Electric cars must be equipped with noisemakers under a Department of Transport proposal. Regulators said pedestrians and bicyclists are likelier to be run over by a quietly humming electric car than a conventional one: “Do you know what the problem is?”
Desperately need the money;
tend to be late;
rarely meet a deadline;
have a loose understanding
of your business.
I demonstrate
no relevant skills
for this job.
You should hire me.
After all, this is the only true résumé
in the stack.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, writes for Blacklock’s each and every Sunday)
Author Robert Calderisi tells the wry story of an Alberta friend who worked eight years in Montréal and never tired of hectoring Haitian cabdrivers by giving his home address in English, “Nun’s Island” instead of Ile-des-Soeurs. “Very few drivers knew what he was talking about,” writes Calderisi. “Instead of letting them off the hook, he would jump into a different taxi, feeling triumphant. I remember hoping that he took a very long time to get home each night. I also knew that if he worked in Poland for eight years he would have learned Polish.”
Québec In A Global Light is no lament. Calderisi is refreshingly candid. After fifty-two years of official bilingualism Canada “is nothing of the sort,” he says: “Few Canadians arriving in Québec do not feel slightly disoriented.”
Authors for generations have made a cottage industry of churning out volumes on “whither Canada” themes of French disaffection and English insensitivity. Québec In A Global Light does nothing of the sort. Calderisi is a skillful writer who examines his home province with affection and a clear eye, as if it were a foreign land. They are like the Afrikaners, the Dutch settlers of South Africa, “obsessed with the survival of their culture in a sea of Others, fighting fossilization and irrelevance,” he writes.
“I hope this book will be revealing, even for those who think they know the subject well, and that it will dispel some misconceptions, just as my research dispelled some of mine,” says Calderisi. He scores on both points. Canadians accustomed to federal cabinet ministers acting as official translators for the two solitudes would be intrigued to learn there is no criticism of Québec that has not been made by a Québecker.
Calderisi quotes a conservative Québec City radio personality: “Each day, the Québec State collapses a little bit more before our eyes, like the Ville-Marie tunnel that runs under the centre of Montréal. Out of shape and out of breath, it seems to be reaching the end of a cycle, with one of the heaviest debt loads in the Western world, one boy out of three dropping out of high school, an average 20-hour wait in what are still called ‘emergency’ wards, a pension system that is running out of money, bureaucratic and trade union practices that are preventing any kind of development, public infrastructure in disrepair, etcetera.”
The provincial debt ratio to GDP is equivalent to the Ivory Coast. The tax system is so dysfunctional forty percent pay no income tax at all. Population growth is so stagnant a million people have left since 1972, and Québec will rate among the grayest provinces by 2040. Calderisi quotes then-Premier Lucien Bouchard’s account of a secret meeting with Standard & Poor’s bond raters in 1996: “I asked them to give us another chance…They answered that Québec had been going its own way for 40 years and the results were hardly brilliant.”
Calderisi proposes remedies, and reminds readers of an attribute known to any visitor who ever attended business in Trois-Rivières or billeted for a hockey tournament at Laval: “Except when they are behind the wheel, they are one of the most civil peoples on earth. And despite their cultural insecurity, Québeckers are generally happy.”
By Holly Doan
Québec In A Global Light: Reaching For The Common Ground, by Robert Calderisi; University of Toronto Press; 224 pages; ISBN 9781-4875-04717; $32.95
Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson yesterday promised cabinet will not further increase the carbon tax. Cabinet made a similar pre-election promise in 2019 before raising the tax 240 percent: “No, we do not intend to.”
Cabinet will not tax Canadians’ home equity, the Commons finance committee was told last night. “Just for the record,” said Liberal MP Sean Fraser (Central Nova, N.S.), parliamentary secretary for finance: “Any suggestion to the contrary is entirely false.”
The Commons finance committee is asking what became of billions spent to Covid-proof public school classrooms. The Canadian Teachers’ Federation yesterday said pandemic supplies have been scant, and teachers have paid out of pocket to keep children safe: “I’m shocked.”
CMHC yesterday said it is “exploring opportunities for ex-prisoners” to become homeowners. The federal insurer awarded a $246,000 grant for a research “lab” on finding suitable housing for parolees: “You can imagine the challenges they face in finding a place to live, especially with a criminal record.”
A proposed federal tax on “extreme wealth” would affect about 16,000 people, records show. Data indicate most Canadians with employee stock option deductions had claims worth an average $7,000: “There are so few people in the top one percent.”
Auditors yesterday cited the Department of Health for failing to enforce federal laws on natural health products. The department rarely conducted spot inspections of wholesalers, failed to check products weren’t contaminated and “fell short of ensuring products are safe and effective,” said an audit by the Commissioner of the Environment: “Health Canada is responsible.”
An expected hundredfold increase in mail-in voting “would be key” in a 2021 federal election, says cabinet. Privy Council President Dominic LeBlanc in a letter to MPs called it a Covid precaution. A cabinet bill would allow mail-in ballots to be received up to a day after polls close: “Major increases in vote by mail would be a critical issue.”
Statistics Canada yesterday said it will update its benchmark Consumer Price Index to reflect pandemic prices. The agency yesterday doubled its official inflation rate to 2.2 percent nationwide: “We are planning another basket update this summer to better reflect changes.”
Cabinet has not spelled out whether a pending federal ban on single-use bags and other plastic products will outlaw their manufacture in Canada, the Commons environment committee was told yesterday. The ban on six blacklisted items is to take effect by year’s end: “Are they going to actually not allow them to be manufactured?”
An Ontario judge has approved millions in out-of-court settlement payments to CIBC and Bank of Montréal customers targeted by hackers in 2018. Security experts earlier told a parliamentary committee that banks are threatened daily by hackers: “There are things that are scary.”
Cabinet yesterday appointed Ralph Goodale as $327,000-a year High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. Goodale as an eight-term Liberal MP had criticized opponents for partisan patronage: “They are just butchering the taxpayers’ dollars to pump pork.”
Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier approved a multi-million dollar contract to have the private sector help tax agents answer the phone. It followed disclosures that wait times at Canada Revenue Agency call centres average almost half an hour: “Call centres provide an essential service.”
