Federal agents have lost track of more than 28,000 foreign fugitives in Canada including several hundred with criminal records, documents show. The latest figures follow an admission by the Canada Border Services Agency that it found it difficult to keep track of people ordered deported: “Should we not look to remove close to 100 percent of these individuals?”
The Canada Border Services Agency yesterday said fears of transmitting Covid by paper Customs forms prompted it to spend $59.5 million on the ArriveCan app. Federal health authorities at the time said there was little chance of getting sick by handling paperwork: “The risk is not really out there.”
Independent MP Han Dong (Don Valley North, Ont.) yesterday admitted foreign students attending school out of town voted in his 2019 Liberal nomination. Dong dismissed the incident as commonplace though his own campaign manager questioned Chinese teenagers’ eligibility to vote: “Do you accept that would be an outrageous intervention by the People’s Republic of China in our democracy?”
Liberal MP Ken Hardie (Fleetwood-Port Kells, B.C.) yesterday said he privately contacted the Canadian Security Intelligence Service following his 2021 re-election regarding allegations of pro-Liberal interference by foreign agents. The China inquiry yesterday disclosed names of 13 ridings including Hardie’s that were allegedly targeted by Beijing. Others include seats held by two former cabinet ministers and the current chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee: “I asked for a meeting with CSIS.”
Erin O’Toole’s Conservative Party was never told its candidates were targeted by foreign agents, the China inquiry learned yesterday. One confidential memo said offshore money was “funneled to preferred candidates” deemed pro-China: “Would information of this nature have been useful to your Party?”
Pensions for retired MPs averaged $77,900 last year, an increase of nearly 10 percent since the pandemic, says the Treasury Board. Pensions are indexed to inflation to “cover increases in the cost of living.”
Zookeepers are protesting a Senate bill to restrict the public display of elephants and apes. Exotic animals in Canada enjoy the highest standards of care, the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee was told: “It is very disappointing.”
Federal investigators waited years to look into allegations a 2021 Liberal candidate benefited from thousands in undisclosed donations from friends of China, records show. Vancouver East candidate Josh Vander Vies’ campaign was ultimately fined $500 for poor bookkeeping: “I cannot speculate here.”
Federal election monitors never caught any Chinese agents despite numerous tips but instead spent four years prosecuting Rebel News Network for improper signage, the China inquiry was told. A director of Elections Act enforcement testified it was complicated: “It is difficult to answer such questions.”
The insolvent SaltWire Network newspaper chain pocketed more than $5 million in taxpayers’ subsidies in one year while failing to pay its tax debts, Court records show. Creditors in filings with the Nova Scotia Supreme Court described SaltWire management as incompetent: ‘They mismanaged the business.’
A 2019 pre-election program promising to make home ownership “an achievable dream” failed, says a CMHC report. The billion-dollar scheme was poorly designed and delivered only a fraction of the promised benefits, wrote auditors: “The program has low uptake.”
Middle class Canadians say they are overtaxed and underappreciated, according to in-house Privy Council research. Focus groups nationwide told federal pollsters they were fed up with rising costs and “the high tax burden.”
Easter greetings to all friends and subscribers. Blacklock’s pauses today for the federal observance. We are back tomorrow — The Editor
I was told
that God created
Adam and Eve,
not Adam and Steve.
Who created Steve, then?
Slave of his earthly desires,
Steve may have evolved
from a more primitive life form,
such as apes.
Like Michael and Gustav,
Nicole and Fatima,
Roberto and Cheng,
Olga and Maya.
Because God –
as I was told
only created
Adam and Eve.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
In 1919 there were so many Bolsheviks in Port Arthur, Ont. the local MP called it one of Canada’s worst “breeding places of revolution.” The mayor calculated three-quarters of local Finnish immigrants were socialists. In neighbouring Fort William they held a memorial for Lenin in 1924 and sang the Internationale.
The twin cities on the north shore of Lake Superior were “storm centres in Canadian working-class history,” writes Michel Beaulieu, associate professor of history at Lakehead University.
It is popular now to dismiss Canadian communism as a historical curiosity peopled by colourful idealists. In its day it was serious business. Churchill scorned fifth columnists like the Lakehead Leninists as Moscow “missionaries”: “Obscure people awaiting the day when they hope to be the absolute masters of their fellow countrymen and pay off old scores.”
It was no joke on the north shore, in what is now Thunder Bay. “The RCMP and Ontario Provincial Police flooded the region with undercover officers in an attempt to infiltrate the movement,” Beaulieu recounts in Labour at the Lakehead. The twin cities were “a metropole for a resource-rich hinterland,” a choke point for cross-Canada railways that monopolized shipments of Western grain and Eastern factory goods.
Beaulieu notes the 1917 Russian revolution inspired a “spirit of revolt” so palpable in Fort William, a local elevator company petitioned city council to lay on extra police for fear that Reds would seize the works. As late as 1930 a local candidate for alderman campaigned on a platform of “sharper class struggles.”
Beaulieu documents the minutiae of local radical groups and their ultimate failure. The twin city Reds could not even elect an MP: “The sum of their efforts came to less than the immense sacrifices and energies they had poured into them.”
Most poignant is Beaulieu’s brief account of “Karelia fever,” the come-to-the-motherland campaign that saw hundreds of Lakehead Bolsheviks leave Ontario for the Karelia Autonomous Soviet Republic in 1931-32. They were among thousands of socialists who fled the west in Depression years, believing a bright future could be found in Stalinist Russia – and surrendered their passports to find it.
“Pathetic,” wrote newspaperman Eugene Lyons, who documented their plight in his 1937 classic Assignment In Utopia: “The period of disillusionment ranged from two weeks to a year, and the embittered regrets were in direct proportion to the fervor of the original renunciation. It was the finality of their act, the realization that they were trapped and held and could never leave Russia again, which worked on these people, even more than their disillusionment with the USSR. They would come to my office and weep bitter tears.”
In Petrozavodsk the north shore radicals helped erect a monument that still stands, a grotesque statue of Lenin as tall as a house. At the Lakehead there is no monument at all.
By Holly Doan
Labour at the Lakehead: Ethnicity, Socialism and Politics 1900-35 by Michel Beaulieu; UBC Press; 316 pages; ISBN 978-077-4820-028; $32.95
