Food is so costly a third of users at Toronto food banks have a full time job, the Commons agriculture committee was told last night. “Things are upside down,” said the CEO of the Daily Bread Food Bank, the nation’s largest: “It does not make sense.”
Consumer groups yesterday endorsed a private New Democrat bill to tighten compensation for air passengers including a tenfold increase in fines on carriers. “This bill is about setting our expectations,” said MP Taylor Bachrach (Skeena-Bulkley Valley, B.C.), sponsor of the bill: “We need to see a much stronger enforcement approach.”
Elections Canada this year will introduce first-ever electronic voting lists, says Stéphane Perrault, chief electoral officer. Perrault in a report to Parliament said he also intended to store more information on foreign computer servers but detailed no new security measures to counter election fraud: “Considering the status of cybersecurity, your entire election could be hacked.”
Compensation for federal employees shortchanged by bungled payroll software has cost taxpayers more than two-thirds of a billion so far, records show. Cabinet is still calculating the total cost of the 2016 Phoenix Pay System failure: “We saw how that didn’t work.”
A federal paid holiday in memory of Indian Residential School children draws “mixed feelings” among First Nations, says in-house research by the Privy Council Office. Indigenous people said they were more concerned about crime and clean drinking water: “Very few believed the Government of Canada had made much in the way of tangible progress towards addressing the most pressing concerns.”
The Department of Transport is demanding advanced reports on more than 100 million air cargo shipments a year into Canada. The mandate is not for tax collection but security, regulators said in a legal notice Saturday: “Half of all cargo that is transported by air travels on passenger flights.”
Sledding is a riskier winter pastime than snowboarding, new Public Health Agency data show. A federal review of six years’ worth of emergency room admissions documented a higher accident rate involving sledding and tobogganing: “Risks highlight the importance of personal safety.”
The Commissioner
of the Canadian Football League
sees no evidence
to connect game-time head injuries
with long-term neurological disorder.
Despite doctors’ opinions.
Despite recognition
by the American league.
Much like the former commissioner.
It appears our football fields
are more dangerous
than previously thought,
causing brain damage
to infiltrate
the organization’s top echelon.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Forty years after the Titanic sank, newspaperman Walter Lord tracked down survivors to ask what they took as they headed for the lifeboats. Lord recited the grab bag of mementos in his 1955 bestseller A Night To Remember. One brought a Bible, another a pistol. There were pocketfuls of cigars or cookies, fur coats, a sapphire necklace and a music box that played the Portuguese tango. One Toronto passenger retrieved three oranges but left behind a tin box containing $200,000 in bonds.
Author Therese Greenwood calls this “telescoping,” a phenomenon experienced by people under stress when their vision tunnels to objects literally in front of them. Greenwood’s What You Take With You explores this intriguing theme in the million-acre Fort McMurray fire, a near-disaster of Titanic proportions.
“Everyone tells me what they would pack if they were caught in a similar situation, usually baby and wedding photos, something sentimental,” writes Greenwood. “The younger ones mention laptop computers, hard drives, phones. ‘My phone is my life,’ they say. What you think you will pack as you look around your comfortable living room and what you snatch when smoke chokes the air and flames lick the sky are entirely different.”
On May 3, 2016 residents were ordered to drop everything and flee as flames spread through Fort McMurray at the rate of ninety feet a minute. There is one road out of the city. Greenwood lost her Riverview Heights home but notes residents count themselves lucky. “I’m still afraid of dying in a fire,” she writes.
She fled the inferno to the jolly tinkling of bells. “Do I hear sleigh bells?” her husband asked: “‘I packed my grandfather’s sleigh bells.’ ‘Smart thinking,’ Steve said. ‘Sleigh bells will come in handy today.’ It was thirty-four degrees Celsius inside the car.”
Greenwood also retrieved a family Bible, two cans of club soda, bank statements, a rolling pin and chipped, foot-high plaster statue of Saint Therese, yoghurt, a chrome-plated pen and two guitars: “You should have let them burn,” her sister said. “I would have thrown them into the flames.” Lost were four generations of family photos and an urn containing her father-in-law’s ashes.
“Driveways and front lawns were filled with scurrying people stowing suitcases, laundry hampers, plastic bins and diaper bags into trucks and vans and cars,” Greenwood writes. She recalls children clutching stuffed animals, and how traffic slowed to a dead stop right by the local cemetery, “ironically”.
Greenwood is part memoirist, part police reporter, skillfully weaving anecdotes from the day a whole city nearly burned to the ground. She remembers canned music on the radio station – announcers had joined the evacuation – and a local donut shop emptying shelves as giveaways. Just because the business was to burn was no reason to waste donuts. “Every vehicle on the road that day contained its own story,” she writes.
What You Take with You: Wildfire, Family and the Road Home, by Therese Greenwood; University of Alberta Press; 160 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-4491; $24.99
A Liberal-appointed Senator yesterday told reporters it was “deeply insulting” to ask if he had contacts with Beijing. “I don’t like getting these attacks,” said Senator Yuen Pau Woo (B.C.): “People are claiming that I am some kind of a foreign agent.”
Cabinet is rejecting a proposal to extend early Canada Pension Plan benefits to aging coal miners facing unwanted retirement due to climate regulations. Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson in a letter to MPs said the proposal “would create inequities.”
VIA Rail breached the Canada Labour Code in firing a locomotive engineer over his vaccination status, a federal arbitrator has ruled. Cabinet to date has not disclosed how many Crown employees were fired or suspended without pay for declining to show proof they took a Covid shot: “The policy was unreasonable.”
All-white, all-female Canadian Human Rights Commissioners yesterday would not comment after being cited for mistreating Black employees. A union representing staff lawyers confirmed the Commission breached a clause in its own contract stating: “There shall be no discrimination.”
The underground economy is at risk of widening even further without constant federal surveillance, says a Canada Revenue Agency report. The value of all-cash dealings and other tax avoidance measures grew 50 percent in five years, according to Statistics Canada data: “Without intervention there is a risk that changes in the social and economic environment can progressively add to the growth of the underground economy.”
CBC managers refuse to testify at a Senate hearing on Islamophobia, claiming it would undermine “journalistic independence.” It follows a 2022 Ombudsman’s report that the network breached its own ethics code with a website article that depicted elderly white Canadians and Conservative Party voters as bigots: ‘Senators questioning news leaders about their editorial decisions and practices undermines journalistic independence.’
