Most federal employees continue to work at home, Treasury Board President Mona Fortier said yesterday. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce petitioned cabinet to suspend the practice introduced in 2020 as a pandemic precaution: “Some public servants are back in the workplace at least two days a week.”
Immigration Minister Sean Fraser yesterday proposed to let nearly 1.5 million immigrants into Canada within three years despite fears of a recession. Cabinet’s latest immigration plan follows in-house research showing Canadians are skeptical of federal claims immigrants create jobs: “Go to a machine shop and see if they get talent on the shop floor to fill the orders.”
Media and political leaders falsely characterized the Freedom Convoy as an extremist movement, according to confidential emails between Ontario Provincial Police commanders. There was no evidence convoy members were anything but political protesters, said one commander: “It is not an ‘extremist’ movement.”
Cabinet and political aides schemed on ways to perpetuate media coverage depicting Freedom Convoy members as “crazies,” the Public Order Emergency Commission was told yesterday. A lawyer for the truckers read out text messages in which Liberal aides contemplated a media campaign to depict protesters as violent, adding: “We need something to back this up.”
Hate thought leads to hate crime, Senator David Arnot (Sask.), a former Saskatchewan human rights commissioner, said yesterday. Arnot’s remarks came amid testimony at the Senate human rights committee that claimed the Freedom Convoy was rooted in hatred of Muslims: “Hate thought, hate speech, begets hate crime. We know that.”
Federal regulators polled Canadians on support for potential postal service cuts and a 36 percent hike in stamp rates. A Department of Public Works report complained of “ongoing financial losses” at the post office: ‘Do you agree Canada Post should be allowed to deliver letters less frequently than five days a week?’
Auditors have found more improper contracting at Canadian missions aboard, this time involving embassies and consulates in Central and South America. Auditors in Mexico City expressed dismay over a mysterious $500 million bookkeeping entry later dismissed as a coding error: “No mission has a budget of that magnitude.”
Secret cabinet minutes disclose Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested using the Emergencies Act days before the extraordinary measure was invoked against the Freedom Convoy. Cabinet at the time publicly assured Canadians the Highway Traffic Act was sufficient to deal with protesters outside Parliament: “The Prime Minister set up the conversation.”
Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino was “very persistent” in discussing the Freedom Convoy, according to RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki. The remark is detailed in minutes of a police meeting. Mendicino denied directing police operations: “My Minister very persistent.”
Rideau Hall last year paid out more than $319,000 in settlements to four unidentified employees, records show. The payments followed then-Governor General Julie Payette’s abrupt resignation over allegations of workplace harassment: “Everyone has the right to work in a safe and healthy environment.”
A federal handgun sales ban will not “meaningfully” reduce gun crime, the RCMP union and Regina’s police chief testified at the Commons public safety committee. Federal authorities have sought to enforce a ban through cabinet order: “The issue is people who are criminals.”
The federal Leaders’ Debates Commission paid $8,500 to settle out of court a defamation claim by Rebel News Network Limited. The payment was disclosed in Public Accounts tabled in Parliament: “There is room in the nation for the expression of opposing points of view.”
“Canada: The Last Best West!” was his slogan. Clifford Sifton, a brilliant interior minister, crafted far-reaching immigration policies that are still with us. The Ottawa house he lived in for 25 years is not. His home might have been saved as a memorial to the man who built the West. Instead it was demolished to make way for a grey apartment building.
First-hand accounts of horrific childhoods are rare in literature, and compelling: Charlie Chaplin’s My Autobiography or A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, the recollections of an English workhouse boy that are so stark one U.K. reviewer said it made Oliver Twist look like a holiday camp.
From Athabasca University Press is My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell, the memoirs of an Indian Residential schoolboy. Arthur Bear Chief’s story is so raw it would have gone unpublished 30 years ago. Bear Chief notes with irony the Anglican Church didn’t give him much of an education at the Old Sun Residential School in Gleichen, Alta. His English skills were so poor that later, as a public servant, he had an ex-wife ghostwrite his government reports. The result in My Decade at Old Sun is a plain and riveting narrative stripped of adjectives and ornamental prose. It is vivid and powerful.
Bear Chief writes in memory of his best friend, Nelson Wolf Leg. He recalls the two little boys cowering in the dark awaiting a summons from the faculty pedophile. “We made a promise to each other to never say anything about what happened to anyone, not even our parents. We also made a pact that if one of us died, the other would come forward and talk about our abuse. I can still vividly remember Nelson, both of us lying in my bed crying and holding onto each other for protection, and scared out of our wits,” writes Bear Chief; “I was younger than Nelson, and I can remember him wiping the tears from my face and saying, ‘Keep quiet.’”
Bear Chief went to Residential School at age 7 in 1949. Eight brothers and sisters were taken, too. He remembers when they came for his older brother: “Francis came running into the house, jumped up into the attic opening and crawled inside,” he writes. “Not long after that, three white men and an RCMP officer came running in. They dragged my brother down as he was screaming and kicking. They dragged him out, and my parents could not do anything. That was a preview of what was in store for me.”
My Decade at Old Sun recounts a boy’s aching loneliness, occasional joy – chocolate pudding was served once a week – and the reign of sadism. One gym teacher liked to rifle a soccer ball at the children’s heads. Another supervisor enjoyed terrifying students by waving his service revolver in class. The faculty kept a directory and checked off the name of any student heard to speak the Blackfoot dialect. A check meant weekly beatings. “We used to call Sundays ‘payday’,” writes Bear Chief.
“There were times when I would go out to the field by myself and sit there calling for my mother,” he writes; “My life is like a cocoon that never really hatched.”
Bear Chief recalls failed marriages and a battle with alcoholism, his letter of apology from the Anglican Church and a $105,000 out-of-court settlement. “My lawyers took 30 percent,” he said. The government charged GST.
Unlike other crime victims, Bear Chief and thousands of fellow Residential School students never had the chance to face their tormentors in court. Nobody named names, nobody went to jail. “Even now I cannot begin to comprehend a system that was so completely out of whack and so full of individuals who were just there to satisfy their cruelty and lust, or understand why they will never be asked to answer for what they did,” he says.
My Decade at Old Sun is an unforgettable memoir. It will make your troubles seem small.
By Holly Doan
My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell, by Arthur Bear Chief; Athabasca University Press; ISBN 9781-7719-91759; $19.95
The Ottawa Police Service days before cabinet invoked the Emergencies Act distributed a memo falsely claiming foreign extremists bankrolled the Freedom Convoy. The memo by a U.K. think tank mentioned “Trump” five times and summarized Facebook insults against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: “Funding appears to be coming from a host of U.S. and international sources.”
