Cabinet yesterday confirmed it will end its failed Two Billion Trees Program after six years, $267.7 million and the work of 50 federal employees. Then-Environment Minister Catherine McKenna announced the plan in 2019 as a “huge asset.”
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne projects the 2025 deficit will be 192 percent higher than forecast but advised Canadians to sleep well tonight. The deficit, originally targeted at $26.8 billion, is now closer to $78.3 billion: “Tonight people will go to bed and say, ‘We’re going to be okay.’
The Department of Industry yesterday said it will not release terms of any job guarantees by heavily-subsidized Stellantis without permission of the automaker. Conservative MP Raquel Dancho (Kildonan-St. Paul, Man.) questioned whether the guarantees exist: “The problem is 3,000 people were laid off and your government committed millions and billions of taxpayers’ dollars and we’re trying to understand.”
Border agents recovered contraband from a total five rail cars last year, new figures show. Nearly two million train cars entered the country. The data followed warnings from the Customs and Immigration Union that smugglers shipping guns or drugs by rail had “almost a zero percent chance” of getting caught: “We don’t really have rail examination.”
Electric cars reduce medicare costs, says the Department of Environment. Authorities yesterday made the claim at the Commons environment committee but would not put a cash value on specific savings: “Electric vehicles bring health benefits and cost savings.”
Health Canada does not require that drug injection sites be located a minimum distance from schools, daycares or playgrounds, according to a departmental report. It was not cabinet’s job, Health Minister Marjorie Michel told MPs: “You are aware they’re next to playgrounds, schools and daycares but you don’t know how many?”
Federal regulation of sports betting ads is unnecessary since “kids aren’t watching television,” says the gaming lobby. A bill mandating federal regulation passed the Senate unanimously and is currently before the Commons: ‘It is unnecessary.’
The Commons finance committee today is expected to open hearings into corporate tax avoidance through offshore accounts. Liberal MPs have called the hearings a bid to “dig dirt” on Prime Minister Mark Carney who benefited from Bermuda tax shelters as chair of Brookfield Asset Management: “They dig dirt on day one.”
Statistics Canada disciplined 72 employees for misconduct last year including 15 who were fired, according to first-ever disclosure of wrongdoing in the workplace. The agency counted another 21 complaints of harassment and 31 cases of lost or stolen taxpayers’ property, mainly cellphones and laptops: “Everyone is responsible for fostering an ethical workplace.”
Unnamed contractors appear to be gaming the federal system by bidding low on tenders with ambiguous wording to take advantage of revisions at escalating costs, says Procurement Ombudsman Alexander Jeglic. He called it “bid low, let it grow.”
Small independent brewers face steep costs under a Senate bill mandating cancer labels, says a lobby group. The private bill would compel all packaging to carry warnings of health risks: “I have never met anybody who thought beer was health food.”
Canadians face jail for “justifying the Indian Residential School system” under a Commons bill introduced by New Democrat MP Leah Gazan (Winnipeg Centre). The maximum penalty is needed to “end Residential School denialism,” said Gazan.
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom writes: “A guy bigger than me comes my way…”
Professor Gene Allen has compiled a history of The Canadian Press from a corporate secretary’s perspective. I didn’t think that was possible. Writing about a newsroom without the people is like writing about the circus without the big top.
Making National News covers ground already ploughed in The Story Of The Canadian Press, a 1948 account by former CP president Mark Nichols of the Winnipeg Tribune. Neither is compelling.
The story of any organization – a newsroom, a box factory, a daycare centre – is the story of humans. Allen, a professor of journalism, appears to miss the point. The result is predictably lifeless. An example is his story of Jack Best.
Now retired in Ottawa, Best was CP’s man in the USSR in the mid-1960s. He’d have fascinating anecdotes of missile parades, the toppling of Khrushchev, the every-day dysfunction that inspired dark Soviet humour: What’s one kilometre long and eats cabbage? The lineup outside the meat shop.
Allen does not appear to have interviewed Jack Best. Instead he pulled his material from the corporate minutes: “In 1964, CP sent Jack Best, a reporter from the Ottawa bureau who had done well on previous international assignments, to Moscow. Although Best was described as a ‘resident correspondent’, the executive committee did not see this as a long term commitment – it was initially supposed to end by May 1965, then extended to until May 1966. After 18 months, it was decided to keep the bureau open indefinitely. The cost of keeping Best in Moscow was the main element in a $40,000 increase for international coverage in the 1966 budget.”
There you have it, an eyewitness account of the Cold War reduced to a line item in the annual budget.
As the country’s first truly national news agency, CP was born as a wartime propaganda arm of the Government of Canada. They kept it afloat from 1917 to 1923 with a $50,000-a year subsidy, a huge sum at the time but a fraction of federal funding the agency draws today..
Canadian Press’ first war correspondent was a former police reporter named Tom Lyon. When Lyon died in 1946 obituary writers insisted he “saw firsthand” the combat on the Western Front. “Possessed of an almost fanatical desire to get the facts, he tramped many weary miles to see things for himself,” the Globe recalled.
This was untrue. Lyon covered the Battle of Vimy Ridge from his desk in London. He was, however, so adept in the boardroom that in 1934 he was Liberal appointee as the $10,000-a year chair of the Ontario Hydro Commission. It was good work in Depression years when CP was cutting reporters’ pay. These anecdotes are not to be found in Professor Allen’s book.
Canadian Press matured. In its heyday it set a standard for crisp news copy and coverage of the remotest corners of Canada. For generations it was a source of $10 cheques for small town stringers who’d call in copy on a local murder trial or hotel fire.
Newsrooms once were so lively, so dysfunctional, so ego-driven, it would be unimaginable to strip the experience of its humanity. Gene Allen found a way.
By Holly Doan
Making National News: A History Of Canadian Press by Gene Allen; University of Toronto Press; 218 pages; ISBN 9781-4426-15328; $34.95
The Canadian Coast Guard has orders to avoid all military conflict though it’s now under military supervision, a senior officer yesterday told MPs. “If there were anything, we leave,” testified Deputy Commissioner Marc Mes.
