More than a tenth of first time homebuyers nationwide now rely on parents to co-sign mortgages, the Bank of Canada said yesterday. The rate of parental co-signs nearly tripled since 2004, wrote analysts: “We asked a simple question: What if parents had not co-signed?”
Cabinet effective April 20 will suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline and diesel until Labour Day. “That’s real relief,” Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters: “Canadians want government to govern.”
Current federal law is inadequate to deal with copper theft, a Senate committee said yesterday. Utilities have sought jail for thieves who sabotage costly telecom lines for scrap copper that sells for $6 a pound: “Copper theft is a threat.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney last night claimed the first Liberal majority since 2019 with three byelection wins and five floor-crossings. One senior Liberal MP called it an end to years of frustration: “That’s been a part of the frustration of minority government over the last number of years.”
Income inequality nationwide has risen to its highest level in a generation, Statistics Canada said yesterday. The rising gap between rich and poor had been “relatively stable” for decades: “The wealth gap grew.”
Deputy Defence Minister Christiane Fox yesterday expressed no regrets for landing an $80,000-a year government job for her husband’s cousin. An ethics report concluded the man was unqualified and that Fox violated the Conflict Of Interest Act: “Any regrets?”
The Department of Immigration yesterday disclosed it spent more than $9 million on advertising in French-speaking countries from Cameroon to Togo. Cabinet has targeted immigration as key to preserving French in Canada: “It is clear the future of French is found in Africa and we need to recruit where there are pools of French speakers.”
Canada is short as many as 10,000 homes for military members, the CEO of the Canadian Forces Housing Agency said yesterday. The latest figures follow an audit that found what housing exists was often unfit for young families: “Would you live in military housing?”
The CRTC yesterday approved a 23 percent hike in subscription fees for CPAC, the Cable Public Affairs Channel that broadcasts parliamentary proceedings. Management complained the channel’s finances were “critical” despite a multi-million dollar federal bailout in 2024: “We cannot continue.”
The Canada Revenue Agency spent $202,942 on a questionnaire that asked people how they liked filing taxes. Most did not enjoy it, said the pollsters’ report: “For many, tax filing was seen as a necessary responsibility rather than an activity they look forward to.”
Cabinet commissioned confidential polling on support for public service job cuts, records show. Canadians in federal focus groups said they supported layoffs providing it did not affect them personally: “They wanted more details regarding the specific areas in which the Government of Canada would be reducing its spending.”
Deputy Defence Minister Christiane Fox in a staff email neither resigned nor apologized after being censured for cronyism. Fox said she breached an Act of Parliament to hire a friend who’d previously worked at a Good Life gym in the name of diversity. The gym employee is Black: “My efforts were focused on advancing diversity and inclusion.”
The $4 billion federal prison system has a quarter more employees than prisoners in custody, new figures show. Staff outnumber inmates even with job cuts proposed this year, said a Correctional Service report: “The current portfolio is not sustainable.”
The balance of probabilities is sufficient to void a declaration of death, says the Supreme Court of Canada. The ruling came on appeal by a life insurance company opposed to a $550,000 payout over a “dead” policyholder: “What is meant by the ‘return’ of a person who has been declared dead?”
Of the capital’s lost landmarks none is more curious than an old federal museum that exhibited oil paintings, whale bones and lobster. It was the Dominion Fisheries Museum, opened at the corner of Queen and O’Connor streets in 1884.
The original curator was an eccentric Scot, Andrew Halkett. He made the museum one of the first of its kind in Canada, a must-see for visitors just two blocks from Parliament Hill.
It was a beautiful Second Empire structure with rows of double-hooded windows and a mansard roof. Two floors displayed a fish hatchery, a full whale skeleton, a rare 8-foot green sturgeon and other ichthyology exhibits. The top floor from 1888 to 1911 was home to the National Gallery of Canada, the first federal collection of paintings and sculpture.
Halkett, the curator, was the main attraction. He joined the Department of Fisheries in 1879 as a resident naturalist and served 52 years. Halkett devoted his life to the study of fish and lobster, oysters and scallops.
“He was ever on the lookout for means of conserving our sea food and he lectured frequently to fishermen explaining to them better methods of making a livelihood,” a newspaperman wrote.
His books are rare and valuable: Sea Life In The Pribilof Islands, a study of creatures off the coast of Alaska, and The Moulting Of The Lobster. One 1913 title, the encyclopedic Check List Of The Fishes Of The Dominion Of Canada And Newfoundland, remains in print.
Halkett was “slightly built, studious and particular of speech,” wrote a contemporary, but had “vim and verve not in keeping with his studious appearance.” He joined the first Canadian scientific expedition to the High Arctic, the 1903 Neptune expedition, and nearly perished in a blizzard while studying habits of the fur seal in the Bering Sea.
At home, Halkett was a Greek scholar and lifelong member of the Bible Society and boasted his fisheries museum was so popular it opened on the Lord’s Day, 2 to 5 pm. Yet in a flash Halkett and the museum were gone.
In 1917 the exhibits were closed and the building demolished to make way for a federal office complex, the Hunter Building. It in turn was sold by the government in 1982 and bulldozed to make way for an insurance tower.
And Halkett? He moved to Nova Scotia to spend the twilight of his career studying lobsters, and retired in 1929 at age 75. The old naturalist died in 1937. The Department of Fisheries sent a wreath.
By Andrew Elliott
