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.”
Cabinet refuses to release “millions of pages” of documents on pandemic mismanagement in defiance of a House order, the Commons health committee was told. The Commons’ lawyer said cabinet aides simply stopped handing over records though a deadline for full disclosure expired last December 7: ‘At this rate it will take 58 years.’
Federal tax law is so complicated the Canada Revenue Agency’s own field auditors have given up calling for interpretation of the 3,279-page Income Tax Act, says a report. No prime minister has ordered a comprehensive review of the Act since John Diefenbaker: “Our tax system has become a ponderous, unwieldy monster.”
Minimum wage increases may cost jobs for students and other entry-level workers, says the federal labour department. Cabinet is mandating a $15 an hour federal minimum this year, the first increase since 1996: “These impacts are most evident for teenagers and young adults.”
Cabinet in a Canadian first is suing Parliament to conceal records over top security clearance given Chinese scientists at a federal lab. One MP last night likened the legal showdown to Watergate: “Shame on you.”
Internet publishers, bloggers, Facebook and Twitter users face house arrest or $70,000 fines under an unprecedented censorship bill introduced yesterday by cabinet. “Self-regulation is not enough,” said Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault. One civil liberties group called provisions of Bill C-36 an “astounding proposal” that curbs free and legal speech: “Criminal conduct in this case is speech in which no actual harm to any specific person needs to be proven.”
Cabinet polled for popular catchphrases to find the most agreeable pandemic-era slogan, records disclose. The title of a September 23 Throne Speech, “A More Resilient Canada,” polled poorly and was not mentioned again: “Participants were most critical of the phrase ‘We need a green new deal.'”
Cabinet would have to impose a $261 per tonne carbon tax, the equivalent of an extra 62¢ per litre of gasoline, to meet its climate change targets, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson has promised there will be no further increases in fuel charges: “No, we do not intend to accelerate the price.”
