A federal judge has dismissed a bid by a U.S. Indigenous group to delay expansion of the Port of Vancouver, largest in the nation. However the Federal Court sidestepped a larger issue of whether Indigenous Americans from border states have rights in Canada: ‘These are questions for another day.’
She is the Swedish teenager
who crossed the Atlantic
in a zero-emission voyage.
Making a statement
about the carbon footprint
of planes.
In a string of flight cancellations,
Air Canada needed five days
to bring one passenger
from Newark to Ottawa.
Making an even bigger statement.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
The Depression, not the war, left the deepest scars on an entire generation of Canadians. Survivors carried indelible memories of the collapse of capitalism. My mother, raised on a Manitoba farmstead, years afterward could not bear to throw out tin foil pie plates: “That’s wasteful,” she warned. My father-in-law cursed TV episodes of The Waltons that depicted poor but cheerful townsfolk who had love, if not money: “It wasn’t anything like that,” he muttered. “I was there and it wasn’t like that.”
The broad strokes of the Depression years are part of the nation’s memory, preserved in schoolbook texts and grainy newsreels: hobos on freight cars, police on horseback, dust storms and factory closures. Yet it’s the fine details that paint the most vivid picture of whole communities brought to their knees by an economic calamity unmatched in its cruelty.
Historian Todd McCallum of Dalhousie University has written a startling book. Hobohemia documents the Dustbowl Years in British Columbia, a “homeland for beggars,” he calls it, where thousands of jobless settled in shantytowns at the railways’ last stop. “Everywhere I turned, archives offered me dusty examples of a multitude of ways of seeing the hobo jungle as an island unto itself, something simultaneously connected to and separate from ‘society,’ whatever one took that to mean.”
McCallum details British Columbia’s descent into chaos. In Kamloops, so many vagrants gathered the mayor sent an urgent petition to the legislature. “The town is being overrun by beggars and panhandlers,” he wrote. “Where is it all going to end?”
In Vancouver one Christmas headline in the Province read: “Man Starves To Death Here.” Ratepayers were overwhelmed by the cost of food for the jobless. The welfare budget peaked at a staggering $1.1 million by 1935, divvied up by 25¢ meal tickets. City Council telegraphed the Prime Minister: “The situation in Vancouver is beyond our control.”
In Victoria, the city launched a desperate boondoggle to put vagrants to work chopping firewood. Officials bought a campsite for $900, then provided $613 worth of saws, hired a cook and offered jobless men $1 a day to chop a cord of wood with room and board provided. Of 229 men who registered, a quarter couldn’t cut wood anyway. Victoria ratepayers were stuck with a stockpile of 2,000 cords trucked to market – that cost another $3.50 a cord – and saw the wood sold at a loss, 75¢ a cord.
“It is in every way easier for most North Americans to imagine the complete and utter destruction of the planet we currently inhabit than to envision the end of the capitalist order,” says McCallum. That is precisely what B.C. faced in the 1930s. The result was a kind of madness.
The number of transients in Vancouver was estimated at 12,000. They gathered in hobo jungles cobbled from cardboard and the city’s waste. “Grounds are filthy and covered with decaying garbage, with open toilets,” the city’s medical officer of health wrote in 1931 following a typhoid outbreak. “Flies swarm over everything and then on all open food.”
Hobohemia is meticulously researched. Professor McCallum is a gifted writer. The story is raw and compelling. To read it is to learn why children of the 1930s could never, ever waste tin foil or see their memories of gnawing despair transformed into a TV drama of joy amid poverty.
By Holly Doan
Hobohemia and the Crucifixion Machine: Rival Images of a New World in 1930s Vancouver; by Todd McCallum; Athabasca University Press; 319 pages; ISBN 9781-9268-36287; $29.95
The Treasury Board yesterday said it had reached a settlement in a multi-million dollar class action claim over the 2020 hacking of 54,057 taxpayers’ accounts. Final costs will be itemized once terms are submitted to a federal judge for approval: “Did these attacks not demonstrate there was a total failure?”
Health Minister Marjorie Michel’s department in a briefing note says the government will be “establishing safe indoor temperature limits” for people’s homes. A department spokesperson last night said the document was not meant to be taken literally: “To clarify, this wording does not refer to any planned regulation of temperature in homes.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday acknowledged failure in negotiating an end to U.S. tariffs on key sectors like Canadian steel and energy. “We didn’t get that agreement,” he told reporters.
Thirty-seven employees at the Department of Justice last year were disciplined for misconduct, says a first-ever report on wrongdoing by federal lawyers. Complaints ranged from faked credentials to a false insurance claim: “We will inevitably learn from this.”
Federal regulators yesterday fined a bitcoin dealer more than a half million for multiple violations of the Proceeds Of Crime And Terrorist Financing Act. It was among the largest penalties imposed since Parliament first regulated cryptocurrency dealers in 2019: “It is something difficult to understand.”
Canada’s population shrank slightly since July for the first time since 1971, Statistics Canada said yesterday. Analysts said the decline was due to the flight of thousands of foreign students and migrant workers whose permits had expired: “Every province and territory except Alberta and Nunavut saw population decreases.”
A York University researcher assigned to work on pro-Palestine reports at taxpayers’ expense called Canada a “racist settler colonial state,” records show. Cabinet advisor Amira Elghawaby met personally with the author and approved the assignment, but yesterday had no comment: “Thank you for the work you are doing.”
Cabinet yesterday agreed to issue a new toonie commemorating the 50th anniversary of the opening of the CN Tower. Once dubbed an unexciting concrete pillar that went twice over budget, the Tower today is an iconic “symbol of national pride,” it said.
Employees at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency ran up nearly $17,000 in traffic tickets, records show. Bad drivers were told to cover fines out of pocket though other federal agencies charged taxpayers for infractions from photo radar to parking in a towing zone: “How many have received tickets?”
Federal judges have faulted the Department of Indigenous Services for dismissing appeals to fix First Nations housing so substandard it made schoolchildren ill. The Federal Court of Appeal ruling followed Minister Mandy Gull-Masty’s pledge to “deliver the proper care for children.”
Cabinet advisor Amira Elghawaby secretly paid $80,000 for pro-Palestine research to counter alleged “disinformation” by MPs, senators and media, Access To Information records disclose. Elghawaby’s Office of the Special Representative on Combating Islamophobia had flatly denied the confidential funding at taxpayers’ expense: “Thank you again for this impeccable work.”
The Department of Industry sought tips from Value Village on “affordability,” Access To Information records show. The nation’s largest commercial second-hand retailer met top federal executives to discuss the benefits of thrift, said a staff memo: “What strategies has Value Village used?”
