MPs have given quick Second Reading to a cabinet bill that would ban bitcoin financing of political campaigns. Approval in principle came Friday, just a month after the bill’s introduction: “There is a high sense of collaboration on this.”
A $3.2 billion telecom subsidy launched on a promise of high-speed internet for every home in Canada is not close to meeting its target, Department of Industry figures show. Auditors blamed cost overruns and slow processing of paperwork: “These projects target areas where there is currently no business case for the private sector.”
Protecting egg quotas is a matter of “national security,” says a farmers’ lobby. The Egg Farmers of Canada in a Senate submission said defence of their quota “is critical.”
You caught me
surfing the web.
I only wanted to read
the top stories.
It’s not my fault
they were topless.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
There were two Franklin Expeditions. One is acclaimed by Parks Canada which spent millions scanning the floor of the Arctic Ocean in search of 19th century English shipwrecks. The other is documented through the passion and extraordinary research of a lone anthropologist, Alison Brown of the University of Aberdeen. The resulting First Nations, Museums, Narrations is intriguing and profound.
In June 1929 a band of researchers left Winnipeg to document what they believed were the vanishing First Nations of the Prairies. Canada’s Indigenous population had been decimated by disease and misfortune and numbered some 107,000 people. “Now or never is the time in which to collect from the natives what is still available for study,” noted a director of the Geological Survey of Canada. Anthropologists believed the end was near. “Indigenous people were thought to be assimilating or dying out,” writes Brown.
The 1929 group called itself the Franklin Motor Expedition for the car they drove, a 1928 six-cylinder Franklin sedan. The team numbered two Australians and a former staffer from New York’s Museum of the American Indian. They spent three months travelling from reserve to reserve, speaking with elders and purchasing artifacts.
Armed with a 16mm film camera and a cash budget, the trio collected everything from the trivial to the priceless: a hide scraper made from Massey-Harris tractor parts, a pair of moccasins picked up at a Banff gift shop, sacred bark, a mink skin medicine bag and Blackfoot dog travois, eagle bone whistles used in Sun Dance ceremonies, drums, scrolls and spectacular headdresses and a Sarcee cougar hide painted with exquisite pictographs.
At Little Pine Nation one researcher paid 25¢ for a grass whisk used in a sweat lodge. A colleague recalled members of the tribe laughed over the sale: “They though he could have gone and picked the grass and tied it together himself.”
The result was the largest single collection of Canadian Prairie Indigenous artifacts ever assembled in a British museum. Some artifacts were sold to local curators to help finance the trip, but the bulk of 680 artifacts was deposited at Cambridge.
The last surviving member of the Franklin Motor Expedition died in 1990. And that was it, until the trove was rediscovered by Alison Brown as she poured over the collection for a museum catalogue in 1998, “an in-house document that was not intended to reach out to First Nations,” Brown notes. “I soon discovered no one from the First Nations visited by the Franklin Motor Expedition had ever been to Cambridge to see the collection. This was not due to a lack of interest; people simply did not know it was there.”
Impressed by the collection and its odd history, Brown retraced the route of the 1929 expedition from Calgary to Swan Lake, Man. She spent months combing public and private archives, interviewing First Nations members and contacting descendants of the expedition members.
Here the rich narrative becomes jarring. Was the Franklin Motor collection an irreplaceable gift to archaeologists or mere plunder? Did researchers salvage artifacts that would have been lost to civilization or simply barter with poor First Nations whose sacred cultural possessions were scorned as cigar-store trinkets?
Brown notes the Indian Act outlawed potlatches and healing ceremonies. Even participation in the Sun Dance at a summer festival was punishable by a $25 fine and a month in jail. “Pieces such as the many ceremonial items collected by the expedition may have been sold because their keepers desperately needed money,” Brown writes.
Collectors “sincerely believed their actions were justified,” First Nations, Museums concludes, but it was never that simple. “First Nations people participated in the gradual commodification of materials that they would previously have treated very differently. This commodification – and the resultant exchange of artifacts for cash – has enabled museums to assert that the actions of collectors in the past were legal and valid, and that people who sold artifacts did so of their own free will. By contrast, First Nations critics of this argument point to the harsh realities of life for their ancestors and the combination of economic conditions and challenges to traditional belief systems that made it difficult to resist the approaches of collectors.”
First Nations, Museums is a fascinating, unsettling account of the one Franklin Expedition that Canadians never hear of. It makes it impossible to enjoy a museum in quite the same way again.
By Holly Doan
First Nations, Museums, Narrations: Stories of the 1929 Franklin Motor Expedition to the Canadian Prairies, by Alison K. Brown; University of British Columbia Press; 305 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-27263; $34.95
The chair of the Commons ethics committee yesterday told reporters to “do your goddamn job” as cabinet moved to quash committee scrutiny of spending and appointments. Conservative MP John Brassard (Barrie South-Innisfil, Ont.) said media were so Liberal-friendly the “Opposition party is held to a greater account than the government.”
Many Canadians are resigned to high household debts and increasingly borrow more to cover basic expenses, a bankruptcy trustee yesterday told the Commons finance committee. Household debt is $3.2 trillion nationwide including more than $2 trillion worth of mortgages, according to Statistics Canada: “Many Canadians have no margin for error.”
Parliament must mandate that news media drawing taxpayers’ aid tell readers when and how much, says an independent publisher. Rudyard Griffiths, publisher of the news site The Hub, yesterday told the Commons heritage committee that hidden subsidies were “undermining public trust in the media.”
The Commons ethics committee yesterday recommended that Parliament close what critics called the “Carney loophole” by forcing the Prime Minister to sell millions in stock holdings. Liberal members of the committee objected: ‘It appeared to have been crafted with one individual in mind.’
The Commons by unanimous vote has passed a private bill to commission a medal for living organ donors. The award would be a token of the nation’s thanks for “a priceless gift,” said the bill’s sponsor, Conservative MP Ziad Aboultaif (Edmonton Manning): “A transplant recipient once said to me, ‘I just don’t feel that a thank you card is enough.'”
Cabinet will take majority control of all 26 Commons committees and no longer “play silly partisan games,” Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon said yesterday. The move effectively quashes all ethics investigations, subpoenas and questioning of reluctant witnesses: “That’s settled.”
Free health care for illegal immigrants and rejected refugee claimants cost more than $43 million last year including free prescriptions and transportation to a doctor’s office, the Department of Immigration disclosed yesterday. Figures were made public at the request of Conservative MP Burton Bailey (Red Deer, Alta.) who said foreigners with no legal right to be in Canada received better care than many taxpayers: ‘People on bogus asylum claims are receiving health care many Canadians do not even receive.’
The Commons yesterday by a 291 to 28 vote gave Second Reading to a private bill to regulate advertising of sports betting. Bill S-211 An Act Respecting A National Framework On Sports Betting Advertising passed the Senate last October 21: “We know there is the potential, as with many other addictive activities, to destroy.”
Protestors convicted of attempting to intimidate Canadians under hate crime amendments to the Criminal Code should pay the cost of prosecution, the Senate was told yesterday. The proposal follows complaints that one of Canada’s largest Orthodox synagogues now spends a million a year on security: “Where hatred is the animating force behind a serious crime, requiring an offender to bear some of those costs is a signal that a community’s safety should not be taken for granted.”
Cable TV subscribers face another rate hike, the second in two weeks, after the CRTC yesterday increased mandatory monthly fees to rescue a money-losing channel. It follows a Department of Canadian Heritage report warning the future of television in Canada is “uncertain.”
