The Department of Health in internal emails cautioned political aides to tone down claims by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that a vaccine was “the best bet to end the pandemic.” Staff warned it was unclear whether a Covid booster shot had to be “reinvented every year.”
Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault yesterday confirmed he is in tax arrears with Revenu Québec. Guilbeault would not say if a portion of his $274,500 cabinet salary was being deducted to settle the five figure debt: “Anyone who profits from the system must contribute to it.”
The Income Tax Act should prohibit Canadian corporations from transferring pre-tax profits out of the country, New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh said yesterday. “We would end that,” said Singh: “Working people, they don’t have an offshore tax haven.”
The Conservative Party yesterday said it would revive a 2015 Senate bill to ban animal testing by the cosmetics industry. Lobbyists opposed the bill after it was endorsed by Laureen Harper posing with an armful of toy rabbits: “Somehow they’re saving little bunnies. It’s not true.”
Preventing maskless shoppers from visiting retail stores is not discriminatory, a Human Rights Tribunal has ruled. An Edmonton adjudicator dismissed two separate complaints by shoppers who claimed in-store mask rules were a breach of the Human Rights Act, including one who was escorted from a Costco outlet by police: “Limitations to the right to be free from discrimination may be justified.”
Canada’s ambassador to Kabul boasted diplomats were prepared for any emergency in “high-risk missions, for example Afghanistan.” Ambassador Reid Sirrs closed the embassy August 15 and left the country though thousands of Canadian citizens and local supporters remained trapped in Kabul: “You can make mistakes and learn.”
The Prime Minister’s policy director in an internal email referred to an Indigenous group as “a friendly” and urged staff to answer their complaints to prevent them “from popping off at us.” The remarks concerned a confidential text from the Métis Nation of Alberta: “This is completely unacceptable.”
Public Works Minister Anita Anand’s department awarded the first of $81 million in sole-sourced Covid contracts to a Québec supplier one day after exchanging emails with the company, according to court records. The vendor was later sued for alleged breach of contract: “Time was of the essence.”
A final audit of foreign aid to Afghanistan says money was spent unwisely without achieving demonstrable results. International Development Minister Karina Gould made no mention of the findings in praising Canada’s efforts: “There was a pressure to spend, and it was too much and too fast.”
More than a quarter-century of litigation by lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber has ended in an Edmonton courtroom. The Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench dismissed Schreiber’s last appeal in long-running Charter challenges in the Airbus case: “Courts have repeatedly dealt with Mr. Schreiber’s Charter claims.”
On October 6, 1920 the city of Ottawa prepared for a riot. The mayor dispatched police to ring St. Patrick’s Hall. Inside, 700 Canadian Catholics, Sinn Féiners and sympathizers rallied for Irish nationalism. Eamon de Valera, a founder of the Irish republic, sent a note to delegates: “No enlightened Canadian will be able to stand by and see an unoffending people massacred…” Outside, 3000 Protestants from nearby Carleton County threatened to descend on the hall and crack heads.
Historian Robert McLaughlin captures the moment in Irish Canadian Conflict, a vivid account of a story now strangely erased from the Canadian experience, the clash of Canadian Protestants and Catholics on the Irish question.
Ancient hatreds from the old country were layered over all the raw nerves that jangled in the new: English versus French, monarchist versus republican, wealthy versus poor. Irish independence was among the great political upheavals of the 1920s, and there were more than a million Irish in Canada. When an Irish nationalist, Terrence MacSwiney, starved himself to death in a British jail in 1920, sympathy marches were held in Halifax, Montreal and Québec City.
“The siege mentality pervasive among Irish Protestants was transferred and even intensified on the colonial frontiers of British North America, where perceived threats from French-Canadian Catholicism and American republicanism were all encompassing,” writes McLaughlin.
It made for a hot time. The 1920 Ottawa riot was averted, yet in Toronto – the “Belfast of Canada,” they called it – street violence between Irish Catholics and Protestants erupted twenty-two times.
Irish Protestants were “members of the upper class,” McLaughlin explains. Catholics were seen as dirty, lazy, feckless drunks, “the shiftless type,” as Toronto Mayor Horatio Hocken put it in a 1921 speech to the Orange Order, an enthusiastic proponent of Protestant superiority.
The Order boasted 200,000 members in Canada. Its influence was so great no candidate could become premier of Ontario without its endorsement. Guests at a 1912 Toronto rally included three alderman, two militia officers and one MP.
Yet Catholics gave as good as they took. “If I were an Irishman, as I am a Canadian, and it was my country that had been treated as Ireland has, I would take my rifle in my hands and fight to the last drop of my blood,” one supporter told Canadian Sinn Féiners. The speaker was MP Armande Lavergne, son of Wilfrid Laurier, and a future deputy speaker of the Commons.
The mainly Catholic Self-Determination League had some 30,000 Canadian members in branches from Charlottetown to Vancouver. One organizer, Charles Foy, the mayor of Perth, Ont., proposed mandatory teaching of Irish history in Catholic schools. Another, Liberal MP Chubby Power, told a rally: “The British uniform which stood for justice and freedom, has been made the instrument of atrocity, arson and murder in Ireland.”
Power today is best known as Canada’s minister of the air force in the Second World War. His grandson, Lawrence Cannon, later served as Canadian ambassador to France.
By Holly Doan 
Irish Canadian Conflict and the Struggle for Irish Independence 1912-1925 by Robert McLaughlin, University of Toronto Press; 296 pages; ISBN 9781-4426-10972; $29.95
Hundreds and possibly thousands of Canadian citizens and local supporters remain trapped in Afghanistan after the military ended a rescue airlift, federal officials said yesterday. The Department of Foreign Affairs recommended they go into hiding: “Use your judgment.”
The Liberal Party yesterday had no comment on one of its candidates who questioned the Prime Minister’s “lack of judgment” on ethics. Candidate Martin Francoeur is running in Trois-Rivière, Que., a riding the Liberals last won 37 years ago: “Therein lies the problem with Justin Trudeau.”
Legal internet content, even the offensive kind, cannot be censored since the web is “not subject to the same controls that exist in traditional media,” a Québec judge has ruled. The decision came in the case of a Facebook user falsely accused of harassment: “It would have the effect of granting everyone the power to censor the comments of others on the sole basis that this content could be considered disagreeable.”
Canadians’ support for trade with China fell by more than a tenth from the outbreak of the pandemic, says in-house research by the Department of Foreign Affairs. Reliance on China contractors for medical supplies also prompted Canadians to worry about “pandemic planning” in trade policy: ‘It should ensure preparedness to a great extent.’
