Federal government to match funds up to $4M

By Mohammed Adam

Plans for a Holocaust monument in Ottawa got a big boost Monday when the federal government pledged a $4-million contribution to help build the memorial.

The government has agreed to match by up to $4 million “whatever is raised to build the monument,” said Avi Benlolo, president and CEO of Toronto’s Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, who was at the announcement in Ottawa.

Benlolo said the memorial would stand as a living monument to the horrors of hate, and commended the government for supporting the endeavour to recognize “one of the most horrific events in modern history.” He said the monument is particularly important in this “disturbing era” of Holocaust denial.

Charlie Angus quits Twitter over ‘ugly’ tweets

Timmins-James Bay MP said if it wasn’t on Twitter, he would consider remarks as hate mail

CBC News

Eclectic Vancouver MLS soccer team exposes challenges of multiculturalism

The composition of the Vancouver soccer club

The diversity and difficulty of Metro Vancouver’s multicultural experiment is revealed in Vancouver Sun writer Yvonne Zacharias’s brilliant weekend feature on the MLS Whitecaps.
With players hailing from 17 different countries, Zacharias explored how challenging it is for a professional soccer team to succeed on the field when its members speak seven different languages. English is not coming easily to many of the new players, whether they are from South Korea, China, France, Africa or South America.
Somewhat like in Metro Vancouver — where almost half of residents do not speak English in their homes and concentrated ethnic enclaves have emerged –  language is the biggest barrier to creating a cohesive, united and winning soccer team, suggested Scottish-born coach Martin Rennie.
“Someone comes in and they don’t speak English. It takes time to get them to understand key soccer phrases and then obviously the whole language.” Language is important, Rennie said. “It allows us to build team chemistry.”

By Pete McMartin, Vancouver Sun

In Saturday’s column, I wrote about a study of Vancouver real estate prices by Andy Yan, an urban planner with Bing Thom Architects and an adjunct professor with the University of B.C.’s School of Community and Regional Planning.

Vancouver is soon to be a Chinese colony

In the study, Yan plotted the worth of all homes in neighbour-hoods zoned single-family residential – or RS, in planning par-lance. He plotted those homes assessed at over $1 million.

The study was an update of a similar one he had done in 2011, and Yan did the update to see what change there had been in the number of million-dollar homes.

He found a radical change.

In a single year, the number of million-dollar homes had increased by 10 per cent. More than half the single-family homes in Vancouver were now assessed at over $1 mil-lion. All homes had increased in value by at least $55,000 (out-stripping Vancouver’s median family income of $53,000) and 80 per cent of the homes had increased in assessed value by over $100,000.

He also found the traditional disparity in real estate prices between the west and east sides of the city had begun to blur. Several east-side neighbour-hoods had seen tremendous growth in the number of homes assessed at over $1 million.

The alarm over such increases has inspired, among other things, the Mayor’s Task Force on Housing Affordability.

It has also inspired calls to impose restrictions on offshore buyers, particularly those from China.

To judge by the increasing number of media stories, and the apocryphal tales of wealthy Chinese offering cash by the shovelful, and the unbridled (and usually vitriolic) comments about such buyers on web pages and in newspapers’ public comment sections, many believe that nouveau riche Chinese nationals are the main reason for the price increases.

By Tom Godfrey ,Toronto Sun

Elif Cocelli lies on her apartment couch while her husband Veli Cocelli holds her hand.

TORONTO - A pair of medics, border officers and a private plane were enlisted for the deportation of a Turkish woman who was deemed unfit to fly, relatives say.

Elif Cocelli, 57, and her husband, Veli, 60, were placed on a chartered flight Saturday that took off from Hamilton airport for the 14-hour trip to Ankara, her nephew Aydin said on Monday.

Officials estimate the deportation — which are rarely executed on a private planes — cost more than $200,000 in aircraft fees and pay for the personnel on the aircraft.

Cocelli was given an injection to help “tranquilize” her during the flight, he said.

“She was treated like a piece of meat by the border services,” Aydin claimed. “They went out of their way to get her out of Canada.”

Cocelli had been refused a seat on commercial flights to Turkey after two doctors signed notes claiming she was unfit to travel. Doctors said she suffers from a severe anxiety and panic disorder.