Cabinet yesterday opened visa applications from Canadians for 1,000 cousins, in-laws and other extended family in Gaza. No rescues will be undertaken unlike a 2006 war evacuation from Lebanon that cost more than $90 million: “Movement out of Gaza remains extremely challenging and may not be possible.”
Canada Post yesterday said it will sell its wholesale shipping subsidiary SCI Group Inc. at an undisclosed price pending cabinet approval. The sale follows warnings the post office faced heavy losses in the past year: “How are we going to get to fiscal sustainability?”
A work-at-home computer technician fired in the last days of vaccine mandates has lost a bid to get her job back. The woman was the only one of 250 employees at the City of Moose Jaw to be terminated for declining to show proof of vaccination, her union told a Saskatchewan labour board: ‘She was a good employee.’
The CRTC yesterday dismissed a request from MPs that it ban state-run Chinese propaganda from its approved distribution list of cable and satellite programming in Canada. A parliamentary committee recommended a ban on all TV shows financed by “authoritarian state-controlled broadcasters.”
Hydro Ottawa is charging the largest Freedom Of Information fee ever claimed by a public utility in Canada, nearly $700,000 over hidden records documenting its use of replacement workers in a 2023 strike. The utility’s conduct came only weeks before cabinet introduced a bill restricting use of replacement workers in the federally regulated sector.
“It has become clear that significant work will be required to search for and prepare responsive records for disclosure,” wrote Matthew Carey, legal counsel for Hydro Ottawa. Carey claimed that “preparation time” would take thousands of hours.
“Given the volume of potentially responsive records we anticipate that we may need to issue a time extension notice upon receipt of the deposit,” wrote Carey. The utility required upfront payment of half its cost estimate totaling a record $669,762.
The utility last September 20 settled a strike with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 636. The strike by 390 employees lasted 83 days and saw Hydro Ottawa managers hire replacement workers.
Blacklock’s sought details of the utility’s use of replacement workers “from May 1 to October 17, 2023 including all documents, records, files, correspondence and electronic communication, data and invoices, excluding records already made public, regarding AFIMAC and XOH Powerline, Batte Pole Line Ltd., KPC Power Electric Ltd., Aerial Work Utilities and Jet Electrical Contractors.”
The records spanned 118 business days. Hydro Ottawa claimed the request covered 640,234 pages of documents that would take 18,047 hours to review and photocopy. Blacklock’s is appealing the $669,762 cost estimate as grossly inflated.
The number of documents Hydro Ottawa claimed to produce concerning its use of replacement workers is the equivalent of more than 5,400 each business day. By comparison the Income Tax Act, the largest Act of Parliament, runs to only 3,471 pages.
Hydro Ottawa settled the strike seven weeks before cabinet introduced Bill C-58 An Act To Amend The Canada Labour Code. The bill restricts federally regulated employers’ use of replacement workers under threat of $100,000-a day fines.
The bill is currently at Second Reading debate in the Commons. Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan called it “a massive change” in labour relations nationwide. “It will fundamentally change how labour relations operate in this country,” O’Regan told the Commons.
“The labour movement has been saying replacement workers are wrong for longer than this country has existed,” said O’Regan. “People in the labour movement have been telling us that replacement workers distract from the bargaining table and prolong disputes and that the use of replacement workers can poison the relationship between an employer and workers for generations after. We listened to the workers.”
By Staff 
New Democrat MP Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East ) will be a target of Communist Chinese agents “for her entire life,” she says. Kwan, a native Hong Konger with extended family in China, yesterday was granted standing at the federal Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference: “She was informed she will continue to be a subject of foreign interference for her entire life.”
Spikes in payday lending coincide with extreme weather, Bank of Canada researchers said yesterday. A Bank report noted extreme cold or hot temperatures typically led to higher bills and “one of the reasons households resort to payday loans is to pay bills.”
Most Québec counties have lower potential for “economic development” and rank below the national average on productivity, a federal agency said yesterday. The figures follow a cabinet proposal to consider “economic status” for the French language: ‘This is the reality on the ground.’
The Bank of Canada has quietly taken steps to control a “digital Canadian dollar” despite public claims it has no interest in the scheme, records show. The Bank in a Christmas filing under the Trademarks Act staked ownership of any “digital dollar” launched in Canada: “In terms of digital currency, it is not under the current legal framework.”
Immigration Minister Marc Miller allowed 807,000 foreign students to work unlimited hours in Canada without any research on how it would impact Canadian jobseekers, records show. Miller said foreigners were not “taking jobs away from other people” but never asked his department for data: “Right now we have nil response.”
Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson’s wife Tara has stepped up trading in oil and gas stocks, records show. The family’s fossil fuel investments continued even as Minister Wilkinson pledged to lead the “fight against climate change.”
Callers to the Canada Revenue Agency typically spent 15 minutes or more on hold last year despite record spending on call centres, figures show. Cabinet in 2018 approved millions in 1-800 upgrades on a promise of prompt service: “We’re still going to see these crappy results coming out of Canada Revenue Agency.”
The Canada Infrastructure Bank lost almost $900,000 in consultants’ fees on a failed climate project, records show. The Commons transport committee has recommended the Bank close as a costly failure: “You haven’t got it done.”
First came the roofer.
“Your insulation is only 20 centimetres thick,”
he said.
“Kyoto Protocol requires 40;
I can fix it
so your house will be cool in the summer,
warm in the winter.”
Then came the window specialist.
“These are not according to code,” he said,
“They transfer heat from around the frame
and through the glass.
Our new models are tightly sealed
and Argon-insulated;
they will keep your house cool in the summer,
warm in the winter.”
Duct cleaning service was next.
“Clogged with dirt,”
announced the rep,
his tone conveys the gravity of the situation.
“They have to be cleaned
if you want your house to be cool in the summer,
warm in the winter.”
The air-conditioning guy was sweating working on the compressor.
“It’s not worth the repair”, he said,
pointing at the rusty part.
“I could get you a deal
on a brand new central air;
it will really keep your house
cool in the summer.”
The heating technician didn’t waste time.
“It’s only 65 percent efficiency,” he said,
his flashlight’s beam probes the old furnace.
“They don’t make these anymore.
I could send a salesperson
to explain our high-efficiency model;
it will really keep you
warm in the winter.”
Considering a new iron-free, short sleeve shirt
at the sport outfit store.
Associate says
it is made from a hi-tech thread
that transfers moisture
away from the body.
I wonder if it will keep me
cool in the summer.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Chester Ronning was a renowned Canadian diplomat and Sinophile so admiring of Chinese culture he spoke fluent Mandarin and into his 80s still prepared his own meals of steaming vegetables and noodles in broth. He was also a Mao apologist.
The Communist leader was not a mass-murderer but a “teacher” and “liberator,” Ronning enthused. When visiting Peking in 1971, he was invited to view May Day celebrations alongside Party functionaries atop Tiananmen Gate. He was “wild with excitement,” Ronning said. Here he could “feel the presence of a new power.”
The decision was all his. If Ronning loved the Chinese people he must love its dictatorship, too. China like all police states demanded no less. “Westerners with no actual experience of what China was like before the People’s Republic cannot possibly understand what the early reforms meant,” he said. It was an outrageous claim.
Famed novelist Pearl Buck loved China as a missionary’s daughter but criticized the regime. To her death in 1973 she was denied a Communist-issue visa. Chester Ronning loved China as a missionary’s son and did what he was told, and was welcomed in 1971, 1973, 1975 and 1983 – twice at the invitation of Premier Chou En-Lai.
“He often confused the ideal, described to him by Chou En-Lai and others, with the broader, harsher reality,” writes biographer Brian Evans. “Indeed, as a guest of the premier of China, he travelled under special circumstances, and wherever he went, the word that he was a special guest of the highest order preceded him. He was honest in reporting what he saw, but what he saw did not generally apply.”
Evans was a diplomat to Beijing and retired professor of Chinese history at the University of Alberta. His recounting of Ronning’s apologia is mournful, as though the old man’s lapses must not detract from his unusual life story. The result is an intriguing glimpse of China in turmoil and one Canadian’s attempt to make sense of it all.
Born of Lutheran missionaries in Hubei Province in 1894, Ronning carried an early childhood memory of his parents fleeing the 1900 Boxer rebellion. As a diplomat posted to Chongqing in 1945, Ronning recalled he had to store his soap by dangling it from a string so the rats wouldn’t eat it. Attending a state banquet in 1971, he exchanged riddles that are amusing only to those immersed in Chinese culture: “What is a golden axe with a silver handle? A bean sprout!”
Ronning often returned to Alberta where his family homesteaded. He served a term in the legislature as a United Farmers candidate. Yet over and over he found himself back in the Motherland.
“Ronning’s life was entwined with the history of China,” writes Evans. “Fate kept drawing him back to the land of his birth, and when recalling his life, he invariably measured it by key events in the history of modern China.”
There was much he chose not to measure. Witnessing Communist troops take over Nanking in 1949, Ronning made it sound like a Legion homecoming: “The soldiers were orderly and disciplined and were greeted by welcome posters and school children singing new songs of praise.” He made no mention of the arrest and summary execution of political opponents.
Ronning once attempted to justify his enthusiasm for the Communists in a 1980 film China Mission: “I sympathized with their side of the case because they were pledged to free China, the Chinese peasants, from the vicious oppression of the landlords,” he said.
If the finer details of Mao’s atrocities were still unknown when Ronning died in 1984, much had already been chronicled by the plainest observer. In China, then and now, you can see what you choose to see.
Diplomat Peter Lum in a memoir Peking 1950-1953 by Camelot Press recounted the Great Dog Massacre that followed the Communist takeover. “Dogs were simply killed,” Lum wrote. Police went house to house rounding up pets to be clubbed to death or hanged: “They were taken away in small carts like garbage carts, closed tight and packed solid, and if you passed one you could hear them thrashing inside and see blood on the sides of the cart. And there are no more dogs in Peking.”
Ronning saw only the New China depicted in propaganda films, devoid of brutality. “Mao Zedong elevated the people,” he told the National Film Board. “The first thing he did was to establish kindergartens.”
In the summer of 1980, Professor Evans made repeated visits to interview Ronning at his home in the town of Camrose, Alberta. Ronning was a silver-haired widower then. Evans recalls he liked to visit the local Chinese diner and speak Mandarin to the waitress.
Did Ronning regret his pro-Mao views? Evans did not press the old man, and acknowledges it would have been pointless anyway: “Ronning had minor memory problems. I found that certain questions or phrases would launch him into his memories of Chinese history. Ronning, like many teachers, came to think in set pieces.”
The Remarkable Chester Ronning is a deft and skillful biography, and more honest than Ronning ever was.
By Holly Doan
The Remarkable Chester Ronning: Proud Son of China by Brian L. Evans, University of Alberta Press; ISBN #9780-8886-46637; $34.95
