Canada’s record on climate change is “so shoddy,” says Environment Commissioner Jerry DeMarco. Testifying at the Senate energy committee, the Commissioner dismissed cabinet claims Canada is a climate leader: “The list of failures grows longer.”
New Democrat MP Taylor Bachrach (Skeena-Bulkley Valley, B.C.) yesterday took the transcontinental train 4,500 kilometres home for Christmas to promote his bill for better VIA Rail service. “It’s six days from Toronto to Smithers,” Bachrach told reporters: “We’re going to talk about passenger rail on the way.”
A federal investigation into bread price fixing is entering its ninth year without any conclusion in sight. “I understand people are concerned,” said Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell: “It’s a significant endeavour.”
The Canadian Museum of History
celebrated 125 years of the
Stanley Cup.
An evening of tribute offered
food,
bar drinks,
your picture with the Cup, and
an opportunity to rub shoulders with
former NHL players.
Even free parking and coat check.
All for $150 a ticket.
Lord Stanley
would have been pleased to know
how far his contribution
to amateur hockey
has gone.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Of all countries on earth how many old colonies managed constitutional independence without gunfire? The answer makes a very short list. First is Canada. This rare achievement took many years and much desk-pounding and today is taken for granted. Canada’s Constitutional Revolution is a celebration of the fact.
The late Barry Strayer, a federal judge, recalled only weeks after the 1982 Charter of Rights was proclaimed thieves broke into his Ottawa home: “When the police came and we were discussing it with the detectives, one of them said, ‘Well, there’s probably not much we can do. It used to be before this Charter thing that we’d round up a few of the likely suspects and take ‘em down to the station. We usually got results.’”
Strayer was a constitutional lawyer, ex-CCF organizer and retired assistant deputy justice minister who helped guide the decades-long, peaceful process to a made-in-Canada Constitution. “I think it is legitimate to call it a revolution,” he writes.
Strayer’s Revolution goes beyond a recitation of task forces and telephone calls. His first week in Ottawa in the winter of 1967 it was so cold the Eternal Flame went out: “I reflected briefly on whether this was a metaphor.” In summer the river log booms bobbed past Parliament and the “pungent, sulphurous odours from the pulp and paper mills” blanketed the Hill.
Then there were the people. Jean Chrétien was “quick minded” but bored by details, Strayer recalls. Ray Hnatyshyn joked “he had passed constitutional law only because he had borrowed my notes.”
Joey Smallwood was a name-dropper who “would mention what ‘Dick Nixon’ or ‘President Ceausescu’ of Romania had said to him.” Certain MPs liked to “treat officials as either stupid or malevolent.” W.A.C. Bennett threw terrible parties; he was a teetotaler who liked ginger ale. Pierre Trudeau, when complimented on his elegant office as justice minister in 1967, shrugged: “When a guy joins the Liberal Party he never knows where he’ll end up!”
All these people, every one of them fallible, set out to achieve what so few countries dream of: a calm, orderly transition from colonialism without violence or sectarian hatred. Strayer’s Revolution is so human and matter-of-fact he dispenses with the Charter proclamation ceremony in three paragraphs. The Queen showed up, it rained, that’s it.
Instead he chronicles a warmer story, like the experience of negotiating with First Nations. “We would make a suggestion and their team would sit across the table in silence. This I found unnerving. It instinctively made one think one said something outrageous and that it should be withdrawn.”
“Was it all worth it?” asked Strayer. It was.
By Holly Doan
Canada’s Constitutional Revolution by Barry Strayer; University of Alberta Press; 360 pages; ISBN 9780-8886-4649; $34.95
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault yesterday reneged on a cabinet promise to freeze the current $170 per tonne cap on the carbon tax, the equivalent of 40¢ per litre of gasoline. “It is a decision that hasn’t been made,” said Guilbeault: “We haven’t made any determination for what will happen.”
Cabinet failed to write Canadian job guarantees into subsidy contracts with foreign electric auto battery manufacturers, an MP last evening told the Commons government operations committee. Conservative MP Rick Perkins (South Shore-St. Margarets, N.S.) said he read a confidential Volkswagen agreement and “what’s not in it is a clause that protects Canadian jobs.”
A Senate committee yesterday endorsed a 38 percent increase in living expenses for legislators who stay in Ottawa hotels while on business. “Senators actually are struggling,” said one $169,600-a year appointee: “It is a pretty serious situation.”
A cabinet appointee under ethics investigation yesterday said her vote to award $217,661 in taxpayers’ subsidies to a company she owned was not a personal benefit. Annette Verschuren, former chair of the Canada Foundation for Sustainable Development Technology, resigned November 20: “I am sure that I didn’t break any ethics laws, absolutely.”
Commons Speaker Greg Fergus yesterday was ordered to apologize a 14th time and pay a fine of his choosing for breach of rules on impartiality. The House affairs committee rejected demands from 149 Conservative and Bloc Québécois MPs that Fergus resign: “For us in the Liberal Party he made a mistake.”
Middle class Canadians were disappointed with cabinet’s Strong Middle Class budget, says in-house Privy Council research. Participants in federal focus groups said they were overtaxed and disillusioned with cabinet: “No participants felt the Government of Canada currently devoted enough attention to the middle class.”
Jewish Liberal MPs yesterday expressed unease with a cabinet decision to vote with Iran and against Israel at the United Nations. Nine of the ten largest Jewish ridings in Parliament are held by Liberals: “If you can’t stand proud and strong with the Jewish community don’t light our damn Hanukkah candles.”
The Department of Health has paid Twitter “influencers” more than $680,000 since 2021, records show. Tweeters collected talent fees to express support for federal programs without disclosing they were paid for posts: ‘They are not required to reveal they are government-paid influencers because that, of course, would be very embarrassing.’
Cabinet budgeted $37.4 million and spent a quarter of it on a gun buyback program without buying any guns, records show. Newly disclosed figures follow an internal Department of Public Safety report that warned the program was prone to “wasted time, energy and funds.”
Cabinet should take steps to disqualify from public pension investments any unethical Chinese companies, a Commons committee recommended yesterday. The Canada Pension Plan, the nation’s largest, has held shares in Chinese coal mines, propaganda film studios and a solar power company linked to slave labour: ‘There are no measures which prevent funds from investing in companies complicit in human rights violations.’
