Elections Canada has stripped the Libertarian Party of its federal registration for failing to meet a filing deadline. The Party’s leader said he was quitting political life: “It has been a very frustrating experience on my part.”
Alexander Mackenzie, Canada’s first Liberal prime minister, lived near Parliament Hill in a beautiful Gothic Revival home He was an honest, thrifty fellow who helped transform the country yet could not stand parliamentary life. “Politics is very low,” he wrote. Today the house is gone and forgotten, just like Mackenzie.
Born in Scotland, he arrived in Kingston, Ont. in 1842 as a near-penniless stonecutter. He became a successful contractor in Sarnia known for quality work. Mackenzie-built structures can still be found including the former Essex County Courthouse, now called Mackenzie Hall.
He was sharp-eyed, tight-mouthed and weather-beaten. Mackenzie did not dress well and hated to spend money. As prime minister he was pained at paying $128 for a political banquet and resolved never to entertain at home due to the cost.
Mackenzie landed in politics as a reformer, elected Liberal leader in 1873 and Prime Minister less than a year later. “Some people have a theory that a successful politician must necessarily depend on intrigue and doing crooked things,” Mackenzie said. “I determined to rule in broad daylight or not at all.”
He refused to campaign on public works spending for fear Canadians would think he was trying to buy votes. When federal contractors sent gifts for the Prime Minister’s wedding anniversary in 1878 Mackenzie had them returned. “I never felt so mortified in my life,” he said.
He grew so weary of reporters and patronage hounds Mackenzie built a secret staircase from his West Block office so he might evade questions. Cronyism and cynicism were enough to “sicken me of public life,” he wrote.
Mackenzie determined to clean up the place. He introduced Canada’s first secret ballot in 1874. Elections had been open ballot affairs with widespread bribe-taking. He established the Supreme Court and the Office of the Auditor General, the bane of grafters.
His home and refuge from the meanness of politics was at 22 Vittoria Street, a short walk west of Parliament Hill. From his veranda Mackenzie had a marvelous view of the Ottawa River. The Gothic home had a distinctive rounded bay window and the tooth-like corner stone patterning that Victorians enjoyed.
On losing the premiership in the recession of 1878, Mackenzie remained an MP but sold the Vittoria Street home in 1880. The house survived till 1928 when contractors demolished it to make way for MPs’ offices in the new Confederation Building.
And Mackenzie? He refused a title from the Queen – “We have no landed aristocracy in Canada,” he explained – and like all honest politicians of his era, died poor. When Mackenzie passed away in 1892 his estate was so modest MPs voted a $10,000 trust fund to support his widow.
By Andrew Elliott 
If mushrooms killed or hospitalized 10,700 Canadians every year MPs would order committee hearings and mushroom regulations would fly like confetti. Now replace the world “mushroom” with “traffic” and consider the fact accidents claim 10,700 casualties every year. This does not include 150,000 minor injuries.
Parliament for years has not enacted a single new traffic safety initiative. A bill that would have required installation of side guards on heavy trucks, C-344 An Act To Amend The Motor Vehicle Safety Act, died in the Commons in 2011. Ontario’s chief coroner said it would have saved bicyclists and pedestrians from being dragged to their deaths.
Author Neil Arason attempts to bring the country to its senses. No Accident is a compelling, plain-spoken appeal for what at first glance seems an incredible goal: to eliminate virtually all traffic fatalities. “The current situation is a system failure,” writes Arason, of the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators. “Because safety has not been the starting point for the design of the system, what we now have is an untreated public health problem.”
The result is that every family in Canada has experienced the anguish of a traffic casualty. “Like most young reporters, I found ways to harden myself when sent to someone’s home to ask for a photo of a child who had just been killed in an accident,” newspaperman Robert Fulford recalled in his memoirs Best Seat In The House (1988 Collins). “Strangely, no such family ever sent me away empty-handed; all of them seemed anxious to co-operate, as if the appearance of their child’s face in the next day’s paper would make this event less terrible or less random. Several times a sad young mother said to me something like, ‘I always told her, ‘Don’t cross the street without looking.’” When I became a parent – and anxious about my own children – those words echoed in my memory.”
Yet traffic safety has always been one of the most hard-fought reforms, fueled in part by resistance of auto manufacturers; complaints about cost; and the conviction that driver error is almost always to blame. As a GM executive put it in 1956, “The seat belt craze isn’t doing anything for the brains of the guy driving the car. Sure, we need thinner pillars and better vision, but this just encourages the nuts. Put belts and shoulder harnesses on them and they think they can do anything.”
In 1960 Cornell University published landmark research proving seatbelts prevented death and injury. It took 27 years for all provinces to enact mandatory seatbelt laws. Arason proposes more reforms like crash-proof auto sensors and better-designed pedestrian crosswalks, but many remedies require no engineering whatsoever.
Drivers’ licenses for 16-year olds? Arason notes the age limit is based on a 1903 Missouri state law that most countries reject since young drivers are most likely to cause accidents: “Today most sixteen-year olds do not quit school to work on the family farm, but we continue to license them to drive anyway.”
Impaired driving at a 0.08 blood alcohol level? Arason argues the standard is based on flawed research conducted in 1963, and disputed by scientists who conclude impairment for most drivers begins after the first drink. The standard is 0.02 in Sweden, 0.03 in Poland, 0.05 in The Netherlands.
Fifty-kilometre city speed limits? A campaign to cut speeds to 30 km/hour in Newcastle, U.K. resulted in a 24 percent reduction in the accident rate. “Injuries cannot be produced without speed,” Arason writes. “Speed, after all, is a factor in all road crash injuries and deaths.”
No Accident is a damning and persuasive appeal for public safety, and a glimpse into what driving will be like in Canada once lawmakers get around to it.
By Holly Doan
No Accident: Eliminating Injury and Death on Canadian Roads, by Neil Arason; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 344 pages; ISBN 9781-5545-89630; $29.99
Prime Minister Mark Carney misled media on his private meetings with Chinese Communist leaders, Privy Council records show. Documents written by cabinet aides directly contradicted Carney’s claims that he raised human rights and foreign interference with his Beijing hosts: “On human rights, with the President, yes, we did discuss human rights.”
Almost half of Canadians surveyed nationwide say immigration is “causing Canada to change in ways I don’t like,” according to in-house research by the immigration department. Two thirds complained immigrants must “do more to integrate.” The research followed Immigration Minister Lena Diab’s most recent cuts to quotas on a promise of “taking back control over our immigration system.”
Cabinet agreed to ease some restrictions on migrant labour under lobbying by Tim Hortons franchisees, Access To Information records show. Operators claimed tens of thousands of jobs would go unfilled if they couldn’t hire foreigners: “The food service sector faces over 63,000 job vacancies.”
Cabinet’s Buy Canadian policy does not mean a majority of supplies used in public works or home construction must be Canadian, Housing Minister Gregor Robertson said yesterday. “We’re not being rigid about this,” he told reporters.
The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to hear gun owners’ challenge of Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s blacklisting of “assault style” firearms. Two lower courts upheld the ban as reasonable though it was introduced without data showing it would fight crime: “There is no way to know exactly.”
Defence Minister David McGuinty yesterday said cabinet for the first time will meet its minimum 2 percent NATO target on military spending by month’s end. MPs have noted the NATO calculations include budget line items of little military value like unarmed Coast Guard lifeboats: “We just can’t have creative accounting to get to 2 percent. We actually need capability to protect Canada.”
Weak growth forecasts for 2026 will get weaker yet, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem yesterday told reporters. A January 28 outlook is already out of date, he said: “It looks like it is going to come in lower than what we previously forecast.”
A federal labour board has upheld the firing of a Statistics Canada supervisor for dishonesty. Managers said the misconduct did not impact any statistical reports but breached the Agency’s Code Of Conduct that states, “Trust is the defining characteristic of an effective and useful statistical system.”
The Canada Revenue Agency yesterday confirmed it is suspending its fax line for charity filings at month’s end. It is the first federal office to eliminate fax lines since Xerox Corporation introduced the dial-up facsimile machine 60 years ago: “We simply don’t seem to be able to modernize and move quickly.”
A Laval, Que. constable who tracked down the author of an insulting Facebook post has been cleared of abuse of authority. Numerous Québec municipalities including Laval enforce local bylaws against “insulting or abusing a peace office or a municipal employee in the performance of his or her duties.”
Average spot prices for regular gasoline have jumped 24 percent since the outbreak of war in Iran, the Department of Natural Resources said yesterday. Diesel is up 28 percent: “Obviously this could affect growth and inflation.”
The Commons industry committee is recommending cabinet reverse a decade of Trudeau-era tax policy. Canada should be more competitive with the United States, wrote MPs: ‘Examine the impact of tax rates on entrepreneurship.’
