Canada now has so many seniors the Department of Employment hired 18 percent more clerks this year to process Old Age Security claims, records show. New applications for benefits are arriving at the rate of more than 60,000 a week: “For a significant number of these seniors the Old Age Security benefits represent their only source of income.”
Media and animal rights activists have indoctrinated Canadians against the Atlantic seal hunt, says the president of one of Newfoundland and Labrador’s largest unions. “It was all crushed,” Greg Pretty told the Senate fisheries committee: “It was crushed by outside forces.”
If you phone your friends
to tell them about your luxury Alaska cruise,
it makes you look old.
Outdated.
Next time, Instagram.
If you smile
with lettuce stuck between your teeth,
that, too, makes you look old.
Next time, kale.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Medicare is a fact of life and death in Canada. Yet, as editor Gregory Marchildon notes, the story of universal health insurance is little known.
“Why have historians devoted so little attention to the history of medicare?” asks Marchildon. There is no single inventor, no drama, no arresting narrative. It is the story of patchwork initiatives that evolved over generations.
Making Medicare fills the void. Contributors in a series of essays recount the Canadian struggle for public health insurance. The result is insightful and surprising, like the story of the “cottage hospitals” of Newfoundland & Labrador.
In 1936 Newfoundland, then a British colony, opened its first public hospital in the fishing village of Old Perlican. In time nearly two dozen cottage hospitals were established across the island.
The timing was desperate. Newfoundland had bankrupted itself in 1934. Half the province was out of work, and debt payments comprised 65 percent of the island budget. Newfoundland was so broke its premier offered to sell Labrador to the Government of Canada for $110 million.
Instead the colony suspended its constitution and surrendered its sovereignty to Britain. “The unforgettable thing about Newfoundland for most of those years before Confederation is that we were poor,” wrote Joey Smallwood. “We were a poor people, a poor country; the poorest in North America.”
The island had the highest infant mortality rate in the English-speaking world. Tuberculosis was epidemic. Harold Horwood, a member of Smallwood’s cabinet, later recalled that with cod and molasses few Newfoundlanders actually starved, but were malnourished.
“Outport Newfoundlanders had always lived off the land, and they continued to do so, right through the 1930s,” recalled Horwood. “Most of them were very poor; their houses were unpainted; their clothing wore out and could not be replaced; thousands of children had no boots or shoes, and some of them stayed out of school because of lack of clothes.”
Outside St. John’s there were only five hospitals in all Newfoundland including two clinics owned by paper mills, and a mining company hospital in Buchans. The alternative to public hospital insurance was no insurance at all.
Under U.K. administrators, the island adopted a public health system modeled on a program in the Scottish Highlands. The cottage hospitals had up to 30 beds. Each had a doctor on government salary. Families paid an annual premium of $5 for unlimited medical care.
It was “one of North America’s earliest efforts at publicly-funded health care,” notes Making Medicare. The system survived Confederation through to the introduction of Parliament’s 1957 Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act that subsidized all provincial insurance plans.
Today only a handful of cottage hospital buildings remain in Newfoundland. And the Old Perlican hospital, first of its kind? It was rebuilt and renamed in 1986, and remains in service.
By Holly Doan
Making Medicare: New Perspectives on the History of Medicare in Canada edited by Gregory P. Marchildon; University of Toronto Press; 336 pages; ISBN 9781-4426-13454; $39.95
MPs yesterday asked the House affairs committee to investigate how ex-Speaker Anthony Rota arranged a parliamentary tribute to a Waffen SS member. The Nazi military unit was named a criminal organization by the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunal for its participation in mass murders of Jews: “How in God’s name did this occur?”
Meeting a federal target to triple annual housing starts to the highest levels in Canadian history will be “difficult to attain,” CMHC said yesterday. One MP described the target of an extra 3.5 million new homes by 2030 as a fantasy: “I don’t see how we will attain it with the current environment.”
Two Regina refinery workers fired for declining semi-weekly Covid tests have regained their jobs. A Saskatchewan labour arbitrator said the firings were unjustified once the men were suspended without pay: ‘They had a sincere personal objection to an invasion of their bodily integrity and protection of private health information.’
Parliament must enact stern measures to counter disruptive animal activists, says the sponsor of an anti-trespassing bill. Conservative MP John Barlow (Foothills, Alta.) said six-figure fines and jailing are needed to counter groups whose “sole goal is to end animal agriculture.”
A Senator yesterday filed a formal complaint alleging sloppy journalism by CBC reporter John Paul Tasker. The parliamentary coverage was “false,” “inaccurate” and appeared to breach network standards, said the complaint to the CBC Ombudsman: ‘Tasker misinterpreted information.’
A parliamentary tribute to a Waffen SS “hero” points to the need for more Holocaust education, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said yesterday. Opposition MPs expressed scorn for the Prime Minister’s remarks six days after the incident: “It is important that we learn from this.”
Department of Finance in-house research rates Minister Chrystia Freeland boastful and self-congratulatory. Canadians also concluded Freeland was disconnected from economic realities on inflation and housing, said a department report: ‘They were somewhat cynical and questioned what had been actually accomplished.’
Contractors don’t have to build affordable apartments to qualify for a GST break because cabinet does “not want to be building cheap homes in a bad part of town,” Housing Minister Sean Fraser said yesterday. The tax break will cost $383 million a year by Budget Office estimate: “It is one of the most important things we could do.”
One of Canada’s biggest discount furniture dealers yesterday agreed to pay a $3.35 million penalty for “false or misleading” advertising. The federal settlement with Dufresne Group Inc. of Winnipeg followed a Competition Bureau investigation dating from 2019: “Tactics that pressure consumers to make a purchase quickly like limited time offers must be truthful.”
Federal inspectors last year imposed a record $1.54 million in fines on employers for breach of migrant labour regulations, the Department of Employment said yesterday. Thousands of inspections were completed after the department failed to do any spot checks as recently as 2017: “The department’s approach to on-site inspections was flawed.”
Anthony Rota yesterday became the first Commons Speaker in 66 years to resign under threat of formal censure. All parties in the House expressed disgust after Rota sponsored a VIP welcome on Parliament Hill for a Waffen SS member: “It was embarrassing.”
