Features
Josh Morry – outstanding young University of Manitoba alumnus: Becoming a change agent who inspires a new dialogue
Reprinted with permission from UM Today The Magazine
Seven years later, Josh Morry still remembers the unsettling phone call he answered that one day in 2013. It was from the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
“Things are out of control,” the man told him. “It’s time you had a bodyguard follow you around campus.”
Morry [BComm(Hons)/13, JD/16], then a 20-year-old student in the Asper School of Business, said he was already geeky and “uncool enough” without a former Mossad agent in tow. He declined their offer. He says in hindsight, he probably should have said yes.
That spring, an international movement—Students Against Israeli Apartheid—held their annual week at the University of Manitoba and at universities across Canada. Criticism of Israel quickly turned into anti-Semitic propaganda.
“There were caricatures of Jews with hook noses and swastikas on their forehead,” Morry says. “At McGill, this group threw pennies at Jewish students because, ‘Jews like money.’ At York University, they chased Jewish students down the hallway.”
UM Jewish students signed a petition. They felt unsafe, unwelcome.
“It’s one thing to have constructive dialogue about complicated issues, but it’s another to demonize and harass Jewish students because of who they are,” says Morry.
As the commerce student representative on the council for the University of Manitoba Students’ Union (UMSU), he pushed to ban the anti-Israeli group from operating—when the motion passed, it broke ground. There had never been a successful motion to decertify the group at any university in the world and it served as a precedent for human rights groups globally to combat anti-semitism on campus.
Morry was praised by the head of the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg and parliamentarians.
In the aftermath, he received hate mail, but Morry and an Arab friend started the Arab-Jewish Dialogue on Campus to keep a rational conversation going.
“As university students you should engage…with issues that put you outside your comfort zone. When you end up talking, you actually agree much more than you disagree, but when you’re screaming at each other, you disagree with everything,” Morry says. “There should be a space for this on campus. You should talk about the Arab-Israeli conflict. But you should do it in a manner that…respects constructive dialogue.”
Morry also worked on the UMSU council for the rights of Indigenous and 2SLGBTQ+ groups.
A love for debate
It was no surprise he became the man of the hour when things heated up on campus. Now a tax lawyer at the Toronto firm Torys L.L.P, he has always been enthralled with debate and history—he heard Winston Churchill biographer Gilbert Martin speak and took a signed copy of his book home to read when he was 14 years old.
And he’s quick to identify the absurd, with a natural wit and his dabbling in stand-up comedy. He once took the stage with a nose cast, lobbing his first joke: I should deal with, like, the elephant in the room: This is an Armani blazer. “If they don’t laugh on the first joke, you’re screwed,” he says.
Projecting confidence: “The two suit thing”
A champion debater both in high school and university, Morry says debating culture was “weird” but it did teach him something about confidence.
He remembers a friend in high school who used to bring two suits to each tournament.
“‘Why would you bring two suits?’ I said. He answered, ‘One for the regular round and one for the finals.’ It was like, wow, that’s confidence.”
Morry started to do the “two suit thing” at business school debates.
“You have to project confidence,” he says, “It’s a sport. You gotta get in their heads.”
Lively dialogue around politics was commonplace in the Morry home in Winnipeg’s Tuxedo neighbourhood. His father, sister and aunt are all lawyers.
He was high school president of Gray Academy of Jewish Education, but says his marks were nothing exceptional. “I had B pluses and As, but I was terrible at math.”
But in the Faculty of Law at UM, Morry found his calling and was first in his class every year, ultimately winning the Gold Medal and becoming a Pitblado Scholar. He was then among the few to be accepted for a master’s of law at the University of Oxford. He joined the Oxford Union, one of the world’s most prestigious debating and private students’ societies; its members include top international debaters.
Morry says he imagined Oxford would be so different—that “everything would be Klingon”—but credits UM for “competing at a world level.”
“The best professors at Robson Hall could teach at Oxford. I felt totally prepared.”
This outspoken 28-year-old continues to reframe conversations, writing op-eds and leading discussions with policymakers. We asked Josh Morry to finish the thought for us…
If we want to build a better society…
“…we’ll need to stop seeing our political beliefs as the dogmas that define us. People on both sides of the political spectrum see disagreements over policy as personal attacks.
Unlike personal identity, political ideology is not an immutable characteristic that we must protect from others. Rather, it is a way of seeing the world that must continuously be challenged and reformed as the underlying facts grounding that ideology change.
We cannot allow our cognitive dissonance to prevent us from listening to opposing views, or we will not have a reliable mechanism to determine public opinion and craft policy to reflect or change that opinion.
We should, of course, have no patience for hate speech in the guise of political activism. However, most mainstream political disagreements are the best way to unleash Canada’s full potential. People on the left and right just disagree on the best way to do so.
I’m now working on an online platform for thought leaders on the left and right to publish long-form opinion pieces engaging with complex issues in a respectful manner.”
It’s far too easy to …
“…define the relationship between Muslims and Jews by reference to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The conflict is very personal and painful to those in the Middle East as well as their families and friends in Canada. It therefore becomes very easy to lose hope and attribute the continuing conflict to irreconcilable differences between the two groups.
These disagreements are only amplified on university campuses when professional agitators acting in the name of social justice seek to position Jews and Muslims against each other, thereby creating an unsafe and unproductive learning atmosphere.
But I feel a real sense of hope when I’m able to go to a restaurant with my Muslim friends and talk about sports, movies and anything other than the Arab-Israeli conflict because at the end of the day, we’re not defined by our differences.
It may sound naive, but I honestly believe that the respectful learning environment we created and fostered at the University of Manitoba can serve as a powerful example to students around the world.
I saw this firsthand when I was one of Canada’s representatives to the World Jewish Congress in Budapest, where leaders from around the world approached me about setting up Arab Jewish Dialogues in their countries, based on the University of Manitoba’s model.”
UM Today the Magazine can be accessed at: https://news.umanitoba.ca/magazine/
and the video with David Asper and Josh:
https://news.umanitoba.ca/watch-daa-interviews/#josh-morry.
Features
Is This the End of Jewish Life in Western Countries?
By HENRY SREBRNIK “Globalize the Intifada” has been the chant echoing through streets since October 7th, 2023. It was never a metaphor, and we now see the gruesome results across the western world, from Australia to Canada: the rise of groups of large, active networks of Islamist and anti-Zionist organizations.
Jews in the West are discovering that the nations they defended, enriched, and profoundly shaped have become increasingly inhospitable. After the Holocaust, explicit Jew-hatred became unfashionable in polite society, but the impulse never disappeared. The workaround was simple: separate Zionism from Judaism in name, then recycle every old anti-Jewish trope and pin it on “the Zionists.”
We have seen the full legitimization of genocidal anti-Zionism and its enthusiastic adoption by large segments of the public. The protests themselves, as they began immediately on October 7th, were celebrations of the Hamas massacres. The encampments, the building occupations, the harassment campaigns against Jewish students, the open calls for intifada, the attacks on Jews and Jewish places have become our new norm. History shows us that antisemitism does not respond to reason, incentive or the honest appeals of the Jewish community.
Outside the United States, there is no Western political establishment with either the will or the capability to address this problem, let alone reverse its growth. I’m sorry to say this, but the future of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand is likely to be increasingly Jew-free.
Today, police stand and watch mobs chant for Israel’s destruction, call for the genocide of its people, harass visibly Jewish citizens, and drive antisemitic intimidation deep into urban life. They now believe their job is to enforce the law only if it does not risk upsetting violent constituencies. This makes Jews expendable, because defending them risks confrontation. This was very clear in the Bondi Beach massacre.
Jews are again donning caps instead of kippot, dressing generically with no cultural markers, and avoiding even a tote bag with Hebrew on it. A corrosive creep toward informal segregation in retail and service sectors is occurring, as Jewish customers report being refused service. A mezuzah hanging from a rideshare mirror leads to cancellations. When Jews express frustration, they are accused of exaggeration or attempting to suppress criticism of Israel. Jewish fear is not treated as a real problem.
“Jews Are Being Sent Back into Hiding,” the title of a Dec. 15 article in the New York Free Press by David Wolpe and Deborah Lipstadt, asserts that the attacks on Jews, including physical assaults, social media campaigns and, most tragically, the recent murders in Australia, are part of a purposive campaign designed to make Jews think twice about gathering with other Jews, entering a synagogue, going to kosher restaurants, putting a mezuzah on the doorpost of their apartments or dorm rooms, or wearing a Jewish star around their necks.
“We know of no one who would consider giving a niece, nephew, grandchild, or young friend a Jewish star without first asking permission of their parents,” they write. The unspoken, and sometimes spoken, question is: “Might wearing a star endanger your child’s well-being?”
Recently, a prominent American rabbi was entering a Target store in Chicago with her grandson, whom she had picked up from his Jewish day school. As they walked into the store the 10-year-old reached up and automatically took off his kippah and put it in his pocket. Seeing his grandmother’s quizzical look, he explained: “Mommy wants me to do that.”
Borrowing a phrase from another form of bigotry, they contend that Jews are going “back into the closet.” No public celebration of Hanukkah took place in 2025 without a significant police presence. Some people chose to stay home.
Lipstadt and Wolpe know whereof they speak. They are respectively a professor of history and Holocaust studies who served as the Biden administration’s ambassador tasked with combating antisemitism, the other a rabbi who travels to Jewish communities throughout the world, and who served on Harvard’s antisemitism task force in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 pogrom.
What the world has seen over the past two years is a continual, often systematic attempt to terrorize Jews. When political leaders fail to condemn rather than merely “discourage” chants of “globalize the intifada,” we are seeding the ground for massacres like the Hannukah one in Sydney.
If each Jewish holiday will now be seen by antisemites as an opportunity for terror, then the prognosis for diaspora Jewry is bleak. There will be fewer public events, more alarms, more bag checks at doors; there will have to be more security and more police. Unless things change, Jewish life in the diaspora will become more sealed off from the larger society.
Why has this failure come about? Confronting antisemitism, stopping the mobs, challenging the activists, and disciplining antisemitic bureaucrats all carry electoral risk for politicians; Jews are demographically irrelevant, especially compared with Muslim voters, with the U.S. being the only partial exception.
There are those who suggest Jews stop donating funds to educational and other institutions that have turned against us. At this point, I doubt very much that withdrawing dollars will have an impact. For every dollar withdrawn, there will be 100 from Qatar and other sources in its place.
Throughout history, the way a society treats its Jews predicts its future with unerring accuracy. If Jews leave, it will be because a civilization that will not defend its Jews will also defend next to nothing and may itself not survive.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island
Features
Canadian Travel Trends 2025 and the Forecast for 2026
Canadians planning to travel in 2026 should keep an eye on shifting trends and learn what’s coming their way in the new year.
Canadian travel has seen a fair amount of change and instability over the last few years, thanks mostly to the country’s southern neighbours. In 2025, and likely into 2026, travel trends in the Great White North have stabilized significantly, with more Canadians than ever choosing to travel within their own borders. And with 2026 nipping at our heels, let’s take a look at what trends in 2025 have been the most prevalent and how these will shape travellers’ decisions and travel plans in the new year.
Canadian Travel in 2025
Thanks to many factors, including politics, inflation, and airline competition, the majority of travellers opted to explore their own country rather than go abroad in 2025. More local travel money is remaining within the local economy, further bolstering it and making it an even more attractive travel choice. Thanks to the accessibility of private jet charter travel across Canada, luxury local travel has increased as well, with more people looking to immerse themselves in luxury from the start of their journey to the end. When travelling abroad, the U.S. is now the least favoured destination for most Canadian travellers, but Europe saw a significant increase in interest as 2025 progressed.
As local Canadian travel increased this year, it brought with it a drive for local tourists to find their own “Secret Canada” destinations. Far more “off the beaten path” trips were taken, resulting in more travel spending going to smaller or more boutique destinations rather than big city experiences. In 2025, travellers have sought out the wonderful diversity in destinations and landscapes, allowing themselves to access more grounded and authentically Canadian experiences.
Canada’s Government has also encouraged and benefited from local tourism, with initiatives like the Canada Strong Pass offering extra benefits. Initially implemented in the summer, but reintroduced from December 12, 2025, until January 15, 2026, this is a ticket to enjoying the richness of their own culture (iconic natural destinations, museums, train trips) at a discounted rate or even in some cases free of charge.
In the second quarter of 2025, locals took a total of 90.6 million trips that included at least some time spent travelling domestically, which indicated a rise of 10.9% on a year-over-year basis. Of these trips, 58.6 million were day trip experiences (an increase of 12.4%), and 32.0 million were overnight trips or longer (an increase of 8.4%).
Between April and June of this year, Canadian residents spent $20.3 billion on local tourism, which represented a 13.5% year-over-year increase. When undertaking day trips, Canadians spent approximately $101 per visit. On overnight trips, locals spent around $449 per trip, with an average trip length of 2.6 nights. The Great White North is clearly holding its own, and then some, in the international travel market.
Canadian Travel in 2026
As we move towards 2026, many trends from 2025 will remain the standard, but some will evolve to fit changing demands. Across the board, though, the outlook for the coming year is that Canadian travel will become a far more personal thing, with trips being customized to fit travellers’ requirements and desires more closely than ever before. From choosing a hotel that they feel smacks of a beloved destination in their favourite novel, to taking a trip to a destination just to try a snack that’s famously made there and only there, travel is stretching and shifting for the traveller rather than the other way around.
Here are some slightly more specific predictions for the coming year based on the answers of polled Canadians.
- One Gen Z-led trend is the idea of “glowmad travel”. Beauty and skincare are now influencing the places that Gen Z travels, and their trips are far more likely to include visits to skincare and beauty destinations like spas and luxury stores.
- Gen Z adults are helping to drive another trend: family travel as a way to save money. 345 of Gen Z adults polled say that they would take this route.
- More than 70% of Canadians are considering some sort of mountainous getaway in 2026, specifically in summer or autumn.
- 48% of polled Canadians say they would book or consider a destination thanks to the influence of literature.
- More travellers than ever are choosing their destinations based on the accommodations available. 44% of polled travellers say that in 2026, accommodation and what it can offer comes first, and the surrounding destination comes second.
The World Is Your Nova Scotia Lobster Roll
Choose something a little different when you vacation this year. Oysters are great, but a Nova Scotia lobster roll might be more to your taste! Canadians know good travel, so take a maple leaf out of their book and experience something new this year.
Features
Fake IDs and Underage Bettors: The Growing Problem for Sportsbooks
The expansion of legalized sports betting worldwide has resulted in sportsbooks grappling with a problem that they can no longer overlook: the increase in underage individuals using counterfeit identification to place bets. As more and more ways to bet through mobile apps and online sign-ups emerge, minors who are set on their goal are inventing ways to get around age limits. The emergence of this trend is a breach of the law and morality; however, it is also an enormous problem that threatens the very existence of the platforms, which are forced to rigorously obey the regulations .
Why Fake IDs Are Becoming More Sophisticated
Conventional fakes used to be quite simple to recognize—low-quality printing, different fonts for the text, and inconsistent holograms would make them not very reliable for any kind of verification. But counterfeit documents have changed significantly over time. Nowadays, fakes are made better with the help of printing technology and software, and they can even copy barcodes and other scannable features, so their IDs look almost real.
This fact complicates things significantly for sportsbooks, especially those operating online. Most of the time, automated identity verification systems capture a user’s photo and perform basic data matching. In cases where a very good fake ID is used by a teenager who looks older, some systems cannot recognize the trick. Therefore, young bettors have found ways to be able to place wagers through these loopholes.
The Influence of Social Pressure and Online Culture
Social media is a major factor in the increase in risky behavior that minors are engaging in. On various platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit, teenagers come across betting slips, parlay wins, and big-payout screenshots that are shared, most probably, by other users. The glamorization of sports betting is leading young people to copy the behavior of influencers, older friends, or even celebrities, as they think that it is the right thing to do.
The competitiveness usually associated with sports is one of the reasons some minors decide to bet on sports. For many, betting becomes another way to engage as a fan—by predicting outcomes, challenging friends, and experiencing the same excitement that adult fans enjoy. Unfortunately, only a small number of minors fully understand the financial risks involved, making them more vulnerable to developing harmful patterns that could continue into adulthood. This is why choosing the most responsible sportsbook, which you can discover more here, is essential. Such platforms provide guidance, enforce safe practices, and ensure regulated play, allowing fans to engage with sports betting in a more informed, secure, and controlled manner.
Sportsbooks Facing Regulatory Pressure
The sportsbooks are being given the task of more closely monitoring and preventing minors from betting on their platforms. If they fail, harsh penalties are possible, including severe fines, loss of a gambling license, and negative publicity that undermines a brand’s trustworthiness. As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to verify their identities, although this also inconveniences those who are, in fact, legitimate users.
Sportsbooks have to decide between two options that are in conflict with each other: on the one hand, they have to keep the registration process as simple as possible, and on the other hand, they have to carry out age verification in a very thorough manner. The work of balancing is tough, and the underage gamblers are trying all methods to find a way out.
The Rise of Identity Fraud Services
An alarming trend is the emergence of online vendors who openly advertise fake IDs and identity documents. These vendors often claim their products can pass standard sportsbook checks. Some even tailor IDs to specific regions, knowing that certain provinces, states, or countries use verification systems that rely heavily on image comparison rather than live validation.
The availability of these fraudulent services not only empowers minors but also exposes sportsbooks to risks related to stolen identities, money laundering flags, and fraudulent accounts that may later become legal liabilities.
The Consequences for Underage Bettors
While a minor might think that gambling is just a bit of fun without any harm, the outcome can be quite serious. If there is a catching, accounts are closed right away, winnings are confiscated, and parents or guardians, in some cases, are made legally liable for any financial disagreements. Besides that, the risk of developing a gambling problem in the future increases with early exposure to gambling, especially since teenagers are more impulsive and less capable of handling financial risks.
The majority of minors are not aware that sportsbooks keep very detailed records of their activities, including device information and IP addresses. In case a fake ID works one time, using it multiple times will definitely lead to getting caught.
A Growing Problem That Requires Joint Action
Fake IDs and underage betting are issues that have become a major challenge in the industry, and no single stakeholder can solve these problems on their own. Sportsbooks need to enhance their identity verifications, regulators should get prepared for new types of fraud, technology providers have to come up with new solutions more quickly, and parents should always be aware of what their children are doing online. The industry’s rapid development is making this problem more and more urgent because the number of minors trying to get around the safety measures is increasing.
Sports betting can serve as a fun and legal form of entertainment for adults, but the need to protect the youth is what defines the industry and ensures its survival in the long run. As the quality of fake IDs keeps improving and the online culture is more and more inclined to consider betting as a normal activity, sportsbooks must ensure that underage users do not have access and that the environment is safe for all users. They need to do this now more than ever.