Cabinet acknowledges a “moral obligation” to recover Indigenous artworks that vanished from government offices, the Commons heritage committee was told. One MP said federal managers appeared determined to downplay the loss of paintings, jewelry, sculptures and other art that went missing from a multi-million dollar collection: “I do believe there is a moral obligation.”
Liberal MP Tatiane Auguste (Terrebonne, Que.) has lost her Commons seat after the Supreme Court invalidated her election by a single ballot in 2025. It was the closest federal campaign in 62 years: “I think this is an issue that goes beyond party politics.”
Extraordinary pandemic-era infringements of Canadians’ rights were justified in the name of public safety, says the Supreme Court of Canada. Judges by a 5-4 decision upheld a Newfoundland and Labrador order that prohibited outsiders from entering the province: “These were difficult times.”
A former campaign manager and longtime political aide to Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith (Beaches-East York, Ont.) has been cited for multiple violations of the Elections Act. Breaches included falsifying records: ‘He was the official agent.’
The political heart of Ottawa spans a ten-square block area of the old city stretching from Wellington to Somerset Streets. Here on Somerset lived Prime Minister John Thompson, a workaholic who wrote Canada’s first Criminal Code, created Labour Day in 1893 and was an early supporter of votes for women.
“The days are not long enough for all the work I have to do,” wrote Thompson. “About all the exercise I can get is the walk from my house up to the Hill and back.”
Thompson was a brilliant young lawyer whose career was meteoric. At 15 he was a Halifax law clerk, at 26 a city alderman. By 37 he had become attorney general of Nova Scotia and a high court judge. “The best thing I ever invented is Thompson,” said John A. Macdonald, who recruited him as federal justice minister in 1885.
For three years Thompson lived in Ottawa boarding houses, lonely and miserable while his wife and children remained in Halifax. In order to forget his solitude, he would work late into the night at his office on the Hill.
When re-united with his family Thompson resumed a joyous home life. He and his wife Annie had nine children. He was devoted to them. For years they led a rambling existence, moving from one rental house to another. On becoming prime minister in 1892 Thompson moved to a grand home at 276 Somerset Street. It was a splendid, over-the-top Queen Anne Revival affair.
Here Thompson read Treasure Island to his children and left love notes for his wife. He called her “baby dear.” She nicknamed him “grunty.” Biographer Peter Waite recounted: “He always remembered birthdays and gifts for the children. He was a wonderful family man.”
Thompson had vices too. He smoked and ate too much. His favourite lunch was a fistful of coconut caramels. At 5’ 7” his weight ballooned past 200 pounds. In September 1894 he was diagnosed with heart trouble and advised by doctors to lose weight and stop drinking rye.
“You have to give your best and your worst,” Thompson said. Tragically, the prime minister who gave his best did not have long to live.
Seven weeks after seeing his doctor, Thompson left the capital on an Italian holiday. In Rome he proposed to climb the 404 steps to the top of St. Peter’s Dome. Left panting by the exertion, Thompson took to his bed for two days. Shortly afterward he was summoned to London to receive an honour from Queen Victoria.
On Dec. 12, 1894, at a luncheon with the Queen, Thompson dropped dead of a heart attack. He was 49. Back in Ottawa a newspaper reporter ran to the house on Somerset Street to break the news to Thompson’s widow. “If it were not for children,” she wrote, “I should long to creep away in some corner and die.”
Thompson died so poor Parliament paid the cost of the funeral. His estate totaled $9,727. Today he is forgotten. While most of the grand houses at Somerset and Metcalfe Streets survive, Thompson’s home was demolished, replaced with a dreary 1960s apartment building. No monument commemorates his life in Ottawa.
By Andrew Elliott
Lost to history is the state funeral of Generalissimo Trujillo, strongman of the Dominican Republic, shot by assassins in 1961. Canadian diplomat John Graham attended the mass. “The only people in the entire church without guns were the clergy and the diplomatic corps,” he recalls.
Fearful that rebels would seize the corpse for public display, Trujillo’s henchmen hoisted it from the church by helicopter winch. “The Generalissimo’s coffin swinging in the air was a moment of unbearable, transcendent mystery for the dazed and credulous mourners below,” writes Graham. Only later did diplomats learn Trujillo wasn’t in the coffin. They’d stuffed it with an unknown corpse while preserving El Presidente in a freezer for quiet burial.
So goes Whose Man In Havana?, the memoirs of a man who served a lifetime in the foreign ministry. Graham’s writing is warm and personable with anecdotes from an era when Canada briefly walked on the world stage.
“When I first joined the foreign service in the late Fifties I caught the tail end of the much-ballyhooed Pearsonian golden age,” says Graham. “Although not always golden, it was a good time to be in External Affairs. The good times dipped a few times, but they did not come to an end with Mr. Pearson’s departure.”
Canada in the Fifties had a Nobel Peace Prize, the fourth largest air force on earth and an aircraft carrier, HMCS Magnificent. The British Empire was bankrupt, Europe was in ruins and America was desperate for Cold War friends. “In the post-war period, Canadians entered a time of prosperity that their forebears and indeed, most of the fellow inhabitants of the world had never dreamed of,” historian Craig Brown wrote in his 1987 Illustrated History of Canada.
Parliament thought nothing of buying Avro Arrow jets at $6.6 million a pop and driving defence spending to 40 percent of the federal budget. This was the heyday of Canadian diplomacy, Graham writes: “It is a term that invites abuse and is best avoided, but seen from the second decade of the twenty-first century, those years appear bathed in gilded light.”
It was an era when Canadian diplomats on the Latin beat packed pistols for safety. Graham recalls the assistant trade commissioner’s Chevrolet Impala was burned by Dominican street rioters in 1961. In Cuba, Graham spied for the CIA by sketching suspicious Soviet military installations: “When the mission was over I sometimes wondered whether I had reported anything significant in the acutely nervous Cold War context,” he writes. “I don’t know – Langley never told me – but I doubt it.”
Whose Man In Havana? is not a lament for a bygone era. It is a collection of reminiscences by a talented storyteller that leaves readers with indelible images like the massacre of black dogs in Haiti on rumours a Vodou spell had been cast over a corrupt local official named Duval. “A Priestess declared she had used her sacred Vodou powers to transform Duval into a dog, a black dog,” Graham explains; “The gardener told me no black dog is safe in all Port-au-Prince.”
By Holly Doan
Whose Man In Havana? Adventures from the Far Side of Diplomacy, by John W. Graham; University of Calgary Press; 328 pages; ISBN 9781-5523-8242; $34.95
The Department of Environment spent more than 10 years and $1.4 million building a “net zero” garage in Whitehorse that it neither needed nor finished, say auditors. The project was commissioned by then-Environment Minister Catherine McKenna as proof her department could “lead by example.”
Illegal immigrants and refugee claimants receive an average $1,363 per year worth of free health care at a total cost of $989 million this year, the Budget Office said yesterday. “Can you understand why Canadians are really frustrated and mad about this program?” Conservative MP Dan Mazier (Riding Mountain, Man.) asked the Commons health committee.
Canadians should beware of “illegitimate” media for the sake of social cohesion, Heritage Minister Marc Miller said yesterday. His remarks followed a briefing note stating cabinet is relying on the CBC and its $1.6 billion annual grant to promote “social cohesion.”
Muslim observances now outnumber Christian days on the federal calendar, according to an Access To Information memo by the Immigration and Refugee Board. It was due to the inclusion of “diversity, equity and accessibility related dates,” it said.
Federal departments and agencies should boycott Twitter, says a Liberal-appointed Alberta Senator. Paula Simons, a former CBC producer and Edmonton Journal columnist, called the social media platform revolting: “Many have quit for reasons of moral revulsion.”
The Commons and Senate yesterday suspended all proceedings in mourning for eight dead including schoolchildren as young as 12 and 13 shot at a Tumbler Ridge, B.C. secondary school. The town’s Member of Parliament said the killing of children was beyond words: “I got a terrible phone call.”
The Department of Canadian Heritage compiled a list of “notable Muslim Canadians” comprised mainly of Liberal and New Democrat MPs including Maryam Monsef, records show. The former Minister of Gender Equality lost re-election in 2021 after describing Taliban terrorists as “our brothers.”
Immigration Minister Lena Diab yesterday raised passport fees by as much as $4 with more hikes on the way and a regulatory change that will result in automatic inflationary increases every subsequent year. There was no public notice: “Fees for travel documents will be adjusted each year to align with inflation.”
Public Works Minister Joel Lightbound yesterday promised cabinet will never abandon century-old preferential mail rates for libraries or the blind. It followed an outcry over a clause in an omnibus budget bill to deregulate stamp prices: “We understand this has been the source of anxiety.”
