About a tenth of federal historical designations approved since 1919 will be purged or rewritten including numerous tributes to John A. Macdonald, records show. Revisionism follows a cabinet order to delete history deemed to celebrate colonialism: “Nothing can be immune from review.”
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s department said it has not yet finalized definitions to fulfill a promised ban on “inefficient” oil and gas subsidies. The work has been ongoing for seven years: “There is no simple set of words.”
A Workers’ Compensation Board has been ordered to reconsider suicide as a workplace fatality. The ruling came in the case of a Saskatchewan policeman distraught after attending so many grisly crimes and accident scenes colleagues nicknamed him “Captain Death.”
Historic references to Pocahontas will be removed from signage at an Alberta forest, managers at Parks Canada said yesterday. Removing other names considered dated or awkward will take time, said the agency: ‘We encourage Canadians to educate themselves on Canada’s brutal history.’
The Department of Public Safety is contradicting dramatic media accounts of reporters’ arrests at a British Columbia First Nations protest. Staff to Minister Marco Mendicino said media omitted contradictory facts in accusing RCMP of misconduct: “The video does not show what occurred.”
Protesters in a cross-country Freedom Convoy to Ottawa are a “small fringe minority” with opinions most Canadians oppose, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said yesterday. Organizers of the truckers’ rally called the remarks sad: “It’s the political class that has abandoned us all.”
The cost of living will run higher than the Bank of Canada predicted just weeks ago, Governor Tiff Macklem said yesterday. Inflation rates already “uncomfortably high” will top five percent, according to the latest rewritten forecast: “What is it that has made inflation so difficult to predict?”
The Department of Health paid a Chinese manufacturer for more than $11 million worth of vaccine syringes, according to Access To Information records. The disclosure comes ahead of Monday’s deadline to begin a federal boycott of China-made medical supplies at federal offices nationwide: “We’ve signed a contract for millions of syringes.”
Visible minorities earn as much as a tenth more than White men, Statistics Canada said yesterday. Minorities were also likelier to live in big cities, achieve university degrees and remain single without children: “More than 60 percent of Korean and Chinese men and more than 40 percent of Arab, West Asian, Japanese and South Asian men had a university degree compared with 24 percent of white men.”
Subsidized newspapers face hard times without more federal concessions, a publishers’ lobbyist has written MPs. Jamie Irving of New Brunswick’s billionaire Irving family said dailies are in dire shape despite hundreds of millions in taxpayers’ grants: “News publishers are facing an existential threat.”
China’s Winter Olympics “remain a priority for international diplomacy,” says a Department of Canadian Heritage briefing note. MPs voted unanimously to petition to relocate the Games from Beijing in protest over human rights atrocities: “I don’t think the athletes are concerned,”
Politicians may not be privately prosecuted for vaccine mandates, a judge has ruled. The decision came in the case of an Ottawa man who tried to file claims against Ontario Premier Doug Ford under an obscure section of the Criminal Code: “None of this has an air of reality.”
The Commissioner of Elections yesterday confirmed a Calgary MP is the first member of the 44th Parliament to be censured for breach of the Elections Act. Liberal George Chahal (Calgary Skyview) was videotaped stealing a rival candidate’s mailbox literature: ‘It can contribute to a loss of public confidence in the political class.’
The Department of Natural Resources yesterday said it is contracting tree experts to fulfill a forestry promise made by cabinet two elections ago. Then-Environment Minister Catherine McKenna in 2019 promised to create thousands of jobs planting billions of trees: “We harvest less than one percent of our forests in Canada.”
Canada’s official inflation rate reflects only a fraction of true increases in the cost of living, a former chief analyst with Statistics Canada said yesterday. Actual inflation is much higher than StatsCan’s benchmark Consumer Price Index, the Commons finance committee was told: “I am sure the inflation rate in Canada is much higher than 4.8 percent.”
