Immigrants taking the citizenship oath at federal ceremonies receive as keepsakes a maple leaf pin made in China, records show. The Department of Immigration last year ordered a quarter-million pins from a Chinese vendor: “This is our national symbol.”
Drug impaired driving rates have doubled since Parliament legalized marijuana, says a Department of Justice report. Legalization was accompanied by Bill C-46 An Act To Amend The Criminal Code that allowed random roadside drug testing: “The rate of drug-impaired driving offences increased 105 percent from 2017.”
Electric cars may pose a fire hazard, says a National Research Council report. The Council said it did not know how many fires were caused by vehicles’ lithium batteries since federal regulators do not collect the data: “There are still questions regarding the fire safety of electric vehicles.”
A labour arbitrator has upheld a firing over $34. An employee at Casino Regina was dismissed after 21 years with the Saskatchewan Gaming Corporation in what the arbitrator acknowledged was an isolated incident: “I must decide credibility questions, not duck them.”
Anti-trust lawyers are investigating what they claim are faked consumer reviews for Amazon products, Federal Court records disclose. The Competition Bureau in a Court filing said it suspected hundreds or thousands of reviewers were paid to praise Amazon: “I believe that certain product reviews and star ratings on the Amazon platform are likely fake reviews.”
Canada’s largest newspaper chain is asking suppliers to volunteer for 12 percent price cuts, according to a confidential email from its chief financial officer. The executive did not respond when asked to confirm the urgent appeal. It follows the resignation of the executive chair of Postmedia Network: “Reduce costs to help Postmedia’s performance.”
Less than half of billions paid out under a corporate subsidy program will ever be recovered, says the Department of Industry. The $7 billion Strategic Innovation Fund was launched six years ago by then-Industry Minister Navdeep Bains on a false claim it would create 56,000 jobs: “Terms are fairly flexible on the whole.”
The Department of Employment will offer a 50 percent bonus on loan forgiveness for medical students who agree to work in the country. The $3.2 million-a year cost is necessary to increase the number of rural doctors and nurses, it said: ‘Shortages are acute.’
A Muslim charity stripped of its tax status for allegedly hosting radical speakers has regained its registration with the Canada Revenue Agency. Auditors said they “reconsidered” the charitable status of the Ottawa Islamic Centre and Assalam Mosque: “We ended the political activities audit program.”
I suggest nominating this manager
for the Outstanding Leadership Award.
In last month’s staff meeting,
he came closer than ever to telling the truth.
Barely any lies about the merger,
human resources, budget.
It was our finest hour.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
There were two Franklin Expeditions. One is acclaimed by Parks Canada which spent millions scanning the floor of the Arctic Ocean in search of 19th century English shipwrecks. The other is documented through the passion and extraordinary research of a lone anthropologist, Alison Brown of the University of Aberdeen. The resulting First Nations, Museums, Narrations is intriguing and profound.
In June 1929 a band of researchers left Winnipeg to document what they believed were the vanishing First Nations of the Prairies. Canada’s Indigenous population had been decimated by disease and misfortune and numbered some 107,000 people. “Now or never is the time in which to collect from the natives what is still available for study,” noted a director of the Geological Survey of Canada. Anthropologists believed the end was near. “Indigenous people were thought to be assimilating or dying out,” writes Brown.
The 1929 group called itself the Franklin Motor Expedition for the car they drove, a 1928 six-cylinder Franklin sedan. The team numbered two Australians and a former staffer from New York’s Museum of the American Indian. They spent three months travelling from reserve to reserve, speaking with elders and purchasing artifacts.
Armed with a 16mm film camera and a cash budget, the trio collected everything from the trivial to the priceless: a hide scraper made from Massey-Harris tractor parts, a pair of moccasins picked up at a Banff gift shop, sacred bark, a mink skin medicine bag and Blackfoot dog travois, eagle bone whistles used in Sun Dance ceremonies, drums, scrolls and spectacular headdresses and a Sarcee cougar hide painted with exquisite pictographs.
At Little Pine Nation one researcher paid 25¢ for a grass whisk used in a sweat lodge. A colleague recalled members of the tribe laughed over the sale: “They though he could have gone and picked the grass and tied it together himself.”
The result was the largest single collection of Canadian Prairie Indigenous artifacts ever assembled in a British museum. Some artifacts were sold to local curators to help finance the trip, but the bulk of 680 artifacts was deposited at Cambridge.
The last surviving member of the Franklin Motor Expedition died in 1990. And that was it, until the trove was rediscovered by Alison Brown as she poured over the collection for a museum catalogue in 1998, “an in-house document that was not intended to reach out to First Nations,” Brown notes. “I soon discovered no one from the First Nations visited by the Franklin Motor Expedition had ever been to Cambridge to see the collection. This was not due to a lack of interest; people simply did not know it was there.”
Impressed by the collection and its odd history, Brown retraced the route of the 1929 expedition from Calgary to Swan Lake, Man. She spent months combing public and private archives, interviewing First Nations members and contacting descendants of the expedition members.
Here the rich narrative becomes jarring. Was the Franklin Motor collection an irreplaceable gift to archaeologists or mere plunder? Did researchers salvage artifacts that would have been lost to civilization or simply barter with poor First Nations whose sacred cultural possessions were scorned as cigar-store trinkets?
Brown notes the Indian Act outlawed potlatches and healing ceremonies. Even participation in the Sun Dance at a summer festival was punishable by a $25 fine and a month in jail. “Pieces such as the many ceremonial items collected by the expedition may have been sold because their keepers desperately needed money,” Brown writes.
Collectors “sincerely believed their actions were justified,” First Nations, Museums concludes, but it was never that simple. “First Nations people participated in the gradual commodification of materials that they would previously have treated very differently. This commodification – and the resultant exchange of artifacts for cash – has enabled museums to assert that the actions of collectors in the past were legal and valid, and that people who sold artifacts did so of their own free will. By contrast, First Nations critics of this argument point to the harsh realities of life for their ancestors and the combination of economic conditions and challenges to traditional belief systems that made it difficult to resist the approaches of collectors.”
First Nations, Museums is a fascinating, unsettling account of the one Franklin Expedition that Canadians never hear of. It makes it impossible to enjoy a museum in quite the same way again.
By Holly Doan
First Nations, Museums, Narrations: Stories of the 1929 Franklin Motor Expedition to the Canadian Prairies, by Alison K. Brown; University of British Columbia Press; 305 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-27263; $34.95
The Senate yesterday amended the Citizenship Act to permit citizenship judges to perform their duties by “electronic means.” The Department of Immigration refused comment following its proposal to allow immigrants to swear allegiance to Canada by clicking a box on a federal website: “The negative concerns I have heard about this idea are legion.”
An Ontario senator yesterday did not comment on a report he wanted to counter media critics who “insist there are Chinese spies” in Canada. Alleged remarks by Senator Victor Oh followed the May 8 expulsion of a Chinese spy: “The situation has escalated.”
The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce yesterday was fined $3 million for billing irregularities affecting more than 130,000 credit card customers. “The total number of customers affected and total dollar amounts involved were relatively high,” wrote regulators: “It is damaging to confidence.”
Canadian diplomats abroad have spent more than $139,000 on circus tickets, concerts and galas, newly-released records show. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in her 2023 Budget proposed a 15 percent cut in unnecessary spending to show cabinet was “fiscally responsible.”
