The Department of Veterans Affairs says it didn’t have time to invite Afghan War veterans to speak at the ceremonial groundbreaking for a National Monument to Afghan War dead. The 40-minute ceremony did hear from non-combatants including Veterans Affairs Minister Jill McKnight: “Why?”
Owners of a heavy duty Russian cargo plane grounded in Toronto by cabinet order are appealing to the Federal Court of Appeal to remove the airline from a federal blacklist. Volga-Dnepr Airlines LLC told judges it played no role in the Ukrainian war, and had freighted cargo in the past for Canada’s Department of National Defence: ‘It transported military cargo for countries around the world including NATO support.’
Building a single high speed railway tunnel to the Island of Montréal will cost taxpayers more than $2.5 billion, the Budget Office said yesterday. The calculation was included among figures showing cabinet underestimated the cost of its regional electrified rail project by billions: ‘Tunnels are major construction cost drivers.’
Cabinet must uphold criminal sanctions on drug trafficking following a Charter Of Rights ruling by a Vancouver judge, Opposition members said yesterday. Conservative MP Frank Caputo (Kamloops-Thompson, B.C.), former Crown prosecutor, predicted greater public disorder if cabinet does not act: “There is no constitutional right to sell heroin.”
Taxpayers will “make a lot of money” on oil exports to Asia, Prime Minister Mark Carney said yesterday. Carney declared permits for a new $43.7 billion pipeline from Bruderheim, Alta. to Pacific terminals at Delta, B.C. will be fast-tracked within 12 months: “It is clear this is a project of national interest.”
Cabinet proposes to launch a Canadian version of the European Union’s Solidarity Corps, a youth volunteer program. It follows earlier federal programs promoting youth volunteerism that cost taxpayers millions: ‘In Norway, the European Solidarity Corps offers opportunities for young people. The government is looking into the possibility of developing its own civic corps in Canada.’
Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday omitted all reference to Indian Residential School graves or genocide in observing National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. It followed the Senate’s defeat of a motion endorsed by the Assembly of First Nations to criminalize “denialism.”
Cabinet aides hired a former CBC Radio announcer to coach Annette Ryan prior to her appearance as Budget Officer at Commons committee hearings, records show. MPs on the government operations committee wanted a candidate other than Ryan, a former finance department executive who knew Mark Carney at Oxford in the 1990s: ‘That person who is a former journalist peppered me with a few questions.’
Cabinet must ensure quotas go “way, way, way down” in its updated Immigration Levels Plan due by month’s end, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner (Calgary Nose Hill) said yesterday. The call was prompted by the Prime Minister’s remarks to New York journalists that “some controlled increase in the population” was a matter of timing.
Cabinet is quietly concealing more records than ever, Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard has written the Senate. The warning followed a single clause in an omnibus budget bill, C-31: “My office was not consulted.”
