One of the nation’s largest grocery chains yesterday agreed to surrender restrictive clauses in leases with mall owners, documents show. Empire Company Ltd., operator of the Sobeys chain, Farm Boy, Safeway, IGA, Foodland and FreshCo stores, was one of the last chains to use property controls: ‘It does not admit any wrongdoing.’
Cabinet yesterday tabled a bill to impose sweeping curbs on strikes and circumvent Federal Court challenges on its repeated use of executive powers to quash legal walkouts. Labour Minister Patty Hajdu said she did not like “people fighting with people.”
The Commons science committee yesterday tabled a report on political conflicts at Canadian universities without any mention of anti-Semitism. It was a striking omission, said Opposition MPs: “It is an important topic within the study that should have received more attention.”
Swearing-in ceremonies for Governor General Louise Arbour cost $388,733 and counting, cabinet disclosed yesterday. The expense exceeded those run up by Arbour’s predecessor, but compared to $330,000 in talent fees paid by a Crown bank to hire CBC comic Rick Mercer as pitchman: “These are tough times. We have to make tough choices.”
The military tolerates too many off-colour jokes despite a decade-long campaign of culture change, says a Department of National Defence report. Investigators said while progress had been made, “sexualized jokes and microaggressions are often overlooked.”
Most renters have not given up on home ownership despite the housing crisis, CMHC said yesterday. Findings of a Canadian Housing Survey showed renters were counting on home equity to help their children and provide security in retirement: “Canadians continue to aspire to housing that better meets their needs yet many still face challenges in doing so.”
Cabinet will press ahead with a bill to regulate the internet, says Prime Minister Mark Carney. Bill C-34 is a third attempt to regulate political speech in the name of social stability: “This fall we will press ahead with the Act to protect Canadians online.”
Any decision on whether to mandate face and fingerprint scanning of air passengers on domestic flights is up to cabinet, says the federal agency responsible for airport security. The Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA) proposes to introduce biometric scanning on local flights by 2031: “CATSA will not be the authority to determine whether biometrics should be mandatory.”
Then-Finance Minister Paul Martin in a secret 1995 cabinet session warned “compound interest is killing us” after decades of deficit spending, newly-declassified records show. Ministers were told to promptly cut billions in spending “come hell or high water.”
A federal manager who called racism a “Canadian reality” has been appointed chair of the Canadian Museum of Immigration. Daniel Quan-Watson’s appointment followed complaints from Museum curators of a “shift in Canadian attitudes towards immigration.”
A simple but serious error affecting the outcome of an election should count as an irregularity under the Canada Elections Act, the Supreme Court of Canada wrote in an explanation Friday of its landmark decision to void the outcome in a lone Québec constituency. Incumbent Bloc Québécois MP Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné (Terrebonne, Que.) lost the riding but set the legal precedent: “I think this is an issue that goes beyond party politics.”
The old Company
Wound down and
Out of the ashes,
Rises the Phoenix.
A people put on clearance.
A pelt for a skin.
The Phoenix arises anew,
Flame and ash below.
What’s old is new,
And this is older than commerce,
Much older than that base pursuit.
From a time beyond memory.
Fealty and Loyalty.
A pelt for a skin.
The howls muted.
Indignation harnessed.
Pro Pelle Cutem,
Takes a new meaning.
Never Fifty One.
But maybe Twenty Eight.
By W.N. Branson 
Membership in hate groups has long been linked to economic failure. Few millionaires joined the Aryan Nations. More contentious is a theory that all human beings are prone to irrational impulses that pit Catholic versus Protestant, English versus French, white versus Black. “We are hardwired to be ethnocentric,” writes Kenneth Stern, director of New York’s Bard Centre for the Study of Hate.
Stern argues we are programmed through millennia to instincts that long ago meant survival but today make no sense whatsoever. Consider the story of the spider and the sedan. He quotes social psychologist James Waller: “Automobiles kill far more people today than do spiders or snakes. But people are far more averse to spiders and snakes than they are to automobiles. Why? Because for most of our ancestral history, spiders and snakes were a serious threat to our survival and reproduction, whereas automobiles did not exist.”
The Conflict Over The Conflict is a calm, controversial analysis of “the tendency of people who defined themselves as part of a group to depersonalize others.” Stern pulls no punches. His work is thoughtful and provocative.
Take language, for instance. Stern recounts a University of New Hampshire guide to appropriate nouns and adjectives. Don’t say “poor” but “persons who lack advantages that others have,” says UNH. Don’t say “rich” but “persons of material wealth.” Don’t say “foreigners” but “international people.”
This is beyond pointless, writes Stern: “You don’t want people calling each other offensive names, but you have to wonder whether an official scorecard or how to self-monitor speech also sends students a destructive message: If there are preferred words, are there preferred thought, preferred ideas, preferred opinions? Are we now too sensitive?”
This is a serious field of research. They call it evolutionary psychology. “Our brains were not developed in an age of jet travel, Skype and Twitter,” Stern explains. “They were formed over millennia, starting when people lived in small groups and survived by hunting and gathering. Sometimes our primitive ancestors confronted strangers, others. Frequently these ‘others’ were dangerous. They competed for resources.”
Thus, the bitter disagreement over street protests, removal of statues, kneeling in public, race-tinged team mascots or bias in media. “When we care about something deeply, especially an issue connected to how we define ourselves, our families, our morality, our values, our group, our children’s future, it’s difficult to acknowledge we might be dead wrong,” he writes.
Stern is a gifted communicator and his argument is rational. The Conflict Over The Conflict frames the analysis within Middle East conflict, but remains useful in deciphering why street protestors make removal of a certain statue a flashpoint in Indigenous relations, or why a certain TV newscast gets on your nerves.
People “are not thinking on a blank slate defined by disconnected and philosophical logic,” Stern explains. “They are bringing themselves as human beings for whom identity, and the symbols of identity, are of oversized importance.”
By Holly Doan
The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate, by Kenneth S. Stern; University of Toronto Press; 296 pages; ISBN 9781-4875-07367; $19.47
Confidential 1995 cabinet records declassified yesterday indicate then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien threatened the President of France not to act if Québec voted for independence. France would “find itself isolated in the United Nations,” Chretien said.
A cabinet bill to penalize taxpayers slow to comply with Canada Revenue Agency demands for documents is needlessly harsh and likely unconstitutional, tax experts have told the Commons finance committee. One group, Tax Executives Institute Inc. of Toronto, said under Bill C-31 a single parent in a $750 tax dispute with auditors could be charged $1,500 in penalties: ‘It is grossly disproportionate.’
