Canada’s costliest renovation project will be late and over budget, Department of Public Works figures show. Parliament’s iconic Centre Block closed January 28, 2019 for a promised ten-year refit at $3.04 billion. Construction has now expanded to 12 years at up to $5 billion: “Am I missing something?”
Québec Premier François Legault yesterday dropped plans to introduce the nation’s first pandemic tax amid ongoing truckers’ protests against vaccine mandates. The concession came as Freedom Convoy blockaders planned a demonstration at the Québec legislature: “They want to be heard.”
More than 200,000 mail-in ballots sent to voters in the last federal election were not counted, Elections Canada disclosed yesterday. The number of ballot kits that were late, cancelled or marked as lost in the mail was greater than the margin of victory: “We are deeply sorry.”
The Canada Revenue Agency falsely accused Freedom Convoy protesters of ransacking office buildings. The Agency yesterday would not comment after spreading fake news that angry truck drivers had run amok in downtown Ottawa. The report was among several that falsely claimed protests had turned violent: “The biggest challenges facing our future will be the restoration of public confidence in institutions such as the media and government.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday said Freedom Convoy protesters must go home after days of demonstrations at Parliament Hill. Trudeau made the comment after describing truckers as “tin foil hats” deserving of public disgust: “What is needed is for people to go home.”
Canada’s chief public health officer is refusing to appear for questioning at the Commons ethics committee. MPs had asked Dr. Theresa Tam to explain a data scoop that saw the Public Health Agency collect information on 33 million cellphone users: “That’s not a small thing.”
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s department confirms more exemptions from renewable fuel regulations that would hike the price of gasoline and diesel. Exemptions were meant to “address affordability concerns,” said a briefing note: “The Clean Fuel Standard has been narrowed.”
The Freedom Convoy truck drivers’ protest rally today prompted Transport Minister Omar Alghabra to abruptly cancel a scheduled personal appearance on Parliament Hill. It followed attendance at the rally of one speaker who’d called Alghabra a terrorist: “The hysteria gripping our society is reaching new heights.”
Federal employees who declined vaccination say they have been ridiculed, harassed and threatened. Workers in a lawyers’ letter to the Treasury Board said suspending unimmunized staff without pay amounted to wrongful dismissal: “There are many reasonable and practical alternatives.”
Cabinet will enact an animal cruelty prevention bill to abolish cosmetic testing on live mammals like albino rabbits, says the Department of Health. A Senate bill to ban the practice lapsed in 2019: “In this day and age we have to find alternatives.”
Truckers and cabinet members alike are “all in the same convoy,” says Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos. The Minister declined to speak with protesters demonstrating on Parliament Hill against his vaccine orders, but told reporters: “We’re all tired.”
Federal call centres still cannot keep up with Employment Insurance claims despite spending more than $620 million on a promise of better service, say MPs. Members of the Commons human resources committee said they would investigate complaints of lengthy wait times: “There is nothing that can explain why.”
Applicants for Summer Jobs program
must check a box on the form.
Agree with women’s right to abortion.
I read the job description
of a military chaplain.
Advise on ethical dilemmas,
spiritual and moral issues.
Provide care after major life incidents.
Not a word on reproductive freedom.
No box to check.
How would Liberals assure
the Chaplain agrees with the Charter?
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)
If you accept money is the great divider in life – not race, gender or religion – any history of money should expose the core of the Canadian story. It is, and this does. Financial historians Christopher Kobrak and Joe Martin of the Rotman School of Management chronicle 300 years of money in Canada with an account rich in anecdotes and telling in its findings.
Canada today is one of the few English-speaking countries with a central bank that is taxpayer-owned. It was money that smashed the two-party system in Parliament a century ago, and regulation that saved Canadians from a sub-Arctic version of the 2008 panic.
“Canadians have more faith in their political and financial elites’ ability to find socially useful compromises between the rights of creditors and debtors,” authors note in From Wall Street To Bay Street. “Perhaps most importantly, Canadians from their earliest history seemed quite willing to learn from the vigour and foibles of their southern neighbour.” When Canada federalized banking in the Confederation era, legislators were “well aware of the strife and troubles south of the border.” In 1860 the United States had 1,562 banks. Canada had sixteen.
From Wall Street To Bay Street moves at a smart clip with quirky research. Who knew colonial Québec used playing cards as currency, or that the Spanish silver dollar was the most commonly circulated coin in Nova Scotia in 1790?
From 1869 the first Bank Act was introduced, ghostwritten by the general manager of the Bank of Montreal. Banks then and now were powerful in Canada, but not all-powerful. Canada in its first 50 years saw numerous bank failures – seven alone in 1907 – and a rise of political parties devoted to controlling banks including Progressives, Social Creditors and CCFers.
Illustrative of the Canadian story is one of the great High Noon moments in banking on December 14, 1998, when then-Finance Minister Paul Martin vetoed proposed mergers of four big banks – the Royal and Montreal, and CIBC and Scotiabank – into two super-banks with billions in assets. It was “because of a concern about creating banks ‘too big to fail’,” authors note. The decision proved prescient when U.S. bank bailouts occurred a decade later.
The history of money is a history of people. The 1920s did not roar in Canada, authors explain. The collapse of the wheat boom saw the economy shrink by 13 percent in a single year, 1921. And the savagery of the Depression produced statistics that still horrify.
In Saskatchewan in the 1930s, average incomes fell 72 percent. Unemployment in Windsor, Ont. peaked at 50 percent. In Manitoba, then one of the world’s largest wheat exporters to Europe, prices fell to 33 cents a bushel, a valuation not seen since the Middle Ages.
Through the sweat and tears, authors document a uniquely Canadian story footnoted by a singular fact: Canada remains a nation where bankers do not enjoy celebrity status. Very few could name the governor of the Bank of Canada. Many more could name the minister of finance.
By Holly Doan
From Wall Street to Bay Street, by Christopher Kobrak and Joe Martin; University of Toronto Press; 370 pages; ISBN 9781-4426-16257; $34.95
MPs yesterday accused media of vilifying protesters attending a Freedom Convoy truckers’ rally on Parliament Hill. Reporters at a press briefing described various demonstrators as bigots: “Establishment media have been looking for controversies with some of these truckers.”
