Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier yesterday acknowledged the value of taxes owed but never collected is billions more than originally claimed. Legislators have spent six years prodding the Canada Revenue Agency to calculate the so-called “tax gap.”
The Canadian Pacific Railway could not fully comply with a federal vaccinate mandate and keep the trains running safely, according to labour board records. The CPR said full compliance would “place the critical operations of the railroad at risk.”
The Bank of Canada warns of “downward pressure” on suburban homes following above-normal price gains in the past three years. “A shift in relative prices could be especially problematic,” wrote researchers: “Prices in the suburbs could face downward pressure.”
The Canada Border Services Agency identified “privacy risks” in a biometric scheme to track air travelers, according to records. It involved a little-known pilot project run through a single airport last year: “Privacy risks and their proposed mitigating measures were identified.”
A champion poker player beat the Canada Revenue Agency in Tax Court. A judge has ruled Jonathan Duhamel, first Canadian to win the World Series of Poker, did not have to declare winnings as taxable business income: “The ability to produce a gain in the game of poker is unpredictable.”
“Negative perceptions” threaten a drab seabird that remains unloved compared to Newfoundland and Labrador’s famed puffin, says a federal study. The Department of Environment paid researchers $39,105 to survey Newfoundlanders’ emotional reaction to the “dirty,” “stinky” Leach’s Storm-Petrel compared to the popular puffin: “Seeing puffins made them feel happy, compassionate, excited.”
Canadians writing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have a five percent chance of getting a reply, records show. The Privy Council Office explained the Prime Minister gets a lot of junk mail: “Almost every day as Prime Minister I learn new things.”
School trustees were entitled to suspend or fire teachers even if vaccine mandates were not medically justified, a labour arbitrator has ruled. The decision came in the case of an Ontario school board that disciplined 52 elementary teachers who declined to show proof of vaccination: “There is no dispute that none of the provincial or public health authorities required or specifically recommended the board make vaccination mandatory.”
Few Canadians, only two in a hundred, turn to CBC-TV for informative documentaries, says in-house federal research. The low viewership follows the launch of a CBC corporate plan to put “the audience at the heart of everything we do.”
Voters in Calgary and suburbs will send two more MPs to Parliament under a redistricting proposal detailed Saturday, the largest gain of any city in Canada. A Federal Boundaries Commission noted Calgary’s population grew ten percent over the past decade: “All the existing electoral districts have been changed.”
Half of foreign college and university students in Canada are in the workforce, says federal research. The new figures follow a proposal from members of the Commons industry committee to lift a cap that limits foreign students to part time work: “International students have become an integral part of the labour force.”
Canadians of a certain vintage can still recall when DDT was found in every kitchen cupboard and it was considered eccentric not to throw candy wrappings out the car window. The Ontario Department of Highways used to spend $1 million a year clearing roadside litter.
This did not change by osmosis. It took years of litigation and dramatic protest by a comparatively few people. “It was a burn-out job but you loved it,” one organizer tells author Ryan O’Connor. “It was what needed to be done so you did it.”
O’Connor’s First Green Wave chronicles the birth of environmental activism in Canada. It is a fresh account of Pollution Probe, a citizens’ committee that grew from the University of Toronto to include chapters from Halifax to Regina. Pollution Probe was never a mass movement; its membership peaked at some 1,500. The Kinsmen Club had 16,000. Yet its impact was far-reaching.
It launched the first recycling drive of its kind, a 1971 campaign to collect a million discarded Toronto telephone directories. It created the Canadian Environmental Law Association in 1972, still indispensable after all these years. It warned Canadians we were poisoning our lakes and streams – a phenomenon dramatized when Lake Erie’s Cuyahoga River caught on fire in 1969.
“One of the impressive things was they couldn’t be dismissed as sort of hairy radicals,” one U of T faculty member tells O’Connor. “They were all so conformist looking.” Pollution Probe organizers had neat haircuts and wore ties and knew how to write a press release.
O’Connor, a research associate at Trent University, traces environmental activism in this country from a TV documentary, a 1967 CBC film called Air Of Death. There were earlier attempts, of course: U.S. author Rachel Carson’s 1962 work Silent Spring made Canadian bestseller lists and a 1960 National Film Board production Poisons, Pests & People savaged the use of farm pesticides, but was withdrawn from distribution amid industry protest.
Air Of Death was more dramatic. It preempted the Ed Sullivan Show, drawing a national audience of 1.5 million. The documentary chronicled the poisoning of crops and cattle by a phosphate plant near Dunville, Ont. on Lake Erie. “Something mysterious burned the peppers, burned the fruit, dwarfed and shriveled the grains,” filmmakers reported; “Cattle lie down and die.” The poison was fluorine. The plant’s operator, Electric Reduction Co., quietly paid out $198,000 in damages to nearby farmers, the equivalent of $1.3 million today.
“Every day your lungs inhale fifteen thousand quarts of air and poison,” viewers were told. “Death has been gathering in the air in every Canadian city.” The documentary would be startling even if broadcast today. In 1967 it was hypnotic.
O’Connor credits the film with inspiring an entire generation of publicity-wise Canadian activists. Their work had such an impact that by 1970 the leader of the federal Progressive Conservative party made sure to be photographed wearing a Pollution Probe button.
The First Green Wave is lively and provocative, nostalgic and compelling. Professor O’Connor recounts the words of Toronto’s parks superintendent, caught sanctioning the use of pesticides so lethal they killed mallards that washed up on a Lake Ontario beach. “It’s either that or have the trees dying and people getting covered in slimy caterpillars,” he said.
By Holly Doan
The First Green Wave: Pollution Probe & The Origins Of Environmental Activism In Ontario, by Ryan O’Connor; University of British Columbia Press; 264 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-28093; $29.95
The Department of Environment is tracking the location of more than 715,000 Canadians who downloaded what ex-Minister Catherine McKenna once called a “super cool” weather app, records show. Staff said they also collected users’ email addresses but insisted the data scoop complied with privacy law: “Oh yes!!”
Members of the Senate communications committee are demanding cabinet spell out regulations under a YouTube bill that passed the Commons Tuesday by a 208 to 117 vote. Senators balked at demands they first pass the bill and see details later: “It will affect potentially every single Canadian who uses the internet.”
Parliament yesterday gave speedy passage to a cabinet bill to close the “extreme intoxication” defence. The cabinet bill was prompted by a Supreme Court decision six weeks ago: “It is our duty as parliamentarians to move quickly to solve problems.”
