Parliament must curb the Canada Revenue Agency’s practice of enforcing tax measures never passed into law, says the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. The appeal follows the Agency’s collection of tax, interest and penalties on capital gains amendments that Parliament never approved: “This experience highlights the need for Canada to introduce rules.”
Labour and cultural groups are asking that Canadians sign a public pledge to “reduce our dependence on the United States.” New Democrat MP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay, Ont.), the only Commons member to sign the Pledge For Canada to date, called it a “plan of resistance.”
Cracks were there at the beginning,
Parged and buttressed,
For centuries.
But the edifice held.
A people grew and prospered,
On common ground,
And common cause.
And found the way forward.
Sacrifice and hardship,
By the best of us,
Made way for wealth and ease,
For the rest.
But an inheritance was forgotten.
Brought to the point,
Broken, battered, bewildered,
Looking for rest,
And a way forward.
A choice emerges,
A better Deal, a future,
A Manifest Destiny,
On higher ground.
But dimly heard voices,
In the tone and timbre of the past,
Call in desperation,
As they recede into memory.
It is the whispers of our honoured dead.
By W.N. Branson 
My grandfather survived Bolshevism and civil war, hyperinflation and the Depression, but was confounded by lawns. Why would anyone seed arable land to inedible grass? His yard produced garlic by the pound. He outlived two wives.
Nearly a quarter-million Ukrainians settled the West before the First World War. Their affinity for garlic was renowned. In the flu epidemic of 1918 many Ukrainian households hung garlic on the walls in the belief it would ward off infection. In the 1920s, when John Diefenbaker began his long climb up Conservative Party ranks as a Prairie populist, biographer Denis Smith noted “garlic eaters” remained an Eastern Tory epithet for Western immigrants.
Garlic was not merely delicious. It was used to treat colds and congestion, ringworm and fever, toothaches and headaches. Men ate it raw. Children had it crushed in warm milk. “We may yet see the time when household ‘kitchen medicine’ is revived as a desirable and widespread practice to be used with self-sufficient pride and not naïve embarrassment,” writes author Michael Mucz, a University of Alberta biologist.
In Baba’s Kitchen Medicines Professor Mucz documents remedies, even garlic-less ones, favoured by Ukrainian healers, herbalists and midwives. Mucz relies on testimonials from aged witnesses who “shared their personal and at times painful recollections” of homesteading. Hospital care was expensive, settlers had little money and no physician would have understood their language, anyway.
The result was the 20th century use of ancient folk medicines to treat “a loss of inner balance or harmony” with plasters, poultices and tinctures. “I was 16 years old when I froze my foot so badly that I could not even take off my shoe,” recalled a Vegreville, Alta. resident. “Mother remembered an Old Country home remedy that used peas. She soaked some dry peas, and when they were soft, she mashed them up. She placed pea mash on my foot, and wrapped it on. She changed the pea poultice daily,and in a week the blistering was all gone.”
Another homesteader described a cure for earache, a six-inch funnel of linen coated in beeswax, inserted in the ear and lit to the accompaniment of prayer: “Father’s pain was gone completely and he fell asleep easily.”
It would be peevish to question whether all “cures” in Baba’s Kitchen Medicines were medically sound. Would standing over a smouldering fire of red onion skins really treat infertility? Could a hangover patient actually clear his head with a mouthful of urine?
The point was this: Ukrainian immigrants carving a society on the sub-Arctic plains discovered they could rely on no one but themselves. So they did.
By Tom Korski
Baba’s Kitchen Medicines: Folk Remedies of Ukrainian Settlers in Western Canada by Michael Mucz; University of Alberta Press; 265 pages; ISBN 978-0-88864-514-2; $34.95
Dr. Mona Nemer, cabinet’s $393,000-a year science advisor, spent tens of thousands on questionnaires asking Canadians if they’d ever seen a UFO. Records indicate Nemer, a biochemist, expressed a personal interest in the subject though her survey showed most Canadians considered it pointless: “Unidentified aerial phenomenon is not an issue of high concern.”
New Democrats yesterday proposed a Buy Canadian program to “produce things we need in our own country” with union labour, said leader Jagmeet Singh. The Party did not comment when asked if its MPs would be compelled to sell shares privately held in U.S. corporations including non-union Amazon: ‘We need to change the rules to favour companies with unionized workers.’
New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh yesterday reneged on his Christmas pledge to “bring this government down” and allow a winter election campaign. Singh said New Democrats instead will support any cabinet bill tabled in response to U.S. tariffs: “Your position has been moving on this issue.”
Convicted felons cannot remain on the government payroll while in federal prison. The labour board finding came in the case of a Parks Canada employee fired after he was sent to the penitentiary: “Integrity is a legitimate concern.”
Even a small increase in urban home prices can have a negative long term impact on city life, CMHC said yesterday. The federal insurer’s Deputy Chief Economist in a commentary warned costly housing “undermines the long term vibrancy of our leading cities.”
Public Safety Minister David McGuinty today is in Washington, D.C. in an 11th hour bid to avert a tariff war. McGuinty’s hurried mission followed testimony at a U.S. Senate hearing in which a star witness blamed Canadian drug labs for killing Americans: “We take it seriously.”
A trade war with America will “badly hurt” Canadian jobs, investment and growth, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem said yesterday. Mackem told reporters the Bank was powerless to help: “We have little experience with tariffs of the magnitude being proposed.”
The Department of Canadian Heritage yesterday would not comment on funding for a proposed national shrine to 215 children purportedly buried at a former Indian Residential School in Kamloops, B.C. No remains have been found despite millions paid for “remains excavation,” records show.
Cabinet in a first-ever report on yearly climate targets predicts all federal offices will use “100 percent clean electricity” this year. Researchers did not explain how they would keep lights on in thousands of federal offices from Iqaluit to Halifax where power grids run on diesel, coal or natural gas: “Sorry, we’ll do it better next time.”
The Correctional Service of Canada has documented hundreds of drone flights over federal prisons after spending more than a million dollars to intercept contraband by air. Details of penitentiary drone drops are itemized in censored Access To Information memos: “It’s a challenge.”
Defence Minister Bill Blair “dropped the ball” in a police investigation of Chinese contacts with the Liberal Party, the Commission on Foreign Interference said yesterday. A report cited legitimate suspicions over unusual inactivity in Blair’s office as public safety minister in 2021: “Concerns are legitimate and understandable.”
