Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault yesterday recommended Parliament prohibit foreign meddling in elections prior to the start of a campaign. It followed a similar proposal in a private Senate bill that lapsed three years ago: “It is a critical exercise.”
Defence Minister Anita Anand yesterday said the military will launch a new recruitment campaign for the army, navy and air force. Anand in testimony at the Commons defence committee made no mention of the recent loss of Canadian Armed Forces members due to a vaccine mandate: “We have to make sure we have the right number of people.”
Achieving climate goals will be difficult and painful, a Liberal MP said yesterday. MP Ryan Turnbull (Whitby, Ont.) said all Canadians are “going to have to switch our lifestyles” to meet emissions targets: “That is going to be painful.”
Canadians’ paper mail would have more privacy protection than email under a cabinet bill pending in the Senate, a federal lawyer testified yesterday. Liberal-appointed senators have opposed Bill S-7 An Act To Amend The Customs Act: “What’s the worst that could happen if the legislation is passed?”
A federal agency had ample warning of rising passenger volumes before hours-long delays at airports, figures show. The Canadian Air Transport Security Authority knew for months that travel volumes were predictably doubling and tripling from 2021 levels: “Additional funding will be necessary.”
The Public Health Agency yesterday said it will fund new research on the effects of Covid on the nation’s children. It follows an earlier report that school closures and lockdowns were more disruptive than the coronavirus: “There is much we still need to know.”
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault and five staff billed more than $100,000 to attend a United Nations climate conference, newly-released records show. Air fare for the six cost more than $37,000 including $11,246 for Guilbeault, who called for urgent action on climate change: “We need more environmentalists in the House.”
A Saskatchewan Conservative MP is the first parliamentarian in 75 years to be barred from her Commons seat. MP Cathay Wagantall (Yorkton-Melville) said she was escorted off Parliament Hill Friday by the Sergeant-at-Arms after declining to disclose her vaccine status. The last MP barred from the House was a Communist spy: “There is nothing that validates this kind of behaviour.”
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is “too busy” to mind her budget bill, say MPs. Opposition members of the Commons finance committee submitted a rewritten bill with dozens of amendments: “We have suggested to delete, delete, delete.”
Federal agencies are warehousing millions of rapid Covid test kits only weeks after Parliament voted to spend billions more with suppliers. Total spending on rapid tests is more than $4 billion to date including millions of kits the government could not give away: “We are just actually in the midst of loading up.”
Federal candidates in Prairie provinces and Ontario were most likely to campaign door to door in the nation’s first pandemic election, new data show. An Elections Canada survey also found winning candidates were more likely to have asked for votes in person: ‘Despite the need for pandemic precautions 7 in 10 candidates interacted with electors by going door to door.’
A recent poll
in the United Kingdom
asked people
who is best suited
to reign after Queen Elizabeth II.
Prince William came first,
winning a commanding 63 percent
of the votes.
The most favourite royal.
His father
must be proud.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, writes for Blacklock’s each and every Sunday)
It’s unfashionable today to recall the settlement of the West as a romantic era. Yet not every sodbuster was an agent of genocide, and very many sincere people dedicated their lives to building up a young country with genuine affection for the land and its people. When Sam Steele lay on his deathbed in England in 1919, he asked that they bury him in Winnipeg where he started his career as a $1.25-a day constable with the North-West Mounted Police.
Well into the 1950s, generations of Canadian schoolchildren remembered Sam Steele as the most famous policeman in the country. He was renowned not for any extraordinary crime-busting exploit but as an honest lawman in an era of hornswogglers. Steele was famous enough that he published his 1914 memoirs Forty Years In Canada, and his son Harwood in 1956 recounted Steele’s life in The Morning Call, “a truly wretched book” filled with many factual errors, writes historian Rod Macleod, professor emeritus at the University of Alberta.
Macleod fills the gap with Sam Steele: A Biography, a colourful true-to-life account of the man and his incredible era. Macleod captures a land we left behind when Western Canada was a white space on the 19th century map interrupted only by remote outposts: Fort Garry, Fort Macleod, Fort Calgary, Fort Edmonton.
Steele at 26 joined a Mounted Police trek from Winnipeg to Edmonton. Today it is a 14-hour drive. It took them four months, riding with two field guns and 93 cattle butchered for meat along the way. “The routine was one of very early starts,” writes Macleod. The trekkers rose at 4 am and rode all day through heat and cold.
Prof. Macleod recounts a visit by Governor General Lord Stanley to Alberta’s Blood Reserve in 1889: “The Governor General and his entourage arrived in Lethbridge by train but from there they traveled in carriages and slept in tents for a couple of days. There were only nine people in the party but they certainly did not travel light; Steele had to provide a mounted escort and fourteen four-horse teams for the party and their baggage.” Later Lord Stanley relaxed with a wolf hunt in the foothills. Much later he invented the Stanley Cup.
Steele achieved fame in the Yukon gold rush acting as police, court and customs officer among hard-drinking prospectors on the Alaska frontier. Steele himself could down a quart of whiskey at a sitting but was so scrupulous in his professional duties it made him a national hero.
“We had a dreadful time of it going down some enormous hills,” Steele wrote in 1898. “Our horses frequently fell, and mine rolled over me several times.”
In Yukon Territory Steele decreed no prospector could make his way to the gold camps without six months’ worth of supplies – a ton of food – and none could depart without paying a 10 percent federal royalty on mining profits. “What on earth right have a few thousand foreigners to take out of the country that there is in it for nothing?” wrote Steele. “We provide them with officers, peace, order and law and must the rest of the people of Canada pay for that?”
Sam Steele: A Biography captures the land when it was all big sky and windswept Prairie, and rugged people trying to create a nation.
By Holly Doan
Sam Steele: A Biography, by Rod Macleod; University of Alberta Press; 320 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-4798; $39.99
A third law enforcement executive, former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly, yesterday denied advising cabinet to use emergency powers against the Freedom Convoy. Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino claimed February 28, “We had to invoke the Emergencies Act and we did so on the basis of non-partisan professional advice from law enforcement.”
Cabinet is concealing the true cost of a landmark bill that would extend official bilingualism to the private sector, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. Actual costs were more than a quarter billion, said analysts: ‘Departments have not announced details and refused to provide these details.’
