Conservative and New Democrat MPs have joined in condemning cabinet for weakening a private bill to protect workers’ benefits in company bankruptcies. “I am sick of it,” New Democrat MP Daniel Blaikie (Elmwood-Transcona, Man.) told the Commons: “There always seem to be roadblocks.”
My favourite Korean folk tale
is designed to teach children proper hygiene
although it plays out like a nightmare:
If you cut your toenails & forget to clean up the clippings
rats will eat it, become an exact replica of yourself
& turn up at your door.
Your identities will be indecipherable to your father
& your position in the household is diminished
by at least half.
My second favourite folk tale concerns a pickled, yellow king
who sends his Turtle Doctor to find a new liver.
The first animal outside the kingdom he finds
is a rabbit.
When they improvidently show their hand
Rabbit insists it’s too valuable to travel with.
He is released in good faith
& according to the story, he ends all benders.
When the doctor demands his dues
the rabbit stifles a laugh: “Why would I give you that?
You know I can’t live without it,”
& bounds off.
(Editor’s note: poet Peter Gibbon has lived in South Korea and published with In/Words Magazine, Apt. 9 Press, Bywords and Toronto’s The Puritan)
Covid is a tale of failure by federal executives and political aides. They did not mean to cause death and suffering; these people are not monsters. They were merely reckless and incompetent in the manner of Titanic officers who kept a dance band and well-stocked liquor cabinet but no binoculars in the crow’s nest. The Public Health Agency of Canada was fully funded at $675 million a year and found money for climate change conferences but literally could not run a mask warehouse. It was their job to keep you safe. They failed.
Displacement City is a story of failure. The City of Toronto last year budgeted $663 million for homeless and housing programs yet authors count 10,000 homeless people. The City has 75 years of experience in public housing and a six-figure CEO at the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, yet was reduced to arguing whether to install communal toilets at tent cities in municipal parks.
“In Toronto people who are poor have been living through crises for years,” write editors Greg Cooke and Cathy Crowe. “Prior to the pandemic over a hundred people were dying preventable deaths each year, many because of the overdose crisis. For years advocates had been demanding the City of Toronto declare a homelessness emergency and asking for additional resources. Now, all of a sudden, there was a health crisis.”
Displacement City is a passionate account of failure. It lists the names of homeless who died including many Jane and John Does. “Shelters were either full or unsafe,” authors quote one homeless person, adding: “Even before the pandemic the shelter system had high rates of violence, bed bugs and theft.”
Toronto’s response to failure, like the Public Health Agency’s, was to spend and spend and spend. No inquiry, no firings, nobody named names. Executives and political aides who could not wisely use $663 million to ensure homeless people did not freeze to death instead concluded the problem was not theirs.
At one point the City began leasing hotel rooms for use by the homeless. “Many of us were excited at the thought of our clients living in these hotels where they would have their own rooms with doors that locked, real beds, hot showers and functioning TVs they could watch freely, the very basics of a safe and dignified space,” writes one contributor. “However this excitement soon turned to frustration. The shelter hotels were run like regular shelters with bed checks and unnecessary rules such as not allowing couples to room together.”
This is what failure looks like. It is expensive and bureaucratic and pleases no one, neither “clients” nor ratepayers who discover they are financing free cable TV.
Identifying who is responsible for failure is hard. These people cover their tracks. Very often it takes Access To Information records and cross-examination under oath to find the truth.
Yet the consequences of recklessness and incompetence are plain as day. The system was fully funded. The municipality had paid experts and powerful friends. Liberals hold 25 of 25 Toronto seats. Six are in cabinet including the minister of housing. Still people died.
This is failure on a Titanic scale. Contributors to Displacement City are understandably angry. Some blame capitalism. One contributor complains the Mayor should have expropriated buildings to find apartments for the homeless. Another writes: “The City might have made life safer for encampment residents by allowing them access to basic amenities in the form of public washrooms, running water, clean electricity and fire safety.”
This is not a failure of humanity. It is a failure of management. It is the tale of Covid. There will be many, many more accounts to come.
By Holly Doan
Displacement City: Fighting for Health and Homes in a Pandemic, edited by Greg Cook and Cathy Crowe; University of Toronto Press: 320 pages; ISBN 9781-4875-46496; $29.95
Liberal MPs last night asked that GoFundMe identify how much the Freedom Convoy raised in Russia. It follows a discredited CBC News report that questioned whether the Kremlin financed Parliament Hill protests: “Can you confirm to the committee that no donations were received from China?”
Jody Thomas, national security advisor to the Prime Minister, yesterday pointed to protesters’ tweets in justifying her claim the Freedom Convoy was a “threat to national interest.” Thomas was appointed as $306,000-a year security advisor last January 11 just two weeks before protesters arrived on Parliament Hill: “It is a threat to democracy.”
The Department of Finance had no opinion “one way or another” whether Freedom Convoy protesters were terrorists, Deputy Minister Michael Sabia testified yesterday. “I’m not going to give you a yes or no,” Sabia said under questioning on why cabinet used a 9/11 anti-terror law to freeze millions in accounts held by protest sympathizers: “Who takes responsibility for the fact these accounts were frozen, that people couldn’t pay their rent, that people couldn’t buy their groceries?”
Protests in the 2021 federal campaign did not appear to be aligned with “any specific ideology” or hate group and saw threats against all major party leaders, say RCMP files. Demonstrations against vaccine mandates prompted Parliament to pass a bill threatening 10 years’ imprisonment for protesters at hospitals and clinics: “Threats against protected persons encompass a range of rhetoric including vague adverse comments.”
A federal landlord, the National Capital Commission, yesterday closed the Prime Minister’s official residence for costly repairs expected to take years to complete. The manor house at 24 Sussex Drive was last occupied by the Harpers in 2015: “What is the pegged cost?”
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland told a secret cabinet meeting that Canadians with bank accounts frozen under the Emergencies Act should be denied their money unless they first reported to police. “Banks were pleased,” said confidential minutes.
RCMP in an internal email acknowledged there was “no serious violence in Ottawa” with the Freedom Convoy despite claims by Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino. One police commander said allegations of violence were “the main reason for the Emergencies Act.”
Chinese-Canadians in an internal Privy Council Office poll say cabinet must “stand up” to China’s Communist Party even if it brings worsening relations. “Canada was not currently doing enough to speak out against human rights issues,” citizens of Chinese ethnicity told federal pollsters: “Very few wanted to see the development of stronger ties.”
Mistaken payments of $2,000 monthly pandemic benefit cheques cost at least $5.3 billion, records show. It is the largest sum disclosed to date under the Canada Emergency Response Benefit program: “When creating a program as quickly as we did there is going to be some abuse.”
Complaints of racism in the Department of Immigration yesterday prompted MPs to recommend all interviews with visa applicants be recorded. The Commons immigration committee also sought appointment of an ombudsman to hear complaints of bigotry: “These problems do exist.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau considered the Freedom Convoy an international embarrassment, say secret minutes of a cabinet meeting. One minister called it a “concentrated effort to make this country look bad,” while Ambassador Ralph Goodale complained from Britain there was “disbelief that this is happening in Canada.”
The Public Health Agency spent more than $43 million hiring security guards to make house calls on returning cross-border travelers, records show. Private security firms completed almost 600,000 “door knocks” to enforce quarantine rules: “What recourse is the Agency making available to individuals who are harassed?”
