The reopening of a British Columbia Coast Guard station cited in a 2015 oil spill should signal restoration of cuts to the marine service, says an MP. Vancouver’s Kitsilano station will be reopened “as soon as possible”, the fisheries department said: “Coast Guard neglect has hurt”.
A fire sale of Crown real estate has seen overseas properties dumped at millions below value, according to Access To Information records. The foreign affairs department in one memo expressed relief that few media or legislators took notice: “There may be a perception the government is not obtaining fair value or managing such properties prudently”.
A Crown agency, Farm Credit Canada, loaned $64,000 on depreciating farm equipment worth about $50,000 according to documents in a Regina lawsuit. The details follow a warning from the Parliamentary Budget Office over lack of oversight on lending practices by Crown corporations: “We emphasize risk management”.
Greenpeace is expressing alarm over Canada’s participation in a forum to develop a regulated commercial fishery in the Arctic. The “exploratory” initiative by the U.S. State Department saw endorsements from Russia, China and other states: ‘All industrial extraction should be prevented’.
Auditor General Michael Ferguson is being petitioned to probe undisclosed payments to losing bidders on federal contracts. The New Democratic caucus in a letter to Ferguson alleged payments worth millions have been made as “compensation” since 2005: “Why some bidders and not others?”
An Ottawa lobbyist has paid $16,281 by Court order for copying Blacklock’s news content in breach of the Copyright Act. Dan Paszkowski, president and CEO of the Canadian Vintners Association, had declined a pre-litigation settlement of $314. “I don’t have a lot of time to spend in court,” he said at trial.
Evidence showed Paszkowski copied a December 13, 2013 article concerning his testimony at the Commons agriculture committee. The article, headlined “Vintners Appeal For Help Under Euro Trade Pact”, reported: “Winemakers are appealing for more subsidies to withstand the impact of a free trade pact with Europe.”
A Vintners employee criticized the article as “sensational” journalism: “That says that we were appealing for more subsidies, which I would say is totally false,” testified Beth McMahon, vice-president of government and public affairs. “We don’t see ourselves as having subsidies,” McMahon told Court; “I think anybody who works in government relations in this town understands that, first of all, the word ‘subsidies’ is not well-received”.
The article correctly noted vintners sought an increase in their $220,000 share of a Growing Forward 2 farm promotions program cost-shared with provinces. The Vintners Association also received $479,356 in funding from the Department of Agriculture in the last reporting year, according to the Lobbyist Registry.
Blacklock’s sued after Paszkowski refused to explain how he obtained a copy of the paywalled article, and declined the $314 payment — the cost of two individual subscriptions. “The Canadian Vintners Association is not a subscriber to Blacklock’s and is therefore not bound by your terms and conditions,” he wrote in a January 17, 2014 letter to the company.
Paszkowski by Court order was compelled to name his source of the copied article, a secretary at another lobbyist’s office. In testimony, he said he knew the article could not be copied without payment or permission:
Deputy Judge Lyon Gilbert of Ontario Divisional Court’s small claims branch ordered the Vintners Association to pay the five-figure judgment including the value of a commercial licensing agreement, legal costs and $2,000 in punitive damages. “They continued to stand steadfast to the notion that they had done nothing wrong while knowing they had taken steps to bypass the paywall,” Gilbert wrote.
“You are prohibited from circumventing a technological protection which uses an effective technology to control access to a work,” wrote Gilbert, citing section 41.1 of the Copyright Act. “What the defendants did is just that. They knew there was limited access to the full article; they knew that access was subscription-based only, and that subscriptions cost money; they knew that there was a technological barrier to that access; they knew that unless they paid they could not get it. They knew and chose another way around it.”
The winemakers had claimed exemption under a “fair dealing” defence that permits copying under strict circumstances “for the purpose of either research or private study”. The Vintners Association represents 59 companies and trade groups that account for 90 percent of the nation’s wine producers.
“It must be remembered that the corporate defendant had in mind its own economic and commercial value in accessing the material, and was seeking to maintain its credibility as a lobbyist with government, and to protect its members’ financial interests,” Judge Gilbert wrote.
Paszkowski prior to the lawsuit expressed enthusiasm for Blacklock’s content: “I am aware that you have a very broad subscription base,” he wrote the company December 17, 2013: “We have discussed Blacklock’s publication with colleagues and have identified several who believe that your publication offers great information and value.”
By Staff 
The Senate is expected to complete a landmark study of obesity rates amid a cabinet pledge to ban marketing of processed foods to children. Senators are due to continue a committee investigation begun in 2014 that also heard demands for a sugar tax: “The sooner we deal with it the better”.
Canada Revenue Agency for the third time in two years has lost a tax appeal after being unable to prove it mailed a letter. Records show the Agency repeatedly sent assessment notices to an incorrect address even after the mail was returned as undeliverable: “What is the point?”
Senators propose to strip cabinet of unchecked powers to run up the national debt without consulting Parliament. Liberals reintroduced a Senate bill to repeal amendments to the Financial Administration Act passed in 2007: “This goes to the whole idea of accountability”.
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
