A Nova Scotia wind farm run by friends of the Liberal Party required $206 million in public financing since no private lender would touch it, says the CEO of the Canada Infrastructure Bank. Ehren Cory said the costly venture was deemed too risky: "Private lenders alone were unwilling to provide the required financing." READ MORE
Foreigners in Canada on temporary permits will number more than two million this year even with quota cuts, records show. Prime Minister Mark Carney imposed cuts after complaining the “system isn’t working.” READ MORE
A total 110,561 electors signed a Commons petition demanding that floor-crossers face byelections. The petition that closed Friday, sponsored by Conservative MP Lianne Rood (Middlesex-London, Ont.), was the first of four targeting defections in Parliament: "End the practice of MPs rejecting the will of the electorate." READ MORE
About a quarter of federal managers say they feel pressured to hire favoured candidates, says a biennial survey by the Public Service Commission. Figures showed more managers also resort to inside appointments rather than openly posting vacancies: "They are based on ‘who you know.'" READ MORE
A federal judge has awarded a Saskatchewan prisoner more than $75,000 in damages and costs after he was pushed into a cell door by a guard. “The Charter is a very important law in Canada,” wrote Justice William Pentney, a former Deputy Minister of Justice: "The use of force violated your right to security of the person." READ MORE
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom writes: " If you phone your friends to tell them about your luxury Alaska cruise, it makes you look old. Outdated..." READ MORE
What did the 19th century smell like? What was it like to stroll ankle-deep in horse effluent and live by the 25-watt glow of an oily lamp on winter evenings? Many Canadian historians and documentary filmmakers recall the facts and figures of the past without ever providing a true tactile sense of how our ancestors got by, with one exception. We can still gain a taste of what they ate. Collecting Culinaria is a tribute to an extraordinary trove of historic cookbooks collected by Linda Distad, a University of Alberta librarian who died in 2012. Distad had a mania for heritage recipes. Her collection ran to more than 3,000 titles including the first English-language cookbook published in Canada, The Cook Not Mad, circa 1830. Consider the recipe for corn beef: “To one hundred pounds of beef. three ounces salt peter, five pints of salt, a small quantity of molasses will improve it, but good without.” READ MORE
All families have skeletons. Ours is illegal betting. My grandfather’s incarceration was an embarrassment for my mother. He served his time at Burch Industrial Farm near Brantford, Ont. Over the years I have spoken to people who knew of these events, but none really told me anything. Parliament wrote an epilogue to my grandfather’s story. Now if someone in Canada wants to bet on a boxing match or hockey game, it’s as simple as downloading an app.
