Taxpayers are spending millions on Atlantic ferries without any legal requirement to do so, says a Department of Transport audit. Subsidies in past years have averaged the equivalent of nearly $400 per vehicle: “Challenges will be critical to sustaining service reliability in the years ahead.”
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly’s department in an internal memo claimed the “Buy Canadian” campaign would revive domestic factories even as federal managers wrote loopholes into the policy. Executives in a censored, three-page memo called support for employers here “the ultimate test of Buy Canadian.”
An anti-Israel website has registered with the Office of the Foreign Influence Commissioner after accepting sponsored content from China. Registration is mandatory for any media “acting at the direction of, for the benefit of or in association with a foreign entity.”
Fears of a Y2K computer crash prompted then-Defence Minister Art Eggleton to put 30,000 troops on standby, according to newly-declassified records. Confidential accounts of 1999 meetings show cabinet braced for emergencies from subway shutdowns in Toronto to sub-Arctic power blackouts as date timers in computers marked the changeover to the year 2000: “An inadvertent launch of nuclear missiles is highly unlikely.”
Municipal police nationwide will gain new powers to jam cellphones under sweeping amendments to telecom law. Currently the use of devices to block signals between wireless phones and cell towers is forbidden under threat of $25,000 fines with limited exemptions for the RCMP, federal prison service and Department of National Defence: ‘For example, the order could support law enforcement agencies at major public events.’
The Department of Employment must pay $5,000 in damages to a Christian employee suspended for refusing a Covid shot, a federal labour board has ruled. An adjudicator said he accepted the clerk’s testimony that only God and not cabinet could mandate the vaccine: “How can I as a practicing Christian agree?”
We are grateful this holiday to friends and subscribers as Blacklock’s embarks on a 15th great year of independent, all-original Canadian journalism. On behalf of contributors, please accept our thanks. We’re back tomorrow — The Editor.
The lessons learned.
Close calls and warnings.
Brexit, Meech Lake,
Quebec 1995.
Backrooms
And greased consciences.
Hushed voices whisper
With grave tones.
In the West they get a whiff of
A double cross with,
The most Canadian of things,
A vote on a Vote.
While big brother Saskatchewan looks over
And waits to reveal,
They want a divorce and they have a lawyer.
They’ll agree to 50/50 with the pipelines.
But they are keeping the dog.
By W.N. Branson
Canada, unlike Zimbabwe, has no federal department of education, to which Professor Jennifer Wallner of the University of Ottawa comments: And your point is – ?
Parliament regulates the minutiae of labels on fertilizer bags, the price of mozzarella, the music they play at Radio CJLR in Meadow Lake, Sask. Yet in 159 years legislators have never set any federal standards on basic elementary and secondary education. Critics lament the fact. Professor Wallner argues this does not mean standards don’t exist.
“Provinces can work together,” Wallner writes. “When we compare the provincial education systems to one another, all ten show remarkably strong similarities in investments, achievements and substantive policies.”
Learning To School delves into the genius of the federation through the prism of schooling. The conclusion is plain. Canadian education standards do just fine in Parliament’s absence, and provinces have been leaders in the classroom since the 19th century.
Learning To School does not varnish the knotholes in the system. True, Canada spends less on education as a percentage of GDP than Finland, Belgium or New Zealand. True, the ratio of teachers to students is lower here than in just about every industrialized country except Korea, Mexico and Turkey.
Yes, the provincial ratio of spending per student has varied as much as 35 percent, though Wallner notes this is improving all the time. In 1945 the gap was more than 200 percent. In 1900 it was twice as bad, when British Columbia outspent Québec by a ratio of 5 to 1.
For all these flaws Learning To School concludes Canadians do not fare too badly: “While Canada seems to invest slightly less in education than other advanced industrial nations, its educational attainments are strong, with high marks on international tests and elevated completion rates in secondary and tertiary education. Without a central authority, moreover, the Canadian provinces support their respective elementary and secondary systems with similar levels of investment.”
How is this possible? Simple, says Wallner: teachers and parents. “Teachers, for example, have similar interests with regards to salaries, benefits and professional working conditions regardless of where they live,” resulting in de facto standards on curricula, class sizes and other factors. And parents from coast to coast “consistently demand and expect high-quality education programming from their respective provincial governments,” Learning To School concludes.
Just as provinces have pretty much the same minimum wage, the same highway speed limits, the same regulations on landfilling, so provinces have adopted comparable standards on elementary and secondary schooling. Their record is impressive.
Nova Scotia created the first effective department of education in 1864 with all others following, though Québec took nearly a century. Public school curricula have been standardized since 1910. British Columbia created the first funding pool between rich and poor districts in 1933. Alberta established the first three-year university degree program in education in 1942.
Learning To School turns conventional wisdom on its head. Without any federal leadership or Act of Parliament, Canadians built a modern, effective school system, even without a Zimbabwean Ministry of Education.
By Holly Doan
Learning To School: Federalism And Public Schooling In Canada, by Jennifer Wallner; University of Toronto Press; 432 pages; ISBN 9781-4426-15892; $37.95
Cabinet is headed for “a danger zone” with continued overspending, warns Budget Officer Annette Ryan. Testifying at the Senate national finance committee, Ryan said any federal claim that deficit spending will promote economic growth is “the opposite of prudence.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney in 2025 ethics filings disclosed extensive shareholding in heating and ventilation companies that would benefit from a federal rebate program announced yesterday. “How is that not corrupt?” asked Conservative MP John Brassard (Barrie-South-Innisfil, Ont.), chair of the Commons ethics committee: “The Prime Minister is not even hiding it anymore.”
Veterans Affairs Minister Jill McKnight yesterday said an Afghan War ceremony that excluded combat veterans was merely “one step in many” to honour ex-military. McKnight would not explain the lapse while testifying at the Commons veterans affairs committee: “We heard that loud and clear.”
Opposition MPs accuse Liberal political aides and other government “sources” of planting favourable stories with subsidized media by leaking secret contents of government bills. New Democrats yesterday joined Conservatives in condemning the practice as contemptuous of Parliament: “There have been repeated ‘leaks’ from so-called ‘unauthorized sources’ to journalists in a clear attempt to shape public discourse.”
Alberta’s lone member of the federal cabinet says she is counting on a large majority of provincial voters rejecting a referendum on separation. “We really need a strong outcome,” said Emergency Management Minister Eleanor Olszewski: “We need a decisive ‘remain’ vote.”
Fisheries Minister Joanne Thompson yesterday denied making a rude gesture under heated questioning in the Commons. Thompson told MPs her extension of the middle finger was “just a hand movement.”
