Foreign offshore speculators face a first-time federal equity tax of $10,000 to $12,000 a year in Canada’s priciest housing markets. The Department of Finance detailed the tax to take effect January 1: “We don’t want to encourage any sort of speculation on housing.”
The Department of Transport surveyed Canadians on whether they’d take a flying taxi. Most said it was not a good idea. The research cost $61,168: “Some feel the sounds would disturb them, others feel flying taxicabs sound like an accident waiting to happen.”
“We need to help immigrants,”
says Sylvain,
sinking his teeth
into a Double Angus Burger
he gets at Harvey’s.
“Agree,”
says Stephanie,
sipping Iced Mocha Latte
from Tim Hortons.
Anne joins them,
unwrapping the chicken donair,
tabouli, and baba ganoush
she gets at the Lebanese bakery.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, writes for Blacklock’s each and every Sunday)
In 1937 Canada had a higher infant mortality rate than South Africa and Ireland. Until 1919 all national medical services were managed by the Department of Agriculture. Child deaths were such an inescapable horror in family life that Prime Minister John Thompson (1892-4) lost four of his nine children in infancy.
Historian Mona Gleason documents the dawn of awareness that Canada’s infants could not be left to sicken and die in an expression of survival of the fittest: “Merely being small and young, in other words, required medical attention.”
Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health is a compelling social history that chronicles the country’s struggle towards the light.
Canada’s first children’s hospital ward opened in Montreal in 1822. By 1879 the first course in pediatrics was introduced, at the University of Laval. Yet there was little understanding of infant care beyond folklore. It’s a phenomenon still visible today in the sweep of gravestones depicting little lambs and cherubs that dominate any 19th century Canadian cemetery.
It was as if the small and weak were never meant to live. Gleason cites an 1897 medical text that warned the newborn “is almost certain sooner or later to exhibit tendencies to disease in the direction of the stock from whence it springs…it may receive an inheritance of tuberculosis or epilepsy, or a tendency to gout or rheumatism.”
Where health and hygiene were introduced in the classroom, the treatment leaned to morality and abstinence from sin. An 1896 text Gage’s Health Series for Intermediate Classes cautioned students to beware of wine jelly: “The appetite, becoming uncontrollable, may bring its owner to a drunkard’s grave.”
The result was the appalling infant mortality rate. A century ago approximately 1 in 6 babies Canadian babies died by age three. In the tubercular slums of the bigger cities the death rate was worse, 1 in 3.
“Overall, the high rate of infant mortality was a state of affairs largely accepted as tragic, but not yet a matter of concern,” writes Gleason, of the University of British Columbia.
Small Matters draws on our deepest childhood memories of illness. Who forgets the blight of chicken pox, or the smell of VapoRub in a shuttered bedroom, or soothing cool of vanilla ice cream after a tonsillectomy?
So, the most unforgettable voices in Gleason’s work are oral histories – like Theresa, who recalls being stricken with polio, the scourge that afflicted 50,000 Canadians till 1962: “When I went to Toronto when I was sixteen, they drilled into me that, ‘Your polio is in your mind. You can do anything. Don’t let polio keep you down’…I remember one girl had polio in both legs, and they stood her up against the wall and she walked with these crutches. And they said to her, ‘Come on, Doreen, you got to walk.’ ‘I can’t.’ She’d cry and she would cry.”
The country cried. Then we got better.
By Holly Doan
Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health by Mona Gleason; McGill-Queens University Press; 232 Pages; ISBN 9780-7735-41337; $29.95
Management of a crack military Cyber War unit assigned to counter Chinese and Russian threats is so haphazard it “lacks direction” despite half a billion in spending, says a Department of National Defence audit. Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan had boasted his department was on the cutting edge of technology. Auditors instead found cyber analysts had to take cabs to access computer networks scattered across Ottawa: “This can result in up to $200 in taxi fares a week for one person.”
The Liberal Party has summoned reporters to a confidential meeting Monday to discuss campaign logistics. New Democrats said it appeared Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was “plunging the country into an election.”
Six million Canadians eligible for Covid shots who’ve declined to get vaccinated to date may lose “certain privileges,” the Public Health Agency said yesterday. The remarks followed the Prime Minister’s suggestion that government employees and those in the federally-regulated private sector be forced to vaccinate: “That’s also a live issue.”
Cabinet yesterday endorsed in principle new carbon tariffs on coal-powered imports from China, but set no deadline for “leveling the playing field.” Opposition Conservatives earlier endorsed the plan targeting goods from Chinese polluters: “Additional measures may be needed.”
A federal arbitrator has ordered Canadian Pacific Railway Company to rehire an employee fired for using marijuana while on call. Employers had sought random workplace drug testing when Parliament legalized cannabis three years ago: “An accident, by itself, is usually not enough to justify testing.”
Ottawa is the nation’s stay-home capital of the pandemic, Statistics Canada said yesterday. Nearly half the city’s workforce stayed home with pay after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau advised the public to “figure out how to stay home from work and work from home” as a Covid precaution: “This is what we all need to be doing.”
Most Canadians don’t trust China says in-house research by the Privy Council Office. Data were released as the Chinese Embassy accused Canada of torturing Indigenous people: “The Canadian government must address by concrete actions, not just words, its historic and ongoing systemic racism.”
A national regulator yesterday cited a Montréal TV station for broadcasting pornography to 13-year olds. The National Broadcast Standards Council said while Québecers have different viewing habits than the rest of the country, depicting sex acts as suitable viewing for Grade Six students went too far: “A Francophone market might tolerate more explicit sexual content than would an Anglophone market.”
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland yesterday ignored a committee summons to explain her opposition to a tax cut for farmers, small business and fishing corporations. The Commons finance committee two weeks ago summoned Freeland for questioning: “The Minister made her decision.”
A proposal for “open banking” to allow electronic shopping by consumers for the best rates on loans and deposits will require numerous rewrites to federal laws, a cabinet advisory panel said yesterday. Bankers and insurance lobbyists have opposed the measure: ‘Consumers must have confidence they are protected if something goes wrong.’
CBC advertising revenues fell again last year by 18 percent. The Crown broadcaster said it will require more federal grants to offset commercial losses, and acknowledged forecasts of a sales boon from the Tokyo Olympics was speculative: “We will be a beacon for truth.”
