Welcome to the Canadian National Multilingual News Group (CNMNG). This is a project made possible through funding by Canadian Heritage. CNMNG aims to gather news researched and written by a corps of Canadian-based journalists/writers from the country’s multilingual community groups. The overall goal is to inform, analyze and critique the issues of the day in a professional manner and to provide that to publishers and editors active in the ethnocultural-multilingual press and media whose experience provides them with a perspective that is sensitive to news relevant to their own language group.
TORONTO – The school year has just begun and there are already several cases of Covid-19: precisely 189, distributed among students and staff. Several classes are already self-isolating at home and one school has been closed: the Viscount Alexander Public School in Cornwall, Ontario. But let’s go in order. →
TORONTO – Back to school amid gatherings, worries and unfulfilled promises. As many parents feared, the first day of school – today for Toronto students – was not one of those days to remember with pleasure. In front of the institutes, gatherings. It was largely predictable, as the boys hadn’t seen each other for months. But evidently the “plan” elaborated by the provincial government and by the various administrations (both the public one, the TDSB, and the Catholic one, the TCDSB) had not thought about it. Thus, it fell to the teachers and principals to try, desperately (and blatantly without a “guide from above”), to impose distancing at least at the entrance. →
TORONTO – The long-awaited day, that of returning to school after months and months, has also arrived for the students of the Toronto administrations, both public and Catholic. And it could be a good day, were it not for the thousand unknowns that loom also due to the delays in the reorganization of schools, necessary with the pandemic still underway. These first two days, then – tomorrow and Friday, then all at home again for the weekend – will be nothing more than a kind of “rehearsal” of what will happen during the school year. Impossible to predict, however, what will happen. →
TORONTO – Last night’s emergency meeting of the Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB) reminded me of a 1964 Pop Music classic, Tobacco Road. Two verses stand out: “Bring that dynamite and a crane, Blow it up, start all over again…” →
TORONTO – Toronto’s public school superintendent tightens up Covid-19 vaccination rules. The Catholic one, on the other hand, at the moment makes a silent scene while the first day of school is approaching by giant strides. The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) voted unanimously to introduce vaccination duty for staff, trustees and visitors. To make the announcement yesterday was the school board: “the school trustees during the meeting Wednesday evening decided to make the anti-Covid-19 vaccination mandatory”. And considering that there are only eleven days left before the reopening of schools and that the TDSB intends to implement the procedure before the children return to class, there is no time to lose. →
