A $735,000 kitchen renovation at the Prime Minister’s official lake property was more elaborate than a mere cooking area, says the Department of Public Works. It also included a pantry, staff told the Commons government operations committee: “These investments are important.”
More than a quarter million federal employees continue to work from home, data show. Cabinet has set no deadline to have all staff return to the office: “I think it’s important to understand the magnitude.”
More taxpayers’ aid is needed to meet climate change targets, says the CEO of a company that received a $27.2 million subsidy for small nuclear reactors. The Department of Industry to date has spent $97.7 million on miniature reactors though none are in actual use: “Federal support will continue to be critical.”
Along the highway,
an excavator
is uprooting trees
for road construction.
The company’s name –
white letters on the hydraulic arm –
is visible from a distance.
Greenbelt.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, writes for Blacklock’s each and every Sunday).
So much Canadian literature is to history what McLobster is to shellfish, an ersatz experience in which facts are processed to the point of blandness. It fills but never satisfies, and makes you pity those who never tasted the real thing.
And then there is this gem by historian Carmen J. Nielson of Mount Royal University. Private Women documents social welfare on the frontier. The narrative turns on a specific time and place – Hamilton, Ont., circa 1850 – but it could be Anytown Canada in the age before government initiatives. This is history no TV producer could re-enact. The film set would be raided by the Children’s Aid Society.
Hamilton in 1846 was a brawling port of Protestant burghers and Catholic labourers that prided itself as the Manchester of Upper Canada. It was home to mills and factories, a steamboat landing and the Great Western Railway, three newspapers and periodic outbreaks of cholera.
The alleys were filthy and poverty was desperate. Professor Nielson notes the only public welfare institution was the local jail: “No formal state provisions had been made for coping with destitute individuals, so responsibility for poor relief most often fell to churches or private individuals and less often to magistrates and local governments.”
The result was appalling. Whole families scavenged for food. Children were apprenticed to mills at age 8. Mothers stole bread and firewood. In 1846 amid the squalor a group of 48 wives and mothers, all “white, middle-class Protestant women,” formed a Ladies’ Benevolent Society with a single purpose: “The investigation and relief of cases of distress and destitution from sickness, poverty or similar causes.”
Members paid a subscription fee of five shillings and were assigned to different wards of the city to mind the destitute. They distributed groceries and counselled orphans and runaways who wandered the streets of the city. The Ladies’ Benevolent Society was almost revolutionary, Nielson writes. For centuries charity was considered the public duty of the very rich. Benevolent societies of the Dickens era were modeled on the concept of the joint stock company.
“Western capitalists with relatively small amounts of money to invest recognized if they pooled their resources they could finance projects that required very large investments, such as building canals and bridges,” Nielson writes. So it was that charitable societies “allowed men and women of the new middle classes to subscribe relatively small sums of money to undertake significant benevolent endeavours.”
From 1848 the ladies of Hamilton operated a day school and orphanage and later an old folks’ home. Private Women is richly researched and recounts those who passed through the doors: Willie, a drunkard’s son, “totally neglected”; Harriet, a girl whose mother’s character “is not good” and was known to police – a prostitute, perhaps; and Jimmy, an incorrigible delinquent taken in by the Orphan’s Home but expelled within days for trying to “corrupt the other boys.”
Jimmy’s sins are lost to history. Was it smoking? Drinking? Playing Three-Card Monte? The boy was driven out and last seen “wandering the streets” of Hamilton.
The regimen at the orphanage was plain and purposeful: Rise at 6, prayers and breakfast, an hour of play, lessons till 5 pm, bedtime at 7. Beatings were uncommon. Children were taught useful skills in the kitchen and workshop.
In time such private charities were overtaken by government aid. Ontario passed an Industrial Schools Act in 1874 and a Children’s Aid Act in 1893. The Hamilton orphanage closed in 1914 and today is forgotten but for Private Women, a compelling account of hardship and charity too raw for textbook processing.
By Holly Doan
Private Women And The Public Good, by Carmen J. Nielson; University of British Columbia Press; 176 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-16921; $24.95
Millions of Canadians are drawing down savings or borrowing money to meet household expenses, Statistics Canada said yesterday. New data came as the Commons agriculture committee opened hearings on food prices and supply: “27 percent reported they had to borrow money from friends or relatives, take on debt or use credit to meet day to day expenses.”
Ambassador Reid Sirrs and staff failed Canada in Kabul, say MPs. “The risks were known,” said a Commons committee report that expressed puzzlement over diplomats’ failure to help fellow Canadians and Afghan allies escape the Taliban before saving themselves: “The way Canada left Afghanistan in August was a betrayal.”
Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino yesterday served notice he will attempt to speed passage of a bill to freeze national handgun sales. Cabinet asked MPs to pass the bill without any committee hearings or testimony from gun owners, police or the public: “Pass this bill as quickly as possible.”
Thirty percent of mortgage buyers are at risk from rising interest rates, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem said yesterday. The warning came as Bank data showed the typical Canadian grew their net worth an average $230,000 last year with the historic run-up in real estate prices: “More Canadians have stretched to buy a house.”
Parliament must spend billions more on the military if Canada is to meet its NATO commitments, the Budget Office said yesterday. A large gap remained even when counting as military expenses the Coast Guard budget and employee pensions: “Canada would need to spend an additional $18.2 billion in 2022.”
Nearly a quarter of Canadians disapprove of the CRTC, according to in-house research. The rise in the agency’s unfavourable ratings coincided with cabinet attempts to have the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission regulate the internet: “Where opinion has changed it has declined significantly.”
Demand for oil will remain constant through 2030, says the Department of Environment. It follows a similar earlier forecast from a separate federal department that Canadians will rely on oil and gas for “years to come.”
A seventh wave of Covid infection is “very likely” after Labour Day into next winter, the chief public health officer said yesterday. Dr. Theresa Tam said Canadians should prepare for the pandemic to continue into 2023: “We think it is very likely we will get some more viral activity in the future.”
Enough is enough with vulgar lyrics in prime time music, a national radio ombudsman has ruled. The Canada Broadcast Standards Council yesterday cited a Québec City station for playing pop tunes with expletives at eight o’clock in the morning: “Even if a station’s music targets a younger audience there is always a choice to be made.”
A federal judge has reopened an investigation into racial discrimination in the Senate. It follows the 2015 firing of the first South Asian to be appointed a manager in Senate administration: “Matters regarding employment cannot be taken lightly.”
