Fossil fuel subsidies have been reduced but not due to any action by Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, Statistics Canada figures show. Short term wage subsidies repealed at the end of the pandemic accounted for most federal aid, said the agency: “Over 91 percent was from the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy program.”
The Senate social affairs committee has cleared a private Liberal bill to ban televised food ads targeting children. A final vote is required to pass it into law: “There is an increasingly urgent public health concern.”
Facilitator says
there’s no I in Team.
Look closely.
Can’t find You, He or She.
They or Them.
We or Us.
Let alone Margaret, Jamie or Trevor.
Anyone for lunch?
By Shai Ben-Shalom
The Depression, not the war, left the deepest scars on an entire generation of Canadians. Survivors carried indelible memories of the collapse of capitalism. My mother, raised on a Manitoba farmstead, years afterward could not bear to throw out tin foil pie plates. “That’s wasteful,” she warned. My father-in-law cursed TV episodes of The Waltons that depicted poor but cheerful townsfolk who had love if not money. “It wasn’t anything like that,” he said. “I was there and it wasn’t like that.”
The broad strokes of the Depression years are part of the nation’s memory, preserved in schoolbook texts and grainy newsreels: hobos on freight cars, police on horseback, dust storms and factory closures. Yet it’s the fine details that paint the most vivid picture of whole communities brought to their knees by an economic calamity unmatched in its cruelty.
Historian Todd McCallum of Dalhousie University has written a startling book. Hobohemia documents the Dustbowl Years in British Columbia, a “homeland for beggars,” he calls it, where thousands of jobless settled in shantytowns at the railways’ last stop. “Everywhere I turned, archives offered me dusty examples of a multitude of ways of seeing the hobo jungle as an island unto itself, something simultaneously connected to and separate from ‘society’, whatever one took that to mean.”
McCallum details British Columbia’s descent into chaos. In Kamloops, so many vagrants gathered the mayor sent an urgent petition to the legislature. “The town is being overrun by beggars and panhandlers,” he wrote. “Where is it all going to end?”
In Vancouver one Christmas headline in the Province read: “Man Starves To Death Here”. Ratepayers were overwhelmed by the cost of food for the jobless. The welfare budget peaked at a staggering $1.1 million by 1935, divvied up by 25¢ meal tickets. City Council telegraphed the Prime Minister: “The situation in Vancouver is beyond our control.”
In Victoria, the city launched a desperate boondoggle to put vagrants to work chopping firewood. Officials bought a campsite for $900, then provided $613 worth of saws, hired a cook and offered jobless men $1 a day to chop a cord of wood with room and board provided. Of 229 men who registered, a quarter couldn’t cut wood anyway. Victoria ratepayers were stuck with a stockpile of 2,000 cords trucked to market – that cost another $3.50 a cord – and saw the wood sold at a loss, 75¢ a cord.
“It is in every way easier for most North Americans to imagine the complete and utter destruction of the planet we currently inhabit than to envision the end of the capitalist order,” says McCallum. That is precisely what B.C. faced in the 1930s. The result was a kind of madness.
The number of transients in Vancouver was estimated at 12,000. They gathered in hobo jungles cobbled from cardboard and the city’s waste. “Grounds are filthy and covered with decaying garbage, with open toilets,” the city’s medical officer of health wrote in 1931 following a typhoid outbreak. “Flies swarm over everything and then on all open food.”
Hobohemia is meticulously researched. Professor McCallum is a gifted writer. The story is raw and compelling. To read it is to learn why children of the 1930s could never, ever waste tin foil or see their memories of gnawing despair transformed into a TV drama.
By Holly Doan
Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival Images of a New World in 1930s Vancouver; by Todd McCallum; Athabasca University Press; 319 pages; ISBN 9781-9268-36287; $29.95
The Commons last night passed a 60-day sales tax holiday on select Christmas goods from beer to Bibles. The 176 to 151 vote came at 11:23 pm Eastern following hours of acrimonious debate: “Instead of taking chump change off chocolates, call a carbon tax election now.”
The Commons industry committee yesterday censured the millionaire CEO of Rogers Communications as a “witness in hiding.” MPs ordered CEO Tony Staffieri to appear by December 5 under threat of arrest by the Sergeant at Arms: “If he thinks he has got political connections that can prevent him from appearing before the committee he is wrong.”
The Commons government operations committee will vote on a first-ever investigation of “March Madness,” the last minute spending of surplus funds in the dying hours of each fiscal year on March 31. Conservative MP Kelly Block (Carlton Trail-Eagle Creek, Sask.), sponsor of a motion to investigate, yesterday said the practice was indefensible “when Canadians are facing financial hardship.”
A cabinet advisor says she accepts some Canadians are skeptical that thousands of children were buried at Indian Residential Schools. However accusations of deliberate deception are hateful, she said: “That’s the type of speech we need to stop.”
Claims of Cree ancestry like those by Liberal MP Randy Boissonnault (Edmonton Centre) are “very common” in federal contracting, an Indigenous witness yesterday told the Commons government operations committee. A company co-founded by Boissonnault had claimed to be Indigenous owned though no First Nation ever certified the claim: “My Cree name means Strong Eagle Man.”
Public support for record high immigration levels has collapsed, says in-house research by the Department of Immigration. The abrupt shift in polling coincided with anti-Israel street protests: “To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Immigration is causing Canada to change in ways I don’t like.”
A former $200,000-a year assistant deputy industry minister last night testified he never reported inside dealing on corporate subsidies since he was “not a lawyer.” MPs on the Commons public accounts committee expressed disbelief over remarks by Andrew Noseworthy: “You never reported that?”
Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly’s department ordered more than $523,000 worth of furniture in a one-day spending spree this past March 31, records show. Cabinet has long denied the phenomenon of “March Madness,” a yearly blitz that sees departments burn through unspent budgets in the dying hours of the fiscal year: “It’s going to disappear if it’s not used.”
Negotiations in the 12-day Canada Post strike are “at a dead end,” Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon said yesterday. Cabinet had no immediate plans to intervene, he told reporters: “It is possible we will have a prolonged labour conflict.”
A private Liberal bill proclaiming April as Arab Heritage Month ignores “blatant anti-Palestinian racism that pervades society,” says a Liberal-appointed senator. “Take the recent uproar over the singing of an Arabic song during a Remembrance Day ceremony at an Ontario high school,” said Senator Yuen Pau Woo (B.C.).
The Commons ethics committee last night issued summonses for two former business associates of Liberal MP Randy Boissonnault (Edmonton Centre). The warning to appear or be taken into custody came as a company co-founded by Boissonnault was struck from the federal bidders’ list amid an Alberta police investigation: “This is a made-for-Netflix miniseries.”
