Canada is witnessing a decline in “democratic norms” and the “rule of law,” says a Law Commission report. Findings were drawn from interviews with MPs and senators, judges, lawyers and scholars: “Public institutions do not work unless they are reviewed and accountable.”
The RCMP in a secret 1981 memo feared Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed could lead the West out of Confederation. Western separatism “lacks a dynamic leader” but might succeed with a charismatic organizer like Lougheed, wrote the Mounties counter-terrorism unit: “If Lougheed or someone of his stature agitates for Western independence, it could become a reality.”
A federal employee suspended after declining a Covid vaccination has won back pay and $5,000 in damages. The Department of Public Safety employee was owed compensation for “loss of dignity,” a labour board ruled: ‘We have over 350 cases like these.’
Atop a hill overlooking the Rideau River on Ottawa’s Charlotte Street stood a mansion that had its share of drama. It saw a sensational spy scandal and a suspicious fire.
Custom-built for a lumber baron’s son, John Frederick Booth, the home was cast in the ornate Queen Anne Revival style in 1917. The architect was John W.H. Watts, a former Department of Public Works designer who turned to building expensive homes for Ottawa’s elite.
The house was a baronial retreat for one of the city’s wealthiest families. Here Booth married off his only daughter to a Danish prince in 1924. It was after Booth’s death that the house at 285 Charlotte Street achieved international notoriety.
In 1942 the Government of Canada purchased it from Booth’s heirs for use by the USSR as an embassy. Prime Minister Mackenzie King would call it “a place of intrigue.” From the day the Russians opened the mission, the house on Charlotte Street “was almost immediately used as a source for espionage,” wrote one historian.
Here on September 5, 1945 cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko fled with enough secret cables to send eight Canadian spies to prison including MP Fred Rose. Gouzenko was sentenced to death in absentia by the Soviet Supreme Court. He spent the rest of his years hiding in southern Ontario under the pseudonym “Mister Sabotka.”
On New Year’s Day 1956 the Charlotte Street mansion burned to the ground. The cause was undetermined. Fire crews agreed the building might have been saved if only embassy staff had not blocked their entry. Instead, the Russians let the flames spread as they hurriedly carted boxes of secret documents to awaiting cars.
The Soviets, it turned out, had much to hide. KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin recounted in his 1999 memoirs The Mitrokhin Archive: “Between 1951 and 1953 the Ottawa legal residency, spurred on by Moscow’s criticism of its inertia since the defection of Gouzenko, recruited eleven agents.”
They stole the plans for the Avro Arrow and recruited Laval economist Hugh Hambleton as a Soviet agent, Mitrokhin wrote. They planted an agent in the RCMP and secretly financed the Canadian Communist Party with funds code named “U.S. wheat.” In a spy operation nicknamed Operation Cedar, the Soviets scouted areas to sabotage oil and gas pipeline installations from British Columbia to Quebec, and arranged an agents’ rendezvous at Lake of the Woods on the Minnesota border.
Only years afterward, with KGB defections and the collapse of the U.S.S.R., was the extent of Soviet skullduggery on Charlotte Street finally revealed. And today? The address at No. 285 remains the Embassy of Russia, rebuilt in 1957 as a grey Stalinist bunker.
By Andrew Elliott
Every hometown has its triumphs and tragedies, but few produce writers as evocative as Professor Jonathan Vance of Western University, one of the most skillful Canadian historians of his generation. Vance chronicles his town’s collision with the First World War, a fascination born in Vance’s youth when he walked door to door as a hydro meter reader in the Township of East Flamborough and spoke to ordinary neighbours with extraordinary experiences.
“The statistics say that about 8 percent of its population served in uniform and about 1 percent died – or , if you prefer raw numbers, 210 out of 2,400 served and 28 died,” writes Vance. “But how much do those numbers actually reveal?”
“Its experience was replicated countless times across rural Canada,” says A Township At War. “Through English Canada were similar townships; the names were different and the geography certainly varied, but there were fundamental commonalities in how the people interacted with each other, the country and the world.”
Professor Vance’s hometown was Waterdown, Ont., population 756, long since swallowed by suburban sprawl. Waterdown was founded by a miller with 11 children. The main drag was Dundas Street, an old coach road dating from the 18th century. The town was small, self-sufficient and hardworking.
At war’s outbreak in 1914, the taproom at the local Kirk Hotel changed the name of Dawes Konigsbier to Kingsbeer, and the local paper published a phonetic guide to faraway place names like Sar-a-yav-o, where they shot an Austrian archduke. The local Women’s Institute raised $140 to help build a hospital ship. One Waterdown native, Leo Clarke, won the Victoria Cross for killing 19 Germans in hand-to-hand combat at the Battle of the Somme.
Waterdown’s war ended in conscription and coal shortages and many deaths. VC Clarke was killed in combat. By 1918 the local weekly was publishing soldiers’ obituaries two and three at a time, boys like Campbell, who studied mechanical engineering, and Gillies, one of the first to volunteer in 1914, and Hunter, killed at Vimy, one of three brothers to die on the Western Front.
There was Mrs. Springer, who lost one son to war, another to pneumonia, and a husband who died from injuries suffered in an auto wreck. And there was Dougherty, who enlisted at 15 then was branded a deserter. They found his body in a reservoir, an apparent suicide.
Professor Vance recalls speaking with the township’s last surviving veteran, Clare Laking, 102, a $6 a week bank clerk when he volunteered as a signaler with the Canadian Field Artillery. “It wasn’t a complicated job,” Laking recalled: “The machine gun bullets would zzz,zzz,zzz all around us. I’d flop to the ground, string out the wire, and run another twenty yards before I’d flop to the ground and string out more wire.”
“As he talks the years fall away,” writes Vance. “His recollections are so vivid that the village I had known since childhood starts to change in my mind. Gone are the strip malls and subdivisions, the fast food joints and traffic lights, the big box stores and skateboard parks. In their place, the Waterdown of Clare’s youth takes shape. Coming into focus are horse-drawn buggies and high, starched collars, barefoot boys in wide-brimmed hats scampering down a dirt street to the creek.”
A Township At War is a beautiful book.
By Holly Doan
A Township At War by Jonathan Vance; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 308 pages; ISBN 9781-7711-23860; $27.99
Bonuses for federal executives averaged nearly $18,000 in 2024, according to figures detailed in a year-end briefing note. Updated numbers on 2025 bonuses are due shortly, said the Treasury Board: “How does it work in the public sector?”
Federal job cuts will total about 40,000 by 2029, according to Treasury Board briefing notes. Board President Shafqat Ali has declined to specify actual numbers of layoffs since it “impacts those public service employees and not only them, their families.”
A Bloc Québécois MP is sponsoring a Commons petition to cancel all subsidies for halal and kosher meat processing in Canada. MP Martin Champoux (Drummond, Que.) earlier expressed outrage after the Department of Agriculture awarded a multi-million dollar subsidy to a halal butcher in Prince Edward Island: “It is not the government’s job.”
The Department of Transport last year disciplined 58 employees for workplace misconduct. Violations covered “a wide range” of wrongdoing from rudeness to theft, said managers: “Even a single instance is unacceptable.”
Parliament should compel the Canada Revenue Agency to annually report on offshore tax evaders including successful prosecutions, says a labour submission to the Commons finance committee. The Commons seven years ago defeated a similar private bill: “Transparency is essential.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s claim of “fast tracking a trillion dollars of investment” is grossly inflated and drawn mainly from reannouncements of old spending, according to Budget Office figure released yesterday. Carney repeated the claim Tuesday in a speech to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos: “We are going to put more than $3,000 in the pocket of every Canadian.”
Authorities yesterday confirmed Housing Advocate Marie-Josée Houle spent two weeks holidaying in Egypt after booking a $13,684 business class junket to Cairo for meetings. A spokesperson denied Houle timed her vacation to subsidize her flights: “The Advocate extended her stay for personal reasons.”
New Democrats must counter an “incredibly active” Jewish lobby, Party leadership candidate Avi Lewis said last night. Lewis made his remarks in a leadership debate sponsored by an anti-Israel group, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East: “We have to expose the actions of the Israel lobby.”
Chrystia Freeland yesterday said she “behaved ethically at every moment” in accepting a job as an advisor to Ukraine’s President while acting as parliamentary secretary overseeing Canadian postwar aid to that country. Freeland spoke to Rebel News Network in her first public comments since resigning January 9: “I wasn’t on both sides of the deal.”
Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault is appointing new returning officers in three federal ridings that reported 2025 election irregularities, records show. Revisions to the List Of Returning Officers are in anticipation of another general campaign as early as 2026: “A ballot box got lost. How can that possibly happen?”
