Inflation is the leading worry for Canadians with many questioning if the country’s best years are behind it, says internal Department of Finance research. Canadians told Minister Chrystia Freeland’s pollsters the cost of living was a bigger worry than crime, terrorism or climate change: “Wages have not kept up.”
Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller yesterday said he had no idea his office approved a Canada Summer Student grant for a group whose anti-Semitic senior consultant campaigned against Jews as “human garbage.” Miller said the funding should be returned: “He’s held horribly anti-Semitic statements that we should have known about earlier.”
Cabinet is “leaning in” on a pending bill to censor legal internet content and will introduce the legislation as soon as possible, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said yesterday. The effort has stalled since first proposed in 2019: “Others within our government are leaning in on this and will bring forward the legislation as quickly as possible.”
A federal judge has certified a class action lawsuit against the Canada Revenue Agency over hacking of thousands of online accounts by CERB cheats. The Agency acknowledged flaws in its software allowed hackers to steal taxpayers’ ID to claim $2,000 pandemic relief cheques: “Did these attacks not demonstrate there was a total failure of the systems?”
Rogers Communications Inc. must answer for a July 8 blackout in pressing for its takeover of rival Shaw Communications, Chief Justice Paul Crampton of the Federal Court has ruled. Rogers executives had questioned the relevance of the internet shutdown that affected 12 million customers: “We work hard to bring the best value for money for our customers.”
Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller’s office approved a Canada Summer Student grant application by a Montréal group linked to anti-Semitic slurs. Cabinet at the time required applicants to swear an oath to “respect individual human rights.”
A federal contractor paid as a media consultant by the Department of Canadian Heritage for years claimed Zionists controlled newspapers in Canada. Friends of Jews “monopolize North American media,” wrote Laith Marouf: “The majority of Canadian media is owned by two Zionists.”
A drafting error by the Department of Justice will save a convicted drunk driver from a six-year license suspension, a judge has ruled. “Mistakes happen,” said the Ontario Court of Appeal: “They happen everywhere. One appears to have happened here.”
The Public Service Alliance of Canada, the largest federal union, never challenged vaccine mandates in court because they “would have little chance of success,” it said. The comments came in a labour board hearing on the Alliance’s representation of members: “It was decided the best approach would be to handle files case by case.”
Air Canada has been ordered to pay $1,000 each to a Fort St. John, B.C. couple whose flight was delayed more than nine hours due to “crew constraints.” A similar July 12 ruling against WestJet is being challenged in Federal Court amid fears airlines now owe clients millions in compensation: “Assessment must be made on a case by case basis.”
Many Canadians recall when a portrait of Her Majesty was displayed in every post office and hockey rink and a thumping rendition of God Save The Queen was a staple of service club luncheons. Much has changed since a monarch last ascended to the throne in “an age of deference,” as David Johnson puts it.
“We are coming to the end of an era,” Johnston writes in Battle Royal. “Elizabeth II, a seemingly near permanent feature of life for so many people, is in her twilight years. At any point in the next decade or so the Queen will die and her son Charles, Prince of Wales, will become king. Monarchists will rejoice at this succession, following the ancient protocols of English common law, but republicans will grimace.”
Battle Royal is a crisp examination of where Canadians stand or fall on the relevance of the monarchy. Even die-hard republicans can’t bother with the tedious chore of changing the Constitution Act to replace the new king with a Canadian head of state, but this is not the point, notes the author. “This we know: The monarchy will continue to exist in Canada once Elizabeth II is gone, and the Canadian vice-regents will carry on their work as they always have,” writes Johnson of Cape Breton University. “There is a world of difference, however, between existing and thriving.”
At the last succession in 1952 the relevance of English monarchs to the World War II generation was unquestioned. Elizabeth remains the only queen who knows how to fix a carburetor, as a 1945 mechanic in the Auxiliary Territorial Service.
The House of Windsor was celebrated as tangible proof of English superiority. Canadians in 1952 still recalled the gruesome fate of lesser royal houses. Seven foreign kings were assassinated from 1900 to 1934 like Alexander I of Serbia, “a flabby young man with pince-nez who had a taste for clumsy experiments in absolutism,” wrote journalist Rebecca West in 1941. Alexander’s killers found him cringing in a secret closet of his Belgrade palace, shot and stabbed him and his Queen Draga and tossed their naked corpses off a balcony. Not very British.
But this is now. Professor Johnson captures the moment perfectly. Deference is gone and Canadian monarchists have no new ideas to make the institution fresh or relevant. As Battle Royal explains, “The country needs a head of state; the head of state has always been a monarch; therefore the country needs a monarch as head of state. While this logic is completely illogical to a republican, it satisfies the monarchists’ reverence for the past and their need for a sense of order.”
“The monarchist defence presented here is far from new,” Johnson writes. “In 1915 Spanish Princess Eulalia wondered how the British people would be any better off if they abolished the royal family. ‘They would gain as little,’ she said, ‘as if by a popular uprising, the citizens of London killed the lions in their zoo. There may have been a time when lions were dangerous in England, but the sight of them in their cages can now only give a pleasurable holiday shudder of awe – of which the nation will not willingly deprive itself.’”
Battle Royal is thoughtful and smartly written, and so unvarnished in its treatment of Canada’s head of state it could never have been published in 1952.
By Holly Doan
Battle Royal: Monarchists vs Republicans and the Crown of Canada, by David Johnson; Dundurn; 288 pages; ISBN 9781-4597-40136; $26.99
The Privy Council Office quietly paid researchers to poll Canadians on decriminalizing narcotics, records show. Findings of focus group surveys were delivered to cabinet aides only weeks before Mental Health Minister Dr. Carolyn Bennett announced the partial lifting of a 1911 criminal ban on simple possession of cocaine in British Columbia: “There were some concerns raised about moving in this direction.”
Canadian financial support for Ukraine will continue, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said yesterday. Freeland spoke of “my cousins in Ukraine” in praising Canadian aid worth $3.12 billion to date: “It’s one thing to promise the money. It’s another thing for that money to hit Ukrainian bank accounts.”
One of the world’s largest tech trade groups says an internet regulation bill by Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez will hurt consumer choice and must be rewritten. The bill passed the Commons June 21 but faces opposition in the Senate transport and communications committee: “Governments should be modest about imposing obligations on the technological future.”
Pandemic money worries saw a quarter of Canadians fall behind on monthly bills and a fifth borrow from friends and family, says in-house research by the federal Financial Consumer Agency of Canada. Forty percent of Canadians surveyed said they “had to use my savings due to the Covid-19 crisis,” typically between $2,000 and $10,000: ““I am just getting by financially.”
