Handgun imports will be banned in Canada under the same law used to block American dairy products at the border, cabinet said Friday. “We will use every single tool at our disposal,” Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino told reporters: “The number of handguns in Canada will only go down.”
Young Canadians are pragmatic but “more individualized” than past generations, says a Department of Heritage report. Staff compiled a personality profile of Canadians under 25 as part of an audit of youth program spending: “The world has changed.”
Taxpayers should not directly pay cash prizes to Canadian Olympic and Paralympic athletes who win international competitions, says the Department of Canadian Heritage. Paralympians have complained they do not receive $20,000 prizes awarded to Olympic gold medalists through organizing committees: ‘The sport support program does not permit use of federal funds for prize money.’
It was a sumptuous apartment building, home to a famed leader, then lost to the wreckers. How many Occupy Movement protesters who gathered in Ottawa’s Confederation Park in 2011 realized they’d camped at what was once among the most prestigious addresses in the capital?
The elegant Roxborough Apartments on the northeast corner of Laurier and Elgin Street was a stroll from Parliament Hill with a prime view of the Rideau Canal. Here William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, lived in a suite for thirteen years – “rooms filled with very sacred and memorable associations,” King confided to his diary. “The notes of beauty and refinement are all a part of what is dear to me.”
The Roxborough, crafted by Montreal architect Howard Colton Stone, was an eight-story, 82-suite landmark built of red and yellow brick and embellished with oak and marble. Rents of $40 a week included full maid service and a lavish dining lounge featuring an ancient cockatoo as mascot. It was the place of choice for Ottawa dignitaries.
King made the Roxborough his Ottawa home from his appointment as labour minister in 1909 through his triumph in the 1919 Liberal leadership campaign and first election as prime minister in ‘21.
“I am spending my last night in the rooms at the Roxborough,” King wrote January 10, 1923 as he prepared a move to the late Wilfrid Laurier’s Sandy Hill mansion. Laurier House “can scarcely ever be to me what these apartments are,” King wrote. “I feel as if I were parting with something akin to a very dear friend. I love this quiet and comfortable atmosphere.” Today the Roxborough is gone and forgotten.
No other 20th century prime minister did more than King to reshape the urban landscape of Ottawa. He initiated grand beautification schemes from the 1920s through the ‘40s;. His ideas held sway over local planners.
King gave the Ottawa Improvement Commission greater powers over construction of parks and parkways and renamed it the Federal District Commission. He was responsible for widening Elgin Street into a boulevard trod by dignitaries and royalty. He inspired creation of the National War Memorial and Confederation Square and Gatineau Park and its parkways. As prime minister he invited Paris-born planner Jacques Gréber to devise a master urban plan, unveiled in 1949, that inspired the capital’s Greenbelt but destroyed much else.
The prime minister’s beloved Roxborough Apartments became a casualty. After King’s death in 1950 it succumbed to the Gréber Plan.
The landmark was expropriated by the National Capital Commission in May 1965 and all tenants including MPs and a Supreme Court justice were evicted six months later. The building was demolished. “A disgrace,” one 89-year old tenant said of the Roxborough’s destruction. “They are pulling down the only decent apartment building in the city.”
The site was marked for construction of a national science museum but instead languished as a parking lot. In 1969 it was turned into a Confederation Park in belated observance of the nation’s centennial two years before. Today, adding further insult to King’s memory, there is no plaque commemorating the site.
By Andrew Elliott
Alberta does not have a provincial sales tax because Albertans do not want one. They tried it 86 years ago. It was not successful. Robert Ascah, former director of the University of Alberta’s Institute for Public Economics, recounts the little-known experiment. “An unpopular and misunderstood tax is something to avoid if you are gunning for re-election,” Ascah wryly observes.
In the teeth of the Dust Bowl and facing insolvency, the Social Credit cabinet introduced a two percent sales tax on May 1, 1936. Ascah recounts the dreadful circumstances. Four hundred school districts were in default, wheat was down to 32 cents a bushel – a price not seen since the Middle Ages – and ratepayers were reduced to eating rodents.
A 1933 Alberta Taxation Inquiry Board endorsed a sales tax in bloodless terms strikingly similar to those used by advocates today. It was “simple,” “easily understood,” “flexible,” “easily modified.” The legislature repealed the tax a year later on September 1, 1937 and never mentioned it again.
“Backing down from this tax appears to have been, in hindsight, an astute move for Alberta’s young government,” writes Ascah. Social Creditors remained in office another 34 years and the sales tax remained Black Death.
When Brian Mulroney introduced the GST in 1991 Albertans challenged it in court and defeated every single GST supporter at the polls. Conservative MP Murray Dorin (Edmonton West), then-chair of the Commons finance committee, was such an enthusiastic support of the GST he wanted it levied on rents.
I lived in Dorin’s riding at the time. The MP had so many fists waved in his face Dorin suspended his 1993 campaign weeks before balloting day. “Nervous exhaustion,” they said.
Against this colourful history Editor Ascah and contributors have produced A Sales Tax For Alberta: Why And How. “The biggest obstacle to actually implementing such a tax is Alberta’s political culture which is widely considered to be hostile to taxes,” authors note. “Politicians fear electoral defeat should they ever advocate for the tax or even consider the idea in public.”
A Sales Tax For Alberta is lively and a good argument starter. Authors concede no sales tax is possible without popular support.
“A sales tax could help fund crucial public programs such as education and health care,” write Ascah. “A sales tax makes good sense both economically and fiscally,” writes Graham Thomson, longtime Edmonton Journal columnist. A sales tax would have reduced past deficits, explains Melville McMillan, professor emeritus of the University of Alberta’s Department of Economics.
So the Taxation Inquiry Board said in 1933. Advocates today have the advantage of 86 years’ worth of data to contrast and compare in proving their assertion Alberta is worse off for its lack of a sales tax. Here A Sales Tax For Alberta falls short.
Does oil-producing Alberta with no provincial sales tax have worse health and education outcomes than oil-producing Newfoundland and Labrador that charges 15 percent? We don’t know.
Are residents of oil-producing Alaska made more miserable by the fact they not only don’t pay a sales tax but last year each received a US$1,114 oil dividend cheque? Readers are left to wonder.
Is the poorest ratepayer next door in British Columbia materially better off for paying seven percent plus GST? A Sales Tax For Alberta does not say.
Alberta taxpayers would answer no, no and no. Advocates accept they must first convince voters before any tax could be imposed. Here at least they are ahead of Murray Dorin.
By Tom Korski
A Sales Tax for Alberta: Why and How, edited by Robert L. Ascah; Athabasca University Press; 160 pages; ISBN 9781-7719-92978; $27.99
A federal contractor hired to manage airport Covid test kits yesterday was cited for keeping 147,000 travelers’ email addresses for sales pitches. Quarantine Act regulations had forced travelers to surrender their emails to receive test results: ‘Travelers had no choice but to comply with the Public Health Agency rules.’
Canadian Armed Forces members continue to be discharged under vaccine rules weeks after other federal employers suspended mandates, Federal Court records show. One corporal who challenged her dismissal noted provinces and most employers also lifted Covid mandates: “She takes issue with the manner in which her religious exemption was considered.”
Cabinet will not detail millions of dollars in Canadian assets they claim to have frozen under sanctions against Russia. Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly yesterday said she had no more information than what the RCMP gave reporters two months ago: “I think your questions are extremely valid.”
Ukraine’s ambassador to Canada yesterday pleaded with MPs to overrule cabinet’s waiver of Russian sanctions. “This appeasement has already failed,” Ambassador Yuliia Kovaliv told the Commons foreign affairs committee: “Just Google the history.”
The Department of Public Works promises to disclose what if anything it did to verify the credibility of federal Covid suppliers. Hurried contracting and outright theft cost taxpayers more than $100 million, records show: “Processes can always be improved.”
The labour department days before Freedom Convoy protests against vaccine mandates complained of “significant” labour shortages in a trucking industry that could not afford to lose drivers, according to records. A cabinet proposal that interprovincial truckers show proof of vaccination was dropped a week after the protest ended: “Science changes. Lots of things are changing.”
The Public Health Agency plans a 2023 earthquake drill. An earlier pandemic drill was interrupted by Covid: “If there is a significant seismic event in either British Columbia or in the Ottawa-Montréal-Québec City corridor we would be looking for an all-of-society approach.”
A federal judge has quashed an order granting three U.S. citizens from Michigan “refugee status” in Canada. The case spent six years on appeal: “There is no such thing in people’s minds, mine included, as a refugee from the United States.”
Hundreds of thousands of records are at “serious risk” at Library and Archives Canada after managers stored material on obsolete tape cartridges, says an in-house report. “Some of the material is on media so old Library and Archives Canada does not have the hardware to open it,” wrote auditors.
Shouting an obscenity in public is not a crime, the Newfoundland and Labrador Court of Appeal has ruled. The decision came in the case of a St. John’s motorist who hollered a drive-by vulgarity at a TV reporter and was charged with disturbing the peace: “Business in a public place may be distracted for any number of reasons including someone shouting an obscenity.”
