Elections Canada yesterday began preparation for printing ballots in anticipation of a general campaign. The agency in a notice to contractors ordered the printing of special ballots for electors with disabilities from August 1: “Be ready.”
Federal airport screeners predict millions more Canadians will fly over the next year but are making no promises on reducing wait times. The forecast follows a 33 percent increase in mandatory fees paid by travelers to cover security costs: “Canadian travelers already pay one of the highest aviation security fees in the world.”
Cabinet’s decriminalization of cocaine in British Columbia sets possession limits “too low” and doesn’t allow addicts to buy in bulk, says a federal report. Researchers advocated more generous possession limits from the current 2.5 grams: “Buying in bulk may be more economical particularly for people who use drugs.”
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland yesterday said it “would be just wrong for me to comment” on a Parliament Hill protest celebrating the October 7 killing and kidnapping of Jews in Israel including eight Canadians. A police investigation of the demonstration is underway: “Is that hate speech?”
Cabinet’s decision to defer a steep increase in capital gains taxes for two months was “surprising to say the least,” says Budget Officer Yves Giroux. MPs called the deferral a ploy for pre-election boosts in tax revenues: “If that’s not the reason that certainly will be the effect.”
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault has postponed until after the next election the mandatory registration of $34 billion a year worth of plastic goods made in Canada from takeaway cups to fishing gear. Guilbeault’s lawyers are currently appealing a 2023 Federal Court decision that struck a “toxic” blacklisting of plastics: “Not every plastic manufactured item has the potential to create a reasonable apprehension of harm.”
A federal ban on false environmental claims should be widened to include all misleading “green” advertising, say environmental groups. A cabinet bill would outlaw fake claims that certain products are environmentally friendly but not broader misleading statements that companies are “net zero.”
The Public Health Agency broke its own rules in auctioning brand new $22,000 ventilators as $6 scrap, records show. Agency directives forbid the sale of licensed medical devices as scrap metal: “Do we get reimbursed?”
The newspaper chain that successfully led the national campaign for press subsidies, FP Newspapers Inc., lost more than $6 million last year, new records show. The publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press, Brandon Sun and other Manitoba titles received $989,000 in payroll rebates at taxpayers’ expense: “There does need to be a deadline.”
A third of Canadians are wary of air taxis and urban drones if the federal government is responsible for regulating traffic, says in-house Department of Transport research. “A third of respondents, 31 percent, have low trust in the Government of Canada to handle the implementation of the technology,” wrote researchers.
Parliamentary critics should be forbidden from calling the Prime Minister corrupt, says Deputy Government House Leader Mark Gerretsen. The Liberal MP (Kingston & the Islands, Ont.) sought a Speaker’s ban on the adjective “to further improve decorum here.”
Two scientists fired as Chinese spies in 2021 kept their top federal security clearance for months while under investigation because “these were allegations,” the Public Health Agency told a Commons committee Friday. MPs expressed astonishment at the lapse: “How were there not red flags at that point?”
The chain promises
cards for every occasion.
I search the collection;
inventory not nearly as complete
as claimed.
Suggestions:
Our sincere condolences
for the death of your mistress;
we know how close you were.
Congratulations
on your successful ED treatment!
We were saddened to hear
about the revocation of your driving licence.
Our deepest sympathy
for the loss of your beloved mayor
to corruption.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
On November 13, 1971 a Cree teenager, Betty Osborne, was walking home in The Pas, Man. when she was abducted by four white men, raped, and stabbed to death with a screwdriver. It took police 16 years to get a conviction. “One of the saddest aspects of the so-called police investigation was the fact that the police began their investigation within the Aboriginal community,” notes Keetsahnak: Our Missing And Murdered Indigenous Sisters. “When no suspects were found, the police dropped their investigation.”
The fact the justice system failed an entire class of Canadian citizens is undisputed. The RCMP count 1,017 Indigenous women murdered in the period from 1980 to 2012. No other identifiable group endured such violence. As low as expectations were of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, it at least fixed in the public mind that local tragedies like the murder of Betty Osborne are interconnected.
“I heard the Minister of Northern and Indigenous Affairs Canada say, ‘Racism and sexism in this country kills,’” writes contributor Christi Belcourt, an Alberta coordinator of Walking With Our Sisters. “The next day, the head of the RCMP admitted there were racist police officers in among the force. These are truths that Indigenous peoples have always known.”
Violence is woven through contemporary Indigenous life. Keetsahnak is a moving documentary of the raw centre of Canadian society. Contributor Sandra Lamouche, an Alberta educator, writes of her grandmother’s death at the hands of a drunk driver on the Bigstone Cree Nation: “Her body was thrown into the lake, only to be discovered a while later, frozen. This happened over fifty years ago and remains an unsolved murder case today.”
In another essay Was She Just A Dream? Writer Anne-Marie Livingstone of Victoria recalls the 1992 disappearance of her mother Elsie. “I sense that most people, especially white, middle-aged men, don’t like to hear about the issue of the missing women. Strangely enough, this demographic represents the majority of employees of the Vancouver Police Department, politicians and bureaucrats.”
Keetsahnak reads like Dostoevsky. It is haunting and eloquent. Writer Maya Ode’amik Chacaby, an educator at York University, tells her story in words that fall like a hammer on anvil: “Dirty Lying No Good Indian was the name given to me by my grandmother, an empty bitter husk of a woman whose spirit went missing in Residential School. I went missing when I was thirteen years old. No one came to look for me. No benevolent adults. No mourning family. I was not counted missing and I was not missed.”
“There is a tenuous space between Being Missing and Being Murdered. I lived there for over a decade. I remember it like a dream, that hypnagogic space, living in the death world, a spectral Indian ghosting the colonial wastelands, the slums, the seedy piss-filled corners and alcoves between walls and fences. Living between passing out in snow banks (latex boots frozen to skin) and death, between rape and death, drugs and death, cops and death, safe spaces and death, friends and death.”
“Missing but not missed. We are caught up, hooked in, counted, catalogued and fixed as objects. Not as sad pictures of missing children on milk cartons though. Fixed instead in the psychic disequilibrium of being a less than human human.”
“I was the harsh reminder that their system fails people like me.”
By Holly Doan
Keetsahnak: Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters, edited by Kim Anderson, Maria Campbell & Christi Belcourt; University of Alberta Press; 400 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-3678; $29.95
Treasury Board President Anita Anand yesterday described herself as “an extremely thorough and systematic minister” but said she did not know why Board employees paid social calls on ArriveCan contractors. “It is not my purview to oversee the day to day work of employees,” Anand told the Commons public accounts committee: “I do not know.”
