Two climate programs launched on a $300 million promise of new jobs and lower emissions could prove neither after seven years, says a Department of Natural Resources report. Managers “stopped collecting” data that would establish whether taxpayers received value for money: “It will most likely be too difficult and too late to identify weaknesses or errors.”
The Department of Employment confirms it has begun writing off millions in unrecoverable pandemic relief cheques paid to ineligible claimants. It would not say how much taxpayers lost: “We knew.”
The Commissioner of Elections in an unusual enforcement action is taking a New Democrat riding association to Federal Court for nonpayment of a fine. The Commissioner would not comment on the $1,000 debt collection: “The Notice Of Violation required the debtor to pay.”
U.S. President Donald Trump cited Canadian dairy quotas in threatening a new round of tariffs by July 4. His remarks Friday on social media came the same day Bloc Québécois MPs celebrated passage of their private bill shielding milk producers from trade concessions: “Passing this bill would no doubt be a provocative move.”
Customs officers now have nearly 13,000 firearms at border crossings and airports, says a Canada Border Services Agency audit. The arsenal included millions of rounds of ammunition: “It is recognized that Border Services officers face inherent risks.”
Thank God It’s Friday
has little to do
with God Almighty.
It’s a polite way
of telling co-workers, managers,
that after being in their company
for the fifth day in a row
you’ve had just about all you can take.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
In 2012 three residents of Huntingdon, Que. complained one of the biggest transport companies on the continent, CSX Corp., was ruining their lives. CSX began shunting freight cars through the town at all hours. Locomotives idled for days at a time. The rumble of diesel engines was so disruptive it rattled windows. Neighbours could not escape the noise inside their own homes.
One resident, Shirley O’Connor, said she begged CSX to expropriate her house. No one would buy it, and she could not afford to move. In desperation, Mrs. O’Conner filed a formal complaint with the Canadian Transportation Agency – and won. A federal panel ordered the billion-dollar corporation to find another place to switch its freight cars.
This is the poignancy of Unjust By Design, an analysis of the nation’s administrative tribunals like the Transportation Agency. These are the obscure boards that rule over pensions, labour standards, workplace compensation, landlord and tenant disputes and a million other David and Goliath battles that affect ordinary lives.
“What judicial tribunals do really matters – often desperately,” wrote author Ron Ellis. Yet they are held to little independent scrutiny, they are often run by patronage hacks, and many people are indifferent to their function. As Ellis put it, “Hardly anyone cares.”
Ellis was an Osgoode professor and member of the bar for 50 years. Unjust by Design is an unnerving exposé of a system with sweeping powers, like the notorious Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal that evicted more than 150,000 tenants in a five-year period without any judicial scrutiny.
“What judicial tribunal members do is too important for them to be pursuing their own political or ideological goals, or dabbling in public service, or wending their way to a comfortable retirement,” wrote Ellis. “Just like judges, they are engaged in serious business where the consequence of getting things wrong may be the infliction on the parties who appear before them, and on their families, of injustices and hardships of the gravest kind.”
In the U.S. adjudicators have been vetted for competence since 1946. In the U.K. tribunals have been scrutinized by a federal agency since 1958. In Australia the work of panels is similarly reviewed by statute since 1975. In Canada, nothing. Appointments are subject to patronage with little oversight of decisions or checks for competence.
“In many U.S. states, a judge’s position is an elective office, and Canadian lawyers have always been smugly dismissive of the U.S. practice of electing and/or re-electing judges,” Ellis wrote. “Never do we stop and think that, in Canada, thousands of judicial tribunal adjudicators with as much power as elected U.S. judges to decide rights disputes, inflict injustice, and cause harm are subject to a system of idiosyncratic renewal that is obviously far less principled than even an election-based system.”
Unjust by Design is unsettling. It documents a kind of back-alley justice system that functions without any of the controls we impose on courts. “A train wreck,” Ellis called it. And it does not appear to matter unless you are a tenant, or an injured worker, or a homeowner whose lifetime equity is lost to CSX Corp.
By Holly Doan
Unjust by Design, by Ron Ellis; UBC Press; 388 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-24781; $34.95
A $49 billion-a year tax on financial trades and transactions first proposed by New Democrats 26 years ago “could happen,” says the Liberal-appointed chair of the Senate budget committee. “You could get revenue from people,” said Senator Lucie Moncion (Ont.): “What would you think if this government were to decide that when you buy a share, there’s a tax on doing so?”
A Liberal-appointed senator yesterday said he received so many abusive calls over his opposition to a Liberal bill that he told staff to stop answering the phone. “Canada is becoming a country of extremes,” said Senator Paul Prosper (N.S.): “Gone is the ability to have moderate social discourse.”
The Senate yesterday passed cabinet’s “nation building” bill under deadline imposed by Prime Minister Mark Carney. “I will trust,” said one senator.
A federal labour board has overturned the firing of a Service Canada clerk caught snooping through Employment Insurance claims. Evidence in the case showed it “was the office culture” to poke through private records: “In some quirky way, she believed she was being efficient because it only took two to three minutes.”
The Senate yesterday observed a seniority record with election of Senator Fabian Manning (Nfld. & Labrador) as chair of the fisheries committee for 14 consecutive years. “I never fished in my life,” joked Manning.
Fewer than 40 percent of federal transactions were actively tracked and monitored during the pandemic, the Treasury Board has disclosed. The figures follow warnings of waste and fraud in hurried contracting worth billions: “We can have the best laws in the world, but if nobody is ensuring oversight of the process, that’s where we wind up in problems of waste, of potential fraud.”
Liberal appointee Senator Yuen Pau Woo (B.C.) yesterday served notice of a motion to “examine the risks to Canada and Canadians of complicity” in alleged war crimes committed by Jews. Woo was among 11 Liberal appointees, a tenth of the Senate, to signed petitions accusing Israel of genocide: “We urge senators to do more.”
Senator Patrick Brazeau (Que.), 50, yesterday fainted on the Chamber floor, prompting an immediate suspension of Senate business. A medical doctor rushed to Brazeau’s aid as senators cried out: “Oh!”
