A 33 percent increase in mandatory security fees will cost air passengers more than a quarter billion next year, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. Cabinet raised the fees for the first time since 2010 though figures showed revenues were an average 12 percent more than the cost of airport X-ray scanning: “It has become a cash cow, not a fee for service.”
The Royal Canadian Mint yesterday released figures confirming it lost millions on a failed digital currency venture. Management would not comment: “The Mint considers that information is commercially confidential.”
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board rates China a good investment despite human rights atrocities. “We are exceedingly, exceedingly cautious,” said Michel Leduc, senior managing director with the Board: “We recognize any investment in China needs to be handled with care.”
MPs yesterday by a 170 to 150 vote defied cabinet in demanding a roundup of Chinese spies and mandatory registration of foreign agents in Canada. Cabinet expelled the first Chinese agent as the Commons voted for tough action against subterfuge: “We don’t know if there are others.”
The chief of the Canadian Human Rights Commission yesterday said she was sorry for mistreatment of Black employees. Members of the Senate human rights committee said the lack of Black executives at the agency diminished the apology: “This is an issue for Blacks, so why isn’t there a Black person on the executive sitting here?”
The Commons human resources committee today opens hearings on corporate landlords and tax treatment of real estate investment trusts. One MP called it a bid to “demonize private sector landlords.”
English speaking Canadians remain indifferent to French despite 54 years of official bilingualism, says in-house federal research. A majority of residents in two provinces, British Columbia and Alberta, said they did not know a single French person: “Positive statements about bilingualism are higher among those living in the eastern part of the country than in the West.”
The pending loss of a federal riding in northern Ontario comes at a “very fragile time for democracy,” says New Democrat MP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay, Ont.). A federal commission has recommended redrawing much of Angus’ riding into a new constituency 520,300 square kilometres in size: “Is your opposition to cutting a seat in northern Ontario about protecting your own riding?”
The Department of Industry now expects a heavily-subsidized Volkswagen battery factory will last perhaps “dozens of years,” says Deputy Minister Simon Kennedy. Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne had predicted it would survive 100 years. Kennedy did not explain the discrepancy: “Is that a challenge?”
Cabinet’s National Housing Strategy Act has financed construction of 106,000 homes since 2019, new figures show. CMHC has estimated builders are short of demand by 400,000 a year: “We have a large task in front of us.”
The Department of Public Safety is finally installing full body scanners in federal prisons 15 years after the devices were first introduced at Canadian airports. Parliament approved their use in prisons in 2019: “The use of body scan search technology is considerate of inmate, staff and visitor gender considerations.”
Successful prosecutions under federal usury laws number only four or five a year, according to Department of Justice figures. Cabinet wrote revisions to loansharking bans into Bill C-47 its Budget Implementation Act: “We haven’t seen much.”
One of Canada’s largest mortgage brokers describes as “a fishing expedition” an investigation of its business practices by anti-trust lawyers. The federal Competition Bureau seeks a court order compelling Dominion Lending Centres to surrender confidential records: ‘It is essentially a fishing expedition.’
It’s been said
great nations act like gangsters,
small ones like prostitutes.
Watching Canada navigate
between the United States and China,
one must conclude
we are no gangsters.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
A New Brunswick schoolgirl was so anxious over her father’s deployment to Afghanistan she felt like vomiting every time the phone rang. Another recalled a sibling who “had nightmares that my dad blew up and he had no face.” A third remembers being reprimanded for weeping in class: “My teacher told me to stop crying because there was no reason to cry, and that it was stupid for me to cry over something like that. I got mad at her because my dad just left to go to war for six months, and I’m pretty sure that’s a valid reason to be upset.”
These are the stories in Armyville: Canada’s Military Families During the Afghanistan Mission. The narrative is compelling. Poet Raymond Souster, a WWII volunteer, said every patriot who would send Canadians to war should first walk through the ward in a veterans’ hospital. They should also read Armyville.
The public has largely forgotten our 12 years in Afghanistan. A 2014 Department of Defence survey found 31 percent of people were unaware Canada’s war had ended. Yet the conflict was indelible for the families of 40,000 Canadians who served, and the 2,229 injured, and the 138 killed in action.
Professors Deborah Harrison of the University of New Brunswick and Patrizia Albanese of Ryerson University arranged interviews with sons and daughters of Afghan veterans in Oromocto, N.B. Sociologists know little “about the unique ways in which deployments” affect military families, notes Armyville. In the absence of research Canadians were left with snapshots of Support Our Troops rallies, and unsettling accounts of a four-fold increase in rates of family violence at Petawawa, Ont. after the troops came home.
“This monograph has provided a glimpse into the lives of Canadian military adolescents during a historically unique time,” authors write. Seen through the eyes of teenagers, Armyville is warm and heartfelt, disturbing and human.
One child recalls attending a government resource centre program intended to cheer up the kids: “It’s annoying and it’s boring, and they don’t do anything. I went to this one thing – it was like a military thing. And we pretty much did this obstacle course. It was a military obstacle course. We had to jump over and under stuff, and monkey bars, and go around. And then we had to run, and I was like: ‘Oh my God!’ Like, ‘We’re not military. Why are we doing this? This isn’t fun!’”
The war repelled and attracted. Some veterans’ families were driven apart – “Mom pretty much told us right off the bat, ‘Don’t ask him about Afghanistan’,” said one boy – and others grew closer. “I see him as more of a man,” a teenager said of his father. “I try to be more like him. I suck everything up. I don’t complain.”
Another boy recalls a haunting incident the time his father was working alone in the basement when his brother returned from school and dropped his book bag on the floor with a loud bang. “When he looked up, my dad was there with a baseball bat. He put it down right away and he was like, ‘I’m going to go for the mail’; “My brother had scared him. He put it down right away as if it was nothing, and then he tried to cover it up by saying he was going to go for the mail.”
Armyville confirms statistically the children of veterans are no more likely to have trouble in school, or skip class, or suffer mental health issues than other Canadian kids. Yet most shared a sense they’d had a profound experience known only to those who lived it. “The majority believed that only adolescents from Canadian Armed Forces families could be sufficiently understanding,” note authors.
Armyville helps.
By Holly Doan
Growing Up in Armyville: Canada’s Military Families during the Afghanistan Mission, by Deborah Harrison and Patrizia Albanese; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 262 pages; ISBN 9781-77112-2344; $38.99
