The Public Health Agency auctioned $22,000 ventilators as scrap metal for pennies a pound because they couldn’t give them away, documents show. The Agency said the costly StarFish Medical devices were declared surplus within months of their purchase: ‘Why were they sold as scrap?’
The Treasury Board yesterday said it knew of 163 cases of in-house conflicts in contracting in the past two years. The number applied only to federal managers who voluntarily disclosed conflicts: “You don’t have the dollar amount?”
Canadians are embracing home economics in a bid to beat high grocery prices, says Department of Agriculture research. Data show more consumers are canning, freezing and planning meals to save money: ‘The need for home economics has influenced purchase behaviour.’
Canadians may share media passwords without payment or permission, a federal judge has ruled. The decision by Federal Court Justice Yvan Roy came in the case of a Government of Canada manager who bought a single Blacklock’s subscription then shared the password with nine people.
“This constitutes the simple act of reading by officials with an immediate interest in the articles for business related reasons,” wrote Justice Roy. “There is no evidence this was in the nature of a frolic in territory protected by copyright.”
“There is a significant public interest in reading articles with a view to protecting the public and the press against errors and omissions,” wrote the Court. Federal lawyers in the case justified password sharing under the guise of fact-checking. No errors or omissions in Blacklock’s stories were cited.
Blacklock’s caught Parks Canada managers circulating a single password by email. “The Court accepts that Parks Canada was subject to Blacklock’s terms,” said Barry Sookman, senior counsel with McCarthy Tetrault LLP of Toronto and adjunct professor of intellectual property at Osgoode Hall Law School. “Those terms clearly limited use by Parks Canada.”
The ruling plainly impacted every media company using passwords, said Sookman. “Canadian publishers rely on the ability to enforce contractual terms and their copyright to sustain their business models, especially those premised on subscriptions,” he said. “The Blacklock’s case leaves these protections in doubt.”
Genevieve Patenaude, a manager at Parks Canada, purchased a single password at the request of the Environment Minister’s office to see one story, records showed. The story stated Blacklock’s obtained documents proving Parks Canada secretly paid the CBC more than $94,000 for positive coverage of the agency’s work. Neither Parks Canada nor the CBC disclosed the cash-for-coverage payment.
Parks Canada and the Department of Environment at the time budgeted more than $282,710 a year for media monitoring including $50,145 to Press News Inc. and $23,632 to Cedrom-SNI Inc. Manager Patenaude had “experience with the purchase of subscriptions for Parks Canada” and should have known Blacklock’s terms and conditions were “plainly visible,” said the Court.
“Had Ms. Patenaude been curious enough she would have clicked on the button ‘Terms And Conditions’ and right upfront she would have read the paragraphs,” wrote Justice Roy. Terms stated: “You acknowledge and agree one subscription is allotted per subscriber. Distribution of articles, photographs, images, writings or other content of any kind by a single subscriber by paper, electronic file, disc, intranet or any and all methods is not permissible. For bulk subscriptions see ‘Contact.’”
Evidence showed Patenaude also immediately received multiple email notices stating: “For institutional subscribers who would like to share or distribute content in-house please contact publisher Holly Doan for custom bulk rates,” with an email and phone number provided.
Justice Roy ruled Blacklock’s terms and conditions though “plainly visible” were irrelevant and the email notices too bewildering for Parks Canada management to comprehend. “What is an ‘institutional subscriber’ other than a subscriber who happens to be an institution of some sort? he wrote. “What is a ‘bulk subscription’? What constitutes ‘distribution’ or ‘share’?”
Records showed Manager Patenaude shared the password with at least nine others and offered it to anyone who asked “if you ever need to access any Blacklock’s article.” Each password granted access to Blacklock’s entire database of thousands of copyright works.
Access To Information records showed where passwords were not shared, Parks Canada staff cut and paste password-protected content for sharing by email. The agency had 2,160 employees at the time.
Blacklock’s argued in Federal Court that password sharing violated 2012 amendments to the Copyright Act forbidding the breach of any “technological protection measure” to access works. Parliament wrote no person shall “avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate or impair the technological measure” without a copyright owner’s permission. The Act defined a technological protection measure as “any effective technology, device or component that in the ordinary course of its operation controls access to a work.”
Justice Roy wrote “there is no evidence of what a ‘password’ is” and that password buyers were entitled to share them without any stated limit. “Use of a password, if it is otherwise a technological protection measure, does not constitute the circumvention of the technological protection measures of the Copyright Act,” he wrote.
Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair at the University of Ottawa, called the ruling a “huge win” for people who do not want to pay for content. “The decision could have enormous implications,” Geist wrote in a blog post, adding that media creators “cannot merely rely on passwords protecting their works.”
Blacklock’s shareholders said in a statement: “Since 2016 we have tramped in and out of Federal Court hearings to uphold Canadian publishers’ centuries-old right to sell subscriptions and prosecute shoplifters. We were naive. The biggest corporation in the land, the Government of Canada, gained new powers to steal from the littlest publisher.”
“Federal media meddling is now complete,” said shareholders. “Paid media get the carrots – $29,750 employee rebates, 15 percent subscription tax credits, six-figure ‘media monitoring’ payments and $94,000 cash-for-coverage – and independent publishers get the stick. Carefully scrutinize the self-interest of anyone who claims otherwise.”
By Staff 
(photo: Federal Court)
The United Nations is being used by countries that “don’t share our values,” says a Department of Foreign Affairs briefing note. It follows Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s public praise for the UN while waging an unsuccessful 2020 campaign for a temporary seat on the Security Council: “Send the message that Canada is back.”
The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada is no help to consumers, say members of the Senate banking committee. The protests follow Access To Information records showing the Agency did not answer a single one of 27,323 consumer complaints it received since 2019: “It was a disaster.”
An air passengers’ visa program intended to keep dangerous foreigners out of Canada instead drove up refugee claims to record levels, Budget Office data show. The number of refugee claims by travelers who bought a $7 electronic visa is up 672 percent, said analysts: ‘The average cost for each asylum claimant is $16,500.’
School boards nationwide should rewrite curricula to include education on seal hunting, says the Senate fisheries committee. Senators said lessons are needed to revive an industry that is “no longer economically viable.”
By the entrance,
names of employees
and their whereabouts.
Andy went for a dental appointment;
Shawn is in a conference;
Barbara on vacation.
I’m coming down with a cold;
haven’t slept all night.
Standing by the board
– a dry-erase marker in my hand –
I consider my options.
“Sick and tired”
sounds right.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Otto Boyko of Edmonton recalls the day he enlisted in the army during the Korean War, and went home to tell Mother he’d take basic training at Camp Petawawa, Ont. “Oh, that’s where your dad was held in the internment camp,” she said.
Another oldtimer, Andrew Antoniuk, remembered when his father bought his first car in 1937, he insisted on taking the family to see a clearing in the bush near Jasper, Alta. “He showed us the area where his eldest brother said he had worked clearing the forest in an internment camp,” said Antoniuk: “It didn’t mean that much, but now as I am reviewing the history, I see the place again and I think about it. Oh, my God.”
The Stories Were Not Told documents the First War internment of 8,579 people, most of them Ukrainians. Yes, detainees included women and children. Yes, men were shot trying to escape. Author Sandra Semchuk describes her work as an attempt at “gathering clues that have been emptied of meaning and forgotten.”
“While doing my research for this book, I found communities who did not want to speak about the internment at all,” writes Semchuk. “One man who refused to speak said, ‘Oh, I know what you are going to do.’”
Immigrants were forced from their homes as enemy aliens by a cabinet order signed October 28, 1914. Some 88,000 were initially required to carry ID cards and report monthly to police. One in 10 were then forced into labour camps. Two facts remain: Ukrainians’ detention served no military purpose whatsoever – the camps operated till 1920, long after the Armistice – and were not controversial at the time.
Semchuk notes Ukrainians were almost a sub-class of Canadian society, considered sturdy and dull-witted. Official documents likened them to livestock. One correspondent wrote then-Interior Minister Arthur Meighen in 1919 that Ukrainians could be “controlled as a lot of sheep.”
The Stories Were Not Told is a stark narrative. It is also beautiful. Semchuk is a skilled photographer whose works have appeared in the National Gallery. Readers are riveted by rare historic images of the camps, and before-and-after photographs that document the precise locations where detainees were held. “Barbed wire emerged from the core of a spruce tree at Castle Mountain and bound a cedar tree at Revelstoke, giving evidence to fact in time,” she writes.
Concealment of the WWI camps is no accident, Semchuk concludes. Cabinet in 1954 authorized the destruction of records from the Custodian of Enemy Property, and internees suppressed memories. “It was almost as if it was all a bad dream, a nightmare that would best be forgotten, certainly not something other Canadians would want to talk about with us, the victims,” Semchuk quotes one ex-child internee. “I can never forget what was done to my family and me.”
By Holly Doan
The Stories Were Not Told: Canada’s First World War Internment Camps, by Sandra Semchuk; University of Alberta Press; 352 pages; ISBN 9781-7721-23784; $34.99
The Department of Finance yesterday said it had no choice but to raise the debt ceiling by a trillion dollars in three years. “The increase is a result of the borrowing,” Alexander Bonnyman, director of debt management, told the Commons finance committee.
The Canada Revenue Agency last year fired 177 employees for security breaches, records disclose. The Agency did not explain each firing though past dismissals involved unauthorized snooping through tax files: “All 177 were revocations of reliability status.”
Nine independent publishers and commentators yesterday denounced federal newsroom subsidies. The first organized opposition to media bailouts was initiated by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa think tank.
“Our media companies will not accept the per employee subsidies currently on offer from government and industry,” said an Ottawa Declaration signed by publishers. Annual subsidies paid to cabinet-approved newsrooms are currently worth up to $29,750 per employee.
“We encourage other digital news outlets to sign this Declaration and reject the payroll subsidies,” it said. “In trying to ‘save’ journalism, these subsidies damage the independence of the press, stifle much needed innovation and private investment and fail to rebuild readers, listeners and viewers’ trust in our industry.”
The first publishers to sign the pledge were Holly Doan of Blacklock’s Reporter, Sam Cooper of The Bureau, Rudyard Griffiths of The Hub, Tara Henley of Lean Out, Candice Malcolm of True North, Substack commentator Paul Wells, Derek Fildebrandt of The Western Standard and Claire Lehmann of Quillette. Columnist Andrew Coyne also signed the petition.
None of the publishers previously solicited federal aid. Blacklock’s in an earlier February 19 submission to the Commons heritage committee opposed the ongoing $595 million bailout as wasteful, corrupting and futile.
The Ottawa Declaration represented the first act by a coalition of independent publishers in opposition to News Media Canada, the newspaper lobby that successfully sought taxpayers’ aid. CEO Paul Deegan claimed in 2023 testimony at the Senate transport and communications committee that publishers could not survive without federal money.
“We have a market failure here,” testified Deegan. “It isn’t working so we need a solution. That’s why we have come to the government even though, frankly, we would like to stay as far away from government and the CRTC as we can. But we do need them.”
The Ottawa Declaration yesterday disputed the claim. “The broadly unpopular subsidy regime represents a challenge to our democratic process insofar as it raises questions in the public’s mind about the independence of the press, thereby undermining the perceived veracity of reported news,” it said. “The subsidy regime also creates an uneven playing field whereby some news outlets, primarily legacy media companies, are able to qualify for government support and others are not.”
Privy Council in-house research confirms taxpayers do not support newsroom subsidies and are indifferent to media failure. “Asked whether they felt that protecting and supporting the Canadian news industry should be a priority for the federal government, few agreed,” said a 2023 report Continuous Qualitative Data Collection Of Canadians’ Views. “Only a small number believed the news industry in general should be a top priority,” it added.
“It was generally felt most Canadians had access to a wide range of news sources on a variety of platforms and there were currently more pressing issues for the federal government to focus on such as housing affordability and the cost of living,” said Canadians’ Views.
By Staff
Canadians should beware of federal censorship of social media for partisan gain, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner (Calgary Nose Hill) yesterday told the House affairs committee. Her remarks followed testimony by two Liberal MPs who complained opponents were uniquely hurtful on Twitter: “You aren’t suggesting the Liberal Party hasn’t made statements that agitated people?”
A bill to unmask paid friends of China and other foreign agents will likely not be in place before the next election, the Commons public safety committee was told yesterday. MPs said the lack of such a law contributed to foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 campaigns: “We could be running into that very thing.”
