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Weekend Newsstand: August 22, 2015
Are you ready for a heavy dose of Saturday news? Best to get it over with before you enjoy your day. The Catholic Children's Aid Society is embroiled in a strange legal battle with an angry father, the riding of Eglinton-Lawrence is one to watch, and mental health services in Peel are a work in progress.
The Catholic Children’s Aid Society is in the middle of an intense legal battle with one parent who describes himself as “extremely pissed off.” The father, who isn’t being identified in order to protect the identity of his young daughter, says his daughter was inappropriately taken from him and abused in the care of a foster family. CCAS denies this, and has filed a lawsuit against the father, claiming he set up a similar-sounding website to defame the organization and that he intends to publish a trove of CCAS staff emails, constituting a breach of their privacy. The man claims his website is intended to unite other parents to fight the CCAS and shine a light on its flaws, and claims he contacted the CCAS when he received the emails but didn’t hear back until their lawsuit was launched. His website is ccastoronto.ca, similar to the CCAS’ torontoccas.org, and he uses a modified version of their logo.
Eglinton-Lawrence is one of many ridings to watch this election: Finance Minister Joe Oliver won there in 2011, the first time the riding voted in anyone but a Liberal in 20 years. But there’s still a large left-leaning electorate there, and with change in the air this election season, there are many undecided voters. Oliver is running against Marco Mendicino, who beat floor-crossing Eve Adams for the Liberal nomination and employed some very effective community-oriented, door-knocking strategies to get there. Andrew Thompson, formerly the finance minister in Saskatchewan, just announced his candidacy for the NDP last week and lives in downtown Toronto (Mendicino has made much of living in the riding). Thompson also instituted significant tax cuts in Saskatchewan, though he says he supports party leader Tom Mulcair’s plan to institute a corporate tax hike because different situations require different responses.
Peel region, like the rest of the GTA, has seen astronomic growth over the last few decades. But with that growth, some services have lagged, like mental health. Mental health caseworkers in the area say the problem of limited services is compounded by poverty among residents (up from two per cent in 1980 to 50 per cent in 2010) and the makeup of the region. Peel has the highest proportion of visible minority residents (57 per cent) and immigrants (50.5 per cent) in the GTA, and a large chunk of those people are South Asian. The culture clash between the traditionally close-knit families and western medicine’s individualist approach to mental health has led to some friction for people who do end up reaching out for services, while many people new to the country don’t know how to access mental health services they need. Mandeep Grewal, mental-health case manager at Punjabi Community Mental Health Services, says people in the region have recognized this is an issue, though, “and it’s basically just trying to make that change, little by little.”