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A United Nations special rapporteur is planning a Canadian trip to examine the “overall human-rights situation” of Indigenous people in light of the discoveries of possible unmarked graves near former residential schools.
Francisco Cali Tzay, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, told The Globe and Mail he would not be investigating crimes related to the graves during his trip, a setback for the Assembly of First Nations and other groups who had called on him to conduct an independent probe.
“Special rapporteurs do not have a mandate to launch a full-fledged investigation akin to a prosecutor, nor do they have the authority to conduct criminal prosecutions,” he said.
The response complicates efforts to have an international body investigate Canada’s residential-school past for criminal wrongdoing.
- Opinion: Reconciliation can’t be achieved with only symbolic gestures
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Texas town of Uvalde reeling over how close to home the carnage has hit
Jazzlyn Noriega was sharpening a pencil in her Grade 4 classroom at Robb Elementary School late Tuesday morning when a bullet crashed through the wall and hit the ceiling.
Her teacher, a substitute, shut off the lights and had the children hide under tables. They remained crouched there for more than an hour as America’s gun violence epidemic found its way to their quiet corner of Texas. By the time it was over, 19 students and two teachers were killed in the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook nearly a decade earlier.
“How crazy is it that you have to be 21 to buy cigarettes and beer, but you can buy an assault rifle at 18? That’s out of control. That’s ridiculous,” said Jennifer Gaitan, Jazzlyn’s mother, as she and her daughter relayed the story. “I don’t understand what it’s going to take to stop this.”
Less than two weeks after a gunman shot 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket in an attack that appeared to have been motivated by white supremacist beliefs, the killings in Uvalde are a reminder of America’s status as the only developed country to experience such persistent mass shootings.
- Gun violence in America, told through seven charts
- Explainer: Texas elementary school shooting: What we know so far
- Elizabeth Renzetti: A decade after Sandy Hook, the Texas school shooting shows the United States is still broken
- Listen to The Decibel: Why guns are so tied to American identity
Residents say a prayer with a Texas state trooper at the entrance of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., on Wednesday, May 25, 2022.IVAN PIERRE AGUIRRE/The New York Times News Service
How a protest against book bans led to a fireproof copy of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale
To build a book that wouldn’t burn, Jeremy Martin and Doug Laxdal’s first idea was to use flame-retardant paper for the pages. Their graphic arts company ordered samples and got to work with a BIC lighter. Alas, the pages burned – slowly, but still. They had to find an alternative. And they had less than three months to do it.
The Gas Company, a Toronto-based business, was asked to craft a fireproof edition of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale as part of a protest against literary censorship. Sotheby’s is now in the process of auctioning off the book in New York to raise money for PEN America, which is leading the charge against book bans and what it calls educational gag orders.
The plan was hatched over the winter amid headline-making book bans in the United States, including Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir Maus, which was banned in January by a school board in Tennessee.
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ALSO ON OUR RADAR
Federal government would join Supreme Court challenge of Quebec’s Bill 21, Justice Minister says: Ottawa will join a legal challenge of Quebec’s controversial religious symbols law, known as Bill 21, should the case end up at the Supreme Court, Justice Minister David Lametti said, prompting swift pushback from Quebec Premier François Legault.
Conservative leadership candidates spar: Conservative leadership candidates attacked their opponents’ ethics during the only official French-language debate, with Jean Charest, Pierre Poilievre and Patrick Brown highlighting past controversies, while also sparring over how to tackle the cost of living and protect the French language.
In Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, terrorized civilians recount war crimes and ‘chaos’: For those living under Russian occupation, there is “an absence of any basic rights,” says Captain Mykola Marinik, who is deputy head of investigations in Beryslav district, a small corner of Ukrainian-controlled territory at the northern tip of Kherson Oblast. His office alone has opened more than 200 war-crimes-related cases, although some are from the two weeks when Beryslav district was itself occupied.
Bankers buck gloomy trend by forecasting growth amid concerns about economic slowdown: Top executives at Bank of Nova Scotia and Bank of Montreal predict they can keep adding new loans and increasing profits in the coming quarters, offering an optimistic outlook for the financial sector that is at odds with economists’ increasingly gloomy forecasts of a downturn ahead.
Johnson takes ‘full responsibility’ after damning final report into ‘partygate’ scandal: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson issued a renewed apology for his staff’s conduct after an internal investigation found widespread drinking, violations of COVID-19 restrictions and abuse of cleaning staff at Downing Street.
MORNING MARKETS
Global markets mixed: World shares were mixed on Thursday on persistent concerns over slowing economic growth and after the latest U.S. Federal Reserve minutes confirmed its intent to tighten monetary policy quickly. Around 5:30 a.m. ET, Britain’s FTSE 100 edged up 0.02 per cent. Germany’s DAX and France’s CAC 40 gained 0.42 per cent and 0.50 per cent, respectively. In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei ended down 0.27 per cent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng also fell 0.27 per cent. New York futures were little changed. The Canadian dollar was trading at 77.96 US cents.
WHAT EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT
With Bill 96, François Legault is trying to tiptoe out of Canada’s constitutional order
“The response to Bill 21 has also been muted, because federal politicians have dared not criticize an override of basic rights that polls say is popular with many Quebec voters. What is being overlooked, though, is the way Quebec City is quietly redefining the constitutional order. We seem headed into a future of asymmetrical regimes, in which a citizen’s most basic rights could change from province to province.” - Editorial
Hong Kong’s ‘autonomy’ era is all but over, only halfway through
“In the old Hong Kong, with a free media and actual elections, public opinion still mattered. If the Hong Kong government insisted on pursuing unpopular and painful policies, it could be forced to take a different course by a combination of political pressure from the opposition, noise from the international business community, criticisms from the media and even complaints by the pro-Beijing camp, which might be wary of suffering defeat in the next election. That was the delicate equilibrium that kept Hong Kong going all these years, even though we did not have full democracy. That is now gone.” - Dennis Kwok
TODAY’S EDITORIAL CARTOON
Brian Gable/The Globe and Mail
LIVING BETTER
Summer TV preview: Easy breezy TV is arriving on your favourite streamers
Summer TV is, by tradition, mainly a distraction from seriousness, aiming to keep you in a summer mood. There’s some breezy, undemanding TV this year but a number of noble attempts at high-minded diversion, writes The Globe’s John Doyle.
MOMENT IN TIME: May 26, 1981
Sale of Lawren Harris painting sets Canadian record
An unidentified dealer paid $240,000 for South Shore, Baffin Island (1930) by Lawren Harris, during auction held in Toronto, May 26, 1981.James Lewcun/The Globe and Mail
The sale of a Lawren Harris oil painting on this day in 1981 was a watershed moment for Canadian art, unexpectedly smashing a previous price record while affirming the market relevance of the artist and his Group of Seven peers. According to a report in The Globe and Mail a day later, an unidentified dealer made a winning bid of $240,000 on Mr. Harris’s South Shore, Baffin Island. Painted in 1930, the landscape depicts a gloomy scene along the shores of Nunavut’s Baffin Island, which served as the subject for a number of pieces by the Group of Seven member. The sale price was a shock to attendees, as the painting’s presale estimate had landed between $150,000 and $200,000. However, this would not mark the end of Mr. Harris’s impact on Canadian auction records. Thirty-five years later, The Globe reported on yet another fierce bid for a Harris landscape, Mountain Forms, which went on to sell for $11.21-million, eclipsing the record for the most expensive work by a Canadian artist sold at auction. Both sales not only serve as significant moments in Canada’s artistic history, but also illustrate the continued influence of Mr. Harris and the Group of Seven. Pascale Malenfant
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