstrates the widespread disruption to the education system,” said Duncan Embury, a lawyer at the Toronto firm Neinstein, which is heading up the litigation.
The allegations in the lawsuits have not been proven in court.
A spokesperson for TikTok has said its team of “safety professionals” continually evaluate practices to support teens’ well-being, while Snapchat has said it is happy with the role it plays helping friends stay connected as they face the challenges of adolescence.
A spokesperson for Meta, the parent company for Facebook and Instagram, said it developed more than 30 tools to support teens and their families, including tools that allow parents to decide when, and for how long, their teens use Instagram.
Hundreds of school boards in the United States, along with some states, have launched similar lawsuits against social media companies.
The Ontario suits make a slew of allegations about how negligently designed social media platforms have upturned the education system.
Among them, they say more staff and administrator time is being spent on addressing compulsive student social media use, more money is going into the heightened need for digital literacy and harm prevention, and more resources are being spent on handling issues such as cyberbullying and online sexual harassment.
Students also struggle to spot misinformation, the suits allege, pushing teachers to spend time and resources to help vet what they see on their social media feeds and prevent them from adopting harmful ideologies they are exposed to on the platforms.
Trudeau ‘in no way’ supports Israeli offensive in Rafah, but is mum on taking action
By: Dylan Robertson
OTTAWA (CP) – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his government is “horrified” by Israeli strikes that killed civilians in Rafah earlier this week, but walked away from reporters when asked what he will do about it.
“Canada in no way supports the military operations by Israel in Rafah,” Trudeau told reporters Tuesday on Parliament Hill.
“Indeed, we have been calling for a ceasefire, including at the (United Nations) since December, and we’ll continue to.”
His comment came two days after gruesome images emerged of children injured in airstrikes and fires burning among encampments of displaced people in Rafah.
The city in the Gaza Strip had become a safe haven for more than a million Palestinians fleeing Israeli attacks.
Canada supported Israel’s right to defend itself following the brutal Hamas attack last Oct. 7, but Trudeau says Canada urged Israel not to proceed with an offensive in the southern city.
Israel says Rafah has become a Hamas stronghold and is crucial to routing the militant group that killed 1,200 people in Israel last October. It described Sunday’s carnage as a mistake.
Humanitarian groups including the Mennonite Central Committee say the area is far too crowded for any safe military operation, pointing to the scenes that occurred Sunday.
“Israel’s military operations in Rafah have created a catastrophic humanitarian situation, in line with the repeated predictions and warnings of the humanitarian community in the build up to the offensive,” reads a joint statement issued Monday.
Trudeau said he’s concerned about the plight of the Palestinians in the territory. The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza reports 36,000 people have been killed in the war, including combatants.
“We need to see much more humanitarian aid flow into Gaza, and we need to see all hostages released,” Trudeau said.
But when pressed for information on what Canada might do, he walked away from the scrum.
Meanwhile, Trudeau is set to attend the G7 leaders’ summit next month in Italy, followed by the Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland.
In a news release today, the Prime Minister’s Office says Trudeau’s focus at the G7 summit will be on highlighting the importance of democracy, promoting fair economic growth and combating foreign interference.
Trudeau’s office says he will also hold bilateral meetings with his counterparts and discuss the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars.
Spy watchdog’s foreign meddling review finds ‘unacceptable gaps’ in accountability
By: Jim Bronskill
OTTAWA (CP) – The Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Public Safety Canada lacked a system for tracking who received and read specific intelligence on foreign interference, creating “unacceptable gaps in accountability,” the national spy watchdog has found.
In a report made public late Monday, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency also said CSIS’s distribution of intelligence on political foreign meddling was inconsistent during the last two general elections.
“The rationale for decisions regarding whether, when, and how to disseminate intelligence was not clear, directly affecting the flow of information,” the report said, adding that the threat posed by interference activities “was not clearly communicated by CSIS.”
Moreover, those who received intelligence did not always understand its significance or how to integrate the findings into their policy analysis and decision-making.
The watchdog also said there was disagreement between intelligence units and senior public servants as to whether activities described in briefs amounted to foreign interference or legitimate diplomatic activity.
The review examined intelligence about attempted foreign interference by China in federal democratic institutions and processes from 2018 to 2023, focusing on how the information flowed within the government. Some passages of the report were considered too sensitive to make public.
‘Let’s call it for what it is’: Tory bid to focus pharmacare bill fails at committee
By: Laura Osman
OTTAWA (CP) – Conservatives say the federal government is offering “false hope” to Canadians with a national pharmacare bill that will not initially apply to a broad range of medications.
The Liberals and NDP, who collaborated on the program, say the bill is a “framework legislation” that will guide a future universal and single-payer plan.
But to start, the bill includes a program that will cover only diabetes medication and contraceptives.
“Let’s call it for what it is,” Conservative MP Todd Doherty told the House of Commons health committee Monday.
“They’re misleading Canadians, giving false hope that this is a pharmacare bill.”
Conservatives on the committee moved 40 amendments Monday, trying to alter the focus of the pharmacare bill to make it more clear it is restricted to just those two types of treatments.
“The two medications that it does propose to cover are simply contraception and treatment of diabetes and potentially associated devices, and even that is a bit of a stretch,” said Conservative health critic Stephen Ellis, who criticized the list of drugs the government expects to cover.
He highlighted the exclusion of semaglutide antidiabetic medications like Ozempic from the list, which are also used off-label as weight loss-drugs.
The committee rejected the vast majority of the amendments and passed the bill with only minor changes, leaving just one stage of debate left to complete in the House of Commons. It still has to go through debate in the Senate.
The amendments would have put limits on pharmacare in the future, NDP health critic Peter Julian said.
“To limit the scope or the purpose of the Act, to my mind, does a disservice not only to all those who are going to benefit from pharmacare in its first stage, which is diabetes medication and contraception,” he said, but also to “all those who are looking to see the next stage of pharmacare.”
The bill is the result of extensive negotiations between the NDP and the Liberals as part of the political pact to prevent an early election. It was a key NDP demand.
The Liberals initially promised only a bill that would set the stage for a future pharmacare program. When the government missed the 2023 deadline to table that legislation, the parties agreed to include immediate coverage for birth control and diabetes medications.
The government wants to see the bill make its way through the House as quickly as possible so Health Minister Mark Holland can begin negotiating with provinces to administer the new program before the summer break.
He’s in talks with senators about expediting the bill through the Senate as well.