A fifth of the federal cabinet will testify at the Freedom Convoy inquiry, investigators said yesterday. Eight of 39 cabinet members will be cross-examined under oath on why they invoked the Emergencies Act against protesters outside Parliament: “The issue is not whether it helped the police but whether the powers they already had could have resolved the problem.”
A now-retired judge enrolled in a charity scheme subsequently shut down by the Canada Revenue Agency as a tax shelter, records show. Documents filed in a Tax Court dispute indicate David Crane signed the charity papers in his chambers while a presiding judge at Superior Court in Hamilton, Ont.: “I did business and I was deceived.”
Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino’s department censored hundreds of pages of documents sought by MPs reviewing security measures against the Freedom Convoy. “It makes no sense,” said Bloc Québécois MP Rhéal Fortin (Riviere-du-Nord, Que.): “Look at the documents we received here.”
The federal spy agency in a secret memo discounted cabinet claims the Freedom Convoy was infiltrated by Nazis. A lone swastika flag spotted outside Parliament was offensive but not representative of protesters who considered themselves “patriotic Canadians standing up for their democratic rights,” said the Canadian Security Intelligence Service: “Only a small, fringe element supports the use of violence or might be willing to engage in it.”
Internal Privy Council polling shows most Canadians are weary of federal pandemic management. “Several felt the federal approach at present lacked direction,” cabinet was told: “More participants felt the federal government was performing worse.”
Cabinet will not name federal officials that approved funding for an anti-Semite who fantasized on Twitter about shooting Jews. Diversity Minister Ahmed Hussen told the Commons heritage committee he was not personally to blame: “We trusted at that time that adequate vetting had been completed.”
A change in immigration rules will see half a million foreign students eligible to work full time in Canada. “It’s good for our economy,” Immigration Minister Sean Fraser told the Commons: “It is a great day for international students.”
We are grateful this holiday to friends and subscribers for your support as Blacklock’s embarks on an 11th great year of independent, all-original Canadian journalism. On behalf of all our contributors, please accept our thanks. We’re back tomorrow — The Editor.
Hitler’s publicist once spent the winter in Red Rock, Ont., humming the Horst Wessel Song and cursing his fate. In the carnival of Canadian oddities, none is more curious than The Little Third Reich On Lake Superior. Historian Ernest Zimmerman of Lakehead University chronicles the strange events that saw 1,150 men and boys – Jews and Nazis alike – herded into bunkhouses northeast of Thunder Bay in the winter of 1940.
It was a “third-rate jungle prison,” one inmate recalled. Another complained it was like being kidnapped and dragged into the wilderness. “They deeply resented the treatment,” Zimmerman writes. “They resented being in foreign surroundings, away from home, and being treated as prisoners of war rather than refugees.”
Professor Zimmerman died in 2008, still working on his manuscript. His drafts and notes were compiled into this lively chronice by two Lakehead historians, Michel Beaulieu and David Ratz.
On May 30, 1940 Britain’s wartime cabinet asked Canada to take 35,000 enemy aliens off its hands. Note the date: German U-boats were prowling the Atlantic; Norway, France and the Low Countries had fallen to the Nazis; Britain feared imminent attack. “The rationale was that in the event of a German invasion, the threat of a ‘fifth column’ would be reduced,” Zimmerman writes.
Deportees were a mix of merchant sailors, Hitler youth, Jewish refugees and pretty much anyone with a German passport now branded a security risk. “Instead of using the deportation as an opportunity to distinguish real Nazis from actual non-Nazis, the selection process for deportation degenerated into a ‘mere juggling of numbers, as if a train timetable were being arranged, and not the disposition of human beings,’” notes Little Third Reich.
They were banished to Québec City aboard the Canadian Pacific liner Duchess Of York and put on a passenger train for the two-day journey to internment at an abandoned paper mill. Little Third Reich counts 26 such camps nationwide from Kananaskis Park in Alberta to Montréal’s St. Helen’s Island, future site of Expo 67. None were bigger than Camp R at Red Rock.
Refugees and Nazis “viewed each other with ‘horror and loathing’,” Zimmerman writes, yet camp life settled into a passable routine with few incidents save occasional fistfights and crude score-settling. When the camp commander ordered kitchen staff to prepare a kosher meal for Chanukah, Nazi cooks instead served bacon. “In general there is a fairly friendly atmosphere in the camp,” a visiting officer wrote. “However, there will always be tension while there are two intensely hostile groups.”
Inmates had radios and movie nights, swam in Lake Superior and organized boxing tournaments and a brass band. Food was plentiful – “never the same soup two days in a row” – and prisoners whiled away the hours at a woodshop making handicrafts to sell in the drugstore at nearby Nipigon, Ont. Ships in a bottle sold for $1.75. “There is just no variety at all,” lamented one inmate. “Every day, roll call, meals, another roll call, bed. You lose your sense of time.” There were worse ways to spend the war.
Camp R was home to minor celebrities. Inmates included a cousin of the Red Baron, a foreign correspondent for the liberal daily Vossische Zeitung, the first newspaper to serialize the anti-war novel All Quiet On The Western Front, and Ernst Hanfstaengl, a Bavarian bon vivant who’d served as publicity agent for Adolf Hitler in the early years and claimed to have invented the salute “Sieg Heil.”
The camp lasted sixteen months, a peculiar corner of the war in Northern Ontario. No plaque marks the site.
By Holly Doan
The Little Third Reich On Lake Superior by Ernest R. Zimmerman; University of Alberta Press; 384 pages; ISBN 9780-8886-46736; $29.95
Peter Sloly, former Ottawa police chief, last night said Freedom Convoy demonstrators were told by local law enforcement they could park outside Parliament. Testifying at committee, Sloly said it was only when truckers declined to leave after a few days that the protest became what he called a “national security crisis.”
Inflation in Canada is now home grown, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem said yesterday. Macklem and others for months had blamed rising costs on global developments: “Increasingly the inflation we’re seeing in Canada reflects what’s going on in Canada.”
Big publishers and TV networks including the CBC are up for more than a third of a billion a year under cabinet’s Bill C-18, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. Independent publishers opposed to the bill have called it another federal subsidy for distrusted media: “We expect news businesses to receive total compensation around $329.2 million per year.”
The Department of Fisheries yesterday said it has no plans for an Atlantic seal cull despite repeated appeals from MPs and senators. Legislators from Atlantic Canada have sought a cull over complaints predatory seals eat too many fish: “The department is not looking at a seal population control program at this time.”
There is no guarantee a cabinet bill expanding bilingual mandates to the private sector will halt the decline in French, Languages Commissioner Raymond Théberge said yesterday. MPs at the Commons languages committee questioned how the mandate would apply in cities like Regina where francophones are outnumbered 200 to 1: “If we don’t do anything the decline will continue.”
Records show the head of the federal public service, then-Privy Council Clerk Ian Shugart, certified a copy of an “April 31” website notice used to mislead a federal judge in a trademarks dispute. The notice included a “date modified” entry of April 31, 2017. April does not have 31 days: “There appears to have been a misunderstanding.”
