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If Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion were going to plan, Serhiy Volyna would be dead and Lilia Cheridnichenko would either have fled Ukraine or would be meekly submitting to Russian rule.
Instead, Major Volyna, who commands the last Ukrainian unit inside the besieged port city of Mariupol, was still alive this week, reports The Globe’s Mark MacKinnon. From inside the ruins of the Azovstal steel factory, he was posting Facebook videos and sending letters to Pope Francis, calling on the international community to intervene and save his wounded soldiers and the estimated 1,000 civilians trapped with them.
The future, for Volyna and for Mariupol, looks grim. But he and his unit of several hundred fighters have rejected repeated calls to surrender. By doing so, they have kept a large Russian force inside Mariupol, preventing it from redeploying elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, now the main front in this 57-day-old war.
Read more:
- Thousands of Ukrainians have entered the U.S. through Mexico. These could be the last
- Russia targets 61 Canadians with sanctions, including politicians, journalists and soldiers
- Russia pushes into eastern Ukraine, collects corpses in ‘liberated’ Mariupol
- Explainer: Why the battle for Mariupol’s steel plant matters in Russia’s war against Ukraine
- Opinion: The destruction of my hometown of Mariupol is something I can never forgive
Maksim Syroizhko kisses his girlfriend, Yana Matvapaeva, next to sandbags at an underpass at Independence Square in Kyiv, on April 21. The couple said that they had not seen one another since Feb. 27, when the war with Russia began.David Guttenfelder/The New York Times News Service
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Overwhelmed and underfunded, women’s shelters say without overhaul to system, they risk turning away more survivors
In Quebec, where 17 women and two children were killed by men in intimate-partner violence in 2021, and amid a surge in hotline calls and texts from victims seeking support this year, women are being turned away from shelters that are stretched beyond capacity.
In Nunavut, where there are currently just four shelters, women and children experiencing violence in many remote communities have nowhere safe to go. And in Saskatchewan – which has the country’s highest provincial rate of intimate-partner violence – homeless women, many of whom are fleeing abusive situations, are left sleeping in the cold.
Canada’s domestic-violence crisis has only intensified through the pandemic, report The Globe’s Tavia Grant, Molly Hayes and Elizabeth Renzetti. Although Ottawa has boosted funding, and some provincial governments have added pandemic-related funds on a temporary basis, long-term investments have been sporadic, piecemeal, variable and largely inadequate. Resources are also not reaching the communities in most need.
Stakeholders say Canada needs an overhaul on where and how money is spent, and access to services should not depend on your postal code.
Ottawa faces blowback for plan to regulate internet
Newly released documents reveal Twitter Canada told government officials that a federal plan to create a new internet regulator with powers to block specific websites is comparable to drastic actions used in authoritarian countries, such as China, North Korea and Iran.
The letter, marked confidential, is among more than 1,000 pages of submissions to an online consultation that Ottawa launched in July, in order to gather opinions on its draft plan for regulating the internet to curb hate speech and other online harms, reports Bill Curry.
The social media company’s comments are contained in a Sept. 24, 2021, letter from Michele Austin, who was then Twitter Canada’s head of public policy. She provides a strongly worded seven-page critique.
“People around the world have been blocked from accessing Twitter and other services in a similar manner as the one proposed by Canada by multiple authoritarian governments (China, North Korea and Iran for example) under the false guise of ‘online safety,’ impeding peoples’ rights to access to information online,” the letter says.
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ALSO ON OUR RADAR
Macklem won’t rule out even larger interest rate hikes: The Bank of Canada might consider raising its benchmark interest rate by more than 50 basis points in a single move as it pushes borrowing costs higher to try to quell runaway inflation, Governor Tiff Macklem suggested on Thursday.
Ottawa dropped some drug pricing reforms to meet need for ‘strong’ pharmaceutical industry, Health Minister says: The federal government withdrew some of its long-promised reforms to drug pricing, which would have shaved billions off industry profits, in order to ensure a vibrant pharmaceutical industry in Canada, Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said. The finalized reforms will cut $2.9-billion from pharmaceutical industry profits over a decade.
CMHC forecasts the average home price could hit $782,400 this year: Canada’s housing agency is forecasting home prices will moderate this year as the cost of borrowing rises and buyers increasingly get priced out of the market. It projects that the annual average home price could be as high as $782,400 at the end of this year, or $740,700 at the lower end of its forecast range.
Queen Elizabeth privately marks her 96th birthday: Queen Elizabeth retreated to the Sandringham estate in eastern England for her 96th birthday. While Thursday’s celebration was expected to be low key, public celebrations are set for June 2-5, when the monarch will commemorate her platinum jubilee year, marking her 70 years on the throne.
Listen to The Decibel: Trouble is brewing in the craft beer world: Over the past decade, craft breweries have grown at an explosive rate. While their rise is good news for beer lovers, brewers face an oversaturated market and are struggling to turn a profit.
MORNING MARKETS
World stocks fell to five-week lows and bond yields rose on Friday as the U.S. Federal Reserve hints at an aggressive half-point interest rate hike in May and the yuan struck a seven-month low as lockdowns in Shanghai hit China’s growth prospects. S&P futures were 0.18 per cent softer after Wall Street indexes fell on Thursday, with the S&P 500 down 1.5 per cent and the Nasdaq down 2 per cent. European stocks dropped 1.06 per cent, and France’s CAC 40 fell 1.39 per cent ahead of Sunday’s presidential run-off vote. Britain’s FTSE fell 0.52 per cent. Japan’s Nikkei declined 1.63 per cent.
WHAT EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT
Will the head of the Anglican Church finally bring restitution to Indigenous peoples?
“No number of apologies can ever be enough to truly forgive what has happened to survivors and their families. If the Archbishop of Canterbury wants to visit, he had better come prepared to offer financial support for the revitalization of languages that the church did so much to wipe out, and with a true promise to release all Anglican Church records and those from the New England Company, which ran the Mohawk Institute from 1885 to 1920.” – Tanya Talaga
Patrick Brown dives dangerously into diaspora politics
“He aims to sell thousands of party memberships to members of targeted ethnic groups, who can swing the vote in critical urban and suburban ridings, by promising to pay special attention to their concerns. This might be acceptable if it involved removing obstacles that racialized Canadians face in their everyday lives and promoting equality.” – Konrad Yakabuski
TODAY’S EDITORIAL CARTOON
Brian Gable/The Globe and Mail
MOMENT IN TIME: April 22, 1964
CCF voted out of office
Then-premier Ross Thatcher of Saskatchewan looks over some of the stock on his ranch at Caron, west of Moose Jaw, circa May,1964.The Canadian Press
Three years after replacing the popular Tommy Douglas as Saskatchewan premier, Co-operative Commonwealth Federation leader Woodrow Lloyd called a provincial election on this day in April, 1964. Political pundits predicted an easy CCF victory. But what many failed to sense was the mood for change. The CCF had been in power for two decades and made its share of enemies, especially during the 1962 doctors’ strike over the introduction of medicare. Then, there were Liberal leader Ross Thatcher’s organizational abilities and his promise to revitalize the provincial economy. “Saskatchewan missed the boat once,” one Liberal ad warned, taking a swipe at CCF socialism, “We can’t afford to miss the boat again.” Polling day brought confusion, followed by surprise. Since the CCF and Liberals secured almost the identical percentage of popular vote (40 per cent), the margin of victory in several ridings was extremely slim. Thatcher won a stunning 32 seats to Lloyd’s 26. Many tried to make sense of the CCF defeat, the most common explanation being that Woodrow Lloyd was no Tommy Douglas. Perhaps the simplest answer, provided by someone who had been part of the 1944 victory, was that the CCF government “died, above all, of old age.” Bill Waiser
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