Parliament must be recalled to deal with ‘back-stabber’ Donald Trump, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre said yesterday. “President Trump stabbed America’s best friend in the back,” he said.
The Department of Agriculture compiled a list of American states reliant on Canadian farm and seafood products where electors voted for U.S. President Donald Trump. Many were “swing states,” said a briefing note: “How is the Government of Canada preparing for potential tariff increases?”
Crown corporations should have powers to conceal records as confidential under the Access To Information Act, says the Federal Court of Appeal. The key ruling on disclosure was watched closely by three Crown agencies: ‘It needed to provide a guarantee of confidentiality to its customers.’
A tariff war with the United States will cost a million Canadian jobs, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said yesterday. The figure is in addition to unemployed who currently number 1,505,000 according to a February 7 Labour Force Survey by Statistics Canada: “A million jobs at risk is no joke.”
A federal agency is charging taxpayers an undisclosed sum to install a sun lounge atop a government office building. The National Research Council yesterday would not discuss expenses for the project that includes flower boxes, a splash pad and Brazilian walnut benches for relaxing during work hours: “Suggest green solutions whenever possible.”
A continental trade war will be painful, costly and unavoidable if the U.S. proceeds today with threatened tariffs, says Liberal leadership candidate Chrystia Freeland. “It is self-mutilating for the United States,” Freeland told reporters: “This tariff war is a really dumb idea.”
Governor General Mary Simon yesterday in pointed remarks to foreign diplomats lamented a tense rise in “economic nationalism.” Her speech came as U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed a tariff war will commence today: ‘Canada understands respect.’
Canada’s chief bank inspector says a current mortgage “stress test” may be replaced altogether with tighter scrutiny of banks instead of borrowers. “We’ll decide after we have a full year of testing,” Superintendent of Financial Institutions Peter Routledge said in a memo.
Organizers of Mark Carney’s Liberal leadership campaign are shielding the candidate from media following criticism he lied about his record. News coverage of one invitation-only Carney speech was restricted to reporters instructed to “RSVP to receive location details.”
Canadians are more alert to “potential biases in ‘mainstream’ news” with the growth of independent media and multiple news sources on the internet, say CRTC researchers. The public said media typically do a poor job of reporting on different political views, said a report released Saturday: ‘People are being more selective.’
Cabinet is counting on the CBC to save Canadian democracy from American threats, says Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly. The Crown broadcaster was just as important as Parliament or the courts in the current “security crisis,” she said.
A multi-billion dollar fund intended to subsidize projects that deliver “social benefits” never defined the term, says a Department of Natural Resources audit. Analysts said it was difficult to determine if taxpayers received value for money: ‘They have yet to fully determine a comprehensive method to measure them.’
Canadian Pacific Railway has been cleared of liability in the nation’s worst postwar train wreck. The Railway was not to blame for the 2013 Lac-Mégantic disaster, the Québec Court of Appeal has ruled: “Canadian Pacific was not the owner of the train that derailed, or its cargo.”
My cat
sleeps through the hurricane.
Undisturbed by
150 miles-per-hour gusts that
shake houses,
bring down trees,
plunge half a city into darkness.
TV screen is filled with
reporters,
emergency crews,
politicians.
Her head on her paws;
eyes closed;
ear occasionally twitches.
Her inner peace
unshakeable;
the calm of her breathing
contagious.
I should have known the drill by know.
She slept through the Russian invasion to Crimea,
the refugee crisis in Syria,
even the marriage of William and Kate.
I soon catch up with her,
snuggle by her side with a tea and a blanket,
switch to the Comedy Network.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
It was a popular quip in the 1980s that West Edmonton Mall’s waterpark had more submarines than the Royal Canadian Navy. The sub service was always the heartbreak branch of the military: underfunded, ill-equipped, with working conditions that would be intolerable in a federal prison.
Author Julie Ferguson spent decades researching this affectionate tribute to the nation’s hard-luck submariners. It remains an intriguing and little-known story. It is also a mystery why anyone ever volunteered for submarine duty in the first place.
Modern underwater warfare dates from 1863 when the Confederate navy launched a combat submarine in Alabama’s Mobile Bay, the H.L. Hunley: a ten-metre tube with hand-cranked propeller and lighting by candle. The idea was to sneak up on Union warships dragging a canister of gunpowder in tow. Instead the Hunley sank like a stone. Rescuers later recovered corpses of crewmen huddled together clutching candles, their faces frozen in agony: “The spectacle was ghastly.”
Early Canadian submariners escaped the Hunley’s fate but the birth of the service was marked by awful conditions and failed equipment. In 1914 the B.C. cabinet, acting on false rumours that German cruisers were headed for Victoria, bought two diesel-electric boats sitting in a Seattle shipyard. The subs had been contracted to the Chilean government. B.C. was charged $1.2 million for the pair, three times what Chile paid. The Iquique and Antofagasta were unimaginatively renamed CC1 and CC2 and assigned to imperial service. It was not an auspicious beginning.
“Early submarines had no air purification, heating or cooling systems, and when they were submerged the air quickly became fetid and damp,” writes Ferguson. The vessels had a top speed of 18 kilometres an hour underwater but only for a few minutes. The wiring shorted in humidity and salt water contaminated the batteries, filling the subs with chlorine gas. On CC1 and CC2’s one epic voyage from Esquimalt, B.C. to Halifax via the Panama Canal the temperature in the engine rooms hit 60° Celsius and the vessels rolled so badly the crew became seasick.
Neither CC1 nor CC2 ever saw combat. The submarine jinx was set.
“If they had been asked, the submariners would have told the policy-makers that submarines were first and foremost weapons of enormous strategic power,” writes Ferguson. “Even the suspicion that one might be lurking outside a naval base was sufficient to bottle up a battle fleet.”
Instead submarines were cast as expensive and pointless. Even in the 1950s when defence spending peaked at nearly half the federal budget, the sub service was starved. When cabinet ordered new vessels in 1964, the Oberon-class Ojibwa, Onondaga and Okanagan, all three diesel-electrics were obsolete in the age of nuclear-powered craft. When Prime Minister Jean Chretien authorized the purchase of four more diesel-powered craft from Britain in 1995, one caught fire killing a crewman while repairs and refits to the fleet sent the program more than $700 million over-budget.
The heartbreak continues.
By Holly Doan
Through A Canadian Periscope: The Story Of The Canadian Submarine Service, by Julie Ferguson, Dundurn Press; 424 pages; ISBN 9781-4597-10559; $26.99
