The Ukrainian Canadian Congress sponsored VIP treatment for an ex-Waffen SS soldier, the House affairs committee was told yesterday. “The past history of this gentleman was unknown to us all,” testified Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon.
Budget Officer Yves Giroux yesterday cautioned taxpayers to beware of cynical or manipulative “Musical Ride” cuts to this year’s half-trillion federal budget. Giroux invoked the RCMP’s threat to cancel Musical Ride performances 30 years ago when confronted with a demand to cut waste: “That’s a well-known phenomenon within the public service, offering the Musical Ride.”
All Canadians share a “moral failure” for homelessness, Housing Minister Sean Fraser said yesterday. Fraser promised a response to a federal report recommending a ban on policing of tent cities with free food, utilities and medical care for residents: “What kind of country do we want to live in?”
MPs will issue subpoenas compelling committee testimony from reluctant ArriveCan witnesses, the chair of the Commons government operations committee said yesterday. The committee “will call every witness and compel every document,” warned Conservative MP Kelly McCauley (Edmonton West).
The ArriveCan program cost taxpayers millions more than originally feared amid widespread irregularities that were “the worst I have seen,” Auditor General Karen Hogan said yesterday. Hogan said crucial records were missing but did not comment on whether paperwork was destroyed to foil investigators. “Many of the questions you are asking just can’t be answered,” said Hogan.
Federal subsidies have turned national media into a government-paid press reliant on the Prime Minister’s Office, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre yesterday told reporters. Any future Conservative cabinet will end direct federal subsidies to newsrooms, he said: “We believe media should be driven by readership, viewership and listenership.”
The Commons yesterday by a 173 to 150 vote demanded cabinet revise current record immigration quotas within 100 days. All but Liberal MPs supported the Bloc Québécois motion: “This used to be a Québec thing.”
More than 120,000 small and medium sized businesses vanished with Covid lockdowns, new federal data show. The Department of Industry said nationwide there are now fewer small businesses in Canada than in 2020: “Insolvency is a lagging indicator.”
Catherine Tait, $497,000-a year CEO of the CBC, ran up more than $119,000 in expenses at the same time the network complained of “immense pressure” on its finances, Access To Information records show. Charges included business class junkets from Prague to Hollywood: “The public broadcaster faces chronic underfunding.”
Canada Student Loan defaults referred to tax collectors total nearly $3 billion, new records show. Figures follow a warning from the Budget Office that write-offs are expected to rise year over year: “The value of unpaid student loans will continue to grow.”
Historical tributes to Samuel de Champlain are now under review as too “colonial,” says the Historic Sites and Monuments Board. Federal authorities as late as 2015 praised Champlain for promoting “friendly relations” with Indigenous people: “This essentially says that Indigenous history started when Champlain showed up.”
The post office is hiking rates an average eight percent effective May 6. Canada Post management in a legal notice Saturday said the $23.8 million increase, the first in four years, was unavoidable due to inflation: “Each year there are fewer letters to deliver to more addresses.”
The Department of Industry last year bought more than $1.5 million worth of American-made electric Ford pickups at $96,000 apiece, records show. “We’re in the big leagues,” Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne earlier told reporters.
Elections are over.
It is time to show generosity.
Members of Parliament
may earn $194,600 a year
– within the top five percent of Canadians earners –
and many are walking away
with $90,000 severance
but
losing that job
is more painful
than losing an everyday job
at Bombardier,
Tim Hortons,
or at the General Motors assembly plant
in Oshawa.
The loss affects
the public persona
of these elected officials.
They must vacate their offices fast
and can no longer login to the network.
Even their cellphones are cut off.
Taxpayers get it, pull together
and fund a transition program
to float the ousted members
from the House of Commons
to the civilian world.
$15,000 for every MP.
How else
would these honourable individuals
acquire the skills
to enter the workforce
on their own?
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Canada west of the Great Lakes was for centuries a blank space on the map, as dark and foreboding as the heart of Africa. Canadians have only anecdotal records of the era of vast buffalo herds, passenger pigeons that blocked out the sun, and volcanoes that leveled Nisga’a settlements in British Columbia.
We don’t even know what ancient Canada looked like, writes historian Jennifer Brown. The remotest districts today have been forever altered by settlement, industrial farming and hydroelectric dams.
Brown is a former Chicagoan who taught for decades at the University of Winnipeg’s Department of History. She rated herself lucky; the Hudson’s Bay Company archives were just down the street. In An Ethnohistorian In Rupert’s Land, Brown chronicles her attempts to piece together a glimpse of early Canada. Brown’s enthusiasm is infectious.
Rupert’s Land was a mammoth territory from James Bay to the foothills of the Rockies assigned to fur traders by royal charter in 1670. “It is almost invisible in most North American histories,” she writes; “I have become more aware of what we do not know.”
Imagine historians five centuries from now attempting to piece together our own time, says Brown: “McDonald’s hamburger restaurants and competing chains are widely distributed across North America, as trading posts once were. They are pervasive and predictable in their appearance, their personnel and offerings, and in the economic transactions and social activities that go on inside.”
“Suppose that some future historian decides to designate a part of North American history as ‘the hamburger era.’ Surely anyone doing so (we must hope) would have missed a vast range of other contemporary cultural, social and economic activities. A similar danger exists for the history of the fur trade.”
Professor Brown follows the threads, acknowledging the shortcomings of the documentary record. Indigenous peoples did not keep diaries, settlers and explorers did. “A key problem with these sources is that, with rare exceptions, they all spring from people of European origin who, even if they were not themselves traders, were enmeshed in the dynamics of biases that have been well recognized – and even overstated, in some instances,” writes Brown.
An Ethnohistorian In Rupert’s Land provides compelling vignettes in an attempt to colour in the blank space on the map. Brown traces the origins of the pejorative “squaw,” a term rarely used in the 18th century but popularized in subsequent years.
She profiles Thomas James, the English explorer immortalized in the naming of James Bay, who spent an entire winter on the Bay and “never met or saw an Aboriginal person,” writes Brown. And readers learn of Abishabis, a prophet of the Cree First Nation who singlehandedly led a pseudo-Methodist revival in 1842 that made the woods “ring with music” and told followers of his visions of “the track to heaven.”
An Ethnohistorian In Rupert’s Land is discovery of a vanished land.
By Holly Doan
An Ethnohistorian in Rupert’s Land: Unfinished Conversations, by Jennifer S.H. Brown; Athabasca University Press; 420 pages; ISBN 9781-7719-91711; $44.95
