Labour Minister Patty Hajdu yesterday said cabinet seeks “better relationships” with organized labour and employers. Cabinet ten times in two years unilaterally issued orders under the Canada Labour Code to quash legal strikes, a record: “Strikes are very disruptive.”
The Public Health Agency in an April 30 memo said measles was not “widespread across Canada” despite a 2025 outbreak. Canada’s loss of measles-free status with the World Health Organization was merely a “classification used to guide surveillance,” it said.
An unidentified automaker is drafting a secret plan to export Canadian-made passenger cars to Asia and the Middle East, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said yesterday. MPs on the Commons industry committee expressed skepticism: “No company has come to any committee on Parliament Hill or gone to the media to suggest that this is a viable business plan.”
Canadians are resigned to failure in eliminating U.S. tariffs, says in-house Privy Council research. Federal focus groups were unable to reach any consensus on whether Prime Minister Mark Carney was “on the right track” after promising to negotiate a win for Canada: “Few thought that it was likely that an agreement could be achieved where all tariffs would be removed.”
Parliament has no business policing political speech to ensure its truthfulness, Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon said yesterday. It was up to voters, not the House of Commons, to “determine the truthfulness of claims” by public office holders, he said.
The Commons yesterday by a vote of 199 to 139 rejected a Conservative motion to sustain property rights after a judge granted Indigenous title to 1,846 acres near Richmond, B.C. including private lots. One cabinet minister said she “agrees with some of the principles of the motion” but would not debate a judgment under appeal: “We recognize the Cowichan decision has caused uncertainty and anxiety.”
The Department of Employment says its Canada Summer Jobs program does help student hiring through 50 percent wage subsidies but cannot say how many jobs it creates. A first-ever analysis called it “a good policy tool” at more than a quarter billion a year: “How do you know if the program is achieving its objectives without measuring exactly that?”
Cabinet will not disclose the budget for the June 8 swearing-in of the new Governor General. The ceremony is the first of its kind since Prime Minister Mark Carney promised to cut spending and “make tough choices.”
Mark Carney misidentified the first Alberta prime minister in a videotaped tribute to “great Albertans,” records show. Carney’s office could not name the first Alberta prime minister when asked: “I think when I come to Parliament of the great Albertans.”
Parliament should withhold federal funding from municipalities that fail to build more homes, says the Canadian Human Rights Commission. It promoted a variation of a 2025 campaign proposal by the Opposition to reward local authorities that build and punish those that don’t: “Municipal governments would be required to demonstrate concrete progress.”
Indigenous Canadians should be formally consulted on all new foreign treaties, the Assembly of First Nations has told the Senate. Consultation with chiefs must be mandatory, they said: “First Nations have engaged in trade since time immemorial.”
New CRTC data confirm a sharp generational divide between Canadians who rely on TV newscasts and those who get their news on the internet. “A lower proportion used regular television as a primary source for their news and information content,” said in-house research.
The news channel
brings stories from the storm
into my living room.
My eyes to the screen;
my heart skips a beat.
With a cleavage deeper than usual,
the commentator seems prettier,
more attractive
than in any previous
disaster.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Police were not infrequent visitors to author Cheri DiNovo’s childhood home. All families have troubles but DiNovo’s make Angela’s Ashes look like a holiday camp. “I grew up in a violent, neurotic, narcissistic household where victims of their own personal traumas acted out in nasty, aggressive ways,” she writes. “This is not to blame any of them.”
Take Uncle Ken, one of the more responsible adults in the home. “It was Ken who took me to dance classes, Ken who took us shopping, Ken who drove us up to the family cottage and stayed with us there, Ken who financially supported us, Ken who always arrived at breakfast at the same time,” writes DiNovo.
“My breakfast was Sugar Crisp, white toast and milk. His, brown toast and coffee. It was also Ken who, one day as I was slurping down my second bowl of cereal, picked up a knife and slashed my Aunt Lorna across the neck.”
She ran away at 15 and sold LSD. “We assumed we would die young,” she writes.
DiNovo is a United Church minister and retired New Democrat member of the Ontario legislature. Her memoir The Queer Evangelist: A Socialist Clergy’s Radically Honest Tale recounts a world of Trotskyites, crusading pastors, Bay Street stock jobbers and colourful Damon Runyon street people that exists in a surprisingly small geographical space, a few square blocks of downtown Toronto. It is unrecognizable seven miles away in North York, let alone Revelstoke or Mount Pearl.
DiNovo makes it work because she is a gifted writer with a wry sense of humour. She boasts she was one of the few in her Trotsky study club who actually read Das Kapital, later drove a Lada and is still capable of pronouncing: “Capitalism is a sort of money addiction.”
“It’s a fabrication that capitalism thrives on competition,” she writes. “It doesn’t. It thrives on consolidation. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. The middle class empties out.”
“Capitalism was doomed,” she writes. Just as this begins to get tiresome, DiNovo recalls meeting a group of rich capitalist farmers among her rural congregation in Brucefield, Ont.
“I once asked my Bible study group why farmers worked so hard when they were sitting on so much land,” she recalls. “‘Why not sell most of it and retire? Buy a BMW and live in Florida?’ The women in the group looked at each other as if they’d never heard of such a thing and answered, ‘Then what would we do?’”
DiNovo served four terms in the legislature, becoming Party whip and caucus chair. Here, too, she writes with candour and irony. “The painful meetings are not with constituents whose problems the staff can handily solve, nor are they the ones where a bill or motion might draw attention to a serious political issue. The difficult ones are those you can see coming, where the constituent arrives with large binders, colour-coded inserts and briefcases full of paper. Inevitably their issues have something to do with a long saga of injustice, often genuine, at the hands of some bureaucracy or ministry.”
“These situations are usually very real and very hopeless,” she writes. “Our standard responses would be along the lines of ‘You’ve learned there’s very little justice in the justice system,’ or ‘You’ve learned there’s very little housing in the housing system.’ It always put me in mind of a scene in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina where people sleep outside bureaucrats’ doors waiting for a chance to be seen disdainfully for a minute or two.”
The Queer Evangelist is raw, a startling autobiography for a public office holder.
By Holly Doan
The Queer Evangelist: A Socialist Clergy’s Radically Honest Tale, by Cheri DiNovo; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 250 pages; ISBN 9781-7711-24898; $23.99
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board holds shares in a Chinese social media company used by Communist Party agents to intimidate Conservatives in the last election, records show. The Board had no comment on millions invested in operators of WeChat, a platform used to distribute wanted posters of one candidate who was forced to suspend his campaign: ‘The RCMP intercepted a credible threat to harm me during the election.’
