Companies 100 percent foreign owned still qualify as “Canadian” under Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Buy Canadian Policy, says the Department of Public Works. The definition of “Canadian” is so broad it would apply to foreign-owned corporations with storefront branches here like the Bank of China, records show: “We need to go back to what the Prime Minister said.”
China remains a leading perpetrator of espionage and foreign interference including cultivation of “relationships” with unnamed politicians, says a security report to Parliament. It follows Foreign Minister Anita Anand’s announcement of a “new foreign policy” emphasizing cooperation with the People’s Republic: ‘Threat actors’ goal is to influence Canadian decision makers to align with positions, narratives and policies that promote a positive image of their country.’
The Department of Canadian Heritage is attempting to claw back $99,500 in funding from a Palestinian group over social media posts. The department cited Instagram messages depicting Israelis as homicidal slave masters and a symbol it associated with Hamas terrorists: “Long live the triangle.”
House of Commons administration is keeping files on what Canadians say about their MPs. The “very robust records management system” included social media posts, said the Deputy Sergeant-at-Arms: “We have different categories, if they are misogynistic, etcetera.”
The Privy Council in a newly-declassified 1968 memo estimated Soviet sympathizers and Cold War subversives in Canada far outnumbered actual Communist Party members. The memo named one university, five unions and the United Church as key targets for subversion: “The Communist movement in Canada consists of some 20,000 persons.”
The Royal Canadian Mint
introduces their new collection.
They say Canadian coins celebrate
our nation’s culture and milestones, natural splendour,
technological and athletic achievements.
Things that make us proud.
Browsing the catalogue,
I debate between the 16-gram silver coin featuring
Batman,
and the red, blue, and gold-coloured coin featuring
a Phoenician warrior, also known as
Wonder Woman.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
On Sunday, June 22, 1953 a liquor store clerk named Bill Beatty died from an accidental fall at his Toronto duplex. Beatty was a plain man who died an ordinary death, yet a Globe & Mail editor pushed his obituary up to page four: “As a result of injuries suffered a week ago in a fall from an upper duplex porch at his home, William James Beatty, 54, of 56 Macdonnell Ave., died yesterday afternoon in St. Joseph’s Hospital. Mr. Beatty, it is believed, suffered a dizzy spell from the heat and lost his balance. He never regained consciousness. A veteran of the First World War, he served overseas with the 75th Regiment.”
He was with the 75th. In a city that celebrated Old School Ties and the exclusivity of private clubs, the combat veterans of the Toronto Scottish Regiment were a privileged class of workers’ aristocracy honoured long after the war’s end.
Author Timothy J. Stewart chronicles their story in Toronto’s Fighting 75th In The Great War, an affectionate account of the city regiment that survived the worst battles of the Western front. Survivors were farmers and stock-jobbers, storekeepers and postal workers. One served a term in the legislature; another was art director at Eaton’s.
Toronto, then and now, was a city of neighbourhoods and tight-knit families. The regiment’s list of dead included ten Browns, five Clarks, four Stewarts and three MacDonalds.
“During the 75ths’ three years overseas, more than 4,000 men had worn its Maple Leaf and Unicorn cap badge; more than 917 had died in battle or afterwards of wounds, or were missing and unknown but to God,” writes Stewart, an educator and curator of the Toronto Scottish museum. “An additional 2,300 had been wounded in body or mind. These were staggering numbers.”
The Fighting 75th is a rich tribute, beautifully illustrated, with vignettes culled from thousands of hours of research. Veterans called the regiment the “six bits.” Their march was “Colonel Bogey,” immortalized later as the theme of Bridge On The River Kwai. They sailed to war on April Fool’s Day to endure “appalling conditions” at the Somme, Vimy and Passchendaele, writes Stewart.
The 75th’s first commanding officer was Samuel Beckett, an architect killed in action at Vimy Ridge as he shouted his last words: “There is no withdrawal; come on again!” Their third commander was Colin Harbottle, an ex-bicycle racer who’d served time in Kingston penitentiary for embezzlement. Harbottle was a zealous reformer in wartime; he fined an infantryman 44 days’ pay for stealing a bottle of cognac. When he died of a heart attack while hunting partridge at Muskoka in 1933 old soldiers lined the streets of Toronto, heads bowed.
Historian Stewart documents their stories with genuine warmth and a police reporter’s eye for detail. The Fighting 75th had one Victoria Cross winner, and seven men court-martialed for self-inflicted wounds. One private, Laurence Ramsay, 21, was killed in action in 1918. A friend found an undated letter in Ramsay’s helmet: “Dear Mother,” it read, “Should I fall in action, I wish to leave you this last farewell…I am as good a boy when I write this as that far off day when I left my beloved home.”
Beautiful.
By Holly Doan
Toronto’s Fighting 75th in the Great War 1915-1919: A Prehistory of The Toronto Scottish Regiment, by Timothy J. Stewart; Wilfrid University Library Press; ISBN 9781-77112-1828; $59.99
The national debt is now worth the equivalent of more than $33,000 for every man, woman and child in Canada, Budget Officer Annette Ryan said yesterday. Sustainability of Canada’s finances is a concern if interest rates rise or growth shrinks, she said: “The economy still remains tenuous.”
Use of the Liberal Party’s “Canada Strong” election slogan in federal advertising violates a directive against partisan misuse of public funds, members of the Commons government operations committee said yesterday. The Privy Council promised to investigate: “It literally violates the Treasury Board rules.”
Statistics Canada yesterday denied downplaying anti-Semitic incidents in a national hate crimes report. Access To Information records showed the agency provided a confidential advance copy of its “highly anticipated” report to Heritage Minister Marc Miller’s department before it was published: “The department will get to review work in progress.”
Canada’s new Chief Public Health Officer yesterday called the pandemic “a very difficult time for everyone” but would not discuss which specific errors contributed to public distrust. “Trust in health and institutions has been strained,” Dr. Joss Reimer of Winnipeg told the Commons health committee: “Whether those were the right or wrong decisions, we know there were many difficult things.”
MPs yesterday recommended first-ever annual reporting on military suicides. The Commons veterans affairs committee complained of “data shortages” amid conflicting figures: “Release an annual report on deaths by suicide.”
Cabinet has jurisdiction to regulate the internet, Heritage Minister Marc Miller said yesterday. Canada had fallen “a couple of years behind” European countries in monitoring legal content, he said: “We’re working on it.”
Cabinet rates its “nation building bill” a success though no project has been approved since it passed into law last June 26, a parliamentary committee was told. Conservative MP Aaron Gunn (North Island-Powell River, B.C.) ridiculed the claim at a hearing of a Special Joint Committee: “John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier are looking down on us saying, ‘These guys know how to build things now’?”
A federal appointee mandated to monitor Canadian corporate ethics abroad has not tabled an annual report since 2022, Conservative MP Arnold Viersen (Peace River-Westlock, Alta.) yesterday told the Commons. Union executives have long questioned the Ombudsman for Responsible Enterprise: “The concern here is not an isolated delay but an ongoing failure.”
