Blanket surcharges on Canadian energy exports to the U.S. would see Americans “lose their minds,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said yesterday. He made the remark as Ontario began collecting a 25 percent surcharge on hydroelectricity exports to Great Lakes ratepayers: “We will not back down.”
Cabinet should introduce more awareness of “Arab cultures” in schools, says Privy Council in-house research. Cabinet aides in pre-election polling targeted focus groups in cities with the largest Arab Canadian communities: “Many felt more needed to be done by the federal government.”
The CBC is “politically inconvenient” for the Conservative Party, says a senior Liberal MP. Yasir Naqvi (Ottawa Centre) in a pre-election report to constituents depicted the CBC’s $1.4 billion annual subsidy as a campaign issue: “It is a necessity.”
Thirty-four years after the GST was introduced amid a public outcry the federal sales tax remains complicated and stressful for small businesses that collect it, says in-house Canada Revenue Agency research. The vast majority of businesspeople surveyed said acting as federal tax collectors was so complicated they had to hire accountants to manage the paperwork: “Descriptions included words like ‘complicated,’ ‘stressful,’ ‘painful,’ ‘frustrating’ and ‘overwhelming.’”
Liberal leader Mark Carney last night appealed to supporters to prepare for a make-or-break general election campaign. “We have to win this election,” Carney told a Party leadership convention in Ottawa: “I will need a lot of help.”
Cabinet should consider an energy export tax to hit the U.S. “where it really hurts,” former prime minister Jean Chretien said last night. It was up to premiers to agree, he added: “Governments altogether can consider going further and hitting the Americans where it really hurts.”
Federal leadership candidates should be required to meet the minimum ethics requirements of ordinary public office holders by disclosing assets, debts and income, says Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre. The proposal would require amendments to the Conflict Of Interest Act to close what Poilievre called a “Carney loophole.”
Cabinet is prepared to allow illegal immigrants to remain in Canada providing they work in construction, says Immigration Minister Marc Miller. The proposal expands a temporary program targeting home builders in the Greater Toronto Area: “These undocumented migrants are already living and working in Canada.”
Advocacy groups and lobbyists have a constitutional right to inform and persuade voters with pre-election advertising, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled. Judges in a 5-4 decision struck an Ontario law that limited ad spending by unions, corporations and advocacy groups for a full year prior to an election campaign: “Political debate dominated by any one actor including political parties threatens balance in the political discourse.”
Cabinet after years of study has approved cellphone jamming at federal prisons. The waiver under the Radiocommunications Act targets bootleg cellphones used by inmates to bypass surveillance systems that monitor prisoners’ calls: “This is the first exemption granted to correctional facilities.”
When wars begin, grandmothers chide the invaders,
As they enter the square.
But it’s tolerated,
When most expect to be home by Christmas.
The Theater contends with a specialized form of theater,
Generals assure,
Leaders assume,
The soldiers recite the lines as they are written.
A thousand heartbreaks bleed into a million.
Calamity compounds.
Glory recedes.
A million injustices spill onto the field.
As the pretense of honour fades,
The weary and worn,
Sit down to ring up the bill.
As the grandmothers bury the future.
By W. N. Branson 
On September 26, 1950 the sun turned deep blue over Edinburgh. The phenomenon was so unnerving Scottish motorists pulled over to gape at the indigo light. U.S. President Truman had announced hydrogen bomb testing earlier that year; no one could be sure what the Soviets were up to. If atomic scientists unleashed the end of time, it was bound to change the colour of the sun.
The cause was not a physics experiment gone awry, but a forest fire in northwest Alberta – the Chinchaga Firestorm of 1950. It might rate among the great fires of all time but for its location. Unlike the 1666 Fire of London or the blaze that razed Chicago in 1871, the Chinchaga fire raged far from any major city and merely captivated eyewitnesses over half the globe.
Firestorm is an intriguing account of one of the largest forest fires in Canadian history. Author Cordy Tymstra is a Government of Alberta wildfire science coordinator; contributor Professor Mike Flannigan is a director of the Western Partnership for Wildlife Fire Science at the University of Alberta. The result of their collaboration is a meticulously-researched story, rich in anecdotes, that documents an epic failure.
The fire was first spotted June 2, 1950 by a British Columbia forest ranger in a remote region near the Alberta border, at a place poetically called Whispering Pines Lake. Maddeningly the cause of the fire is lost to history: a lightning strike, a cigarette butt, a campfire? No one is certain. That day the fire had burned fewer than 200 acres and was considered a nuisance. “They had so damn much timber in the south they didn’t give a damn about the north,” Firestorm quotes one ranger. If anyone had trees to burn it was Alberta in 1950, a vast territory larger than France with a population half the size of Dallas.
“Fire control policy in 1950 for northern Alberta stipulated no suppression action could be taken on fires located more than 10 miles from a highway, settlement or major river,” authors note. The entire fire watch system in the Peace River district consisted of a single wooden lookout ladder and anecdotal reports from mail pilots.
Unchecked, the fire spread through peat bogs and spruce forests. By Labour Day 1950 it had run to five million acres. “That’s about half the size of Nova Scotia,” Tymstra writes. It led to what the U.S. Weather Bureau called the Great Smoke Pall, a plume of gas and ash so spectacular a passing RCAF pilot reported his cockpit filled with blinding smoke at 14,000 feet.
Firestorm recalls, “The high concentration of smoke reduced the incoming solar radiation and produced unique optical effects: darkness, coloured skies, moons and suns of varying colour and intensity, blue rays of light that flooded through windows, and unexpected blockage of the eclipse of the moon.”
Ontario Hydro reported a midday power surge as streetlights came on in Toronto. In Bradford, Pennsylvania hundreds of panicked townspeople called the Bell Telephone Co. as ash blacked out the midday sun. In New York the pall made the front page of the Times.
Firestorm is a crisp and timely account of a little-known natural disaster, the spectacle of an indigo sun.
By Holly Doan
The Chinchaga Firestorm: When The Moon And Sun Turned Blue by Cordy Tymstra and Mike Flannigan; University of Alberta Press; 264 pages; ISBN 9781-7721-20035; $34.95
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday confirmed he will resign next week. Trudeau rejected repeated claims by U.S. President Donald Trump that he was scheming to remain in office under the pretext of managing a trade war: “Are you considering playing some kind of caretaker role?”
Ontario effective Monday will impose a 25 percent surcharge on hydroelectricity exported to Great Lakes states, Premier Doug Ford said yesterday. All blame rested squarely with U.S. President Donald Trump, he told an American television audience: “Isn’t that a shame that we have to put a tariff on the electricity?”
Claims for millions in damages against the Freedom Convoy should be heard, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled yesterday. Judges rejected an appeal by protest organizers to dismiss a claim by Ottawa residents for $290 million in damages for “public nuisance” and “psychological distress.”
