Cabinet yesterday denied the RCMP is investigating the Prime Minister’s Office over attempts to quash a criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin Group Incorporated. Police in a letter to the advocacy group Democracy Watch said an investigation was ongoing: ‘They were hounding me and my staff.’
Millions of unsafe vehicles are on Canadian roads due to an odd gap in federal regulations, says the Department of Transport. It counted up to 6.6 million “unsafe vehicles” driven by unwitting owners: “Yes, there is always room for improvement.”
Immigration of African francophones is “crucial” to saving French in Canada, says Languages Commissioner Raymond Théberge. “We need to recruit where there are pools of French speakers” like Mali and the Ivory Coast, he testified at the Commons languages committee: “It is clear the future of French is found in Africa.”
Lockdowns were the least popular national Covid control measure, says in-house research by the Privy Council Office. Only a Québec curfew was rated worse: ‘If the following public health measures were to be reintroduced would you support them?’
The Department of Public Works will not disclose how many federal ads are flagged in breach of a ban on partisan promotions. The department in a briefing note said the number was irrelevant: ‘The number of times that issues were flagged does not provide any relevant information.’
Canada’s homeless population is smaller than originally estimated, Statistics Canada data show. A Census count of people living in shelters was less than half the number in 2016: “Some people who experience homelessness do not access shelters.”
My friend overseas
inquires
about Canadian politics.
“I’ve heard your Prime Minister
is losing popularity,” he says.
I agree that’s what the polls show.
“Think he might lose the election?” he asks.
I say that’s a possibility.
“So the Leader of the Opposition
could become your next Prime Minister?”
I tell him that’s not what the polls show.
“I don’t get it,” he says.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Those who live long enough reach a point where all regrets and anxieties simply vanish. No one on their 100th birthday recites a century’s worth of petty gibes. Perhaps it’s the distraction of arthritis, or the comfort of knowing there are no surviving witnesses to our most embarrassing incidents.
Cherie Dimaline, Governor General’s Award-winning author, is only in her 40s and not there yet. Dimaline vividly recalls all her regrets and anxieties, like the time she got drunk on Jägermeister.
“Remember there was that party you went to in your early twenties, when they were giving out free Jägermeister and you were still broke enough to think you needed to drink the hell out of that Jägermeister because, well, it was free, and then you got so drunk you started an argument with that group of strangers who said you were an idiot?” writes Dimaline. “Oh, man, you really were an idiot. Wait, let me play that back in detail for you.”
An Anthology Of Monsters is the text of a lecture Dimaline gave to the Canadian Literature Centre’s annual Kreisel Lecture Series. It is warm and human. Remember the time you had that panic attack at age 7 and locked yourself in the bathroom before First Communion? Dimaline remembers.
“What if I pee my pants in front of everyone?” she writes. “What if I say the wrong words and the priest stops the whole thing to demand I find the right ones? What if I take the Eucharist and then throw up the Eucharist?”
“And then I went to the church to take my First Communion in front of two hundred people,” writes Dimaline. “And while I might have otherwise forgotten it, that day was sharply carved into my memory.”
Dimaline depicts anxiety and regret as a pushy house guest with a photographic memory. “Anxiety, she remembers,” says Dimaline. “She remembers the weather and what I wore and the looks on people’s faces, even people I never saw again.”
Many recollections are funny and not at all hurtful: “Hey girl, remember in 2012 when you were at the airport in Montréal and the Air Canada employee at the desk said, ‘Have a great flight’ and you said, ‘You too’?”
Other recollections bring a stab of pain: “I have the horrifying talent of still feeling embarrassed about something I said or did twenty years ago. Do I remember how I felt when I was on the front page of the New York Times arts section? No. But I remember, word for word, a mean tweet directed at me from a man who never met me but decided to question everything about me as if I was not a real person.”
Dimaline finds safety in family and words. An Anthology Of Monsters has advice for anyone with a keyboard or paper and pencil.
“The reason I always advise people to write things out, is that you get to organize yourself, figure out how you feel, and record the truth before your anxiety twists everything like a funhouse mirror,” writes Dimaline. “Think about how much better you feel when you take all the dangling threads of deadlines and errands and put them into a list. Then you know what you have to do and for who and for when.”
By Holly Doan
An Anthology Of Monsters: How Story Saves Us From Our Anxiety, by Cherie Dimaline; University of Alberta Press; 56 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-6822; $14.99.
New Democrat and Liberal MPs yesterday sought to censure Conservative finance critic MP Jasraj Singh Hallan (Calgary Forest Lawn) in apparent retribution for a 37-day budget filibuster. “You want to get rid of me?” Hallan told the Commons finance committee: “I am not here to make friends.”
Parliament is catering to transgender visitors by mandating the installation of “non-gender” washrooms, the Opposition Leader in the Senate said yesterday. “Why don’t we call a spade a spade?” Senator Donald Plett (Man.) told the Senate committee on internal economy: “We’re catering to a group of people who say, ‘I want to go into a washroom I don’t belong in.'”
Federal whistleblowers who disclosed secret memos on Chinese spy activities to media should be prosecuted, says a former chief of the public service. Mel Cappe, ex-cabinet secretary, compared whistleblowers to predators whose identities must be exposed: “That is a strange position to take when we lack the clarity of the truth here.”
Cabinet yesterday introduced a bill to promote “support for workers” facing layoffs due to its climate program. Some 170,000 energy workers face unemployment, according to the Environment Commissioner: “We know the stakes are incredibly high.”
Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez yesterday defended millions in federal subsidies for TV corporations despite cutbacks at the network with the largest audience, BCE Incorporated. Television broadcasters received more than $100 million in direct federal grants through the pandemic: “What’s not working?”
Privy Council President Bill Blair yesterday said he never saw a secret memo on Chinese spies because it was sent to the wrong office. Blair’s earlier claim that information was deliberately withheld by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was contradicted in committee testimony: ‘They sent it to another office, not my office.’
Cabinet yesterday said Canadian delegates will no longer attend meetings of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank but stopped short of dumping Canada’s shares in the Beijing operation. It followed complaints by a Canadian executive working for the Bank that the Communist Party “runs the joint.”
