Employees used government-issue credit cards to buy personality tests on the internet, Department of Canadian Heritage accounts show. The department defended the practice as team building: “It is to support the training and development activities.”
Pandemic wage subsidies to large corporations averaged a quarter million, according to Canada Revenue Agency records. Applicants had a 99 percent chance of being approved under a program Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland called essential to recovery: “That has been one of the most important measures.”
Most provinces, six out of ten, failed to increase their number of intensive care unit hospital beds from the outbreak of the pandemic, according to the Department of Health. Figures show provinces either cut capacity or left it unchanged despite billions in federal transfers: ‘Funding was committed to address capacity and backlogs.’
A federal agency yesterday declined comment on a project manager who publicly boasted of joining counter protests against the Freedom Convoy and called truckers anti-Trudeau roughnecks. Federal guides state employees must be politically neutral: ‘As a sturdily built white male I could blend in.’
Military spending will increase in Thursday’s budget, Defence Minister Anita Anand yesterday told the Senate national security committee. The pledge came despite a cabinet promise to cut billions from the deficit: “We are increasing our defence spending.”
Cabinet must stop deficit spending, the Commons finance committee yesterday wrote in a report. MPs recommended cabinet “present as soon as possible a plan to return to a balanced budget” as the first of 222 recommendations on finances: “What are we looking at as a country?”
The image of policing is so poor applications to the RCMP have plummeted, the Commons human resources committee was told yesterday. Almost a third of those who do apply and are accepted never bother to finish training, said the National Police Federation: “Policing is no longer considered as attractive a career as it used to be.”
Hurried Covid contracting and outright theft of Public Health Agency supplies cost taxpayers more than $106 million, records show. The Agency said it did its best: “We are moving as quickly as possible to wire transfer money now.”
The Canadian Journalism Foundation is nominating for an “excellence award” disputed accounts of an anti-pipeline protest. A federal memo contradicts media versions of the 2021 arrest of a reporter for The Narwhal, a subsidized environmental advocacy website: “My arrest actually makes me a big part of a national reckoning with press freedoms.”
A majority of Canadians support cuts to the number of mail delivery days to three a week if it saves money at the post office, says in-house Privy Council Office research. Cabinet in the past six years has spent $4.5 million polling questions about Canada Post, records show: “We were not aware of the polling.”
The Department of Canadian Heritage denies contract splitting in a case of $42,000 divvied into 22 separate payments to a favoured supplier. The limit on contracts that may be issued without public notice is $40,000: “The vendor submitted individual invoices per days worked.”
The Department of Industry acknowledges higher risks of default under a proposal to issue taxpayer-guaranteed lines of credit for small business. “Lines of credit are assumed to have a higher loss rate than term loans,” about 50 percent higher, the department said: “Small businesses have evolved.”
Trail, B.C. produced the 1939 World Ice Hockey Champion Smoke Eaters, longtime Canadian Labour Congress president Ken Georgetti, NHL All Star Ray Ferraro and historian Ron Verzuh, a smelter worker’s son who clocked hours at the Cominco mill in its heyday and became a gifted chronicler of the nation’s labour history. “If there was ever a workplace that would persuade me to return to school it was the lead furnaces,” writes Verzuh.
Smelter Wars through meticulous research and a warm narrative documents tensions between managers in a company town and the Communist-led Local 480 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. It is also more than that.
Verzuh recaptures an era when home for most Canadians meant a thriving place far from the big cities. It’s not that Trail was off the beaten path; there was no path. The Trans-Canada Highway was not complete until 1962. Years later when Brian Mulroney famously campaigned on the slogan that Canada was a land of “small towns and big dreams” it touched a nostalgic chord with many voters.
Trail was a thrifty Catholic town home to the Cristoforo Colombo Lodge where members recalled the 1931 Vatican degree to beware “the tenets of socialism,” recalls Verzuh: “Many had come from Catholic countries with strong antipathies to leftist ideology. Parents conveyed Old Country convictions to their sons and daughters.”
It had its own radio station where the assistant mill manager gave a 1948 fireside chat entitled Your Union And You. “Very skillfully and highly organized efforts are being made to bring your locals under Communist domination,” listeners were told.
Trail had its own Daily Times with advertised specials at the company store – the shop was finally sold to Hudson’s Bay in 1951 – and newspaper editorials that warned readers “Communist agitators” could only ruin town life for millworkers who never had it so good. This was not all propaganda, writes Verzuh.
“Workers tended to respect the company,” he writes. “It had been instrumental in establishing and transforming Trail into a relatively well-endowed city that provided steady incomes.”
Workers even in recession years could buy automobiles and enjoy Saturday dances with the Kootenay Boys Orchestra at the Legion Hall. The company built the Smoke Eaters’ rink and ran a company health plan. In 1938 it gave every millworker a free turkey and cash bonus, $50 for married men – that’s the modern equivalent of $953 – and $35 for bachelors.
Of course it wasn’t all fat bonuses and free turkey. The Local 480 newspaper the Commentator captured the sentiment in a wry poem:
We never speak of workers’ rights,
We vote for the Company union.
They tell us that it leads to fights,
So I vote for the Company union.
The Company has always said
That men who talk like that are ‘Red,’
We listen to the boss instead
And vote for the Company union.
The town plutocrat was Selwyn Blaylock, Mr. Blaylock. “It was always ‘Mr.,’” recalls Verzuh. He lived in a house so big they later turned it into a hotel. Saturday Night magazine once hailed Blaylock as Canada’s Henry Ford, a proponent of the high-wage, no-union school of management. “Could we not have a few more men like S.G. Blaylock helping to turn each industrial centre into a workingman’s paradise?” asked the magazine.
“Your company is your friend,” Blaylock explained in one speech. “If trouble comes to you it will do its utmost to help you as it has helped hundreds of your fellows in the past.”
When Blaylock spotted an anti-labour article in Liberty magazine he enjoyed it so much that managers were instructed to distribute copies at the mill. It featured “a Frankenstein-like figure stomping on buildings and destroying everything in his wake,” writes Verzuh, a caricature of a church-hating Bolshevik monster: “Across his bare chest was stamped the word ‘Lawlessness.’”
Local 480 “was just barely accepted in Trail,” says Smelter Wars. “Close to half of the more than five thousand smelter workers and their spouses consistently rejected the Communist-led local, many preferring Blaylock’s ‘one big happy family.’”
Today the Cold War battles are forgotten but for local murals that capture the past. The Trail of Verzuh’s boyhood is a different place, “a sleepy provincial town” with retirees, great fishing and a fraction of its old smelter workforce. “The smoke emanating from the smelter stacks is less toxic these days although the company still faces the occasional fine for polluting northern Washington State,” he writes.
“The prospect of a labour movement able to challenge modern day capitalism seems more and more to a bygone era,” says Verzuh, wistfully. Smelter Wars is the story of the era. The book is wonderful.
By Holly Doan
Smelter Wars: A Rebellious Red Trade Union Fights for Its Life in Wartime Western Canada, by Ron Verzuh; University of Toronto Press; 372 pages; ISBN 14875-41125; $34.95
Cabinet conducted pre-election polling on vaccine mandates that found they were most divisive in regions where Liberals held few seats. The confidential polling was finalized only days before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a snap election, records show: ‘Atlantic Canada indicated unanimous support for requiring proof of vaccination for domestic flights; Alberta and Saskatchewan were unanimous in opposing this idea.’
Inflation is likely to remain high and climb even higher, Statistics Canada yesterday told the Commons finance committee. Analysts said they will change methods used to account for some price gains that explain the difference between Canadian and U.S. rates: “Thirty years I’ve worked at Statistics Canada and I can tell you we haven’t been through an economic period like this.”
