Legislators must press cabinet to roll pandemic relief programs into a permanent guaranteed income plan, members of an Anti-Poverty Caucus said yesterday. “We still have to aim for it in the budget,” said Senator Kim Pate (Ont.), a Liberal appointee: “We’re certainly well on our way.”
Cabinet has assigned fifty-three sedans and chauffeurs to federal executives not including cabinet members and the Governor General. Managers with cars and drivers include the deputy at the Department of Environment that proclaimed a climate crisis: “We need to work very quickly to address that.”
Elections Canada on Saturday named returning officers in all federal ridings nationwide. And cabinet in a Ministerial Mandate letter said it will speed a bill to enforce pandemic rules in a vote: “What happens when a province unfortunately goes through a very severe outbreak and has stay-in orders for its population?”
The Canada Revenue Agency says it will offer free credit protection to any 2021 tax filer who discovers they were victimized by identity thieves claiming $2,000 Canada Emergency Response Benefit cheques. The Agency to date has not disclosed the scope of fraud under the program that went 240 percent over budget: “Many Canadians had their identities stolen.”
Canadians should expect more intensive pandemic controls, says the Public Health Agency. Measures to date including lockdowns and curfews are insufficient, it said: “Do I absolutely need to go out today?”
Cabinet in a Ministerial Mandate letter proposes to “foster a vision for the Prairies.” The Liberal Party did not elect any candidates west of Winnipeg to the Rocky Mountains in the 2019 campaign: ‘It can get tough.’
The Department of Transport says it will “ensure” airlines refund billions in cash to customers whose prepaid flights were cancelled due to the pandemic. Federal regulators say they have logged more than 11,000 complaints from passengers who received vouchers as compensation: “Is the Government of Canada willing to back those tickets?”
Twenty-six percent of all new federal prisoners have already served time, which begs the question: Whatever happened to the other 74 percent who served time and never returned? On The Outside looks for answers. The result is fresh and compelling research on life after prison.
The authors interview longtime inmates including those jailed for serious violent crimes that once earned the death penalty. One hides his past from his children and “aspires to a simple life filled with laughter.” Another complains he must learn how to buy groceries: “People have been cooking my meals for twenty-two years and all of a sudden I gotta cook my breakfast.” A third ex-convict is upset by the loss of civility in polite society: “Personal rudeness in the prison system is not tolerated under any circumstances, at least in the old days when I was there.”
On The Outside is no celebration of rehabilitation. Former inmates interviewed by the authors appear broken men, some guilt-ridden, some unapologetic. “The quest for normalcy was a preoccupation,” write the authors, former members of a prisoners’ liaison group at Collins Bay Penitentiary in Kingston, Ont.
Melissa Munn is a professor of sociology at Okanagan College, Chris Bruckert is a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Criminology. Together they interview twenty ex-convicts. “We had come to know the men as individuals.”
The authors do not detail the men’s crimes and interestingly neither do most employers or acquaintances. One parolee says he was fired from a jobsite after a supervisor spotted his gang tattoo. However another recounts his experience in applying for a credit card at the bank: “I was very nervous because I didn’t want to reveal my past and she asked me my particular information and she checked my credit rating and she said, ‘You don’t have a credit rating.’ So I had to tell her where I was. And her comment to me was, ‘Well, banking’s our business, that’s your business.’ And I really appreciated it. I never forgot that comment.”
Common themes emerge. All the released prisoners had bad childhoods, most came out of prison to work at entry-level jobs as janitors, lawn cutters, 7-Eleven clerks. None returned to their hometowns, and all considered incarceration the most important event in their lives. “It isn’t helpful being locked up every friggin’ day,” says one convicted murderer. “I mean, the whole atmosphere is not helpful.”
Yet On The Outside is no lament. If ex-convicts appear as sympathetic figures, it is only because readers are hearing their voices for the first time, like the man who refuses to wear black as reminiscent of his past as a biker, or the freed prisoner whose life turns after he buys a little house: “It puts you in a different class of people automatically.”
Or the man who recalls with dread the night he walked home after dark. “I haven’t been out at night when it’s dark for a long time”; “This kid walks up and taps me on the shoulder. I said, ‘Oh, gosh, lucky one of us didn’t die,’ because I almost had a heart attack and I was going to kill him because I don’t know who he was. All he wanted was a dollar”; “I had never been out at night and I never had anybody come up behind me and put their hand on my shoulder.”
By Holly Doan
On The Outside: From Lengthy Imprisonment To Lasting Freedom, by Melissa Munn & Chris Bruckert; UBC Press; 240 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-25375; $29.95
The $675 million-a year Public Health Agency is hiring private contractors by the hour to manage its pandemic response. The plea for outside help follows the Prime Minister’s boast that Canada was “among the best prepared countries in the world” when Covid struck.
The Department of Health will spend more than $90,000 to encourage Canadians to eat more ‘culturally diverse’ foods. Staff awarded a contract to a Canada Food Guide consultant who complained too many white people run restaurants: “The wine industry is overwhelmingly white.”
The Public Health Agency in a briefing note denies blacklisting a federal grant application by a scientist who criticized its work. Professor Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa’s School of Epidemiology told MPs he was asked to remove his name from a funding request because “I was negative.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday rejected any scheme to require that Canadians prove whether they’ve been vaccinated for Covid-19. The issue is too divisive, he said: “There are a broad range of reasons why someone might not get vaccinated.”
A federal proposal to tax “extreme wealth” would raise one million dollars next year, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. It would take more than a decade to see more serious revenues, analysts said: “Revenues generated by this new measure will gradually increase over the next few years.”
Jesse Moore, millionaire CEO of a company in Africa that received taxpayers’ funding in the name of Third World development, has a six-figure salary and $633,000 in stock options, according to accounts. The federal agency that bought shares in Moore’s company yesterday refused comment: “I could do whatever I wanted to do.”
Not even a pandemic dimmed “March Madness” spending by federal agencies last year, records show. Managers approved millions in expenses marked “miscellaneous” in the dying hours of the fiscal year last March 31: “That’s a problem.”
