The Senate is being urged to reject the work of one of its own committees and outlaw use of DNA testing by insurance companies. The Senate human rights committee’s Conservative majority rejected the bill last February 19: “We need to do something”.
A Conservative MP citing two recent police shootings is urging that the Commons adopt a motion promoting use of body-warn cameras by law enforcement nationwide. Video surveillance would curb “instances of police and public violence”, the MP said: “Why do police not want this?”
Canada is spending a fortune on its search for terror financing with little justification for budgeting, and no accounting for privacy concerns, a Senate committee has been told. The current dragnet for black market cash is reduced to tracking house payments and wire transfers to family, said a University of Toronto law professor: “We do not have evidence of the benefits”.
A landmark quarter-billion dollar settlement in a Nunavut dispute should spur cabinet to fairer resolution of land claims nationwide, says a lead attorney in the case. The Government of Canada will pay $255.5 million to Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. on complaints it breached terms of an Inuit claim that led to creation of the territory in 1999: “Hopefully this won’t be necessary in the future”.
First-ever regulation of wholesale wireless roaming charges is being cheered by consumers’ advocates. The CRTC yesterday said it will fix charges levied by big telecom providers on smaller rivals: “It is really great”.
A bank proposal to sanction currently-illegal sharing of depositors’ information raises numerous questions, says the chair of the Commons finance committee. Bankers seek amendments to privacy law that would allow them to exchange details on customers: “How do I know they’re not sharing information I don’t want them to share?”
Federal agencies are paying almost $22 million a year in transaction fees for processing credit card payments, documents show. MPs and senators have rejected first-ever regulation of fees, mainly charged by Visa and MasterCard Canada: “We pay”.
Lawmakers must adopt “strict measures” to support the seal hunt, says a Liberal senator. A proposal to outlaw photographs of the Atlantic hunt will be discussed today at a closed-door meeting of the Senate fisheries committee: ‘We have to check what people are doing’.
The Canadian Human Rights Commission is being cited for unfair treatment of an ex-railway mechanic who complained he lost his job due to poor health. The Commission was mistaken in dismissing the mechanic’s complaint, a federal Appeal Court judge has ruled: ‘It was unreasonable’.
New changes to Canada’s drug patent regulations will revive 2006-era rules after Federal Court judgments narrowed patent law. Industry Canada said it feared numerous drug patents would lapse without a change in regulations: “It’s back to the future”.
Bankers want changes to federal privacy law to allow them to swap information on customers. The demand follows disclosures in an Ontario court that banks already permit a spy agency to scrutinize accounts without a warrant: “How do you ensure you are protecting privacy?”
A federal agency broke the law in awarding a multi-million dollar contract, an Appeal Court judge has ruled. The Canadian Air Transport Security Authority was cited for unfair and illegal conduct in its 2010 purchase of airport X-ray screeners. Federal auditors are conducting a special examination of the agency: ‘The decision was unreasonable and unlawful’.
A news photographer twice stung by the CBC has lost a bid to take her case to the Supreme Court. Justices declined to hear an appeal from the journalist who sued over the network’s improper use of her copyright images, only to end out-of-pocket over an obscure Federal Court rule: “We have these rules for a reason”.
A gloom index has Canadian executives more pessimistic about the economy than at any time since the end of the financial panic. The survey by the Canadian Professional Accountants of Canada found nearly a third of managers see dark days ahead: “We are in the middle of a period of uncertainty”.
Each time there is an E.coli outbreak – it is now a triannual event – the beef industry and its apologists explain food poisoning wouldn’t be a problem if only consumers knew how to cook tainted hamburger. It’s the same logic Big Auto used once against mandatory seatbelt laws.
“We are all part of the problem,” Laura Rance, editor of the farm periodical Manitoba Co-operator, wrote in a snide 2012 commentary; “How is it that in Canada, one of the world’s wealthiest and most well-educated countries, we have a population so functionally illiterate when it comes to safe food preparation? Even meat carrying E.coli is edible when properly cooked.”
So it was that General Motors’ director of styling, William Mitchell, told a reporter in 1956: “The seat belt craze isn’t doing anything for the brains of the guy driving the car. Sure, we need thinner pillars and better vision, but this just encourages the nuts. Put belts and shoulder harnesses on them and they think they can do anything.”
So, Big Auto sold inherently unsafe cars that killed and maimed through normal operation. And Big Beef sells meat that can kill or maim through normal consumption. Robert Boschman, co-editor of Found In Alberta, challenges the logic.
Found In Alberta is an eloquent series of essays on environmental themes in the province that celebrates natural wonders in tourism advertising, then licenses oilsands development and the biggest concentration of feedlots in the country. Boschman, a professor of English at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, notes Alberta cattlemen like to show photos of the Rockies in their marketing: it evokes “a relationship between natural landscape and the domesticated cattle,” he writes.
In 1999, Boschman’s three-year old daughter was poisoned after eating E.-coli-tainted sausage. The bacteria infected an older sibling, age 5, when the two sisters shared a bath. “At first, and for a long time afterward, I was devastated that my own complicity in beef consumption and my unthinking act of bathing the girls together when one of them suffered food poisoning should have such grievous consequences.”
Both girls were hospitalized. The five-year old emptied her bowels 54 times, “her body’s attempt to rid itself of a pathogen so toxic the intestinal wall was being rejected,” Boschman writes: “Until that moment, the reality of urban humans living in a single, interconnected biosphere had not entered my personal experience and consciousness with such force.”
E.coli is spread by filth. Cattle trucks force livestock to stand in their own excrement that coats their hides. Once delivered to the slaughterhouse, they are processed at a rate of up to 500 cattle per hour. The system has had spectacular failures.
In the XL Foods Inc. scandal, a case of mass food poisoning that prompted the diatribe from the Manitoba Co-operator, E.coli spread from cattle dirt to mechanical blades to raw meat later shipped and sold to consumers. The bacteria were first detected on August 29, 2012. Federal inspectors allowed the plant to keep shipping tainted meat for another thirty-one days. Incredibly, no one was fired – least of all Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, then responsible for meat inspection. Instead cabinet quietly assigned inspection duties to the Minister of Health, and the Co-operator concluded food poisoning wouldn’t be an issue if only consumers weren’t so stupid.
Found In Alberta questions these practices with a poignant observation: stewardship of the land and profit-taking from the land are not the same thing: “Where better to examine apparent contradiction between the deeply-held love and pride of wilderness, and the relentless pursuit of the riches it yields?”
By Holly Doan
Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene, edited by Robert Boschman and Mario Trono; by Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 398 pages; ISBN 9781-5545-89593; $32.24
