Canada Post yesterday warned “the gravity of our financial situation” will be spelled out in its next Annual Report in May. One Liberal MP questioned whether the post office is now “almost unsustainable.”
Cabinet should amend its own Bill C-58 An Act To Amend The Canada Labour Code to speed a ban on replacement workers, Canadian Labour Congress President Bea Bruske yesterday told MPs. The current bill delays enforcement until after the next federal election: “There is no excuse for delaying.”
Pandemic ventilators bought from a Toronto company by the Public Health Agency under a $169.5 million sole-sourced contract were sold as scrap, records show. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had praised the manufacturer by name as a Canadian success story: “This is exactly the kind of innovative and collaborative thinking we need.”
The Department of Health continues to take delivery of millions of new Covid-19 vaccines even as it throws away nearly $2 billion worth of expired shots, records show. “Overall wastage increased,” said a department briefing note.
Federal election monitors attached little significance to suspected Communist Party meddling via Chinese language media posts because they were “written in Mandarin,” a cabinet aide told the China inquiry. None of five cabinet appointees assigned to keep a lookout for foreign agents spoke Chinese: “The fact it is written in Mandarin meant the content would likely only reach Chinese diaspora readers.”
Cabinet-appointed election monitors found it “really difficult” to track Chinese interference in the 2021 campaign, says one director. Spotting the difference between misconduct and ordinary election activities was “a very fuzzy area,” the China inquiry was told: “Had we been more certain we could have maybe applied more certainty to it.”
Auditors hunting waste at Canadian missions abroad found “piles of furniture” discarded at taxpayers’ expense in Sao Paulo, Brazil, says a Department of Foreign Affairs report. Round-the-world audits followed the discovery of a fraud ring at the Canadian Embassy in Haiti: ‘Stronger practices are needed.’
In my cubicle
two men are working;
the guy who came to clean the window
and me.
We share office space,
commitment,
a sense of accomplishment.
Teamwork is nice.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Parliamentary democracies have an extraordinary capacity to produce third parties: NDP, CCF, WCC, Greens, Progressives, Reformers, Libertarians, Social Creditors, Confederation of Regions, the Reconstruction Party and others. If their historical impact is uneven, each protest movement bettered the nation by rattling the establishment and giving voice to grievance.
Canadians take for granted they may choose from four or five parties on a ballot. Pity the American who has the pick of two – red team or blue team – knowing neither has to be very good to maintain a 50 percent chance of winning.
Historian Ian Bullock examines such a protest movement forgotten years after its collapse, the U.K. Independent Labour Party. Bullock’s affectionate account Under Siege explains why so many protest movements flame and then fade. Years after the ILP disbanded, its members became Liberals or Conservatives “or simply became alienated from politics altogether,” writes Bullock.
They united briefly in a shared vision of how society might be different. This is the trajectory of all protest movements, a magnificent burst of ideals ending in implosion or whimpering, with fine principles lost to necessary compromise with powerful vested interests. It is always a compelling story. Under Siege is no exception.
Founded as a cooperative movement in 1893, the Independent Labour Party platform was radical to Victorians yet instantly recognizable to Canadians today. It advocated public ownership of utilities (see Ontario Hydro or the Manitoba Telephone System) as well as transportation (St. Lawrence Seaway and Marine Atlantic), public control of banks (see Alberta Treasury Branches). abolition of capital punishment, votes for women, guaranteed annual income and an early version of the baby bonus.
Like all third parties, the ILP thought big — impractically so. In 1931 its members introduced a private Living Wage Bill to appoint a panel comprised of three housewives, three trade unionists and three cooperative leaders to calculate “what should constitute a living wage” and report to Parliament in 90 days. The bill did not have the remotest possibility of becoming law, notes Historian Bullock.
Adherents remained true believers. A longtime member, a former millworker appointed to Britain’s Labour cabinet in 1924, refused to wear the customary top hat to his swearing-in at Buckingham Palace. Another explained that Independent Labour was neither Labour nor Communist, and the distinctions were not a question of cheese-paring: “Under state socialism, nationalized industry would have to be managed by a bureaucracy on a highly centralized system. The ILP never was state socialist in that way. Control will be based upon the workshops, federated into the district, federated into the nation, and finally federated into an international organization.”
The Party at its peak had 120 members in the British Commons. When it broke with Labour in 1931 following a dispute over unemployment insurance benefits, 85 percent of the membership melted away. “All of the debates and events including the ILP during the interwar years contributed, directly and indirectly, to the policies, culture and ambience of the labour movement after 1945,” writes Bullock.
Under Siege ends in heartbreak. Protest often does. But isn’t it worth it!
By Holly Doan
Under Siege: The Independent Labour Party In Interwar Britain, by Ian Bullock; Athabasca University Press; 416 pages; ISBN 9781-7719-91551; $44.95
Communist Party agents worked to elect “pro-China” candidates to the current Parliament, CSIS director David Vigneault yesterday testified at the Commission on Foreign Interference. “I support those conclusions,” said Vigneault as documents pointed to large cash payments for unnamed public office holders: “As you can imagine, we are not at liberty to discuss the specifics.”
Police have opened a criminal investigation into 2021 election interference by foreign agents, RCMP Commissioner Michael Duheme said yesterday. Testifying at the China inquiry, Duheme would not discuss details: “We received information that prompted us to open an investigation.”
Suspicions a Chinese agent was planted at a 2021 election meeting to heckle Conservative MP Michael Chong (Wellington-Halton Hills, Ont.) are “compelling” but unprovable, say police. “I slowly came to the realization many months afterwards that event may have been a foreign interference threat activity,” MP Chong testified at the China inquiry.
Executives with KPMG Canada yesterday were urged to get “lawyered up” over their dealings with an ArriveCan contractor now under investigation. KPMG managers testified at the Commons public accounts committee they were specifically told to work with GC Strategies Inc.: ‘I find it incredible that KPMG, this massive accounting firm, winds up as a subcontractor for two dudes working out of a basement.’
Federal employees did their bit to save electricity under a January 13 Alberta Emergency alert, records show. Guards dimmed the lights at an Edmonton penitentiary while constables unplugged RCMP block heaters at Elk Point as temperatures fell to -40°.
A former Conservative MP named as a target of Chinese Communist Party agents in the 2021 campaign yesterday said he felt like Canadian election monitors left him to drown. “The government doesn’t seem to care,” Kenny Chiu testified at the China inquiry.
