Parents are more likely now than before the pandemic to question their children’s vaccination, says Department of Health research. “Immunization rates have declined since Covid-19,” said an in-house report: “Key concerns included side effects.”
Conservative MP Michael Chong (Wellington-Halton Hills, Ont.) yesterday said he was astounded the Canadian Security Intelligence Service never told him it secretly suspected a Chinese diplomat was targeting his family. Many émigrés face similar intimidation, said Chong: “At minimum I would have expected my government had a duty of care to inform me.”
Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson yesterday said he was one of the few MPs still alive who personally knew Tommy Douglas. Record show Douglas left Saskatchewan years before Wilkinson was born. Staff clarified Wilkinson’s claim: “Minister Wilkinson met Mr. Douglas a couple of times.”
The Public Service Alliance of Canada yesterday urged 120,000 members to ratify a Treasury Board contract that met many of its key demands in a 12-day strike. “This agreement delivers important gains for our members and will set the bar for all workers in Canada,” said Chris Aylward, national president.
Dozens of organized crime groups have “influence” in the public sector, says a federal report. “Infiltration in public sector agencies is not necessary to support organized crime operations,” wrote police: “Corrupt activities in government processes can increase project costs by up to 50 percent.”
Universities should mandate anti-Black racism training and fund an “Award for Black Excellence,” says a federal report. “A wider range of topics may be explored to understand the implications of Blackness,” wrote advisors to the $1.2 billion Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council: “We must be relentless in our pursuit of equity.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s brother has been summoned to testify Wednesday at the Commons ethics committee over his role at the Trudeau Foundation. Alexandre Trudeau was a senior director when the Foundation falsified reports to conceal Chinese donations, says a former CEO. The Income Tax Act requires that all charities truthfully account for donations under threat of 125 percent penalties and loss of charitable status: “A Chinese Association was communicating with employees of the Foundation. They were giving clear direction on what needed to appear on receipts.”
Today marks the last tax deadline that sees the Canada Revenue Agency accept cheques for all payments under a practice dating back 106 years. The Agency said it will detail new rules on electronic transfers for large payments to take effect in 2024: ‘We will communicate details in due course.’
Uncollected customs duties still run to millions despite a 2017 report that recommended an immediate crackdown on tax evasion, says an internal Canada Border Services Agency audit. Inspectors complained of “significant non-compliance” by importers dodging tariffs: “Challenges were encountered.”
Cabinet was warned Canadians were upset with ineffective gun laws just seven weeks before it abandoned plans to restrict hunting rifles. Internal Privy Council polling showed Canadians complained gun crimes went unresolved while cabinet chased pointless legislation: ‘Their impression is crimes involving firearms had largely continued unabated.’
A third of Canadians with high skill jobs have a Grade 12 certificate or are high school dropouts, says federal research. Conversely more than a third of low skill jobs are held by Canadians with a postsecondary education: “The correlation between educational attainment and holding a lower or higher skilled job was not as high as one might expect.”
Public transit
becomes dangerous.
More robberies,
sexual assaults
than ever.
Police storm bus stations,
charging three
for possessing open alcohol containers,
and no less than forty-nine
for failure to produce
proof of payment.
For all other needs,
please call 911.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Police were not infrequent visitors to author Cheri DiNovo’s childhood home. All families have troubles but DiNovo’s make Angela’s Ashes look like a holiday camp. “I grew up in a violent, neurotic, narcissistic household where victims of their own personal traumas acted out in nasty, aggressive ways,” she writes. “This is not to blame any of them.”
Take Uncle Ken, one of the more responsible adults in the home. “It was Ken who took me to dance classes, Ken who took us shopping, Ken who drove us up to the family cottage and stayed with us there, Ken who financially supported us, Ken who always arrived at breakfast at the same time,” writes DiNovo.
“My breakfast was Sugar Crisp, white toast and milk. His, brown toast and coffee. It was also Ken who, one day as I was slurping down my second bowl of cereal, picked up a knife and slashed my Aunt Lorna across the neck.”
She ran away at 15 and sold LSD. “We assumed we would die young,” she writes.
DiNovo is a United Church minister and retired New Democrat member of the Ontario legislature. Her memoir The Queer Evangelist: A Socialist Clergy’s Radically Honest Tale recounts a world of Trotskyites, crusading pastors, Bay Street stock jobbers and colourful Damon Runyon street people that exists in a surprisingly small geographical space, a few square blocks of downtown Toronto. It is unrecognizable seven miles away in North York, let alone Revelstoke or Mount Pearl.
DiNovo makes it work because she is a gifted writer with a wry sense of humour. She boasts she was one of the few in her Trotsky study club who actually read Das Kapital, later drove a Lada and is still capable of pronouncing, “Capitalism is a sort of money addiction.”
“It’s a fabrication that capitalism thrives on competition,” she writes. “It doesn’t. It thrives on consolidation. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. The middle class empties out.”
“Capitalism was doomed,” she writes. Just as this begins to get tiresome, DiNovo recalls meeting a group of rich capitalist farmers among her rural congregation in Brucefield, Ont.
“I once asked my Bible study group why farmers worked so hard when they were sitting on so much land,” she recalls. “‘Why not sell most of it and retire? Buy a BMW and live in Florida?’ The women in the group looked at each other as if they’d never heard of such a thing and answered, ‘Then what would we do?’”
DiNovo served four terms in the legislature, becoming Party whip and caucus chair. Here, too, she writes with candour and irony. “The painful meetings are not with constituents whose problems the staff can handily solve, nor are they the ones where a bill or motion might draw attention to a serious political issue. The difficult ones are those you can see coming, where the constituent arrives with large binders, colour-coded inserts and briefcases full of paper. Inevitably their issues have something to do with a long saga of injustice, often genuine, at the hands of some bureaucracy or ministry.”
“These situations are usually very real and very hopeless,” she writes. “Our standard responses would be along the lines of ‘You’ve learned there’s very little justice in the justice system,’ or ‘You’ve learned there’s very little housing in the housing system.’ It always put me in mind of a scene in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina where people sleep outside bureaucrats’ doors waiting for a chance to be seen disdainfully for a minute or two.”
The Queer Evangelist is raw, a startling autobiography for a public office holder.
By Holly Doan
The Queer Evangelist: A Socialist Clergy’s Radically Honest Tale, by Cheri DiNovo; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 250 pages; ISBN 9781-7711-24898; $23.99
The Senate last evening by a 52 to 16 vote passed into law first-ever federal regulations of legal internet content in Canada. “I am excited,” Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez told reporters.
Bank scares in the U.S. and Switzerland have prompted cabinet to grant itself unusual powers to stem any financial panic in Canada. “Why is it that government feels those authorities should be granted?” New Democrat MP Daniel Blaikie (Elmwood-Transcona, Man.) yesterday asked the Commons finance committee: “There are some extraordinary powers.”
