A new federal program promising honesty in contracting will “promote ethical business practices,” says a Department of Public Works briefing note. The initiative followed the ArriveCan scandal that saw two federal managers suspended, a leading contractor raided by police and a $59.5 million charge for taxpayers: “The trail behind you is deleted.”
Auditors are faulting a $157 million military contractor for poor service. The contractor is a former subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management previously chaired by Prime Minister Mark Carney: “This had a negative impact on Canadian Armed Forces morale.”
The Canadian Tourism Commission yesterday said it is hiring U.S. publicists to encourage Americans to vacation here. The Commission made no mention of Justin Trudeau’s February 1 appeal for a cross-border travel boycott: “The United States is Canada’s largest source of international tourism.”
Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly privately praised the United States for taking “a hard stand on drugs” after President Donald Trump threatened 25 percent tariffs in the name of border security, records show. The comments were at odds with cabinet’s public statements and were scripted in notes for a Mar-a-Lago conference: “We are pleased the incoming U.S. administration also takes a hard stand on drugs.”
Canadians should welcome illegal immigrants from the United States in the name of humanity, Amnesty International said yesterday. The U.S. counts nearly 11 million illegal immigrants including hundreds of thousands in border states: “We are calling on Canada to be a leader.”
Judges have dismissed a defamation claim against CTV News over a 2022 exposé on the dog sled industry. One company sued after a W5 cameraman appeared on an owner’s doorstep for an episode called “Dogs In Distress.”
The heritage department paid a consultant six figures to track Twitter and Facebook posts by friends of Israel, Access To Information records show. The surveillance followed Hamas terrorists’ October 7, 2023 killing and kidnapping of Jews in Israel including eight Canadians: “Several influential accounts particularly on Twitter have taken a staunch pro-Israel position.”
Managers of an election fund that paid cash for news coverage will not disclose how much was given individual applicants or why. Known recipients include The Logic, a Toronto website whose publisher David Skok called subsidies “an insult to the audience” before soliciting more than $1.5 million in federal funding: “It will have a direct impact on the daily assigning and editing of a journalism product.”
Liberals have no interest in reviving a vote pact with New Democrats, says Prime Minister Mark Carney. MPs were expected to “do what we need to do as a country,” he told reporters: “We received the highest number of votes in Canadian history.”
Bloc Québécois MPs described as “strange” the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm for having King Charles open Parliament as a symbolic act of sovereignty. Two other British monarchs have attended the Canadian Parliament: “In the time of Elizabeth II one could understand; she was an old lady.”
An Alberta riding picked for a federal byelection has had one Liberal MP in 60 years. Three-term Conservative MP Damien Kurek (Battle River-Crowfoot, Alta.) resigned Friday and asked constituents to put Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre back in the Commons: “Hold the Liberal minority government to account.”
The family huddled under the Blanket,
Warm and safe,
Listening to the wind outside.
Waiting out the storm.
The father, loaded down,
With a season’s worth of furs,
Approached the white man’s post,
Counting on fair trade for his effort.
Three and half centuries,
Treaties and trade,
Heartache and promise,
Woven into the wool.
A town grew around the store,
Families grew around the store,
As a country emerged from the land.
And a people found their voice in the wilderness.
Maps drawn,
Track laid and roads cut,
The citizens working together,
Became a Nation.
Three and half centuries,
History and progress,
The fabric of the country,
Woven into the wool.
Once a Company of Adventurers,
Now sliding into memory,
The fortunes made.
Prosperity hard won.
Once a Country of Adventurers,
Now dwindled in spirit,
Huddle under a blanket,
Waiting to see if they weather the storm.
By W.N. Branson
How do you destroy a centuries-old industry? We managed. Ottawa for decades tried and failed to save the Atlantic northern cod fishery from European poachers. There were fishing limits and quotas, scientific panels and studies, diplomatic protests and many, many transatlantic meetings. “There are no gunboat solutions,” Joe Clark once remarked. As an old German philosopher put it, pacifism is no virtue in the toothless. The results are still cursed in Newfoundland & Labrador as the biggest layoff in Canadian history.
The cod fishery was a heritage industry that thrived for 400 years and helped build the federation. As late as the 1980s the fishery accounted for one-tenth of Newfoundland’s economy.
Its decline is one of the nation’s great commercial collapses, more devastating than the Avro Arrow or wind-up of the Hudson’s Bay fur trade. “Canada was preoccupied with rebuilding fish stocks; the European Union was preoccupied with finding outlets for its fishing capacity,” authors note. “The stage was set for confrontation.”
Fishing For A Solution is concise and unvarnished, a plain analysis on what happens when federal politicians defending provincial interests step in the ring with the European Union, population 500 million. It is a story of “good intentions and bad outcomes,” Fishing concludes. Its co-authors have the street cred to document the long, downward spiral: One is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary; two are former chiefs of the Department of Fisheries’ international affairs directorate.
The facts still jolt. From the 1960s serial over-fishing threatened the trade, prompting Canada to begin fixing a series of offshore fishing limits: nine miles in 1964, extended to twelve miles in 1970, expanded to 200 miles by international treaty in 1977.
What could go wrong? Just about everything. It was a “very conservative management regime” in the face of “aggressive fishing practices” by European trawlers, authors conclude.
From 1981 Canada agreed to let E.U. countries fish within the 200-mile limit on the promise of “conservation cooperation” and “improved market access” to Europe: “The Canadian government made it clear that it would only allow fishing in Canadian waters by countries that entered into agreements with Canada, and that it would have to receive certain benefits in return.” Treaties were signed with the USSR, Norway, Poland, Spain and Portugal.
Year over year E.U. trawlers exceeded their quotas, the Canadian fishery expanded to keep pace and nobody seemed to keep an accurate count of just how many cod there were. Successive fisheries ministers, nine of them all told, jostled Europe for a workable scheme. By the time then-minister John Crosbie closed the fishery as unsustainable in 1992 – “I didn’t take the fish from the goddamn water,” he told demonstrators – the processing plants were shuttered and 190,000 jobs were lost.
And now? You can still see a cod packinghouse with gear in Bonavista, Newfoundland. It is a museum.
By Holly Doan
Fishing For A Solution: Canada’s Fisheries Relations With The European Union 1977-2013, by Donald Barry, Bob Applebaum & Earl Wiseman; University of Calgary Press; 150 pages; ISBN 9781-55238-7788; $34.95
Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam and dozens of other pandemic managers were required to sign a secret oath promising never to divulge information that “may result in embarrassment” for cabinet, Access To Information records show. “Quite a few” were required to sign the pledge, said a newly-released federal memo: “It makes me wonder, what is so damaging?”
The health department in its last memo to then-Addictions Minister Ya’ara Saks cautioned that “changing laws alone is not sufficient” to reduce drug overdose deaths. The December 17 memo came nearly two years after cabinet changed federal law to decriminalize personal possession of narcotics in British Columbia: “If pressed on national decriminalization, there is no plan for national decriminalization.”
