Cabinet yesterday called on consultants to help it create a long-promised Financial Crimes Agency. The Department of Public Safety said work will continue into 2024: “It will establish Canada’s first ever nationwide agency whose sole purpose is to investigate these highly complex crimes.”
A federal agency saw more than a tenth of its annual operations budget spent through employees’ use of government-issue credit cards. Auditors uncovered “purchases from unusual vendors” at the National Research Council: “We reviewed a sample of high risk transactions.”
Federal prisoners allowed to serve time at Indigenous healing lodges have a higher recidivism rate than those held in regular cells, says a federal report. Healing lodges feature arts and crafts, skating and book clubs, said the Correctional Service: “Emphasis for hobby crafts would be on traditional Indigenous arts and crafts such as rattle making or beadwork.”
Federal regulators yesterday fined a Toronto-based bank $676,500 for breach of regulations under the Proceeds Of Crime And Terrorist Financing Act. The penalty for Wealth One Bank of Canada was the steepest levied in two years: “We will be firm.”
A federal panel recommends another Covid booster shot for retirees beginning this month. It follows disclosures the Public Health Agency ordered delivery of 91 million vaccine doses: “We will never be fully vaccinated against Covid-19.”
Federal spending on consultants will jump 13 percent this year, says a Budget Office report. “It has shown consistent growth year over year,” wrote analysts: “More than half of spending on professional and special services is consistently comprised of five departments alone.”
The Senate human rights committee outspent all other committees combined last year with a detailed study of Islamophobia. Hearings resume this week after the panel heard from 135 witnesses in five cities: “How does the Senate human rights committee define the term Islamophobia?”
Conventional TV is on a “downward trajectory” that will see networks fight over an ever-dwindling pool of revenue, says a CRTC report. All television programming with the exception of sports is now a money loser, it said: “Each year a larger share of ad spending in Canada is flowing to the internet.”
An Iqaluit judge has sent to trial a landmark Charter case, first of its kind, on whether Inuit schoolchildren have a constitutional right to public education in their own language. “The action must proceed to trial,” wrote Justice Paul Bychok of Nunavut Territorial Court.
In Paris,
cartoonists killed in the line of duty.
Just one day
after Canada had announced its support
for freedom of expression, transparency,
and access to global information.
Meanwhile at Shared Services,
blacklists of banned news sites are reviewed,
updated.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
On April 11, 2000 a supermarket employee in Williams Lake, B.C. called police after spotting a drunk passed out at a storefront picnic table. A constable arrived and threw the man, Paul Alphonse of the Williams Lake Indian Band, into a police vehicle. Hold that image for a moment: the hopeless drunk, a peevish clerk, an angry cop. It was a very ordinary incident
Except Alphonse was mysteriously dead in police custody within a week. He suffered broken ribs and had a purple bruise on his chest the size of a boot, Alphonse’s boot. The man could not have stomped himself to death. At the inquest, Constable Bob Irwin testified Alphonse was so violent he’d slapped him around and pinned him against a wall at police headquarters. None of this was corroborated by precinct video cameras. They weren’t operating that day.
Alphonse was 67, weighed 120 pounds, and had been arrested for drunkenness more than 70 times. He was a small, sick old man. Constable Irwin stood over 6’, weighed 240 pounds and enjoyed martial arts. “The pathologist believed the stomping had probably occurred just prior to Alphonse’s arrest and may not have been due to the actions of police,” writes Professor Sherene Razack, a sociologist at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Studies In Education. “There remained only the sinister possibility that someone deliberately stomped on Alphonse while wearing his own boot.”
Alphonse’s gravesite is shown on the cover of Dying From Improvement, a riveting examination of deaths in police custody in Canada. Professor Razack pored over testimony of coroners’ inquiries and identifies a disturbing them. For a disproportionate number of Indigenous men arrest is fatal. Razack counted 116 deaths in custody in Saskatchewan between 1995 and 2013 including suicides, shootings, “head injuries,” fatal run-downs by police cars and hypothermia.
The death of Neil Stonechild, 17, is recounted. In 1990 Stonechild was picked up after drinking and causing a ruckus at a Saskatoon 7-Eleven store. They found him frozen to death on the outskirts of town with wrist marks that looked like handcuffs. Two constables last seen with Stonechild were subsequently fired but no charges were ever laid. “Why is indigenous death nearly always a timely death, a death that no one could prevent or cause?” asks Razack.
Parliament abolished capital punishment in 1976. Yet public drunkenness is punishable by death under peculiar circumstances. Dying From Improvement is vivid and disturbing. Professor Razack draws readers with an electric narrative and police reporter’s eye for detail.
The images are indelible: The frozen boy, the mysterious bootprint, the last moments of Frank Paul, drunk on mouthwash and left to die after being dragged into a Vancouver alleyway by city police just before Christmas in 1998.
Police Sergeant Russell Sanderson, the officer who ordered that Paul be dragged away, was later suspended two days without pay: “Asked whether he agreed that his action with respect to Frank Paul was the biggest mistake of his career, Sanderson replied: ‘That’s a hard question. I don’t think I can really answer that question without a lot of deep thought and without going back over my career. There’s a lot of things I’ve done.’”
By Holly Doan
Dying From Improvement: Inquests & Inquiries Into Indigenous Deaths In Custody, by Sherene H. Razack; University of Toronto Press; 328 pages; ISBN 9781-4426-28915; $23
The House affairs committee yesterday by a vote of 6 to 5 ruled Parliament must order a public inquiry into claims of foreign election interference. Liberal MPs opposed the motion now expected to be endorsed by the entire Commons following its return from recess Monday: “This is just taking cheap shots at the Prime Minister.”
Federal campaign monitors “were seeing implications that foreign interference could be occurring” in the 2021 election but kept suspicions to themselves, the House affairs committee was told yesterday. MPs expressed astonishment that no one was told: “What prevents you from taking pre-emptive action?”
Nearly half of foreign border crossers flagged as security risks were let into the country by the Department of Immigration, according to an internal audit. The report did not detail any follow-up on thousands of foreigners permitted to stay in Canada despite “admissibility concerns.”
“Mental illness” accounts for almost half of all disability claims by federal employees, says a departmental report. It follows an earlier study that found employees are “drowning in a pool of repetitive, menial and uninspiring tasks.”
