Organized crime is active in Canadian ports, says an RCMP report. Police have sought new powers to conduct mandatory background checks on all port workers including federal Customs agents: “We need to take a hard look at the security of our ports.”
The Communist Party and other groups are lobbying the Commons to support a motion accusing Jews of war crimes. Activists publicly claimed credit for “tirelessly pressuring” Liberal MP Julie Dzerowicz (Davenport, Ont.), chair of the Canadian NATO Parliamentary Association, to change her view of the Hamas war: “Julie’s newfound support for an arms embargo is a direct result of our organizing!”
Pandemic lockdowns doubled small business loan defaults under a federal program, new data show. The scope of losses on taxpayer-backed loans was expected to worsen due to “a certain time lag.”
Jews have filed a discrimination lawsuit against federal meat inspectors over new guidelines they say threaten the entire production of kosher meats in Canada. Kosher processing has already fallen 89 percent under new Guidelines, petitioners told the Federal Court: “Freedom of religion does not require citizens to change or abandon their religious beliefs,”
Canadian medicare is so bad people consider it frightening, say in-house research by the Department of Health. The national survey found Canadians were typically afraid they would never receive life-saving treatment when needed: ‘Participants have fears about access to services and delays in tests or treatment.’
Cabinet members facing re-election commissioned Privy Council research on whether Filipino-Canadian voters felt they were getting enough “attention,” newly-disclosed records show. Liberals currently hold all but three of the ten largest Filipino ridings nationwide: ‘Several spoke positively about increasing immigration.’
The federal “safe supply” drug policy is senseless and destructive, says Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre. Speaking in Vancouver, Poilievre told business owners that cabinet must “break the cycle of addiction that is raging out of control in our country.”
Uncorroborated childhood memories cannot be reported as fact, says the CBC’s Ombudsman. The advisory followed complaints a Manitoba town was unfairly depicted as cruel and bigoted in a Truth and Reconciliation Day story: “Our article could have been clearer about the extent to which we were relying on the perceptions of children 45 years later.”
Federal anti-trust lawyers are tracking more complaints of false environmental claims by businesses claiming to be net zero, Commissioner of Competition Matthew Boswell wrote in a letter to senators. Current law must be broadened to deal with fake “green” advertising, he said: ‘For example, claims about being ‘net zero’ or ‘carbon neutral by 2030.’
You know what bad neighbours are like;
they smile and wave
– pretending to be your friends –
then talk behind your back,
file anonymous complaints
when you’re three days late mowing your lawn.
Not in our city.
49 gang-related shootings in one year
and no one snitched.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
In 1959 one of Canada’s great hell-raisers, Aaron Sapiro, died in Los Angeles. There is no gravesite. Sapiro left his body to medical students.
Sapiro as a community organizer in the 1920s promoted co-operatives for grain, dairy and fruit producers from British Columbia to Nova Scotia. He created Prairie wheat pools. “You need to be paid decent prices,” he told farmers.
Saskatoon once presented him the keys to the city in tribute to his public service. The periodical Farm And Home wrote in 1922 that Sapiro “did more than any other man on earth to make farmers the most prosperous and contented in the world.”
Spy the land and you will not find a single monument to Sapiro, though his legacy is everywhere. Such is the fate of community organizers. “Organizing isn’t all fun and winning,” writes Matt Price, former campaign director for Environmental Defence Canada. “It also involves drudgery, tension and controversy.”
Price writes: “On balance, the path of least resistance is to be a free rider and not be involved.” Alternatively, University of British Columbia Press has published Price’s guide for hell-raisers, Engagement Organizing. It is fresh and candid, and provides insight to everyday Canadians – readers, voters, taxpayers, neighbours – who remain the natural constituency of any grassroots campaign, left or right, regardless of whether you’ve ever planted a lawn sign or endorsed a petition.
“Everybody fails sometimes,” writes Price. “The question is whether you fail well.”
Need a traffic light on the corner? Want to save home mail delivery? Oppose subsidies for Bombardier Inc.? Price details the practice of politics from the ground up. “People hunger to be part of something bigger than themselves,” he writes.
Engagement Organizing skirts platitudes, scorns media manipulation, questions ballyhoo claims of Twitter traffic, and convincingly argues lapel buttons and low-cost memberships in grassroots groups from ACORN Canada to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation are worth more than billboards. “When people see a campaign billboard, at some level they know that it means a candidate ‘just has rich friends’,” he quotes one municipal organizer in Calgary. “But when they see a button or a bumper magnet, it counts more as a personal endorsement.”
In 2011 Vancouver organizers with the Dogwood Initiative cost ex-Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn his seat in Parliament due in part to what Price calls “an ingenious concept”: a decal fit to stick on a dollar coin that protested oil tankers on the Pacific coast. “Dogwood had tens of thousands of these decals made and asked supporters to stick them to coins for circulation.”
“Within 48 hours, someone had one across the country in Halifax,” writes Price. The campaign made a national issue of marine safety, though Canada has not had a major tanker spill since 1970, and elected the Green Party in Lunn’s riding.
Why did the Occupy movement and Idle No More fail? Price covers that too. “Digital tools and practices and good data management do not ‘change everything’ and by themselves do not build real power,” writes Price; “We need to check our assumptions about how we wish the world would work versus how it actually does.”
By Holly Doan
Engagement Organizing: The Old Art and New Science of Winning Campaigns, by Matt Price; UBC Press; 200 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-90168; $22.95
Homeowners with billions in mortgages face a “trigger point” on default, says a federal memo. Peter Routledge, Superintendent of Financial Institutions, has repeatedly warned Parliament to brace for fallout from variable rate, fixed payment home loans: “Mortgages such as these total $369 billion.”
Treasury Board President Anita Anand has been summoned for questioning over suspicious ArriveCan contracting. Anand as Minister of Public Works was in charge of contracting when program costs soared to $59.5 million on alleged bribery, fraud and bid-rigging: ‘They make it sound like she is a passenger, not steering the ship.’
The Department of Public Works last year fired five employees for sweetheart contracting, Deputy Minister Arianne Reza disclosed yesterday. Managers were concerned about “integrity of the system,” she said: “Where does the buck stop?”
The Department of Indigenous Services is attempting to verify contractors who identify as First Nations, Inuit or Métis. It follows the suspension of a federal employee who claimed to be a descendent of an Ojibway chief in applying for millions in contracts: “I myself have picked up the phone to speak to the RCMP.”
