Cabinet yesterday defended unusual expense claims by the president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, Pierre Tremblay. The Commission was part of “the best nuclear system in the world,” said one minister.
Cabinet yesterday would not discuss consequences for federal managers who failed to achieve goals on Indigenous issues despite billions in new spending. “Has anybody been fired?” asked Conservative MP Jamie Schmale (Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes, Ont.).
A subsidized newspaper publisher had numerous conflicts with the Department of Canadian Heritage over terms of its grant applications, internal records show. The department will not say why it continued to fund Discourse Community Publishing Ltd. of Sun Peaks, B.C. even after the company was fined for breaching migrant labour regulations: “It can be difficult to provide exact information on how the costs of our business are broken down.”
Cabinet must ensure any digital identification program is strictly voluntary, Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis (Haldimand-Norfolk, Ont.) yesterday told the Commons. The Department of Employment is proceeding with legislative changes to have Canadians use digital ID when applying for Employment Insurance and Old Age Security: “We must be on guard.”
Pierre Tremblay, the $343,000-a year president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, billed taxpayers for limo rides, a stay at a French resort hotel and dozens of flights between Ottawa and Toronto rather than take the train, Access To Information records show. Tremblay hiked his travel and hospitality budget 85 percent this year despite cabinet directives to cut unnecessary spending: “These are tough times.”
It is possible aliens have visited Earth though the technology required is beyond human comprehension, says a report by Dr. Mona Nemer, cabinet’s $393,000-a year chief science advisor. Nemer has recommended cabinet create a federal agency to take calls from Canadians who spot UFOs: “Canadian media does not cover the subject.”
Another Jewish charity has been stripped of its tax status by the Canada Revenue Agency, the third in 15 months. It follows an internal report in which the Agency acknowledged “unconscious biases” in auditing charities.
House of Commons Administration is asking security consultants for help following a cyberattack on its internal computer server. It followed a breach of MPs’ accounts by Chinese Communist Party agents four years ago: “We could have taken steps to protect ourselves.”
Cabinet will cut the federal payroll by a tenth and find $60 billion in savings, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Friday. His remarks came hours after the Budget Office warned there was little chance cabinet will meet its latest deficit targets and remains too secretive over where it will find savings: “It is unclear.”
Chess grandmasters
lost to IBM’s Deep Blue.
Elite Go players
surrendered to Google’s AlphaGo.
Can technology defeat
the best of us?
In my 2010 Corolla
– foot on the gas –
I recall Usain Bolt’s top speed:
44 km/h.
Ready when he is.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Take the story of one battalion raised in one city, multiply it 100,000 times, and you have a haunting account of the catastrophe of the First World War. Historian David Campbell chronicles such a story with encyclopedic research and a filmmaker’s eye for poignant detail, like the Battle of Passchendaele reduced to a terrified pack mule drowning in mud.
“The more we pulled on him the worse it was, and the poor thing kept sinking down and down, inch by inch, and we were frantic. We couldn’t stop it and finally the transport officer of the 18th Battalion decided there was only one thing to do…When his head was just above the mud the officer had pulled his revolver out of his holster, and the mule turned his head, and I will never forget the look on that poor brute’s great big brown eyes when he looked at the officer, and the officer shot him, and then cried like a kid. Some of us, too.”
It Can’t Last Forever chronicles the life and death of the 19th Battalion of Hamilton, Ont., raised in 1914 and disbanded in 1920. The Battalion saw action from the 1916 Battle of Ypres – the troops called it “Wipers” – to the last day of the war on November 10, 1918. Campbell tells their story by the numbers: 3,076 casualties, 264 cases of venereal disease, 18 Battle Honours, eight recipients of the Distinguished Service Order, five commanding officers and one soldier executed for desertion, Private Harold Lodge, 20, who left a heartbroken mother on Dunne Avenue.
Volunteers with the 19th were mainly single, English-born, at least 5 foot 3, without any military training. Many were happy to get regular meals and a private’s pay, $1.10 a day. When they left Hamilton in 1914, the town band played Tipperary as the train pulled out of the station. The first commanding officer was John McLaren, a former Hamilton mayor who tried to jolly weary soldiers on a 17-mile march by remarking, “Only 500 yards further, boys.”
It Can’t Last Forever documents the lives of these boy soldiers as they became survivors, then ruthless combat veterans. By the Battle of Amiens in 1918, infantrymen would shoot German prisoners rather than send them back of the lines. “My nerves are gone,” wrote one veteran. “The war has made me ten years older.”
Combat life was comprised of monotonous food – soldiers ate a lot of plum and apple jam in WWI – and long periods of tedium interspersed with outbreaks of terror. The enemy were called “Heinies,” German mortar rounds were nicknamed “flying pigs.” Soldiers cursed their five-pound hobnail boots and Canadian-made Ross rifles that jammed in combat, and learned that death was random. “Two chaps behind me were blown to pieces,” recalled a soldier at the Battalion’s first action. “It was a horrible place.”
The first infantryman killed in action with the 19th was George Durand, 21, a machinist, shot in the head by a German sniper. The oldest member lived to 106. One veteran, Ed Youngman, remembered the bravest man in his unit, a small, meek fellow the Battalion cruelly nicknamed Lizzie.
At the Battle of Vimy, Youngman recalled he was trying to quiet a panicked mule under heavy shellfire as one by one, other mule drivers passed him pale with fright. Then along came Lizzie, “the butt of all our jokes,” he wrote: “He was the only little fellow who had the guts to say, ‘Can I help you, Eddie?’ He held the mule and his own. I don’t know how he did it. For me, he was one of the bravest men who ever lived.”
It Can’t Last Forever is a tragic and beautiful book.
By Holly Doan
It Can’t Last Forever: The 19th Battalion and the Canadian Corps in the First World War, by David Campbell; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 680 pages; ISBN 0781-7711-22368; $39.99
The Treasury Board is concealing the scope of federal job cuts from analysts at the Budget Office, records show. Refusal to disclose follows Treasury Board President Shafqat Ali’s promise to MPs to “strengthen openness.”
Liberal MP Arielle Kayabaga (London West, Ont.) yesterday would not say whether paid employees worked on her political campaign while on the public payroll, a breach of Treasury Board rules. The former Government House Leader’s six-figure billing for “personnel” over nine days mainly reflected vacation pay for staff, a spokesperson said.
The Canada Revenue Agency counted “450 possible fraud cases” involving staff who falsely claimed pandemic relief benefits while on the payroll, documents show. The figure detailed in a labour board case contradicted claims at the time by Revenue Commissioner Bob Hamilton who assured MPs there were “not very many, obviously.”
A piece of Canadiana is bound for the scrapyard. MV Prince Edward, last ferry to link Prince Edward Island with the mainland under parliamentary mandate, will be sold for scrap, the fisheries department said yesterday: “It is highly likely the vessel would have sunk.”
