Parliamentary critics should be forbidden from calling the Prime Minister corrupt, says Deputy Government House Leader Mark Gerretsen. The Liberal MP (Kingston & the Islands, Ont.) sought a Speaker’s ban on the adjective “to further improve decorum here.”
Two scientists fired as Chinese spies in 2021 kept their top federal security clearance for months while under investigation because “these were allegations,” the Public Health Agency told a Commons committee Friday. MPs expressed astonishment at the lapse: “How were there not red flags at that point?”
The chain promises
cards for every occasion.
I search the collection;
inventory not nearly as complete
as claimed.
Suggestions:
Our sincere condolences
for the death of your mistress;
we know how close you were.
Congratulations
on your successful ED treatment!
We were saddened to hear
about the revocation of your driving licence.
Our deepest sympathy
for the loss of your beloved mayor
to corruption.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
On November 13, 1971 a Cree teenager, Betty Osborne, was walking home in The Pas, Man. when she was abducted by four white men, raped, and stabbed to death with a screwdriver. It took police 16 years to get a conviction. “One of the saddest aspects of the so-called police investigation was the fact that the police began their investigation within the Aboriginal community,” notes Keetsahnak: Our Missing And Murdered Indigenous Sisters. “When no suspects were found, the police dropped their investigation.”
The fact the justice system failed an entire class of Canadian citizens is undisputed. The RCMP count 1,017 Indigenous women murdered in the period from 1980 to 2012. No other identifiable group endured such violence. As low as expectations were of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, it at least fixed in the public mind that local tragedies like the murder of Betty Osborne are interconnected.
“I heard the Minister of Northern and Indigenous Affairs Canada say, ‘Racism and sexism in this country kills,’” writes contributor Christi Belcourt, an Alberta coordinator of Walking With Our Sisters. “The next day, the head of the RCMP admitted there were racist police officers in among the force. These are truths that Indigenous peoples have always known.”
Violence is woven through contemporary Indigenous life. Keetsahnak is a moving documentary of the raw centre of Canadian society. Contributor Sandra Lamouche, an Alberta educator, writes of her grandmother’s death at the hands of a drunk driver on the Bigstone Cree Nation: “Her body was thrown into the lake, only to be discovered a while later, frozen. This happened over fifty years ago and remains an unsolved murder case today.”
In another essay Was She Just A Dream? Writer Anne-Marie Livingstone of Victoria recalls the 1992 disappearance of her mother Elsie. “I sense that most people, especially white, middle-aged men, don’t like to hear about the issue of the missing women. Strangely enough, this demographic represents the majority of employees of the Vancouver Police Department, politicians and bureaucrats.”
Keetsahnak reads like Dostoevsky. It is haunting and eloquent. Writer Maya Ode’amik Chacaby, an educator at York University, tells her story in words that fall like a hammer on anvil: “Dirty Lying No Good Indian was the name given to me by my grandmother, an empty bitter husk of a woman whose spirit went missing in Residential School. I went missing when I was thirteen years old. No one came to look for me. No benevolent adults. No mourning family. I was not counted missing and I was not missed.”
“There is a tenuous space between Being Missing and Being Murdered. I lived there for over a decade. I remember it like a dream, that hypnagogic space, living in the death world, a spectral Indian ghosting the colonial wastelands, the slums, the seedy piss-filled corners and alcoves between walls and fences. Living between passing out in snow banks (latex boots frozen to skin) and death, between rape and death, drugs and death, cops and death, safe spaces and death, friends and death.”
“Missing but not missed. We are caught up, hooked in, counted, catalogued and fixed as objects. Not as sad pictures of missing children on milk cartons though. Fixed instead in the psychic disequilibrium of being a less than human human.”
“I was the harsh reminder that their system fails people like me.”
By Holly Doan
Keetsahnak: Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters, edited by Kim Anderson, Maria Campbell & Christi Belcourt; University of Alberta Press; 400 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-3678; $29.95
Treasury Board President Anita Anand yesterday described herself as “an extremely thorough and systematic minister” but said she did not know why Board employees paid social calls on ArriveCan contractors. “It is not my purview to oversee the day to day work of employees,” Anand told the Commons public accounts committee: “I do not know.”
Cabinet yesterday denied any plans to recognize Sharia law in federal financing after citing “halal mortgages” in Tuesday’s budget. CMHC in 2023 funded research by the Islamic Family Social Services Association into mortgages suitable for observant Muslims: “Why is it in the budget?”
The federal sale of new $22,000 ventilators as scrap metal for $6 apiece is inexplicable, an MP said yesterday. The Department of Health said it had no records on the purchase of devices it licensed for use in 2020: “Was it incompetence or corruption?”
Cabinet’s signature Canada Dental Care Plan is confusing and bureaucratic with 61 percent of dentists declining to participate, the Canadian Dental Association yesterday told the Commons finance committee. Health Minister Mark Holland said he was confident difficulties will be resolved: “We heard from a lot of dentists.”
Complying with a federal bill on replacement workers will put “a lot more pressure” on the Canada Industrial Relations Board, the chair yesterday warned MPs. The bill mandates rulings within 90 days though the Board currently takes an average seven months to settle Canada Labour Code complaints: “It will be difficult for us to meet the timelines that are in the bill.”
Millionaire ArriveCan supplier Kristian Firth yesterday named names of federal managers he met over meals and drinks to discuss lucrative contracts. Firth’s disclosures followed his summons to the bar of the House as the first federal contactor in 111 years to be cited for contempt of Parliament. Firth said his company GC Strategies Inc. of Woodlawn, Ont. “could have been stopped” at any time as it billed $19.1 million for the ArriveCan project.
A federal contractor’s summons yesterday to the bar of the House of Commons was the first punishment of its kind since 1913. The last contractor named and shamed by MPs was jailed for months as a “prisoner of Parliament.”
Cabinet has a “lot of details that we need to work out” in its latest housing plan, Housing Minister Sean Fraser said yesterday. The plan reiterates CMHC figures suggesting Canada would have to triple annual housing starts to attain affordability: “Details need to be worked out.”
Any federal employees who leaked secret memos on Chinese interference must be “identified and prosecuted,” says Liberal-appointed Senator Yuen Pau Woo (B.C.). The Senator made the demand in a submission to the Commission on Foreign Interference made public yesterday: “Why have the leakers not been identified and prosecuted?”
The next Census will include new questions on “couple relationships” outside marriage and common law, Statistics Canada said yesterday. It follows the first-ever collection of Census data on “gender diversity.”
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland yesterday proposed billions in new mid-term deficit spending at rates up to 95 percent higher than forecast only a year ago. Freeland revised all deficit projections upwards despite writing in her budget document that “it would be irresponsible and unfair to pass more debt to the next generation.”
