Heavy duty mechanics earn more than nurses, and plumbers make more than mathematicians, according to new data compiled by Employment Canada. The department noted at the peak of the oil boom, Alberta mechanics pulled in higher salaries than chemical engineers: “There are regional differences”.
The economy is fueling pessimism among the nation’s professional accountants, with a gloom index now at the highest level in six years. Nearly half of accountants surveyed doubt recovery is imminent: “It continues to be a concern”.
An appeal court cited To Kill A Mockingbird in tagging a Nova Scotia man a vexatious litigant. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” a Halifax court quoted novelist Harper Lee in offering sympathy but no relief to a self-represented plaintiff.
Federal regulators are accused of sidestepping consumers’ claims in the collapse of a Montréal-staffed airline grounded in bankruptcy court. The advocacy group Air Passenger Rights said regulators have failed to contest lengthy SkyGreece proceedings that will see customers wait months for any possible compensation: “I am troubled by the inaction”.
The fisheries department is counting grey seals in a national park, Sable Island, for the first time since commissioning a plan to shoot and incinerate 220,000 animals. The department would not say if it finally approved plans to cull seals, blamed for eating too many fish: “Animals should be killed by a well-aimed shot to the head”.
A federal judge has cited Canada Revenue Agency for over-reach in a tax audit. The Agency had issued a sweeping order for information from a businessman accused of under-reporting millions in income: ‘It was overly extensive in breadth and depth’.
A drug company’s request is prompting Health Canada to consider approving higher non-prescription sales of the painkiller ibuprofen. The department declined an interview, and would not disclose research it claimed justified the regulatory change: “A manufacturer has submitted acceptable information”.
The RCMP is declining comment on a lawsuit alleging it breached privacy law. The claim in British Columbia Superior Court was filed by a police association attempting to unionize the force under a 2015 Supreme Court order: ‘Members have not even received an apology’.
Blacklock’s Reporter pauses today with gratitude and warm regards to all our friends and subscribers, sponsors, writers and staff as we enter our fourth great year on Parliament Hill. We couldn’t do it without you. — The Editor
The Liberals
blame the Conservatives
for only balancing the budget
in election years.
Instead,
they promise to run three deficits
– put the money into infrastructure –
then balance the books on the fourth year.
Just in time for election,
if math serves.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)
Parliament hangs by the thin cotton thread of government-issue gloves. Once a week the Commons speaker parades down the corridors in a tricorn hat accompanied by security guards marching in spotless white gloves. It is a display of ancient parliamentary democracy in form, if not in fact. The effect is mildly infuriating and mainly pathetic.
Professor David Schneiderman of the University of Toronto’s law faculty argues the Prime Minister’s Office has cut the brake line on Parliament and gone full throttle with executive control. “This is not meant to be a polemic directed at the Harper Conservative government,” he writes. It is what it is, and has been going on for some time.
Red, White & Kind Of Blue? suggests the 40th and 41st Parliaments marked a new low in executive control that appears to ape traditions of the American republic – but only the bad parts. “Political authority is now, more than ever, concentrated in the person of the prime minister,” Schneiderman writes; “The Harper initiatives were intended to move constitutional culture further along in a U.S. direction, with an emphasis on limited and divided government. He has sought to do so by exploiting Canada’s constitutional malleability via discretionary prerogatives and control over parliamentary legislative agenda.”
So, the Prime Minister tried to amend the Supreme Court Act by shoehorning illegal clauses into an omnibus bill alongside fisheries regulations. He signed and ratified a 31-year trade pact with China without ever consulting Parliament. He has staff assign MPs to recite speeches they’d never written, and vote on bills they’d never read.
And who was to stop him? Red, White detects “a disinterest in the press to instruct Canadians about the parliamentary fundamentals of responsible government”; “As Conservative talking points get channeled through the rituals of balanced journalistic practice – hearing from one side and then another – there seems to be no countervailing narrative that is as compelling or effective.”
Red, White is crisp and unnerving. It suggests Parliament is so malleable, and many of its participants so weak, it dispensed with ancient checks and balances without a shot being fired. “The presidentialization of the Canadian prime minister is improbable only because the prime minister is already so much more powerful than the president,” Red, White concludes.
Stephen Harper nine years ago told the Western Standard, “Well, I’ve got more control now.” The Prime Minister was more eloquent in a 1997 remark that Professor Schneiderman pulls from the archives. “Anybody who has seriously studied the parliamentary system knows that the House of Commons has long ceased to be a serious legislative body,” Harper said then. “It is first an electoral college to maintain the power of the incumbent Prime Minister and second a debating forum for partisan alternatives to the current dictator.”
Just don’t try to dispense with the white gloves. Parliament prizes its traditions.
By Holly Doan
Red, White & Kind Of Blue? The Conservatives & the Americanization of Canadian Constitutional Culture, by David Schneiderman; University of Toronto Press; 328 pages; ISBN 9781-4426-2948; $23
Cabinet granted a contractor permission to hire non-union migrant workers though it violated the Employment Department’s own rules. Confidential memos disclosing the order were obtained through Access To Information: “They prefer to be an employer of non-unionized labour”.
One of Canada’s largest companies is again being cited for firing sober workers under its random drug test policy. A labourer at a J.D. Irving Ltd. subsidiary was fired a week before Christmas though he’d tested negative for drugs and alcohol: “What I don’t understand is the rush to judgment”.
Recessions drive more Canadians into self-employment, according to two decades’ worth of tax data. Analysts at Statistics Canada said figures suggest the worse the economy, the likelier more people will resort to working for themselves: “You would expect the recent recession would have a bigger impact”.
A Canada Revenue Agency error resulting in the loss of a multi-million dollar judgment is headed to Tax Court. A judge earlier ruled tax collectors failed to produce “precise evidence” they ever mailed a notice to an oil company on underpayment of royalties: “It wasn’t written in pencil”.
