Revenues from a national luxury tax exceed Budget Office forecasts, new data show. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland imposed the tax in 2022 to make wealthier Canadians share “a little bit of that good fortune” with the federal treasury, she said: “Thank you for contributing.”
The China inquiry tomorrow opens its public investigation with testimony from Elections Canada officers who downplayed complaints of meddling by foreign agents. Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault, the first to testify, earlier told MPs he saw no evidence of Chinese interference but acknowledged he didn’t look: “Our goal is to uncover the truth.”
A total 986 Gazans, the majority men and boys, have applied to enter Canada, records show. Immigration Minister Marc Miller has proposed to raise the current cap of 1,000 permits to an unspecified number: “The Department of Immigration has not refused any applications.”
Taxpayer holdings in a Kenyan phone company have declined by two thirds despite millions spent on shares, records show. Lori Kerr, CEO of FinDev Canada that bought the shares, had assured MPs the agency was “an investor with impact.”
Almost all Canadian retailers conduct cash transactions and a majority still take cheques, the Bank of Canada said yesterday. The research followed Bank monitoring of “digital” currency like bitcoin: “Merchants will continue to accept methods of payment consumers choose to use.”
Pandemic ventilators purchased from an ex-Liberal MP’s company but never used have been donated to Ukraine as war surplus, records show. Thousands of the Baylis Medical machines remain warehoused: “What are the known location of each ventilator?”
An ArriveCan supplier faces a summons to the bar of the House of Commons to name friends in government who provided inside tips on millions in contracts. Conservative MP Michael Barrett (Leeds-Grenville, Ont.) sponsored the summons, the first involving a federal contractor since 1913: “Who was in charge?”
Dozens of federal employees logged thousands of hours on the ArriveCan app despite the hiring of 32 contractors at a $59.5 million charge, new records show. The Canada Border Services Agency said staff logged 134,000 hours on the program it falsely claimed had saved lives: “It was value for money,”
Canadian shippers are pleading with cabinet to delay the May 13 launch of a digital Customs collection scheme already 42 percent over budget. “If it launches and launches poorly this will land on the government’s feet because they have been warned,” Conservative MP Kyle Seeback (Dufferin-Caledon, Ont.) told the Commons trade committee.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland provoked outrage Friday after asking senators to pass a budget bill they hadn’t read. Senate managers sought approval to spend another $8.9 billion without disclosing the legal text of the bill: “This is not the first time.”
One of Canada’s longest running tax investigations has ended in a Brampton, Ont. court. The partner in a costly charity kickback scheme was jailed three years: “Most agree it is important that everyone pays their fair share of taxes.”
I consider running
for office.
A white,
male,
openly heterosexual.
What are
my chances?
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Any history of racial politics of the Victorian era is alive with booby traps for reckless pundits. Were colonists hardy survivors or plain bigots? The historical record is riddled with trigger wires. Researchers are left with fragments of paper. No eyewitness is available for questioning.
Dr. Doris Jeanne MacKinnon, a Red Deer historian, takes the field with Metis Pioneers, a thoughtful account of interracial politics in an era where serious people ascribed characteristics to blood lines for humans and cattle alike. Society manufactured a descending scale of racial superiority. Indigenous women were always at the bottom.
Metis Pioneers chronicles compelling biographies of Victorian women on the Prairies. The reader is guided pleasantly along by MacKinnon’s meticulous research – until. Time freezes on page 125. The gentle lead-up makes it all the more arresting. MacKinnon is a scholar, not a headline writer for the Police Gazette.
Peter Lougheed’s grandmother was Métis. The late Alberta premier rarely spoke of the fact, but too much can be made of this omission. Lougheed never mentioned his alcoholic father, either. He was a man of the pre-Clinton era when politicians considered it cloying and pathetic to weep softly in public and mutter I-feel-your-pain.
MacKinnon’s research suggests Lougheed did not really know his grandmother, Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed. He was 8 when she died in 1936. Lougheed recalled her as a remote figure who lived in a mansion and once made a cutting remark that Peter had the same name as the family dog.
Isabella was undeniably Métis. “Her racial features confirmed her ancestry,” write the author. She neither denied nor celebrated her roots, instead cultivating “the persona of the gracious woman.” Historian MacKinnon describes her as a member of the fur trade aristocracy, the niece of one senator, wife of another, grandmother to a premier. Isabella Lougheed attended private schools, traveled by chauffeured limousine and lived in a sandstone mansion that still stands in Calgary, the Beaulieu National Historic Site.
The Prairies then and now was an egalitarian society. It was no scandal to marry for love. Isabella was simultaneously a Daughter of the Empire and a member of the Alberta Pioneer Association where they enjoyed moose steak and the Red River Jig.
Yet racial divisions were unmistakable. Métis had no legal standing. First Nations could not even vote. Author MacKinnon notes Grandmother Lougheed left no diary. Her deepest thoughts are unknown. Was she brave or conflicted, victim or champion, feminist or poseur?
Then, the jaw-dropping moment on page 125. MacKinnon uncovers a rare interview Isabella gave a Toronto newspaper reporter in a feature on prominent ladies of the West. “In Calgary’s early days it was almost impossible to get help,” said Lougheed. “The squaws and half-breed women were all that were available. They could wash but not iron, and they were never dependable.”
Here Lady Lougheed becomes a Métis heroine to break your heart. Her remark was gratuitously stupid, yet perhaps judgment is too harsh. Isabella was not the one to starve First Nations or mandate the celebration of Empire. It doesn’t fall to everyone to be Nelson Mandela.
“The interview provides a rare example, in Isabella’s own words, of her own management of her public image,” writes MacKinnon; “This is the one and only time we know for certain she had Indigenous women in her grand home in Calgary, and she took the opportunity to let her new community know what she thought of ‘squaws’ and ‘half breeds’.”
Metis Pioneers is a compelling journey through the Victorian minefield of race and politics. It works.
By Holly Doan
Metis Pioneers: Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed, by Doris Jeanne MacKinnon; University of Alberta Press; 584 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-2718; $45
Attorney General Arif Virani yesterday said the internet “frankly terrifies me.” Virani defended a federal censorship bill even Liberal MPs questioned as far-reaching: “We need to make the internet safe.”
Addictions Minister Ya’ara Saks yesterday bristled over criticism over her posing in an official photograph by holding hands with a Holocaust denier, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Saks described herself as a proud Jewish Canadian: “I take offence to your comments.”
