A Customs agent who described supervisors as “a bunch of Nazis” has lost an appeal over denial of promotion. Nazi quips are no joke, ruled a federal labour board: “The fact it may have been used by others does not excuse it.”
RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki yesterday urged Canadians to report suspicious internet activity including comments by people who express “anti-government, anti-law enforcement” opinions. The Mounties earlier praised federal proposals to censor legal web content deemed offensive: “When in doubt, report it.”
Half of businesses surveyed that were shuttered in 2021 lockdowns remained closed five months later, says a Bank of Canada study. Researchers said it was critical to calculate the scope of insolvencies and so-called “zombie” businesses: ‘They are essentially dead but haven’t finalized the closure process altogether.’
The Commons finance committee tomorrow opens hearings on housing prices. Urban Canada runs a risk of a “massive financial collapse,” said the Conservative MP who requested hearings: “We risk the possibility of a major housing crash.”
Banks can afford billions in new taxes, the Superintendent of Financial Institutions said yesterday. Peter Routledge told a teleconference of Toronto bankers that taxes proposed in the Liberal Party’s election campaign platform were worth a fraction of the industry’s net income: “From our perspective this issue is rather minor.”
Opposition MPs yesterday ordered Commons ethics committee hearings into federal monitoring of cellphone users. It follows admissions by the Public Health Agency it tracked 33 million mobile devices using cell tower locators to monitor compliance with lockdown orders: “This was done in secret.”
Attorney General David Lametti in a letter to senators questioned whether police were “less aggressive” with white protesters opposed to vaccine mandates than Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Lametti cited in evidence a single CBC election commentary that complained Covid protesters were “mostly white.”
Parliament must show “fiscal discipline” after running up the biggest deficits in Canadian history, say accountants. The Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada in a submission to the Commons finance committee said Parliament must stop the spending: “It is not an appropriate time to increase personal or corporate taxes.”
Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos under questioning by reporters Friday said he personally considered compulsory vaccination inevitable, but that it was up to provinces to introduce such a measure. No province has: “I personally believe it’s going to come to that one day, mandatory vaccination.”
Federal departments must stop conducting business with their favourite contractors on the phone, says Procurement Ombudsman Alexander Jeglic. Federal policy requires any tips given to special bidders must be given to all: “I am reaching out to arrange a phone call.”
Taoists have lost a claim for a religious tax holiday. The Ontario ruling contradicts an earlier decision by a Québec judge who asked, “What is a religion?”
A snowstorm paralyses Vancouver.
The city deploys half their fleet
in a bid to reopen roads.
The second plow
may join the effort
if deemed necessary.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, writes for Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)
Parliament for 90 years enforced a White Canada immigration policy intended to create an all-Caucasian society, literally a Great White North. It was built on crude and false assumptions of racial characteristics. Lawmakers and educators rarely speak of it today though the painful topic has inspired excellent academic research like White Settler Reserve, an exposé of attempts to create a Nordic master race on the Prairies.
It was a “special experiment of immigrant colonization”, newspapermen wrote in 1875. Cabinet subsidized Icelandic immigrants to colonize the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg on territorial lands of the Cree, Ojibwe and Métis. Among the 19th century settlers were the great-great-grandparents of Prof. Ryan Eyford of the University of Winnipeg, who chronicles the experiment in a crisp narrative.
“Contemporary European racial theories posited that Icelanders should be part of the dominant race,” writes Eyford. “Canadian elites typically believed that ‘northern peoples’ were ideally suited to become colonists and future citizens, and thus the Icelanders were recruited and settled in the Northwest.”
Some 285 Icelanders were the first to arrive in 1875. Governor General Lord Dufferin called them “the grand old Norse race”; “They very much resemble the Norwegians,” wrote Dufferin. “They are quiet peaceable folk, Lutheran in religion, but not fanatical.”
White Settler Reserve explains, “Iceland was a source of endless fascination to European Romanticism because of its presumed isolation from world history. Philologists claimed that the Icelandic language was the ancient Norse tongue, once common to all Scandinavia, and ethnologists argued that Icelandic people were a racial anachronism, a strand of the ancient northern race preserved on an isolated northern isle.”
The campaign worked nicely in depopulating Iceland. Between 1870 and 1914 the island lost about a quarter of its population, about 20,000 men, women and children. The majority of immigrants came to Canada.
Icelanders were offered discounted steamship tickets and 160 acres free of charge under the 1872 Dominion Lands Act providing they busted sod and grew crops. They built communities named New Iceland and Gimli and Voger, Manitoba.
They also suffered from scurvy and smallpox, fire and flood, and the snide remarks of government agents who concluded they were not the Viking supermen Ottawa was looking for. The chief medical officer in Gimli described settlers as weak and lazy, “listless”, “dejected” and “apathetic”. “Centuries of isolation and intermarriage have had the effect of reducing their physical condition to a point below which they are likely to be successful,” wrote the Gimli doctor.
White Settler Reserve exposes one of those corners of Canadiana omitted from official records and federal observances. It is shocking and intriguing, the best kind of history.
By Holly Doan
White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West, by Ryan Eyford; University of British Columbia Press; 272 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-31598; $32.95
The Department of Northern Affairs spent more than $1.4 million installing solar panels in the most sunless region of Canada, records show. The climate change program was to aid Arctic hamlets that rely on diesel generators for heat and light in winter months: “We funded solar projects.”
The Commons health committee must investigate why public agencies continue to distribute China-made pandemic supplies, Opposition Leader Erin O’Toole said yesterday. “We need made-in-Canada supplies of personal protective equipment,” O’Toole told reporters: “Have we not learned anything?”
