Cabinet aides in pre-election polling asked Arab Canadians how the government could “promote the rights and safety of members of the Arab diaspora,” says a Privy Council report. No corresponding focus groups were held with Jewish Canadians: "Most felt the Government of Canada was on the wrong track." READ MORE
The Liberal Party must run a leadership contest free of foreign interference, say MPs. A change in Party voting rules follows evidence a busload of Chinese foreign students helped nominate MP Han Dong (Don Valley North, Ont.) in 2019: "Listen, there’s foreign interference concerns." READ MORE
Electric car dealers say they are stunned by cabinet’s abrupt wind-up of a $5,000 rebate program for new buyers. The Department of Transport announced Friday it will suspend rebates by the end of March or “until program funds are exhausted.” READ MORE
Taxpayers lost millions through defaults on federal loans to Québec businesses, records show. The federal agency that approved the loans, Canada Economic Development for Québec Regions, boasted in a briefing note it was “prepared to support riskier projects.” READ MORE
A federal subsidy program for Canadian musicians went 80 percent over budget due to pandemic lockdowns and collapsing album sales, says a Department of Canadian Heritage report. Musicians have complained they are reduced to collecting pennies in royalties from streaming services: "The current economic context does not allow the majority of artists to make a living." READ MORE
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom writes: "Google wants to verify my identity. It presents weird-looking letters, numbers..." READ MORE
Michael Maclear was the only Western TV correspondent in North Vietnam the day Ho Chi Minh died in 1969. Half a million mourners clad in white queued for hours to see Ho laying in state, his head resting on a soft pillow. It was “a great river of people,” Maclear recalls. The temperature hit 107° and kept climbing: “Every few seconds in the intense heat, even among the ranks of soldiers, someone would faint.” Reading Guerrilla Nation is like opening a drawer to find a lapsed passport or faded yearbook. In an instant you are in a time and place once very important and now utterly forgotten, “the strangest of journeys in the most divisive of times, when ‘Nam confounded us all,'” writes Maclear. Travel was expensive. Asia seemed distant. And a CBC-TV foreign correspondent like Maclear was assured fame and a mass audience. One of Maclear’s newsroom colleagues, Knowlton Nash, went into management and self-appointment as network anchor. Another, Roméo LeBlanc, became Governor General. Maclear remained a working reporter, still writing in his 84th year. He died in 2019. READ MORE
If you bought the house you got a computer, plus the ability to connect with your neighbours. It was a selling point, like a bonus. The computer was very exciting. It had a “cool” factor. We volunteered right away. You would go to work and tell people you’re part of a “wired community,” and they would ask: What’s that? It was a great conversation piece. Later the emails started coming. Someone’s cat went missing, lost cat, the name of the cat. Then people started sharing complaints about the builder, the deficiencies, problems with the house: Did you get this? Did they fix that? It was like an early version of Twitter.
