Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s current deficit will be 16 percent higher than forecast, the Budget Office said yesterday. Freeland last March 28 predicted her deficit would “decline in every year of the forecast.” It didn’t: “I don’t know if they have lost control.”
Rebel News Network Ltd. yesterday filed a $1 million lawsuit over the January 8 handcuffing of a reporter for attempting to question Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland. Police complained the questions were too “aggressive,” Rebel News’ lawyer wrote Ontario Superior Court: “The questions spoke to the federal government’s foreign affairs.”
Cabinet’s feud with Facebook cost the CBC millions of website visitors, according to financial statements. CBC.ca had been the longest-running, most popular news site in the country with content uploaded from 1,000 staff, by official estimate: “It is Facebook’s decision.”
Federal prisoners have won more take-home pay. The Correctional Service halted 30 percent deductions for telephone calls and other privileges: “The cost of what inmates are supposed to buy for themselves – stamps, candy bars, phone calls – has increased.”
Canadians don’t care about media troubles and think subsidies for failing newsrooms would be better spent on urgent needs like affordable housing, says in-house Privy Council research. Cabinet commissioned the poll weeks before it doubled newsroom payroll rebates at another $129 million cost: “Few agreed.”
Liberal and New Democrat MPs yesterday by a 6 to 4 vote blocked an ethics committee probe of why cabinet concealed a report into Chinese security breaches at the National Microbiology Laboratory. Conservative and Bloc Québécois MPs sought the investigation: “Why?”
A federal judge has overturned a quarter billion-dollar decision by then-Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. The Federal Court faulted Wilkinson for “inexplicable” conduct in the 2021 case: ‘It was a matter of common sense.’
Corporate landlords have “made rent more expensive,” says a cabinet report to MPs. However Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland stopped short of proposing repeal of preferential tax treatment for real estate investment trusts in her next budget due April 16: “Corporate investors own a significant share of Canada’s rental units.”
A federal program offering free snowmobiles to Arctic residents cost $32 million last year, new records show. The cost was four times the $8 million budgeted in 2022: “Snowmobiles can, yes, be available.”
Federal auditors are investigating millions in payments through a Crown bank, Export Development Canada, to manage a pandemic relief program. MPs on the Commons public accounts committee said they were puzzled by the $208 million cost: “Is that normal?”
Cabinet would be better off if it could spend five minutes with each Canadian to explain the carbon tax, says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He made the remark after being called a tax grabber while touring a seniors club near Sudbury, Ont.: “If I can only have five minutes to explain it like that to every Canadian we’d be better off.”
The secret author of an unsigned federal directive asking that journalists submit stories for fact-checking has been named. Maryse Durette, a former CBC employee and spokesperson for the Department of Health, was identified through Access To Information. She did not respond to questions.
Durette emailed the directive to five journalists regarding a Blacklock’s story published January 19 concerning drug decriminalization. The January 24 directive complained journalists were “talking about Health Canada and never contacted us.”
“Readers deserve accurate reporting,” it said. “A respectable reporter goes to the source for reporting.”
News stories concerning the health department should first be checked by staff to ensure publishers were not “purposefully reproducing inaccuracies and misleading your readership,” said the directive. “Standards, I am sure, rely on more sound principles than quoting inaccuracies from fringe media, like going to the source of what you are talking about.”
Journalists must ensure “your coverage comes from real journalism work,” it said. The directive did not identify any author and was issued in the name of the Department of Health. Durette, one of ten communications staff working at the department’s Ottawa office, was identified as the author through Access To Information records.
Health Canada leads all other federal departments and agencies in demanding “corrections” from media. The department since 2018 issued 269 notices according to a 2023 Inquiry Of Ministry tabled in the Commons. The health department claimed factual errors at the Globe & Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, Hamilton Spectator, Winnipeg Free Press, Whitehorse Daily Star, Medicine Hat News and others.
‘Fact-Checking Things They Don’t Like’
“Fact-checking” is mandatory for media that accept federal subsidies. Newsrooms must prove “a consistent practice of providing rebuttal opportunity for those being criticized” including the Government Of Canada, according to a 2019 Canada Revenue Agency document Guidance On The Income Tax Measures To Support Journalism.
Delegates to a national Liberal Party convention last May 6 went further in adopting a resolution that “the government explore options to hold online information services accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms and to limit publication to material whose sources can be traced.” No such regulations have been tabled to date.
Compulsory government “fact-checking” is unconstitutional under a Depression-era Supreme Court of Canada ruling. The Court in 1938 struck an Alberta law that mandated all newspapers publish official “corrections” and provide a right of rebuttal to critical articles under threat of $20,000 fines.
Senator Paula Simons (Alta.), a former Edmonton Journal columnist, last May 9 told the Senate transport and communications committee that government had no business “fact-checking” newsrooms. “I come from Alberta,” said Simons. “In the 1930s the government of the day passed what it called the Accurate News And Information Act which gave the government the power of rebuttal and the power to basically fact-check and correct anything the government believed was inaccurate. The courts properly struck that down as unconstitutional.”
“I am always concerned about what happens if someone you don’t like or whose opinions you don’t share suddenly has the power to regulate, even at arm’s length, what is said in the press,” said Senator Simons. “Having been a journalist, lots of people think there are factual errors in the newspaper that are just things they don’t like,” she added.
By Staff 
Working in retail is not “befitting” journalists who face layoffs without taxpayers’ aid, says the president of the Canadian Association of Journalists. He made the remark while successfully appealing for renewal of a 100 percent wage subsidy for employees in select newsrooms: “What are they going to do? Are they going to work at Home Hardware?”
A third of Canadians worry they will never enjoy the standard of living their parents did, says in-house Privy Council research. The stark finding follows 2023 Statistics Canada data showing inflation was eating away at young families’ finances: ‘At the moment how much do you worry you won’t be financially better off?’
A beggar
approaches.
I offer more than he asks.
Odds are
he’ll spend it on drugs,
alcohol.
True help
would have been food,
shelter,
a respectful place in
society.
Put money
in his pocket
and watch him walk away,
drifting
from bad
to worse.
Yet again
I preach one thing
and practice another.
Because he was there.
It’s only hypocrisy
when you don’t admit it.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
