Gambling has grown in Canada under a 2021 cabinet bill that legalized bookmaking, says a federal briefing note. Authorities appeared powerless to curb black market gaming or match fixing, wrote the Department of Canadian Heritage: “Illegal sport betting has expanded.”
MPs investigating the $54 million ArriveCan project tomorrow will question an Ottawa insider who reportedly boasted he “rubbed shoulders with every assistant deputy minister in town.” The Commons government operations committee to date has been unable to find who approved sweetheart contracts that paid millions to federal consultants.
“It should be evident to everyone in this room as well as Canadians there is systemic corruption within this government,” Conservative MP Stephanie Kusie (Calgary Midnapore) told an October 26 committee hearing. “It should be absolutely evident.”
Consultant Vaughn Brennan was named as a reluctant witness who ignored initial requests that he appear for questioning. Brennan is scheduled to appear tomorrow at the government operations committee at 12 noon Eastern. Subcontractors earlier named Brennan “as a self-styled political insider.”
Witnesses testified Brennan reportedly “rubbed shoulders with every assistant deputy minister in town” and considered $23 million on a sole-sourced contract “a drop in the bucket.” Brennan has never spoken publicly. He is confirmed to have worked with an ArriveCan consultant GC Strategies Incorporated of Woodlawn, Ont.
Brennan had “declined” to testify, Conservative MP Kelly McCauley (Edmonton West), chair of the government operations committee, earlier told MPs. “GC Strategies is playing hard to get,” said McCauley. “That would be a polite way of saying it. We have not been able to get a commitment from them despite our clerk going above and beyond in trying to accommodate them. We’re having difficulties with them.”
GC Strategies, a two-man company operating from a private home, received an $8.9 million sole-sourced contract to work on the ArriveCan project. Evidence showed GC Strategies pocketed an undisclosed commission worth up to 30 percent or $2.7 million then assigned all work to subcontractors.
“It is a two-person company that works out of their basement who did no IT work whatsoever but simply did a Google search and found IT professionals,” Conservative MP Larry Brock (Brantford-Brant, Ont.) told a November 28 hearing.
MPs have been unable to find which federal manager asked GC Strategies to submit a contract proposal for ArriveCan, a pandemic-era app that required cross-border travelers to submit electronic proof of vaccination prior to arrival in Canada. “Nobody wants to take responsibility,” Conservative MP Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park-Fort Saskatchewan, Alta.) told a November 28 hearing.
MPs were told a GC Strategies executive “routinely boasted he and his friends, senior government officials with contracting authority, have ‘dirt on each other.’” There was no explanation. GC Strategies received some $44 million in federal contracts since 2022, according to records.
By Staff 
A taxpayer-subsidized electric auto battery factory is under Department of Fisheries review over “potential for the destruction of wetlands and fish habitat.” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had called the Northvolt plant “the world’s cleanest.”
CBC News says it published an inaccurate “fact check” of Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre. The Crown broadcaster had sought recognition as a Facebook fact checker in the last federal election: “CBC’s video has been edited to remove inaccurate mortgage comparisons and clarify information.”
Employers opposed to assisted suicide should be disqualified from Canada Summer Jobs funding, an advocate has written MPs. The submission to the Commons human resources committee is from the same group that successfully lobbied for denial of funding to pro-life employers: “Regardless of the Canada Summer job, even if it is to mow the lawn, that work gives sustenance to the group’s harmful mandate and activities.”
The CBC last year cut spending on Indigenous language services that account for less than one half of one percent of its budget, Access To Information records show. CEO Catherine Tait had cited “fantastically exciting” Indigenous shows as justification for ongoing subsidies: “Should we be defunded we would no longer be reaching all of those Canadians.”
The Department of Transport rated its vaccine mandate “aggressive” and “unique in the world,” says a 2021 memo. The in-house document obtained by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms contradicts public claims the mandate “followed the recommendations of public health experts.”
Cabinet is using media bailout money to “leverage news coverage in its favour,” says Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre. His remarks coincided with release of a federal briefing note indicating media subsidies will continue indefinitely “through this time of disruption.”
Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault on Saturday named new returning officers for all federal ridings nationwide. The legal notice preceded a major revision to the electoral map: “We are going to have to be ready.”
Processing of Employment Insurance cheques has never been faster, says the Department of Employment. Managers claimed turnaround times averaged 18 days last year after longstanding complaints of poor service: “Canadians are growing impatient as they wait months.”
The West Block
of Parliament Hill.
Eight years renovations.
Glass-domed ceiling
covers the interior courtyard, home
of the interim House of Commons Chamber.
Light pours in.
Sunlight.
The best disinfectant.
Little wonder discussions
between the PMO and SNC-Lavalin
and
between the PMO and the former Attorney General
were held elsewhere,
in the building across the street,
behind shuttered windows and
under a copper-sheathed roof.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
For a certain generation Two Freedoms invokes a nostalgic era when Canada briefly strode on the world stage. In 1955 the nation had 118,000 men and women in uniform and the world’s fourth largest air force. And now? “When a Canadian surface vessel HMCS Athabaskan sailed to Haiti to position itself off the coast where Canadian forces, replete with medics, nurses, technicians and doctors were to be deployed to come to the aid of the local population, amphibious small vessels had to be borrowed from the Americans to get our own folks ashore,” Hugh Segal wrote.
Critics lament a “decade of darkness” in Canadian defence spending and foreign policy but it has been five decades and “darkness” is debatable. Electors decided generations ago they could not have a big navy and pensions and medicare and good schools all at the same time, and made their choice. This was not a conspiracy. It was the will of the voters.
Hugh Segal, former senator, died last August 9 at 72. He published Two Freedoms in 2016. He was a warm and thoughtful man and Two Freedoms is a warm and thoughtful book. Segal lamented Canada was not a big power or even a middle one.
“There is nothing particularly venal or myopic about Canadian foreign policy goals or desired outcomes in the key regions of the world,” he wrote. “They are simply wildly unambitious and surprisingly narrow for a modern democracy like Canada.”
“We need a radical reboot,” wrote Segal. The instinct of the Department of Foreign Affairs was to “go along to get along.” Segal lamented Ottawa thinks small: “We spend less than 1.5 percent of our GDP on defence and deployment capacity.”
Yet the current tide is unmistakable and Two Freedoms swam against it. The cabinet rates Indigenous land claims a more pressing challenge than military recruitment. We live in an age of nationalism, and everyone wants the right to be left alone.
This troubled Segal. He advocated a muscular Canadian foreign policy committed to combating freedom from fear and freedom from want. “The lessons of history are sadly and inevitably clear,” warned Two Freedoms. “The collapse of freedom from want into a state of economic and social despair can produce huge, even cataclysmic consequences.”
We embraced a “lazy, liberal optimism” of “sovereignty uber alles”, Segal wrote. “The freedoms that matter most and whose protection should be central to Canadian foreign policy are the freedom from fear and freedom from want. How these two freedoms are built, strengthened, attained and defended should form the true nucleus of a modern foreign policy mission worldwide.”
Instead, cabinet since 2012 sold 52 embassies and missions abroad and decided they’d sooner spend the money on children’s tax credits. Nobody seemed to mind.
By Holly Doan
Two Freedoms: Canada’s Global Future, by Hugh Segal; Dundurn; 228 pages; ISBN 9781-4597-34456; $19.99
Grants to Ukrainian war refugees will cost nearly a half billion, says a federal briefing note. To date 189,194 Ukrainians in Canada have applied for subsidies to temporarily resettle here: “It’s one thing to promise the money. It’s another thing for that money to hit Ukrainian bank accounts.”
The Commons industry committee yesterday adjourned without calling Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne to answer for claims he would cut cellphone prices. Rogers Communications has announced prices on some plans will rise by up to $108 a year effective January 17: “This is like going around in circles.”
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland yesterday said she played no role in police handcuffing of a Rebel News reporter after he asked her a question outside a public meeting. Freeland would not discuss Monday’s incident or her past advocacy of press freedoms: “We categorically condemn anyone who in any way intimidates and harasses journalists.”
