The Canadian Human Rights Commission faces international naming and shaming after mistreating Black employees. A coalition of unions and human rights groups yesterday petitioned a United Nations agency to investigate misconduct by managers: “It has to start at the top.”
Cabinet confidentially polled Canadians on whether they’d stop eating meat for the sake of climate change, Access To Information records show. The suggestion was unpopular: “How frequently or infrequently have you made efforts to eat a more plant-based diet?”
The Commons public safety committee today opens hearings on auto theft following complaints of poor policing at Canadian ports by the Border Services Agency. One MP counted only a handful of inspectors at the Port of Montréal: “The X-ray scanner used for the containers only works about half the time.”
Canada is short about 90,000 doctors, nurses and other front line health care workers, says a Department of Health memo. The document for the Deputy Minister warned of a “health worker crisis.”
Parliament must end all subsidies earmarked for “diversity,” says People’s Party leader Maxime Bernier. Campaigning in an Ontario byelection, Bernier said his Party would “abolish all federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs and policies in the public service and federal institutions such as the Armed Forces.”
Tobacco smuggling is now worth $2.5 billion a year in lost tax revenue, the highest estimate to date, says one of Canada’s largest cigarette makers. Imperial Tobacco Canada in a submission to senators said smuggled cigarettes are worth nearly 40 percent of the market in some provinces: ‘Organized crime groups use it as a cash cow.’
Police officer
stops a city councilor
who had slowed down his vehicle
in an area known for prostitutes.
The ladies on the street
are the only ones in the story
not paid for
by my tax-payer dollars.
How can I make it up to them?
By Shai Ben-Shalom
In the village of Authie, France, population 1,500, it’s still possible to score a $56 hotel room with a nearby McDonald’s rated “catastrophique” on TripAdvisor. There is also a Rue des Canadiens “where the bodies of two murdered soldiers were placed on the street so that a tank could repeatedly run over them,” explains Canadian Battlefields Of The Second World War. In Authie in 1944 “wildly excited Hitler Youth began murdering Canadians while the battle still raged and continued killing prisoners systematically after the fighting ceased.” Murder victims numbered 37.
Authors Terry Copp and Matt Baker lead readers on an intriguing tour of the Normandy countryside that witnessed gallantry and atrocity. Take a drive down Highway D170, “one of the prettiest roads you will explore in Normandy,” they write. “This is one of the roads the Regina Rifles used in their advance inland on D-Day.” Names of the dead are immortalized in a village church.
Canadian Battlefields rises to the best tradition of war tour guides, juxtaposing tips on where to find a good, cheap lunch with concise accounts of horrific sacrifice where Canadians fought and died in “the hope of a better world.” The historical research is flawless; accompanying maps are compelling. Readers learn the actual location of parachute drop zones off the farm roads.
“The Canadian citizen army that fought in the Battle of Normandy played a role all out of proportion to its relative strength among the Allied armies,” the authors write: “Perhaps it is time to recognize the extraordinary achievements that marked the progress of the Canadians across Normandy’s fields of fire.”
“No one knew what the outcome of individual battles would be or how long the campaigns in Western Europe might last,” they note. “And no one knew exactly what was required of them.”
Readers are swept along the stony beach at Dieppe where 901 Canadians perished and 1,946 were taken prisoner in 1942. “The heroism of individuals could only accomplish minor miracles,” says Canadian Battlefields.
Only seven of 23 landing craft made it ashore that morning. Victims included tank crews drowned within sight of the beach. Canadian Battlefields takes readers through the seaside resort along a narrow lane to a nearby cemetery “beautifully kept,” it says.
And there is the village of Bretteville-sur-Laize, where the French erected a memorial to Private Gérard Doré of Roberval, Que., a veteran of the Fusiliers Mont-Royal. Doré enlisted at 15 and was dead at 16, “believed to be the youngest Canadian soldier killed in Normandy.” The marker reads: “Volunteer.”
By Holly Doan
Canadian Battlefields of the Second World War: Dieppe, D-Day and the Battle of Normandy, by Terry Copp and Matt Baker; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 250 pages; ISBN 9781-92680-41701; $24
Final costs of the ArriveCan program were ten times the original budget, two former managers yesterday told the Commons government operations committee. “I delivered a detailed costing of $6.3 million,” testified Cameron MacDonald (pictured right), former director general with the Canada Border Services Agency: “We are not responsible for the $60 million.”
A majority of Canadians are confused and anxious about climate change while 20 percent are uninterested, says in-house Privy Council “behavioural science research.” The federal study obtained through Access To Information showed worriers and skeptics alike were found in all regions and walks of life: “Canadians are a diverse group.”
Costs of federal employee salaries and benefits topped $67 billion last year, a record, Budget Officer Yves Giroux said yesterday. Giroux earlier described growth in payroll expenses as “worrisome.”
Justice Marie-Josée Hogue yesterday pleaded with immigrant groups to testify without fear of retaliation at the Commission on Federal Interference. Hogue promised extraordinary precautions for anyone with evidence against foreign agents: “They fear reprisals if they provide information.”
CBC’s Ombudsman yesterday dismissed viewer complaints of bias over a TV show on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Mormon viewers called it a “hit piece.”
Housing Minister Sean Fraser has launched national fundraising but yesterday would not comment on whether he is campaigning to lead the Liberal Party. “Hopeful about the future!” wrote one Fraser fundraiser: “While many are counting the federal Liberals as being dead on arrival in the next election I think the outcome of this is far from clear.”
The Department of Public Works has “sufficient suspicion” of wrongdoing in ArriveCan contracting, a manager testified yesterday. Assistant Deputy Minister Catherine Poulin made the admission under questioning at the Commons public accounts committee: “People would be fired for this.”
