The Department of Foreign Affairs spent more than $32 million on an iceberg-themed pavilion at the Osaka World Fair, records show. Expenses included $164,279 for questionnaires and $50,000 on “creative concept options” even as Prime Minister Mark Carney appealed to Canadians to make sacrifices: “We won’t play games.”
Statistics Canada yesterday said it’s revising how it calculates inflation for its benchmark Consumer Price Index but wouldn’t discuss what changes are contemplated. The agency in the past has removed or added check-out items to reflect changing spending patterns, it said: ‘The Index can only reflect changes in consumer expenditures when basket weights are updated.’
An activist group is out of Department of Canadian Heritage funding for the first time since 2020 after being accused of anti-Catholic bias, Access To Information records show. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network received hundreds of thousands in taxpayer funding until MPs questioned its role in “spurring greater polarization.”
Billions in federal aid for Ukraine are an expression of Canadian values, Prime Minister Mark Carney said yesterday. “We’re going to be on the right side of history,” he told reporters.
Cabinet’s “Buy Canadian” policy is to be phased in over an indefinite period, says a memo by the Department of Public Works that manages most federal contracts. The announcement of the policy last September 5 did not imply Canadians would get immediate preferential treatment in contracting, it said: “Measures will be phased in.”
Rideau Hall on Saturday stripped civil honours for a Canadian Business Hall of Famer. Jacques Lamarre, retired CEO of SNC-Lavalin Group Inc., had his Order of Canada revoked: “Events of recent years have been trying for me.”
Parliament should ban public display of the Soviet hammer and sickle as a hate symbol, says the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. A federal bill currently before the Senate would ban the swastika and Hamas banners: ‘The Congress was disappointed the Communist hammer and sickle was not included.’
Prime Minister Mark Carney garbled Alberta history in reciting a scripted anecdote as a self-described “proud Albertan,” records show. Carney made the comments last Friday in announcing a pipeline pact with the Government of Alberta: “When I was born just north of the Alberta border in Fort Smith, the oil sands were just a concept.”
A federal agency gave more than a million to a small Yukon school board to promote “Indigenous food systems,” records show. The funding was one of a string of grants awarded in the name of food security: ‘It developed a traditional processing kitchen in Whitehorse.’
A federal judge has dismissed a request that Canada declare all foreigners in immigration proceedings including illegal border crossers have a right to counsel. Immigration lawyers had sought the declaration.
Blacklock’s pauses for the Victoria Day observance with warmest wishes to friends and subscribers. We’re back tomorrow — The Editor.
Programmed from an early age,
To trust your life to the cold unblinking system,
Distracted, distanced, too weak to engage,
When the need is a deep abiding wisdom.
With transgressions, large and small,
Wars always radiate information,
And politics broadcast it all,
Before the ignition.
The pretext presumed,
Democracy will give us a cage,
The people will want their cage.
And a nation will be consumed.
But the absence of names builds a quiet rage,
And the hollowed out remnant, reconciled to the truth,
Of an analog echo to a hidden age.
By W.N. Branson 
Buried in the files of Ontario District Court is R v. Anguei Pal-Deng, an unsettling case. The accused, a Sudanese man, 25, already on probation for common assault, was charged with savagely pushing an 82-year old grandmother down a flight of stairs at Toronto’s Dufferin Mall on March 6, 2014. Two eyewitnesses saw everything: The vicious attack, the bleeding victim, the thin blue line of criminal justice that separates civilized society from public disorder. “He grabbed my arm and threw me down the stairs,” the woman said. The suspect spent seven months in jail awaiting trial.
The case was assigned to Judge Melvyn Green, former co-president of the Association in Defence of the Wrongfully Convicted. Judge Green took an uncommon interest in the case. He pulled mall security tapes and examined them frame by frame. “I feel compelled to note that absent the closed-circuit television evidence, the result may have been tragically different,” he wrote.
Video showed the suspect was minding his business, drinking a Coke, when the elderly woman approached the stairs, struggling with her cane, purse and shopping bag. The Somalian gently reached out to offer assistance when she “physically recoiled,” then tumbled downstairs. He rushed forward and knelt to comfort the woman.
Neither eyewitness saw anything. One was on an escalator several feet away, facing in the opposite direction. “It is of profound concern that justice could so easily have miscarried but for the good fortune that the very physical exchange at issue was preserved on videotape,” wrote Judge Green. He acquitted the defendant and apologized. “I regret I do not have the authority to do more,” said Green.
Miscarriages Of Justice In Canada examines phenomena that occur over and over in criminal courts: unreliable witnesses, sloppy police work, indifferent prosecutors. Not every defendant has the good fortune of appearing before a Judge Green. “It is a highly imperfect system,” writes author Professor Kathryn Campbell of the University of Ottawa’s Department of Criminology.
Campbell’s work is meticulous and jarring. Miscarriages Of Justice counts scores, even hundreds of cases of wrongful conviction annually in Canada typically due to witness misidentification, “problematic police investigation,” failure of Crown prosecutors to disclose evidence, fabricated testimony, unreliable jailhouse informants, Court errors, false confessions, prejudice and poor lawyering.
The actual number of wrongful convictions is not known. Campbell identifies at least 32 cases in which Canadians were compensated after being jailed for crimes they did not commit. One victim, Clayton Johnson of Shelburne, N.S., was paid $2.5 million for spending five years in prison on allegations he murdered his wife. Investigators determined Mrs. Johnson fell down the basement stairs while Mr. Johnson was at work.
“Existing laws and evidentiary procedures are presumed to be in place to protect everyone, yet, regardless, errors frequently occur throughout the criminal justice process from investigation, arrest and trial all the way through sentencing,” notes Professor Campbell.
Miscarriages Of Justice concludes officialdom alone is not to blame. Media representation of lawlessness “exerts enormous pressure on the police to solve these crimes, and to do so expeditiously,” writes Campbell. “While public pressure to solve a crime immediately does not always result in the wrong person being accused or convicted, police may, in their desire to solve these cases, cut corners in investigative practices.”
Perhaps. It is also true that journalists, police, prosecutors, defence lawyers and judges are never fired for participating in wrongful convictions through incompetence, indifference or malice. No party to the Dufferin Mall prosecution suffered the loss of a penny’s worth of pensionable earnings let alone seven months in jail.
Miscarriages Of Justice is a darkly compelling book not because it is sensational, but because it is so matter of fact.
By Holly Doan
Miscarriages of Justice in Canada: Causes, Responses, Remedies, by Kathryn M. Campbell; University of Toronto Press; 544 pages; ISBN 9780-80209-4063; $40.76
Canada needed nearly 82,000 homes to shelter new landed immigrants let into the country last year, says the Department of Immigration. The figure was equivalent to more than a third of all new urban housing starts in 2025: “Immigration affects housing.”
Parks Canada installed hundreds of small cabins at the equivalent of more than $57,000 apiece to encourage overnight visits by people who don’t like camping, says an internal audit. Recordkeeping was so poor it was impossible to learn if the agency recovered its costs: “Further exploration of operational and capital costs will be needed.”
