A federal homeless relief program paid millions to consultants, documents show. Overall spending on consultants jumped 13 percent last year despite cabinet’s promise to cut spending on consultants: “This is not about doing more with less.”
The Department of Immigration issued study permits to 982,880 foreign students last year, new records show. The department for the first time listed Canadian universities and colleges with the highest number of foreign students ahead of looming cuts to permits: “There are clearly some institutions that shouldn’t exist.”
MPs are demanding Prime Minister Justin Trudeau detail a financial crime-busting program he promised three years ago. Creation of the Canada Financial Crimes Agency was first proposed in the Liberals’ 2021 re-election platform: ‘It is Canada’s first ever nationwide Agency to investigate these highly complex crimes.’
The Canadian Space Agency
presents pictures from above
in celebration of
Canada Day.
I look closely.
They resemble views of Earth
offered for free
by satellite-imaging services.
Taken by the commander
of the International Space Station
is what makes them special,
I presume.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
In spring 1999 a paramilitary group called the Scorpions descended on Podujevo, Kosovo, a mid-sized city the size of Medicine Hat. Albanians were rounded up. It was a cold morning and one small boy named Shpetim, age 9, jammed his hands in his pockets to keep warm. The gesture seemed to irritate the gunmen.
They ordered Shpetim to empty his pockets and out tumbled the boy’s collection of marbles – plunk, plunk, plunk. The boy’s mother, unsure of what to do, bent down and tried to gather them up as they scattered, writes Eliott Behar. Later they shot Shpetim in the head.
Behar is a former Ontario Crown prosecutor who recounts his two years’ work as a war crimes attorney at The Hague. Behar was raised in Toronto, the son of an architect. His family numbered Holocaust survivors. He is a skillful writer with a police reporter’s eye for detail.
“Spend time listening to the men who directed these atrocities, and listen to the collective narratives and beliefs of the citizens who either carried out these acts or endorsed them from the sidelines, and you begin to see that they were themselves, even before the bloodshed began, driven to act by their own sense of injustice and victimhood,” Behar writes. He spent so much time listening to chain-smoking witnesses, Behar notes his Court robes always faintly smelled of Kosovar tobacco.
All participants in genocide are “in thrall to narratives of injustice and victimhood that made them feel entitled to act as they did, and that seemingly silenced the demands of their individual consciences,” writes Behar. “It is a mentality with the power to infect not just the leadership but also the facilitators and willing executioners amongst the general population.”
Canada was oblivious to the viciousness of civil war when it committed forces to the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbian cities. Few Canadians could spot Belgrade on a map. Fewer still had any nuanced understanding of the ancient and justifiable hatreds in the region. “I have no politics,” a Serbian friend once told me. In the Balkans, politics are fatal.
The facts: The Serbian cabinet in 1999 devised a secret plan to roust 800,000 civilians, mainly Muslim, from their Kosovar villages, and later attempted to cover it up. The expulsions were “forced, well-coordinated and part of a systemic campaign,” notes Tell It To The World. The chief architect, former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, died of a heart attack at trial seven years later: “It was, to be sure, a striking and disappointing anti-climax,” Behar writes. “No factual findings were ever made and no verdict was ever delivered.”
Milosevic’s interior minister shot himself before he could be brought to trial. A deputy prime minister was sentenced to 22 years. Yes, there were atrocities on both sides, and Serbians as a people were not collectively complicit in atrocities. It was a Serbian newspaperman who first uncovered the conspiracy, and Serbian parliamentarians who provided much of the evidence against Serbian murderers.
“Crimes had taken place on all sides of the conflict and many Serbs had also been victims themselves – victims of violence by Croats, by Bosniaks and by Kosovo Albanians,” Behar writes. “But it was also true that the mass murders and deportations I had described had happened, and that they had been directed and overseen by Serbian authorities. The evidence was clear.”
In a town called Suva Reka, a police constable Velibor Veljkovic remembered the day orders came to round up Albanians. Police went down the street, shooting terrified townspeople. Veljkovic had been on traffic detail and IT records storage, but this day his assignment was to collect the corpses of the police department’s victims – more than a hundred, he recalled. The mayor supervised the work.
Back at the station, Veljkovic returned to his desk when the phone rang. A distraught Albanian woman was on the line: “I told her they had to leave. She asked me where to, and I told her to Albania. She asked me, ‘What are we going to do in Albania?’ I didn’t want to continue this conversation. I simply said, ‘Go to Albania; you have to leave otherwise you will suffer the fate of the other ones’”; “I hung up and within half an hour there was an en masse departure of members of the Albanian community by vehicles.”
“There was no more killing. People simply left. We resumed our work,” Veljkovic explained. For a town constable in Suva Reka, public duties now included traffic tickets, IT management, murder.
Tell It To The World is a haunting and poignant and remarkable book. To read it is to gain some greater understanding of humanity.
By Holly Doan
Tell It To The World, by Eliott Behar; Dundurn Press; 264 pages; ISBN 9781-4597-23801; $24.99
Health Minister Mark Holland approved a multi-million dollar “wellness” program for department employees stressed by their job. Holland disclosed the in-house health care expenditure in a report to Parliament: “Topics covered during sessions include how to prevent burnout.”
The $8 million cost of a solar-powered warehouse at Rideau Hall included nearly a half million in architects’ fees, according to documents. The Commons public accounts committee has ordered an audit: “It looks like a 1960s garage.”
The Bank of Canada “may still need to raise rates,” Governor Tiff Macklem yesterday told the Commons finance committee. The Bank’s next rate announcement is March 6: “When can we cut them?”
Canada likely permitted “significant numbers” of Nazi collaborators and war criminals to enter the country after 1945, says a newly-declassified report. Cabinet still refuses to release a secret blacklist of named fugitives: “There can be little doubt that war criminals could have and are likely to have come to Canada in significant numbers.”
A 33 percent increase in mandatory security fees will cost air passengers millions more than originally estimated, says an Access To Information memo. The finance department claims the Air Travelers Security Charge merely recovers costs though data show it generates a profit for the federal treasury: “I wish I could say these increases in fees would lead to better service.”
Then-Industry Minister Navdeep Bains named a Liberal Party donor to a federal post knowing the appointee was in a conflict of interest, the Commons industry committee was told last night. One witness testified Bains’ office was repeatedly warned the appointment was improper and may have breached an Act of Parliament: ‘The Minister was personally aware of serious problems but did it anyway?’
The Canada Border Services Agency has misled and “even lied” to Parliament over sweetheart contracting for the ArriveCan program, Conservative MP Kelly Block (Carlton Trail-Eagle Creek, Sask.) last night told the Commons government operations committee. Witnesses testified contracting was so irregular the $54 million program cost much more than it should have: “We have I think been misled and perhaps even lied to.”
Canada has more than tripled coal exports since claiming to ban coal exports under its climate plan, new records show. Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault had threatened to use criminal sanctions against provinces that continue running coal-fired power plants: “Canada is driving the international phase-out of emissions from coal power.”
Government-issue Ford pickups and Toyota Highlanders are most popular among thieves targeting the federal motor pool, the largest vehicle fleet in the country, records show. The disclosure came as Attorney General Arif Virani yesterday suggested a Criminal Code crackdown on auto thieves: “This is truly a national issue.”
Canada does not export weaponry to Israel, says a cabinet report. The document was requested by a New Democrat MP who repeatedly claimed Canada is selling armaments to Israel: “We haven’t exported arms to Israel in 30 years.”
