There is no chance of a housing crash in Canada despite spiralling prices, the Prime Minister’s Office forecast in a confidential 2014 memo. More recent federal reports have cited concerns of a housing bubble: “This is not the case”.
Alberta has the worst air in the country in terms of dust and coarse particulate matter, says new Health Canada research. The department based its data on air samples from test sites in Edmonton, Calgary and cities nationwide: “This is irritating”.
All Crown corporations would be required to appoint women to at least half their directorships under a New Democrat bill introduced in the Commons. Currently 27 percent of Crown directors are women, and two agencies have no women board members whatsoever: “It’s a start”.
Canada Revenue Agency has tallied another conviction – the 20th in eight years – involving an internet-fueled tax evasion scheme blamed for more than half a billion dollars in false claims. The Agency in earlier confidential memos lamented the “multitude of fraudsters” adhering to the so-called natural person movement: “The true size of the problem was never known”.
Lawmakers’ failure to pass a DNA privacy bill has let more employers and insurers discriminate against Canadians using their own genetic data, says the Huntington Society of Canada. Senators reopen hearings tomorrow on a first-ever bill protecting DNA as confidential: “Where is this going?”
The government wants to ‘simplify’ the payment of millions it spends each year on taxi fares for employees in Ottawa – but won’t say if staff should use bootleg Uber cabs. The initiative follows a Competition Bureau proposal for deregulation of the entire taxi industry: “The government wishes to modernize”.
The fisheries department is spending $2.5 million a year monitoring an Atlantic seal hunt with an export value of barely $500,000, according to confidential memos. Draft minutes of a censored Intradepartmental Discussion On Seals blamed the industry’s collapse on a gullible public: “What we’re up against regarding misinformation: ‘A person is smart, people are stupid,’” the memo said.
The Department of Fisheries has concealed data on the Atlantic hunt since 2014, when figures confirmed its value declined from a peak of $34.3 million in 2006 to less than half a million dollars. “The industry has been decimated,” Marvin Hildebrand, director general of market access for the Department of Trade, earlier told the Commons fisheries committee.
Memos obtained through Access To Information indicate field supervisors and other fisheries staff questioned the cost of monitoring the annual hunt, set to get underway next month. “The Government of Canada spends a fortune,” said a memo; “These enhancements are above and beyond the traditional monitoring carried out by fishery officers in the region and come at a significant cost. These costs are beyond the capacity to absorb from traditional budgets”.
Surveillance expenses totaling $975,000 in 2007 more than doubled to $2.5 million a year by 2009 including $1 million for a Coast Guard icebreaker; $475,000 in helicopter rentals; $400,000 for high definition long-range cameras “capable of identifying a person at one mile”; and $375,000 in staff overtime. Costs for the RCMP were not tabulated.
The Senate in 2015 passed a bill expanding the surveillance quarantine around the Atlantic hunt. Bill C-555 An Act Respecting The Marine Mammal Regulations imposes a 1.9 kilometre no-go zone around the seal hunt, restricting access to official “observers” licensed by the Department of Fisheries. The department in the past refused permit applications from photographers, the Human Society and a European Union environmental commissioner.
The bill’s passage followed disclosures the Department of Trade paid a total $857,500 in grants to the Fur Council of Canada to promote seal products in the period from 2006 to 2013. Cabinet’s 2015 budget proposed another $5.7 million in five-year funding to “secure new market access” for seal meat, oil and pelts.
Seal exports collapsed under a 2009 European Union ban on Canadian products. The World Trade Organization three years ago upheld the ban that saw the price of seal pelts fall from $100 apiece to as little as $20.
Sausages & Heart Valves
Fisheries staff wrote in memos they must maintain support for sealing despite the market collapse, and the fact funding for surveillance is deducted from other fisheries programs. “Ever consider an end for the commercial hunt? The short answer: no,” said one memo.
“There is a need for fresh public opinion research,” staff wrote; “We need more education of the Canadian public”; “We’ve been telling folks its humane for years. Is it being effective? What are the issues we need to address? Is it just the look of the hunt, or would something else assist?”
The size of the harp seal harvest in the decade from 2004 to 2014 fell from 366,000 animals to just 60,000, by official estimate. The fisheries department withheld figures from the 2015 hunt, claiming its release would compromise “the privacy and economic interests of participants in the fishery.” Officials did confirm only some 11 percent of licensed sealers were active.
The department in a secret 2015 memo earlier obtained by Blacklock’s said it had no scientific research to support Canada’s claim that seals are to blame for dwindling fish stocks. “No explicit linkage has been identified between diminishing groundfish resources and the increased presence of grey seals,” said the Memorandum For The Minister by Leslie MacLean, associate deputy minister; “While no explicit link has been established, the burgeoning grey seal population has been identified by harvesters as a possible cause for the decline, and also the cause of gear damage and depredation to fish caught in gear.”
Authorities have commissioned numerous studies to boost seal exports through alternative uses of products, including a 2014 Fur Institute study Grey Seal Management that suggested shipping seal penises to Asia as aphrodisiacs; marketing seal meat as “gourmet” meatballs; and selling intestines to food processors as sausage casings.
A 2009 fisheries memo also contemplated some medical use for seal heart valves, but cautioned “the need to be very careful here”; “Apparently grey seals have calcium deposits in their valves,” the memo said; “There is medical rebuttal to some information we had”.
By Tom Korski 
Rising rent increases are running at more than five times the inflation rate, says a new report. Costs for renters jumped 10.7 percent in 2014, the most recent data available. The typical Canadian now spends 29 percent of household income on shelter: “You’re starting to make sacrifices”.
Official figures grossly misrepresent the actual number of poor seniors in Canada, says a confidential Department of Finance memo. The true number is about half, and possibly as little as a fifth of what Statistics Canada claims, according to the memo obtained through Access To Information: “Statistics overestimate the actual number of seniors living in low income”.
Canadian National Railway Co. seeks to waive federal caps on certain freight revenues in British Columbia. The railway has been fined six times in the past 10 years for excess profits on grain shipments under the Canada Transportation Act: “We have no comment”.
MPs for the second time in two years will consider a bill to federalize shipwrecks. The proposal would see the Canadian Coast Guard assume costs of salvage and clean-up of wrecked and abandoned vessels nationwide: “They can act fast”.
Municipalities nationwide seek tighter federal scrutiny of telecom providers in local property disputes, according to submissions to the CRTC. The appeal follows long-running feuds over placement of cellphone towers: ‘They don’t know conditions on the ground’.
Poverty is called a trap, though millions of Canadians have escaped it using subtle and very human methods. The Department of Employment, an anti-poverty agency, is not good at this. “The welfare state, which imposes order from above and requires specific outcomes, fails on many levels,” write Joe and Stephanie Mancini. “Access to basic necessities of life is often denied because someone does not fit into bureaucratic categories, or because they cannot navigate complex rule-based systems.”
The Mancinis’ Transition To Common Work is a crisp critique of the welfare state written by a devoutly Catholic husband and wife committed to aiding the poor. This is not a rant about the dole. It is an eloquent account of the subtle, human remedies for despair.
At the Working Centre in downtown Kitchener, Ont., founded by the Mancinis in 1982, “We became known as the place to go where there were few other options,” they explain. What do visitors say? “‘My brother died in Hamilton and I am trying to find bus fare and clothing so I can go to the funeral.’ ‘My daughter is in a hospital just outside London and I would like to visit her. Is there someone I could pay to drive me there two times a week?’ ‘I am new to Canada and I am trying to find work as an engineer.’ ‘I am living in my car but I have a dog, so I have to find a job quickly so I can find a place to live.’”
This is where the Mancini method works and Employment Canada fails. No check-off bureaucracy can resolve the small, immediate crises that are the burden of the workaday poor. At one point the couple attend an Employment Canada workshop where managers provide a fixed answer for the jobless: “Unemployment could be beaten by an organized and meticulous job search,” Transition recounts. “The jobs are out there, the system works, and it’s up to the unemployed to work hard to find them. What else could the government say? This was the same service that was paying out Unemployment Insurance claims. The Canada Employment Centre was designed with carrots and sticks. Part of its mandate was to help the unemployed find work, but it could also suspend benefits if the job search was not up to undisclosed standards.”
Later the Mancinis count the job listings at the Kitchener unemployment office: there were 560, with about half paying less than $5 an hour, and nearly a quarter of the postings part-time: “The bulk of the jobs paid low wages for unskilled labour. When we published these details in our newsletter, we received a letter from the Canada Employment Centre manager demanding that we never count the jobs board again.”
Instead they created the Working Centre. It runs a thrift store and bicycle repair shop, market garden and café. It serves a no-charge lunch and rents apartments at sub-market rates. It issues a quarterly newsletter Good Work News, and draws funding from an annual Mayor’s Dinner and a golf tournament where unions sponsor foursomes and a big prize table. It is “a non-judgmental place that offered hospitality and support for the unemployed” — without bureaucracy.
Transition To Common Work is fresh and candid. It concedes failure. The Mancinis opened a recycling depot that bundled paper and metal for scrap dealers. At its peak it employed 12 and generated $20,000 a month in revenue till it collapsed in the teeth of the Mulroney Recession in 1991: “We started with altruistic notions about recycling and sought companies and individuals eager to recycle their waste,” they write. “We learned that paper mills had no loyalty and treated us like second-class citizens, and that equipment salespeople had their own agenda.”
“The initiative had no value in itself,” Transition concludes – a lesson lost in so many anti-poverty programs. “We concluded that private and public bureaucracies expend vast sums of money administering systems that are often second rate or unimaginative and that governments tie up tax money in highly unproductive activities.”
Transition details the subtle, human methods a Kitchener couple used to better their city. It works. They proved it. In 2014 the Mancinis received the Benemerenti Medal from the Pope for outstanding service to society.
Transition to Common Work: Building Community at The Working Centre, by Joe & Stephanie Mancini; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 232 pages; ISBN 9781-7711-21606; $14.99
The Department of Public Works says it’s prepared to fingerprint federal contractors under a so-called “integrity regime”. Officials also maintain a confidential database of subcontractors without individuals’ consent, according to documents obtained through Access To Information: “It was gut-wrenching when I saw that letter”.
The Supreme Court has cleared the way for a class action lawsuit over hip replacements. The case follows the 2013 lapse of a Senate bill to create a national registry of medical devices: “Anybody who has an artificial implant would like to know”.
