The Canada Revenue Agency spent $202,942 on a questionnaire that asked people how they liked filing taxes. Most did not enjoy it, said the pollsters’ report: “For many, tax filing was seen as a necessary responsibility rather than an activity they look forward to.”
Cabinet commissioned confidential polling on support for public service job cuts, records show. Canadians in federal focus groups said they supported layoffs providing it did not affect them personally: “They wanted more details regarding the specific areas in which the Government of Canada would be reducing its spending.”
Deputy Defence Minister Christiane Fox in a staff email neither resigned nor apologized after being censured for cronyism. Fox said she breached an Act of Parliament to hire a friend who’d previously worked at a Good Life gym in the name of diversity. The gym employee is Black: “My efforts were focused on advancing diversity and inclusion.”
The $4 billion federal prison system has a quarter more employees than prisoners in custody, new figures show. Staff outnumber inmates even with job cuts proposed this year, said a Correctional Service report: “The current portfolio is not sustainable.”
The balance of probabilities is sufficient to void a declaration of death, says the Supreme Court of Canada. The ruling came on appeal by a life insurance company opposed to a $550,000 payout over a “dead” policyholder: “What is meant by the ‘return’ of a person who has been declared dead?”
Of the capital’s lost landmarks none is more curious than an old federal museum that exhibited oil paintings, whale bones and lobster. It was the Dominion Fisheries Museum, opened at the corner of Queen and O’Connor streets in 1884.
The original curator was an eccentric Scot, Andrew Halkett. He made the museum one of the first of its kind in Canada, a must-see for visitors just two blocks from Parliament Hill.
It was a beautiful Second Empire structure with rows of double-hooded windows and a mansard roof. Two floors displayed a fish hatchery, a full whale skeleton, a rare 8-foot green sturgeon and other ichthyology exhibits. The top floor from 1888 to 1911 was home to the National Gallery of Canada, the first federal collection of paintings and sculpture.
Halkett, the curator, was the main attraction. He joined the Department of Fisheries in 1879 as a resident naturalist and served 52 years. Halkett devoted his life to the study of fish and lobster, oysters and scallops.
“He was ever on the lookout for means of conserving our sea food and he lectured frequently to fishermen explaining to them better methods of making a livelihood,” a newspaperman wrote.
His books are rare and valuable: Sea Life In The Pribilof Islands, a study of creatures off the coast of Alaska, and The Moulting Of The Lobster. One 1913 title, the encyclopedic Check List Of The Fishes Of The Dominion Of Canada And Newfoundland, remains in print.
Halkett was “slightly built, studious and particular of speech,” wrote a contemporary, but had “vim and verve not in keeping with his studious appearance.” He joined the first Canadian scientific expedition to the High Arctic, the 1903 Neptune expedition, and nearly perished in a blizzard while studying habits of the fur seal in the Bering Sea.
At home, Halkett was a Greek scholar and lifelong member of the Bible Society and boasted his fisheries museum was so popular it opened on the Lord’s Day, 2 to 5 pm. Yet in a flash Halkett and the museum were gone.
In 1917 the exhibits were closed and the building demolished to make way for a federal office complex, the Hunter Building. It in turn was sold by the government in 1982 and bulldozed to make way for an insurance tower.
And Halkett? He moved to Nova Scotia to spend the twilight of his career studying lobsters, and retired in 1929 at age 75. The old naturalist died in 1937. The Department of Fisheries sent a wreath.
By Andrew Elliott
Conspiracy is mythology, but after sundown. Even when wholly fiction, both satisfy some human need to explain a ridiculous, implausible world. Author Richard Syrett calls it “the madness unleashed by creative genius.” He is a gifted essayist.
Syrett is a Toronto broadcaster, producer and podcaster, and enthusiastic chronicler of the underworld of popular culture. “Pop keeps people distracted and docile, background noise for factory life,” Syrett quotes an interview subject. The result is Tales From The Rock ‘n Roll Twilight Zone, a forensic probing of “the eerie coincidences, the suspicious circumstances, the whispers that something darker was at work.” The result is jarring.
Take The Beatles’ 1964 tour that included dates in Vancouver and Montréal. “Rebellious yet safe, exotic yet relatable,” writes Syrett. “Their lyrics spoke of love and longing, but their cultural impact went deeper, normalizing experimentation and questioning authority. By the late 1960s, as their music evolved into psychedelic anthems, the band was linked to the counterculture’s embrace of drugs and dissent. Was this evolution organic or guided?”
Rock ‘n Roll Twilight Zone questions whether the “British invasion” was not about clever Capitol Records marketing at all. “It was psychological warfare designed to destabilize the American family, discredit religion and flood youth culture with drugs, sex and apathy,” writes Syrett. “The guitars were merely delivery systems for the message.”
“Rock and roll had been cheeky rebellion,” writes Syrett. “By 1967 it was mystical rebellion, the soundtrack of self-destruction.” And John Lennon? “He sang about peace while living inside a storm of projection and expectation. He stepped, daily, across the thin membrane between man and symbol. And symbols, once formed, do not belong to themselves.”
Rock ‘n Roll Twilight Zone spans the soundtrack of the Sixties onward. It questions whether Jimi Hendrix and Elvis Presley were killed by managers. It recounts an improbably incompetent investigation of Buddy Holly’s 1959 plane crash. It pauses where rockabilly star Johnny Horton, 35, was so paralyzed by premonition of violent death he gave a friend his guitar. “You can have it,” he said. “I won’t be here much longer.” Horton was killed by a drunk driver weeks later.
Syrett is such a vivid and compelling writer even the coldly rational would keep it up through 380 pages. Here is his account of The Rolling Stones’ disastrous 1969 concert at California’s Altamont Speedway that left four dead including one teenager stabbed near the stage. It was the epilogue to the mythology of Woodstock that same year.
“There was no myth to buoy Altamont,” writes Syrett. “No pastoral camera sweeps of smiling crowds. No mass chorus harmonizing the world into gentleness.”
“Altamont looked like a hollow, an enormous bowl where a fire had burned and gone out, leaving only a thin rim of ember-glow along the ridge. The stage looked like an abandoned altar. Dust hovered like smoke from a ritual that had ended badly. Wind rolled over the hills in cold sheets, as if something old were turning in its sleep. One witness would later describe it as ‘the Sixties walking off the stage without saying goodbye.’”
By Tom Korski
Tales From The Rock ‘n Roll Twilight Zone, by Richard Syrett; Trine Day LLC; 380 pages; ISBN 9781-63424-5494; $31.99
Auditors are faulting Foreign Minister Anita Anand’s department for sloppy accounting by diplomats abroad including disappearing paperwork on spending. The latest report follows a 2020 disclosure that one Embassy misappropriated $145,000 for a party pavilion and lied to cover the expense: “It was nearly impossible to determine.”
Parliament must convene hearings on property rights after a British Columbia judge granted Aboriginal title to 1,846 acres near Richmond, B.C. including private lots purchased by ratepayers, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre said yesterday. “This is a federal issue,” he told reporters: “You need property rights protection to have a thriving, property-owning democracy.”
Canada Border Services Agency executives hurriedly convened strategy sessions after an Opposition MP publicly disclosed whistleblower complaints of workplace harassment, Access To Information records show. Conservative MP Rhonda Kirkland (Oshawa, Ont.) persuaded the Commons public safety committee to investigate the Agency’s “toxic workplace culture.”
Federal executives in 2025 discussed a national campaign to electrify school buses, according to an Access To Information memo. Rebates for the purchase of new vehicles to replace Canada’s current fleet of 65,000 school buses would cost a billion: “We are generally aligned with the direction.”
There is insufficient evidence to determine if a costly grocery subsidy for Northerners is lowering the price of food, says a federal report. The Nutrition North program cost $194.3 million last year: “Is the subsidy being fully passed on to consumers?”
Cabinet for a third time in five years is reviewing federal regulation of legal internet content, the Department of Industry said yesterday. “Details will be made public at the appropriate time,” it said.
Floor-crossing by a fifth opposition MP to the Liberal caucus yesterday marked the largest mass defection to a federal governing party in the Commons in 109 years. MP Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia-Lambton, Ont.), former Conservative Party leadership candidate, said she hoped to gain more federal funding for her riding as a Liberal: “I thought, should I quit?”
Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet yesterday appealed to voters to hold the line on a close Liberal majority in a Montréal-area byelection. A Bloc win in Terrebonne, Que. would limit cabinet to a thin but working majority in the Commons: “‘Who the hell speaks for me?”
