Indigenous Canadians should be formally consulted on all new foreign treaties, the Assembly of First Nations has told the Senate. Consultation with chiefs must be mandatory, they said: “First Nations have engaged in trade since time immemorial.”
New CRTC data confirm a sharp generational divide between Canadians who rely on TV newscasts and those who get their news on the internet. “A lower proportion used regular television as a primary source for their news and information content,” said in-house research.
The news channel
brings stories from the storm
into my living room.
My eyes to the screen;
my heart skips a beat.
With a cleavage deeper than usual,
the commentator seems prettier,
more attractive
than in any previous
disaster.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Police were not infrequent visitors to author Cheri DiNovo’s childhood home. All families have troubles but DiNovo’s make Angela’s Ashes look like a holiday camp. “I grew up in a violent, neurotic, narcissistic household where victims of their own personal traumas acted out in nasty, aggressive ways,” she writes. “This is not to blame any of them.”
Take Uncle Ken, one of the more responsible adults in the home. “It was Ken who took me to dance classes, Ken who took us shopping, Ken who drove us up to the family cottage and stayed with us there, Ken who financially supported us, Ken who always arrived at breakfast at the same time,” writes DiNovo.
“My breakfast was Sugar Crisp, white toast and milk. His, brown toast and coffee. It was also Ken who, one day as I was slurping down my second bowl of cereal, picked up a knife and slashed my Aunt Lorna across the neck.”
She ran away at 15 and sold LSD. “We assumed we would die young,” she writes.
DiNovo is a United Church minister and retired New Democrat member of the Ontario legislature. Her memoir The Queer Evangelist: A Socialist Clergy’s Radically Honest Tale recounts a world of Trotskyites, crusading pastors, Bay Street stock jobbers and colourful Damon Runyon street people that exists in a surprisingly small geographical space, a few square blocks of downtown Toronto. It is unrecognizable seven miles away in North York, let alone Revelstoke or Mount Pearl.
DiNovo makes it work because she is a gifted writer with a wry sense of humour. She boasts she was one of the few in her Trotsky study club who actually read Das Kapital, later drove a Lada and is still capable of pronouncing: “Capitalism is a sort of money addiction.”
“It’s a fabrication that capitalism thrives on competition,” she writes. “It doesn’t. It thrives on consolidation. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. The middle class empties out.”
“Capitalism was doomed,” she writes. Just as this begins to get tiresome, DiNovo recalls meeting a group of rich capitalist farmers among her rural congregation in Brucefield, Ont.
“I once asked my Bible study group why farmers worked so hard when they were sitting on so much land,” she recalls. “‘Why not sell most of it and retire? Buy a BMW and live in Florida?’ The women in the group looked at each other as if they’d never heard of such a thing and answered, ‘Then what would we do?’”
DiNovo served four terms in the legislature, becoming Party whip and caucus chair. Here, too, she writes with candour and irony. “The painful meetings are not with constituents whose problems the staff can handily solve, nor are they the ones where a bill or motion might draw attention to a serious political issue. The difficult ones are those you can see coming, where the constituent arrives with large binders, colour-coded inserts and briefcases full of paper. Inevitably their issues have something to do with a long saga of injustice, often genuine, at the hands of some bureaucracy or ministry.”
“These situations are usually very real and very hopeless,” she writes. “Our standard responses would be along the lines of ‘You’ve learned there’s very little justice in the justice system,’ or ‘You’ve learned there’s very little housing in the housing system.’ It always put me in mind of a scene in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina where people sleep outside bureaucrats’ doors waiting for a chance to be seen disdainfully for a minute or two.”
The Queer Evangelist is raw, a startling autobiography for a public office holder.
By Holly Doan
The Queer Evangelist: A Socialist Clergy’s Radically Honest Tale, by Cheri DiNovo; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 250 pages; ISBN 9781-7711-24898; $23.99
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board holds shares in a Chinese social media company used by Communist Party agents to intimidate Conservatives in the last election, records show. The Board had no comment on millions invested in operators of WeChat, a platform used to distribute wanted posters of one candidate who was forced to suspend his campaign: ‘The RCMP intercepted a credible threat to harm me during the election.’
Attorney General Sean Fraser yesterday said he feared some future justice minister will use federal hate crimes legislation to settle scores with environmental groups or political opponents. Fraser did not identify any person by name: “Those are dangerous conversations.”
Parliament should criminalize Indian Residential School denialism just as it outlawed wilful downplaying of the Holocaust, First Nations leaders yesterday told the Senate human rights committee. Indigenous witnesses condemned skeptics who state “no children actually died or are buried at these sites.”
A federal Taxpayer Bill Of Rights is “non-binding,” says the Canada Revenue Agency. The admission followed repeated Court rulings that the measure was neither a bill nor any guarantee of rights for taxpayers: “It would probably be better if the document were given a different name.”
A failed experiment with decriminalization left British Columbia with the lowest public support of any province for a “public health” approach to drug addiction, says in-house Department of Health research. New findings followed admissions the “safe supply” policy led to public disorder: ‘Support is only 15 percent in B.C.’
Nearly half of Canadians surveyed distrust the federal government to “make good decisions in the public interest,” according to in-house Privy Council research. The study documented growing public skepticism: “On the whole, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the way democracy works in Canada?”
Federal agencies have warned a mass attack targeting Canadian Jews may occur in coming months, the Senate human rights committee was told yesterday. Senators did not question the testimony: “This is not theoretical.”
Communities targeted by public disorder have “lost confidence” in police, prosecutors and the courts, Toronto’s Deputy Chief of Police yesterday told the Senate human rights committee. The testimony followed complaints of repeated, violent attacks on Jews: ‘When a Jewish school is shot at, social damage resonates widely.’
Cabinet has no plans to update a federal grant program for schoolchildren that’s been unchanged for decades, says a report by the Department of Social Development. It follows complaints the Canada Education Savings Grant hasn’t kept pace with costs: “This is a way to help our grandchildren given that parents are struggling to make ends meet.”
Taxpayers face Olympic-sized debts from hosting FIFA Men’s World Cup matches in Vancouver and Toronto, the Budget Office said yesterday. Thirteen games scheduled through June and July will cost the equivalent of $82 million apiece: “Federal support will be $473 million with the remainder of $593 million funded by other levels of government.”
The Department of Foreign Affairs spent more than $32 million on an iceberg-themed pavilion at the Osaka World Fair, records show. Expenses included $164,279 for questionnaires and $50,000 on “creative concept options” even as Prime Minister Mark Carney appealed to Canadians to make sacrifices: “We won’t play games.”
