Marijuana tax revenues after four years have finally met federal estimates tabled when Parliament legalized cannabis in 2018. Statistics Canada figures did not account for any increased costs of policing, licensing, zoning and insurance: “There really isn’t much room for taxes other than the GST.”
Bankruptcy lawyers claim a bill to protect company pensions in case of insolvency may spell the death of defined benefit plans in the private sector. “Employers may abandon these plans,” partners with the largest law firm in Western Canada said of Bill C-228.
Enforcement of a bill guaranteeing prompt payment to contractors on public works remains stalled though Parliament passed the measure four years ago. Cabinet in a notice Saturday said it was still considering regulations: “They are some of the hardest-working people in our country and they are going bankrupt.”
It is Employee Appreciation Week
and my mailbox
is getting full.
The Director of Operations is proud
of our positive, inclusive,
and constructive hard work,
earning admiration and respect.
The Vice President recognizes
our commitment and dedication,
thanks us
for putting the needs of our clients
at the heart of our efforts.
The President, impressed
by our leadership, expertise and engagement,
wants us to celebrate our contribution
in driving an innovative, competitive
and sustainable business.
“Must have taken them time
to write so beautifully,” I think.
“One day, an app may do all that.”
I check emails of previous years.
Similar words,
comparable praises,
a matching tone.
Different executives.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
In 1926 the Manitoba Paper Co. founded a company town called Pine Falls northeast of Winnipeg. The community grew to 3,200 people by the 1950s. Raw sewage and mill effluent, 80,000 gallons a day, were dumped in the Winnipeg River, the only source of drinking water for the nearby Sagkeeng First Nation. Children were sick.
The Pine Falls Hospital had plenty of fresh, clean beds – it ran at 43 percent capacity in the 1950s – but townspeople objected to Indians receiving care in the same ward with Caucasians, so authorities built an Indian hospital instead.
Historian Maureen Lux picks up the story: “Between 1949 and 1958, in a population of less than 1300, 462 infants were admitted to the Fort Alexander Indian Hospital and 19 died. In July 1958 alone, 33 infants were admitted and one died.” The Indian Hospital operated at 128 percent occupancy.
“The Indian Health Service field nurse reckoned that mothers were negligent for bottle-feeding instead of breastfeeding their infants,” Lux writes; “Accordingly she advised that children should be taken from the parents as soon as possible and enrolled in the Fort Alexander Residential School. But the school’s water supply, also contaminated by raw sewage, was suspected as the cause of an infectious hepatitis outbreak in 1954.”
In painstaking research and matter-of-fact reportage, Associate Professor Lux of Brock University documents Canadian apartheid. Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals In Canada is a riveting and extraordinary account of mistreatment of citizens.
“Indian hospitals reflected the changing role of health care in an emerging welfare state, but they were also firmly rooted in persistent, century-long government policies that, regardless of political stripe, sought to protect, civilize and assimilate Aboriginal people,” writes Lux. “Such a remarkably consistent policy stemmed from the notion that Aboriginal people could not be considered true individuals in the classical liberal model that was hegemonic in Canada by the twentieth century.”
They were separate and unequal. Indian hospitals received a fraction of funding – as little as $4 a day for patients compared to $10 in general hospitals – and subsequently drew incompetent staff like the nurse at Pine Falls. Separate Beds recalls one Indian Health Service doctor who liked to diagnose patients from his car.
The heyday of Indian hospitals was short-lived but pernicious. “Overwhelmingly paternalistic, coercive in nature, and informed by the understanding of race as a biological reality that posed a threat to the nation’s health, Indian hospitals were the mid-century answer to the failures of the past,” Lux notes.
Consider Edmonton’s Camsell Hospital, opened in 1946, “the best the Indian Health Service had to offer,” writes Lux. It was opened by the Governor General and featured in a 1956 National Film Board production The Longer Trail.
What was it like? The building was decrepit with wiring rated a fire hazard. Sewer lines were ruptured and made the kitchen smell like dead rats. Fecal contamination in the water supply was blamed for a hepatitis outbreak in 1955. Linen went unwashed – surgeries were once cancelled due to lack of clean sheets – and the facility intended to care for 475 patients was soon stacked with 560 beds. The Camsell closed in 1996 due in part to asbestos contamination. This was the flagship Indian hospital.
“The history of Indian hospitals from the 1920s to 1970s is situated at the intersection of race, medicine and public policy,” explains Separate Beds.
Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals In Canada 1920s – 1980s, by Maureen Lux; University of Toronto Press; 273 pages; ISBN 9781-4426-13867; $32.95
Criminals are bypassing a multi-million dollar security system intended to keep dangerous foreigners out of Canada, says a federal report. Smugglers “found workarounds” of the electronic visa system, admits the Department of Immigration: “Those with malicious intent including associations with fraud, human trafficking and smuggling movements have found workarounds.”
Canada Student Loan write-offs are up 34 percent year over year, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. Losses to taxpayers rose even as Parliament voted to ease repayment terms by eliminating interest charges: “The value of unpaid student loans will continue to grow.”
More than 17,000 Canadians have signed a petition demanding Parliament conduct a special investigation of Loblaw Companies Ltd. The nation’s largest grocer yesterday reported net yearly earnings of $1.9 billion with a 4.7 percent gain in same-store food sales: “Open a parliamentary investigation into Loblaw Companies for their pandemic profiteering.”
The once-thriving seal export business is reduced to shipping frozen mammal penises to two Asian markets, according to a Canadian Food Inspection Agency report. Exports of all seal products once worth millions a year are down to $275,000 annually: “We all know negative media reports and anti-sealing messaging from animal rights groups had major impacts.”
A site will be selected by year’s end as perpetual home of the nation’s nuclear waste, according to regulatory filings. Two of 22 rural communities are shortlisted: “Decisions made in the near future will have repercussions decades, centuries and even millennia from now.”
Data confirm middle class Canadians, especially young families, have seen inflation eat away at their standard of living, Statistics Canada data showed yesterday. “Most workers have seen their purchasing power decline,” wrote the agency: “Wages and earnings have not kept pace.”
The incidence of suspected “birth tourism” is about 2,500 a year, says a Department of Immigration report. Researchers used new data in estimating the number of births by foreign mothers on short term visits to Canada: “The issue of ‘birth tourism’ has drawn considerable public attention in recent years.”
Chiefs of police are endorsing a private Senate bill to permit DNA sampling of people convicted of non-violent crimes like drunk driving. The measure might have averted one of the country’s most notorious wrongful convictions, they said: “You should know there are hundreds of unsolved murders in Canada.”
A telecom industry consultant who exposed Laith Marouf as an anti-Semite sponsored by the Department of Canadian Heritage says “too many people in Ottawa knew about this” and did nothing. Mark Goldberg in a submission to the Commons heritage committee said he repeatedly warned officialdom of Marouf’s conduct: “I do want to see some real accountability.”
The fate of helmetless curling rests with Alberta Court of King’s Bench. A judge has ordered a local school district and curling club to face civil trial for failing to meet a “required standard of care” by allowing children to hit the ice without a helmet: “The ice was slippery and could cause students to fall and become injured. That risk was obvious.”
