Cabinet will spend months reviewing a proposed registry of Canadians working as paid agents for foreign governments, says Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino. A bill to create a registry has languished in the Senate for over a year: “Why don’t we do our job?”
Inflation is keeping retirees in the workforce, says in-house Privy Council research. More Canadians in their 60s told federal focus groups they couldn’t afford to stop working: “Some described their long term financial outlook as bleak.”
A federal bill to ban new sales of handguns in Canada raises questions of “cost to the taxpayer and impact on property rights,” Alberta Chief Firearms Officer Teri Bryant told the Commons public safety committee. Bryant called Bill C-21 a waste of money that could be spent fighting crime: “This bill is demonstratively not about public safety.”
Canada’s rail safety record improved following the worst train wreck in the nation’s postwar history, says a Department of Transport report. “Based on occurrence data rail safety has improved overall,” wrote auditors.
If you open your mind
to the beauty around you,
tune your heart
to nature’s hidden music…
You could see a forest
in a maple leaf,
an ocean
in a drop of water.
You may even get a job
with the federal government.
They’re looking for those
who can see a salary
in a penny.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
The thing about Joey Smallwood is he often failed, and not in a character building way. It was repetitive, fruitless failure. He made a career of mismanagement.
Smallwood failed as a movie promoter and union organizer. Three times he tried and failed to run a newspaper. The stumbles left his family in poverty.
Smallwood’s daughter Clara, in the last interview before her death in 2011, told me: “There just wasn’t any money. One particular Christmas I can remember we were up in bed waiting for Santa Claus when mum called up the stairs and told us, ‘Santa didn’t come.’” It is a beaten man who cannot whittle a doll or buy a penny’s worth of peppermint for his daughter at Christmas.
In profiling this character who led Newfoundland and Labrador into Confederation in 1949, biographer Ray Argyle marvels at Smallwood’s inability “to distinguish between the bogus and the genuine, between bravado and reality.”
If Smallwood could not manage a Corner Brook weekly, he could scarcely run a province.
He built a Department of Economic Development but hired no economists. Instead Smallwood named as director general a heel-clicking hustler from Nazi-occupied Latvia later jailed for fraud. His deputy minister of development was an ex-felon who fled to Panama one step ahead of a corruption trial.
Economic planning was berserk. One cabinet member, Herbert Pottle, called it the “Smallwood shock treatment.” With unemployment at 19 percent Smallwood vowed Newfoundland must “develop or perish,” then burned through $30 million in subsidies for failed ventures: a chocolate factory, a rubber boot shop, a plant to make gazelle-skin gloves.
Argyle does not recite all these failures. You can only cram so many fiascos into 192 pages. Nor does he harshly censure Smallwood, but Newfoundlanders have taken care of that. The biography does recount Smallwood’s biggest debacle, the Churchill Falls contract to sell power to Hydro Quebec at below-market 1969 rates for decades to come. It remains the most incompetent commercial treaty ever sanctioned by any legislature. “The final contract, running to 2041, called for Quebec to pay three-tenths of a cent per kilowatt hour, with the price dropping to one-fifth of a cent after 2016,” Argyle notes.
Schemer and Dreamer is a gentle profile. Smallwood is dead. Newfoundland has a functioning economy. Tempers cool. Writes Argyle, “Many Newfoundlanders who have come of age since the death of Joey Smallwood see him as a figure of the distant past, even a slightly ridiculous character, a big spender, a different kind of politicians than is acceptable in Newfoundland today.”
By Holly Doan
Joey Smallwood: Schemer and Dreamer by Ray Argyle; Dundurn Press; 192 pages; ISBN 978-1-45970-369-8; $19.99
Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly yesterday said she was aware of at least one Chinese Communist Party agent who attempted to enter Canada on a diplomatic visa. “I have instructed my department to never shy away from denying a visa if it is for a political operative linked to the Communist Party of China,” Joly told the House affairs committee.
Newly-declassified cabinet minutes show Prime Minister Brian Mulroney scanned Access To Information disclosures on his own ministers’ expenses. Mulroney complained cabinet members had a reputation “for the good life.”
Bell Canada in 1985 lobbied to buy all federal telecom interests, newly-declassified cabinet minutes show. Cabinet was warned to beware of any appearance of “sweetheart deals” in selling Crown corporations: “Treasury Board seeks an extension of the Bell offer.”
Cabinet should expand a federal migrant labour program to dedicate workers for restaurants and building trades, the Commons industry committee said yesterday. MPs complained of chronic labour shortages in the sectors: “Job vacancies have grown.”
Prices on property listings are not the last word on true value, the British Columbia Court of Appeals ruled yesterday. The Court found one municipality, North Vancouver, lowballed an expropriation offer by 45 percent after arguing the property went unsold at a listed price: “Owners not infrequently list a property for sale at an attractively low asking price to prompt a bidding war.”
Canadians will suspect past elections were corrupt “no matter what I say,” the Prime Minister yesterday told reporters. Justin Trudeau was repeatedly called a liar in Parliament as MPs prepared for a Commons vote forcing him to call a public inquiry: “No matter what I say, Canadians continue to have questions.”
Conservatives should expect “attitude” from a hostile press, then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney warned cabinet in 1985. Secret minutes obtained through Access To Information disclose cabinet members were instructed to “think carefully before speaking” and tape every interaction with reporters: “Have a press aide with a tape recorder to produce transcripts of everything Ministers say.”
A Senate Liberal majority posed a threat so serious the “future of the government was at stake,” say confidential minutes of a 1985 cabinet meeting. Records obtained through Access To Information show then-Deputy Prime Minister Erik Nielsen was author of a proposal to permanently throttle Senate proceedings: “The Senate threat is most serious.”
Cabinet last night said it was “just shy of the finish line” in passing the first bill in Canadian history to put legal internet content under federal regulation. Cabinet rejected eight of 26 Senate amendments to Bill C-11 An Act To Amend The Broadcasting Act: “Now is the time to move forward.”
