Ex-cabinet advisor and Toronto Star columnist Amira Elghawaby billed taxpayers nearly $18,000 for a business-class junket to England to ‘define Islamophobia,’ newly-released expense accounts show. Expenses included a $2,947 stay at a four-star hotel in Piccadilly: “Personal attendance was required.”
Cabinet is now censoring internal audits at the passport office after successive investigations documented mismanagement that cost taxpayers millions. The latest Audit Of Passport Delivery Service redacted its findings: “I wouldn’t be surprised if they claim some sort of success despite the disaster we’ve seen.”
Provinces were to blame for homelessness by emptying the mental hospitals, then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s cabinet agreed in confidential 1999 meetings. Newly-declassified records show ministers in private conversation said homelessness also appeared to be an issue with the “native population.”
The Department of Transport’s electric car rebate program paid millions to affluent drivers with six-figure incomes who planned to buy a zero emission vehicle anyway, new records show. A fraction of electric car buyers, 5 percent, made under $50,000 a year: “It’s a fair question to ask whether regular Canadian taxpayers should be subsidizing the purchase of luxury vehicles for people who are prepared to pay full price for them.”
Fewer than half of “assault style” firearms banned by federal order were surrendered to police under a now-suspended amnesty program, records show. The roundup was deferred until 2027 at the earliest due to a pending Supreme Court of Canada challenge by gun owners: ‘Most did not see themselves or their peers as a major factor in gun crimes in Canada.’
When the summer warmth fades to winter’s chill,
My heart seeks the sentimental to its detriment.
And the memories fall with the snow.
A Thursday night in St John’s,
Icons, scoundrels and minstrels,
You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
August on a Halifax pier and a cold pint of Keith’s.
Youth and time on our side, dimly aware of
Our whole lives ahead.
Feeling like a kid again in Charlottetown,
Or surprising a friend in Fredericton,
Decades discussed in a minute.
Silence to take your breath away,
And a feeling of insignificance,
Demanding a piece of your soul on the Taiga.
Freezing rain driving in sideways from the
Big lake as you cling to the cliffs,
In a place as wild as Patagonia.
A quiet sadness garnished with a quieter despair,
Lays upon the reservation in the Stony Country,
While the glory of the Aurora shimmers in Revelation.
The wickedest blizzard I’ve ever seen,
A teacup of snow and a howling wind.
Never thought I’d be glad to see Regina.
A wide open country, up against the Front Range,
A hard people, warmed with a smile.
And a little bit of crazy.
A bar fight in Dawson avoided with a laugh.
Stale beer and soup in the drifts of Eagle Plains.
A drive within a mile of the land of Ice and Ghosts.
Tea and scones in the warmth of the Pacific sun,
With the realization that this is the best of us,
A thing that won’t be seen again, at the end at the West.
Sentimental to a fault. The chill in the air brings it on.
Perhaps the deep buried soul of an old Yorkshireman is to blame.
But this country was a proper adventure.
By W.N. Branson
Those who live long enough reach a point where all regrets and anxieties simply vanish. No one on their 100th birthday recites a century’s worth of petty gibes. Perhaps it’s the distraction of arthritis, or the comfort of knowing there are no surviving witnesses to our most embarrassing incidents.
Cherie Dimaline, Governor General’s Award-winning author, is only in her 40s and not there yet. Dimaline vividly recalls all her regrets and anxieties, like the time she got drunk on Jägermeister.
“Remember there was that party you went to in your early twenties, when they were giving out free Jägermeister and you were still broke enough to think you needed to drink the hell out of that Jägermeister because, well, it was free, and then you got so drunk you started an argument with that group of strangers who said you were an idiot?” writes Dimaline. “Oh, man, you really were an idiot. Wait, let me play that back in detail for you.”
An Anthology Of Monsters is the text of a lecture Dimaline gave to the Canadian Literature Centre’s annual Kreisel Lecture Series. It is warm and human. Remember the time you had that panic attack at age 7 and locked yourself in the bathroom before First Communion? Dimaline remembers.
“What if I pee my pants in front of everyone?” she writes. “What if I say the wrong words and the priest stops the whole thing to demand I find the right ones? What if I take the Eucharist and then throw up the Eucharist?”
“And then I went to the church to take my First Communion in front of two hundred people,” writes Dimaline. “And while I might have otherwise forgotten it, that day was sharply carved into my memory.”
Dimaline depicts anxiety and regret as a pushy house guest with a photographic memory. “Anxiety, she remembers,” says Dimaline. “She remembers the weather and what I wore and the looks on people’s faces, even people I never saw again.”
Many recollections are funny and not at all hurtful: “Hey girl, remember in 2012 when you were at the airport in Montréal and the Air Canada employee at the desk said, ‘Have a great flight’ and you said, ‘You too’?”
Other recollections bring a stab of pain: “I have the horrifying talent of still feeling embarrassed about something I said or did twenty years ago. Do I remember how I felt when I was on the front page of the New York Times arts section? No. But I remember, word for word, a mean tweet directed at me from a man who never met me but decided to question everything about me as if I was not a real person.”
Dimaline finds safety in family and words. An Anthology Of Monsters has advice for anyone with a keyboard or paper and pencil.
“The reason I always advise people to write things out, is that you get to organize yourself, figure out how you feel, and record the truth before your anxiety twists everything like a funhouse mirror,” writes Dimaline. “Think about how much better you feel when you take all the dangling threads of deadlines and errands and put them into a list. Then you know what you have to do and for who and for when.”
By Holly Doan
An Anthology Of Monsters: How Story Saves Us From Our Anxiety, by Cherie Dimaline; University of Alberta Press; 56 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-6822; $14.99.
The Department of Veterans Affairs says it didn’t have time to invite Afghan War veterans to speak at the ceremonial groundbreaking for a National Monument to Afghan War dead. The 40-minute ceremony did hear from non-combatants including Veterans Affairs Minister Jill McKnight: “Why?”
Owners of a heavy duty Russian cargo plane grounded in Toronto by cabinet order are appealing to the Federal Court of Appeal to remove the airline from a federal blacklist. Volga-Dnepr Airlines LLC told judges it played no role in the Ukrainian war, and had freighted cargo in the past for Canada’s Department of National Defence: ‘It transported military cargo for countries around the world including NATO support.’
Building a single high speed railway tunnel to the Island of Montréal will cost taxpayers more than $2.5 billion, the Budget Office said yesterday. The calculation was included among figures showing cabinet underestimated the cost of its regional electrified rail project by billions: ‘Tunnels are major construction cost drivers.’
Cabinet must uphold criminal sanctions on drug trafficking following a Charter Of Rights ruling by a Vancouver judge, Opposition members said yesterday. Conservative MP Frank Caputo (Kamloops-Thompson, B.C.), former Crown prosecutor, predicted greater public disorder if cabinet does not act: “There is no constitutional right to sell heroin.”
Taxpayers will “make a lot of money” on oil exports to Asia, Prime Minister Mark Carney said yesterday. Carney declared permits for a new $43.7 billion pipeline from Bruderheim, Alta. to Pacific terminals at Delta, B.C. will be fast-tracked within 12 months: “It is clear this is a project of national interest.”
Cabinet proposes to launch a Canadian version of the European Union’s Solidarity Corps, a youth volunteer program. It follows earlier federal programs promoting youth volunteerism that cost taxpayers millions: ‘In Norway, the European Solidarity Corps offers opportunities for young people. The government is looking into the possibility of developing its own civic corps in Canada.’
Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday omitted all reference to Indian Residential School graves or genocide in observing National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. It followed the Senate’s defeat of a motion endorsed by the Assembly of First Nations to criminalize “denialism.”
Cabinet aides hired a former CBC Radio announcer to coach Annette Ryan prior to her appearance as Budget Officer at Commons committee hearings, records show. MPs on the government operations committee wanted a candidate other than Ryan, a former finance department executive who knew Mark Carney at Oxford in the 1990s: ‘That person who is a former journalist peppered me with a few questions.’
