The Government of Mexico complains it is too expensive and bureaucratic to do business with Ottawa. The candid report by diplomats comes three months after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a “new era of cooperation” with Mexico: ‘Many expressed concern about excessive requirements, cost or red tape.’
Labour Minister Patty Hajdu undermined constitutional rights with her frequent use of strike bans, says the nation’s largest pilots’ association. The union in a submission to the Commons human resources committee said strike bans had “now become commonplace.”
A phone call cost the Canada Revenue Agency $879,092 in a tax dispute, according to evidence in Federal Court. Justice Danielle Ferron ruled a conversation between a tax lawyer and a dismissive collections officer amounted to “breach of procedural fairness.”
“An arsenal of illegal weapons” is being smuggled across the border from the United States, says a Canada Border Services Agency audit. The report said criminals are attempting to bypass controls by shipping plastic firearms parts through the mail: “We were informed that three dimensional printing of firearms parts sent via the postal mode pose a risk.”
The Public Health Agency admits it’s wasted more than $170 million buying and storing now-expired medical goods marked for landfill. MPs have questioned why no executive has been fired for ongoing mismanagement of inventory first uncovered five years ago: “How many individuals have been held accountable?”
The Business Development Bank of Canada faces courtroom allegations it approved a loan over political considerations. Bank lawyers lost a bid to strike the counterclaim by a borrower in the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador: ‘It alleges they were under pressure to solve economic issues’ in a Liberal riding.
Veterans Affairs Minister Jill McKnight’s department in ten years hired 36 medically-released veterans though it had a legal requirement to hire more, records show. Fewer vets were hired by the Department of Veterans Affairs than the fisheries department or Canada Revenue Agency: “How many?”
The post office says it has agreed to a compounded 9.7 percent two-year pay increase for its largest union. It comes ahead of another emergency loan from cabinet: “How much funding is being discussed for this additional loan?”
Elections Canada is ordering millions of ballot box seals in case of a 2026 general election, a spokesperson said. It would be the fourth national campaign in seven years: “Is it time to go?”
Parliamentary floor-crossers would face a mandatory byelection under a Commons petition sponsored by Conservative MP Lianne Rood (Middlesex-London, Ont.). Floor-crossing in the aftermath of the last general election was “raising concerns of opportunism over principle,” wrote petitioners.
New Democrats in a final report on the 2025 election campaign conclude the Party was “too closely linked” to Justin Trudeau and out of touch with taxpayers. The report did not single out then-leader Jagmeet Singh for specific criticism, but stated: “It is indisputable that Conservative messaging on jobs and identity is resonating with many workers.”
Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin on Saturday served legal notice that cabinet will again allow the manufacture of straws and other plastic goods in Canada, but only for export to the United States: “A prohibition on export would result in economic harms.”
A federal judge has dismissed a bid by a U.S. Indigenous group to delay expansion of the Port of Vancouver, largest in the nation. However the Federal Court sidestepped a larger issue of whether Indigenous Americans from border states have rights in Canada: ‘These are questions for another day.’
She is the Swedish teenager
who crossed the Atlantic
in a zero-emission voyage.
Making a statement
about the carbon footprint
of planes.
In a string of flight cancellations,
Air Canada needed five days
to bring one passenger
from Newark to Ottawa.
Making an even bigger statement.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
The Depression, not the war, left the deepest scars on an entire generation of Canadians. Survivors carried indelible memories of the collapse of capitalism. My mother, raised on a Manitoba farmstead, years afterward could not bear to throw out tin foil pie plates: “That’s wasteful,” she warned. My father-in-law cursed TV episodes of The Waltons that depicted poor but cheerful townsfolk who had love, if not money: “It wasn’t anything like that,” he muttered. “I was there and it wasn’t like that.”
The broad strokes of the Depression years are part of the nation’s memory, preserved in schoolbook texts and grainy newsreels: hobos on freight cars, police on horseback, dust storms and factory closures. Yet it’s the fine details that paint the most vivid picture of whole communities brought to their knees by an economic calamity unmatched in its cruelty.
Historian Todd McCallum of Dalhousie University has written a startling book. Hobohemia documents the Dustbowl Years in British Columbia, a “homeland for beggars,” he calls it, where thousands of jobless settled in shantytowns at the railways’ last stop. “Everywhere I turned, archives offered me dusty examples of a multitude of ways of seeing the hobo jungle as an island unto itself, something simultaneously connected to and separate from ‘society,’ whatever one took that to mean.”
McCallum details British Columbia’s descent into chaos. In Kamloops, so many vagrants gathered the mayor sent an urgent petition to the legislature. “The town is being overrun by beggars and panhandlers,” he wrote. “Where is it all going to end?”
In Vancouver one Christmas headline in the Province read: “Man Starves To Death Here.” Ratepayers were overwhelmed by the cost of food for the jobless. The welfare budget peaked at a staggering $1.1 million by 1935, divvied up by 25¢ meal tickets. City Council telegraphed the Prime Minister: “The situation in Vancouver is beyond our control.”
In Victoria, the city launched a desperate boondoggle to put vagrants to work chopping firewood. Officials bought a campsite for $900, then provided $613 worth of saws, hired a cook and offered jobless men $1 a day to chop a cord of wood with room and board provided. Of 229 men who registered, a quarter couldn’t cut wood anyway. Victoria ratepayers were stuck with a stockpile of 2,000 cords trucked to market – that cost another $3.50 a cord – and saw the wood sold at a loss, 75¢ a cord.
“It is in every way easier for most North Americans to imagine the complete and utter destruction of the planet we currently inhabit than to envision the end of the capitalist order,” says McCallum. That is precisely what B.C. faced in the 1930s. The result was a kind of madness.
The number of transients in Vancouver was estimated at 12,000. They gathered in hobo jungles cobbled from cardboard and the city’s waste. “Grounds are filthy and covered with decaying garbage, with open toilets,” the city’s medical officer of health wrote in 1931 following a typhoid outbreak. “Flies swarm over everything and then on all open food.”
Hobohemia is meticulously researched. Professor McCallum is a gifted writer. The story is raw and compelling. To read it is to learn why children of the 1930s could never, ever waste tin foil or see their memories of gnawing despair transformed into a TV drama of joy amid poverty.
By Holly Doan
Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival Images of a New World in 1930s Vancouver; by Todd McCallum; Athabasca University Press; 319 pages; ISBN 9781-9268-36287; $29.95
