According to the latest Ipsos poll conducted for Toyota Canada, just under half of Ontarians surveyed state that they’re less likely to take a summer road trip, thanks to the rising costs of gas province-wide.
That same survey found that 44 percent of Ontarians are “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to take a “vacation involving extended driving” this summer, and nearly 80 percent of those surveyed would estimate fuel costs for their coming road trip.
This year’s prices are definitely high, but they’re still a drop from last year’s prices, with some outliers.
“It doesn’t look like we’re going to have a very expensive summer, certainly not one that rivalled what we saw last year,” said Dan McTeague, an analyst at GasPriceWizard.com to Global News.
“I can look maybe two weeks ahead and say we’re going to be within three cents of where we are, up or down.”
According to Patrick DeHaan, petroleum analyst at GasBuddy.com, gas prices have actually dropped from May 3 to about June 16. “They’ve been up and down, but certainly they stand lower than where they were just a couple months ago,” he added.
DeHaan has even stated that gas prices would “probably” stay down between $1.15 to $1.25 a litre for the rest of the summer, “barring any unpredictable events.”
DeHaan went on to say that the biggest issues affecting oil prices for Ontario thus far have been the rising trade tensions between the U.S. and China, as well as the escalating tensions between the U.S. and Iran.
Though Ontario’s oil prices are still high, the province’s complaints fall on deaf ears to those out west, and out east. Both British Columbia and Newfoundland & Labrador are currently experiencing gas prices that reach up to nearly $1.40 per litre and over 1.30 per litre, respectively.
The demand for gas goes up in the summer, meaning the price goes up as well, says DeHaan.
Gas prices tend to be higher in the summer, mainly because demand is higher and much of the country uses more expensive gas during that time, DeHaan said.
“You could say that downward demand really begins kind of the first week in August,” he added. “Most of the road trips, most of the vacations that we see are in July.”
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Georgetown Prof who called for “miserable deaths” of white men off the hook
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has launched a Title IX investigation against Georgetown University to formally determine if the school’s women-only programs violate Title IX. The OCR, however, has declined to look into the feminist professor whose tweet about Brett Kavanaugh triggered the investigation in the first place.
Title IX—a federal law that threatens to revoke funding for schools found guilty of discriminating “on the basis of sex”—was initially implemented in 1972 to fight for women’s equality in U.S. universities.
Over the past few years, advocates for boys and men have begun challenging the law’s precedents to fight for more resources for male college students. Since 56% of college students are now women, some are arguing that young men are neglected.
Kursat Pekgoz, 31, is one of the key activists who pioneered this approach. In early 2018, Pekgoz filed a federal complaint against the University of Southern California, alleging that USC’s female-only programs discriminate against men.
The complaint—initially dismissed by the San Francisco Office—was reinstated upon Pekgoz’s appeal to the U.S. federal government. This precedent inspired a wave of activism across the nation.
During the Brett Kavanaugh hearing in Sept. 2018, Georgetown Professor C. Christine Fair tweeted that white men who support Kavanaugh deserve “miserable deaths.” Because of this, Pekgoz later wrote the Title IX complaint against Georgetown.
“Look at all the entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement,” tweeted Fair. “All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine.”
Fair’s comments caught Pekgoz’s attention.
“She cannot be expected to teach her male students in a fair manner, and her presence creates a hostile environment against young male students,” Pekgoz wrote in his missive to OCR.
Georgetown has at least 18 programs that violate Title IX, he alleged.
“Georgetown has a very large number of female-only programs, even though women are the majority of students at Georgetown. Christine Fair’s comments supplied an additional incentive to write the complaint,” Pekgoz said by phone Friday.
According to an October 2019 letter, the OCR agreed to investigate numerous Georgetown programs and scholarships to determine if they truly do violate Title IX.
These include the school’s policy of affirmative action hiring for women, seven programs that exclude men, and numerous opportunities and scholarship programs that exclude men, according to the OCR.
But Pekgoz says the letter highlights the OCR’s “hypocrisy.”
Pekgoz notes that the OCR declined to investigate Georgetown’s Women’s Studies Department, based on the claim that Title IX does not allow the OCR to review curricula.
However, the OCR has previously interfered with curricular materials under Title IX before, Pekgoz says. The OCR is also “currently micromanaging” the curricular materials of Middle Eastern Studies under Title VI, a very similar law, Pekgoz argued.
The OCR also declined to investigate Professor Fair, whose tweets triggered the complaint.
“The letter does mention Professor Fair, even though she called for the mass-murder of white men and the desecration of their bodies. OCR’s bureaucrats would have reacted with swift retribution if Fair called for mass-violence against any other ethnic class such as Blacks, Muslims, or Jews” Pekgoz told The Post Millennial.
As I previously reported, Professor Fair also ran a Tumblr blog to doxx men who sent her hate mail. She made 11 full-on doxxing posts (which included full names, addresses, and phone numbers), and hundreds of other partial doxxing posts.
Tumblr de-platformed Fair soon after, citing a violation of the site’s community guidlines against terrorism and harassment. But after Georgetown gave her paid leave for a few months, Professor Fair has resumed teaching at the school.
While Pekgoz wrote the Title IX complaint itself, the National Coalition For Men (NCFM) took charge of filing the complaint against Georgetown University and answering follow-up questions from the OCR.
Harry Crouch, President of NCFM, said that he and his team are hopeful.
“It took a year almost to the day to get a response, but we are very excited that the OCR will investigate significant parts of our complaint. We are hopeful they will rule in our favour, and consequently, Georgetown will become much more male-friendly,” he said.
“We would like to thank Kursat Pekgoz for doing the initial research and draft of this complaint. … We are excited that OCR found sufficient substance to investigate many of our concerns,” he added.
Marc Angelucci—an attorney and NCFM board member—told TPM that the OCR is taking steps in the right direction.
“It’s about time the Department of Education finally looks at discrimination against men. Title IX is not gender-specific. It applies to men too. But the last administration didn’t seem to think so. All we want is fairness and justice,” Angelucci told TPM.
Now that some Georgetown programs are under investigation, it’ll likely take a few months to a year for the OCR to reach a verdict.
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Huawei complains Wanzhou arrest 'unlawful and illegal act'
Chinese tech giant Huawei tweeted on Monday regarding the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, calling her detainment “an unlawful and illegal act.”
The tweet links to a Globe and Mail article that goes over the moments leading up to Wanzhou’s arrest, but doesn’t provide any evidence her detainment was “unlawful” or an “illegal act”. The article is behind a paywall, so only subscribers can actually have access to the story and that it doesn’t match Huawei’s bold claims.
Reaction to the post from Canadians online was generally one of outrage.
Many replied to Huawei’s tweets, upset with the company’s audacity to complain about Wanzhou’s detention while two Canadians remain in Chinese prison, with another, Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, sentenced to death for drug trafficking charges.
Nowhere in the article does it explicitly state that the detention of Wanzhou was illegal, with the word “illegal” not appearing once. Rather, the article features details regarding America’s role in Meng’s arrest, with quotes from Chinese diplomats calling the arrest “unreasonable” due to the lack of notice from the Canadian side during her arrest.
“In accordance with the consular agreement between China and Canada, the Canadian side should inform the Chinese diplomatic missions in Canada immediately of its unreasonable detention of Ms. Meng Wanzhou,” said the Chinese embassy in a statement. “But the Canadian government failed to do that, the Chinese side first learned about the situation from other channels. We lodged stern representations with the Canadian side as soon as we learned about the relevant information.”
The Globe‘s article does note that those familiar with extradition practices call Meng’s arrest a “rare” incident, as Washington “typically pursues criminal charges for sanction violations against an individual rather than a corporation.”
“In a case like this one, where Ms. Meng is in all likelihood executing corporate policy, one would expect individuals not to be charged and the corporation would be fined,” said extradition expert Eric Lewis.
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POLL: Less than 50% of self-described Conservative voters want Andrew Scheer as leader
A new online poll conducted by the Canadian Press has shown that Andrew Scheer has less than 50 percent support from Canadians who self-identify as Conservatives, according to CKOM.
Just 48 percent of Conservative supporters say they want Andrew Scheer to continue as leader. 40 percent want him to resign, while 12 percent remain undecided.
This comes as another bad news story for the Conservative leader who will require a far greater majority in his leadership review in April of next year. The precedent in Candian politics is that leaders who undergo reviews should receive a much higher portion of the vote than just 50 percent.
Stephan Harper, for example, won over 85% of the vote in his leadership review after his 2004 election loss. It has been broadly considered that 75 percent of the vote is the bare minimum for an incumbent leader to continue his tenure.
The survey was conducted from Nov. 15-25 and over 3,000 Canadians participated.
Recently, Andrew Scheer has received significant pressure from the Conservative base to resign. This criticism previously derived from the Red Tory faction of the party when Peter MacKay and Rona Ambrose criticized his leadership.
Peter MacKay, for instance, declared that issues like abortion and immigration “hung round [Scheer’s] neck like a stinking albatross.” MacKay went on to say that this election was like “having an open net and missing the net.”
Another prominent Conservative politician, Ed Fast, who served in Harper’s cabinet as the trade secretary, declined a position in Scheer’s cabinet, saying that the leader needed someone who “fully supports” his leadership.
Soon after, the Globe and Mail reported that the social conservative wing of the party had begun to abandon Scheer. One former Conservative MP, Brad Trost, said in the article that “A lot of social conservatives have no interest whatsoever in backing Andrew Scheer.”
Last week, Scheer suffered another setback after a third-party organization was created by a group of prominent figures within the Conservative movement. This group, Conservative Victory, is devoted entirely to the ousting of Scheer.
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McGill sides with Jewish student, against student government
McGill University sent out an email to its students stating that their student government’s decision to prosecute a Jewish student for attending a Hillel-sponsored trip to Israel and Palestine fosters “a culture of ostracization.”
This is in reference to a case where Jordyn Wright, a Jewish student at McGill and a Board of Director of its Student Society (SSMU), was personally targetted by SSMU for attending a trip to Israel and Palestine.
The motion that was presented in SSMU’s council meeting on November 28th explicitly singled out Jordyn. Furthermore, the SSMU President Bryan Buraga also introduced amendments that only pertained to Jordyn and none of the other BoD going on the trip.
“I am outraged and disgusted, but not surprised. This is not the first time that Jewish students at McGill have been bullied out of student government,” Jordyn exclaimed in a Facebook post.
“If I do not resign, I am being implicitly threatened with impeachment upon my return,” said Jordyn. “I have been the subject of thinly-veiled and blatant anti-Semitism.”
A copy of the email was received by The Post Millennial.
The email was sent out on behalf of Fabrice Labeau, Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) of McGill Univerity, and emphasizes “freedom of speech” while saying McGill “is also committed to maintaining a respectful environment for all members of [its] community.”
“The motion approved by the SSMU Legislative Council purposely singles out an individual member of SSMU,” reads the email.
“Despite the SSMU Board of Directors previously assessing that enrolling in this program does not constitute a conflict of interest, the Legislative Council has nonetheless decided to overturn this decision by mandating its Board of Directors to start a procedure to remove this individual from the SSMU Board of Directors, should this individual choose to go on the trip.”
The email further adds that the “decision made by the SSMU Legislative Council is contrary to the University’s values of inclusion, diversity and respect.”
It goes on to say that it also diverges from SSMU’s own Constitution and represents a “very serious breach of trust.”
“For that reason, we call upon the SSMU Board of Directors to seriously consider the concerns raised by students and take proper action.”
The email was sent in English and French to all members of the McGill staff, and all students at the university.
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