Computer security at the Canada Revenue Agency remains poorly monitored years after hackers breached taxpayers’ accounts, says an internal audit. The Agency maintains electronic records on more than 27 million individual and corporate tax filers: “Did these attacks not demonstrate there was a total failure?”
The Department of Transport is finally enforcing an auto bill passed by Parliament in 2018 that grants regulators new powers to recall faulty cars. Millions of “unsafe vehicles” are on Canadian roads, by official estimate: “Yes, there is always room for improvement.”
A federal charity called Israel “sadistic” and “barbaric” after terrorist attacks in that country left 3,100 casualties, mostly Jews. Directors of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East include one former MP and a current Government of Canada manager: ‘Charities may not support one or another political faction or prolong violence.’
A decades-old federal law mandating labels on date-expired food is under review. The Department of Agriculture said it supports in principle the removal of “best before” dates as Canadians face rising food costs: “The government supports in principle this recommendation.”
The Canadian Human Rights Commission says it has stopped mistreating Black employees but acknowledged “there is a long road ahead on our anti-racism journey.” Critics have demanded the entire management be fired for discrimination: “We do have some senior Black executives.”
The next election will see fewer MPs in Toronto and northern Ontario and more in the Okanagan and suburban Alberta. Historic changes under the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act take effect April 22, 2024, according to a legal notice: “It is necessary.”
The CBC should rethink news coverage that disparages cabinet critics as extreme or disreputable, warns the network Ombudsman. The advisory follows a 2021 attempt by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to act as a political fact checker: “When they do so they had better be right.”
We are grateful this holiday to friends and subscribers as Blacklock’s embarks on a 12th great year of independent, all-original Canadian journalism. On behalf of all our contributors, please accept our thanks. We’re back tomorrow — The Editor.
A gun-metal sky hangs over
The lake, which is oil-black
And loud as it folds into itself
Again and again until it reaches
The shore and my boots.
Behind, town lights blink on
As eyes ready to shut.
Maple leaves, dead and grey,
Are picked up and scattered
As a child mindlessly throws stones.
I have been standing here for decades
But I have never seen it like this.
This place has never lived through a fall.
What season comes next?
By S.M.G. Dupel
For Canadians who recall when the U.S. won its wars and paid its bills, it’s now popular to consider America as a wheezing empire in decline, to which Professor Tanner Mirrlees replies, ha! Mirrlees’ Hearts and Mines is a bird’s-eye view of a U.S. cultural industrial complex so vast its reach is taken for granted. It is a very sad Third World village that has never heard of Mickey Mouse or Marlboro cigarettes.
“The United States’ cultural reach is unparalleled,” writes Mirrlees, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. “The U.S. culture industry’s global economic power and the near omnipresence of American cultural commodities – news programs, motion pictures, TV shows, video games and interactive digital content – are facts.”
Pundits once marveled at the ascendancy of China though its cultural exports are unwatchable “opera” and Cantonese boy bands. Canadians of a certain generation still recall when schoolchildren celebrated Empire Day and everything English was deemed the epitome of culture, elegance and superiority. The mystique vanished with the British empire. Today the works of Rudyard Kipling are unread.
Not America. Those people know how to sell, Mirrlees writes. “Just because it does not now fit the profile of empires of old does not mean that it is not an empire.”
Its agents are McDonald’s and Microsoft, Pepsi and Coca-Cola, Google, Ford and George Clooney. “The U.S. government on behalf of powerful corporate lobbyists has largely established and enforced through law, policy and regulation a capitalistic mode of media and cultural control that extols markets, private ownership, the profit motive, advertising and hyper-commercial values.”
The reach is spectacular. Consumers from Irkutsk to Bangkok to Cardston, Alta. equate American products with primacy. Nike shoes are not merely footwear, they are a celebration of can-do sportsmanship and individual athletic achievement. No Canadian shoe manufacturer stands a chance.
“At its core the ideology of American exceptionalism represents the United States as a unique liberal capitalist country in a world system of liberal and illiberal capitalist states,” Hearts and Mines explains.
It’s a claim that grates on the nerves, U.S. exceptionalism, though here Professor Mirrlees points to evidence hidden in plain view. America remains the world’s largest national economy, still home to the only world currency, still a “choice of destination for highly skilled workers.” Nobody wins more Nobel Prizes. Nobody files more patents. Nobody sells more pizza.
“The U.S. culture industry creates, coopts and commoditizes universal and particular stories, transnational and national symbols, and global and local motifs to strengthen its grip in markets everywhere,” Mirrlees writes. “It floods markets with goods that do not always appear to be agents of Americanization. Yet, in an era of endless market segmentation into smaller and smaller niches, and the resulting marketization of cultural difference, diversity sells.”
An empire in the decline? Not yet – not by a long stretch.
By Holly Doan
Hearts and Mines: The U.S. Empire’s Culture Industry, by Tanner Mirrlees; University of British Columbia Press; 336 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-30157; $34.95
Cries of “fascists” yesterday rang out in the Commons as MPs pressed for release of a secret federal blacklist of 20 Nazi fugitives in Canada. Demands for disclosure of the 1985 list came as the Liberal chair of Parliament’s Canada-Ukraine Friendship Group expressed unease with disclosure: “I prefer not to speak to that.”
Budget Officer Yves Giroux yesterday defended research indicating cabinet misled taxpayers on the recovery of green technology subsidies. “I don’t have a vested interest,” Giroux told the Commons industry committee: “As soon as we publish a report that sets the record straight there are accusations we have not understood the problem or have a bone to pick.”
Federal financing for energy refits of a luxury Toronto hotel is “grotesque,” says Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis (Haldimand-Norfolk, Ont.). The MP challenged the Minister of Housing to justify the funding when “Canadians are sleeping in garages.”
Parliament must curb deficit spending now or “pick up the pieces” later, former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge yesterday told the Senate banking committee. Canadians had no choice but to confront an “unpleasant” future, he said: “I mean, Canadians are pretty realistic.”
Animal rights advocates yesterday opposed a bill threatening jail and six-figure fines for trespassing on farms. Camille Labchuk, executive director of Animal Justice, called it an “ag gag law” to conceal cruel farm practices: “This includes things like keeping pregnant pigs in gestation crates which are metal cages so small the mothers can’t even turn around.”
