Another sporting good supplier faces a five-figure federal penalty for misleading claims its hockey helmets may protect players for concussions. Consumers’ advocates described the Competition Bureau settlement as weak: “It lets the company spend on brand remediation”.
Trade groups say they spent some $5 million on lawyers’ fees in waging a seven-year battle to repeal U.S. restrictions on Canadian meat exports. Authorities yesterday marked the formal end to the 2008 dispute over so-called country of origin labeling: ‘It was a long and expensive fight’.
Statistics Canada is appealing to “civic duty” in promoting a new, improved census in 2016, cautioning its TV promotions won’t be as entertaining as beer ads. Patriotic appeals must also avoid imagery like dead maple leaves that suggest the nation “is in decline”, focus groups said: “Graphic treatment of such a prominent national symbol was disturbing”.
Rail shippers can be required to pay for liability on hazardous goods, a federal court has ruled. Canadian Pacific Railway Co. successfully challenged a regulator’s decision that billing customers on liability for cargo it freighted was unreasonable: “There has to be a way to move those goods”.
Health Canada is endorsing the continued sale of a herbicide banned in the European Union, concluding it poses no threat to Canadians’ health or the environment. The public has till January 29 to comment: ‘The substance affects people the same way regardless of where they live’.
One of the country’s largest provincial marketing boards has lost a crucial legal battle. The Supreme Court declined to hear a bid by Québec’s maple syrup producers to block the off-board sale of goods: “Each province has their own rules”.
Ice-skating falls
send thousands each year
to emergency rooms.
Children are the most vulnerable.
The grand prize of this year’s
Children Hospital of Eastern Ontario’s lottery:
A fully furnished, 1.5 million dollar home, featuring
an 18-feet high, freestanding fireplace,
oak cabinets,
and three-dimensional, hexagon marble tiles in the
kitchen and the master bathroom.
In the basement,
a private rink.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)
The territories are a 60-year experiment in state planning. The result is a succession of little victories and big defeats. Ottawa spends $64 million a year on food subsidies, yet chicken costs $45. The jobless rate in Nunavut is 18 percent. Homeless shelters in Yellowknife face periodic outbreaks of tuberculosis. Yukon’s GDP has shrunk three years in a row.
“Canada’s North has always been a colony to southern interests, a fact that has profoundly marked its historical development,” writes editor Chris Southcott in Northern Communities Working Together. “Despite current trends towards increased self-government, the territorial North is still heavily dependent on the federal government for the provision of services and decision making.”
This happened once before, in Newfoundland & Labrador in 1949, when state planners tried and failed to impose an industrial economy on a society of poor fishermen. The result was costly and disastrous. “Anyone familiar with administering public services in Newfoundland is well aware of the naiveté with which Newfoundlanders – especially the very dependent ones, and they are legion – look to government to supply most every need,” Herbert Pottle, the province’s first welfare minister, wrote in his 1997 memoirs Newfoundland: Dawn Without Light.
“Their age-long isolation had encouraged it, and the glad tidings of additional government benefits have tended to institutionalize it,” Pottle wrote. “It was the old and easy way out: ‘Get the government to do it.’”
Northern Communities examines the grassroots alternative. The verdict is uneven. The territories remain underpopulated – Whitehorse, the biggest city, has only 23,000 people – and many residents have no intention of spending the rest of their lives in the region. There are few community clubs organized by unions, charities or local improvement groups, and those that exist are dominated by government. “It’s not surprising that people who live in the territorial North rely upon publicly-funded education, health care and social welfare,” writes Southcott, a professor of sociologist at Lakehead University.
“Paternalistic state policies, no matter how well intentioned, have had an impact, sometimes positive but often negative, on the development of social economy organizations in the North,” says Southcott.
Northern Communities is not an exposé; it’s an honest account of community life in a region governed by faraway federal regulators and mining corporations. Accounts are candid. The effect is unsettling.
“In the North, state-society relations bear the marks of their undemocratic history of power imbalance,” writes Prof. Frances Abele, of Carleton University’s School of Public Policy. “Sustained and sometimes massive federal interventions have affected, for example, how people make their living (wildlife harvesting regulations); their living arrangements (settlement of people in communities); and the organization of child rearing (compulsory education) to name just a few.”
Even attempts to document success stories are mitigated by unrealized potential, if not outright failure. Prof. Thierry Rodon of Laval cites Pangnirtung Fisheries Ltd., a Nunavut processor. Is a fish plant part of the social economy? “Yes,” says a resident. “The fish plant here provides money for us and it also provides economy for the families who are out working together as a group. That’s an example of social economy.”
Pangnirtung Fisheries Ltd. has never turned a profit. It has operated as a Crown corporation for 23 years. It employs 80 people. Its net loss after subsidies is $41,000 annually, and that was before Parliament chipped in $40.5 million to improve the village harbour.
Is this the best Canada can do?
By Holly Doan
Northern Communities Working Together: The Social Economy of Canada’s North; edited by Chris Southcott; University of Toronto Press; 304 pages; ISBN 9781-4426-14185; $24.95
Health Canada faces demands it table thousands of documents in Parliament involving a regulatory decision that drove a Manitoba company out of business. MP James Bezan said he suspected regulators were “over-zealous” and may have skirted federal law: “The department tried to wear them down in the hope they would go away”.
Thousands of municipal landfills nationwide are being studied by Environment Canada to ensure they’re safely capped. The department said its concerned material used to cover current and decommissioned dumps is safe and effective: “Historically we don’t know”.
Women’s rate of participation in the workforce is stagnating after strong postwar gains, according to new federal research. Statistics Canada said the rate of women at work has slowed markedly since the 1990s: “Further analysis is warranted”.
The Supreme Court is declining to hear an appeal from a British Columbia man who alleged he got bad advice from a lawyer in purported conflict of interest. The barrister had taken the case without charge: “Clients frequently complain”.
Liberals’ newly-appointed parliamentary secretary for international development was fired as a consular adviser a year ago, and unsuccessfully filed a human rights complaint against her Mexican hosts. The Embassy of Mexico yesterday declined an interview on the appointment of MP Karina Gould. “We have no comment on Ms. Gould,” an official said.
The MP for Burlington, Ont. last year was fired as a consultant for the Toronto office of ProMexico, a trade commission. Gould had been on the job nine months. In a subsequent human rights complaint, she alleged discrimination because of gender, age and “sexual orientation”. Gould is 28 and married.
The MP did not respond to Blacklock’s request for comment. Gould omitted all reference to the ProMexico post in her official campaign biography. The Prime Minister’s Office would not say if it was aware of Gould’s employment when she was appointed parliamentary secretary assigned to deal with foreign nationals, including Mexican authorities.
“The allegations describe the applicant’s employment up until the termination of her employment, which she says was a forced resignation due to a toxic work environment,” an Ontario Human Rights Tribunal adjudicator wrote in dismissing Gould’s allegations. “She describes a series of incidents which she believes show that she was targeted by her employer, treated unfairly and falsely accused of inadequate performance of her duties. She alleges that the reason for this treatment was her sex and age. Many of the allegations related to the applicant’s involvement in various trade shows and related events, and reports she prepared relating to trade issues.”
Gould was hired as a ProMexico consultant in January 2014 assigned to “generate business opportunities” for exporters, and fired by September. “The application alleges discrimination in employment or in the performance of a contract because of sex, sexual orientation and age,” wrote Tribunal adjudicator Brian Cook.
Gould also complained of “inter-office conflicts about job roles and alleged preferential treatment of other employees as compared to her treatment,” the adjudicator wrote. The Tribunal dismissed her complaint against Mexican diplomats as prohibited by the State Immunity Act.
The Tribunal made its ruling September 2, while Gould was campaigning for Parliament in Burlington. Gould won the riding by 2,400 over incumbent Conservative MP Mike Wallace, and was appointed as parliamentary secretary on December 2.
Gould made no mention of her firing or “toxic work” complaint in campaign literature. Her constituency office yesterday did not respond when asked for details of her Tribunal complaint.
By Tom Korski
Cabinet is revoking a 5¢ increase in stamp rates scheduled to take effect January 11. Canada Post had proposed the increase, the sixth in five years: “Those price increases have been substantial”.
Despite decades of internet retailing Canadians still shop with their feet, says new federal research. Statistics Canada reported the vast majority of retail sales occur at the old-fashioned checkout counter: “You go to the mall, you eat, you talk with friends”.
