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High school calls police, bans parents from soccer games for silently supporting girls-only teams

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

The ‘No Trespass’ order alleged that parents wearing the pink wristbands ‘had the effect of intimidating, threatening, harassing, and discouraging’ the boy playing on the opposing girls team.

A New Hampshire high school halted a girls soccer game last week and called the police after parents, who were dismayed about a female-identifying male playing on the opposing team, were found to be wearing pink wristbands as a means of silent, peaceful protest.

Two parents subsequently received a notice from the superintendent of schools banning them from attending their daughters’ future games, asserting that by distributing the pink wristbands, which carried the simple message, “XX” (referring to the two chromosomes indicating the female sex), had the effect of “intimidating, threatening, harassing, and discouraging” the boy playing on the opposing girls team.

A NO TRESPASS order from Superintendent Mary Kelley sent to parent Anthony Foote of Bow, New Hampshire, alleges that “prior to and during the soccer game,” he “brought and distributed pink armbands to parents and other attendees to protest the participation of a transgender female student on the other team.”

“You are hereby prohibited from entering the buildings, grounds, and property of the Bow School District, including but not limited to all school administrative office buildings, parking lots, and athletic fields, until further notice,” the terse notice declared.

“You are also prohibited from attending any Bow School District athletic or extra-curricular event, on or off school grounds.”

“My daughter’s playing in the homecoming game this weekend, and I’m banned until the 23rd,” Foote told the NHJournal.  “I can’t watch her play in homecoming — which is ridiculous.”

Foote told the NHJournal that he doesn’t care about what Parker Tirrell, the male student playing on the rival team, wants to do with his life.

“What I do care about is that my daughter could be physically hurt, maybe not by Parker because he’s not the biggest kid on the field. But there’s a chance that next time will be different,” Foote said.

Gov. Chris Sununu had signed the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act into law in July, making the Granite State the 26th state to keep males from participating in girls’ sports events.

However, U.S. District Court Judge Landya McCafferty prevented the law from being enforced.

“Judge Landya McCafferty”s ruling has settled the question of allowing males to compete as girls for the moment … but the issue of free speech is not resolved,”  NHJournal’s Michael Graham noted. “It’s possible the school’s treatment of these parents violates their First Amendment rights, or that the school district’s interpretation of what is ‘disruptive behavior’ could be viewed by a court as too expansive.”

Foote also said he’s concerned that social pressure may prevent a large number of parents from expressing their views about the matter of boys competing in girls’ sports.

“Bow is a very blue town, and the people who run things will defend any liberal issue. It’s hard to speak out. But I would say there’s a silent majority,” Foote said. “There are firemen, there are police officers, there are teachers from other towns. They don’t agree, but they have to think about their finances. They have to protect their families. They can’t say anything.”

Parental concerns about their daughters being injured by males playing on what not so long ago were “female only” sports teams are by no means unfounded.

In nearby Massachusetts earlier this year, a gender-confused male playing on a girls high school basketball team injured three female players, causing the remaining female teammates to fear for their safety.

The Daily Item reported that Collegiate Charter School of Lowell ended its February 8 game against the KIPP Academy girls basketball team after just 16 minutes due to the KIPP team’s inclusion of a male player reportedly six feet tall with facial hair.

Earlier this year, LifeSiteNews’ Calvin Freiburger explained:

Inclusion of gender-confused individuals in opposite-sex sports is promoted by leftists as a matter of “inclusivity,” but critics note that indulging “transgender” athletes undermines the original rational basis for having sex-specific athletics in the first place, thereby depriving female athletes of recognition and professional or academic opportunities.

There have been numerous high-profile examples in recent years of men winning women’s competitions, and research affirms that physiology gives males distinct athletic advantages that cannot be fully negated by hormone suppression.

In a 2019 paper published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, New Zealand researchers found that “healthy young men (do) not lose significant muscle mass (or power) when their circulating testosterone levels were reduced to (below International Olympic Committee guidelines) for 20 weeks” and “indirect effects of testosterone” on factors such as bone structure, lung volume, and heart size “will not be altered by hormone therapy;” therefore, “the advantage to transwomen (biological men) afforded by the (International Olympic Committee) guidelines is an intolerable unfairness.”

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Trudeau Unrepentant: Sorry Seems to Be The Hardest Word

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There’s a grim irony in seeing Justin Trudeau leave the country to find people still willing to buy his act. But find them he did in the U.S. media capital of New York where flash-frozen spares like Stephen Colbert or the ladies of The View are still re-living the 2016 presidential election.

Could it be that Justin’s real constituency all along has been these voidoids of Wokeness, not Canadians? Apparently so, judging from the cringeworthy interaction between Canada’s defrocked PM and Colbert. Like mammoths in a tar pit, fatuous Trudeau and fawning Colbert thrashed around in their irrelevance, steering clear of what will be a historic electoral drubbing of Mr. Happy Ways. It’s amazing Colbert didn’t hold Trudeau’s hand during the lovefest.

Colbert’s staff might have come up with multiple lines of questioning on why the former GQ squish is now reviled north of the border. Instead the two re-heated 2015 talking points from when Skippy was elected and Hillary was throwing away the 2016 election to Trump.

There were multiple softballs for a smirking Trudeau, but the PM’s entire detachment from reality could be summed up by a healthcare question pitched by Colbert. (Americans love the Canadian healthcare myth the way Kamala loves a suburban lawn). Trudeau was asked to reflect on the U.S. alternative.

“It would be a lot easier if you guys had universal health care,” he riposted. The self-satisfied grin on Trudeau’s face told us he knows he was among friends in the CBS TV studio. Colbert’s audience of midwits slapped their flippers after Trudeau inserted himself in the current American presidential election. As his Papa once said during the October Crisis: “There’s a lot of bleeding hearts around who don’t like to see people with helmets and guns,” Trudeau remarked jauntily. “All I can say is, go on and bleed…”

Anyone with a shred of journalistic integrity might have replied, “This year, Canadian patients faced a median wait of 27.7 weeks for medically necessary treatment from a specialist after being referred by a general practitioner. That’s over six months—the longest ever recorded. It’s a slight increase from last year’s median wait—and a 198 percent increase from the 9.3-week median wait that patients faced in 1993, the year that Fraser Institute began tracking wait times. But let’s accept it as received that Colbert and the Kamala left are not given to intellectual rigour.

In his new persona as Michael Scott from The Office, Trudeau is the only guy not in on the joke he’s become while wielding power and teddy bears. (Dunning Kruger Effect states that some people are too stupid to know they’re stupid.) Politics can have that effect on those who take themselves just a little too seriously like (checks notes) Justin Trudeau. But Skippy has this syndrome to the Nth degree.

Trudeau makes a convenient avatar for the entire managerial class that sins greatly but uses its privilege to avoid accountability. Watching him slough off the poor clods he represents as PM, Trudeau is as stand-in for every politician and Blob creature who employed, to use one example, Covid to trample all that’s sacred in society without ever having to say sorry.

Sorry for what? 2023 meta-analysis of 40 high-quality studies shows that, despite the apocalyptic predictions off the elites, COVID death rate in 2020 for people younger than 70 was 0.07%. That’s 1-in-1,500. The death rate from COVID for those aged 0-19 years was 0.0003%. That’s 1-in-333,333. This is not a pandemic.

Still, while Skippy hid in the Rideau cottage, federal and provincial health officials churned out specious daily statistics on “positive cases” as justification to shut drown schools, work places and even the beaches. The social cost of grandparents dying alone and children denied schooling was incalculable. When Trump said the death rate from COVID was lower than 3.4 percent, the media angrily accused him of “misinformation.”

When the initial hysteria abated, bully boy Trudeau turned to vaccines to whip the herd. He removed the civil and financial rights of dissenters, incarcerating them in hotels. His followers actively talked of isolating vaccine deniers to work camps while denying them healthcare. When truckers objected he sent in the police on horseback. Because, as Naomi Klein bragged, events like the covid lockdowns are a Once-in-a-Century Chance to Make Our World More Equitable.

In this theatre of the grotesque Trudeau has become the epitome of the Ugly Canadian. As we wrote in the fall of 2015. “The scold impulse is never far from the Canadian id as we stare balefully south at the Excited States. In Canada it’s not so important that we have things such as single-payer health care and non-gun culture as that Americans don’t have them.

Trudeau represents that most vile class of Canadian, those who leap to print to disparage their nation in front of the world. Citing research (as yet unpublished) on attitudes in the Balkans, French Polynesia and Equatorial Guinea toward Canada, we are told that Canada’s reputation as a noble, compassionate nation is now in tatters. In Boy Trudeau’s Gatling-gun delivery, the government’s refusal to bend to the UN secretary general’s dictates has made us a travishamockery in the league of nations. See if Robert Redford ever comes here again.

This is always a rich vein to mine In Canadian politics. In a land that thinks Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, lamenting Canada’s fallen status is considered a political kill shot by the media.” Trudeau embraces the model.

It’s hard to square his unapologetic tough guy with the obsequious Trudeau of the Colbert show. But he knows that as long as there are pandering cretins such as Colbert he doesn’t have to apologize for causing citizens for not taking a for-profit experimental product with manufacturer immunity. His future is assured. Were that Canadians’ futures looked as rosy.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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Business

Time to finally privatize Canada Post

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From the Fraser Institute

By Vincent Geloso

In the 10 years following privatization, prices for stamps and other postal services fell by 11 per cent in Austria, 15 per cent in the Netherlands and 17 per cent in Germany (adjusted for inflation). All these countries now have lower postal prices than the European average.

Canada Post wants to increase the price of a stamp by 25 cents to $1.24 to keep up with inflation and rising costs. But Canada Post has often relied on this reasoning for previous price increases since it stopped being a government department and became a Crown corporation in 1981. Since then, it’s jacked up prices every time it’s had “financial difficulties.”

The source of these difficulties has changed over time. It used to be the modernization of infrastructure, then the problems of pensions, then the rise of the Internet. The answer is, however, always the same. Prices must increase. Indeed, since 1981 stamp prices have increased 98 per cent (after adjusting for inflation). In other words, the price for stamps have increased far beyond the rate of inflation.

Why does Canada Post keep getting away with this?

Because it has a monopoly over most of the letter market in Canada. And while it competes with private companies (UPS, for example) in the parcel market, Canada Post can borrow money at much lower costs than its rivals because it is a Crown corporation ultimately backed by taxpayers. That’s a huge advantage.

Normally, a company facing losses and declining demand would innovate and reduce costs. Otherwise, it would likely be bought out by competitors or go bankrupt. However, due to its monopoly over most of the letter market, Canada Post lacks this incentive. In can simply pass the burden onto consumers by raising prices, which is exactly what it has done since the 1980s. And as a Crown corporation, it cannot be purchased by another company without express approval from Ottawa.

So, what’s the solution?

In Europe, due to a directive from the European Commission, all letters regardless of weight have been open to competition since 2013. The directive does not mandate the privatization of state-owned postal companies; it simply ends postal monopolies. Combined with local liberalization efforts before 2013, this directive has forced state-owned postal service providers to better control costs because they cannot turn to taxpayers (for subsidies) or consumers (by raising prices) to bail them out.

Some countries such as the Netherlands, Austria and Germany went further and privatized their postal operators. With privatization, the discipline of competition is combined with the discipline imposed by shareholders seeking to maximize profits and increase sales.

In the 10 years following privatization, prices for stamps and other postal services fell by 11 per cent in Austria, 15 per cent in the Netherlands and 17 per cent in Germany (adjusted for inflation). All these countries now have lower postal prices than the European average.

Predictably, postal service providers in these countries found new methods of organizing their activities, tying multiple services together to generate economies of scale, and moved fast in adopting new information and logistical technologies. Due to the incentives of competition, providers focused their efforts on controlling costs—a focus Canada Post will never achieve as long as it’s a Crown corporation with a monopoly.

If approved by federal regulators, Canada Post’s latest price increase would go into effect in January. Policymakers in Ottawa should finally put postal liberalization and privatization on the table. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time before a new problem emerges, which Canada Post will use to justify another price increase.

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