The Commons yesterday by a 298 to 23 vote rejected a Bloc Québécois motion to reinstate a 15 percent fee on Netflix and other video streaming services. Cabinet suspended the tax under threat of U.S. retaliation: “This kind of flip-flopping and back-and-forth is absolutely pointless.”
Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin in a letter to MPs would not fix any deadline for introduction of a long-promised national flood insurance program. The proposal has been under review since 2020: “Our members are frustrated that we are not yet over the finish line.”
Cabinet’s decision to grant Chinese electric vehicle makers a 278,989-car import quota over five years marked “a new path,” says an internal Department of Foreign Affairs memo. The censored eight-page document made no mention of slave-made parts: “If we concede that electric vehicles required forced labour in their supply chain, will you put them on the list of products banned in Canada?”
Widespread promotion of online gambling is a “serious mental health concern,” the Canadian Psychological Association is warning MPs. The group urged passage of a private bill to regulate sports betting advertising: “Expansion and promotion of online gambling have become matters of serious mental health concern.”
Canadians can no longer file private complaints with the Competition Tribunal over false environmental claims in corporate advertising, says the Competition Bureau. No reason was given, though the directive Friday followed one MP’s complaint of misleading claims by the Government of Canada: “The Bureau reviewed its existing guidance.”
Newly-disclosed records show cabinet was upset by the 1996 resignation of Québec’s lieutenant governor over his participation in an anti-Jewish street riot in his student days. Jean-Louis Roux’s resignation was “a difficult precedent,” cabinet was told.
Opposition parties in a rare joint protest accuse cabinet of manipulating a Commons committee into conducting an investigation solely to boost a Liberal MP’s re-election. A spokesperson for first-term MP Alana Hirtle (Cumberland-Colchester, N.S.) denied the allegation: “It was a personal, local initiative of the MP.”
Veterans Affairs
struggles to handle
thousands of phone calls
from current and former military personnel.
Staff shortages,
technical glitches,
and budget cuts
are blamed.
Have they considered
moving their call centres
to India?
Let veterans enjoy a familiar-sounding voice
answering their inquiries;
let government services
reach the level of the private sector;
and let the savings begin.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
Author Wendy Dobson calls China’s system “authoritarian state capitalism.” Analysts similarly called pre-war Italy a “corporate state.” Like the Beijing Politburo of 2026, Mussolini in 1934 mesmerized outsiders with showboat statistics. Italian GDP appeared to defy Depression-era gravity, growing year over year from 1929 to 1939 while the Canadian economy shrank five percent overall.
“Everything looks well ‘on the surface’,” wrote economist Henry Schultz of the University of Chicago on a 1934 Italian tour. “No debating, no complaints.” The UK Saturday Review in 1934 put Mussolini on its cover and enthused: “He dragged Italy out of the mire of socialism and in a few years has made it the most successful and prosperous country in Europe.”
Interestingly, both pre-war Italy and contemporary China adopted the identical economic tools: over-valued currency, state management of the economy, price controls, abolition of independent trade unions, abolition of dissent, abolition of a free press, restrictions on mobility rights, property rights and rule of law, voodoo statistics and disastrous state spending. In fascist Italy one in five workers was a government employee.
“Canadians will have to learn to deal with regimes that differ from theirs whether they like it or not,” writes Author Dobson, a former federal associate deputy minister of finance. “A narrative for deeper engagement with China should therefore accept that China is different, but cooperation is possible and differences can be acknowledged and managed.”
Living With China is an invitation to argument. “They are not like us,” writes Dobson, in an unnerving echo of Mussolini’s press clippings. T.S. Eliot called fascism “an Italian regime for Italians, a product of the Italian mind.” So Dobson writes: “China will be itself. Canadians should adjust their expectations by learning about it and living with it as it evolves.”
Dobson concludes China defies gravity and is on a trajectory leading ever upwards. She cites the Politburo’s Five-Year Plans, the Made In China 2025 policy to “realize the goal of the country becoming a world leader in advanced manufacturing.”
“All levels of government in China are involved,” writes Dobson. “Local governments in particular have pushed projects forward, speeding progress towards national goals, especially in robotics. Impressive indeed, but performance has to be weighed against evidence that funds are being misallocated and efforts duplicated in the rush. The heavy state role raises questions about the implications of such politicization for the innovation ecosystem.”
Living With China is neither an outright apology for Chinese fascism nor a critical analysis of its fatal flaws. It is a buy-and-save contemporary artifact of conventional wisdom: Chinese are different, they must be doing something right, they might play rough but we can’t shun them. “One goal for Canadian leaders’ increased attention should be to deepen public knowledge about China and to address the reservations and concerns about China,” writes Dobson.
As Tung Chee-hwa, the former Communist Party-appointed chief executive of Hong Kong, used to tell visiting reporters: “You don’t understand this. You are not Chinese.”
By Holly Doan
Living with China: A Middle Power Finds Its Way, by Wendy Dobson; University of Toronto Press; 192 pages; ISBN 9781-48750-4823; $32.95
Liberal MPs yesterday rejected a motion to recover $34 million in federal grants wrongfully paid to ineligible applicants by a scandal-ridden federal agency. Industry Minister Mélanie Joly earlier told Parliament it was “not in the public interest.”
The Budget Office that has already warned of 25 percent cost overruns on cabinet’s regional high-speed rail venture yesterday said it is investigating ridership claims. Promoters predicted 24 million Canadians a year would take the train: “There are 40 million people in Canada.”
A fifth of food bank users in Toronto spend 100 percent of their income on rent, the Commons agriculture committee was told yesterday. Others have disposable income of less than $9 a day after paying for shelter and utilities, said the CEO of the Daily Bread Food Bank: “Here is the math.”
Providing safe drinking water to First Nations by a fixed deadline “is not a yes or no question,” Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty said yesterday. Cabinet earlier skipped its 2021 deadline to eliminate all boiled water advisories despite spending $3.6 billion: “It’s not a yes or no question.”
The Supreme Court yesterday served formal notice it will hear a last appeal from cabinet over the legality of emergency measures it used against peaceful Freedom Convoy protestors in 2022. Two lower courts determined cabinet’s actions including the freezing of demonstrators’ bank accounts were unlawful: “It captured people who simply wanted to join in the protest by standing on Parliament Hill carrying a placard.”
Health Minister Marjorie Michel yesterday waived repayment of nearly a half billion owed taxpayers from people who falsely claimed free dentistry under a federal program. The Department of Health to date has yet to explain steep cost overruns in the Canada Dental Care Plan: “Costs associated with pursuing and managing recovery may be disproportionate.”
