Anonymous “extremist actors” have attempted to infiltrate the RCMP, says a Department of Public Safety document. The briefing note did not identify how many extremists or criminals were caught within police ranks: “The RCMP is aware.”
It is “too early to fully evaluate” the reliability of electric cars in Canadian winters, says a Department of Natural Resources report. Six years and $76.1 million worth of study were inconclusive though analysts warned of potential “negative unintended outcomes” from cabinet’s electric car mandate: ‘Address specific Canadian requirements such as technologies for cold climates.’
The Budget Officer is completing a first-ever independent review of newsroom subsidies. The analysis follows the doubling of payroll rebates to $29,750 a year for employees of cabinet-approved newsrooms: “I am requesting specific data.”
The Department of Public Works on Saturday opened a vacant Ottawa federal building for use as a “warming centre” by the homeless. Vacancy rates in federal buildings nationwide average as high as 40 percent, by official estimate: “We are seeking meaningful opportunities to use these properties.”
In Dali’s
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans,
limbs are scattered, face twisted in pain.
A grotesque figure
rips itself to pieces.
Spain, 1936, on its way to Civil War.
In Brexit 2019,
a country is torn down
without a war.
Democracy allows it.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
In 2012 RCMP raided a small office in Brighton, Ont. and hauled away hard drives and files. Leia Picard, owner of Canadian Fertility Consulting Co., faced ten years in the penitentiary on fifteen charges under the Assisted Human Reproduction Act. It was a felony to offer any “consideration” to a surrogate mother.
“The end result was anticlimactic,” writes Professor David Snow of the University of Guelph’s Department of Political Science. Prosecutors later struck a plea deal and Picard paid a $60,000 fine. She remains the only Canadian in history charged under the Act. It was “bewildering,” said Picard’s lawyer.
“This book surveys the ruins to explain how Canada arrived at a point that nearly every policymaker and stakeholder involved in the process would describe as suboptimal,” says the author.
Assisted Reproduction Policy In Canada is meticulously researched. Professor Snow is a punchy writer. More importantly, Snow’s book is a handy guide that explains why longtime politicians glance at the ceiling and breathe a heavy sigh whenever someone says, “There ought to be a law!”
“Fundamentally, much of political science is concerned with answering one question: What drives politics?” writes Snow. As Assisted Reproduction shows, it is an impulse for government over-reach, a fetish for control and regulation and a mistaken suspicion that Canadian society is comprised of wolves and sheep, never far from chaos without the “dominant role” of Parliament.
Professor Snow notes the whole idea behind the Assisted Human Reproduction Act was “the impact of market forces in the area of human reproduction could, if not properly regulated, undermine important social values and ethical principles and harm people by leading to inappropriate, unethical or unsafe use of technology.”
Ms. Picard was arrested for breaching 2007 regulations under a 2004 law that followed 2000 consultations that followed failed bills introduced in 1997 and 1996 that followed a 1995 moratorium and 1994 consultations following the 1993 final report of a 1989 Royal Commission that ran to 1,275 pages and 293 recommendations – and on and on ad infinitum. It ended with a Supreme Court ruling that much of this was under provincial jurisdiction anyhow.
“What is remarkable when analyzing the policymaking process from 1993 to 2004, from the Royal Commission to the Act, is the extent to which the content and the frames remained almost entirely the same,” writes Snow. Time marched on, science advanced, society adapted. They even put a cloned sheep named Dolly on the cover of Newsweek magazine.
“There was significant normalization of assisted reproduction in the Western world over this period, including in Canada,” concludes Snow. “Yet the content and the framing strategies were almost entirely identical for the Royal Commission and the federal government.”
And that’s how Ottawa works.
By Holly Doan
Assisted Reproduction Policy in Canada: Framing, Federalism and Failure, by David Snow; University of Toronto Press; 200 pages; ISBN 9781-4875-23290; $22.46
Canada Border Services Agency management yesterday said it was proud of the ArriveCan app that cost taxpayers $54 million. The Agency initially misrepresented the cost to MPs as less than half the actual amount: “I am very proud.”
A federal grant for homeowners with oil furnaces could cost almost four times the original budget, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. Federal grants for homeowners who convert to electric heat pumps were originally estimated to cost $750 million: “Program uptake was projected by extrapolating historical participation trends.”
The Department of Health says confidential data indicates its year-old experiment with drug decriminalization in British Columbia has not “led to an increase in public drug consumption.” The department did not release the data: “Isn’t it incredible?”
Rising food costs are driving Canadians to “hopelessness and desperation,” a National Advisory Council on Poverty yesterday reported to Parliament. Updated figures due this spring are expected to show a sharp rise in poverty rates due to inflation, it said: “Things seem worse now than they were before.”
The Department of Social Development has quietly dropped a 2024 deadline to introduce a long-promised national school lunch program. The department in a briefing note omitted all reference to the 2024 target and said more work is required: “We heard you.”
Federal commemoration of Anne Of Green Gables will be reworked with “new narratives” from Indigenous, Black and French perspectives, Parks Canada said yesterday. Novels depicting the red-haired orphan raised by a white, English-speaking Presbyterian couple on Prince Edward Island have been bestsellers since 1908: ‘Cultures not currently presented, e.g. Acadians, Black, Indigenous and people of colour, will be shared with visitors.’
Cabinet will detail draft regulations this spring to impose a billion-dollar ban on food advertising to children on TV and the internet, says a Department of Health briefing note. Regulations will still permit fast food ads on radio, billboards, movie theatre screens and sponsorships of minor sports leagues by restaurant chains: “Industry self-regulation is not enough to protect children.”
A federal consultant who boasted to clients that he had a secret contact in Chrystia Freeland’s office yesterday testified he made it all up. “I don’t even have those relationships,” said Vaughn Brennan, director TeaLav Consulting Limited of Ottawa. “I don’t have a Rolodex.”
The Commons ethics committee yesterday by a 7 to 3 vote rejected Opposition requests for internal emails regarding Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest sun holiday. “There has been a change in the story three times,” said Conservative MP Michael Barrett (Leeds-Grenville, Ont.).
