Christmas is discriminatory, says a Canadian Human Rights Commission report. Observance of Jesus’ birth is “an obvious example” of religious bias rooted in colonialism, wrote the Commission: “No one is free until we are all free.”
The Department of Finance has failed a major security audit. An internal report said the department that guarded confidential data from parliamentarians and the public was slack in watching its own staff: “The employee may divulge secret information in exchange for money.”
Newly-declassified records show Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was wary of Conservative MPs’ “small town values” in amending 1980s-era obscenity laws. “Intercourse was alleged to happen all the time even in the government caucus,” said confidential minutes of one cabinet meeting: “Perhaps the idea of ‘current community standards’ should be revisited.”
Cabinet should promote plastic recycling instead of banning products, says Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre. The remarks followed a federal judge’s decision to strike the 2021 federal blacklisting of all plastic products from building materials to children’s toys as toxic: “None of this is backed up by any science or evidence.”
Electric vehicle subsidies to date will cost taxpayers up to $50 billion and counting including debt financing charges, says a Budget Office report. The figure is triple the value of annual production of the entire Canadian auto sector: “As soon as we publish a report that sets the record straight there are accusations we have not understood the problem or have a bone to pick.”
Canada’s leading proponent of a home equity tax faced an empty Parliament Hill pressroom Friday. No reporters, MPs, senators or political aides attended remarks by Professor Paul Kershaw of the University of British Columbia, a CMHC consultant: “That’s fine.”
Ontario replaces Exit signs in
malls, public places,
for the benefit of newcomers
who can’t read
English.
The new design
shows a little green man
running.
By certain conventions,
this could mean
“Aliens go this way”,
which some newcomers
might consider
offensive.
But that’s the least of their concerns.
As they rush to safety,
they’ll stop in front of a closed door
with a sign that says:
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY.
SECURITY ALARM WILL SOUND
IF DOOR IS OPENED.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Any tourist can describe Burmese jungles or the snows of Kilimanjaro. It takes talent to write a travel book about shopping malls. “I am writing a book on boredom, on repetition, on déjà vu, on replication, on the dysphasia of constructed landscapes, on the tackiness of the world and how it is shrinking,” writes Swiss author Rinny Gremaud.
All The World’s A Mall pops and snaps. It is outstanding. “It never ceases to amaze me how fatalistic people are about the ugly environments they live in,” she writes. Yes, the food courts in Edmonton and Casablanca look much alike. Yet Gremaud’s book is no tiresome rant against commercialism. She captures the contrasts of life on Earth through the lens of shopping centres.
It’s easy to sneer at malls as “sinister places, cultural and aesthetic deserts where the dead souls of a population that has converted to the religion of consumerism mill around,” writes Gremaud. They are much more.
Our correspondent visits Alberta, “almost rectangular,” she tells European readers. “If it were a country it would be somewhere between Qatar and Norway in terms of petrodollars per inhabitant.”
At the airport Gremaud encounters labourers bound for Fort McMurray, an industrial city “in the middle of the boreal forest,” she explains. Here “you can earn a six-figure salary without having finished high school,” adding: “Alcohol and sex are reputed to be rampant.”
In Edmonton in January, Gremaud correctly notes the predominant feature of local life is the climate. It was minus 23 degrees Celsius with night winds that could freeze batteries, but in the windowless West Edmonton Mall “the sun never sets,” she writes: “The lighting has turned white. The effect is daytime busy-ness in this long two-storey tunnel with its glass dome. The night and the freezing cold outside are mere abstractions, long-gone memories of an animal condition.”
Outside is hypothermia. Inside, “there is a strange background noise, fizzing fountains, footsteps slapping or squealing as the acoustics change with the height of the ceiling.”
Gremaud spent two days inside West Edmonton Mall in January. The profundity of the experience dawns later. “The indoor corridors that were lined with shop windows let me indulge in a kind of mental streetwalking,” she writes. “I could think about everything and nothing, why commerce exists, the value of things, the nature of exoticism.”
All The World’s A Mall tours the shopping centres of Kuala Lumpur, a city “yellow with pollution, red with congested traffic.” In Casablanca, Morocco Mall corridors run like “intestines of a whale lit up with neon tubes” and security guards enforce a dress code to keep out local slum dwellers. “Casablanca feels hostile,” writes Gremaud.
Beijing’s Golden Resources New Yansha Mall attempts to mimic West Edmonton Mall but fails, she notes. It is cockroach infested, has an “illogical arrangement of the elevators and escalators” and retail tenants selling a “diverse and wacky assortment of stuff” like harmonicas and chicken feet. “I haven’t bought a thing,” writes Gremaud. “At a certain cynical point there are no souvenirs for anyone.”
The Dubai Mall by contrast is spotless. Doorways are 15 metres high. There is a pond filled with tiger sharks. A cellphone store sells diamond iPhone cases for $1,300. Outside are sidewalks where nobody walks and greenspaces irrigated with drinking water that “are a nonsense that nobody notices,” says All The World’s A Mall. “Who in this era of touchscreen pleasures will look out the tinted windows at the landscape flowing by while ensconced in the back of a chauffeur-driven car?”
All The World’s A Mall is fresh and funny and sad. It is the best thing since free parking.
By Holly Doan
All The World’s A Mall by Rinny Gremaud; University of Alberta Press; 152 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-7126; $24.99
Cabinet will almost certainly appeal a Federal Court ruling on plastics regulations, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said last evening. The Court upheld a manufacturers’ complaint that blacklisting all plastic manufactured items as toxic was “unreasonable.”
Federal spending on consultants is up 16 percent this year to a record high despite cabinet’s promise to curb the practice, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. Federal managers earlier paid almost $670,000 to consultants for advice on how to save money on consultants: “Spending on professional services continues to increase.”
The Canada Border Services Agency yesterday acknowledged it recovered a small fraction of stolen vehicles believed to be exported through the Port of Montréal. New figures followed the launch of an investigation by the Commons public safety committee: “Everyone here knows someone whose car was stolen.”
The Canada Revenue Agency yesterday in a tax notice said employers offering private dental insurance must report the fact on their 2023 tax slips. The measure is intended to track companies that drop coverage: “We’re not going to insure our employees anymore for dental care because now it’s being covered by the government.”
Taxpayer grants for children’s postsecondary education do not go to families that need it most, says a federal report. Families that claimed the maximum $500 a year subsidy were typically able to save without assistance, wrote auditors: “Almost all parents care about postsecondary education but many for various reasons have not saved for it.”
Liberal MP Judy Sgro (Humber River-Black Creek, Ont.) yesterday distributed a Commons motion asking that cabinet “work together with Ukrainian fact-checkers” to monitor internet content. It follows a 2019 proposal by the Ukrainian-Canadian Congress to ban “false attacks” on politicians: “Work together with Ukrainian fact-checkers and disinformation specialists on ways of damage control.”
The Parliamentary Budget Office is checking Alberta’s claim to most of the Canada Pension Plan. A report earlier released by Premier Danielle Smith claimed Alberta was entitled to 53 percent of funds worth a third of a trillion: “I am requesting a custom tabulation that includes historical contributions.”
