How American Manufacturers Are Innovating for the Future

If the new protocol is a positive improvement, why am I referring to it as simply a decent starting step? There are two primary reasons: one relates to the protocol's wording, and the other concerns its enforcement. First, the new procedure makes an exemption for illegal youngsters, who have been exploited along the southern US border with terrible humanitarian implications. There is no reason why unaccompanied minors should not be treated as any other migrant, regardless of where they first arrived.Making an exception for them yields no benefits and may result in significant losses. Specifically, it will create a serious incentive for unscrupulous people smugglers to send minor children along alone, so that their family can subsequently take advantage of the relative exception after the child has arrived in Canada. This was a risky oversight, and the exception, rather than the new general norm, may jeopardize vulnerable youngsters. And that's assuming we can detect if a person without documents is a youngster in the first place—a ruse used by Central American gangs in the United States for decades.On the enforcement front, the two-week deadline to return illegal border crossers creates a race against the clock for law enforcement. If we can immediately demonstrate that we can catch and return the vast majority of migrants, the deterrent impact of the new protocol will kick in, since people will have less reason to try their luck in the first place. Over time, this is the most promising way to disrupt established travel patterns and reduce unlawful border crossings. However, if would-be migrants discover that we are unable or unwilling to enforce the agreement, or if the refugee lobby is able to use lawfare to persuade activist courts to undermine the accord, this week's agreement will be rendered ineffective.

To guarantee that the strategy is successful

Canada should dramatically boost its enforcement at all potential crossing locations. Contrary to what many detractors of the STCA claim, there aren't many convenient sites for migrants to enter the border, especially during the winter. Physical deterrence in these areas should be supplemented with a significant expansion of technology—cameras, drones, and invisible fences—to better monitor the border. This should have been done years ago, but it makes more sense today.The government should also request U.S. assistance in establishing joint RCMP-US Border Patrol patrols that would operate on both sides of the border to intercept illegal immigration. These teams might be based on the current Shiprider program, which was established in 2012 to allow the RCMP and the US Coast Guard to conduct combined patrols of the Great Lakes to catch smuggling.In addition to these operational issues, the government should plan for a wild card. In 2020, a Federal Court judge found that the STCA infringed the Charter rights of some migrants. Sanity won out at the Federal Court of Appeal, which overturned the Federal Court verdict. Last October, the Supreme Court of Canada—a place where sanity is far from guaranteed—heard the case's appeal, and the justices' decision might come anytime between now and summer. If the Court is stupid enough to overturn the STCA, which has been in place for almost two decades, the government should be prepared to intervene and utilize its political power to rescue it and keep the gift that Biden just gave them.

The worries, anxieties, and uncertainties that 

held us at the worst of the worldwide COVID-19 crisis are gradually dissipating, revealing a changed world. Therapy culture, which was forcibly disclosed by British sociologist Frank Furedi twenty years ago, is today dominant and deeply embedded in Canada's K-12 institutions. Therapy talk is common in various aspects of Canadian life, but it is especially prevalent in education, where "student well-being" has replaced "academics" in curriculum, education journals, pre-service training, and staff meetings.It is gaining traction in our provincial systems under different names, including "Social and Emotional Learning" (SEL), "therapeutic education," and "trauma-informed practice." According to American policy researcher Robert Pondiscio, the therapeutic ethos and imperative, widely regarded as "an unambiguously positive development," have broadened the reach of education into students' lives and expanded teachers' roles. While the phenomena is acknowledged and widely contested in the United Kingdom and the United States, it goes largely unexplored in Canada's fragmented provincial school systems.

The growth of "therapeutic education

as British education experts Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes defined it, has swallowed provincial education ministries, school administrators, and the majority of parent advocacy groups. Published in 2009 and reprinted a decade later, their book received little attention in North America. When entrenched in a culture, it can be impossible to see its entirety or comprehend its vast significance. That could explain why it was generally disregarded or dismissed in Canadian education ministries and faculties of education.two decades of government emphasis on boosting academic standards, including theintroduction of the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) and so-called high-stakes testing, the attractiveness of a therapeutic turn for school administrators and educators at all levels is clear. However, public support for testing and accountability remains relatively strong, which explains why advocacy groups such as Ontario's People for Education spin Canadian curricular and pedagogical reforms aimed at advancing SEL as "broadening the basis" of curriculum and assessment as a new mutation of core academic competencies.