One federal department suspended employees without pay under its vaccine mandate though virtually its entire workforce, 99 percent, had a Covid shot, says an internal audit. Cabinet has yet to disclose the total number of staff targeted under the now-disbanded mandate: “The mandates weren’t a law.”
The Canada Revenue Agency has spent more than $116 million on carbon tax paperwork, records show. Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier in a report to Parliament said 330 employees are now assigned to collecting the fuel charge and processing rebates: “What are the annual costs?”
Trade Minister Mary Ng avoided any questioning by senators over sweetheart contracting in her first committee appearance since being censured in an ethics report. Members of the foreign affairs committee made no mention of Ng’s breach of an Act of Parliament though she invited senators to ask anything they liked: “Wonderful.”
The Canadian Transportation Agency yesterday would not release raw data on complaints filed against the worst airlines. The regulator instead rated carriers based on complaints per flight with one discounter topping the grievance list: “They’re never going to get on top of this.”
The runaway freight train that caused Canada’s deadliest postwar rail disaster passed four safety inspections on its final trip, records show. Details of the 2013 Lac-Mégantic wreck are cited in Québec Superior Court documents: “Defects were immediately corrected on site.”
RCMP prepared for a costly month-long Freedom Convoy siege in Ottawa even after cabinet invoked the Emergencies Act, records show. Internal memos indicate police booked more than a million dollars’ worth of hotel rooms and cross-Canada charter flights: “We may have urgent, last-minute requirements.”
Contracting at Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez’s department is haphazard, says an internal audit. Investigators said millions were spent with little oversight: “By its nature procurement is inherently exposed to certain fraud-related risks.”
Federal subsidies continue to support the work of the Community Media Advocacy Centre, the Montréal consultancy cited for anti-Semitism. A taxpayer-funded academic journal published Centre research even after its senior consultant Laith Marouf fantasized on Twitter about shooting Jews: “Are you telling us then all of this took place in your ministry without you being aware of it?”
Cabinet does not know how many guns are smuggled into Canada, says a federal briefing note. The Department of Public Safety said it was at a loss to estimate the scope of gun running despite budgeting $312 million over five years to combat smuggling: “The total number of firearms successfully smuggled into Canada is unknown.”
A British Columbia businessman has doubled his damages after being defamed in an online article. The more libel is spread on the internet, the more publishers should pay, said the B.C. Court of Appeal: “The extent of the circulation of a newspaper or newsletter may be taken into account.”
It’s mid-winter.
Double-glass windows
in the manager’s office
tightly shut.
Heater ON.
Source of chill
a mystery.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
When Powell River, B.C. marked its centennial in 2010 Powell River Living magazine in a special issue enthusiastically recalled the mill town’s first hotel, built in 1911, the first vaudeville theatre (1913), the first dial telephones (1921). There was culture, too, the founding of the annual music fest International Choral Kathaumixw. That’s Welsh, not Indian.
Elsie Paul read the articles in Powell River Living. Her great-uncle was last hereditary chief of the Sliammon people who thrived in the region for millennia. Paul did not enjoy the articles about vaudeville and dial phones. “They’re celebrating this and celebrating that, and how Powell River originated,” she said. “I’m thinking, we were here!”
Written As I Remember It is warm and honest, partly a memoir, part ethnography, part Farmer’s Almanac. It draws on a Sliammon Elder’s oral history of a skilled and prosperous people who lived and died here long before they built a company town and named it for an English surgeon.
There are teachings on grief and marriage, tips on how to dry salmon or cure a colicky baby and legends of the people like the story of the telepathic twins. Two brothers were separated as one traveled to nearby Texada Island to camp and fish and his worried mother asked one twin to check on the other: “I’ll meditate on it.’ And he did.”
Emerging later from a trance, he told his mother: “Oh, I found him. He’s OK.” The second brother on returning home explained he was camping on the island when he saw lightning approach, striking three times, each time coming closer. “So he said to his travelling companion, ‘That was my brother. He’s looking for me. Now he’s gone. He’s found us.’”
Written As I Remember It is drawn from 36 hours of recordings with Elsie Paul transcribed, translated and compiled by granddaughter Harmony Johnson and Dr. Paige Raibmon of the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. Here Paul recalls conversations with her grandparents in a narrative that spans more than a century of coastal life.
There was no Christmas or birthdays. “For us as First Nations people I think every day was pretty much the same. It’s the seasons that our people honoured and acknowledged.”
Marriages were arranged. Dowries were paid typically in property like canoes. Children were frightened by the legend of the wild man of the woods who gathered up small boys and girls that foolishly wandered from camp, trapped them in a basket made of writhing snakes and then roasted them for supper: “That was real frightening. I don’t know if that would be acceptable today to scare your children like that, but it worked!”
There were no elections, no politics, no police. Justice was restorative and not adversarial: “In the old system your people dealt with those matters. You had to sit with a family you offended. You had to sit in a circle, and you apologized, and you each had something to say. Say you’re sorry. You admit to what you’ve done. And the people that you victimized have a right to say whatever they have to say. And you resolve that by forgiveness, shaking hands and making amends. And all that style is gone.”
And there was the food, a selection that would cost $120 in a Bay Street restaurant: fresh herring and venison, duck stew, wild blackberries, smoked clams and the famous salmon. “When the fish came here, they would honour the salmon.”
“The oldtimers would go down the beach and welcome, raise their hands to the sea. ‘Come,’ you know, ‘You’ve come back!’”
Written As I Remember It captures a vanished world that survived for 10,000 years and was just as worthy as mill towns with telephones.
Written As I Remember It: Teachings from the Life of a Sliammon Elder by Elsie Paul, with Paige Raibmon & Harmony Johnson; UBC Press; 488 pages; ISBN #9780-7748-27119; $39.95
The Department of Public Safety in internal memos acknowledged the Freedom Convoy was not a national security threat. The Access To Information documents contradict sworn testimony by Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino and were withheld from Blacklock’s until Parliament adjourned for Christmas: “The RCMP is not aware of any national security criminal activity having taken place during the protest.”
Senators yesterday endorsed another budget increase to almost $127 million a year. Figures show in six years the Senate payroll grew by a third while overall spending jumped 70 percent: “We are a publicly-funded monopoly. We don’t have an incentive to change.”
Cabinet should act against “irresponsible speculation” by media that Chinese Communist agents targeted 11 candidates in the 2019 election, Senator Yuen Pau Woo (B.C.) said yesterday. Woo claimed allegations had turned into a witch hunt: “Why is the government not calling out this egregious example of disinformation?”
