A federal labour board has ordered the Canada Revenue Agency to pay a total $13,500 in damages to two Christian employees suspended for defying its vaccine mandate. The discipline was discriminatory, an adjudicator ruled: “How does a manager decide?”
Federal researchers will spend three years and $12.6 million attempting to substantiate claimed benefits of a Trudeau-era venture, the $1 billion National School Food Program. “More data are needed,” the Canadian Institutes of Health Research said in an internal memo.
When did it all fall apart?
A bill given Royal assent?
A memo sent on some Friday in November?
A million bad decisions by a million stupid people?
Or merely, a bite into an apple?
It’s a Great Game,
Played for our amusement,
We, the vulgar and profane.
But deadly serious,
And a contest to the end,
For those born into it.
Lost lives lived and still,
They circle around the pale blue flames
Faces lit,
Beauty and laughter in the light,
Horror and madness as the shadows fall.
Black and White, Light and Dark,
All end in the same place,
Bound, howling in terror and rage,
Cast into the Outer Darkness,
For an eternity plus a day.
By W. N. Branson 
Canadians of a certain vintage can still recall when DDT was found in every kitchen cupboard and it was considered eccentric not to throw candy wrappings out the car window. The Ontario Department of Highways used to spend $1 million a year clearing roadside litter.
This did not change by osmosis. It took years of litigation and dramatic protest by a comparatively few people. “It was a burn-out job but you loved it,” one organizer tells author Ryan O’Connor. “It was what needed to be done so you did it.”
O’Connor’s First Green Wave chronicles the birth of environmental activism in Canada. It is a fresh account of Pollution Probe, a citizens’ committee that grew from the University of Toronto to include chapters from Halifax to Regina. Pollution Probe was never a mass movement; its membership peaked at some 1,500. The Kinsmen Club had 16,000. Yet its impact was far-reaching.
It launched the first recycling drive of its kind, a 1971 campaign to collect a million discarded Toronto telephone directories. It created the Canadian Environmental Law Association in 1972, still indispensable after all these years. It warned Canadians we were poisoning our lakes and streams, a phenomenon dramatized when Lake Erie’s Cuyahoga River caught on fire in 1969.
“One of the impressive things was they couldn’t be dismissed as sort of hairy radicals,” one University of Toronto faculty member tells O’Connor. “They were all so conformist looking.” Pollution Probe organizers had neat haircuts and wore ties and knew how to write a press release.
O’Connor, a research associate at Trent University, traces environmental activism in this country from a TV documentary, a 1967 CBC film called Air Of Death. There were earlier attempts, of course: U.S. author Rachel Carson’s 1962 work Silent Spring made Canadian bestseller lists and a 1960 National Film Board production Poisons, Pests & People savaged the use of farm pesticides, but was withdrawn from distribution amid industry protest.
Air Of Death was more dramatic. It preempted the Ed Sullivan Show, drawing a national audience of 1.5 million. The documentary chronicled the poisoning of crops and cattle by a phosphate plant near Dunville, Ont. on Lake Erie. “Something mysterious burned the peppers, burned the fruit, dwarfed and shriveled the grains,” filmmakers reported. “Cattle lie down and die.” The poison was fluorine. The plant’s operator, Electric Reduction Co., quietly paid out $198,000 in damages to nearby farmers, the equivalent of $1.3 million today.
“Every day your lungs inhale fifteen thousand quarts of air and poison,” viewers were told. “Death has been gathering in the air in every Canadian city.” The documentary would be startling even if broadcast today. In 1967 it was hypnotic.
O’Connor credits the film with inspiring an entire generation of publicity-wise Canadian activists. Their work had such an impact that by 1970 the leader of the federal Progressive Conservative party made sure to be photographed wearing a Pollution Probe button.
The First Green Wave is lively and provocative, nostalgic and compelling. Professor O’Connor recounts the words of Toronto’s parks superintendent, caught sanctioning the use of pesticides so lethal they killed mallards that washed up on a Lake Ontario beach. “It’s either that or have the trees dying and people getting covered in slimy caterpillars,” he said.
By Holly Doan
The First Green Wave: Pollution Probe & The Origins Of Environmental Activism In Ontario, by Ryan O’Connor; University of British Columbia Press; 264 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-28093; $29.95
Federal employees who witness criminality at work are now required to report it under a revised Code Of Conduct, says a Department of Public Works report. It follows in-house government research showing few employees were eager to “rock the boat.”
A federal program to name newsrooms deemed reliable and trustworthy is not an attempt to profile Liberal Party-friendly media, says a lead researcher. “There is no role for government oversight,” said Professor Colette Brin of Laval University: ‘Criteria are not related to editorial opinions, political perspectives or relationships with government.’
MPs yesterday at a public hearing wept over Canadians who suffered death or injury from Covid shots, including a Conservative parliamentary aide. “I don’t think we have properly acknowledged the harm that was done to many people,” said Conservative MP Blaine Calkins (Ponoka-Didsbury, Alta.).
There is no chance based on current projections that cabinet’s housing targets will be met, new CMHC figures showed yesterday. Data contradicted claims by Housing Minister Gregor Robertson that cabinet was “building big.”
A second Liberal MP yesterday sponsored a petition to end decades of free trade with Israel. The action by MP Pat Weiler (West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast) followed a Department of Foreign Affairs announcement Tuesday that Canada would boycott Jewish imports from West Bank territories: “Suffering in Gaza has gone on too long.”
A government-approved Local News Directory is paying researchers to list media deemed trustworthy and reliable, according to Access To Information records released yesterday. The initiative follows disclosures federal managers circulated blacklists of reporters who met with government disapproval: ‘It will help people struggling to find news they can trust.’
Prime Minister Mark Carney effective yesterday repealed a requirement that new interprovincial pipelines be subject to the Impact Assessment Act. First Nations opposed the change: “I am from Alberta. I am direct and I do things.”
The growth of tent cities dampened a Parks Canada program to promote camping skills for immigrant families, says an internal report. Overnight camping parties in public parks had to be cancelled due to conflicts and criticism, it said: “The emergence of this issue created a challenge.”
Ex-cabinet advisor Amira Elghawaby yesterday described 9/11 observances as marking “a difficult 25 years” for Muslims. The former Toronto Star columnist told reporters the decades following the terrorist attacks have seen “dangerous narratives about who we are.”
The Competition Bureau has dropped any investigation into whether cabinet breached its own law against false advertising. An MP who filed a formal complaint yesterday said the decision left “an absurd double standard.”
The Department of Agriculture in a rare admission has cited unnamed employees for scientific malpractice. Government-wide, no federal agency to date has attempted to document instances of plagiarism in federal science: “Examples of breaches may include but are not limited to fabrication, falsification or misrepresentation of research data.”
