Montreal’s public health department says the proportion of young people who have experienced some form of violence — whether physical, sexual, or psychological — in their romantic relationships is on the rise.

As well, eight per cent of Montreal high school students aged 14 or older have reported at least one forced sexual encounter in their lifetime. That figure is higher than in two previous surveys, when the average stood both times at five per cent.

The percentage is higher for girls than for boys. In the most recent survey, conducted during the 2022-23 academic year, 12 per cent of girls reported at least one experience of sexual violence; four per cent of boys did.

The data is from the third edition of a survey on the health of high schoolers, for which more than 70,000 students across Quebec aged 14 and older were polled. Previous surveys were conducted in the 2010-11 academic year and the 2016-2017 year.

Results specifically from for Montreal were taken from 5,800 students from 92 schools between October 2022 and May 2023.

“We have seen an upward trend since 2010-11, which was the first edition of the survey,” said Salomé Lemieux, a research officer at the health department and author of the report.

“The figure of eight per cent is still worrying because … it refers to forced sexual relations, whether by a young person or an adult.”

In Montreal, 38 per cent of young people who had been in a romantic relationship report having been a victim of one or more forms of violence (physical, psychological, or sexual) from their partner. In 2010-11, the figure reported was 31 per cent.

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“This is also an upward trend since 2010-11, but it can be explained by various factors, such as the fact that technology is now increasingly present in our daily lives,” Lemieux said in an interview.

“Young people have new places where they experience violence: For example, digital surveillance, young people monitoring their social networks, or geolocation for the purpose of controlling the other person are phenomena that we are now seeing a little more,” she said.

As for why the numbers are rising, Lemieux points to the #MeToo movement, which has encouraged victims to speak out since it began in 2017 and has made it easier for young people to recognize and feel more comfortable talking about sexual violence.

“We can ask ourselves about these figures: Is this really an increase in cases, or could it also be an increase in reports of forced sexual relations?” Lemieux said.

She also noted the most recent data was collected toward the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, following a period of social isolation and when youth had reported a degradation of their interpersonal relationships. Other factors, such as low self-esteem, psychological distress, and problematic alcohol consumption, are associated with an increased risk of a young person experiencing violence or inflicting it on others.

The report indicates that intimate relationships marked by violence can have lasting negative impact on people’s mental, physical, and sexual health. Those who experience these situations are at increased risk of psychological distress, engaging in risky behaviours, and repeating the cycle of violence in their future relationships.

For the 2022-23 academic year, 43 per cent of young people in Montreal who had been in at least one romantic relationship in the past year reported having experienced or inflicted physical, psychological, or sexual violence. That figure has remained stable throughout the surveys.

“This is a fairly worrying figure, and we want to see an improvement in this situation. It’s extremely important,” Lemieux said.

The report mentions that in order to reduce violence in intimate relationships in the long term, it is essential to act early. It suggests interventions aimed at strengthening young people’s social skills.

“Ensuring that they know how to resolve conflicts in their friendships, for example. It’s important to start sending these messages early in childhood and to make sure that there are adults around, that there is a support network trained to know how to respond to (situations) and how to connect people to resources for help if they witness … violence in childhood or adolescence,” Lemieux said.

She emphasized the importance of talking about healthy, balanced relationships from an early age.

“And making sure they recognize violence if they experience it, and that they can ask for help as easily as possible,” Lemieux said.

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Horizon Health Network’s CEO is calling for “urgent systemic change,” saying the number of people in hospitals waiting for nursing home beds is at a “crisis point.”

Margaret Melanson painted a bleak picture of New Brunswick’s emergency departments while addressing the province’s legislative public accounts committee.

“We’re moving towards having regional nursing homes, as opposed to regional acute care hospitals,” she said.

2:01
Hundreds still waiting in N.B. hospitals to access long-term care beds

She said the result has been ambulance offload times double that of the national benchmark, patients having to be treated in hallways and ER wait times that last hours or days.

Melanson said it’s essential for the province to first solve the mounting pressure for long-term care beds.

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“It’s reached a crisis point now. Forty per cent of your acute care beds to be filled with people that do not require to be there is honestly an anomaly,” she said.

“This is incredibly frustrating to us, and you know, up until now, not really any light, if I can say, with regard to change that is going to alleviate the situation.”

Meantime, about a third of New Brunswickers — 238,000 patients — are now waiting to be attached to a nurse practitioner or family doctor.

Liberal MLA Sam Johnston told reporters government is working to make those changes.

“Challenges with the health-care system in New Brunswick are nothing new,” said Johnston, who represents Miramichi Bay-Neguac.

“We will come up with solutions to improve bed space in hospitals and primary care aspects in the community.”

1:48
Bed shortage leaves N.B. seniors stuck in hospitals

However, Melanson said that without “urgent systemic change,” the consequences could be severe.

“The teams work tirelessly daily to see surgical care proceed despite these bed challenges; that is not indefinite. We will have surgical interruptions because we will not have any other places to place patients,” she told MLAs.

For PC MLA Bill Hogan, who represents Woodstock-Hartland, Melanson’s testimony was worrying.

“I’m really concerned about where we’re headed,” he said.

Green Party Leader David Coon said Horizon Health clearly needed more support.

“The health-care system is badly underfunded. [Melanson is] expected to run Horizon Health without the money necessary, and it’s falling apart,” Coon said.

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Police have laid manslaughter charges in connection to a deadly assault at a business in Waterloo Monday night.

Police were called to a business on King St. N. near Young St. W. around 12:45 a.m. Monday for a report of an assault.

When they arrived they found a 62-year-old man unconscious and suffering from a head injury. He was transported to hospital with serious injuries. The next day he died as a result of his injuries.

On Thursday, Waterloo Regional Police Service’s major crime unit arrested and charged a 37-year-old Kitchener man with manslaughter.

He is being held in police custody for a bail hearing.

Police believe this was an isolated incident and that no weapons were involved.

Anyone with information is being asked to call police or Crime Stoppers.

A 21-year-old man is in critical condition after a shooting in Winnipeg’s West End on Wednesday.

Homicide unit investigating

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A 21-year-old man is in critical condition after a shooting in Winnipeg’s West End on Wednesday.

Police were called to a home on Agnes Street between Sargent Avenue and Wellington Street around 7 a.m. to investigate a shooting.

Officers provided life-saving measures to a man suffering from injuries in his upper body, police said in a news release Thursday. 

The man was taken to hospital, where he remains in critical condition.

Winnipeg police’s homicide unit is investigating. Officers have not made any arrests at this time, police said.

Anyone with information about the shooting is asked to contact police at 204-986-6508 or provide a tip anonymously via Crime Stoppers at 204-786-TIPS or winnipegcrimestoppers.org.

Primary school-age children who question their gender could be allowed to use different pronouns under long-awaited government guidance on the subject.

The guidance, billed as moving away from a culture-war approach to the subject, has some notablechanges compared with a draft produced in 2023 under the Conservatives, which said that primary-aged children “should not have different pronouns to their sex-based pronouns used about them”.

The latest draft, which applies to England and is open for consultation, sets out that school staff members should not adopt social transitioning markers such as a new name or different pronouns unilaterally, and that this should be agreed by the school or college based on proper procedures, including parental involvement and clinical advice.

It also stresses the need for caution on social transitioning for younger children, saying it is expected to happen very rarely in primary schools.

The Department for Education (DfE) said in a statement that guidance included the findings of the 2024 review into gender transitioning and children led by Dr Hilary Cass. It also follows last year’s supreme court ruling about gender, which set out the necessity of single-sex spaces.

The guidance will be statutory, meaning schools have to abide by it. It has been welcomed by some education union leaders, and the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, said the aim was to provide pragmatic advice and not use the issue as a “political football”.

Teachers will be expected to respond to social transition requests “with caution”, but children’s wellbeing should be paramount, meaning there was a need for flexibility.

Parents should be notified about such requests, unless there is a particular safeguarding risk, and schools should seek clinical advice where possible, the guidance says.

It says it is “not for schools and colleges to initiate any action” over gender questioning, and that the advice focuses solely on circumstances where a child or their parent raises the issue.

“In the vast majority of cases we would expect the school or college to work with parents to determine what is in the best interests of the child as well as considering any clinical evidence or advice,” it says.

“Schools and colleges should consider everything that could be affecting a child, including whether they have any wider health issues or neurodiversity.”

Among several references to the Cass review, it says schools and colleges should be “particularly conscious of safeguarding concerns relating to primary-aged children”, citing evidence in the review that children who socially transition before puberty are more likely to do so medically than those who transition later.

The advice, which will be reviewed annually, says schools should not have mixed toilet facilities or mixed sleeping arrangements on trips beyond the age of eight, and “no child should be made to feel unsafe through inappropriate mixed-sex sport”.

It notes the implications of this for socially transitioning students, saying schools and colleges should “sensitively explain” that they will not have access to toilets, changing rooms or residential accommodation designated for the opposite sex.

In a statement released by the DfE, Phillipson said: “Parents send their children to school and college trusting that they’ll be protected. Teachers work tirelessly to keep them safe. That’s not negotiable, and it’s not a political football.

“That’s why we’re following the evidence, including Dr Hilary Cass’s expert review, to give teachers the clarity they need to ensure the safeguarding and wellbeing of gender-questioning children and young people.

“This is about pragmatic support for teachers, reassurance for parents and, above all, the safety and wellbeing of children and young people.”

The general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, Pepe Di’Iasio, said that in the absence of guidance, schools and colleges had found their own solutions “amid an often polarised public debate”.

“We have long called for clear, pragmatic and well-evidenced national guidance to support them in this area and we are pleased to have reached this point,” he said.

The general secretary of the school leaders’ union NAHT, Paul Whiteman, said: “We welcome the publication of this guidance for consultation, as there is a clear need for greater clarity about how schools should manage this sensitive issue and support their pupils.”

Laura Trott, the Conservatives’ shadow education secretary, condemned the release of the guidance just before a Commons recess, saying this was “to avoid detailed scrutiny”.

She said: “Whilst it’s welcome that schools now have long-overdue clarity, this guidance clearly weakens the role of parents in decisions relating to their own children.

“Primary schoolchildren should not be navigating changes in pronouns at all. But shockingly Labour’s guidance opens the door to children as young as four being referred to in a way that does not reflect their biological sex.”

To be an Olympic-class skeleton racer requires extraordinary guts and impeccable nerve, as the corners loom and then whoosh past at frightening speed. So did anybody really believe that Ukraine’s Vladyslav Heraskevych would lose his when the world’s eyes were upon him?

Not the International Olympic Committee, who flipped between threats of expulsion and sweet talk over the past fortnight, without coming close to changing his mind. And certainly not those of us who have spoken and messaged Heraskevych, and found a man utterly prepared to sacrifice his dream of winning a Winter Olympic medal for a higher purpose.

In public and private his message was the same: he would not back down. And if the IOC barred from competing in his “helmet of memory”, which commemorates some of the 600 Ukrainian athletes and coaches killed by Russian bombs and bullets since 2022, he would accept his fate.

And when the moment came, shortly before 8.30am on Thursday, he met it with a powerful but resolute message: “This is price of our dignity,” alongside a photo of his helmet.

For the IOC it must have been like watching a public relations car crash from the passenger seat. One that everyone knew was going to happen – and nothing could be done about it.

Partly that was because Heraskevych’s messaging was so clever and precise. He didn’t focus on statements about Russian aggression. Instead he spoke powerfully of wanting to honour his fallen friends. That allowed him to claim his message didn’t violate the IOC’s rules banning political expression on the field of play. Did everyone believe it? No. But it was a deft sidestep.

Heraskevych also cut through with his claims that the IOC was inconsistent in its application of its rules over athlete expression. At the opening ceremony, for instance, his fellow skeleton racer, Israel’s Jared Firestone, wore a commemorative kippah to remember the 11 victims of the Munich massacre at the 1972 Games, which said: “We remember. We endure. We rise.”

This week the US skater Maxim Naumov, who lost his parents in the Potomac air collision last year, honoured them by holding up a photograph in their memory after he competed. Why, Heraskevych pointed out, was his case any different?

Finally, as he stated in his submission to the court of arbitration for sport in an attempt to overturn his ban on Thursday evening, was the IOC’s decision really proportionate?

All that said, the IOC did try avert one of the most controversial moments of recent Olympics. Its president, Kirsty Coventry, went to Cortina in a last-ditch attempt to break the impasse. The fact that she did so, and was in tears afterwards, said a lot about her compassion and leadership style.

However, allowing Heraskevych to use his helmet in practice and letting him wear a black armband in competition was never going to be enough to change his mind.

This is not the IOC of her predecessor, Thomas Bach, who seemed to only smile in public when votes were needed at elections.

And this is certainly not the IOC of a generation or two ago. When Tommie Smith and John Carlos were kicked out for their black power salute at the 1968 Olympics it came at the urging of the then IOC president Avery Brundage – a man who repeatedly defended Nazi Germany before and after the 1936 Games when president of the US Olympic Committee.

Brundage was at it again in 1972 in Munich when the American 400m athletes Vincent Matthews and Wayne Collett were given a lifetime ban from the Olympics after turning their backs to the US flag on the podium. “A disgusting display,” he called it.

So times have changed. But the problem the IOC has is that it clings to the old lie that sport and politics can be separated. Remember that it was only last week that the IOC – along with Fifa – was making noises about bringing Russia back into the sporting fold.

This is the same Russia that tried to hack the Milano Cortina website before these Games. That launched a sophisticated cyber-attack at the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Pyeongchang. And, most famously of all, corrupted the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi by doping its athletes – with a scheme that involved using a mousehole to swap steroid-riddled urine samples with clean ones.

Russia has, according to Ukraine, also destroyed more than 800 sports facilities, including over 20 Olympic, Paralympic and Deaflympic training centres.

I am not convinced the IOC was doing Russia’s propaganda for them, as Heraskevych and the Global Athlete organisation has claimed. But it was certainly a terrible look to ban an athlete for wanting to pay homage to his friends, while his country is being hit with ballistic missiles and you have recently made cooing noises to Russia.

The question is, could the IOC have done anything differently? Perhaps. But the stumbling block was always going to be that it saw Heraskevych’s helmet – rightly or wrongly – as violating one of its core tenets: that the field of play must be entirely neutral and free of political and social protest.

As one insider put it to me, if the “helmet of memory” had been approved, the IOC could have potentially opened up Pandora’s box and set a precedent. Could you imagine the furore if the Iranian government forced its athletes to mourn the head of the revolutionary guard, say, after he was assassinated?

But perhaps there was a way. After all, if the IOC was able to set up an independent panel to decide whether Russians could compete as Authorised Neutral Athletes, why could they not have done the same for Heraskevych and other such cases? And maybe the IOC could have even looked the other way, and allowed him to compete. It would have made a ripple, for sure. But a day later we would have been on to the next ski jumping penisgate or biathlete cheating on his girlfriend story. That’s how fast the Olympics news cycle moves.

But there is one thing we can say for certain: Heraskevych has got the horrors of the war in Ukraine back on the agenda, which was his aim all along.

The Russian team will be back at the Winter Paralympics later this month. And last week there were suggestions that the Olympic team would be reinstated this year. The latter decision has surely been pushed back now.

So while Heraskevych has lost his battle to compete – at least until Cas rules – he has taken a stand that will live long in the memory, and certainly won the public relations war.

In a biting opinion that chastised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a Republican-appointed judge on Thursday blocked the Defense Department from trying to punish Sen. Mark Kelly over a video he and other Democrats made urging service members not to follow illegal orders, accusing Hegseth of “trampling” on the Arizona senator’s First Amendment rights and suggesting Hegseth should be more “grateful” for the wisdom of retired service members.

“This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees,” Washington D.C. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon wrote in his opinion.

Leon sharply questioned Trump administration lawyers on whether there was legal precedent for the Defense Department’s attempt to demote and reduce retirement benefits for Kelly, who has been sharply critical of the White House.

“Rather than trying to shrink the First Amendment liberties of retired servicemembers, Secretary Hegseth and his fellow Defendants might reflect and be grateful for the wisdom and expertise that retired servicemembers have brought to public discussions and debate on military matters in our Nation over the past 250 years,” Leon wrote. “If so, they will more fully appreciate why the Founding Fathers made free speech the first Amendment in the Bill of Rights! Hopefully this injunction will in some small way help bring about a course correction in the Defense Department’s approach to these issues.”

 The Justice Department could appeal the decision, although it’s not clear if it would. The Pentagon and Hegseth on Thursday did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

The case has drawn considerable attention as a major test of the First Amendment rights of military veterans and the government’s separation of powers. Kelly was suing the Pentagon for threatening to demote him in rank and reduce his military retirement benefits because of a video he made with other Democrats that urged troops not to comply with illegal orders, which they did not specify.

Hegseth accused Kelly of violating a federal law that prohibits undermining good order and discipline within the military and accused him of hiding behind his position as a U.S. senator to do so.

In a video posted online to social media on Thursday, Kelly said he is grateful for the judge’s opinion.

“I appreciate the judge’s careful consideration of this case and the clarity of his ruling, but I also know that this might not be over yet, because this president and this administration do not know how to admit when they’re wrong,” he said.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.