The latest numbers on COVID-19 in Canada for Aug. 2

They Jays have been getting big-time performance from the man with the big-time contract, now that he’s healthy.

BILL 64, if passed, would succeed in cutting some of the last strands tying education to democracy in the English-speaking western world, a movement which had its beginnings in the post-war European continent.

Friedrich von Hayek, the founder of neoclassical economic theory, persuaded the political elite of the day that their future lay in a deregulated capitalistic marketplace, and in the reduction of government investment in public services. But even he would be shocked by the latest developments in Manitoba.

A rough timeline would have had Hayek meeting the newly elected Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher, in 1975. Immediately upon her election as prime minister in 1979, she began to implement his economic theory of mass privatization of state assets. The oil and gas industry and the national British Airways were privatized. The powerful miners’ unions were relentlessly pilloried as enemies of the state.

Public services such as health and education were methodically dismantled, systematically privatized in the name of personal choice, while taxes for the wealthy were reduced. In the name of creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation, among other public goods, airlines, telecommunications, banking, trucking and environmental protections were deregulated. Is this starting to sound familiar?

A disciplinary panel has ordered the cancellation of a Chinese-Canadian teacher’s certificate because of her “repeated boundary-crossing with a student” during her tenure at an international school with local ties.

Janice Wen Ying Ma is permanently barred from teaching on Manitoba soil or at a Manitoba-accredited institution as of Sept. 14.

The new ruling concludes that Ma engaged in inappropriate physical interaction and “emotionally intimate online messages” with a girl who attended Clifford International School in Guangzhou, China in 2024-25.

“This conduct represents a fundamental departure from the standards expected of a teacher,” the panel, chaired by public representative Gordon Schumacher, wrote in its 22-page decision.