The Department of Immigration without any parliamentary scrutiny ordered research into enforcement of a national ID system using digital passports, Access To Information documents show. MPs have repeatedly rejected any national identity scheme as costly and dangerous: ‘The assumption is the passport would be used within Canada as an identity document.’
Year-end bonuses for federal executives are not literally tied to departmental performance, says a Treasury Board report. It follows data showing departments typically reward 90 to 100 percent of managers regardless of failure: “There is a system that is broken.”
The founder of a Palestinian activist group in Canada is in federal policing, according to Access To Information records. Documents disclosed an RCMP member is founder of the group that advocated “expressing their Palestinian identity at work” and circulated complaints about Jews testifying at parliamentary committee hearings: ‘It is important to present a narrative in support of Palestinians.’
The Department of Immigration acknowledges it let a million foreign students into the workforce without ever studying the impact on Canadian students. A single questionnaire was sent only to foreigners even as the unemployment rate for Canadian students climbed to 16 percent or more in several provinces: “A survey was sent to international students who would have been authorized to work unlimited hours.”
The RCMP is spending nearly a million a week on Black Hawk helicopters leased after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened 25 percent tariffs over inadequate border security. The Mounties already had an air patrol with 30 aircraft but were faulted by auditors for scrimping on basic equipment like night vision goggles for pilots: “How many times has suspicious or illegal activity been monitored?”
1.
Ambassador to Slovak Republic: having been subject to unfriending be ready to locate where were you when it happened.
Member of the Parole Board: forgiveness isn’t endless cause it starts.
Member of the Social Security Tribunal: think our taxes, their small curve, and one great ‘did’ in reserve.
Chair of the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board: the old flags may not be burned as well.
Ambassador to Equatorial Guinea: many movements dress as holidays.
Part-time member the Parole Board: consider the notion of a part-time prisoner; how would ‘life’ satisfy?
2.
Commissioner of Official Languages: swath ya’ll done get the blame, rest ya’ll right with me.
Member of the Social Security Tribunal: gluttons feel it first.
Member of the National Energy Board: yes is a straight line; watch for the Y-shaped imitator.
Member of the Security Intelligence Review Committee: ask a few more times what’s new.
Chair of the Canada Mortgage & Housing Corporation: remember no one can see everyone you’ve left behind, because you won’t.
3.
Part-time member of the Parole Board: a big crime is impossibly personal.
President of the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec: your money is so divisible, no?
Federal Court Justice: there is no glamour in refusing almost most but not most.
Chief Negotiator for the St. Anne’s Hospital Transfer Project: that pizza you didn’t eat and those birds with one leg and the bottom part of the calculation; I could go on but I won’t.
CEO of Montreal Science Centre and Vice President, Canada Lands Company: yes, men have many jobs, many antithetical to their beliefs, many self-employed.
Chief of the British Columbia Treaty Commission: treaty isn’t a word like smelly or friendly.
4.
Member of the Immigration & Refugee Board: nothing is slow.
Member of the Social Security Tribunal: the elderly organize tragically well.
Member of the Parole Board: all our examples are criminal.
By Jeff Blackman
Mr. S, a British Columbia pensioner, took his $325,000 in life savings and left it all with Union Securities of Vancouver. He was an “unsophisticated investor,” as the investment industry puts it. He believed what the salesman told him.
By the time Union Securities was finished with Mr. S virtually all his savings were wiped out. Mr. S might have sued. Instead he complained to the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments, a dispute resolution office created by banks and investment dealers. The ombudsman agreed Mr. S was badly treated and recommended compensation. Union Securities refused and that was it. Mr. S did not get his savings back. The ombudsman issued a news release.
Alternative dispute resolution systems like the Ombudsman for Banking are growing ever popular. It is privatized justice promoted as quicker, more efficient and cheaper than public courts, writes Professor Trevor Farrow of Osgoode Hall. Lawsuits are undoubtedly expensive. Even an Ontario Superior Court judge once marveled that “excess appears to be the norm” in legal fees that run to as much as $1,000 per hour.
Instead Canadians with a grievance are led to believe private dispute resolution is much better. But what if this is all wrong?
Civil Justice, Privatization and Democracy is an arresting book that challenges the whole premise of private dispute resolution. The system is “simply taking the imbalances that exist in the public sphere and shifting them behind closed doors to unregulated private venues,” writes Professor Farrow. In the case of Mr. S, we are not told the name of the financial advisor who led the client. We cannot see the contract Mr. S was asked to sign. We cannot learn why or how Union Securities did what it did.
“Without adequate public scrutiny, primarily through open court processes and the publication of precedents, there is a real danger that parties, particularly including those with power, will use the private system to circumvent public policies, accountability, and basic notions of procedural fairness,” Farrow writes.
Yet alternative dispute resolution is so widespread Rogers Inc., Telus, Amazon and Direct Energy write it into their standard consumer contracts, and an estimated 95 percent of civil disputes are now settled before trial. Farrow notes this is not a good sign: “Put simply, the more we privatize our justice system, the less law we produce.”
Case law and precedent are all the law we have. To win a judgment in court is to inform the next investor, the next policyholder, the next property owner with a grievance, on and on through centuries of common law. If public courts are slow and expensive – and Farrow argues the alternatives are not as quick and cheap as people think – the solution is not to privatize justice. It is to make the public system better.
Civil Justice makes a persuasive argument that Canadians are too quick to abandon the courts. “We need to take serious stock of what our current voracious appetite for privatization will mean for civil justice and democracy in five, ten, fifteen or twenty years,” Farrow concludes.
At the moment the future appears to foretell an old man’s lost savings and a one-page news release.
By Holly Doan
Civil Justice, Privatization and Democracy by Trevor C.W. Farrow; University of Toronto Press; 400 pages; ISBN 9781-4426-45783
MPs “will not be censored” in scrutinizing federal executives over management of immigration, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner (Calgary Nose Hill) said yesterday. Her remarks followed a formal protest from a deputy minister that criticism at committee hearings made it unsafe for managers to testify: “These clips fuel anger among members of the public who then target our officials.”
Cabinet last year approved an 84 percent increase in the number of federal managers paid more than $150,000 a year, records show. It coincided with public statements by the finance minister that “these are hard times for Canadians.”
Managers at Shared Services Canada, the federal IT department, recommended cancelling coffee breaks for a month due to Ramadan, Access To Information records show. An estimated 100 of 9,393 employees self-identified as Muslim though not all were observant: “It’s important to be respectful of Muslim colleagues who may be fasting.”
Canada Post is seeking more emergency funding from cabinet, a Department of Public Works manager yesterday suggested. MPs have speculated the post office requires another $500 million after receiving a $1.034 billion line of credit last January 24: “Given their current projections, they will likely need to have some additional support on an ongoing basis.”
Municipal development charges pose “a significant constraint to housing affordability” in some cities, CMHC said yesterday. Analysts documented mandatory fees as high as six figures: “Development charges account for a significant part of the cost of a new housing unit.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney was director of a charity, the Rideau Hall Foundation, that agreed to create tax credits for corporations whose donations were used to pay federal contractors on public works, records show. Carney yesterday did not comment: ‘It was issuing tax receipts.’
The Department of Public Safety says it is “very close” to launching a foreign registry ordered by Parliament 18 months ago, but will not set any deadline after twice skipping promised dates to begin tracking foreign agents. “We are very close,” one manager told the House affairs committee: “You need top secret clearance.”
Winter propane stocks are as much as 30 percent below normal, federal regulators cautioned yesterday. The Canada Energy Regulator said it was unclear from conflicting long-range weather forecasts whether customers faced a repeat of a 2014 price spike that prompted a federal investigation: “Where there is high demand for a finite good, and propane like all energy is a finite good, prices tend to rise.”
