The nation’s largest grocer Loblaw Companies Ltd. yesterday denied profiteering. An executive told the Commons agriculture committee Loblaw’s profit margin is no greater than it was before food inflation averaged 11 percent: “It’s been flat since inflation took off.”
Parliamentary Press Gallery executives accompanied by armed police on Friday evicted Blacklock’s. All questions were referred to a House of Commons employee. Blacklock’s said the eviction, first of its kind in the history of the National Press Building, was clear reprisal over its continued protests against media subsidies.
Eviction followed Gallery president Guillaume St-Pierre’s threat to “terminate” Blacklock’s membership. The eviction letter stated Blacklock’s managing editor Tom Korski was “impolite,” “disturbs the journalists around him” and “streams parliamentary committee hearings on his computer.”
The complaints were made by three reporters: Emilie Bergeron and Michel Saba of Canadian Press and freelancer Hélène Buzzetti, a former Gallery president. Fourteen other reporters assigned desks in the National Press Building did not sign the complaint.
“Failure to observe these prohibitions could result in further and potentially more serious sanctions including further and potentially permanent prohibitions,” wrote President St-Pierre, correspondent for the Journal de Montréal.
The Gallery refused to permit Blacklock’s to speak to the board of directors regarding reprisal complaints. “The executive did not invite oral representations,” said the eviction notice.
“We will now see the Press Gallery in court,” Blacklock’s shareholders said in a statement. “Our subsidized competitors met in secret, plotted punitive measures over petty grievances and served an eviction notice accompanied by armed police. Their conduct is outrageous.”
Blacklock’s is the only Press Gallery member eligible for federal subsidies that neither solicits nor accepts government funding. The eviction came one day after Blacklock’s published Access To Information records detailing a private meeting between 35 unnamed publishers and the Canada Revenue Agency on distribution of $595 million in subsidies.
Blacklock’s in 2020 also reported Canadian Press unsuccessfully petitioned the Commons finance committee for federal grants to cover 100 percent of revenues, the equivalent of $500,000 a week. CP President Malcolm Kirk asked for subsidies “to fully offset subscription fees paid by CP’s media clients.”
Blacklock’s at a 2021 Press Gallery meeting sponsored a motion that “all Gallery members disclose all applications for grants, rebates or subsidies to any branch of the Government of Canada” and publish the disclosures on its website. The motion was defeated. “That’s cleared up,” said then-Gallery president Catherine Levesque of Canadian Press.
“The Press Gallery action is clearly reprisal,” wrote Blacklock’s shareholders. “We will fight.”
By Staff 
Cabinet’s latest budget bill is unlikely to survive a court challenge, lawyers have written the Senate. One clause of the bill would require lawyers to report clients to the Canada Revenue Agency: “This requirement would infringe upon solicitor-client privilege.”
An innocuous cabinet bill on national parks violates the Charter Of Rights, say Conservative MPs. The bill grants park wardens rare powers to search vehicles or “enter any place” without a Court order: “Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.”
A federal report questions whether homeowners who suffer flooding after declining to buy insurance should be disqualified from receiving disaster aid. It follows a proposal that Parliament mandate the purchase of flood insurance for property owners at risk: “Adopt the strategy of refusing disaster financial assistance payments to households that do not avail themselves of flood insurance.”
The Department of Environment that proposes to mandate electric cars by 2035 is now researching whether the vehicles are cost effective. Electric manufacturers have claimed their cars save money in the long run despite higher sticker prices: “Batteries are so costly.”
Fairmont Hotels
offers authentic,
non-westernised
Chinese cuisines
to attract tourists
from Asia.
They may have figured it out…
I imagine:
Mandarin-speaking staff
and pagoda-shaped facilities;
anything to make them feel
like they never left
China.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
How do you create a profitable, secure and much-loved professional sports franchise in a city of fewer than 300,000 people? Community ownership. This is no Rubik’s Cube. Hometown economics are the only reason they play football in Regina or Green Bay, Wisconsin. The mystery is not that Roughriders and Packers thrive but that other cities have not figured this out.
Power Play delves into the dark world of billionaire club owners, weak mayors and unconscionable subsidies that litter the world of professional sports. The names and dollar values change but these grinding sagas are all the same: One false move and the dummy gets it. Pay up or you lose the team. So, taxpayers pay and pay.
Authors document this phenomenon in a post-mortem on the Edmonton Oilers’ downtown arena. “Hundreds of millions of dollars of scarce public resources had been spent to support the business interests of a billionaire at the expense of other infrastructure needs,” says Power Play. It is instantly familiar to ratepayers in a dozen other cities.
“Readers will be all too familiar with the well-worn playbook deployed so often in recent years by the commissioners of professional sports leagues and the owners of major league sports franchises intent on extracting billions of dollars in concessions for the construction of increasingly costly and spectacular sports facilities and entertainment districts,” authors write. “Between 1990 and 2010 over 100 new facilities were built across North America, a replacement rate of more than 90 percent.”
This is a compelling account of glib boosterism, secret meetings, bland assurances from the mayor that this “wouldn’t cost the taxpayers any money”, and dog-like hometown media coverage. The Edmonton Journal in one editorial called the local arena power play a “rare and priceless opportunity”.
The Oilers briefly had something resembling community ownership until 2008 when Daryl Katz, a local pharmaceutical mogul, bought the team for $200 million. “This was a real estate play,” authors quote one city official.
Katz proceeded to extract spectacular municipal concessions to build a new downtown arena. The $613.7 million financing agreement included a twenty-year tax freeze, direct taxpayer financing, $7 million in federal subsidies, waivers on local liquor licensing, you name it.
There was no local bond issue or plebiscite. Edmonton voters had rejected hockey palace subsidies in plebiscites in 1966 and 1970. City Council never made that mistake again.
“The arena debate in Edmonton skewed municipal priorities and dominated political energies for almost a decade,” sighs Power Play: “Beyond the significant financial costs, these matters will continue to affect municipal governance for the next thirty years.”
Power Play is more entertaining than an Oilers opener and definitely cheaper than a first-tier ticket.
By Holly Doan
Power Play: Professional Hockey and the Politics of Urban Development, by Jay Scherer, David Mills and Linda Sloan McCulloch; University of Alberta Press; 464 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-4934; $32.99
Expression of anti-government views on the internet may pose a terrorist threat, the director of a federal security agency said last night. “We are seeing that kind of narrative, very like anti-authority, anti-government,” said Marie-Helen Chayer, executive director of the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre.
An expected winter recession will “hurt small businesses significantly,” a former federal Budget Officer yesterday told the Senate banking committee. Both the Bank of Canada and Department of Finance forecast a recession is likely: “We have to be careful.”
More than a thousand Canadians remained in Afghanistan months after diplomats fled Kabul, say Department of Foreign Affairs briefing documents. Records did not indicate if Canadians are still trapped under Taliban rule: ‘There has been an alarming rise in forced disappearances and arrests.’
Increased federal hiring surpasses rates in the private sector, Budget Officer Yves Giroux yesterday told the Commons government operations committee. “It’s mostly recent and ongoing,” said Giroux, who earlier estimated payroll costs will top $50 billion this year: “Growth has been faster in the public sector.”
Transport Minister Omar Alghabra yesterday said he could not explain how a reputed anti-Semite was invited to a Parliament Hill reception he attended with more than 100 others. Alghabra and the Liberal MP who hosted the event said no background checks were conducted: “There is always a risk of us meeting unsavoury individuals.”
Thirty-five publishers attended a confidential 2020 teleconference with the Canada Revenue Agency and Department of Finance to discuss terms of a $595 million media bailout, Access To Information records show. Publishers submitted questions in advance. None reported it: “What is the expected wait time to receive payment?”
Cabinet’s use of the Emergencies Act “is not likely to be unique” in years ahead, a former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said yesterday. Richard Fadden told a policy hearing of the Freedom Convoy inquiry he expected more “disruptive events” in the future: “What happened with the invocation of the Emergencies Act is not likely to be unique.”
