Reedah Hayder

A 60-storey condominium is being proposed for 49–51 Yonge Street at Wellington Street atop 19th-century heritage buildings, but city staff and the local city councillor say revisions are needed. The application is by SmartLiving, the residential sub-brand of SmartCentres REIT.
At a virtual community meeting on March 23, Toronto community planner
Kevin Friedrich said preliminary concerns include overdevelopment on a small site, a lack of ground-floor retail plans and inadequate heritage conser...

Liberal Marci Ien, former co-host of CTV’s The Social, won Toronto Centre’s federal by-election on October 26 with a lower but still substantial vote compared with the 2019 election.
The seat, held by the Liberals since 1993, was vacated when former finance minister Bill Morneau resigned in August following exposure of his involvement in the WE Charity scandal.
Ien said, “When this riding opened and it was the riding I was born in – I was born in St. James Town – I thought ‘wow, do I sit at t...

Canadians have voted. And after a $600-million election, we are right back to a minority Liberal government, virtually the same as the previous one. Meanwhile, COVID passports have kicked into effect, flights from India have resumed, and divisive People's Party leader Maxime Bernier takes aim at journalists.

Monday
On Monday, a new study found that healthcare and dealing with COVID-19 were the first and second most important electoral issues for Canadians, respectively, with over 75 per cent supporting vaccine passports. Misinformation, however, is causing “non-negligible” subsection of voters to resort to violence.
This groups has supported hostile protests towards the Liberal government, which has included gravel being hurled at Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau. People who hold “COVID-19 misconcep...

Hundreds of ethnic media outlets exist across Canada and advocates say they are crucial in getting minority communities to vote in the upcoming Sept. 20 federal election.

Madeline Ziniak, chair of the Canadian Ethnic Media Association, said that ethnic media — which tend to be produced for a particular ethnic and linguistic community — are a pillar of communication in Canada.

Ethnic media is “even more effective than mainstream or traditional media in encouraging people” to vote because they ...

Though the government is putting $875 million into the settlement services sector in 2021-2022 – over $100 million more compared to the previous year – to help support newcomers and refugees, critics still see limitations in the services, including lack of public education about their availability and lack of accessibility.
For instance, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s (IRCC) First Settlement Outcomes Report found that settlement services were crucial for new Canadians’ integra...

Many international students are choosing Canada as their top destination for the upcoming school term, a new study suggests.
Almost 60 per cent of international students interested in studying in Canada are fully vaccinated and another 33 per cent will get their vaccines as soon as they can, according to research from IDP Connect, a U.K.-based data-driven organization. It surveyed over 4,000 international students from 20 countries during July 2021.
“Canada continues to lead the world in term...

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has called out federal security and tax agencies for contributing to Islamophobia in this country. He was delivering opening remarks at the national Islamophobia summit Thursday.
“From the (Canada Revenue Agency) to security agencies, institutions should support people, not target them,” he said.
The CRA has been accused by civil liberty organizations of targeting Muslim charities with audits based on flimsy reasoning.
He also called on all Canadians to fight aga...

Timea Pintilie, a Hungarian citizen, submitted her application for Canadian permanent residence (PR) along with her husband, Alejandro Canseco, a Mexican citizen, on March 30, 2020. They assumed their Confirmation of Permanent Residence (COPR) would not be issued until travel restrictions were lifted.

“(We thought) it would be illogical to issue COPR during restricted travel because the COPR has a short expiry date. Four months in our case,” said Pintilie.

But they were issued their COPR eigh...

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has called out federal security and tax agencies for contributing to Islamophobia in this country. He was delivering opening remarks at the national Islamophobia summit Thursday.
“From the (Canada Revenue Agency) to security agencies, institutions should support people, not target them,” he said.
The CRA has been accused by civil liberty organizations of targeting Muslim charities with audits based on flimsy reasoning.
He also called on all Canadians to fight aga...

Twenty-year-old Iman Adem lives in Toronto with her 70-year-old grandmother, Sayeeda Yousef, and her 22-year-old sister, Yasmin. With her parents in Dubai, Iman and Yasmin oversee their grandmother’s health.
Iman and her family are one among many who live in multi-generational homes, which is becoming more and more common in Canada due to unaffordable housing prices, lack of affordable child care and inadequate long-term care homes, as NCM has previously reported. According to 2016 Census dat...

Fadi Salback and his family immigrated to Ontario, Canada from Haifa, Israel when he was a young boy. He played soccer as a child, dreaming of one day becoming a professional player.
So when he began his first year of software engineering at Ontario Tech University, he naturally made the team for the Ontario Tech Ridgebacks. It was here that he caught the eye of FC Vorkuta, a Canadian soccer club that is a member of the Canadian Soccer League.
Playing in Ukraine
It wasn’t long before he becam...

Sukhmeet Sachal has a grim saying. That COVID-19 is like a storm wreaking havoc, with various communities sheltering in boats – some fully equipped with resources, some with nothing at all.
“[The South Asian community] would maybe be in a rowboat,” he says.
Sachal is a second-year medical student at the University of British Columbia. Nine months ago, he launched an outreach project at Sikh gurdwaras in Surrey, B.C. Now his team of more than 150 volunteers translates and circulates culturally...

A five-part research series by New Canadian Media unpacks the impacts of ethnic media’s pandemic coverage for multilingual communities. Here’s how we did it
Alicja Minda, a Polish immigrant, researcher and editor-in-chief of the Editors Toronto official blog, BoldFace, sits in her bedroom-turned-office-space, scrolling through COVID-19 coverage.
There are hundreds of articles on her list, each translated into English by non-partisan consulting firm Multilingual International Research and Ethn...

The freedom of press is not equal across the world, a fact too well-known by refugee journalists. James Cullingham, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, spoke with Jeffrey Dworkin, a senior fellow at Massey College, to discuss his upcoming documentary The Cost of Freedom – Refugee Journalists in Canada, scheduled for release later this year.
The documentary profiles three refugee journalists —Abdulrahman Matar, Luis Nájera and Arzu Yildiz — all of whom share the lived experience of the thr...