A Québec constable who announced on Facebook he would not ticket people under the province’s Covid curfew has been banned from policing for a year. A provincial Police Ethics Tribunal noted thousands of Facebook friends shared the protest message: “He wanted to help and support these people, not ‘destroy’ them.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau only 36 hours after pledging to lead a Team Canada fight against American tariffs yesterday offered numerous concessions in exchange for a 30-day reprieve from U.S. President Donald Trump. No legal text of an agreement was detailed: “We work together.”
Parliament must deploy the Army and Customs agents to intercept U.S. gun runners at the border, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre said yesterday. “Let’s stop the gangsters and gun smugglers,” he told reporters. “I want to protect Canadians from criminals.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Chief Science Advisor spent more than $300,000 on travel from Tokyo to Oslo, records show. “Science can be everywhere,” Dr. Mona Nemer earlier told MPs: “I believe in science diplomacy.”
Federal archivists face a Federal Court challenge from B’nai Brith over their concealment of a decades-old blacklist of Nazi fugitives let into Canada after the Second World War. “History still needs to be fully told,” the group wrote a federal judge.
Cabinet in a briefing note says plans to introduce digital ID for Canadians in contact with federal agencies would be strictly optional. A program to have pensioners, Employment Insurance claimants and tax filers use digital identification has been under development for six years at a cost of more than $6.4 million: ‘It would be offered on an optional basis.’
Managers of the Canada Pension Plan, largest in the nation, yesterday would not comment on whether they’ll follow Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s directive to buy Canadian. Almost half the fund’s $675.1 billion is invested in the United States, from shares in American fast food chains to ownership of Dallas apartment buildings, San Diego shopping malls and industrial parks in Florida: “Now is the time to choose Canada.”
Parliament will not be recalled to manage a multi-billion dollar U.S. trade war, says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Commons trade committee members including Liberal MPs had rated parliamentary hearings a priority in a 2019 tariff dispute: “It is insane that in this great crisis, Parliament is shut down.”
The cost of the federal payroll is nearly $85 billion a year including police and military, says the Treasury Board. The agency in a briefing note calculated 1,700,000 current and former public employees are now enrolled in the federal Public Service Health Care Plan: “Yes, it is worrisome.”
Cabinet must repeal its signature climate program, the consumer carbon tax, says former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney. Campaigning for the March 9 Liberal Party leadership, Carney said the tax was not working: “We have to win this election.”
Parliament must curb the Canada Revenue Agency’s practice of enforcing tax measures never passed into law, says the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. The appeal follows the Agency’s collection of tax, interest and penalties on capital gains amendments that Parliament never approved: “This experience highlights the need for Canada to introduce rules.”
Labour and cultural groups are asking that Canadians sign a public pledge to “reduce our dependence on the United States.” New Democrat MP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay, Ont.), the only Commons member to sign the Pledge For Canada to date, called it a “plan of resistance.”
Cracks were there at the beginning,
Parged and buttressed,
For centuries.
But the edifice held.
A people grew and prospered,
On common ground,
And common cause.
And found the way forward.
Sacrifice and hardship,
By the best of us,
Made way for wealth and ease,
For the rest.
But an inheritance was forgotten.
Brought to the point,
Broken, battered, bewildered,
Looking for rest,
And a way forward.
A choice emerges,
A better Deal, a future,
A Manifest Destiny,
On higher ground.
But dimly heard voices,
In the tone and timbre of the past,
Call in desperation,
As they recede into memory.
It is the whispers of our honoured dead.
By W.N. Branson 
My grandfather survived Bolshevism and civil war, hyperinflation and the Depression, but was confounded by lawns. Why would anyone seed arable land to inedible grass? His yard produced garlic by the pound. He outlived two wives.
Nearly a quarter-million Ukrainians settled the West before the First World War. Their affinity for garlic was renowned. In the flu epidemic of 1918 many Ukrainian households hung garlic on the walls in the belief it would ward off infection. In the 1920s, when John Diefenbaker began his long climb up Conservative Party ranks as a Prairie populist, biographer Denis Smith noted “garlic eaters” remained an Eastern Tory epithet for Western immigrants.
Garlic was not merely delicious. It was used to treat colds and congestion, ringworm and fever, toothaches and headaches. Men ate it raw. Children had it crushed in warm milk. “We may yet see the time when household ‘kitchen medicine’ is revived as a desirable and widespread practice to be used with self-sufficient pride and not naïve embarrassment,” writes author Michael Mucz, a University of Alberta biologist.
In Baba’s Kitchen Medicines Professor Mucz documents remedies, even garlic-less ones, favoured by Ukrainian healers, herbalists and midwives. Mucz relies on testimonials from aged witnesses who “shared their personal and at times painful recollections” of homesteading. Hospital care was expensive, settlers had little money and no physician would have understood their language, anyway.
The result was the 20th century use of ancient folk medicines to treat “a loss of inner balance or harmony” with plasters, poultices and tinctures. “I was 16 years old when I froze my foot so badly that I could not even take off my shoe,” recalled a Vegreville, Alta. resident. “Mother remembered an Old Country home remedy that used peas. She soaked some dry peas, and when they were soft, she mashed them up. She placed pea mash on my foot, and wrapped it on. She changed the pea poultice daily,and in a week the blistering was all gone.”
Another homesteader described a cure for earache, a six-inch funnel of linen coated in beeswax, inserted in the ear and lit to the accompaniment of prayer: “Father’s pain was gone completely and he fell asleep easily.”
It would be peevish to question whether all “cures” in Baba’s Kitchen Medicines were medically sound. Would standing over a smouldering fire of red onion skins really treat infertility? Could a hangover patient actually clear his head with a mouthful of urine?
The point was this: Ukrainian immigrants carving a society on the sub-Arctic plains discovered they could rely on no one but themselves. So they did.
By Tom Korski
Baba’s Kitchen Medicines: Folk Remedies of Ukrainian Settlers in Western Canada by Michael Mucz; University of Alberta Press; 265 pages; ISBN 978-0-88864-514-2; $34.95
Dr. Mona Nemer, cabinet’s $393,000-a year science advisor, spent tens of thousands on questionnaires asking Canadians if they’d ever seen a UFO. Records indicate Nemer, a biochemist, expressed a personal interest in the subject though her survey showed most Canadians considered it pointless: “Unidentified aerial phenomenon is not an issue of high concern.”
