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
The federal anti-trust Competition Bureau yesterday promised MPs it was “relentlessly” committed to fighting mergers in the grocery trade. Members of the Commons agriculture committee ridiculed the claim, noting the Bureau approved 30 years’ worth of mergers: “What were you doing in the 1990s, the 2000s?”
Federal marketers will turn seal meat into a seafood delicacy like lobster, Fisheries Minister Diane Lebouthillier said yesterday. “When properly prepared it is delicious,” she said: “Making it a consumer product is a priority.”
Canada Revenue Agency data confirm a “significant drop” in the number of audits targeting wealthy tax filers, Conservative MP Adam Chambers (Simcoe North, Ont.) yesterday told the Commons finance committee. New figures follow longstanding criticism that auditors target small business and other “low hanging fruit.”
A landmark $310,000 award to a federal employee victimized by malicious workplace gossip has been upheld by the Federal Court of Appeal. The employee was subjected to years of “reprehensible, deliberate and shameful” slander, a labour board ruled in the case: ‘It was highly offensive.’
Small business has yet to see billions in promised carbon tax rebates, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business said yesterday. The finance department in 2019 said it was “developing the specifics” for payouts: “There is no mechanism in place to return a dime to small business.”
Only a third of Canadians rate news media trustworthy and balanced, says in-house CRTC research. The latest data follow Statistics Canada figures showing reporters are considered less reliable than politicians or lawyers: “Canada is facing not one news crisis but two. One is financial and the other is the crisis of mistrust.”
Fake Indigenous communities have “sprung up almost overnight” by pretenders claiming to have First Nations, Métis or Inuit roots, says a Manitoba Senator. Debate on a proposal to investigate misrepresentation of Indigenous ancestry follows publicized cases like Buffy Sainte-Marie: “It is community theft.”
MPs yesterday gave all-party approval for a committee investigation of cuts to rural postal service. Critics complained of piecemeal reductions in service under a 1994 moratorium limiting outright closure of Canada Post outlets: “I know, it is surprising.”
A federal program to let hundreds of Gazans into Canada has now expanded to thousands, Immigration Minister Marc Miller yesterday told reporters. Miller said he was upset none had been permitted out of the war zone to date: “I am pretty pissed off about it.”
Cabinet admits an Arctic green energy program is running behind schedule but denies millions in cost overruns. Local authorities since 2017 have sought to install a wind turbine on the tundra outside Inuvik: “Delays in projects occur for a variety of reasons.”
A federal climate program to phase out oil furnaces has seen only 80 homeowners convert to greener energy nationwide, records show. Cabinet had pointed to the program as justification for a billion-dollar carbon tax break for Atlantic electors: “It is not slogans, it is solutions.”
