Blacklock's Reporter

Canadians have a complex relationship with success and failure. That’s strange in a capitalist society where city life is a weekly succession of petty contests. Success is caricatured as a triumph of positive thinking that culminates in a prize, like winning on Dragon’s Den. Failure is a vaguely shameful exhibition of personal weakness: “The Morgans lost their house!” Neither is accurate. Winners and losers strive, and even successful people fail from time to time. Billy Durant, the Michigan wagon maker who created General Motors, went bankrupt in 1936 and ended his career as manager of a bowling alley. It must have been a well-run bowling alley. Successful people like to run things. READ MORE

Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday denied he was ever lobbied by developers to endorse a $1.45 billion plan to buy distressed Vancouver condos at taxpayers’ expense. Carney did not say if he personally held shares in any British Columbia development as he does in Ontario: "Mark Carney helped build this system." READ MORE

The Department of National Defence in a newly-declassified report described Ukraine as a “no man’s land” of organized crime and political corruption. The confidential document was written in 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union: "Bribery and theft are rife." READ MORE

Federal regulators yesterday disclosed the Royal Bank paid $4.25 million in fines for overcharging hundreds of thousands of credit card customers in breach of the Bank Act. It was the largest fine to date against RBC: 'It reflects significant harm to customers.' READ MORE

The Department of Foreign Affairs yesterday would not disclose the cost of reopening a consulate in Phoenix that was closed 14 years ago to save taxpayers’ money. The new Arizona office follows an internal audit that complained of costly missions in the United States: "Canada maintains a large mission footprint in the United States requiring considerable effort and expenditures." READ MORE

Muttering that you’d like to kill your boss is not an automatic firing offence, a British Columbia labour board has ruled. The decision came in the case of a North Vancouver cleaning lady, 60, fired last Christmas after a bad day at work: "She does not pose a danger." READ MORE

Cabinet should adopt as a principle the validity of “Indigenous laws,” says a Canadian Human Rights Commission report. “Indigenous ways of life and Indigenous laws are not seen as valid as Canadian law,” wrote the Commission. READ MORE