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COVID-19

Learning loss piles up alongside snow while ‘e-learning’ collects dust

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From the Fraser Institute

By Alex Whalen and Paige MacPherson

During COVID school closures, students in the province missed at least 125 days of school between March 2020 and February 2022, more than any other province (except Ontario), generating a significant learning loss from which students have not caught up.

In a world increasingly connected by technology, and given the Nova Scotia government recently spent tens of millions of dollars enabling at-home learning, one might think that students would seamlessly shift to online learning during the recent snowstorms to avoid losing crucial instructional time. Unfortunately, that’s not happening.

During COVID school closures, the Nova Scotia and federal governments spent at least $31.5 million dollars on “virtual school” and other technological upgrades so students could, according to the provincial government, “succeed, even in an at-home learning environment.”

Unfortunately, the electronic learning infrastructure—which includes Chromebooks, laptops and iPads for students and teachers, and additional support and new teachers for Nova Scotia Virtual School—is collecting dust in a corner while Nova Scotia kids are falling further behind.

This isn’t some blip in an otherwise strong record of instructional time for Nova Scotia students. During COVID school closures, students in the province missed at least 125 days of school between March 2020 and February 2022, more than any other province (except Ontario), generating a significant learning loss from which students have not caught up.

Indeed, according to the latest results (2022) from the Programme for International Assessment (PISA), the gold standard of testing worldwide, Nova Scotia 15-year-olds trail the Canadian average in reading by 18 points and trail the Canadian average in math by 27 points. For context, PISA characterizes a 20-point drop as one year of lost learning.

Moreover, between 2003 and 2022, Nova Scotia student performance in reading dropped by 24 points—more than one year of learning loss—and dropped by 45 points in math. In other words, in math, 15-year-old Nova Scotia students today are more than two years behind where Nova Scotia 15-year-olds were in 2003.

These troubling trends underscore the need to put the existing e-learning infrastructure to work. During a recent two-week period, students in the Cape Breton-Victoria Regional Centre for Education school district missed seven days of school due to snow. And some students missed an additional five days due to weather and power outages. That’s nearly three weeks. While more instructional time is not a silver bullet for student success—and with power outages, e-learning is not a perfect solution—it could still make a big difference.

According to international research, missed classroom time causes learning loss and impacts children for life, reducing their life-long earnings. Nova Scotia education researcher Paul Bennett found that lost classroom time due to inclement weather compounds absenteeism and sets back student achievement and social progress.

The Houston government should ensure that Nova Scotian students have access to teacher-directed e-learning when schools are closed and, like other jurisdictions in Canada and the United States, abandon the practise of simply cancelling school due to inclement weather. It’s simply common sense. The snow may pile up, but there’s no good reason why learning loss must pile up with it. Parents are right to demand access to the e-learning they’ve already paid for through their tax dollars.

COVID-19

Japan’s most senior cancer doctor: COVID shots are ‘essentially murder’

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Dr. Masanori Fukushima

From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

The most senior medical oncologist in Japan recently slammed the COVID-19 mRNA shots as “the work of evil” that has caused “essentially murder.”

In an interview published April 19, Dr. Masanori Fukushima, who spearheaded the first cancer outpatient clinic at Kyoto University and launched the first course in pharmacoepidemiology there, listed a slew of problems with the COVID mRNA jabs, evidencing what he called an evil “abuse of science.”

He pointed out that “turbo cancers,” a kind “previously unseen by doctors” that progress extremely quickly and are typically in stage four by the time they are diagnosed, have started to appear after the jab rollouts. These “turbo cancers” are emerging along with excess mortality due to cancer in general, which Dr. Fukushima says cannot be explained only by lost opportunities for screenings or treatment during the COVID outbreak.

As a tragic example of the fatal danger of the COVID shots, the oncologist shared the story of a 28-year-old man who was found dead by his wife when she tried to wake him in the morning, five days after he received his second Pfizer shot.

“The doctor who did the autopsy said that when he tried to remove the heart, it was soft and had disintegrated,” Dr. Fukushima said. “And even just one case like this shows how dangerous this vaccine can be.”

He pointed out that these severe harms, including death, have been afflicting people — post-jab — who have a history of good health.

“It’s serious. It’s essentially murder. In the end, I want to state clearly that this is my view,” the doctor said.

He lamented that the media, including newspapers, generally have not reported on these harms, and that in fact those who question the safety of the COVID shots — just as with the flu shots — have been characterized as anti-science “heretics.” He described the attitude of those who shut down the voices COVID “vaccine” critics, however, as far from scientific, and “more akin to faith, hysteria or even cult behavior.”

He highlighted the fact that countries that most aggressively pushed the COVID shot, such as Israel, saw the highest rates of death and infection, as shown by studies comparing Middle Eastern countries, including Jordan, Syria and Egypt.

“Israel led in early and widespread vaccination but also had the highest death and infection rates. The less aggressively vaccinated areas saw less harm,” said Dr. Fukushima, noting that “Israel was quick to halt the vaccine.”

There were problems, moreover, with the very technology used to administer the mRNA — the lipid nanoparticles — that the doctor said result in “off-target effects” on various organs, including the ovaries, brain, liver, and bone marrow.

Worse, the spike proteins produced by the mRNA have been detected in the human body more than a year after the administration of the COVID shot, noted the oncologist, indicating “a severe problem.”

The doctor took aim at the World Health Organization (WHO) for “hastily” pushing the COVID shots without proper investigation, and moreover for trying to enforce a one-size-fits-all approach in countries with widely varying “medical circumstances, habits, and systems,” calling it “somewhat absurd.”

He argued that it is “crucial” that the WHO take responsibility for the harms of the COVID shots, which he called “an abuse, a misuse of science and an evil practice of science, to be frank.”

Dr. Fukushima pointed out that the WHO is “aware” of harms from the so-called vaccines because they are compensating for these damages in certain countries, and yet they are not properly addressing the COVID shot-induced death and injury through an investigation and report.

“Imagine finding your spouse dead in the morning. It’s no joke. A vaccine that causes such outcomes, even a single death, is unacceptable,” said Dr. Fukushima, adding that in Japan alone, the government has documented 2,134 deaths reported due to the COVID shot, which is likely a low estimate.

“There are tens of thousands of people who must see a doctor because of vaccine-related issues,” he continued, asserting that a big chunk of them — 30% — are “suffering from ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis) or chronic fatigue syndrome.”

This is just the beginning, according to Dr. Fukushima, because the rates of all sorts of diseases have been spiking since the COVID shot rollout, including “autoimmune disease, neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, and infections.”

“It’s as if we’ve opened Pandora’s box … We must take these damages seriously and address them earnestly. Any efforts to dismiss these damages as if they didn’t happen are frankly the work of evil. This is a quintessential example of the evil practice of science,” Dr. Fukushima said.

He called on scientific and medical institutions, led by the WHO, to directly confront these outcomes through research efforts in order to “shine the light of science” on the shots.

“We should never again use such vaccines,” he said. “This is a shame for humanity. It’s a disgrace that we did this.”

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COVID-19

Trudeau government only sought legal advice after Emergencies Act was invoked, records indicate

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Canada’s Freedom Convoy in Ottawa                                                                      Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The two-page Memorandum For The Attorney General was dated February 15, 2022, and was written by the deputy director of prosecutions. The date of the memorandum is significant, as it comes after Trudeau had invoked the EA on February 14.

A Conservative MP’s request for information has revealed that the cabinet of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau waited until after it had invoked the Emergencies Act (EA), which was done to take down the peaceful Freedom Convoy, to get legal advice from Canada’s Attorney General on whether its use was lawful. 

As noted in a recent Blacklocks’s Reporter article, Access To Information records obtained by Conservative MP Arnold Viersen from the office of the Attorney General confirm what many MPs have been suspicious of for years, that Trudeau’s use of the EA was not really warranted.  

“I filed an Access To Information request for the memorandum on the Emergencies Act sent to the Attorney General from the Public Prosecution Service,” MP Viersen said in a statement to the media. 

“What did they advise the Attorney General? We will never know because Justin Trudeau censored it.” 

The documents, despite being censored, do reveal that the two-page Memorandum For The Attorney General was dated February 15, 2022, and was written by the deputy director of prosecutions. The date of the memorandum is significant, as it comes after Trudeau had invoked the EA on February 14.

Trudeau’s Attorney General Arif Virani, during testimony on February 28, said that there was a legal opinion offered regarding whether the use of the EA would be justified, but that its contents had to remain confidential.

This claim of secret legal advice has never been substantiated.

In early 2022, the Freedom Convoy saw thousands of Canadians from coast to coast come to Ottawa to demand an end to COVID mandates in all forms. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Trudeau’s government enacted the EA on February 14, 2022. Trudeau revoked the EA on February 23.   

Earlier this year, Canada’s Federal Court announced that the use of the EA by the Trudeau government was a direct violation of the nation’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and thus was “not justified.”   

The Trudeau government has since appealed the court’s decision.   

I do not ‘believe for a second’ the ‘threshold’ was met to invoke EA  

Conservative MP Glen Motz told a February 28 hearing of the Special Joint Committee on the Declaration of Emergency that he did not believe for a “second” that the “broader interpretation even existed,” in terms of the legality of the EA’s use. 

“I still believe more strongly today than I did in 2022 that the circumstances to invoke the Emergencies Act were not met,” he said, noting that “The threshold was not met.” 

“I agree with Justice Mosley in his decision that it was in fact illegal and unconstitutional,” he said.  

The EA controversially allowed the government to freeze the bank accounts of protesters, conscript tow truck drivers, and arrest people for participating in assemblies the government deemed illegal.   

Before Mosley’s ruling, an investigation into the use of the EA, as per Canadian law, was launched by Trudeau. The investigation, titled the Public Order Emergency Commission, was headed by Liberal-leaning Judge Paul Rouleau. Unsurprisingly, the commission exonerated Trudeau’s use of the EA.   

During the clear-out of protesters after the EA was put in place, one protester, an elderly lady, was trampled by a police horse, and one conservative female reporter was beaten by police and shot with a tear gas canister.   

Last month, LifeSiteNews reported that Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu uncovered that the federal government of Trudeau spent $2.2 million in taxpayer money in a failed attempt to try and stop court challenges filed against it for enacting the EA to stop the peaceful Freedom Convoy.  

Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber have been in a ongoing legal battle with federal officials.   

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