Canadians can now wait an average three months to renew a passport, Social Development Minister Karina Gould said yesterday. Gould recommended the public take complaints to their MP: “I would recommend you contact your Member of Parliament.”
Cabinet yesterday admitted failure with a pre-election bill allowing municipal handgun bans. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau instead introduced what he called a proposed a “national freeze” on sales: “It didn’t make sense for them.”
University students who take a “gap year” after high school typically lose thousands in long term earnings, says Statistics Canada data. There were no similar impacts on high school graduates who waited before entering trades: “A gap year may have long term economic implications.”
The abrupt resignation of VIA Rail’s chief executive is a “privacy matter,” Transport Minister Omar Alghabra yesterday told the Commons transport committee. The $318,000-a year CEO quit May 20 with two years remaining on her contract: “I don’t think you want this committee to do a performance review on individual employees.”
The head of CMHC in a private meeting complained of a “need for home prices to stall,” according to Access To Information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. CEO Romy Bowers also welcomed tips from equity tax advocates on a strategy to “brief political leaders” on the tax scheme: “Her own personal view is that real estate being 14 percent of GDP is not a strong path.”
Online black market drug dealers sell more marijuana pound for pound than federally-licensed distributors, says a Department of Public Safety report. Data suggested criminal gangs prospered when Parliament legalized recreational cannabis four years ago: “Factors put the online illicit market on par with the online legal market.”
A federal contractor Thomson Reuters paid to host the Prime Minister’s chief of staff and her deputy at the invitation-only White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, according to ethics filings. Katie Telford was earlier quoted by a cabinet minister as boasting she could manipulate press coverage: “Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson made a splash.”
Nunavut has the largest government payroll outside Scandinavia, new federal figures show. Statistics Canada estimated 29 percent of the territory’s workforce is employed by government: “The public service is the largest employer in Nunavut,”
Conservative and New Democrat MPs joined in condemning a Supreme Court decision striking lifetime imprisonment without parole as unconstitutional. Parliament in 2011 amended the Criminal Code to permit literal life sentences for multiple murderers: “This is unacceptable.”
When Pierre Trudeau died the Calgary Herald published a commentary calling him a Communist. As late as 1989 an Alberta Liberal running for a Senate seat drew protest after describing Trudeau as “a great Canadian.”
The provincial party has not won an election in more than a century. If voters send a handful of Liberals to Ottawa from time to time, statistically a Canadian has a better chance of visiting outer space than earning an MP’s pension as an Alberta Liberal. The last to serve three terms left office 16 years ago.
Yet author Darryl Raymaker recalls Trudeau was once cheered on horseback in the Calgary Stampede parade and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Alberta. He was “our very own JFK,” writes Raymaker.
If Trudeaumania was muted in Alberta in 1968 – one Liberal candidate in Red Deer had his car windows shot out – there were ripples of enthusiasm. “Western Canadians with a longstanding grievance against central Canada saw that Trudeau was different,” writes Raymaker. “Not only young and exciting, he was a potential leader from Québec who could put Québec in its place.”
Raymaker is a longtime Calgary barrister and Liberal organizer. Trudeau’s Tango is part memoir, part documentary of the geographic, cultural and political divisions that are a permanent fixture of Confederation. The fact we held it together remains a world-class achievement.
Prairie residents then were their own distinct society. Many were Dust Bowl refugees only a generation removed from pioneer sodbusters. They were hard people in a hard land. Author Raymaker recalls a 1969 Kiwanis Club speech by the Chief Justice of the Alberta Supreme Court, Val Milvain. “When police brutality is played up by the news media, it is playing into the hands of those who want to disrupt law and order,” said Justice Milvain; “We will be destroyed by the noisy clamorers after what they call ‘civil rights’.”
The law-and-order speech came the same year Trudeau liberalized divorce laws and decriminalized gay sex. The two worlds were bound to collide.
In 1968 Liberals elected four Alberta MPs. By 1972 the party was decimated. “Their promise of 1968 shattered, they had gone down to a resounding defeat in every riding,” recalls Raymaker. What went wrong?
Farm protests and political foul-ups didn’t help. The provincial party contemplated a coalition with the decrepit Social Credit movement. “It was like necrophilia,” as former Alberta Liberal leader Nick Taylor once put it. And there was the Official Languages Act, passed in 1969.
“Many English-speaking people across Canada, Albertans prominent among them, were outraged at the federal government ‘shoving French down our throats’,” writes Raymaker; “English-speaking Canadians generally seemed to tolerate bilingualism so long as it included being tough with Québec or staring down the separatists.”
Bilingualism was considered alien, overbearing and Québec-centric. In Alberta today, French immersion runs at 6 percent. More than a third still oppose the Languages Act, according to federal polling.
Canadian history is much more than vanilla-bland observances. Trudeau’s Tango is a fresh and lively account of politics with sharp elbows.
By Holly Doan
Trudeau’s Tango: Alberta Meets Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968-1972 by Darryl Raymaker; University of Alberta Press; 244 pages; ISBN 9781-7721-22657; $24.95
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s luxury tax on planes, boats and automobiles will cost jobs and generate less revenue than estimated, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. The ten percent tax takes effect September 1: “There would certainly be job losses.”
Aggressive sales tactics remain commonplace at major banks, according to an undercover sting operation by a federal agency. Auditors posing as customers were routinely oversold products they neither sought nor required: “The Agency expects banks will not misplace this trust.”
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault yesterday approved a six-figure climate change grant to Canada’s largest beer maker. Guilbeault’s department paid $250,000 to replace a diesel boiler in a St. John’s brewery: “We are a company based in nature.”
Cabinet will not overturn a CRTC decision blamed for high wholesale telecom rates, the Department of Industry said yesterday. “It would be irresponsible,” André Arbour, director general of internet policy, told reporters in a technical briefing: “That does not mean to say there is not room for improvement for competition.”
Vaccination status is “fundamentally private,” a national broadcast ombudsman said yesterday. The Canada Broadcast Standards Council ruling came in the case of an Edmonton announcer Lochlin Cross who outed a listener as unvaccinated: “Revelation of this private, confidential medical information was not only careless but egregious.”
