Nearly 900 million pages of historic records, the vast majority of the collection held by Library and Archives Canada, are inaccessible to the public, says an internal briefing note. Archivists blamed in part the fact that “boxes must be physically retrieved from storage.”
Maintaining embassy lawns and tennis courts abroad is important for the “representational image of Canada,” the Department of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. Diplomats served notice they’re hiring full-time gardeners to tend the acreage at the Canadian Embassy in Rome and nearby Villa Grandi, a luxury estate occupied by the ambassador: “Maintain the tennis court.”
An expanded trade war has cabinet “constantly looking at our tax system,” Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters Saturday. The Budget Office had warned of larger-than-forecast deficits even before the shock of 50 percent tariffs: “We will borrow.”
Carmakers repeatedly warned cabinet any permanent tariff on vehicles for the first time since 1964 would leave Canada without an auto industry. Records show industry lobbyists met with MPs and officials 53 times in a seven-week period prior to the collapse of trade talks: “There is no Canadian auto industry without the United States.”
Cabinet says it has no plans to mandate national digital identification despite budgeting billions to develop and test a digital ID system. The pledge came in reply to a Commons petition sponsored by Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis (Haldimand-Norfolk, Ont.): “Testing in stages, first in controlled environments, then in real world pilots, is standard practice.”
Contractors must use all-Canadian materials and supplies in costly renovations to the Prime Minister’s official residence, according to a federal notice. The manor house at 24 Sussex Drive “must be completed by Canadians for Canadians,” it said.
One of the biggest federal spenders on consultants increased expenditures 10 percent above average last year, records show. The Department of Employment spent $998.5 million even as Prime Minister Mark Carney promised to cut spending on consultants by 20 percent: “I have a simple rule: spend less, invest more.”
You were a few seats away from me.
Darkness camouflaged my staring at you.
You seemed mesmerized,
smiling whenever DiCaprio
made his entry.
I was mesmerized by my own fantasies.
Still couldn’t make my move,
for all these people between us.
Blocking all options.
Perhaps I was also fearful
of your date, who sat beside you,
and mine
who sat beside me.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
In 1937 Canada had a higher infant mortality rate than South Africa and Ireland. Until 1919 all national medical services were managed by the Department of Agriculture. Child deaths were such an inescapable horror in family life that Prime Minister John Thompson (1892-4) lost four of his nine children in infancy.
Historian Mona Gleason documents the dawn of awareness that Canada’s infants could not be left to sicken and die in an expression of survival of the fittest: “Merely being small and young, in other words, required medical attention.”
Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health is a compelling social history that chronicles the country’s struggle towards the light.
Canada’s first children’s hospital ward opened in Montreal in 1822. By 1879 the first course in pediatrics was introduced, at the University of Laval. Yet there was little understanding of infant care beyond folklore. It’s a phenomenon still visible today in the sweep of gravestones depicting little lambs and cherubs that dominate any 19th century Canadian cemetery.
It was as if the small and weak were never meant to live. Gleason cites an 1897 medical text that warned the newborn “is almost certain sooner or later to exhibit tendencies to disease in the direction of the stock from whence it springs…it may receive an inheritance of tuberculosis or epilepsy, or a tendency to gout or rheumatism.”
Where health and hygiene were introduced in the classroom, the treatment leaned to morality and abstinence from sin. An 1896 text Gage’s Health Series for Intermediate Classes cautioned students to beware of wine jelly: “The appetite, becoming uncontrollable, may bring its owner to a drunkard’s grave.”
The result was the appalling infant mortality rate. A century ago approximately 1 in 6 babies Canadian babies died by age three. In the tubercular slums of the bigger cities the death rate was worse, 1 in 3.
“Overall, the high rate of infant mortality was a state of affairs largely accepted as tragic, but not yet a matter of concern,” writes Gleason, of the University of British Columbia.
Small Matters draws on our deepest childhood memories of illness. Who forgets the blight of chicken pox, or the smell of VapoRub in a shuttered bedroom, or soothing cool of vanilla ice cream after a tonsillectomy?
So, the most unforgettable voices in Gleason’s work are oral histories – like Theresa, who recalls being stricken with polio, the scourge that afflicted 50,000 Canadians till 1962: “When I went to Toronto when I was sixteen, they drilled into me that, ‘Your polio is in your mind. You can do anything. Don’t let polio keep you down’…I remember one girl had polio in both legs, and they stood her up against the wall and she walked with these crutches. And they said to her, ‘Come on, Doreen, you got to walk.’ ‘I can’t.’ She’d cry and she would cry.”
The country cried. Then we got better.
By Holly Doan
Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health by Mona Gleason; McGill-Queens University Press; 232 Pages; ISBN 9780-7735-41337; $29.95
A federal memorial to Afghan War dead will be inscribed with an Algonquin land acknowledgement in the name of “supporting reconciliation,” says an internal memo. Veterans Affairs Minister Jill McKnight’s department would not say how many of the 2,229 Canadian casualties in Afghanistan including 158 killed in action were Algonquin: ‘It’s to recognize the Indigenous peoples on whose traditional territory the Monument stands.’
The Federal Court yesterday in a rare order suspended all constitutional challenges of an immigration law passed March 12 by Parliament. All plaintiffs were ordered into case management on complaints that repetitive claims were clogging the docket: “New immigration proceedings have increased for a fifth record-breaking year and may exceed 30,000 files in 2026.”
Cabinet takes Canadian democracy as it is and will not pursue electoral reform, Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon yesterday wrote the Commons. The remarks followed Justin Trudeau’s lament that dropping a 2016 proposal for a national referendum on reform was his greatest regret: “I do wish we had been able to.”
Workers whose jobs require sound judgment, physical contacts or special skills have little to fear from artificial intelligence, the Bank of Canada said yesterday. While AI to date had limited impact on jobs in Canada, analysts warned some occupations were vulnerable: “Exposure is lowest in occupations that rely more heavily on judgment.”
A Nova Scotia Court has ordered the eviction of a Halifax tenant over derogatory remarks against his South Asian neighbours. A “good behaviour” clause in tenancy laws of most provinces applies to rudeness, a Small Claims adjudicator ruled: “Good behaviour extends beyond merely refraining from threatening to commit physical or property damage.”
Opposition parties yesterday demanded Prime Minister Mark Carney disclose to Parliament the secret terms of a cross-border trade pact. A draft agreement outlined by U.S. authorities would end 61 years of tariff-free Canadian auto exports to the U.S. and grant unprecedented Canadian market access for American farmers: “We have the right to know what concessions are being granted to Donald Trump.”
