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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.

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Alberta

Crown recommends 9 years in prison for Freedom Convoy-inspired border blockade protesters

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From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

Originally charged with conspiracy to commit murder, Anthony Olienick and Chris Carbert were convicted of mischief and weapons offences during the Coutts blockade in 2022. They’ve already spent more than two years in prison awaiting their trial.

The Crown recommended nine years in prison for two men linked to the 2022 Freedom Convoy-inspired border blockade protest in Coutts, Alberta.

On August 29th, Crown prosecutor Steven Johnston declared that Anthony Olienick and Chris Carbert, who were convicted of mischief and weapons offences at the 2022 Freedom Convoy, should receive nine years in jail despite already spending more than two years in prison awaiting their trial.

“Mr. Carbert and Mr. Olienick believed they were at war. They were prepared to die for their cause. The very real risk is that a firefight would have occurred,” Johnston claimed.

Olienick and Carbert have already spent more than two years in prison after they were charged with conspiracy to commit murder during 2022 Freedom Convoy-inspired border blockade protest in Coutts that protested COVID mandates.

Earlier in August, they were finally acquitted of that charge and instead found guilty of the lesser charges of unlawful possession of a firearm for a dangerous purpose and mischief over $5,000. Olienick was also found guilty of unlawful possession of an explosive device.

Olienick and Carbert have been jailed since 2022 when, at the same time the Freedom Convoy descended on Ottawa to protest COVID restrictions, they joined an anti-COVID mandate blockade protest at the Alberta-Montana border crossing near Coutts. The men were denied bail and kept in solitary confinement before their trial.

At the time, police said they had discovered firearms, 36,000 rounds of ammunition, and industrial explosives at Olienick’s home. However, the guns were legally obtained and the ammunition was typical of those used by rural Albertans. Similarly, Olienick explained that the explosives were used for mining gravel.

Now, they are being recommended to spend nine more years in prison despite their lawyer pointing out that they have already spent 929 days in jail, which equates to nearly four years given the accepted valuation of granting extra credit for time served while awaiting trial.

Justice David Labrenz is set to give his decision on September 9th.

Under the EA, the Trudeau government froze the bank accounts of Canadians who donated to the protest. Trudeau revoked the EA on February 23 after the protesters had been cleared out. At the time, seven of Canada’s 10 provinces opposed Trudeau’s use of the EA.

Recently, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled that Trudeau was “not justified” in invoking the Emergencies Act.

Many are pointing out that the two were being unjustly held as political prisoners similar to those in communist countries.

It’s unclear why the two Alberta men are denied bail while dangerous criminals are allowed to roam free thanks to Trudeau’s catch and release policy.

Indeed, this policy has put many Canadians in danger, as was the case last month when a Brampton man charged with sexually assaulting a 3-year-old was reportedly out on bail for an October 2022 incident in which he was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon and possession of a dangerous weapon.

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COVID-19

Australian Senate report ignores obvious: excess deaths began after COVID jab rollout

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From LifeSiteNews

By David James

It is considerably more likely that the sudden jump in excess deaths was caused by the vaccines rather than the virus. The same pattern is being repeated across heavily vaccinated countries.

When the Australian Federal Senate announced an inquiry into excess mortality in Australia, there was little hope the participants would undertake a dispassionate examination of the possible effects of vaccines on the population. The report has now been released and it did not disappoint; or, rather, it did disappoint.

The report was an exercise in misdirection and concealment by bureaucrats, industry bodies, and political parties. It did, though, settle the question of whether what the Australian authorities did was due to incompetence or darker motives. Based on the non-arguments proffered it is clear that there has been a sustained and organized exercise in lying.

The Senate committee, according to the state broadcaster, the ABC, found that “COVID-19 was the main cause of excess deaths in 2021, 2022, and up to August 2023”. It is a message that has been repeated across the mainstream media, providing an apparent reason to forget about the whole COVID problem.

Bindi Kinderman, general manager of the People and Place Division of the ABS, told the inquiry COVID-associated deaths were behind the unusual rise in death cases between 2021 and August 2023, adding that “in 2020, COVID-19 ranked as the 38th leading cause of death in Australia. In 2021, it moved up to the 34th position.”

Apart from the obvious problem that the 34th leading cause of death is hardly likely to be responsible for extreme changes to death levels, the ABS found in its own reporting that in 2021 the mortality rate in Australia from respiratory diseases was the second lowest on record (after 2020). There were 1,122 deaths attributable to COVID-19, less than a third of the number who died from influenza in 2019.

That suggests that any attempt to blame Covid-19 for the excess mortality had to begin at 2022 – after the mass vaccination.

References to 2021 were only made to create the false impression that the excess deaths started earlier than they actually did. The reason? Because there was a desire to avoid comparisons of what happened before the mass inoculation with what happened after.

The deception becomes especially obvious after looking at the ABS’s own data on excess deaths. In 2020, when Australians were being warned that a deadly disease was ravaging the country, excess mortality was actually negative:  minus 3.1 per cent. In 2021 it was a comparatively modest 1.6 per cent above average. But in 2022, after the mandating of jabs, it soared to 11.7 per cent before falling to 6.1 per cent in 2023.

Additionally, in 2022 the number of deaths from Covid increased more than nine times from the 2021 level, invalidating the claim that the “vaccines” provided protection.

It is routinely pointed out that “correlation is not causation”; that just because two things coincide does not necessarily mean one causes the other.  That also works in reverse. Without some kind of correlation there is no reason to look for causation. There is no correlation between COVID infections, which the ABS said started in March 2020, and excess mortality. So why would the virus suddenly have started causing excess deaths in 2022, when by that time it had mutated and become less deadly? The timeline does not add up.

A study entitled Too Many Dead by the Australian Medical Professional’s Society (AMPS) makes this point. “Why did the official death rates attributable to COVID-19 disease only become notable after the vast majority of Australians had received allegedly ‘safe and effective’ vaccines for the infection?  Furthermore, why did the much milder Omicron variant take such a toll on a heavily vaccinated population, if indeed the much-repeated therapeutic claim of protection from severe illness and death was in effect?”

It is considerably more likely that the sudden jump in excess deaths was caused by the vaccines rather than the virus. The same pattern is being repeated across heavily vaccinated countries. According to the OECD, excess mortality is still high, at levels comparable with what happens during war time. In Australia excess mortality is still running about 10 per cent above average, according to the OECD. A study in the European Society of Medicine into the effect of vaccine boosters in Australia has found there is a “strong correlation” with the excess mortality.

A dissenting report by Senator Ralph Babet, who instigated the inquiry, makes the most interesting reading. Babet notes that there was a lot of suppression of submissions, which is unusual in such an inquiry. Only half were uploaded for public viewing.

“The submissions that the committee chose to suppress by taking as ‘unpublished correspondence’ include those from professors, doctors, medical specialists, academics, actuarial and subject matter experts, as well as concerned Australian citizens,” Babet wrote. He pointed to delays and road blocks, unreliable or unavailable data, and limited investigation of vaccine-related deaths.

It is no surprise that almost no-one will come forward to take responsibility for what appears to be the greatest man-made medical catastrophe in Australian history. It is no surprise that politicians, bureaucrats, health bodies and industry groups lack collective conscience and honesty. They are only interested in lying to protect themselves.

The question that remains unanswered is: “What kind of government and health system is left once it has lost its integrity and credibility?”

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