Cabinet would criminalize the public display of “terror symbols,” says a briefing note by Attorney General Sean Fraser’s department. B’nai Brith Canada has sought a swastika ban following anti-Semitic street protests: “The government is considering legislative and other actions.”
The Department of Immigration in a report to the Senate said foreign students contributed billions to the economy, mainly through tuition. The report did not mention costs cited by other federal analysts including impacts on rents: “Most newcomers start out as renters.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney held a vast stock portfolio when he quit the private sector to run for the Liberal Party leadership last January 16, records show. Carney’s investments ran to millions’ worth of shares in 606 publicly-traded corporations including federal contractors, in addition to royalties from his book “Values: Building A Better World For All.”
Rideau Hall is spending a third of a million on an artificial ice rink, records show. The sole-sourced contract to be signed July 28 followed Prime Minister Mark Carney’s promise of a government-wide austerity drive to “spend less.”
The labour department in a briefing note to Minister Patty Hajdu acknowledged young jobseekers face “economic shocks” including rising unemployment. The note made no mention of cabinet’s decision to allow 1,040,000 foreign students into the workforce: “This may result in increased competition for Canadian workers.”
Parliament will never allow cabinet to trade away dairy quotas, says Green MP Elizabeth May (Saanich-Gulf Islands, B.C.). “We have to stand up,” the Party leader told reporters after the U.S. again cited protection of the Canadian dairy industry as unfair: “We promised.”
In-house federal research found widespread public support for an oil and gas emission cap among Ontario and Québec residents. Participants in Privy Council focus groups said energy companies must face “clear consequences” for greenhouse gas emissions.
Canadian doctors
asked to volunteer in West Africa,
help fight Ebola.
Some answer the call.
Others may prepare
for the greater challenge
of going to Disney,
fight measles.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
In 2012 a small group of Taiwanese Buddhists applied for charity status for a nunnery in Prince Edward Island. They had modest habits, according to Access To Information filings with the Canada Revenue Agency. “All the nuns are vegetarians,” they wrote on their application. They spent 16 hours a day at silent prayer and chores to “joyously engage in resource conservation,” “promote Buddha’s teachings” and “reveal the ultimate truth of life and universe” in the hamlet of Vernon Bridge, P.E.I.
Their application was approved. “Congratulations on becoming a Canadian registered charity,” auditors wrote the Great Wisdom Buddhist Institute Inc. in 2013. “We wish you every success.”
And how. The nunnery by 2023 held $85.1 million in securities, $61.7 million in assets including land and buildings, $2.3 million in “furniture and fixtures” and $1.1 million worth of vehicles. Clearly there was more to the Great Wisdom nunnery than prayers and salad.
Canada Under Siege: How PEI Became A Forward Operating Base For The Chinese Communist Party advances a theory. The first Buddhist settlements on the Island were “humble and practical,” it says. Within a decade their property holdings expanded to 18,000 acres – “Monks and nuns had become landowners,” authors write – and installed a fibre optic line at a $2.1 million cost.
Canada Under Siege is the work of publisher Dean Baxendale, former RCMP anti-money laundering director Garry Clement and Michel Juneau-Katsuya, former head of the Asia-Pacific desk at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. They pull no punches.
Prince Edward Island is called “an easy target,” “a perfect target,” the “easiest entry point” for foreign agents as the smallest legislative district in North America with a fifth the population of Delaware. “It is within reach of Halifax, home to Canada’s East Coast naval operations,” authors note. “It lies along NATO shipping routes, and important undersea communications cables are just a few miles off the coast. It is part of North America’s maritime perimeter.”
This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Canada Under Siege attempts to name names but concedes not all the dots are connected. “On their own, each transaction might seem legal, even innocuous,” it states. “But taken together, they form a mosaic.”
Canada Under Siege is punchy and provocative. It stirs and shakes. If authors have not fully documented a conspiracy, inquiring readers are asked to ponder: Why would Buddhist nuns need their own dedicated high-speed internet line?
Authors asked now-retired Liberal MP Wayne Easter (Malpeque, P.E.I.), former chair of the Commons finance committee. “These are people coming in, buying up farms, entire sections, using shell companies, offshore accounts,” he said.
“We don’t know what we’re up against,” Easter is quoted. “And when we do, we call it ‘investment.’ That word has become a shield. But it’s not investment when the land is empty, the buildings are vacant and the money’s untraceable. That’s laundering.”
“We need a public inquiry,” said Easter. “That’s the only way. Without subpoena power and the ability to track bank records and compel testimony this will remain in the shadows.”
By Holly Doan
Canada Under Siege: How PEI Became A Forward Operating Base For The Chinese Communist Party, by Michel Juneau-Katsuya and Garry Clement; Optimum Publishing; 252 pages; ISBN 9780-8889-03556; $29.95
Cabinet’s signature housing plan saw a modest five percent increase in select housing starts, the Budget Office said yesterday. Housing Minister Gregor Robertson has said starts must double to restore affordability: “I don’t see how we will attain it.”
Households will be able to access a keyword-searchable website to gauge flood risk to their property as early as this fall, says the Department of Public Safety. The initiative is the first step to eliminating blanket disaster relief for at-risk property owners who decline flood insurance: “Canadians surveyed expressed confidence the government would take care of them and their property in the event of a major flood, signaling a potential misunderstanding.”
A federal judge has certified a class action lawsuit against Canada Post over fuel surcharges. The post office had sought to dismiss the claim by commercial customers, saying its surcharge was common practice in the delivery business: “Everyone uses this.”
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is asking a federal judge to seal files regarding mortgages it “inadvertently” insured at Montréal’s Laurentian Bank. CMHC said it had confidential reasons for defying a federal order to release the records under the Access To Information Act: “There is a reasonable expectation that harm could occur.”
A federal labour board has upheld the firing of a Canada Revenue employee for reading his own tax file on Agency time. Managers called it a breach of their zero tolerance policy on snooping: “He should have known better.”
Federal inspectors this year are on pace to levy record fines against employers for breach of migrant labour regulations, figures show. Steep penalties levied in the first six months of the year followed cabinet complaints that Canadian employers had “gotten addicted” to using the Temporary Foreign Worker Program: “We have gotten complacent.”
