Heritage Minister Marc Miller yesterday would not say who in his office recommended a Canada Summer Jobs grant for an anti-Semite. Internal records confirm payment to a constituent in Miller’s riding who fantasized about shooting Jews: “I would strongly recommend as the Member of Parliament for downtown Montréal that the money be clawed back.”
Canadian universities, unions and medical professions must confront anti-Semitism, the Senate human rights committee said yesterday. A committee report specifically denounced anti-Jewish discourse in professions: “It was deeply sad.”
The Commons by a 164 to 153 vote yesterday confirmed Prime Minister Mark Carney’s nominee as Budget Officer. Annette Ryan, 55, a former assistant associate deputy finance minister, acknowledged she knew Carney when both studied at Oxford in the 1990s but denied any partisan leanings: “Will you commit to never censoring or watering down a report at the request of the government, bureaucracy or Prime Minister’s Office?”
Canada Post yesterday said it will cut 30,000 jobs through attrition after reporting a “seismic” pre-tax loss of $1,569,000,000 last year. “Some changes will raise concerns,” CEO Doug Ettinger wrote in an Annual Report to Parliament: “Change is never easy, especially at Canada Post.”
Auto executives yesterday warned cabinet concessions to Chinese automakers undermine Canadian jobs. Cabinet on March 11 granted Chinese battery electric cars low-tariff access to the Canadian market with an initial quota of 49,000 vehicles this year, rising by 6.5 percent annually: “It is a major mistake.”
The Canadian Human Rights Commission in a report to the United Nations said it’s upset by anti-Black bigotry. The federal agency made no mention of mistreating its own Black employees, prompting censure by the Treasury Board and a public apology by the Chief Commissioner: “There needs to be a swift and complete overhaul of the Commission’s senior management.”
Enlistment is up in the Canadian Armed Forces, according to figures released yesterday by Defence Minister David McGuinty. Recruiters noted it still takes more than four months to process an application to join the Army, Navy or Royal Canadian Air Force: “We’d like to bring that down to 30 days.”
A federal judge yesterday dismissed an attempt by two ArriveCan executives to challenge an internal report on alleged wrongdoing. The two former Canada Border Services Agency managers, Antonio Utano and Cameron MacDonald, were ordered to pay a combined $41,709 in costs.
A Nova Scotia wind farm run by friends of the Liberal Party required $206 million in public financing since no private lender would touch it, says the CEO of the Canada Infrastructure Bank. Ehren Cory said the costly venture was deemed too risky: “Private lenders alone were unwilling to provide the required financing.”
Foreigners in Canada on temporary permits will number more than two million this year even with quota cuts, records show. Prime Minister Mark Carney imposed cuts after complaining the “system isn’t working.”
A total 110,561 electors signed a Commons petition demanding that floor-crossers face byelections. The petition that closed Friday, sponsored by Conservative MP Lianne Rood (Middlesex-London, Ont.), was the first of four targeting defections in Parliament: “End the practice of MPs rejecting the will of the electorate.”
About a quarter of federal managers say they feel pressured to hire favoured candidates, says a biennial survey by the Public Service Commission. Figures showed more managers also resort to inside appointments rather than openly posting vacancies: “They are based on ‘who you know.'”
A federal judge has awarded a Saskatchewan prisoner more than $75,000 in damages and costs after he was pushed into a cell door by a guard. “The Charter is a very important law in Canada,” wrote Justice William Pentney, a former Deputy Minister of Justice: “The use of force violated your right to security of the person.”
If you phone your friends
to tell them about your luxury Alaska cruise,
it makes you look old.
Outdated.
Next time, Instagram.
If you smile
with lettuce stuck between your teeth,
that, too, makes you look old.
Next time, kale.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
What did the 19th century smell like? What was it like to stroll ankle-deep in horse effluent and live by the 25-watt glow of an oily lamp on winter evenings?
Many Canadian historians and documentary filmmakers recall the facts and figures of the past without ever providing a true tactile sense of how our ancestors got by, with one exception. We can still gain a taste of what they ate.
Collecting Culinaria is a tribute to an extraordinary trove of historic cookbooks collected by Linda Distad, a University of Alberta librarian who died in 2012. Distad had a mania for heritage recipes. Her collection ran to more than 3,000 titles including the first English-language cookbook published in Canada, The Cook Not Mad, circa 1830. Consider the recipe for corn beef: “To one hundred pounds of beef. three ounces salt peter, five pints of salt, a small quantity of molasses will improve it, but good without.”
Editors Caroline Lieffers and Merril Distad write that “the social and economic history of food, cooking and dining habits, subjects once mainly the province of anthropologists and sociologists,” are only now are taking their rightful place as archival documents.
What was it like to dine in Canada circa 1913? Here’s a menu from the cookbook Fifty-Two Sunday Dinners: consommé, beef tongue, baked potatoes, creamed celery, plum pudding – a beefy, heavy, tasteless meal for people accustomed to hard physical labour. The tongue had to be simmered in hot water for two hours just to be edible.
Collecting Culinaria celebrates them all including the famed Fannie Farmer Cookbook, first published in 1915 and “credited with popularizing level measurements,” now in its 13th edition, and the Joy Of Cooking introduced in 1931: “With its chatty and familiar tone, the text would become a bestseller and remains popular today.”
“Books might reflect wartime exigency or 1950s abundance, and many titles were little more than quick money makers for enterprising publishers,” Culinaria notes. “Indeed, while at the beginning of the century many households may have owned only one or two cookbooks, families – now less likely to have servants – were also increasingly accumulating small culinary libraries.”
Recipes date from Roman times but Culinaria credits an English homemaker, Isabella Beeton, as author of the “culinary and household management touchstone” that started the whole ball rolling in 1859. Mrs. Beeton’s Book Of Household Management ran to 1,112 pages of recipes, cleaning tips and advice.
When she died in 1865 – she was only 28 – her widowed husband sold the rights to Ward & Lock Publishing and the rest is history. Variations are still in print. “Throughout its many iterations,” Culinaria writes, “the trademark ‘Mrs. Beeton’ has assumed an almost mythological status, representing both the practicality and excess of British cookery over the last hundred and fifty years.”
Collecting Culinaria is spectacularly illustrated with photos and artwork. It will make you want to get cooking.
By Holly Doan
Collecting Culinaria, by Caroline Lieffers & Merrill Distad; University of Alberta Press; ISBN 9781-55195-3243
