A BBC report published Monday confirmed the existence of an ethical and editorial issue in a documentary about Gaza that the broadcaster had pulled offline in February, but claimed this was the result of an honest mistake by an external production firm.

The

31-page review

by Peter Johnston, director of the BBC’s Editorial Complaints and Reviews department, upheld complaints of misleading audiences of the documentary film “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone,” due to the fact that its main narrator, a boy named Abdullah, was later found to be the son of a Hamas government official, Ayman Alyazouri, deputy minister of agriculture in the Hamas-run Gaza government.

The London-based production company Hoto Films, which produced the documentary for the BBC, “had to bring this information to the BBC’s attention” but did not and is therefore “the party with the most responsibility for this failure,” Johnston wrote.

“However, I do not consider that the production company intentionally misled the BBC about the narrator’s father’s position,” he added. Rather, it believed that the father’s position “was a civilian or technocratic one, as opposed to a political or military position in Hamas,” Johnston added. The issue is “a breach of Guideline 3.3.17 on Accuracy, which deals with misleading audiences,” he added.

“This is the only breach of the (BBC) Editorial Guidelines I have identified in connection with the Programme,” wrote Johnston.

Avi Benlolo: Media fuels violence with false reporting on Gaza

All mentions in Arabic of the word “Jew” were translated in the film as “Israeli,” but this was not in breach of the guidelines, Johnston wrote, as Gazans often refer to the Israel Defence Forces this way. “Translating a contributor’s words to give the impression they meant to refer to Jewish people generally would therefore also risk misleading audiences,” he claimed.

“I do not find there to have been any editorial breaches in respect of the Programme’s translation; but I do find that guidance on this topic could be clarified and not just based on previous rulings, as explained further below,” he also said.

The inquiry found that the production firm provided payment to the tune of $2,448 and that this was “reasonable.” An adult earning an average salary in Gaza in 2021 would need to work for 21 months to earn that sum, according to U.N. data. Wages likely dropped even further following the outbreak of war with Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which eliminated many places of employment.

Johnston also wrote that he had “not seen or heard any evidence to support a suggestion that the Narrator’s father or family influenced the content of the Programme in any way.”

David Collier, an independent British journalist who exposed the family ties of the narrator Abdullah, dismissed the inquiry’s findings as insufficient and criticized the latter’s assertion.

“They didn’t find evidence to suggest ‘daddy’ had any input. Seriously? He only went home to his Hamas daddy EVERY NIGHT,” Collier wrote on X.

• Jewish BBC employees leave union after call to dress in Palestinian colours
• Avi Benlolo: Media fuels violence with false reporting on Gaza

In what

Science magazine

has dubbed “Novo Nordisk’s Canadian Mistake,” Ozempic is soon to come off patent in Canada, opening the door to cheaper generic copycats, after the drug giant reportedly failed to pay a few hundred dollars in annual fees to maintain the patent rights before the weight-loss drug became a blockbuster seller.

As

Science

reported, a patent, once lapsed, can’t be restored. Novo Nordisk will continue to hold its U.S. patent until 2032.

Ozempic was already the third most prescribed drug in Canada last year with 7,390,000 prescriptions dispensed, a 17 per cent increase over 2023, according to drug analytics research firm IQVIA.

Several applications for generic semaglutide, the active compound in Novo Nordisk’s injectable drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, are now before Health Canada. Last week,

a U.S. telehealth service

announced plans to expand into Canada next year and offer generic semaglutide at  a significant discount.

Richard Saynor, the head of Sandoz, a global leader in generic and biosimilar drugs, told

Endpoint News

in June that his company has filed for approval for a generic semaglutide in Canada once Novo Nordisk’s patent exclusivity expires “sometime in Q1 next year.”

Canada is the globe’s second-biggest semaglutide market, Saynor told Endpoint News. “You gotta ask why. I don’t think Canadians are disproportionately large. There’s clearly a dynamic, like insulin, with cross-border business,” he said. Americans with diabetes have crossed into Canada to buy insulin at

much lower prices.

Ozempic and Wegovy cost about $5,000 per year. If money is no longer a factor, if chemically-identical drugs are cheaper and more affordable, “that’s going to change the calculus for many people,” said Justin Lehmiller, a senior research fellow at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute and co-author of a new survey exploring the impact that weight-loss drugs — formally known as GLP-1 agonists — are having on dating and intimacy.

The survey of 2,000 single Americans (aged 18 to 91) led by Kinsey with DatingNews.com found eight per cent reported having used a GLP-1 medication for weight loss in the past year.

Among the GLP-1 users, 16 per cent said exes had reached out to reconnect, 14 per cent said they were getting more matches on dating apps and 12 per cent said they were going on more dates. The drugs seemed to be doing more to booster “online dating success” for men than for women, the researchers said.

“Some of the studies and research that I’ve seen suggest that men only match one in 100 times on dating apps where for women, it’s more like one in 10,” Lehmiller said. “An attractiveness boost for men, which often accompanies using these drugs, could translate into a much bigger impact for them in the world of dating.”

Men, however, were nearly twice as likely to women to say they feared being judged or shamed for taking Ozempic or other GLP-1 drugs.

“There are some masculinity concerns that are tied up in this,” said Lehmiller, a social psychologist. Men might worry about being accused of cheating, he said. “It might be viewed as a sign of weakness for turning to a drug as opposed to losing weight through ‘hard work.’”

About half of the GLP-1 users also said the medications impact their sex lives, in both positive and negative ways: 18 per cent said their sexual desire increased, while 16 per cent said it dropped. Sixteen per cent said their sexual function improved; 12 per cent said it worsened. It’s a nuanced picture, Lehmiller said. “These drugs seem to be affecting different people in different ways.”

“And I think that makes sense: There is a lot of variability in the side effects people experience on these drugs.” More side effects might mean more negative impact on intimacy, he said. The drugs have also been associated with a slightly higher risk o

f erectile dysfunction and testosterone deficiency

in men taking semaglutide for obesity compared to men not taking the drug.

About one in five in the dating survey said the drugs are creating more stigma against being overweight. “Changing standards of attractiveness might be creating more pressure for people to look a certain way or use these medications,” Lehmiller said.

A study published this week in the

Canadian Medical Association Journal

found 32.7 per cent of adults in Canada (10.6 million people) were obese in 2023, an eight per cent jump over 2009.

Generic semaglutide won’t be as cheap as Aspirin. “It’s still going to be a cost,” said Dr. Hertzel Gerstein, an endocrinologist and professor in McMaster University’s department of medicine. “And that does not relieve a responsible health practitioner of assessing a patient before they prescribe the medication,” he said.

“Is it possible that more people would be willing to pay out of pocket if they don’t have insurance coverage for the drug? Sure, if it’s cheaper,” Gerstein said.

“There may be more demand for it. People need to understand the risks and benefits.”

Taken once a week by injection, Ozempic and Wegovy work by mimicking a hormone — glucagon-like peptide-1 — the small intestine releases when people eat. GLP-1 tricks the body into thinking it’s full. It works on the brain to reduce appetite and interest in continuing to eat, and works on the stomach to slow how fast it empties so that food lingers in the stomach longer.

Semaglutide has been studied extensively, Gerstein said. The amount of weight lost is related to the dosage: the higher the dose, the more weight dropped. In people with type 2 diabetes, the drug can reduce the need for insulin, or the dosage. “But most importantly these drugs unequivocally reduce the future risk of serious health outcomes, including heart attacks, strokes, death from cardiovascular causes” and heart failure symptoms when used long-term, “in the two- to five-year window of time,” Gerstein said.

A

major analysis

published earlier this year based on health data from more than two million Americans veterans with diabetes found that, compared to more traditional drugs, GLP-1 use was associated with a reduced risk of substance use (alcohol, cannabis, stimulants and opioids), psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, seizures, several respiratory conditions and neurocognitive diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia.

The magnitude of the associated benefits — about a 10 to 20 per cent reduction for most outcomes — was modest, according to a background release, though the researchers said they don’t “negate” the potential value of the drugs.

There were, however, several drawbacks, including an increased risk of gastrointestinal disorders (nausea, vomiting, diarrhea), low blood pressure, fainting, arthritic disorders, kidney disorders and drug-induced pancreatitis associated with GLP-1 drugs compared to usual care.

Nothing is guaranteed, Gerstein said. “I always tell patients we don’t know exactly what it’ll do in you. And weight loss, if it’s going to happen, usually takes a month or two to start” and plateaus at around eight months. People don’t lose weight indefinitely. “There’s definitely a plateau. You do not keep losing weight,” he said. The drugs yield an average weight loss of around 15 per cent, and weight can also rebound rapidly once the drugs are stopped.

Ozempic has been approved in Canada for diabetes but is often used “off label” for obesity. Wegovy has been approved for obesity.

In an email to National Post, Novo Nordisk, the only current company in Canada with Health Canada-approved products containing semaglutide, said “all intellectual property decisions are carefully considered at a global level.

“Periods of exclusivity for pharmaceutical products end as part of their normal lifecycle and generic treatments may become available over time.”

“Currently, no Health Canada-approved generic versions of semaglutide exist and we cannot speculate on other manufacturers’ plans,” the company said.

National Post

 

 

 

 

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MONTREAL – Marjorie Michel never wanted to run for office. She didn’t want to come out of the shadows, she said.

To most Canadians, she’s a complete unknown. In Montreal, though,

she just replaced Justin Trudeau as the MP for Papineau

. And in Ottawa, she was recently appointed as minister of health. Yet since the April 28 election, she has remained almost invisible, trying to acclimate to a life she knows well, but never imagined for herself.

Behind the scenes, Michel is praised for being “direct,” serious, organized, calm, pragmatic and “blunt.” And in Montreal’s Haitian community and in Quebec’s Liberal circles, she’s known as a heavyweight, and called a “pioneer.” Several people spoken to for this story referred to her as the “godmother” of the Liberal Party in Quebec.

Before 2025, Michel was deputy chief of staff and close adviser to former prime minister Justin Trudeau. Being a politician, the public face of the government, has required some adjustment.

“When you are a staffer, you’re there to advise, you’re there to protect, but you’re not there to make decisions, either. So, you often have to live with advice you’ve given that isn’t taken,” she tells National Post, in French.

But it’s a life she grew up with. She’s the daughter of a former prime minister of Haiti: Smarck Michel held the post for a year from 1994 to 1995, appointed by the country’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide when Aristide returned to power after being deposed by a coup d’état.

Marjorie Michel had worked in Haitian politics, too. But the political instability and the country’s inability to embrace a peaceful democracy became too much. In even their upscale Port-au-Prince neighbourhood, kidnappings were common.

“It was a very tense situation because there were kidnappings of people we knew,” said Marjorie Michel’s daughter, Maxim Kernisant. “So, it was very, very anxiety-provoking. And I know that my sister was also having panic attacks; she didn’t want to go to school anymore. It had really become unbearable.”

‘Happy coincidence’ or master plan: How Carney’s team full of Quebecers wants to govern Canada

One morning, in 1999, Marjorie Michel told her two daughters they wouldn’t be going to school. That’s when she decided to leave Haiti.

They settled in Montreal in 2000. She lived alone with her two daughters in a tiny apartment in the Outremont neighbourhood, with a limited salary, and a teenager attending a French private school in the city. Money was tight, but education and security were Michel’s priorities for her family.

After a year, two of Maxim’s cousins moved in with them. And Michel was left raising four children aged between five and 12 all by herself.

“She was truly the rock of the family. The person you could always count on, and whenever you needed guidance or information, she was the one,” said Kernisant.

Politics never left Michel. She dived into the provincial scene for several years with the Quebec Liberal party as an organizer and an advisor to MNA Emmanuel Dubourg, who was also born in Haiti. He would eventually move to Ottawa, where he was the Liberal MP for Bourassa from 2013 to 2025. Eventually the two of them ended up as a couple and got married.

Just like Dubourg, Michel found her way into the federal Liberal party. In 2019 she became chief of staff to then president of the Treasury Board Jean-Yves Duclos. She was made deputy chief of staff to Trudeau in 2021.

In 2024, Michel was briefly the federal Liberal party’s deputy campaign director, but soon left that role. Andrew Bevan, who was campaign director, describes her as a “confident and expressive” woman who makes sure you know she is in the room.

“She takes up space in that room, making clear that people know what her point of view is, and making clear what she thinks of the situation at hand,” he said.

When National Post first met Michel at a public event in June, she quickly admitted she wasn’t a very media-savvy politician. But she said her staff encourages her to make public appearances and to accept interview requests. It’s clearly not her favourite part of the job.

But she agreed to sit for one in her constituency office in Montreal, a beige office in a nondescript office building. The name on the door still reads “The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau, MP Papineau”. There’s a wooden gate; evidently some kind of security barrier into the office.

Finance minister directs cabinet colleagues to find billions in spending cuts

“I don’t know why we have that,” said Michel.

“We had a prime minister as an MP here before. Things are, I guess, different,” suggested one of her aides.

In her office, she shows off a note on Trudeau’s stationery, signed by the former prime minister. “Congratulations my dear friend! You have the best riding in the country,” reads the note in French. Trudeau left it after she won the riding with 53 per cent of the vote in April.

For years, Liberal insiders had urged Michel to run. She preferred to stay behind the scenes, finding candidates and organizing on the ground.

She believed in what Trudeau was doing. After the Liberal party began collapsing and lost a 2024 byelection in its long-held riding of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun (which she said she fully expected) she said she promised Trudeau she would fight to the end to preserve his legacy.

She offered to recruit candidates and, if necessary, run herself, anywhere, even in an unwinnable riding.

After Trudeau resigned and now Prime Minister Mark Carney was installed as Liberal leader, Trudeau summoned her to his office in downtown Ottawa, across from Parliament Hill.

“I want you to run in Papineau,” he said.

She said she told him that was out of the question. She did not want to be elected. Her husband had already decided to leave politics and she wanted to join him living in Montreal.

Trudeau told her to think about it. Then, Carney’s close advisers pushed her to do it. So she made the leap.

Carney would soon make her Canada’s first-ever Haitian-born cabinet minister.

“You have to be there when it’s difficult, and I think I’m strong enough to be there when it’s difficult,” she said. “Then there were the questions that I was a woman, and also that I was a racialized woman. At one point there were a lot of men who were running. So, I said to myself, well, if I accept, it’s going to be a seat for a woman,” she said.

Now her priority, she says, is to be a good MP for her constituents first, and to manage the Department of Health calmly — but firmly.

As minister, mental health was one of her top priorities, she said. Canadians are anxious, she explained, mostly because of the difficult relationship between Canada and the United States. She wants to help the prime minister weather the storm and “reduce the level of anxiety” in the country.

With the Liberals in a minority government, she doesn’t know how long she’ll be in the House of Commons.

“If we had won a majority, I would have run once and then prepared the next generation. Now, I don’t know. We’ll see,” she said.

National Post

atrepanier@postmedia.com

• Carney will have to cut the uncuttable — if he has the guts
• Border bitterness is devastating cross-border tourism. But one Canadian city is bucking the trend

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Obesity climbed 7.74 per cent in Canada thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to a

new report

released Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, obesity increased at an accelerated rate after the onset of the pandemic.

Investment in research and interventions is needed, say the authors, to prevent and treat obesity in Canada. It should be an urgent priority for policymakers, they insist.

Obesity was recognized early on as a significant risk in exacerbating the severity of COVID-19, as well as the risk of death, say the authors. However, the impact of the pandemic on chronic disease, such as obesity, has received less scientific attention.

Researchers Laura N. Anderson, Rabiul Islam and Arthur Sweetman looked at a cross-section of data collected from 2009–2023 as part of the Canadian Community Health Survey. They drew on two studies, one pre-pandemic (2009-2020) and a second completed during the pandemic (2020-2023).

“The pandemic led to unprecedented and rapid changes in the daily lives of people in Canada, including adverse changes in sedentary time, physical activity, diet, food insecurity, stress, mental health, and the worsening of many socioeconomic factors, including job loss and higher costs of living,” they write in the report. “Many of these … factors have been associated with a greater risk of developing obesity.”

How have obesity numbers changed since 2009?

In 2023, 32.69 per cent of adults in Canada (10.6 million people) were overweight with a Body-Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or higher (27.5 or higher for people of Asian descent). This was an absolute increase of nearly 8 per cent from 2009, when the prevalence was 24.95 per cent.

Compared with the 11 years before the pandemic, obesity increased at a greater rate during the four years after the pandemic arrived.

Did obesity climb more in some groups of Canadians?

Specific subgroups of the population were affected more than others by increased obesity, particularly females and younger adults, the researchers concluded.

Is obesity prevalence in Canada different from elsewhere?

The overall findings of an increase in obesity during the COVID-19 pandemic are consistent with studies from several other countries and populations, according to the researchers.

What about weight-loss drugs?

GLP-1 medications (such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Contrave or Rybelsus) for treatment of diabetes and weight loss were introduced in Canada during the study period, though they were not widely available for obesity treatment. But the researchers question the impact of these medications going forward, and wonder whether they will dampen pandemic exacerbated obesity trends.

Hasn’t BMI been questioned as a measurement tool for obesity?

The authors conceded that BMI as a measurement tool has limitations. BMI is calculated as the weight in kilograms divided by the height in metres squared. It has been the standard measure for defining obesity because it is quick, inexpensive, noninvasive, and has some correlation to metabolic disease prevalence.

However,

BMI categories

indicating underweight, normal, overweight, obese, etc., differ for Asian Americans who have a higher risk of metabolic disease at lower BMI values. The researchers say they used different thresholds for people of Asian (South Asian, Chinese, Filipino, Southeast Asian, Korean and Japanese) descent.

Another anomaly is that some men who are deemed overweight according to BMI but don’t have excess middle-body fat can have lower overall mortality risk than men in other BMI weight categories. There is also evidence of an obesity paradox where obesity has protective effects for patients with a history of previously diagnosed heart failure.

Despite these caveats, the researchers argue that for population-level screening and surveillance, using “BMI categories as a proxy for obesity in adults continues to be recommended.”

What could future studies show?

The researchers are advocating for future studies to understand longer-term trends, specifically to evaluate whether the steep increase in obesity during the pandemic continues as a trend or falls to pre-pandemic levels.

And they wonder about the causes of upward trends among females and younger adults – whether they were driven by increased stress or adverse mental health related to occupation or caregiving during the pandemic.

• The obesity epidemic is real, but our solutions to date have been anything but
• New report says Canada’s obesity rates rose during the pandemic

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.

Best-selling author and commentator

Jordan Peterson

and his wife, Tammy, are

selling their Toronto home

and relocating to Arizona.

The

listing

for the couple’s home at 68 Olive Avenue in the city’s Seaton Village, part of the greater community of Annex, went live last week, and the Petersons’ ownership was confirmed by their daughter, Mikhaila Fuller.

In an email to the National Post, Fuller, the CEO of Peterson Academy she co-founded with her father, said her parents are moving to Arizona to be close to her, her husband Jordan and their children Elizabeth Peterson and George Peterson Fuller.

“With the touring they do, they were hardly in Toronto at all anymore, and it didn’t make sense to keep the house,” Fuller wrote, noting her parents “are not rebuying in Toronto.”

As for the property they’re leaving behind, realtor Daniel Freeman told National Post that Peterson and his family have called the 100-year-old-plus midtown home theirs since 1999, with extensive improvements and upgrades completed within the last nine years.

“A bespoke retreat that fuses bold architecture with soulful living, nestled in one of Toronto’s most neighbourly pockets,” the listing reads.

From the outside, the semi-detached brick home doesn’t look significantly different than the other two-storey homes along the quiet street. Its modesty is one of Freeman’s favourite things about the home.

“The homes that I always enjoy the most are the ones where your expectations from the outside are different from what you see on the inside. It’s like unwrapping a gift box,” he said. “For this house, it’s like you have five or six gifts that you have to unwrap, and each time there’s another surprise.”

The first comes the moment you enter a bright sun porch through a stained glass door adjacent to a beautiful stained glass window custom-designed by Toronto’s

Eve Guinan Design Restoration.

The rest of the carpet-free first and second floors — redone by interior designer

Shelley Kirsch

in 2019 — are bright and welcoming, featuring two spacious bedrooms and a newly renovated bathroom that Freeman said would rival “any Forest Hill or modern rebuilt home in the city.”

The “show stopper,” according to the listing, is a third-storey bedroom “that feels plucked from a Muskoka escape” with its vaulted ceilings and exposed wooden beams. The add-on also features two gas fireplaces, a seating area overlooking the front of the house and a rear deck above the backyard.

“One of the people that came through the open house on Saturday said ‘I feel like I’m in a large cabin staring out into the trees on the side of a mountain,’” Freeman said of the space designed by local architects

Doug Rylett and Cathy Tafler.

The basement features the last two of the five bedrooms, laundry and an infrared sauna. Freeman said they were able to make great use of the space by lowering, or benching, the basement floor without disturbing the existing foundation walls.

By doing so and employing the right waterproofing, heating and ventilation, Freeman said the home isn’t at risk for the usual mustiness most old basements in the area are known for.

“The lower level doesn’t feel any different than the rest of the house in this property,

The basement also features access to a stunning backyard with living plant walls, durable ipe hardwood decking, motorized retractable awnings and a “garage style shed, ideal for storage or studio.”

Other bells and whistles inside include smart climate control and automation, central air conditioning and vacuum, tankless water heater and, as Freeman discovered over the weekend, “a filtration system that offers carbonated filtered water” from the sink.

As for the location, Freeman said it’s close to four major grocery stores and subway access, has high walkability and bike scores, sits on the doorstep of well-appointed Vermont Square Park, and features a tight-knit neighbourhood of people. He once lived on Olive, and

Freeman Real Estate

is based just around the corner on Bathurst Street.

“Olive Avenue is known to be one of the warmest, friendliest blocks in this midtown area,” he said.

“It has a historical block party once or twice a year, where everyone shares a potluck dinner on the street, where the kids play and they have a little stage they put up and they have shows.”

Because the house is “like fine art,” Freeman doesn’t think it will be on the market for long.

The psychologist and his wife are asking $2,268,000, but Freeman said, “the value is greater than the listing price” because of “so many intangibles.”

• Jordan Peterson: At long last, my re-education ‘coach’ has been chosen
• Jordan Peterson says Canadians choosing path of ‘severe pain’ with Mark Carney

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