The Commons yesterday placed an order for 6,000 bottles of fine wine to “maintain expected standards of hospitality” in the Parliamentary Dining Room. The stocking of the wine cellar came four days after Prime Minister Mark Carney’s budget lamented the plight of “hardworking Canadians struggling to get by.”
Newly-declassified records show the RCMP from the close of the Second World War spied on the Royal Canadian Legion in a hunt for Communists. The Mounties in one confidential 1947 memo named dozens of Legion members as subversive: “The menace of Communist infiltration and disruption was brought to the attention of the Dominion President.”
Cabinet says it was never told who gave a custom sculpture of Chief Justice Richard Wagner to the Supreme Court of Canada for display in its Grand Entrance Hall. The Court’s Registrar yesterday said it was “reviewing the relevant information.”
The post office promises to Buy Canadian in its seven-year program to replace all doorstep mail delivery with community mailboxes. Cabinet put conversion costs at over a billion: “What are the details of each contract?”
Old Age Security costs will top a record $92 billion this year, more than forecast by the Department of Finance, says the Chief Actuary. The number of Canadians over 65 is growing by a half million people annually in a country that statistically is becoming as grey as Japan or Italy, actuaries told Parliament: ‘Examine historical short to long term trends and apply judgment.’
Green MP Elizabeth May (Saanich-Gulf Islands, B.C.), 72, in her final address to Parliament as Party leader said she felt foolish for siding with Liberals when it counted in past confidence votes. “I was a fool,” she said: “I see clear-eyed now.”
Federal agents have not seized a single shipment of slave-made imports in Canada in the last 10 years, new records show. Cabinet in a 2021 Ministerial Mandate letter had promised to “eradicate forced labour from Canadian supply chains and ensure Canadian businesses operating abroad do not contribute to human rights abuses.”
Cabinet proposes to end homelessness by 2036 after abandoning an earlier target to end homelessness by 2030. Failure to achieve results showed it was “a hard problem,” Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters: ‘Previous well-intentioned efforts have fallen short.’
Nearly a quarter million temporary foreign residents in Canada now eligible for permanent status are mainly Ukrainian war refugees and migrant workers, says Prime Minister Mark Carney. Cabinet announced the quota in its budget last Thursday without specifying whether it applied to illegal immigrants facing deportation: “Who are these people?”
The Department of Veterans Affairs will not recognize Indigenous fighters of pre-Confederation Canada as veterans. The honour was sought by the Assembly of First Nations: “Veterans Affairs Canada defines a veteran as ‘any former member of the Canadian Armed Forces who successfully completed basic training and was honourably discharged.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs has agreed to take over management of the largest private military cemetery in the nation at a $15.9 million cost. The National Field of Honour at Pointe-Claire, Que. was established in 1929 by private donors as a dignified resting place for impoverished veterans facing a pauper’s grave: “No man who has given his services in defence of his country should be buried as a pauper.”
The geese flee south,
In the moonlight.
A weird eerie sight.
Silent dark shadows gliding,
In that putrefying light.
The report of a rifle.
A shock.
A flash.
The spark ignites.
Baal’s port smashed,
Despoiled.
Ruination.
The Orders of the day.
Perhaps the best nears its end.
Only Thompson would know.
Escorted in a somber,
Armoured Cruiser.
By W.N. Branson 
“It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk,” wrote English author Rebecca West. This is enough to make you wary of history that smells like violets.
Winston Churchill & Mackenzie King casts these “two elderly statesmen” as wartime peers out to save democracy. Author Terry Reardon is struck by parallels. Both were Sagittarians born in 1874, both had blue eyes and “large egos,” both stood 5’6”.
In chronicling their fifty-year acquaintance Reardon sees two dynamos of the Second World War. Well, not exactly. Churchill’s own Foreign Office in 1940 described King as “lukewarm about any war measure which he cannot show to redound to Canada’s own advantage.”
King took no part in battlefield strategy. No Allied leader took his advice too seriously. Even fellow Liberals considered King a partisan, cheese-paring functionary who was forever “traveling in the ditches of expediency,” as Air Minister Chubby Power put it in 1948.
Angus Macdonald, Canadian navy minister, considered King “weak at all points where pressure has been exerted – on conscription, on labour matters, on financial concessions to this or that group,” he wrote in 1944.
In his wartime diaries King emerges as a lonesome bachelor and scheming administrator devoid of any heroic impulse. To read King’s daily scribbling is to search pointlessly for any broad insight into WWII as compared to, say, a byelection in Cartier.
An example: On July 12, 1941, with Nazis approaching Leningrad and the RAF executing daylight raids over France, King confided the highlight of his day was singing to his little dog Pat: “I sang over to myself and to him the little hymn Safe In The Arms Of Jesus, as beautiful a hymn as I knew from those childhood days.”
“King’s reputation did not survive the day of his resignation,” Max Aitken, Churchill’s wartime supply minister, wrote in 1959. No historian has yet made a persuasive case that King was any more than what he was, though many have tried including Reardon.
“During the lifetime of these two products of the Victorian age the world evolved into a global village,” he writes. “On the world stage, Winston Churchill still towers as the great leader in the cause of freedom. In Canada the orchestrator of the successful development of the country during the turbulent first half of the twentieth century has been recognized as Mackenzie King.”
There is no evidence Churchill thought much about King. His most candid reflections are sadly lost to history. We will never know Churchill’s reaction in 1947 when King privately told him of his fascination with séances and Ouija boards.
In pairing Churchill and King as wartime giants, “so similar, so different,” the author unfortunately omits evidence to the contrary including juicy bits. In 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, as Churchill galvanized his people with a pledge to fight to the death, the Luftwaffe bombed Westminster Hall. On hearing the news, King secretly cabled the Canadian mission in London to retrieve stones from the rubble for his private rock collection. The British declined.
By Tom Korski
Winston Churchill & Mackenzie King: So Similar, So Different by Terry Reardon; Dundurn Press; 432 pages; ISBN 97814-5970-5890; $35
Cabinet will add $182.4 billion in new borrowing over the next three years under a budget plan tabled yesterday. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne justified ongoing deficit spending as reasonable: “I stand by our projections.”
The head of a federal anti-money laundering agency that failed an October 29 audit yesterday declared auditors were all wrong. “I do not agree,” Stéphane Sirard, interim CEO of the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre, told the Commons public accounts committee: “That is deeply disturbing.”
