Immigration fell as much as forty-nine percent this year to the lowest level in more than two decades. Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino said quotas must be raised in future years to make up the difference. “Immigrants create jobs,” he said.
A cabinet crackdown on paid leave for federal employees who are neither sick nor working from home has prompted human rights grievances by the largest government union. The Treasury Board will not confirm the latest cost of Covid-19 furloughs, estimated at more than $1 billion to date: “Taxpayers have a right to know.”
Cabinet opposes a Conservative bill to ban Canadian exports of plastic waste. One supporter called the bill “a no-brainer”, though Liberals said they feared it would affect cross-border garbage shipments to the U.S.: “Whatever happens with the private member’s bill, we do not know.”
A labour board has upheld a five-week suspension for factory workers suspected of smoking marijuana in the company parking lot. Any lesser penalty would “be sending the wrong message”, wrote an Ontario adjudicator.
A law against thieving by public employees was quietly repealed by Parliament though prosecutors used it dozens of times over a ten-year period, according to Access To Information records. The Department of Justice said the law was slated for repeal because it was “obsolete”.
A media start-up that complained of the corrosive influence of federal money in Canadian newsrooms has won a sole-sourced Department of Public Works contract worth more than a quarter million. David Skok, former Toronto Star editor who launched the business website The Logic Inc. two years ago, declined an interview: “I founded The Logic on the belief that journalistic independence comes from financial independence.”
Legislators would take a pandemic pay freeze for up to three years under a Senate motion debated yesterday. Senator Lucie Moncion (Ont.) said she donated her own $3,700 raise to charity this year, and recommended cabinet waive all increases: ‘It is an expression of our solidarity with Canadians in these difficult times.’
The Canadian Tourism Commission yesterday appealed to people to “travel within Canada first” to save the recession-bound industry. The Commission put tourism job losses at up to 500,000 by year’s end: “It’s just bad everywhere.”
Senators including a Liberal appointee yesterday questioned a lack of public information about federal finances. Mandated disclosure of borrowing ended when the Prime Minister suspended Parliament August 18: “It’s not being transparent.”
Canada’s chief public health officer yesterday in an official report on the pandemic deleted all references to garbled advice on masks. Dr. Theresa Tam as late as April 3 claimed there was no evidence masks protected Canadians from Covid-19: “It is absolutely mind-boggling.”
Cabinet cannot risk censure for concealing We Charity documents for fear of losing control of Parliament, a Liberal MP said last night. MP Julie Dzerowicz (Davenport, Ont.) made the remarks as Liberals continued a three-week filibuster against disclosure: “It’s unpredictable.”
Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien spent four years and assigned seven investigators to a cursory review of a privacy complaint, records show. The complainant, a retired policeman, described Therrien’s office as slow and dysfunctional: ‘If I conducted investigations the same way they did I would have been charged.’
A British Columbia judge has dismissed a lawsuit against an MP as a waste of Court time. Litigation is not “some sort of megaphone for indignation or therapy for hurt feelings”, said the Court: ‘It is not a soapbox to complain.’
Labour Minister Filomena Tassi yesterday rewrote rules to save federally-regulated employees from having to get a doctor’s note in claiming unpaid sick leave. Tassi did not comment, but acknowledged in a regulatory notice that employers protested the change: “Of course we believe Canadians are honest.”
No state secrets were disclosed in the inadvertent sale of encrypted hard drives to a used equipment dealer, the Communications Security Establishment said yesterday. The foreign spy agency said no one was fired for the security breach, but that it’s halted all resale of used computers: “We now physically destroy our electronic assets.”
