A federal immigration museum faces years of operating deficits, according to management. The Canadian Museum of Immigration in Halifax earlier blamed losses in part on changing public opinion about foreigners: “Social cohesion in our country is threatened.”
Friends who help friends file their taxes for a few hundred dollars still owe a duty of care, a court has ruled. Even a “nominal fee” establishes a business relationship, wrote a British Columbia judge: “I accept that friends can become clients and clients can become friends.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand’s department last year fired 25 Canadian diplomats including one caught in secret contact with a foreign government. Neither the fired diplomat nor the foreign state were identified: “A report was received from a partner department that an employee was in contact inappropriately with foreign government officials.”
Cabinet yesterday would not release terms of a multi-billion dollar concession to the U.S. over the Gordie Howe International Bridge. Prime Minister Mark Carney confirmed he agreed to share toll revenues with the United States, a breach of a 2012 agreement: “Carney has negotiated a terrible deal for Canada.”
Canada Post spent nearly $194 million on climate programs amid ever-increasing deficits, service cuts and a 46 percent hike in stamp rates, records show: “It’s a responsibility we embrace.”
The Senate Ethics Officer yesterday would not say whether a Liberal appointee’s vulgar Twitter posts breached a 2019 citation on appropriate conduct on the internet. Senator Charles Adler (Man.) in his official social media account posted a series of insults about the Official Opposition: “The minimum standard of conduct tolerated in the community is not necessarily the same standard of behaviour that a senator must adhere to.”
Airlines will receive $150 million jet fuel loans at below-market rates, says a federal briefing note. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne made no mention of the subsidy in announcing the program June 8: ‘Borrowing costs are favourable relative to market rates for affected companies.’
Canada Post managers last year pocketed nearly $31 million in bonuses even as CEO Doug Ettinger told Parliament the organization was “on the brink.” The disclosures were detailed in financial accounts requested by MPs: “One of the things I lose sleep about is keeping the good people who are with us.”
Eleven percent bonuses for federal executives are proportionate and fair, says a memo to Treasury Board President Shafqat Ali. Bonuses averaging $18,316 per executive were paid last year even as cabinet told Canadians “these are tough times.”
Federal agents cannot keep up with deportation of foreign fugitives, according to figures in a Privy Council briefing note. Current targets are thousands short, data showed: “I liken our inventories to a bathtub; we are constantly scooping water out of that bathtub but the bathtub is filling up.”
Cabinet members and political aides received dozens of free passes to attend the FIFA World Cup including four staff and a summer student in the office of Liberal MP Adam van Koeverden (Burlington North-Milton West, Ont.), Secretary of State for Sport. The tournament cost taxpayers $1.07 billion: ‘Memories will last a generation.’
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne must “restore fiscal credibility,” say investment bankers. A Toronto think tank in a submission to MPs expressed alarm over high deficits: ‘There is no path to balance the budget.’
Long before,
The vacant promises of the elected.
Long before,
The vacant seats in the House.
Indians on foot greeted every lake, river and ridge.
If it’s off, turn back,
If the land feels wrong, it is.
The land watches.
Deracinated, society fractured and dulled.
Organizational structure,
Dictates outcome,
Mob rule by poll.
Respect the routes of the ancestors.
The land remembers and keeps the score.
The Big Water whispers its intent with each ripple.
Heed naught and suffer as fools.
Bureaucracies replicate,
And rush towards singularity,
Insularity results,
And the land waits.
But as the sun awakes in the East and surely rests in the West,
The absence of nature eats at man,
And the land remembers what the traveler has forgotten,
In the land that watches.
By W.N. Branson 
One day in 2004 two co-workers – one black, one white – had an unpleasant physical alteration at a slaughterhouse in Brooks, Alta. The black man was fired. About 200 Sudanese employees protested the wrongful dismissal. “Management told them, go back to your jobs or we’ll fire you,” one witness recalled. They refused. Sixty were fired.
The incident set in motion an extraordinary series of events documented in Defying Expectations by Professor Jason Foster of Athabasca University. Foster is a former policy director with the Alberta Federation of Labour, and a skillful writer whose account reads like a screenplay. The Brooks plant was the least promising candidate for a union drive anywhere in Canada.
There was no “eureka moment,” writes Foster. Local 401 of the United Food and Commercial Workers union was a “grocery store local” facing long odds in organizing industrial workers who didn’t speak English, in a province with an 11 percent private sector unionization rate, with an employer, Tyson Foods, so unfriendly to labour it posted a banner outside the Brooks plant that read, “Proudly Union-Free.”
“The Lakeside strike was no ordinary strike,” writes Foster. “The plant is located in Brooks, a sleepy southern Alberta town previously known for cattle and oil well servicing and deeply entrenched in Alberta’s conservative rural culture. The employer, Tyson Foods, was virulently anti-union and had fought hard for two decades to keep the plant union-free.”
Local 401 had no time for fine speeches and excellent PowerPoint presentations on long-term sectoral trends. “Perhaps they were too busy fighting immediate battles,” Foster explains. The president of Local 401 was Douglas O’Halloran, a combative former meatpacker. On gaining the presidency in 1989, he was handed elegant business cards identifying him as CEO of the local. “F–k that,” said O’Halloran. “Get me new cards.”
The UFCW tried for years to organize the Lakeside plant from 1992 and “almost annually after that” with failed membership drives in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002. “If the drive got to a vote the results were rarely close,” writes Foster. “The company waged aggressive counter-campaigns, using tactics that included threats and intimidation.”
The successful 2005 drive was gritty. Management ploughed makeshift roads through surrounding fields to bus replacement workers through a back gate. O’Halloran was injured in a high-speed chase with plant managers determined to serve him with Court papers. And African and Asian strikers had everything to lose. Many were refugees who’d slept in trailers outside the plant. “The immigrants had nowhere to go,” a union staffer recalled.
This tale of the Lakeside strike is riveting, too easily caricatured as black-and-white conflict in a small Prairie town with a fighting Irish union man and desperate immigrant jobseekers. It is much better than that.
“I can do anything for union because my soul is with them,” the author quotes one Lakeside worker, speaking in broken English. “I am closer with them than my family.”
By Holly Doan
Defying Expectations: The Case of UFCW Local 401, by Jason Foster; Athabasca University Press; 195 pages; ISBN 9781-7719-91995; $34.95
Condo speculators in Metro Vancouver caught with thousands of unsold units should be allowed to fail, says a Commons petition sponsored without comment by Conservative MP Dan Albas (Okanagan Lake West-South Kelowna, B.C.). Petitioners opposed a $1.45 billion bailout of developers at taxpayers’ expense: “Unsold units should be allowed to fall to prices that households can afford through open market discounts, credit or losses, or receivership.”
