Irregularities from missing fuel to contract splitting have been uncovered at the Canadian Embassy in Nairobi. The latest critical audit in Foreign Minister Anita Anand’s department follows a series of investigations triggered by the discovery of a fraud ring at our Embassy in Haiti: “The procurement and vendor landscape remains challenging with risks linked to corruption.”
The Privy Council polled Metro Vancouver residents’ wariness of energy projects ahead of an August 31 byelection in ex-environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson’s riding, records show. Wilkinson in 2025 won North Vancouver-Capilano by 16,568 votes: ‘A number were particularly concerned about the potential for accidents such as oil spills.’
Employees at the Department of Natural Resources remain unclear about Indigenous reconciliation despite years of programming, says an internal report. The department was the first to give an entire division an Indigenous name to promote “cultural teachings, sharing circles and Indigenous recruitment programs.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs is preparing to take over management of the nation’s largest private military cemetery, according to a briefing note. The National Field of Honour is home to thousands of impoverished veterans saved from a pauper’s grave by a century-old charity, the Last Post Fund: “No man who has given his services in defence of his country should be buried as a pauper.”
Internal auditors are faulting the Canada Revenue Agency for mediocre management of a program to collect billions owed by tax delinquents. The Agency would not disclose how many individual and corporate tax filers have unpaid accounts: ‘Limited controls are in place in the effective collection of lower risk, low complexity accounts.’
I suggest nominating this manager
for the Outstanding Leadership Award.
In last month’s staff meeting,
he came closer than ever to telling the truth.
Barely any lies about the merger,
human resources, budget.
It was our finest hour.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Once upon a time officialdom discovered a new branch of science nobody had ever heard of. Fresh and exciting, it was quickly embraced by the smartest professors, the most progressive thinkers, the wisest judges. It swept the nation. You can’t argue with science.
Only later did Canadians learn it wasn’t science at all but a hodgepodge of supposition and anecdotes perpetuated by hidden agendas. Of course by then much harm was done. There were lawsuits and unsatisfying half-apologies but the people who foisted this fraud on the citizenry were not known for their humility.
It was eugenics, the scientific claim that if dull people were prevented from having children by force if necessary, society as a whole would become sharper. Psychiatry And The Legacies Of Eugenics unravels this dark and startling story, the “devastating social movement of the first half of the twentieth century.”
The monstrosity of eugenics is well known. It formed a basis of Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws. Here authors go further in documenting the leading role played by Canadian scientists in claiming justification for coercive mutilation of humans.
Editor Dr. Erna Kurbegovic notes in Manitoba it was “pressure from the medical community” that prompted the legislature to introduce a 1933 Mental Deficiency Act. Only an outcry from Roman Catholics led MLAs to defeat the sterilization clause by a single vote, 21-20. “Eugenics was a powerful movement in the early twentieth century that captivated many medical professionals, social reformers and interest groups,” writes Kurbegovic.
Advocates included Emily Murphy, a suffragette whose statue today stands in front of the Senate, and Tommy Douglas, the New Democrat founder who wrote a 1933 Master’s thesis The Problems Of The Subnormal Family. Douglas lamented the burden to society of mental defectives, people with “moral standards below normal,” unwed mothers, alcoholics, prostitutes and those “so improvident as to be a public charge.”
Putting aside all sense of revulsion to the degree that’s possible, Professor Douglas Wahlsten of the University of Alberta in a devastating chapter points out the scientific claims of eugenics were gibberish. Intelligence is difficult to measure, and brains are not hereditary.
Wahlsten calculates even if Alberta fully enforced its 1928 Sexual Sterilization Act like a Nuremberg Law on all children who scored poorly on IQ tests, “every child below IQ 70 including those dearly loved, nurtured and sheltered by their parents,” the result would have been a temporary overall improvement of “about one third of an IQ point” in the entire province.
“An intelligence test is not a measure of some innate or biologically fixed entity,” writes Professor Wahlsten.
Professor Henderikus Stam of the University of Calgary, and psychologist Dr. Ashley Barlow of Edmonton, profile the most notorious Man Of Science in the eugenics crusade. He was John MacEachran, founder of the University of Alberta’s Department of Psychology.
MacEachran studied at the finest German universities. Wise and rational, he was chair of the Alberta Eugenics Board until his retirement at 88. “Like MacEachran himself, the Board was a model of bureaucratic efficiency,” write the authors. “With remarkably little oversight, and with the overt assistance of the medical profession, the Board operated out of the public eye.”
“We should endeavour to get away from a very costly form of sentiment and give more attention to raising and safeguarding the purity of the race,” MacEachran said in a 1932 speech. “We allow men and women of defective intelligence or those of these criminal tendencies to have children.”
Authors document a poignant letter to MacEachran from one woman sterilized by his order. She wanted children, she pleaded. Couldn’t the Doctor do something? “It was done for your own good,” replied MacEachran. “You would not want children who might have to come here and spend many years or perhaps their whole life in an institution.”
Psychiatry And The Legacies Of Eugenics is a shocking story, unbelievable if it were not true.
By Holly Doan
Psychiatry and the Legacies of Eugenics, edited by Frank W. Stahnisch and Erna Kurbegovic; Athabasca University Press; 412 pages; ISBN 9781-7719-92657; $37.99
The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to hear a final challenge of a 1912 law requiring that lawyers in Alberta swear allegiance to the King. The oath is similar to that required of newly-elected MPs: “If it does not come from the heart it has no value.”
The decommissioned Kingston Penitentiary this fall should be transferred to federal real estate managers for sale as Lake Ontario waterfront property, says a Correctional Service memo. The penitentiary closed 13 years ago: “Anyone who says we don’t need to put everything on the table right now is not listening.”
A union’s 12-year defamation claim against Toronto journalist Jerry Agar has been dismissed by the Ontario Court of Appeal. Judges upheld a lower court ruling that “heated” or “colourful” debate on current events was “what a free and democratic society does.”
Parliament’s 2023 passage of the Online News Act left Canadians, especially those in rural areas, too reliant on mainstream media and “official voices” in news coverage, says a report to the Commons heritage committee. The Act provoked a Facebook news ban that left communities “lacking credible information on the platform they used most,” it said.
Canadian parents remain wary of Covid shots for children even years after the pandemic, new Public Health Agency data show. Current vaccination rates run as low as 12 percent: ‘They object to what they saw as an attempt to make them feel guilty.’
More Canadians owe more than ever, says a Financial Consumer Agency of Canada memo. The release of the document yesterday followed a warning by bankruptcy trustees that millions of Canadians have “no margin for error.”
A squatter’s tent in a city park meets the legal definition of “accommodation,” the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal has ruled in a far-reaching judgment on urban encampments. The decision came in the case of a homeless Halifax man denied welfare for shelter costs since he had no shelter: “The ordinary meaning of the word ‘accommodation’ is broad.”
A Montréal judge has certified a class action lawsuit against McGill University for failing to curb anti-Semitic disorder on campus. The decision allowing the case to proceed to trial coincided with a new federal report condemning Canadian universities for Jew hate: “Universities are not immune from the intervention of the courts.”
