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The reason I chose this picture is for the reason that it shows several different ethnicity's which I wanted to have one because Canada is known for it's cultural mosaic and in Canada you may practice any religion or cultural practices you wish without fear of discrimination

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this includes the five questions asked.

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This video talks about the history of freedom of association along with how it has changed to what it is currently.

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Michael McConnell - "Whatever Happened to Freedom of Association?"

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This video talks about three fundamental rights surrounding association, expression and freedom of assembly. This video also talks about the restriction of these rights and how they interact.

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Freedom of expression, association and assembly

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In the video it goes more in-depth on freedom of association and talks about each factor of freedom of association

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In this article talks about Canadian corporations infringing on the right of freedom of association.

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The principle that businesses must respect international human rights standards, including when operating in countries that don't themselves do so, has been embraced by (among others) the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and multinational corporations such as Royal Dutch Shell, GE and Goldcorp.

In Canada, the principle is often articulated with respect to mining companies, whose activity abroad has at times infringed local employees' and other people's rights to freedom of association and security of the person. Global Affairs Canada operates an Office of the Extractive Sector Corporate Social Responsibility Counsellor precisely to try to minimize the harmful effects of Canadian companies' overseas mining operations.

But recent reports suggest that a different sector in which Canadian companies are active - political consulting - poses its own threat to an internationally enshrined human right. The right to vote and stand in genuine elections is set out in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It is a subset of the broader international human right to political participation, which is the legal core of democracy. While many states are backsliding on democracy in its broad sense, for the time being most still hold elections.

Even within electoral democracies, however, opposition candidates for high office face a growing threat from misinformation campaigns, many reportedly developed by transnational political consulting firms. Especially in the febrile pre-electoral climates of fledgling African democracies, recent news reports have attributed the following to Western political consultancies:

* In Kenya in 2017, U.S. consultancy Harris Media allegedly produced a widely circulated misinformation video on behalf of incumbent President Uhurru Kenyatta, depicting massive inter-tribal violence should his challenger, Raila Odinga, be elected;

* In Nigeria in 2015, U.K. consultancy Cambridge Analytica and its Canadian partner, AggregateIQ, allegedly produced and disseminated a misinformation video on behalf of incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan, depicting the imposition of Sharia law and widespread violence should his challenger, Muhammadu Buhari, be elected. AggregateIQ says it complied with Nigerian law;

* In South Africa in 2014, U.K. firm Bell Pottinger produced widely circulated race-baiting materials on behalf of incumbent President Jacob Zuma, depicting "economic apartheid" should his challenger, Helen Zille, a white woman, be elected.

Whether or not these misinformation campaigns were determinative of the electoral outcome, and whether or not they were permitted under the law of the country concerned, they undoubtedly infringed the internationally enshrined right of opponents to participate in fair elections. In this respect, Canadian whistleblower Christopher Wylie stated to British MPs last week that AggregateIQ "is a company that has gone around the world and undermined democratic institutions in all kinds of countries." If the above allegations are true, the same can be said of Harris Media, Cambridge Analytica, Bell Pottinger and no doubt other consultancies - and arguably also the social media companies that allow electoral misinformation campaigns to be propagated.

Political consulting firms, in Canada and elsewhere, should follow the lead of the extractive sector in adopting and abiding by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Given political consultants' unique sphere of activity, this would entail a commitment to respect the right of all candidates to participate fairly in a given election; to undertake ongoing due diligence to identify, prevent and account for their direct or indirect impact on the right to political participation; and to establish processes to remediate any adverse impact on that right in a given instance.

Corporate social responsibility is not confined to certain sectors or rights. As new areas of transnational activity emerge, companies engaged in that activity must acknowledge their responsibility to respect the rights impacted.

Canadian political consultancies, like Canadian extractive companies, should lead the way.
Tim Wood is a lawyer and has served on international election observation missions of the European Union, Organization of American States, and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

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Wood: Consulting firms, including Canadian ones, must stop undermining democracy abroad

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The principle that businesses must respect international human rights standards, including when operating in countries that don't themselves do so, has been embraced by (among others) the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and multinational corporations such as Royal Dutch Shell, GE and Goldcorp.

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In this article it talks about how being politically correct is constricting Liberals into not discussing with both sides of abortion.

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It is reasonable to assume that the sociopolitical disease of oppressive political correctness will become more constricting and life-threatening to the human capacity for deductive reasoning and liberality of mind until it is forcefully attacked by a widely applied cultural germicide. Instances are regularly reported of steadily more virulent outbreaks of this affliction, which is now so pernicious and widespread, millions of Canadian adults are carriers of it. A particularly alarming recent outburst was when the federal government decreed that applicants for the Canada Summer Jobs Program check off (not sign, but the effect is the same) an "attestation" that "the job and" (the applicant organization's) "core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression."

In an Applicant Guide, it is further stipulated that "The government recognizes that women's rights are human rights." (Surely no one now contests that and the point need not be laboured.) However, "This includes sexual and reproductive rights - and the right to access safe and legal abortions. These rights are at the core of the Government of Canada's foreign and domestic policies." No application would be considered without the attestation being checked as agreed to by the summer job program applicant.

The attestation was added to requirements this year when the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada complained last year that some grants were made to anti-abortion organizations. This was declared by the federal Employment Minister, Patty Hajdu, to have been an "oversight," and the attestation was added as obligatory for any application under the program to be considered this year. Many churches, secular organizations and people do not agree that the right to an abortion should be so absolutely entrenched. Both the prime minister and the employment minister claim that the rights of such groups and individuals are not infringed because the right to an abortion is deemed by the government not to be in any organization or person's "core mandate."

The government has no standing to tell any Canadian citizen or resident or group composed of citizens or residents what their "core mandate" is. The attempt to do so is already being litigated by the Toronto Right to Life Association as an infringement of the Charter, which does guarantee an almost unlimited freedom of opinion and very broad freedom of expression. The government has also taken unto itself as an executive prerogative of junior officials of the ministry of employment to determine arbitrarily what the "underlying values" of the Charter are. They have no such jurisdiction, and they should not be bandying about this obnoxious misnomer "reproductive rights."

The government has no standing to tell any Canadian citizen or resident or group composed of citizens or residents what their 'core mandate' is

The right to an abortion is not a right to reproduce; it is not even a contraceptive right; it is a right to extinguish life. I am not an abortion enthusiast, but I accept that the state does not have and should not aspire to have the right to inflict childbirth on a woman who does not want to have a child. Abortions occur and they must be sanitary and unstigmatizing, and on this subject the full range of views must be respected. The argument is when the unborn attain the rights of a person that supersede the rights of a woman over her own physical person, and a good argument can be made for any point from conception to end of term. There is no need to pursue that terribly vexed subject further here.

Our federal government has been afraid to address this issue directly, and it cannot rightfully require people eligible for a government grant to amend their conscientious and religious views to preserve that eligibility. Such a course is an official infraction of the Charter. The recourse to telling those uncomfortable with the attestation that their views on abortion are not their core beliefs and that the "underlying values" of the Charter are whatever the government officials say they are, is simply an outrage. Responsible mature people make those decisions for themselves. This government should do what the Harper government would not do and legislate abortion. That is the sort of thing Parliamentarians do for a living. The best method, as in the U.K, is to have a completely nonpartisan debate and a free vote on a series of bills stating the date at which the unborn attain the rights of a person, after which, apart from specified extraordinary circumstances, abortions are not legal, even if that time is not until the baby is born and it is not a matter of abortion but of infanticide. (In the U.K. the date selected was after five months of a pregnancy.)

The government is operating a vast national abortion clinic while telling those in conscientious opposition that the issue is not important to them. This is especially irritating coming from senior officials, including the prime minister, who profess to be Roman Catholics and follow the Teddy Kennedy-Joe Biden-John Kerry liturgy of a strong faith that doesn't mean imposing their beliefs on others. Instead, they impose by government fiat what they claim to regard as immoral on all society.

This is intellectual fraud, on the state and the Church. In this as in other activities, you can't suck and blow at the same time. It is fatuous for the government to announce on a relatively minor issue like this that an unlimited right to an abortion is "at the core of the Government of Canada's foreign and domestic policies." These are not characters out of the novels of Franz Kafka, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell, but Hajdu sounds like the spokesperson (to "peoplekind") of Orwell's Ministry of Truth. This is the humbug, and amateurism of make-believe government by people in office but not in power.

The plague of political correctness is all about, as an update on the travails of Lindsay Shepherd illustrates. She is the Wilfrid Laurier University graduate student who was interrogated in camera and accused of creating a "toxic atmosphere" and of committing an act comparable to playing, uncritically, to her discussion group, a speech of Adolf Hitler, when she aired extracts of a debate between the distinguished University of Toronto philosopher and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson and another academic. Prof. Peterson is now one of the Western world's leading humanities intellectuals and is a best-selling and much acclaimed author in the United States and the United Kingdom. Only in a Canadian politically correct backwater would he be compared with Hitler.

Shepherd recently set up a campus group called "Laurier Students for Free Speech," and invited the conservative and Christian television journalist Faith Goldy to address interested students about "Ethnocide: Multiculturalism and European-Canadian identity." The posters announcing the talk were torn down, the conveners were threatened, presumably because Faith Goldy has been falsely labelled as a white supremacist because of her completely impartial reporting of the Charlottesville disturbances last August, and her defence of herself in an unexceptionable interview with, unknown to her, a white supremacist podcaster. I know Faith Goldy well and she believes unreservedly in the principles espoused by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and has never hinted in my presence at any of the prejudices condemned in the Charter and defamatorily imputed to her by the campus riffraff at Wilfrid Laurier on March 20. (This, despite her alarming subsequent misread of an anti-Semitic book, as was reported this week. Faith is a Philo-Semite and led Rebel Media's trip to Israel in 2016.) The civilized listeners at WLU outnumbered the hostile disrupters by more than three to one, though the opposition included Antifa thugs. Special police were provided, the university did its best, but one of the opponents pulled the fire alarm and the occasion was cancelled.

The Charter was not written by this prime minister's father to stifle opponents of abortion or frustrate free speech and facilitate the antics of street thugs discriminating against Caucasian Christian Canadians. The federal government cannot dictate values but it can and should do all it can to encourage elemental freedoms and to ensure that officially enunciating freedoms does not degenerate, as it did at Wilfrid Laurier, into the suppression and demonization of decent people exercising freedom of expression, which everyone in this country has taken as their birthright for more than 250 years.
* Email: cbletters@gmail.com

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Conrad Black: The Liberals prefer punishing Christians to confronting the abortion issue

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It is reasonable to assume that the sociopolitical disease of oppressive political correctness will become more constricting and life-threatening to the human capacity for deductive reasoning and liberality of mind until it is forcefully attacked by a widely applied cultural germicide.

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The reason why I chose this picture is for the reason that it shows people protesting which is a form of association which in Canada we have the right to do so

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The reason I chose this photograph is for the reason that this organization was created to show that all people are equal and no single group of people is less than another.

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In this article it talks about the relationship between dictatorship and the denial or suppression of charter rights and freedoms.

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Last Monday, April 2, was International Children's' Book Day, and thanks to the efforts of provincial organizations such as Decoda Literary Solutions, a subsidiary of Literacy B.C., the profile of literacy has been raised.

And thanks also to local organizations such as the South Island's three 1,000x5 projects, which have collected and distributed 250,000 children's books in the past 10 years.

So for a few days, at least, the issue of literacy was back in the news.

Many studies emphasize an undeniable fact: Literacy begins at home, but in Canada, the system of public education is also more successful in promoting literacy than in the majority of other comparable countries.

The number of Canadian children from newborn to 14 was last estimated at 5.5 million (about 16.2 per cent of the total national population). Many children attend pre-schools from age three onward and, although entry ages vary province to province, all children living in Canada attend school, or more accurately, are enrolled in a school of some kind from the year in which they turn five.

With all its kids having access to school, Canada does well on international testing programs such as the PISA assessment run by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. In Canada, on the 2015 PISA, the average performance in reading of 15-year-olds was 527 points, compared with an average of 493 points in other OECD countries.

The percentage of low performers in reading (below proficiency Level 2) is one of the lowest among PISA-participating countries and economies (10.7 per cent, ranked 66th out of 69). That's beyond good because it bodes well not only for literacy in Canada but for Canada's cultural and political future.

The same applies to a brighter future for democratic governance around the world, as the number of children who previously have had no access to education and to literacy decreases.

Worldwide, about 60 million kids still don't go to elementary school, and while that sounds like an enormous number, there are about 1.9 billion children in the world under the age of 15, so only about three per cent do not have access to schools of any kind.

Increased literacy will eventually do the same for the international political landscape as it did in the 16th century for the religious landscape.

Many studies identify the relationship between the emergence of literacy and the eventual decline of authoritarian regimes, which depended on repression of the written word.

Two Harvard professors, in a paper called The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism, identify the close correlation between dictatorships and the suppression or outright denial of "political rights and civil liberties, including freedom of the press, freedom of association and freedom to criticize the government without reprisal."

In any democratic election, some issues will be important to the future of a country. Literacy provides the opportunity to develop the skills of critical analysis of the issues - especially the ability to subject what is written and what we read to rules of logic and evidence.

The spoken word can get by on bluster and familiar rhetorical devices such as repetition of a phrase, but the thoughtful and well-developed written argument must be spare, logical and well-constructed. It must make sense upon reflection and, simply because it is written, will bear careful examination more than once.

So the good news about increased levels of education and literacy, even in emerging countries, bodes well for the ability of generations to come to demand wise government. Much of the praise for that goes to organizations such as the Global Partnership for Education.

GPE is a partnership and funding platform that aims to strengthen education systems in developing countries in order to dramatically increase the number of children who are in school and learning.

But the news is less encouraging, at least for the next while, when adult literacy rates, even here in Canada, are considered.

The most recent Canadian results on the International Adult Literacy Survey, as quoted by the Conference Board of Canada, includes some troubling findings:

* Four out of 10 Canadian adults have literacy skills too low to be fully competent in most jobs in our modern economy.

* Canadian adults with low literacy skills have fewer opportunities because they are outside the mainstream education system.

Literacy B.C. goes so far as to suggest that about 40 per cent of adults in B.C. - and more than 35 per cent of working-age people - do not have the degree of literacy skills they need to function and thrive in the modern economy.

So even as literacy takes hold with the next generation, there is still work to be done in the adult world.

Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.

gfjohnson4@shaw.ca

© Copyright Times Colonist

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Geoff Johnson: Literacy taking hold for Canadian kids

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Last Monday, April 2, was International Children's' Book Day, and thanks to the efforts of provincial organizations such as Decoda Literary Solutions, a subsidiary of Literacy B.C., the profile of literacy has been raised. And thanks also to local organizations such as the South Island's three 1,000x5 projects, which have collected and distributed 250,000 children's books in the past 10 years.