Mexico last year was the top foreign destination for crime and sudden death involving Canadian travelers, says the Department of Foreign Affairs. Consular cases in Mexico outnumbered those in America though the U.S.A. drew more than 10 times the number of Canadian visitors: “Sometimes things don’t go as planned for Canadians.”
The National Research Council at least a dozen times in two years approved sweetheart appointments of “top-ranked talent” without posting job vacancies, says an internal audit. The Research Council previously confirmed it specifically recruited foreigners because it was “not possible to find qualified Canadians” to work at its labs: “It could undermine the perceived fairness of hiring practices at the Research Council.”
The Department of Foreign Affairs says last year it suspended 34 permits to ship military goods to Israel. Reminded of its repeated statements that Canada never exported “lethal items” to Israel, a department spokesperson confirmed the suspensions were largely symbolic: “We haven’t exported arms to Israel in 30 years.”
Federal elections managers privately circulated an unsigned commentary ridiculing Anton Boegman, British Columbia’s Chief Electoral Officer, for a “comedy of errors” in a 2024 provincial vote. The Commissioner of Canada Elections released the critical seven-page document through Access To Information: “No one at Elections BC has apologized or assumed responsibility for the embarrassing failures of leadership and management.”
A federal Competition Act investigation marks an “unprecedented and legally unsubstantiated” attempt to ban service fee pricing in Canada, say lawyers for California-based Door Dash Inc. The delivery firm in a Tribunal filing said the outcome would impact all fee pricing nationwide: “This matter raises novel issues.”
The CRTC has approved the abrupt closure of another local TV station, the sixth in six years. Revocation of a federal license for CHAT-TV of Medicine Hat, Alta., on the air since 1957, followed warnings from broadcasters that local television is in crisis: “The future of an entire Canadian industry is hanging in the balance.”
It only took forty years,
To expose the Charter for what it is,
Merely paper and hollow words,
Bereft of Truth.
Law and Order,
Aren’t always collegial,
With Rights and Freedoms,
But they can be conflated.
In the maintenance of order,
The elderly were trampled,
Veterans were dragged, beaten.
With shades of Ordnungspolizei.
The law has limits,
In Vancouver, one man,
Concerned for his daughters,
Could breech the peace.
Older wisdom succinctly put,
Perhaps could be found,
On a tattered old label of Keith’s Pale,
Veritas Vincit.
By W. N. Branson
Manitoba Premier Howard Pawley’s Conservative opponent Sterling Lyon liked to call him a Bolshevik. Even the Soviets had abandoned the phrase in the 1950s, but Pawley had that effect on some people.
His leftist credentials were impeccable. Pawley once played a juror in a theatrical production of Twelve Angry Men, Henry Fonda’s denunciation of anti-Latino bigotry. In 1962 he served as president of Winnipeg’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
It was a popular quip in Manitoba that Pawley’s cabinet dare not meet at the International Peace Garden for fear of arrest by North Dakota marshals. Pawley’s northern affairs minister was a Vietnam draft evader, his attorney general was an ex-Communist organizer.
Yet Pawley never looked like a bomb-throwing Marxist. His campaign slogan was “Great People, Great Land.” No subversion there. As a legislator he reformed family law in Manitoba to mandate the equal sharing of assets in cases of separation. No radicalism here.
He was earnest, honest and plain spoken, with all the habits of a small-town solicitor from Stonewall, Manitoba: no smoking, no drinking, no carrying on. Pawley joined the Kinsmen Club. His wife Adele worked as a tax preparer for local farmers.
These intriguing contradictions are captured in Keep True. The political anger was genuine. One Pawley initiative that allowed an NDP-approved arbitrator to impose a first contract in new union shops was bitterly opposed by small manufacturers. Yet if Pawley adopted policies that enraged critics – his approval rating once hit 12 percent – he was also the kind of man you’d like as a neighbour.
Pawley was a skilled memoirist. He recounts indelible vignettes of his rural childhood, a portrait of curly-haired Howard chosen as a poster boy for Crown Syrup Co. in 1935 and the remembrance of a stern grandfather who rebuked him for breaking the Sabbath by listening to the Charlie McCarthy Show on the radio.
He recalls walking to Grade One, four miles there and back, and the time he stumbled across his father in the barn, killing a chicken for the evening meal. It was “hanging by its legs from the ceiling by a chord, a steady trickle of blood dripping from its slashed throat,” Pawley wrote. He could not bear to eat chicken the rest of his life.
Pawley also had a Napoleonic sense of destiny. He ran and lost elections in 1957, 1958 and 1965 and again in ’88, when Pawley campaigned as an anti-free trade candidate for Parliament and lost by 3,900 votes. He recounts these failures plainly. It is an attractive quality.
Keep True is the memoir of a Prairie New Democrat. If Pawley was a mild personality, his memory is sharp-elbowed. He recalled Brian Mulroney as a schemer and reminds readers that 57 percent of Canadians actually voted against free trade.
Most indelible is the image of Pawley the small-town lawyer who gave Manitoba its public auto insurance program in the teeth of opposition by insurers and members of the Canadian Bar Association. Manitoba became only the second province to introduce the measure, after Saskatchewan pioneered it in 1946.
A reporter recalled Pawley would drive from farm to farm in a battered Chevrolet, then “wade through slush and talk to people who had never met a cabinet minister. He would figure out the insurance rates for everybody’s car and show how they were going to save money.” It was not, on reflection, the kind of thing a Bolshevik would do.
By Holly Doan
Keep True: A Life In Politics, by Howard Pawley; University of Manitoba Press; 278 pages; ISBN 9780-88755-7248; $27.95
Federal agents last year tracked more than 44 million trips by Canadians driving back and forth across the border, says a Canada Border Services Agency report. Drivers were monitored under a little-known surveillance program approved by cabinet six years ago: “Do you feel comfortable?”
A federal fund for exhumation of suspected graves at Indian Residential Schools is heavily oversubscribed, says a report. First Nations have applied for more than $700 million in funding, triple the original budget: “The actual number of individuals buried, or cemetery sites associated with Residential Schools, is unknown.”
Housing starts will fall this year, CMHC forecasters said yesterday. Cabinet was counting on builders doubling the number of housing starts to meet its affordability target: “New construction is slowing.”
Honouring Persian Gulf War veterans with an inscription on the National War Memorial “would set a precedent,” says a Department of Veterans Affairs briefing note. Veterans have sought the honour though no Canadians died in the conflict: “There are differing perspectives among veterans and military historians about adding the Gulf War.”
The Public Health Agency yesterday appealed to Canadian parents to keep children’s vaccinations up to date as a cost savings for the nation. New revisions to the Canadian Immunization Guide followed acknowledgment that many families remain wary of taking medical advice from the federal government: “What is your perception of childhood vaccination?”
Federal surveillance of social media posts by friends of Israel was part of a larger project to find “promising regulatory avenues to curb online content,” according to Access To Information records. The Department of Canadian Heritage responsible for the project would not say whose Twitter and Facebook accounts were monitored: “Help drive evidence-based strategies to counter the harmful online fallout of the Israel-Gaza crisis.”
Foreigners do not have a right to immigrate to Canada, a Saskatchewan judge has ruled. The decision came in the case of an Indian lab technician whose permit was revoked on suspicion of irregularities: “Foreign nationals do not have a right to immigrate to Canada.”
