A federal contractor paid as a media consultant by the Department of Canadian Heritage for years claimed Zionists controlled newspapers in Canada. Friends of Jews “monopolize North American media,” wrote Laith Marouf: “The majority of Canadian media is owned by two Zionists.”
A drafting error by the Department of Justice will save a convicted drunk driver from a six-year license suspension, a judge has ruled. “Mistakes happen,” said the Ontario Court of Appeal: “They happen everywhere. One appears to have happened here.”
The Public Service Alliance of Canada, the largest federal union, never challenged vaccine mandates in court because they “would have little chance of success,” it said. The comments came in a labour board hearing on the Alliance’s representation of members: “It was decided the best approach would be to handle files case by case.”
Air Canada has been ordered to pay $1,000 each to a Fort St. John, B.C. couple whose flight was delayed more than nine hours due to “crew constraints.” A similar July 12 ruling against WestJet is being challenged in Federal Court amid fears airlines now owe clients millions in compensation: “Assessment must be made on a case by case basis.”
In 1911, when Richard Bedford Bennett first arrived in Ottawa as the bachelor MP for Calgary West, his choice of accommodation was the Rideau Club. No finer meal could be had. Bennett loved food. “He believed if he put on weight he would present a more impressive appearance,” a friend recalled.
In the end Bennett ate his way to diabetes and heart disease and the Rideau Club burned to the ground. But once both were in their glory.
Bennett was a self-made millionaire and corporate lawyer. He was brash, opinionated, obsessive, mercurial, philanthropic and a workaholic. Bennett put in 16 hour-days amassing his fortune.
He said tersely of his time in Calgary: “I went West. I worked. The country and I grew with it.” In Calgary Bennett was somebody. In Ottawa this tall, portly man was a backbencher. His first impressions of both the capital and parliament were thin.
“I am sick of it here,” he wrote a friend. “There is little or nothing to do, and what there is to do is that of a party hack or departmental clerk or messenger.”
In 1911, the Rideau Club opened a stately new four-story headquarters at Wellington and Metcalfe Streets in Ottawa, a stone’s throw from Parliament. The club was a terra cotta beauty and Conservative institution. John A. Macdonald was first club president. Prime Minister Robert Borden used the clubhouse for cabinet meetings.
One newspaperman observed, “Ottawans who cared not at all for the Rideau Club as a club cared a lot about the building. It presented an elegant, finely proportioned but unobtrusive façade that stared steadily across Wellington Street, decade after decade, towards the parliament.”
With its upholstered lounges and elegant dining, it was an obvious attraction for the Calgary MP. A light lunch for Bennett was a dozen oysters with pie and maple syrup. He snacked on chocolates by the box. A lifelong chum Max Aitken recalled: “His daily breakfast was immense: a plate of porridge, bacon and eggs, plenty of toast, honey or marmalade.”
At the Rideau Club Bennett never lingered in the cigar lounge. He loathed smoking and could not stand a dirty ashtray. And the bar? “I promised my mother I would never drink and I never have,” he said, though Bennett took his meals with a glass of crème de menthe and laced his soup with tumblers of sherry.
Bennett served six terms in the House. He relocated in time from the Rideau Club to the Chateau Laurier Hotel where Bennett kept a suite. He won the Conservative leadership and served as prime minister, from 1930 to ’35. In retirement Bennett bought an English manor where his gardener recalled he liked to eat buttered asparagus by the pound.
Bennett died of a heart attack at 76. He remains the only prime minister buried outside Canada. And the Rideau Club? It went up in flames Oct. 23, 1979. A century of furnishings, artwork and irreplaceable mementos were lost. The elegant landmark was reduced to a smoldering shell. Today the site is a paved lot.
By Andrew Elliott
Many Canadians recall when a portrait of Her Majesty was displayed in every post office and hockey rink and a thumping rendition of God Save The Queen was a staple of service club luncheons. Much has changed since a monarch last ascended to the throne in “an age of deference,” as David Johnson puts it.
“We are coming to the end of an era,” Johnston writes in Battle Royal. “Elizabeth II, a seemingly near permanent feature of life for so many people, is in her twilight years. At any point in the next decade or so the Queen will die and her son Charles, Prince of Wales, will become king. Monarchists will rejoice at this succession, following the ancient protocols of English common law, but republicans will grimace.”
Battle Royal is a crisp examination of where Canadians stand or fall on the relevance of the monarchy. Even die-hard republicans can’t bother with the tedious chore of changing the Constitution Act to replace the new king with a Canadian head of state, but this is not the point, notes the author. “This we know: The monarchy will continue to exist in Canada once Elizabeth II is gone, and the Canadian vice-regents will carry on their work as they always have,” writes Johnson of Cape Breton University. “There is a world of difference, however, between existing and thriving.”
At the last succession in 1952 the relevance of English monarchs to the World War II generation was unquestioned. Elizabeth remains the only queen who knows how to fix a carburetor, as a 1945 mechanic in the Auxiliary Territorial Service.
The House of Windsor was celebrated as tangible proof of English superiority. Canadians in 1952 still recalled the gruesome fate of lesser royal houses. Seven foreign kings were assassinated from 1900 to 1934 like Alexander I of Serbia, “a flabby young man with pince-nez who had a taste for clumsy experiments in absolutism,” wrote journalist Rebecca West in 1941. Alexander’s killers found him cringing in a secret closet of his Belgrade palace, shot and stabbed him and his Queen Draga and tossed their naked corpses off a balcony. Not very British.
But this is now. Professor Johnson captures the moment perfectly. Deference is gone and Canadian monarchists have no new ideas to make the institution fresh or relevant. As Battle Royal explains, “The country needs a head of state; the head of state has always been a monarch; therefore the country needs a monarch as head of state. While this logic is completely illogical to a republican, it satisfies the monarchists’ reverence for the past and their need for a sense of order.”
“The monarchist defence presented here is far from new,” Johnson writes. “In 1915 Spanish Princess Eulalia wondered how the British people would be any better off if they abolished the royal family. ‘They would gain as little,’ she said, ‘as if by a popular uprising, the citizens of London killed the lions in their zoo. There may have been a time when lions were dangerous in England, but the sight of them in their cages can now only give a pleasurable holiday shudder of awe – of which the nation will not willingly deprive itself.’”
Battle Royal is thoughtful and smartly written, and so unvarnished in its treatment of Canada’s head of state it could never have been published in 1952.
By Holly Doan
Battle Royal: Monarchists vs Republicans and the Crown of Canada, by David Johnson; Dundurn; 288 pages; ISBN 9781-4597-40136; $26.99
The Privy Council Office quietly paid researchers to poll Canadians on decriminalizing narcotics, records show. Findings of focus group surveys were delivered to cabinet aides only weeks before Mental Health Minister Dr. Carolyn Bennett announced the partial lifting of a 1911 criminal ban on simple possession of cocaine in British Columbia: “There were some concerns raised about moving in this direction.”
Canadian financial support for Ukraine will continue, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said yesterday. Freeland spoke of “my cousins in Ukraine” in praising Canadian aid worth $3.12 billion to date: “It’s one thing to promise the money. It’s another thing for that money to hit Ukrainian bank accounts.”
One of the world’s largest tech trade groups says an internet regulation bill by Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez will hurt consumer choice and must be rewritten. The bill passed the Commons June 21 but faces opposition in the Senate transport and communications committee: “Governments should be modest about imposing obligations on the technological future.”
Pandemic money worries saw a quarter of Canadians fall behind on monthly bills and a fifth borrow from friends and family, says in-house research by the federal Financial Consumer Agency of Canada. Forty percent of Canadians surveyed said they “had to use my savings due to the Covid-19 crisis,” typically between $2,000 and $10,000: ““I am just getting by financially.”
The Department of Foreign Affairs yesterday said it will hire German consultants to promote poutine and other specialties for Oktoberfest. The idea was to “promote Canadian food and beverage products to German-speaking end consumers,” it said.
The Canadian Embassy in Washington in internal emails disclosed it was under scrutiny by watchful U.S. officials over handling of vaccine mandates on truckers. Staff cited “inquiries from the White House” just days before the Freedom Convoy blockade: “Discussion came at the request of the U.S.”
Supreme Court of Canada nominee Michelle O’Bonsawin in a 2016 questionnaire said her family suffered discrimination from people “insensitive towards your heritage.” The remarks were omitted from a 2022 questionnaire released by the Prime Minister’s Office: “Oh, she’s a native Indian, she’s our Pocahontas.”
The Supreme Court is a “colonial institution,” Attorney General David Lametti said yesterday. Lametti told the Commons justice committee he wanted to revitalize ancient Indigenous legal systems: “It gives a boost to Indigenous laws themselves.”
Employees who do dangerous work, even firefighters, cannot be forced to take random drug tests without cause or consent, a judge has ruled. The decision came on an appeal by firefighters at the Ottawa International Airport: ‘Management provided no evidence of a problem of drug use among employees.’
