Executives at the Public Health Agency in an internal report admit they were unprepared and poorly trained to manage the Covid outbreak that killed 60,871 Canadians. The acknowledgement came three years after the Agency awarded a pandemic hero’s medallion to every manager and employee for “their commitments towards pandemic relief.”
A British Columbia family made to hurry up and wait for a WestJet flight to Kelowna has been awarded $5,323 in compensation. The airline falsely blamed the weather for an inexplicable delay in boarding, said a British Columbia Tribunal: “It was caused by WestJet.”
A federal subsidy program that gave away more than $130 million on a promise of promoting business start-ups and creating jobs achieved neither, says a Department of Industry report. Auditors could not identify a single start-up or count any net job creation despite claims of success by then-Trade Minister Mary Ng: “These would have been useful.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney has gone too far with trade concessions to the United States, says a key ally. Lana Payne, national Unifor president, said Carney’s elimination of $30 billion in retaliatory tariffs was “not an option.”
Federal inspectors have confirmed a black market in migrant worker permits, says a labour department briefing note. The department said it would tighten inspections amid public complaints that foreigners have cost Canadians jobs and wages: ‘Misuse includes the buying and selling of permits.’
Canada shows slight improvement in easing a chronic shortage of doctors and nurses, says a Department of Health briefing note. The department noted there are still tens of thousands of foreign-trained health care professionals here who do not work in the medical field: “Only 58 percent, 114,000 workers, have employment in the field.”
The City of Niagara Falls, Ont. presented Prime Minister Mark Carney with a bottle of Wayne Gretzky-brand whiskey as a token of thanks for his service, according to ethics filings. Carney’s nemesis Donald Trump has repeatedly praised Gretzky as one of his favourite Canadians: “The Great One, Wayne Gretzky the Great. How good is Wayne Gretzky? He’s the Great One.”
Gas rates
sharply drop.
Radio says
rising supplies
of North American crude
are pushing prices down
while reducing dependency
on foreign oil.
Good news, I suppose,
but
why the day after I fueled?
By Shai Ben-Shalom
In the 1950s any Soviet paratrooper who attempted to land in the Northwest Territories would have faced the Canadian Rangers, a crack team of marksmen assigned to wage guerrilla-style “hit and run” operations on the tundra.
The Russians never landed. By the laws of inertia, the Rangers remained. Historian P. Whitney Lackenbauer celebrates these Cold Warriors who never fired a shot in anger. Instead, they became a caricature.
“Clad in their red sweatshirts, they appeared regularly in media photographs,” Lackenbauer writes without irony. “Rangers greeted Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip when they arrived in Iqaluit to begin their Golden Jubilee visit. The Queen made particular note of the Rangers’ presence and told them how much she liked their uniforms.”
Professor Lackenbauer is a respected scholar. His difficulty is in chronicling members of an armed force whose military careers were never interrupted by combat. At one point he is reduced to telling the story of a Labrador Ranger who used icebergs for target practice.
The history of this odd force dates from 1947 when the first company was formed in Dawson City. The captain was a local storekeeper. In 1956 the Rangers’ strength peaked at 2725 men, mainly ex-cops, Inuit trappers and Hudson’s Bay clerks.
“Should an enemy ever advance over the Arctic barrens,” explained the Cold War-era Montreal Gazette, “the Ranger role would be hit-and-run operations to stall the invading force until Canada’s mobile striking force could be transported or parachuted into the area.”
The Rangers received neither pay nor training, but satisfied a romantic ideal. “They are a flexible, inexpensive and culturally inclusive means of having ‘boots on the ground’ to demonstrate sovereignty and to conduct or support domestic operations,” Lackenbauer writes.
Whatever military purpose was served by the Rangers vanished Oct. 4, 1957 with the Soviet launch of a 23-inch satellite Sputnik 600 miles into orbit. Now the Russians didn’t have to parachute into Dawson City. They could fling a missile overhead into Washington D.C.
Regardless, The Canadian Rangers is a celebration. “The Rangers’ basic mandate –‘to provide a military presence in sparsely settled northern, coastal and isolated areas of Canada that cannot conveniently or economically be provided for by other components of the Canadian Forces’– has remained remarkably consistent since 1947,” Lackenbauer writes.
Well, maybe. Readers are told of the experience of John Sperry, an Anglican missionary who served as a Ranger lieutenant in Coppermine. Sperry received his commission in the mail and never held any meetings since “no one ever asked him to report on the number of Rangers in the platoon.” Captain Sperry’s only function was to sign up volunteers, hand them a government-issue rifle and distribute the annual ration of bullets.
The Rangers’ yearly ammunition budget was $8.35 per volunteer. It was a long fall from making the Arctic safe from the Soviets.
By Holly Doan
The Canadian Rangers: A Living History by P. Whitney Lackenbauer; UBC Press; 658 pages; ISBN 9780774824538; $34.95
Cabinet claimed a right to censor charities from making statements deemed “false or misleading” under threat of losing their tax status, then-Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland wrote in a 2023 email. The document was disclosed yesterday under Access To Information: “It frightens me.”
The Department of Health spent more than $200 million on a pandemic program with untrained staff and little oversight, says an internal report. Auditors relied on grant recipients to explain if they used the money wisely: “Most of the original staff members had left and those who replaced them had no previous experience.”
The federal cabinet must make “more effort in a more urgent fashion” to lift Chinese tariffs on 40,000 canola farmers, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe said yesterday. Only Prime Minister Mark Carney can speak for the nation in a trade war, he said: “It’s very, very serious.”
Cabinet should cut billions in seniors’ benefits, says a federally-funded research group. A total $13.9 billion in cuts are detailed in a budget submission by Generation Squeeze, a University of British Columbia group that previously lobbied cabinet for a home equity tax: “It’s appropriate to ask retirees with six-figure incomes to accept fewer taxpayer dollars.”
Parliament must permit free debate on immigration quotas without “emotionally driven objections,” an Ottawa think tank said yesterday. Conservatives and Bloc Québecois MPs have sought significant reductions including curbs on 3,049,277 temporary permit holders: “I’m not going to accept that every proposal that immigration should be reduced is racist.”
A costly green subsidy program will not come close to achieving promised greenhouse gas emission reductions though the Department of Environment twice lowered its targets, says an in-house report. The failed Low Carbon Economy Fund was a “good example” of climate leadership, then-Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said in 2022.
