A federal anti-terror watchdog will not identify a single tax prosecution that resulted from nearly 24 million financial reports it processed last year. The new data follow criticism of the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre as costly and ineffectual: “It’s not good news.”
The Department of Indigenous Affairs last year spent more than $100,000 on art for its Québec head office, say Access To Information records. Spending included $32,600 for three inkjet photographic prints: ‘It represents our collective identity.’
The Canada Border Services Agency last year intercepted millions’ worth of narcotics from Mexico, say newly-released records. Cabinet last year lifted a requirement that Mexican nationals apply for a visa when traveling to Canada: “It’s a red flag all the way.”
The Bank of Canada approved $7 million in suspicious payments from dormant accounts it was supposed to safeguard for depositors, says a forensic audit. The full scope of payments isn’t known since the Bank destroyed records. Managers face questioning by the Commons finance committee: “Where did that money go?”
Cabinet has quietly passed regulations approving the sale of radiation-treated meat. The Canadian Cattleman’s Association since 1998 has lobbied for amendments to Food And Drug Regulations to sell hamburger irradiated to kill bacteria and parasites: “They are treating the symptoms instead of the cause.”
Robot cars threaten the viability of mass urban transit systems, says a Government of Canada think tank. The futuristic report appeared unrealistic, said a transport analyst: “If a city is stupid, it will allow this.”
Cabinet will enact new measures on road safety with any legislation to legalize marijuana, says Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould. The Minister would not commit to passing a Senate bill on roadside testing of cannabis-impaired drivers: “We’re looking at it.”
The Canada Revenue Agency should move to prosecution in cases of offshore tax avoidance, says an advocacy group Canadians for Tax Fairness. The tax department faces another federal lawsuit challenging the reach of its audit powers: “The government is in a weak position.”
The Bank of Canada lost at least $800,000 after paying funds through dormant safekeeping accounts held in the names of dead depositors, say Access To Information records. Millions more in payments were “high risk”, auditors said. One charity received $1.6 million to which it had no legal claim: “We do not want the Bank to appear to be a dysfunctional bureaucracy.”
The CBC was quietly slated for privatization by members of the previous Conservative cabinet, says an MP. The Crown broadcaster has requested a 35 percent increase in subsidies in next month’s federal budget to offset loss of NHL licensing rights: “Prime Minister Harper had certain feelings on this.”
Most Canadian women surveyed, 77 percent, have never even thought of joining the military and consider the work unappealing and dangerous, says in-house Department of National Defence research. The military admits it will not meet its target to nearly double the proportion of women in the army, navy and air force: ‘There is discomfort with a profession that involves the potential of killing people, especially innocent people.’
A Crown shipping authority must raise user fees up to 7 percent by April 1 or run out of cash. The Pacific Pilotage Authority of Vancouver blamed recurring deficits on a slow economy: “We’d never let ourselves go bankrupt.”
Homicides in Ottawa
hit a record high.
24 bodies in 2016; more than Montreal.
At police headquarters,
plans are drawn
to raid pot dispensaries.
Officers know it’s a race against time;
legislation is coming.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)
Headlines perpetuate the one familiar story from the Arab world: “Canadian-Funded Clinic Destroyed” (Globe & Mail); “No Peace When War Never Ends” (Toronto Star); “Obama Outlines Military Plan” (Vancouver Sun); “Where ISIL Came From” (Montreal Gazette).
“In the West the Arab region of the Middle East and North Africa is all too often associated with terrorism, religious fanaticism, intolerance, sexism, racism, and a myriad of other social and political ills,” writes Prof. Bessma Momani of the University of Waterloo. Momani suggests there are two sides to every story – and in this case 350 million sides, representing the population of the Arab world.
They are typically young, media savvy, entrepreneurial and educated. The number of universities in the Arab region has more than doubled in fifteen years. In the United Arab Emirates 70 percent of post-secondary students are women. Momani quotes a Moroccan teen who laments the country’s education minister “doesn’t even have a bachelor’s degree”.
If newsgathering is an exercise in the depiction of fact, Arab Dawn is first-rate reportage. Drawn from first-hand travels and interviews with Arab students in Canada, Momani draws a three-dimensional picture much more satisfying than scanning the headlines. As the author quotes an old family proverb, “Add a hair to another hair and eventually you get a beard.”
A hit TV show in Qatar is Stars Of Science where young contestants build prototypes of patent-worthy inventions and viewers cast ballots for their favourite creation. The show is in its eighth season. “Winners are awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes,” Momani writes.
In Saudi Arabia teenagers play Unearthed, the first Arabic-language video game for Sony PlayStation 3 featuring a character named Faris and his sister Dania, an archaeologist in a hijab. Together they “embark on an exotic adventure throughout the Middle East on the trail of the famous Muslim explorer Ibn Battuta”, outwitting arms dealers and smugglers.
At the mall in Dubai is retailer DKNY’s “Ramadan Collection” featuring “colourful trench coats paired with trousers, khakis and stylish hijabs,” Arab Dawn reports. Mall cops keep an eye out for teenagers looking for dates.
“Arab society is changing from within – thanks to its youth, who are pushing it to become more competitive, accountable and cosmopolitan,” Momani writes. Eighty-seven percent own a mobile phone; 70 percent spend more than three hours a day online.
Arab Dawn is not an apologia, nor does it patronize readers with bland assurances that, really, Arab youth want to be just like their Canadian counterparts. “Many young Arabs find it perfectly compatible to identify as a person of faith who holds modern and progressive values such as wanting democracy, has a cosmopolitan identity, and respects individual liberties,” the author explains. “Similarly, Arab youth are capable of synthesizing a deep commitment to their families and communities and the pursuit of individual freedoms. They see no contradiction in the mixing of identities such as modern, Western, family-oriented, religious and Arab.”
Interviewing foreign students, Momani notes with interest those Canadian experiences that make the greatest impression: public transit, environmentalism, and law and order imposed without threat or favouritism. One Saudi scholar named Omar recounted with fascination his first brush with bylaw enforcement: “I got a parking ticket and I thought how amazing this was,” Omar said; “I felt this is what we need most in Saudi, law enforcement…I won’t park in an illegal spot again.”
Arab Dawn is an honest and persuasive profile of a newfangled society, the one they never show in the headlines.
By Holly Doan
Arab Dawn: Arab Youth & The Demographic Dividend They Will Bring, by Bessma Momani; University of Toronto Press; 176 pages; ISBN 9781-4426-28564; $14.27
Finance Minister Bill Morneau has stripped the Royal Canadian Mint of authority to launch new business ventures without his approval. The order followed millions in losses on a digital currency program. Morneau also ordered the Mint to report all Access To Information releases to his office, and all correspondence with MPs and senators: “It’s not something I would have done.”
