Taxpayers may be out three quarters of a billion on a federal buy-back program for prohibited firearms though final costs are “impossible” to forecast, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. Estimates of the number of banned weapons vary by hundreds of thousands: ‘Details remain unclear.’
Senators last night began proposing amendments to Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault’s Bill C-10, the first of two cabinet bills to regulate the internet. Legislators proposed lengthy committee hearings that would slow the bill: “Shouldn’t we ask Canadians if they even want the internet regulated in this way?”
Cabinet yesterday said it has “nothing to hide” over the firing of Chinese scientists at a federal lab, but defended a Federal Court reference to seal records in the case. The Court reference seeks to overturn four Commons orders that the files be disclosed to House lawyers under a citation for contempt: “What are you so desperate to hide?”
Climate change efforts to date are insufficient and must be stepped up, says a report released yesterday by the Department of Environment. The report follows a Parliamentary Budget Office warning that a 62¢ per litre carbon tax on gasoline is needed to meet emissions targets: “Future climate change costs for Canada will be high.”
Labour Minister Filomena Tassi yesterday said she will proceed with regulations on “the new reality of working from home.” Tassi has proposed overtime pay for federally-regulated employees who take after-hours Zoom calls, texts and company emails, a Canadian first: “The home is increasingly becoming the workplace.”
Canadians are wary of robot cars and don’t trust the software, says Department of Transport research. People surveyed by the department raised liability issues and concerns with computer glitches: “Some note technology is not infallible.”
The Canada Revenue Agency in an internal memo said it feared its own employees would help misappropriate pandemic relief money. The memo identified a “moderate” likelihood of misappropriation under one of the costliest pandemic relief programs, the $83.6 billion Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy: “Money has just been going out the door.”
Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault’s office has not received a single letter or email from the general public in support of internet regulation, say staff. Guilbeault had claimed broad support for first-ever controls on web content, claiming only “a minority” oppose it: “A very high proportion of Canadians are asking the government to step in.”
A bonus for pensioners will cost nearly $10 billion by 2026, says the Parliamentary Budget Office. The payments for seniors over 75 beginning August 1 are not income tested: “Why not target the most vulnerable seniors?”
Say “Canada” and Italians think of mountains and maple syrup, according to Department of Foreign Affairs research. People in France think of sled dogs and Niagara Falls: “Canada’s image has its strengths and weaknesses.”
A navy ship that hasn’t gone to sea in 23 years has cost taxpayers $2,351,241 and counting, according to records. Total expenses for HMCS Cormorant at Bridgewater, N.S. are not yet finalized, said the Canadian Coast Guard: “The work is ongoing.”
At my friend’s wedding
waitress recommends
the free-range quarter-chicken
roasted
in fine herbs.
Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day;
you were thinking of a chicken breast
in mushroom and red wine sauce.
Whenever we celebrate
a chicken must die.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, writes for Blacklock’s each and every Sunday)
Canada has never seen anything like it. Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the nation with Muslims soon outnumbering Anglicans. In Manitoba, Tagalog has eclipsed French as a second language.
We remain a country largely comprised of descendants of dirt-poor European fishermen, lumberjacks and sodbusters, but these deep currents of post-1967 immigration are about to break the surface. Newcomers now are educated, eloquent and outspoken. Much will change, and some things will not change at all.
“What does it mean to walk down the vast, wintry streets of Toronto and know no part of you had a hand in what looms there?” writes novelist Esi Edugyan. “I stand before the museums and public statues of Ottawa knowing that no one in my family is represented in such edifices. The wars they fought were elsewhere.”
Edugyan is one of the accomplished voices of the New Immigrant Experience. Born the daughter of a Ghanaian economist – her father was one of a “line of minor chiefs in Gomua-Kumasi,” she writes – Edugyan was raised in Calgary from the mid ’60s. In Dreaming of Elsewhere she recounts the familiar story of conflict and disconnection known to many first-generation Canadians: “I would often be asked where I’d come from. ‘Canada,’ I would reply, and then brace for the inevitable next question. ‘Yes – but where are you from really?’”
“My life has been an uneasy one in relation to the ground under my feet. Home, for me, was not a birthright, but an invention,” Edugyan writes; “It is difficult to ignore the creeping suspicion that we are not wholly free here, that some part of us is still not over there – wherever ‘there’ might be.”
Dreaming of Elsewhere is vivid and intimate. This is the voice of change. If pre-war immigrants were hyper-assimilationists grateful to live free of pogroms, police corruption and hyperinflation, post-1967 Canadians are skilled professionals with commensurate expectations.
“The laws I obey, the borders of the country I occupy, all were determined by others, by people who were here before I or any of my bloodline had arrived,” Edugyan explains. “And that is the crux of it. The roots do not go deep; the past is not one’s own. Having been born here, I feel as much a Canadian as anyone.”
And then: the rest of the story, the part that has not changed at all. In 2006 Edugyan visits Ghana for the first time in her life. The air is bad, she writes; the traffic is unnerving; the store signage is comic: No Bad Deed Goes Unpunished Vulcanizing Service. Her host is a cousin who drives a BMW and boasts of a suburban bungalow with indoor plumbing. “We did not belong,” she writes.
Visiting her grandmother’s village, one woman leans over: “Eh, Obruni, why don’t you come home?’” “Come home, she’d said. Not go home. It wasn’t until later I learned ‘Obruni’ meant White Person”.
For every newcomer whose introduction to Canada is the gate at Pearson International or a grandparents’ struggle across sub-Arctic plains with oxen, the quiet rewards of citizenship remain exactly the same: a big, rich land of non-conformists where most everybody is left alone to be what they want to be.
Edugyan recalls her encounter with a Toronto immigrant, a former professor of physics from Accra. He was driving an airport cab, a grinding job: “‘Do you miss Ghana?’” I asked, thinking of my parents. ‘No.’ ‘You don’t miss being a professor?’ “Eh, I will not drive a cab forever,’ he laughed. ‘I go to night school with my two sons. I have big plans, big plans.’”
By Holly Doan
Dreaming of Elsewhere by Esi Edugyan; University of Alberta Press; ISBN 9780-8886-48211; $10.95
Chinese foreign agents have threatened Canadian citizens here, says cabinet. The disclosure follows Commons committee testimony of harassment campaigns orchestrated by the Chinese Embassy: “This is China’s influence on Canada. Governments should deal with it.”
Janice Charette, the $343,000-a year head of the federal public service, yesterday declined comment after praising as an example to all staff a Public Health Agency executive censured for contempt of Parliament. It was the first Commons censure of a federal employee since the 1891 summons of a Superintendent of the Government Printing Bureau for pocketing kickbacks: “He acted in a way that represents public service values and ethics.”
