Ex-cabinet members who advocated a 2022 Freedom Convoy crackdown yesterday had no comment after the Federal Court ruled their actions were unlawful. Using the Emergencies Act against peaceful protesters was unconstitutional, ruled the Court: “It captured people who simply wanted to join in the protest by standing on Parliament Hill carrying a placard.”
Cabinet will collect nearly a half billion in sales taxes on the carbon tax this year, the Budget Office said yesterday. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has repeatedly claimed the carbon tax is “revenue neutral.”
A federal incentive program dating from 2012 has drawn nearly 18,000 doctors and nurses to rural Canada, says a Department of Employment report. Auditors rated Canada Student Loan forgiveness a success though many medical and nursing students never heard of it: ‘They found out about it from family or friends.’
More than $11 million has been paid to families of Canadians who suffered death or injury as a result of Covid vaccines, say managers of a federal compensation fund. The new figures follow Health Minister Mark Holland’s boast that Canada was a world leader in pandemic lifesaving: “Thanks to vaccines and to other measures we saved literally hundreds of thousands of lives.”
Parliament must fund a full investigation into longstanding claims of unmarked Indian Residential School graves in Kamloops, B.C., Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre said yesterday. Cabinet three years ago budgeted millions for a final search that was never undertaken: “Canadians deserve to know the truth.”
Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne yesterday ordered all federally registered companies to disclose names and addresses of major shareholders. A publicly accessible database of beneficial owners is still a year away, he added: “We had some bad actors who used Canadian corporations in the way that I think Canadians would find very disturbing.”
Canadians are resigned to unhappy experiences with their internet service provider, says in-house CRTC research. Relatively few switched companies since they considered all services to be equally mediocre, wrote researchers: “Some simply said the alternatives all cost about the same.”
Immigration Minister Marc Miller yesterday outlined cutbacks on the number of foreign students in Canada currently estimated at 807,000. Miller didn’t release the legal text of any regulation but said it “will be approximately a 50 percent reduction” in some provinces: “The net intake will show that decrease.”
The Commons health committee by a 6 to 5 vote has rejected public disclosure of a contract to a failed Québec vaccine supplier. Conservative MP Rick Perkins (South Shore-St. Margarets, N.S.) said piecemeal records show cabinet lied about why it paid $150 million to a factory in the Minister of Public Work’s riding: “It is voting for a cover-up.”
Anonymous “extremist actors” have attempted to infiltrate the RCMP, says a Department of Public Safety document. The briefing note did not identify how many extremists or criminals were caught within police ranks: “The RCMP is aware.”
It is “too early to fully evaluate” the reliability of electric cars in Canadian winters, says a Department of Natural Resources report. Six years and $76.1 million worth of study were inconclusive though analysts warned of potential “negative unintended outcomes” from cabinet’s electric car mandate: ‘Address specific Canadian requirements such as technologies for cold climates.’
The Budget Officer is completing a first-ever independent review of newsroom subsidies. The analysis follows the doubling of payroll rebates to $29,750 a year for employees of cabinet-approved newsrooms: “I am requesting specific data.”
The Department of Public Works on Saturday opened a vacant Ottawa federal building for use as a “warming centre” by the homeless. Vacancy rates in federal buildings nationwide average as high as 40 percent, by official estimate: “We are seeking meaningful opportunities to use these properties.”
In Dali’s
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans,
limbs are scattered, face twisted in pain.
A grotesque figure
rips itself to pieces.
Spain, 1936, on its way to Civil War.
In Brexit 2019,
a country is torn down
without a war.
Democracy allows it.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
In 2012 RCMP raided a small office in Brighton, Ont. and hauled away hard drives and files. Leia Picard, owner of Canadian Fertility Consulting Co., faced ten years in the penitentiary on fifteen charges under the Assisted Human Reproduction Act. It was a felony to offer any “consideration” to a surrogate mother.
“The end result was anticlimactic,” writes Professor David Snow of the University of Guelph’s Department of Political Science. Prosecutors later struck a plea deal and Picard paid a $60,000 fine. She remains the only Canadian in history charged under the Act. It was “bewildering,” said Picard’s lawyer.
“This book surveys the ruins to explain how Canada arrived at a point that nearly every policymaker and stakeholder involved in the process would describe as suboptimal,” says the author.
Assisted Reproduction Policy In Canada is meticulously researched. Professor Snow is a punchy writer. More importantly, Snow’s book is a handy guide that explains why longtime politicians glance at the ceiling and breathe a heavy sigh whenever someone says, “There ought to be a law!”
“Fundamentally, much of political science is concerned with answering one question: What drives politics?” writes Snow. As Assisted Reproduction shows, it is an impulse for government over-reach, a fetish for control and regulation and a mistaken suspicion that Canadian society is comprised of wolves and sheep, never far from chaos without the “dominant role” of Parliament.
Professor Snow notes the whole idea behind the Assisted Human Reproduction Act was “the impact of market forces in the area of human reproduction could, if not properly regulated, undermine important social values and ethical principles and harm people by leading to inappropriate, unethical or unsafe use of technology.”
Ms. Picard was arrested for breaching 2007 regulations under a 2004 law that followed 2000 consultations that followed failed bills introduced in 1997 and 1996 that followed a 1995 moratorium and 1994 consultations following the 1993 final report of a 1989 Royal Commission that ran to 1,275 pages and 293 recommendations – and on and on ad infinitum. It ended with a Supreme Court ruling that much of this was under provincial jurisdiction anyhow.
“What is remarkable when analyzing the policymaking process from 1993 to 2004, from the Royal Commission to the Act, is the extent to which the content and the frames remained almost entirely the same,” writes Snow. Time marched on, science advanced, society adapted. They even put a cloned sheep named Dolly on the cover of Newsweek magazine.
“There was significant normalization of assisted reproduction in the Western world over this period, including in Canada,” concludes Snow. “Yet the content and the framing strategies were almost entirely identical for the Royal Commission and the federal government.”
And that’s how Ottawa works.
By Holly Doan
Assisted Reproduction Policy in Canada: Framing, Federalism and Failure, by David Snow; University of Toronto Press; 200 pages; ISBN 9781-4875-23290; $22.46
