The federal backlog of air passenger complaints is now a record 42,000, the Canadian Transportation Agency said yesterday. Cabinet pledged millions in new funding to investigate complaints of poor service: “Are there additional rules we can make?”
The number of Canadians claiming a charity tax credit on their 2021 tax return declined by 165,330, Statistics Canada said yesterday. Charities have blamed the latest decline on the pandemic and fallout from We Charity investigations: “We Charity ambassadors were A-listers from the world of entertainment, politics, civil society and the corporate world.”
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland must “close the growing income gap” with new taxes in her March 28 budget, says a Commons finance committee report. The income gap is not in fact growing, according to Bank of Canada figures: ‘It has been relatively stable over the last 25 years.’
Museums are too “colonial” and must educate Canadians on “climate change, equity, diversity and inclusion,” says a Department of Canadian Heritage report. Traditional exhibits are too mainstream and fail to “take into consideration important societal shifts,” it said: “For many years museums have decided what to acquire, what to exhibit and whose stories to tell.”
Canada’s military must embrace “critical self-reflection” on racism, privilege and “white fragility,” says the Department of National Defence. Commanders in an Anti-Racism Toolkit detailed steps that soldiers, sailors and air crew must take to examine “ways that whiteness and white superiority become embedded in policies and processes.”
Ontario and Québec have the worst water in Canada, say Department of Environment data. The quality of rivers, lakes and streams showed no improvement in the past two decades due in part to dumping of raw sewage: “Water quality has deteriorated at 24 sites.”
A federal labour board has dismissed another complaint over unions’ acceptance of vaccine mandates. The latest grievance was rejected on a technicality though arbitrators have ruled unions acted in good faith in accepting mandates: “The complaint is clearly untimely.”
Trade Minister Mary Ng will not comment on her association with a group one parliamentary witness on Friday named as a Communist Party front. Ng is one of four Liberal MPs to publicly endorse the Confederation of Toronto Chinese Canadian Organizations: “This is but the tip of the iceberg.”
Cabinet will spend months reviewing a proposed registry of Canadians working as paid agents for foreign governments, says Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino. A bill to create a registry has languished in the Senate for over a year: “Why don’t we do our job?”
Inflation is keeping retirees in the workforce, says in-house Privy Council research. More Canadians in their 60s told federal focus groups they couldn’t afford to stop working: “Some described their long term financial outlook as bleak.”
A federal bill to ban new sales of handguns in Canada raises questions of “cost to the taxpayer and impact on property rights,” Alberta Chief Firearms Officer Teri Bryant told the Commons public safety committee. Bryant called Bill C-21 a waste of money that could be spent fighting crime: “This bill is demonstratively not about public safety.”
Canada’s rail safety record improved following the worst train wreck in the nation’s postwar history, says a Department of Transport report. “Based on occurrence data rail safety has improved overall,” wrote auditors.
If you open your mind
to the beauty around you,
tune your heart
to nature’s hidden music…
You could see a forest
in a maple leaf,
an ocean
in a drop of water.
You may even get a job
with the federal government.
They’re looking for those
who can see a salary
in a penny.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
The thing about Joey Smallwood is he often failed, and not in a character building way. It was repetitive, fruitless failure. He made a career of mismanagement.
Smallwood failed as a movie promoter and union organizer. Three times he tried and failed to run a newspaper. The stumbles left his family in poverty.
Smallwood’s daughter Clara, in the last interview before her death in 2011, told me: “There just wasn’t any money. One particular Christmas I can remember we were up in bed waiting for Santa Claus when mum called up the stairs and told us, ‘Santa didn’t come.’” It is a beaten man who cannot whittle a doll or buy a penny’s worth of peppermint for his daughter at Christmas.
In profiling this character who led Newfoundland and Labrador into Confederation in 1949, biographer Ray Argyle marvels at Smallwood’s inability “to distinguish between the bogus and the genuine, between bravado and reality.”
If Smallwood could not manage a Corner Brook weekly, he could scarcely run a province.
He built a Department of Economic Development but hired no economists. Instead Smallwood named as director general a heel-clicking hustler from Nazi-occupied Latvia later jailed for fraud. His deputy minister of development was an ex-felon who fled to Panama one step ahead of a corruption trial.
Economic planning was berserk. One cabinet member, Herbert Pottle, called it the “Smallwood shock treatment.” With unemployment at 19 percent Smallwood vowed Newfoundland must “develop or perish,” then burned through $30 million in subsidies for failed ventures: a chocolate factory, a rubber boot shop, a plant to make gazelle-skin gloves.
Argyle does not recite all these failures. You can only cram so many fiascos into 192 pages. Nor does he harshly censure Smallwood, but Newfoundlanders have taken care of that. The biography does recount Smallwood’s biggest debacle, the Churchill Falls contract to sell power to Hydro Quebec at below-market 1969 rates for decades to come. It remains the most incompetent commercial treaty ever sanctioned by any legislature. “The final contract, running to 2041, called for Quebec to pay three-tenths of a cent per kilowatt hour, with the price dropping to one-fifth of a cent after 2016,” Argyle notes.
Schemer and Dreamer is a gentle profile. Smallwood is dead. Newfoundland has a functioning economy. Tempers cool. Writes Argyle, “Many Newfoundlanders who have come of age since the death of Joey Smallwood see him as a figure of the distant past, even a slightly ridiculous character, a big spender, a different kind of politicians than is acceptable in Newfoundland today.”
By Holly Doan
Joey Smallwood: Schemer and Dreamer by Ray Argyle; Dundurn Press; 192 pages; ISBN 978-1-45970-369-8; $19.99
Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly yesterday said she was aware of at least one Chinese Communist Party agent who attempted to enter Canada on a diplomatic visa. “I have instructed my department to never shy away from denying a visa if it is for a political operative linked to the Communist Party of China,” Joly told the House affairs committee.
