The chair of the Senate banking committee yesterday invited a registered business lobbyist to join in releasing a report advocating corporate tax cuts. “It’s unusual,” acknowledged Senator Douglas Black (Independent-Alta.), committee chair: “We think it’s so important for the country.”
Factory managers yesterday told the Commons trade committee metal tariffs have cost Canadian jobs and may result in plant closures. “When you lose it, you lose it,” said one manufacturer: “We have basically lost 25 percent of our business.”
The Treasury Board yesterday warned federal employees must not consume marijuana at work. One department, Public Works, earlier fired two employees for smoking cannabis on their break: “Don’t get too excited.”
Full costs of cabinet’s decision to nationalize a British Columbia pipeline are confidential and will not be disclosed, officials yesterday told the Senate national finance committee. The refusal came moments after the Privy Council Office boasted of its “payback” analysis on public spending: “I can’t say more.”
A federal lawsuit is targeting a major bank’s ban on marijuana home-grows for mortgage holders. Scotiabank in 2010 pulled one homeowner’s loan though medical cannabis was grown under a federal license: “It may have been a factor.”
The Royal Canadian Mint yesterday blamed bad digital imagery and not faulty historical research for depicting a foreign helmet on an Armistice coin. “That image is definitely not a Canadian helmet,” said one militaria expert.
Canadian playwrights have seen royalties drop 86 percent since 2011 under changes to the Copyright Act, a professional association yesterday told the Commons industry committee. “It boggles the mind,” a witness said.
The Commons industry committee yesterday by a 5-to-4 vote rejected hearings on copyright terms of a tentative U.S. trade pact. MPs complained cabinet negotiated legal changes at the very moment the committee is conducting a statutory review of the Copyright Act: “That would simply be odd.”
Cabinet yesterday ordered a fresh review of school bus safety. The initiative followed a TV report that Transport Canada concealed crash-test data confirming seatbelts would prevent injury: “This problem needs to be fixed now.”
Statistics Canada is planning a first-ever national questionnaire on children’s addiction to electronics, according to Access To Information records. The 2019 survey of 30,000 to 50,000 families, the first of its kind, includes questions ranging from breastfeeding to bad friends at school, and how often families eat take-out food: “We need to understand this.”
The Federal Court of Appeal has disclosed a case of sexual assault at a Customs office. The Court upheld an ex-employee’s claim for compensation for workplace harassment and assault that a labour board earlier dismissed as an office prank: “It is necessary to take care not to inappropriately downplay or diminish the seriousness of unacceptable conduct.”
The Department of Finance in an Access To Information memo estimates up to $1 trillion is needed to pay for unfunded repairs to Canada’s roads, bridges and utilities. The figure was attributed to third-party estimates; no federal agency to date has calculated the “infrastructure deficit”.
Department of Canadian Heritage in-house research shows after decades of official bilingualism, 43 percent of Anglophones disagree or have no opinion on whether two official languages is “an important part of what it means to be Canadian”. The department plans 2019 observances marking the 50th anniversary of the Official Languages Act: “Canadians are divided.”
They want to consult “at length”
where to sell pot
in Ontario.
Will delay store openings
by half a year.
But
issue is important,
deserves stakeholder input.
Citizen involvement and
public deliberation
key to moving forward.
They do not consult on small things:
dropping Cap-and-Trade Program,
scraping Basic Income Pilot Project,
cancelling renewable energy contracts,
axing fund for school repairs,
suspending plans for overdose prevention sites,
slashing Toronto City Council by half,
repealing sex-ed curriculum, and
telling brewers
what the price of beer should be.
Campaign slogan
says it all:
For The People
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)
Fighting Words is a document of war, intriguing because so many of us know only peace. So, we learn the hanging of 1837 rebels was bungled so badly one prisoner was nearly decapitated; that rifles fired by Canadian troops in the Boer War sounded “like lightning humming birds” — Zzz-Zzz-Zzz-Zzz-Zzz; that Hitler on weekends wore a tweed coat one size too small.
These are anecdotes of Canadian war reporting from the age of Vikings to al-Qaeda. “People seem to have a pathological need for conflict,” writes Mark Bourrie. “They also have a very strong urge to tell stories about it.”
Bourrie recounts the most poignant reporting of anonymous diarists and acclaimed war correspondents like Stewart Lyon, who pioneered Canadian Press coverage of WWI; Ross Munro, who documented the slaughter at Dieppe in 1942; Gregory Clark, who filed on deadline from liberated Paris for the Toronto Star in 1944 though his own son was killed in action days before.
The result is compelling accounts of high-stakes conflict, human triumph and minutiae of depravity.
Here is Laura Secord, on stumbling through the woods in the dark to warn the Yanks were coming in 1812: “Here I found all the Indians encamped; by moonlight the scene was terrifying…Upon advancing to the Indians they all rose, and, with some yells, said ‘Woman,’ which made me tremble.”
Here is a Toronto Leader account of the death of a Fenian in 1866: “He was sensible and able to tell me that his names was James Gerrahty, from Cincinnati, and that one of his own comrades had shot him by mistake, and that he freely forgave him. He died in about thirteen minutes, one of his comrades holding a crucifix before him as long as he could see it. We buried him in an orchard.”
Here is Paul de Martigny, a Canadian reporter imprisoned by Nazis in occupied France: “Among the internees was a cultured Englishwoman with her 18-year-old idiot son. The guards delighted in torturing the mother by playing pranks on the boy. She spent most of the time in tears,” de Martigny recalled. “The more she wept, the more they teased.”
Tales of conflict are always the most indelible. In the words of one fighting man – not a Canadian – “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.”
By Holly Doan
Fighting Words: Canada’s Best War Reporting by Mark Bourrie; Dundurn; 368 pages; ISBN 978-1-45970-666-8; $29.99
