Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre yesterday described a proposed $90 billion regional high speed rail venture as a costly scheme to reward friends of the Liberal Party. His remarks followed a report by the Crown corporation Alto that acknowledged public wariness over the expense: “Liberal insiders, activists, lawyers will get rich.”
A Liberal-appointed trustee yesterday quit the board of a federal museum with an appeal to Heritage Minister Marc Miller to investigate anti-Israel content. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights on Saturday is to open an exhibit depicting the founding of Israel as a catastrophe: “A Museum that purports to tell stories about history does not get to change history.”
State-subsidized Chinese automakers are eager to ship vehicles to Canada, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said yesterday after concluding a trip to the People’s Republic. Joly did not explain how imports would clear a federal ban on slave-made goods: “All the different Chinese electric vehicle automakers I met are interested in having access.”
Canadians call China a greater threat than Iran, says in-house federal research on security. Polling by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service followed Prime Minister Mark Carney’s announcement of a “new partnership” with China: “Half of respondents, 52 percent, feel Canada is more dangerous than it was five years ago.”
The Canada Revenue Agency rates as a “success” an $18 million chatbot that gives taxpayers wrong answers 10 percent of the time, according to Access To Information records. The Agency’s own Taxpayer Bill Of Rights states all Canadians “have the right to complete, accurate, clear and timely information.”
Another stamp hike is near after cabinet on Saturday waived a requirement that it approve Canada Post rates. The post office has complained the regulation led to months-long delays in adjusting prices: “The stamp rate in Canada has not kept pace.”
The Department of Immigration will speed processing of illegal immigrants and refugee claimants in a bid to clear a four-year backlog. Cabinet in a legal notice Saturday proposed strict new deadlines following a dramatic increase in claims: “How did we arrive at this point?”
A 2026 tax cut is a net benefit despite any corresponding reductions in credits for the poorest tax filers, says a Department of Finance report. Critics had warned of “unintended consequences” in lowering benefits for the elderly and disabled: “For nearly all Canadians who pay tax, savings from the middle class tax cut will outweigh the reduction.”
George W. Bush
presents a collection of portraits:
heads of state
met in person.
The sharp eye
of the former president
captures revealing views
of these individuals:
Two dimensional,
no deeper than oil on canvas.
Remind them of the latest scandal,
or throw the truth in their face,
and they look through you –
unmoving,
unblinking.
Oh, there’s a self-portrait too.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Few authors possess the skill to take an everyday image and turn it just slightly, in Twilight Zone fashion, to reveal a startling and intriguing truth. Professor Joan Sangster of Trent University does just that in The Iconic North. To read Sangster’s account is to question every common media depiction of the Arctic.
“The North has been rendered exotic, romantic, terrifying, sublime, enigmatic, otherworldly and intrinsically Canadian, and some of these adjectives are equated not just with the landscape but with the original inhabitants of the North,” Sangster writes.
This is not ancient history. Parks Canada spent more than $21.5 million looking for an English shipwreck, “a salient reminder that we need an ongoing critical analysis of a romanticized North ‘discovered’ by white explorers,” says Sangster. The Franklin Expedition was a famous failure of no scientific or exploratory value whatsoever. Media’s fascination with the sailors’ deaths is striking.
Millennia-old culture of Inuit is not documentary material in itself. It’s the fact 129 Englishmen froze to death that justified CBC-TV specials secretly subsidized with a $98,000 Parks Canada grant. “Fantastic media coverage,” the agency enthused.
Iconic North challenges the narrative. Implicit in Arctic imagery in most TV documentaries, newspaper features and school textbooks is the suggestion history began with inhabitants’ contact with whites. Sangster calls it a “European ‘obsession’ with the romanticized image of stoic but happy Inuit facing environmental adversity with unending cheerfulness.” The propaganda is not harmless. “These images thus helped to sustain Canada’s distinctive brand of internal colonialism,” she notes.
Iconic North is meticulously researched. Sangster has a matter-of-fact writing style. In 400 devastating pages she makes the case our popularized conceptions of the Arctic are Eurocentric, condescending and inaccurate, “constantly invoked in the mainstream media as Canada’s last frontier, one where settlers and Indigenous peoples were engaged in constructing new relationships in contrast to the old, tattered antagonism of southern Indian and white.”
Sangster examines RCMP, a short-lived 1959 CBC cop drama that depicted the exploits of Jacques Gagnier, a “paternal and benevolent” Mountie in the fictional town of Schamattawa “bringing insight, law and justice to bear on Indigenous peoples and their problems.” In one episode Constable Gagnier saves a whole village of children from gun-toting hostage takers “while their Aboriginal parents stand by, cowed into fearful acquiescence.” Producers and viewers alike took it for granted that Indigenous parents were too weak or inept to care for their own children
Sangster also recounts I Was No Lady: I Followed The Call Of The Wild published by Ryerson Press, the 1959 memoirs of Jean Godsell, Scottish-born wife of a Hudson’s Bay manager. Godsell has trouble with an Inuit houseboy she calls Johnny, and recalls “sage advice” from her husband: “‘He’s just trying you out,’ he remarked. ‘He wants to see how far he can go with you. It’s a typical Indian trick. Give him hell,’ he reiterated, ‘if you don’t master him now, you never will.’ Never will I forget the look of stupefaction on John’s face when I finally sailed into him…From then on, on my husband’s advice, I gave him what-for on an average of once a month. Often I had to make an excuse for doing so. At first this seemed rather mean but I soon learned, as everyone does who handles Indians, that it was the only way to keep him in line.”
No Mississippi planter ever put it more succinctly.
By Holly Doan
The Iconic North: Cultural Constructions of Aboriginal Life in Postwar Canada, by Joan Sangster; University of British Columbia Press; 400 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-31840; $34.95
Canada Post paid bonuses last year while losing a record $1.57 billion, CEO Doug Ettinger yesterday disclosed. Payments were made even as cabinet told the post office to “cut the fat.”
MPs yesterday demanded Public Works Minister Joel Lightbound release a confidential report on postal service cuts. Cabinet has withheld the 2025 document for months: “Parliamentarians, municipalities, workers, citizens still do not have a detailed plan of what is going to happen.”
The Canada Border Services Agency yesterday said it will likely investigate whether imported China-made battery electric cars are assembled with slave-made parts. Conservative MP Michael Kram (Regina-Wascana) questioned why cabinet didn’t first check before approving the import of more than a quarter million Chinese vehicles: “Would you say it’s more than a little bit irresponsible?”
The Senate yesterday by a 58 to 4 vote passed into law a cryptocurrency ban in election financing. The bill is the first of its kind that prohibits use of bitcoin in ordinary transactions where traceable money is accepted: “Changes to prevent anonymous and hard-to-trace funding channels are welcome.”
Environmental groups opposed to coal mining may petition cabinet to blacklist the rock as toxic, the Department of Health said yesterday. The remarks came in response to a Commons petition sponsored by the Green Party: “Regulate the mining, use, export and import of thermal coal in Canada.”
