A bill banning animal testing in cosmetics has been introduced in the Senate, in an initiative the industry described as disingenuous and “bizarre”. The private Conservative bill would outlaw safety testing on any “live, non-human vertebrate” by manufacturers: “The Senator posed with Mrs. Harper with stuffed bunnies, that somehow they’re saving little bunnies. It’s not true”.
The anti-trust Competition Bureau is applying for a court order for confidential documents involving the sale of Canada’s largest independent gas station chain. Bureau lawyers asked Federal Court for access to price surveys, sales volumes and other industry data from companies not even involved in the acquisition: ‘Consumers are likely to face less choice’.
A Senate bill to appoint an inspector general with oversight of the Canada Border Services Agency has been introduced anew. Cabinet pledged careful examination of the measure, which lapsed as a private Liberal bill in the last Parliament: ‘Currently if you have an issue it’s processed internally; that’s like asking me to mark my own math exam’.
The public works department is buying only Canadian-made flags to celebrate the nation’s 150th birthday in 2017. Authorities disqualified bids to manufacture more than four million flags from companies without Canadian printing and assembly plants: ‘ I love to see this’.
Canadians have told the finance department they fear a housing bubble. The in-house research preceded a federal notice that banks must set aside more cash for “severe but plausible losses” on residential mortgages: “Buying a new home is becoming difficult due to the high cost”.
They say cemeteries are full of indispensable people, but some deaths are more far-reaching than others.
On October 19, 1984 a Piper Navajo commuter plane operated by Wapiti Airlines Ltd. crashed in a freezing rainstorm near Lesser Slave Lake, Alta. An inquiry would cite human error. The pilot, 24, suffered from “cumulative fatigue” and had 11 hours’ sleep in the past two days. Six perished in the crash including New Democrat MLA Grant Notley, Alberta’s Opposition Leader, flying home for the weekend.
He died in anticipation of an election “in which he sensed the party would finally make the breakthrough,” a reporter wrote at the time. For years afterward the words were heard at the Alberta legislature: “If only Notley had lived….” If.
A grinding recession drove then-Premier Peter Lougheed into retirement months later. A subsequent 1986 election saw Conservatives lose 14 seats yet still win the legislature – or more properly steal it. Ridings were so crudely gerrymandered that rural voters controlled the balance of power in the assembly, though two-thirds of Albertans lived in Edmonton and Calgary. The average Edmonton riding had 23,000 electors; one country seat called Little Bow had barely 6,000.
If only Notley had lived…
The University of Alberta Press has printed a second edition of this 1992 biography now more arresting given recent events. Author Howard Leeson, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Regina, recalls the man who might have smashed a Prairie political machine a generation before his daughter did.
Notley was a 4-H farmboy whose grandparents had been prairie sodbusters, and worked all his life to elect New Democrats in Alberta. Curiously Leeson does not dwell on Notley’s spectacular death; it is relegated to a single paragraph on the 311th page. Instead he recounts the struggles of a populist whose singular achievement was to keep the hard-luck NDP alive.
“The NDP was a socialist party in a province where the people had continually rejected the socialist alternative,” writes Leeson, former executive assistant to Notley. Every marginal success was matched with failure.
The party elected its first MLA in 1966, then fell into bankruptcy in 1967. Leeson recalls the arrival at NDP headquarters of a new party secretary, Hart Horn, in 1970: “The office had been closed for months. Everything was, as he recalled, musty and dusty. There was no list of current or past members. Indeed, there was no list at all, only some old addressograph plates piled in a corner. It was a mystery to Hart that the organization functioned at all.”
New Democrats for years were caricatured as Marxists – Premier Ernest Manning once called them “the greatest threat facing this nation today” – though party policies fell short of hysteria. The 1963 platform proposed “open government”, free long-distance calls within Alberta, and state auto insurance. It was not too communistic in a province where conservatives maintained a state-run telephone company, state-run bank, state-run railway and state-run airline, Pacific Western.
Grant Notley is an affectionate tribute to a quiet, decent workaholic who might have become Alberta’s premier in 1986, and altered the whole course of his province and the Prairies. Instead he became another indispensable man in the Fairview, Alta. cemetery.
By Holly Doan
Grant Notley: The Social Conscience of Alberta, by Howard Leeson; University of Alberta Press; 392 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-12544; $29.95
Three years into its rebranding as a “concierge” for business, executives have told the National Research Council its new motto is boring, and that dealing with the federal agency is a “hassle”. The Council would not say how much it spent on its new corporate slogan, cnrcsolutions: ‘It reminded many of a consulting firm’.
The Salvation Army will not comment on a lawsuit against its Governing Council alleging financial irregularities. An Ontario Superior Court judge declined to dismiss the suit, saying though the allegation “may seem outrageous at first blush, that does not make it untrue”.
Operators of Canada’s aging payphone system must disclose long-distance charges to customers, federal regulators have ruled. Toll charges are unregulated for payphone clients: “This solves a problem that actually exists”.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal against Law Society rules by longtime Winnipeg lawyer Sid Green, 86, a former Manitoba cabinet minister. Green was suspended for declining mandatory “professional development” training after practicing law for 60 years: “This case falls within a time-honoured tradition”.
A DNA privacy bill has been reintroduced in the Senate after lapsing in the last Parliament. The Liberal bill would forbid employers and insurers from demanding that Canadians take genetic tests, or divulging the results of previous testing: “The law is well behind the science”.
Environment Canada is mapping toxic emissions from Alberta’s oil sands including mercury, benzene and other poisons. The department commissioned the most sweeping review of new pollution data for the industry since 2006: “We really don’t have a good handle on emissions”.
A trucking company has lost a Constitutional challenge of fines issued by agricultural inspectors. A federal tribunal ruled corporations with “pure economic interests” cannot cite the Charter of Rights in challenging administrative monetary penalties: “The law is clear”.
Telecom companies must divulge wholesale roaming rates to federal regulators within 30 days ahead of a promised 2016 cap on charges. The CRTC ordered wireless providers to disclose all rates charged smaller rivals for cellphone calls and text messaging in 2014 and 2015: ‘The sooner, the better’.
New Democrats for the third time since 2008 are attempting to legislate bilingualism at the Supreme Court. The party’s languages critic introduced a bill requiring that all justices pass a language test: “They have to be able to understand”.
