Blacklock's Reporter

To read this delightful account of wartime eating is to comprehend for the first time our mothers’ fascination with liver. Livestock organs have today vanished from many supermarkets including items that butchers once creatively marketed as “variety meats”: calves’ brains, tongue, tripe and kidneys. None blighted so many childhoods as liver: liver loaf, minced liver, liver sauté, and fried liver and onions, a dense, grey, mealy dish that could only be choked down with ketchup. “Eat liver frequently,” decreed the 1944 Official Food Rules. An entire generation of homemakers took the admonishment to heart long after victory was ours. Food Will Win The War is a fresh and lively account of the Canadian dinner plate. It peers into the corners of the historical cupboard to uncover the most intriguing details of the home front experience. Researchers rarely delve into diet in documenting the past, though the results are always revealing. Who is not wiser on learning Lester Pearson’s favourite lunch was a poached egg? Or that Britain’s Ministry of Food decreed rice soup with haddock as Christmas Day supper in 1917? READ MORE

Dr. Mona Nemer, cabinet’s Chief Science Advisor, was caught trying to bill taxpayers for a personal holiday in Paris, Access To Information records showed yesterday. Her staff withdrew thousands in expenses after the Department of Industry challenged the charge: "We have a situation." READ MORE

The Mounties last year disciplined 45 civilian employees for wrongdoing from illegal drug use to “being dishonest,” says a new report. Commissioner Michael Duheme said the public deserved better: "Canadians expect the highest standards from us." READ MORE

Cabinet says the Bank of Canada didn’t mean to act unlawfully when it hired replacement workers in breach of the Canada Labour Code. “The Bank respects the law,” cabinet wrote in response to a Commons petition censuring management for misconduct in a lengthy strike with the Public Service Alliance of Canada. READ MORE

A million Canadians a year are now using free clinics to file their annual tax returns, according to Revenue Agency figures. The latest data follow remarks by a former Minister of Revenue that most taxpayers were functionally illiterate: "When these people receive documents, they are not able to understand what is written there." READ MORE

The Department of Transport yesterday commissioned a $100,000 study on anticipated benefits and job losses resulting from widespread use of robot cars. In-house research earlier showed Canadians are typically wary of automated vehicles and don’t trust the software: "Canadians are considerably more likely to be apprehensive about these technologies than to be welcoming of them." READ MORE

Cabinet withheld public disclosure of a damning audit of the Canadian Soccer Association until after FIFA World Men’s Cup matches in Vancouver and Toronto, records show. Independent auditors faulted soccer managers for high salaries and sloppy bookkeeping after receiving millions in taxpayer grants: "We made history." READ MORE