Commons rivals yesterday put cabinet on an 11-week death watch regardless of who Liberals select to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. All opposition parties pledged a spring election after Trudeau announced his departure over “internal divisions,” the first resignation of its kind by a sitting Prime Minister in 129 years: “We have to go to an election.”
A federal program paid researchers to document supposed links between the Conservative Party and German Nazis and other hate groups, Access To Information records show. Government House Leader Karina Gould, who launched the “Digital Citizen Initiative” in 2019 under the guise of internet fact checking, yesterday had no comment: “Sowing of discontent and distrust in elected political leaders and the political process has significantly impacted how Canadians understand themselves.”
A bill to censor legal internet content yesterday lapsed with prorogation of Parliament. It marked the second time in four years that cabinet tried and failed to regulate blogs, Facebook posts and other social media deemed hurtful: “The government is close to the end of its mandate and does not have a lot of public support.”
An Alberta policeman disciplined for speaking at a Freedom Convoy rally has had his suspension without pay overturned. The punishment was “not justifiable,” ruled an Edmonton judge: “We are left in my view with factual distinctions.”
The Department of Foreign Affairs spent a record $84 million on special security at the Canadian Embassy in Kabul prior to abandoning it to the Taliban, documents show. Then-Ambassador Reid Sirrs, who had boasted of security preparedness in Kabul, fled the city the same day it fell to terrorists in 2021: “We failed. Look at us now.”
Cabinet used a costly “Digital Citizen Initiative” to fund partisan research at taxpayers’ expense, Access To Information records show. The Initiative launched by then-Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould polled Black people on whether they voted Liberal and hired Liberal publicists to monitor “anti-Liberal” media: “We decided to focus.”
Governor General Mary Simon and entourage billed nearly $37,000 in hotel charges to visit the Paris Paralympics last August, records show. The junket followed demands from MPs for greater scrutiny of Simon’s expenses that included silk jackets, limousine rides and gourmet meals: “The Governor General has shown a lack of respect for taxpayers.”
Canada saw a rush of foreign students claiming to be refugees after cabinet announced cuts to study permits, new figures show. A total 11,630 foreign students applied to remain in Canada as refugees from last January to August, the equivalent of more than 340 a week: “That isn’t the sign of a healthy system.”
Taxpayers in Canada Revenue Agency focus groups complained they were “gouged” and “overtaxed” by greedy auditors, says a pollsters’ report. The research followed cabinet’s threat to enact a $17.4 billion increase in capital gains taxes: “Impressions of Canada’s tax system focused on its complexity, lack of fairness and rates of taxation which were characterized as high.”
The Canada Revenue Agency was stung by public ridicule after attempting humour in a Twitter post, Access To Information records show. Management used a cartoon character to encourage taxpayers to file a yearly return on a promise of federal benefits: ‘It was met with bewilderment.’
The Liberals didn’t know
the deficit would be three times their
estimate.
Nor did they know
international agreements
would be in their way of legalizing
pot.
And how could they know
bringing in Syrian refugees
would be such a challenge
they couldn’t meet their own
deadline?
I remember trying it in Grade 4,
telling my teacher
– straight face, eye contact –
that I didn’t know the homework was for today.
That evening,
Mom needed to write a note,
explain,
apologise.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
In Canadian remembrance of the Second World War one fact rarely rates a footnote: Victory was union-made. Wartime membership in trade unions more than doubled.
The U.S.-based Congress of Industrial Organizations first organized a Windsor, Ont. auto parts plant in 1935. It became the fastest-growing labour group in the country.
“A union leader must be an incurable optimist,” one organizer told the CIO’s inaugural national conference in Ottawa just weeks after war’s outbreak in 1939. Their slogan: “C-anada I-s O-rganizing!”
Author Wendy Cuthbertson recounts a story that is rich in anecdotes. An English-born organizer marveled that in Canada, union members drove automobiles and wore fur coats. “Unthinkable in a European union meeting,” she said. Another recalled the gratitude of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants organized in the slaughterhouse trade: “I’d hand them a leaflet and they’d take it and smile and go into the plant and wave out the window. They knew it was about the union, even if they didn’t know what it said.”
Labour Goes To War documents the role of trade unions in the greatest industrial mobilization in our history. Canada’s manufacturing grew two-and-a-half times. The industrial workforce increased to more than 900,000. Ontario was so short of factory hands it issued work permits to 6,800 children under 14.
Unions stood “wholeheartedly behind the empire,” as a Trades and Labour Congress president put it. One former UAW organizer recruited an entire platoon for the Essex Scottish regiment.
Yet Labour Goes To War is not a patriotic romp. Even WWII could not erase tension on the shop floor. When labour tried to organize the Massey-Harris company in Toronto, management tried to foil the campaign by granting workers a paid lunch, then fired 76 employees as troublemakers.
Other wartime managers countered union drives with kindness. Dominion Foundries of Hamilton, Ont. invested in employees’ banquets, brass bands, sports teams and a staff newspaper, all money that “could have gone into workers’ wages,” wrote a Steelworkers’ organizer.
Nor did Parliament appear sympathetic to labour’s cause. With the outbreak of war cabinet dusted off the 1907 Industrial Disputes Investigations Act that required unions to submit to federal conciliation before any strike. The resulting cooling-off period could last months or a full year, in the case of Algoma Steel.
For all that, CIO membership ballooned from 50,000 to 244,000 in war years, an “astounding rate of growth,” writes Cuthbertson. By 1944 the union-backed Co-operative Commonwealth Federation stood first in the national Gallup poll, won government in Saskatchewan and elected 34 members to the Ontario legislature.
It rates more than a footnote.
By Holly Doan
Labour Goes To War: The CIO and the Construction of a New Social Order 1939-45 by Wendy Cuthbertson, UBC Press; 240 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-23432; $32.95
The Department of Foreign Affairs is censoring records detailing Canada’s hurried flight from Kabul in 2021. Staff in one memo confirmed Taliban terrorists confiscated diplomatic offices but would not “disclose further details due to security considerations.”
A pre-election carbon tax break on home heating oil will increase the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by more than a quarter million tonnes, new figures showed yesterday. The Prime Minister called it a break for Atlantic Canada where oil is a mainstay of home heating and Liberals held 24 seats: “We have heard clearly from Atlantic Canadians.”
Mortgage fraud and money laundering are growing worse in real estate despite new federal laws dating from 2020, cabinet said yesterday. The Department of Finance detailed new anti-fraud rules to take effect October 1, 2025 affecting realtors and title insurers: ‘Fraud is on the rise.’
