Canada's highest-paid CEOs make 246x the average worker, says new report - CBC.ca

It was another record-breaking year for Canada's richest CEOs. 

In one work day, and less than a half hour into the new year — 27 minutes to be exact — Canada's 100 highest-paid CEOs will have already earned the average worker's annual salary, according to a new study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

It translates to roughly $60,600 by 9:27 a.m. on Jan. 2, if you include Monday as a paid holiday, according to the report. 

The CCPA, an Ottawa-based think-tank that focuses on social, economic and environmental issues, found that the 100 best-paid CEOs in Canada now make 246 times what the typical worker earns. That number breaks last year's record of 243 times the average worker's pay. 

"The 100 CEOs, who are overwhelmingly male, got paid an average of $14.9 million in 2022. This amount surpasses their previously record-breaking pay of $14.3 million in 2021 and sets a new all-time high in our data series," said David Macdonald, a senior economist at the CCPA and the report's author. 

Lana Payne, the national president of Unifor, Canada's largest private sector union, calls the report "enraging."

"We've seen CEO pay increase consistently over the last number of years to a point now where it's the highest it's been ... And at the same time we have these CEOs and the employer clubs that they're part of lobbying every single day and fighting tooth and nail to make sure that we don't have better labour laws in this country," she said.

How one CEO tries to keep things on an 'even scale'

Not all CEOs, however, are paid such large amounts of money. Hosni Zaouali, the CEO of ConnectED Labs, a Toronto-based technology company, has a specific formula that he said he follows to ensure his pay and his employees' pay are on an "even scale."

He said the highest salary at his company is "never 10 times higher than the lowest salary."

Hosni Zaouali, the CEO of ConnectED Labs, says the highest salary at his company is never more than '10 times higher than the lowest salary.' (CBC News)

"It means that if the company shows success, operational success and financial success, it's not only thanks to the CEO, it's also thanks to everybody, including the lowest salary in the company. So we make sure that everybody gets compensated accordingly," he said. 

Zaouali said it's "very important that the lowest salary is not too far from the highest salary in our company to keep everybody energized and everybody motivated."

While base salary is an important factor when considering CEO wealth, it doesn't provide a full picture of their total compensation, according to the CCPA report. 

A 'story about inflation' 

Like last year's report, which CBC News also covered, part of the explanation for the large increases in CEO pay is linked to inflation, Macdonald said.

"This is largely a story about inflation ... CEOs are paid primarily through bonuses, and those bonuses are based on things like revenue and profits. When revenue and profit goes through the roof due to inflation, bonuses go through the roof."

Macdonald said despite this, salaries for average workers are often not keeping up with inflation.

"In 2022, the average worker in Canada got an average pay raise of $1,800, or three per cent. But prices went up by 6.8 per cent in 2022, meaning workers took a real pay cut of almost four per cent compared to 2021."

WATCH | 'It's a lot harder than it usually is': Budgeting for holiday shopping with inflation: 

‘It’s a lot harder than it usually is’: Budgeting for holiday shopping with inflation

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Shoppers and their wallets are feeling the pain of the increase in the cost of living this holiday season.

In comparison, the top 100 CEOs saw an average pay raise of $623,000, or 4.4 per cent in 2022, according to the report.

One economist said studies like the one presented by the CCPA are "flawed."

"The only way you can arrive at this conclusion is that you're comparing oranges with apples," said Vincent Geloso, an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia. 

Geloso said reports like this fail to include other forms of employee compensation like benefits.

"People get more fringe benefits in the form of insurance, in the form of flexible hours. Things that employers pay for but aren't considered compensation. When you include them, and you include that instead of wages alone, you're getting a completely different portrait."

In a 2020 report for the Fraser Insitute, a Canadian think-tank promoting private sector solutions, Geloso also argues that CEOs are paid for possessing unique skill sets that are increasingly in demand. 

"Today you find CEOs who have a larger share of PhDs and MAs and MSCs and STEMs. So they're in harder sciences and harder domains, so there's greater levels of skill in terms of pure knowledge."

Addressing the gap

Lana Payne, the union leader, thinks governments can help reduce growing inequality. She supports measures such as improving and expanding access to collective bargaining rights for workers, raising the minimum wage and ensuring people have guaranteed hours of work.

 "I think the challenge is that more work needs to be done on a number of fronts to make sure that workers are not falling behind," said Payne, who believes these measures could reduce what she calls the "inequality gap."

Improving and expanding access to collective bargaining rights for workers, improving minimum wages, and making sure people have guaranteed hours of work are some of the things Lana Payne, the national president of Unifor, says could contain what she calls the 'inequality gap.' (CBC News)

The CCPA report also makes several suggestions for reducing the pay gap. The group suggests: introducing higher top marginal tax brackets, removing corporate tax deductability for compensation over $1 million, introducing a wealth tax on the rich and increasing the capital gains inclusion rate (making CEOs pay more taxes on the money they make selling stocks). 

"We've seen the active closure of the stock option deduction in 2021 as well as new higher income tax brackets in 2016. So this is something where we've seen a lot of debate particularly in other areas like a new wealth tax," said Macdonald.

• How has inflation and the high cost of living impacted you? Tell us your story in an email to ask@cbc.ca

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Canada's highest-paid CEOs make 246x the average worker, says new report - CBC.ca
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Opinion: Don't blame the boomers for the economy – they put in more than they take - The Globe and Mail

Open this photo in gallery:

In this July 3, 2017 file photo, a man and woman walk under trees down a path at Alta Plaza Park in San Francisco.Jeff Chiu/The Associated Press

Thomas Klassen is a professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration at York University.

Born between 1946 and 1965, and now in their late 50s to late 70s, baby boomers comprise nearly one-quarter of Canada’s population. Such a large cohort is bound to have an outsized impact on the economy and society.

During the 1950s and 1960s, suburbs mushroomed to house them, schools were built at breakneck speed to educate them, and the welfare state expanded to provide health care.

As adults, they lead various movements: for equal rights, environmental protection, for greater personal choice and freedom, and much more. Now as older Canadians, they continue to reshape the country.

It’s unfortunate that a typical story has emerged about baby boomers, many retired, that they are ruining the economy, draining government resources and hoarding wealth. This cannot be further from the truth.

Boomers continue to contribute more to the economy than any earlier generation. It is they who pressured governments some years ago to eliminate mandatory retirement at age 65. Today, they are working longer than the generation before them.

The average retirement age has increased by three years over the past two decades. Boomers retire, on average, at 65 with the self-employed working past age 68. Rather than embracing freedom 55, they are keen to keep earning employment income.

Before the boomers, retirement was binary: you’re either working full-time or retired and receiving a pension. Now, retirement is varied, with any number of ways to combine paid employment with pensions.

In some circumstances, a 65-year-old can earn income from full-time employment, receive Canada Pension Plan (CPP) payments, Old Age Security (OAS) payments, and pension benefits from a defined benefit plan while continuing to make further contributions to that same pension plan, as well as contributing to the CPP.

Alternatively, it is possible to retire, but delay receipt of the CPP and OAS to age 70. Or, to work past age 65, but no longer contribute to the CPP but receive OAS.

And contrary to popular belief, boomers in retirement are not huge beneficiaries of government largesse.

OAS payments, which the federal government pays to those 65 and older, require meeting eligibility criteria to receive the full amount: 40 years of residence in Canada, income of less than $82,000 and residence in the country for at least six months each year.

Those meeting these requirements receive $700 a month between ages 65 to 74, and somewhat more starting at age 75. Not meeting these requirements reduces payments or eliminates them altogether.

The Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) – Canada’s basic income for those 65 and older – is paid to people who receive OAS but have little or no other income. The supplement ensures that nearly all those Canadians have annual income of at least $20,900 for a single household.

For the CPP, Ottawa makes no contributions but merely sets the rules. Retirement provides no escape from taxes. All pension income, except GIS, is taxed. The only minor concession for those receiving an employer pension is a $2,000 income-tax credit that slightly reduces tax payable.

Most of the discounts offered to those 65 and older come not from governments, but from private businesses such as movie theaters, retail stores and restaurants. Retirement is a self-funded experience. Those heading for the cottage on Monday mornings, or to sunny destinations for several months in the winter, are doing so entirely from their own money.

Boomers are not draining public health care either. Other than being eligible for pharmacare at age 65, they generally have the same publicly funded health benefits as all other Canadians. If admitted to a nursing home, they must pay between $2,000 to $3,000 a month from their own pockets for accommodation and meals.

Nearly all older Canadians fend for themselves, financially and otherwise. They remain independent, relying on family, friends and neighbours as needed, until death or until they require intensive medical care.

As the oldest baby boomers begin to reach their 80s, most have the financial resources for continued independence. When they die, their remaining wealth will remain in the economy.

In the next several decades, government policies will shift to accommodate a larger percentage of older Canadians. Expect more ramps, elevators, efforts to extend working lives, and measures to increase home and community care services.

Although a small number of retirees will need targeted assistance from the state, there is no conceivable future in which boomers bankrupt governments or wreak havoc on the economy.

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German officials detain 3 more suspects in connection with a Cologne Cathedral attack threat - CTV News

BERLIN -

Three more people were detained Sunday in connection with a reported threat of an attack on the Cologne Cathedral over the holidays, German authorities said.

The detentions came only days after a 30-year-old Tajik man was detained in relation to an alleged plot to attack the world-famous cathedral by Islamic extremists in the western German city.

The suspects were detained in the western cities of Duisburg, Herne and Dueren in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and their apartments were also searched there. No details about their identities were released.

All of the detained suspects -- including the Tajik who was arrested last week -- allegedly belong to a larger network that included people across Germany and in other European countries, according to Cologne police chief Johannes Hermanns, German news agency dpa reported.

The attack was supposed to have been carried out with a car, dpa reported.

North Rhine-Westphalia's Interior Minister Herbert Reul called the detentions a "success, for which I would like to thank the investigators."

Islamic extremists have always been active, but they are currently more active than usual, Reul said, according to dpa. "The police always try to be a few steps ahead," he added.

Police had received information about a planned militant attack on Cologne Cathedral shortly before Christmas. The attack was to be carried out on New Year's Eve.

The city's world-famous cathedral has been under high protection for a week and the threat led to the closure of the house of worship for tourists since Christmas Eve.

Usually, more than 100,000 tourists visit the cathedral in the last week of the year. In recent days, only worshippers were allowed to enter the building for Mass, but they had to go through thorough security checks involving sniffer dogs.

On Sunday evening, around 1,000 police officers were on duty around the cathedral as revelers began celebrating the end of 2023.

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A Former Hostage Struggles With Speaking Out on Israel War - The New York Times

He had spent his entire career attending to the horrors of terrorism and war, and now Chris George, 70, believed it was his responsibility to act again. He sat at his desk inside Connecticut’s largest refugee resettlement agency, trying to write a public statement about the violence in Israel and Gaza that had resurfaced traumas among his staff, and in his own personal history.

“We believe that all human life is precious and should be protected,” he wrote in mid-October. He read over the sentence, and it sounded obvious and weak. He set the draft aside for a few days and then tried again.

“We condemn, in the strongest terms, the killing of all innocent civilians,” he wrote, but that phrasing seemed almost clinical — so remote and impersonal compared with how he felt.

He had spent several months in the 1970s living and volunteering on Kibbutz Nirim, where dozens of Hamas terrorists broke through the wall on Oct. 7 to kidnap and murder civilians. He had also lived for many years as an American expatriate and a Quaker in Gaza, learning Arabic and working on behalf of oppressed Palestinian children, and now thousands were being killed by Israel’s bombings.

And then there were the Israeli hostages still being held captive at the center of the conflict. George understood at least a little about what that was like, too. He was the first American ever kidnapped in Gaza, in 1989, when three Palestinian refugees abducted him and demanded that Israel release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for his life. The extremists held George at gunpoint in a safe house for 29 hours before eventually releasing him unharmed, and then instead of retreating into fear or hatred, George returned to America and devoted his career to helping refugees start new lives and heal from conflict.

“One violation of human rights does not justify another,” he wrote, in another attempt at a statement on behalf of his nonprofit, Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, in New Haven, Conn. “It doesn’t matter whether we call it a cease-fire or a humanitarian pause. Let’s not quibble over terminology. The killing must stop.”

Even at the risk of inviting controversy, he felt compelled to speak up on behalf of the people and places he loved. He sent a draft of the statement to his board of directors, but some of them thought it might be interpreted as too political and potentially divisive. A few blocks away, students at Yale University were disrupting the campus by holding concurrent demonstrations in support of either Jews or Palestinians. The head of the local Service Employees International Union had been forced to resign after publicly voicing support for “our comrades” in Gaza. Dozens of companies and nonprofits across the state were being torn apart by internal divisions over a conflict on the other side of the world, and George wanted to protect his nonprofit, IRIS.

He had led the organization as it grew from eight employees in the late 1990s to more than 150. Together they helped to house, clothe, feed, educate, protect and support more than 800 refugees who arrived each year in Connecticut. That work required an annual budget of $14 million, a third of which came from private donors with their own opinions and connections to the conflict in the Middle East.

George was the first American kidnapped in Gaza, in 1989.

Under George’s leadership, IRIS has experienced significant growth.

“Crafting a statement that satisfies everyone and does not create problems for IRIS will be impossible,” George eventually wrote to some of his colleagues.

He shelved his drafts of statements on his computer in late November and tried to focus on the problems of the upcoming month: a family of eight arriving in New Haven after fleeing starvation and sexual assault in South Sudan; a Christian couple from Afghanistan escaping Taliban rule; triplets from Syria arriving after a decade of war. But whenever he returned to his office, George went back on his phone to check the location of the latest bombings and send messages to his former colleagues in Gaza.

“My dear friend, are you OK?” he wrote, several times each day, and then he waited.

On his desk, there was a piece of shrapnel the size of a football that he had found in the Middle East, and a soldier’s helmet riddled with 14 bullet holes. There was a photo of him with his late wife, holding a sign demanding an end to war crimes outside a United Nations convention in the 1980s. Now he was nearing his retirement from IRIS, and sometimes he wondered whether his silence on behalf of the organization came from a place of pragmatic caution or cowardice. “Is it actually defensible to sit here and say nothing while innocent people die?” he wondered.

On the last day of November, an email arrived on his work computer. It was a statement of its own, written to George and the board of directors by 41 IRIS employees in response to a war that now threatened to create one more divide.

“IRIS’ response thus far to this conflict has been unacceptable. We have been silenced,” they wrote.

Omar Yacoub, the after-school education coordinator at IRIS, worries about family members living in Gaza.

Omar Yacoub walked through the IRIS office one morning on his way to help teach English to 11 refugee children who had just arrived in the United States. Yacoub, 34, had been hired in September as IRIS’s after-school education coordinator. It was his first job after immigrating to the United States, and he loved it. But, in the last few weeks, he had become increasingly confused about the organization that hired him.

He wondered: If IRIS’s role was to support refugees, why wasn’t it speaking up on behalf of the 1.6 million registered Palestinian refugees living in Gaza, including many of his own family members? Why was it controversial for a humanitarian organization to call for a cease-fire?

“Is your family doing OK?” a co-worker asked Yacoub, as he grabbed a stack of textbooks for his students.

“No, of course they’re not OK,” he said. “They’re losing homes, losing electricity, losing limbs, losing lives, losing everything.”

His grief had been hardening into frustration ever since Oct. 9, when George first spoke about the Hamas terrorist attacks at a staff meeting. George condemned the barbaric raids on civilians and also expressed his horror at Israel’s early retaliations against Palestinians, but then he moved on to the next topic without allowing anyone else on his staff to comment. A few employees decided to begin the next several staff meetings by playing nationalist Palestinian songs for the entire group; other co-workers complained that those songs made them feel uncomfortable. One employee emailed an article to the rest of the staff about the Palestinian liberation movement; other co-workers replied that the article was anti-Semitic, and eventually George shut down the reply-all function on the email thread.

The work at IRIS proceeded as normal, whereas Yacoub woke up each morning to a new emergency on his phone. His mother’s relatives were still trapped in Gaza, where the family had lived under Israeli occupation for several generations. Yacoub’s family had told him stories about his 16-year-old cousin, who they said had been shot in the head and killed by Israeli soldiers in the late 1980s for throwing a stone, his brain preserved in a jar of formaldehyde in the family home. Yacoub was born two months later and named in honor of that cousin, but by then his parents had fled to Jordan as refugees and Yacoub had a Jordanian passport. Now he was safely in Connecticut with his twin 1-year-olds, while his cousins were in Gaza caring for their own children. They had no food. They couldn’t find fresh water. Their own names were written on their arms, in case they needed to be identified for an emergency surgery or for burial.

Yacoub attended a fund-raiser in New Haven with other IRIS colleagues that raised $7,000 for Palestinian refugees. He traveled to a protest on the National Mall in Washington. And then he joined 41 of his co-workers by writing and signing a letter to George and the IRIS board demanding the organization issue a statement condemning Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza and then leverage IRIS’s connections by writing advocacy letters to Connecticut’s congressional delegation. The 41 staff members used the kind of divisive language that IRIS had so far attempted to avoid: “occupation and brutalization of Palestinians”; “genocidal campaign in blatant violation of international humanitarian law”; “the United States is complicit”; “permanent cease-fire.”

The luggage of a father and daughter from Congo, who had just arrived in the country.

An IRIS staffer hugs a Sudanese client.

“Our silence does not represent the morals of our clients and staff,” the 41 employees wrote. They warned that if IRIS failed to respond to their letter within a week, they would act in defiance of the organization by taking “collective action” of their own.

The group was still waiting for a response five days later when Yacoub stopped by George’s office to discuss his plans for an after-school tutoring program for refugee children. He’d chosen to work at IRIS in part because he admired George, who spoke Arabic and had hired a diverse staff with dozens of Muslims, Jews and more than 60 people who spoke English as a second language. A sign on the wall of George’s office read: “Keep the immigrants. Deport the racists.” He had spoken out publicly on behalf of separated immigrant families at the U.S. border. Yacoub couldn’t understand why George had chosen to be silent now, but he was just two months into his first job in the United States, and he didn’t yet feel comfortable confronting his boss directly.

“How are you holding up?” George asked him.

“As you would expect. Not so good,” Yacoub said.

George nodded and looked at him for a moment, noticing the Palestinian kaffiyeh scarf that Yacoub wore around his shoulders in the office, at home and on his motorcycle rides through the city.

“I worry for you when you’re wearing that,” George said. A New Haven school district had recently sent out a warning about escalating incidents of both antisemitism and Islamophobia. Three college students had just been shot in Vermont while they were speaking in Arabic and wearing kaffiyehs in a suspected hate crime.

“I hate that we have to think that way, but I don’t want you to be a target,” George said.

“I worry about it, too,” Yacoub said. He fingered the cloth and looked back at George. “It’s who I am,” he said. “Why should I have to take it off?”

George pouring juice for a Congolese family waiting to speak with a case worker.

The day before George’s deadline to answer the staff letter, he called a meeting with his senior directors to determine IRIS’s response. George had prepared for the meeting by reading other official statements about the conflict in Israel, including many issued by American companies with little connection to the Middle East. They sold jeans or salads or tractors or coffee or discount car insurance. They were “saddened,” “enraged,” “unmoored,” “galled” and “genuinely horrified.” Some had donated money to Israel or to humanitarian aid organizations working in Gaza, and George was still trying to decide if the collective outcry was meaningful or mostly performative.

“Is it appropriate, fair, useful and strategically wise for us to engage publicly on this conflict?” George asked his colleagues.

“How can we say something now when we didn’t say anything after the Hamas attacks that incited so much of this?” one staff member asked.

“It’s 41 people on our staff,” another argued. “We can’t ignore them.”

“Forty-one and counting,” George said. He had learned that the group was still in the process of showing the letter to some colleagues for the first time, and that at least 10 more had already decided to sign it.

“Some of them are losing their loved ones,” one staff member said. “They’re hurting.”

“Same with all of our Jewish colleagues,” another responded. “Just think about everything they’ve been through. What happened on Oct. 7 was one of the worst atrocities we’ve ever seen.”

“That’s what makes this so hard,” George said. “For a lot of us, everything about this particular conflict is scary and deeply personal.”

A case worker handing a newly arrived client dinner.

Yacoub teaching at the after-school program.

He had been thinking lately about the echoes of his own scariest moment in the Middle East, in June 1989, when a Palestinian named Muhammed Abu Nasser barged into the Gaza office of George’s nonprofit, Save the Children, with three handguns and a machete and told George to follow him outside. George had worked with Abu Nasser a few months earlier, when Save the Children had given him a grant of $1,000 to build a playground for Palestinian children. He only managed to build an initial wall before Israeli troops rejected the project and knocked the wall down. In the ensuing months, Abu Nasser had become angrier and more erratic, and now he was pushing George into the back of a car with the help of two accomplices, blindfolding him and driving him to a safe house in the desert.

George tried to dissuade his kidnappers by reminding them that he also worked on behalf of Palestinian children. He tried appealing to their sense of humanity by telling stories about his wife and two young daughters back home in Ramallah, but, instead of releasing him, Abu Nasser handed George a pen and forced him to write a hostage letter in English on behalf of his kidnappers to the Israeli government and the American Embassy. They demanded the release of all Hamas prisoners and other Palestinians. “If you don’t comply, we will be forced to kill Chris George,” the letter read.

George sat alongside his kidnappers for the next uncertain hours, thought about his family, and imagined some of the ways he might die. What if Abu Nasser became impatient and made good on his threat? What if the Israel Defense Forces found the safe house, and their rescue mission turned into a shootout? Abu Nasser turned on a radio and waited for news about the kidnapping. He expected to be heralded as a hero by militant Palestinian leaders, but even the most radical groups immediately condemned his actions as rash and unproductive, and Israel rejected all of his demands.

“Your operation is starting to go rotten,” George remembered saying to him after more than a day together, and, eventually, Abu Nasser agreed. He hailed a donkey cart and sent George back to Gaza, with a handwritten apology note to his wife.

What was almost as disorienting as the kidnapping itself was the reaction that followed. The Israel Defense Forces continued to blame the incident on organized Palestinian terrorist groups in an attempt to discredit them. When George insisted that the plot was the work of a single, deranged man, some Israeli media outlets falsely accused George of participating in his own kidnapping. The disinformation continued for several days, with both Israelis and Palestinians using George’s kidnapping to escalate their own conflict in the press. Israeli forces found and killed Abu Nasser eight days later, and international reporters called George to ask for a statement. He decided his best course of action was to say nothing.

“No matter how careful we are and what language we use, some people are not going to like it,” George told his staff now, in the conference room. “Our words could be taken out of context. They could be twisted and distorted. That distortion could go viral.”

“It would be an incredible act of hubris for IRIS to write a statement demanding a cease-fire,” one staffer said. “That’s so far outside our scope.”

“Why would we go all in on one global conflict out of the dozens and dozens that impact our clients?” another asked. “Are we going to start commenting on every disaster and injustice that happens around the world? Is that the best use of our time?”

“We are not going to come to some kumbaya statement,” another staff member said. “We are here to serve our clients. Come to work. Get it done. I wouldn’t touch this.”

“OK, so we are mostly in agreement,” George concluded. They’d been debating for more than an hour, and he flipped through his notes to summarize the meeting. “IRIS is not going to issue a statement. That’s not our role. But is there anything else we can do?”

Preparing groceries for clients at a food pantry run by IRIS.

He went back to his office and checked for news on the latest bombings in Israel. He looked at the map and texted one of his friends in Gaza. “Are you OK?”

“We are still alive.”

He started to write the draft of a letter to the original 41 staff members, explaining that IRIS had decided not to issue a statement, but that he wanted to meet with the group to discuss other possibilities like writing letters to Connecticut’s senators, or helping to educate New Haven about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He finished a draft, checked for bombings again, and saw that the Al-Nuseirat neighborhood had been hit overnight. He sent a message to check on one of his former colleagues at Save the Children, Ali Mansour, whose family lived nearby.

“Are you OK?”

“May Allah rest her soul in peace, I lost my little daughter and granddaughter in a terrible massacre against her house,” Mansour wrote. “Pray for us.”

George stared at his phone and reread the message, trying to imagine what was happening at that moment in Al-Nuseirat. Israel Defense Forces believed some of the Hamas terrorists responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks were hiding among civilians in the residential neighborhood.

He did some research online and learned that the bombings had killed one of Hamas’s original founders, damaged a mosque and destroyed several concrete apartment buildings. He saw images of survivors searching through the rubble, wrapping victims in white sheets and finding leaflets allegedly dropped by Israeli planes. “To Hamas leaders,” the leaflets read, according to The Associated Press, and what came next was a partial quote from the Quran. “A life for a life, an eye for an eye and whoever started is to blame. If you punish, then punish with the like of that which you were afflicted.”

George recognized it as the same philosophy he had witnessed throughout his career: terror resulting in more terror, one conflict escalating into the next, persecution breeding hatred and war until more than 110 million people around the world had been displaced from their homes by violence and human rights violations, according to the latest data from the United Nations.

George wiped his eyes and replied to his friend’s message. Everything he wrote felt small and inadequate. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

A key to a home that was given to George when he lived and worked in Gaza.

IRIS employees gathering furniture for a refugee family’s new home.

He was still sitting in his office several hours later when he heard people beginning to clap and speak Pashto somewhere down the hall. He walked out to the IRIS lobby and saw a family of five that had just arrived from Afghanistan, where they had been threatened and persecuted by the Taliban for being Christian. The family had never been to the United States. They had never heard of Connecticut. They carried everything they owned in four duffel bags marked “fragile.”

IRIS employees emerged from every department to introduce themselves and to help. An interpreter translated on behalf of the family. A receptionist made coffee for the parents and hot chocolate for the children. A transportation team prepared to drive them to a hotel so they could recover from their flight. A case manager stocked their fridge with groceries and a hot meal from an Afghan restaurant. A housing team worked to furnish their new apartment. A legal team assembled to protect their rights. Yacoub and his education team prepared to tutor the children, because even if he remained unhappy with IRIS’s silence, he still believed in the righteousness of its work.

George handed out candy and granola bars and then greeted the family with the same statement he’d made thousands of times, and the one he believed in most.

“We welcome you,” he said. “I’m so sorry for what you’ve suffered. It’s our job to support you.”

IRIS staffers welcoming a family from Sudan who had just arrived to their offices directly from the airport.

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A Former Hostage Struggles With Speaking Out on Israel War - The New York Times
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With wild day now behind them, Raptors face even more pressing questions - Sportsnet.ca

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Le Droit goes digital after more than a century in print - Yahoo News Canada

Pierre Bergeron, a retired editor at Le Droit, holds a copy of the Ottawa-Gatineau newspaper. The French-language paper published its final print edition on Saturday and is now available exclusively online. (Emilien Juteau/Radio-Canada - image credit)

After more than 100 years in print, Le Droit, a prominent French-language newspaper serving the Ottawa-Gatineau region, has published its last physical edition.

The final paper rolled off the presses Saturday, marking the last step in Le Droit's gradual transition to a digital publication. The paper had already switched in 2020 from printing six times a week to once a week on Saturdays.

According to editor-in-chief Marie-Claude Lortie, the decision to go exclusively online has been a long time coming.

"When I joined Le Droit [in 2021], it was already decided. The question wasn't, 'Are we going to stop?' It was when," she told Radio-Canada's Les matins d'ici.

Though some readers will be disappointed, the transition is "a necessary change from an environmental [and] financial perspective," Lortie said in the French-language interview.

The Groupe Capitales Médias, which owns the the Le Droit newspapers, is getting $5 million from the Quebec government.

The once-daily paper had already gone mostly online, publishing print editions only on Saturdays since 2020. (Maxime Huard/Radio-Canada )

In 2019, Le Droit's future was left uncertain after newspaper chain Groupe Capitale Médias, which owned it and five other Quebec newspapers, filed for bankruptcy.

According to Lortie, Le Droit joins those papers, now employee co-operatives, in making the move online.

"Personally, I don't see it as a time to mourn. I see it more as an evolution," said Pierre Bergeron, a retired Le Droit editor, in a French-language interview with Radio-Canada.

"I may be a little light-hearted in that regard, but I tell myself that journalists will find a way to do their jobs."

Lortie called the final 88-page edition a special one, dedicated to remembering the paper's impact in the community and filled with stories by writers and readers alike.

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