Cabinet must curb CRTC powers under a YouTube regulation bill, says a coalition of unions and publishers. Bill C-11 An Act To Amend The Broadcasting Act would grant the Commission too much authority without oversight, it said: “The fears are varied.”
Canadians required to self-quarantine due to monkeypox should receive federal aid, says Dr. Theresa Tam. The remarks by the chief public health officer followed estimates the virus has resulted in 28 hospitalizations in Canada: “Support people who do the right thing.”
The greatness of Canada is that it’s even here. We’ve had every reason to be at each other’s throats for 155 years yet kept the federation together. Anyone who doubts the achievement should ask Czechs and Slovaks, Tutsis and Hutus, Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, Confederates and Yankees. The roll call of nations that absorbed bitter factionalism without revolt or disintegration is a very short list.
Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based On Incomplete Conquests documents this remarkable story. In 1867 the Dominion Bureau of Statistics estimated the population was 28 percent French with few surviving Indigenous people, about 118,000. Today it is 22 percent French and the Indigenous population has grown tenfold.
“Canadians have not agreed that they belong to a single ‘people’ whose majority expresses the sovereign will of their nation. The holdouts are the French Canadians and members of the nations indigenous to North America whose historic lands are in Canada,” writes author Peter Russell, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto’s political science faculty.
Russell explains: “These Canadians do not accept that the tide of history has somehow washed away these nations of their first allegiance or diluted their constitution significance. Their enduring presence as ‘nations within’ Canada is fundamental to understanding Canada, as is the often troubled, uncomfortable accommodation of the ‘nations within’ by the country’s English-speaking majority.”
The Canadian experience is one of incremental adjustment and maddening deliberation. This remains a hard place to get things done. Professor Russell cites the example of radio.
The first Broadcasting Act was introduced in 1932 only after a Royal Commission, one Supreme Court reference – who has jurisdiction over radio waves? – and a ruling of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. “There was some doubt about the issue because, of course, there was no mention of radio in the British North America Act,” notes Russell.
Canada’s Odyssey chronicles the teeter-totter of the past 155 years with a warm narrative and compelling facts. By example: John A. Macdonald wanted Canada proclaimed a “kingdom.” It was the British who suggested “dominion.”
The 1864 Charlottetown Conference was the invention of Lord Stanmore, later governor of Fiji. When Stanmore died in 1912 the Globe & Mail knocked his obituary down to a single paragraph. Also, cabinet in 1914 prohibited traditional aboriginal dancing in public and in 1927 passed regulations forbidding First Nations from hiring their own lawyers.
And the most incredible fact of all: Canada in 1867 was 93 percent English and French. By 1961, the proportion of descendants of the so-called founding peoples was down to 74 percent. Today it is 66 percent. We are slightly revolutionary after all, writes Russell.
“Canada has not returned to the quest for a big bang, popular resolution of all its constitutional concerns – and let’s hope it never does,” says Russell. “That kind of constitutional politics may be appropriate for a country based on a single founding people. But Canada, a country based on incomplete conquests, is clearly not such a country.”
By Holly Doan
Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based On Incomplete Conquests, by Pete Russell; University of Toronto Press; 544 pages; ISBN 9781-4875-02041; $39.95
Climate change rewrites to the National Building Code will have a cost impact, the National Research Council warned yesterday. The Council said it will hire consultants to calculate the additional expense for new home construction: “Until we talk real numbers we can’t talk reality.”
The Department of Public Works says taxpayers could save a fortune on office space if federal employees continue to work from home. The department has estimated 230,000 staff are working remotely: “Infrastructure is the second largest expense to the Government of Canada after salary expenses.”
Canadians rate plastic a lesser environmental risk than marijuana smoke or flushing prescription drugs down the toilet, says in-house Department of Health research. Only a third of Canadians, 34 percent, said they worry about single use plastics: “Fewer are concerned.”
Federal excise taxes on marijuana totaled more than a quarter billion a year prior to the pandemic, according to Canada Revenue Agency tables. Cabinet had pledged to initially limit its share of taxes to $100 million a year to aid provinces with enforcement expenses: “Organized crime does not share its data with us.”
The number of family-run small businesses crashed in Canada from pre-pandemic levels, the Department of Industry said yesterday. The figures are the latest to gauge the scope of the small business recession: “There has been a substantial decline in the percentage of small and medium sized enterprises owned by members of the same family.”
A federal board is reviewing posthumous honours for Alexander Graham Bell due to his “controversial beliefs,” according to records. Bell died a hundred years ago. Designation of Canadian landmarks like the Halifax Citadel and Crowsnest Pass are also up for review under a cabinet policy against “colonialism, patriarchy and racism.”
Most vehicles in cabinet’s multi-million dollar motor pool are American made, records show. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had pledged to ensure “vehicles of the future are made right here in Canada.”
A Department of Public Works manager has been fired for cronyism. The department would not name the person but said in a notice that conflicts of interest would not be tolerated: “Public servants must act at all times in a manner that will withstand the closest scrutiny.”
Cabinet must consider steps to “secure a foothold for French in the public realm by way of political, cultural and economic status,” says a guide issued by Languages Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor. Staff complained after 53 years of federal bilingualism only seven percent of English-speaking Canadians know French words: “There is a decline in French across Canada including in Québec.”
Refusal to take a ratepayer’s cheque as payment for a bus pass has prompted a formal apology and change of policy by the City of Calgary. The dispute is only the latest over use of paper cheques: “Cheque recipients have become harder to engage.”
MPs, provincial legislators and city councillors are known to be in the pay of foreign agents, a former espionage officer yesterday told the Commons ethics committee. The foreign agents’ source country was not named though cabinet has accused China of clandestine activities: “What we know for sure is we have various foreign countries that succeeded in recruiting elected officials – again, municipal, provincial or federal.”
The Commons ethics committee yesterday by a 6 to 5 vote ordered the RCMP to comply with its demand for data on any spyware surveillance of MPs. The Mounties earlier dismissed a similar request: “Nobody is talking about preventing the spyware from being used in the first place.”
